Mixed Race Studies

Colored Perceptions: Racially Distinctive Names and Assessments of Skin Color

American Behavioral Scientist
Published online before print 2015-10-28
DOI: 10.1177/0002764215613395

Denia Garcia
Department of Sociology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Maria Abascal
Department of Sociology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Scholars are increasingly employing skin color measures to investigate racial stratification beyond the dimensions of self- or other-classification. Current understandings of the relationship between phenotypic traits, like skin color, and racial classification are incomplete. Scholars agree that perceptions of phenotypic traits shape how people classify others; it remains to be seen, however, whether racial classification in turn shapes people’s perceptions of phenotypic traits. The present study is based on an original survey experiment that tests whether assessments of others’ skin color are affected by a subtle racial cue, a name. Results indicate that skin color ratings are affected by the presence of a racially distinctive name: A significant share of people will rate the same face darker when that face is assigned a distinctively Hispanic name as opposed to a non-Hispanic name. In addition, ratings of male faces are more sensitive to racially distinctive names. The findings bear important lessons for our understanding of the social construction of race and its role in producing inequalities.

Read or purchase the article here.

Sense of Place with Guest Sharon H. Chang

Sense of Place
Roundhouse Radio 98.3 FM
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
November 2015

Minelle Mahtani, Host

Minelle Mahtani and Sharon H. Chang (Source: Facebook)

Author, scholar, sociologist, and activist Sharon H. Chang discusses her new book Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World.

Listen to the interview (00:36:17) here.

Vanishing Eden: White Construction of Memory, Meaning, and Identity in a Racially Changing City

Temple University Press
November 2015
198 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 978-1-43991-119-8
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-43991-118-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-43991-120-4

Michael T. Maly, Associate Professor of Sociology; Director of the Policy Research Collaborative
Roosevelt University, Chicago, Illinois

Heather M. Dalmage, Professor of Sociology; Director of the Mansfield Institute for Social Justice and Transformation
Roosevelt University, Chicago, Illinois

For many whites, desegregation initially felt like an attack on their community. But how has the process of racial change affected whites’ understanding of community and race? In Vanishing Eden, Michael Maly and Heather Dalmage provide an intriguing analysis of the experiences and memories of whites who lived in Chicago neighborhoods experiencing racial change during the 1950s through the 1980s. They pay particular attention to examining how young people made sense of what was occurring, and how this experience impacted their lives.

Using a blend of urban studies and whiteness studies, the authors examine how racial solidarity and whiteness were created and maintained—often in subtle and unreflective ways. Vanishing Eden also considers how race is central to the ways social institutions such as housing, education, and employment function. Surveying the shifting social, economic, and racial contexts, the authors explore how race and class at local and national levels shaped the organizing strategies of those whites who chose to stay as racial borders began to change.

“Mixed Race” Identities in Asia and the Pacific: Experiences from Singapore and New Zealand

Routledge
2015-10-28
188 pages
2 B/W Illus.
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-13-893393-4

Zarine L. Rocha, Managing Editor
Current Sociology and The Asian Journal of Social Science

“Mixed race” is becoming an important area for research, and there is a growing body of work in the North American and British contexts. However, understandings and experiences of “mixed race” across different countries and regions are not often explored in significant depth. New Zealand and Singapore provide important contexts for investigation, as two multicultural, yet structurally divergent, societies. Within these two countries, “mixed race” describes a particularly interesting label for individuals of mixed Chinese and European parentage.

This book explores the concept of “mixed race” for people of mixed Chinese and European descent, looking at how being Chinese and/or European can mean many different things in different contexts. By looking at different communities in Singapore and New Zealand, it investigates how individuals of mixed heritage fit into or are excluded from these communities. Increasingly, individuals of mixed ancestry are opting to identify outside of traditionally defined racial categories, posing a challenge to systems of racial classification, and to sociological understandings of “race”. As case studies, Singapore and New Zealand provide key examples of the complex relationship between state categorization and individual identities. The book explores the divergences between identity and classification, and the ways in which identity labels affect experiences of “mixed race” in everyday life. Personal stories reveal the creative and flexible ways in which people cross boundaries, and the everyday negotiations between classification, heritage, experience, and nation in defining identity. The study is based on qualitative research, including in-depth interviews with people of mixed heritage in both countries.

Filling an important gap in the literature by using an Asia/Pacific dimension, this study of race and ethnicity will appeal to students and scholars of mixed race studies, ethnicity, Chinese diaspora and cultural anthropology.

Contents

• 1. Finding the “Mixed” in “Mixed Race”
• 2. Mixed Histories in New Zealand and Singapore
• 3. The Personal in the Political
• 4. Being and Belonging
• 5. Roots, Routes and Coming Home
• 6. Conclusion

BU community urged to increase open, uncomfortable conversation

The Daily Free Press
The independent student newspaper at Boston University
ISSN 1094-7337
2015-11-03

Joe Becker

Keynote speaker and comedian W. Kamau Bell speaks about his mixed race children during “Let’s Talk About It,” a dialogue about race, identity and social action, on Monday night. PHOTO BY BRITTANY CHANG/DAILY FREE PRESS CONTRIBUTOR

Boston University College of Arts and Sciences Student Programs and Leadership hosted the “Let’s Talk About It: Race, Power and Privilege” talk Monday evening, featuring a keynote and question-and-answer session with socio-political comedian W. Kamau Bell. The dialogue touched on the social fabric on campus and around the country.

More than 100 attendees, comprised of mostly students and faculty, gathered in the Metcalf Hall of the George Sherman Union. Sitting at round tables, attendees, assisted by a minimum of one student facilitator, engaged in intimate conversations with each other throughout the event.

Bell elicited humor from often-uncomfortable social issues in his talk. He spoke of his interracial marriage with a white woman and the difficulties of talking about race and racism with his two mixed-race daughters.

“Remember the first time you saw an iPad? That’s how people react to mixed-race children,” he said during the event. “It’s not that big of a deal. You can tell kids anything. The construct of race is real, and racism is definitely real.”…

Read the entire article here.

Author Meets Reader: Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics and Big Business Recreate Race in the Twenty-First Century by Dorothy Roberts

University of California, Irvine
School of Law
401 E. Peltason Drive
Irvine, California
Room 3500
Monday, 2015-11-02, 18:30 PST (Local Time)

Sponsored by the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy and the Center on Law, Equality and Race’s Perspectives, this special Author Meets Reader event will feature author Dorothy Roberts speaking about her book…

For more information, click here.

Is race a choice?

VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal
Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists
Centre for Economic Policy Research
2015-01-26

Emily Nix, PhD candidate in Economics
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Nancy Qian, Associate Professor of Economics
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Race is usually treated as a fixed, exogenous characteristic in academic studies and policy discussions, but a growing body of evidence calls this assumption into question. This column presents evidence from historical US census data that more than 19% of black males ‘passed’ as white, around 10% of whom later ‘reverse-passed’ to being black. Passing was associated with geographic relocation and with better political-economic and social opportunities for whites relative to blacks, providing prima facie evidence that passing was endogenous.

The relationship between a person’s race and/or ethnicity and her economic, political, and social behaviour has been a focal point for numerous policy discussions. This is because the composition of race and ethnicity are often found to be associated with outcomes such as conflict, earnings, educational attainment, and voting. This is true in many different contexts across the world, including rich countries such as the US, middle-income countries such as Brazil and India, and very poor countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, the interpretation that race has a causal impact on the aforementioned outcomes critically depends on whether one believes that race and ethnicity are exogenous and fixed characteristics – i.e. outside the control of an individual and constant over her lifetime.

The literature typically assumes that racial and ethnic identities are fixed and exogenous. For examples, see the reviews of the political economy literature by Alesina and Ferrara (2004) and of studies of the US black-white wage gap by Lang and Lehmann (2012)…

Read the entire article here.

Race Relations In Brazil

Odyssey
2015-10-12

Evan Mextorf

Is racial democracy real?

If one was to ask a member of the Brazilian government if racism exists within the country, they would more than likely say no. They might say “Brazil is a racial democracy. Sure, there are social factors such as gender and class that could inhibit one’s climb up the economic ladder, but race has no bearing.” The fact, however, that the country imported more slaves than any country in the world, and that Brazil was the last country in the New World to abolish slavery, makes it hard for outsiders to understand the concept of racial democracy in Brazil.

Portugal founded its first settlement in Brazil in 1532, and from that point on, the Portuguese began to expand throughout South America, originally using mainly indigenous slaves for agricultural purposes. Unlike the island of Hispaniola, the indigenous people of Brazil were not killed off at such an alarming rate, which made them much cheaper slaves than African slaves that needed to be imported. African slaves. however, lived longer under their extreme working conditions than those of indigenous descent due to their previous exposure to European diseases. Even though indigenous slaves were cheaper, African slaves were imported at a rapid rate, because it was cheaper to import slaves rather than to “breed” slaves through families, a practice most notably performed by the United States. Brazil imported more African slaves from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century than anywhere else in the Western hemisphere. Following the Haitian revolution, some slaves in Brazil wanted to fight for their rights as humans…

Read the entire article here.

Professor Minelle Mahtani on ‘Raising Mixed Race’ in Canada

Multiracial Asian Families
2015-10-29

Sharon H. Chang

Following are closing remarks given by Minelle Mahtani after the premiere of my new book Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children In a Post-Racial World at Hapa-Palooza Festival 2015, Vancouver B.C. Minelle Mahtani is Associate Professor of Human Geography and Journalism at University of Toronto-Scarborough. Currently she is on sabbatical to host new show ‘Sense of Place‘ on Roundhouse Radio. She is also author of the recent book ‘Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality.’

My book ‘Raising Mixed Race’ will be released December 11, 2015.

Hi everybody. I’m going to keep this really short and sweet because I just think that we’ve heard so many really important things. But I just want to say thank you, Jeff, for that really warm introduction. And I just want to thank Sharon and Professor Wei Ming Dariotis for the extraordinary contribution they made here tonight.

For me being in this room really means a lot. I think it’s really rare that so many mixed people come together to have these conversations… I think it’s really valuable to remember that you’re not alone in this and that there’s other people around who want to share in these conversations. I grew up as a person of mixed race identity. I’m [of] Indian, Iranian, Muslim, Hindu background. And that was a really complicated identity to have in the suburbs of Toronto, mostly white area, that I grew up in…

Read the entire article here.

La melaza que llora: How to Keep the Term Afro-Latino from Losing Its Power

Latino Rebels
2015-10-16

Jason Nichols, Lecturer in African American Studies
University of Maryland

Me quiere hacer pensar/ que soy parte de una trilogía racial/ donde todo el mundo es igual/ sin trato especial/ se perdonar/ eres tú que no sabe disculpar/ so, como justifica tanto mal/ es que tu historia es vergonzosa/ Entre otras cosas/ cambiaron las cadenas por esposas —Tego Calderon, “Loiza”

Recently, it has become en vogue for Latinos (Latinx) to acknowledge their African “roots.” This understanding is a leap forward in racial formation for many in a region that is often known for hiding their Black grandmother in the closet. However, acknowledging her existence doesn’t always mean taking her out from behind that closed door.

Rosa Clemente is one of the first to contextualize Afro-Latinidad as an identity that is becoming more what she calls “trendy” than progressive. The Bronx-born Puerto Rican activist alludes to the fact that Afro-Latino identity has fed into, rather than disrupted the myth of a multicultural democracy that is often the dominant narrative in Latin America. Puerto Ricans and some other Latino groups have always acknowledged that they have African ancestry, but it is couched in the idea that the people are a perfect blend of the African slave, proud and noble Spaniard, and the humble native Taíno. This conception is problematic because it is a convenient way to deny institutional and in some cases individual racism. When Venezuelan TV personality Rodner Figueroa called Michelle Obama “planet of the apes,” he quickly defended himself from accusations of racism by stating that he comes from a racially plural family. Clemente doesn’t reject the term Afro-Latino completely, but states that there is a difference between identifying as Afro-Latino and identifying as Black, with the latter being a more progressive racial identity. Unlike many who believe in Latin multiracial democracy, Clemente states that she does not acknowledge the Spaniards in her lineage because she would “never claim my rapist.”…

Read the entire article here.