Mixed Race Studies

Washington College students awarded summer fellowships

The Star Democrat
Easton, Maryland
2010-06-02

CHESTERTOWN, MARYLAND Six Washington College students were awarded Comegys Bight Summer Research Fellowships supported by the Comegys Bight Fellows Program, which invites scholars to design independent research projects and internships built around their particular interests. These projects include field research on the ghost tour industry, a study of the relationship between military service and political behavior, and an exploration of biracial identity in America.

The program, conceived and sustained by Drs. Thomas and Virginia Collier of Chestertown and administered by the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, offers stipends for students to pursue independent projects with the guidance of faculty mentors…

The program has served 38 students since its advent in 2003.

“One of the most exciting things about this program has been seeing how the students’ experiences as Comegys Bight Fellows continue to resonate in their lives throughout college and far beyond,” said Adam Goodheart, Hodson Trust-Griswold director of the Starr Center…

..Drawn from a range of academic majors, the 2010 Fellows include:…

…English major Kristine Sloan, Class of 2012, will explore biracial identity in America through a nonfiction writing project about her Filipino-American family and her own sense of dual identity. She will travel to the Philippines…

Read the entire article here.

3rd Annual Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival

2010-06-12 through 2010-06-13
Japanese American National Museum
69 East 1st Street
Los Angeles, California

The 3rd Annual Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival will take place at the Japanese American National Museum, 369 East 1st Street, June 12-13, 2010, in downtown Los Angeles.

In the Obama age, this free public event celebrates storytelling of the Mixed racial and cultural experience including that of transracial/cultural adoption and interracial/cultural relationships.

The Festival, a fiscally sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts, a non-profit organization, brings together film and book lovers, innovative and emerging artists, and multiracial families and individuals for two days of workshops, readings, film screenings and live performance including music, comedy and spoken word.

Today, 7 percent of all marriages are interracial, according to the Census. More than 6.8 million individuals identify as Mixed.

The Festival highlights include:

• The largest West Coast Loving Day party, a nationwide celebration of the Supreme Court decision which affirmed the right of people of different races to marry
• Family fun
• Mixed Unplugged: Comedy, Music, Performance and Spoken Word, a live performance
• Loving Prize Presentation honoring celebrated storytellers and community leaders

Black Women See Fewer Black Men at the Altar

The New York Times
2010-06-03

Sam Roberts

It is a familiar lament of single African-American women: where are the “good” black men to marry?

A new study shows that more and more black men are marrying women of other races. In fact, more than 1 in 5 black men who wed (22 percent) married a nonblack woman in 2008. This compares with about 9 percent of black women, and represents a significant increase for black men — from 15.7 percent in 2000 and 7.9 percent in 1980…

…Among all married African-Americans in 2008, 13 percent of men and 6 percent of women had a nonblack spouse. This compares with nearly half of American-born Asians choosing non-Asian spouses…

…While the increased rate of intermarriage reflects demographic changes in the American population — a more diverse pool of available spouses — as well as changing social mores, they may presage a redefinition of America’s evolving concepts of race and ethnicity.

“The lines dividing these groups are getting blurrier and blurrier,” said Jeffrey S. Passel, an author of the Pew analysis.

For instance, of the 2.7 million American children with a black parent, about 10 percent also have one nonblack parent today. Because many mixed-race African- Americans still choose to identify as being black—as Mr. Obama did when he filled out the 2010 census—the number of multiracial African-Americans could actually be higher.

How children of the expanding share of mixed marriages identify themselves—and how they are identified by the rest of society—could blur a benchmark that the nation will approach within a few decades when American Indian, Asian, black and Hispanic Americans and people of mixed race become a majority of the population.

More precise estimates of the number of people who identify themselves as mixed race will be available from the 2010 census. Other census estimates found a 32 percent increase in the mixed-race population (to 5.2 million, from 3.9 million) from 2000 to 2008.

Still, the “blending” of America could be overstated, especially given the relatively low rate of black-white intermarriage compared with other groups, and continuing racial perceptions and divisions, according to some sociologists.

“Children of white-Asian and white-Hispanic parents will have no problems calling themselves white, if that’s their choice,” said Andrew Hacker, a political scientist at Queens College of the City University of New York and the author of a book about race.

“But offspring of black and another ethnic parent won’t have that option,” Professor Hacker said. “They’ll be black because that’s the way they’re seen. Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Halle Berry, have all known that. Will that change? Don’t hold your breath.”…

To read the entire article, click here.

Book Review: Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America

Hot Topics in Journalism and Mass Communication
2010-05-19

Queenie A. Byars, Assistant Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America. Catherine R. Squires. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007.

When Dispatches from the Color Line was published, Barack Obama was still  the junior senator from Illinois and fresh from a rousing keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Fast forward to 2009 and President Barack Obama has jokingly compared his multiracial identity to that of a mixed-breed dog. Obama’s joking aside, the October 2009 case of a Louisiana justice of the peace refusing to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple is no laughing matter, and underscores the value of this book.

Catherine R. Squires is the Cowles Professor of Journalism, Diversity and Equality at the University of Minnesota. Her scholarly work in Dispatches from the Color Line offers serious discourse on the media’s role in framing the identity of multiracial people. She uses case study analysis to examine this issue…

Read the entire review here.

America’s Mixed-Race Kids Examine Their Identity

Voice of America News
2010-05-05

Faiza Elmasry
Washington, DC

Photographs celebrate richness and beauty of multiracial society

At least seven million Americans identify themselves as belonging to more than one race, and interest is rapidly growing in issues of multi-racial identity.

In his new book, “Mixed: [Portraits of Multiracial Kids],” writer and artist Kip Fulbeck presents a collection of portraits celebrating the faces of mixed-race children.

Kip Fulbeck grew up in a multi-racial family.

His father was English, Irish and Welsh. He had a Chinese mother and Chinese step-siblings. At home, he says, he was considered the white kid, but at school he was the Asian kid. Exploring the multi-racial identity has inspired Fulbeck’s works, including his recent photography book…

Read the entire article here.

At last! It’s cool to be mixed race (which is handy because I’m African, American, Jewish, Geordie, Irish, Scottish and Hungarian)

The Daily Mail (United Kingdom)
2010-04-25

Oona King, Head of Diversity
Channel 4

White supremacy is so last century. These days it’s on-trend to be a mixed-race supremacist. Unlike the British National Party, mixed-race people can now point to scientifically credible research that highlights the various biological advantages of their ethnicity.

And that’s not to mention the anecdotal evidence pointing to sports stars and celebrities such as Lewis Hamilton, Theo Walcott and Leona Lewis as representing the new ideal of physical beauty.

But is this just a media fad, sparked by the election of the world’s most famous mixed-race person as President of the United States? And now that mixed-race people are our fastest growing ethnic group, what does it mean for Britain’s uneasy relationship with race?..

…And now it seems that mixed race genes are being hailed as the latest Darwinian ‘must-have’ accessory. If you spent your childhood being called a ‘mongrel’ in the playground, the recent research by Cardiff University, which seems to show that mixed-race people are more attractive and more successful, may bring a wry smile to your face.

Dr. Michael Lewis, who conducted the research said: ‘Darwin suggested that diversity of genes led to greater genetic fitness and this in turn seems to be linked to attractiveness.’

Far from being an abomination of the natural order, mixed-race children are apparently biologically preferable. The logic is that the wider the gene pool (the further apart genetically two parents are) the greater protection from illness or genetic abnormality their children enjoy…

Read the entire article here.

Politics and policies: attitudes toward multiracial Americans

Ethnic and Racial Studies
First Published on: 2010-04-15
Volume 33, Issue 9 (October 2010)
pages 1511-1536
DOI: 10.1080/01419871003671929

Mary E. Campbell, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Iowa

Melissa R. Herman, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Dartmouth College

The growing prominence of the multiracial population in the United States is prompting new questions about attitudes toward multiracial people and popular opinion of policies designed to protect them from discrimination. Currently, American anti-discrimination policies are directed at groups who identify with a single race, but the rising profile of multiracial groups introduces new complexity into questions about racial policy. In this study, we find generally positive affect toward multiracial people, although monoracial minorities are more positive toward multiracial people than whites are. About half of the monoracial minorities and the majority of whites oppose including multiracial people in anti-discrimination policies. Attitudes are associated with traditional predictors such as education and political beliefs, and also with the racial heterogeneity of the local context and intimate contact with other racial groups. Although multiracial people report experiencing discrimination at levels similar to those of monoracial minorities, our results suggest there may be significant resistance to anti-discrimination policies that include multiracial groups. 

Read the entire article here.

Dartmouth Junior wins Beinecke Scholarship

Dartmouth College Office of Public Affairs
Press Release
Media Contact: Kelly Sundberg Seaman
2010-05-18

Anise Vance, a member of the Dartmouth Class of 2011, has been named a Beinecke Scholar, one of 20 college juniors nationally. The award, which supports the “graduate education of young men and women of exceptional promise,” provides $4,000 prior to entering graduate school and an additional $30,000 while attending graduate school. He joins Gabrielle Ramaiah ’10 and Jodi Guinn ’09 as the third Dartmouth student tapped for the scholarship in the past three years.

Vance, of Weston, Mass., is majoring in geography. “This is a huge honor,” he says, “both for the validation of my aspirations, and the financial support.” On the other hand, he notes, “it raises expectations. The call from the award committee came while I was working in the library; I phoned my parents, and then went right back to work.”

Issues of social justice, in the United States and globally, engage Vance. He traces his drive to ask questions about who lives where — and what results from that mix of space and identity — to his childhood “growing up all over the place”: Vance attended school in Kenya, Botswana, and Egypt. Growing up, as he calls himself, “a mixed race child of an Iranian mother and an African American father,” he was aware that the perceptions of others were often linked to one’s environment. This understanding has formed the basis of his research thus far…

…My current research for my senior thesis as a Mellon Mays Fellow investigates the causes of and mechanisms by which residential segregation continues to plague urban centers and their populations,” he reports. “Using a variety of methods, including ethnographic research, census-data analysis and structural examination of lending and real estate practices, I hope to provide a comprehensive investigation of African American segregation in my father’s hometown of Hartford, Connecticut.”…

Read the entire press release here.

Census trend shows mixed-race Americans are more likely to identify with their multiracial background

Daily Bruin
University of California, Los Angeles
2010-05-18

Brittany Wong, Bruin contributor

When President Barack Obama got to Question No. 9 on the 2010 Census, he did what mixed-race respondents nationwide were asked to do: pare down and define his complex racial background by checking all the boxes he saw fit.

His decision to exclusively check “Black, African Am., or Negro” and the fractured response that followed speaks to the complex nature of being mixed race today, said Kyeyoung Park, an associate professor of sociocultural anthropology at UCLA who teaches a class about race.

A new generation of mixed-race people are coming into their own this decade, and as they do, many are more comfortable self-identifying in a way that encompasses all of their background, Park said…

…Miguel Unzueta, a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management who conducted a study that showed that self-identified mixed-race children were better adjusted in school, said he was somewhat surprised by Obama’s decision. Given the president’s discussion of his mixed heritage during the primaries, he said he expected a census answer more in line with his talk on the campaign trail.

But the decision also speaks to the reality that the way Americans talk about race is not always the way they think, he said.

“I think people are more comfortable with having a mixed-race background, but there still isn’t a label that we’re comfortable with in society,” Unzueta said…

Read the entire article here.

Book Review/Compte rendu: Stanley R. Bailey, Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil

Canadian Journal of Sociology
Volume 35, Number 1 (2010)
pages 189-191

Luisa Farah Schwartzman, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Toronto

Stanley R. Bailey, Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, 304 pp. paper (978-0-8047-6278-6), hardcover (978-0-8047-6277-9)

Legacies of Race is a must-read for anyone who thinks they understand “race” in Brazil, since it successfully challenges many assumptions in the literature. It is also an important contribution to the literature on racial attitudes in the US, highlighting their distinctiveness. Finally, its discussion of the myth of racial democracy provides food for thought for debates on whether multiculturalist discourse can address emerging issues of racism in Canadian society.

For decades, foreign observers have wondered why the Brazilian Black Movement has had limited success mobilizing Brazilian blacks to fight for their rights, despite the existence of glaring inequalities correlated with skin color. Since the 1970s, social scientists have blamed this lack of black mobilization on the myth of “racial democracy” — the idea of Brazil as a unified mixed-race nation — used by Brazilian elites to downplay the extent of racial discrimination for most of the twentieth century. Scholars argued that black Brazilians failed to mobilize in large numbers because they were duped into thinking that racism was not a problem. Bailey demonstrates that this theory simply does not square with current survey data…

Read the entire book review here.