Mixed Race Studies

In Kamala Harris’s Blackness, I See My Own

The New York Times
2024-08-04

Danzy Senna

We seem to be beginning yet another season of a perennially popular American spectacle, “How Much Is That Mulatto in the Window?” I frequently think that, after 400 years, this show is about to go off the air — jump the shark, as it were. But then it returns, with ever more absurd plot lines. Yet even as a so-called mulatto myself, I can’t stop watching.

The Hollywood pitch goes something like this: Put racially ambiguous Black people in the public eye — Kamala, Meghan, Barack. Have them declare themselves Black. Count down the minutes before the world erupts into outrage, distress and suspicion. People scream their confusion and doubt, accusing the figures of lying about who they really are. It makes for good TV.

On last week’s episode, Donald Trump got his cameo, accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of switching races. “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person,” he said during an appearance in front of the National Association of Black Journalists. His staged bewilderment, implying that she was practicing some sort of sinister racial sorcery, felt wild for 2024, when mixed-race people are everywhere, visually overrepresented in Target commercials and Kardashian family reunions. Yet even in the midst of our fetishization, a stubborn strain of mulattophobia remains widespread. And no matter what answer we give to the ubiquitous question — What are you? — someone, somewhere, will accuse us of lying, of being a grifter trying to impersonate another race, a more real race.

Multiracial, mulatto, mixed-nuts, halfies — whatever you want to call us today, we remain the fastest-growing demographic in our country. When we enter the spotlight, we are often treated as specimens, there to be dissected, poked, debated, disputed and disinherited. We are and always have been a Rorschach test for how the world is processing its anxiety, rage, confusion and desire about this amorphous construction we call race…

Read the entire essay here.

Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica

University of Pennsylvania Press
June 2017
328 Pages
6.00 x 9.00 in, 10 illus.
Hardcover ISBN: 9780812249187
Paperback ISBN: 9780812224603
eBook ISBN:

Sasha Turner, Associate Professor of History
The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves’ reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women’s labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves’ interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted their owners’ medicine and benevolence. Turner contends that the social bonds and cultural practices created around reproductive health care and childbirth challenged the economic purposes slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children.

Through powerful stories that place the reader on the ground in plantation-era Jamaica, Contested Bodies reveals enslaved women’s contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children, which put them at odds not only with their owners but sometimes with abolitionists and enslaved men. Turner argues that, as the source of new labor, these women created rituals, customs, and relationships around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that enabled them at times to dictate the nature and pace of their work as well as their value. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including plantation records, abolitionist treatises, legislative documents, slave narratives, runaway advertisements, proslavery literature, and planter correspondence—Contested Bodies yields a fresh account of how the end of the slave trade changed the bodily experiences of those still enslaved in Jamaica.

Contents

• Introduction. Transforming Bodies
• Chapter 1. Conceiving Moral and Industrious Subjects: Women, Children, and Abolition
• Chapter 2. “The Best Ones Who Are Fit to Breed”: The Quest for Biological Reproduction
• Chapter 3. When Workers Become Mothers, Who Works? Motherhood, Labor, and Punishment
• Chapter 4. “Buckra Doctor No Do You No Good”: Struggles over Maternal Health Care
• Chapter 5. “Dead Before the Ninth Day”: Struggles over Neonatal Care
• Chapter 6. Mothers Know Best? Maternal Authority and Children’s Survival
• Chapter 7. Raising Hardworking Adults: Labor, Punishment, and Slave Childhood
• Conclusion. Transforming Slavery
• Notes
• Sources
• Index
• Acknowledgments

On Turning Black

The New York Times
2024-08-01

Esau McCaulley, Contributing Opinion Writer

During his interview before the National Association of Black Journalists this week, Donald Trump was asked if he would call upon his fellow Republicans to refrain from labeling Vice President Kamala Harris a “D.E.I. candidate” for the presidency. Rather than condemn his party’s increasingly troubling language on the topic, Mr. Trump took the opportunity to question Ms. Harris’s racial identity.

“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” he said. “I didn’t know she was Black, until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black? I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t.”

This is all clearly untrue. Ms. Harris graduated from Howard University, a historically Black university, and she is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, a historically Black sorority. Her biographies and self-descriptions throughout her career have cited both her Black and Indian identities.

My wife is white, so we have multiracial children. Depending on the context, they can refer to themselves as Black or multiracial. When my children describe themselves using the latter term, they are acknowledging that their mother is a part of their story as well. Does Mr. Trump really expect interracial people to deny half of their families?…

Read the entire essay here.

Should Harris Talk Much About Her Racial Identity? Many Voters Say No.

The New York Times
2024-08-03

Jeremy W. Peters

Even as Trump plays up racial divisions, many Americans said they would rather not dwell on race or identity. “We can all see that you’re Black.”

“Obviously, we have eyes.”

That was the somewhat jaded response by Larhonda Marshall, a 42-year-old health care worker from Chicago, about all the attention being paid to Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity.

As a Black woman herself, Ms. Marshall said that the symbolism of a Harris victory would surely be on her mind as she considers her vote for president. But it was not the most important factor at all, she said. And she wishes the Harris supporters who keep mentioning it would drop it.

“I’m tired of hearing it,” Ms. Marshall said. “That’s not an issue. I just want what’s best for the country.”

This week, after former President Donald J. Trump claimed falsely that Ms. Harris “happened to turn Black” only recently, the vice president did not attempt to clarify the obvious: that she has, in fact, been Black all her life…

Read the entire article here.

Why Kamala Harris’ biracial identity upsets Donald Trump so much

MSNBC
2024-08-01

Sarah E. Gaither, Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Samuel R. Sommers, Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Acknowledging the existence of multiracial identities completely scrambles Trump’s stereotypes.

Early in Donald Trump’s meltdown at this week’s National Association of Black Journalists convention, the former president offered unsolicited commentary on the racial identity of Vice President Kamala Harris, who has an Indian mother and a Jamaican father. “She was Indian all the way,” Trump said of his presumptive opponent, “and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person. Somebody should look into that.”

There is a multitude of problems with Trump’s comments, from his presumption that he has the expertise and jurisdiction to judge someone else’s identity to his argument that Harris lacks the racial bona fides to merit the Black audience members’ allegiance. But the former president’s ramble offers another important conclusion: Trump simply doesn’t understand race. When Trump asks for somebody to “look into that,” the truth is that for years researchers have looked into that. What they’ve found is that overly simplified perspectives on race like Trump’s are not only misplaced, but they are counterproductive and dangerous.

Scholars of race have long argued, and demonstrated, that race is a socially constructed category that still has very real outcomes. We, as members of society, constantly construct, deconstruct and reconstruct what race means.

Even the basics of how race is measured in America have evolved over time. The 1850 U.S. census was the first to acknowledge people of multiracial descent, with the category “Mulatto” used as a way to exclude them from having full political rights. Not until the 2000 census were multiracial Americans able to formally mark more than one racial identity. In fact, the multiracial population is the fastest growing racial group in the United States, with a 276% increase between 2010 and 2020…

Read the entire article here.

The Lesser-Known Side of Harris’s Identity: Asian American

The New York Times
2024-07-28

Amy Qin

Some Asian American leaders are rooting for Kamala Harris to become the first Asian American president. But she is not widely known as Asian American, reflecting the complexity of the identity.

Daniel Chiang can remember one Asian American who ran for president in 2020: Andrew Yang, a Taiwanese American entrepreneur. But he was surprised to learn last week that there was another person running for president then, and in 2024, who counted herself an Asian American: Kamala Harris.

“I never got that impression,” said Mr. Chiang, 38, a Taiwanese American from Connecticut.

Ms. Harris, the vice president and likely Democratic nominee for president, is known widely as the first Black woman to be elected vice president.

But Ms. Harris, whose mother emigrated from India and whose father emigrated from Jamaica, is less known as an Indian American and Asian American. Asked to name a famous Asian American, only 2 percent of Americans said Kamala Harris, according to a recent survey by The Asian American Foundation…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Desis: Stories of Multiracial South Asians

HumSub Global
2024-02-12
176 pages
6 x 0.4 x 9 inches
ISBN-13: 979-8989630202

Rahul Arjun John Yates
Punita Khanna

Embark on an inspiring journey through the captivating narratives of “Mixed Desis,” a book creating community for and gathering the voices of mixed-race individuals, interracial families, and multiracial family researchers. Within these pages, you’ll find the heartfelt stories of trailblazers who dared to defy convention in their pursuit of love and life.

Listen to this community of brave, vulnerable, and perceptive multiracial South Asians as they share their journeys toward happiness, balance, and self-actualization.

Join us in celebrating the resilience, love, and strength of these remarkable individuals. Purchase “Mixed Desis” today and empower yourself with knowledge, empathy, and a deeper connection to the vibrant tapestry of human experience. Your journey to understanding and unity begins here.

Multiracial Generations: (Mis)Identification & Socialization Experiences of Interminority Multiracials and Half-White Multiracials

EON Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Volume 02: Issue 05, May 2024

Joie Lynn Haydel
Sceptre Ganasi
Samantha Yim
Torin Perreyclear
Lizzie Hernandez
Haochen Zheng
Kaitlyn Jubera
Taylor Pauley
Xinzhuo Gao
Yiyue Lin
Rosi Vera
Zhihui Sheng
Alisa Panichkina
Mel Markley
Jarryd Willis

Multiracials were the fastest growing ethnoracial group in America according to the 2020 United States Census, and our investigation sought to contribute to the growing body of literature on the (mis)identification and ethnoracial socialization experiences of various half-White Multiracial groups (Wasian, Whitino, Whindian, half Middle Eastern-half White, and half Black-half-White Multiracials) and interminority Multiracial groups (Blasian, Latinasian, and Blatino Multiracials). We took an interdisciplinary approach in our literature review of Multiracial experiences, incorporating historical contexts that influenced Multiracials experiences, cross-cultural research (e.g., how phenotypically ambiguous Multiracials have become commodified in the advent of globalization and international marketing), critical race studies, and social psychology. We asked Multiracial groups about their experiences of identity (mis)categorization, parents’ approach to ethnoracial socialization, and how their personal, phenotypically influenced, and socially perceived identities influence experiences with coracial and non-coracial peers. We found that phenotypically ambiguous Multiracials were the most likely to experience misidentification. Interminority Multiracials were more likely to be misperceived as a higher-status ethnoracial group and half-White Multiracials were more likely to be misperceived as a lower-status ethnoracial group. Moreover, phenotypically ambiguous Multiracials reported a marginally higher proportion of non-coracial friends. Furthermore, interminority Multiracials were more likely to be socialized in both parents’ cultures than half-White Multiracials. We discuss our findings in the context of cultural pluralism and identity development, and hope our research contributes to the literature on the experiences of various Multiracial groups.

Read the entire article here.

Populations, individuals, and biological race

Biology and Philosophy
Volume 39, article number 10, (2024)
24 pages
DOI: 10.1007/s10539-024-09946-0

M.A. Diamond-Hunter, Teaching Associate
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Research Associate, Sidney Sussex College
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

In this paper, I plan to show that the use of a specific population concept—Millstein’s Causal Interactionist Population Concept (CIPC)—has interesting and counter-intuitive ramifications for discussions of the reality of biological race in human beings. These peculiar ramifications apply to human beings writ large and to individuals. While this in and of itself may not be problematic, I plan to show that the ramifications that follow from applying Millstein’s CIPC to human beings complicates specific biological racial realist accounts—naïve or otherwise. I conclude with the notion that even if biological races do exist—by fulfilling all of the criteria needed for Millstein’s population concept (which, given particular worries raised by Gannett (Synthese 177:363–385, 2010), and Winther and Kaplan (Theoria 60:54–80, 2013) may not)—the lower-bound limit for the scope of biological racial realism is at the level of populations, and as such they cannot say anything about whether or not individual organisms themselves have races.

Read the entire article here.

Building a Mixed Race Community: The People, Building, and Sites of the Winton Triangle

Photoworks at Glen Echo Park
2024-02-09 through 2024-03-31
7300 MacArthur Blvd.
Glen Echo, Maryland

Photoworks is delighted to host the work of acclaimed photojournalist and historian, Marvin Tupper Jones, in the exhibition, Building a Mixed Race Community. The show will be on display from February 9th – March 31st.

The history covered in this exhibit spans from 1851 to 1973 and takes the viewer from the antebellum time through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the modern Civil Rights eras. It tells stories about over 30 people along with photographs and text. Four women are featured, as well as business people, farmers, carpenters, educators, church leaders, soldiers (Civil War and WWII), Civil Rights activists and organizations.

For more information, click here.