Mixed Race Studies

UK in 2051 to be ‘significantly more diverse’

University of Leeds
2010-07-13

The ethnic makeup of the UK will change dramatically over the next 40 years, with the country becoming far more ethnically diverse and geographically integrated, according to new projections.

In a report published this week, researchers from the University of Leeds predict that ethnic minorities will make up one-fifth of the population by 2051 (compared to 8% in 2001), with the mixed ethnic population expected to treble in size. Their projections also indicate that the UK will become far less segregated as ethnic groups disperse throughout the country. 

These initial findings of a three-year study include population projections for 352 local authorities in England, and projections for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, for each year until 2051.

Key projections for 2051

• UK population could reach almost 78 million* (59 million in 2001)
• White British, White Irish and Black Caribbean groups to experience slowest growth
• Other White (Australia, US and Europe) and Mixed to experience the biggest growth
• Ethnic minority share of the population to increase from 8% (2001) to around 20%
• Ethnic minorities to shift from deprived local authorities to more affluent areas
• Ethnic groups to be significantly less segregated from the rest of the population…

Read the entire news release here.

The Quadroon Ball on stage one week only Oct. 13-17 [2010]

Lone Star College
The Woodlands, Texas
2010-09-22

Lone Star College-CyFair Drama Department presents Damon Wright’s play “The Quadroon Ball” on stage Oct. 13 through Oct. 17 [2010].

“The Quadroon Ball” is a moving drama taking place in New Orleans just prior to the Civil War.  It focuses on the women of mixed race who were prized for their beauty and yet regarded as second-class citizens, said LSC-CyFair Director Ron Jones. The play traces the life of a beautiful Quadroon woman (one quarter black and three quarters white) whose life is affected both by the man of royalty who loves her and the presence of slavery in society.

With a cast of 22 community and college actors, this poignant and elegant story begins as Jeanette is introduced at a cotillion for women of her stature and continues for 20 years, marking her rise to fame and her ultimate demise.

According to The New York Times, “Damon Wright’s ‘The Quadroon Ball’ is an intelligent, affecting new play about race, family, honor and freedom.”  Jones adds that this play is for mature audiences only due to adult subject matter and graphic language.

Half and Half: An (Auto)ethnography of Hybrid Identities in a Korean American Mother-Daughter Relationship

Journal of International and Intercultural Communication
Volume 2, Issue 2 (May 2009)
pages 139-167
DOI: 10.1080/17513050902759512

Stephanie L. Young, Associate Professor of Communication Studies
University of Southern Indiana

This essay focuses on how immigrant mothers and second generation interracial daughters construct, perform, and negotiate racial and ethnic hybrid identities. Placing my mother’s experiences in dialogue with my own experiences, I (auto)ethnographically examine how we navigate our mother-daughter relationship and intercultural and interracial identities in relation to discourses of Asian American-ness. I identify three sites for identity formation: location, language, and the dialectical tension of assimilation-preservation. I argue that the enactment of a racial self is not always a conscious part of one’s identity. Rather, we each enact racialized cultural identities that are contextually performed and continuously shifting.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Great Unraveling [Book Review of “Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America”]

The New York Times
2010-12-29

Raymond Arsenault, Visiting Scholar, Florida State University Study Center in London
and John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History, University of South Florida

Eugene Robinson, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America (New York: Doubleday, 2010).

When Henry Louis Gates Jr. told Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge police, “You don’t know who you’re messing with,” he was speaking truth to power, albeit in a manner more akin to arrogance than erudition. The big shock here, according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson, is not that a Harvard professor misused the subjective case (“who” for “whom”) and inelegantly ended a sentence with a preposition; it is, rather, that Gates belongs to an elite enclave beyond the sergeant’s experience or imagination. Gates’s life as an academic superstar places him among a select group of black Americans aptly labeled “Transcendent” by Robinson. Think of Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé, Kobe Bryant, Vernon Jordan and Richard Parsons, the retired chief executive of Time Warner…

…These Transcendent men and women, Robinson tells us at the outset, live and work in a privileged world of wealth and power. Despite the color of their skin, they do not belong to the black community.

Fair enough, but Robinson does not stop there. Over the next 200 pages, he demonstrates rather convincingly that no one belongs to the black community anymore…

…During the past four decades, Robinson persuasively argues, black America has splintered into four subgroups: the Transcendent elite; the Mainstream middle class, which now accounts for a majority of black Americans; an Emergent community made up of mixed-race families and black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean; and the Abandoned, a large and growing underclass concentrated in the inner cities and depressed pockets of the rural South…

Read the entire article here.

Not Quite White: Race Classification and the Arab American Experience

This paper was first presented at a symposium on Arab Americans by:
The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies
Georgetown University
1997-04-04

(This is also a chapter in Arabs in America: Building a New Future)

Issues of race and identity are certainly dominant factors in American social history. The dual legacies of slavery and massive immigration – and how they have intersected over time—deeply conditioned the ways in which the citizenry relates to race, and how the government intercedes to classify the population.

Throughout the more than 100 years that Arabs have immigrated to the U.S., there has been the need to clarify, accommodate and reexamine their relationship to this peculiar American fixation on race. In each historical period, Arabs in America have confronted race-based challenges to their identity. Today, the constituency known as Arab American is situated at an interesting social crossroads, where issues of minority and majority affiliation demand more attention—and reflection.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine race classification policy as it has impacted the Arab American experience. Rather than approach the question of identity development from within the ethnic boundaries (which continues to be ably and amply studied), this view is principally to examine the externally—imposed systems of classification in the American context: how and why they have developed, changed over time, and how they have related historically to Arab immigrants and ethnics…

…The effect of racial classification on Arab Americans thus became one of the topics that continued to be debated throughout the three-year review process. Under the heading of “emerging categories”, the AAI proposal was presented at the next major phase of the review process, a workshop sponsored by the National Research Council in February 1994 to discuss further the federal standards and make recommendations to the Office of Management and Budget. The other principal emerging category issue proposed was the addition to the race choices of a multi-racial check off for individuals of mixed parentage who in the current framework are obliged to select one identifying race. Although other refinements to the federal guidelines were entertained, such as reclassifying Hawaiians as Native Americans and merging Hispanics into the race categories, the mixed race question was clearly the most controversial recommendation, one that generated the most organized public pressure and one that virtually every stakeholder requiring data on race—including the minority communities—oppose on the grounds that it skews continuity of race data and, in effect, serves to undermine policies that implement affirmative action.

Though overshadowed by the mixed race issue, the Arab American proposal continued to be raised in the final phase of the federal review: a series of public hearings sponsored by the OMB around the country during the summer of 1994. By then, a similar proposal for a specific “Arab American” category—as a linguistically-based identifier—was introduced by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). Testimony for the regional category (Middle East/North African) with ethnic subgroups (Arab, Iranian, Turk, Cypriot, Assyrian, etc.) was presented alongside support for a distinctly Arab American classifier—a mixed signal cited in the OMB report as a lack of consensus over the definition of the population in question. This was in fact one of several findings cited by the OMB as not justifying further research in this area at this time; another factor was the relatively small size of the population. By September 1997, the review process was complete and the OMB decided against the Arab American proposals, leaving open the possibility of study at some future date…

Read the entire paper here.