Mixed Race Studies

Where Black-White Couples Live

Urban Geography
Volume 32, Number 1 (2011-01-01 through 2011-02-14)
pages 1-22
DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.32.1.1

Richard Wright, Professor of Geography
Dartmouth College

Mark Ellis, Professor of Geography
University of Washington

Steven Holloway, Professor of Geography
University of Georgia

This study analyzes where households headed by Black-White, mixed-race couples live in cities. Using 2000 confidential U.S. Census data, we investigate whether Black-White households in 12 large U.S. metropolitan areas are more likely to be found in racially diverse neighborhoods than households headed by White or Black couples. Map analysis shows that concentrations of Black-White headed households are most often found in moderately diverse White neighborhoods. This relationship, however, varies by metropolitan context. Controlling for socioeconomic conditions reveals that Black-White couples are drawn to diversity no matter which racial group forms the neighborhood majority. In contrast, neighborhood racial diversity matters for households headed by Black couples only when they enter spaces containing many Whites or Asians; it matters for households headed by White couples only when they enter neighborhoods with a large number of Blacks or Latinos.

Read or purchase the article here.  Also, see Mixed Metro US.

The Law of the Census: How to Count, What to Count, Whom to Count, and Where to Count Them

Cardozo Law Review
Volume 32, Number 3 (2011)
pages 756-791

Nathaniel Persily, Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science
Columbia Law School

The 2010 Census, like its predecessors, represented a momentous logistical and technological undertaking with far reaching consequences for political representation and allocation of public resources. It also promised to spawn a series of legal controversies over how to count people, what information the government should gather, which individuals truly “count” for purposes of the census, and where they should be counted. This Article explores these present and past controversies surrounding the census. The issues of “sampling” and “statistical adjustment” pervaded much of the legal commentary and case law concerning the census for the past twenty years. The undercount will continue to be a common theme, although given new found ideological opposition to filling out the census form, it is unclear at this stage who is less likely to be counted. The 2010 Census raises new issues of relevance to redistricting claims under the Voting Rights Act, concerning the counting and distribution of data on both the non-citizen and prisoner population. At the same time, recent developments in voting rights law, which place a premium on the size of a minority community, have raised the legal stakes for this census. Despite the technical nature of many census related controversies, one’s position on how, what, whom, and where to count cannot be separated from the larger questions of how easy or difficult it should be for plaintiffs to bring and win civil rights claims, particularly with respect to the redistricting process.

The Framers of the American Constitution viewed the decennial census as providing a certain rhythm to American politics. Every ten years a state’s tax burdens and representation in the House of Representatives would change to reflect its share of the national population as revealed in the “actual enumeration,” the manner of which Congress “shall by law direct.” Much has changed since the first census, but the rhythm still remains. Perhaps unintended and unimagined by the Framers, however, is the rhythmic and ritualistic dance to the courtroom every ten years to argue over the census numbers themselves and the methods used to construct apportionment totals.

Just as its rhythm has remained true to the Framers’ intent, so too the controversies surrounding the census have remained linked to the unique place of the census in the constitutional design. In the Constitution itself, the census is “about” representation, money, and race, so we should not be surprised to learn that courtroom controversies over the census have persisted with respect to these three themes. By tying both representation in the House and taxation to the census, the Constitution provided cross-incentives and an internal political check that might guard against manipulation of the census to overrepresent a state’s population. Today, dickering over the census numbers represents a critical stage in arguments states and localities make for more representation (concerning either apportionment among states of seats in the House of Representatives or within states with respect to redistricting) or for more money (given that funding for many federal and state programs is tied to the census). In addition, just as the first census necessarily had to categorize the population according to race in order to determine which people were “Indians not taxed” or “other persons” subject to the three-fifths rule, so too today the racial categories of the census and the racial implications of census counts become fodder for litigation over representation and funding.

This Article examines the law of the census: specifically, how to count, what to count, whom to count, and where to count them. For the most part this Article draws on my experience and research concerning the use of census data in the redistricting process; however, many of the topics discussed apply to federal funding decisions as well. The Article begins by describing the most recent legal controversies involving census methods, particularly imputation and statistical adjustment. When one thinks of the “law of the census,” these high-profile disputes probably come first to mind. In cases that have arrived at the Supreme Court at the beginning of each of the last three census cycles, undercounted cities and states have argued that census methods were deficient in that the procedures missed some people, double-counted others, or counted people that did not exist.

Second, this Article explores the legal implications of the decisions concerning what to include on the census form, paying particular attention to the topics of race and citizenship. For the second time, the 2010 Census allows respondents to check off more than one race, raising a host of interesting questions concerning the legal implications of alternative methods for categorizing the multiracial population. More significantly for the 2010 Census, the long form, which was previously asked of one sixth of the population, has been replaced by the yearly American Community Survey (ACS), distributed to 2.5% of households. The ACS is the only source for citizenship data from the census, raising questions about the reliability of citizenship estimates for purposes of VRA litigation.

Finally, this Article examines the related issues of who should be included in the census and where they should be counted. The section deals with special populations such as soldiers and other Americans living abroad, college students, the homeless, and prisoners. Prisoners, in particular, present an important case, as some have argued that the wholesale involuntary transfer of convicted criminals away from their communities toward more rural and often whiter areas has allowed for the padding of legislative districts in one part of a state at the expense of districts in other parts of a state. For the first time in 2011, the census will make data available in time for redistricting about the number of prisoners in each census block. Jurisdictions will now be able to subtract out prisoners from the census redistricting data file. Some states have even gone further and have reallocated prisoners to their pre-incarceration address for purposes of redistricting…

…The race question on the 2000 Census was the first to allow respondents to check off more than one race. In 1997, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued “Revisions to the Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity,” a directive that changed the way federal agencies, including the Census Bureau, would categorize people according to race. By moving to a format that allowed respondents to check off any and all of the six principal racial groups on the census, the form effectively created one hundred and twenty six possible combinations of racial and ethnic categories. Although many social scientists worried about the policy implications at the time the OMB and the Census made these decisions, the actual political and legal effects of this change have been minimal. Even so, with each census, the share of the population identifying with more than one racial group will undoubtedly increase. At some point, the confusion caused by the data format, let alone the actual politics of multiracial identity, will present real political and legal challenges.

The first problem to recognize is a logistical one: How does one use the data with its 126 combinations in the process of redistricting? The short answer is that it is not easy unless one reaggregates the data into some more usable format. The OMB therefore promulgated a directive to do just that in the context of civil rights enforcement. The OMB issued Bulletin No. 00-02, which provides the following rules of aggregation:

“Federal agencies will use the following rules to allocate multiple race responses for use in civil rights monitoring and enforcement.

• Responses in the five single race categories are not allocated.
• Responses that combine one minority race and white are allocated to the minority race.
• Response that include two or more minority races are allocated as follows:
  • If the enforcement action is in response to a complaint, allocate to the race that the complainant alleges the discrimination was based on.
  • If the enforcement action requires assessing disparate impact or discriminatory patterns, analyze the patterns based on alternative allocations to each of the minority groups.”

The OMB approach maximizes the numbers for racial minority groups by recategorizing some multiracial respondents as some category other than white. Critics of the OMB guidelines have therefore described them as a modern version of the “One Drop Rule”—the Jim Crow-era law where one drop of black blood made someone black. Defenders, however, would point out that the reaggregation rules merely create a presumption for purposes of civil rights enforcement. That presumption places the data in the light most favorable for the civil rights plaintiff (usually non-white). The reaggregation rules, while smacking of the same racial essentialism that often follows from any categorization scheme, simply try to provide rules of thumb that prevent such plaintiffs from being disadvantaged by the new census format…

Read the entire article here.

Review of Spencer, Jon Michael, The New Colored People: The Mixed-Race Movement in America

H-Net Reviews
January 1998

Richard L. Hughes

The Census, Race, and…

Amid a racial climate which includes a presidential advisory board on race and a discussion of slavery within the popular media, there lies an increasingly prominent dialogue on race in American culture. As the United States nears its next federal census in the year 2000, many Americans have expressed dissatisfaction with the accuracy of the current four categories of white, black, Asian and Pacific Islander, and American Indian or Alaskan Native. Some observers have supported the addition of a “multiracial” category where others, such as historian Orlando Patterson, have criticized the continued existence of racial categories on the census as a “scientifically meaningless” and “politically dangerous” “Race Trap.”[1]

One of the reasons why this debate resonates with so many Americans is that the discussion of race and public policy includes both the persistent belief that race is a fixed biological factor and the emerging notion of many scholars and policymakers that race is a fluid historical and sociopolitical construct. Acknowledging both perspectives, Jon Michael Spencer’s The New Colored People: The Mixed-Race Movement in America is the latest scholarly contribution to this ongoing debate concerning the census and the possible use of the category “multiracial.” Borrowing both the title and analytical framework from Joel Williamson’s New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (1980), which focused on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Spencer offers a cautionary tale about a “multiracial” category in the contemporary United States.[2] He contends that without a “frank assessment of race” and the end of racism, such a category would be “politically naive” and even “suicidal” to black Americans (pp. 148,155).

While Spencer shares Williamson’s astute perspective that the status of “mulattoes” or, to use Spencer’s term, “multiracial” Americans, is an instructive index for race relations, his argument about the dangers of a new government-sanctioned racial category centers on a “cross-cultural analysis” of multiracial Americans and the coloured people of South Africa (p. 11). Building on the comparative work of historian George Fredrickson, the writings of coloured intellectuals such as Richard Van der Ross and Allan Boesak, and interviews with other “coloured nationalists,” Spencer concludes that the creation of a coloured “middle status” under apartheid served to divide and oppress nonwhites by creating a buffer zone between white elites and the black masses (pp. xiii, 91).[3] The result was the continued oppression of South African blacks and a marginal status for coloured South Africans. Cognizant of the centrality of issues of personal identity in the current American debate, Spencer adds that the middle status robbed coloureds of the identity, esteem, and culture only possible through a unified black consciousness movement in more recent South Africa. Spencer’s valuable contribution lies in his comparative analysis in which the tragedy of South African apartheid underscores the possible dangers in careless additions to America’s racial landscape…

Read the entire review here.

Mixed emotions: The multiracial student experience at UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley News
University of California, Berkeley
2005-03-07

Bonnie Azab Powell, NewsCenter

BERKELEY – “What are you?”

That’s the question Robert Allen, adjunct professor of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, writes on the chalkboard when students first file in for his “People of Mixed Racial Descent” class. It’s also the question that complete strangers have asked Ai-Ling Malone, a third-year business administration and economics major, all her life; Ai-Ling, whose mom is Chinese and whose dad is African-American, says it has never bothered her. Josh Fisher (Chinese and white), an environmental sciences Ph.D. student, almost never hears it. Third-year industrial engineering major Rey Andrew Perocho Doctora (Filipino and Chinese/Japanese) mostly hears it only from Asian people: “I have Chinese eyes but my skin is dark, so they find it hard to figure me out.”…

…At UC Berkeley, an eye-opening 22.9 percent of all respondents identified themselves as “multi-racial or multi-ethnic” on the 2004 UC Undergraduate Experience Survey. Across the UC system, the average was 25.8 percent. Thanks to the growing numbers of mixed young people, a journey that often begins in college as a personal quest for identity is starting to gather force as a political movement.

It’s a movement still in its infancy, however. The “What are you?” question aside, “mixed” students like Ai-Ling, Josh, Rey, and Amina are struggling with the same question – “Who am I?” – as their monoracial classmates. The difference is, they can face racism on two fronts: both from white-dominated society and, more upsettingly, from their own racial peer groups, for whom they are not “black enough” or “Asian enough.”…

…Much of the academic research on the mixed-race community began at Berkeley. The “People of Mixed Racial Descent” class was the first of its kind in the nation. It was started in 1980 by Terry Wilson, a Berkeley professor of Native American Studies and the son of a Potawatomi Indian father and a white mother. Several of the course’s early teachers, like Ph.D. student Cynthia Nakashima, have gone on to write landmark texts about the multiracial experience.

The class is even more heavily subscribed now. “For many of the students it’s the first chance they’ve had to talk about their experience in a supportive environment,” says Allen. When he teaches the class – alternating with African-American Studies chair Stephen Small – he emphasizes the artificiality of the idea of race, reminding students that it has no scientific basis. In 1998 the Anthropological Association of America actually released a formal statement to that effect: “Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94 percent, lies within so-called racial groups.This means that there is greater variation within ‘racial’ groups than between them.”…

Read the entire article here.

Student director tackles ‘mixed race’ issues

Daily Titan
California State University, Fullerton
2009-05-17

Sean Belk

From hapa to mestizo to mulatto, ‘Half ‘n’ Half’ acts out stories and history of miscegenation. Bright colorful faces peered through shadows of the low-lit set.

The multi-cultural group of student actors then formed a circle, surrounding an infant, and simultaneously shouted, “What would it be like to shake someone’s hand and not know what they are?”

Then, the set went dark.

It was a small 30-minute production, but the subject matter touched on a big topic that some feel has gone under-reported – the aspect of growing up as two races and the discrimination that can go along with it.

The short sketch was part of the Cal State Fullerton Theatre and Dance Department’s Spring 2009 One Act performances, May 8 and 15 in the Arena Theatre, where advanced directing students presented short plays they had been working on throughout the semester for an audience of friends, family and faculty.

“Half ‘n’ Half,” an adaptation from a 1998 compilation of essays written by 17 writers and edited by Claudine Chiawei O’Hearn, was the only play with an original script adapted from a book. The play was partly written and directed by Lissa Supler, a 25-year-old senior theatre directing major.

Half Filipino and half caucasian, Supler wanted to both share her experience on the subject of being a “mixed race” and also educate people about the history of miscegenation, a term once used to describe interracial marriages that were illegal in the United States until a Supreme Court ruling in 1967…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed race, mixed emotions

The Arizona Republic
2005-05-13

Janie Magruder

Multiracial children face challenges of identity, community

Aaron Foster was 3 years old the first time the question came.

“What are you?” asked the barber, out of earshot of his mother.

“I’m a boy,” Aaron replied, bewildered.

“No, what are you? Black? Chinese?”

“I do gymnastics.”

That exchange, in 1997, made Christina Cooper-Foster, the preschooler’s Taiwanian-born mom, realize that issues of race haven’t changed much. Cooper-Foster was raised by White adoptive parents in rural Florida in the 1970s, and the same hurtful queries and curious stares she got were now plaguing her son, who is mixed race…

…They also are more likely to suffer from depression, substance abuse, sleep problems and various illnesses, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Their 2003 study of 90,000 U.S. adolescents found students who called themselves biracial were more likely to have sex at younger ages, access to guns and poorer experiences at school.

“It did not matter what races the students identified with,” said J. Richard Udry, a professor of maternal and child health and lead researcher. “The risks were higher for all of them if they did not identify with a single race.”

Udry concluded that multiracial children live with stress that their single-race peers do not…

…Who are they?

They’re people like Nathalie Conte, a past president of SIMBA—Students Identifying Multiracial and Biracial at Arizona State University—who helped host a mixed-race event last month on campus. Tempe was among 15 cities on the Generation MIX tour, aimed at focusing attention on the challenges of multiracial people. It ended Tuesday in Seattle.

Conte, a 22-year-old ASU senior, has a Black mother and a Caucasian father.

“The biggest issue is we have to choose our race on application forms, and it’s kind of frustrating when you have to pick ‘other,’ because you don’t think of yourself as ‘other,’ ” she said…

Read the entire article here.

Transgressing Boundaries: A History of the Mixed Descent Families of Maitapapa, Taieri, 1830-1940

University of Canterbury, New Zealand
2004
393 pages

Angela Wanhalla, Lecturer in History
University of Otago, New Zealand

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History at the University of Canterbury

This thesis is a micro-study of intermarriage at the small Kāi Tahu community of Maitapapa from 1830 to 1940. Maitapapa is located on the northern bank of the Taieri River, 25 kilometres south of Dunedin, in Otago. It was at Moturata Island, located at the mouth of the Taieri River, that a whaling station was established in 1839. The establishment of this station initiated changes to the economy and settlement patterns, and saw the beginning of intermarriage between ‘full-blood’ women and Pākehā men. From 1848, Otago was colonized by British settlers and in the process ushered in a new phase of intermarriage where single white men married the ‘half-caste’ and ‘quarter-caste’ daughters of whalers. In short, in the early years of settlement intermarriage was a gendered ‘contact zone’ from which a mixed descent population developed at Taieri. The thesis traces the history of the mixed descent families and the Maitpapapa community throughout the nineteenth century until the kāika physically disintegrated in the 1920s. It argues that the creation of a largely ‘quarter-caste’ population at Maitapapa by 1891 illustrates the high rate of intermarriage at this settlement in contrast to other Kāi Tahu kāika in the South Island. While the population was ‘quarter-caste’ in ‘blood’, the families articulated an identity that was both Kāi Tahu and mixed descent. From 1916, the community underwent both physical and cultural disintegration. This disintegration was rapid and complete by 1926. The thesis demonstrates that while land alienation, poverty, poor health and a subsistence economy characterized the lives of the mixed descent families at Maitapapa in the nineteenth century, it was a long history of intermarriage begun in the 1830s and continued throughout the nineteenth century which was the decisive factor in wholesale migrations post World War One. Education, dress and physical appearance alongside social achievements assisted in the integration of persons of mixed descent into mainstream society. While Kāi Tahu initially welcomed intermarriage as a way of integrating newcomers of a different culture such as whalers into a community, the sustained pattern of intermarriage at Maitapapa brought with it social and cultural change in the form of outward migration and eventual cultural loss by 1940.

CONTENTS

• Abbreviations
• Note on Dialect
• Glossary
• Graphs
• Tables
• Maps
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Literatures
• Chapter Two: Encounters
• Chapter Three: Boundaries, 1844-1868
• Chapter Four: Assimilations, 1850-1889
• Chapter Five: Recoveries, 1891 164
• Chapter Six: Identities, 1890-1915
• Chapter Seven: Migrations, 1916-1926
• Chapter Eight: Destinations, 1927-1940
• Conclusion
• Appendix One: Taieri Native Reserve Succession List, 1868-1889
• Appendix Two: Taieri Native Reserve Succession List, 1890-1915
• Appendix Three: Taieri Native Reserve Succession List, 1916-1926
• Appendix Four: Taieri Native Reserve Succession List, 1927-1940
• Appendix Five: SILNA Grantees: Taieri
• Bibliography

GRAPHS

1. Composition of the Taieri Kāi Tahu Population, 1874-1886
2. Kāi Tahu Census, 1891
3. Kāi Tahu Mixed Population, 1891
4. Kāi Tahu ‘Racial’ Composition, 1891
5. Application of national census categories to the 1891 Census
6. Composition of Taieri Kāi Tahu and mixed descent population, 1891-1911

TABLES

1. Whakapapa of Patahi
2. Mixed Community, Maitapapa, 1849-1852
3. Census of Maitapapa, 1853
4. Taieri Native Reserve Owners’ List, September 1868
5. Marriages (Maitapapa Women): 1850-1889
6. Marriages (Maitapapa Men): 1879-1889
7. Kāi Tahu Mixed Population, 1891
8. Kāi Tahu ‘Racial’ Composition, 1891
9. Family Size
10. ‘Racial’ Composition of Taieri Kāi Tahu Population, 1891
11. Marriages (Maitapapa Women): 1890-1915
12. Marriages (Maitapapa Men): 1890-1915
13. Marriages (Maitapapa Women): 1916-1926
14. Marriages (Maitapapa Men): 1916-1926
15. Marriages (Maitapapa Women): 1927-1940
16. Marriages (Maitapapa Men): 1927-1940

MAPS

1. Location Map of Whaling Stations in Otago and Southland
2. Lower Taieri Place Names
3. England’s Topographical Sketch Map of Taieri Native Reserve, 1860
4. MacLeod’s Survey Map of the Taieri Native Reserve, 1868
5. Sketch Map of Lake Tatawai (Alexander Mackay)
6. Location Map of Destinations

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. William Palmer
2. Edward Palmer
3. Ann Holmes
4. Peti Parata and Caroline Howell
5. Eliza Palmer
6. Sarah Palmer
7. Robert, William and Jack Palmer
8. James Henry Palmer
9. George Palmer and Mary List
10. Helen McNaught and George Brown
11. Taieri Ferry School Pupils in the mid-1880s
12. Harriet Overton and her son George
13. Thomas Brown, 1885-1974
14. The Joss Family at Rakiura
15. Tiaki Kona/Jack Conner
16. Robert Brown, 1830-1898
17. Te Waipounamu Hall, 1901
18. Official opening of Te Waipounamu Hall, 1901
19. Hangi at opening of Te Waipounamu Hall, 1901
20. Wellman Brothers and Band at Henley
21. William George Sherburd
22. Wedding of Thomas Garth and Annie Sherburd
23. The Drummond Family
24. James Smith and Emma Robson
25. Matene Family
26. Ernest Sherburd and Isabella Mackie
27. George and Caroline Milward
28. William Richard Wellman
29. Elizabeth Garth, Thomas Garth and John Brown
30. The Crane Family at Waitahuna Teone Paka Koruarua and the Maahanui Council, 1905
31. Lena Teihoka, Waitai Brown and Mere Teihoka
32. Teihoka family gathering at Taumutu, c. 1930s
33. Tuarea
34. Portrait of Jane Brown
35. Portrait of Robert Brown
36. Portrait of Mere Kui Tanner

Read the entire thesis here.

What Racial Hybridity? Sexual Politics of Mixed-Race Identities in the Caribbean and the Performance of Blackness

Lucayos
The School of English Studies of The College of The Bahamas’ Journal of Caribbean and Postcolonial Criticism and Creative Work
Volume 1 (2008)
pages 90-105

Papers from the 26th West Indian Literature Conference, March 8-10, 2007

Angelique V. Nixon, Assistant Professor in Residence of Woman’s Studies
University of Connecticut

for our blood, mixed
soon with their passion in sport,
in indifference, in anger,
will create new soils, new souls, new
ancestors; will flow like this tide fixed
to the star by which this ship floats
to new worlds, new waters, new
harbours, the pride of our ancestors mixed
with the wind and the water
the flesh and the flies, the whips and the fixed
fear of pain in this chained and welcoming port.

~ Kamau Brathwaite “New World A-Comin’”

The authenticity of “Blackness” has continuously been challenged in the debates over identity politics, specifically within Black Cultural Studies, Black feminisms, African American Studies, and Postcolonial Theory. The meaning of the word “Black” often depends upon the social, historical, cultural, and geographical context, but it is almost invariably political. In the United States, Black refers to African Americans (including mixed people of African descent because of the “one drop” rule), while in Britain, the term Black politically generally categorizes all non-white people—Asians, Africans, and Afro-Caribbeans (Kanneh 86). In the Caribbean, the word “Black” is usually used to describe people of African descent, but its history remains complex given the array of reactions to racial mixing by different colonial powers (meaning the development of racial categories determined by blood and coded by law). Each European colony had legal codes and categories for mixed race identities, which created different “classes” of people determined by skin color. Today, the word “Black” has different political and social meanings, but at the same time, we cannot deny the realities of race and racism for Black people and other people of color around the world. Furthermore, mixed-race Black identities continue to have a major affect on how we think about race and identity. And considering the different political and social connotations of the word “Black” and the massive consumption of Black culture, “Blackness” as a signifier remains elusive and subject to appropriation and commodification; hence, Blackness has been and continues to be constructed and commodified by all kinds of people and places.

Therefore, any essential notion of ‘the Black subject or experience’ has been contested by a number of theorists; however, Stuart Hall argues for a “new politics of representation” that engages in difference and recognizes Black experience as Diaspora experience (170). In essence, he argues that we must remain committed to engaging in the politics of Black representation, while simultaneously recognizing the differences within our difference. The challenges to “identity politics, recent debates over ‘mixed race’ identities, forms of racism, and class complicate the broad terrain of ‘racial difference’ on which ‘Blackness’ is identified” (Kanneth 94). In these debates, postmodernism has been helpful to Black Cultural Studies insomuch as it allows for multiple Black identities, but as bell hooks recognizes in “Postmodern Blackness,” the postmodern critique of identity appears at first glance to threaten any opportunity for those who have suffered from oppression, domination, or colonization (hooks 23). But hooks argues that a postmodern critique of essentialism is useful in opening up constricting notions of Blackness, and this would be a radical and serious challenge to racist discourse that uses the notion of a Black authentic experience (28). She asserts that “such a critique allows us to affirm multiple Black identities, varied Black experience. It also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms of Black identity which represent Blackness one-dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy” (28). While hooks does posit that we critique and abandon essentialist notions of Blackness, at the same time, she says that we must still “struggle for radical Black subjectivity”—where the lived and diverse experiences of Black people complicate our sense of identity (29). Although hooks does not specifically discuss mixed-race identities, I use her insights to discuss the possibilities around the signification of “Blackness.”

Given the recent media attention on mixed-race and bi-racial identities (including Tiger Woods, Barack Obama, Kamora Lee [Kimora Lee Simons], Alicia Keys, and others) and the historical fetishization of “exotic” women of color, I am interested in how racial performance and performativity operates in a mixed-race body, and most specifically, how these complicate the signification of Blackness. Thus, how is the Blackness of a mixed-race person embodied? What does this embodiment of Blackness mean for a mixed-race person? Are mixed-race Black identities normalized through choosing a race, passing, or legal codes that regulate race? How is mixed race situated in the discourse of racism? When a racially mixed person claims or asserts Blackness through performance or a speech act utterance (I am Black, but I’m mixed, or I’m mixed and Black, or I identify as Black) does this destabilize racism or essentialist notions of race? In this project, I offer a theoretical framework about what I call the sexual politics of mixed-race identities and performance of Blackness in the Caribbean context, which I argue through using both personal narrative and literary representations….

Read the entire article here.

Evidence for hypodescent and racial hierarchy in the categorization and perception of biracial individuals.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Published online: 2010-11-22
DOI: 10.1037/a0021562

Arnold K. Ho
Department of Psychology
Harvard University

Jim Sidanius, Professor of Psychology and African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Daniel T. Levin, Professor of Psychology and Director of Graduate Studies
Vanderbilt University

Mahzarin R. Banaji, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics
Harvard University

Individuals who qualify equally for membership in two racial groups provide a rare window into social categorization and perception. In 5 experiments, we tested the extent to which a rule of hypodescent, whereby biracial individuals are assigned the status of their socially subordinate parent group, would govern perceptions of Asian–White and Black–White targets. In Experiment 1, in spite of posing explicit questions concerning Asian–White and Black–White targets, hypodescent was observed in both cases and more strongly in Black–White social categorization. Experiments 2A and 2B used a speeded response task and again revealed evidence of hypodescent in both cases, as well as a stronger effect in the Black–White target condition. In Experiments 3A and 3B, social perception was studied with a face-morphing task. Participants required a face to be lower in proportion minority to be perceived as minority than in proportion White to be perceived as White. Again, the threshold for being perceived as White was higher for Black–White than for Asian–White targets. An independent categorization task in Experiment 3B further confirmed the rule of hypodescent and variation in it that reflected the current racial hierarchy in the United States. These results documenting biases in the social categorization and perception of biracials have implications for resistance to change in the American racial hierarchy.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Historical Treatment of Biracial Individuals
• Empirical Studies of Biracial Individuals: Identification, Categorization, and Perception
• Overview of the Experiments
• Experiment 1: A Blatant Test of Hypodescent
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• Experiment 2A: A Test of the Automaticity of Hypodescent
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• Experiment 2B: A Replication
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• Experiment 3A: Evidence of Hypodescent in Visual Face Perception
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• Experiment 3B: A Replication and Extension
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• General Discussion
• Conclusions
• References

The “mixing of races” in America provides a natural laboratory for measuring perceptions of new racial identities that diverge from older and simpler notions of race purity (Shih & Sanchez, 2009). Although social psychologists have studied how humans think about ingroups and outgroups for decades, relatively little is known about the perception of individuals who, by the fact that they embody mixtures of social identities within a single individual, blur traditional group boundaries. Such individuals provide intriguing test cases for social categorization and social perception. We focus on one aspect of such mixtures by studying how humans who meld two seemingly distinct racial groups are categorized and perceived, and thereby test how socially meaningful lines that determine inclusion into desired group memberships are drawn. Fundamentally, the categorization and perception of biracial and multiracial individuals more broadly can reveal how culturally entrenched social categories and norms guide, and even limit, social perception.

From a sociostructural perspective, miscegenation and biracial identity have profound implications for understanding the stability and permeability of extant racial group boundaries. In the United States, there is a clear and consensually agreed upon racial status hierarchy—members of dominant and subordinate groups alike agree that Whites have the highest social status, followed by Asians, Latinos, and Blacks (see Fang, Sidanius, & Pratto, 1998; Kahn, Ho, Sidanius, & Pratto, 2009; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999, pp. 52–53). However, many have argued that the increasing rate of interracial dating and marriage between racial minorities and Whites, and resulting patterns of biracial identification of their offspring, will lead to a fundamental change in the American racial hierarchy (e.g., Alba & Nee, 2003; J. Lee & Bean, 2004, 2007a, 2007b; Sears & Savalei, 2006; Thornton, 2009). For example, J. Lee and Bean (2004) suggested that “based on patterns of immigration, intermarriage, and racial/multiracial identification…, Latinos and Asians may enjoy the option to view themselves as almost white or even white, and consequently, participate in a new color line that is still somewhat exclusionary of blacks” (p. 237). Others, like Thornton (2009), have documented how the mainstream media perceives the significance of multiracial identification: “For mainstream [news] papers, we are in a new era, sans racial determinants, and in this context multiracial people embody a color-blind America…” (p. 121). These sentiments assume that biracials will be accepted as part of their dominant parent group and not limited by their minority parent group status. However, are biracial targets perceived accurately as equal members of both parent groups or more in terms of their dominant or subordinate group lineage? The five experiments reported here are aimed at addressing this question…

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Changing Family Structures in America [Project Description]

US 2010: Discover America in a New Century
2010

Zhenchao Qian, Professor of Sociology
Ohio State University

The US 2010 research project examines changes in American societ in the recent past.  Directed by sociologist John Logan, US 2010 is funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and Brown University.

Qian will create a descriptive portrait of changes in family structure, with a special emphasis on gender and racial/ethnic differences and geographic variations. Using the 2010 and earlier censuses and the 2005-2010 American Community Surveys (ACS), his research will highlight several trends.

Marriage rates have declined over the years. The weakened connection between marriage and childbearing, the growing popularity of nonmarital cohabitation, the stable high divorce rates, and the declining remarriage rates have all contributed to the decline in marriage rates…

Interracial marriage reflects racial and cultural diversity in American families. Recent increases in interracial marriage have narrowed the “social distance” between racial groups; Qian will demonstrate trends in intermarriage with whites for blacks, Asian Americans, American Indians and Hispanics. ..

“With increasing shares of minority populations, Americans can no longer be viewed in simple black and white or even single-race terms,” Qian said. “Intermarriage connects married couples, families, friends, and social networks of different racial/ethnic groups; the growing population of mixed-race individuals from intermarriage further blurs racial boundaries and adds another dimension of diversity in American families.”

Read the entire project description here.