Mixed Race Studies

When Social Inequality Maps to Demographic Diversity, What Then for Liberal Democracies?

Social Research: An International Quarterly
Volume 77, Number 1 (Spring 2010)
pages 1-20
ISBN: 978-1-933481-20-3

Kenneth Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs
Columbia University in the City of New York

If social inequality results from discriminatory behaviors or policies based on membership in a race and ethnicity, as it certainly has in the U. S., should policy in a liberal society offer group-based benefits? The civil rights era answered positively. Identity politics, diversity rationales, and pressures for color-blind policy are challenging that answer. What and how we measure is in the middle of the argument.

Framing the Issue

Nations vary in the diversity of their population—here using “diversity” to reference some or all of the following: ethnicity, religion, language, race, ancestry, tribe, and caste. The U.S., Canada and Australia are generally cited as more “diverse” than other OECD countries. There is a large literature indicating that governing demographically diverse populations challenges statecraft in ways not experienced in nations with more homogeneous populations. Diverse populations, for example, are generally assumed to be more prone to internal conflict than more homogenous societies, giving rise to research on how to manage conflict rooted in cultural differences. The conflict may pit group against group. Under some conditions, the conflict expresses itself as a demand for more autonomy, even separation, by the aggrieved group—especially where political power is monopolized by a religion or ethnicity that does not adequately serve or protect the aggrieved group. Where separation is impractical or fiercely resisted—apartheid South Africa and Northern Ireland are examples—armed uprising can occur.

Nations vary in the magnitude and patterns of their social inequality—which does bring us nearer to our topic. The U.S. and Europe are, of course, often contrasted in how much inequality they tolerate—more in the U.S., less in Europe.

Here I start with the observation that demographic diversity and social inequalities have to be jointly examined. What policy responses are appropriate in liberal democracies when social inequalities map to demographic diversity? More specifically—how far should the liberal state go in remediation of inequality by providing group rights or group-targeted benefits? My comments offer the U.S. as a case in point…

…Racial Classification in the United States

In the U.S., more than three centuries of racist doctrine planted racially inscribed inequalities deep into the society, polity, and economy. The civil rights movement in the 1960s attempted to end this history through a policy regime that used race to undo racism. Making policy distinctions based on race came to be accepted as the only way to overcome the legacies of a racist history.

Now, nearly a half-century into that policy regime, strong reservations are being voiced. Political arguments echo the “dilemma of recognition”—do race-based policies not defeat their own purpose?…

…More than a century and a half of discriminatory social policy designed to protect the numerical and political supremacy of Americans of European ancestry needed a classification system that assigned everyone to a discrete racial group. Census categories provided this classification, as did vital statistics and, eventually, all administrative records. This measurement system is the basis for presuming that separate and distinct races constitute the true condition of the American population, and can thereby provide the basis for law and public policy. Because there are measurable groups, there are traits that are differently distributed across these groups–including, of course, traits such as intelligence, social worth, moral habits. On this foundation was constructed a race-based legal code and social and economic practices that haunts American history. Ironically, the Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s gave fresh momentum to racial measurement. Laws and policies were still to be based on racial classification, but in a 180-degree policy reversal the task became to ensure civil rights that prior uses of racial classification had denied…

…The classification adopted in 1977 and used in the 1980 and 1990 censuses seemed secure and capable of discharging its civil rights purposes in policy arenas. But by the middle of the 1990s, the political landscape was transformed by demographic changes, by the rise of multiculturalism and by the multiracial movement. New political demands called into question the existing racial and ethnic categories–and also the public purposes they were thought to serve.

The OMB again took up the task of reviewing the nation’s official racial classification system, and adopted two changes. The most commented upon change was to allow census respondents to mark one or more to the race question, finally putting to rest the one-drop rule that had worked so hard to preserve the myth of racial purity. This multirace option expresses the obvious—laws against miscegenation notwithstanding, reproduction across racial lines has been a constant in American history for four centuries.

There was a second change. The prior OMB standard had placed Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders within the more general Asian race. Advocates argued that the census should recognize Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders as a separate racial category. The OMB held public hearings and examined research showing that Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders did differ from Asians more generally; it agreed to the separate category. In the mid-1990s the official primary race groups of the United States went from four to five, unwittingly reproducing the Blumenbachian pentagon from two centuries earlier…

…Classification as the Site of Identity Politics: Multiracial rhetoric came to the fore in the 1990s, when advocates insisted on explicit recognition of multiracialism in federal statistics. What was striking about the debate that erupted is what the advocates wanted—not civil rights, but demands for recognition, choice, and identity. In congressional testimony, the Association of MultiEthnic Americans, though recognizing that the multiple-race option would make it harder to enforce civil rights law, nevertheless insisted on “choice in the matter of who we are, just like any other community.” This testimony found it ironic that “our people are being asked to correct by virtue of how we define ourselves all of the past injustices of other groups of people.”

Of course, correcting past injustices was what the traditional civil rights organizations were all about. Their cause was thus threatened by talk of choice and identity. Self expression, they insisted, was not a good reason to revise the government’s scheme of racial and ethnic categories. In its testimony, the NAACP pointed out that the current racial classification was fashioned “to enhance the enforcement of anti-discrimination and civil rights law,” and warned that “the creation of a multiracial classification might disaggregate the apparent numbers of members of discrete minority groups, diluting benefits to which they are entitled as a protected class under civil rights laws and under the Constitution itself.”…

Read the entire article here.

In Their Own Words with Michele Elam

The Human Experience: inside the humanities at Stanford University
2011-04-15

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Stanford University

 In this installment of “In Their Own Words” English professor Michele Elam discusses her latest research, which explores how representations of mixed race in literature and the arts are redefining new millennial aesthetics and politics.

Elam’s latest publication is entitled, “The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium.”

The dangers of insisting on black and white mixed-race political recognition in a system in which blacks are disadvantaged is that a mixed-race group could act as a buffer between blacks and whites and re-inscribe that disadvantage. It is interesting to note that under apartheid in South Africa, there was not only a robust mixed population known as “colored,” but individuals were able to change their race as their life circumstances changed (Goldberg 1995).  From the perspective of mixed-race individuals, this example may seem as though even South Africa was more liberatory on the grounds of race than the one-drop-rule-governed U.S. (This is not to say that South African coloreds had full civil liberties under apartheid, but only that they were better off than many blacks.)  But from a more broad perspective, in terms of white–black relations, recognition of mixed-race identity, while it may advantage mixed-race individuals and add sophistication to a black and white imaginary of race, does little to dislodge white supremacy overall. The public and political recognition of mixed-race identities could be quite dangerous to white–black race relations overall if the position of blacks remained unchanged (Spencer 1999).  But continued obliviousness about mixed-race identities holds the immediate danger of denying the existence of injustice for some presumptively pure blacks who do not have the advantages of white parentage.

Naomi Zack, “The Fluid Symbol of Mixed Race,” Hypatia, Volume 25, Issue 4, (Fall 2010) 875–890. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01121.x.

True Blood: The Vampire as a Multiracial Critique on Post-Race Ideology

Journal of Dracula Studies
Number 12 (2010)
19 pages

Nicole Myoshi Rabin, Instructor of Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College, Boston. Massachusetts

In the Western consciousness there has been a long tradition of the associations between race and evil.  According to Celia R. Daileader, in her Introduction to Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee, “Before black men were lynched for alleged sex with white women, white women were burned alive for alleged sex with a devil described as black”.  Daileader calls attention to the historical relationship between blackness, sex, and evil that predates the literal transmission of this discourse into “race relations.” Over time this relationship has found its way into many racist fantasies, particularly those manifested within the stories of the horror genre—including vampire tales.  Although race has only begun to be theorized in relation to Dracula, one of the most well known vampire novels published in 1897, there has been some important recent work theorizing the Count within Homi Bhabha’s category of the “not quite/not white” (Daileader 97).  As John Allen Stevenson notes, “the novel [Dracula] insistently—indeed, obsessively—defines the vampire not as a monstrous father but as a foreigner, as someone who threatens and terrifies precisely because he is an outsider” (139).  Dracula, the Romanian Count, is seen in opposition to the rest of the British characters—including the main object of his desire, Mina.  The predatory sexual threat of Dracula is a common racist fantasy where racialized men exude “predatory sexual desire” that “endangers white womanhood and consequently threatens the racial purity of white [American] society” (Hamako).  In most instances, this threat to racial purity manifests itself in the fear of clear racial miscegenation and a necessary drive to eradicate the one attempting to perform this racial contamination—the vampire.

Over the past two years there has been a resurgence of vampire stories in U.S. popular culture. These new vampire stories conveyed on-screen —True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, and Twilight—promote specific ideologies about race, class, and gender that are specific to our cultural moment. In “Color Blindness: An Obstacle to Racial Justice?” Charles A. Gallagher states that: “since the mid-1990s there has been a change in the way race, race relations, and racial hierarchy have been depicted in the mass media…the media now provides Americans with an almost endless supply of overt and coded depictions of a multiracial, multicultural society that has finally transcended the problem of race” (109).  As examples of contemporary media, these new vampire shows also promote a society “beyond” race; so, with the historical tradition between race and vampires, what happens when the victims of vampires—in these new vampire tales—are no longer racially homogenous?  Can the vampire still be read as racially other?  I argue that the vampire of these contemporary stories actually becomes a symbol of multiracial identity as it is seen within the multicultural discourse that pervades American popular consciousness.  For the purpose of this paper, I will be focusing specifically on issues of race and sexuality (only as they are concerned with racial purity) in the first season of HBO’s series True Blood—encapsulated within the first two episodes, “Strange Love” and “The First Taste.”  While the series deals with a greater range of issues—gay rights, American slavery, terrorism, war, religion, etc.—these issues remain outside the scope of this particular paper.  I hope that these issues will be theorized in subsequent work on the series, but for this paper I will have to limit my consideration to the ways in which these beginning episodes of True Blood portrays a multicultural society on screen that undercuts the reality of still pervasive racist currents in our own society; how the show creates a multiracial identity that is at once feared and championed within the American society; and, how the show while depicting multiculturalism actually works to subtly critique this ideology…

Read the entire article here. (Rich Text Format)

Mixed race women speak out [Review]

rabble.ca
2011-02-14

May Lui

Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out by Adebe De Rango-Adem and Andrea Thompson, eds.(Inanna Publications, 2010)

In the past 20 years Canada has seen a few mixed race anthologies that reflect both the time, place and language that we use to talk about being of mixed heritage and the many complicated social locations this takes us to. The first and the groundbreaking, was Miscegenation Blues: Voices of mixed-race women edited by Carol Camper and published in 1991 [1994]. Ten years later I was fortunate to be part of the editorial team for the journal Fireweed’s issue 75, the Mixed Race issue, published in 2002.

Other Tongues collection of personal essays, poetry and visual art is an excellent addition to the body of writing already out there. In a nice circular way that happens sometimes, Carol Camper wrote the introduction. All these years later, most of the issues are the same, but hearing the experiences of women in their 20s and 30s is heartening, even as they bring sadness and frustration at how little has changed.

The pieces are all short to very short, with the longest piece at around six pages and the average length about two pages long. This is one of the anthology’s strengths as it can show the breadth and range of experiences as well as the vast array of how women have dealt with / coped with / celebrated what their racial identity means to them in the context of Canada and the U.S., where the majority of the contributors live.

There is no mistaking the power of speaking our own stories: having mixed race women naming our struggles within and between our families, who often force us to deny parts that they deem shameful. Whether that’s the parent of colour’s family and existence, or how that’s linked to working class roots, or the naming of one’s identity by others, another continuing theme throughout the collection…

Read the entire review here.

Review of Kessler, John S.; Ball, Donald B., North From the Mountains: A Folk History of the Carmel Melungeon Settlement, Highland County, Ohio

H-Net Reviews
June 2002

Penny Messinger, Assistant Professor of History
Daemen College, Amherst, New York

John S. Kessler, Donald B. Ball. North From the Mountains: A Folk History of the Carmel Melungeon Settlement, Highland County, Ohio. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2001. xiii + 220 pp., ISBN 978-0-86554-703-2; ISBN 978-0-86554-700-1.

Ethnic Diversity in Appalachia and Appalachian Ohio

Scholars of the Appalachian South have begun to explore the ethnic and racial diversity of the region as part of an attempt to go beyond the one-dimensional stereotype of the white, “one hundred percent American” hillbilly that has frequently prevailed in depictions of the area’s residents. Kessler and Ball offer an interesting contribution to this effort. The title, North from the Mountains, while specifically describing migration from the mountains of eastern Kentucky to the hills of southern Ohio, also refers to a migration from South to North that took place in several steps, over several generations. The group that established the settlement in the small crossroads community of Carmel, Ohio had its origins, the authors explain, in a multi-racial community that formed in the mid-Atlantic colonies between the mid-1600s and 1800. Members of the group relocated to the disputed borderlands of the Virginia and North Carolina mountains during the 1790s, where they were called “Melungeons,” and from there to Magoffin County (then part of Floyd County), Kentucky, by 1810. Migrants from Magoffin County settled in Highland County, Ohio, around 1864, forming the Carmel Melungeon settlement. The Melungeon settlement straddled the borders of Highland and Pike counties and spread south and east from Carmel, a small crossroads community not far from the current Fort Hill State Memorial. Although it never grew into a town, during the 1940s Carmel was large enough to sustain a store, schools (later absorbed during the consolidation process), two churches, and several cemeteries. At its peak size around 1900, Carmel had included additional stores and businesses, an attorney, and a post office (operating from 1856 until 1921). The Melungeon settlement in Carmel appears to have reached its peak size of around 150 people during the 1940s.

The questions “Who are the Melungeons?” and “Where did they come from?” have intrigued anthropologists, novelists, and regional scholars for many decades. To an even greater degree than is the case for other residents of the Southern Appalachians, the group has been the subject of stereotype and myth. The term “Melungeon” is explained as an adaptation of the French “mélange,” meaning “mixture,” and has sometimes been used as an epithet. Kessler and Ball use the Spanish “mestizo,” meaning a person of mixed racial ancestry, to characterize members of the Melungeon communities. The term “Melungeon” describes several insular, multi-ethnic, or multi-racial communities within the Appalachian region, notably those located in Hancock and Hawkins counties in Tennessee, and Lee, Scott, and Wise counties in Virginia. However, Kessler and Ball argue that this definition should be expanded to include “genetically comparable and similarly named families throughout an area covering at least twenty-nine adjacent counties variously located in northwestern North Carolina, southwestern Virginia, northeastern Tennessee, and southeastern Kentucky,” in addition to the Carmel settlement (p. 2). These mixed-race communities were often held in low regard by their neighbors, creating a sense of shared identity among residents within the community that was reinforced by hostility from outside. Historically, the attitude of residents of the communities surrounding mestizo settlements was often manifested in a refusal to intermarry with the community members, a pattern that served to reinforce group identity and to preserve racial composition. Kessler and Ball also provide concise discussions of other mestizo populations within the Appalachian area that are unrelated to the Melungeon groups and delineate the points of distinction among the groups.

During the 1940s and 1950s, anthropologists described Melungeon communities as “tri-racial isolates,” a term that emphasized a mixed heritage of white, African, and Native American ancestry. The authors note that group members generally emphasized their Native American rather than their African ancestry, although both races contributed to the group’s ethnic mix. A more controversial aspect of Melungeon identity is the group’s claim of Portuguese and/or Middle Eastern ancestry. Molecular biologist Kevin Jones is currently coordinating a project to analyze genetic material from Melungeon community members in order to answer the question of ancestry. N. Brent Kennedy, who edits the series “The Melungeons,” addresses the issue of identity in the book’s foreword. Kennedy is also the author of a recent book on the Melungeons and a leader in the movement for Melungeon pride and identity.[1] In discussing the ancestry of the group, Kennedy writes, “No doubt some of us are primarily Native American; others more Turkish and/or central Asian; still others more Portuguese, or Semitic, or African. But, despite the old argument that the Melungeon claim to be of various origins is ‘proof’ against all origins, there is no conflict in such a multiplicity of claims. We were more multicultural than the average Englishman when we first arrived. And, like all Americans, we Melungeons have also become even more multicultural and multiethnic with the passage of time.” Kennedy continues, “Early America was far more ethnically and racially complex than we have been taught. Some whites were not northern European, some blacks were not sub-Saharan African, and some Indians and some mulattos were not Indians and mulattos….We Melungeons and, indeed, other mixed groups have irrefutable ties not only to northern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and early America, but also to the eastern Mediterranean, southern Europe, northern African, and central Asia” (pp. ix-x)…

Read the entire review here.

North from the Mountains: A Folk History of the Carmel Melungeon Settlement, Highland County, Ohio

Mercer University Press
2001
220 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780865547032

John S. Kessler

Donald B. Ball

The newest book in Mercer University Press’ new series The Melungeons: History, Culture, Ethnicity, and Literature is North from the Mountains: A Folk History of the Carmel Melungeon Settlement, Highland County, Ohio by John S. Kessler and Donald B. Ball. It is the first substantive study of the Carmel Melungeon settlement since 1950. Tracing their history from about 1700, this book contains extensive firsthand information to be found in no other source, and relates the Carmel population to the Melungeons and similar mixed-blood populations originating in the Mid-Atlantic coastal region. This study combines a review of documentary evidence, extensive firsthand observations of the group, and information gleaned from area informants and a visit to the Carmel area. The senior author, until about age eighteen, was a resident of a community nearby, hence the personal insight and perspective into the lifestyle and inter- and intrarelationships of the group.