Mixed Race Studies

What about These Children? Assessing Poverty Among the ‘Hidden Population’ of Multiracial Children in Single-Mother Families

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research
Discussion Paper Series: DP 2010-09
2010
ISSN: 1936-9379
48 pages

Jenifer L. Bratter, Associate Professor of Sociology
Rice University

Sarah Damaske, Assistant Professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations
Pennsylvania State University

Capturing the conditions of children of color living in single-parent families has become more complex due to the growing presence of interracial households. This analysis assesses the size and poverty status of single-female headed families housing multiracial children. Using data from the 2000 Census, we find that 9 percent of female-headed families house either children who are classified with more than one race or are classified as a single race different than their mother’s compared to only 3 percent of married couple families. Logistic regression analyses assessing the odds of poverty status for families finds that being a multiracial family does not constitute a uniform advantage or disadvantage for female headed households. Rather, these families, like most families of color, are more likely to experience poverty than white monoracial families. The two exceptions are White multiracial families who are more likely to be in poverty relative to this reference group and Asian multiracial families who have similar poverty rates as white monoracial families (and a lower rate than Asian monoracial families).

Read the entire report here.

Manufacturing citizenship: Metapragmatic framings of language competencies in media images of mixed race men in South Korea

Discourse & Society
Volume 22, Number 4 (July 2011)
pagesw 440-457
DOI: 10.1177/0957926510395834

Adrienne Lo, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Jenna Kim
Department of Educational Psychology
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

This article examines how discourses of linguistic (in)competency regiment productions of citizenship in the South Korean popular media. Through an analysis of newspaper articles and television programs, we investigate how depictions of language competency become key resources for locating individuals within genealogies of kinship and chronotopic figures of personhood. In some cases, the speech of these celebrities associates them with imaginings of their backwards, low-class Korean kin, the Japanese colonial period, and American military presence, while in other cases, their language is associated with the 21st-century ideal of the modern, elite, globetrotting neoliberal subject. This analysis demonstrates how competence is read in relation to changing notions of citizenship in the new ‘multicultural’ Korea as these men are differentially positioned between multiple raced, classed, and gendered imaginings of Whiteness and Koreanness. More generally, we argue that understandings of linguistic competence are social productions, rather than reflections of language ability.

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Gender Differences in Ancestral Contribution and Admixture in Venezuelan Populations

Human Biology
Volume 83, Number 3 (June 2011)
pages 345-361
E-ISSN: 1534-6617 Print ISSN: 0018-7143

D. Castro De Guerra
Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas

C. Figuera Perez
Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas

M. H. Izaguirre
Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas

E. Arroyo Barahona
Universidad Central de Venezuela

A. Rodriguez Larralde
Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas

M. Vivenes De Lugo
Universidad de Oriente

The origin of the contribution of uniparental heritage were analyzed in 615 samples of individuals proceeding from 13 towns classified according to historic differences in their emergence and development as African-derived, European-derived, and admixed/urban. Mitochondrial and Y-chromosome haplogroups were identified by PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism. The results were compared with previous estimates of admixture made with autosomal markers and with historic aspects. The results show a predominantly indigenous genetic contribution through the female, being more prevalent in urban populations; the African contribution, although dispersed, presents a larger concentration in the African-derived towns, whereas the European contribution is limited to populations with this origin, reflecting isolation and the conservation of the distribution pattern of genes of the Colonial era. With regard to admixture through males, it is almost exclusively of European origin, whereas the African contribution is basically concentrated in the African-derived towns, and the Amerindian lineages are almost nonexistent. The genome of paternal heredity, as opposed to the autosomal and the mitochondrial, shows a homogeneous pattern of admixture that is independent of the origin of the population studied, suggesting that European genes have been introduced into the Venezuelan population through male immigrations, whereas the indigenous contribution has been preserved in the Venezuelan genetic pool through the women. These results provide evidence of the heterogeneity in the genetic origin of the Venezuelan population, which should be taken into account in forensic and epidemiologic genetic studies.

Read or purchase the article here.

Multiracial Teens Launch A ‘Latte Rebellion’

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2011-07-15

Michel Martin, Host

“You’re half Chinese and half European, I’m half Indian, a quarter Mexican and a quarter Irish. We’re mixed up. We’re not really one or the other ethnically. We’re like human lattes.”

So explains Asha, the main character in Sarah Jamila Stevenson’s debut novel, The Latte Rebellion.

To raise money for a class trip she and her friends began as selling a few T-shirts and labeled the effort the Latte Rebellion. But the movement soon became something much larger than they could have anticipated.

Seen through the eyes of adolescents, Asha and her friends tackle the complexities of identifying as multiracial during adolescence, when identifying as anything seems like a challenge.

“At the time I was writing it … there were still some news stories about South Asians who were getting harassed and insulted, and even assaulted,” Stevenson said in an interview with Tell Me More host Michel Martin. “And because I’m part South Asian myself, it really hit close to home. It had me worried about my relatives who live in the United States. So I felt pretty strongly about working that into my book somewhere.”…

Read the transcript here.  Listen to the interview here.

‘In The Blink Of An Eye,’ A Change In Racial Identity

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2011-07-07

Michele Norris, Host

Michael Sidney Fosberg grew up thinking he was white. His mother is white. His stepfather is white. And while he never met his biological father, the assumption was that he was white too. But well into his adulthood, Fosberg found out that his father was a black man. Michele Norris speaks to him about his story that he’s told in his one-man play and his book, both called Incognito.

Read the transcript of the interview here.  Listen to the interview here.

Number of multiracial people grows in Oneida County

The Observer-Dispatch
Utica, New York
2011-07-14

Elizabeth Cooper

UTICA — Nisa Duong is part Vietnamese, part black, part American Indian and part white.
 
But the 19-year-old Utica resident said her racial and ethnic identity isn’t at the forefront of her mind, and if it comes up, it’s in positive ways.
 
“I feel really unique because of all those cultures being bundled up together,” she said. “It sets you apart from other people. It makes you who you are.”
 
Duong is one of a growing number of multiracial people living in Oneida County.
 
New census figures show the number of people identifying themselves as mixed race has risen about 35 percent since the 2000 Census, from 3,583 to 4,865.
 
Combinations of white, black and Asian are turning up in greater numbers, and each statistic illuminates a different aspect of the region’s ever-changing mosaic.

• The number of Oneida County residents who said they are a combination of black and white jumped from 831 to 2,157.
• The number of those saying they are white and Asian rose from 388 to 586.
• The number saying they are part black and part Asian went from 18 to 51.

Those numbers still make up a small portion of the total population of the county, which stands at 234,878. Still, they echo a transformation going on across the nation.
 
Experts attributed the change to several factors, Hamilton College Associate Professor of Sociology Jenny Irons said…

…The Obama factor

Even as attitudes toward race change, there are ways people’s attitudes have remained the same.

Irons noted that even though President Barack Obama has been clear about his biracial background, he still is talked about as the nation’s first black president.

“In our society we still think of race in pretty rigid, fixed categories,” she said…

…Black and white

Michael Fenimore, 31, is half black and half white, but when it came to filling out the census form, he said he was black.

“One thing my mom always told me is the color of my skin is black,” he said. “I always put myself down as a black male and am proud of that. I know who my parents are and I’m proud of who I am.”…

Read the entire article here.

Robeson County Native Writes Book on Lumbee Indians

The Pilot
Southern Pines, North Carolina
2010-06-16

Kay Grismer

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

The Native Americans who have lived along the Lumber River in Robeson County for generations may have been given names to identify their “tribe”— “Croatan,” “Cherokee,” “Siouan” and “Lumbee” — but their collective identity as a “People” does not come from the “outside.”

“The word ‘People’ acknowledges that Indians have a history and a sense of self that goes back to before the colonial relationships that labeled us as Indian, Native American or Indigenous,” says Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, assistant professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and a Lumbee Indian. “Growing up, I knew first and foremost that I was part of a People, that I had a family and that my family connected to other families; and that all of these families lived in a place, what for us was a sacred homeland: the land along the Lumber River in Robeson County. Kinship and place are the foundational layer of Indian identity in Robeson County.”

This identity as a People has been tested repeatedly over time.

“Indian people are burdened with defending their identity more often and more extensively than any other ethnic group in America,” says historian Alexandra Harmon.

This is especially true for the 50,000 Lumbees, the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi River, who have had to struggle for recognition and acceptance.

During the years between 1885 and 1956, Robeson County Indians adopted different names, “not because they didn’t know who they were or what constituted their identity,” Lowery says, “but because federal and state officials kept changing their criteria for authenticity.”

Lowery will discuss the evolution of the Lumbee Indians Thursday, June 17, at 4 p.m. at The Country Bookshop in downtown Southern Pines, when she presents her book, “Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity and the Making of a Nation.”…

…In a segregated society where white supremacists had the power to reclassify Indians as “colored,” Indians began to distance themselves from both blacks and whites. White supremacy demanded that Indians avoid blacks both politically and socially and deny inclusion to community members who might possess African ancestry.

“Excluding blacks from their community may have preserved some autonomy, but it sometimes required Indian leaders to forswear their own kin ties and the value they placed on family,” Lowery adds. “This process of adopting segregation to affirm their distinctiveness results in an additional layer of identity for Indians who had previously thought of themselves as a People. They began to express their intentions as a race and as a tribe.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Jackson Whites

The New Yorker
1938-09-17
page 29

George Weller

REPORTER AT LARGE about the Jackson Whites; history and origin of a primitive race living in the Ramapo Mountains. They are a mixture of three races, the white, the Negro, & the American Indians. Next to being an Indian, the greatest point of distinction for the Jackson White is to be an albino. The Ramapos have several entire families of albinos. The queen of the albinos was Nellie Mann, who in the late 1890’s travelled with the Barnum & Bailey sideshow, billed as a wild girl captured in the Australian bush. Mentions the van Dunks an albino family; the de Frees family which has branches all over the Ramapos, and Uncle Willie de Frees, a patriarch of the Jackson Whites and the only surving doctor

Read or purchase the article here.

Ramapough Mountain People: “The Jackson Whites”: A Pathfinder and Annotated Bibliography

1995

Randy D. Ralph

Introduction:

My parents moved the family way, way out in the country, after my baby brother was born, to a little tract house in the middle of the Preakness Valley in Passaic County, New Jersey. The valley was open and green and filled with Dutch dairy farms and Italian truck gardens. It lay snuggled between the Ramapo and Watchung ridges. Our family was one of the first to move into the new neighborhood between Old Man van der Veen’s dairy cows and Mrs. Capodimaggi’s vegetable garden. One day in mid-summer, not long after we’d moved in, a new kid showed up at the baseball diamond the us kids had carved out of one of the still-vacant lots. His name was Willie G. Mann, Jr., or, just “Junior.” He became one of my best friends for reasons I didn’t understand until many years later.

I was a fat kid. I was usually the last to be picked when the kids chose up sides for baseball. I could hit OK, but I couldn’t catch worth a damn and I couldn’t run fast either. More often than not, I’d wind up in the middle of a fight over whose team I’d made lose the last time—until Junior showed up.

The kids on the block thought Junior was “weird-looking” and said so. His complexion was almost bronze. He had sparkling Blue Plate Special blue eyes and jet black, curly hair. He looked for all the world like an Indian to me. To the kids on the block it was clear he wasn’t “one of us.” He was lanky and athletic, though. It almost seemed he could hit a home run with one hand tied behind his back, catch a pop fly blind-folded or round the bases in a blur and slide into home without a drop of sweat on his brow. He was a natural, and that was all that mattered to them…

“The Jackson Whites”:

The Ramapough Mountain People, also known locally, and in the pejorative as “The Jackson Whites,” are an extended clan of closely interrelated families living in the Ramapo Mountains and their more remote valleys principally in Bergen County, New Jersey, but also in immediately adjacent Passaic County, New Jersey, and Rockland County, New York. Their largely Dutch surnames, de Groot, de Fries, van der Donck, and Mann, in all their variant spellings, are among the oldest in the countryside and predate the Revolutionary War. They live only thirty miles or so from downtown Manhattan which lies just across the Hudson River (see map). They are shy, gentle, proud, and reclusive people who, until relatively recently, seldom ventured far from their mountain homes.

They are clearly racially mixed. There are elements from native Indian, Negro, Dutch, and possibly German (Hessian) and Italian blood lines…

Readd the entire article here.

Methodology and Measurement in the Study of Multiracial Americans: Identity, Classification, and Perceptions

Sociology Compass
Volume 5, Issue 7 (July 2011)
pages 607–617
DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00388.x

Melissa R. Herman, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Dartmouth College

This article lays out some of the methodological issues in doing research on multiracial people (those whose immediate and/or distant ancestors come from different racial or ethnic groups), including how they are counted, how they are perceived, how they identify themselves, what factors affect their self-identifications, and how their identifications change over time.

Read or purchase the article here.