Mixed Race Studies

Mixed-race numbers double since 2000

The Tuscaloosa News
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
2011-10-04

Dana Beyerle, Montgomery Bureau Chief

More than twice as many people in Alabama say they are of two races than 10 years earlier

MONTGOMERY | Alabama’s black population increased slightly between 2000 and 2010, but the number of people claiming mixed-race status more than doubled, according to researchers at the University of Alabama.

More than twice as many people in Alabama indicated they were of mixed race in 2010 as they did on the 2000 Census, the first time the option was available.

In 2000, 13,068 Alabamians reported they were of two races, one of which was black. For the 2010 Census, 29,807 Alabamians indicated that they were of mixed-race status.

Carolyn Trent, socio-economic analyst at the Center for Business and Economic Research’s state data center, said Monday the mixed-race increase probably reflects a growing willingness to identify a person’s dual heritage…

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Visualizing a Critical Mixed-Race Theory

Stance: An International Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
Volume 2 (Spring 2009)
pages 18-25
Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana
ISSN: 1943-1880

Desiree Valentine, Departments of Philosophy and Communication Studies
Marquette University

In this paper, questions regarding the cultural understanding of mixed race are explored, which have the ability to complicate the accepted portrayal of race in society as a black/white binary system. Thus, the acknowledgement of something other than this binary system offers new ways of theorizing about race, particularly concerning the sociopolitical implications of mixed-race designation. This paper argues that the visually mixed-race person has a certain direct ability to challenge the binary and its racist logic. Furthermore, this paper goes on to offer a unique interpretation of where power for working against a racially oppressive system lies within critical mixed-race theory.

I was in kindergarten when I had a clear understanding of the racialized world in which we live, when I had to check a box on my school registration papers recognizing myself as either black or white. This simple action can be quite complicated when one is a daughter of a black father and white mother. I was finally offered the choice of “mixed” by the time I reached Jr. High. But what is this concept of “mixed” and what does it offer a nation still infused with racism years after the time period known as the “Civil Rights Era” has ended?

Questions of mixed race bring with them complications to the established black/white binary system and thus offer new ways of theorizing race as well as the sociopolitical implications of mixed race designation. As Lewis Gordon states, “In spite of contemporary resistance to ‘binary’ analyses, a critical discussion of mixed-race categories calls for an understanding of how binary logic functions in discourses on race and racism. Without binaries, no racism will exist.” Can a breakdown of the current binary logic, which places social and political advantages on white individuals, occur with the inception of a critical mixed race theory? And could this lead to a society free of racism?

This essay will focus on the views of theorists Lewis Gordon and Naomi Zack and their conceptions of the racial binary system and mixed race. I will begin by looking at both theorists’ views on the racial binary system, posing the question, “How do we understand the spectrum of race?” From there, I will explore the approaches each theorist offers for deconstructing the binary, followed by a comparison and critique of both theorizations, with the end goal of offering my own interpretation of where power for working against a racially oppressive system lies within a critical mixed race theory. It is my view that what often gets overlooked in these theorizations is the effect of visual incoherency to the black/white binary that can be provided by the mixed race individual. The concept of the “visibly mixed race person” will be used in this essay to explore the transformative areas for a society still enmeshed in the ugly history of racism…

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‘Going out of stock’: Mulattoes and Levantines in Italian literature and cinema of the Fascist period

University of Connecticut
2008
255 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3329116
ISBN: 9780549826118

Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut

My dissertation examines, within Fascist propagandist literature and cinema of the 1930s, the hybrid figures of mulattoes—the offspring of interracial unions between Italian men and native women of Italy’s African colonies—and Levantines—white Italian immigrant merchants and craftsmen living in Alexandria, Egypt, who culturally intermingled with other ethnic groups. The popular novels and feature films I examine reveal the mulattoes and Levantines as interchangeable characters invalidating Benito Mussolini’s efforts at establishing a national identity based on a common cultural background, racial attributes, and religious beliefs. As my title suggests, I take mulattoes and Levantines out of the cinematic and literary “stock” of propaganda, where they were depicted as outside the stirpe (stock) of the Italian people, to reveal the inconsistencies within Fascist ideals of racial and cultural purity. In historical and anthropological terms, I intend to bring to light how literary and cinematic devices used to stigmatize mulattoes and Levantines often undermine themselves, calling attention to what was supposed to be absent or different from what was in “stock,” in the works themselves, in the actual peoples depicted and even in the motives of Fascist colonial enterprises. My analysis is informed by the framework of studies on exoticism, hybridity and mimicry, passing and the tragic mulatto, masculinity and femininity, and cultural studies, all of which lead back to the question: Why did Italians resist the ethnic and cultural metissage during colonialism and still to this day insist on “whiteness” when they describe themselves and their culture?

Table of Contents

• Approval Page
• Acknowledgments
• Table of contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: ‘Speaking of Itself:’ Exoticism in ‘African Works’ of the Early Italian Colonialism
  • 1.1. Introduction
  • 1.2. Italian Colonialism from the Purchase of the Bay of Assab to the Ethiopian Campaign
  • 1.3. Exoticism and Colonialism
  • 1.4. Exploration and First Italian Colonization: Piaggia, Franzoj, Bianchi and Martini
  • 1.5. Italian Anthropology in the Second Half of the 19th Century and the Hamitic Theory
  • 1.6. Africa in the Literary Works of De Amicis, Salgari, D’Annunzio and Marinetti
• Chapter Two: ‘Art of Darkness:’ The Aestheticization of Black People in Fascist Colonial Novel
  • 2.1. Introduction
  • 2.2. Mixed Race Children in Italy’s African Colonies
  • 2.3. The Colonial Novel
  • 2.4. Disciplining the Native Population and the Italian Audience
  • 2.5. Rosolino Gabrielli’s II piccolo Brassa
  • 2.6. Arnaldo Cipolla’s Melograno d’Oro, regina d’Etiopia
• Chapter Three: Undermining Fascist Policies of Order and Risanamento. The Dissident Literature of Enrico Pea and Fausta Cialente
  • 3.1. Introduction
  • 3.2. Alexandria of Egypt: Historical Framework
  • 3.3. The Italian Emigrants of Alexandria
  • 3.4. Growing up in the Shadow of Alexandria
  • 3.5. Enrico Pea’s Egyptian Novels
  • 3.6. Fausta Cialente’s Levantine Characters
• Chapter Four: Fade to White:’ How Italian Cinema Affiliated with Fascism Framed the Native Population of Italy’s African Colonies
  • 4.1. Introduction
  • 4.2. Demographic Colonization of Ethiopia
  • 4.3. Italian Cinema before Fascism
  • 4.4. ‘African Films’ during the Fascist Period
  • 4.5. Augusto Genina’s Lo squadrone bianco
  • 4.6. Guido Brignone’s Sotto La Croce del Sud
• Bibliography

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Race and Class in Political Science

Michigan Journal of Race and Law
Volume 11, Issue 1 (Fall 2005)
pages 99-114

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

As a discipline, political science tends to have a split personality on the issue of whether the driving force behind political action is material or ideational. Put too crudely, White scholars tend to focus on structural conditions as the cause of group identity and action, whereas scholars of color tend to focus on group identity and conflict in order to explain structural conditions. More generally, the relevant debate within political science revolves less around Jacques Derrida versus Karl Marx (as in critical race studies) than around W. E. B. DuBois versus Thomas Hobbes—that is, whether “the problem of the twentieth [and other] centur[ies] is the problem of the color line” or whether people are fundamentally self-interested individualists whose social interaction is shaped by the opportunities presented in a given political structure.
 
This paper examines those propositions by discussing important recent work by political scientists in several arenas, including ethnic conflict, nationalism, and a belief in linked fate. I then briefly discuss my own research on the relationship between race and class, and on the possible malleability of racial and ethnic concepts and practices to show one way that identity-based and interest-based political analyses interact. I conclude that material forces drive most important political disputes and outcomes, but that politics is best understood through a combination of material and ideational lenses.

Introduction
 
The discipline of political science tends to have a split personality on the issue of whether the underlying driving force behind political action is material or ideational. Put too crudely, mainstream (disproportionately White) scholars tend to focus on structural conditions such as laws or the economy, the self-interest of leaders or activists, political incentives, or even geography in order to explain ethnic identification and conflict. Conversely, scholars who study racial politics (disproportionately people of color), tend to start from racial or ethnic identity and conflict in order to explain structural conditions, understandings of self-interest, or political incentives. This generalization, like most, is indeed too crude, and one can immediately identify exceptions; but, it is arguably accurate enough to be a good starting point for further exploration. I develop this argument, with reference to the most prominent work of political scientists in several subfields, in the next two sections below.
 
Few political scientists, and even fewer in mainstream, high-status departments, focus on discourse analysis growing out of continental European philosophy. Most who do are political philosophers whose central mission does not include explaining empirical phenomena. As a result, the relevant debate within political science revolves less around Derrida versus Marx than around DuBois versus Hobbes—that is, whether “the problem of the twentieth [and other] centur[ies] is the problem of the color line” or whether people are fundamentally self-interested individualists whose social interaction is shaped by the opportunities offered in a given political structure.
 
This paper begins by examining and illuminating that proposition through discussion of important recent work by political scientists. I then briefly discuss my own prior work on the relationship between race and class, and use my current research to illuminate how tensions between identity-based politics and interest-based politics play out in academic political science as well as in actual political arenas. I conclude roughly where Richard Delgado does: that material forces and access to resources drive most significant political disputes and outcomes, but that politics is most fully understood through a combination of material and ideational lenses…

…Multiracialism shows some of the same effects. The values placed on multiracial identity are at present completely mixed, even contradictory and mutually hostile. Some people of color (and Whites) embrace the new politics and culture of multiracialism as a means of breaking down the old rigid color lines, as a way to enable people to recognize and identify with their full heritage, as a necessity for good medical care, or as a new frontier for civil rights advocacy. Others see the embrace of multiracialism as merely one more attempt by outsiders to undermine Black or Hispanic solidarity, as a strategy to disrupt litigation or legislation around civil rights, voting rights, and employment discrimination, or as an underhanded way to distance oneself from Blackness (or Latino identity). Still others see it as a pragmatic reality, given rates of immigration and intermarriage, that political actors must accommodate as well as they can. Regardless of how one feels about it, there is growing evidence that the fact of being multiracial has important consequences for one’s life chances. For example, the socioecononomic status of biracial children fall consistently between those of their lower status parent and those of their higher status parent. Thus, on the one hand, the fact of having mixed racial or ethnic ancestry has real, material, consequences for one’s life – independent of the language with which we understand that fact. But on the other hand, the growth of and contestation around a multiracial movement show that the mere fact of having parents of different races is politically and personally very different from the claim of a multiracial identity and community…

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Who Will You Let Me Be?

Race, Ethnicity, and Me: Autobiographical Reflections by Trinity University Students
Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas
Fall 2008

Claire Murphy-Cook

Race, Ethnicity, and Me is a collection of autobiographical essays written by Trinity University students as an assignment for a course taught by Professor David Spener in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. In their essays, students use research findings and scholarly concepts to analyze their own experiences involving racial and ethnic identities in the United States. The collection is intended for use by students and educators as a tool for promoting dialogue about diversity issues as they affect their academic institutions and communities. The essays it contains were written by students in the fall 2008 semester.

Claire Murphy-Cook comes from what, in her words, “can only be described as an alternative family.” She has two lesbian mothers who have been in a relationship for nearly thirty years. Both her mothers are non-Hispanic whites. Her father is a mixed-race, gay man from Brazil who was asked by her mothers to be their sperm donor. He has, nonetheless, been an active presence in Claire’s life. In her essay, she describes how traveling to Brazil with him as a teenager gave her a new sense of her own identity in racial and ethnic terms.

To be mixed race means not having a place in any defined racial categories. It means being defined by standards that do not recognize who you are or where you came from, checking too many bubbles on Scantrons, and puzzling over census categorizations. What is it exactly that places us in these arbitrary categories? How does a person come to terms with the gaps in society’s perceptions about you and the way you see yourself?…

…Though I am aware that American society perceives me as white, I view myself as half Irish (white) and half Brazilian (Latina), someone multiracial. Growing up, there was always an emphasis of both of these identities; I can remember numerous times when my parents told me that I was “not just white.” They also told me that because of societal perceptions of my race that I was treated better than if than if my skin were darker. They were not so overt as to tell me that I had white privilege, but we always talked about how my dad used to be stopped and searched in the airport all the time. Then my moms would bring up how we never got stopped or searched at the airport, and tell my sister and I that it was because we were two white ladies traveling with young daughters. Although never explicitly mentioned as such, I have always been both aware and wary of my white privilege…

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The right colour

Index on Censorship
Volume 28, Issue 1, 1999
Special Issue: The Last Empire
pages 110-114
DOI: 10.1080/03064229908536514

Daniela Cestarollo

Five hundred years after the arrival of the Portuguese, Brazilians are only Just beginning to address the legacy of slavery

Brazil is at last revealing its other face. After 500 years of seeking to shape itself in the image of a white, western Catholic country, Brazil is having to come to terms with its immense ethnic diversity and the social and economic implications this brings with it. An extensive report published in 1996 by the daily Folha de São Paulo revealed to the nation that almost half its 160 million people are black. This amounts to the realisation that Brazil had the largest black population in the world after Nigeria. The report also presented figures on racial prejudice, illiteracy, unemployment and income distribution among blacks from all over Brazil. The figures shocked a nation that has always believed itself to be the racial democracy of the southern hemisphere.

The myth of racial democracy has since the 1930s marketed Brazil as the sunny country where people of all races mix happily together on the beach, on the football pitch and in the Carnival parade. However, the myth has in reality served as a buttress for one of the most perverse and sophisticated forms of modern racism. By contrast to the apartheid system of South Africa, Brazil reveals a number of examples of disguised discrimination, such as in job advertising or television programming. Job adverts, which often ask for a ‘good appearance, in reality mean that blacks are not expected to apply. Television dramas, meanwhile, typically portray blacks within extremely limited, stereotyped roles, such as domestic servants or thieves. Not surprisingly, a recent poll on racial origins showed that only 5 per cent of Brazilians identified themselves as black. Most preferred to be called brown, bronze or coffee-coloured.

Discrimination based on skin colour was made a criminal offence in 1951, but the law was completely ignored and almost no-one was aware of its existence. During the military dictatorship (1964-1985), any…

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Brazil’s unfinished battle for racial democracy

The Economist
2000-04-20

JOSILENE SALES’S career is typical of Brazil’s emerging middle class. She spent seven years working in a petrochemical plant, while studying for a degree at night classes. Having moved to a better paid job in marketing, she saved enough to start her own telemarketing firm in Salvador, a city in Brazil’s north-east, and now employs two other staff. Less typically, Ms Sales is black, something which sometimes surprises her clients when they meet her. “You just have to overcome this [reaction] with professionalism,” she says.

Ms Sales descends from the 4m or more African slaves imported to Brazil, many of them through Salvador, for two centuries the colonial capital. When the Portuguese first landed on Brazil’s north-east coast, on April 22nd 1500, they thought that the docile Indians they encountered could easily be put to work building a new colony. But the Amerindians were few in number, unwilling workers, and many fell victim to European diseases. The colonists quickly sought African labour for Brazil’s sugar plantations, and later its mines. Brazil would not abolish slavery until 1888.
 
Five centuries of miscegenation have blurred the racial boundaries between Europeans, Africans and Amerindians: today 38% of Brazilians call themselves “brown” (of mixed ancestry). Blacks are only 6% and Amerindians a mere 0.2%. Such racial mixing encouraged Brazil’s largely white elite to nourish a myth that their country had overcome the legacy of slavery and become a “racial democracy”, with no colour prejudice—unlike the strife-torn United States.

Displays of racial hatred are indeed rare in Brazil. Nor do Brazilians live in racially segregated areas. And in contrast to their counterparts in the United States, Brazilians of mixed race are likely to be seen, and see themselves, not as black but as white or brown.

But Brazil’s blacks do face prejudice. And though, or because, as Brazilians say, “money whitens”, the country’s deep social inequalities run broadly along racial lines. Brazil is still largely governed, managed and owned by whites. Blacks and browns are disproportionately poor, and find it harder than similarly qualified whites to get a job….

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Britain: More mixed than we thought

British Broadcasting Corporation
2011-10-07

Mark Easton, Home editor

New figures seen by the BBC suggest our mixed race population may be twice the size of official figures—numbering up to two million people

Looking at some new figures on ethnic minorities in Britain the other day, I glanced at a footnote and suddenly sat bolt upright in my chair.

The implications of it were clear: Britain’s mixed-race community must be at least double the size we previously thought.

The research by Dr Alita Nandi at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) used data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) to examine the experience of different ethnic groups in the UK.

As with the census and other surveys, ethnicity is defined in the UKHLS by the individual: if you regard yourself as black Caribbean or white British that is how you are counted.

Using this self-reported approach, the figures suggest that 0.88% of adults define themselves as “mixed”.

But the survey—following 100,000 people in 40,000 households—asks another question: what is the ethnicity of your parents?

The footnote puts it: “If we use this alternative definition of mixed then 1.99% of adults are of mixed parentage.”

More than twice as many over-16-year-olds are technically mixed race than describe themselves that way…

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Human Genetic Diversity and the Nonexistence of Biological Races

Human Biology
Volume 75, Number 4, August 2003
pages 449-471

Rich Kittles, Associate Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology and Biostatistics
University of Illinois, Chicago

Jeffrey C. Long, Professor of Anthropology
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

Sewall Wright’s population structure statistic, F_ST, measured among samples of world populations is often 15% or less. This would indicate that 85% of genetic variation occurs within groups while only 15% can be attributed to allele frequency differences among groups. In this paper, we show that this low value reflects strong biases that result from violating hidden assumptions that define F_ST. These limitations on F_ST are demonstrated algebraically and in the context of analyzing dinucleotide repeat allele frequencies for a set of eight loci genotyped in eight human groups and in chimpanzees. In our analyses, estimates of F_ST fail to identify important variation. For example, when the analysis includes only humans, F_ST = 0.119, but adding the chimpanzees increases it only a little, F_ST = 0.183. By relaxing the underlying statistical assumptions, the results for chimpanzees become consistent with common knowledge, and we see a richer pattern of human genetic diversity. Some human groups are far more diverged than would be implied by standard computations of F_ST, while other groups are much less diverged. We discuss the relevance of these findings to the application of biological race concepts to humans. Four different race concepts are considered: typological, population, taxonomic, and lineage. Surprisingly, a great deal of genetic variation within groups is consistent with each of these concepts. However, none of the race concepts is compatible with the patterns of variation revealed by our analyses.

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The Fletcher Report 1930: A Historical Case Study of Contested Black Mixed Heritage Britishness

Journal of Historical Sociology
Volume 21, Issue 2-3 (August 2008)
Pages 213 – 241
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6443.2008.00336.x

Mark Christian, Professor & Chair of African & African American Studies
Lehman College, City University of New York

This article examines a controversial report that focused negatively on mixed heritage children born and raised in the city of Liverpool. The official title was: Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports. The social researcher was Muriel E. Fletcher, who had been trained in the Liverpool School of Social Science at The University of Liverpool in the early 1920s.  The report was published in 1930 amid controversy for its openly stigmatizing content of children and mixed heritage families of African and European origin.  It could be deemed the official outset in defining Liverpool’s ‘half castes’ as a problem and blight to the “British way of life” in the city.

…Numerous ‘intellectual’ views held by white commentators, either consciously or unconsciously, or even a mixture of the two if we take the example of Ralph Williams, related to racialised discourse and they appear to have had a strong bearing on the complex nature of the anti-Black riots in 1919 Liverpool.  An outcome of this was to further stigmatise Black-white sexual relations in which the offspring of those liaisons were effectively branded as less-than human, degenerate, only to be despised and scorned by mainstream society.  Again, imbued in the rhetoric, was the notion of hybridity between Black-white unions being anomalous, which echoed the philosophy of the Eugenics Movement in Britain (Park 1930; Searle 1976: 43)….

…The aftermath of the anti-black riots in 1919 saw the problem of ‘half-caste’ children in Liverpool take on greater significance and the issue developed into a much discussed and analysed topic (King and King 1938; Rich 1984, 1986; Wilson 1992).  The debates engendered ‘intellectual’ legitimisation of racialised ideology that effectively produced a climate of opinion that sought to reduce the sexual interaction between Black and white people.  The corollary of this was to further stigmatise the mixed heritage population as a social problem that society had to be rid.  Some of the key racialised stereotypes associated with the term ‘half-caste’ will be made clearer through an examination of key Liverpool-based philanthropic organizations, which were set up to deal specifically with the ‘social problem’ caused by the progeny of Black and white relationships…

…Arguably, in relation to the Liverpool Black experience, the pivotal stigmatising report to be published in the history of poor ‘race relations’ in Liverpool was in regard to mixed heritage children and their family structure. Muriel E. Fletcher (1930), who had the full backing of Ms. Rachel Fleming, a prominent eugenicist (Jones 1982), and other contemporary pseudo-scientific intellectuals, conducted the research on behalf of the Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children and published in 1930 a document entitled a Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and other Ports. It is a sociological report produced in the late 1920s and can be regarded as a nadir in the Liverpool mixed heritage population’s struggle to secure a positive social identity.  This ubiquitous racialised stigma was grounded in the eugenicist tradition of Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911) and the Eugenics Society. The society viewed humans in terms of being ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’ in stock (Jones 1982), and it is an overt philosophy throughout the report. Using eugenicist techniques, it is apparent that Fletcher attempted to study the physical and mental quality of ‘half-caste’ children.  Implicit in the research is the idea that the African and white British/European offspring were an anomaly in terms of human breeding. Eugenicists believed selective breeding could improve the physical and mental quality of humans by, e.g., ‘controlling’ the spread of inherited genetic abnormalities (which led in this era, 1920–1930s, to eugenics being abused by the Nazi Party in Germany to justify the extermination of thousands of ‘undesirable’ or mentally and physically ‘unfit’ humans)…

…Fletcher argued that ‘half-caste’ women were particularly vulnerable in Liverpool as they naturally consort with ‘coloured men’.  She maintains that ‘half-caste’ women were regarded as virtual social outcasts whose only escape from a life of perpetual misery was to marry a ‘coloured man’. As the opportunity in marrying a white man was, for a ‘half-caste’ woman, a near impossibility.  Again Fletcher points out:

Only two cases have been found in Liverpool of half-caste girls who have married white men, and in one of these cases the girl’s family forced the marriage on the man (1930a: 21).

It should be pointed out that this negative reflection of ‘half-caste’ girls in Liverpool is a major theme throughout the Fletcher Report.  Certainly the experience of mixed heritage women would require and deserves a study in itself, if only due to the significance and importance of highlighting the perspective of mixed heritage women in the history of Liverpool.  However, what is important here and central to this historical social research is to provide an insight into the racialised stigma that has impacted all individuals of mixed heritage in the Liverpool Black experience in terms of their collective social identity in the context of the city…

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