Mixed Race Studies

Challenges and resilience in the lives of urban, multiracial adults: An instrument development study.

Journal of Counseling Psychology
Volume 58, Issue 4 (October 2011)
pages 494-507
DOI: 10.1037/a0024633

Nazish M. Salahuddin

Karen M. O’Brian

Multiracial Americans represent a rapidly growing population (Shih & Sanchez, 2009); however, very little is known about the types of challenges and resilience experienced by these individuals. To date, few psychological measures have been created specifically to investigate the experiences of multiracial people. This article describes 2 studies focused on the development and psychometric properties of the Multiracial Challenges and Resilience Scale (MCRS). The MCRS was developed using a nationwide Internet sample of urban, multiracial adults. Exploratory factor analyses revealed 4 Challenge factors (Others’ Surprise and Disbelief Regarding Racial Heritage, Lack of Family Acceptance, Multiracial Discrimination, and Challenges With Racial Identity) and 2 Resilience factors (Appreciation of Human Differences and Multiracial Pride). A confirmatory factor analysis with data from a second sample provided support for the stability of this factor structure. The reliability and validity of the measure, implications of these findings, and suggestions for future research are discussed.

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The immediacy of Obama’s interracial parentage, along with his transnational experience of being reared in Hawaii and Indonesia, by his white mother and her relatives, along with his Indonesian step-father, has imbued his consciousness with a broader vision and wider-ranging sympathies in forming an identity. This in turn enhances his image as the physical embodiment of the principles of equity and inclusiveness. Yet Obama has never said he identifies as multiracial. This was underscored when he checked only the “Black, African American, or Negro” box, rather than multiple boxes, on his 2010 census form. In the media, and more generally, Obama is considered black or African American.

G. Reginald Daniel, “Chats: Is Obama Black, Bi-racial, or Post-racial?” Zócalo Public Square, September 7, 2011. http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2011/09/07/is-obama-black-bi-racial-or-post-racial/read/chats/

The Preacher and the Politician: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and Race in America

University of Virginia Press
October 2009
160 pages
5 1/2x 81/4
Cloth ISBN: 0-8139-2886-9

Clarence E. Walker, Professor of History
University of California, Davis

Gregory D. Smithers, Visiting Associate Professor of History
Virginia Commonwealth University

Barack Obama’s inauguration as the first African American president of the United States has caused many commentators to conclude that America has entered a postracial age. The Preacher and the Politician argues otherwise, reminding us that, far from inevitable, Obama’s nomination was nearly derailed by his relationship with Jeremiah Wright, the outspoken former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago. The media storm surrounding Wright’s sermons, the historians Clarence E. Walker and Gregory D. Smithers suggest, reveals that America’s fraught racial past is very much with us, only slightly less obvious.

With meticulous research and insightful analysis, Walker and Smithers take us back to the Democratic primary season of 2008, viewing the controversy surrounding Wright in the context of key religious, political, and racial dynamics in American history. In the process they expose how the persistence of institutional racism, and racial stereotypes, became a significant hurdle for Obama in his quest for the presidency.

The authors situate Wright’s preaching in African American religious traditions dating back to the eighteenth century, but they also place his sermons in a broader prophetic strain of Protestantism that transcends racial categories. This latter connection was consistently missed or ignored by pundits on the right and the left who sought to paint the story in simplistic, and racially defined, terms. Obama’s connection with Wright gave rise to criticism that, according to Walker and Smithers, sits squarely in the American political tradition, where certain words are meant to incite racial fear, in the case of Obama with charges that the candidate was unpatriotic, a Marxist, a Black Nationalist, or a Muslim.

Once Obama became the Democratic nominee, the day of his election still saw ballot measures rejecting affirmative action and undermining the civil rights of other groups. The Preacher and the Politician is a concise and timely study that reminds us of the need to continue to confront the legacy of racism even as we celebrate advances in racial equality and opportunity.

Table of  Contents

• “They Didn’t Give Us Our Mule and Our Acre”: Introduction
• “The “Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost”: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Black Church
• “I Don’t Want People to Pretend I’m Not Black”: Barack Obama and America’s Racial History
• “To Choose Our Better History?” Epilogue
• Text of Barack Obama’s March 18, 2008, Speech on Race
• Notes
• Index

“Asi lo paresçe por su aspeto”: Physiognomy and the Construction of Difference in Colonial Bogotá

Hispanic American Historical Review
Volume 91, Number 4 (2011)
pages 601-631
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-1416648

Joanne Rappaport, Professor of Anthropology
Georgetown University

My objective in this article is to examine the relationship between perception and classification in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Andes, focusing in particular on the Nuevo Reino de Granada (today, Colombia). During the first century of colonization, the visual identification of members of ethnoracial categories—indios, mestizos, mulattos, negros, and Spaniards— transformed over time and space in the Atlantic context. I argue in this article that we may be confining ourselves to a conceptual straitjacket if we limit our interpretation of terms like “indio” or “mulato” to their ethnic or racial dimensions as part of a self-enclosed system of classification, because such usages were embedded in broader schemes of perception and categorization that both antedated the Spanish invasion of the Americas and continued to be employed on the Iberian Peninsula. In particular, ethnoracial categories interacted in a complex relationship with the ways that observers reacted to the physiognomy of the individuals who bore these labels, so that the fluidity of classification can be seen as deriving in part from the interpretation of visual cues.

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“Pure and Noble Indians, Untainted by Inferior Idolatrous Races”: Native Elites and the Discourse of Blood Purity in Late Colonial Mexico

Hispanic American Historical Review
Volume 91, Number 4 (2011)
pages 633-663
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-1416657

Peter B. Villella, Assistant Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

As sixteenth-century Spaniards constructed their global empire, they carried with them the racial-religious concept of “limpieza de sangre,” or blood purity, which restricted marginalized communities from exercising prestige and authority. However, the complex demographic arena of early modern America, so different from the late medieval Iberia that gave rise to the discourse, necessarily destabilized and complicated limpieza’s meanings and modes of expression. This article explores a variety of ways by which indigenous elites in late colonial Mexico sought to take advantage of these ambiguities and describe themselves as “pure-blooded,” thereby reframing their local authority in terms recognized and respected by Spanish authorities. Specifically, savvy native lords naturalized the concept by portraying their own ancestors as the originators of “pure” bloodlines in America. In doing so, they reoriented the imagined metrics of purity so as to distinguish themselves from native commoners, mestizos, and the descendants of Africans. However, applying limpieza in native communities could backfire: after two centuries of extensive race mixing, many native lords found themselves vulnerable to accusations of uncleanliness and ancestral shame. Yet successful or not, indigenous participation in the discourse of limpieza helped influence what it meant in New Spain to be “honorable” and “pure,” and therefore eligible for social mobility.

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Toward a Cleaner White(ness): New Racial Identities

The Philosophical Forum
Volume 36, Issue 3 (Fall 2005)
pages 243–277
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9191.2005.00203.x

David Ingram, Professor of Philosophy
Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois

The essay critically examines some arguments advanced by Henry Giroux that ‘whiteness’ can be appropriated within pedagogical settings as a positive force in combating racism. I question his assumption that racial identity can be rethought in terms of ethnicity. Nonetheless, I concede that, from a folk-psychological perspective, ethnic and racial ‘identities’ are fluid. Although blurring the distinction between race and ethnicity erases important distinctions between different types of groups, it also tends to deconstruct identity as an inherited and ascriptive—as distinct from voluntarily affirmed—locus of solidarity. Drawing on cognitive psychology, sociology, and cultural studies, I conclude that whiteness is less a form of cultural identity than a structure of power.

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She Just Loved Baseball

Black Athlete Sports Network
2010-02-28

Bill Carroll

NEW YORK—Effa Manley was seemingly yet another “lost” pioneer in Negro Leagues Baseball before being posthumously honored in 2006 with induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

She was part of a class of players and executives selected by a special committee chaired by former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent. But a plaque for the only woman inducted in the Hall of Fame barely touches the surface of an often controversial life.

Manley was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Bertha Ford Brooks, was of German and East-Indian descent. Bertha, who was a seamstress, gave birth to Effa after becoming pregnant by her wealthy White employer, John M. Bishop.

Bertha’s husband, Benjamin Brooks, who was Black, sued Bishop and received a settlement of $10,000 before he and Bertha divorced.  Bertha later remarried, and Effa was raised in a household with a Black stepfather and Black half-siblings.

Inheriting somewhat dark skin from her mother, she chose to live as a Black person, leading most people to assume her stepfather was her biological father and to classify her as Black.

After graduation from high school in Philadelphia, she moved to New York to work in the millinery business. She met Abe Manley, an African-American man 24 years older than she, at the 1932 World Series at Yankee Stadium, where she had gone to see her favorite player, Babe Ruth…

…The Newark Eagles were founded in 1936 when the Newark Dodgers merged with the Brooklyn Eagles. The Eagles sported the likes of Hall-of-Famers Larry Doby, Monte Irvin, Ray Dandridge, Leon Day, and Willie Wells.  The Eagles shared Ruppert Stadium with the Newark Bears, beginning in 1936…

…In addition to managing her baseball team, Manley was also a social activist for Civil rights. She organized a boycott of Harlem stores when they wouldn’t hire Black salesclerks. It took only six weeks for the stores to give in.

As a result, one year after the boycott, 300 stores employed Blacks. She held an “Anti-Lynching Day” at Ruppert Stadium and was treasurer for the Newark chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)…

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Documentary Genocide: Families Surnames on Racial Hit List

Richmond Times-Dispatch
2000-03-05

Peter Hardin, Former Washington Correspondent
 
Long before the Indian woman gave birth to a baby boy, Virginia branded him with a race other than his own.
 
The young Monacan Indian mother delivered her son at Lynchburg General Hospital in 1971. Proud of her Indian heritage, the woman was dismayed when hospital officials designated him as black on his birth certificate. They threatened to bar his discharge unless she acquiesced. The original orders came from Richmond generations ago.
 
Virginia’s former longtime registrar of the Bureau of Vital Statistics, Dr. Walter Ashby Plecker, believed there were no real native-born Indians in Virginia and anybody claiming to be Indian had a mix of black blood.
 
In aggressively policing the color line, he classified “pseudo-Indians” as black and even issued in 1943 a hit list of surnames belonging to “mongrel” or mixed-blood families suspected of having Negro ancestry who must not be allowed to pass as Indian or white.
 
With hateful language, he denounced their tactics.
 
“ . . . Like rats when you are not watching, [they] have been ‘sneaking’ in their birth certificates through their own midwives, giving either Indian or white racial classification,” Plecker wrote.
 
Twenty-eight years later, the Monacan mother’s surname still was on Plecker’s list. She argued forcefully with hospital officials. She lost…

…“It’s not that we’re trying to dig him [Plecker] up and re-inter him again,” said Gene Adkins, assistant chief of the Eastern Chickahominy Tribe.
 
“We want people to know that he did damage the Indian population here in the state. And it’s taken us years, even up to now, to try to get out from under what he did. It’s a sad situation, really sad.”
 
Said Chief William P. Miles of the Pamunkey Tribe: “He came very close to committing statistical genocide on Native Americans in Virginia.”…

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Black Liverpool, Black America, and the Gendering of Diasporic Space

Cultural Anthropology
Volume 13, Issue 3 (August 1998)
pages 291–325
DOI: 10.1525/can.1998.13.3.291

Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hunter College of the City University of New York

The terms black Liverpool and black America, no less than the African diaspora, refer to racialized geographies of the imagination. The mapping of racial signifiers onto geographical ones lends such terms the illusion of referring to physical rather than social locations. That there is no actual space that one could call “the African diaspora,” despite how commonly it is mapped onto particular locales, points attention to the ways that social spaces are constructed in tandem with processes of racial formation…

Inspired by Paul Gilroy’s first book, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987), I set out in 1991 to study the meanings and practices surrounding “race” andnation in Liverpool, England. Set in a city with one of the longest-settled black populations in the United Kingdom, my research investigated why and how black identity is constituted as the mutual opposite of English and British identities. Yet in pursuing these themes, I became increasingly amazed at how frequently my informants would make discursive forays into “black America.” Nested at key moments in their narratives were references to the formative influence that black America—in many forms—has had on racial identity and politics in their city. The experiences they narrated were varied, and the narratives themselves were rich, poignant, and deeply gendered. Black Liverpudlians told of their relations with the black American servicemen (or “GIs”) who were stationed outside their city for some 25 years following World War II. Men and women also spoke about the travels of their own African, Afro-Caribbean, and native black Liverpudlian fathers who were employed as seamen by Liverpool shipping companies. The global wanderings of the city’s black men often brought them to black Atlantic ports of call-many in the United States. Narratives of black Liverpudlians’ diasporic encounters also referred to the emigration of local women to the mythical place called “black America.” Finally, and crucially, men and women told of how and why they have accessed the many black American cultural productions that have, for decades, circulated around the social space of black Liverpool.

Setting Sail: The Birth of Liverpool’s Black Community

When black Liverpudlians narrate their history, three themes often emerge. The first concerns the participation of black men in the city’s shipping industry; the second concerns the birth of the black population-a process narrated with special reference to the prevalence of interracial  marriage in Liverpool; and the third concerns the transformation of their racial identity from “half-caste” to “black.” These related processes, to be examined briefly below, have given rise to the contemporary form of black Liverpudlians’ local and racial identities…

African seamen, as has been suggested, are heralded in Liverpool for essentially giving birth to the black community. Yet they are also noted for setting another phenomenon into motion: the institution of interracial marriage. The prevalence of interracial marriage is a crucial theme in narratives on local history. During their careers at sea, African men commonly docked in Liverpool’s port, formed romantic relationships with local women, mostly white, and later married them, had children, retired from seafaring, and settled in the city—so the dominant narrative goes, both in social scientific and local discourse. Diane Frost’s recent explanation is exemplary of the former. She writes,

Transient work patterns that derive from the nature of seafaring… led to short-term relationships with local women. Permanent and long-standing relationships with local women through marriage (formal or common-law) usually occurred when these seamen became permanently domiciled in Liverpool or in some cases this became a reason for gaining domicile. [1995-96:51]

Several black Liverpudlians told me of a much earlier study of this phenomenon. Published in 1930, it was written by an anthropologist named Muriel Fletcher and given the revealing title Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports (Fletcher 1930). Mark Christian marks the publication of “the Fletcher Report” as the dawn of philanthropic racism in Liverpool because it expressed “concern” both for the “morally degenerate” white women who consorted with African seamen, and for their haplessly pathological “half-caste” children (1995-96). The sexualized interpretation of seafaring lends specificity to the racialization not only of interracial unions, but also of the children born of them.

Major and minor publications on blacks in Liverpool always condemn the Fletcher Report for essentially developing a non-category (“neither black nor white”) to speak of blacks of mixed racial parentage. Their struggles to overcome that inscription is an absolutely central theme in black Liverpudlian accounts of the way they became black. While some blacks of mixed parentage specifically cite black American influences on the rise of a black identity in Liverpool, the blacks I knew with two black parents tended to boast that “we were always ‘black’ in our family”—speaking somewhat disparagingly, perhaps, of those who took longer to claim that identity. Yet the narratives of black Liverpudlians of mixed parentage reveal the difficulty of that process, for these Liverpudlians indicated rather painfully that their African fathers, whom they said they looked to for racial identity, often perceived their children as racially different than themselves. Blacks of mixed parentage in Liverpool commonly reported that their African fathers referred to them as “half-caste.” While this is not the place to historicize the term, we must grant the obvious possibility that West African societies colonized by the British were heavily influenced by Victorian constructions of “race” that were characterized by a concern for “purity” (Lorimer 1978). African informants in Liverpool reported that they, too, grew up with the term, and never recognized it as derogatory. A relatively recent immigrant to England explained, “Growing up in Nigeria, it was acceptable to call people of mixed race ‘half-caste’ because to a lot of Nigerians it was not an abusive term. It was purely a biological description of somebody who comes from a mixed race.”…

Read the entire article here.

“My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir,” by Mark Whitaker

The Washington Post
2011-10-14

Jonathan Yardley, Critic

Now in his mid-50s, Mark Whitaker has had an impressive journalistic career. Fresh out of Harvard in the late 1970s, he went to work at Newsweek and rose steadily through various assignments, eventually becoming its editor. In 2006 he moved to NBC, at first as “the number two executive in the news division,” then as chief of its Washington bureau. Now he is executive vice president and managing editor of CNN Worldwide, an immensely influential position given that CNN reaches into almost every nook and cranny of the world.

All of which makes for quite a resume, but it also makes for the least interesting part of “My Long Trip Home,” Whitaker’s memoir. It’s worth reading because it’s a thoughtful account of growing up bi-racial at a point in this country’s history when racial identities are in flux and when people of mixed race are ever more common…

…“My Long Trip Home” is not a confessional memoir of the sort so popular these days, especially among younger memoirists who have nothing to confess except the cruelties allegedly inflicted upon them by others or simply by life itself. For the most part Whitaker’s tone is objective, almost reportorial, which permits the reader to see his story clearly rather than through the mists of hyperventilated emotion. It’s a good book.

Read the entire review here.