Mixed Race Studies

Multiracial Americans: Racial Identity Choices and Implications for the Collection of Race Data

Sociology Compass
Volume 6, Issue 4, April 2012
pages 316–331
DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00454.x

Nikki Khanna, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Vermont

In 2010, approximately nine million Americans self-identified with more than one race on the U.S. Census – a 32 percent increase since 2000. In this paper, I review the growing body of research on this population, with a particular focus on identifying and describing factors important in shaping their racial identities. Factors explored include: social norms regarding racial classification, socioeconomic status, racial composition of one’s neighborhood and community, region, socialization by family, age, cohort, genealogical locus of multiracial ancestry, nativity, and phenotype. I discuss the broader implications of findings to-date, with a particular focus on the ongoing scholarly discourse regarding the collection of race data in the United States.

See the teaching guide to this paper here.

Read or purchase the article here.

Visualizando la Conciencia Mestiza: The Relation of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Mestiza Consciousness to Mexican American Performance and Poster Art

University of South Florida
2010
53 pages

Maria Cristina Serrano

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Liberal Arts Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies College of Arts and  Sciences University of South Florida

This thesis explores Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of mestiza consciousness and its relation to Mexican American performance and poster art. It examines how the traditional conceptions of mestizo identity were redefined by Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera in an attempt to eradicate oppression through a change of consciousness. Anzaldua’s conceptions are then applied to Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performance art discussing the intricacies and complexities of his performances as examples of mestiza consciousness. This thesis finally analyzes various Mexican American posters in relation to both Anzaldúa and Gomez-Peña’s art works. It demonstrates that the similarities in the artist’s treatment of hybridity illustrate a progressive change in worldview, thus exhibit mestiza consciousness.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Mestiza Consciousness
• Chapter 2: The Relation of Mestiza Consciousness to Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s Border Brujo and The Couple in a Cage
• Chapter 3: The Creative Synthesis in Mexican American Poster Art
• Conclusions
• References

List of Figures

• Figure 2.1: Still from Border Brujo
• Figure 2.2: Gomez-Peña as Border Brujo
• Figure 2.3: Fusco and Gomez-Peña in Couple in the Cage
• Figure 2.4: Close-up of performers
• Figure 3.1: Andrew Sermeno, Huelga! (Strike!)
• Figure 3.2: Unknown, Tierra o Muerte! Venceremos
• Figure 3.3: Diego Rivera, The History of Mexico: The Ancient Indian World
• Figure 3.4: David Alfaro Siqueiros, Cuauhtemoc Against the Myth
• Figure 3.5: Malaquias Montoya, Vietnam, Aztlán
• Figure 3.6: Xavier Miramontes, Boycott Grapes (Boicotea las Uvas)
• Figure 3.7: Rodolfo “Rudy: Cuellar, Bilingual Education Says Twice as Much
• Figure 3.8: Jose Montoya, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez, and Louie “The Foot” Gonzalez, Jose Montoya’s Pachuco Art: A Historical Update
• Figure 3.9: Victor Ochoa, Border Bingo
• Figure 3.10: Laura Molina, Cihualyaomiquiz, The Jaguar
• Figure 3.11: Tina Hernandez, Ya Basta!
• Figure 3.12: DC Comics, Wonder Woman
• Figure 3.13: J. Howard Mitchell, We Can Do It

Read the entire thesis  here.

Hybrid Veggies & Mixed Kids: Ecocriticism and Race in Ruth Ozeki’s Pastoral Heartlands

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Volume 2 (2011)
pages 22-29

Melissa Eriko Poulsen
Literature Department
University of California, Santa Cruz

This paper explores the troping of racial categories and mixed race bodies in Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation (2003) and My Year of Meats (1999). Moving through both transnational and local space, Ozeki’s writes an ecocritical pastoral text in order to resist representations of people of mixed race stemming from nineteenth century racial theory. Drawing attention to the consumption of food within and across national borders, whether genetically modified potatoes or hormone-infused beef, Ozeki simultaneously highlights the uncritical consumption of the language of biology around the mixed race body. All Over Creation and My Year of Meats are constructed around the traditions and tensions inherent in the pastoral, using mixed race to counter the silences of ecocritical discourse while problematizing science- and place-based constructions of race.

Read the entire article here.

Teaching Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far: Multiple Approaches

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Volume 1 (2010)
pages 70-78

Wei Ming Dariotis, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies
San Francisco State University

This essay compares pedagogical approaches to teaching the literature of Edith Eaton in two distinct contexts: a course on Asian American Literature and a course on Asian Americans of Mixed Heritage.  This is a comparison of the variant pedagogical approaches in these two different contexts.

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race Jamaicans in England

A Parcel of Ribbons: Eighteenth century Jamaica viewed throught family stories and documents
2012-01-28

Ann Powers

The status of  mixed race Jamaicans in eighteenth century Jamaica was always going to be less than than of white colonists, but it was possible for them to become established and successful in England. A case in point are two of the children of Scudamore Winde.

Ambrose Scudamore Winde (he seems to have dropped the Ambrose early on) was born about 1732 at Kentchurch in Herefordshire, son of John Winde and Mary Scudamore.  The beautiful Kentchurch Court is still in the hands of the Scudamore family as it has been for the last thousand years or so. In 1759, following the suicide of his father, he and his brother Robert went to Jamaica where Scudamore Winde became an extremely successful merchant.  He was also Assistant Judge of the Supreme Court of the Judicature and a member of the Assembly.

Like many white colonists of the island he had relationships with several women but did not marry.  When he died in late September 1775 he left generous legacies to his various children. His business had prospered and a large part of his assets were in the form of debts owed to him. According to Trevor Burnard[1] he had  personal assets of £94,273, of which £82,233 were in the form of debts. This would be equivalent to about £9.3 million relative to current retail prices or £135 million in relation to average wages today.

Scudamore Winde freed his negro slave Patty who was baptised as Patty Winde in 1778 at Kingston when her age was given as about 50.  Patty and her daughter Mary were left land that he had bought from Richard Ormonde in Saint Catherine’s with the buildings on it, and £100 Jamaican currency together with two slaves called Suki and little Polly.  It is not clear whether Mary was Scudamore Winde’s daughter for although her name is given as Mary Winde she is referred to as a negro rather than mulatto.

Scudamore Winde had a mulatto son called Robert, possibly the son of Patty, who was born about 1759, and three children with Sarah Cox herself a free negro or mulatto (records vary).  Her children were Penelope, John and Thomas born between 1768 and 1774.  John may have died young and Thomas elected to remain in Jamaica where he had a successful career as a merchant in Kingston.  Robert and Penelope travelled to England under the eye of Robert Cooper Lee who was trustee and executor of his close friend Scudamore Winde’s Will…

Read the entire article here.

Morgan Goode: On Board with the Future of the Movement

The Bilerico Project
2012-03-21

Amy Andre, Project Contributor

If you haven’t heard of her already, BiNet USA board member Morgan Goode is a name for you to remember. At this year’s Creating Change conference, she co-led a workshop about mixed race issues that brought a crowd that was literally spilling out of the doors. I was in that room, and I saw the current and future leadership of the bi movement—and of the LGBT movement as a whole—sitting in there with me. Specifically, I saw it at the front of the room.

Morgan is a writer and photographer living in Brooklyn. She is a profo-queer and is affiliated with many different LGBT organizations, but her opinions are her own. She tells me that one day she is going to make good on her threat to do a photo project on white tourists photographing homeless people of color. In the meantime, she is an editor-at-large at prettyqueer.com and is also organizing the 6th Annual Amazingly Queer Race for Economic Justice. Her favorite pastimes include subverting the gaze, making people uncomfortably aware of their privilege and petting kitties.

I recently caught up with Morgan to learn more about where she’s going, where the movement is going, and how we can all get on board. Here’s what she had to say.

Amy: What inspired your workshop at Creating Change for mixed race attendees? How did it go for you? Do you plan to do more in the future?

Morgan: Mixed race issues have been on my mind since I can remember but that workshop actually came out of meeting fellow activist Ryan Li Dahlstrom at the 2010 BECAUSE Conference. The conference and the panel obviously focused on bi/pan/fluid issues, but Ryan Li and I really connected around our shared identities as mixed race queers. It wasn’t long before we knew we had to do a workshop that would give mixed race queer and trans folks the opportunity to come together and support each other as activists and allies. I think mixed race queer and trans folks are really hungry for that space to share our experiences and be heard…

Read the entire article here.

2010 Census Shows Asians are Fastest-Growing Race Group

United States Census Bureau
2012-03-21

The U.S. Census Bureau today released a 2010 Census brief, The Asian Population: 2010 [PDF], that shows the Asian population grew faster than any other race group over the last decade. The population that identified as Asian, either alone or in combination with one or more other races, grew by 45.6 percent from 2000 to 2010, while those who identified as Asian alone grew by 43.3 percent. Both populations grew at a faster rate than the total U.S. population, which increased by 9.7 percent from 2000 to 2010.

Out of the total U.S. population, 14.7 million people, or 4.8 percent, were Asian alone. In addition, 2.6 million people, or another 0.9 percent, reported Asian in combination with one or more other races. Together, these two groups totaled 17.3 million people. Thus, 5.6 percent of all people in the United States identified as Asian, either alone or in combination with one or more other races…

Read the entire press release here.

Family Tree’s Startling Roots

The New York Times
2012-03-19

Felicia Lee

Thirty-nine lashes “well laid” on her bare back and an extension of her indentured servitude was Elizabeth Banks’s punishment for “fornication & Bastardy with a negroe slave,” according to a stark June 20, 1683, court document from York County, Va. Through the alchemy of celebrity and genealogy, that record and others led to the recent discovery that Banks, a free white woman despite her servitude, was the paternal ninth great-grandmother of Wanda Sykes, the ribald comedian and actress.

More than an intriguing boldface-name connection, it is a rare find even in a genealogy-crazed era in which Internet sites like ancestry.com, with more than 14 million users, and the popular NBC program “Who Do You Think You Are?” play on that fascination. Because slavery meant that their black ancestors were considered property and not people, most African-Americans are able to trace their roots in this country only back to the first quarter of the 19th century.

“This is an extraordinary case and the only such case that I know of in which it is possible to trace a black family rooted in freedom from the late 17th century to the present,” said the historian Ira Berlin, a professor at the University of Maryland known for his work on slavery and African-American history.

Mary Banks, the biracial child born to Elizabeth Banks around 1683, inherited her mother’s free status, although she too was indentured. Mary appeared to have four children. There are many other unanswered questions, but the family grew, often as free people of color married or paired off with other free people of color.

Ms. Sykes’s family history was professionally researched for a segment of “Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr.,” a new series that has its debut Sunday on PBS.

“The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched, ” said Mr. Gates, the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard. He was referring to the dozens of genealogies his researchers have unearthed for his television roots franchise, which began in 2006 with the PBS series “African-American Lives” and includes three other genealogy-inspired shows. Mr. Gates said he also checked Ms. Sykes’s family tree with historians, including Mr. Berlin…

…Johni Cerny, who is the chief genealogist for Mr. Gates’s television programs, noted that many African-Americans with white ancestry could trace their heritage beyond the 1600s to European ancestors. She said 85 percent of African-Americans have some European ancestry.

“The unique thing about Wanda is that she descends from 10 generations of free Virginia mulattos, which is more rare than descendants of mixed-race African-Americans who descend from English royalty,” Ms. Cerny wrote in an e-mail message.

More than 1,000 mixed-race children were born to white women in colonial Virginia and Maryland, but their existence has been erased from oral and written history, said Paul Heinegg, a respected lay genealogist and historian. Mr. Heinegg’s Web site, freeafricanamericans.com, features books and documents like tax lists that provide information about those families…

Read the entire article here.

Performativity and the Latina/o-white hybrid identity: performing the textual self

University of South Florida
2005
192 pages

Shane T. Moreman, Associate Professor of Communications
California State University, Fresno

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Communication College of Arts and Sciences

This study is an exploration of Latina/o-White hybrid identity for constructions and negotiations of hybridity as performed in the lives of individuals and as rearticulated in discourse. These discourses are drawn from interviews with nine individuals, stories of my own life, and three published memoirs. Despite these different forms, all the self identified Latina/o-White hybrid individuals speak to the difficulty of imagining and enacting a hybrid identity within todays discourse on race and ethnicity. This study articulates these difficulties as lived experience, theory, and performance come together to argue for and against hybridity as a model for contemporary identity. The project rests mainly on the theory of performativity and the theory of hybridity. In Chapter Two, I interview nine participants. While Whiteness was consistently re-centered in their self-perceptions, this re-centering disrupts naturalness to their racial identity.
 
Race is understood beyond the visual and into the performative.This disruption of naturalness allows room for a more imaginative approach to race. In Chapter Three, I utilize the Mexican pop singer, Paulina Rubio, as a backdrop to my own theoretical and material performative embodiments of hybridity. I deconstruct the perceived hybridity of Paulina Rubio, and I theorize the lived-experience of my own hybrid performativity. I demonstrate how hybrid performativity,while theoretically achievable, loses its material efficacy.In Chapter Four, I do a close-reading of three memoirs written about and by Latina/o-White hybrid individuals. The range of hybridity, being thrust upon and beinga strategy, is reproduced as a continuum across different hybridities of the Latina/o-White hybrid individual. The continuum moves across five hybrid strategies for languaging identity: imposter, mongrel, homeless, bridge, and twin. Chapter Five is a summary of the dissertation.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables
• Abstract
• Chapter One: Introduction
  • Rationale for the Study
  • Identity: Self, Other, and Racial Other
  • Performing an Identity
  • Multiplicity of Self and Other
  • Preview of the Chapters
• Chapter Two: Acting in Concert and Acting In Accord: Performativity of Latina/o-White Identity
  • The Terms of Latina/o Identity
  • The Ineffable White
  • Between the Many-Named and the Never-Need-to-be-Named
  • Constructing and Negotiating Identity through Material Practices
  • Constructing and Negotiating Identity through the Visual
  • Constructing and Negotiating Identity through Discourse
  • Constructing and Negotiating Identity through Performative Acts
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Three: Paulina Rubio Y Yo: Questioning Hybrid Perfomativity
  • Paulina Rubio: ?Eres la persona que te dices?
  • Moving as She Moves and Mouthing Her Words: Hybrid Performativity
  • Globalized Media as an Opportunity for Hybridity
  • A Hybrid Identity Foreclosed
• Chapter Four: Memoir as Equipment for Living: Hybrid Performative Identities
  • Textual Production of Hybrid Performativity
  • Performative Trappings: Language as Binary/Hierarchy Trap
  • Performative Trappings: Performing Whiteness
  • Performative Trappings: Words that Produce Their Subjects and Effects
  • When Performativity Meets Hybridity: Beyond the Trappings
  • A Continuum of Strategies of Hybrid Performativity: The Imposter
  • A Continuum of Strategies of Hybrid Performativity: The Mongrel
  • A Continuum of Strategies of Hybrid Performativity: The Homeless
  • A Continuum of Strategies of Hybrid Performativity: The Bridge
  • A Continuum of Strategies of Hybrid Performativity: The Twin
  • Hybridizing Art with Love
• Chapter Five: A Grammar of Hybridity in the Subjunctive Mood
  • Overview of Significant Findings within the Chapters
  • Performativity & the Latina/o-White Hybrid Identity: Performing the Textual Self
  • Implications for Future Research in Hybridity
• References
• Appendices
  • Appendix A: Informed Consent
  • Appendix B: Interview Schedule
  • Appendix C: Letter of Support
• About the Author

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Obama Effect: Understanding Emerging Meanings of “Obama” in Anti-Discrimination Law

Indiana Law Journal
Volume 87: Issue 1 (Spring 2012)
pages 328-348
Symposium: “Labor and Employment Under the Obama Administration: A Time for Hope and Change?”

Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Charles and Marion Kierscht Professor of Law
University of Iowa

Mario L. Barnes, Professor of Law
University of California, Irvine

Panel 6: Employment Law: Antidiscrimination Law Under a Black President in a “Post-Racial” America?

The election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency on November 4, 2008, prompted many declarations from journalists and commentators about the arrival of a post-racial society, a society in which race is no longer meaningful. For many, the fact that a self-identified black man had obtained the most prominent, powerful, and prestigious job in the United States symbolized the end of an era in which Blacks and other racial minorities could make legitimate claims about the harmful effects of racism. In fact, on the night of the election, conservative talk show host Bill Bennett proclaimed that Blacks would have no more excuses for any failures or unattained successes. Black actor Will Smith essentially agreed with Bennett, proclaiming the following: “I love that all of our excuses have been removed. African-American excuses have been removed. There’s no white man trying to keep you down, because if he were really trying to keep you down, he would have done everything he could to keep Obama down.”

Along the same lines, many conservatives pointed to Obama’s election as a symbol of a racism-free society when they initiated constitutional challenges to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite the fact that Obama had earned only one in four votes from Whites in areas covered by section 5 of the Act while earning nearly half of all votes from Whites nationally, Texas lawyer Gregory Coleman argued that the Voting Rights Act was basically irrelevant in today’s society; to him and other conservatives, Obama’s election as president demonstrated as much. Coleman declared, “The America that has elected Barack Obama as its first African American president is far different than when [the Voting Rights Act] was first enacted in 1965.”

Overall, many pondered whether Obama’s election signaled a new day for Blacks. The fact that Obama was biracial only made the symbolism stronger. The son of a black Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, Obama represented a break from our nation’s troubled past with race and racism, not just because of his ability to become president but also because of his individual racial background.

In this Article, we explore the proclamations that have been made about an emerging “post-racial” society within the context of workplace anti-discrimination law. Specifically, as the title of our panel for this symposium asks, we inquire: What is the significance of having a biracial, black-white president (or more specifically, the first self-identified black president) to the enforcement of anti-discrimination law? What impact, if any, has President Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency and election as president had on discrimination in the workplace?

Based in part on our review of discrimination cases in which President Obama’s name has been invoked—in most cases, either to demean minority workers or with an otherwise discriminatory purpose—we conclude that having a biracial, black-white (or self-identified black) president has had a surprising effect on the enforcement of anti-discrimination law. Indeed, we contend that Obama’s campaign and election have, to an extent, had an unusual effect in the work environment. Rather than revealing that racism is over or that racial discrimination is diminishing in the workplace, Obama’s presence and prominence have developed a specialized meaning that ironically has resulted in an increase in or at the very least a continuation of regular discrimination and harassment within the workplace. In fact, our review of a number of anti-discrimination law cases filed during the political ascendance and election of Obama suggests that, within certain contexts, individuals have made references to Obama in ways that demonstrate racial animus against Blacks and those associated with Blacks or as a means for explaining why offending conduct toward racial minorities does not involve discrimination. In other words, in these contexts, the term “Obama” itself has become a new tool for racial harassment and discrimination as well as a new tool for denying the reality of racism…

Read the entire article here.