Mixed Race Studies

Race doesn’t fit in a checkbox

Arkansas Times
Little Rock, Arkansas
2013-05-02

Gene Lyons

Lamentably, the Boston Marathon bombing re-opened some of the most poisonous arguments in American life. Specifically, are the Tsarnaev brothers “white”? It’s a meaningless question.

Some hotheads couldn’t wait to declare all Muslims suspect. Certain thinkers on the left (David Sirota, Salon) argued against collective guilt while oddly lamenting that “white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated” for the crimes of Caucasian psycho killers.

Should they be?

Anyway, I’d previously treated the theme of ethnicity as destiny in a column about which racial ID boxes President Obama should have checked on his 2010 census form.

Everybody knows Obama’s mother was a white woman from Kansas, his father an exchange student from Kenya. But there’s no box labeled “African-American.” So the president checked “black.” He could also have checked “white,” but chose not to.

This decision disappointed a unique student group at the University of Maryland, although most understood it. Recently profiled in the New York Times, the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association could with equal accuracy be called “Students Whose Mothers Were Asked Insulting Questions by Busybodies at the Supermarket.”…

…But I’m getting ahead of myself. The Maryland group strikes me as entirely benign. Asked which boxes she checks, vice-president Michelle Lopez-Mullins, age 20, says “It depends on the day, and it depends on the options.”…

…Anyway, back to President Obama, who’s written books about his mixed inheritance. It appears to me that along with his great intelligence, Obama’s mixed background helped make him an intellectual counterpuncher — watchful, laconic, and leery of zealotry, a born mediator.

Like a man behind a mask, Obama watches people watch him.

Checking the “black” box on the census form, however, was the politically canny choice. Americans aren’t far from the days when absurd categories like “mulatto,” “quadroon,” and “octoroon” could determine people’s fate. Sadly, had he checked the “white” box too, many voters would have resented it.

My own choices were simpler. Raised to think of myself as Irish before American — all eight of my great-grandparents emigrated during the late 19th century, hunkering down in ethnic enclaves within walking distance of salt water — I was taught that there was a proper “Irish” opinion on every imaginable topic…

Read the entire article here.

What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans

Princeton University Press
June 2013
296 pages
6 x 9; 5 line illus. 3 tables.
Cloth ISBN: 9780691157030
eBook ISBN: 9781400846795

Kenneth Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs
Columbia University
Also former director of the U.S. Census Bureau from 1998 to 2001

America is preoccupied with race statistics–perhaps more than any other nation. Do these statistics illuminate social reality and produce coherent social policy, or cloud that reality and confuse social policy? Does America still have a color line? Who is on which side? Does it have a different “race” line—the nativity line—separating the native born from the foreign born? You might expect to answer these and similar questions with the government’s “statistical races.” Not likely, observes Kenneth Prewitt, who shows why the way we count by race is flawed.

Prewitt calls for radical change. The nation needs to move beyond a race classification whose origins are in discredited eighteenth-century race-is-biology science, a classification that once defined Japanese and Chinese as separate races, but now combines them as a statistical “Asian race.” One that once tried to divide the “white race” into “good whites” and “bad whites,” and that today cannot distinguish descendants of Africans brought in chains four hundred years ago from children of Ethiopian parents who eagerly immigrated twenty years ago. Contrary to common sense, the classification says there are only two ethnicities in America—Hispanics and non-Hispanics. But if the old classification is cast aside, is there something better?

What Is Your Race? clearly lays out the steps that can take the nation from where it is to where it needs to be. It’s not an overnight task—particularly the explosive step of dropping today’s race question from the census—but Prewitt argues persuasively that radical change is technically and politically achievable, and morally necessary.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Part I What Are Statistical Races?
  • Chapter 1 Introduction and Overview
  • Chapter 2 Classification before Counting: The Statistical Races
• Part II Policy, Statistics, and Science Join Forces
  • Chapter 3 The Compromise That Made the Republic and the Nation’s First Statistical Race
  • Chapter 4 Race Science Captures the Prize, the U.S. Census
  • Chapter 5 How Many White Races Are There?
• Part III When You Have a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail
  • Chapter 6 Racial Justice Finds a Policy Tool
  • Chapter 7 When You Have a Hammer: Statistical Races Misused
• Part IV The Statistical Races under Pressure, and a Fresh Rationale
  • Chapter 8 Pressures Mount
  • Chapter 9 The Problem of the Twenty-first Century Is the Problem of the Color Line as It Intersects the Nativity Line
• Part V What We Have Is Not What We Need
  • Chapter 10 Where Are We Exactly?
  • Chapter 11 Getting from Where We Are to Where We Need to Be
• Appendix: Perspectives from Abroad–Brazil, France, Israel
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1960–1980

Duke University Press
2007
256 pages
29 illus., 8 tables, 1 map
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4081-2 
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4060-7

Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

In A Discontented Diaspora, Jeffrey Lesser investigates broad questions of ethnicity, the nature of diasporic identity, and Brazilian culture. He does so by exploring particular experiences of young Japanese Brazilians who came of age in São Paulo during the 1960s and 1970s, an intensely authoritarian period of military rule. The most populous city in Brazil, São Paulo was also the world’s largest “Japanese” city outside of Japan by 1960. Believing that their own regional identity should be the national one, residents of São Paulo constantly discussed the relationship between Brazilianness and Japaneseness. As second-generation Nikkei (Brazilians of Japanese descent) moved from the agricultural countryside of their immigrant parents into various urban professions, they became the “best Brazilians” in terms of their ability to modernize the country and the “worst Brazilians” because they were believed to be the least likely to fulfill the cultural dream of whitening. Lesser analyzes how Nikkei both resisted and conformed to others’ perceptions of their identity as they struggled to define and claim their own ethnicity within São Paulo during the military dictatorship.

Lesser draws on a wide range of sources, including films, oral histories, wanted posters, advertisements, newspapers, photographs, police reports, government records, and diplomatic correspondence. He focuses on two particular cultural arenas—erotic cinema and political militancy—which highlight the ways that Japanese Brazilians imagined themselves to be Brazilian. As he explains, young Nikkei were sure that their participation in these two realms would be recognized for its Brazilianness. They were mistaken. Whether joining banned political movements, training as guerrilla fighters, or acting in erotic films, the subjects of A Discontented Diaspora militantly asserted their Brazilianness only to find that doing so reinforced their minority status.

Table of Contents

• Illustrations and Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Prologue: The Limits of Flexibility
• Introduction: The Pacific Rim in the Atlantic World
• 1. Brazil’s Japan: Film and the Space of Ethnicity, 1960-1970
• 2. Beautiful Bodies and (Dis)Appearing Identities: Contesting Images of Japanese-Brazilian Ethnicity, 1970-1980
• 3. Machine Guns and Honest Faces: Japanese-Brazilian Ethnicity and Armed Struggle, 1964-1980
• 4. Two Deaths Remembered
• 5. How Shizuo Osawa Became Mario the Jap
• Epilogue: Diaspora and Its Discontents
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index

The Rise of Ethnic Pride for Multicultural Americans

TheGuyOnSports
2013-04-13

Damien Haynes

In America, race and skin color are some of the most critiqued and analyzed issues within our society. For some people, growing up of mixed race decent can either be a detriment or a blessing. It can separate you from the rest of society or educate you to aspects of society that (for most people of a monoracial background) would go unlearned. People who are of mixed race decent is considered to be the fastest growing populous in the United States with a 32 percent increase as of 2010 on the U.S Census, according a CNN report. Although asking someone “What are you”, or “Where does your family come from,” is not lost in the consciousness of American conversation. The acceptance of persons who are of mixed race decent and those who identify as bi-racial or mixed, is on the rise.

To be of a multiracial background, a person has to be categorized as having the racial makeup of two or more ethnic groups. In a world where checking one box on a job application or census report is all that is offered, some people are caught between choosing one race over the other, not only on paper, but in some cases, all together within society.

The analysis of the United States population shows that multiple race groups such as White and Asian combinations, and White and Black combinations are the highest contribution to the change in the United States Census reporting since 2000…

…According to Andrew Jolivétte, Associate Professor and Chair of the American Indian Studies Department of San Francisco State University, more and more individuals are identifying themselves as multiracial due to an overall sociological acceptance and shift in perception….

Read the entire article here.