Mixed Race Studies

“First and foremost, I would be remiss if I didn’t suggest that people go to MixedRaceStudies.org. It is one of the most comprehensive websites about all things mixed-race… This is a website created by Steve Riley. He’s a regular on Mixed Race Radio and throughout the entire academic circle.. or circuit. He has created this website. And if you are looking for history, historical articles, snapshots of individuals doing amazing things in today’s world. A very real-time account of all things mixed-race.” —Tiffany Rae Reid

Kelly Ellison, “The Joys and Challenges of Becoming a Transracial Family Through Adoption,” Your Adoption Coach with Kelly Ellison (April 20, 2013, 00:27:25-00:28:04). http://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/68557/the-joys-and-challenges-of-becoming-a-transracial-family-through-adoption.

“The offspring of the two races is a hybrid—the offspring whose progression, though not limited like that of some of the lower animals to the first generation, is nevertheless so arrested by lunacy, idiocy, blindness, deafness and dumbness, and other the most crushing infirmities ‘that flesh is heir to,’ that it can never become the sound parental stock of self-maintaining population.” —Virginia Governor James McDowell (1795-1851)

“Extracts from the Speech of Gov. McDowell, of Virginia,” The Columbus Enquirer (Columbus, Georgia: April 10, 1849, page 1, columns 2-4). (Source: Georgia Historic Newspapers). http://enquirer.galileo.usg.edu/enquirer/view?docId=news/cwe1849/cwe1849-0053.xml.

If we’re going to play race games let’s do it scientifically. For example, if you’re black that’s meaningless unless you specify Bantu, Hutu/Tutsi, San, or any number of other lineages within Africa. Africa has the biggest human variety in the world.  Obama looks totally different from the rest of the Black Caucus; it’s because he is. He belongs to a different biological lineage. He’s not a Bantu. But most American blacks are mixed-race, of course, like Obama himself.

Likewise, if you’re pure Irish, your race is Gaelic. If you’re Irish-English, you’re Gaelic-Caucasian or something close to that. If you look blond, you’re likely to be a Northern European. If you’re Jewish but you look like a Russian, you are Semitic-Nordic-Slavic. If you’re Jewish and you look like a Spaniard, you’re Semitic-Hispanic. If you’re Jewish from Yemen, you’re probably Semitic-Arabic. If you’re a pure cohen, you’re Semitic back some 3,000 years, especially if you have heritable diseases like Tay-Sachs. But of course going earlier than that, there are plenty of generations back to the human population bottleneck in North Africa, where humans were reduced to some 5,000 individuals. That’s the shared founding population for all of us. (And everybody was Black at that time.).

James Lewis, “How to really be accurate on ‘race’ on the Census,” The American Thinker, (March 17, 2010) http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/03/how_to_really_be_accurate_on_r.html.

‘Las Caras Lindas’: To Be Black And Puerto Rican In 2013

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2013-05-25

Jasmine Garsd

I am a black man
Who was born café con leche
I sneaked into a party, to which I had not been invited.
And I got kicked out. They threw me out.
When I went back to have fun with the black girls
All together they said ‘Maelo, go back to your white girls’
And they kicked me out. They threw me out.”

– Ismael Rivera, “Niche“

In “Niche” (“Black Man”), iconic Puerto Rican singer Ismael Rivera navigates the labyrinth of race and ethnicity in the Caribbean. A light-skinned “café con leche” black man, he wanders through his island like a ghost of a colonial Spanish past, shooed off by both blacks and whites uncomfortable with his presence and what he represents.

In another iconic and deeply melancholy song, “Las Caras Lindas” (or “The Beautiful Faces”), Rivera sets aside the discomfort and pens an ode to his people: “The beautiful faces of my black race, so much crying, pain and suffering, they are the challenges of life, but inside we carry so much love.”

I was recently in Puerto Rico reporting on the island’s troubled economy and reignited diaspora. During that time, I had the chance to visit legendary rapper Tego Calderón. In his studio in Santurce, Puerto Rico, I found the entire place wallpapered with photographs of Ismael Rivera…

Read the entire article here.

Arthur Wharton: The first Black Footballer

BBC Tyne
Culture
October 2003

BBC

Over 100 years before Dyer, Jenas and Ameobi, the North East had the UK’s first professional black League player. Meet the legendary Arthur Wharton.

Arthur Wharton was born on 28 October 1865 in Accra, formerly the Gold Coast, now capital of Ghana, West Africa.

His father, Henry Wharton was a famous Methodist Minister and Missionary from Grenada in the West Indies and his mother was Annie Florence Egyriba, was related to the Fante Royal Family.

Both of Arthur’s paternal grandfather’s were Scottish traders. One of his great grandmothers was an African-Grenadian slave.

Arthur’s uncle on his mothers’ side was a successful businessman and owner of the Gold Coast Times…

Read the entire article here.

The Joys and Challenges of Becoming a Transracial Family Through Adoption

Your Adoption Coach with Kelly Ellison
2013-04-20

Kelly Ellison, Host

If you are considering adopting a child of a different culture or race than your family, or you are already a transracial family formed through adoption, don’t miss this show. Our host this week is Amanda Grant, President of USAdopt, and an adoptive mother in a transracial family, who is joined by guest Tiffany Rae Reid, expert in a racial identity development and host of Mixed Race Radio. Contemplating the adoption of any child takes courage and honesty. The adoption of a child of a different cultural or racial heritage adds another layer of both complexity and celebrations. Learn the realities of transracial adoption, how to prepare your family for the change in its composition, what to do to support the healthy development of your child’s identity and what resources are available to support your child and your family in every aspect of living as a transracial family.

Listen to the episode here.  Download the episode here.

Differences give mixed-heritage students a common bond

The Los Angeles Times
2013-05-27

Larry Gordon

Increasing numbers of college campus clubs give voice to those who don’t fit into the traditional perceptions of race.

No matter what their ancestry or their skin color, many members of UCLA’s Mixed Student Union say they have repeatedly been asked the same question by classmates and strangers curious about an ambiguous racial appearance: “What are you?”
And that shared experience, they say, helps to bond the otherwise extremely diverse group, which is devoted to the rising numbers of students who are biracial and from mixed ethnic heritages.

Jenifer Logia, 20, a UCLA sophomore who is one of the Mixed Student Union’s directors, said much of campus life is defined by distinct ethnic, religious or social groupings. But none comfortably fits someone like her — from a family that blends Nicaraguan, Filipino and Guamanian heritages…

Read the entire article here.

Casta Painting: Art, Race and Identity in Colonial Mexico (HI972)

University of Warwick
Coventry, England
Spring 2013

Rebecca Earle, Professor of History

This module explores the distinctive vision of colonial Mexico purveyed via the artistic genre known as the casta painting. Casta paintings depict the outcomes of different types of inter-ethnic mixing, and often come in series of 16, showing many different family groups. They are quite remarkable. Consider, for example, José de Alcíbar’s painting showing a family group consisting, we are told in the helpful label, of a Black father, and Indian mother and their ‘Wolf’ son:

Casta paintings can be seen as attempts at cataloguing the varied inhabitants of Spain’s colonial universe. They thus offer a visual taxonomy of colonial space. At the same time, they have been read as statements of local pride, and usually include a wealth of details about local customs and habits. In addition, they are rich and complex documents relating to the material culture of colonial Spanish America. In Alcíbar’s painting reproduced above we notice not only the domestic strife but also the beautiful china (which is endangered by the parental row) and food items such as the headless chicken. How are we to interpret and understand such images?

The module will introduce students to this artistic genre, and will explore different ways of interpreting these multi-valent images. Its educational aims, therefore, are to help students consider how to read artistic works produced in a colonial setting, how to use casta paintings as a body of source material, and how to explore the relationship between visual and textual depictions of colonial space…

For more information, click here.

On the ideology of Hypodescent: Political Conservatism Predicts Categorization of Racially Ambiguous Faces as Black

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
In Press (May 2013)
32 pages

Amy R. Krosch
Department of Psychology
New York University

Leslie Berntsen
University of Southern California

David M. Amodio, Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science
New York University

John T. Jost, Professor of Psychology and Politics
New York University

Jay J. Van Bavel, Assistant Professor of Psychology
New York University

According to the principle of hypodescent, multiracial individuals are categorized according to their most socially subordinate group membership. We investigated whether the tendency to apply this principle is related to political ideology. In three studies, participants categorized a series of morphed faces that varied in terms of racial ambiguity. In each study, self-reported conservatism (vs. liberalism) was associated with the tendency to categorize ambiguous faces as Black. Consistent with the notion that system justification motivation helps to explain ideological differences in racial categorization, the association between conservatism and hypodescent was mediated by individual differences in opposition to equality (Study 2) and was stronger when U.S. participants categorized American than Canadian faces (Study 3). We discuss ways in which the categorization of racially ambiguous individuals in terms of their most subordinate racial group may exacerbate inequality and vulnerability to discrimination.

Barack Obama (2004) jokingly describes his mother as “White as milk,” but the fact is that he is seen as the United States’ first Black president. Following the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws and the gradual normalizing of interracial relationships, the United States of America has become an increasingly multiracial society, with a 32% increase in the number of citizens identifying as more than one race over the last decade (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011). Nevertheless, monoracial labels are frequently applied to multiracial individuals, and “White” is rarely applied to persons of mixed racial heritage (Hirschfeld, 1995).

The tendency to categorize multiracial individuals according to their most socially subordinate racial group membership reflects the principle of hypodescent, which is closely associated with the notorious “one drop rule” in American history (Banks & Eberhardt, 1998; Hollinger, 2003). From the earliest days of American slavery through the Civil Rights Era, this principle was formally employed to subjugate individuals with any non-White heritage by denying them full rights and liberties under the law. For instance, individuals who had lived in the United States for years but were one-quarter or even one-eighth Japanese were forced to live in internment camps during World War II (Werner, 2000).

Social psychological research reveals that the principle of hypodescent characterizes racial categorization even today. When research participants are presented with images of Black/White biracial targets, they are more likely to classify them as Black than White (e.g., Halberstadt, Sherman, & Sherman, 2011; Ho, Sidanius, Levin, & Banaji, 2011; Peery & Bodenhausen, 2008). Furthermore, it appears to take fewer minority characteristics (e.g., facial features or ancestors) to be judged as “Black,” compared to the proportion of majority characteristics it takes to be judged as “White” (Ho et al., 2011)…

…In this article, we propose that biased racial categorization may also be related to ideological motives. Prior research has indicated that race perception and categorization may be influenced by a number of motives, including social identification (Knowles & Peng, 2005) and biological essentialism (Plaks, Malahy, Sedlins, & Shoda, 2012). Furthermore, Caruso, Mead, and Balcetis (2009) found that political conservatives were more likely to believe that a darkened photo of Barack Obama represented his actual appearance, as compared with liberals and moderates. These results are broadly consistent with public opinion data revealing that Republicans are more likely than Democrats and Independents to state that President Obama is Black rather than biracial (Pew Research Center, 2011). In the current research, we explored whether liberals and conservatives would differ in their categorization of racially ambiguous individuals in a nonpolitical context and examined potential psychological mediators of this proposed relationship. More specifically, we conducted three studies to investigate the hypothesis that there would be ideological differences in biased racial categorization…

Read the entire article here.

The Art of Conversation: Eighteenth-Century Mexican Casta Painting

SHIFT: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture
Issue 5, 2012
25 pages

Mey-Yen Moriuchi
Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania

Traditionally, casta paintings have been interpreted as an isolated colonial Mexican art form and examined within the social historical moment in which they emerged. Casta paintings visually represented the miscegenation of the Spanish, Indian and Black African populations that constituted the new world and embraced a diverse terminology to demarcate the land’s mixed races. Racial mixing challenged established social and racial categories, and casta paintings sought to stabilize issues of race, gender and social status that were present in colonial Mexico.

Concurrently, halfway across the world, another country’s artists were striving to find the visual vocabulary to represent its families, socio-economic class and genealogical lineage. I am referring to England and its eighteenth-century conversation pictures. Like casta paintings, English conversation pieces articulate beliefs about social and familial propriety. It is through the family unit and the presence of a child that a genealogical statement is made and an effigy is preserved for subsequent generations. Utilizing both invention and mimesis, artists of both genres emphasize costume and accessories in order to cater to particular stereotypes.

I read casta paintings as conversations like their European counterparts—both internal conversations among the figures within the frame, and external ones between the figures, the artist and the beholder. It is my position that both casta paintings and conversation pieces demonstrate a similar concern with the construction of a particular self-image in the midst of societies that were apprehensive about the varying conflicting notions of socio-familial and socio-racial categories.

Read the entire article here.