Mixed Race Studies

Refusing to Identify by Race

The New York Times
2013-07-11

Carlos Hoyt
Andover, Massachusetts

Re “Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning?” (news analysis, Sunday Review, July 7 [2013]):

I recently completed a doctoral study at the Simmons School of Social Work about people who are commonly ascribed to the black/African-American, biracial or multiracial categories, but who do not themselves subscribe to any racial identity.

These race transcenders refuse to self-racialize, while being fully conscious of the fact that they are and have been racialized by others since the Constitution mandated the census, making racialization legal and compulsory beginning in 1790. We have been knotted up in meaningless terms like Caucasian ever since…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Race and ethnicity II: Skin and other intimacies

Progress in Human Geography
Volume 37, Number 4  (August 2013)
pages 578-586
DOI: 10.1177/0309132512465719

Patricia L. Price, Professor of Geography
Florida International University

The intimate turn in geography has centralized approaches to race and ethnicity which foreground bodily encounters. The quirky spatialities of intimacy, involving not just proximities but also distancing and borders, operate in racial and ethnic ‘contact zones’. Skin is one of these, and it is central to an understanding of race and ethnicity as arising through bodily encounters in places. Geographic scholarship emphasizing embodied racial and ethnic topics has highlighted processes of approximation, distancing, and bordering in race and ethnicity as lived events. Set within the intimate turn, this work has the potential to inform geographers and geographic scholarship with respect to criticality, the stickiness of place, and visceral geographies. In addition, the need to elucidate further the relationship between race and ethnicity is underscored.

Read or purchase the article here.

I Am What I Say I Am

Time Magazine
2001-03-18

Lise Funderburg

According to Russell (my personal trainer by night, a lawyer by day, and a philosopher by disposition), I have white calves. Not white as in pasty, but as in Caucasian. My calves are–how to put it?–substantial, and their shape not only pegs me racially, Russell says, but also makes clear what kind of runner I would be (distance) if, say, hell were to freeze over and I were to take up that sport.

When I filled out my Census form last spring, the issue of my calves never came up. What did arise, however, was a new option that allowed Americans to claim identity in more than one racial group. When the result of this historic change was released last week, it showed that an unexpectedly large number of people had taken advantage of this choice: nearly 7 million, or 2.4% of the population. While the complexity of the outcome has sent demographers scrambling, I celebrate its promise.

Due to circumstances beyond my control (e.g., my birth), race is more plastic for me than for some. The catalog of purported racial characteristics I could assemble seems to be compounded rather than dissolved by my particular heritage: one black parent and one white.

Examples follow…

Read the entire article here.

One of the key phenomena to understanding skin color stratification among African Americans is the history of sexual violence against African women by white men during slavery. “The social order established by powerful white men was founded on two inseparable ingredients: the dehumanization of Africans on the basis of race, and the control of women’s sexuality and reproduction.”¹ As one of the violent mechanisms of social control that whites exercised against African Americans, sexual violence, including rape, was part of the beginning of the skin color stratification process itself. This violent method of social control produced two important effects. The first and most obvious result was the creation of racially mixed children by white fathers and black mothers. The second more long-term effect was the creation of a color hierarchy through systematic privileging of light-skinned African Americans over darker-skinned African Americans. Though many mixed-race offspring were the result of violent unions between white men and black women, there were also a notable number of consensual relationships between the races. Many men and women involved in interracial relationships lived together and were married in churches despite an enormous amount of resistance on the part of most whites and some blacks.

Margaret L. Hunter, Race, Gender, and the Politics of Skin Tone, (New York, London: Routledge, 2005). 18-19.

We speak of bastardization in the case of a mixed race (Mischlinge) that develops from fundamentally different races or racial mixtures, as, for example, one between Europeans and Negroes, Europeans and Asians, Europeans and Indians, Europeans and Jews, etc. Such mixed race individuals carry the contradictory trains of both races, resulting in a confusion. Bastards are unhappy people. A bastard of European and Negroid decent has some of the characteristics of the white race, and some characteristics of the black race. He unsuited both for the jungles and hot sun of the south, but also for the north. Two souls live and compete within the breast of the bastard. He never finds peace and a harmonious, balanced life. The hard laws of blood force him to live a life of racial confusion and fragmentation.

Karl Bareth and Alfred Vogel, (Randall Bytwerk, trans.), Heredity and Racial Science for Elementary and Secondary Schools (Erblehre und Rassenkunde für die Grund- und Hauptschule) 2nd edition, (Bühl-Baden: Verlag Konkordia, 1937). Source: German Propaganda Archive, Calvin College. http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/erblehre.htm.

Brazilians of African descent demand equality

Al Jazeera English
2013-07-02

Rachel Levin

“Brazil is one of the most socially unequal countries in the world, we’re selling the image that everything is good and we’ll host the World Cup but it’s a country that denies opportunity to its own people.” —Lais Nascimento, student

Eighty percent of Brazilians are originally from Africa and they say they suffer discrimination

Tens of thousands of Brazilians are renewing the decades-old struggle for racial equality, and are staging protests to draw attention to their grievances.

Eighty percent of Brazilians are of African descent and they say they suffer discrimination.

Al Jazeera’s Rachel Levin has this report from Salvador.

Afro-Rebel (Or Why I am not an Afropolitan)

Black Girl Dancing at Lughnasa
2013-07-09

Emma Dabiri, Teaching Fellow
Africa Department, School of African and Oriental Studies, London
Visual Sociology Ph.D. Researcher, Goldsmiths University of London

The following is from a discussion I recently took part in ‘Fantasy or Reality? Afropolitan Narratives of the 21st Century’ as part of the Africa Writes 2013 Festival. I was joined on the panel by Minna Salami and Nana Ocran, and the Chair was Professor Paul Gilroy.

When I first heard Afropolitan I was excited. I am always looking for language that expresses my position as an Irish/Nigerian woman who is deeply connected to her Nigerianess. I’d rather refrain as describing myself as half anything, and I detest the word mixed-race. I thought perhaps Afropolitan presented an alternative to this terminology and interestingly, positioned me with others through a shared cultural and aesthetic leaning rather than a perceived racial classification. Further it identified that you could be black or African without having to subscribe to the depressingly limited identities widely perceived as being authentic.

The enduring insights of Afropolitanism as interpreted by Mdembe, should be its promise of vacating the seduction of pernicious racialised thinking, its recognition of African identities as fluid, and the notion that the African past is characterised by mixing, blending and superimposing. In opposition to custom, Mdembe insists the idea of ‘tradition’ never really existed and reminds us there is a pre-colonial African modernity that has not been taken into account in contemporary creativity.

As Minna Salami writes on her blog Africans should be as free to have multiple subcultures as anyone else but the problem with Afropolitism to me is that that the insights on race, modernity and identity appear to be increasingly sidelined in sacrifice to the consumerism Mdembe also identifies as part of the Afropolitan assemblage. The dominance of fashion and lifestyle in Afropolitanism is worthy of note due to the relationship between these industries, consumption and consumerism…

Read the entire article here.

Historicizing “mixed-race” and post-modern amnesia

O Desafio da Diferença (Challenge of the Difference)
Universidade Federal da Bahia
Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
2000-04-09 through 2000-04-12

Grupo de Trabalho (Workshop) 5: Mixing it up with Mixed Race: Problematizing and Historicizing the Mixed Race Discourse

Katya Gibel Azoulay [Mevorach], Associate Professor of Anthropology
Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa

Americans have carried the problem of the color line into the 21st century but it is doubtful that the generation of W.E.B. Du Bois anticipated the emergence of a “multiracial” movement whose primary objective was to gain recognition of mixed-race people as a unique entity and different collective. This phenomenon is an outgrowth of “interracial” marriages which, according to the U.S. Census, indicate dramatic increases since the dismantlement of state anti-miscegenation laws in 1967. Blacks, however, are “noticeably absent” from this trend and Newsweek has estimated that approximately 20 percent of interracial marriages were between black and white partners and the overwhelming majority of these are between white women and black men [Fletcher 1998; Azoulay 1997:95]

This paper focuses on the demand for a multiracial category in the U.S. Census in order to explore two intersecting aspects of the multiracial discourse. Attention is only given to the black/white binary for it is this angle which is the most contentious and has received the most public attention. On the one hand, the idea of multiracialism eclipses the broader issue of power partially because it is premised on privileging individual rights rather than group rights. On the other hand, the celebration of multiracial people may be read as a postmodern script in which women, as mothers, occupy a central role in the formation and politicization of racial identities.

As a departure point, let us address the premise of the question posed by the multiracial movement: should racial classifications used to track broad demographic trends and monitor compliance with legislation against racial discrimination take each individual heritage into account? I suggest that the demand for a multiracial category confuses personal identities with prescriptive identities while ignoring the relationship between public policy and identifiable communities. Public policies that utilize race categories affect groups of people who may or may not subscribe to a shared collective identity but who are nevertheless perceived as a group. Government and institutional policies shaped by information gathered about social categories are not formulated for individuals but for groups. The political implications of this lead opponents and supporters of government sponsored social engineering to invoke the equal protection clause under the 14th amendment with very different interpretations. In a departure from the direction set by the U.S. Supreme Court 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education toward civil rights legislation, the courts have moved away from protecting historically disadvantaged group rights evidenced by court-ordered repeals of affirmative action policies confusing invidious discrimination with remedial racial preference.

As a preface, let me state clearly my position: race categories are public fictions which are deeply embedded in American ways of thinking and acting. Furthermore, because classifications based on the political and social category of “race” have no scientific basis, they are misused when appropriated as biological criteria into medical research in the United States [Tapper 1999]. Consequently, arguments for a multiracial category for health reasons (such as bone marrow donors) rely on a faulty notion that race categories can be adjusted for accuracy. Nevertheless, race has assumed the status of a social fact whose meanings reflect, and are reflected by, the cognitive feel of lived experience in a race-based society [Piper 1992; Scales-Trent 1995].

Read the entire paper here.

Dwayne Johnson – ‘Race Shifter’ In A Post Racial World?

Shadow and Act: On Cinema Of The African Diaspora
2013-03-27

Sergio Mims, Staff Writer

We all know that there’s been a lot of talk about how we are all now living in a “post-racial” society. Though I think, most of us will respond to that with a “Yeah right.”

But things are changing, albeit slowly, but they are changing. And it dawned on me last night, during  an advance screening of G.I. Joe: Retaliation, that the one person who could be an example of this post racial utopia we’re supposed to be living in, is Dwayne Johnson.

It should be very obvious by now the Johnson has been positioning himself to be a major A–list movie star. He easily could have just gone on to be a B-movie actor, content with doing supporting roles in action/exploitation films, and starring in direct-to-video movies, like some of his former WWE cohorts. But Johnson has much higher aspirations.

And it’s not just the film projects that he’s attached himself to, but also, either by design or by happenstance, how he’s been perceived racially by the public. He has become a “race shifter” for lack of a better word.

Through his obviously ethnic, but not clearly defined looks (he’s black Canadian/Samoan), he has managed to become “identified” as it were, by different audiences, as different things, and has used that to his advantage.

I should say that, of course, we identify him as black on S & A, or else we wouldn’t always be reporting news about his various film projects. And Johnson has neither ever obscured, or refused to acknowledge his bi-racial heritage, unlike Vin Diesel, who has gone out of his way to not publicly acknowledge his mixed heritage, preferring to instead let people think he’s, perhaps, Italian…

Read the entire article here.

This family lives in the Stringer community of Jasper County. A school bus from Stringer white attendance center passes in front of their home and also a school bus from the white attendance center at Soso in Jones County. The School Board in Jasper County will not permit them to go to the white school and the School Board in Jones County will not take them on transfer. They cannot and will not attend the Negro schools because they are white and because this would be violating Mississippi law. They are now eight and nine years old respectively and have never attended school one day.

Erle Johnston, Jr., “Letter to Paul B. Johnson Jr. and Lieutenant Governor Carroll Gartin,” Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, (February 14, 1964, Jackson, Mississippi). Source: University of Southern Mississippi Libraries Special Collections: Exhibits and Events. http://http//www.lib.usm.edu/spcol/exhibitions/item_of_the_month/iotm_march_10/iotm_mar10_letter