Mixed Race Studies

Identity Politics, in a Brand-New Form

The New York Times
2013-09-14

Sam Roberts, Urban Affairs Correspondent

ARGUABLY, New York’s identity politics peaked in 1945. That year, William O’Dwyer, the Democratic Party machine’s mayoral favorite, was Irish and from Brooklyn. Lazarus Joseph, the candidate for comptroller, was Jewish and from the Bronx. Party leaders balanced their citywide ticket with a candidate for City Council president by plucking the name of Vincent R. Impellitteri, an obscure legal secretary to a Manhattan judge, from the index to the official city directory.

“We flipped through the Green Book for the longest Italian name we could find,” Bert Stand, the secretary of Tammany Hall, the venerable Democratic organization, explained at the time.

Last week, after Bill de Blasio finished first in the Democratic mayoral primary, students of New York politics were already pronouncing identity politics dead. After all, half the black voters abandoned the black candidate, William C. Thompson Jr., to back Mr. de Blasio (he and Mr. Thompson each got 42 percent among blacks, according to an Edison Research survey of voters leaving the polls). Ideology trumped race as even the Rev. Al Sharpton, more impressed with Mr. de Blasio’s policy agenda, remained publicly neutral instead of reflexively endorsing the black candidate. Mr. Thompson carried Italian and Irish Catholic districts in Staten Island and Breezy Point, Queens, which, in the past, have not routinely embraced black candidates, as well as several Orthodox Jewish and Russian enclaves…

…This year, said John H. Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a neighbor of Mr. de Blasio, “the really big story is that black central Brooklyn, the single largest contiguous settlement of black people anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, did not back an African-American who climbed up the rungs of regular Democratic politics in the borough, but chose instead a younger white leader in a biracial family who is a former organizer and much more Obamaesque.”…

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Kinship and Identity: Mixed Bloods in Urban Indian Communities

American Indian Culture and Research Journal
ISSN 0161-6463 (Print)
Volume 23, Number 2 (1999)
Pages 73-89

Susan Applegate Krouse [Ziigwam Nibi Kwe (Spring Water Woman) Haslett] (1955-2010), Associate Professor of Anthropology
Michigan State University

INTRODUCTION

American Indians have become an increasingly urban population in the twentieth century, moving away from their rural home communities and reservations in search of jobs or schooling. This movement to cities has resulted in higher rates of intermarriage with non-Indians for urban Indians than for rural Indians and consequently higher numbers of mixed bloods in urban areas than on reservations. Today, many of those urban mixed bloods are interested in claiming their Indian identity and learning more about their culture, but they often lack both physical characteristics and cultural knowledge that would allow them readily to assert their Indianness. Consequently, they turn to kinship—an important component of American Indian communities, whether urban, rural, or reservation—to provide an entry into the urban Indian community. By aligning themselves with a larger structure of family and relations, mixed bloods fit into an existing framework and community. This paper examines the effectiveness and the limitations of kinship-based identity for mixed bloods in urban Indian communities.

The population under study here is mixed bloods who, because of their parents’ or grandparents’ move to the city and subsequent marriage to non-Indians, have lost ties to their tribal communities. They may be a single generation removed from their tribes or many generations, but they are defined for purposes of this study as a population with mixed ancestry, urban for one or more generations, without clear ties to a reservation or tribal community. This study examines those people who are hoping to establish or reestablish ties to their Indian identity, and one strategy for doing so—through kinship—and excludes mixed bloods who have maintained community ties as well as full bloods who have lost ties to their tribal communities through relocation or adoption. This paper is concerned specifically with the problems of mixed…

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“Squaw Men,” “Half-Breeds,” and Amalgamators: Late Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Attitudes Toward Indian-White Race-Mixing

American Indian Culture and Research Journal
Volume 15, Number 3 (1991)

David D. Smits, Professor of History
The College of New Jersey

Indian-white biological amalgamation, whether in or out of wedlock, is a subject well calculated to evoke spirited conceptions and feelings; certainly, it impinges upon the research of those who would probe more deeply into the labyrinth of Indian-white interaction in late nineteenth-century America. The tapestry of post-Civil War America is woven with many-hued Indian and white attitudes toward race-mixing. To unravel, illuminate, and interpret the complex and often antithetical views of authoritative white commentators on this issue is the purpose of this essay. The Anglo-American commentators whose attitudes will be surveyed include natural and social scientists, novelists, army officers, Christian reformers, Protestant missionaries, Indian Service personnel, historians, imperialists, and immigration restrictionists, among others. Of course, their personal fears, hatreds, prejudices, jealousies, aspirations, imaginations, sympathies, and emotions shape their views. Moreover, their attitudes represent a complex interaction among the prevailing ideas about race, gender, and class, a topic of considerable current scholarly interest. Because Indian-white race-mixing often has been associated with the more inflammatory Black-white variety, it is useful to begin with a glimpse of representative antebellum attitudes…

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Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History

University of Texas Press
2003
456 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
142 illustrations, 3 tables
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-292-70527

Teresa Palomo Acosta

Ruthe Winegarten (1929-2004)

Awards

• 2004 T.R. Fehrenbach Award; Texas Historical Commission
• Texas Reference Source Award; Reference Round Table, Texas Library Association

This groundbreaking book is at once a general history and a celebration of Tejanas’ contributions to Texas over three centuries

Since the early 1700s, women of Spanish/Mexican origin or descent have played a central, if often unacknowledged, role in Texas history. Tejanas have been community builders, political and religious leaders, founders of organizations, committed trade unionists, innovative educators, astute businesswomen, experienced professionals, and highly original artists. Giving their achievements the recognition they have long deserved, this groundbreaking book is at once a general history and a celebration of Tejanas’ contributions to Texas over three centuries.

The authors have gathered and distilled a wide range of information to create this important resource. They offer one of the first detailed accounts of Tejanas’ lives in the colonial period and from the Republic of Texas up to 1900. Drawing on the fuller documentation that exists for the twentieth century, they also examine many aspects of the modern Tejana experience, including Tejanas’ contributions to education, business and the professions, faith and community, politics, and the arts. A large selection of photographs, a historical timeline, and profiles of fifty notable Tejanas complete the volume and assure its usefulness for a broad general audience, as well as for educators and historians.

Contents

• Foreword by Cynthia E. Orozco
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Native Women, Mestizas, and Colonists
• Chapter 2: The Status of Women in the Colonial Period
• Chapter 3: From the Republic of Texas to 1900
• Chapter 4: Revolution, Racism, and Resistance: 1900-1940
• Chapter 5: Life in Rural Texas: 1900-1940
• Chapter 6: Life in Urban Texas: 1900-1940
• Chapter 7: Education: Learning, Teaching, Leading
• Chapter 8: Entering Business and the Professions
• Chapter 9: Faith and Community
• Chapter 10: Politics, the Chicano Movement, and Tejana Feminism
• Chapter 11: Winning and Holding Public Office
• Chapter 12: Arts and Culture Epilogue: Grinding Corn Fifty Notable Tejanas
• Time Line
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

The Plum Thicket

University Press of Kentucky
1996-04-11 (Originally published in 1954)
284 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8131-1947-2 (out of print)
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8131-0859-9

Janice Holt Giles (1905-1979)

Janice Holt Giles had a life before her marriage and writing career in Kentucky. Born in Altus, Arkansas, Giles spent many childhood summers visiting her grandparents there. After the success of her historical novel The Kentuckians in 1953, she planned to write a second frontier romance. But a visit to Altus caused her imagination to drift from Kentucky in 1780 to western Arkansas in 1913.

At age forty-eight—the same age as Giles at the writing of the novel—the heroine Katie Rogers recalls her first visit alone to her grandparent’s home in Stanwick, Arkansas. Eight-year-old Katie spends her summer climbing the huge mulberry tree and walking with her wise grandfather, a veteran of bloody Shiloh. She is fascinated, not frightened, by the grave of an unknown child in the nearby plum thicket. Throughout the visit Katie helps Aunt Maggie plan her wedding and looks forward to the three-day Confederate Reunion. But the Reunion—and the summer—end violently, as guilt, repression, and miscegenation are unearthed. “That summer was the end of a whole way of life,” Katie realizes, for she can never again dwell in the paradise of childhood.

In Katie Rogers, Giles voiced her own lament for “the beautiful and the unrecoverable past.” To her publisher Giles wrote, “Out of my forty-odd years of living, much of whatever wisdom I have acquired has been distilled into this book.” This new edition of The Plum Thicket gives Giles’s many fans a powerful, moving glimpse into the mind and heart of this beloved author.

Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “Colorblind?: The Contradictions of Racial Classification”

Seminar Series: Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective
University of California, Merced
California Room
5200 North Lake Rd.
Merced, California 95343
2013-09-19, 10:30 PDT (Local Time)

Michael Omi, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley

The dominant racial ideology of colorblindness in the United States holds that the most effective anti-racist policy, and practice, is to ignore race. Issues continue to arise, however, that present a set of contradictions for colorblind ideology by “noticing” race. On-going debates about racial data collection by the state and the “rebiologization” of race in biomedical research and DNA sampling illustrate, in different ways, the inherently problematic character of racial classification.

Michael Omi is associate professor of Ethnic Studies and the associate director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society (HIFIS) at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the co-author of Racial Formation in the United States, a groundbreaking work that transformed how we understand the social and historical forces that give race its changing meaning over time and place. Professor Omi’s research interests include racial theory and politics, racial/ethnic classification and the census, Asians Americans and racial stratification, and racist and anti-racist social movements. He is a recipient of UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award—an honor bestowed on only 240 Berkeley faculty members since the award’s inception in 1959.

The seminar series “Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective” is organized by Tanya Golash-Boza, Nigel Hatton, and David Torres-Rouff. The event is co-sponsored by the UC Center for New Racial Studies, Sociology, and SSHA.

For more information, click here.

A Black Confederate General That We Can All Embrace?

Civil War Memory: Reflections of a High School History Teacher & Civil War Historian
2011-03-17

Kevin M. Levin, Instructor of American History
Gann Academy, Waltham, Massachusetts

I trust that after this post no one will accuse me of dismissing any and all evidence for the existence of black Confederate soldiers.  Better yet, I give you at least one black Confederate general.  The interesting question is whether the Sons of Confederate Veterans and others will accept him as one of their own…

Read the entire article here.

“Japanese in the Samba”: Japanese Brazilian Musical Citizenship, Racial Consciousness, and Transnational Migration

University of Pittsburgh
2008
213 pages

Shanna Lorenz, Assistant Professor of Music
Occidental College, Los Angeles, California

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

his doctoral dissertation is an ethnographic study of musical culture among Japanese Brazilians in São Paulo, Brazil. Specifically, the study explores how the musical culture of this community has changed in recent years as a result of the dekasegui movement, the migration of hundreds of thousands of Japanese Brazilians who have traveled to Japan since 1990 in search of work. In order to explore these questions, I conducted fieldwork between May and November of 2003 on three musical groups, Zhen Brasil, Ton Ton Mi, and Wadaiko Sho, each of which have found different ways to invoke, contest, and reinvent their Brazilian and Japanese musical heritages. By exploring these groups’ musical practices, texts, dance, costumes, and discourses of self-definition, this study offers insight into shifts in the ethnic self-definition and racial consciousness of the Japanese Brazilian community that have taken place as the result of face-to-face contact between Japanese Brazilians and Japanese under the conditions of contiguous globalization. This study contributes to our current understandings of the impact of circular forms of migration on the musical culture and ethnic identity of diasporic communities in the contemporary world.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Cuban Color Classification and Identity Negotiation: Old Terms in a New World

University of Pittsburgh
2004
246 pages

Shawn Alfonso Wells

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Pittsburgh in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This thesis analyzes how the Cuban Revolution’s transnational discourse on blackness positively affected social attitudes, allowing color identity to be negotiated using color classification terms previously devalued.

In the Caribbean and Latin America, most systems of social stratification based on color privilege “whiteness” both socially and culturally; therefore, individuals negotiate their identities with whiteness as the core element to be expressed. This dissertation examines how this paradigm has been overturned in Cuba so that “blackness” is now the featured aspect of identity. This is due in part to the popular response to the government’s rhetoric which engages in an international political discourse of national identity designed to situate Cuba contextually in opposition to the United States in the global politics of color. This shift has occurred in a dialectic environment of continued negative essentialized images of Blacks although blackness itself is now en vogue. The dialogue that exists between state and popular forms of racial categorization serves to recontextualize the meanings of “blackness” and the values attached to it so that color classification terms which indicate blackness are assumed with facility in identity negotiation.

In the past, the concepts of whitening and mestizaje (race mixture) were employed by the state with the goal of whitening the Cuban population so that Cuba would be perceived as a majority white country. Since the 1959 Revolution, however, the state has publicly claimed that Cuba is an Afro-Latin nation. This pronouncement has resulted in brown/mestizo/mulatto and not white as being the national ideal. The symbolic use of mestizaje in Cuban society and the fluidity inherent in the color classification system leaves space for manipulation from both ends of the color spectrum and permits Cubans from disparate groups to come together under a shared sense of identity. The ideology of the state and the popular perceptions of the symbolism that the mulatto represents were mediated by a color continuum, which in turn was used both by the state and the populace to construct, negotiate, maintain, and manipulate color identities. This study demonstrates that although color classification was not targeted by the government as an agent to convey blackness, it nevertheless does, and the shift in how identity is negotiated using racial categories can be viewed as the response of the populace to the state’s otherwise silent dialogue on “race” and identity.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Introduction: Mulatas del Caribe
• Chapter One: The problem of race
  • Problematizing Race
  • Field Setting
  • Conducting Fieldwork in Cuba
  • Methodology
• Chapter Two: Historical Context of Color Classification in Latin America and the Caribbean
  • History of racial/color categorization in Cuba
  • The Era of Conquest and Colonization
  • The Plantation Era
    • Color classes
    • Pigmentocracy/Whitening
  • The Era of Capitalism
  • The Era of Socialism and Castro
• Chapter Three: Terms of Classification
  • Settings
    • The Census
    • The Carnet
    • The Medical Establishment
  • Cognitive Categories of Color Classification
  • Features of Classification
  • Constructing Identity
    • Blancos
    • Mestizos, Mulatos and Mestizaje
    • Negros
    • Chinos
• Chapter Four: The social significance of classification
  • Contested classifications
  • Stereotypes and Social Status
  • Shifts in meaning and preference of terms
• Chapter Five: Mulatizaje and Cubanidad
  • Mestizaje, Mulattoization and Cubanidad
    • The typical Cuban
  • Claiming Identity and Negotiating Mulatizaje
    • Extended Case Study #1
    • Case study #2
    • Case study #3
    • Case study #4
    • Case study #5
    • Case study #6
    • Case study #7
    • Case study #8
    • Case study #9
    • Case study #10
    • Case study #11
• Conclusions
• Appendices
  • Appendix A: Glosses of Color Terms.
  • Appendix B: Census Enumeration of Writs of Freedom
  • Appendix C: Racial Categories of 1827 and 1841 Censuses
  • Appendix D: Census with Conflicting Terminology
• Bibliography

LIST OF TABLES

• Table 1: Chronological Table of Data Collection Techniques
• Table 2: Census Terms.
• Table 3: Formal Labels on Documents
• Table 4: Descriptive Color Terms
• Table 5: Cognitive Map of Terminology
• Table 6: Labels of Pilesorting Groups.
• Table 7: Percentages of Informants Employing Particular Classification Terms
• Table 8: Johnson’s Hierarchial Clustering.
• Table 9: Color Continuum.
• Table 10: Informal Descriptors
• Table 11: Common Descriptors for Hair Texture
• Table 12: Common Descriptors for Facial Features.
• Table 13: Common Modifying Descriptors
• Table 14: Common Compound Terms
• Table 15: Descriptive Labels

Read the entire dissertation here.

Addressing Racial/Ethnic Health Disparities Best Practices for Clinical Care and Medical Education in the 21st Century

University of Texas, Austin
2013-09-23 through 2013-09-24

One of the primary goals of the US Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and many public health programs is the reduction of health disparities in the United States. However, significant racial/ethnic disparities persist in the prevalence of disease, access to medical care, quality of care, and health outcomes for the most common causes of death (including cardiovascular and lung disease, infectious disease, cancer, diabetes, and accidents). At this conference, nationally-recognized speakers will discuss the causes of such disparities and describe new approaches in clinical care and medical education that improve care, achieve better health outcomes, and reduce racial/ethnic health disparities. We will also discuss how these best practices can be incorporated into medical training at the new Dell Medical School at The University of Texas and at other medical schools around the country. One key goal of this conference is to help design a cutting-edge curriculum that will better prepare medical students to meet the challenges and opportunities of 21st century medicine.

Conference registration is open to anyone interested in attending this event. See the Continuing Medical Education (CME) tab for information regarding continuing education for the September 23rd portion of the conference.

The second day of the conference (September 24) is open to invited participants only. Discussions and working groups on the second day will focus on developing new pedagogical approaches and innovative learning modules for the pre-clinical curriculum at the Dell Medical School, with the goal of more effectively integrating training on human genomic variation, race/ethnicity, health disparities, and social/environmental determinants of health into the medical curriculum.

Speakers

• Deborah Bolnick, PhD
• Vence Bonham, JD [Coauthor of article “Mixed Race: ”]
• Understanding Difference in the Genome Era
• Richard Garcia, MD
• Paul Godley, MD, PhD, MPP
• Ernesto Gonzalez, MD
• Clarence Gravlee, PhD [Author or article “How race becomes biology: Embodiment of social inequality”]
• Helena Hansen, MD, PhD
• John Hoberman, PhD [Author of Black and Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism]
• Seth Holmes, MD, PhD
• Jonathan Kahn, JD, PhD [Author of Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age]
• Jay Kaufman, PhD [Contributor to What’s the Use of Race? Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference]
• Diane Magrane, MD
• Kyriakos Markides, PhD
• Jamie McGuire, MD
• Jonathan Metzl, MD, PhD
• Michael Montoya, PhD
• Rayna Rapp, PhD
• Dorothy Roberts, JD [Author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century]
• Charles Rotimi, PhD [Author of article “Are medical and nonmedical uses of large-scale genomic markers conflating genetics and ‘race’?”]
• Karen-Sue Taussig, PhD

For more information, click here.