Mixed Race Studies

Counting Americans: How the US Census Classified the Nation

Oxford University Press
2017-07-03
376 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardback ISBN: 9780199917853

Paul Schor, Associate Professor History
Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France

• Shows that U.S. census categories are more complex than previous histories of the census have shown, and directly contributed to the social construction of race.
• Demonstrates the fluidity of racial categories in the U.S. census between the nineteenth and twentieth century, and the social implications of that fluidity.
• Traces the visible and less known connections between categories such as slave, mulatto, mixed, “Mexican race,” and more current categories of the US census.
• Shows how the mobilization of individuals or groups over contested statistical categories occured in the first half of the twentieth century, much earlier than race-based affirmative action policies since the 1960’s.
• Draws on previously unused documents from the Census Bureau archive and other unpublished sources to explore the interactions between census officials and laypeople.

How could the same person be classified by the US census as black in 1900, mulatto in 1910, and white in 1920? The history of categories used by the US census reflects a country whose identity and self-understanding–particularly its social construction of race–is closely tied to the continuous polling on the composition of its population.

By tracing the evolution of the categories the United States used to count and classify its population from 1790 to 1940, Paul Schor shows that, far from being simply a reflection of society or a mere instrument of power, censuses are actually complex negotiations between the state, experts, and the population itself. The census is not an administrative or scientific act, but a political one. Counting Americans is a social history exploring the political stakes that pitted various interests and groups of people against each other as population categories were constantly redefined. Utilizing new archival material from the Census Bureau, this study pays needed attention to the long arc of contested changes in race and census-making. It traces changes in how race mattered in the United States during the era of legal slavery, through its fraught end, and then during (and past) the period of Jim Crow laws, which set different ethnic groups in conflict. And it shows how those developing policies also provided a template for classifying Asian groups and white ethnic immigrants from southern and eastern Europe–and how they continue to influence the newly complicated racial imaginings informing censuses in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond.

Focusing in detail on slaves and their descendants, on racialized groups and on immigrants, and on the troubled imposition of U.S. racial categories upon the populations of newly acquired territories, Counting Americans demonstrates that census-taking in the United States has been at its core a political undertaking shaped by racial ideologies that reflect its violent history of colonization, enslavement, segregation and discrimination.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Illustrations and Tables
• Note on Terminology
• Introduction
• Part I: The Origins of the U.S. Census: From Enumeration of Voters and Taxpayers to “Social Statistics,” 1790-1840
  • Chapter 1: The Creation of the Federal Census by the Constitution of the United States: A Political Instrument
  • Chapter 2: The First Developments of the National Census (1800-1830)
  • Chapter 3: The Census of 1840: Science, Politics and “Insanity” of Free Blacks
• Part II: Slaves, Former Slaves, Blacks, and Mulattoes: Identification of the Individual and the Statistical Segregation of Populations (1850-1865)
  • Chapter 4: Whether to Name or Count Slaves: The Refusal of Identification
  • Chapter 5: Color, Race, and Origin of Slaves and Free Persons: “White,” “Black,” “Mulatto” in the Censuses of 1850 and 1860
  • Chapter 6: Color and Status of Slaves: Legal Definition and Census Practice
  • Chapter 7: Census Data for 1850 and 1860 and the Defeat of the South
• Part III: The Rise of Immigration and the Racialization of Society: The Adaptation of the Census to the Diversity of the American Population (1850-1900)
  • Chapter 8: Modernization, Standardization, and Internationalization: From the Censuses of J. C. G. Kennedy (1850 and 1860) to the First Census of Francis A. Walker (1870)
  • Chapter 9: From Slavery to Liberty: The Future of the Black Race or Racial Mixing as Degeneration
  • Chapter 10: From “Mulatto” to the “One Drop Rule” (1870-1900)
  • Chapter 11: The Slow Integration of Indians into U.S. Population Statistics in the Nineteenth Century
  • Chapter 12: The Chinese and Japanese in the Census: Nationalities That Are Also Races
  • Chapter 13: Immigration, Nativism, and Statistics (1850-1900)
• Part IV: Apogee and Decline of Ethnic Statistics (1900-1940)
  • Chapter 14: The Disappearance of the “Mulatto” as the End of Inquiry into the Composition of the Black Population of the United States
  • Chapter 15: The Question of Racial Mixing in the American Possessions: National Norm and Local Resistance
  • Chapter 16: New Asian Races, New Mixtures, and the “Mexican” Race: Interest in “Minor Races”
  • Chapter 17: From Statistics by Country of Birth to the System of National Origins
• Part V: The Population and the Census: Representation, Negotiation, and Segmentation (1900-1940)
  • Chapter 18: The Census and African Americans within and outside the Bureau
  • Chapter 19: Women as Census Workers and as Relays in the Field
  • Chapter 20: Ethnic Marketing of Population Statistics
• Epilogue: The Fortunes of Census Classifications (1940-2000)
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Abbreviations
• Sources and Bibliography
• Index

The Americans Our Government Won’t Count

Sunday Review
The New York Times
2018-03-30

Alex Wagner, Contributing Editor
The Atlantic

Monica Ramos

Racially speaking, the United States is zero percent Hispanic. This is confusing — especially for America’s nearly 58 million Hispanics.

The United States census breaks our country into six general racial categories: White; Black; Asian; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; American Indian or Alaska Native; and Some Other Race. “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin” is treated not as a race but as an ethnicity — a question asked separately. So someone may be White (Hispanic) or Black (Hispanic) but not simply Hispanic. As a result, many Hispanics check “White” or, increasingly, “Some Other Race.” This ill-defined category is what mixed-race Americans, like me — half Burmese, half Luxembourgian-Irish — often check. It might just as well be called “Generally Brown.” Today, the third-largest racial group in America is “Some Other Race” — and it is made up overwhelmingly of Hispanics.

Equally obscured are America’s estimated 3.7 million residents of Arab descent. With neither a racial nor an ethnic category to call their own, they most often opt for a racial designation of “White.” But to count Yemenis and Syrians as generically white is a complicated proposition these days, when whiteness confers power, and men and women from the Arab world are instead the subjects of travel bans and national security debates.

Nearly four years ago, the Census Bureau began researching how to more accurately represent these populations and decided to combine the race and ethnicity questions into one, and to add two new categories: one for residents of Middle Eastern/North African origin and one for those of Hispanic origin. Many advocates within those groups celebrated the reforms, and the broad expectation was that the next census, in 2020, would incorporate these changes. After all, the bureau itself concluded that they were necessary to “produce the highest quality statistics about our nation’s diverse population.”…

Read the entire article here.

To really grasp race, we must accept a double paradox. The first one is a truism of antiracist educators: we can see race, but it’s not real. The second is stranger: race has real consequences, but we can’t see it with the naked eye. Race is a power relationship; racial categories are not about interesting cultural or physical differences, but about putting other people into groups in order to dominate, exploit and attack them. Fundamentally, race makes power visible by assigning it to physical bodies. The evidence of race right before our eyes is not a visual trace of a physical reality, but a by-product of social perceptions, in which we are trained to see certain features as salient or significant. Race does not exist as a matter of biological fact, but only as a consequence of a process of racialisation.

Gregory Smithsimon, “How to see race,” Aeon, March 26, 2018. https://aeon.co/essays/race-is-not-real-what-you-see-is-a-power-relationship-made-flesh.

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

Pantheon
2018-03-27
368 Pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781101870327
Ebook ISBN: 9781101870334

David Reich, Professor of Genetics
Harvard Medical School
also, Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

David Reich describes how the revolution in the ability to sequence ancient DNA has changed our understanding of the deep human past. This book tells the emerging story of our often surprising ancestry – the extraordinary ancient migrations and mixtures of populations that have made us who we are.

• A gripping account, from the head of a world-leading lab, of the picture of human history and ancestry emerging from the revolution in the study of ancient DNA.
• Describes the evidence for ancient migrations and ghosts of long-lost populations, now revealed through comparing the genomes of ancient modern humans, archaic humans, and present-day populations.
• Considers what the latest research tells us about the often surprising ancestry of the people who now inhabit Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
• Shows how there are no ‘pure’ races: all modern human populations are mixtures of more ancient ones.
• Shares new insights into how human populations spread across the world, and makes a compelling argument that ancient DNA is fundamentally changing our picture of who we are.

Here is a groundbreaking book about how the extraction of ancient DNA from ancient bones has profoundly changed our understanding of human prehistory while resolving many long-standing controversies.

Massive technological innovations now allow scientists to extract and analyze ancient DNA as never before, and it has become clear—in part from David Reich’s own contributions to the field—that genomics is as important a means of understanding the human past as archeology, linguistics, and the written word. In Who We Are and How We Got Here, Reich describes with unprecedented clarity just how the human genome provides not only all the information that a fertilized human egg needs to develop but also contains within it the history of our species. He explains how the genomic revolution and ancient DNA are transforming our understanding of the lineage of modern humans and how DNA studies reveal the deep history of inequality—among different populations, between the sexes, and among individuals within a population. His book gives the lie to the orthodoxy that there are no meaningful biological differenced among human populations, and at the same time uses the definitive evidence provided by genomics to show that the differences that do exist are unlikely to conform to familiar stereotypes.

Table Of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I The Deep History of Our Species
  • 1 How the Genome Explains Who We Are
  • 2 Encounters with Neanderthals
  • 3 Ancient DNA Opens the Floodgates
• Part II How We Got to Where We Are Today
  • 4 Humanity’s Ghosts
  • 5 The Making of Modern Europe
  • 6 The Collision That Formed India
  • 7 In Search of Native American Ancestors
  • 8 The Genomic Origins of East Asians
  • 9 Rejoining Africa to the Human Story
• Part III The Disruptive Genome
  • 10 The Genomics of Inequality
  • 11 The Genomics of Race and Identity
  • 12 The Future of Ancient DNA
• Notes on the Illustrations
• Notes
• Index

How to see race

Aeon
2018-03-26

Gregory Smithsimon, Professor of Sociology
Brooklyn College, City University of New York

Edited by Sally Davies

Mulberry Street, Little Italy, New York, c1900. Photo courtesy Library of Congress

Race is a shapeshifting adversary: what seems self-evident takes training to see, and twists under political pressure

We think we know what race is. When the United States Census Bureau says that the country will be majority non-white by 2044, that seems like a simple enough statement. But race has always been a weaselly thing.

Today my students, including Black and Latino students, regularly ask me why Asians (supposedly) ‘assimilate’ with whites more quickly than Blacks and Latinos. Strangely, in the 1920s, the US Supreme Court denied Asians citizenship on the basis that they could never assimilate; fast-forward to today, and Asian immigrants are held up as exemplars of assimilation. The fact that race is unyielding enough to shut out someone from the national community, yet malleable enough for my students to believe that it explains a group’s apparent assimilation, hints at what a shapeshifting adversary race is. Race is incredibly tenacious and unforgiving, a source of grave inequality and injustice. Yet over time, racial categories evolve and shift.

To really grasp race, we must accept a double paradox. The first one is a truism of antiracist educators: we can see race, but it’s not real. The second is stranger: race has real consequences, but we can’t see it with the naked eye. Race is a power relationship; racial categories are not about interesting cultural or physical differences, but about putting other people into groups in order to dominate, exploit and attack them. Fundamentally, race makes power visible by assigning it to physical bodies. The evidence of race right before our eyes is not a visual trace of a physical reality, but a by-product of social perceptions, in which we are trained to see certain features as salient or significant. Race does not exist as a matter of biological fact, but only as a consequence of a process of racialisation…

Read the entire article here.

The Rise of the Afro-descendent Identity in Latin America

teleSUR
2018-03-04

For Black History Month, Catherine Walsh, professor of Afro-Andean Studies at the University Simon Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador, shares with teleSUR her views about the achievements and challenges for the construction of an Afro-descendent consciousness in Latin America.

What in recent history would you say has contributed to the rise of a Black and Afro-descendent identity, with Black communities now embracing more than ever their culture across the continent?

Yes, this has changed radically. Several moments in recent history are important to highlight: in the 1990s, with the rise of Indigenous movements, alliances were built between Indigenous and Black people like in Ecuador.

But Black communities also began to organize by themselves, involving the construction of a notion of a Black territory, sometimes referred to as the “Gran Comarca” from the South of Panama to the North of Ecuador, where national identity does not matter. Black people living in the region often come from the same families, they have similar last names, and for many years have moved freely over the borders identifying as Afro-descendent and regardless of the national borders…

Read the entire interview here.

Kevin Sharkey wants to become Ireland’s first black president

Extra.ie
2018-03-26

Alison O’Reilly
DMG Media Ireland

Artist and former RTÉ star Kevin Sharkey has laid out his stall for his presidential election bid as he hopes to be Ireland’s first black president.

Sharkey, 56, who in recent years fell on hard times and was homeless for a period, said he intends to speak to county councils and TDs across the country in the coming months to seek their support for his nomination.

The painter recently revealed he would like to be an independent candidate in the next general election, but he is also assembling a team to help him get nominated to run for the áras…

Read the entire article here.

The idea of widespread interracial sex was central to the construction of Brazilian racial exceptionalism and the myth of racial democracy. Sex and its traditional connection to intimacy and interracial reproduction were used to create a racially complex society and as an effective weapon of subjugation for the enslaved. Sex was attributed a transcendental meaning by many of the nation’s white elite and racial theorists; that is, sex and reproduction had the capacity to erase barriers and served as proof that race could be and had been transcended. This conceptualization of sex and its connection to race was central to Portuguese colonialism and became the very basis of Brazilian racial exceptionalism and the myth of racial democracy.¹ The silencing and sanitization of the nation’s history of rape, sexual violence, and abuse during slavery and its aftermath laid the foundation for an enduring legacy of erasure that then created the illusion of equality and racial progressivism, while in reality, solidifying an antiblack, racist system that preserved white male supremacy in Brazil’s past and present.

Lamonte Aidoo, Slavery Unseen: Sex, Power, and Violence in Brazilian History, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). 3

Politics beyond Black and White: Biracial Identity and Attitudes in America

Cambridge University Press
2018-03-29
251 pages
Online ISBN: 978-1108694605
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1108425988
Paperback ISBN: 978-1108444330
DOI: 10.1017/9781108694605

Lauren D. Davenport, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Stanford University, California

The US is transforming into a multiracial society: today one-in-six new marriages are interracial and the multiple-race population is the fastest-growing youth group in the country. In Politics Beyond Black and White, Lauren D. Davenport examines the ascendance of multiracial identities and their implications for American society and the political landscape. Amassing unprecedented evidence, this book systematically investigates how race is constructed and how it influences political behavior. Professor Davenport shows that biracials’ identities are the product of family, interpersonal interactions, environment, and, most compellingly, gender stereotypes and social class. These identities, in turn, shape attitudes across a range of political issues, from affirmative action to same-sex marriage, and multiracial identifiers are shown to be culturally and politically progressive. But the book also reveals lingering prejudices against race-mixing, and that intermarriage and identification are highly correlated with economic prosperity. Overall findings suggest that multiracialism is poised to dismantle some racial boundaries, while reinforcing others.