Mixed Race Studies

Biracial Student Voices: Experiences at predominatly white institutions

The Bulletin
Association of College Unions International
Volume 77, Issue 6 (November 2009)

Willie L. Banks Jr., Associate Dean of Student Life
Cleveland State University

Race is a complex issue for campuses to address. Often, universities tout their diversity by sharing statistics about the respective racial populations present within their study body, all boxes that can be neatly checked: African-American, Asian, Hispanic, etc. While “other” may be used as a catchall, rarely is a category for biracial or multiracial students included in this list. In the January 2002 issue of American Demographics, Alison Stein Wellner reported that 2.4 percent (approximately 6.8 million people) of the total U.S. population were living in households that included two or more races. In the Aug. 8, 2006 issue of Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik indicated the biracial population was increasingly growing and attending institutions of higher education, requiring the need for research reflecting the experiences of these students on college campuses. Biracial students have been on campus for a number of years; however, their voice has not been adequately represented within the literature as Donna M. Talbot described in the 2008 book, “Biracial and Multiracial Students.”

April Jourdan commented in the 2006 Journal of Counseling and Development that the majority of research on minority populations on college campuses focused on monoracial ethnic categories (i.e., Asian, African American, or Hispanic) and not on the lives of biracial or multiracial individuals in higher education.

For many campuses, biracial individuals provide an interesting challenge and pose more questions than answers. Who comprises this population? What are this population’s needs? How can institutions provide resources and services to address those needs? Unfortunately, there is not one answer to these critical questions. Just as biracial individuals are complex and multilayered, so are their needs and experiences.

Earlier this year, a new study was conducted to examine the experiences of biracial students with one parent of African American heritage attending predominantly white institutions in the southern United States. The findings demonstrate some practical strategies that campus professionals can employ to improve the educational environment in which biracial students develop their identities.

Read the entire article here.

Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa 1895-1960

Oxford University Press
1999
216 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780198208198; ISBN10: 0198208197

Owen White, Associate Professor of History
University of Delaware

This book recreates the lives of the children born of relationships between French men and African women from the time France colonized much of West Africa towards the end of the 19th century, until independence in 1960. Set within the context of the history of miscegenation in colonial French West Africa, the study focuses upon the lives and identities of the resulting mixed-race or métis population, and their struggle to overcome the handicaps they faced in a racially divided society. This author has drawn an evaluation of the impact and importance of French racial theories, and offers a critical discussion of colonial policies in such areas as citizenship and education, providing insights into problems of identity in colonial society.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations
Map of French West Africa and Togo
Introduction
1. Miscegenation in French West Africa
2. Abandonment and Intervention
3. Education and Employment
4. Race and Heredity
5. Paternity and the Mother Country
6. Métis and the Search for Social Identity
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Don’t tell me who I am

The Guardian
2002-01-12

Libby Brooks, Deputy Comment Editor

Jackie Kay has become used to all kinds of assumptions being made about her identity—literary, national, sexual and familial. The more annoying, because the joy of being a writer is that you can create any persona you like. On the other hand, she does want to stand and be counted. She explains to Libby Brooks

Jackie Kay tells a tale of mistaken identity. “I went to sit down in this chair in a London pub and this woman says, ‘You cannae sit doon in that chair – that’s ma chair.’ I said, ‘Oh, you’re from Glasgow, aren’t you?’ and she said, ‘Aye, how did you know that?’ I said, ‘I’m from Glasgow myself.’ She said, ‘You’re not, are you, you foreign-looking bugger!'” Kay roars delightedly. “I still have Scottish people asking me where I’m from. They won’t actually hear my voice, because they’re too busy seeing my face.” Meanwhile, in Glasgow, her black female friends are stopped in the street and asked if they’re Jackie Kay…

…Born in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and Nigerian father, Kay herself was adopted by a white couple and brought up in Glasgow. A lesbian – she lives in Manchester with poet Carol Ann Duffy, her own 13-year-old son, Matthew, and Duffy’s daughter, Ella, six – Kay has found her own identities too easily commodified for comfort. “Your characters are fiction, but when you’re a public writer people often try to make them you. Often, they have this real need, which seems to come out of our culture, to relate things back to this big thing called the personality. There’s something discomforting about that gaze being on you because, by writing, you’ve deliberately chosen to put yourself behind the scenes…

…Kay has always read and always written. As a young girl growing up in predominantly white Glasgow, books such as Anne Of Green Gables and the Famous Five series offered her other lives, while writing gave her the chance to create her own. When she was 12, she wrote the 80-page One Person, Two Names in a school jotter, illustrated by a pal, about a girl living in the States who was black but pretended to be white. “It interests me that I still write about the same things,” she notes dryly…

Read the entire article here.

Census Nonsense: Why Barack Obama isn’t black.

The New Republic
2010-04-07

John Judis, Senior Editor and Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

When asked about his race on the census form, Barack Obama, the child of a white Kansan and black African, did not take the option of checking both “white” and “black” or “some other race.” Instead, he checked “black, African American or Negro.” By doing that, Obama probably did what was expected of him, but he also confirmed an enduring legacy of American racism…

…The obvious question—perhaps not to an American, but certainly to a visitor from another planet—is why if someone’s ancestry is predominantly white, they are not identified as “white” rather than “black.” It’s not because of the way they look. Walter White was widely “mistaken” as a white person. As a student at Colgate, Adam Clayton Powell [, Jr.] was initially believed to be “white.” But once it became known that they had black ancestry, they became black. And American law backed up this conclusion. In the South, the idea that any black ancestry would qualify someone as black, negro, or colored was called the “one-drop rule.”…

…In its American incarnation, blackness emerged as a social category in the seventeenth century as part of Southern whites’ attempt to justify the economic and social subordination of Africans who had been brought to the country in bondage. The legal interpretation of blackness was accompanied by laws barring miscegenation between whites and blacks. The one-drop rule endured after the Civil War and after emancipation as a justification of racial segregation and of the tiered economy of the sharecroppers…

Read the entire article here.

Race/Ethnicity and the 2000 Census: Recommendations for African American and Other Black Populations in the United States

Amercan Journal of Public Health
Volume 90, Number 11 (November 2000)
pages 1728-1730

David R. Williams, Florence and Laura Norman Professor of Public Health and of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

James S. Jackson, Daniel Katz Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, Professor of Health Behavior and Health Education, School of Public Health, and Director of the Institute for Social Research
University of Michigan

This commentary considers the implications of the assessment of racial/ethnic status for monitoring the health of African Americans and other Black populations in the United States. It argues that because racial disparities in health and other social indicators persist undiminished, the continued assessment of race is essential. However, efforts must be made to ensure that racial data are of the highest quality. This will require uniform assessment of racial status that includes identifiers for subgroups of the Black population.

Research also indicates that the health of multiracial persons varies by maternal race. Thus, efforts to monitor multiracial status should assess the race of both parents. More attention should also be given to analysis and interpretation of racial data and to the collection of additional data that capture characteristics linked to race (such as socioeconomic factors and racism) that may adversely affect health.

…As long as being Black remains consequential for every aspect of life, and as long as racial status continues to reflect differences in power and desirable resources in society, it is important to assess race. The view that we should all simply be called “Americans,” and that all other race and ethnic terms should be dropped, denies the power and status differences that exist between and among racial and ethnic groups. Thus, if the welfare of the African American population and racial inequalities in society are to be monitored more broadly, it is important to continue to assess racial status. This information should be used in the effort to eliminate inequalities…

…What are the implications of multiracial status for characterizing health risks? A few studies have examined distributions of health problems by multiracial status. They have all shown that health outcomes vary by the race of the mother. For example, Collins and David studied the relationship between biracial status and low-birthweight children born in Black–White unions in Illinois. In comparison with infants whose parents were White, infants born to Black mothers and White fathers had a higher rate of low birthweight than infants born to White mothers and Black fathers. Even after adjustment for maternal age, education, marital status, parity, prenatal care, census tract income, and gestational age, infants born to Black mothers and White fathers were still 1.4 times more likely to be of low birthweight than infants with 2 White parents. Similarly, using the 1983 national population of single live births, Migone et al. found that among infants born in Black–White unions, low birthweight, mean birthweight, and rates of preterm births were more strongly related to the mother’s than to the father’s race. Biracial infants with White mothers and Black fathers had better outcomes than those with Black mothers and White fathers…

Read the entire article here.

Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule

Backintyme Publishing
2005
542 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780939479238

Frank W. Sweet

• Every Year, 35,000 Black-Born Youngsters Redefine Themselves as White
• About 1/3 of “White” Americans have detectable African DNA

Genealogists were the first to learn that America’s color line leaks. Black researchers often find White ancestry. White genealogists routinely uncover Black ancestry. Molecular anthropologists now confirm Afro-European mixing in our DNA. The plain fact is that few Americans can truly say that they are genetically unmixed. Yet liberals and conservatives alike agree that so-called Whites and Blacks are distinct political “races.” When did ideology triumph over reality? How did America paint itself into such a strange corner?

Americans changed their concept of “race” many times. Eston Hemings, Jefferson’s son, was socially accepted as a White Virginian because he looked European. Biracial planters in antebellum South Carolina assimilated into White society because they were rich. Intermarried couples were acquitted despite the laws because some courts ruled that anyone one with less than one-fourth African ancestry was White, while others ruled that Italians were Colored. Dozens of nineteenth-century American families struggled to come to grips with notions of “racial” identity as the color line shifted and hardened into its present form.

This 542-page book tells their stories in the light of genetic admixture studies and in the records of every appealed court case since 1780 that decided which side of the color line someone was on. Its index lists dozens of 19th-century surnames. It shows that: The color line was invented in 1691 to prevent servile insurrection. The one-drop rule was invented in the North during the Nat Turner panic. It was resisted by Louisiana Creoles, Florida Hispanics, and the maroon (triracial) communities of the Southeast. It triumphed during Jim Crow as a means of keeping Whites in line by banishing to Blackness any White family who dared to establish friendly relations with a Black family. This analysis of the nearly 300 appealed court cases that determined Americans’ “racial” identity may be the most thorough study of the legal history of the U.S. color line yet published.

What is particularly interesting about the high percentage of multiracial children is that children do not fill out census forms. Children are being identified as multiracial by their parents, or by the parent who fills out the census form as the head of the household. This tends to corroborate the claim that the multiracial movement has been fueled by parents of multiracial children. But it also underlines the instability of this category, not to mention the other categories as well. We do not know, for example, if these children will continue to identify as multiracial when it is their turn to fill out the census form. Lee suggests that the “number of people who identify with more than one race is likely to increase as interracial marriages increase.”  This may be so, but we also know that many people who could report themselves as multiracial choose not to. We also know that how people report their identity depends on the prevailing discourse of race and the options available at any given time. Current multiracial children, and multiracial adults for that matter, may in the future decide not to identity themselves as multiracial. They may decide to identify with a single minority race, or they may decide to identify themselves as white. When these multiracial children are grown, the categories will undoubtedly have changed, just as they have every year since 1790, and with them, the debate about race and identity. What is clear is that “the parameters of self-definition have never been open-ended, for the state has always furnished the range of available, credible, and reliable-that is, of licensed and so permissible-categories in which self-definition could occur.”

Naomi Mezey. “Erasure and Recognition: The Census, Race and the National Imagination,” Northwestern University Law Review. (Number 97, Number 4, 2003): 1701-1768.

Erasure and Recognition: The Census, Race and the National Imagination

Northwestern University Law Review
Number 97, Number 4 (2003)
Pages 1701-1768

Naomi Mezey, Professor of Law
Georgetown University Law Center

This Article is concerned with the constitutive power of the census with respect to race. It is an examination of the U.S. Census as an aspect of what Angela Harris calls race law, “law pertaining to the formation, recognition, and maintenance of racial groups, as well as the law regulating the relationships among these groups.” While others have noted and explored the epistemological and constitutive functions of the census race categories, my aim is to unpack this insight in the context of two specific examples of categorical change and contest: the addition of a Chinese racial category in 1870 and the debate over a multiracial category in 2000. In addition, I analyze the differing sites of categorical reimagining in each instance, further exploring how the census has been deeply influential in two different directions: informing, defining and naming the racial identity of specific groups, and informing an imagined racial identity of “the nation.” The census is a kind of mass public performance of nationality; it is both a legal and cultural mechanism for imagining the American nation, a nation that has always represented itself with racial specificity. Over 200 years the content and significance of its racial categories have varied considerably, but the census appears to consistently play a crucial role in both constructing and reinventing a national identity and influencing the self-definition and identity of a number of subnational groups. In short, this paper is about how census classifications have contributed to our understanding of race, to the grammar and logic of identity discourse, and to a particular way of imagining the nation. Its primary aim is to explore some of the dynamics between official racial counting, popular conceptions of race, and racialized views of the nation. In doing so, it will address a series of questions. When do census or other legal categories seem to drive popular notions of race? When do popular understandings of race seem to drive official categorization? When and how are the politics of racial classification mobilized toward national inclusion or exclusion? A secondary aim of this Article is to aid in enlarging our sense of what “law” is by investigating alternate legal forms; in this case, by pursuing how a state apparatus like the census is not just legal by virtue of its constitutional and statutory origins, but in the way it generates and enforces cultural norms, race-based rights and disabilities, and the boundaries of identity.

Table of Contents

I.     INTRODUCTION
II.   NATION, NUMBERS, AND POWER
III. ENUMERATION AS DISCIPLINE: COUNTING THE CHINESE
IV.  ENUMERATION AS ASPIRATION: THE DEBATE OVER A MULTIRACIAL CATEGORY
V.   CONCLUSION

…2. Policing Racial Identity.

Embedded in the congressional testimony on census categories is another debate about the role of the census in the production of identity: it is a debate about what race is, how we confer and “administer” it, and who gets to define its contested contours. And the answers to those questions matter to how we imagine ourselves as a nation.  It is in this sense that the battle over a multiracial census category participates in the larger politics of “racial formation,” and control over racial identity. This debate has serious implications for our national imagination at a time when there is deep ambivalence about the racial choices available to us.

In policing the boundaries of their different racial identities, the civil rights groups seek to protect a particular vision of the group against attack from both within and without. From within, they have to confront the dissent or exit of those likely to identify as multiracial, and from without they have to fight against deracialization by those who see a multiracial category as a step toward colorblindness. The danger in both cases is the ease with which such maneuvers end up essentializing race. For example, evident in arguments against census recognition of a separate multiracial category by various opponents are implicit claims that multiracial advocates are betraying their (minority) race. While arguments by opponents of a multiracial category take a number of forms, almost all of them are at heart claims that ”you are really one of us,” and to the extent that multiracial people reject that appeal, they are serving the interests of racial subordination. Such moves are emblematic of the tendency of all cultural and racial groups to discipline from within and to use law to protect themselves from redefinition and “cultural dissent.” What opponents fail to appreciate is that their attempts to police the borders of group identity are partly responsible for the multiracial movement. As Maria Root notes, “multiracial people experience a ‘squeeze’ of oppression as people of color and by people of color.”

The problem, of course, is that the opponents of a multiracial category are also right; the dissent they are trying to suppress is potentially dangerous to efforts aimed at ameliorating discrimination on the basis of race. Internal resistance has been used in the service of external attack. For example, opponents worry about how attractive the multiracial movement has been to some alarming bedfellows on the right (and left, it should be admitted) who seek to destabilize racial categories altogether.” This is not an inconsequential concern. Newt Gingrich endorsed adding a multiracial category not only as a step toward overcoming racial division but also as an effort to get rid of race categories altogether. Gingrich’s push toward ultimate color blindness has gained many allies in the 1980s and 1990s who have wanted to deracialize American law and culture. john powell has pointed out that this position is not necessarily benign. “The language used by the new right of a raceless, colorblind society is viewed by some not simply as an error, but as a strategy or racial project to maintain white supremacy and racial hierarchy.” Yet it is not clear that those who advocate dismantling racial hierarchies should embrace our current and increasingly incoherent race categories. As Angela Harris has observed, “the notion of race is problematic for anti-racists because at the most subtle, seldom examined level, ‘race’ entrances us in a familiar but dangerous metaphysics: a representational economy in which bodies stand in both for power and history…

…What is particularly interesting about the high percentage of multiracial children is that children do not fill out census forms. Children are being identified as multiracial by their parents, or by the parent who fills out the census form as the head of the household. This tends to corroborate the claim that the multiracial movement has been fueled by parents of multiracial children.  But it also underlines the instability of this category, not to mention the other categories as well. We do not know, for example, if these children will continue to identify as multiracial when it is their turn to fill out the census form. Lee suggests that the “number of people who identify with more than one race is likely to increase as interracial marriages increase.” This may be so, but we also know that many people who could report themselves as multiracial choose not to. We also know that how people report their identity depends on the prevailing discourse of race and the options available at any given time. Current multiracial children, and multiracial adults for that matter, may in the future decide not to identity themselves as multiracial. They may decide to identify with a single minority race, or they may decide to identify themselves as white. When these multiracial children are grown, the categories will undoubtedly have changed, just as they have every year since 1790, and with them, the debate about race and identity. What is clear is that “the parameters of self-definition have never been open-ended, for the state has always furnished the range of available, credible, and reliable-that is, of licensed and so permissible-categories in which self-definition could occur.”…

Read the entire article here.

Harry Chang: A Seminal Theorist of Racial Justice

Monthly Review
January 2007

Bob Wing

It is little known that a shy Korean immigrant named Harry Chang made vital contributions to the theory and practice of racial justice in the United States. In his most fruitful period, the 1970s, his work shaped the thinking and political work of numerous movement organizations, mostly led by people of color. Although he died prematurely in 1979, his work helped lay the foundations of two of the most progressive and influential theories of racism: the theory of racial formation and critical race theory.

To one degree or another, Harry may be credited with a number of ideas that were highly controversial in the 1970s but which in recent years have become much more accepted. His starting point was to highlight the centrality of the “one drop” rule that determines race in the United States (only). By analyzing this rule, he showed that racial categories are socio-historical categories, not genetic or genealogical, and that they are qualitatively distinct from class, ethnicity, or nation/nationality categories. Harry coined the term racial formation to underscore the necessity of analyzing racism as a historical process that encompasses the origins of racism, how and why it has changed over time, and the process of eliminating it in a given historical context. He also argued for the centrality of law to racial formation and the inseparability and mutual determination of racial and class formation. Clarifying the distinctiveness of racism also laid the basis for analyzing the intersection of race and nationality…

…Harry’s experience as an immigrant, his study of Cuba, and his analysis of racial categories highlighted the peculiarity of the dialectic of U.S. racial categories: the so-called hypodescent rule by which anyone who appeared to have a single drop of “black blood” was considered black. He commented on how U.S. racism often viciously divided immigrant siblings from Latin America and the Caribbean into black and white. Such anti-human racial categories, Harry recognized, are peculiar to the United States alone.

In fact, he argued, these categories themselves harbor a chauvinistic logic: “Inherent in the notion of ‘White’ is the requirement of genetic ‘purity’ while the notion of ‘Black’ harbors the assumption of genetic ‘contamination.’ One of the peculiarities of the racist psyche in the U.S. is that its sense of a ‘drop of African blood’ is unbelievably acute but it is practically blind to ‘a drop of European blood.’” “White” and “black” are not the least bit neutral; they contained the chauvinistic logic of pure versus contaminated, clean versus dirty, and pure breed versus mongrel. Racial categories, in other words, are not determined by natural science or genealogy, and were certainly not an attempt at neutral physical description. “Racial categories are not biological categories, but social-relational categories that fetishize genetic diversity.” The logic of racial categories is itself racist…

Read the entire article here.

In First Lady’s Roots, a Complex Path From Slavery

The New York Times
2009-10-08

Rachel L. Swarns

Jodi Kantor

WASHINGTON — In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions. Among the spinning wheels, scythes, tablecloths and cattle that he bequeathed to his far-flung heirs was a 6-year-old slave girl valued soon afterward at $475.

In his will, she is described simply as the “negro girl Melvinia.” After his death, she was torn away from the people and places she knew and shipped to Georgia. While she was still a teenager, a white man would father her first-born son under circumstances lost in the passage of time.

In the annals of American slavery, this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason: This union, consummated some two years before the Civil War, represents the origins of a family line that would extend from rural Georgia, to Birmingham, Ala., to Chicago and, finally, to the White House.

Melvinia Shields, the enslaved and illiterate young girl, and the unknown white man who impregnated her are the great-great-great-grandparents of Michelle Obama, the first lady…

While President Obama’s biracial background has drawn considerable attention, his wife’s pedigree, which includes American Indian strands, highlights the complicated history of racial intermingling, sometimes born of violence or coercion, that lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans. Mrs. Obama and her family declined to comment for this article, aides said, in part because of the personal nature of the subject.

“She is representative of how we have evolved and who we are,” said Edward Ball, a historian who discovered that he had black relatives, the descendants of his white slave-owning ancestors, when he researched his memoir, “Slaves in the Family.”

“We are not separate tribes of Latinos and whites and blacks in America,” Mr. Ball said. “We’ve all mingled, and we have done so for generations.”…

Read the entire article here.