Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Students’ growing refusal to state a race on forms frustrates school officials

    Students’ growing refusal to state a race on forms frustrates school officials

    Sacramento Bee
    2010-01-18

    Stephen Magagnini

    Sacramento, California — About half of the 37 students in teacher Jeanne Kirchofer’s Laguna Creek High School classroom, who span nearly every combination of race and ethnicity, have joined the growing number of California students who decline to state a race on official forms and tests…

    “I’m not saying we’re going to forget where we came from, but we can all see similarities from different hardships,” Belcher said. By eliminating racial categories—and racial consciousness—”we can make racial hatred go away,” she said.

    Eighteen classmates agreed. “If we were all one race, then there wouldn’t be any racism,” said Mike Obi, 14, whose roots are Italian and Nigerian. He said his parents declined to state his race on his school registration form.

    “We shouldn’t be judged by our race,” said senior Jessica Mae Belcher, 17, whose roots are African and Cherokee. She prefers “none of the above” because “we’re all different, but we’re all the same, too.”..

    …From 2006 to 2009, the number of Elk Grove Unified School District students whose parents listed their race as “multiple/no response” went from 500 to 6,200 — a twelve-fold jump in just three years, the California Department of Education says. About one of every 10 of the district’s students now list race as “multiple/no response.”

    There’s also been a dramatic rise statewide. Data show the number of K-12 students listing their race as “multiple/no response” has jumped 70 percent, from 124,000 in 2006 to 210,000 last year…

    …Senior Candice Renkin, 17,—who identifies herself as white/European American—said it’s important to close the achievement gap. “By ignoring racial categories, it makes the problem worse because people can be racist and there’s no way to quantify it.” …

    Read the entire article here.

  • Hideously diverse Britain: the college where histories collide

    Hideously diverse Britain: the college where histories collide

    The Guardian
    2010-01-10

    Hugh Muir

    It was 1940 and the 200 students of South West Essex Technical College posed ramrod straight on the sharply inclined steps; ties stiff, uniforms crisp. They were RAF ­cadets learning science and ­engineering at the place that was dubbed the People’s University. Unsurprisingly, those pictured were all white.

    The place is called Waltham Forest College nowadays and the grand steps remain imposing. The porticos, by sculptor Eric Gill, have been lovingly preserved.

    But last week, when the east London college recreated that recently discovered archive photograph, everything else was different. The formation was identical to that created with military precision all those years ago, but lining the steps were 200 students from ­another generation, another century. White Britons, black Britons, teenagers of Asian and African and Mediterranean and Eastern European descent. A student body with links to every continent on the planet. Speakers of 76 different ­languages. Each standing out in the cold to make a statement. “I told them it was their job to represent their era, just as the cadets in 1940 were symbolic of that time,” said lecturer Gaverne Bennett. “They bought into it.”…

    Read the entire article and view the photographs here.

  • College applications in a post-race world: Admissions process will soon need to address class concerns

    College applications in a post-race world: Admissions process will soon need to address class concerns

    GW Hatchet
    Independent Student Paper of George Washington University
    2010-01-14

    Evan Schwartz, Columnist

    In a recent editorial for The Boston Globe, columnist Neal Gabler railed against what he referred to as “the college admissions scam” and a perceived bias in admission board selection against, well, everyone. Gabler made it seem as though anyone who is not a privileged white high school student has no chance of getting into an Ivy League or comparable university.

    …Racial identity has been changing dramatically in the last few years, perhaps punctuated by the election of a mixed-race president of the United States. The concept of “whiteness” in this country has become more complicated, especially given the influx of Hispanic immigrants and the decreasing stigma attached to mixed-race couples. Over a third of the U.S. population is now composed of minority groups, and the Census Bureau predicts that white people will have a far less pronounced majority in the next several decades….

    Read the entire article here.

  • Six degrees of Princeton’s African-American history: America writ small

    Six degrees of Princeton’s African-American history: America writ small

    Princeton Alumni Weekly
    Rally ‘Round the Cannon
    2010-01-13

    Gregg Lange, Class of 1970

    The New York Times’ recent genealogy study of Michelle Obama ’85, noting for the first time her slave and mixed-race heritage, seemingly surprised a broad swath of the populace. This indicates that we here in the History Corner of the World haven’t been doing our jobs very well. The complex intertwining of peoples and cultures living side by side for hundreds of years, their humanness grotesquely masked by slavery and then gratuitous segregation, is as near a universal experience as you can find in the United States. We were all involved; we are all affected. Get used to it.  

    It is, for a nearby example, pretty much common knowledge that the saga of African-Americans at Princeton began in World War II, and gained no effective traction until the Goheen administration in the 1960s. A whites-only world, if ever there was one.

    Let me instead tell you a story more than 200 years old…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Geek Out: Mixed Race in America

    Geek Out: Mixed Race in America

    University of Californa, Berkeley
    Lawrence Hall of Science
    2010-02-10, 19:00 to 22:00 PST (Local Time)

    Geek Discourse
    Tour the “Race: Are We So Different?” exhibit and participate in a discussion facilitated by Dr. Victoria Robinson of the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies and American Cultures programs on what it means to be mixed race in America. Authors of the book “Blended Nation” Mike Tauber and Pamela Singh will present several photographs and stories from the book…

    For more information click here.

  • Racial Boundary Formation at the Dawn of Jim Crow: The Determinants and Effects of Black/Mulatto Occupational Differences in the United States, 1880 (Working Paper)

    Racial Boundary Formation at the Dawn of Jim Crow: The Determinants and Effects of Black/Mulatto Occupational Differences in the United States, 1880 (Working Paper)

    33 pages
    Updated 2008-07-03

    Aaron Gullickson, Assistant Professor of Sociology
    University of Oregon

    Much of the literature within sociology regarding mixed-race populations focuses on contemporary issues and dynamics, often overlooking a larger historical literature.  This article provides a historical perspective on these issues by exploiting regional variation in the United States in the degree of occupational differentiation between blacks and mulattoes in the 1880 Census, during a transitionary period from slavery to freedom.  The analysis reveals that the role of the mixed-race category as either a “buffer class” or a status threat depended upon the class composition of the white population.  Black/mulatto occupational differentiation was greatest in areas where whites had a high level of occupational prestige and thus little to fear from an elevated mulatto group. Furthermore, the effect of black/mulatto occupational differentiation on lynching varied by the occupational status of whites. In areas where whites were of relatively low status, black/mulatto differentiation increased the risk of lynching, while in areas where whites were of relatively high status, black/mulatto differentiation decreased the risk of lynching.

    Read the entire paper here.

  • Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century

    Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century

    University of Pennsylvania Press
    2007
    200 pages
    6 x 9, 7 illus.
    Cloth ISBN 978-0-8122-4056-6

    Fay A. Yarbrough, Associate Professor of History
    University of Oklahoma

    “We believe by blood only,” said a Cherokee resident of Oklahoma, speaking to reporters in 2007 after voting in favor of the Cherokee Nation constitutional amendment limiting its membership. In an election that made headlines around the world, a majority of Cherokee voters chose to eject from their tribe the descendants of the African American freedmen Cherokee Indians had once enslaved. Because of the unique sovereign status of Indian nations in the United States, legal membership in an Indian nation can have real economic benefits. In addition to money, the issues brought forth in this election have racial and cultural roots going back before the Civil War.

    Race and the Cherokee Nation examines how leaders of the Cherokee Nation fostered a racial ideology through the regulation of interracial marriage. By defining and policing interracial sex, nineteenth-century Cherokee lawmakers preserved political sovereignty, delineated Cherokee identity, and established a social hierarchy. Moreover, Cherokee conceptions of race and what constituted interracial sex differed from those of blacks and whites. Moving beyond the usual black/white dichotomy, historian Fay A. Yarbrough places American Indian voices firmly at the center of the story, as well as contrasting African American conceptions and perspectives on interracial sex with those of Cherokee Indians.

    For American Indians, nineteenth-century relationships produced offspring that pushed racial and citizenship boundaries. Those boundaries continue to have an impact on the way individuals identify themselves and what legal rights they can claim today.

  • Legislating Women’s Sexuality: Cherokee Marriage Laws in the Nineteenth Century

    Legislating Women’s Sexuality: Cherokee Marriage Laws in the Nineteenth Century

    Journal of Social History
    Volume 38, Number 2, Winter 2004
    E-ISSN: 1527-1897 Print ISSN: 0022-4529
    DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2004.0144

    Fay A. Yarbrough, Associate Professor of History
    University of Oklahoma

    During the first half of the nineteenth century, the Cherokee Nation passed many laws to regulate marriage and sex. This essay first contemplates the gendered aspects of such laws by exploring the importance of Cherokee women’s marital choices and official response to those choices. In particular, Cherokee women’s choice of non-Cherokee marital partners, most frequently whites, and the concomitant introduction of outsiders into the Nation forced the Cherokee legislative branch to reformulate Cherokee women’s relationship to the production of new citizens in the Nation. Then the essay turns more explicitly to the laws’ racial implications and examines who could marry in the Cherokee Nation and why by first examining Cherokee laws regulating marriage with people of African descent. Cherokees increasingly excluded people of African descent from membership in the Nation through legislation prohibiting legal marriage between Cherokees and people of African descent. Lastly, this essay considers Cherokee legislative provisions to include whites as marriage partners and citizens in the Cherokee Nation. Ultimately, this essay finds that Cherokee officials were redefining Cherokee Indians racially and used marriage laws to write and reinforce this new definition.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance

    The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance

    Temple University Press
    November 2002
    256 pages
    Cloth EAN: 978-1-56639-981-4, ISBN: 1-56639-981-5
    Paper: EAN: 978-1-56639-982-1, ISBN: 1-56639-982-3

    Steve Martinot, Adjunct Professor
    San Francisco State University

    A significant re-writing of the history of class formation in the US

    An important history of the way class formed in the US, The Rule of Racialization offers a rich new look at the invention of whiteness and how the inextricable links between race and class were formed in the seventeenth century and consolidated by custom, social relations, and eventually naturalized by the structures that organize our lives and our work.

    Arguing that, unlike in Europe, where class formed around the nation-state, race deeply informed how class is defined in this country and, conversely, our unique relationship to class in this country helped in some ways to invent race as a distinction in social relations. Martinot begins tracing this development in the slave plantations in 1600s colonial life. He examines how the social structures encoded there lead to a concrete development of racialization. He then takes us up to the present day, where forms of those structures still inhabit our public and economic institutions. Throughout, he engages historical and contemporary thinkers on the nature of race in the US, creating a book that at once synthesizes significant critiques of race while at the same time offers a completely original conception of how race and class have operated in American life throughout the centuries.

    A uniquely compelling book, The Rule of Racialization offers a rich contribution to the study of class, labor, and American social relations.

    Read an excerpt from the introduction here.

    Table of Contents

    Acknowledgments
    List of Abbreviations
    Introduction
    1. The History And Construction Of Slavery And Race
    2. Racialization And Class Structure
    3. The Contemporary Control Stratum
    4. The Meanings Of White Racialized Identity
    Notes
    Index

  • Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They?

    Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They?

    PLoS Medicine
    Volume 4, Number 9 (September 2007)
    pages 1423-1428
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0040271

    Lundy Braun
    Departments of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Africana Studies
    Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

    Duana Fullwiley, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and of Medical Anthropology
    Harvard University

    Anne Fausto-Sterling
    Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Biochemistry, Program in Women’s Studies, and Chair of the Faculty Committee on Science and Technology Studies
    Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

    Evelynn M. Hammonds, Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity
    History of Science and of African and African American Studies programs
    Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

    Alondra Nelson
    Departments of Sociology and African American Studies
    Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

    William Quivers
    Department of Physics
    Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

    Susan M. Reverby
    Women’s Studies Department,
    Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

    Alexandra Shields
    Harvard/MGH Cente on Genomics, Vulnerable Populations and Health Disparities,
    Massachusetts General Hospital
    Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts

    The Trouble with Race

    Is it good medical practice for physicians to “eyeball” a patient’s race when assessing their medical status or even to ask them to identify their race? This question was captured in a 2005 episode of “House M.D.,”  Fox television’s medical drama. In the episode, a black patient with heart disease refuses a hospital physician’s prescription for what is clearly supposed to be BiDil, the drug approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration only for “self-identified” African-Americans. Dr. House, on seeing the patient for followup, insists on the same prescription.  The patient again refuses, telling House, “I’m not buying into no racist drug, OK?” House, a white physician asks, “It’s racist because it helps black people more than white people? Well, on behalf of my peeps, let me say, thanks for dying on principle for us.” The patient replies, “Look. My heart’s red, your heart’s red.  And it don’t make no sense to give us different drugs.”  Who is right here, House or his patient? And what does this episode tell us about the way race plays itself out in the physician-patient clinical encounter? What of clinical importance can be learned by making a quick racial assessment?  That an ACE (angiotensin-converting enzyme) inhibitor may not be effective? That screening for sickle cell anemia is a waste of time? Sorting patients by race may seem useful during a time constrained interview, but we argue that acting on rapid racial assessment can lead to missed diagnoses and inappropriate treatments…

    Racial Categories Are Historical, Not Natural

    …Racial definitions are historically and nationally specific. In her comparison of the history of racial categories in the US and Brazilian census from the late 18th century to the present, political scientist Melissa Nobles demonstrated that categories emerge and are  deployed in different ways over time. For example, during the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, at the height of US anxiety about “miscegenation,” categories such as “mulatto” were vehicles for expressing and containing cultural anxiety about racial purity.  Bolstered by scientific ideas about race, data collected on the numbers of “mulattoes” were shaped by the desire to prove that “hybrids” would die out…

    …A dark-skinned, curly-headed person who identifies as African American may, indeed, have much in his or her history and upbringing to justify that identification. But he or she may also have a white grandparent and several Cherokee ancestors. Thus, returning to the example of glaucoma, it is more important to know a patient’s family history than to assess his or her race.  And collecting family history ought to mean not only compiling a list of which diseases family members have, but making some attempt to assess common (familial) habits such as diet and life experiences (e.g., first- versus second-generation immigrants, living conditions, or same versus widely varied work experience and geographical locations). Similarly, when the history of passing for white is ignored, those who identify themselves as “white” are assumed to have no ancestral “black blood.”  Finally, immigration patterns constantly change. A “black” person walking into a Boston, Massachusetts clinic could easily be the child of a recent immigrant from Ethiopia or Brazil who has a genetic makeup as well as cultural and environmental exposures that differ significantly from the descendents of 19th century US slaves from the western coast of Africa…

    Read the entire article here.