An American Puzzle: Fitting Race in a Box

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Critical mixed race studies (CMRS) is transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational in scope. It places the concept of mixed race at the critical center of focus such that multiracial individuals become subjects of historical, social, and cultural processes rather than simply objects of analysis. This involves the study of racial consciousness among racially mixed people, the world in which they live, and the ideological forces that inform their identity and experience. CMRS also stresses the critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political structures based on dominant conceptions of race. In keeping with sociologists Michael Omi’s and Howard Winant’s racial formation theory, CMRS acknowledges that the concept of race invokes biologically-based human characteristics, but the selection of specific human features for the purposes of racial signification is a constantly changing sociohistorical process. Accordingly, CMRS emphasizes the constructed nature of race and the notion that racial categories are unstable and decentered structures of sociocultural meanings that are continuously being created, inhabited, contested, transformed, and destroyed. Finally, CMRS underscores the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique local and global systemic injustices rooted in processes of racialization and social stratification based on race, as well as the interlocking nature of racial phenomena with sex, gender, sexuality, class, and other categories of difference.

—G. Reginald Daniel

An American Puzzle: Fitting Race in a Box

An American Puzzle: Fitting Race in a Box

The New York Times
2023-10-16

K.K. Rebecca Lai and Jennifer Medina

Census categories for race and ethnicity have shaped how the nation sees itself. Here’s how they have changed over the last 230 years.

Since 1790, the decennial census has played a crucial role in creating and reshaping the ever-changing views of racial and ethnic identity in the United States.

Over the centuries, the census has evolved from one that specified broad categories — primarily “free white” people and “slaves” — to one that attempts to encapsulate the country’s increasingly complex demographics. The latest adaptation proposed by the Biden administration in January seeks to allow even more race and ethnicity options for people to describe themselves than the 2020 census did.

If approved, the proposed overhaul would most likely be adopted across all surveys in the country about health, education and the economy. Here’s what the next census could look like…

Read the entire article here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2023 at 01:37Z and is filed under Articles, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Social Science, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Mixed Race Studies

An American Puzzle: Fitting Race in a Box

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