Mixed Race Studies

Making Blackness, Making Policy

Harvard University
2012
178 pages

Peter Geller

Doctoral Dissertation

Too often the acknowledgment that race is a social construction ignores exactly how this construction occurs. By illuminating the way in which the category of blackness and black individuals are made, we can better see how race matters in America. Antidiscrimination policy, social science research, and the state’s support of its citizens can all be improved by an accurate and concrete definition of blackness.

Making Blackness, Making Policy argues that blackness and black people are literally made rather than discovered. The social construction of blackness involves the naming of individuals as black, and the subsequent interaction between this naming and racial projects. The process of naming involves an intersubjective dialogue in which racial self-identification and ascription by others lead to a consensus on an individual’s race. These third parties include an individual’s community, the media, and, crucially, the state. Following Ian Hacking, this process is most properly termed the dynamic nominalism of blackness.

My dissertation uses analytic philosophy, qualitative and quantitative research, and historical analysis to defend this conception. The dynamic nominalist process is illustrated through the media’s contribution to the making of Barack Obama’s blackness, and the state’s creation and maintenance of racial categories through law, policy, and enumeration.

I then argue that the state’s dominant role in creating blackness, and the vital role that a black identity plays in millions’ sense of self, requires the United States Government to support a politics of recognition. The state’s antidiscrimination efforts would also improve through the adoption of a dynamic nominalism of blackness. Replacing the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission’s inconsistent and contradictory definitions of race with the dynamic nominalism of blackness would clarify when and how racial discrimination occurs.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Making Blackness Across Disciplines
• Chapter One: The Dynamic Nominalism of Blackness
• Chapter Two: Barack Obama and the Making of Black People
• Chapter Three: The State and the Centrality of Black Identity
• Chapter Four: Definitions of Race and Antidiscrimination Policy
• Conclusion: Making Use of Making Blackness
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

The rise of a multiracial identity dovetails with an utopian ideal of a pan-ethnic, post-racial America—one where everyone is a little something. But that post-racial space doesn’t yet exist, with one of the effects being that multiracial people are often pulled between identities. Whether someone identifies more with one race or the other is strongly attributable to their upbringing, their family history, their surroundings, and their physical appearance, making no two multiracial experiences totally alike. It has to do with their public perception, too: Take this one stat from the Pew Research Center, which says 60% of biracial white and black adults say they’re seen as black while only 23% of biracial white and Asian adults say they’re seen as Asian.

Jeremy Gordon, “Multiracial in America: Who gets to be “white”?,” Hopes&Fears, December 15. 2015. http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/politics/217005-multiracial-in-america.

Multiracial in America: Who gets to be “white”?

Hopes&Fears
2015-12-15

Jeremy Gordon

The author with his parents, Mary and Dennis Gordon.

Jeremy Gordon on growing up multiracial, assimilation and “whiteness” in post-Obama America.

Every Christmas, when the dishes have been cleaned, when the presents are exchanged and the photos snapped, my cousins and I book it out of my aunt’s house in the suburbs for the comfort of the city, where we spend the rest of the night in each other’s company—playing video games, getting drunker, eating a second meal to close the holiday. Last year, we drove to a dim sum restaurant in Chicago’s Argyle neighborhood, which my Chinese family has patronized for my entire life.

Times had changed, though. We assumed we’d be seated right away, but the restaurant was full. As far as I could remember, it was the first time we’d ever had to wait for a table—and this time, we noticed that most of the diners were white. As we waited for our names to be called, my cousin couldn’t help but gripe. “I can’t believe we’re stuck behind all these white people!” she said. “Can’t they go somewhere else?”

My cousin is not a facetious woman, so the comment didn’t register as a joke. Nevertheless, her brother and I managed a laugh. It was true—the restaurant was filled with white people, whose grannies had never used Mandarin to order from the sullen teenagers pushing the dim sum carts around. But the complaint was a little awkward because of an incontrovertible fact: My cousins and I are half-white, each of us the offspring of a Chinese woman and a Jewish man…

We look about half-and-half—not quite white, not quite yellow, definitely a little something. White people might see us as Chinese—or, failing their ability to pinpoint our race, an ever-ambiguous “person of color”—but there are plenty of Chinese who might insist we were white. Joking about “white people” when that might be us—it’s an easy laugh, but ultimately disingenuous. Wondering what to identify as—white, Chinese, or something else—is something I, my cousins, and many multiracial people have struggled with for our whole lives, to no definite conclusion…

…Multiraciality is a young identity, one that didn’t formally come into existence until the 1980s. G. Reginald Daniel is a sociology professor who’s taught a class on multiracial identity at the University of California, Santa Barbara for nearly three decades, and even he can’t identify its first usage. He points to television shows like Oprah and Sally Jessy Raphael, where panels on multiracial experiences featuring multiracial people were hastily conceived. “The first time I heard the word multiracial used was on The Phil Donahue Show in 1988,” he tells me. “I was pretty shocked because I’d never heard that word before. Prior to that, nobody was talking about this, surely not in public.”..

Read the entire article here.

This poem perfectly captures feelings from a campus protest

Blavity
2015-12-26

Blavity Team

What’s it like to be conscious of being love[d] and being hated at the same time? This poet [Ariana Brown] eloquently explains her experience at a campus protest.

15 striking findings from 2015

Pew Research Center
2015-12-22

George Gao, Associate Digital Producer

Every year, we look back at our research to select the most memorable facts that illustrate important trends shaping our world. At Pew Research Center, the topics we analyze range from the specific subjects of video gaming and family caregivers to broader areas like political attitudes, global climate change and religious affiliation.

It’s a hard task to select just 15, but here are some of our most striking findings of 2015:…

…4. There’s a substantial rise in the share of Americans who say the country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites. In July 2015, six-in-ten (59%) Americans said changes are needed, up from 46% in March 2014. These findings come in a year where racial tensions were high in much of the country, from protests over police shootings to student strikes at universities. Our poll also shows that a racial divide in public opinion persists: Blacks are much more likely than whites to say changes are needed.

…

…12. Multiracial Americans account for 6.9% of adults, and they are growing at a rate three times as fast as the population as a whole. For much of the nation’s history, America has discussed race in the singular form. But with the rise of interracial couples, combined with a more accepting society, the language of race is changing. More than half of multiracial Americans are proud of their background and feel more open to other cultures. But a majority (55%) also say they have been subjected to slurs or jokes because of their racial background.

…

Read the entire article here.

Race in Mind: Critical Essays

University of Notre Dame Press
2015
408 pages
ISBN: 978-0-268-04148-9

Paul Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

With contributions by Jeffrey Moniz and Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly

Race in Mind presents fourteen critical essays on race and mixed race by one of America’s most prolific and influential ethnic studies scholars. Collected in one volume are all of Paul Spickard’s theoretical writings over the past two decades. Ten of the articles have been revised and updated from previous publications. Four appear here for the first time. Spickard’s work embraces three overarching themes: race as biology versus race as something constructed by social and political relationships; race as a phenomenon that exists not just in the United States, but in every part of the world, and even in the relationships between nations; and the question of racial multiplicity.

These essays analyze how race affects people’s lives and relationships in all settings, from the United States to Great Britain and from Hawaiʻi to Chinese Central Asia. They contemplate the racial positions in various societies of people called Black and people called White, of Asians and Pacific Islanders, and especially of those people whose racial ancestries and identifications are multiple. Here for the first time are Spickard’s trenchant analyses of the creation of race in the South Pacific, of DNA testing for racial ancestry, and of the meaning of multiplicity in the age of Barack Obama.

When black is white and vice versa

The New Tri-State Defender
Memphis, Tennessee
2015-12-23

Brittney Gathen, Special to The New Tri-State Defender

Dr. Allyson Hobbs signed copies of her book, “A Chosen Exile: AHistory of Racial Passing in American Life,” during an event called “Book Talk” at the National Civil Rights Museum. (Photo: Merritt Gathen)

Stanford professor and author shines light on racial ‘passing’ at NCRM event.

“Passing” – living as a part of one race despite being born into another – is often full of complexity and consequences, so much so that author and Stanford history professor Dr. Allyson Hobbs calls it a type of “exile.”

Hobbs, author of “A Chosen Exile: AHistory of Racial Passing in American Life,”examined the topic of racial passing during “Book Talk” at the National Civil Rights Museum last week (Dec. 17). During the event, Hobbs discussed topics such as the negative side of passing and her perception of former Spokane, Washington NAACP president Rachel Dolezal, who, despite being born white, lived as (and still identifies as) a black woman…

Read the entire article here.

White Latinos need to own up to their Whiteness because we just can’t continue to afford this to continue any further. We also need African-Americans to understand that Latin America has over 200 million Afro-descendants and that going to Africa also entails going to Colombia, Brazil, Cuba and Puerto Rico, among other countries. Blackness does not have to solely mean African-American and Whiteness does not have to solely mean Anglo-white.

Wiliam Garcia, “White Latino Racism on the Rise: It’s Time for a Serious Conversation on Euro-Diasporic Whiteness,” Latino Rebels, December 21, 2015. http://www.latinorebels.com/2015/12/21/white-latino-racism-on-the-rise-its-time-for-a-serious-conversation-on-euro-diasporic-whiteness/.

Skin color is historically the locally adaptive trait most commonly considered by European cultures as a “racial trait” in humans. Skin color is an adaptation to the amount of ultraviolet (uv) radiation in the environment: dark skins are adaptive in high uv environments in order to protect from radiation damage that can kill and burn cells and damage DNA if not protected by melanin, and light skins are adaptive in low uv environments in order to make sufficient vitamin D, which requires uv (Hochberg & Templeton, 2010; Jablonski & Chaplin, 2010). The geographical distribution of skin color follows the environmental factor of uv intensity. Skin color differences do not reflect overall genetic divergence. For example, the native peoples with the darkest skins live in tropical Africa and Melanesia. The dark skins of Africans and Melanesians are adaptive to the high uv found in these areas. Because Africans and Melanesians live on opposite sides of the world, they are more highly genetically differentiated than many other human populations (Figure 2) despite their similar skin colors. Europeans, who are geographically intermediate between Africa and Melanesia, are likewise intermediate at the molecular genetic level between Africans and Melanesians, even though Europeans have light skins that are adapted to the low uv environment of Europe. Skin color differences in humans are not a reliable indicator of overall genetic differentiation or evolutionary history. Moreover, skin color varies continuously among humans in a clinal fashion rather than categorical ecotypes (Relethford, 2009). Hence, there is a compelling biological reason to exclude skin color as the racially-defining adaptive trait under the ecotype concept of race.

Alan R. Templeton, “Biological races in humans,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Volume 44, Issue 3, September 2013. 262–271. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2013.04.010.

White Latino Racism on the Rise: It’s Time for a Serious Conversation on Euro-Diasporic Whiteness

Latino Rebels
2015-12-21

Wiliam Garcia

A common misconnection that exists today rests on the notion that there are no racial hierarchies in Latin American countries or within the Latino communities in the United States. In other words, Latino (or Hispanic) is itself a race. For many, this conversation is a pointless squabble that halts the true need for unity amongst marginalized groups in the United States. Unfortunately, overlooking the importance of this issue has in fact delineated separation and a lack of interest in each other’s problems.

The shooting of unarmed African-American teenager Trayvon Martin by a half-Peruvian and half-White man named George Zimmerman, the rise of so-called Hispanic conservatives like Ted Cruz, Al Cardenas and Marco Rubio, and the examples of racist comments by Latinos in the media like Rodner Figueroa, have made it impossible to have a conversation of Latinos and race. It is becoming clear that Whites from Latin America, although marginalized by Anglo-Whites, have been able to pass as honorary Whites and benefit from the inequalities formed by White Supremacy. This is not new, and it has a history.

Many people who neglect to explore the history of Latin Americans in the United Sates fail to analyze people like the famous white Cuban Ricky Ricardo (Desi Arnaz), who penetrated the American television series “I Love Lucy” (1951) at a time when Black people were not even allowed to perform next to White actors. Lucy (Lucille Ball) was Arnaz’ real wife, and both enjoyed a long and prosperous career in the film industry. In 1954 Arnaz was even able to get a role as the famous Don Juan…

…While many invoke the idea of mestizaje (racial mixing) and the one-drop rule, it did not determine Latin American identity racially. The false idea that you were non-White if any of your ancestors was not White has been a common belief that undergirded racial categories and Whiteness as passing in the United States. Regardless if Arnaz was considered White or not, his Whiteness allowed him to pass and have access to Hollywood. Arnaz benefited from the system of White Supremacy. While Arnaz was able to remain Cuban (while also being marginalized), Hernández was not able to be Puerto Rican because he was Black…

Read the entire article here.