Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Multiracialism & the civil rights future

    Multiracialism & the civil rights future

    Daedalus
    Volume 134, Number 1 (Winter 2005)
    Pages 53-60
    DOI: 10.1162/0011526053124406

    Kim M. Williams, Associate Professor of Public Policy
    Harvard Kennedy School
    Harvard University

    Spurred by a small group of activists in the 1990s, the American system of racial classification changed recently in a conceptually bold way. With moving reference to the self-esteem of their children, along with the moral conviction that multiracial recognition could help the entire nation beyond an impasse, multiracial advocates were astonishingly successful in the 1990s.

    Yet at the height of activity, the multiracial movement involved no more than a thousand individuals, mainly living on the East and West Coasts. Only a handful of leaders pushed the multiracial category effort forward, in fits and starts, throughout the decade. Despite its small size, the group that advanced the cause did not agree on much beyond the belief that forcing multiracial Americans into monoracial categories was inaccurate and inappropriate. Still, with only the slightest nudging by this poorly financed and increasingly fractious handful of activists, six states passed legislation between 1992 and 1998 to add a multiracial category to state forms. During the same period, legislators introduced multiracial category bills in five additional states, while two other states added a multiracial designation by administrative mandate.

    The multiracialists’ best-known campaign would have added a multiracial category to the 2000 census. While the group did not get exactly what it wanted, its efforts led to the creation of an unprecedented “mark one or more” option, allowing individual Americans to identify with as many racial groups as they saw fit. Throughout the prolonged review by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) culminating in this 1997 decision, the priorities of traditional civil rights advocates were twofold. First, they strongly opposed a stand-alone multiracial category, fearing that it would jeopardize civil and voting rights enforcement by diluting the count of minorities. Having successfully averted this outcome, but faced with no alternative to multiple check-offs, civil rights proponents secondly strove to ensure that multiple-race responses would be tabulated to a minority group.

    The OMB met both demands. It rejected a stand-alone multiracial category and arrived at a tabulation scheme that has actually increased the tally of minority groups in some contexts, since anyone who checks off boxes for both white and a minority race counts as part of the latter for civil rights purposes. From one perspective, the technical fix adopted by the federal government–intended to balance the tension between growing racial fluidity on the one hand, and on-going racial and ethnic data needs on the other—amounted to symbolic appeasement. Federal-level multiple-race data serve no statutory purpose, and the tabulation guidelines stipulate a systematic process by which to convert multiple-race responses into single-race data. This is necessary because, to enforce civil and voting rights laws, we must be able to distinguish between those who are members of minority groups and those who are not.

    Only 2.4 percent of the population, about 6.8 million people, identify with multiple races, as measured in 2000. At first glance, this might seem insignificant. Given that civil rights enforcement depends heavily on patterns, and that ‘multiple-race’ is not a protected class, the consensus has been that the multiple-race option is probably irrelevant to civil rights claims involving the size and the characteristics of minority groups. (1) But is the “mark one or more” format merely symbolic? Is the symbolism politically irrelevant?…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • The Myth of Latin American Multiracialism

    The Myth of Latin American Multiracialism

    Daedalus
    Volume 134, Number 1 (Winter 2005)
    Pages 82-87
    DOI: 10.1162/0011526053124398

    Melissa Nobles, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science
    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    Many Latin American nations have long proudly proclaimed a multiracial ideal: unlike the United States, countries like Brazil and Mexico have celebrated the mixing of races, and claimed to extend equal rights and opportunities to all citizens, regardless of race. As a result of the region’s regnant faith in racial democracy, it has long been widely assumed that Latin American societies are nondiscriminatory and that their deep economic and social disparities have no racial or ethnic component.

    Yet new statistical evidence (a byproduct of democratization) suggests that most of the region’s societies have yet to surmount racial discrimination. At the very time that some in the United States have timidly embraced multiracialism as a fitting ideal for North Americans, Latin American critics have begun to argue that multiracialism, like racial democracy, functions as an ideology that masks enduring racial injustice and thus blocks substantial political, social, and economic reform.

    Latin American elites have always been deeply concerned about the racial stocks ol their populations and have always prized the European antecedents of their peoples and cultures—just like their Counterparts in the United States. But at the same time, and unlike their U.S. counterparts, Latin American political and cultural leaders in the first half of the twentieth century viewed their societies as unique products of racial intermingling. Sensing that such racial mingling might help define an emergent nationalism, intellectuals and statesmen argued that extensive racial mixture had resulted in the formation of new, characteristically ‘national’ races.

    For example, the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos (1882- 1959) famously celebrated the idea of racial mixture by arguing that all Latin Americans, and not just Mexicans, were a raza cósmica (cosmic race) comprised of both Spanish and indigenous peoples. But his conception of mixture left no doubt as to the…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Counting Multiracial People in the Census: The Unfulfilled Wish for More Data

    Counting Multiracial People in the Census: The Unfulfilled Wish for More Data

    Racism Review
    2010-03-26

    Jenifer L. Bratter, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Institute for Urban Research
    Rice University

    People who study the multiracial population are constantly confronted with the problem of small numbers to work with.  A recent article I co-authored on the multiracial health (Bratter, Jenifer and Bridget K. Gorman. Forthcoming. “Does Multiracial Matter? A Study of Racial Disparities in Self Rated Health.” Demography)  required combining seven years of data from a health survey (over 1.7 million cases) to get 20,000 mixed-race folks for analysis.  The 2000 Census, with its “check all that apply” race question, remains the database with the largest number of cases and the 2010 Census will be the first to count race the same way as the preceding installment. While this may sound like a mundane detail, this will allow us to gauge growth, decline, or stability of this population and whether this will affect the population bases of single-race communities.  If the sheer anticipation doesn’t shake you to your core, perhaps you have forgotten the history of introducing this option into the Census…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Biracial Youth and Their Parents: Counseling Considerations for Family Therapists

    Biracial Youth and Their Parents: Counseling Considerations for Family Therapists

    The Family Journal
    Volume 12, Number 2 (2004)
    pages 170-173
    DOI: 10.1177/1066480703261977

    Laurie McClurg
    University of Virginia

    In spite of recent developments in the area of multicultural family therapy, interracial families and their biracial children remain a neglected population in the mental health field. Very little research exists, and few suggestions have been made for working with this unique population. This article addresses the developmental needs of such families and provides suggestions for family counselors and therapists.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Jared Sexton: People of Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery

    Jared Sexton: People of Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery

    University of Northern Arizona
    Gardner Auditorium, W.A. Franke College of Business, NAU
    2010-03-25, 17:30 to 19:00 CDT (Local Time)

    Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies
    University of California, Irvine
     
    This lecture explores the significance of the ongoing shift in the color line from a white/non-white to black/non-black configuration in the post-civil rights era United States. It asks how we might reframe discussions of immigration, multiracialism (race mixture), and coalition-building among people of color in this context.

    For more information, click here.

  • Crises of Whiteness and Empire in Colonial Indochina: The Removal of Abandoned Eurasian Children From the Vietnamese Milieu, 1890–1956

    Crises of Whiteness and Empire in Colonial Indochina: The Removal of Abandoned Eurasian Children From the Vietnamese Milieu, 1890–1956

    Journal of Social History
    Volume 43, Number 3 (Spring 2010)
    pages 587-613
    E-ISSN: 1527-1897 Print ISSN: 0022-4529
    DOI: 10.1353/jsh.0.0304

    Christina Firpo, Assistant Professor of History
    California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

    From 1890–1956, non-governmental welfare agencies worked with the French colonial government in Indochina to remove Eurasian children, who had been abandoned by their French fathers, from their Vietnamese mothers and the Vietnamese cultural environment. In an era marked by historical exigencies, perceived threats to white prestige, and inherent challenges to the colonial patriarchy, such children were believed to be a threat to colonial security and white prestige. The racial formations of abandoned Eurasian children in colonial Indochina changed repeatedly in response to these threats. Drawing from the rhetoric of racial sciences and led by anxieties over changes colonial security, French civilians increasingly and colonial government administrators increasingly made the case that these children where white and must be removed from their Vietnamese mothers’ care, using force if necessary.

    Read the entire article here.

  • The beauty of difference

    The beauty of difference

    In The Fray
    2005-12-04

    Nicole Marie Pezold

    Zadie Smith’s latest novel, “On Beauty”, is many things. Chief among them: an homage to differences.

    For those of mixed heritage — who straddle more than one race, nationality, faith, class, or whatever else — uncovering a coherent identity can be a complicated emotional journey. There are multiple, potentially conflicting, avenues and models, and choosing one or melding several is difficult business. This may be part of why Zadie Smith—herself the product of an English father and Jamaican mother—returns to this endlessly rich topic in her third novel, On Beauty, which was short-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize. As with her acclaimed debut novel, White Teeth, published when she was a mere 23 years old, and her less stunning second book, The Autograph Man, Smith ambitiously mines the cultural morass of mixed worlds. Now, with her latest work, she paints her most vivid portrait of the challenges and ecstasies of multiculturalism…

    Read the entire article here.

  • 2010 Association for Asian American Studies Conference

    2010 Association for Asian American Studies Conference

    Omni Austin Hotel Downtown
    Austin, Texas
    2010-04-07 through 2010-04-10

    Theme: Emergent Cartographies: Asian American Studies in the Twenty-first Century

    Selected programs from the conference schedule:

    Panel
    Transnational Perspectives on Beauty and Skin Color: China, Indonesia, and the Philippines
    Friday 2010-04-09, 08:30-10:00 CDT (Local Time)

    Chair: Paul Spickard, University of California, Santa Barbara

    Amy Chang, Brown University
    Rich and Fair: The Culture of Skin Whitening in China and Its Impact on Chinese-Americans

    Joanne L. Rondilla, University of California, Berkeley
    “From Ebony to Ivory”: Global Beauty, the Mixed Race Body and Cosmetics Advertising

    L. Ayu Saraswati, University of Kansas
    Affecting Whiteness: The Performativity of Affect in Constructing Whiteness Transnationally

    Panel
    Queer Takes on Asian American Culture Production
    Friday 2010-04-09, 14:45-16:15 CDT (Local Time)

    Chair: Victor Roman Mendoza, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

    Kekoa C. Kaluhiokalani, Muskingum University
    Mixploitation, Counter-Apophasis, and James Duval: Mixed-Race Representation in Gregg Araki’s Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy

    Rick H. Lee, Rutgers University
    From A to Q: Literacy, Sexuality, and Shame in the Work of Justin Chin

    Martin Joseph Ponce, Ohio State University
    At Sea: Traveling Desires in The Book of Salt

    Panel
    Re-examining Japanese America
    Saturday, 2010-04-10, 08:30-10:00 CDT (Local Time)

    Chair: Eiichiro Azuma, University of Pennsylvania (?)

    Cathleen K. Kozen, University of California, San Diego
    ‘Never Again!’: The Case of Japanese Latin/American Redress and the Politics of (Un)redressability

    Christina Chin, University of California, Los Angeles
    “Aren’t you a little short to play basketball?”: Gender roles and dynamics within Japanese American youth basketball leagues

    Rachel Endo, The College of Saint Mary
    Beyond Kodomo No Tame Ni: Japanese Immigrant Mothers and the Socialization of the New Nisei

    Lily Anne Yumi Welty, University of California, Santa Barbara
    Multiraciality and Migration: Mixed Race American Japanese 1945-1972

    For more information, click here.

  • The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries

    The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries

    Palgrave Macmillan
    January 2005
    176 pages
    Size 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
    Paperback ISBN: 1-4039-6708-3
    Hardcover ISBN: 1-4039-6563-3

    Edited by:

    Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Assistant Professor of Luso-Brazilian Literature
    University of California, San Diego

    The Masters and the Slaves theorizes the interface of plantation relations with nationalist projects throughout the Americas. In readings that cover a wide range of genres–from essays and scientific writing to poetry, memoirs and the visual arts–this work investigates the post-slavery discourses of Brazil, the United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti and Martinique. Indebted to Orlando Patterson‘s Slavery and Social Death (1982) and Paul Gilroy‘s The Black Atlantic (1993), these essays fill a void in studies of plantation power relations for their comparative, interdisciplinary approach and their investment in reading slavery through the gaze of contemporary theory, with particularly strong ties to psychoanalytic and gender studies interrogations of desire and performativity.

    Table of contents

  • White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity

    White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity

    Palgrave Macmillan
    December 2007
    208 pages
    Size 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
    Hardcover ISBN: 1-4039-7595-7

    Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Associate Professor of Luso-Brazilian Literature
    University of California, San Diego

    White Negritude analyzes the discourse of mestiçagem (mestizaje, métissage, or “mixing”) in Brazil. Focused on Gilberto Freyre‘s sociology of plantation relations, it interrogates the relation of power to writing and canon formation, and the emergence of an exclusionary, ethnographic discourse that situates itself as the gatekeeper of African “survivals” in decline. Taking Freyre’s master/slave paradigm as a point of departure for theorizing a particular form of racial and authorial impostery, this book analyzes the construction of race and raced writing in Brazil in relation to U.S. identity politics and Caribbean “mestizo projects.”

    Table of Contents

    • Vanishing Primitives: An Introduction
    • Poetry and the Plantation: Jorge de Lima‘s White Authorship in a Caribbean Perspective
    • White Man in the Tropics: Authorship and Atmospheric Blackness in Gilberto Freyre
    • Joaquim Nabuco: Abolitionism and Erasure in the Americas
    • From the Plantation Manor to the Sociologist’s Study: Democracy, Lusotropicalism, and the Scene of Writing