Mixed Race Studies

Black and Yellow: Blasian Narratives

Psychology Today
2015-04-07

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu Ed.D.

Crossing racial borders through storytelling

Saturday night I went to an event called, Black and Yellow: Blasian Narratives, featuring students from Stanford joining a group from Morehouse and Spelman, two historically black colleges. The students presented both monologues and interactive storytelling. Their diversity was stunning, Asian being Korean, Chinese, Sri Lankan, Japanese, and Vietnamese, with diverse forms of Black as well, from the Caribbean to Ghana. The purpose of the project by Canon Empire, a Cambodian American filmmaker and storyteller, is to unite Asian and Black communities through “Blasian” narratives and intimate and critical dialogues about race. He seeks to illuminate the reality that two communities historically socialized to see each other as polarized opposites and as competition and comparisons actually have much in common.

The presentations showed the complexity of lives that cross borders and enter liminal and marginal spaces, where creativity can flourish. Each person, in their own unique way, expressed their identities-in-flux, as if they were re-creating it right there on stage. As I watched them perform I was reminded of the wisdom of the identity scholar Erikson, who reminded us that: “Identity consciousness is overcome by a sense of identity won in action.”…

Read the entire article here.

Race in a Baby’s Face

Psychology Today
2014-07-28

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Ed.D, Psychologist and Co-founder
Stanford University LifeWorks program for Integrative Learning

Crawling the color line

Race is supposedly something objective, even biological, that we’re ascribed at birth and marks us through our whole lives, assigning us to a group that separates us from others. But for many people race is ambiguous, complex, and uncertain. I’ve never understood my race or that of my children. And for the newest babies in my extended family, it’s not clear at all what their race is supposed to be.

When my niece had a baby, a beautiful boy, everyone oohed and aahed when they saw the cute little guy. One of his cousins glowed, “Oh he’s so cute!”  But suddenly a puzzled expression came over him and he looked at the baby’s father, then at the mother, and back at the baby and blurted out: “Wait…..they had a white baby?”…

Read the entire article here.

When Dad Wiped Away My Tears: Accepting a Child’s Vulnerability

Psychology Today
2014-06-15

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu Ed.D.
Stanford University

I thought summer camp would be endless fun. My two best friends were going and I wanted to go with them so badly I asked my dad to lie about my age so I could get in. I was seven and you were supposed to be eight. Dad liked my spunk, so he changed my birthday on the application and I got to go to the two-week overnight camp. On Father’s Day I always remember this story with gratitude and want to share it with you.

Camp Russell wasn’t quite what I had dreamed about. It wasn’t a rich kids’ camp, but the Boy’s Club camp and was full of tough kids from all over the city. I was scared and tried not to be noticed, but as the only Asian kid there I stood out everywhere I went. Kids would whisper to each other when I walked by or shout from a distance, “Hey Jap” or “Ching, Chong, Chinaman!” and everyone would laugh or pretend to speak Chinese. I didn’t know what to do. There were too many and they were too big to fight. So I pretended not to hear anything and no one approached me or threatened me. I was big for my age and I heard them joking that I knew karate…

Read the entire article here.

Things to Know When Talking About Race and Genetics

Psychology Today
2014-05-13

Agustín Fuentes, Professor of Anthropology
University of Notre Dame

On May 5th, 2014, I shared the platform in a webinar debate with Nicholas Wade (former NYTimes Science Writer) about his new book “A Troublesome Inheritance – A discussion on genes, race and human history.” The debate was sponsored by the American Anthropological Association.

Wade’s assertions in the book (and our discussion) are that Humans are divided into genetically identified “continental races” and that there are significant differences in genetically based social behaviors between these “races” as a result of the last 50,000 years of human evolution.

Wade argues that social scientists are covering up these ideas and claims that a true discussion on race is repressed by most academics out of political correctness. These points were also made by Charles Murray in a laudatory review of Wade’s book in the Wall Street Journal. They are both wrong.

I am an academic and I love to talk about the data on race, so do many of my colleagues. The scientific data on human genetic variation and human evolution refute the claims there are multiple biological races in humans today and in the debate I offered articles, datasets, and work by biologists, geneticists, evolutionary theorists and even anthropologists to demonstrate this. Unfortunately, in such discussions the bulk of data, and its complexity, are too often ignored.

Avoiding direct challenge is a common tactic by people trying to use select slices of genetic data to “prove” that there are multiple biological races in humans today. This is a problem because dialogue on such an important topic should be encouraged and as open minded as possible, but it must also be accurately informed by the science of human biology. So here is a mini-primer on what we what we know about human genetics to help such a discussion (see the bibliography at the bottom of this post for very good articles on the topic)…

…5) Nearly all the genetic variation in our entire species is found in populations just in Africa, with most of the variation found in all populations outside of Africa making up a small subset of that variation…

…Given these facts, here is the key argument you need to remember: While different populations vary in some of the .1% of the genome, the way this variation is distributed does not map to biological races, either by continent or otherwise.

For example, when you compare people from Nigeria, Western Europe and Beijing you do get some patterned differences…but these specific groups do not reflect the entire continental areas of Africa, Europe, and Asia (the proposed “continental races” of African, Caucasian and Asian). There are no genetic patterns that link all populations in just Africa, just Asia or just Europe to one another to the exclusion of other populations in other places. If you compare geographically separated populations within the “continental” areas you get the same kind of variation as you would between them. Comparing Nigerians to Western Europeans to people from Beijing gives us the same kind of differences in variation patterns as does comparing people from Siberia, Tibet and Java, or from Finland, Wales and Yemen, or even Somalia, Liberia and South Africa— and none of these comparisons demonstrates “races.”…

Read the entire article here.

Four Simple Reasons Smart People Shouldn’t Believe in Races

Psychology Today
About Thinking: Questioning everything with a hopeful skeptic
2013-12-23

Guy P. Harrison

Today is a good day to wake up and join the human species.

Guess what I do almost every time race and racism are discussed in popular culture. I groan and turn away in discomfort. The curse of an anthropology education makes me painfully aware of how clueless politicians, writers, broadcasters, and virtually everyone else are on this topic. Whenever some celebrity utters the dreaded N-word or a person of one race does something horrible to a person of another race, the voices of authority take center stage and call for understanding, love and cooperation between races.

Blah, blah, blah.

Such reactions to race problems may feel nice and do some good but they are too shallow to be effective long-term. The problem is that they completely miss the core problem, which is race belief itself. Races are not naturally occurring subspecies of human beings. They are the artificial creations of our cultures. Therefore, attempting to solve the problem of racism by asking for tolerance between races is like turning up the air conditioner in a burning house because you don’t like the temperature. Overt racism and all other destructive but less obvious race problems are unlikely to ever go away no matter how much love and tolerance we pour on the fire. What is needed is a game-changer, an awakening to the reality of who we are as revealed by science.

The critical problem with biological races is the claim that we are all inherently limited or empowered based on our birth into a unique genetic group that contains millions of other similar people. Many good people who champion racial equality and would not be considered racists carry this destructive belief in their heads. But it can’t be true because the groups themselves are unnatural, inconsistent and illogical. The biological race group called “black people”, for example, makes no sense because of the deep genetic diversity within it. Two randomly selected “black” people from Africa, the Caribbean or elsewhere are likely to be more distantly related to one another than any one of them is to a typical “white” European…

…1. The police lineup in your head. By far, the most common objection I hear to the rejection of biological races comes from what I call the “mental police lineup”. It’s easy to imagine a dark-skinned African, a light-skinned European, and a typical Japanese or Chinese person all standing side-by-side. The visible contrast is so great, I’m often told, that races must be real. There is an easy answer to this popular defense of the race concept, however…

Read the entire article here.

Obama as Wounded Healer

Psychology Today
Ideals in Question: Exploring values in psychotherapeutic culture
2013-08-02

Stephen Salter, Psy.D.

Validating the context of racial trauma

On July 19th, Barack Obama honored the life of Trayvon Martin by giving voice to the history of racial trauma in the African American community.  “It could have been me,” Obama states in reference to Trayvon.  The remark reminds me of the old proverb, “There but for the grace of God go I.”  Obama’s kinship with Trayvon relates of course to their identities as African Americans.

He delivered a 17 minute off the cuff speech with unprecedented candor, provoking powerful reactions that diverged along racial, political, and personal lines.

For Barack Obama, Trayvon Martin’s death was a trauma.  It set off a chain of recollections that were outside of the flow of day to day experience, revealing additional dimension of his character.  His recollections pointed toward his personal past, his identity as a black man, and his connectedness to the history of African American trauma…

Read the entire article here.

What Does the Brazilian Census Tell Us About Race?

Psychology Today
2011-12-06

Jefferson Fish, Ph.D.

Problems with Brazilian and U.S. census data on race.

In 2010 I posted a six-part series on the U. S. census and race (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). In it I pointed out numerous changes in race categories and sub-categories over the 23 censuses, and multiple contradictions between scientific knowledge about human variation and the census race categories. I also offered a simple solution that would allow the government to collect the information it needs without contradicting science and offending or perplexing many citizens.

Because race is a cultural concept, beliefs about race vary dramatically from one culture to another. In this regard, America and Brazil are amazingly different in the categories they use. The United States has a small number of racial categories, based overwhelmingly on ancestry. Thus, it is possible for an American who “looks white” to “really be black” because he or she has “black blood.”

In contrast, Brazilians classify people according to what they look like, using a large number of different terms. For example, one study in the Brazilian northeast conducted by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE)—the entity responsible for the census—asked people what color (cor) they were, and received 134 different answers! (Other studies have found even larger numbers; and the results vary regionally, with much fewer categories used in the south of the country.) In many Brazilian families different racial terms are used to refer to different children, while such distinctions are not possible in the United States because all the children—no matter what they look like—have the same ancestry.

Thus, I was fascinated to read that “For the first time, non-white people make up the majority of Brazil’s population, according to preliminary results of the 2010 census.”…

Read the entire article here.

The One Drop Rule: How Black Is “Black?”

Psychology Today
Blogs: In the Eye of the Beholder: The science of social perception
2011-04-07

Jason Plaks, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology
University of Toronto

The perception of race is subjective.

Many biracial people publicly identify themselves with only one race (for example, either black or white, but not both). President Obama raised eyebrows when he checked only one box on his 2010 Census form: “Black, African American, or Negro.” Halle Berry (who is biracial), in discussing her one-quarter black daughter, Nahla, has stated, “I feel she’s black. I’m black and I’m her mother, and I believe in the one-drop theory.” When pressed on why Nahla, who is 75 percent white, should be considered black, she conceded that Nahla may ultimately have some choice in the matter, but added, “I think, largely, that will be based on how the world identifies her.” In other words, according to Berry, regardless of how she may choose to self-identify, as long as she has “one drop” of black blood, the world will see her as black.

Is this true? Clearly, there is a good deal of idiosyncratic variation from person to person in terms of how prototypical they are of a particular race. But if you average across many people, what do observers generally view as the threshold where one race ends and the other race begins?

A team of researchers led by Arnold Ho of Harvard University recently examined this question by using a face-morphing computer program. In one study, participants were presented with faces on a computer screen. They were told that each time they pressed the “continue” button the face currently on the screen would morph slightly (in reality, 1 percent increments) into a different race. They were further instructed to keep pressing “continue” until the exact moment they felt that the person on the screen now belonged to another race…

…The legal definition of race membership has a checkered history. Although the precise figure differed from state to state, many U.S. states outlined specific fractions of blackness a person needed to possess in order to be considered legally black (and therefore ineligible for rights and privileges that were exclusive to whites). Similar rules existed for Native Americans. Nowadays, the tables have turned in some respects. Because in some cases being black or Native American can be an advantage (for example, some affirmative action policies), many are motivated to see the threshold lowered so that the category is more inclusive, not less. In other words, we see some movement in the direction back toward the one-drop rule…

Read the entire article here.

Looking in the Cultural Mirror: How understanding race and culture helps us answer the question: “Who am I?”

Psychology Today
2010-07-06

Jefferson M. Fish, Ph.D.

The Census and Race—Part I–Key Issues: What can science tell us about the census’s race questions? (2010-07-06)

The 2010 Census is well on its way to completion. Its controversial questions about race have raised many issues that deserve to be explored in depth. This is the first post in a multi-part series dealing with the census’s race questions and what we can learn from them about science, politics, and American culture…

The Census and Race—Part II—Slavery (1790-1860): How did the census deal with race during slavery? (2010-07-13)

…The term “color”–not “race”– first appeared in the 1850 census, with three options: white, black, or mulatto; and these options were repeated in 1860. Whatever folk beliefs about “race” Americans may have held prior to the Civil War, they were of secondary importance. Instead, the census questions were organized around the institution of slavery, and were aimed at getting the information needed to apportion taxes and allocate congressional representation.

The key to understanding these questions is political, not biological. The Three-Fifths Compromise, was the deal that made possible the formation of a national government consisting of both free states and slave states; and it did so by counting each slave as 3/5 of a person. (The constitution euphemistically avoided the words “slave” or “slavery” by referring to “other Persons.”) The interrelatedness of the three critical issues of congressional representation, the distribution of taxes, and the creation of the census is embodied in the way they are bound together in just two sentences. Here is the relevant part of Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution:..

Read part II here.

The Census and Race—Part III— Reconstruction to the Great Depression (1870-1940): How did the census deal with race during segregation? (2010-07-20)

…The terms mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon reify the non-scientific American folk concept of blood. Blood is a biological entity, and many people inaccurately believe that it is the same as genes. The following explanation shows why they are wrong.

Suppose that there are eight genes for race, so that a mulatto has four black genes and four white genes, a quadroon has two black genes and six white genes, and an octoroon has one black gene and seven white genes. Now suppose that a mulatto man and a mulatto woman have a lot of children. Each child would get half its genes from the father and half from the mother. One child might get all four white genes from each parent and be 100% white, another might get all four black genes from each parent and be 100% black, and other children might wind up with all the other possible combinations of white and black genes. However, American culture views mulattos as black (e.g., President Obama); and believes that two blacks cannot have a 100% white baby. This is why the folk concept of blood does not act like genes…

• The Census and Race—Part IV— Civil Rights and the Cold War (1950-1980): What is special about the census categories White, Japanese, and Chinese? (2010-07-27)
• The Census and Race—Part V—(1990-2010): How do Samoans differ from Tahitians on the census? (2010-08-03)
• The Census and Race—Part VI—Summary of Trends/Lessons Learned: What have we learned from comparing all of the censuses since 1790? (2010-08-10)

President Obama checks the “Black” box Evidently it’s official: Barack Obama is the nation’s first black president.

Psychology Today
2010-04-04

Samantha Smithstein, Psy.D., Clinical and Forensic Psychologist and Co-Founder
Pathways Institute for Impulse Control, San Francisco

This week, the New York Times reported that “It is official: Barack Obama is the nation’s first black president.” Evidently, President Obama chose to check the “African-American” box when defining his race for the 2010 census

…From the perspective of science and biological anthropology, race does not exist. In other words, there is not one gene, trait, or characteristic that distinguishes all members of one race from all members of another. In fact, eighty-five percent of all human variation can be found in any local population, and a full ninety-four percent can be found on any continent. In other words, there are no sub-species when it comes to humans; we are, in truth, one of the most genetically similar to each other species of all species on earth…

Read the entire article here.