Mixed Race Studies

Immigration’s Racial Complexity

The Washington Post
Political Bookworm: Where tomorrow’s must-read political books are discovered today
2010-07-09

Steven E. Levingston

Will today’s Latino and Asian immigrants become incorporated into American society like their European predecessors? Or will race remain a stumbling block to full assimilation? Jennifer Lee and Frank Bean explore these questions in their new book “The Diversity Paradox: Immigration and the Color Line in Twenty-First Century America,” recently released by the Russell Sage Foundation. What they discover is that second-generation Asians and Latinos are not as constrained by racial categories as are African-Americans. A key to the question may lie in the state of intermarriage.

By Jennifer Lee and Frank D. Bean

The United States is more racially diverse than ever before. New non-European immigrant groups such as Latinos and Asians made up only 5 and 1 percent of the nation’s population in 1970, but today, they account for 15 and 5 percent, respectively. According to Census projections, by 2050, they will soar to 30 and 9 percent.

Immigration alone, however, is only one factor contributing to the country’s new diversity. Interracial marriages, which increased from 1 percent in 1960 to 7 percent in 2008, are contributing to this growing diversity. According to a Pew Research Center study released June 3, 1 in 6 marriages in the U.S. is interracial.

Along with the growth in intermarriage is the rise in the number of Americans who chose to identify multiracially. Accounting for just 2.2 percent of the U.S. population in 2008, some analysts project that multiracial Americans will account for 1 in 5 Americans by 2050, and 1 in 3 by 2100. Such trends appear to portend a post-racial society where racial divides are disappearing. However, a closer look at racial group differences tells a bleaker story…

Read the entire article here.

Lost in the Middle: Growing up Across Racial & Cultural Divides

The Washington Post
1998-05-17

Malcolm Gladwell

His parents conqured racial difference with dignity and relative ease.  But race became a more complicated question for their son.

One summer Saturday, when I was growing up, my father piled my brothers and me into the family station wagon and took us to a barn raising. This was in rural southern Ontario, in the heart of Canada’s Old Order Mennonite country, where it was the custom when someone’s barn burned down for friends and neighbors to rebuild it. There were probably 200 people there that day. They came from the surrounding farms in black horse-drawn buggies, the women in gauzy caps and gingham dresses, the men in white shirts and black pants. The women set up long picnic tables outside, and piled them high with bread and luncheon meats and pickles, and pies for dessert. The men swarmed over the skeleton of the barn, those on the roof and on ladders against the walls hammering away in unison, everyone else forming a long human chain, passing plywood and roofing metal and nails hand to hand to hand from the bottom to the top. It was a marvel of improvisational coordination, a communitarian ballet of burly cleanshaven Mennonite farmers in straw hats and loose cotton shirts, and in the midst of it all, in happy and oblivious contrast to everything around him, was my father — slender, bearded and professorial, in the tie he rarely left the house without…

…Once my mother graduated, they began a period of frantic courtship. Two weeks later, my mother returned to Jamaica to teach again, and my father informed his parents that they intended to marry. It was a difficult moment. My paternal grandparents had grave objections to mixed marriages. They objected, citing New Testament verses to the effect that God had set boundaries for the habitation of nations. “It’s wrong for Graham to have a black child,” my grandmother told my mother. “It is wrong for you to have a white child.” It is easy, I think, with the benefit of hindsight, to conceive of my grandparents as bigoted or small-minded. But that was not it at all. They were simply expressing what my father, apparently, could not see, that his decision to marry my mother was a revolutionary act. When my father made it clear that he would not be moved, they acquiesced. His three sisters were my mother’s bridesmaids. Her wedding veil was my grandmother’s wedding veil…

…I am not like my parents. I do not have my father’s gift for overcoming social barriers, nor my mother’s gift for appreciating when differences are not relevant. I go back and forth now between my two sides. I never feel my whiteness more than when I’m around West Indians, and never feel my West Indianness more than when I’m with whites. And when I’m by myself, I can’t answer the question at all, so I just push it out of my mind. From time to time, I write about racial issues, and always stumble over personal pronouns. When do I use “we”? In a room full of people I do not know, I always search out the ones who fall into the middle, like me, out of some irrational idea that we belong together.

I worry sometimes that this is the wrong thing for the child of a mixed marriage to feel. My parents conquered difference, and we would all like to think that sort of accomplishment is something that could be passed down from generation to generation. That’s why we’re all, in theory, so excited by the idea of miscegenation — because if we mix the races, presumably, we create a new generation of people for whom existing racial categories do not exist. I don’t think it’s that easy, though. If you mix black and white, you don’t obliterate those categories; you merely create a third category, a category that demands, for its very existence, an even greater commitment to nuances of racial taxonomy. My mother never had to think about whether she was black. She was. I have to think about it, and turn the issue over in my mind, and gaze in the mirror and wonder, as I was so memorably asked, what I am…

Read the entire article here.

Stop the finger-wagging about Obama’s Census form

The Washington Post
2010-04-29

Kevin Huffman

It’s tough being president. In the last year, pretty much every constituency has expressed disappointment in some facet of Barack Obama’s work or play.

Now, apparently, the president is even letting down biracial children with his choice of Census categories. Elizabeth Chang writes in a Post op-ed that the president shouldn’t have identified as “black” on the Census given that he is mixed race. She even goes so far as to say that it is “disingenuous” and that “there is an important consequence when our president does not acknowledge half of his heritage, or, more basically, the mother and grandparents who raised him, or even his commonality with his sister, who is also biracial, though with a different mix.”

Let me start by suggesting this may slightly over-value the deep personal meaning of the Census form. I viewed the form as a seven-minute exercise in ensuring that the District of Columbia gets to count my whole family as residents. Maybe we can even get enough funding to fix the Metro escalators. I hadn’t realized the need to express solidarity with my relatives and ancestors, living and dead…

Anyway, like Chang, my kids are half Asian and half white, which led me to identify them on the Census as… Asian. My brother is half black and half white. He went with biracial. Somehow neither of these decisions has resulted in meaningfully different personal connections for my family.

Read the entire op-ed here.

Why Obama should not have checked ‘black’ on his census form

The Washington Post
2010-04-29

Elizabeth Chang, Sunday Magazine Editor

I have always considered Barack Obama to be biracial, and I had hoped that his election would help our country move beyond the tired concept of race. Unfortunately, the president is not getting with my program.

Although I knew Obama self-identifies as African American, I was disappointed when I read that that’s what he checked on his census form. The federal government, finally heeding the desires of multiracial people to be able to accurately define themselves, had changed the rules in 2000, so he could have also checked white. Or he could have checked “some other race.” Instead, Obama went with black alone…

…I am the mother of biracial children (Asian/Caucasian) and believe that multiracial people need to be accepted and acknowledged — even celebrated. The president’s choice disappoints me, and it seems somewhat disingenuous. Obama, who has also referred to himself as a “mutt,” made a big deal during the 2008 campaign of being able to relate to Hawaiians and Midwesterners, Harvard grads and salespeople, blacks, whites, Latinos, whatever — precisely because of his “unconventional” background and multicultural exposure. On the census, however, he has effectively said that when it counts, he is black…

Read the entire article here.