Mixed Race Studies

Before state’s high court: role of race in identifying a face

Seattle Times
2012-03-03

Ken Armstrong, Staff Reporter

In a case out of Seattle’s University District, the Washington State Supreme Court is being asked to determine whether jurors should be told that eyewitnesses who identify strangers across racial lines — for example, a white man identifying a black man — are more likely to be mistaken.

In State of Washington v. Bryan Edward Allen, two issues intersect that could hardly be of greater importance to the functioning of the criminal-justice system: the role of race, and the reliability of eyewitnesses.

The case, argued Thursday before the state Supreme Court, is also about sunglasses. We’ll get to that later.

On an August evening in 2009, in Seattle’s University District, Gerald Marcus Kovacs called 911 and said a stranger on the street had just threatened to kill him. Within minutes, police picked up Bryan Allen at a nearby bus stop. Officers took Kovacs to Allen and asked: Is this the guy? “Yeah, definitely, that is 100 percent him,” Kovacs told police.

Two months later, Allen was convicted of felony harassment. He received a sentence of 14 months.

Kovacs is white. Allen is black.

Allen’s appeal argues that when the case was tried in King County Superior Court, the judge should have instructed jurors that when someone from one race identifies a stranger from another race, the chances of a mistake go up.

An assemblage of professors and legal advocacy groups — including the Innocence Network, the Washington Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington Foundation, and the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality — filed briefs in support, saying a wealth of research shows that people often struggle to distinguish faces outside their own racial group…

…Arguing the other side, Deborah Dwyer, a King County prosecutor, did not challenge the science on cross-racial identifications. Instead, she took issue with having a trial judge tackle the matter rather than having an expert witness testify.

The proposed instructions would not only violate the state’s constitution, Dwyer said, but invite all kinds of “practical difficulties.”

“Our society now is increasingly made up of mixed-race people. Well, what race are they? To take an example we could all relate to: President Obama. He is of mixed racial heritage. If he’s an eyewitness to a crime, is he presumed to be able to identify white people and black people? Or, perhaps, neither?”

Dwyer also asked: “Does race include ethnicity?” Some studies say Chinese people struggle to distinguish Japanese people, and vice versa. Would trial judges need to instruct jurors in cases like that? And if someone’s race isn’t entirely clear, how is a judge to figure that out?…

Read the entire article here.

This is who I am: Defining mixed-race identity

The Seattle Times
2008-09-28

Lornet Turnbull, Seattle Times staff

The story of race in the U.S. is changing, and so is the way many of us identify ourselves. That’s especially true in the Seattle area, which has a higher concentration of mixed-race people than any other metro area in the country.

Rachel Clad’s parents are a black woman from Detroit and a white man from California who met in the Peace Corps in Africa.

Clad, 26, was born in New Zealand and spent her early years in far-flung parts of the world before her family settled into a middle-class lifestyle in Washington, D.C.

She’ll tell you she’s multiracial.

“People look at me and see African American,” she said. “In my mind, that’s not who I am. I’m both and I’d like to be seen as both.”.

Aaron Hazard’s mother was a French-Canadian white woman who met his African-American father at a dance in Boston in the 1930s, at a time when such unions were forbidden.

When he signed up for service during the Vietnam era, the Army listed him as white, although Hazard has never referred to himself as anything other than black.

“It’s what my father was and that’s what I am,” the 62-year-old South Seattle resident said. “Back then there were too many white people to remind me of it.”

Barack Obama’s rise to prominence has broadened the dialogue around race in a country that has always done a poor job talking about it. And this new attention is prompting some people of mixed race to more closely examine how they define themselves.

That’s especially so in Greater Seattle, which has a higher concentration of mixed-race people — nearly 4 percent of the area’s population — than any other large metropolitan area in the country.

“One of the biggest mistakes people make in this discussion is assuming there’s only one correct way to be biracial,” said author Elliott Lewis, who grew up in Eastern Washington and has written about the biracial experience…

…”There were historical rules … that if you were mixed and had a parent who wasn’t white, then you checked the census box of the parent who wasn’t white,” said Maria P. P. Root, a Seattle clinical psychologist who has written extensively on mixed race in America.

“There was this gate-keeping around whiteness. The public still hasn’t gotten around to the fact that you can be blended.”…

Read the entire article here.