Mixed Race Studies

Beyond Biracial: When Blackness Is a Small, Nearly Invisible Fraction

The Root
2014-05-12

Jenée Desmond-Harris, Senior Staff Writer and White House Correspondent

In the past, these Americans would have been labeled “quadroons” or “octoroons.” Today their options are so much broader. What can they teach us about race in 2014 and in the future?

Stephanie Troutman, a 36-year-old professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., has a white mother and a black father. She has her own family’s racial elevator speech down to a single sentence: “I’m a mixed woman who has a child with a black man and a child with a white man.” Her 7-year-old son, Rex, is unambiguous when it comes to his racial identity and “very pro black,” even protesting when he’s described as merely “brown,” she says.

With her 11-year-old daughter, Melora—whose pale, golden-hued skin; light eyes; and long, copper-colored hair prompt strangers to ask if she’s “Mediterranean” or “Arab”—things aren’t as simple.

“For now I’ve told her that she’s a person of color. That’s the best way I can explain it. I want to take it away from black and white because those are weird options for her,” Troutman says. “But I always kind of knew that I’d have a kid who looked white, and I was right. When Melora was born, my friends were like, ‘How did her dad’s white hippie granola genes completely beat out your biracial genes?’ ”

Despite those biracial genes, Troutman realized as a teen that most people see her as “just light skinned” (in other words, black). That hit home one day in the mid-1990s when, in a classically tragic black-identity-forming moment, a Florida stranger yelled “nigger” at her from a passing car.

“At first I was like, ‘Damn, that’s kind of messed up. Who are they yelling at?’ And then I realized I was the only person on the street.”

Read the entire article here.

Americans Say Obama’s Not Black? How Pew Got This Wrong

The Root
2014-04-14

Jenée Desmond-Harris, Senior Staff Writer and White House Correspondent

Saying “Yes, Obama is mixed race” is not the same as saying “No, he’s not black.” Racial Identity 101: You can be both.

Twenty-seven percent of Americans say President Barack Obama is black, while 52 percent say he’s mixed race.

That’s part of a newly published Pew Research Center report that has inspired jarring headlines like these about perceptions of the man commonly (formerly?) known as the first African-American president:

“Is Barack Obama ‘Black’? A Majority of Americans Say No”

“Poll: Majority of Americans Say Obama Is Mixed-Race, Not Black”

The Washington Post calls the data “fascinating.”

But it’s actually not. The only thing fascinating (read: frustrating) is why Pew would force people to choose between these two options. By setting up “black” and “mixed race” as mutually exclusive, as it appears to have done in the “Obama: Black or Mixed Race” (emphasis mine) portion of its poll, it offered Americans a misleading choice that doesn’t reflect their social reality, and certainly doesn’t tell us anything new about how they see their president.

If participants were, in fact, forced to choose between the two options, knowing that Obama self-identifies as black and knowing, too, that he has a white parent and a black parent, it makes sense to assume that many people simply picked the most specific option: “mixed race.”

That does not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean they say “no” to his being black…

Read the entire article here.

Ties to Thomas Jefferson Unravel Family Mystery

The Root
2014-01-26

Gayle Jessup White

A woman seeks answers to decades-old questions about whether her family is related to the descendants of Thomas Jefferson.

ore than 40 years ago, I learned of my family’s ancestral ties to Thomas Jefferson. It was a blood connection impossible to prove, and one seldom discussed, as my father was ashamed of his mother’s out-of-wedlock birth. Still, he acknowledged that he’d heard from an older generation that Jefferson was his lineal ancestor. The tie was a mystery because the only black descendants we knew of were from Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, and we couldn’t find the link.

Dad also painfully confessed that his mother’s life was a mystery—she and his five older sisters died of tuberculosis in 1920 when he was 5 years old, leaving him and his older brother to be raised by a taciturn father and a cold stepmother. He remembered little about his mother, and seemed to know even less. He did offer these tidbits: She was born in Charlottesville, Va., home of Jefferson’s Monticello, and she sometimes called herself Eva Robinson, other times Eva Taylor. No one knew why.

Like most African Americans, oral history is my primary source for deep family roots. There are no birth certificates, marriage licenses or census records. Our great-great grandmothers, great-great grandfathers, aunts, uncles and cousins were items on manifests, bills of sale and plantation ledgers. Sometimes, our forefathers or their families owned our foremothers. This was apparently the case in my family. But I wasn’t to learn that for decades.

No, 40 years ago, I was accepting of what scant evidence I had, and for me, there was little doubt of my father’s Jefferson family bona fides. Dad was tall—6 feet 2 inches—freckle-faced and, in his youth, redheaded. He even had, I would learn years later, the Jefferson family nose, one that sloped gently. It was evident that there were whites in the woodpile, as folks used to say.

So when after years of collecting what little tangible proof was available, including a Bible engraved with the initials D.T. and the date 1821, which belonged to my grandmother and which I inherited from my uncle, and a baptismal certificate signed Eva Taylor Jessup, I was thrilled to find more circumstantial evidence. With the help of Thomas Jefferson scholar Lucia (Cinder) Stanton, I saw a 1900 census record listing my grandmother. She was a domestic servant living in the home of Jefferson’s great-granddaughter. I almost wept when I read Cinder’s words: “Could this Eva Robinson be your grandmother?” Cinder, who had built a highly regarded career studying Jefferson and his Monticello slaves and is the author of “Those Who Labor for My Happiness: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello,” seemed very confident.

It wasn’t long before she found my great-grandmother, one Rachael Robinson, in the 1870 census records, unmarried and with two children described as “mulattos.” Living as a bachelor and just one household away was Moncure Robinson Taylor, my probable great-grandfather and Jefferson’s great-great grandson, and the man who most likely fathered her children. Additionally, in 1901, my grandmother, Eva Robinson Taylor, left Charlottesville for Washington, D.C., where she was married. Around the same time, Moncure Robinson Taylor, then 40 years old, married for the first time. An interesting coincidence, or had Rachael, my great-grandmother, died, leaving Eva free to move to the city and Moncure free to marry? There’s no written evidence of that, no death certificate, but it’s possible. Cinder said the discoveries made her tingle. To say I felt the same would be an understatement.

So I‘ve learned my family is probably descended from the Taylor line, explaining why my grandmother sometimes used that surname. I started attending lectures about Jefferson, taking my friends to Monticello, Googling Thomas Jefferson and African-American descendants. It was the Googling that delivered. I read about Tess Taylor, a poet and a white Jefferson descendant. She’d written a book of poems, The Forage House, about her conflicting feelings of being descended from the country’s most enigmatic slave-holder. I sensed a connection, I reached out and she reached back. I would learn later that Tess’ great-great-grandfather was Moncure’s brother, and my great uncle. That would make Tess my third cousin, once removed…

Read the entire article here.

Biracial Girls Will Be Fine If Their Dolls Don’t Look Like Them

The Root
2013-12-27

Jenée Desmond-Harris

Race Manners: A rainbow of toys is great, but how kids live is much more important than how they play.

“Hello. I’m wondering if you can offer some broad guidance before I head out to the malls for Christmas shopping. I have two beautiful nieces in a very diverse, melting pot family. My sisters and I are white, and one has a daughter who is half-Japanese, and my younger sister’s husband is half-African American. The two little ones are 4 and 6. Both are very much in the girly-girl phase, pink, purple, dolls, etc. and also great friends.

“I’m well aware that there are now, thankfully, dolls in many different ethnicities and even with different hair textures. But what’s the right choice for these two? The 4-year-old is Japanese and Caucasian but has light brown hair and essentially looks more like brunette white dolls. The 6-year-old who is half African American has fair skin and long dark hair and probably looks more like white dolls than African-American dolls. If I purchase dolls for them, should they receive the ones that reflect their nonwhite ethnicity or the way they look, or does it matter if they are at this point unaware of any color-related differences?” —Shopping Sensitively

Well, Christmas is over, but I decided to answer this anyway. After all, the relationship between little girls of color and dolls is by no means limited to the holiday season.

It’s why people were so ecstatic (seriously, what took so long?) when Natural Girls United’s line of dolls with realistic black hair came out and why it was so moving when the mom behind Chocolate Hair/Vanilla Care styled this doll’s hair so its braids (as well as its complexion and outfit) would match her daughter’s exactly.

Generally speaking, it sucks if little girls can’t access dolls that look like what they see in the mirror (that extends beyond race to body shape and size, etc). And when they can, everyone is happy. I think we can all agree on that.

Of course, when it comes to color, hair and background matching, your situation is extra complicated because you’re dealing with kids whose identity is up in the air (it’s anyone’s guess how they’ll see themselves 10 years from now when America’s demographics have changed even more), and who might not look anything like what a factory-made plastic representation of their particular racial mixtures would, even if those existed.

I just read—and can’t stop thinking about—Yaba Blay’s (1)ne Drop, which explores the way historical definitions of race help shape contemporary identities through a collection of individual stories and accompanying photos. Let’s just say there’s a lot of variation and very little predictability when it comes to people’s actual skin and hair color and how they identify. A doll manufacturer could spend the rest of the year producing all of the variations of complexion and features and textures chronicled in the project, and there would still be people who couldn’t find reflections of themselves…

Read the entire article here.

Many Rivers to Cross: From Black Power to the Black President

The Root
2013-11-26

Peniel E. Joseph, Professor of History
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

In the sixth and final installment of his PBS series, Henry Louis Gates Jr. leads us from the black power movement to the historic election of Barack Obama.

Americans have notoriously short memories when it comes to race and history, especially black history. And it’s in that context that Harvard professor and The Root’s editor-in-chief, Henry Louis Gates Jr., has looked back through time to bring us The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, a six-part documentary film, airing on PBS, that concludes tonight and that has offered an important capstone to a year full of important civil rights anniversaries.

Over the past five weeks, the series has taken viewers to locations around the world to explore the origins of trans-Atlantic slavery, plumb the depth of America’s antebellum era and chronicle the exploits for black political, economic and cultural self-determination in the Civil War’s bloody aftermath.

And after watching this series, which is a timely corrective to contemporary discourse around race relations, all Americans will gain a better understanding of the way in which both the distant and recent past continue to shape and inform our national present…

Read the entire article here.

How Diversity Will Alter Black History

The Root
2013-11-06

Lynette Holloway

A changing population will help shed more light on America’s multiracial past.

(The Root)—This is part 3 of a three-part series. To see the previous stories, here and here.

Time was, the social construct of the one-drop rule made United States history either black or white. The rule emerged from the South as a way to facilitate slavery and implement Jim Crow segregation. But while the courts and the civil rights movement have dismantled legal segregation, vestiges of the one-drop rule still linger.

But now, 7 million Americans self-identify as multiracial, quickly changing the meaning of who is black, white, Asian, Hispanic or other. For some, it raises questions about how history is perceived by future generations, black history specifically. Will there still be a need for Black History Month?

“We’ve been biracial or a multiracial country since the 17th century,” Bernard W. Kinsey told The Root. He and his wife, Shirley, are touring their Kinsey Collection, a national museum exhibit of African-American art and history dating back to the 1600s.

“America is the only country in the world where having one drop of black blood still makes you black,” Kinsey continued. “We operate on this notion of color as a basis of identity in America. I’ve been to 94 countries, and no other country operates quite like America does with this notion of color.”

Douglas A. Blackmon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II, told The Root that a multiracial America will only bring to the surface what has been hidden for centuries.

“All American history has always been multiracial, at least certainly since the early 1600s,” Blackmon told The Root. “It’s not a question of whether there has been a multiracial history, but whether it’s been acknowledged or specifically understood…

Read the entire article here.

The Future of Race in America

The Root
2013-11-05

Jenée Desmond-Harris, Senior Staff Writer

Editor’s note: This is part 2 of a three-part series. To read part 1, click here.

Will we ever abandon stereotypes? Will “people of color” act as a group? Here are four possible theories about where we are headed as a country.

(The Root)—When it comes to race in America, there’s no question that things are changing.

Here’s what we know for sure: The country is becoming more diverse. Half of kids under age 5 are members of racial and ethnic minority groups. Non-Hispanic white Americans will almost certainly be outnumbered by everyone else over the next three decades. Americans who consider themselves multiracial are growing in numbers faster than any other group.

Then there’s the part that the census can’t measure—the stories that reveal that racial identity is getting more complicated and convoluted all the time: a teen who once called herself Latina “coming out” as black; a woman everyone thinks is Greek announcing that she’s biracial; the news that 12 percent of Jewish households consider themselves “multiracial or nonwhite”; a leading African-American history scholar’s discovery that he has 49 percent European ancestry…

…Is this a sign that we’re swiftly approaching an America in which we all look about the same, and we will dispense with the messy and imprecise exercise of putting one another into racial categories?

Almost certainly not. Experts agree on that.

So what are their predictions about the future of race in America? How might the ways in which we think about it and talk about it actually change in our lifetimes? If we’re not postracial—or even close—what are we? And where are we going?

The only real consensus about the answer to this complicated question is, it depends.

Here are four very different theories about the evolution of race in America and what exactly the meaningful changes that are within reach will require from all of us.

1. We could all finally reject the idea that biology divides human beings into five racial groups. But science isn’t enough. It will take a political movement.

Dorothy Roberts, author of Fatal Invention: How Politics, Science, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century, says it’s no longer a secret or even a little-known fact that what we think of as “race” is simply a set of political categories that were created to govern people.

According to the University of Pennsylvania School of Law professor, the information has been out since the scientists who mapped the human genome declared that racial differences didn’t exist at the genetic level.

Sure, says Roberts, race “uses various biological demarcations that help distinguish who belongs to one or another [group]. But those—skin color, hair color, the shape of the nose or the lips—are only part of what we use to determine what race someone is.” Thus, the same person’s racial identification could change with time, place and perspective—or even over a lifetime—and is impossible to pin down objectively in the way that good science would require…

…2. We might develop more accurate ways to describe our identities. But only if the census does it first.

Kenneth Prewitt, author of What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans, sees an American population rapidly outgrowing what he calls “the 18th-century, antique races” that currently appear on the census and other government forms.

But, he says, it’s difficult for people to identify themselves in nuanced ways—and even harder to make accurate social policy—when newspapers, statistics and accountings of disparities all use those federally mandated categories that fail to reflect the details of our actual experiences…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial America Makes Census Boxes Obsolete

The Root
2013-11-04

Keli Goff

As the nation becomes more multiracial, some question whether the survey can accurately reflect the country’s true diversity.

Editor’s note: This is the first of three in a series.

(The Root) — In 30 years, America will look very different than it does now. According to analysis of census data, by 2043 white Americans will no longer be a majority. But an equally significant population milestone will arrive in 2020. That is the year in which the next census takes place, and it will be the first one tasked with successfully chronicling the most racially and culturally mixed population in American history.

Governing the nation at the very time the census is grappling with this issue is the country’s first biracial president. Though President Obama has said he identifies as black on the census, there is a growing population of people who may share a similar background but do not wish to identify as he has chosen to. Helping to ensure that these Americans are adequately and accurately counted through his administration’s efforts to perfect a modern census could end up being a significant part of the Obama legacy.

Multiracial Americans are the fastest growing demographic in the country, yet the U.S. Census Bureau has struggled with how to effectively capture the changing racial makeup of America. In his new book What Is Your Race: The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans, Kenneth Prewitt takes the census to task for its many shortcomings when it comes to painting an accurate portrait of America’s racial and cultural landscape. Prewitt, though, is not just any run-of-the-mill critic. He is a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau, where he served from 1998 to 2001.

In an interview with The Root, Prewitt explained that America is unique in its racial categorization and its reasons for categorizing. “We decided why we wanted racial statistics and the purpose of them, and then designed statistics to accomplish those purposes.”…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial Families in 18th-Century Mexico

The Root
2013-07-23

Unknown artist working in New Spain (Mexico), De español y negra mulata, oil on canvas, 36 by 48 cm (Museo de America, Madrid)

Image of the Week: A painting captures the multiethnic population in New Spain, now Mexico.

One of the most typical, revealing products of colonial Spanish culture was the casta painting. This Iberian term means “lineage,” or “race,” and in art refers to the comprehensive representation of mixed-race couples and their offspring. Produced in a series usually consisting of 16 family groups, casta paintings categorize the uniquely complex degree of racial variation that arose within the multiethnic population of the viceroyalty of New Spain, now Mexico. These works were produced almost exclusively in the major artistic and governmental centers of Mexico City and Puebla during the 18th century. About 100 sets of casta paintings survive today from what must once have been a considerably larger number.

Casta sets were commissioned primarily by members of the ruling elite of New Spain. Their audience consisted of a fairly limited but discerning group of officials, clergy and scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. In some cases the sets were directly presented to the king in Madrid as a visual record of the diversity of his overseas realm. The miscegenation recorded in these series is also reflected in the origins of the artists themselves. With only one known exception, all identified casta painters were born in Mexico, not Spain, and many were themselves of mixed race.

In all casta series, the couples consist of men and women from the three main ethnicities living in New Spain: white, Indian and black. Those represented are types, not specific individuals. All known series begin with the union between a white man, described as a Spaniard (español), and an Indian, producing a mestizo. The sequence then continues with a new category produced by the pairing of a mestizo with another Spaniard, producing a castizo. In the next case a white man is the father as well, and so the complexion becomes lighter, and therefore of greater advantage in the racially ordered hierarchy of colonial life. The child is, in fact, described as español, the same as his or her father…

Read the entire article here.

We are going to need new terms that reflect numerical reality and social-political reality. Part of that implies thinking about what race and ethnicity mean in general and what specific racial and ethnic, and multiracial and multiethnic, identities mean in particular. At the same time, we’ve got to remember that every racial or ethnic community has some issues and experiences in common and is also unique.

For one, these changes mean that the white-black and white-people of color binaries need to be rethought and replaced with a full-color perspective on race and ethnicity. A full-color perspective acknowledges that racial and ethnic mixing has been part of our social fabric since Europeans met and mated with Native Americans; that it continued on through African enslavement and segregation and Asian exclusion and internment; that it progressed with increased rates of Hispanic immigration and is still with us as increasing numbers of interracial and multiracial couples get together and have children today. A full-color perspective must also acknowledge that racial and ethnic mixing has been occurring for centuries in same-sex communities as well.

On one hand, sociologists predict that the definition of whiteness will expand to include Hispanic and Asian groups but will always exclude those with African-American descent in order to maintain political and social power. On the other hand, this prediction is reductive because it assumes that only those who will continue to identify as white will be privileged and that those who will continue to identify as black will be non-privileged. It also ignores the fact that, generally speaking, to be African American is to be racially mixed…

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, “The Future of the ‘Tan Generation’,” (interview with Jenée Desmond-Harris), The Root, June 6, 2012, http://www.theroot.com/views/browner-america-marcia-dawkins-qa.