Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Whiteness Without Complex?

    Whiteness Without Complex?

    Anthropology While White
    2014-03-06

    Sarah Abel, Marie Curie Fellow
    EUROTAST

    A couple of weeks ago I attended an event called ‘Color Without Complex‘, featuring a public conversation between image activist Michaela Angela Davis and ethnographer and publisher Dr. Yaba Blay. The discussion revolved around Blay’s recent book and accompanying exhibition, (1)ne Drop, which looks at the faces and stories of individuals who identify as black, but do not necessarily fit with common prototypes of blackness in the US. By focusing on light-skinned individuals existing at the very outer periphery of blackness, the project tests the perceptual limitations and the social implications of the one drop rule in today’s post-segregation America – a country in which contemporary notions and benchmarks of ‘race’ are still rooted in cultural and legal traditions established under slavery, colonialism and Jim Crow segregation.

    The theme up for debate was colourism, a hot internet topic over the past nine months in particular, and the object of a number of recent documentaries, chat shows and news articles in the US. While social prejudice against people ‘of colour’ – as well as the pathological tendency of the Western media to showcase whiteness not only as the norm, but also as virtually the sole domain of beauty – are perhaps two of the most visible social legacies of colonialism throughout the Atlantic world and beyond, these recent debates are bringing to light skin colour prejudices within the black community. Whereas, historically, light coloured skin was prized and aspired to throughout the Americas as a path to social ascension and a means of escaping the stigma of blackness, in recent decades pan-Africanism and a multitude of black pride initiatives have caused a shift towards celebrating and embracing blackness as embodied by a dark-skinned, African ideal. Meanwhile, in some cases light-skinned blacks have become the target of double-edged prejudice: stigmatised by whites for being black, and ostracised by blacks for apparently aspiring to be white…

    …And yet, I think it is worth mentioning that there was also a significant minority of white women among the audience who turned up to listen to the debate. Looking around the room, I wondered what had brought them there, like me, to listen from the sidelines into a conversation to which we were not party. In the Q&A session at the end, the (white) woman sat in front of me, holding hands tightly with her (black) husband, asked a question about healing through empathy [at 00:45:43]. Some minutes later, a young (white) woman a few rows further down asked the following question [at 01:05:05]:

    “How would you defend, or maybe not necessarily defend, but how would you address a woman who is of colour, but appears to look as white as I do? How would you talk to her or address to her what her place is in relation to colourism, for example? How does colourism apply to her, because she looks white but she is a person of colour, and identifies with that?”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Empire, Race, and the Debate over the Indian Marriage Market in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)

    Empire, Race, and the Debate over the Indian Marriage Market in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)

    Eighteenth-Century Fiction
    Volume 26, Number 3, Spring 2014
    pages 427-454
    DOI: 10.1353/ecf.2014.0004

    John C. Leffel, Assistant Professor of English
    State University of New York, Cortland

    In the late eighteenth century, East India Company stations were characterized as marriage “bazaars” in which Englishwomen were traded like any other merchandise. Women at the centre of such trafficking were depicted as complicit in their own commodification. In the face of such pervasive negative stereotyping, women returning to Britain after time spent on the subcontinent often found themselves ridiculed and shunned. In this article, I explore how author Elizabeth Hamilton (1758–1816) responded to this potent imperial stigma. She absorbed and perpetuated popular negative stereotypes regarding these matrimonial “speculators” in her own writing, but in her second novel, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), she subtly recalibrated her stance, in ways that illuminate the changing tenor of Anglo-Indian social, political, and sexual relations. By the turn of the nineteenth century, burgeoning discourses of racial difference and the perceived threat of sexual “miscegenation” in the empire became thoroughly entwined with debates regarding the “Indian marriage market” and female emigration.

  • Race Reporting Among Hispanics: 2010

    Race Reporting Among Hispanics: 2010

    United States Census Bureau
    Population Division
    Washington, D.C. 20233
    Working Paper No.102
    March 2014

    Merarys Ríos

    Fabián Romero

    Roberto Ramírez

    Since the release of the 2010 Census Race and Hispanic Origin Alternative Questionnaire Experiment (AQE) report in August 2012, much has been written about the AQE results (Compton et al., 2012; Hill and Bentley, 2013; Stokes et al., 2012). Several recommendations were made based on the AQE findings; one of which was to further test a combined race and Hispanic origin question. Recently, numerous articles and blogs supporting or arguing against the use of combined or separate race and ethnicity questions have made national headlines (El Nasser, 2013); particularly, about the Census Bureau’s recommendation to continue testing a combined question during the 2020 Census testing cycle (Compton et al., 2012). One concern, largely stemming from the Latino community, is the potential negative impact on race reporting among the Hispanic or Latino population (e.g., the undercounting of ‘Afro-Latinos’) if a new combined question is approved for the 2020 Census. In response to these concerns, the Census Bureau developed supplemental analysis from the AQE, specifically examining differences in race distributions by Hispanic origin when alternative questions were tested (Hill and Bentley, 2013). The results from this study are discussed later in this paper.

    The Census Bureau is committed to improving the validity and reliability of census data, and over the last few decades, many census studies have examined race reporting among Hispanics (Stokes et al., 2012; Ennis et al., 2011; Martin, 2002; U.S. Census Bureau, 1996 and 1997). However, none examined race reporting among self-reported Hispanics in the decennial census. In this analysis, self-reported Hispanics are defined as those whose origin was not imputed.

    Read the entire paper here.

  • Mixed Race Related Sessions at ACPA 2014

    Mixed Race Related Sessions at ACPA 2014

    American College Personnel Association
    2014 Annual Convenetion
    Indianapolis, Indiana
    2014-03-30 through 2014-04-02

    574: Coloring Outside the Lines: How to Advocate for Multiracial Students on the College Campus
    Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI)
    Tuesday, 2014-04-01, 10:30-11:30 CDT (Local Time)
    Location: Indiana Convention Center, 141

    Program Presenter:

    Jessica Harris
    Indiana University

    Additional Presenter

    Jordan West
    The Pennsylvania State University

    Utilizing Milem, Chang, and Antonio’s (2005) campus climate framework and existing literature, this session explores the racialized experiences of multiracial students on the college campus. Systemic factors that create challenges for the growing population of multiracial students in higher education are explored. Additionally, to create praxis, we offer suggestions on how participants can support and advocate for multiracial students within the campus climate.

    Research Paper Session #11
    723 Race in the College Experience
    Indianapolis Marriott Downtown – Indiana D
    Tuesday, 2014-04-01, 15:00-16:15 CDT (Local Time)

    Discussant:

    Nick Bowman
    Bowling Green State University (Ohio)

    Chair: Claire Gonyo

    Mixed Messages: The Role of Multiraciality in Students’ Racial Claims

    Marc P. Johnston
    The Ohio State University

    Prema Chaudhari
    University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania)

    Race in College Students’ Leadership Development: A Longitudinal Assessment

    Cassie L Barnhardt
    University of Iowa

    Jiajun Liu
    University of Iowa

    Wei Lin Chen
    University of Iowa

    Importance of American Indian/Alaskan Native Cultural/Resource Centers

    Bianica Yellowhair
    Michigan State University

    759: Where Do I Fit?: Serving and Supporting Multiracial College Students
    Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI); Student Learning and Development
    Location: Indianapolis Marriott
    Downtown, Indiana F
    Tuesday, 2014-04-01, 16:30-17:45 CDT (Local Time)

    Program Presenter:

    Jennifer B. Chapman
    CSU Channel Islands

    Additional Presenter:

    Janson Chapman
    CSU Channel Islands

    For more information, click here.

  • Daughter of the Empire State: The Life of Judge Jane Bolin

    Daughter of the Empire State: The Life of Judge Jane Bolin

    University of Illinois Press
    December 2011
    168 pages
    6 x 9 in.
    4 black & white photographs
    Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-03657-6
    Ebook ISBN: 978-0-252-09361-6

    Jacqueline A. McLeod, Associate Professor of History and African & African American Studies
    Metropolitan State College of Denver

    The trailblazing work of the first African American woman judge

    This long overdue biography of the nation’s first African American woman judge elevates Jane Matilda Bolin to her rightful place in American history as an activist, integrationist, jurist, and outspoken public figure in the political and professional milieu of New York City before the onset of the modern Civil Rights movement.

    Bolin was appointed to New York City’s domestic relations court in 1939 for the first of four ten-year terms. When she retired in 1978, her career had extended well beyond the courtroom. Drawing on archival materials as well as a meeting with Bolin in 2002, historian Jacqueline A. McLeod reveals how Bolin parlayed her judicial position to impact significant reforms of the legal and social service system in New York.

    Beginning with Bolin’s childhood and educational experiences at Wellesley and Yale, Daughter of the Empire State chronicles Bolin’s relatively quick rise through the ranks of a profession that routinely excluded both women and African Americans. Deftly situating Bolin’s experiences within the history of black women lawyers and the historical context of high-achieving black New Englanders, McLeod offers a multi-layered analysis of black women’s professionalization in a segregated America.

    Linking Bolin’s activist leanings and integrationist zeal to her involvement in the NAACP, McLeod analyzes Bolin’s involvement at the local level as well as her tenure on the organization’s national board of directors. An outspoken critic of the discriminatory practices of New York City’s probation department and juvenile placement facilities, Bolin also co-founded, with Eleanor Roosevelt, the Wiltwyck School for boys in upstate New York and campaigned to transform the Domestic Relations Court with her judicial colleagues. McLeod’s careful and highly readable account of these accomplishments inscribes Bolin onto the roster of important social reformers and early civil rights trailblazers.

    Table of Contents

    • Preface
    • Acknowledgments
    • 1. Her Standing in Poughkeepsie: Family Lineage and Legacy
    • 2. On Her Own: The Years at Wellesley and Yale
    • 3. Politics of Preparation: The Making of the Nation’s First African American Woman Judge
    • 4. Politics of Practice: An African American Woman Judge on the Domestic Relations Court
    • 5. Speaking Truth to Power: A View from the Benchof Judge Jane Bolin
    • 6. Persona Non Grata: Jane Bolin and the NAACP, 1931–50
    • Epilogue
    • Notes
    • Index

  • When it Comes to Diversity, Who Counts?

    When it Comes to Diversity, Who Counts?

    The Huffington Post
    The Blog
    2014-03-26

    Martha S. Jones, Arthur F Thurnau Professor, Associate Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies
    University of Michigan

    When talking diversity at colleges and universities, the numbers count. Still, when it comes to mixed-race students, too often they do not count at all. This is a missed opportunity. University leaders rely upon statistics for a measure of where students of color stand on campus. Data on those who self-identify as Black, Latino and Native American are said to reflect how well diversity goals are being met. What about those who check more than one box? Their numbers and their contributions to campus diversity are largely overlooked.

    On my campus, the University of Michigan, numbers matter. This past fall, student activists set off a debate. Their movement began with a Twitter speak-out known by its hashtag #BBUM, Being Black at the University of Michigan. The declining number of Black students has been much discussed, and with good reason. Black students were 7.8 percent of the student body in 2004. Ten years later, their number has dropped to 4.8 percent. As we respond to this challenge, administrators, faculty, staff and students all recognize that the numbers reflect a diminishment in campus diversity. And as student testimony makes plain, there is a correlation between dropping enrollments and the increasing marginalization of Black students.

    At Michigan, we also count mixed-race students. Since 2010, students have had the opportunity to check more than one box when reporting their race. The numbers have remained steady. 3.3 percent of the university’s 37,000 students report that they are mixed-race. This new demographic parallels what we know from the United States census. There, in the year 2000, respondents were given the option of checking more than one box for the first time. By 2010, over 9 million people self-identified as more than one race, nearly three percent of the population. By these numbers mixed-race people have become visible…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Jean Toomer and Cultural Pluralism

    Jean Toomer and Cultural Pluralism

    Gino Michael Pellegrini: Education, Race, Multiraciality, Class & Solidarity
    2014-03-21

    Gino Michael Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
    Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

    [This short paper was originally written for “Jean Toomer and Politics,” a Special Session Roundtable at the 2012 MLA Conference in Seattle. I have made a few edits.]

    In disagreeing with Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr., I will not directly critique their support and rhetorical strategies. Instead, I will put forth my own interpretation of Toomer’s political vision. Toomer saw literature as his means to address socioeconomic inequalities, transform himself, and influence people in a manner that would advance the promise of democracy in America. We should ask then, not whether he identified as black or white, but what his political vision is, what it is not, and what it entails. Specifically, I argue that his political vision conflicts with the cultural pluralisms of his mentors, Alain Locke and Waldo Frank, and anticipates some postethnic, cosmopolitan, and multiracial perspectives that have emerged in recent history in strong opposition to the limitations and problems of multiculturalism…

    Read the entire paper here.

  • Jane Bolin, the Country’s First Black Woman to Become a Judge, Is Dead at 98

    Jane Bolin, the Country’s First Black Woman to Become a Judge, Is Dead at 98

    The New York Times
    2007-01-10

    Douglas Martin

    Jane Bolin, whose appointment as a family court judge by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia in 1939 made her the first black woman in the United States to become a judge, died on Monday in Queens. She was 98 and lived in Long Island City, Queens.

    Her death was announced by her son, Yorke B. Mizelle.

    Judge Bolin was the first black woman to graduate from Yale Law School, the first to join the New York City Bar Association, and the first to work in the office of the New York City corporation counsel, the city’s legal department.

    In January 1979, when Judge Bolin had reluctantly retired after 40 years as a judge, Constance Baker Motley, a black woman and a federal judge, called her a role model.

    In her speech, Judge Motley said, “When I thereafter met you, I then knew how a lady judge should comport herself.”.

    The “lady judge” was frequently in the news at the time of her appointment with accounts of her regal bearing, fashionable hats and pearls. But her achievements transcended being a shining example. As a family court judge, she ended the assignment of probation officers on the basis of race and the placement of children in child-care agencies on the basis of ethnic background.

    Jane Matilda Bolin was born on April 11, 1908, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Her father, Gaius C. Bolin, was the son of an American Indian woman and an African-American man. Her mother, the former Matilda Emery, was a white Englishwoman…

    Read the entire obituary here.

  • Owning my mixed-race identity: Why I don’t have to choose sides

    Owning my mixed-race identity: Why I don’t have to choose sides

    Salon
    Wednesday, 2014-03-12

    Eternity E. Martis
    London, Ontario, Canada

    People can’t seem to understand that I’m not either black or Anglo-Pakistani, but all of the above

    My mother is Anglo-Pakistani and my father is Jamaican (and a quarter Chinese). I grew up with my mother and her family, a chubby, curly-haired, dark-skinned child eating chana masala, aloo paneer and chicken makhani.  As a child, I didn’t know I was any different from the rest of my family. But as I grew up, I realized that I was different, because I looked different.

    My mom is fair-skinned with pin-straight hair. My uncle and several other members of my family are also fair with clear, light green eyes. I did not get any of those traits — I’m the darkest-skinned person in my immediate family, and the only one who’s mixed-race. As a child, I envied my mother’s skin; I longed to be white. She didn’t have to feel uncomfortable in the spaces white people inhabited. She wasn’t sneered at, followed around department stores by an employee as if she was a thief, or pushed off the sidewalk when she was walking to school by white kids. Life seemed easy for her.

    I despised my father; his absence humiliated me. Not only did I loathe his withdrawn parenting, but I hated his genes. I inherited his dark skin and large nose. All six of his kids did. They were markers of my presumed inferiority, giving people a reason to treat me unkindly, giving boys a reason to rate me a “4” for my “monkey face” while my other female classmates received a generous “9.” It also didn’t matter that I was my mother’s child; nowhere did people recognize me in her…

    …Someone asked me why people who are mixed with black try to distance themselves from their black ancestry, as if we are ashamed. It has nothing to do with shame; on my part, I find myself more in touch with s side now that I am older. However, I do want to bring awareness to mixed race politics and break down rigid categories of race. I do not have to be black because I am mixed; I do not have to be white because I am mixed. I do not have to be Pakistani because I am mixed. I do not have to choose a side, because I am everything…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Butterfield featured on ‘Colbert Report’

    Butterfield featured on ‘Colbert Report’

    The Wilson Times
    Wilson, North Carolina
    Tuesday, 2014-03-25

    Corey Friedman, Times Online Editor

    Comic pundit Stephen Colbert argued Obamacare and the Racial Justice Act with U.S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield while bashing North Carolina barbecue in a playful segment spotlighting Wilson’s congressional district.

    Butterfield, a Democrat representing the state’s 1st District, appeared on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” Monday night, the latest installment in a series of interviews with House members. Colbert asked Butterfield whether Obamacare was a “great train wreck or greatest train wreck.”

    “Let me tell you, when the history of this period is written, you will see that the Affordable Care Act has been one of the most significant pieces of legislation that’s ever been passed,” Butterfield said.

    Colbert asked whether President Barack Obama was lying when he told Americans that if they liked their health insurance plans, they could keep them…

    …Colbert profiles congressional representatives and their constituents in his occasional “Better Know a District” segment. He’s known for using satire and deliberately taking some comments out of context for comedic effect in the often offbeat interviews…

    …Racial identity framed the opening of Colbert’s segment, when he introduced Butterfield as a “prominent African-American congressman and civil rights leader,” then appeared visibly surprised upon meeting Butterfield, who is light-skinned.

    “What’s happening?” Colbert asks someone off-camera. “Can someone tell me what’s happening? Is this the guy? You said he was black.”

    “I have been for 66 years,” Butterfield said.

    “My mistake,” replied Colbert. “I don’t see race.”

    “We come in all shades,” said Butterfield. “How about that?”

    “I really thought you were a white guy,” Colbert mused. “My apologies.”

    The Comedy Central host teased Butterfield for supporting a plan to fund pre-kindergarten education with a tax increase of 94 cents on each pack of cigarettes, implying that the proposal would make smoking more expensive for preschoolers.

    “Those who smoke cigarettes can afford to pay a little bit more to help us invest in education,” Butterfield said.

    “Even a 6-year-old?” asked Colbert…

    Read the entire article here.