Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • A birth certificate masked my multiracial truth. For me and 33 million others, the 2020 Census asserts it.

    A birth certificate masked my multiracial truth. For me and 33 million others, the 2020 Census asserts it.

    The Washington Post
    2021-08-31

    Steve Majors


    More than 33 million people in the United States identify as being of two or more races, according to the 2020 Census, a 276 percent jump from the 2010 head count. (Paul Sancya/AP)

    My face burned — whether with anger or shame, I wasn’t sure. In 1994, I stood outside human resources at the CBS offices in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Studio City and listened to my future boss over the phone. You want the job? You need to complete the paperwork and check just one box, he insisted. Hours earlier, my pencil had marked X’s in two boxes on the application form. One designated my race as White, the other Black. The HR representative had called him to intervene, and now she waited inside her office for my decision. In a split second, I decided. I wanted the job at CBS’s flagship TV station in Los Angeles; it would be career-changing. So, though no one had told me which box to check, I had a feeling what the HR rep wanted. The recruiter who had first connected me with the opportunity had explicitly told me CBS was looking to increase diversity among its producer ranks. So I grabbed the pencil and erased the mark that declared me half-White. After all, I thought, no one — not even my own family — had officially told me I was of mixed race. The only evidence I had otherwise was written all over my face.

    Decades later, when the “23andMe” response jumped into my email inbox at work, I stopped talking to colleagues mid-meeting to read the results. After years of looking at my pale reflection in the mirror and questioning my identity, I already knew the truth. When I walked out into the world, people looked at my fair skin and perceived and treated me as White. I sensed that the birth certificate that claimed I had the same father as my all-Black siblings was a lie, as was the story of my birth that my mother held on to until her death. Even my family’s nickname for me, “High Yella,” has been a signal to me that I was different from them. Now the results I read confirmed it: 56 percent European, 42 percent sub-Saharan African, with a fraction of East Asian and Indigenous American and other thrown in. I felt a sense of recognition. Science had validated who I was.

    This month, I felt a similar sense of validation. After filling out the 2020 Census and checking the box to declare myself as two or more races, I saw the final results. My multiracial identity counts, and I’m far from being alone. According to the data, I’m among 33.8 million people who identify as multiracial, a whopping 276 percent increase since the 2010 Census. It’s proof that the United States is truly a racial melting pot, with the most diverse population in its history…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Between Heritage and Hate

    Between Heritage and Hate

    palabra
    2021-05-25

    Alejandra Arevalo


    Photo from the archive of Fabiana Chiu-Rinaldi.

    For Latino Asians, waves of Coronavirus-fueled hate and violence present a seemingly unending threat. They’re also reminders of a strong, but complicated heritage

    Ahki Hasegawa is glad the COVID-19 pandemic has everyone wearing masks, and not just to protect against the virus.

    “The only Asian part about me is my face,” the 34-year-old nurse told palabra. “So if I were to just slap on some sunglasses, and then wear my mask, there’s no way anybody would assume that I’m Asian at all.”

    As an American citizen of Mexican and Japanese descent, Hasegawa said she trembled when she ran into a recent “White Lives Matter” rally in Huntington Beach, California, while walking her dog. “I’m glad I have a dog. And I haven’t been going out unless I’m with the dog. I don’t own a gun, but I definitely thought about it for self defense.”

    Hasegawa is part of an often-overlooked community of Latinos of Asian heritage who have endured the waves of anti-Asian hate spreading across the United States.

    Believing the Latino community to be a homogenous group is an almost routine mistake in American society. The image of a light-skinned mestizo floods the media as the only face of Latinidad. But it bears repeating: Latino is an ethnicity that stems from many combinations of races…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Special Issue: Multiracial Identities and Experiences in/under White Supremacy

    Special Issue: Multiracial Identities and Experiences in/under White Supremacy

    Social Sciences
    2021-03-31
    Extended Abstract Deadline: 2021-05-15
    Paper Submission Deadline: 2021-10-01

    Guest Editors:

    Professor Dr. David L. Brunsma (brunsmad@vt.edu)
    Department of Sociology, Virginia Tech
    Blacksburg, Virginia, USA

    Dr. Jennifer Sims (jennifer.sims@uah.edu)
    Sociology Department, University of Alabama, Huntsville
    Huntsville, Alabama, USA

    Deadline for manuscript submissions: 1 October 2021

    Message from Guest Editors:

    Social scientific scholarship on Multiracial experiences and processes of identity development have been the subject of social scientific scholarship for over three decades. In this Special Issue, we invite critically engaged work that focuses on exploring the experiences and identities of multiracial people in/under white supremacy. While we remain interested in research that continues to track the realities of U.S. Black/White mixed-race folks, we also encourage work that center s race and racism in traditionally under-researched mixed-race populations. We welcome work that is intersectional, transdisciplinary, and global and theoretical or empirical in nature.

    For consideration, please submit extended abstracts by May 15, 2021. Please submit your abstract to special issue editors, Prof. Dr. David Brunsma and Dr. Jennifer Sims (emails above). Special issue editors will contact those whose manuscripts they wish to see submitted for consideration in the special issue, by June 1, 2021. For those accepted for consideration, paper submission will be due October 1, 2021 for preliminary review (if applicable – as some may be desk rejected).

  • “Our Relations…the Mixed Bloods” Indigenous Transformation and Dispossession in the Western Great Lakes

    “Our Relations…the Mixed Bloods” Indigenous Transformation and Dispossession in the Western Great Lakes

    SUNY Press
    April 2021
    264 pages
    Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-8285-9

    Larry Nesper, Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies
    University of Wisconsin, Madison

    Foreword by:

    Michael S. Wiggins Jr., Chief Executive Officer & Tribal Chairman
    The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Ashland, Wisconsin

    Articulates the relationships between kinship, racial ideology, mixed blood treaty provisions, and landscape transformation in the Great Lakes region.

    In the Great Lakes region of the nineteenth century, “mixed bloods” were a class of people living within changing indigenous communities. As such, they were considered in treaties signed between the tribal nations and the federal government. Larry Nesper focuses on the implementation and long-term effects of the mixed-blood provision of the 1854 treaty with the Chippewa of Wisconsin. That treaty not only ceded lands and created the Ojibwe Indian reservations in the region, it also entitled hundreds of “mixed-bloods belonging to the Chippewas of Lake Superior,” as they appear in this treaty, to locate parcels of land in the ceded territories. However, quickly dispossessed of their entitlement, the treaty provision effectively capitalized the first mining companies in Wisconsin, initiating the period of non-renewable resource extraction that changed the demography, ecology, and potential future for the region for both natives and non-natives. With the influx of Euro-Americans onto these lands, conflicts over belonging and difference, as well as community leadership, proliferated on these new reservations well into the twentieth century. This book reveals the tensions between emergent racial ideology and the resilience of kinship that shaped the historical trajectory of regional tribal society to the present.

    Table of Contents

    • List of Illustrations
    • Acknowledgments
    • Foreword
    • Introduction
    • 1. Ojibwe Ethnogenesis and the Fur Trade
    • 2. Descent Ideology, Sociality, and the Transformation of Indigenous Society
    • 3. Ojibwe Treaties, the Emerging Paradigm of Race, and Allotting Mixed Bloods
    • 4. “Mixed Bloods” in the Southwest Sector of Anishinaabewaki
    • 5. Implementing the Mixed-Blood Provision of the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe
    • 6. Constituting Reservation Society on the Emerging Postdispossession Landscape
    • 7. Allotment and the Problems of Belonging
    • Conclusion
    • Epilogue
    • Notes
    • Bibliography
    • Index

  • In Our Blood: A People, Divided

    In Our Blood: A People, Divided

    a LATTO thought: An immersive audio documentary series that dismantles post-racial myths about mixed race identities.
    2021-08-28

    CA Davis, Host

    Marilyn Vann, Doug Kiel, Ariela Gross, Leetta Osborne-Sampson and Kim TallBear

    The conclusion of a LATTO thought’s first miniseries traces how Indigenous kinship has been damaged by centuries of racist and colonial American policies. Marilyn Vann (Cherokee Nation) and LeEtta Osborne-Sampson (Seminole Nation) share the painful fight that the descendants of Indigenous Freedmen have waged for civil rights within their own nations. Genocide in slow motion and the lack of one equal citizenship created a zero sum game that, left a people—a family—divided.

    But… that may not be the case for much longer.

    Listen to the episode (01:11:00) here.

  • Free People of Color in the Spanish Atlantic: Race and Citizenship, 1780–1850

    Free People of Color in the Spanish Atlantic: Race and Citizenship, 1780–1850

    Routledge
    2020-08-07
    252 pages
    5 b/w Illustrations
    Hardback ISBN: 9780367494926
    eBook ISBN: 9781003046813

    Federica Morelli, Associate Professor of History of the Americas
    University of Turin, Turin, Italy

    This book grapples with the important contemporary question of the boundaries of citizenship and access to naturalization by analyzing a body of relevant juridical sources, dating from the end of the eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century, concerning the free people of color in late colonial and early independent Spanish America. Their precarious status makes this group a privileged subject to examine the negotiation and formation of racial identity as well as the definition of citizenship requirements in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Based on archival material collected in Spain (Seville and Madrid) and Latin America (Mexico City, Bogotá, Quito, Lima and Buenos Aires), the book demonstrates that the access of free people of color to citizenship both in the late colonial and early independent period was not established by state authorities, but resulted from complex dynamics between the state and the local society.

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction
    • 1. Seeking Spaces for Mobility
    • 2. The Revolutions of the Hispanic World: New Citizenship Rights?
    • 3. Between Grace and Rights
    • 4. Race and Equality
    • Conclusion

  • How the Census Misleads on Race: A new ‘diversity index’ and a subtle change in a question have resulted in an undercount of whites.

    How the Census Misleads on Race

    The Wall Street Journal
    2021-08-29

    John B. Judis

    A new ‘diversity index’ and a subtle change in a question have resulted in an undercount of whites.

    The most common reaction to the release of the 2020 census was summed up in the headline “Census Data show the number of white people fell.” The data show the number of whites declining by 8.6%. This observation was often coupled with a political projection: that while gerrymandering could benefit Republicans in 2022, the political future belongs to the Democratic Party, which commands large majorities among minorities.

    But these conclusions about race and politics rely on misleading census results. Contrary to Democratic hopes and right-wing anxieties, America’s white population didn’t shrink much between 2010 and 2020 and might actually have grown.

    “Races” are defined not by biology but by cultural convention. As late as the early 20th century, many Anglo-Americans didn’t identify Southern or Eastern Europeans as “white.” In 1918, 33-year-old Harry S. Truman, while visiting New York City, wrote his cousin: “This town has 8,000,000 people. 7,500,000 of ’em are of Israelish extraction. (400,000 wops and the rest are white people.)” After World War II, Jews and Italians became identified as “white.”

    Something similar seems to be happening to many Americans of Hispanic and Asian origin. About 3 in 10 Hispanics and Asians intermarry, usually to a white spouse. According to a 2016 study by economists Brian Duncan and Stephen J. Trejo, 35% of third-generation Hispanics of mixed parentage no longer identify as Hispanic; and 55% of third-generation Asian-Americans of mixed parentage no longer identify as Asian. A 2017 Pew report found that among Americans of Hispanic origin who don’t identify themselves as Hispanic, 59% said that they were seen by others as white…

    Read the entire article here.

  • EXCLUSIVE! MASC Analysis of Census 2020: Latinos Make Up A Majority of the Multiracial Population

    EXCLUSIVE! MASC Analysis of Census 2020: Latinos Make Up A Majority of the Multiracial Population

    Multiracial Americans of Southern California
    2021-08-23

    The recent release of Census 2020 demographic data has enabled us to envision a new version of the country we live in. The following charts and discussion have been prepared to tell a story of unique interest to the multiracial community in a way that may not be easy to find anywhere else. Before we get too into the data it should be noted that the Census Bureau warns about interpreting changes in data between 2010 and 2020. Differences in methodology contributed to these changes. But we believe the major trends described in the following are still valid. Some changes have been so dramatic they exceed the impact from methodology change alone. To learn more about the methodology changes click HERE.

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Boundaries of Mixedness: A Global Perspective

    The Boundaries of Mixedness: A Global Perspective

    Routledge
    2020-10-12
    164 pages
    Hardback ISBN: 9780367522926
    eBook ISBN: 9781003057338

    Edited by:

    Erica Chito Childs, Professor of Sociology
    Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York

    The Boundaries of Mixedness tackles the burgeoning field of critical mixed race studies, bringing together research that spans five continents and more than ten countries. Research on mixedness is growing, yet there is still much debate over what exactly mixed race means, and whether it is a useful term. Despite a growing focus on and celebration of mixedness globally, particularly in the media, societies around the world are grappling with how and why crossing socially constructed boundaries of race, ethnicity and other markers of difference matter when considering those who date, marry, raise families, or navigate their identities across these boundaries. What we find collectively through the ten studies in this book is that in every context there is a hierarchy of mixedness, both in terms of intimacy and identity. This hierarchy of intimacy renders certain groups as more or less marriable, socially constructed around race, ethnicity, caste, religion, skin color and/or region. Relatedly, there is also a hierarchy of identities where certain races, languages, ethnicities and religions are privileged and valued differently. These differences emerge out of particular local histories and contemporary contexts yet there are also global realities that transcend place and space.

    The Boundaries of Mixedness is a significant new contribution to mixed race studies for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociology, History and Public Policy.

    Table of Contents

    • 1. Critical Mixed Race in Global Perspective: An Introduction / Erica Chito Childs
    • Hierarchies of Mixing: Navigations and Negotiations
      • 2. An Unwanted Weed: Children of Cross-region Unions Confront Intergenerational Stigma of Caste, Ethnicity and Religion / Reena Kukreja
      • 3. Mixed Race Families in South Africa: Naming and Claiming a Location / Heather Dalmage
      • 4. Negotiating the (Non)Negotiable: Connecting ‘Mixed-Race’ Identities to ‘Mixed-Race’ Families / Mengxi Pang
    • Hierarchies of Mixedness: Choices and Challenges
      • 5. Linguistic Cultural Capital Among Descendants of Mixed Couples in Catalonia, Spain: Realities and Inequalities / Dan Rodriguez-Garcia
      • 6. ‘There is Nothing Wrong with Being a Mulatto’: Structural Discrimination and Racialized Belonging in Denmark / Mira Skadegaard
      • 7. Exceptionalism with Non-Validation: The Social Inconsistencies of Being Mixed Race in Australia / Stephanie Guy
    • Mixed Matters Through a Wider Lens
      • 8. Recognising Selves in Others: Situating Dougla Manoeuverability as Shared Mixed-Race Ontology / Susan Barratt and Aleah Ranjitsingh
      • 9. What’s Love Got To Do With It? Emotional Authority and State Regulation of Interracial/National Couples in Ireland / Rebecca King-O’Riain
      • 10. Re-viewing Race and Mixedness: Mixed Race in Asia and the Pacific / Zarine Rocha

  • Identities in Flux: Race, Migration, and Citizenship in Brazil

    Identities in Flux: Race, Migration, and Citizenship in Brazil

    SUNY Press
    February 2021
    296 pages
    Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-8249-1
    Paperback ISBN13: 978-1-4384-8250-7

    Niyi Afolabi, Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies
    University of Texas, Austin

    Reevaluates the significance of iconic Afro-Brazilian figures, from slavery to post-abolition.

    Drawing on historical and cultural approaches to race relations, Identities in Flux examines iconic Afro-Brazilian figures and theorizes how they have been appropriated to either support or contest a utopian vision of multiculturalism. Zumbi dos Palmares, the leader of a runaway slave community in the seventeenth century, is shown not as an anti-Brazilian rebel but as a symbol of Black consciousness and anti-colonial resistance. Xica da Silva, an eighteenth-century mixed-race enslaved woman who “married” her master and has been seen as a licentious mulatta, questions gendered stereotypes of so-called racial democracy. Manuel Querino, whose ethnographic studies have been ignored and virtually unknown for much of the twentieth century, is put on par with more widely known African American trailblazers such as W. E. B. Du Bois. Niyi Afolabi draws out the intermingling influences of Yoruba and Classical Greek mythologies in Brazilian representations of the carnivalesque Black Orpheus, while his analysis of City of God focuses on the growing centrality of the ghetto, or favela, as a theme and producer of culture in the early twenty-first-century Brazilian urban scene. Ultimately, Afolabi argues, the identities of these figures are not fixed, but rather inhabit a fluid terrain of ideological and political struggle, challenging the idealistic notion that racial hybridity has eliminated racial discrimination in Brazil.