Mixed Race Studies

Race statistics: how to get from where we are to where we should be: a rejoinder

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 37, Issue 10, 2014
Special Issue: Ethnic and Racial Studies Review
pages 1852-1856
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2014.932413

Kenneth Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs
Columbia University

America’s race statistics are inadequate to the policy challenges of the twenty-first century, especially for social justice and immigrant incorporation policy. But inertial forces – technical and political – complicate change. Overcome technical barriers by taking advantage of an experiment fielded in 2010. To miss that opportunity would be a huge failure. Political barriers are more difficult. Start with what is familiar – more emphasis on national origin – and add flexibility and granularity, both are politically desirable. Introduce change without disrupting the existing policy practices. Phase in improvements gradually, taking advantage of generational turnover. One generation changes the statistical basis for policy. The next generation, which has grown up with the new statistics, implements the policy changes. An example of how this works is found in the multiple-race option introduced in the 2000 census but probably not put to policy use until after the 2030 census.

Read the entire rejoinder here.

The United States of the United Races: a rejoinder

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 37, Issue 10, 2014
Special Issue: Ethnic and Racial Studies Review
pages 1857-1861
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2014.932414

Greg Carter, Associate Professor of History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

I respond to a review by C. Matthew Snipp, revisiting how my book connects abolitionist leanings to acceptance of racial mixing in the Early Republic. I reiterate that, contrary to the reviewer’s claims, the book does not suggest that the defence of interracial marriage has been a thriving social movement. I correct his reading of my chapter on the Civil War era, referring to both the variety of voices present, and the claims of reformers’ opponents, who were the only ones who claimed racial mixing was an aim of the abolitionist movement. Lastly, I defend The United States of the United Races against Professor Snipp’s characterization of it as a work anticipating a ‘post-racial’ ideal, embodied by racially mixed people, who would be the end point of the obsolescence of race as a relevant analytic tool.

Read the entire rejoinder here.

Utopian visions of racial admixture

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 37, Issue 10, 2014
Special Issue: Ethnic and Racial Studies Review
pages 1847-1851
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2014.932409

C. Matthew Snipp, Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Sociology
Stanford University, Palo Alto, California

• Carter, Greg, The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 288 pages.
• Prewitt, Kenneth, What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 296 pages.

In a world unbounded by racial divisions, the choice of a lover, a spouse and the children that come from that union should transcend the schemes devised by others to oppress and exploit. Racial admixtures, to the extent that they blur and obscure entrenched ideas from the past, are things to be celebrated and embraced. Both of these books, as different as they are, embrace the essential value of racial admixture but from very different perspectives, for very different reasons, and with very different emphases.

The United States of the United Races traces the history of interracial relationships in this country. Carter begins his narrative with a close reading of the French author Hector St John de Crèvecoeur. Crèvecoeur penned a very popular work titled Letters from an American Farmer that was intended to describe everyday life in the new nation. Carter’s discussion makes it clear that Crèvecoeur was an opponent of slavery and portrayed it in the vilest possible terms. However, Carter takes Crèvecoeur’s opposition to slavery and tries to make something more of it. Carter writes:

Crèvecoeur’s most important legacy… suggested that true Americans cast off the old ways of their ancestors and consented to a new way of life based on equality. In this, mixture was a positive. The American was new and mixed, just as the society was new and mixed and the way of life was new and mixed. (26, emphasis added)

Carter’s insistence that Crèvecoeur’s abolitionist leanings represent an early endorsement of racial amalgamation is a logical leap for which he provides no justification.

Taking a benign view of this logical lapse, a reader could conjecture that important links in this argument fell victim to an editor’s delete key. However, I dwell on this point because it is the first instance of something that happens in other parts of the book. That is, Carter wishes to convince us that the proponents of racial amalgamation, the formation of intimate personal relationships across racial lines have been a thriving social movement throughout the nation’s history. In places, Carter’s ebullient embrace of this theme causes him to stretch a point that sorely tests a reader’s credulity.

In a similar though subtler fashion, Carter situates the movement for racial amalgamation within the larger movement to abolish slavery. Chapter 2 is titled ‘Wendell Phillips, Unapologetic Abolitionist, Unreformed Amalgamationist’ and focuses on the life of a single abolitionist to assert the centrality of interracial marriage within the movement, invoking the affairs of Frederick Douglass with white women as additional evidence. Carter is careful to point out that ‘racial amalgamation’ was a controversial position and one that could incite violence. This chapter vacillates between making interracial marriage a focal point of the movement to abolish slavery and acknowledging that this was an extremely unpopular position. Nonetheless, the narrative of this chapter too often seeks to make us believe that the freedom to form interracial intimate relationships was one of the core objectives of the abolitionist movement. To be sure, there were abolitionists who subscribed to this view. Carter delivers evidence that at least one existed, but the argument in chapter 2 does little to dispel the view that this was little more than the lunatic fringe of the abolition movement…

…What is Your Race? takes on a problem in US public policy that seems poised to only grow more serious over time. Namely, the USA has a set of public policies anchored to a racial classification system with categories that are increasingly out of step with a twenty-first-century experience and understanding of the American racial order. Prewitt has written a policy brief that consists of three parts: (1) it begins by laying out the origins of the existing system; (2) it then turns to the growing problems connected with the status quo; and (3) it concludes with recommendations for modifying the existing system along with a strategy for deploying these recommendations. The book contains eleven chapters and it would not be unfair to say that the first nine chapters are a prologue and justification for chapters 10 and 11. However, before turning to the final and most important chapters of this book, the first nine chapters deserve notice.

The official racial classification used by the federal government does not emanate from the Census Bureau. It is instead, a product of the Office of Management and Budget and articulated in a document known as Directive No. 15 (revised October 1997). Prewitt is well aware of this fact and, indeed, discusses this document at length. However, the focus of this book is on the way that the US Census Bureau collects information about race, and the recommendations that he makes are most applicable to the Census Bureau. This is not surprising partly because Prewitt is a former Census Bureau director. He writes with an insider’s deep knowledge about the workings of this complex organization. More significantly, the Census Bureau is arguably the single largest producer of data about race in the nation. Much if not most of what Americans know about race in their nation originates at the Census Bureau.

Prewitt begins by presenting a concept that he calls ‘statistical races’. Statistical races were first created by the Constitutional mandate that a census be taken every ten years. Constitutional language embedded whites and African American slaves, and excluded American Indians in the first census taken in 1790. In every census since, race has been a prominent feature. Prewitt acknowledges that racism and prejudice are indeed social realities that frame the everyday lives of Americans. However, statistical races, he argues, are classificatory artifacts manipulated to serve public policy interests…

Read the review of both books here.

The collection of race-based data in the USA: a call for radical change

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 37, Issue 10, 2014
Special Issue: Ethnic and Racial Studies Review
pages 1839-1846
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2014.932407

Peter Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Population Health
University of Kent, United Kingdom

• Carter, Greg, The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 288 pages.
• Prewitt, Kenneth, What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 296 pages.

Two important new books by Greg Carter and Kenneth Prewitt provide detailed historical perspectives on how understandings of race and race categories have evolved since the founding of the republic. Prewitt focuses on an analysis of racial classification in the US census – the so-called ‘statistical races’ –and its changing role in US policy, culminating in recommendations for radical change. Carter takes as his theme population mixing across the races, offering a positive, even celebratory, but little known account of the moments and movements that have praised mixing. As pressures mount on the ‘statistical races’ in the late twentieth century, Prewitt uses the political space opened up by these debates to offer fundamental changes to US methods of ethno-racial data collection, including the removal of these questions from the census. The jury is in recess for further deliberations.

Read the review of both books here.

And you thought we had moved beyond all that: biological race returns to the social sciences

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 37, Issue 10, 2014
Special Issue: Ethnic and Racial Studies Review
pages 1676-1685
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2014.931992

Ann Morning, Associate Professor of Sociology
New York University

Recently, sociologists have argued in high-profile journals that racial categories are linked to genetically distinct clusters within the human population. They propose theorizing race as a socially constructed categorization system that is related to biological groupings within our species. This work overlooks, however, the extent to which statistically inferred genetic clusters are themselves socially constructed, making it impossible to juxtapose ‘subjective’ social categories with ‘objective’ biological ones. This editorial urges social scientists to take a critical look at claims about the genetic underpinnings of race, and to contribute their insights to ongoing debates about the nature of race.

Read the entire article here.

The invisible weight of whiteness: the racial grammar of everyday life in contemporary America

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 35, Issue 2, 2012
pages 173-194
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.613997

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

Racial domination, like all forms of domination, works best when it becomes hegemonic, that is, when it accomplishes its goal without much fanfare. In this paper, based on the Ethnic and Racial Studies Annual Lecture I delivered in May 2011 in London, I argue there is something akin to a grammar – a racial grammar if you will – that structures cognition, vision, and even feelings on all sort of racial matters. This grammar normalizes the standards of white supremacy as the standards for all sort of social events and transactions. Thus, in the USA one can talk about HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities), but not about HWCUs (historically white colleges and universities) or one can refer to black movies and black TV shows but not label movies and TV shows white when in fact most are. I use a variety of data (e.g., abduction of children, school shootings, etc.) to illustrate how this grammar works and highlight what it helps to accomplish. I conclude that racial grammar is as important as all the visible practices and mechanisms of white supremacy and that we must fight its poisonous effects even if, like smog, we cannot see how it works clearly.

Read the entire article here.

[View Dr. Bonilla-Silva’s lecture at the Fall 2010 Honors Colloquium at the University or Rhode Island here.]

Race as freedom: how Cedric Dover and Barack Obama became black

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 37, Issue 2
pages 222-240
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.715661

Nico Slate, Associate Professor of History
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Born across racial lines, Cedric Dover and Barack Obama both came to identify with the African American community. By contrasting the lives and ideas of two mixed-race individuals, one born in Calcutta and the other in Hawaii, this article examines cosmopolitanism, racial formation and the promise of the ‘post-racial’. A ‘Eurasian’ intellectual born in Calcutta in 1904, Dover developed a coloured cosmopolitanism that mirrors in revealing ways Obama’s approach to race. Both men embraced blackness while transcending the boundaries of race and nation. Dover and Obama developed a conception of race as freedom—not freedom from race or of a particular race, but the freedom to embrace race without sacrificing other affiliations.

We must be both “racial” and anti-racial at the same time, which really means that nationalism and internationalism must be combined in the same philosophy. Cedric Dover (1947, 222)

I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible. Barack Obama (2008)

Born a Eurasian in Calcutta in 1904. Cedric Dover died in England in 1961 a ‘coloured’ man. Born to a white mother in Hawaii in 1961 and raised partially in Indonesia. Barack Obama became the first African…

Read or purchase the article here.

Migrating race: migration and racial identification among Puerto Ricans

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 37, Number 3 (2014-02-23)
pages 383-404
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.672759

Carlos Vargas-Ramos, Research Associate
Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Hunter College, City University of New York

The pattern of racial identification among Puerto Ricans is not uniform. It varies depending on where they live. Most identify as white, but more do so in Puerto Rico than in the USA. This paper addresses the impact that living alternatively in the USA and in Puerto Rico has on racial identification among Puerto Ricans. Using Public Use Microdata Sample data from the American Community Survey and the Puerto Rico Community Survey 2006–2008, I find that while there is no single pattern of impact, those more grounded on the island’s racial system are more likely to identify as white in the USA, while those less grounded in Puerto Rico are more likely to identify as multiracial or by another racial descriptor. On their return to the island, they revert to the prevalent pattern of racial identification, while still exhibiting effects of their sojourn on their racial identity.

Census data on Puerto Ricans and race manifest the contingent nature of racial identity and identification and how specific racial formations impact an individual’s understanding of race and racial identification. Despite contemporary projections of Puerto Ricans as a multiracial people (Davila 1997), in fact a mulatto nation (Torres 1998; Duany 2002). the majority of Puerto Ricans portray themselves as white in the context of official statistics. This is the case for both Puerto Ricans on the island and in the USA. Their location, however, determines the proportions by which they identify as white or as something else.

Presently, more than half of the 8.3 million people who identify as Puerto Ricans live in the USA. Moreover, there is a recurrent movement of migrants between the island and the USA, with net migration reaching the hundreds of thousands between decades (Rivera-Batiz and Santiago 1996; Duany 2002; Acosla-Belen and…

Read or purchase the article here.

Unbecoming blackness: the diaspora cultures of Afro-Cuban America [Review]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 37, Issue 5, 2014
pages 889-890
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.847200

Nora Gámez Torres, Visiting scholar
Cuban Research Institute
Florida International University, Miami

Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora cultures of Afro-Cuban America, by Antonio López, New York, New York University Press, 2012, xi + 272 pp., (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8147-6547-0.

Unbecoming Blackness poses directly the question of an underdiscussed afrolatinidad in Cuban American Studies. The book opens up by analysing the lives and performances of key figures in the Afro-Cuban diaspora in the USA during the first half of the twentieth century: Alberto O’Farrill, a writer and blackface actor in the teatro bufo a theatrical Cuban genre he helped to export to New York: and Eusebia Cosme, a renowned performer of poesía negra (black poetry) and actress. This is the first significant accomplishment of the book, since these histories had to be carefully recovered and reconstructed by collecting disperse information, the ‘fragments attaches’ (14) common to black diasporas in the Americas.

The third chapter, examining the afrolatinidad and specific Puerto Rican identifications in the work of Cuban-born anthropologist Rómulo Lachatañeré and Cuban-descendent writer Piri Thomas, continues building the main theme of the book: how Afro-Cubans actively negotiate their racialization in the USA, by cither asserting or concealing their ‘Hispanic’ heritage through linguistic choices, or by forging alliances with black Americans and other Latin/o groups. In so doing, they enact an afrolatinidad that is malleable and transnational, and thus, unsettling for hegemonic Cuban and Cuban American identities, rooted in nationalism and whiteness. That performers such as Cosme and O’Farrill and scholars such as Lachatañeré travelled to the USA looking for better professional opportunities and decided to associate to ‘subaltern’ subjects such as black Americans and other Latino groups, generated an anxiety among Cuban writers and intellectuals of the time who defended the idea of mestizaje, as López shows in these chapters. The point of conflict is brilliantly captured in the following passage by Lopez: (the implication) ‘that Afro-Cubans are somehow ‘better off’ being in and belonging to an explicitly racist US nation rather than, it turns out, Cuba. This being and belonging is asserted against ‘the best interests’ of a postracial, mestizo, even negro island-Cuban nation—indeed, against the ‘best interests’ of Afro-Cubans themselves’ (9). To speak of an afrolatinidad in this context disrupts both Cuban American and Cuban fictions of national identity. Precisely due to the implications of the book for a critical debate on Cuban racial identities on and off the island, it would have been very useful for the leader to have a contextual analysis of what was happening in Cuba in different moments and in the different fields the author explores.

Less accomplished is the following chapter, in which López lacks the clarity to successfully connect ‘texts around 1979 in Miami and the overlapping histories of the illicit drug trade. African American uprising, Mariel migration‘ (16), to Cuban American reactions to the ‘blackening’ of their community after Mariel and the African Americans…

Read or purchase the article here.

Rethinking race, racism, identity and ideology in Latin America

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36,  Issue 10, 2013 (Special Issue: Rethinking Race, Racism, Identity, and Ideology in Latin America)
pages 1485-1489
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.808357

Tanya Golash-Boza, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Merced

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

This special issue explores ideas of race and racial hierarchy in Latin America in the twenty-first century. By examining the intersection between racialization and processes of identity formation, political struggle, as well as intimate social and economic relations, these essays question how and to what extent traditional racial ideologies continue to hold true. In so doing, we consider the implications of such ideologies for anti-racism struggles. This collection of articles provides a unique insight into the everyday lived experiences of racism, how racial inequalities are reproduced, and the rise of ethnic-based social movements in Latin America. The qualitative nature of the projects allows the authors to advance our understanding of how racial ideologies operate on the ground level. The geographic diversity of the articles – focusing on Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Costa Rica and Cuba – enables a greater understanding of the distinct ways that racial ideologies play out across different settings.

Race and national ideologies in the Americas are inextricable. The ideas and practices of race were essential to the conquest and colonization of the Americas (Smedley 2007). As European colonizers and settlers shaped the western hemisphere into nations, distinct racial ideologies emerged alongside national ideologies. This special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies provides us with new insights into how race and national ideologies continue to shift in Latin America, in the context of a globalizing world.

During the nineteenth century, Latin American countries began to break away from their colonial past and form independent states. Intellectual and political elites across Latin America preoccupied themselves with building national unity (Knight 1990). In these nation-building projects, national leaders had to contend with European scholars who denounced their racial degeneracy due to extensive racial mixing (Stepan 1991). Latin Americans could not simply ignore European arguments about racial inferiority as these arguments were central to scientific and medical discourses. Thus, they chose to counter European intellectuals’ claims about their inferiority and argue that racial mixture was not only beneficial, it was the hallmark of Latin American nations. During the twentieth century, ideologies of whitening, mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture), blackness, indigeneity and racial democracy informed national ideologies across Latin America. Instead of countering ideas of white supremacy espoused by European intellectuals, Latin American intellectuals and political leaders embraced white supremacy and worked to facilitate and justify a system of pervasive race and colour stratification whereby darker-skinned people, typically with more notable indigenous and African features, occupy the lower rungs of the racial ladder, and those of primarily European descent are at the top…

Read the entire article here.