Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

If we’re going to play race games let’s do it scientifically. For example, if you’re black that’s meaningless unless you specify Bantu, Hutu/Tutsi, San, or any number of other lineages within Africa. Africa has the biggest human variety in the world. Obama looks totally different from the rest of the Black Caucus; it’s because he is. He belongs to a different biological lineage. He’s not a Bantu. But most American blacks are mixed-race, of course, like Obama himself.

Likewise, if you’re pure Irish, your race is Gaelic. If you’re Irish-English, you’re Gaelic-Caucasian or something close to that. If you look blond, you’re likely to be a Northern European. If you’re Jewish but you look like a Russian, you are Semitic-Nordic-Slavic. If you’re Jewish and you look like a Spaniard, you’re Semitic-Hispanic. If you’re Jewish from Yemen, you’re probably Semitic-Arabic. If you’re a pure cohen, you’re Semitic back some 3,000 years, especially if you have heritable diseases like Tay-Sachs. But of course going earlier than that, there are plenty of generations back to the human population bottleneck in North Africa, where humans were reduced to some 5,000 individuals. That’s the shared founding population for all of us. (And everybody was Black at that time.).

James Lewis, “How to really be accurate on ‘race’ on the Census,” The American Thinker, (March 17, 2010) http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/03/how_to_really_be_accurate_on_r.html.

Sociology of Multiracial Identity in the Late 1980s and Early 1990s: The Failure of a Perspective

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2022-02-26 20:12Z by Steven

Sociology of Multiracial Identity in the Late 1980s and Early 1990s: The Failure of a Perspective

Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies
Volume 8, Number 2 (2021)
pages 106-125
DOI: 10.29333/ejecs/643

Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Sociologists largely failed to comprehend the emergence of multiracial identities in the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was due, in part, to hypodescent and the monoracial imperative. These social devices, respectively, categorize offspring of interracial unions between Whites and people of color based exclusively on the background of color, and necessitate single-racial identification. This has prohibited the articulation and recognition of multiracial identities. Hypodescent and the monoracial imperative are so normative that they have been taken for granted by sociologists across the monoracial spectrum, much as the larger society. Sociology’s espoused objectivity blinded sociologists to the standpoint of their own monoracial subjectivity. They provided little critical examination of hypodescent and the monoracial imperative in terms of their impact on multiracial identity formations. Some sociologists challenged theories of marginality, which stressed the psychological dysfunction of multiracials. Yet multiracial identities were considered symptomatic of mainly isolated psychological concerns with personal identity. Sociologists were absent from analyses of collective identity and agency speaking to mixed-race concerns. Consequently, they remained on the periphery of social scientific theorizing of multiracial identities in terms of their wider-ranging implications.

Read the entire article in here.

Comments Off on Sociology of Multiracial Identity in the Late 1980s and Early 1990s: The Failure of a Perspective

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30

Sociology of Multiracial Identity in the Late 1980s and Early 1990s: The Failure of a Perspective

Pages

Categories

Calendar of Posts

Links

Meta