Mixed Race Studies

There is nothing more bizarre to me than when people who identify as biracial/mixed race etc, demand that those of us who also have parents of differing races, identify ourselves just like they do. Barack Obama self-identifies as a black man. Period. Finished. Let him be. It is those people (and not black/white people) who actually hurt the multiracial “cause” (if such exists), by forcing one experience on us. To me, they are exactly like those who invented the tragic mulatto. We all have different experiences and should be free to identify as we wish. My mother is black (African) and my father a white man. I never got to meet or know him or his family, but my mother made sure that I was proud of who I am from all angles. I have always chosen to identify myself as a black woman. Not because I hate my “white side”, but because my experiences closely mirror those of black people, especially the black people who raised me. While I do share some experiences with biracial people, I have not come close to identifying myself as such. However, I think it’s great when anyone can chose who they are or identify with. I’m not ashamed of either of my parents, just ashamed of the society we live in, where people try and force you to be who they want you to be. It comes from all sides, but it’s uglier when it comes from those who have front-row experience on the pain of being society outcasts because people are unable to box us immediately. I don’t think this topic will ever go away, in fact it will get worse, no matter how much we try and wish it away. Race was born out of capitalist ambitions, invented by human beings so one group can control and benefit from the subjugation of another. That’s a human problem that will never go away. If you call yourself biracial…good for you. But I call myself black, and so does Barack. Leave us alone.

Rosalie (from NY), Reader’s Comments (#45) for article “Pushing Boundaries, Mixed-Race Artists Gain Notice,” The New York Times, July 5, 2011. http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/arts/mixed-race-writers-and-artists-raise-their-profiles.html?permid=45#comment45

Generation Mixed and the One Love Club

Gino Michael Pellegrini: Education, Amalgamation, Race, Class & Solidarity
2012-06-03

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

The popular media and specifically the Race Remixed series in the New York Times propagate the myth of multiracialism. According to this social myth, the increasing number of interracial families and multiracial children in America is transforming race and paving the way for a post-racial future. This myth assumes the existence of a growing mass of mixed youth who both identify with their multiracial heritage and who have a clear conception of its significance and transformative potential. At best, writers and audiences (popular and academic) who believe in this myth are engaged in wishful thinking. From my experience and observation, they confuse a few individuals for the many.

For instance, I remember that Timesia is colorful. She wears yellow, purple, red, and taupe colored tops with brown, indigo and maroon pants. She is awkward and sweet, sixteen or seventeen. She’s from the neighborhood and probably poor. She is brown, black, copper, beige, and she wants to start a club for mixed kids like her.

Or at least this is what she initially tells me when she asks me to be the faculty sponsor for her club. The year is 2006, and I am working as an English teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, Van Nuys High School. I recall that it’s my future wife, her counselor, who suggests to her that I might be the right teacher to sponsor her club.

I am more than happy to sponsor her club, but there’s a hitch. She has to complete an application: Describe the club. Explain its purpose. Give it a name…

Read the entire essay here.

Playing Games with Race

The Feminist Wire
2011-06-03

Omar Ricks
University of California, Berkeley

“Mulatto” by Jenia Lisunov

NOTE: This article expands on a comment on Prof. Hortense Spillers’ article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s, Too” published on The Feminist Wire on February 25, 2011. Omar Ricks would like to thank Prof. Spillers for inviting his contribution to The Feminist Wire.

At several places in the first article of her New York Times series, Race Remixed, concerning mostly young adult multiracial individuals, Susan Saulny has one woman, Laura Wood, vice president of the University of Maryland Multiracial Biracial Student Association (MBSA), embody much of the human-interest side of what might otherwise be an article about U.S. Census data. In a game at the beginning of the article, an MBSA friend correctly guesses Wood’s genotype: “Are you mulatto?” We learn of Wood’s painful personal journey. Initially given up for adoption by her white mother, later taken back and raised as white until the age of 8, she is rejected by the black family of her father, who she says “can’t see past the color of my skin and accept me even though I share DNA with them.” As Saulny conveys Wood’s story, we do not get a sense of any other problematics of this woman’s multiracial identity besides this one. We are left wondering at the shape that black people and blackness take in the rhetoric of Saulny’s article, if not of the interviewees, like Wood, with whom she speaks.

“If someone tries to call me black I say, ‘yes — and white.’ People have the right not to acknowledge everything, but don’t do it because society tells you that you can’t.” (Saulny, 2011, January 29)

“All society is trying to tear you apart and make you pick a side,” Ms. Wood says. “I want us to have a say.” (Saulny, 2011, January 29)

Few actual opponents of multiracialism are quoted in the article, but, oddly enough, when opposition to multiracialism is given a face, it is generally not the face of “all society” but a black one. Through such moments as these, this article is not merely reporting on but also typical of multiracial discourse, a diverse and sometimes mutually contentious collection of speeches, writings, and collective actions that broadly assert: (a) the presence of multiracial people as such; (b) the freedom of people to define themselves as their genetic diversity allows; and often (c) the implicit imperative that people (especially, for some reason, President Barack Obama) should choose to identify as multiracial. Time and again in this article, as in much of multiracial discourse, several questions arise when it comes to the ways black people are figuratively deployed. Is the problem really that blacks, more than others, are truly preventing multiracial people from identifying as such? If so, how so? Were one to ask against which real or anticipated threat to this freedom to “have a say” the MBSA students are asserting it, and attend closely to the rhetorical structure of the answers that Saulny articulates, I suspect that one would notice in those answers a structural function that blackness serves within multiracial discourse. This structural function owes to the staying power that comes from blacks’ unique position not just as a group, but also as useful rhetorical figures against which the coherence of an asserted “freedom to identify” might be sustained…

…The problems with multiracial identity, at least according to this article series, are not for the most part problems within the movement or its philosophical foundations. Rather, the problems almost always consist of the failure of others to accept mixed-race people—and those “others” are not those with the power to shape things like media representations or urban geography. For example, Saulny says,

No one knows quite how the growth of the multiracial population will change the country. Optimists say the blending of the races is a step toward transcending race, to a place where America is free of bigotry, prejudice and programs like affirmative action.

Pessimists say that a more powerful multiracial movement will lead to more stratification and come at the expense of the number and influence of other minority groups, particularly African-Americans. (Saulny, 2011, January 29)

This passage is performing some subtle but important ideological work. Those who advocate “the blending of the races” are contrasted with those who oppose “a more powerful multiracial movement.” Considering that one can be in favor of “the blending of the races” and yet opposed to the particular politics of “a more powerful multiracial movement,” this statement is a curious slippage, comparing “apples with oranges.” There is also the laying of the mantle of “optimist” on those who make the questionable juxtaposition between “bigotry, prejudice and programs like affirmative action,” almost as though there is no question that affirmative action is rooted in the bigotry and prejudice that necessitated it. Based on my reading of the article series as a whole, it is unclear to which specific “optimists” Saulny refers here, but, far more important is the way she leaves this equation unpacked. By juxtaposing these terms without critically examining them, Saulny ends up, intentionally or not, echoing a connection that multiracial discourses routinely and uncritically draw: the connection between black freedom struggle (affirmative action in this case, although any of the other political concessions that black freedom struggle has effected would probably suffice) and bigotry by blacks toward non-blacks…

Moves like these might be easily bypassed, if they did not bear a close resemblance to a common trope within multiracial discourse. As analyzed by Jared Sexton in his book Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, the thing that unifies a diverse (left, liberal, conservative, and right) field of discourse around multiracial identity is the singular desire to achieve distance from “certain figures of blackness” that “resurface in each instance of multiracial discourse” and “are generally made to serve as a foil for the contemporary value of multiracialism” (Sexton, 2008). It would require an excessive degree of naïveté or willful disregard to ignore the same symptoms of thought in Saulny’s article series. In Sexton’s words, “what lends [multiracial discourse] its coherence […] is its obdurately unsophisticated understanding of race and sexuality and its conspicuously negative disposition toward what Fanon (1967) terms ‘the lived experience of the black’” (Sexton, 2008).

Most essentially, then, in multiracial discourse, blackness stands in not as an identity or identification to be rejected or worked through but, in the words of Sexton, as a structural position “against which all other subjects take their bearings” (Sexton & Copeland, 2003). In what might otherwise be an incomprehensible world or a movement without a cause, blackness is so serviceable that it can be used to stand in as that with which nobody wants to be associated, even by those who are partly black.

Even if multiracialism shifts us from the “one-drop rule” to a more graduated mestizaje model of racialization, this changes nothing for black people because blackness is still located at the “undesirable” end of the continuum—or, more accurately, hierarchy. In my view, it is necessary that we first understand the stability of that unethical structural relation before we can say that multiracialism challenges racism by injecting into the racist structure a “more fluid” sense of identity. Rainier Spencer’s 2009 Chronicle of Higher Education article, [“Mixed Race Chic”] (Spencer, 2009, May 19), for example, asked, “how can multiracial identity deconstruct race when it needs the system of racial categorization to even announce itself?” Posing this question as a statement would be to say that one needs for there to be a structure of race in order to call oneself multiracial. Small wonder, then, that so many celebrations of multiracial identity sound antiblack. They are…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Divides in a Multicultural America

The American Prospect
2011-01-31

Jamelle Bouie

In The New York Times, Susan Saulny writes about the apparent malleability of race in an increasingly multicultural America. To that end, she profiles a group of students in the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association at the University of Maryland:
 
Many young adults of mixed backgrounds are rejecting the color lines that have defined Americans for generations in favor of a much more fluid sense of identity. Ask Michelle López-Mullins, a 20-year-old junior and the president of the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association, how she marks her race on forms like the census, and she says, “It depends on the day, and it depends on the options.”

It’s interesting to see a group of kids who want to live in a colorblind—or at least, racially fluid—world. But I’m not sure how meaningful this is for future demographic trends. I’ve said this before, but it remains true that “black/non-black” is the main racial divide in American life. For proof, it’s useful to look at rates of interracial marriage:…

…The great majority of intermarriages take place between Hispanics, Asians, and whites. If there is a great population of multiracial people, it’s almost certain that they will be some combination of Hispanic and white, or Asian and white. Undoubtedly, some of these people will “become” white in our racial discourse. To paraphrase myself, by 2050 or so, we’ll have a large population of white people with Latino or Asian last names, and a cultural understanding similar to the descendants of ethnic European immigrants…

Read the entire article here.

Race Remixed?

Living Anthropologically
2011-03-28

Jason Antrosio, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York

The 2000 U.S. Census was the first in modern times allowing respondents to check off more than one box for the mandatory race question. In 2010, the number of people checking more than one box grew enormously. At the New York Times, Susan Saulny investigates “the growing number of mixed-race Americans” in a series called “Race Remixed.”

This post uses Saulny’s numbers to do a reality check. There may be some interesting things going on with regard to personal attitudes about racial identification, but in terms of how race really matters–economic and political inequalities, or structural racism–the trends look more like retrenchment.

Race and racism in the U.S. today is best seen through economic and political inequalities. The average white household holds ten to twenty times the wealth of the average black household. This gap is growing, as reported in “The Racial Wealth Gap Increases Fourfold” (2010). And despite Barack Obama, black political power is extremely limited:…

…Given these present inequalities–which by some measures are increasing, not decreasing–I don’t find it very interesting that “many young adults of mixed backgrounds are rejecting the color lines that have defined Americans for generations in favor of a much more fluid sense of identity,” the subject of Saulny’s first article “Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above.” Personal feelings about race and identity could influence economic-political inequality, but it will not be automatic. There are already a lot of white people who say “race doesn’t matter anymore.” They are often the same people who ask “why do all the black people sit together?” or complain about affirmative action and “reverse racism.” Statements of “race doesn’t matter anymore” or rejecting color lines often are claims to a more enlightened-progressive state, better than benighted previous generations, or people of color, who are tagged as “more racist.” Saulny does briefly mention the “pessimists” who think the emphasis on mixing might “lead to more stratification.” She also writes “it is telling that the rates of intermarriage are lowest between blacks and whites, indicative of the enduring economic and social distance between them.” Still, the vast bulk of the article is about new multiracial college students celebrating mixture.

Saulny’s second article, “Black and White and Married in the Deep South” is more interesting. It is certainly worth investigating the rise of black-white marriages in places like Mississippi, where such unions were illegal 50 years ago, and where “a black man could face mortal danger just being seen with a woman of another race.” This is not to say southern states are “more racist” than northern states, which still boast the most segregated cities in the United States. Northern states have usually been able to get by on economic-geographic segregation instead of explicit legal sanction or lethal violence, although there has been plenty of legal sanction and lethal violence in northern states (see “A Dream Still Deferred” on Detroit). In any case, it is actually difficult to tell what is going on in Mississippi–is there really an increase, or are people just checking off different boxes in 2010 than they did in 2000?

The question remains as to whether inter-racial marriages can alter the structure of economic and political inequality. On this question, the graphic of “Who is Marrying Whom” is very enlightening. The numbers hint at three points I elaborate below: first, white people and the white-black household wealth gap are not going away; second, the “Hispanic” category shows signs of bifurcating into white and black; third, Asian-Americans have more securely become “probationary whites”:

What matters here is how the changing construction of whiteness intersects with the maintenance of a white/black divide that structures all race relations in the United States. Whether significant numbers of the people now called Latinos or Asian Americans–or the significant numbers of their known “mixed” offspring with whites–will become probationary whites and thus reinforce the structure is an important indicator of the future of race relations in the United States. (Trouillot 2003:151, Global Transformations)

White people are not going away

In 2009, approximately 95% of white people married each other, a figure that rises to 97% if “Hispanic (white)” is included. About five whites out of every thousand married a black person, or about 0.5%. That’s not going to change the wealth gap. Indeed, I suspect the numbers of white-black intermarriages decrease as one moves up the class ladder, but the overall number is so miniscule that further tracking is unnecessary.

There is certainly more white-black intermixture than registered by official marriage numbers. As “Census Data Presents Rise in Multiracial Population of Youths” reveals, the most common multi-racial combination chosen is white-and-black. This may simply be recognizing a long history of intermixture: “America already has almost 400 years of race mixing behind it, beginning with that first slave ship that sailed into Jamestown harbor carrying slaves who were already pregnant by members of the crew” (Brent Staples, 1999, “The Real American Love Story“). However, mixing has not altered overall white-black disparities. White people, white privilege, white-black wealth gap: no reason from the 2010 numbers to believe there will be much change….

Read the entire article here.

For Many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture Than Color

The New York Times
2012-01-13

Mireya Navarro

Every decade, the Census Bureau spends billions of dollars and deploys hundreds of thousands of workers to get an accurate portrait of the American population. Among the questions on the census form is one about race, with 15 choices, including “some other race.”

More than 18 million Latinos checked this “other” box in the 2010 census, up from 14.9 million in 2000. It was an indicator of the sharp disconnect between how Latinos view themselves and how the government wants to count them. Many Latinos argue that the country’s race categories—indeed, the government’s very conception of identity — do not fit them.

The main reason for the split is that the census categorizes people by race, which typically refers to a set of common physical traits. But Latinos, as a group in this country, tend to identify themselves more by their ethnicity, meaning a shared set of cultural traits, like language or customs…

…A majority of Latinos identify themselves as white. Among them is Fiordaliza A. Rodriguez, 40, a New York lawyer who says she considers herself white because “I am light-skinned” and that is how she is viewed in her native Dominican Republic.

But she says there is no question that she is seen as different from the white majority in this country. Ms. Rodriguez recalled an occasion in a courtroom when a white lawyer assumed she was the court interpreter. She surmised the confusion had to do with ethnic stereotyping, “no matter how well you’re dressed.”

Some of the latest research, however, shows that many Latinos—like Irish and Italian immigrants before them—drop the Latino label to call themselves simply “white.” A study published last year in the Journal of Labor Economics found that the parents of more than a quarter of third-generation children with Mexican ancestry do not identify their children as Latino on census forms.

Most of this ethnic attrition occurs among the offspring of parents or grandparents married to non-Mexicans, usually non-Hispanic whites. These Latinos tend to have high education, high earnings and high levels of English fluency. That means that many successful Latinos are no longer present in statistics tracking Latino economic and social progress across generations, hence many studies showing little or no progress for third-generation Mexican immigrants, said Stephen J. Trejo, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study…

…On the other side of the spectrum are black Latinos, who say they feel the sting of racism much the same as other blacks. A sense of racial pride has been emerging among many black Latinos who are now coming together in conferences and organizations.

Miriam Jiménez Román, 60, a scholar on race and ethnicity in New York, says that issues like racial profiling of indigenous-looking and dark-skinned Latinos led her to appear in a 30-second public service announcement before the 2010 census encouraging Latinos of African descent to “check both: Latino and black.” “When you sit on the subway, you just see a black person, and that’s really what determines the treatment,” she said. The 2010 census showed 1.2 million Latinos who identified as black, or 2.5 percent of the Hispanic population…

Read the entire article here.

In Strangers’ Glances at Family, Tensions Linger

The New York Times
2011-10-13

Susan Saulny

TOMS RIVER, N.J. — “How come she’s so white and you’re so dark?”

The question tore through Heather Greenwood as she was about to check out at a store here one afternoon this summer. Her brown hands were pushing the shopping cart that held her babbling toddler, Noelle, all platinum curls, fair skin and ice-blue eyes.

The woman behind Mrs. Greenwood, who was white, asked once she realized, by the way they were talking, that they were mother and child. “It’s just not possible,” she charged indignantly. “You’re so…dark!”

It was not the first time someone had demanded an explanation from Mrs. Greenwood about her biological daughter, but it was among the more aggressive. Shaken almost to tears, she wanted to flee, to shield her little one from this kind of talk. But after quickly paying the cashier, she managed a reply. “How come?” she said. “Because that’s the way God made us.”

The Greenwood family tree, emblematic of a growing number of American bloodlines, has roots on many continents. Its mix of races — by marriage, adoption and other close relationships — can be challenging to track, sometimes confusing even for the family itself…

…Jenifer L. Bratter, an associate sociology professor at Rice University who has studied multiracialism, said that as long as race continued to affect where people live, how much money they make and how they are treated, then multiracial families would be met with double-takes. “Unless we solve those issues of inequality in other areas, interracial families are going to be questioned about why they’d cross that line,” she said.

According to Census data, interracial couples have a slightly higher divorce rate than same-race couples — perhaps, sociologists say, because of the heightened stress in their lives as they buck enduring norms. And children in mixed families face the challenge of navigating questions about their identities…

…Once, on a beach chair at a resort in Florida years ago, a white woman sunning herself next to Mrs. Dragan bemoaned the fact that black children were running around the pool. “Isn’t it awful?” Mrs. Dragan recalled the woman confiding to her.

Within minutes, Mrs. Dragan, ever feisty despite her reserved appearance, had her brood by her side. “I’d like to introduce you to my children,” she told the woman. Awkward silence ensued…

Read the entire article here.

Getting Back to Basics: Re-Reading NYT’s “Race Remixed”

Nuñez Daughter
2011-02-15

Kismet Nuñez

A few weeks ago, @TrickAmaka sent me a New York Times piece by Susan Saulny on the high numbers of adults who identify as mixed-race as of the 2010 census.  In what was apparently the first in a series titled “Race Remixed,” the article focuses on a group of students at the University of Maryland as part of “the crop of students moving through college right now” who make up “the largest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States.”  Apparently, inquiring minds expect to latest census to reflect the changing dynamics of race in America:

One in seven new marriages is between spouses of different races or ethnicities, according to data from 2008 and 2009 that was analyzed by the Pew Research Center. Multiracial and multiethnic Americans (usually grouped together as “mixed race”) are one of the country’s fastest-growing demographic groups. And experts expect the racial results of the 2010 census, which will start to be released next month, to show the trend continuing or accelerating.

I’m glad I waited until after V-Day to even click the link.  Turns out the second article basically redacted the first (it is, *gasp* a “complex” matter, quantifying and analyzing the mixed-race population), and the third (well, what do you, our ever so intelligent and enraged readers, think?) threw the topic to the wolves of the blogosphere for further discussion…

The piece is mostly NYT playing Columbus and re-discovering race (mixture) in this country.  Again.  After all, what do you with bleached out phrases like these:

“Some proportion of the country’s population has been mixed-race since the first white settlers had children with Native Americans.”

 A bit of rape with your legacy of colonialism?  A dollop of indentured servitude and forced labor on the side?  How Disney of you…

…And I affirm Ms. Wood, Ms. López-Mullins, and all of the other students who were brave enough to talk to a reporter about what is going on in their hearts and in their heads.  Figuring out who you are is no easy feat, regardless of your race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, political affiliation, etc., etc., etc.
 
But there is a legacy of violence that underlies all of these identity claims and we need to make that central to the discussion.   Once upon a time a black man boy was lynched for whistling at a white woman.  Once upon a time a black woman was raped for walking down the wrong road.  Once upon a time a white woman was enslaved for not being white enough (or was she?).
 
And because we should never speak of these relations as though they were simply a matter of romance, a rainbow conflagration of resistance that just happened to occur between the legs of women of color, I will also never advocate for “mixed-race” as a corporate identity…

Read the entire article here.

Race Card: The New York Times Realizes Mixed People Exist

Bitch Media
2011-01-31

Nadra Kareem Nittle

Breaking news: the New York Times has discovered mixed people. Did you know that the number of racially mixed families in the US is growing? Or how about that some mixed kids feel pressured to choose one race? And get this—multiracial people find it annoying to be asked, “What are you?”
 
Yeah, that’s about as deep as the Times Jan. 29 piece on multiracial youth got. The paper evidently rolled out the article because the Census Bureau will soon unveil data about racial groups in the U.S., including how many people identified as more than one race—a move the government first allowed on the 2000 census.

…As required by law after Election Day 2008, all articles about multiracial people must make note of President Obama. And this piece follows suit. Why did Obama just check black on his census form? Isn’t he white, too? Should we call him the first black president or the first multiracial president?…

Read the entire article here.

This lame and utterly boring series has yet to even reach the already low, low bar set in the mid-1990s regarding this topic by Time and Newsweek. Beyond the drippingly bathetic nature of the reporting throughout the series, there is never more than a sentence or two given over to the fact that there is a huge ideological debate occurring within critical mixed-race studies circles about just what mixed race is and is not, about whether or not supporting it requires belief in the fallacy of biological race, about how much it does or does not advance the cause of white supremacy (whether overtly and knowingly or not), and about the propriety of the disproportionate influence of white mothers of black/white children within the multiracial movement.

The only boundary being pushed by the “Race Remixed” series is the continued fencing off of any significant input (beyond that sentence or two acknowledged above) by scholars who are critical of multiracial identity. If this thoroughly unbalanced series wanted to actually provide real news, it would dare to investigate how multiraciality poses a danger to civil rights compliance monitoring, how multiraciality is assisting certain persons of Hispanic and Asian descent in their transition to “honorary whiteness” while persons of African descent remain barred from doing the same, and how the multiracial movement remains absolutely exclusionary in terms of setting itself apart from the nearly 40 million Afro-Americans of mixed descent in this country. If that thoroughly mixed population is not mixed race, then no one is.

Rainier Spencer (Professor and author of Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix, 2011), Reader’s Comments (#49) for article “Pushing Boundaries, Mixed-Race Artists Gain Notice,” The New York Times, July 5, 2011. http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/arts/mixed-race-writers-and-artists-raise-their-profiles.html?permid=49#comment49