{"id":11036,"date":"2010-12-28T02:31:58","date_gmt":"2010-12-28T02:31:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11036"},"modified":"2013-07-10T19:22:18","modified_gmt":"2013-07-10T19:22:18","slug":"interpreting-the-census-the-elasticity-of-whiteness-and-the-depoliticization-of-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11036","title":{"rendered":"Interpreting the Census: The Elasticity of Whiteness and the Depoliticization of Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interpreting the Census: The Elasticity of Whiteness and the Depoliticization of Race<\/a><\/em><\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n

2007
\npages 155-170\u00a0<\/p>\n

Katya Gibel Mevorach<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of Anthropology
\nGrinnell College<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

From the anthology:\u00a0<\/p>\n

Racial Liberalism and the Politics of Urban America<\/a><\/em><\/strong>
\nMichigan State University Press
\n<\/a>2007
\n280 pages
\n6 ” x 9 ”
\nISBN: 0-87013-669-0, 978-0-87013-669-6\u00a0<\/p>\n

Edited by:\u00a0<\/p>\n

Curtis Stokes<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Political Philosophy and African American Thought
\nJames Madison College of Public Affairs
\nMichigan State University<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Theresa A. Melendez<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of Chicano\/Chicana Literature
\nMichigan State University<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

I begin with a brief review of how whiteness<\/a> was established as a norm and context for considering initial media reports of U.S. Census data on race released in March 2001.\u00a0 This is followed by reflections on the politically conservative ramifications of multiracialism and multiculturalism, which have had an exaggerated impact on popular interpretations of the census.\u00a0 As a preface, it should be noted that although we are, collectively, caught in the trap of using race as a noun, race should be understood as a verb\u2014a predicate that requires action.\u00a0 People do not belong to\u00a0a race but the are raced<\/em>; in this context, race operates as a social fact with concrete material consequences for the manner in which experiences shape individual lives and their meaning.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Let us take note of an overlooked but rather obvious observation: inequality is not distributed equally<\/em>.\u00a0 Therefore Americans of all colors and national origins need a constant reminder that Africans brought to the English colonies<\/a> in the 1600s were strategically and explicitly excluded, by law and social custom, from the privileges and rights accorded English men.\u00a0 This is a critical factor in how U.S. history has been shaped.\u00a0 Emphasizing the unequal distribution of inequality underlines the continuities and clarifies the linkages between the past and the present.\u00a0 Beginning in the colonial period<\/a>, being white was perceived and defined as having certain privileges and rights, including right to citizenship,\u00a0 to vote, to serve in the militia and <\/em>bear arms, and to be a member of a jury.\u00a0 Most important of all was the right of self-possession\u2014in other words, he right to be identified as a free person and to act on that right.\u00a0 Children of enslaved African females were legally designated as slaves and property of their masters, who often where their biological fathers.<\/strong>\u00a0 As blackness quickly came to be associated with slave status, the law set the parameters within which, conceptually, people with African ancestors would be legally and socially identified as Negroes (Fields 1990)…\u00a0<\/p>\n

…In sum, the multiracial movement has successfully <\/em>blurred the lines between two very different forms of identifying: public self-identification and personal or private plural identities. From Elk <\/em>magazine to Seventeen <\/em>and ABC to MTV, the notion of mixed-race and multiracial identities is given positive visibility as a celebration of how much America is changing. Curiously, this multimedia arena has neglected a discussion of the limitations of a notion of multiracialism that refers only to children whose parents are raced differently. In fact, the campaign for a multiracial category completely obscures the fact that black or African American is already <\/em>a multiracial category.<\/strong> Patricia Williams<\/a> skillfully interprets this phenomenon when she writes, \u201cwhat troubles me is the degree to which few people in the world, and most particularly in the United States, are anything but <\/em>multiracial, to say nothing of bi<\/em>racial. The use of the term seems to privilege the offspring of mixed marriages as those \u2018between\u2019 races without doing much to enhance the social status of us mixed-up products of the illegitimacies of the not so distanct past<\/strong>\u201d (1997, 53)…<\/p>\n

Read the entire chapter here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interpreting the Census: The Elasticity of Whiteness and the Depoliticization of Race\u00a0 2007 pages 155-170\u00a0 Katya Gibel Mevorach, Associate Professor of Anthropology Grinnell College\u00a0 From the anthology:\u00a0 Racial Liberalism and the Politics of Urban America Michigan State University Press 2007 280 pages 6 ” x 9 ” ISBN: 0-87013-669-0, 978-0-87013-669-6\u00a0 Edited by:\u00a0 Curtis Stokes, Professor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,11,33,1933,8,394,20],"tags":[4804,4803,4802,4800,195,3600,4801,1785,4805,4806],"class_list":["post-11036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-books","category-census","category-bookchapter","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-curtis-stokes","tag-katya-azoulay","tag-katya-g-azoulay","tag-katya-g-mevorach","tag-katya-gibel-azoulay","tag-katya-gibel-mevorach","tag-katya-mevorach","tag-michigan-state-university-press","tag-theresa-a-melendez","tag-theresa-melendez"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11036\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}