{"id":13905,"date":"2011-05-22T02:53:43","date_gmt":"2011-05-22T02:53:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=13905"},"modified":"2013-05-03T18:41:50","modified_gmt":"2013-05-03T18:41:50","slug":"mediating-racial-mixture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=13905","title":{"rendered":"Mediating Racial Mixture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mediating Racial Mixture<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Journal of Media Literacy<\/a>
\nVolume 55, Numbers 1 & 2<\/a> (Cultural Diversity) (2008)<\/p>\n

Carlos E. Cort\u00e9s<\/a><\/strong>, Professor Emeritus of History
\nUniversity of California, Riverside<\/em><\/p>\n

Which one of the following names does not fit in the set? Barack Obama. Mariah Carey<\/a>. Halle Berry<\/a>. Tiger Woods<\/a>. Ann Curry<\/a>. Soledad O\u2019Brien<\/a>. Benjamin Jealous<\/a>. Carlos Cort\u00e9s.<\/p>\n

Oh, that\u2019s too easy. All of the others\u2014a presidential candidate, a pop diva, an Oscar-winning actress, a professional golfer, two national television newspeople, and the newly-elected president of the NAACP<\/a>\u2014are visible figures of contemporary American popular culture.
\n\u00a0
\nBut let\u2019s try another question. What characteristic do they have in common? The answer: they are all the offspring of mixed heritages, part of a major U.S. population shift\u2014the relentless growth of ethnically-mixed Americans.
\n\u00a0
\nThis phenomenon has myriad implications. Not the least, it has challenged traditional U.S. categorical thinking about race and ethnicity. This includes news media conventions for racially and ethnically identifying individuals and groups (Cort\u00e9s, 2000).
\n\u00a0
\nTHE ROOTS OF MIXEDNESS<\/p>\n

Two historical trends have converged to hypertrophy<\/a> this challenge. First, the rise of interracial marriage, particularly since the 1967 Loving v. Virginia<\/a><\/em> Supreme Court decision that invalidated the sixteen remaining state-level intermarriage bans. (Mildred Jeter Loving<\/a>, the African-American woman whose marriage to a white man helped precipitate that landmark decision, died in May of this year.)
\n\u00a0
\nSecond, the continuous inflow of Latin Americans. Millions are of mixed heritage and come from nations with racial systems quite different than the one that has taken root in the United States. Furthermore, by the third generation, more than half of U.S. Latinos marry non-Latinos, so their children further undermine categorical purity.<\/p>\n

The year 2000 census illustrated the impact of these two trends. Through a set of decisions that reflected changing realities, pragmatism, compromise, and external pressure, the Census Bureau addressed mixed heritage in two ways.
\n\u00a0
\nFirst, it repeated the 1990 practice of separating Hispanic heritage (question five on the short form) from race (question six). The result\u201448 percent of self-identified Hispanics checked white as their racial identity, while 42 percent checked \u201csome other race\u201d (meaning I don\u2019t fit into any of your racial categories).<\/p>\n

Second, and for the first time, the 2000 census permitted respondents to indicate more than one \u201crace.\u201d This ended, at least temporarily, the historical \u201ccheck one\u201d practice that had forced mixed-race respondents to reject either their father or their mother.
\n\u00a0
\nThese demographic and census category changes have contributed to scholarly dissensus, including deep disagreements over the meaning and use of such terms as \u201crace\u201d and \u201cethnicity\u201d (Gracia, 2007). They have also raised a challenge for the American news media (Squires, 2007). How should they categorize and label mixed-heritage people?…<\/p>\n

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

Mediating Racial Mixture The Journal of Media Literacy Volume 55, Numbers 1 & 2 (Cultural Diversity) (2008) Carlos E. Cort\u00e9s, Professor Emeritus of History University of California, Riverside Which one of the following names does not fit in the set? Barack Obama. Mariah Carey. Halle Berry. Tiger Woods. Ann Curry. Soledad O\u2019Brien. Benjamin Jealous. Carlos […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,459,8,26,394,20],"tags":[6393,6392,6394],"class_list":["post-13905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-history","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-carlos-cortes","tag-carlos-e-cortes","tag-the-journal-of-media-literacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13905","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=13905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13905\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}