Mixed Race Studies

Measuring Race (and Ethnicity): An Overview of Past Practices, Current Concerns and Thoughts for the Future [Draft]

Population Association of America
2010 Annual Meeting Program
2010-04-17
25 pages

C. Matthew Snipp, Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

On the eve of the 2010 census, Census Bureau staff are already beginning to think about how race should be measured in the 2020 census. This paper looks at the history of racial measurement, assesses the performance of the current standard in the context of a 1996 NAS report, and concludes with a set of considerations that must be taken into account for the purposes of assessing race in the census or in any survey instrument. Particular attention is given to a variety of legal definitions that have historically been used to measure race, followed by the first issuance of OMB Directive No. 15 in 1977, and then followed by the latest revision in 1997. Discussion of how various federal agencies have adjusted to the 1997 revision is also included in this discussion.

Read the entire draft paper here.

Bio-Ancestry and Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity

Population Association of America
2010 Annual Meeting Program
2010-04-17

Guang Guo, Odum Distinguished Term Professor of Sociology
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Yilan Fu
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Kathleen Mullan Harris, James Haar Distinguished Professor of Sociology
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Two sharply divided perspectives concerning the nature of racial distinction have developed over the past two decades. On one hand, the consensus has long been established among academics that racial and ethnic categories are the invention of social construction. On the other, a number of genetic studies point to a bio-ancestral base for the major racial/ethnic categories used in the contemporary United States. Instead of treating the two perspectives as diametrically opposed, this application proposes to examine evidence for the coexistence of socially-constructed and bio-ancestrally-rooted racial identity in the contemporary United States.

The overarching goal of this application is to investigate whether adding estimates of bio-ancestry will significantly advance our understanding of social construction of race and ethnicity. In previous studies of social construction of race, racial identities have been considered socially constructed. In this application, we investigate whether and why self-reports of race and ethnicity depart from bio-ancestry. The project will draw on decades of scholarship in race and ethnicity, recent advances in human genetics, and data resources from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) (Harris, Florey, Tabor et al. 2003) and the Human Genome  Diversity Project (HGDP) (Cann, de Toma, Cazes et al. 2002).

This proposed project has two broad objectives. First, we assess the accuracy of a panel of 186 genetic ancestral informative markers in predicting self-reported race/ethnicity in the contemporary United States using a racially and ethnically diverse sample of 17,000 individuals from Add Health. Previous studies of bio-geographic ancestry were carried out for the purpose of understanding the history of human evolution (Li, Absher, Tang et al. 2008; Rosenberg, Pritchard, Weber et al. 2002) or population admixture in the context of genetic association studies (Tang, Quertermous, Rodriguez et al. 2005). These studies did not directly address the relation between bio-ancestry and racial/ethnic identity using a US-based racially- and ethnically-diverse population sample. Second, we take advantage of estimated bio-ancestry and use it in an investigation of the social construction of race and ethnicity in the US. We examine to what extent self-reports of race and ethnicity follow the one-drop rule—the century-old social practice of treating individuals with any amount of African ancestry as black in the US. We address whether and why individuals change their racial/ethnic identity under different social circumstances. We then examine the relationship between bio-ancestry and friendship social network in a school context.

Beyond the Looking Glass: Exploring Variation between Racial Self-Identification and Interviewer Classification

Population Association of America
2010 Annual Meeting Program
2010-04-17
10 pages

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Andrew Penner, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Recent research has demonstrated the existence of fluidity in both racial self-identification and interviewer classification. Racial self-identification has been shown to vary for the same individuals across contexts (Harris and Sim 2002), over time (Doyle and Kao 2007; Hitlin et al. 2006) and depending on their social position (Penner and Saperstein 2008). Similarly, interviewer classifications of the same individuals have been shown to vary over time (Brown et al. 2007), as well as change in response to biographical events such as incarceration, unemployment and experiencing a spell of poverty (Penner and Saperstein 2008). However, the specific pattern of variation between racial self-identification and interviewer classification—i.e., how they might influence each other over time—has yet to be empirically explored.

The prevailing assumption in the literature on racial identity is that people calibrate or edit their self-identification based on how they are perceived by others (e.g., Nagel 1994). We propose to test this hypothesis directly by examining what happens when there is discordance between an individual’s perceived and self-identified race, using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. This is a crucial, and up to now missing, piece of the puzzle of whether and how different measures of race relate to one another. Additional analyses will also provide insight into how differences in life chances, such as educational attainment and contact with the criminal justice system, affect how respondents racially identify, are perceived by others and how both change over time.

Read the entire paper here.

Our obsession with classification: What are the implications to mixed race studies?

2009-02-11
3 pages

Marcia Yumi Lise

Whether it is by gender, sex, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, age, or nationality, in contemporary society, we are immensely preoccupied by classifying people into categories. Social scientists collect and produce data to utilise it for analysis. We hold passports or identity cards (of some sort), which specify one’s nationality, gender, name, date of birth, place of birth etc. When taking up employment we are asked to fill in an ethnic monitoring form. What’s interesting is that in England for example the Domesday Survey is said to have started nearly 1,000 years ago (The National Archives). Objectification manifests everywhere in our world now.

…What does all this mean to the study of mixed race people and identities? When we speak of mixed race people, we are constantly drawing lines between different ethnicities, races, nationalities, heritages, or cultures to allow us to define “mixed race”. Academics have often stated that ‘mixed race’ people challenge existing classifications based on the aforementioned criterias. For instance, a Japanese and British individual instantly confronts conventional racial/national/ethnic/cultural classification. However we adjust to work in line with and make do with existing classification system. Recall how the concept of ‘race’ is ungrounded however. In this light the objectification of people using the criteria of ‘race’ is misleading…

Read the entire essay here.

The Poet as Cultural Dentist: Ethnicity in the Poetry of Jackie Kay

Theory and Practice in English Studies 4 (2005)
Proceedings from the Eighth Conference of British, American and Canadian Studies.
Brno: Masarykova Univerzita
pages 63-67

Pavlína Hácová, Philosophical Faculty
Palacky University, Olomouc

The acclaimed British poet Jackie Kay (born 1961) belongs to the colourful mainstream of recent British poetry. The paper aims to survey the ethnic imagery and consciousness Kay explores in her poems, predominantly with the images of dentistry. Special attention will be paid to the images of cultural significance. A few sample poems will be discussed to demostrate the constant search for identity (inclusion vs. exclusion, assimilation vs. marginalization) and cultural heritage.

…Kay keeps clear-cut the distinction between white and black. In the poem “Pride”, the exploration of identity that is based on the imagery of teeth, leads to concern with nationality. Kay is proud of her mixed Scottish and Nigerian background. She links her African descent to her Scottish nationality as she compares Scottish clans to African tribes – both sharing the pride of their respective cultures:

His [the stranger’s] face had a look
I’ve seen on a MacLachlan, a MacDonnell, a MacLeod,
the most startling thing, pride. (Kay 1998: “Pride”, lines 51-53)

However, Kay does not see the identity of the characters as either black or white. She has stated in an interview: “I consider myself a Scottish writer, in the sense that I am, and I consider myself a black writer, in the sense that I am, and a woman writer, in the sense that I am” (Severin 2002)…

Read the entire paper here.

Mixed-race theory for everyone

Mixedness & mixing: New perspectives on mixed-race Britons
A Commission for Racial Equality eConference
2007-09-04 through 2007-09-06

Jin Haritaworn, Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and Environment at the Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University, Canada

What insights does mixed-race theory bear for mixed-race people, our allies, and the professionals who work with us? This paper introduces three lessons which are especially relevant in this time and place.

Table of Contents

Lesson 1: Scandalising the ‘What are you?’ encounter
Lesson 2: The good mix and the bad
Lesson 3: A Mongrel Nation?

Mixed-race theory helps us challenge the voyeuristic entitlement which some people feel to find out intimate things about us. Many of us are used to giving unreciprocated information about our identities, origins and families. We endure this treatment as we know from experience that the person asking ‘Where are you from?’ will not be satisfied with ‘Northampton’. We rarely risk challenging this inappropriate ‘smalltalk’, for fear of being labelled irritating.

Read the entire paper here.

What Are You? Multi-racial and Bi-racial College Student Experiences [Session Handout]

Association of College Unions International Annual Conference
New York, New York
2010-03-01
13:00Z – 14:15Z
1 March 2010
11 pages

Megan E. Bell, Assistant Director
University Memorial Center
University of Colorado, Boulder

Seven million people checked more than one box to select their ethnicity in the 2000 census. As an increasing number of multiracial students enter campus, it is crucial to understand how identity development for these students is unique. This session will showcase student interviews on video, as well as include dialogue and a gallery exercise.

Read the entire handout here.

MixedRaceStudies.org

A Paper Presented at
Who Counts & Who’s Counting? 38th Annual Conference National Association for Ethnic Studies Conference
Session: The race in “mixed” race? Reiterations of power and identity
Washington, DC
2010-04-10

Steven F. Riley

Abstract

In the paper I describe the origins of www.MixedRaceStudies.org a non-commercial website that provides a gateway to contemporary interdisciplinary (sociology, psychology, history, law, etc.) English language scholarship about the relevant issues surrounding the topic of multiracialism.  I discuss the inspiration, conception, development and future plans for the site.

Good Morning.

I would like to take a few moments of your time to describe an online resource I created a year ago called MixedRaceStudies.org.  Before I continue, I would like to thank Dr. Rainier Spencer and Dr. Sue-Je Gage for giving me this opportunity to speak to you.

The heightened visibility of self-described ‘mixed-race’ individuals in the entertainment industry and professional sports has of recent years has captured the attention and fascination of the American public.  This heightened awareness has even led to changes in the way our decennial census collects racial data.  Even more recently, the election of ‘mixed-race’ individuals across the country from mayors (such as this city) to the president of our country has led some to believe we have in fact entered a ‘post-racial’ society.

The skeptic in me has always questioned the validity of the American popular culture multiracial gaze.  To be honest, I too have occasionally succumbed to the gaze of increasing numbers of interracial relationships (like my own 24 year relationship with my loving wife Julia), and the offspring of such unions.  In the Silver Spring, Maryland area that my wife and I live in, interracial couples and mixed-race individuals seem to be everywhere.  And this, in a racialized society as ours is fascinating.  But, like many things, what is fascinating today may be irrelevant next week, despised next month, discarded next year… and rediscovered next century. 

I was drawn to the subject of mixed race because it is so complex.  I wanted to ask questions, and to share the answers and information I found along the way.  For me, current discourses about multiracialism in pop-culture today provide us with only a cursory understanding of the lives of ‘mixed-race’ people and the societal implications of their increasing presence.  The many shortcomings of pop-cultural discourses are too numerous to mention, but include.

1. An utter lack of historical perspective.  This ‘new’ thing has been occurring in the Americas for over five centuries.
2. An unwillingness to dismiss or even question the (scientifically proven) fallacious concept of ‘race’ despite the fact that mixed-race individuals—as Dr. Spencer says—embody its’ fallaciousness.
3. An unwillingness to question whether our ‘fascination’ with multiracialism may in fact be due to the persistence of racism.
4. A tendency to view the increased number of ‘mixed-race’ individuals of heralding in an era of a “post-racial” America.

To that end, I have turned my gaze away from television, away from rising and falling sports figures, towards the writings of individuals who have dedicated their life’s work to elucidating us about multiracialism.

Conception

 I began this journey, quite by accident in January 2008 when the son of a college friend of my wife Julia came to visit us for dinner at our home.  This young man—who we had not seen since he was a child—is the son of a black Haitian man and a white Jewish woman, mentioned to us that he was bringing along his girlfriend.  This caused me to spend an inordinate amount of time wondering about the girlfriend. I’m sure you have heard the phrase or question that “dare’th not speak its’ name”… “What are you?”  “What is she?”  I wondered was she “black” like his father or “white” like his mother?  Would he be in an interracial relationship like his parents?  Would his parents approve of the relationship? Was I asking myself a lot of stupid questions and what did it matter anyway?

As it turned out, our young guest’s girlfriend (now fiance) was in fact the daughter of a black father and a white mother also.  Were they an interracial couple?  Would their children be ‘mixed-race’?…. or not.

As the evening progressed, our conversation turned to politics and our preferred candidates for Democratic presidential nomination.  Julia and I supported then Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, because… we thought she could win.  Our two young guests disagreed and were convinced—and convinced us—that this “black man of mixed heritage” named Barack Obama could indeed be elected to the presidency.

My journey continued after the election of President Obama and before his inauguration.  It seemed that everywhere I looked there were articles about interracial families on television programs, in newspapers, magazines and websites… again.  Were “mixed race” people in hiding since a previous victory, not in the electoral politics, but on the golf course in 1997?  Was America on the verge of a becoming post-post racial society?  What I yearned for was not another 15 second sound bite about the “changing face of America”, but an honest appraisal of what the apparent heightened visibility of mixed-race people really meant for America.

In February of 2009, I discovered the online podcast Mixed Chicks Chat.  Started in May of 2007 by educator Fanshen Cox and author Heidi W. Durrow, this wonderful podcast promotes itself as “the only weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed.”  Available live or recorded via TalkShoe or recorded via Apple’s iTunes, the 150 episodes—I appeared as a featured guest on the 150^thepisode this last Wednesday—provide listeners with insightful and thought provoking discussion surrounding ‘mixed-race’ issues.  After listening to several live podcasts, I found the hosts Ms. Cox and Ms. Durrow quite knowledgeable about all aspects of the ‘mixed-race’ experience.  Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the some of the listeners.  On many occasions, I would post links in the “chat room” to books and articles for fellow participants unfamiliar with terms such as “one-drop rule”, “Jim Crow”,  etc.  It was after a few weeks of this exercise, I decided to create an online resource to answer these many questions.

To obtain the knowledge to begin the process of building this resource, I purchased and read Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe’s ‘Mixed Race’ Studies: A Reader.  Considered by some the definitive anthology on the subject, ‘Mixed Race’ Studies takes the reader on a 150 year interdisciplinary trek encompassing the origins of “miscegenation theory” and false notions of moral and hybrid degeneracy, to contemporary discourses on identity politics and celebration, and finally to the critiques of these political movements.  Great anthologies like ‘Mixed Race’ Studies encourage the reader to further their scholarship by reading additional discourses by the various authors.  That was and remains the goal for my site, which I named MixedRaceStudies.org in April of 2009.

www.MixedRaceStudies.org  is a non-commercial website that provides a gateway to contemporary interdisciplinary (sociology, psychology, history, law, etc.) English language scholarship about the relevant issues surrounding the topic of multiracialism.

The site contains over 1,000 posts that include over 400 articles, 300 books, and over 100 papers, reports and dissertations.

The site is by no means an exhaustive listing of discourses on ‘mixed race’ scholarship.  Some examples of the scholarship that is not available on the site are as follows:

• Non-English language resources.
• Out-of-print resources.  This includes important texts such as Everett V. Stonequist’s The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict (1937) and other works.
• Non-web-based resources.

I created this site:

• For all of those who think that race is a biological construction.
• For Daphne who thought interracial marriage was not legal in the US until 1967.
• For those who have always wondered why people who have complexions that range from white to dark-brown are classified as ‘black’.
• For the young student of my 40-something pal Bradley in Manchester, England who was asked if there were any ‘mixed-race’ people older than him in Britain.
• For Mike who told me there “weren’t many scholarly resource available on mixed-race identity.”

The goals of the site are to:

• Provide visitors with links to books, articles, dissertations, multimedia and any other resources to enable them to further their (and my) knowledge on the topic.
• Remind visitors that so-called “racial mixing” has been occurring in the Americas for over five centuries and in fact, all of the founding nations of the Americas were mixed-race societies at their inception.
• Ultimately support a vision of the irrelevance of race.

In supporting the vision of the irrelevance of race, I’ve been forced to ask myself the following questions.

• Is the ideal of no racial distinction a possibility?
• Does mixed race identity continue the racial hierarchy/paradigm or does it change it?
• Will the acknowledgement and study of multiraciality help or hinder a goal of a post-racial future?
• Will the sheer volume of mixed race people provoke change?
• …But if everybody has been mixed already and our racial paradigm hasn’t changed in the last 400 years, what do we make of the changes in these last 40 years?
• And what changes can we expect in the next 40?

Future plans for the site

After creating the site, I firmly believed that the audience would be individuals like myself—non-scholars—with a casual to moderate interest in multiracial identity issues.  At best, I hoped that parents or caregivers of mixed race children would find some interest in the site.  To my surprise, I have discovered that the overwhelming audience—at least by those who have contacted me—have been individuals in academia!  Many scholars in fact, are regular subscribers to the site.  A professor at the University of California has told me that his institution has been trying to set up a website similar to mine, but for now there are no funds to proceed.

As for now, MixedRaceStudies.org remains a labor of love, requiring minimal financial resources to host ($10.00 per/month).  Future plans involve utilizing my programming and database skills to produce a scholar bibliographic search engine and other features.

Policies of Racial Classification and the Politics of Racial Inequality

In Suzanne Mettler, Joe Soss, and Jacob Hacker (eds.). Remaking America: Democracy and Public Policy in an Age of Inequality
Russell Sage Foundation
November 2007
41 pages

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Vesla Mae Weaver, Assistant Professor
The Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
University of Virginia

Introduction: Policy, Politics, Inequality, and Race

In 1890, the United States census bureau reported that the nation contained 6,337,980 negroes, 956,989 “mulattoes,” 105,135 “quadroons,” and 69,936 “octoroons.” In the early twentieth century it also reported the number of whites of “mixed parentage,” the number of Indians with one-quarter, half, or three-quarters black or white “blood,” and the number of part-Hawaiians and part-Malays. The boundaries between racial and ethnic groups, and even the definition of race and ethnicity, were blurred and contested. By 1930, however, this ambiguity largely disappeared from the census. Anyone with any “Negro blood” was counted as a Negro; whites no longer had mixed parentage; Indians were mainly identified by tribe rather than ancestry; and a consistent treatment of Asians was slowly developing. In other work we examine how and why these classifications rose and fell; here we examine the consequences for contemporary American politics and policy.

Official governmental classification systems can create as well as reflect social, economic, and political inequality, just as policies of taxation, welfare, or social services can and do. Official classification defines groups, determines boundaries between them, and assigns individuals to groups; in “ranked ethnic systems” (Horowitz 2000), this process enshrines structurally the dominant group’s belief about who belongs where, which groups deserve what, and ultimately who gets what. Official racial categories have determined whether a person may enter the United States, attain citizenship, own a laundry, marry a loved one, become a firefighter, enter a medical school, attend an elementary school near home, avoid an internment camp, vote, run for office, annul a marriage, receive appropriate medical treatment for syphilis, join a tribe, sell handicrafts, or open a casino. Private racial categories have affected whether an employer offers a person a job, whether a criminal defendant gets lynched, whether a university admits an applicant, and whether a heart attack victim receives the proper therapy. In these and many more ways, racial classification helps to create and maintain poverty and political, social, and economic inequality. Thus systems of racial categorization are appropriate subjects for analysis through a policy-centered perspective because they are “strategies for achieving political goals, structures shaping political interchange, and symbolic objects conveying status and identity” (p. 2 of Intro). Race is also, not coincidentally, the pivot around which political contests about equality have been waged for most of this country’s history.

The same classification system that promotes inequality may also undermine it. Once categorization generates groups with sharply defined boundaries, the members of that group can draw on their shared identity within the boundary to mobilize against their subordinate position—what one set of authors call strategic essentialism (Omi and Winant 1994). Thus classification laws are recursive, containing the elements for both generating and challenging group-based inequality. For this reason—and also because demographic patterns and other social relations on which classification rests can change—categorizations are unstable and impermanent.

We explore these abstract claims by examining the past century of racial classification in the United States. That period encompassed significant change in systems of classification and their attendant hierarchies; thus we can see how classification and inequality are related, as well as tracing the political dynamics that reinforce or challenge inequality-sustaining policies. From the Civil War era through the 1920s, the Black population was partly deconstructed through official attention to mulattos (and sometimes quadroons and octoroons), then reconstructed through court decisions and state-level “one drop of blood” laws. As of 1930, a clear and simple racial hierarchy was inscribed in the American polity — with all the attendant horrors of Jim Crow segregation. However, the one-drop policy that reinforced racial inequality also undermined it. From the 1930s through the 1970s, that is, the Black population solidified though a growing sense of racial consciousness and shared fate, and developed the political capacity to contest their poverty and unequal status…

Read the entire chapter here.

Shades of Gray: The Life and Times of a Free Family of Color in Antebellum Texas

Jason A. Gillmer, Professor of Law
Texas Wesleyan University School of Law

2009-08-13
64 pages

The history of race and slavery is often told from the perspective of either the oppressors or the oppressed. This Article takes a different tact, unpacking the rich and textured story of the Ashworths, an obscure yet prosperous free family of color who came to Texas beginning in the early 1830s. It is undoubtedly an unusual story; indeed in the history of the time there are surely more prominent names and more famous events. Yet their story reveals a tantalizing world in which–despite legal rules and conventional thinking – life was not so black and white. Drawing on local records rather than canonical cases, and listening to the voices from the community rather than the legislatures, this Article emphasizes the importance of looking to the margins of society to demonstrate how racial relations and ideological notions in the antebellum South were far more intricate than we had previously imagined. The Ashworths never took a stand against slavery; to the contrary, they amassed a fortune on its back. But their racial identity also created complications and fissures in the social order, and their story ultimately tells us as much about them as it does about the times in which they lived.

Read the entire article here.