Mixed Race Studies

Soledad O’Brien Isn’t Holding Back Anymore

Rolling Stone
2020-03-03

EJ Dickson, Reporter

After leaving CNN, the veteran journalist started Soledad O’Brien Productions. Leeor Wild for Rolling Stone

After a new executive pushed her out at CNN, the veteran journalist became one of mainstream media’s most fiery critics

Soledad O’Brien likes to tell a story: Eleven years ago, a senior employee at CNN — “my boss’s boss’s boss” — called her into his office to upbraid her about a comment she had made while promoting her multipart series Black in America. At a panel, O’Brien had said she had interviewed black parents from various socioeconomic backgrounds, all of whom said they had conversations with their sons about how to navigate interactions with police. The superior, who was white, told her this experience was not specific to people of color, and that white parents had this discussion with their sons too. He requested that she stop publicly speaking about young black men and police brutality.

O’Brien was stunned. “I’d spent 18 months working on that doc,” the veteran journalist recalls in the office of her company, Soledad O’Brien Productions. “But the idea that I would come back with something that challenged his belief was just not acceptable.” Nonetheless, she wanted to keep her job, and she knew that speaking out would be career suicide. “I didn’t tell that story,” she says. “Until I was telling it on Twitter.” And once she started telling stories, she found she couldn’t stop.

Read the entire article here.

Who is Hispanic?

Fact Tank: News in the Numbers
Pew Research Center
2019-11-11

Mark Hugo Lopez, Director, Global Migration and Demography Research

Jens Manuel Krogstad, Senior Writer/Editor

Jeffrey S. Passel, Senior Demographer

Beauty pageant contestants at the Junta Hispana Hispanic cultural festival in Miami. (Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Debates over who is Hispanic and who is not have fueled conversations about identity among Americans who trace their heritage to Latin America or Spain. The question surfaced during U.S. presidential debates and the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. More recently, it bubbled up after a singer from Spain won the “Best Latin” award at the 2019 Video Music Awards.

So, who is considered Hispanic in the United States? And how are they counted in public opinion surveys, voter exit polls and government surveys like the upcoming 2020 census?…

Read the entire article here.

Establishing the Denominator: The Challenges of Measuring Multiracial, Hispanic, and Native American Populations

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Volume: 677, Issue: 1, What Census Data Miss about American Diversity, (May 2018)
Pages 48-56
DOI: 10.1177/0002716218756818

Wendy D. Roth, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Pennsylvania

For multiracial, Hispanic, and Native Americans, norms for racial and ethnic self-identification are less well established than they are for other population groups. There is considerable variation and fluidity in how multiracial, Hispanic, and Native Americans self-identify, as well as how they are classified by others. This presents challenges to researchers and analysts in terms of consistently and accurately estimating the size and population dynamics of these groups. I argue that for analytic purposes, racial/ethnic self-identification should continue to be treated as a statistical numerator, but that the challenge is for researchers to establish the correct denominator—the population that could identify as members of the group based on their ancestry. Examining how many people who could identify with these groups choose to do so sheds light on assimilation and emerging racial classification processes. Analyses of the larger potential populations further avoid bias stemming from nonrandom patterns of self-identification with the groups.

Read or purchase the article here.

What Racial Discrimination Will Look Like in 2060

Scientific American
2019-11-29

Marisa Franco

Credit: Getty Images

As biracial people become increasingly common in America, bias based on perceived rather than actual identity will too

In 2009, Nathaniel Burrage requested a transfer from his job in Youngstown, Ohio, where he worked as a driver for FedEx. He alleged that he was experiencing ongoing racially motivated harassment. According to Burrage, his supervisor, Dennis Jamiot, alternated between referring to him as “Mexican” and “cheap labor,” and shouted “ándale” and “arriba” at him as he walked by. Soon after, he said his other supervisors began to chime in with the same racist insults, and Jamiot began to lob paper clips and chalk at him. One co-worker asked him to weigh in on whether what was etched on a graffiti wall was true: Mexicans are proof that American Indians had sex with buffalos.

Burrage filed a lawsuit under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet, despite the verbal and physical abuse he alleged he’d experienced, his case was dismissed. The reason? Nathanial Burrage was not actually Mexican, or even Hispanic. Burrage was a black/white biracial man experiencing what I have termed in my research as “identity incongruent discrimination.” Identity incongruent discrimination occurs when someone experiences racial discrimination for a race they are misperceived as.

As the browning of America continues, identity incongruent discrimination will only continue to rise. It’ll be a pressing problem for the growing multiracial population—a group that is the fastest growing racial group in America and that’s set to triple in size by 2060. Research finds that members of the multiracial group are more likely to be miscategorized than members of any other racial group. Compared to categorizing people into a single-race category, categorizing someone as multiracial is more mentally cumbersome, takes longer and is less likely to occur. And the most common race that black/white biracial people, like Burrage, are categorized as is Hispanic…

Read the entire article here.

Rosie Perez Says It’s ‘Dangerous’ For Afro-Latinos To Separate Themselves Within Latin Community

ESSENCE
2019-10-25

Lapacazo Sandoval

Photo by JC Olivera/Getty Images

“The Latinos that are not dark-skinned don’t call themselves White Latinos or Caucasian Latinos. I know that might sound controversial,” she admitted.

Puerto Rican-American actress Rosie Perez burst onto the Hollywood scene thanks to Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing at a time when Tinsel Town wasn’t necessarily rich with opportunities for people of color. And some decades later, Perez, who identifies as Afro-Latino, still isn’t shy when it comes to voicing her concern about the pervasive racism in Hollywood.

“I think it’s very dangerous—the separation of color within the Latin community,” Perez told ESSENCE last Saturday while receiving Hispanicize’s Latinavator Award at The InterContinental in Los Angeles. “ People who are dark skin have to pronounce themselves as Afro-Latinos. The Latinos that are not dark-skinned don’t call themselves White Latinos or Caucasian Latinos. I know that might sound controversial, [but] I think it’s important that we unify.”

“That said: there is a disparity in regards to seeing brown, dark brown and Black-skinned colored Latinas, Latinos, LatinX—whatever—it hasn’t changed that much,” she added…

Read the entire article here.

Approaching Conceptions of “Blackness” and “Mixed-Race” in Legal Scholarship and Housing Segregation

The Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration
Yale University
2019-11-13

Zaire Dinzey-Flores, Associate Professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University and Tanya Herńandez, Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham University discuss “Approaching Conceptions of “Blackness” and “Mixed-Race” in Legal Scholarship and Housing Segregation.”

The Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM) hosted the discussion. To learn more about the Center visit ritm.yale.edu.

There Will Be No More Daughters, Poems

Northwestern University Press
2019-10-15
120 pages
Trim size 6 x 9
Trade Paper ISBN: 978-1-941423-03-5

Christine Larusso

At once sharp and tender, this debut collection from Christine Larusso (winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency Prize) overflows with all the sorrows and ecstasies, the violations and acts of revenge, of girlhood and women’s coming-of-age. Set against the landscape of Southern California, where wide, wild expanses mingle with segregated sprawl, written from the viewpoint of a woman in a multiracial family, There Will Be No More Daughters has one foot planted in the firm realities of patriarchal domination, racial unbelonging, sex, death, and intergenerational alcoholism—and another in vivid flights of dream and dissociation.

I’m black. My siblings aren’t. What people need to know about Latinos and diversity.

The Boston Globe Magazine
2019-10-27

Karina E. Cueavas, Producer
Telemundo Boston, NBC Universal

Adobe Stock

What Big Papi, Gwen Ifill, and Celia Cruz have in common.

“Is she adopted?” That was the first question my brother’s math teacher asked my mom as we awaited seating at his ninth-grade graduation ceremony. I was only in fifth grade and I didn’t know what adopted meant. But I did see my mom’s frown. Her mouth twitched and I knew what was about to come wouldn’t be nice.

Minutes later my dad walked up to my mom, who was fuming. Asked what happened and she let him know. My dad only wished he were present to give the math teacher a piece of his mind.

My mom had already cursed Mr. Tonato out. And she had every right to do so. Now, let me make it very clear: Being adopted is wonderful, but I was the biological product of two very different looking people. And to many that was an alien concept. Little did I know that wasn’t the first time my parents ever got asked that question. It was just the first time I ever heard it. It certainly wouldn’t be the last.

I’m Afro-Latina. My mom is a white Latina and my siblings have her skin tone. Our dad is Afro-Latino. Both my parents are originally from the Dominican Republic. And this has been our story throughout my entire life. My mom having to explain to people that I’m her daughter. Me trying to teach people that Latinos come in different shades, sometimes all within one family. To add to some people’s confusion, my siblings and I are bilingual — we speak Spanish, our parents’ native language.

The kicker here — I grew up in New York City. The melting pot of the United States. Sometimes it felt suffocating to navigate the streets feeling as if even in such a diverse city, I didn’t belong. I wasn’t alone in that train of thought. I was part of what the book The Afro-Latin@ Reader describes in detail: “a large and vibrant, yet oddly invisible community in the United States: people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean.”…

Read the entire article here.

This Afro-Latina Started a Magazine in Puerto Rico to Celebrate Black Beauty

The Oprah Magazine
2019-09-20

Natasha S. Alford

Mikey Cordero

Revista étnica shines a spotlight on Afro-Latino culture on the island.

When Sacha Antonetty-Lebrón was a young child growing up in Puerto Rico, she attended modeling school, her dreams of appearing in advertisements sprouting like the palm trees in the sandy streets of her native island.

But even with her bright eyes and perfect smile, Antonetty-Lebrón was often warned there may be one factor that worked against her.

“The owner invited me to the modeling school but made sure to tell me, ‘They didn’t ask for Black girls, but I’m going to send you. Do the best you can do,’ Antonetty-Lebrón remembers.

And when she did get calls for castings, she rarely saw any other Black faces. Antonetty-Lebrón, whose skin was a deep rich brown, learned at an early age that Afro-Latinos—or afro descendientes—were noticeably absent in nearly every form of Spanish media in Puerto Rico.

From TV anchors to beauty queens, the “ideal” Puerto Rican was always fair-skinned with European features—despite the fact that Puerto Rico’s rich history includes African, Taino native, and Spaniard ancestry.

Still, when Afro-Latino images did appear in media or television, they were often in offensive or derogatory roles—and just like in the United States, actors would even dress in blackface for comedy…

Read the entire article here.

The Problem With Latinidad

The Nation
2019-09-16

Miguel Salazar

A growing community of young, black, and indigenous people are questioning the very identity underpinning Hispanic Heritage Month.

Every September 15, a flurry of independence days across Central America—in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—kicks off National Hispanic Heritage Month, a celebration of Latin culture that lasts through mid-October. For Latin Americans and their descendants, the month is a time to celebrate shared cultures and customs across nationalities. For others in the United States, it provides an opportunity to educate Americans about a growing demographic that, like most minorities, has long been relegated to the margins of US history and, over the past half-century, has worn many hats—“Latin American,” “Hispanic,” “Latino,” and most recently, “Latinx.” Now, however, a growing number of writers, activists, and academics are questioning the very underpinnings of this common identity, an idea known as Latinidad (loosely translated as “Latino-ness”).

Historically, the forging of this ethnic identity has been understood as a necessity in the face of white supremacy and anti-Mexican Juan Crow laws. In response to recent events, it’s been useful for raising awareness of migrant family separations, Washington’s insistence on militarizing borders in Mexico and Central America, and mass shooters warning of a “Hispanic invasion” of the United States. Even so, its most vocal critics, who are often young and black or indigenous, have not minced words in their critique of what they see as an exclusionary identity fabricated by—and for the benefit of—white and mestizo elites and the American political class.

I spoke about the recent rejection of Latinidad with the journalists, organizers, and thinkers at the forefront of this conversation. We talked about what determines who is allowed to claim the term, what purpose it serves, and whether the identity is useful as a category anymore…

Read the entire interview here.