Mixed Race Studies

In Florida, a Death Foretold

The New York Times
2012-03-31

Isabel Wilkerson

In the mid-1930s, a Yale anthropologist ventured to an unnamed town in the South to explore the feudal divisions of what we commonly call race but what he preferred to describe with the more layered language of caste. When he arrived — white, earnest and fresh from the North — white Southerners told him that a Northerner would soon enough “feel about Negroes as Southerners do.” In making that prediction, the anthropologist John Dollard wrote in his seminal study “Caste and Class in a Southern Town,” they are saying “that he joins the white caste. The solicitation is extremely active, though informal, and one must stand by one’s caste to survive.”

Americans tend to think of the rigid stratification of caste as a distant notion from feudal Europe or Victorian India. But caste is alive and well in this country, where a still unsettled multiracial society is emerging from the starkly drawn social order that Dollard described. Assumptions about one’s place in this new social order have become a muddying subtext in the case of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager slain at the hands of an overzealous neighborhood watch captain, who is the son of a white father and a Peruvian mother.

We do not know what George Zimmerman was thinking as he watched Mr. Martin from afar, told a 911 dispatcher that he looked suspicious and ultimately shot him. But we do know that it happened in central Florida, a region whose demographic landscape is rapidly changing, where unprecedented numbers of Latino immigrants have arrived at a place still scarred by the history of a vigilante-enforced caste system and the stereotypes that linger from it. In this context, newcomers — like previous waves of immigrants in the past — may feel pressed to identify with the dominant caste and distance themselves from blacks, in order to survive…

…On the other hand, almost three-quarters of blacks felt that Latinos were hard-working or could be trusted. Black Americans appear to view Latinos as more like themselves. “Blacks are not as negative toward Latinos as Latinos are toward blacks because blacks see them as another nonwhite group that will be treated as they have been,” said Paula D. McClain, the lead author on the study. Even as blacks worry about losing jobs to new immigrants, they are less supportive of harsh anti-immigration laws, she said, “because they know what laws have done to them.”

But shared hardships don’t necessarily make allies. “As linked fate rises, so does competition,” said Michael Jones-Correa, a professor of government at Cornell who specializes in immigration and interethnic relations. “It’s like a sibling rivalry,” he said. “This is not a painless relationship.” And, of course, Latino immigrants don’t just enter a pre-existing racial hierarchy; they bring with them their own assumptions based on the hierarchies in their home countries. “When we come to the U.S.,” Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor of sociology at Duke, who is Puerto Rican, said, “we immediately recognize whites on top and blacks on the bottom and say, ‘My job is to be anything but black.’ ”…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Race, Gender, and the Politics of Skin Tone

Routledge
2005-06-23
160 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-94607-0
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-94608-7

Margaret L. Hunter, Associate Professor of Sociology
Mills College, Oakland, California

Race, Gender, and the Politics of Skin Tone tackles the hidden yet painful issue of colorism in the African American and Mexican American communities. Beginning with a historical discussion of slavery and colonization in the Americas, the book quickly moves forward to a contemporary analysis of how skin tone continues to plague people of color today. This is the first book to explore this well-known, yet rarely discussed phenomenon.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Colorstruck
• Chapter 2: The Color of Slavery and Conquest
• Chapter 3: Learning, Earning, and Marrying More
• Chapter 4: Black and Brown Bodies Under the Knife
• Chapter 5: The Beauty Queue: Advantages of Light Skin
• Chapter 6: The Blacker the Berry: Ethnic Legitimacy and Skin Tone
• Chapter 7: Color and the Changing Racial Landscape
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Redefining la raza

U.S. Catholic
2011-07-06

Father Tom Joyce, CMF

There use to be an unspoken pattern to Hispanic migration to the United States: Mexicans drifted to Los Angeles or South Texas, Puerto Ricans—soon followed by Dominicans—to New York City. Cubans stayed in Miami for a quick return to Havana that never came. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans shared Chicago—Mexicans on the Southwest side and Puerto Ricans on the Northwest. Over the years Central Americans drifted into Florida and the nation’s capital, and Mexicans followed meatpacking into the plains states.

The recent plague of xenophobic nastiness in state laws aren’t confined to Arizona and Utah, who have long known Hispanics, but are now popping up in Georgia, Indiana, and Alabama. The latest census confirms the spread of the 50 million-plus Latino population across the entire nation. Our largest minority, they are now on the way to being the majority in the latter part of the 21st century, according to projections.

But a funny thing is happening on the way to that majority: It’s getting more diverse every day. The most recent census gave respondents more choice when selecting their racial identity—mostly to accommodate the growing number of mixed race individuals. We have long had black Hispanics—look at any major league baseball team—and they have usually identified as Hispanics first. They are unmindful of color or that racial prejudice has a long nasty history in their homelands.

The result of the 2010 census of New York City has added another twist to those identifying as Latino or Hispanic. Out of the 57,000 who identified themselves as American Indian in New York City, 40,000 were Latino from Mexico; the rest were from Latin America. Even families long established in the United States check American Indian and Hispanic on their census forms…

Read the entire article here.

Of Loving and Zimmerman

Univision Communications, Inc.
2013-06-26

Carlos Cortés, Professor Emeritus of History
University of California, Riverside

In my last blog I addressed the question of Latino identity by examining the controversy in “Is the New Pope Latino?” I responded with an emphatic “yes” (in about 500 words). Since then, three separate items relating to Latino identity have caught my eye.

First was the Census Bureau’s report that, between 2010 and 2012, the number of multiracial Americans grew faster (6.6%) than any other racial category. That figure does not include marriages between Latinos and non-Latinos, as the federal government correctly classifies us as an ethnic group, not as a race.

Second was the start of the Florida murder trial of George Zimmerman for the February 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin. Current articles often explicitly identify Zimmerman as Hispanic. Indeed, he is of mixed ancestry—his mother is Peruvian.

Third, June marked the 46th anniversary of the game-changing Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision, which voided state-level anti-miscegenation laws. That decision has given rise to the boom in interracial marriages (now around 15% annually). It also contributed to the recent outpouring of public support for General Mills when it was criticized by some for featuring a biracial family in one of its Cheerios commercials.

As an ethnic group with a long tradition of intermarriage stretching back to our Latin American roots, Hispanics have been way ahead of the U.S. curve.  According to some estimates, by the third generation more than half of U.S. Latinos outmarry—that is, marry someone who is not Latino.

This raises two critical questions: How do children of such intermarriages identify ethnically? How are they identified by others?…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Where in the World Is Juan—and What Color Is He?: The Geography of Latina/o Racial Identity in Southern California

American Quarterly
Volume 65, Number 2, June 2013
pages 309-341
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2013.0020

Laura Pulido, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity
University of Southern California

Manuel Pastor, Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity
University of Southern California

Recently there Recently there has been a robust discussion on the question of Latina/o racial subjectivity, particularly whether Latinas/os are more apt to identify as “white” or as people of color. Scholars focused on contemporary identification patterns have examined key variables, including age, education, income, and nativity in an effort to understand Latinas/os’ racial choices. However, dimensions of time and space are frequently unanalyzed. Focusing on the seven-county region of Southern California—home to the United States’ largest concentration of Latinas/os—we use the American Community Survey (2008-10) to consider a range of variables, including spatial and temporal characteristics, to better understand Latina/o, especially Mexican American, racial subjectivity. Focusing on Latinas/os who identify as either “white” or “some other race” and utilizing a regression analysis to isolate the relative impact of each variable, we find that Latinas/os who live in more segregated neighborhoods as well as those who live among a high proportion of Latinas/os, are more likely to identify as “some other race.”

In 1980. for the first time, the US Census Bureau broadly allowed respondents to identity themselves as Latinas/os or Hispanics, in addition to designating their “race.” To the surprise of some, 38 percent of the newly minted Latinas/os rejected the usual race categories, marking “some other race” (SOR) rather than white, black. Asian, or Native American. Thinking that matters might change as respondents became accustomed to the forms. Census authorities grew more concerned when in 1990 43 percent of Latinas/os marked SOR. Believing that the issue might be related to question sequencing—respondents were asked to identify race first, then Hispanicity—the sequence of the questions was reversed in 2000. The logic of the Census Bureau: perhaps once respondents were able to mark the Latina/o identification, they would then be more willing to mark a standard racial category as requested. That year, the percentage of Latinas/os marking SOR stayed relatively steady at 42 percent, with an additional 6 percent choosing a new multirace category. Looked at another way. the share marking “white” fell from 52 percent to 48 percent between 1990 and 2000.

The popularity of the SOR designation should not have been a surprise to Census bureaucrats: Latinas/os, especially ethnic Mexicans, have long been seen as nonwhite in the popular and political imagination, and since the Chicana/o movement many have embraced a nonwhite identity. At the same time, Latinas/os racial subjectivity has attracted considerable scholarly attention over the last decade, including examinations of how “whiteness” may be open to peoples who were previously considered nonwhite (including Asians and Latinas/os), how the multiracial experience affects racial and color identification, and how racial subjectivity is contested within families and communities that seem, at first glance, to be racially similar.  While obviously a matter of academic interest, racial subjectivity also has significant political consequences. Since Latinas/os became the largest “racial minority” in 2000. scholars and activists alike are grappling with how Latinas/os will intersect with the existing…

Who Is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide

Lynne Rienner
2003
230 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-58826-337-7

George Yancey, Professor of Sociology
University of North Texas

“By the year 2050, whites will be a numerical racial minority, albeit the largest minority, in the United States.” This statement, asserts George Yancey, while statistically correct, is nonetheless false.

Yancey marshals compelling evidence to show that the definition of who is “white” is changing rapidly, with nonblack minorities accepting the perspectives of the current white majority group and, in turn, being increasingly assimilated. In contrast, African Americans continue to experience high levels of alienation. To understand the racial reality in the United States, Yancey demonstrates, it is essential to discard the traditional white/nonwhite dichotomy and to explore the implications of the changing color of whiteness.

Contents

• Alienation and Race in the United States.
• How To Become White.
• “They Are OK—Just Keep Them Away From Me”: Residential and Marital Segregation Patterns.
• The End of the Rainbow Coalition.
• The Changing Significance of “Latino” and “Asian.”
• The Black/Nonblack Society.

Black/Non-Black Divide and The Anti-Blackness of Non-Black Minorities

Still Furious and Brave: Who’s Afraid of Persistent Blackness?
2013-04-03

Robert Reece
Department of Sociology
Duke University

Last week, an Asian-American fraternity at the University of California Irvine posted a parody of a music video featuring one of their members in blackface. Blackface has become the go-to type of public racism for many types of white people across the political spectrum, and the internet is overflowing with analyses of why it’s racist so I won’t bother with that here. My concern is that an Asian-American fraternity is the culprit this time and what that may mean as we enter an era where our racial boundaries may be shifting as dramatically as the racial demographics.

I’m certainly not surprised that an Asian-American fraternity harbors racial stereotypes, both about themselves and other minorities. White supremacy is partially rule by consent, with subordinate groups believing in their own pathology (I’m looking at you Bill Cosby), but I think this incident, in this moment, deserves much more attention.

Proclamations by demographers about the coming white minority are used by both liberals and conservatives to promise inevitable political change. Liberals discuss how minorities outnumbering whites will signal as intense power shift in politics that will usher in an unprecedented age of progress and liberalism, and conservatives fear that they will lose their country to the brown hoards resting just over the horizon. But sociologist George Yancey, in Who is White?, questions the very demographers claiming that a white minority is certain. Yancey argues that demographers cannot account for shifting racial boundaries when making their predictions. So while their raw numbers may be correct, their racial predictions are probably incorrect because racial categories are always changing…

…This is the phenomenon at play when an Asian American fraternity implicitly approves of an act of anti-black racism. And this isn’t an isolated incident of negative black attitudes. In Racism Without Racists, sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva presents survey results showing that Asian American political attitudes, including those regarding stereotypes of blacks, are very similar to those of whites. On some items, Asian Americans even demonstrated stronger anti-black attitudes than whites. In this way, they are following in the footsteps of other formerly marginalized groups who demonized blackness on their way to whiteness.

In The Wages of Whiteness, historian David Roediger chronicles how the newly immigrated Irish of the 19^th century made a strategic decision to pit themselves against blacks despite their acknowledgement of a common oppressor. They essentially built their case for inclusion into whiteness on the back of their anti-black attitudes. Anti-black racism was the glue that bound white ethnics to whiteness, and it may serve a similar purpose as our current racial project progresses. In the case of the Irish, their attitudes eventually manifested in an emulation of whiteness, in committing mob violence against blacks. But in 2013, popular violence against blacks doesn’t come in the form of gruesome beatings in the streets (police brutality notwithstanding); it comes in the form of YouTube videos of fraternity boys in blackface that, just like the mob violence of the 19^th century, goes unpunished by authorities.

Read the entire article here.

Who is Latino?

The Washington Post
2013-06-21

Carlos Lozada, Editor of Outlook, The Washington Post’s Sunday section for opinion, analysis

‘Shut up, you stupid Mexican!”

The words spewed from the mouth of a pale, freckle-faced boy, taunting me on our elementary school playground.

I wish I could recall what I said to inspire the insult. But more than three decades later, I remember only my reply. “Stupid Peruvian,” I pointed out, wagging my finger.

My family had emigrated from Lima to Northern California a few years earlier, so my nationality was a point of fact (whereas my stupidity remains a matter of opinion). The response so confused my classmate that my first encounter with prejudice ended as quickly as it started. Recess resumed.

Today, my grade-school preoccupation with nationality feels a bit quaint. Peruvian or Mexican — does it even matter? We’re all Latinos now…

…If all ethnic identities are created, imagined or negotiated to some degree, American Hispanics provide an especially stark example. As part of an effort in the 1970s to better measure who was using what kind of social services, the federal government established the word “Hispanic” to denote anyone with ancestry traced to Spain or Latin America, and mandated the collection of data on this group. “The term is a U.S. invention,” explains Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center. “If you go to El Salvador or the Dominican Republic, you won’t necessarily hear people say they are ‘Latino’ or ‘Hispanic.’ ”

You may not hear it much in the United States, either. According to a 2012 Pew survey, only about a quarter of Hispanic adults say they identify themselves most often as Hispanic or Latino. About half say they prefer to cite their family’s country of origin, while one-fifth say they use “American.” (Among third-generation Latinos, nearly half identify as American.)

The Office of Management and Budget defines a Hispanic as “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race” — about as specific as calling someone European.

“There is no coherence to the term,” says Marta Tienda, a sociologist and director of Latino studies at Princeton University. For instance, even though it’s officially supposed to connote ethnicity and nationality rather than race — after all, Hispanics can be black, white or any other race — the term “has become a racialized category in the United States,” Tienda says. “Latinos have become a race by default, just by usage of the category.”…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

There is No There There: Women and Intermarriage in the Southwestern Borderlands

Common-Place
A Common Place, An Uncommon Voice
Volume 13, Number 3, Spring 2013

Amanda Taylor-Montoya

Amanda Taylor-Montoya is an independent scholar living in southern New Mexico.

Borderlands are fuzzy, slippery, ambiguous places. Whether imagined as a geographic region straddling an international border, “the contested boundaries between colonial domains,” or simply zones of intercultural contact where state or imperial power is weak, borderlands are spaces where social boundaries are unstable and social conventions appear more flexible. Cooperation and accommodation characterize the borderlands as much as conflict and violence. Historians often point to centuries of racial mixture to help explain the cultural fluidity and hybridization that prevail in the borderlands.

Tales of liaisons that transgressed racial boundaries (beginning with the relationship between Hernán Cortés and Malíntzin Tenépal) are so common in histories of the Southwestern borderlands that they function as a kind of creation story for the region and its peoples. Here, men exchanged women—as captives or wives—to establish, bolster, or consolidate economic and social relationships. Indigenous women not only provided sexual companionship and domestic labor, but also served critical roles as translators, guides, and cultural mediators in colonial encounters between Europeans and native peoples. Whether consensual or coerced, mixed unions figured prominently in the borderlands economy and culture…

…Spanish colonial society recognized a wide variety of mixed race peoples, but also maintained a stringent hierarchy between them. The racial system included not only españoles (Spaniards) and indios (Indians), but also people identified as mestizos (Spanish and Indian), mulatos (Spanish and African), castizos (Spanish and mestizo), castas (racial mixture), color quebrado (literally, “broken color”), and genízaros (Hispanicized Indians). One’s racial classification was determined not only by ancestry or phenotype, but also by occupation or class, and could change over time according to one’s circumstances.

Race and legitimacy were intertwined in colonial New Mexico, as many associated mixed unions with illegitimacy and illicit sex. Consequently, many marriages—particularly among the elite—were arranged, in order to ensure matches with someone of equal status to preserve family honor. Simply put, the state’s acknowledgment of mixed race people did not alter the association of racial mixture with dishonor. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, New Mexicans increasingly moved away from the nuanced racial hierarchy in place during the colonial period toward a more rigid racialization of two categories: Spanish and Indian…

Read the entire article here.

More Americans consider themselves multiracial

The Los Angeles Times
2013-06-12

Emily Alpert

The number of mixed or multiracial people in the United States jumped 6.6% between 2010 and 2012, according to the Census Bureau. Their ranks will only continue to grow, experts say.

The number of Americans who consider themselves multiracial has grown faster than any other racial group nationwide, new Census Bureau data reveal, a sign of slow but momentous shifts in the way that Americans think about race.

Mixed or multiracial people are still just a small slice of the American public, but their numbers jumped 6.6% between 2010 and 2012 — four times as fast as the national population, according to new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Experts say their ranks will only continue to swell.

…Mingling of races “has been with us forever in this country, and it has been erased and denied,” said G. Reginald Daniel, professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara. Today, “that has begun to unravel. That is what you’re seeing with these figures.”…

…For African Americans, in particular, the “one drop rule” that historically defined blackness is relaxing. Sixteen years ago, when golfer Tiger Woods dubbed himself “Cablinasian” — Caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian — critics said Woods was denying his black heritage, said New York University associate professor of sociology Ann Morning…

…”For mixed Latinos there’s no answer,” said Thomas Lopez, director of Latinas and Latinos of Mixed Ancestry, a project of the nonprofit Multiracial Americans of Southern California. When the Census Bureau ran an experiment three years ago giving people a chance to claim Hispanic along with at least one other race, 6.8% did so…

…”Americans are becoming more nuanced in their understanding of race,” said Carolyn Liebler, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota. “But I don’t think race is becoming less important in our society.”

Read the entire article here.