Mixed Race Studies

Why Today’s GOP Crackup Is the Final Unraveling of Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’

The Nation
2015-10-12

William Greider

Tea Party rebels are exposing the deep rifts between country-club elites and social-issue hard-liners.

Fresh chatter among Washington insiders is not about whether the Republican Party will win in 2016 but whether it will survive. Donald Trump — the fear that he might actually become the GOP nominee — is the ultimate nightmare. Some gleeful Democrats are rooting (sotto voce) for the Donald, though many expect he will self-destruct.

Nevertheless, Republicans face a larger problem. The GOP finds itself trapped in a marriage that has not only gone bad but is coming apart in full public view. After five decades of shrewd strategy, the Republican coalition Richard Nixon put together in 1968 — welcoming the segregationist white South into the Party of Lincoln — is now devouring itself in ugly, spiteful recriminations.

The abrupt resignation of House Speaker John Boehner was his capitulation to this new reality. His downfall was loudly cheered by many of his own troops — the angry right-wingers in the House who have turned upon the party establishment. Chaos followed. The discontented accuse party leaders of weakness and betraying their promises to the loyal rank and file

At the heart of this intramural conflict is the fact that society has changed dramatically in recent decades, but the GOP has refused to change with it. Americans are rapidly shifting toward more tolerant understandings of personal behavior and social values, but the Republican Party sticks with retrograde social taboos and hard-edged prejudices about race, gender, sexual freedom, immigration, and religion. Plus, it wants to do away with big government (or so it claims)…

…In 2008, when Americans elected our first black president, most of the heavy smears came after Barack Obama took office. Grassroots conservatives imagined bizarre fears: Obama wasn’t born in America; he was a secret Muslim. Donald Trump demanded to see the birth certificate. GOP leaders like Senator Mitch McConnell — who had been a civil-rights advocate in his youth — could have discouraged the demonizing slurs. Instead, McConnell launched his own take-no-prisoners strategy to obstruct anything important Obama hoped to accomplish.

At least until now, Republicans have gotten away with this bigotry. As a practical matter, there was no political price. Democrats often seemed reluctant to call them out, fearful that it might encourage even greater racial backlash. Indeed, the Dems developed their own modest Southern strategy — electing centrists Jimmy Carter of Georgia and later Bill Clinton of Arkansas to the White House. But the hope that Democrats could make peace with Dixie by moderating their liberalism was a fantasy. Conservatives upped the ante and embraced additional right-wing social causes…

…A Republican lobbyist of my acquaintance whose corporate client has been caught in the middle of the political disturbances shared a provocative insight. “I finally figured it out,” he told me. “Obama created the tea party.” I laughed at first, but he explained what he meant. “We told people that Obama was a dangerous socialist who was going to wreck America and he had to be stopped, when really we knew he was a moderate Democrat, not all that radical,” the lobbyist said. “But they believed us.”

In other words, the extremist assaults on the black president, combined with the economic failures, were deeply alarming for ordinary people and generated a sense of terminal crisis that was wildly exaggerated. But it generated popular expectations that Republicans must stand up to this threat with strong countermeasures — to win back political control and save the country. I suggested that racial overtones were also at work. “That’s your opinion,” the lobbyist said. “I don’t know about that.”…

Read the entire article here.

Race, color, and income inequality across the Americas

Demographic Research
Volume 31
Article 24 (2014-09-19)
pages 735-756
DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2014.31.24

Stanley Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

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

Background: Racial inequality in the U.S. is typically described in terms of stark categorical difference, as compared to the more gradational stratification based on skin color often said to prevail in parts of Latin America. However, nationally representative data with both types of measures have not been available to explicitly test this contrast.

Objective: We use novel, recently released data from the U.S. and 18 Latin American countries to describe household income inequality across the region by perceived skin color and racial self-identification, and examine which measure better captures racial disparities in each national context.

Results: We document color and racial hierarchies across the Americas, revealing some unexpected patterns. White advantage and indigenous disadvantage are fairly consistent features, whereas blacks at times have higher mean incomes than other racial populations. Income inequality can best be understood in some countries using racial categories alone, in others using skin color; in a few countries, including the U.S., a combination of skin color and self-identified race best explains income variation.

Conclusions: These results complicate theoretical debates about U.S. racial exceptionalism and methodological debates about how best to measure race. Rather than supporting one measure over another, our cross-national analysis underscores race‟s multidimensionality. The variation in patterns of inequality also defies common comparisons between the U.S. on the one hand and a singular Latin America on the other.

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Gen Z And The Future Of Marketing

Media Post
2015-09-03

Jose Villa, Founder and president
Sensis, Los Angeles, California

Millennials are generally believed to be the most ethnically and racially diverse generation in American history. Hispanics (20%), African-Americans (14%) and Asians (6%) make up 40% of the total millennial population. This diversity underpins the notion of the bicultural millennial, a young consumer straddling two worlds, balancing their cultural lives with their mainstream integration into popular culture. Yet, lost in the buzz around bicultural millennials is the growing multiracial U.S. population truly living in two worlds at home and in society…

…Multiracial America

The large segment of multiracial Gen Z is the result of demographic trends at work for the last two decades. Starting with the 2000 census – the first census that allowed individuals to self-identify with more than one race – we have been seeing a steady demographic shift resulting from an increase in multiracial marriage. In a recent New Republic article, William Frey laid out how the blending of racial minorities through multiracial marriage is leading to a major demographic shift in the U.S. In 2000, 6.7% of all marriages were multiracial. That number jumped to 8.4% in 2010. Hispanics are driving the increase in multiracial marriages, accounting for 49% of all multiracial marriages in 2010 (Hispanics and Whites: 44%, Hispanics and Black: 3%, Hispanics and Asian: 2%). Furthermore, more than one in seven newlywed couples are now multiracial. This data also does not account for non-married multi-racial couples that are adding to the growing multiracial Gen Z population…

Read the entire article here.

The post-racial illusion: racial politics and inequality in the age of Obama

Revue de Recherche en Civilisation Américaine
Number 3 (March 2012): Post-racial America?

Olivier Richomme
l’université de Lyon II-Lumière

Contents

• 1. The 2008 election as an exception
  • a-The circumstances
  • b-A post-racial election?
• 2. The state of the racial divide
  • a-Economic well-being
  • b-Health
  • c-Housing
  • d-Education
  • e-Incarceration
• 3. Racial politics today
  • a-The persistence and evolution of the color-line
  • b-The future of identity politics

As Americans celebrated the much anticipated inauguration of the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in Washington D.C. a few months ago, one could not help but raise questions about the state of race relations in the United States. How much did race matter 45 years after this great civil rights leader gave his most famous speech in the capital? Many commentators wondered if the election of Barack Obama and the overall evolution of the country indicated that the United States might be entering a new era in which race inequalities had been reduced to the point that they might no longer be such a spurious issue (Taeku Lee 2001). In other words, the election of first non-white president and the inauguration of the statue of the first African-American on the National Mall could be the symbols of a new era of post-racialism in America.

It cannot be denied that a sentiment of post-racial achievement spread throughout the United States during the 2008 presidential election and lasted until the inauguration. For many Americans, casting their ballots for this atypical candidate was proof that the United States had moved beyond race and overcome its racist past. Obama’s message of hope meant the hope of a less racialized future. Such promise added a historical dimension to every ballot. However intoxicating this feeling was, it was short lived. Some time after the inauguration, political behaviors went back to normal, culminating in the 2010 mid-term elections that were as violent and as racially loaded as ever1. Racial politics did not change overnight. In that regard Obama’s election was an exception, an anomaly. America voted for a very special candidate under a very particular set of circumstances. We may not see the stars aligned in this way for a long time as we will attempt to show in this article.

We believe that, in spite of Obama’s historical election, in the United States race is, to use Bob Blauner’s expression (2001), “still the big news”. Every socio-economic indicator, every demographic study, every political study shows that wealth, poverty, education, spatial segregation, rates of incarceration, voting patterns are correlated to race. America is still the ideological battlefield of two institutional racial orders competing for power (King and Smith, 2005). The claims of post-racialism developed by the conservatives in order to dismantle race-conscious public policies such as busing, affirmative action or even redistricting cannot sustain the avalanche of data and studies showing how racial disparities and racial material inequality still plague American society. Furthermore, it seems that anti-discrimination policies are the only form of government intervention that the American public is not ready to do away with. This is because the American people know that, in spite of some improvement and some encouraging signs, their daily lives are still marked by racial divides. Communities and identities are still defined by these racial fault lines…

Read the entire article here.

Negotiating cultural ambiguity: the role of markets and consumption in multiracial identity development

Consumption Markets & Culture
Volume 18, Issue 4, 2015
pages 301-332
DOI: 10.1080/10253866.2015.1019483

Robert L. Harrison III, Associate Professor of Marketing
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan

Kevin D. Thomas, Assistant Professor
Stan Richards School of Advertising & Public Relations
University of Texas, Austin

Samantha N. N. Cross, Assistant Professor of Marketing
Iowa State University

Due to their growing social visibility and recognized buying power, multiracial individuals have emerged as a viable consumer segment among marketers. However, there is a dearth of research examining how multiracial populations experience the marketplace. In an attempt to better understand the ways in which multiracial individuals utilize consumption practices as a means of developing and expressing their racial identity, this study examined the lived experience of multiracial (black and white) women. Findings of this phenomenological study indicate that multiracial consumers engage with the marketplace to assuage racial discordance and legitimize the liminal space they occupy. This marketplace engagement is explored through themes such as living in two worlds, the mighty ringlets and forced choice. Multiracial identity is seen to be co-constituted by marketers and consumers. Existing theories proved ineffectual at fully capturing the lived experience connected to the consumer acculturation and socialization processes for those with two distinctly constructed racial backgrounds.

Read or purchase the article here.

How A Latina-Asian American Ascended Amazon’s Ranks

NBC News
2015-05-29

Stephen A. Nuño, Associate Professor of Politics & International Affairs
Northern Arizona Univeristy

If you have ever bought anything from the online retail giant, Amazon.com, you probably didn’t know that a multicultural woman is one of the managers leading the work behind the scenes with software developers, user interface (UI) designers and product teams to help you spend your money.

In an age where the tech industry has increasingly come under fire for being mostly male and for its lack of diversity, women like Erica Gomez are serving as role models and urging others to break through the technology ranks. Currently Amazon’s Senior Technical Program Manager, Gomez has also worked at Microsoft as an engineer and program manager for the Bing search platform and at Boeing as a software developer for real-time aircraft monitoring programs.

A lover of trivia and a tennis athlete, Gomez illustrates the proliferation of people who identify with multi-ethnic backgrounds since the U.S. Census began allowing respondents to check multiple boxes for their racial and ethnic identity in 2000. She is also an example of the growing diversity among Latinos.

Gomez’s mother, who is of Japanese-Scottish descent, was born on an Air Force base in Texas and grew up mainly in Taipei. Gomez’s father is Puerto Rican; her grandparents moved from Puerto Rico to Los Angeles before her dad was born and he grew up bouncing between the island and Los Angeles. His family eventually settled in San Clemente, California, a sleepy surfers’ haven in Orange County…

Read the entire article here.

The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South

Oxford University Press
June 2015
336 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199383092

Howard Bodenhorn, Professor of Economics
Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina
also Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research

• The first full-length study of how color intersected with polity, society and economy in the nineteenth-century South
• Pulls together and expands on previous research on the connection between color and wealth and health
• Compiles empirical economic research on how color affected plantation life, including which slaves ran away and were chased, or how color influenced entrepreneurship or education and the accumulation of human capital

Despite the many advances that the United States has made in racial equality over the past half century, numerous events within the past several years have proven prejudice to be alive and well in modern-day America. In one such example, Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina dismissed one of her principal advisors in 2013 when his membership in the ultra-conservative Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) came to light. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in 2001 the CCC website included a message that read “God is the one who divided mankind into different races…. Mixing the races is rebelliousness against God.” This episode reveals America’s continuing struggle with race, racial integration, and race mixing-a problem that has plagued the United States since its earliest days as a nation.

The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South demonstrates that the emergent twenty-first-century recognition of race mixing and the relative advantages of light-skinned, mixed-race people represent a re-emergence of one salient feature of race in America that dates to its founding. Economist Howard Bodenhorn presents the first full-length study of the ways in which skin color intersected with policy, society, and economy in the nineteenth-century South. With empirical and statistical rigor, the investigation confirms that individuals of mixed race experienced advantages over African Americans in multiple dimensions – in occupations, family formation and family size, wealth, health, and access to freedom, among other criteria.

The Color Factor concludes that we will not really understand race until we understand how American attitudes toward race were shaped by race mixing. The text is an ideal resource for students, social scientists, and historians, and anyone hoping to gain a deeper understanding of the historical roots of modern race dynamics in America.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Legal constructions of race and interpretations of color
• Chapter 2: Race mixing and color in literature and science
• Chapter 3: The plantation
• Chapter 4: Finding freedom
• Chapter 5: Marriage and the family
• Chapter 6: Work
• Chapter 7: Wealth
• Chapter 8: Height, health and mortality

Mixed Race in Manchester – Intersections of Class and Mixed Race Identity

Musings of a Mixed Race Feminist: Random diatribes from a mixed race feminist scholar.
Tuesday, 2015-03-03

Donna J. Nicol, Associate Professor Women & Gender Studies
California State University, Fullerton

I spent the last three months of 2014 living in Manchester, England helping my mother-in-law through chemotherapy and navigating the National Health Services bureaucratic red tape to secure caregiver support and the like. While I wasn’t able to keep up with this blog, I did manage to work on my first novel and make note of how I was perceived differently than I normally am in the U.S. Now these perceptions draw on my specific interactions so my observations are certainly not generalizable to all but I found the comparisons revealing.

In the African and South Asian (think Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian) community of Longsight, being mixed race (as determined by skin color, hair texture and physical markers of mixed race identity) was not as common as in other parts of Manchester which were predominantly white. In Longsight, I felt like the odd person out and though I have traveled to England many times before (mostly London and Manchester), I was not cognizant of being one of the few mixed folks in the bunch until I stayed more than a week in the area. Home to mostly first generation immigrants to the U.K., Longsight appeared to demonstrate a kind of “racial insularity” that I had not experienced in other parts of the city. Mixed race couples were, in fact, quite rare to find…

Read the entire article here.

Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico

University of Illinois Press
February 2015
320 pages
6.125 x 9.25 in.
38 black & white photographs, 3 maps, 1 chart, 3 tables
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-03890-7
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-08045-6

Isar P. Godreau, Researcher and Former Director
Institute for Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

Ideas of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture in a Puerto Rican barrio

The geopolitical influence of the United States informs the processes of racialization in Puerto Rico, including the construction of black places. In Scripts of Blackness, Isar P. Godreau explores how Puerto Rican national discourses about race—created to overcome U.S. colonial power—simultaneously privilege whiteness, typecast blackness, and silence charges of racism.

Based on an ethnographic study of the barrio of San Antón in the city of Ponce, Scripts of Blackness examines institutional and local representations of blackness as developing from a power-laden process that is inherently selective and political, not neutral or natural. Godreau traces the presumed benevolence or triviality of slavery in Puerto Rico, the favoring of a Spanish colonial whiteness (under a hispanophile discourse), and the insistence on a harmonious race mixture as discourses that thrive on a presumed contrast with the United States that also characterize Puerto Rico as morally superior. In so doing, she outlines the debates, social hierarchies, and colonial discourses that inform the racialization of San Antón and its residents as black.

Mining ethnographic materials and anthropological and historical research, Scripts of Blackness provides powerful insights into the critical political, economic, and historical context behind the strategic deployment of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture.

The Fluidity of Race: “Passing” in the United States, 1880-1940

The National Bureau of Economic Research
NBER Working Paper No. 20828
January 2015
76 pages
DOI: 10.3386/w20828

Emily Nix
Department of Economics
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Nancy Qian, Associate Professor of Economics
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

This paper quantifies the extent to which individuals experience changes in reported racial identity in the historical U.S. context. Using the full population of historical Censuses for 1880-1940, we document that over 19% of black males “passed” for white at some point during their lifetime, around 10% of whom later “reverse-passed” to being black; passing was accompanied by geographic relocation to communities with a higher percentage of whites and occurred the most in Northern states. The evidence suggests that passing was positively associated with better political-economic and social opportunities for whites relative to blacks. As such, endogenous race is likely to be a quantitatively important phenomenon.

Read or purchase the paper here.