Mixed Race Studies

An Insidious Way to Underrepresent Minorities

The American Prospect
2015-11-05

Gary D. Bass, Executive Director
Bauman Foundation, Washington, D.C.

Adrien Schless-Meier, Program Associate
Bauman Foundation, Washington, D.C.

Cuts in U.S. Census funding threaten to produce an undercount of minorities and the poor and to reduce their share of federal aid.

African Americans, Hispanics, and other minority populations are in danger of losing representation in Congress as well as their share of more than $400 billion a year in federal funds for health care, education, job training, and community development. That possibility should get anyone’s attention, yet few have noticed that it will be the likely result if Congress cuts the budget for the U.S. Census Bureau to the extent it now threatens to do.

The Constitution requires a decennial census to determine congressional apportionment, and federal law relies on the numbers to allocate funds among states and localities. Historically, the census has missed large numbers of people in poverty and racial and ethnic minorities. By the 2000 and 2010 censuses, however, the national undercount had dropped to less than 2 percent, due primarily to the Census Bureau’s dogged determination to walk America’s streets and knock on the doors of the roughly 100 million U.S. residents who didn’t mail back their forms. Racial and ethnic minorities were still more likely to be missed than whites. But the Census Bureau could not have reduced the disparity in counting minorities without budgetary support.

Now, Congress is insisting that the Census Bureau spend less preparing for and conducting the 2020 census than it did on the 2010 census, even though the U.S. population is expected to have grown by more than 25 million people by 2020. The bureau has chosen not to fight this directive, which census experts call delusional. Instead, the bureau has embarked on a high-risk strategy to save $5 billion by rolling back door-to-door canvassing and conducting a largely electronic, Internet-based census…

…Adding to this uncertainty, and on top of the technology overhaul, the Census Bureau is exploring significant changes in the way it asks about race and ethnicity, which also need prior testing. The right changes could improve the quality of race and ethnicity data, but at least one approach under consideration—relying on write-in responses instead of check boxes—would do the opposite, according to civil-rights advocates…

…Resolving Confusion about Race and Ethnicity

The census might be the best source of data on race and ethnicity, but it is by no means perfect, and respondents often are confused about how to identify themselves. As currently designed, the survey first asks whether the respondent is of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin, and then offers a series of check boxes for Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, or other Hispanic origin, with a write-in box. The next question asks for the respondent’s race, with check boxes for white, black, American Indian or Alaska Native, seven Asian nationalities, four Pacific Islander groups, or “some other race,” followed by a write-in box.

About 20 million people in 2010 checked the “some other race” box—making it the third most selected race category behind white and black—and the vast majority of those were Hispanic. Vargas, who serves on the Census Bureau’s advisory committee examining the race and ethnicity question, summed up the challenge: “Once you’ve asked, are you Hispanic, yes or no, and they answer yes, I’m Mexican American, they go to the next question and are asked, so what’s your race. And people are like, wait a minute, you just asked me that. I just told you I’m Mexican. And the bureau would say, no, being Hispanic is an ethnicity. It’s not a racial category. But they don’t see themselves in the white, black, Asian, [or] Native American categories.”…

Read the entire article here.

Williams: A positive among the attack ads in the Gecker-Sturtevant race

Richmond Times-Dispatch
Richmond, Virginia
2015-11-02

Michael Paul Williams, Columnist

During the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina, John McCain was the target of a whisper campaign that he’d fathered a black child out of wedlock. McCain, who in reality had an adopted Bangladeshi daughter, suffered a pivotal loss to eventual nominee George W. Bush.

Fifteen years later, with control of the Virginia State Senate in the balance, the Republican and Democratic candidates — both white — are showcasing their black children in televised campaign ads…

…No politician places his children before the camera with the idea that it will cost him votes. But we must never become so cynical, so suspicious of motivation, that we lose the capacity to acknowledge positive change when we see it.

“It’s hard to call this anything but good news,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “I remember the 1950s and 1960s, when Virginians would openly decry racially mixed marriage or the adoption of children of another race. And the Senate race is in the Richmond area, once one of the most resistant to change.

“Today,” Sabato said, “a mixed-race family is a political plus. Without saying a word, you project an image of progress and modernity.”

Of course, it’s hard to imagine a mixed-race family as part of a political master plan, given the love, commitment, energy and money required to raise a child. And what happens if you lose the election?

But evidence abounds that Sabato is on to something.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and his African-American wife, Chirlane McCray, are the parents of college-age daughter Chiara and son Dante, who wears a prodigious Afro hairstyle. And south of the Mason-Dixon Line in Kentucky, Republican gubernatorial candidate Matt Bevin and his wife have run ads including their four adopted Ethiopian children…

Read the entire article here.

BU community urged to increase open, uncomfortable conversation

The Daily Free Press
The independent student newspaper at Boston University
ISSN 1094-7337
2015-11-03

Joe Becker

Keynote speaker and comedian W. Kamau Bell speaks about his mixed race children during “Let’s Talk About It,” a dialogue about race, identity and social action, on Monday night. PHOTO BY BRITTANY CHANG/DAILY FREE PRESS CONTRIBUTOR

Boston University College of Arts and Sciences Student Programs and Leadership hosted the “Let’s Talk About It: Race, Power and Privilege” talk Monday evening, featuring a keynote and question-and-answer session with socio-political comedian W. Kamau Bell. The dialogue touched on the social fabric on campus and around the country.

More than 100 attendees, comprised of mostly students and faculty, gathered in the Metcalf Hall of the George Sherman Union. Sitting at round tables, attendees, assisted by a minimum of one student facilitator, engaged in intimate conversations with each other throughout the event.

Bell elicited humor from often-uncomfortable social issues in his talk. He spoke of his interracial marriage with a white woman and the difficulties of talking about race and racism with his two mixed-race daughters.

“Remember the first time you saw an iPad? That’s how people react to mixed-race children,” he said during the event. “It’s not that big of a deal. You can tell kids anything. The construct of race is real, and racism is definitely real.”…

Read the entire article here.

Author Meets Reader: Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics and Big Business Recreate Race in the Twenty-First Century by Dorothy Roberts

University of California, Irvine
School of Law
401 E. Peltason Drive
Irvine, California
Room 3500
Monday, 2015-11-02, 18:30 PST (Local Time)

Sponsored by the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy and the Center on Law, Equality and Race’s Perspectives, this special Author Meets Reader event will feature author Dorothy Roberts speaking about her book…

For more information, click here.

Is race a choice?

VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal
Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists
Centre for Economic Policy Research
2015-01-26

Emily Nix, PhD candidate in Economics
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

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

Race is usually treated as a fixed, exogenous characteristic in academic studies and policy discussions, but a growing body of evidence calls this assumption into question. This column presents evidence from historical US census data that more than 19% of black males ‘passed’ as white, around 10% of whom later ‘reverse-passed’ to being black. Passing was associated with geographic relocation and with better political-economic and social opportunities for whites relative to blacks, providing prima facie evidence that passing was endogenous.

The relationship between a person’s race and/or ethnicity and her economic, political, and social behaviour has been a focal point for numerous policy discussions. This is because the composition of race and ethnicity are often found to be associated with outcomes such as conflict, earnings, educational attainment, and voting. This is true in many different contexts across the world, including rich countries such as the US, middle-income countries such as Brazil and India, and very poor countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, the interpretation that race has a causal impact on the aforementioned outcomes critically depends on whether one believes that race and ethnicity are exogenous and fixed characteristics – i.e. outside the control of an individual and constant over her lifetime.

The literature typically assumes that racial and ethnic identities are fixed and exogenous. For examples, see the reviews of the political economy literature by Alesina and Ferrara (2004) and of studies of the US black-white wage gap by Lang and Lehmann (2012)…

Read the entire article here.

The Mulatto Factor in the Race Problem

The Atlantic Monthly
May 1903
pages 658-662

Alfred Holt Stone

[The author of this paper, Mr. Alfred H. Stone, of Greenville, Miss., has made valuable studies of the negro in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, and is a member of the Committee of the American Economic Association appointed to investigate the condition of the American negro. — The Editors.]

It is a matter of regret that in organizing the twelfth census it was determined to attempt no separate enumeration of the mulatto element of our population, — using the term in its popular sense, as denoting all persons having any admixture of white and negro blood. It will not do to say that the failure to do this will in any wise affect the solution of our race problem, for to do so would be to regard it as admitting of a sort of blackboard treatment, — the only essentials to success being an array of statistics and their proper handling. But any one who endeavors to go beyond the superficialities of the problem — to do something more than academically consider, from his particular standpoint, its external symptoms — must feel that such data would at least be of value, whatever ideas he may entertain as to its ultimate solution.

Any consideration which fails to reckon this mulatto element as an independent factor ignores what is possibly the most important feature of the problem, and is faulty in its premises, whatever the theoretical conclusion arrived at. Yet we see this constantly done, and of the hundreds of such discussions annually engaged in, it is safe to say that scarcely one is entirely free from this blunder. There appears in them but a single “problem,” and every panacea proposed — education, voting, industrial training, or what not — is made to fit the same Procrustean bed. It is a primal postulate of these discussions that the negro is an undeveloped, not an inferior, race, and to this basic error may be attributed much of the confusion which surrounds the entire subject.

We have too long been guilty of the folly of trying to legislate the negro into a white man, and a pyramid of failures has apparently not yet convinced us of the futility of the undertaking. We have ignored the scientific truth of the ethnic differences among the human family, and have blindly disregarded the fact that the negro, in common with all other races, possesses certain persistent, ineradicable distinguishing characteristics. Foolishly attempting to evade the stubborn fact that the negro in Africa is to-day just what we know him to have been since he first appeared on that continent, we have sought in slavery an excuse for the natural and inevitable resemblance between the native and transplanted branches of the family, and have proceeded toward the American negro as though heredity could be overridden by constitutions and laws. Probably nothing has contributed more toward the persistence of this effort at creating an artificial being than the absolute elimination of the mulatto equation from all our considerations of the subject. It is this that has enabled those who have so long ignored the laws and operations of heredity to point, in proof of the correctness of their theory of race-problem treatment, to the achievements of men loosely accredited to the negro race. Unless through discussion the American people be able to reach a common ground, a century of polemical strife will accomplish no tangible good; and I know of no surer means of reaching a working agreement than by the frank acknowledgment of the mulatto factor in the race problem. I would not be guilty of complicating a situation already sufficiently complex through the introduction of a new factor; I rather hold to the hopeful belief that the consideration of one which already exists, though commonly ignored, may at least serve to simplify discussion, even though it fail to at once point a way out of existing difficulties. When we recognize the very simple and very patent fact that the intermixture of white and black races has given us a hybrid that is neither the one nor the other; when we get far enough along to separate this type from the negro masses in our efforts at determining what may be best for the latter; when the South is willing to lay at the white man’s door many of the failings of this mulatto type and much of the meanness which he too frequently exhibits, and Northern opinion is sufficiently candid and honest to persist no longer in ascribing all his virtues and accomplishments to the negro, — I think we shall have made a distinct gain in race-problem discussion…

Read the entire article here.

Goucher Social Justice Committee Presents: Rosa Clemente

Goucher College
Kelly Lecture Hall
1021 Dulaney Valley Road
Baltimore, Maryland
Thursday, 2015-10-29, 18:00 EDT (Local Time)

Rosa Clemente is a Black Puerto Rican grassroots organizer, hip-hop activist, journalist, and entrepreneur. She was the vice presidential running mate of 2008 Green Party Presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election.

Rosa Clemente will be speaking on the Black Lives Matter Movement, the contours of Afro Latina identity and the Black Radical Tradition.

Co-sponsored by The Center for Race, Equity and Identity.

For more information, click here.

Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America

New York University Press
October 2013
244 pages
17 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 9780814717226
Paper ISBN: 9781479892174

Catherine Ceniza Choy, Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley

In the last fifty years, transnational adoption—specifically, the adoption of Asian children—has exploded in popularity as an alternative path to family making. Despite the cultural acceptance of this practice, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the factors that allowed Asian international adoption to flourish. In Global Families, Catherine Ceniza Choy unearths the little-known historical origins of Asian international adoption in the United States. Beginning with the post-World War II presence of the U.S. military in Asia, she reveals how mixed-race children born of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese women and U.S. servicemen comprised one of the earliest groups of adoptive children.

Based on extensive archival research, Global Families moves beyond one-dimensional portrayals of Asian international adoption as either a progressive form of U.S. multiculturalism or as an exploitative form of cultural and economic imperialism. Rather, Choy acknowledges the complexity of the phenomenon, illuminating both its radical possibilities of a world united across national, cultural, and racial divides through family formation and its strong potential for reinforcing the very racial and cultural hierarchies it sought to challenge.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: International Adoption Nation
• 1 Race and Rescue in Early Asian International Adoption History
• 2 The Hong Kong Project: Chinese International Adoption in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s
• 3 A World Vision: The Labor of Asian International Adoption
• 4 Global Family Making: Narratives by and about Adoptive Families
• 5 To Make Historical Their Own Stories: Adoptee Narratives as Asian American History
• Conclusion: New Geographies, Historical Legacies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author

Race In R.I.: The Invisible Natives

The Providence Journal
Providence, Rhode Island
2015-10-24

G. Wayne Miller, Journal Staff Writer

Their ancestors were the state’s original settlers, but today’s Indians say whites ‘don’t even see us’

First of two parts

EXETER – On this fine autumn morning, Paulla Dove Jennings welcomes a visitor into her home at the edge of woods with a handshake and a smile. She pours tea, sits at her kitchen table, and begins relating some of her life’s story, which in its essential elements mirrors that of her relatives and ancestors, Rhode Island’s Narragansett and Niantic peoples.

A tribal elder now at 75, Jennings has been a waitress, chef, clerk, author, historian, educator, museum curator, state Indian Affairs Commissioner, Narragansett leader and more. Gifted with words and possessing a keen memory, she is a celebrated storyteller — a woman who laughs easily, and who also feels anger and pain at how some whites have treated her people since the Great Swamp Massacre of 1675 nearly obliterated them. The Narragansett and Niantic are among the state’s original inhabitants, here for 30,000 or more years.

“Oppression” is one word Jennings sometimes uses to describe that centuries-long treatment.

“Racism” is another.

“Rhode Island has close to the same racism as in Mississippi, and I’ve lived in both places,” says Jennings, a direct descendant of the great 17th-century Niantic sachem Ninigret…

Read the entire article here.

Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President

Bloomsbury Press
2010
288 pages
5 1/2″ x 8 1/4″
Hardback ISBN: 9781608190607

Edward McClelland

Barack Obama’s inspirational politics and personal mythology have overshadowed his fascinating history. Young Mr. Obama gives us the missing chapter: the portrait of the politician as a young leader, often too ambitious for his own good, but still equipped with a rare ability to inspire change. The route to the White House began on the streets of Chicago’s South Side.

Edward McClelland, a veteran Chicago journalist, tells the real story of the first black president’s political education in the capital of the African American political community. Obama’s touch wasn’t always golden, and the unflappable and charismatic campaigner we know today nearly derailed his political career with a disastrous run for Congress in 2000.

Obama learned from his mistakes, and rebuilt his public persona. Young Mr. Obama is a masterpiece of political reporting, peeling away the audacity, the T-shirts, and the inspiring speeches to craft a compelling and surpassingly readable account of how local politics shaped a national leader.