Mixed Race Studies

Color-Blindness Is Counterproductive

The Atlantic
2015-09-13

Adia Harvey Wingfield, Professor of Sociology
Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri

Many sociologists argue that ideologies claiming not to see race risk ignoring discrimination.

How many times have you heard someone say that they “don’t see color,” “are colorblind,” or “don’t have a racist bone in their body?” Maybe you’ve even said this yourself. After all, the dominant language around racial issues today is typically one of colorblindness, as it’s often meant to convey distaste for racial practices and attitudes common in an earlier era.

Many sociologists, though, are extremely critical of colorblindness as an ideology. They argue that as the mechanisms that reproduce racial inequality have become more covert and obscure than they were during the era of open, legal segregation, the language of explicit racism has given way to a discourse of colorblindness. But they fear that the refusal to take public note of race actually allows people to ignore manifestations of persistent discrimination.

For the first half of the 20th century, it was perfectly legal to deny blacks (and other racial minorities) access to housing, jobs, voting, and other rights based explicitly on race. Civil-rights reforms rendered these practices illegal. Laws now bar practices that previously maintained racial inequality, like redlining, segregation, or openly refusing to rent or sell real estate to black Americans. Yet discrimination still persists, operating through a combination of social, economic, and institutional practices…

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Chosen by Mississippi Democrats, Shy Trucker Is at a Crossroad

The New York Times
2015-09-07

Campbell Robertson, Southern Correspondent

Robert Gray (Photo source: WLBT-TV)

JACKSON, Miss. — Only three people who had ever met this man, Robert Gray, knew that he was running in the primary for governor of Mississippi.

There were the two volunteers who took his $300 filing fee and qualifying papers several months ago at the state Democratic Party office and the candidate for agriculture commissioner who happened to be in the headquarters at the same time.

Otherwise, no one — not even Mr. Gray’s mother, with whom he lives.

At least she voted for him when she saw his name on the Aug. 4 ballot. Mr. Gray, 46, a round-faced, soft-spoken long-haul truck driver who lives on a quiet country road south of Jackson, was too busy working on his rig to vote himself. He would, nonetheless, go on to win, taking 79 out of Mississippi’s 82 counties.

Mr. Gray beat two other candidates, who unlike him spent money and campaigned. Democratic Party officials were stunned. The news media was stunned. Mr. Gray, now Mississippi’s Democratic nominee for governor, gave some interviews and then set off with a truck full of sweet potatoes for a potato chip factory in Pennsylvania…

…No one there had met Mr. Gray, but Gary Downing, who was getting a little off the ears, offered a thought on the state of politics: “Can’t do no worse than what we’ve got.”

This may be the central plank of the Gray campaign, such as it is. His campaign staff for now consists mostly of his sister, Angela Gray, 45, who works in real estate in Georgia, and Dwight Utz, 57, an engineer who moved here three years ago from Idaho. Mr. Utz, who is white, sees the campaign as the stirrings of a new civil rights movement.

Mr. Gray does not talk much about race. He cites no specific issue that prompted him to run for governor. He emphasizes a more general conviction that the state has been foundering for too long and that it could be thriving if only the governor would expand Medicaid and spend more on infrastructure and education…

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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.

Barack Obama and the Third Wave: the syntaxes of whiteness and articulating difference in the post-identity era

Politics, Groups, and Identities
Volume 2, Issue 4, 2014
pages 573-588
DOI: 10.1080/21565503.2014.969739

Melanye T. Price, Assistant Professor
Africana Studies and Political Science Departments
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Emerging critiques of Third Wave Feminism and its employment of grammars of whiteness provide a framework for analyzing racial discourses emerging in the same social context. Like Third Wave Feminists, Barack Obama’s political ascendancy happens in a post-identity (post-racial, post-feminist) moment where members of ascriptive categories having achieved significant civil rights gains begin to assert their rights to live unconstrained by racialized and gendered histories and norms. Using the syntaxes of whiteness outlined previously by Rebecca Clark Mane, I critically analyze Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech. I argue that Obama does the following: he provides a racial analysis that is disconnected from historical context, suggests that prevailing isms are primarily relegated to the past, conflates oppositional racial experiences, and relies too heavily on his own personal narrative to justify claims. These discursive practices have damaging effects for our broader understanding of contemporary racial politics. Moreover, reliance on Obama’s perspective on American race relations makes it more difficult to argue and demonstrate that material inequalities are produced by structural injustice that continues to over-determine the lives of certain groups. Additionally, advocates and activists who continue to make identity-based claims are viewed as either holding on too tightly to the past or failing to understand the present.

Read or purchase the article here.

Politics, Opinion and Reality in Black and White: Conceptualizing Postracialism at the Beginning of the 21st Century

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

Lisa Veroni-Paccher, MCF, Civilisation américaine
Université Bordeaux Montaigne

With the election of the first black president, commentators and pundits said that Americans could now believe that African Americans had achieved racial equality, or at least that they would achieve it in their lifetimes. As Barack Obama used a universalist message and adopted a racially transcendent strategy which might seem at odds with his self-definition as an African American, he came to be defined as a postracial candidate, in a postracial America. The promise of an electoral victory indeed called for a strategy that would avoid race-specific issues, while at the same time reassured voters that their interests would be best served. This article argues that postracialism can thus be understood and used as an effective electoral strategy aiming at downplaying the individual and collective roles race and racism play in structuring group hierarchy and interaction, so that black or other nonwhite candidates can appeal to white voters. Using recent public opinion data, this paper will then attempt to understand how the contemporary political environment transforms the use of race as a political and/or social construction and whether it matches the evolution of black public opinion as it relates to understandings of race and racism.

Contents

• I. Postracial Politics: Deracialized Electoral Strategies as Necessity
• II. Race, Racism, Racial Equality and Public Opinion: Postracial America as Desire
• III. Postracialism Real or Dreamed? Beyond the black/white dichotomy
• Conclusion

Read the entire article here.

The Politics of Race and Class in the Age of Obama

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

Myra Mendible, Professor of English and Department Chair for Language and Literature
Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, Florida

This essay explores the revival and misappropriation of identity politics in the age of Obama. I argue that Obama’s presidency has exposed the fault lines of American society, evoking deep-seated apprehensions about race, immigration, and America’s role in a post-9/11 world. As a result, it has generated a range of discursive strategies intended to both disguise and deploy racialist ideology. In particular, my analysis focuses attention on three developments in the wake of Obama’s election: the emergence of “whiteness” as an endangered identity; the prevalence of “class” as a code word for “race”; and the reconfiguration of “passing” and miscegenation tropes in political discourse. I consider the ways that these rhetorical sleights-of-hand exploit post-racial discourse in order to dismantle decades of progressive civil rights legislation in the United States.

Contents

• Post-Racial America: New Myth for a New Age?
• “Passing” for “Black”?
• Is White the New Black?
• Exploiting the “Obama Effect”

Read the entire article here.

In Conversation: Quentin Tarantino

Vulture
2015-08-23

Lane Brown, Culture Editor

Midway through postproduction on his eighth movie, the Western THE HATEFUL EIGHT — about a band of outlaws trapped in a saloon during a blizzard — the director discusses the country’s legacy of white supremacy, Obama, and why he doesn’t worry about a Transformers future.

We’re five months from the release of The Hateful Eight. How close to finishing are you?

We’ve got a little bit more than an hour finished right now. I just got back from seeing an hour of the movie cut together…

…Hateful Eight uses the Civil War as a backdrop, sort of like how The Good, the Bad and the Ugly does.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly doesn’t get into the racial conflicts of the Civil War; it’s just a thing that’s happening. My movie is about the country being torn apart by it, and the racial aftermath, six, seven, eight, ten years later.

That’s going to make this movie feel contemporary. Everybody’s talking about race right now.

I know. I’m very excited by that.

Excited?

Finally, the issue of white supremacy is being talked about and dealt with. And it’s what the movie’s about.

How did what’s happening in Baltimore and Ferguson find its way into The Hateful Eight?

It was already in the script. It was already in the footage we shot. It just happens to be timely right now. We’re not trying to make it timely. It is timely. I love the fact that people are talking and dealing with the institutional racism that has existed in this country and been ignored. I feel like it’s another ’60s moment, where the people themselves had to expose how ugly they were before things could change. I’m hopeful that that’s happening now.

You supported Obama. How do you think he’s done?

I think he’s fantastic. He’s my favorite president, hands down, of my lifetime. He’s been awesome this past year. Especially the rapid, one-after-another-after-another-after-another aspect of it. It’s almost like take no prisoners. His he-doesn’t-give-a-shit attitude has just been so cool. Everyone always talks about these lame-duck presidents. I’ve never seen anybody end with this kind of ending. All the people who supported him along the way that questioned this or that and the other? All of their questions are being answered now…

Read the entire interview here.

Conservatives Are Missing the Point of Black Lives Matter

The Atlantic
2015-08-26

Adrienne Green, Editorial Fellow

Courtesy of Shaun King

Those that questioned Shaun King about his race think that it’s relevant to the movement. They’re wrong.

Shaun King, a prominent figure in the Black Lives Matter movement, responded last week to accusations published by some conservative websites that he has lied about being biracial, and about being the victim of racially-motivated attacks.

“The reports about my race, about my past, and about the pain I’ve endured are all lies,” he wrote on Thursday in [an] article for Daily Kos, the liberal news site where he works.

Both The Daily Caller—which referred to King as “the facebook pastor”—and Breitbart.com cited a police report from 1995, which listed King’s identity as white. King, who claims the incident that resulted in the police report was an example of racial tensions that had surfaced at his school, offered harrowing details about the brutality he says he faced.

“In March of 1995, it all boiled over and a racist mob of nearly a dozen students beat me severely, first punching me from all sides,” King wrote. “When I cradled into a fetal position on the ground they stomped me mercilessly, some with steel-toed boots, for about 20 seconds. That day changed the entire trajectory of my life.”

In an attempt to defend his identity and silence his critics, King offered up a complicated family history, identifying his biological parents as a white mother and “light skinned black man,” who, The Washington Post reports, is not the man listed on his birth certificate…

Read the entire article here.

The Wrongs of the Right: Language, Race, and the Republican Party in the Age of Obama

New York University Press
May 2014
232 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780814760543

Matthew W. Hughey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

Gregory S. Parks, Assistant Professor of Law
Wake Forest University School of Law, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

On November 5, 2008, the nation awoke to a New York Times headline that read triumphantly: “OBAMA. Racial Barrier Falls in Heavy Turnout.” But new events quickly muted the exuberant declarations of a postracial era in America: from claims that Obama was born in Kenya and that he is not a true American, to depictions of Obama as a “Lyin African” and conservative cartoons that showed the new president surrounded by racist stereotypes like watermelons and fried chicken.

Despite the utopian proclamations that we are now live in a color-blind, postracial country, the grim reality is that implicit racial biases are more entrenched than ever. In Wrongs of the Right, Matthew W. Hughey and Gregory S. Parks set postracial claims into relief against a background of pre- and post-election racial animus directed at Obama, his administration, and African Americans. They provide an analysis of the political Right and their opposition to Obama from the vantage point of their rhetoric, a history of the evolution of the two-party system in relation to race, social scientific research on race and political ideology, and how racial fears, coded language, and implicit racism are drawn upon and manipulated by the political Right. Racial meanings are reservoirs rich in political currency, and the Right’s replaying of the race card remains a potent resource for othering the first black president in a context rife with Nativism, xenophobia, white racial fatigue, and serious racial inequality. And as Hughey and Parks show, race trumps politics and policies when it comes to political conservatives’ hostility toward Obama.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Grand Old Party and African Americans: A Brief Historical Overview
• 2. Unsweet Tea and Labor Pains: The Tea Party, Birthers, and Obama
• 3. A Fox in the Idiot Box: Right-Wing Talking Heads
• 4. Political Party, Campaign Strategy, and Racial Messaging
• 5. The Social Science of Political Ideology and Racial Attitudes
• 6. Unconscious Race Bias and the Right: Its Meaning for Law in the Age of Obama
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authors

Hispanic Or Latino? A Guide For The U.S. Presidential Campaign

National Public Radio
2015-08-27

Lulu Garcia-Navarro, South America Correspondent

My parents are Cuban and Panamanian. I grew up in Miami. I travel broadly in Latin America but reside in Brazil, which speaks Portuguese, not Spanish.

So what am I?

This may seem an irrelevant question to many, but as the American presidential season kicks into high gear there’s been a lot of confusion about how to refer to people alternately called Hispanics or Latinos.

Donald Trump, who’s made immigration central to his campaign, has sometimes used the catchall phrase “the Mexicans.” And his verbal confrontation this week with Spanish-language broadcaster Jorge Ramos — a Mexican-American — lit up social media.

I feel the need to jump into the fray because it will save me from writing lengthy corrections to others on my Facebook feed. Now, I’ll just be able to post this link. There are a lot of misconceptions out there.

Latino And Hispanic Don’t Refer To Race Or Color: As in the U.S., there are many races in Latin America owing to the history of the region. The indigenous peoples of the region were conquered and colonized by white Europeans, who then forcibly imported millions of black Africans and enslaved them. In Brazil, you also have a huge Japanese community, and there are many Chinese descendants in Peru. One of Peru’s former presidents was of Japanese descent…

Read the entire article here.