Mixed Race Studies

Albanez: Exploring my mixed-race identity at NU has been invaluable experience

The Daily Northwestern
2017-05-09

Andrea Albanez, Op-Ed Contributor

In 2011, The New York Times published an article about how many young Americans were no longer defining themselves as one single race, but rather beginning to cast themselves under multiple races or calling themselves “mixed-race.” According to the article, “the crop of students moving through college right now includes the largest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States.”

I identify as a mixed-race American. I encompass an array of nationalities that define who I am biologically: Filipino from my mother’s side and Mexican, Portuguese, French and German from my father’s side. I have met many students and peers just within my first year at Northwestern that share this commonality of mixed-race background along with me. Yet though identifying as mixed is so common now, how a mixed-race individual can identify themselves in society is still a difficult feat to overcome.

As I am a makeup of 5 different races, I myself have only identified closely with two out of my five races: Filipino and Mexican, which makes up 75 percent of my overall racial identity. This is prominently because my parents shared those two ethnicities’ cultures and practices more so than those of French, Portuguese and German, which they had lesser affinities with. Because of this, I have solely defined Filipino and Mexican as my ethnicities. Yet even so, I still do not feel as strong of a connection to my ethnicities as I wish or hope to be…

Read the entire article here.

What Does Identifying as Afro-Latina Really Mean?

Hip Latina
2017-05-04

Johanna Ferreira
Brooklyn, New York

Pic of author. Photo Credit: Karina Munoz

Racial identity for a lot of U.S. born Latinos, is a very complex, multi-dimensional, and multi-faceted thing. As a Dominican-American woman born and raised in Queens, New York, I can attest to that. All I have to do is take a good look in the mirror to know that aside from being a Latina, I am also mixed race. I see it in my tan complexion, my light hazel eyes, my dark curly hair (that’s neither tight nor loose), my plump lips, my small nose, and my bottom-heavy figure I inherited from my Dominican mother. I am a beautiful blend of European and African ancestry and yet there still seems to be so much confusion around me identifying as Afro-Latina. Why is that?

The term Afro-Latino is a term some Latinos use as a way to identify their racial background but it’s one that still triggers a lot of confusion, pain, and shame for many. This is due in large to the complex and varied nature of racial identity in the Latino community.

According to a 2016 Pew Research study, one quarter of all U.S. Latinos self-identify as Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean or of African descent with roots in Latin America. Mind you, this is only taking into consideration the amount of Afro-Latinos who actually identify that way. The study shows that a lot of Afro-Latinos in the states don’t identify as Afro-Latino.

So much of our Latin American culture and history involves strong African influence. We see it in our varied skin tones, facial features, and hair textures and we experience it in our food and music. According to Pew Research, in Brazil, half of the population is of African descent (Black or mixed-race Black). In Cuba, Blacks and mixed-race Blacks make up more than a third of the country’s population. And according to the Central Intelligence Agency, 11 percent of the population in the Dominican Republic is Black while 73 percent of the population is mixed-race Black. That’s huge!

So why are there still so many Latinos out there hesitant to call themselves Afro-Latinos? Well for starters, not everyone understands the actual definition of Afro-Latino…

Read the entire article here.

Williams’s Pregnancy Proves Interracial Couples Still Aren’t Accepted

Fortune
2017-05-03

Erica Chito Childs, Associate Professor of Sociology
Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center

Serena Williams arrives at the Costume Institute Benefit May 1, 2017 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. ANGELA WEISS/AFP/Getty Images

When Romanian tennis captain Ilie Nastase imagined Serena Willams’s baby with her white fiancé Alexis Ohanian would look like “chocolate with milk” last week, his offensive comments were immediately criticized in the media. Williams herself called out his comments as racist on Instagram. Days later Nastase apologized, saying, “That was the first time I had heard about her pregnancy, and my reaction was spontaneous.”

This feud offered the public a glimpse of how mixed race people around the globe are subject to a variety of similarly insulting terms. Nastase may try to pass off his remark as an isolated incident. But in reality, it reflects the continued widespread opposition to and discomfort with interracial couples and multiracial children.

On one hand, mixed race celebrities and interracial celebrity couples like Williams and Ohanian are heralded in the media as examples of a world where race, ethnic background, and color no longer matter. This belief in a post-racial world grew louder after the election of President Barack Obama, who is biracial. Accompanying these proclamations of multiracialism was the notion that opposition to interracial unions was a thing of the past. In addition, we also hear that interracial marriages are on the rise and the biracial population is booming.

Yet a closer look at the statistics tells a different story…

Read the entire article here.

How Census Data Mislead Us about Ethno-Racial Change in the United States: A Response to Mora and Rodríguez-Muñiz

New Labor Forum
2017-04-28

Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor of Sociology
Graduate Center, City University of New York

I am pleased to open a conversation with G. Cristina Mora and Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz about census data and what they indicate about ethno-racial change.

In this issue of New Labor Forum. To forestall misunderstandings, I think it advisable at the outset to make clear the framework within which I am operating. I take it from the way that Mora and Rodríguez-Muñiz formulate their critique that their starting point is critical race theory, with its normatively inflected concerns about the deep and persisting structures of American racism and the pathways to eventual racial justice. That is fine. But I am operating from a different standpoint, that of sociological realism, which has the goal of identifying and understanding important ongoing social processes and discerning their implications. This, it should be obvious, does not mean that I am unconcerned about racial justice, just as critical race theorists generally are not unconcerned about empirical patterns and their consequences.

It does not help the conversation that Mora and Rodríguez-Muñiz tend throughout to downplay the significance of the concerns behind my analysis, which they characterize as narrowing “debates to the issue of ‘methodological accuracy’.” I find this an unfortunate attempt to reduce my argument to mainly technical issues (granted, these are part of the story); they miss that I, too, am talking ultimately about social power, even if I do not place it in the foreground in the piece I wrote for The American Prospect (it is more clear in other writings, some currently under review [1])….

Read the entire article here.

Seeking better data on Hispanics, Census Bureau may change how it asks about race

Pew Research Center
2017-04-20

D’Vera Cohn, Senior Writer/Editor

Federal officials are considering major changes in how they ask Americans about their race and ethnicity, with the goal of producing more accurate and reliable data in the 2020 census and beyond. Recently released Census Bureau research underscores an important reason why: Many Hispanics, who are the nation’s largest minority group, do not identify with the current racial categories.

Census officials say this is a problem because in order to obtain good data, they need to make sure people can match themselves to the choices they are offered. Census data on race and Hispanic origin are used to redraw congressional district boundaries and enforce voting and other civil rights laws, as well as in a wide variety of research, including Pew Research Center studies…

Read the entire aticle here.

A Response to Richard Alba’s “The Likely Persistence of a White Majority”

New Labor Forum: A journal of ideas, analysis, and debate
2017-04-28

G. Cristina Mora, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Latina/o Studies
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Photo Credit: Stephen Phillips

That politics undergirds censuses is a truism. At least since Benedict Anderson wrote Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism in 1983 [1]. scholars have accepted that censuses are both political and scientific enterprises. Census racial classifications are a case in point because they have historically become instituted through political efforts. For example, “Mulatto” became a census classification in 1850 after politicians, alarmed by racial miscegenation, demanded that the Census Bureau enumerate those of black/white parentage [2] More recent ethnoracial categories have arisen as a result of the political efforts championed by community stakeholders. To wit, the Hispanic/Latino classification emerged as Mexican, Puerto Rican, and other community leaders pressured the Census Bureau for official recognition during the 1970s [3] And if a Middle Eastern/North African category is added to the next census in 2020, as is predicted, it will be because activists, academics, and others have lobbied over two decades for its inclusion. In effect, rather than reflecting an existing reality, all census racial categories emerge, or are negotiated, in such a political fashion—none exists in nature.

Despite the political origins of our official racial and ethnic categories, lay and academic prognostications about the country’s demo- graphic future rarely take politics seriously.

Take, for example, sociologist Richard Alba’s provocative commentary published in The American Prospect, “The Likely Persistence of a White Majority.”…

Read the entire article here.

How I Got Over: ‘One Drop of Love’ Performance and Conversation

The Greene Space
44 Charlton Street (corner of Varick Street), New York, New York
Thursday, 2017-04-06, 19:00 EDT (Local Time)

One Drop of Love (Photo by David Scarcliff)

Join us for a special presentation of “One Drop of Love,” a multimedia solo performance that explores the intersections of race, class and gender in search of truth, justice and love.

Written and performed by Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, the interactive show parallels the history of changing demographics in the U.S. with DiGiovanni’s own family history, traveling from the 1700s to the present.

The ultimate goal of the performance is to encourage the discussion of race and racism openly and critically, and to commit to making the world more liberated for all.

WNYC editor Rebecca Carroll hosts a post-performance conversation with DiGiovanni as part of The Greene Space’s ongoing How I Got Over series.

For more information, click here.

Beyond Black and White: The Identity Construction and Political Attitudes of Biracial Americans

University of Hawaiʻi, Hilo
200 W. Kāwili Street
Hilo, Hawaiʻi 96720-4091
Student Services Center Room W-201
Friday, 2017-04-07, 17:00–19:00 HAST (Local Time)

Lauren D. Davenport, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Stanford University, Stanford, California

Free presentation on the broader social and political implications of the increasingly racially mixed American landscape, featuring guest lecturer Dr. Lauren Davenport, Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.

In what has been called “the greatest change in the measurement of race in the history of the United States” (Farley 2002: 33), Americans were allowed, for the first time, to self-identify with more than one race in the 2000 U.S. census. Since then, the U.S. multiple-race population has skyrocketed by 106%—more than 17 times the rate of growth of the single-race population. Individuals of mixed-race comprise the fastest-growing youth group in the nation, and an estimated 20 percent of Americans will identify with multiple racial groups by 2050. When it comes to multiple-race labeling, Hawaii is leading the charge: it is the state with the largest percentage of the population identifying as multiracial, by far.

In this presentation, Dr. Davenport draws upon a wealth of sources to address the following questions:

• How do mixed-race Americans see themselves, socially, culturally, and politically?
• What factors determine how someone of mixed-race parentage decides to racially self-identify?
• What are the repercussions of these identities for the broader American political structure?
• How do people of mixed-race approach racial policies, such as affirmative action, and social policies, such as same-sex marriage?
• What do the increasing number of multiracial identifiers mean for the allocation of resources and benefits intended for minority populations?

For more information and to make reservations, click here.

Diversity doesn’t make racism magically disappear

The Guardian
2017-04-01

Daniel José Camacho
Duke Divinity School

‘Consider Brazil. There, white people are a minority – but are still dominant.’ Photograph: Brazil Photos/LightRocket via Getty Images

Some hope that changing demographics make us destined to be post-racial. It isn’t so simple

We can’t screw our way beyond racism. Many think mixed-race babies and browner demographics will automatically usher in a post-racial world. They interpret the projections of a “majority-minority” shift in our nation – now set to take place in 2044 – as a sign of guaranteed progress. Changing faces in the US are seen as anti-racist destiny. But don’t overestimate the power of this post-racial cocktail.

Jordan Peele’s brilliant film Get Out reminds me of the importance of questioning overly optimistic narratives of racial progress. Made by someone who has been open about being biracial and married to a white women, this film creatively uses the genre of horror to depict the persistence of racism through a story about an interracial couple. In many ways, it can be seen as a strident critique of a liberal brand of racism that has blossomed in the post-Obama era…

…If more mixed people guarantee greater tolerance, then Brazil – and most of Latin America – should be a racial paradise. Although a great degree of ‘mestizaje’ or racial mixing has taken place since the time of conquest, Indigenous and Afro-descendent people in Latin America remain disproportionately poor, discriminated against, and locked out from opportunity.

Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, in his book Racism without Racists, has speculated whether the racial order in the US might eventually resemble that of Latin American and Caribbean nations. In this case, white supremacy and racial stratification will continue to operate in the US even as it becomes a “majority-minority” nation…

Read the entire article here.

Residential Racial Diversity: Are Transracial Adoptive Families More Like Multiracial or White Families?^*

Social Science Quarterly
Volume 97, Issue 5 (November 2016)
Pages 1189–1207
DOI: 10.1111/ssqu.12242

Rose M. Kreider, Chief
Fertility and Family Statistics Branch
Social, Economic and Housing Statistics Division
United States Census Bureau, Washington, D.C.

Elizabeth Raleigh, Associate Professor of Sociology
Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota

^*The views expressed on statistical and methodological issues are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Census Bureau. Doctors Kreider and Raleigh contributed equally to this publication.

• Objective: The purpose of this article is to examine whether and how the residential racial diversity of transracially adopted children (i.e., nonwhite children adopted by white parents) varies from those of biological children in white monoracial families and biological children in mixed-race families.
• Method: Using the restricted access 2009 American Community Survey, we take advantage of the large number of adoptive families not only to investigate differences among these families, but also to explore whether racial socialization within transracial adoptive families varies by the race and nativity of the child.
• Results: We show that the context of racial socialization for transracially adopted children is more similar to that of white children in monoracial families than that of children in mixed race families.
• Conclusion: This article adds a quantitative, nationally representative picture of the context of racial socialization for specific groups of transracially adopted children, complementing existing research published in this area.

Read or purchase the article here.