Mixed Race Studies

Filipino Americans: Blending Cultures, Redefining Race

Code Switch: Race and Identity, Remixed
National Public Radio
2016-05-24

Renee Montagne, Host

There are over 3 million people of Filipino heritage living in the U.S., and many say they relate better to Latino Americans than other Asian American groups. In part, that can be traced to the history of the Philippines, which was ruled by Spain for more than 300 years. That colonial relationship created a cultural bond that persists to this day.

It’s the topic of the book The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race. Author Anthony Ocampo spoke about the book with Morning Edition’s Renee Montagne.

Read the interview highlights here. Read the transcript here. Download the interview here.

Spotlight: Beneath Japan’s polite veneer lies secret codes of racial hatred aimed at minorities, foreigners

China.org.cn (China Internet Information Center)
State Council Information Office and the China International Publishing Group (CIPG), Beijing, China
2016-05-21

Xinhua News Agency

Is Japan a gentle nation? For many people who have little knowledge about the island country or just take a week-long vocation here, the answer would be a resounding “yes.”

But for the ethnic minorities and some foreigners who live here for a long time, their bitter tales would tell a totally different story behind the iconic Japanese smile — a real Japan with an underground social code of inherent racial discrimination.

Japan has a long history of discriminating “burakumin,”or hamlet people as they’re known here in English. This group, brandished an”underclass”of people comprise those perceived as having impure or tainted professions such as workers in abattoirs or those in the leather industry. They were seen as “untouchable” and also known as “eta,” an ancient name for burakumin, and were “worth” one seventh the regard of an ordinary person in the Feudal era, and in some cases regarded just slightly higher than animals.

However, such discrimination was not eliminated with the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese Enlightenment in the 19th century, and still impacts people with burakumin ancestry…

…”There was a lot of bullying when I was at school, particularly when I was an elementary school student. They used to throw garbage in my face but I had no idea why,” Ariana Miyamoto, the first Afro-Asian to be crowned Miss Universe Japan, told Xinhua.

“There was this one time when a whole class of kids refused to get in the swimming pool with me, because my skin was a different color,” remembered Miyamoto, who was born in Nagasaki Prefecture but was accused of not being Japanese.

A spiteful remark on one social media after Miyamoto’s won the hard-fought competition read that “they should do blood tests before such events and if a contestants’ DNA is less than 100 percent ‘Japanese’ they should not be allowed to participate.” Another claimed that being “hafu,” which represents “half” in English used by Japanese people referring to people of mixed-race, meant that the “other” half was “less than human.”…

Read the entire article here.

Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority

The New Press
January 2016
272 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-62097-115-4

Steve Phillips

A New York Times bestseller, Brown Is the New White takes an unvarnished look at the history of whites and people of color in America and reveals how the past has created current conditions that have revolutionary implications for U.S. politics in 2016 and beyond

Despite the abundant evidence from Obama’s victories proving that the U.S. population has fundamentally changed, many progressives and Democrats continue to waste millions of dollars chasing white swing voters. Explosive population growth of people of color in America over the past fifty years has laid the foundation for a New American Majority consisting of progressive people of color (23 percent of all eligible voters) and progressive whites (28 percent of all eligible voters). These two groups make up 51 percent of all eligible voters in America right now, and that majority is growing larger every day. Failing to properly appreciate this reality, progressives are at risk of missing this moment in history—and losing.

A leader in national politics for thirty years, Steve Phillips has had a front-row seat to these extraordinary political changes. A civil rights lawyer and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Phillips draws on his extensive political experience to unveil exactly how people of color and progressive whites add up to a new majority, and what this means for U.S. politics and policy. A book brimming with urgency and hope, Brown Is the New White exposes how far behind the curve Democrats are in investing in communities of color—while illuminating a path forward to seize the opportunity created by the demographic revolution.

“One Drop of Love”: The Keynote Performance for the Mixed Heritage Conference at UCLA

University of California, Los Angeles
James West Alumni Center
325 Westwood Plaza
Los Angeles, California 90095
Saturday, 2016-04-30 14:30-16:00 PDT (Local Time)

Join us for some or all of this enlightening and affirming conference. One Drop will start at 2:30 pm in the James West Alumni Center.

TICKETS: FREE and open to the public!

We remain so very grateful for your continued support and look forward to sharing One Drop with you.

For more information, click here. To RSVP, click here.

Beyond Black and White: Biracial Attitudes in Contemporary U.S. Politics

American Political Science Review
Volume 110 / Issue 01 / February 2016
pages 52-67
DOI: 10.1017/S0003055415000556

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

The 2000 U.S. census was the first in which respondents were permitted to self-identify with more than one race. A decade later, multiple-race identifiers have become one of the fastest-growing groups in the nation. Such broadening multiracial identification poses important political ramifications and raises questions about the future of minority group political solidarity. Yet we know little about the opinions of multiple-race identifiers and from where those opinions emerge. Bridging literatures in racial politics and political socialization, and drawing upon a multimethod approach, this article provides insight into the consequences of the U.S.’s increasingly blurred racial boundaries by examining the attitudes of Americans of White-Black parentage, a population whose identification was traditionally constrained by the one-drop rule. Findings show that on racial issues such as discrimination and affirmative action, biracials who identify as both White and Black generally hold views akin to Blacks. But on nonracial political issues including abortion and gender/marriage equality, biracials who identify as White-Black or as Black express more liberal views than their peers of monoracial parentage. Being biracial and labeling oneself a racial minority is thus associated with a more progressive outlook on matters that affect socially marginalized groups. Two explanations are examined for these findings: the transmission of political outlook from parents to children, and biracials’ experiences straddling a long-standing racial divide.

Read or purchase the article here.

Multiracial families socially excluded

The Korean Times
2016-04-26

Kim Bo-eun

Multiracial family members in Korea have become more stabilized but continue to feel isolated due to obstacles in building relationships with locals, a survey shows.

According to a Statistics Korea’s survey of 17,849 multiracial households here, more immigrant brides and naturalized Koreans have trouble befriending Koreans than in 2012, when the last survey was conducted.

More than 30 percent of the respondents said they lacked social ties — they did not have anyone with whom they could discuss problems they need help with, or enjoy pastimes and spend their leisure time with.

More respondents said they felt lonely. And perhaps due to the lack of acquaintances and friends around them with whom they could share information, they also were found to have greater problems in raising their children here.

Trouble with relationships was not only limited to mothers with foreign backgrounds — the children were also found to have trouble finding close friends…

Read the entire article here.

Why Ethnic Minority Forms Suck for Mixed-Race People

The Huffington Post United Kingdom
2016-04-22

Deborah Chatterjee, Co-founder
SharedCity, London, United Kingdom

There has been a bit of an uproar in Brighton & Hove because children as young as four, are being given the option to leave the gender section on their Primary School application blank if they don’t identify with being strictly male or female.

This has reminded me of how I have often wanted to leave Ethnic Minority Forms blank because I don’t identify with any of the options laid out. Ticking ‘Other’ like I’m something indescribable is the only box that works for me.

My heritage is Indian/Italian so why not tick the ‘White/Asian’ box? Well, it doesn’t feel correct, as the term ‘White’ is so vague in terms of describing my Italian side. And Asian could be Japanese or Korean which are both completely different from being Indian.

It gets even more confusing with my daughters. In order of percentage they are: English, Indian, Italian, Swedish and Irish. Again, ‘White/Asian’ isn’t appropriate and choosing ‘Other’ just seems like an insult. However, unlike young children in Brighton & Hove, my children along with millions of other Mixed-Race kids don’t get the option of leaving the form blank…

Read the entire article here.

From multiracial children to gender identity, what some demographers are studying now

Pew Research Center
2016-04-08

D’Vera Cohn, Senior Writer/Editor

The nation’s largest annual demography conference, held in Washington, D.C., last week, featured new research on topics including couples who live in separate homes, children of multiracial couples, transgender Americans, immigration law enforcement and how climate change affects migration. Here is a roundup of five of the many innovative posters and papers from the Population Association of America meeting, some based on preliminary work. They give insight into the questions on researchers’ minds. (To see the conference presentations by our own Pew Research Center experts, check out this page.)…

…Children of multiracial couples

When two people of different races have a child together, how do they choose to identify the race of their child on census forms? Carolyn A. Liebler and José Pacas of the University of Minnesota analyzed U.S. census data from 1960 to 2010 – a period of dramatic rise in interracial marriage that has resulted in a corresponding growth of the multiracial population. Since 1960, Americans have been allowed to choose their own race on census forms, rather than having enumerators do it for them. Although the census form did not offer people the opportunity to check more than one race box until 2000, the researchers found that some did so as early as 1980.

Their research found that not all interracially married parents checked more than one race box for their young children. Different groups varied in their responses, too. Some factors mattered in how parents did report race: Interracial couples living in the West, the region with the largest Asian and Pacific Islander population, were more likely to report their child is Asian and Pacific Islander, alone or in combination with another race. A child of a white or black male householder was more likely to be reported as the same race as the father.

But other factors, such as whether a parent is Hispanic (an ethnic category, not a race), didn’t make a consistent difference, the researchers found. In general, the share of married people living in a census tract who have mixed-race marriages is not linked to how the child’s race is reported…

Read the entire article here.

About Latino Whiteness…

The NiLP Report on Latino Politics & Policy
The National Institute for Latino Policy
2016-04-10

CONTENTS

• “A Response to Linda Martín Alcoff’s ‘Latinos and the Category of Whiteness'” By Manuel Pastor (April 10, 2016)
• “Reply to Manuel Pastor” by Linda Martín Alcoff (April 10, 2016)

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

Linda Martín Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy
City University of New York

Read both essays here.

The black people ‘erased from history’

BBC News Magazine
2016-04-10

Arlene Gregorius, BBC Mexico

More than a million people in Mexico are descended from African slaves and identify as “black”, “dark” or “Afro-Mexican” even if they don’t look black. But beyond the southern state of Oaxaca they are little-known and the community’s leaders are now warning of possible radical steps to achieve official recognition.

“The police made me sing the national anthem three times, because they wouldn’t believe I was Mexican,” says Chogo el Bandeno, a black Mexican singer-songwriter.

“I had to list the governors of five states too.”

He was visiting the capital, Mexico City, hundreds of miles from his home in southern Mexico, when the police stopped him on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant.

Fortunately his rendition of the anthem and his knowledge of political leaders convinced the police to leave him alone, but other Afro-Mexicans have not been so fortunate…

Read the entire article here.