Mixed Race Studies

Mexico Finally Recognized Its Black Citizens, But That’s Just The Beginning

The Huffington Post
2016-01-27

Krithika Varagur
Associate Editor, What’s Working

In Mexico, like everywhere, identity is complex.

Last month, for the first time ever, the Mexican government recognized its 1.38 million citizens of African descent in a national survey. The survey served as a preliminary count before the 2020 national census, where “black” will debut as an official category.

A major force behind the government’s recognition was México Negro, an activist group founded in 1997 by Sergio Peñaloza Pérez, a school teacher of African descent. México Negro works for, among other initiatives, the constitutional recognition of Afro-Mexicans and to increase the visibility of Afro-Mexican culture.

The Huffington Post recently caught up with Peñaloza to discuss his organization, why recognition matters and what’s next for black Mexicans…

…Why Has It Taken So Long?

Until last month, Mexico was one of only two Latin-American countries (the other is Chile) to not officially count its black population. As a result, the move to recognize Afro-Mexicans has been met with some pushback from Mexicans who believe that mestizo identity (the mix between indigenous people and Europeans) is more important than specific ethnicities.

Mexico’s post-revolutionary government made a conscious effort to create a national mixed-race identity that melded Hispanic, indigenous and African ethnicities. Article 2 of Mexico’s 1917 Constitution recognized its “multicultural composition,” and today, over 60% of Mexicans identify as mestizos. So in modern Mexico, “blackness” is still a tenuous identity, and many use labels like “criollo” (creole) or “moreno” rather than the ones black Mexicans tend to prefer. Peñaloza, for instance, describes himself as “afrodescendiente (of African descent), negro (black), or afromexicano (Afro-Mexican).”…

Read the entire article here.

Why Race Policy must include Multiracial Americans

Policy Press Blog at the University of Bristol
2016-01-27

Kathleen Odell Korgen, Professor of Sociology
William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey

Today’s guest blog by Kathleen Odell Korgen, whose book Race policy and multi-racial Americans published this month, examines the much overlooked issue of including multiracial Americans in policy making and explains why this oversight must stop.

Americans who identify as multiracial comprise approximately 7 percent of the U.S. population. With a growth rate three times that the rest of the population, this percentage will rise quickly (U.S. Census Bureau 2012; Frey 2014; Pew Research Center 2015).

One would never know this, however, by viewing the nation’s race policies. A look at policies across a variety of areas, including public school curricula, health policy, and prison regulations, reveals little trace of the existence of growing numbers of Americans who identify as multiracial…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial in the Workplace: A New Kind of Discrimination?

Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC Fall 2015 Speaker Series presents: “Multiracial in the Workplace: A New Kind of Discrimination?”
University of Pittsburgh
2015-12-10

Tanya Hernandez, Professor of Law
Fordham University

Welcome by:

Larry Davis, Dean, Donald M. Henderson Professor, and Director
Center for Race and Social Problems, University of Pittsburgh

Introduction by:

Jeffrey Shook, Associate Professor
School of Social Work, University of Pittsburgh

Watch the video (01:02:59) here.

Law is still black & white, not multiracial, Fordham prof says

University Times: The Faculty & Staff Newspaper Since 1968
University of Pittsburgh
2016-01-07

Marty Levine

Despite the fact that more people are identifying themselves as multiracial on the U.S. census, decisions in discrimination cases involving multiracial defendants still are primarily based on the presence of anti-black prejudice, and there is no need to change civil rights laws.

That was the message of Tanya Hernandez, professor of law at Fordham University, who delivered the final fall Buchanan, Ingersoll & Rooney lecture in the School of Social Work’s Center on Race and Social Problems last month.

Hernandez, author of “Racial Subordination in Latin America,” spoke on the topic “Multiracial in the Workplace: A New Kind of Discrimination?” She is studying mixed-race identity and discrimination law in the United States in preparation for her next book…

Read the entire article here.

Census Finds Many Claiming New Identity: Indian

The New York Times
1991-03-05

Dirk Johnson

For the first 43 years of her life, Barbara Anderson did not talk about her ethnic background. But now it is a matter of pride — and record. On the latest census form, Mrs. Anderson, now 48, checked a different box: American Indian.

“I no longer had to pretend,” she said.

Census officials are finding a sharp increase in the number of people who identify themselves as American Indians. Tribes are swamped with applications for enrollment. And a large wave of urban Indians now takes part in traditional Indian practices, like the “vision quest,” a time of spiritual reflection spent alone in the wilderness.

As American society becomes more accepting and admiring of the Indian heritage, and as governments set aside contracts and benefits for tribe members, an increasing number of Indians, like Mrs. Anderson, feel freer to assert their identities.

“There were many people who were ashamed of their Indian past, so they hid it,” said Russell Thornton, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley. “But a lot of people who went the assimilationist route have come back. And the tribes have been enjoying a renaissance.”

Since 1960, the Government count of American Indians has tripled, to an estimated 1.8 million. The Census Bureau has so far released ethnic data from 38 states and the District of Columbia showing a 38 percent increase in the last 10 years. Some of the biggest increases came in states without large Indian populations: Alabama rose 118 percent, New Jersey 78 percent. In Wyoming, which had an overall population loss of more than 3 percent, the number of Indians grew by more than 33 percent…

…Many of the Indians who now strongly assert their identities are the children or grandchildren of Indians who “passed” as white. Others were adopted into white families, and later sought to reclaim their heritage. John Homer, for example, was born 44 years ago to Indian parents in Hugo, Okla., but was adopted by a white couple. As a child growing up in Arkansas, he knew that he was Indian and was bothered that he could walk comfortably in whites-only neighborhoods because of his adopted parents but that other Indian boys could not…

Read the entire article here.

Race Unknown

Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
2011-02-21

Katti Gray

Bryan Lee, a senior at the University of California, Irvine, has noticed that some of his classmates adamantly declare their multiracial heritage while others choose not to identify themselves as being any particular ethnicity.

The half-Korean, half-White biomedical engineering major is co-president of the university’s Mixed Students Organization and says many of the group’s members “absolutely refuse to check any box when they’re filling out forms that ask you to describe your race.” Lee himself has occasionally checked the “other” box in the list of racial identifiers.

It’s an exercise in choice that is driving a gradual but steady uptick in the “race unknown” category of enrollment stats at some colleges and universities. The shift results, in part, from a continuing rise in the number of interracial couples and the children born to those unions. But observers say it also hints at efforts by some current college students to be less fixated on skin color.

“They are the change,” says Arlene Cash, vice president for enrollment management at Spelman College in Atlanta. “They have a very different way of looking at themselves and a much more global perspective of who they are. Many students of mixed races do not want to be pigeon-holed.”…

…Although public funding of college programs is not determined on the basis of race, the racial makeup of a student body is commonly used to track achievement gaps among races. Entities such as the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board use the data to measure how well the student population at public universities mirrors the state’s overall racial diversity.

Read the entire article here.

Meet Team One Drop: Dr. Chandra Crudup

Fanshen Cox
2016-01-12

Meet One Drop of Love’s Production Manager, Dr. Chandra Crudup. She makes sure all technical aspects of the show are in place and lends lots of other support to Fanshen when we travel. She also often calls the show and hosts our Q&A talkbacks. She has her PhD in Social Work and is an experienced actor, choreographer and theatre producer. She’s also on the Boards of Mixed Roots Stories and MAViN. We are so grateful to have her on the team!

One Drop of Love is a multimedia one-woman show exploring the intersections of race, class, gender, justice and LOVE.

For more information, click here.

Both native and foreign: How being of mixed race affects Japanese students

The Cavalier Daily
Charlottesville, Virginia
2014-07-01

Emily Gorham

I have now entered week five of my three month stay in Japan as an intern for the Ibaraki Christian University’s English department. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what I’ve termed the gaijin stare — a phenomenon in which, as one of very few foreigners living in the Japanese countryside, I get stares from just about everyone, wherever I go.

This concept got me thinking: what happens when the gaijin stare is misplaced? Japan used to think of itself as a homogenous nation. Some people still think of it this way — though times are certainly changing and interracial marriage is growing increasingly common.

By one statistic, one in every 49 babies born in Japan today is considered “mixed race” — or “haafu,” which natives presumably take to mean half-Japanese and half-foreign. While this number may not sound staggering, it means Japan’s mixed raced demographic cannot be ignored.

After experiencing the gaijin stare myself, I spoke to a few students at the university who are considered “haafu” for their take on racial perception in Japan…

Read the entire article here.

The Likely Persistence of a White Majority

The American Prospect
Winter 2016, Volume 27, Number 1 (2016-01-11)

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

Has the notion of demography as destiny ever enjoyed so much credence? The disappearance of a white majority in the United States by the middle of this century is now widely accepted as if it were an established fact. Projections by the Census Bureau have encouraged those expectations, and people on both the right and left have seized on them in support of their views. On the right, the anxieties about the end of white majority status have fueled a conservative backlash against the growing diversity of the country. On the left, many progressives anticipate an inexorable change in the ethno-racial power hierarchy. Numerous sites on the web offer advice and counsel on how whites can handle their imminent minority status.

But what if these different reactions are based on a false premise—actually two false premises? The first stems from the Census Bureau’s way of classifying people by ethnicity and race, which produces the smallest possible estimate of the size of the non-Hispanic white population. Whenever there is ambiguity about ethno-racial identity, the statistics publicized by the bureau count an individual as minority. This statistical choice is particularly important for population projections because of the growing number of children from mixed families, most of whom have one white parent and one from a minority group. In the Census Bureau’s projections, children with one Hispanic, Asian, or black parent are counted as minority (that is, as Hispanic or nonwhite). The United States has historically followed a “one-drop” rule in classifying people with any black ancestry as black. The census projections, in effect, extend the one-drop rule to the descendants of other mixed families. A great deal of evidence shows, however, that many children growing up today in mixed families are integrating into a still largely white mainstream society and likely to think of themselves as part of that mainstream, rather than as minorities excluded from it…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Identity Recognition – Why Not? A Comparison Between Multiracialism in the United States and Brazil

University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
2015
143 pages

Ana Carolina Miguel Gouveia

Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Post-Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a LLM Master degree in Law Graduate Studies in Law

Scholars debate the importance of multiracial identity recognition as the increasing number of self-identified multiracial individuals challenges traditional racial categories. Two reasons justify the count of multiracial individuals on censuses. One is the right to self-identification, derived from personal autonomy. The other is social: the category allows governments to accurately assess affirmative action programs’ results and society’s acceptance of multiracialism. Critical Race Theory and Critical Mixed-Race Studies serve as basis for my analysis over multiracial identity formation and its recognition. Comparing multiracialism in America and Brazil, I verify that both countries are in different stages regarding categorization and social acceptance of multiracial identity. Neither uses multiracial data for social programs, though. I conclude that the growth of mixed-race individuals makes the identification of race-based social programs’ beneficiaries difficult, which demands the use of diverse criteria. Moreover, official recognition can serve to improve the way society deals with race.

Read the entire thesis here.