Mixed Race Studies

One Drop of Love

Northern Arizona University
Ashurst Hall
Flagstaff, Arizona
Wednesday, 2015-02-18, 18:00 MST (Local Time)

Performed by Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni. Presented by NAU College of Education

One Drop of Love, is an hour-long one woman show. This funny, interactive and moving memoir explores history, family, race, class, justice and love and takes audiences from the 1600s to the present, to cities all over the U.S. and to West and East Africa, where both father and daughter spent time in search of their ‘racial’ roots.

For more information, click here.

Checking Boxes: A close look at mixed-race identity and the law

Macomb County Leagal News
Mt. Clemens, Michgan
2015-02-05

Jenny Whalen, ‎Web Communications Specialist
School of Law
University of Michigan

Professor Martha S. Jones has long struggled with the idea of checking more than one box. Her reluctance to do so has been influenced by a lifetime of changing perceptions about her own identity. Born to an interracial couple a decade before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the legality of such a relationship in Loving v. Virginia, Jones, who co-directs the Program in Race, Law & History at U-M, crossed the color line at birth.

As the featured speaker for Michigan Law’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day lecture last month, Jones reflected on her mixed-race experience to open up an understanding of how legal culture has wrestled with the idea that Americans might check more than one box of racial identity.

“Today I’m going to be asking myself, ‘How does it feel to be a problem?’” Jones said, looking to address the same question contemporaries of W.E.B. Du Bois asked him at the dawn of the 20th century.

For Jones, the answer to this question starts with Loving v. Virginia…

Read the entire article here. View Professor Jones’ presentation here.

Census Bureau may count Arab-Americans for the first time in 2020

PBS NewsHour
Public Broadcasting System
2015-01-30

Jeff Karoub, Reporter
The Associated Press

DETROIT — The federal government is considering allowing those of Middle Eastern and North African descent to identify as such on the next 10-year Census, which could give Arab-Americans and other affected groups greater political clout and access to public funding, among other things.

The U.S. Census Bureau will test the new Middle East-North Africa (MENA) classification for possible inclusion on the 2020 Census if it gets enough positive feedback about the proposed change by Sunday, when the public comment period ends.

Arab-Americans, who make up the majority of those who would be covered by the MENA classification, have previously been classified by default as white on the Census, which helps determine congressional district boundaries and how billions of dollars in federal funding are allocated, among other things.

Those pushing for the MENA classification say it would more fully and accurately count them, thus increasing their visibility and influence among policymakers.

The Census Bureau plans to test it later this year by holding focus group discussions with people who would be affected by the proposed change. Congress would still have to sign off on the proposal before the change could be added to the 2020 Census…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race People Are Changing The Face Of America

Huffington Post Live
2013-10-04

Hosted by: Ahmed Shihab-Eldin

Guests:

• Marvin Russell @marvinrussell (Chicago, IL) CEO of The Ocean Agency
• Sarah Willie-LeBreton (Swarthmore, PA) Professor of Sociology at Swarthmore College
• Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben (New York, NY) Author of “There’s an Easter Egg on Your Seder Plate”
• Veena Goel Crownholm @TiarastoBabies (San Francisco, CA) Freelance Multimedia Journalist ; Former Miss California

Since the U.S. Census Bureau started collecting data on mixed race people in 2000, the category has grown by 32 percent. How do multiracial Americans define themselves and how are they changing the face of the country?

For more information, click here.

Race in Contemporary Brazil: From Indifference to Inequality

Pennsylvania State University Press
1999
304 pages
Dimensions: 6 x 9
1 illustration
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-01905-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-271-01906-2

Edited by: Rebecca Reichmann

Brazil’s traditionally agrarian economy, based initially on slave labor and later on rural labor and tenancy arrangements, established inequalities that have not diminished even with industrial development and urban growth. While fertility and infant mortality rates have dropped significantly and life expectancy has increased during the past thirty years, the gaps in mortality between rich and poor have remained constant. And among the poor of different races, including the 45 percent of Brazil’s population identified as preto (“black”) or pardo (“brown”) in the official census, persistent inequalities cannot be explained by the shortcomings of national economic development or failure of the “modernization” process.

Reichmann assembles the most important work of Brazilians writing today on contemporary racial dynamics in policy-relevant areas: the construction of race and color classification systems, access to education, employment and health, racial inequalities in the judiciary and politics, and black women’s status and roles. Despite these glaring social inequalities, racial discrimination in Brazil is poorly understood, both within and outside Brazil.

The still-widespread notion of harmonious “racial democracy” in Brazil was first articulated by anthropologist Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s and was subsequently reinforced by the popular media, social observers, and scholars. By giving voice to Brazilians’ own interpretations of race, this volume represents an essential contribution to the increasingly international debates about the African diaspora and comparative constructions of race.

Mixed Race Identities: Written by Peter J. Aspinall and Miri Song

The Kelvingrove Review
Issue 13: Dialogue Across Decades (2014-05-27)
5 pages

Mengxi Pang
Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity
University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

Aspinall, Peter J. and Miri Song, Mixed Race Identities (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 218 pp.

As the fastest growing population in Britain, the mixed race group has received increasing attention from academics in social sciences disciplines. The book Mixed Race Identities is one of the latest sociological contributions to mixed race studies, engaging in the ongoing debate on ‘race’, ethnicity and identities. This book succeeds in bringing attention to the British context of mixed race studies, a field that has been long dominated by research in the US. The two authors, Peter Aspinall and Miri Song, are leading researchers of mixed race studies in the UK, who published extensively on identities and identity politics of mixed race populations. Based on their ESRC-funded project ‘The ethnic options of mixed race people in Britain’, this book presents the analytical results derived from questionnaire surveys and follow-up, in-depth interviews with over three hundred mixed race participants from higher education institutions in England. The results depict the unique identity dilemmas faced by mixed race youths. Findings specifically identify how different types of mixed race people understand and articulate their identifications, and eventually question the salience of ‘race’ in shaping individuals’ lived experiences…

Read the entire review here.

Social representations of ‘mixed-race’ in early twenty-first-century Britain: content, limitations, and counter-narratives

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Published online: 2015-01-23
19 pages
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2014.992924

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Public Health
Centre for Health Services Studies (CHSS)
University of Kent, United Kingdom

Over the last two decades, lay and professional interest in Britain’s ‘mixed-race’ population has markedly increased, following dramatic growth in mixing and mixedness. As is often the case with new phenomena, agencies in the sphere of popular culture have stepped in to offer the wider public interpretative representations of this ‘new’ group. Drawing on challenging concepts, like demographic growth rates and projections, the family ‘norm’, the ostensible benefits of heterozygosity, and the drawbacks of claimed ‘in-betweenness’, they have offered us a picture of the ‘mixed-race’ population that is sometimes at variance with lived experiences or the harder image of statistical reality. Social representation theory is used to explore the limitations of these representations and to offer a number of counter-narratives that are grounded in the evidence base.

Read or purchase the article here.

Some other race

The Economist
2013-02-09

How should America count its Hispanics?

THE noisy debate over how to fix America’s immigration system is mainly about the large and rapidly growing Hispanic minority. Behind this hums a quieter debate over how they should be counted. Every ten years the American government conducts a census of its citizens. Hispanics present a particular challenge.

According to guidelines laid down by the federal Office of Management and Budget in 1977, “Hispanic” is an ethnicity, not a race. Someone of Hispanic origin may belong to any of the five officially recognised races: white, black, Asian, American Indian or Pacific Islander (or any combination of these). The census form reflects this distinction.

It’s complicated

This, however, is not how many American Hispanics have come to see themselves. In 2010, the last time a count was carried out, many were puzzled by a form that asked them first to declare whether or not they were of Hispanic origin, and then to say what race they belonged to. Half identified themselves as white. But over a third ticked a box marked “Some other race”. As a result, “some other” emerged as America’s third-largest racial grouping…

Read the entire article here.

The Children of Loving v. Virginia: Living at the Intersection of Law and Mixed-Race Identity

Martin Luther King Jr. Day Special Lecture
University of Michigan
2015-01-19

Martha S. Jones, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Associate Professor of History
University of Michigan

University of Michigan Law School Prof. Martha S. Jones, who codirects the Program in Race, Law & History​, addresses her own experience as a mixed race woman and explores issues facing contemporary society as the featured speaker at Michigan Law’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration on Jan. 19, 2015.

Presenting “The Children of Loving v. Virginia: Living at the Intersection of Law and Mixed-Race Identity,” Jones uses lived experience to open up an understanding of how legal culture has wrestled with the idea that Americans might check more than one box.

View the video (00:37:05) here.

The Fluidity of Race: “Passing” in the United States, 1880-1940

The National Bureau of Economic Research
NBER Working Paper No. 20828
January 2015
76 pages
DOI: 10.3386/w20828

Emily Nix
Department of Economics
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

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

This paper quantifies the extent to which individuals experience changes in reported racial identity in the historical U.S. context. Using the full population of historical Censuses for 1880-1940, we document that over 19% of black males “passed” for white at some point during their lifetime, around 10% of whom later “reverse-passed” to being black; passing was accompanied by geographic relocation to communities with a higher percentage of whites and occurred the most in Northern states. The evidence suggests that passing was positively associated with better political-economic and social opportunities for whites relative to blacks. As such, endogenous race is likely to be a quantitatively important phenomenon.

Read or purchase the paper here.