Mixed Race Studies

What If Everything You Know About Race Is Wrong?

Texas Public Radio
San Antonio, Texas
2015-01-15

Jack Morgan, Arts and Culture Reporter

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni

A one-woman show is coming to the Tobin Center and it’s probably unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It’s called “One Drop of Love.” starring Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

“How did you get mixed up with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon?” I asked.

(Laughs) “I think I met Matt when I was about 12 and Ben when we started high school together,” DiGiovanni told me. “And we did theater—we had a very wonderful theater program at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. And these two guys are such wonderful human beings.”

A year ago, DiGiovanni first produced this one-woman show for a Master of Fine Arts degree thesis performance.

“Ben came and saw my thesis performance and just said afterwards ‘I think this is really great and important and I’d like to help you get it to a wider audience.’”

Matt Damon also saw it and agreed with his friend. Thus DiGiovanni’s tour was conceived. So exactly what is One Drop of Love? It’s talking about one of this country’s most difficult subjects: race.

“I never know what kinds of experiences the people in the audience have had with race and racism,” DiGiovanni explains.

The whole show revolves around this premise.

“I start off the show as the character from a 1790 census, on which there were only three racial categories.”

In her show, she goes around her audience, linking audience members to one of those racial categories.

Walking through an audience, she names them: “Okay, white…black…mulatto…Chinese? Yes, hello…quadroon…no, I see you! An Indian…”

It’s one part history, one part performance art.

“There are people who look at me and shake their head and say ‘no, that’s not what I am!’ Which is very much the point, because that’s how the census was counted until 1970. A census worker would just go around and guess the race of the person they were looking at.”

She says race, in a sense, isn’t even real…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the interview (00:03:34) here.

One Drop of Love

Tobin Center for the Performing Arts
Carlos Alvarez Studio Theater
100 Auditorium Circle
San Antonio, Texas 78205
2015-01-17, 14:00 CST and 20:00 CST (Local Time)

BMW OF SAN ANTONIO SIGNATURE SERIES
“Amazing performance, staging, autobiography and artistry, and an amazing meditation on race and examination of America.” – Ben Affleck, 2013 Academy Award for Best Picture: Argo

“One Drop of Love is beautiful and brave. Cox DiGiovanni’s honesty, insight, dedication, and love are an inspiration. She takes us into the intimate places where family, race, love, and pain intertwine. In this sometimes searing, sometimes funny, and always smart play she shows us both the terrible things we do to those we love and a way forward to a better future.” – Paul Spickard, professor of history at University of California, Santa Barbara

How does our belief in ‘race’ affect our most intimate relationships? One Drop of Love is a solo performance exploring family, race, love and pain – and a path towards reconciliation. The show is produced by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and the show’s writer/performer Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni.

For more information, click here.

Don’t put race in a box

The Eastern Echo
Ypsilanti, Michigan
2015-01-11

C.A. Joseph Peters

One ought to talk about race like one talks about their mother’s age: very rarely and very discreetly. Given the Census Bureau’s outdated categories, I say it’s time for one of those rare and discreet conversations.

In January 2013, Haya El Nasser of USA Today reported that “many [Hispanics] feel boxed in by the current race categories . . . 95 percent of those who selected ‘some other race’ are Hispanic.” Last July, Fox News Latino reported that Detroit’s Mexico town not only withstood the brunt of Detroit’s most recent downturns but was spearheading Detroit’s economic recovery. But Detroit’s growing Hispanic community gets whitewashed by the Census.

By attempting to define race with neat little boxes, the Census Bureau is forcing an increasing number of Americans to check “other,” doing a disservice to Detroit’s growing Hispanic community and to Dearborn’s already sizable Middle Eastern community. In 2010, the Census categorized Dearborn, a city where one third of the residents speak Arabic, as over 89 percent white. But with a term nebulous enough to include everyone from Morocco to Murmansk and from Riyadh to Reykjavik, it should be no great surprise that the Census categorizes Dearborn as whiter than Montana. Race is difficult enough without the government trying to define it too…

Read the entire article here.

How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America

The Diane Rehm Show
WAMU 88.5 FM
Washington, D.C.
2015-01-05

Diane Rehm, Host

Mark Hugo Lopez, Director of Hispanic Research
Pew Research Center

Jim Tankersley, Economic Policy Correspondent
The Washington Post

William Frey, Senior Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program (author of Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America)
Brookings Institution

Jamelle Bouie, Staff writer covering politics, policy, and race
Slate

America is becoming a country with no racial majority. In 2009, for the first time in U.S. history, more minority than white babies were born in a year. Soon, most American children will be racial minorities. The nation’s diversity surge played a key role in Barack Obama’s election as president. Many see these trends as necessary as a much-needed younger minority labor force is already boosting an aging baby boom population. But challenges loom, including clashes over public resources, overcoming a cultural generation gap, and fears over losing privileged status. Diane and her guests discuss how new racial demographics are remaking America.

Listen to the show (00:51:40) here.

Racial Fluidity and Inequality in the United States

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 118, Number 3, November 2012
pages 676–727
DOI: 10.1086/667722

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Andrew M. Penner, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

The authors link the literature on racial fluidity and inequality in the United States and offer new evidence of the reciprocal relationship between the two processes. Using two decades of longitudinal data from a national survey, they demonstrate that not only does an individual’s race change over time, it changes in response to myriad changes in social position, and the patterns are similar for both self-identification and classification by others. These findings suggest that, in the contemporary United States, microlevel racial fluidity serves to reinforce existing disparities by redefining successful or high-status people as white (or not black) and unsuccessful or low-status people as black (or not white). Thus, racial differences are both an input and an output in stratification processes; this relationship has implications for theorizing and measuring race in research, as well as for crafting policies that attempt to address racialized inequality.

Read the entire article here or here.

Census Bureau’s Plan to Cut Marriage and Divorce Questions Has Academics Up in Arms

The New York Times
2014-12-31

Justin Wolfers, Senior Fellow
Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington, D.C.

also: Professor of Economics and Public Policy
University of Michigan

If the Census Bureau proceeds with a recently released plan, then in a few years’ time, we will know very little about how the contours of family life are changing.

We will not even know whether marriage and divorce rates are rising or falling. For all the talk of evidence-based policy, the result will be that important debates on issues including family law, welfare reform, same-sex marriage and the rise of nontraditional families will proceed in a statistical void.

Much of what I, an economist who has studied family issues, and my colleagues in this field have learned about recent trends in marriage and divorce has come from questions in the American Community Survey. It asks people whether they have given birth, married, divorced or been widowed in the past year. Their answers allow demographers to track marriage and divorce rates by age, gender, race and education.

These data have revealed many important social trends, including the rise of sharply different marriage and divorce patterns between rich and poor, and the increase in divorce among older Americans, even as it has fallen for younger people. And they have provided the only statistical window into the adoption of same-sex marriage.

The Census Bureau is proposing to eliminate these questions. It would follow a series of steps taken over recent decades that have collectively devastated our ability to track family change. This isn’t being done as a strategic policy choice but rather is the result of a series of isolated decisions made across several decades by statisticians scattered across various government agencies who have failed to understand the cumulative effect of their actions…

Read the entire article here.

The Whiteness Project: Facing Race In A Changing America

National Public Radio
All Things Considered
2014-12-21

Karen Grigsby Bates
Los Angeles Correspondent

Whitney Dow found participants in the Whiteness Project by putting out a call for interested white folks in Buffalo to talk about whiteness on tape.

The voices in the Whiteness Project vary by gender, age and income, but they all candidly express what it is like to be white in an increasingly diverse country.

“I don’t feel that personally I’ve benefited from being white. That’s because I grew up relatively poor,” a participant shared. “My father worked at a factory.” These are the kind of unfiltered comments that filmmaker Whitney Dow was hoping to hear when he started recording a group of white people, and hoped to turn their responses into provocative, interactive videos.

“I was essentially giving people permission to discuss this,” he says. “And I believe there’s a huge hunger in this country to engage this topic.”…

…”It is not typical for white people to think about their race,” says Catherine Orr, who teaches critical identity studies at Beloit College in Wisconsin. She says that many white people who don’t feel privileged struggle against the notion that race gives them an inherent advantage. “I think white folks are terribly invested in our own innocence,” she points out. “We don’t want to think about how what we have is related to what other people don’t have.”…

Listen to the story here. Download the story here.

Multiracial Marriage on the Rise

The Brookings Institution
The Avenue: Rethinking Metropoliitian America
2014-12-18

William H. Frey, Senior Fellow
Metropolitan Policy Program

One consequence of America’s diversity explosion is a rise in multiracial marriages. In 1960, before immigration levels to the United States started to rise, multiracial marriages constituted only 0.4 percent of all U.S. marriages. That figure increased to 8.4 percent in 2010 and for recent newlyweds, 15 percent.

Not surprisingly the prevalence of out-marriage is high for new minorities, Hispanics and Asians, in light of the large pool of potential partners who are of different origins. More than four in ten new marriages of each group marry someone of a different race—with whites the most likely partners…

Read the entire article here.

Whiteness in Latin America: measurement and meaning in national censuses (1850-1950)

Journal de la Société des Américanistes
Volume 95, Number 2 (2009)
pages 207-234 (63 paragraphs)

Mara Loveman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Drawing on an analysis of all national censuses conducted in Latin America from 1850 to 1950, this article examines how tacit assumptions about the nature of « whiteness » informed the production of statistical knowledge about Latin American populations. For insight into implicit racial beliefs that shaped census-taking in this period, the article considers how census agents accomplished three basic tasks: 1) identifying the « race » of individuals in the population; 2) preparing statistical tables to publicize census results; and, 3) projecting the racial composition of national populations in the future. The analysis identifies variation in notions of « whiteness » across the region, but also points to a set of broadly shared premises about the nature, value, and boundaries of whiteness that transcended nation-state boundaries in this period. Fundamental similarities in ideas about whiteness found in Latin American censuses appear even more starkly when the scope of analysis expands to include the censuses of the United States.

Table of Contents

• Racial classification in Latin American censuses
• The nature of whiteness: who is white?
• The value of whiteness: describing and inscribing racial hierarchy
• The boundaries of whiteness: projecting a whiter future
• Discussion and conclusion

Read the entire article here.

Jewish tent widens as diversity grows

The Chicago Tribune
2014-12-16

Bonnie Miller Rubin, Reporter

Ellen Zemel (left) lends a hand for a symbolic lighting of a menorah for Hanukkah during a party for parents and children of Project Esther: The Chicago Jewish Adoption Network of the Jewish Child & Family Services, at the Elain Kersten Children’s Center in Northbrook. (Michael Tercha, Chicago Tribune)

‘The tribe’ expands to include children of many ethnicities

Meira and Tyler Burnett look forward to their family’s annual Hanukkah party, when they will light the menorah and enjoy traditional potato pancakes, called latkes.

The siblings, ages 11 and 14, respectively, also will sing in the children’s choir at B’nai Yehuda Beth Shalom, where four of the eight participants are African-American — just like them.

“When I tell friends at school that I’m Jewish, they don’t believe me,” said Meira, at the Homewood synagogue. “But that’s what I am.”

The American Jewish population has always been overwhelmingly white, with Central or Eastern European roots — synonymous with matzo ball soup, bagels, Maxwell Street pushcarts and “Seinfeld” — and it’s common to hear Jewish people refer to themselves as members of “the tribe.”

But today, as Jews prepare to celebrate Hanukkah, the eight-day holiday that begins Tuesday, the tribe looks different, because of interracial marriages, adoptions and conversions. And while the white majority still holds true, experts say more racial and ethnic diversity can be found across the spectrum of Judaism.

“There’s more variety of narratives than ever before,” said Chava Shervington, president of The Jewish Multicultural Network. The Philadelphia-based organization started in 1997 with 20 families and has grown to more than 950 members and almost 3,000 Facebook followers, she said. Its tag line: “Because Jews come in all colors.”

The increase in diversity is difficult to quantify. The Chicago Jewish Population Study, conducted every decade by the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, first asked about race in 2010. It found that 4 percent (or 5,600 Jewish households) are multiracial, including black, Hispanic, Asian and biracial members…

Read the entire article here or here.