Mixed Race Studies

Henry Samuel, Frankfort Barber and Free Man of Color

Random Thoughts on History: My musings on American, African American, Southern, Civil War, Reconstruction, and Public History topics and books
2013-03-19

Tim Talbott
Frankfort, Kentucky

Recently reading Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom got me to wondering if Frankfort had any black barbers in the antebellum era. Well, I didn’t have to look too hard to find one. No, I didn’t have to search through slides of microfilm searching the 1860 census records for Franklin County barbers—after all, in this particular case that would not have helped me.

Fortunately, I had remembered seeing an advertisement for a town barber while browsing through issues of the Frankfort Commonwealth newspaper some time back. And, it was not difficult to find these particular advertisements when I went back searching, because Henry Samuel had an ad in almost every edition of the newspaper for many years in the 1850s and 1860s. He must have been a firm believer in the old adage that “advertising pays.” However, there was no clue from the advertisements whether he was African American or white. That part took some searching…

Read the entire article here.

“One Drop of Love” is Fanshen’s Story & She’s Sticking To It

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-07-17, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Playwright, Producer, Actress, Educator

Join us on today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio as we meet award-winning actor, producer and educator, Fanshen Cox. Fanshen is currently touring the one-woman show she wrote and performs in: One Drop of Love, which is produced by Ben Affleck, Chay Carter and Matt Damon.

One Drop follows Fanshen’s journey to reconciliation with her father, taking audiences from the 1700s to the present and through various locations near and far—all in search of how our belief in ‘race’ affects our most precious intimate relationships.

Fanshen is also the co-creator of the Mixed Chicks Chat podcast (named a top podcast by Ebony magazine and the Black Weblog Awards) and co-founder of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival^®—a five-year festival celebrating its final event in 2012. She won a 2012 SAG award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast (for the film Argo).

Fanshen served as a Peace Corps Volunteer for two years in Cape Verde, West Africa as a teacher, and has taught in and designed curricula for over 15 years. She holds a BA in Spanish and Education, an MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, and just earned her MFA in Acting and Performance in Film, TV and Theater. Fanshen is dedicated to constantly questioning the notion of ‘race’ and fighting racism through storytelling.

For more information, click here.

He Checked That Box, But How Black is Obama?

Politic365: From Your Point of View
2013-07-12

William Reed, Head
The Business Exchange Network

“If you had a choice of color, which one would you choose, my brother?”

– Curtis Mayfield, 1969

In the official U.S. 2010 head count, President Barack Obama provided one answer to the question about his ethnic background: African American. Since the option was introduced in 2000, the census figures indicate that the country has 5.2 million multiracial individuals. Americans who check more than one box for race now make up 5 percent of the minority population. It’s of note that Obama didn’t check multiple boxes that were available on the form, or choose the option that allowed him to elaborate on his racial heritage. He simply ticked the box that said “Black, African American, or Negro.”

Though he checked the census “Black” box, is Obama “Black” like you and me? To date, he has paid no attention to Blacks and their economic challenges. African-American voters are rooted in the belief that Obama’s platform and persona represent “real Black Americans.” They both may have run the streets of Chicago; however, it’s doubtful Obama knows about the late Curtis Mayfield and what he represented. An American singer, songwriter and record producer best known for his anthem-like music, Mayfield recorded and produced “message music” during the 1960s and 1970s. “Choice of Colors” hit No. 1 on Billboard‘s R&B chart and reached No. 21 on the Billboard Hot 100. Neither did Obama grow up under the influence of a weekly Jet and or Ebony magazine adorning the family living room coffee table. As opaque as Obama is to Blacks, a fellow Chicago businessman, the late John H. Johnson, made his fortune catering to us.

Obama has yet to show up in the East Room in a dashiki, but his being “Black” and being “there” has spawned “Obamania” among African Americans. Black voters love the fact that Obama checked the “Black” box, even though his mother was a white woman from Kansas. His father was a Black Kenyan. Obama’s biracial identity helped him build a sizable middle-class American following; it’s also opened up questions as to his authenticity as a Black man. “Obama and the Biracial Factor,” edited by Andrew J. Jolivette, is a book that explores the role of Obama’s mixed-race identity in his path to the presidency. It offers a broad and penetrating view of the importance of race in the ongoing development of American politics. It demonstrates how mixed-race identity reinforces rather than challenges white supremacy within popular discourse…

Read the entire article here.

A Postracial Society or A Diversity Paradox? Race, Immigration, and Multiraciality in the Twenty-First Century

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
Volume 9, Issue 2, Fall 2012
pages 419-437
DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X12000161

Jennifer Lee, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Frank D. Bean, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Southern states decreed that one drop of African American blood made a multiracial individual Black, and even today, multiracial Blacks are typically perceived as being Black only, underscoring the enduring legacy and entrenchment of the one-drop rule of hypodescent. But how are Asians and Latinos with mixed ancestry perceived? Based on analyses of census data and in-depth interviews with interracial couples with children and multiracial adults, I find that the children of Asian-White and Latino-White couples are much less constrained by strict racial categories. Racial identification often shifts according to situation, and individuals can choose to identify along ethnic lines, as White, or as American. Like their Irish and Italian immigrant forerunners, the Asian and Latino ethnicities of these multiracial Americans are adopting the symbolic character of European, White ethnicity. We appear to be entering a new era of race relations in which the boundaries of Whiteness are beginning to expand to include new non-White groups such as Asians and Latinos, with multiracial Asians and Latinos at the head of the queue. However, even amidst the new racial and ethnic diversity, these processes continue to shut out African Americans, illustrating a pattern of “Black exceptionalism” and the emergence of a Black–non-Black divide in the twenty-first century.

Read or purchase the article here. (Read for free until 2016-03-04!)

“The One and Only Cheerios”~ The “NEW” American Family?

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-07-10, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Join us on Wednesday July 10th, 2013 as we explore the newest General Mills Cheerios commercial that recently debuted. We will discuss the backlash and speak with an all-star guest line-up while exploring what many of us have known for years: The “NEW” American family is mixed, blended, and splendid!

Listen to the episode here.

I Am What I Say I Am

Time Magazine
2001-03-18

Lise Funderburg

According to Russell (my personal trainer by night, a lawyer by day, and a philosopher by disposition), I have white calves. Not white as in pasty, but as in Caucasian. My calves are–how to put it?–substantial, and their shape not only pegs me racially, Russell says, but also makes clear what kind of runner I would be (distance) if, say, hell were to freeze over and I were to take up that sport.

When I filled out my Census form last spring, the issue of my calves never came up. What did arise, however, was a new option that allowed Americans to claim identity in more than one racial group. When the result of this historic change was released last week, it showed that an unexpectedly large number of people had taken advantage of this choice: nearly 7 million, or 2.4% of the population. While the complexity of the outcome has sent demographers scrambling, I celebrate its promise.

Due to circumstances beyond my control (e.g., my birth), race is more plastic for me than for some. The catalog of purported racial characteristics I could assemble seems to be compounded rather than dissolved by my particular heritage: one black parent and one white.

Examples follow…

Read the entire article here.

Historicizing “mixed-race” and post-modern amnesia

O Desafio da Diferença (Challenge of the Difference)
Universidade Federal da Bahia
Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
2000-04-09 through 2000-04-12

Grupo de Trabalho (Workshop) 5: Mixing it up with Mixed Race: Problematizing and Historicizing the Mixed Race Discourse

Katya Gibel Azoulay [Mevorach], Associate Professor of Anthropology
Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa

Americans have carried the problem of the color line into the 21st century but it is doubtful that the generation of W.E.B. Du Bois anticipated the emergence of a “multiracial” movement whose primary objective was to gain recognition of mixed-race people as a unique entity and different collective. This phenomenon is an outgrowth of “interracial” marriages which, according to the U.S. Census, indicate dramatic increases since the dismantlement of state anti-miscegenation laws in 1967. Blacks, however, are “noticeably absent” from this trend and Newsweek has estimated that approximately 20 percent of interracial marriages were between black and white partners and the overwhelming majority of these are between white women and black men [Fletcher 1998; Azoulay 1997:95]

This paper focuses on the demand for a multiracial category in the U.S. Census in order to explore two intersecting aspects of the multiracial discourse. Attention is only given to the black/white binary for it is this angle which is the most contentious and has received the most public attention. On the one hand, the idea of multiracialism eclipses the broader issue of power partially because it is premised on privileging individual rights rather than group rights. On the other hand, the celebration of multiracial people may be read as a postmodern script in which women, as mothers, occupy a central role in the formation and politicization of racial identities.

As a departure point, let us address the premise of the question posed by the multiracial movement: should racial classifications used to track broad demographic trends and monitor compliance with legislation against racial discrimination take each individual heritage into account? I suggest that the demand for a multiracial category confuses personal identities with prescriptive identities while ignoring the relationship between public policy and identifiable communities. Public policies that utilize race categories affect groups of people who may or may not subscribe to a shared collective identity but who are nevertheless perceived as a group. Government and institutional policies shaped by information gathered about social categories are not formulated for individuals but for groups. The political implications of this lead opponents and supporters of government sponsored social engineering to invoke the equal protection clause under the 14th amendment with very different interpretations. In a departure from the direction set by the U.S. Supreme Court 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education toward civil rights legislation, the courts have moved away from protecting historically disadvantaged group rights evidenced by court-ordered repeals of affirmative action policies confusing invidious discrimination with remedial racial preference.

As a preface, let me state clearly my position: race categories are public fictions which are deeply embedded in American ways of thinking and acting. Furthermore, because classifications based on the political and social category of “race” have no scientific basis, they are misused when appropriated as biological criteria into medical research in the United States [Tapper 1999]. Consequently, arguments for a multiracial category for health reasons (such as bone marrow donors) rely on a faulty notion that race categories can be adjusted for accuracy. Nevertheless, race has assumed the status of a social fact whose meanings reflect, and are reflected by, the cognitive feel of lived experience in a race-based society [Piper 1992; Scales-Trent 1995].

Read the entire paper here.

Census report shows multiracial and minority population growing fastest

PoliticsNation with Rev. Al Sharpton
NBC News
2013-06-13

Morgan Whitaker, Producer

As white birth rates declined, Asian-American and Hispanic populations grew significantly, but the latest Census Report shows that multiracial populations grew fastest.

America’s young children are more racially diverse than ever before, according to a Census report released Thursday morning, which finds that approximately half of all children under five are racial minorities.

Additionally, the fastest percentage of population growth is among self-identified multiracial Americans—especially fascinating in a time when ads featuring interracial families still spark controversy…

Read the entire article here.

Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning?

The New York Times
2013-07-06

Shaila Dewan, Economics Reporter

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As a racial classification, the term Caucasian has many flaws, dating as it does from a time when the study of race was based on skull measurements and travel diaries. It has long been entirely unmoored from its geographical reference point, the Caucasus region. Its equivalents from that era are obsolete — nobody refers to Asians as “Mongolian” or blacks as “Negroid.”

And yet, there it was in the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action. The plaintiff, noted Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in his majority opinion, was Caucasian.

To me, having covered the South for many years, the term seems like one of those polite euphemisms that hides more than it reveals. There is no legal reason to use it. It rarely appears in federal statutes, and the Census Bureau has never put a checkbox by the word Caucasian. (White is an option.)…

…The use of Caucasian to mean white was popularized in the late 18th century by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German anthropologist, who decreed that it encompassed Europeans and the inhabitants of a region reaching from the Obi River in Russia to the Ganges to the Caspian Sea, plus northern Africans. He chose it because the Caucasus was home to “the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgians,” and because among his collection of 245 human skulls, the Georgian one was his favorite wrote Nell Irvin Painter, a historian who explored the term’s origins in her book “The History of White People.”…

…Susan Glisson, who as the executive director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation in Oxford, Miss., regularly witnesses Southerners sorting through their racial vocabulary, said she rarely hears “Caucasian.” “Most of the folks who work in this field know that it’s a completely ridiculous term to assign to whites,” she said. “I think it’s a term of last resort for people who are really uncomfortable talking about race. They use the term that’s going to make them be as distant from it as possible.”

There is another reason to use it, said Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government and African-American studies at Harvard. “The court, or some clever clerk, doesn’t really want to use the word white in part because roughly half of Hispanics consider themselves white.” She added, “White turns out to be a much more ambiguous term now than we used to think it was.”

There are a number of terms that refer to various degrees of blackness, both current and out of favor: African-American, mulatto, Negro, colored, octaroon. There are not a lot of options for whites. In Texas, they say Anglo. And there is the pejorative we were so pithily reminded of when a witness in the racially charged George Zimmerman trial said the victim, Trayvon Martin, had called Mr. Zimmerman a “creepy-ass cracker.”…

Read the entire article here.

Redefining la raza

U.S. Catholic
2011-07-06

Father Tom Joyce, CMF

There use to be an unspoken pattern to Hispanic migration to the United States: Mexicans drifted to Los Angeles or South Texas, Puerto Ricans—soon followed by Dominicans—to New York City. Cubans stayed in Miami for a quick return to Havana that never came. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans shared Chicago—Mexicans on the Southwest side and Puerto Ricans on the Northwest. Over the years Central Americans drifted into Florida and the nation’s capital, and Mexicans followed meatpacking into the plains states.

The recent plague of xenophobic nastiness in state laws aren’t confined to Arizona and Utah, who have long known Hispanics, but are now popping up in Georgia, Indiana, and Alabama. The latest census confirms the spread of the 50 million-plus Latino population across the entire nation. Our largest minority, they are now on the way to being the majority in the latter part of the 21st century, according to projections.

But a funny thing is happening on the way to that majority: It’s getting more diverse every day. The most recent census gave respondents more choice when selecting their racial identity—mostly to accommodate the growing number of mixed race individuals. We have long had black Hispanics—look at any major league baseball team—and they have usually identified as Hispanics first. They are unmindful of color or that racial prejudice has a long nasty history in their homelands.

The result of the 2010 census of New York City has added another twist to those identifying as Latino or Hispanic. Out of the 57,000 who identified themselves as American Indian in New York City, 40,000 were Latino from Mexico; the rest were from Latin America. Even families long established in the United States check American Indian and Hispanic on their census forms…

Read the entire article here.