Mixed Race Studies

When You’re Mixed Race, Just One Box Is Not Enough

The Race Card Project: Six-Word Essays
National Public Radio
2013-04-02

NPR continues a series of conversations about The Race Card Project, where thousands of people have submitted their thoughts on race and cultural identity in six words. Every so often NPR Host/Special Correspondent Michele Norris will dip into those six-word stories to explore issues surrounding race and cultural identity for Morning Edition. You can find hundreds of six-word submissions and submit your own at www.theracecardproject.com.

Since The Race Card Project is about identity, it’s not surprising that many submissions deal with the question of how people choose to identify themselves. That can be more complicated for those who have two parents who do not share the same race — especially when asked to choose a particular box for race or ethnicity on an application or government form.

George Washington III is familiar with this quandary. An African-American voice-over artist, Washington has been married twice, both times to women who are white. When he heard about The Race Card Project, his thoughts went immediately to his children. His six words: “My mixed kids have it differently.”…

Read the article here. Listen to the story here.

Playing Games with Race

The Feminist Wire
2011-06-03

Omar Ricks
University of California, Berkeley

“Mulatto” by Jenia Lisunov

NOTE: This article expands on a comment on Prof. Hortense Spillers’ article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s, Too” published on The Feminist Wire on February 25, 2011. Omar Ricks would like to thank Prof. Spillers for inviting his contribution to The Feminist Wire.

At several places in the first article of her New York Times series, Race Remixed, concerning mostly young adult multiracial individuals, Susan Saulny has one woman, Laura Wood, vice president of the University of Maryland Multiracial Biracial Student Association (MBSA), embody much of the human-interest side of what might otherwise be an article about U.S. Census data. In a game at the beginning of the article, an MBSA friend correctly guesses Wood’s genotype: “Are you mulatto?” We learn of Wood’s painful personal journey. Initially given up for adoption by her white mother, later taken back and raised as white until the age of 8, she is rejected by the black family of her father, who she says “can’t see past the color of my skin and accept me even though I share DNA with them.” As Saulny conveys Wood’s story, we do not get a sense of any other problematics of this woman’s multiracial identity besides this one. We are left wondering at the shape that black people and blackness take in the rhetoric of Saulny’s article, if not of the interviewees, like Wood, with whom she speaks.

“If someone tries to call me black I say, ‘yes — and white.’ People have the right not to acknowledge everything, but don’t do it because society tells you that you can’t.” (Saulny, 2011, January 29)

“All society is trying to tear you apart and make you pick a side,” Ms. Wood says. “I want us to have a say.” (Saulny, 2011, January 29)

Few actual opponents of multiracialism are quoted in the article, but, oddly enough, when opposition to multiracialism is given a face, it is generally not the face of “all society” but a black one. Through such moments as these, this article is not merely reporting on but also typical of multiracial discourse, a diverse and sometimes mutually contentious collection of speeches, writings, and collective actions that broadly assert: (a) the presence of multiracial people as such; (b) the freedom of people to define themselves as their genetic diversity allows; and often (c) the implicit imperative that people (especially, for some reason, President Barack Obama) should choose to identify as multiracial. Time and again in this article, as in much of multiracial discourse, several questions arise when it comes to the ways black people are figuratively deployed. Is the problem really that blacks, more than others, are truly preventing multiracial people from identifying as such? If so, how so? Were one to ask against which real or anticipated threat to this freedom to “have a say” the MBSA students are asserting it, and attend closely to the rhetorical structure of the answers that Saulny articulates, I suspect that one would notice in those answers a structural function that blackness serves within multiracial discourse. This structural function owes to the staying power that comes from blacks’ unique position not just as a group, but also as useful rhetorical figures against which the coherence of an asserted “freedom to identify” might be sustained…

…The problems with multiracial identity, at least according to this article series, are not for the most part problems within the movement or its philosophical foundations. Rather, the problems almost always consist of the failure of others to accept mixed-race people—and those “others” are not those with the power to shape things like media representations or urban geography. For example, Saulny says,

No one knows quite how the growth of the multiracial population will change the country. Optimists say the blending of the races is a step toward transcending race, to a place where America is free of bigotry, prejudice and programs like affirmative action.

Pessimists say that a more powerful multiracial movement will lead to more stratification and come at the expense of the number and influence of other minority groups, particularly African-Americans. (Saulny, 2011, January 29)

This passage is performing some subtle but important ideological work. Those who advocate “the blending of the races” are contrasted with those who oppose “a more powerful multiracial movement.” Considering that one can be in favor of “the blending of the races” and yet opposed to the particular politics of “a more powerful multiracial movement,” this statement is a curious slippage, comparing “apples with oranges.” There is also the laying of the mantle of “optimist” on those who make the questionable juxtaposition between “bigotry, prejudice and programs like affirmative action,” almost as though there is no question that affirmative action is rooted in the bigotry and prejudice that necessitated it. Based on my reading of the article series as a whole, it is unclear to which specific “optimists” Saulny refers here, but, far more important is the way she leaves this equation unpacked. By juxtaposing these terms without critically examining them, Saulny ends up, intentionally or not, echoing a connection that multiracial discourses routinely and uncritically draw: the connection between black freedom struggle (affirmative action in this case, although any of the other political concessions that black freedom struggle has effected would probably suffice) and bigotry by blacks toward non-blacks…

Moves like these might be easily bypassed, if they did not bear a close resemblance to a common trope within multiracial discourse. As analyzed by Jared Sexton in his book Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, the thing that unifies a diverse (left, liberal, conservative, and right) field of discourse around multiracial identity is the singular desire to achieve distance from “certain figures of blackness” that “resurface in each instance of multiracial discourse” and “are generally made to serve as a foil for the contemporary value of multiracialism” (Sexton, 2008). It would require an excessive degree of naïveté or willful disregard to ignore the same symptoms of thought in Saulny’s article series. In Sexton’s words, “what lends [multiracial discourse] its coherence […] is its obdurately unsophisticated understanding of race and sexuality and its conspicuously negative disposition toward what Fanon (1967) terms ‘the lived experience of the black’” (Sexton, 2008).

Most essentially, then, in multiracial discourse, blackness stands in not as an identity or identification to be rejected or worked through but, in the words of Sexton, as a structural position “against which all other subjects take their bearings” (Sexton & Copeland, 2003). In what might otherwise be an incomprehensible world or a movement without a cause, blackness is so serviceable that it can be used to stand in as that with which nobody wants to be associated, even by those who are partly black.

Even if multiracialism shifts us from the “one-drop rule” to a more graduated mestizaje model of racialization, this changes nothing for black people because blackness is still located at the “undesirable” end of the continuum—or, more accurately, hierarchy. In my view, it is necessary that we first understand the stability of that unethical structural relation before we can say that multiracialism challenges racism by injecting into the racist structure a “more fluid” sense of identity. Rainier Spencer’s 2009 Chronicle of Higher Education article, [“Mixed Race Chic”] (Spencer, 2009, May 19), for example, asked, “how can multiracial identity deconstruct race when it needs the system of racial categorization to even announce itself?” Posing this question as a statement would be to say that one needs for there to be a structure of race in order to call oneself multiracial. Small wonder, then, that so many celebrations of multiracial identity sound antiblack. They are…

Read the entire article here.

Obama and the Elusive Idea of Race

The Root
2011-04-26

Mary C. Curtis

Scientists increasingly conclude that ethnicity cannot be defined scientifically, but that hasn’t stopped the racists, the Birthers and the confused from casting their insecurities onto the president.

It’s not surprising to get involved in a heated discussion about race when you’re strolling through a museum exhibit called “Race: Are We So Different?” And wouldn’t you know that President Barack Obama would get caught right in the middle of it.

Not all charges that the president isn’t who he says he is come from Donald Trump’s “Birther” fantasies or a California GOP official’s crude email. A young mother and fan had her own issues with Obama when we talked while strolling through the latest attraction at Discovery Place, Charlotte, N.C.’s hands-on science museum.

“Race: Are We So Different?”—with its science-based displays showing that human beings are more alike than any other living species, and its assertion that no one gene or set of genes can support the idea of race—shouldn’t be controversial or particularly revelatory. That the exhibit is, in fact, both reveals how invested so many people are in racial differences and in the ranking of one race over another. The show—which closes May 8—has inspired discussions by school and business groups in a city with an African-American mayor whose residents have nonetheless scored low on measures of trust among the races.

The mother, with a young daughter at her side and a son in a stroller, couldn’t contain her disappointment—anger, even—that the president had marked “black” instead of indicating “biracial” or one in the long list of multiracial alternatives on the 2010 census form. She was white; her husband—not in attendance that day—was black. And their children were the reason she was upset at the president of the United States and why it was personal. “He’s president. He could have been an example,” she insisted.

I tentatively engaged her. Since she and her children had the right to choose, wasn’t it hypocritical for her to criticize others for their choices? And since—as the exhibit around us made clear—race is an uneven line that has shifted throughout history, depending on political and economic expediency, why does a check mark on a page matter so much?

Suppose, at some later date, one or both of her children checked “black” on that census form. Would she love them any less? I asked her…

Read the entire article here.

Mama’s Baby, Papa’s, Too

Trans-Scripts: An Interdisciplinary Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine
First Issue Launch (2011-02-16)
Volume I (2011): Race: Theories, Identities, Intersections, Histories, and the “Post-Racial” Society
4 pages

Hortense Spillers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

In the world of newspapers, “beneath the fold” apparently means that the feature bears only secondary interest or importance compared to what is situated above it, but in all fairness to the writer of the article that I am alluding to, all news for the last three weeks has taken a back seat—or should I say, assumed a beneath-the-fold-posture?—to events unfolding in Egypt. In a very real sense, though, post-millennium changes in American racial attitudes—the topic of the article—are in fact revolutionary-seeming and may go far to explain both the 2008 national elections and their midterm mate of 2010. Both elections “addressed” race in a more or less explicit manner and dispatched glaringly opposite messages concerning it. We might put it this way: It was as though 2010 were furious with 2008 and wrought its revenge in an election result that all but cancelled out the previous outcome. It seems that the Facebook crowd—the young and the restless—stayed home that day, and it is precisely that generational cohort toward which Susan Saulny’s New York Times piece, “Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above,” is aimed and from which it draws its inspiration. For this cohort, race is no longer just “race,” but becomes a playful smorgasbord of this, that, and the other. My head spins and my eyesight grows cock-eyed, trying to figure this one out. In short, I fall down in the dizziness.

We’ve been here before, and that is the disappointment. Reminded in the course of Saulny’s treatment that terms like “mulatto,” “once tinged with shame…is enjoying a comeback in some young circles” (1), one wonders what all the brouhaha about “post-racial” identity actually means, unless the new racialist reflexes are intended to be taken as parodic gestures, but I’m not at all sure that is the case. Ms. Saulny’s article, designated as a single entry in a series that “will explore the growing number of mixed-race Americans” (20), is based on the author’s probe of the issues, conducted among some fifty students who are members of the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association at the University of Maryland in College Park. Though membership in the MBSA is said to be open, the rationale for the group’s existence is predicated on the number of racial mixtures that converge on a single personality and the descriptive apparatuses that differentiate skin tone and hair type: “tan skin” and “curly brown hair,” for instance, signal, in one case, that the person’s ancestry “could have spanned the globe” (1). Americans are in the midst of a demographic shift, we know, that is fuelled by immigration and intermarriage, as “one in seven new marriages is between spouses of different races or ethnicities” (1). As a result, today’s undergraduate population comprises the “largest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States” (1). Needing, then, names for racial categories that do not fit the traditional census classifications, the “new” subjects of race welcome “the multiracial option… after years of complaints and lobbying, mostly by white mothers of biracial children who objected to their children being allowed to check only one race.”

What amounts to demographic data and genetic input is here transliterated into terms of human and ontological value, and that is precisely the rebarbative boomerang of the old race concept, or “the racialized perception of identity,” as Robin Blackburn describes it. Rainier Spencer’s view, cited in the article, that “‘mixed race identity is not a transcendence of race, it’s a new tribe,’” penetrates to the heart of the matter, which I would conceptualize as the mimesis of a social and political problem that misnames its vocation. And what, exactly, is the problem?

…We very much doubt that the fury here is that there are not enough boxes on the census form, or a deficit of classificatory items, or the prohibition to check more than one, or even the thwarted desire to express racial pride, but, rather, the dictates of a muted self-interest that wishes to carve its own material and political successes out of another’s hide. To that degree, these celebratory, otiose gestures are very American! In other words, if “racial ambiguity” or looking that way, can be amplified and translated into a legitimate political interest (as it is increasingly becoming a commercial one), then the padded new racism that comes about as a result will gladly declare a new class of winners. But the historical reality (which the nineteen-year olds are not aware of, and neither this author, nor anyone else has informed them of it) is that racial ambiguity is itself a new-world thematic—probably about seven centuries old by now—so that 300 million coeval Americans, all of them, could check off several race boxes on the decennial census form, and who could argue with them? But I suspect that the citizen-taxpayer is not thinking, first and foremost, about traditional race ascription when she responds to the census taker’s queries, but, rather, by what cultural name she is interpellated. Saulny apparently found out (and how silly is this?) that President Obama, for instance, checked only one box on his 2010 census form, and that was the black one, while he could have checked two, Saulny trumpets. Well, yes, he could have checked two, but this President likely has a solid grasp of race and how it operates in the social and political context of the United States, and to call oneself mixed-race, or black and white, or something and something else, means what? What work is that supposed to do for you?…

Read the entire article here.

The 1850 census marked a watershed in census-taking in several ways. For our purposes, a large part of its significance rests in the introduction of the “mulatto” category and the reasons for its introduction. This category was added not because of demographic shifts, but because of the lobbying efforts of race scientists and the willingness of certain senators to do their bidding. More generally, the mulatto category signaled the ascendance of scientific authority within racial discourse. By the 1850s, polygenist thought was winning a battle that it had lost in Europe. The “American school of ethnology” distinguished itself from prevailing European racial thought through its insistence that human races were distinct and unequal species. That polygenism endured at all was a victory, since the European theorists to abandon it. Moreover, there was considerable resistance to it in the United States. Although most American monogenists were not racial egalitarians, they were initially unwilling to accept claims of separate origins, permanent racial differences, and the infertility of racial mixture. Polygenists deliberately sought hard statistical data to prove that mulattoes, as hybrids of different racial species, were less fertile than their pure-race parents and lived shorter lives.

Melissa Nobles, “History Counts: A Comparative Analysis of Racial/Color Categorization in US and Brazilian Censuses,” American Journal of Public Health, Volume 90, Number 11 (November 2000): 1738-1745.

One Drop of Love: A Multimedia Solo Performance on Racial Identity by Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni at University of Maryland

University of Maryland, College Park
The Stamp (Adele H. Stamp Student Union) [Directions]
Atrium Room
Friday, 2013-03-29, 17:00-19:30 EDT (Local Time)

Sponsored by the Multiracial Biracial Student Association (MBSA), Office of Multicultural Involvement and Community Advocacy (MICA), The Asian American Literary Review, University of Maryland Asian American Studies Program, and Hamsa.

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Playwright, Producer, Actress, Educator

Jillian Pagan, Director

Q&A afterwards hosted by:

Steven F. Riley, Founder and Creator
www.MixedRaceStudies.org

One Drop of Love is a solo performance piece that journeys from Boston, Michigan, Los Angeles, and East & West Africa from 1790 to the present as a culturally Mixed woman explores the influence of the One Drop Rule on her family and society.

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni. ©2103, Evan Tamayo

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni is a leading activist concerning mixed race, and is an actor, comedian, producer and educator. One Drop of Love is her MFA thesis, and she will be using footage from her performances to make a documentary.

Admission is free.

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni and Steven F. Riley. ©2012, Laura Kina

Ms. Cox DiGiovanni appeared in the 2013 Academy Award and Golden Globe winning film Argo (2012); co-created, co-produced and co-hosted the award-winning weekly podcast Mixed Chicks Chat (2007-2012); and co-founded and produced the annual Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival^® (2008-20012). For more on Ms. Cox DiGiovanni and One Drop of Love, visit: http://www.onedropoflove.org.

“Founding Mothers:” White Mothers of Biracial Children in the Multiracial Movement (1979-2000)

Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut
April 2012
142 pages

Alicia Doo Castagno

A thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors in American Studies

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Interrogating Multiracial Advocacy
  • The Multiracial Movement
  • Methodology
  • Chapter Outline
• Chapter 1: The Multiracial Movement
  • Pre-History of the Multiracial Movement
  • First Steps Towards a Movement: Interracial Family Organizations
  • AMEA, Project RACE, and Multiracial Activism
  • Census 2000
  • Post-Census 2000
• Chapter 2: Founding Mothers – A Study in White Privilege
  • Altered Perspectives, Shifting Identities
  • Race and Family: Locating Interracial Relationships
  • White Racial Identity Development
  • White Racial Identity and Interracial Family Organizations
  • Flesh and Blood: Complicating Sentimental Politics
• Chapter 3: Whiteness and Privilege in the Multiracial Movement – Project RACE as Case Study
  • Complicating the Multiracial Politics of Recognition
  • Project RACE
• Conclusion: The Thwarted Utopian Potential of Multiracial Politics
• Appendix I: Sample Interview Permission Form
• Appendix II: Transcript of Telephone Interview with Mandy – I-Pride
• Appendix III: Transcript of Interview with Mandy – I-Pride
• Appendix IV: Transcript of Telephone Interview with Anonymous – I-Pride
• Appendix V: Transcript of Telephone Interview with Susan Graham – Project RACE (part I)
• Appendix VI: Transcript of Telephone Interview with Susan Graham – Project RACE (part II)
• Appendix VII: Helms’s White Racial Identity Development Model
• Bibliography

INTRODUCTION: INTERROGATING MULTIRACIAL ADVOCACY

In early November 2010, I interrupted my junior semester abroad in Lima, Peru, to attend the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference hosted by DePaul University in Chicago. I had been asked to participate in a roundtable discussion regarding the student forum I co-created and co-taught the fall semester of my sophomore year at Wesleyan University entitled, “Mixed Heritage Identity in Contemporary America.” After speaking only Spanish for three months, I found myself clumsy and thick-tongued in English as I attempted to describe my experience as a student facilitator and my involvement with mixed race activism. Later in the day, DePaul featured another roundtable entitled, “Community-Based Multiracial Movements: Learning from the Past, Looking toward the Future.” Representatives from multiracial organizations MAVIN; Swirl, Inc.; Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival; Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC); Lovingday.org; and Biracial Family Network (BFN) Chicago led the discussion. I have been involved with mixed heritage politics since the age of fifteen, when I was an intern at Seattle’s MAVIN Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that deals specifically with mixed heritage issues. I was already aware of the history of the Multiracial Movement and some of its internal tensions. It was not until I attended the DePaul roundtable, however, that I began to question some of the movement’s more unusual historical characteristics…

…Chapter Outline

In Chapter 1, “The Multiracial Movement,” I chronicle the history of the Multiracial Movement from 1979-2000, focusing specifically on the role of interracial family organizations within the movement. I reveal the tensions between different players within the movement, such as AMEA and Project RACE, as well as the tension between multiracial activists and monoracial civil rights groups. I briefly outline the pre-Multiracial Movement socio-political history that set the foundations for Census 2000 and formal multiracial recognition to become the movement’s cornerstones. I argue that focusing on multiracial politics of recognition limited the movement’s potential for radical change.

Chapter 2 is entitled, “Founding Mothers: A Study in White Privilege,” and tracks the various ways in which being part of an interracial relationship or family altered the way white women in the 1970s-90s perceived themselves and the world. I situate white women’s political involvement in a historical context that favors monoracial families and emphasizes racial belonging as an important aspect of healthy childrearing. Moreover, I link white mothers’ campaigning for multiracials to separate spheres ideology and sentimental politics. I assert that the coping mechanisms white mothers of biracial children employed to deal with being an interracially married white woman in the 1970s-90s ultimately resulted in the formation of interracial family groups and participation in multiracial politics that unwittingly attempted to regain racially privileged experiences and status.

In Chapter 3, entitled “Whiteness And Privilege In The Multiracial Movement—Project RACE as Case Study,” I examine the ways in which white female involvement led to the movement’s focus on multiracial politics of recognition, and the ways in which these politics of recognition ultimately limited the movement’s potential. I connect the arguments I have laid out in my first two chapters through the example of Project RACE, and elaborate on the history of the Multiracial Movement discussed in Chapter 1. Susan Graham did groundbreaking political work as the head of Project RACE, and facilitated the entry of multiracial politics into the OMB’s discussion of changing racial categories for Census 2000. However, her politics remained grounded in a perspective of white privilege. The political alliances she made and her unwillingness to sympathize with monoracial civil rights groups’ concerns lost her the support both of monoracial people of color and multiracial activists…

Read the entire thesis here.

Race and the Census: The “Negro” Controversy

Pew Research: Social & Demographic Trends
Pew Research Center
2010-01-21

D’Vera Cohn, Senior Writer

The topic of racial identification on census forms has a long, fascinating history, which has generated fresh debate as the 2010 Census begins. Why, some ask, does the form include the word “Negro,” along with “black” and “African American,” among the options that Americans can choose for their self-identification? Isn’t that term out of date?

As you can see from the review that follows here, racial terms have come in and out of favor from one decade to the next. There was a similar debate about “Negro” in the 2000 Census, as there have been about other race terms in previous census years.

Before 1960, census-takers filled out the enumeration forms and chose the category for each American they counted. They used a detailed set of instructions from the government, key points of which are listed below. The 1960 Census was a transitional year in which census-takers chose the race for some Americans, and others self-identified from a list of categories.  From 1970 to 1990, most Americans filled out their own forms and checked off a race category for themselves. Starting in 2000, they could choose more than one.

When the census began in 1790, the racial categories for the household population were “free white” persons, other “free persons” by color, and “slaves.” Census-takers did not use standard forms in the early censuses.

For 1850-1880, the codes for enumerators were generally white (W), black (B) and mulatto (M). Beginning in 1850, the data item was labeled “color.” In 1870, Chinese (C) and Indian (I) were added. In 1880, the data item was not labeled; it was “whether this person is…” In 1890, “Japanese,” “quadroon” and “octoroon” were added…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race Identities

Palgrave Macmillan
2013-08-02
224 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9780230275041

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Population Health
University of Kent, UK

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent, UK

In recent years, Britain has witnessed a significant growth in the ‘mixed race’ population. However, we still know remarkably little about this diverse population. How do young mixed race people think about and experience their multiracial status? What kinds of ethnic options do mixed race people possess, and how may these options vary across different types of ‘mixes’? How important are their ethnic and racial identities, in relation to other bases of identification and belonging? This book investigates the ethnic and racial options exercised by young mixed race people in higher education in Britain, and it is the first to explore the identifications and experiences of various types of mixed race individuals. It reveals the diverse ways in which these young people identify and experience their mixed status, the complex and contingent nature of such identities, and the rise of other identity strands, such as religion, which are now challenging race and ethnicity as a dominant identity.

Contents

1. Exploring ‘Mixed Race’ in Britain
2. Racial Identification: Multiplicity and Fluidity
3. Differential Ethnic Options?
4. Does Racial Mismatch in Identification Matter?
5. Are Mixed Race People Racially Disadvantaged?
6. How Central is ‘Race’ to Mixed Race People?
7. Rethinking Ethnic and Racial Classifications
8. Conclusion: What is the Future of ‘Mixed Race’ Britain?

Mixing it Up

Salon
2001-03-08

Suzy Hansen

Alabama just legalized black-white marriage. An expert talks about why it took so long and the American obsession with racial purity.

In November 2000, after a statewide vote in a special election, Alabama became the last state to overturn a law that was an ugly reminder of America’s past, a ban on interracial marriage. The one-time home of George Wallace and Martin Luther King Jr. had held onto the provision for 33 years after the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. Yet as the election revealed — 40 percent of Alabamans voted to keep the ban — many people still see the necessity for a law that prohibits blacks and whites from mixing blood.

Werner Sollors, a professor of Afro-American studies at Harvard, was born in Germany and came to the United States in 1978. He has been studying and writing about the history of American interracial relationships since 1986. Sollors is the editor of the recently published “Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law,” a fascinating survey of legal decisions, literary criticism and essays by writers and scholars including Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois and Randall Kennedy. Salon spoke with Sollors by phone from his office in Cambridge about the mixed-race origins — and multiracial future — of the nation.

What took Alabama so long to overturn its anti-miscegenation law?

In the years after the Civil War, most of the Southern states made miscegenation bans part of their constitutions. And part of the constitutional provision was that no legislation should ever change them. These were not just ordinary laws that you could modify with a simple majority; they called for very complicated processes and very large majorities to be overturned.

In 1967, the Supreme Court invalidated these anti-miscegenation provisions with the Loving vs. Virginia case, and the Southern states began to adjust. But not right away. In the first 10 or 15 years, there wasn’t a lot of activism or popular support for having the laws changed — no politician wanted to be caught trying to remove those statutes. I think Mississippi did it in 1987 or 1988 — 20 years after the Loving vs. Virginia case…

…What’s been going on with racial categories in the census is also interesting.

The census had two rules. One is the 1997 rule that permitted everyone to mark more than one box in the 2000 census. Then came the 2000 evaluation procedure, which allowed the census to classify anyone who marked more than one box as part of the “people of color” category — if there was a white and color mix indicated.

Essentially, it’s one thing to say that a person can fall into multiple racial categories, but what happens to all the people in the old categories? It can have some disastrous consequences now because in some states, apparently many white Americans found it fashionable to indicate that they were Native American. In some counties where Native Americans were a minority they may now end up as a majority. There are lots of headaches with counting and civil rights and voting rights and districting that are going to come in the next two years as a result of this census decision…

Read the entire interview here.