Mixed Race Studies

MASC’s Thomas Lopez Discusses Mixed Latina/o Identity

Mixed Race Radio
Wednesday, 2012-10-17, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT, 09:00 PDT, 17:00 BST)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Thomas Lopez

Thomas Lopez continues to amaze me. He has held various positions with Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC), Los Angeles, CA since 1995 and continues to organize numerous conferences, workshops and events such as “Race In Medicine: A Dangerous Prescription” and “A Rx for the FDA: Ethical Dilemmas for Multiracial People in Race-Based Medicine” at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, DePaul University, 2010.

Thomas is also a filmmaker, having produced, Mixed Mexican: Is Latino a Race? which was shown at the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival (2010), Readymade Film Festival (2010), and Hapapalooza Film Festival (2011)

On today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio, Thomas will announce the start of a new program by Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC) called: Latinas/os Of Mixed Ancestry (LOMA).

The purpose of the LOMA project is to:

• Provide space for expression of mixed Latina/o identity.
• Provide culturally relevant material to the mixed Latino community.
• Raise awareness of this community to society at large.

This will be accomplished by:

• The establishment of a website with blog and forum discussions.
• Social media campaign.
• Attendance at conferences.
• A public relations awareness campaign.
• MASC seeks to broaden self and public understanding of our interracial, multiethnic, and cross cultural society by facilitating interethnic dialogue and providing cultural, educational, and recreational activities. In 2009 MASC celebrated twenty years of incorporation.

As a part of our mission, MASC has always worked to raise awareness of the impact of multiracial identification. During the 1990’s, we successfully worked to revise the Census to allow multiple racial classifications.

For more information, click here.

Skeptic’s Café: Understanding Popular Uses of Percentages

Pacific Standard
2011-04-30

Peter M. Nardi, Professor Emeritus of Sociology
Pitzer College, Claremont, California

Four New Jersey women in March accused the Campbell Soup Company of misleading customers with claims of lower sodium levels in its “25% Less Sodium Tomato Soup.” Whether the soup has more or less sodium than regular versions is not for me to investigate. I want to focus on the “25% less” phrase — a type of claim we see regularly in ads and new product labels — and in the process provide some numerical literacy skills to our arsenal of skeptical thinking tools.

In an age when quantitative thinking is at a premium and “innumeracy,” as cognitive scientist Douglas R. Hofstadter termed it, is a problem, many people easily misinterpret numbers and become wary about statistics. Sometimes this skepticism is for good reason – remember that oft-cited phrase “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”

But turning our backs on numbers is a mistake. We require critical thinking skills to make sense of data that appear in commercials, politician-mediated public opinion polls, official documents and research studies…

Consider this paragraph from a New York Times article about the increase in multiracial people in the latest 2010 U.S. Census: “In North Carolina, the mixed-race population doubled. In Georgia, it expanded by more than 80 percent, and by nearly as much in Kentucky and Tennessee. In Indiana, Iowa and South Dakota, the multiracial population increased by about 70 percent.” A few paragraphs later the article reports a possible national multiracial growth rate of 35 percent, maybe even a 50 percent increase from the last census in 2000 when 2.4 percent of Americans selected more than one race.

With these numbers coming at you fast and furious, it takes a moment to reflect on what is actually being said and what information is missing…

…Going back to the Census figures quoted in The New York Times, it’s one thing to claim that the multiracial population may increase 50 percent, but when the original figure is only 2.4 percent of Americans, a 50 percent increase simply means that the 2010 multiracial population could end up around 3.6 percent of the population. The number 50 surely sounds more impressive than the smaller 3.6 figure. Manipulating these numbers can create misleading impressions, sometimes done with intention…

Read the entire article here.

2010 Census Shows Multiple-Race Population Grew Faster Than Single-Race Population

United States Census Bureau
New Releases
News Release: CB12-182
2012-09-27

The 2010 Census showed that people who reported multiple races grew by a larger percentage than those reporting a single race. According to the 2010 Census brief The Two or More Races Population: 2010, the population reporting multiple races (9.0 million) grew by 32.0 percent from 2000 to 2010, compared with those who reported a single race, which grew by 9.2 percent.

Overall, the total U.S. population increased by 9.7 percent since 2000, however, many multiple-race groups increased by 50 percent or more.

The first time in U.S. history that people were presented with the option to self-identify with more than one race came on the 2000 Census questionnaire. Therefore, the examination of data from the 2000 and 2010 censuses provides the first comparisons on multiple-race combinations in the United States. An effective way to compare the multiple-race data is to examine changes in specific combinations, such as white and black, white and Asian, or black and Asian.

“These comparisons show substantial growth in the multiple-race population, providing detailed insights to how this population has grown and diversified over the past decade,” said Nicholas Jones, chief of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Racial Statistics Branch…

Read the entire news release here.

Afroargentines

The Argentina Independent
2007-03-23

Laura Balfour

As a descendant of two slaves, Maria Lamadrid has a hard time biting her tongue when airport officials think her Argentine passport is not real because ‘there are no blacks in Argentina’.
 
And that was in 2002.
 
The 25th of March marks the landmark 200th anniversary of the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. Though the trade continued after this date, it marked the beginning of the end of the transatlantic trafficking of Africans.
 
Ms Lamadrid is fighting to alter the common belief that all blacks who live in Argentina are foreigners. In 1997 she founded Africa Vive, a non-governmental organisation that defends the rights of African descendants. Today, she claims, there are 2m Afroargentines in Argentina.
 
Ms Lamadrid and Miriam Gomez, a history professor at the University of Buenos Aires, have dedicated themselves wholly to the NGO’s cause because “there is so much to do and very few people to do it.”…

…Africa Vive has requested that a separate category for African descendants be reintroduced in the 2010 census. Ms Lamadrid said the most frustrating thing is that there used to be one: 1887 was the final year that Afroargentines were recognised in the census; the results showed that 2% of the residents of Buenos Aires were of African descent at that time. She added that indigenous people, who have also suffered discrimination, have their own category because they have more support…

Read the entire article here.

The reawakening of Afro-Argentine culture

Global Post
2009-08-30

Anil Mundra

Descendants of slaves are starting to assert their identity but it’s not easy in South America’s whitest country.

BUENOS AIRES — “Liberty has no color” read the signs held outside a Buenos Aires city courthouse. “Arrested for having the wrong face,” and “Suspected of an excess of pigment,” said others. And more to the point: “Enough racism.”
 
A black street vendor was allegedly arrested without cause or proper procedure earlier this year, prompting this August hearing of a habeas corpus appeal. But leaders of the Afro-Argentine community say this moment goes beyond any particular man or incident, calling it a watershed case that brings to trial the treatment of blacks in Argentina.
 
“It’s not about this prosecutor or that police officer, but rather an institutionally racist system,” said Malena Derdoy, the defendant’s lawyer.
 
Argentina is generally considered the whitest country in South America — 97 percent, by some counts — possibly more ethnically European than immigrant-saturated Europe. There was once a large Afro-Argentine presence but it has faded over the epochs. Now, for the first time in a century and a half, Argentine descendants of African slaves are organizing and going public to assert their identity…

…At the beginning of the 1800s, black slaves were 30 percent of the population of Buenos Aires, and an absolute majority in some other provinces. The first president of Argentina had African ancestry, and so did the composer of the first tango. Even the word “tango,” like many other words common in the Argentine vocabulary, has an African root; so do many beloved foods, including the national vices of the asado barbecue and dulce de leche.
 
The abolition of slavery was a slow process that spanned the better part of the 19th century. At the same time, under the government’s explicit and aggressive policy of whitening the race — to replace “barbary” with “civilization,” in the famous phrase of the celebrated president Sarmiento — Afro-Argentines were inundated by European immigration, the largest such influx in the Americas outside of the United States. Blacks had dwindled to only 1.8 percent of Buenos Aires by the 1887 census, after which their category was replaced with more vague terms like “trigueno” — “wheaty.”

“It’s part of Argentine common sense that there are no blacks, that their entire culture had disappeared toward the end of the 1800s,” said anthropologist Pablo Cirio. “That’s all a lie.”…
 
…The survey was performed with help from the national census bureau and World Bank funding, at the urging of local Afro-Argentine activists who hoped to have the “Afro-descendant” category re-inserted into the Argentine census in 2010 and count themselves as a distinct segment of the populace after a century missing. Soon afterward, DNA tests of blood samples in several Buenos Aires hospitals bolstered the pilot census’ result with a very similar percentage of genes traceable to Africa. Moreover, a much higher number — about 10 percent — was obtained by testing mitochondrial DNA, which traces maternal ancestry. This is consistent with the historical conjecture that many black men were lost after being sent to the frontlines of 19th-century wars, and Afro-Argentines assimilated into the white population when the
remaining women mixed with the hordes of European males who had come to Argentina to work…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-race teen in the middle: who will she choose?

Tampa Bay Times
St. Petersburg, Florida
2012-09-23

Leonora LaPeter Anton, Times Staff Writer

Her dark eyes scanned the fluorescent-lit lunchroom, locking onto her friends in the center of the chaos. Her thoughts sprayed in many directions: the upcoming eighth-grade formal, a surprisingly bad grade she recently got on an English paper, her role in the school play.

She passed a table full of white girls and one of them high-fived her. She passed a table full of white boys and one of them called her name. She arrived at a table full of black girls — the table where she sits almost every day. As she set her notebook down, one of her best girlfriends ignored her and moved to another table.

Asianna Williams, 14, wanted to ignore the drama. She is a light-skinned mixed-race girl trying to discover who she is in a society that still carves up territory by race. Nowhere was this more evident than in the lunchroom at Thurgood Marshall Fundamental Middle School. Table after table, as far as the eye could see, white faces congregated around one table, black faces around another.

Asianna’s father is black and her mother is white. Years ago, this might have relegated her to a no-man’s land, not fully welcomed by either blacks or whites. Now, thanks in part to sheer numbers (last year, there were 42 other mixed-race students at Thurgood Marshall), Asianna doesn’t feel ostracism. But she does feel pressure.

Pressure to choose black kids. Pressure to choose white kids. Like the tables in the lunchroom, nearly everything Asianna does — and she does a lot of things — comes with an overlay of race.

But what if you were someone who didn’t want to choose?…

…There have always been people of mixed race in American society. Cultural taboos and prejudice often meant they simply identified themselves as black, or if their skin was sufficiently light-colored, tried to pass as white…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial Brooklyn

Brooklyn Historical Society
Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations
September 2012

Michael J. Rosenfeld, Associate Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Intermarriage has been rising in the United States steadily since about 1960. Before 1960 there were so few interracial marriages in the United States that Interraciality was really invisible. Prior to 1960, the idea of marrying someone from another race in the US was so unusual that social pressure, family pressure, and in some states the law made such marriages impossible.

So what explains the rise in interracial marriage?

One answer is that the law changed. In 1967, the US Supreme Court, in a brief but powerful and unanimous decision (Loving v. Virginia), struck down all the state laws that had made interracial marriage illegal. Overnight, Americans had the right to marry anyone from the opposite sex regardless of race. New York, however, was one of the states that had never had laws against interracial marriage. Take a look at this map of US states to see which states had laws against interracial marriage and when.

In the above graph (click to enlarge), you can see that intermarriage had a similar rise in the US, in Brooklyn, and in New York, starting near zero, and peaking at between 5% and 7% of all marriages in 2010. The trajectory of interracial marriage was so similar in Brooklyn and in the US as a whole that the blue US line is hidden underneath the green Brooklyn line in parts of the graph above. Since interracial marriage was always legal in Brooklyn but often illegal in the rest of the US before 1967, something other than the law (which never changed in Brooklyn) must explain the rise of intermarriage.

Even though interracial marriage has risen a great deal, Americans and Brooklynites still have a strong tendency to marry people from their own racial group…

…What explains the rise of Intermarriage?

• The US had a big immigration reform in 1965, which led to a sharp rise in immigration from Asia and Latin America. As the US population became more racially diverse, there was more opportunity for Americans to meet (and fall in love with) people from other races. Immigrant destinations like New York City tend to have more intermarriage as a result of having more racial diversity.
• The age at first marriage has been steadily rising since the 1960s. Age at first marriage in the US is now 27 or 28 years of age. In the past, age of first marriage was typically about 21 years. The later age at first marriage means that young people are more likely to travel away from home before they marry. Travel away from home increases the chances of meeting (and falling in love with) someone who is different from you.
• Attitudes have changed. Interracial marriage is not very controversial for people who were raised in the post- Civil Rights and post- Loving v. Virginia era. As interracial marriage has become more common and more visible, more Americans have gotten used to the idea that interracial couples are part of the panorama of American families. Opposition within families to intermarriage has declined, but has not disappeared…

…In order to figure out how many interracial couples there are, one must first divide people into separate and mutually exclusive racial/ethnic categories. In dividing people into mutually exclusive racial/ethnic categories, one immediately confronts a series of definition problems that have no unique solution.

The fact is that race exists in America only because we Americans believe in race and invest the categories with meaning…

Read the entire article here.

The Lure of Whiteness and the Politics of “Otherness”: Mexican American Racial Identity

University of Texas, Austin
2004
185 pages

Julie Anne Dowling

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the The University of Texas at Austin In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Using a “constructed ethnicity” (Nagel 1994) approach, this project employs multiple methods to explore the racial identification of Mexican Americans. The U.S. Census has grappled with appropriate strategies for identifying the Mexican-ancestry population for over a century, including the use of a “Mexican” racial category in 1930. I examine historical documents pertaining to the 1930 Census and the development of the “Mexican” racial classification, as well as how Mexican Americans in the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) constructed “White” racial identities in their efforts to resist such racialization. I then explore contemporary Mexican American identity as reflected in current racial self-reporting on the U.S. Census. Finally, I conduct fifty-two in-depth interviews with a strategic sample of Mexican Americans in five Texas cities, investigating how such factors as socioeconomic status, racial composition of neighborhood, proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border, social networks, nativity/migration history, Spanish language fluency, physical appearance, and political attitudes affect their racial and ethnic identifications. Results indicate a complex relationship between personal histories and local community constructions of identity that influences racial identification.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables
• List of Figuresxii
• Chapter 1: Latinos and the Question of Race
• Chapter 2: Modernity and Texas Racial Politics in the Early Twentieth Century, LULAC and the Construction of the White Mexican
• Chapter 3: The “Other” Race of Mexican Americans: Exploring Racial Identification in the 1990 and 2000 U.S. Censuses
• Chapter 4: “Where’s Hispanic?” Mexican American Responses to the Census Race Question
• Chapter 5: What We Call Ourselves Here: Mexican American Racial and Ethnic Labeling in Texas
• Chapter 6: Just An(other) Shade of White? Making Meaning of Mexican American
• Whiteness on the Census.
• Appendix A: Census 1990 Race Question
• Appendix B: Census 2000 Race Question
• Bibliography
• Vita

Chapter 1: Latinos and the Question of Race

Introduction

The roots of this dissertation can be traced to a qualitative study I began as an undergraduate, interviewing persons of “biracial” mixed Mexican-Anglo heritage like myself. During the course of this research that became the basis for my master’s thesis, I discovered that according to the U.S. Census, Latinos are not a racial group. This did not fit my experience growing up in Texas where I found myself torn between two different worlds, one white and one brown.

This disjuncture between government classification and self-identification, between federal definitions and regional definitions of race, is at the heart of my project. The goal of this dissertation is to explore the historical roots of the census classification of Mexican Americans as “White,” and to examine who rejects this classification, identifying as “Other” race. Are there significant differences between these groups? What factors play into how Mexican Americans label themselves? And what are the meanings of these labels?

The most common “other race” response given on the racial identification question of the 1990 U.S. Census was a Hispanic identifier—Hispanic, Latino or a nationality such as Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban (U.S. General Accounting Office 1993). While approximately 51% of Mexican Americans in the 1990 census identified as “White” on the racial identity question, an almost equal proportion (47%) identified as “Other.” In 2000, the numbers were similar with 48% of Mexican Americans identifying as “White” and 46% as “Other.” It is clear that a substantial number of Mexican Americans view themselves as a racial group outside of the current census classifications of White, Black, Native American, and Asian American…

Read the entire dissertation here.

The United States Census in Its Relations to Sanitation

Public Health Paper Report
Volume 15 (1889)
pages 43-46

John S. Billings, Surgeon, U.S.A. (1838-1913)

I have several times inflicted upon this patient and long-suffering Association papers relating to statistical matters and methods, which, it must be confessed, were better fitted to serve for occasional reference than to occupy any of the scanty time available for listening at our annual meetings. To-day, however, I have a very short discourse on the same subject which I want you to listen to, because, if the suggestions in it have any value, some of them should be acted on before the paper will probably appear in the volume of our proceedings.

Theoretically, we all agree that vital statistics are the foundation of public medicine, but, practically, I suppose that the majority of sanitarians and physicians think that they are not essential to the work of a health officer or board of health, although they may be desirable; that the main objects in sanitary work are to see that the water-supply is pure; that garbage and excreta are promptly removed or destroyed; that no filth is allowed to accumulate in the vicinity of habitations; that contagious diseases are controlled by isolation and disinfection; that plenty of fresh air be provided in schools, churches, etc.; and that all this can and should be done whether death-rates are known or not.

This is not my own view, because my observation of the progress of public health work in this and other countries for the last twenty years leads me to believe that this progress, in any locality, for any considerable length of time, depends upon the completeness of its vital statistics and the use that is made of them; because upon such completeness and use depend mainly the amount and regularity of appropriations from state or municipal funds for the payment of the expenses needed to secure the objects of the health department. Occasionally it is possible to get up a cholera, or yellow-fever, or small-pox, or typhoid fever scare, and to then get a little money for sewerage, or for street and alley cleaning; but these spasmodic reforms do not last long, and in most cases do not amount to much. You have got to produce constant, undeniable evidence that the work is needed, and is useful, evidence that will convince the press and the majority of the community; and this evidence must be mainly death-rates, to which should be added all the sickness rates that can be obtained…

…In investigating the details of the records of deaths kept in different cities, I have noted deficiencies in a few of them to which I wish to call the attention of all who have to do with the registration of vital statistics.

First. All deaths occurring in hospitals should be charged to the ward or district of the city from which the patient was taken to hospital, when this can be ascertained. Otherwise the death-rate in the ward in which the hospital is located will be too high, and in the other districts it will be too low.

Second. The birthplace of the parents of the decedent should be reported. We want to know the race of the decedent, whether he was Irish, German, Italian, or American, and to give merely his own birthplace is not sufficient.

Third. It is very desirable that in all cases of deaths of colored persons it should be stated whether the decedent was black or of mixed blood, such as mulatto or quadroon.

One of the most important questions in the vital and social statistics of this country relates to the fertility, longevity, and liability to certain diseases of those partly of negro and partly of white blood, and the only way to obtain data on this subject is through the registration of vital statistics.

Under the provisions of the law providing for the census, the living colored population is to be enumerated with distinction as to whether each person is black, mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon; and we need the same distinctions for all colored persons dying during the census year, to enable us to calculate comparative death-rates. Wherever there is a fairly accurate registration of deaths, which now exists in several states and in over one hundred cities, the next census will afford the means of calculating death-rates with distinctions of color, sex, and age, which will furniish important indications for sanitary work. For all cities of io,ooo inhabitants and upward, it is proposed to collect as complete information as possible with regard to altitude, climate, water-supply, density of population, sewerage, proportion of sewered and non-sewered areas, and other points bearing on the healthfulness of the place, which will permit of interesting comparisons with the death-rates.

Read the entire paper here.

Latinos may get own race category on census form

The Seattle Times
2012-08-30

Lornet Turnbull, Staff Reporter

Under proposed changes under consideration by the Census Bureau in its once-a-decade census forms, Latino and Hispanic would be added to the list of government-defined races, rather than being listed separately as an ethnicity. And people from the Middle East and North Africa, now counted as white, would be allowed to write in their country of origin.

U.S. residents of Spanish origin typically have no trouble checking the box on their census form that asks whether they are Latino, Hispanic or Spanish.

It’s a different question — the one that asks their race — that apparently gives some of them pause.

In the 2010 census, well over one-third — perhaps unsure how to answer that question — either checked “some other race” or skipped the question entirely.

Now, in advance of the 2020 count and as part of its ongoing effort to allow Americans to better reflect how they see themselves, the U.S. Census Bureau is researching ways to clear up the confusion by adding Latino or Hispanic to a list of government-defined race categories that includes White, Asian, Pacific Islander, Black and American Indian, along with a “two or more races” option…

…Luis Fraga, a political-science professor at the University of Washington who directs its Diversity Research Institute, said, “identifying ourselves by racial grouping is at the very core of who we are as a nation and how we understand political power.”

Results from the decennial survey not only help direct more than $400 billion in federal funds are distributed each year, but they also help evaluate how well government policies are responding to historical disparities among various racial and ethnic groups.

“As much as we hope we become a country where these racial distinctions don’t matter — and that’s a worthy goal — it is central to how we understand ourselves as a people and how we decide who has opportunity, rights, privileges and protection under the law,” Fraga said…

Read the entire article here.