Mixed Race Studies

Being between: can multiracial Americans form a cohesive anti-racist movement beyond identity politics and Tiger Woods chic?

ColorLines: Race, Culture, Action
2003-06-22

Sasha Su-Ling Welland, Assistant Professor Anthropology & Women Studies
University of Washington

So much of being mixed race these days seems about having to explain, always answering “What are you?” for others and for one’s self. And I’m tired of it. This variation of identity politics confronts the annoying question, but then gets hung up on the self in a way that hinders the collaborations necessary for fighting racism in all its mutating forms. In my mind, the problem of how to move from individual experience to collective action defines the current struggle of the multiracial movement.

I grew up in St. Louis, where race was mostly black and white, and where it seemed clear enough in schoolyard politics that I had slanted eyes and was neither. In St. Louis, the police arrived at our burglarized house and questioned my mother about the Hong Kong gang connections they assumed she had used to rip off her own husband, whom they assumed she had married in a bid for a nice white slice of American pie. Never mind that my mother was born and raised in Indiana or that my father hails from working class Ontario. Being mixed race means you elicit fears of loss all around (of status for whites and culture for people of color) and accusations—sometimes justified—that multiracial identity is just about passing.

When I moved to California, I discovered the labels had shifted on me. An Asian American woman took one look at my face, and said, “You’re hapa haole, aren’t you.” Ignorant of her terms, I snapped back, “I don’t think so.” I soon learned, however, that hapa, from hapa haole or half-white in Hawaiian, was my mixed race category between categories of race in America. Two syllables dismissed me from belonging to the Asian America I had always imagined from my St. Louis schoolyard. I started to look at myself differently. I began a quest to become a real hapa, whatever that might be, not just one who was passing. But, passing for what? I’ve been Chicana in the eyes of Missourians, white in San Francisco Chinatown, and a Uighur minority on the streets of Beijing, where I landed after years of learning Chinese to prove myself to my own Chinese American family.

Multiracial identity, being between, challenges the biological essence of race and exposes it as a construction designed to create social hierarchy. But progressives find themselves resisting those who naively claim that the existence of multiracial people effectively ends racist thinking. A character in Afroasian playwright Velina Hasu Houston’s 1988 play Broken English declares that she lives in a “no passing zone.” She suggests a space of possibility for mixed folks to embrace composite identities as part of an inter-ethnic, anti-racism struggle…

Read the entire article here.

Panel discusses race, identity

Indiana Daily Student
2009-11-06

Therese Kennelly

Graduate student Fileve Palmer said though her parents always talked about their diverse backgrounds with her, she still struggled to find a way to relay her identity to others.

She struggled throughout her life to retain her African-American identity, while society viewed her as Puerto Rican.

“I have always been dealing with this,” Palmer said. “I always was familiar with what I was.“

She was part of a group of panelists who spoke Thursday on “Race and Ethnic Classification: Can Identity be Negotiated?” the final installment of the Choices of Color Series. The panel began with questions about how each of the participants acquired their own sense of identity while growing up in a multi-racial household.

Joseph Stahlman, interim director of the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center, served as moderator. He said his life has been a struggle preserving his Native  American heritage because people would often simply see him as white…

Read the entire article here.

BEYOND ‘OTHER’: A special report.;More Than Identity Rides On a New Racial Category

The New York Times
1996-07-06

Linda Mathews

Edward Cooper, a Portland, Ore., businessman, is black. His wife and business partner, Barbara McIntyre, is white. Their 12-year-old son, Ethan McCooper, is, like his name, a blend of his parents, and harder to classify.

On Ethan’s school forms and other official papers, his parents sometimes check both the “white” and the “black” boxes. If “other” is available, they check that and write in “interracial.” When ordered to choose between “black” and “white,” they resolutely leave the form blank.

What they would like to call the light-skinned, dark-eyed boy with the reddish-brown hair is “multiracial.” They may yet get their way, if the Federal Government yields to growing pressure and adds a “multiracial” category to the census in the year 2000.

“This is an issue that isn’t going away,” said Mary Waters, a Harvard professor of sociology who teaches a course on race. “We’re riding such a big wave of interracial marriages that inevitably there are going to be many more people who can claim a multiracial identity if it’s permitted.”…

Read the entire story here.

Immigration’s Racial Complexity

The Washington Post
Political Bookworm: Where tomorrow’s must-read political books are discovered today
2010-07-09

Steven E. Levingston

Will today’s Latino and Asian immigrants become incorporated into American society like their European predecessors? Or will race remain a stumbling block to full assimilation? Jennifer Lee and Frank Bean explore these questions in their new book “The Diversity Paradox: Immigration and the Color Line in Twenty-First Century America,” recently released by the Russell Sage Foundation. What they discover is that second-generation Asians and Latinos are not as constrained by racial categories as are African-Americans. A key to the question may lie in the state of intermarriage.

By Jennifer Lee and Frank D. Bean

The United States is more racially diverse than ever before. New non-European immigrant groups such as Latinos and Asians made up only 5 and 1 percent of the nation’s population in 1970, but today, they account for 15 and 5 percent, respectively. According to Census projections, by 2050, they will soar to 30 and 9 percent.

Immigration alone, however, is only one factor contributing to the country’s new diversity. Interracial marriages, which increased from 1 percent in 1960 to 7 percent in 2008, are contributing to this growing diversity. According to a Pew Research Center study released June 3, 1 in 6 marriages in the U.S. is interracial.

Along with the growth in intermarriage is the rise in the number of Americans who chose to identify multiracially. Accounting for just 2.2 percent of the U.S. population in 2008, some analysts project that multiracial Americans will account for 1 in 5 Americans by 2050, and 1 in 3 by 2100. Such trends appear to portend a post-racial society where racial divides are disappearing. However, a closer look at racial group differences tells a bleaker story…

Read the entire article here.

One Drop of Blood

The New Yorker
1994-07-24

Lawrence Wright, Staff Writer

Washington in the millennial years is a city of warring racial and ethnic groups fighting for recognition, protection, and entitlements. This war has been fought throughout the second half of the twentieth century largely by black Americans. How much this contest has widened, how bitter it has turned, how complex and baffling it is, and how far-reaching its consequences are became evident in a series of congressional hearings that began last year in the obscure House Sub-committee on Census, Statistics, and Postal Personnel, which is chaired by Representative Thomas C. Sawyer, Democrat of Ohio, and concluded in November, 1993.

Although the Sawyer hearings were scarcely reported in the news and were sparsely attended even by other members of the subcommittee, with the exception of Representative Thomas E. Petri, Republican of Wisconsin, they opened what may become the most searching examination of racial questions in this country since the sixties. Related federal agency hearings, and meetings that will be held in Washington and other cities around the country to prepare for the 2000 census, are considering not only modifications of existing racial categories but also the larger question of whether it is proper for the government to classify people according to arbitrary distinctions of skin color and ancestry. This discussion arises at a time when profound debates are occurring in minority communities about the rightfulness of group entitlements, some government officials are questioning the usefulness of race data, and scientists are debating whether race exists at all…

In this battle over racial turf, a disturbing new contender has appeared. “When I received my 1990 census form, I realized that there was no race category for my children,” Susan Graham, who is a white woman married to a black man in Roswell, Georgia, testified. “I called the Census Bureau. After checking with supervisors, the bureau finally gave me their answer: The children should take the race of their mother. When I objected and asked why my children should be classified as their mother’s race only, the Census Bureau representative said to me, in a very hushed voice, ‘Because, in cases like these, we always know who the mother is and not always the father.’”…

…Actual interracial marriages, however, were historically rare. Multiracial children were often marginalized as illegitimate half-breeds who didn’t fit comfortably into any racial community. This was particularly true of the off spring of black-white unions. “In my family, like many families with African-American ancestry, there is a history of multiracial offspring associated with rape and concubinage,” G. Reginald Daniel, who teaches a course in multiracial identity at the University of California at Los Angeles, says. “I was reared in the segregationist South. Both sides of my family have been mixed for at least three generations. I struggled as a child over the question of why I had to exclude my East Indian and Irish and Native American and French ancestry, and could include only African.”…

…Kwame Anthony Appiah, of Harvard’s Philosophy and Afro- American Studies Departments, says, “What the Multiracial category aims for is not people of mixed ancestry, because a majority of Americans are actually products of mixed ancestry. This category goes after people who have parents who are socially recognized as belonging to different races. That’s O.K.–that’s an interesting social category. But then you have to ask what happens to their children. Do we want to have more boxes, depending upon whether they marry back into one group or the other? What are the children of these people supposed to say? I think about these things because–look, my mother is English; my father is Ghanaian. My sisters are married to a Nigerian and a Norwegian. I have nephews who range from blond- haired kids to very black kids. They are all first cousins. Now, according to the American scheme of things, they’re all black-even the guy with blond hair who skis in Oslo. That’s what the one drop rule says. The Multiracial scheme, which is meant to solve anomalies, simply creates more anomalies of its own, and that’s because the fundamental concept–that you should be able to assign every American to one of three or four races reliably-is crazy.”…

…Multiracial people, because they are now both unable and unwilling to be ignored, and because many of them refuse to be confined to traditional racial categories, inevitably undermine the entire concept of race as an irreducible difference between peoples. The continual modulation of racial differences in America is increasing the jumble created by centuries of ethnic intermarriage. The resulting dilemma is a profound one. If we choose to measure the mixing by counting people as Multiracial, we pull the teeth of the civil-rights laws. Are we ready for that? Is it even possible to make changes in the way we count Americans, given the legislative mandates already built into law? “I don’t know,” Sawyer concedes. “At this point, my purpose is not so much to alter the laws that underlie these kinds of questions as to raise the question of whether or not the way in which we currently define who we are reflects the reality of the nation we are and who we are becoming. If it does not, then the policies underlying the terms of measurement are doomed to be flawed. What you measure is what you get.”…

Read the entire article here or here.

Making sense of race and racial classification

Race and Society
Volume 4, Issue 2, (2001)
Pages 235-247
DOI: 10.1016/S1090-9524(03)00012-3

Angela D. James, Associate Professor of African American Studies
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles

As social scientists, race scholars, and demographers, how do we begin to make sense of recent changes in the Census Bureau’s system of racial classification, as well as of the popular response to those changes? This paper explores the lacuna between popular and scientific understandings of race. It reviews the theoretical understanding of race as a social construct, providing a brief history of racial classification in the United States. In addition, it examines the concepts of race mixing and racial ambiguity as a function of the peculiar and distinctive construction of race in the United States. Finally, the essay critically assesses how race is currently used in social research and how race might be more accurately represented and effectively employed in that research.

Article Outline

1. Changing notions of race
2. Race as social construction
2.1. The origin of race
2.2. The nature of race
3. The U.S. Census and its use of race for classification
3.1. Race versus ethnicity in the Census
4. From ethnicity to race: contemporary racial construction and Hispanics
4.1. Mixed-race and racial stratification
4.2. The strange history of race in social science research
5. Conclusions
References

Read or purchase the article here.

100% Multiracial

UrbanFaith.com
2010-06-11

Kyle Waalen

The latest Census estimates show that multiracial people are the fastest growing demographic group in the United States. Yet many still struggle with the question of how many boxes to check. Two Christian women share about the tension and joy of being young and multiracial in America.

Kristy McDonald and Alicia Edison have a lot in common. They are both 27, both Christian women, and they are both children of an African American father and Caucasian mother. If we’re living in a multiracial world, as current demographic trends reveal, then Kristy and Alicia reflect the new face of American society. But is America ready?

The 2010 U.S. Census has reignited the debate about how society pressures multiracial people to choose one race over the other. In fact, President Obama made headlines when he selected “Black” on his census form rather than checking multiple boxes. The boxes we choose indicate more than just the color of our skin. For many reasons, racial identity still matters in America.

UrbanFaith’s Kyle Waalen asked Kristy, a caregiver at a group home for adults with disabilities in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Alicia, a Ph.D. student in sociology at the University of North Texas, to offer their personal perspectives on the challenges of being a mixed-race person in a multiracial society that hasn’t yet figured out how to be multiracial…

…Do ever feel that, as a multiracial person, you fall between the cracks when it comes to racial labels?

KRISTY: First of all, I am multiracial, but my skin tone is very light. When I was younger, I was part of a club at my local YMCA. It was designed to help African American girls make good choices about going to college and doing well in school. When guest speakers came to talk to us, they didn’t know what to think about my skin color. All the other girls at the club where dark-skinned, but I was not.

ALICIA: A multiracial person may fall through the cracks if they choose not to define themselves within the categories that society assigns. On most forms, we are given an alternative of choosing “other.” “Other” is not okay. It is not sufficient. “Other” means that we will continue to be marginalized and that we don’t count. We should be given the option to name ourselves when and how we choose…

Read the entire article here.

Diversity on a Personal Level: A First Look at Multiple Race Population

Indiana Business Review
Summer 2001
pages 6-7

John Besl, Research Demographer
Indiana Business Research Center, Kelley School of Business
Indiana University

For many decades, census data have provided a look at racial diversity in our nation’s communities. But Census 2000 offers a truly innovative look at racial diversity, with counts of persons claiming a heritage of two or more races. Census 2000 race tabulations include six different categories of one race “alone,” and 57 different combinations of these six discrete races. Adding to the mountain of data, the 63 race categories are also cross-tabulated by two origin categories (Hispanic or Not Hispanic). The unprecedented detail afforded by 126 race-origin combinations was made possible (necessary?) by the new “check all that apply” option for identifying race on the Census 2000 questionnaire. Former Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt, the man in charge of the 2000 national headcount, recently expressed his opinion that the most significant historical development from the 2000 census will be the introduction of the multiple race option…

Read the entire article here.

Demographic Knowledge and Nation-Building: The Peruvian Census of 1940

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Published online 2010-08-03
DOI: 10.1002/bewi.201001471

Raúl Necochea López
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Demographic Knowledge and Nation-Building: The Peruvian Census of 1940. The demographers who organized the 1940 census of Peru portrayed the increasingly mixed-race Peruvian population as indicative of the breaking down of cultural barriers to the emergence of a robust Peruvian identity, a process that, they claimed, would lead to greater national development. This paper analyzes the ways in which demographers constructed cultural heterogeneity as a potential national asset. This reveals how scientific knowledge of miscegenation affected the formation of a nationalist project in the second half of the twentieth century, and also how demographers’ ideological commitments to socialism shaped scientific practice.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Geography of a Mixed-Race Society

Growth and Change: A Journal of Urban And Regional Policy
Volume 40, Issue 4 (December 2009)
Pages 565 – 593
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2257.2009.00501.x

William A. V. Clark, Professor of Geography
University of California, Los Angeles

Reagan Maas
University of California, Los Angeles

The pattern and level of separation among ethnic groups continues to change, and there are certainly more mixed neighborhoods both in cities and suburbs than two decades ago. The immigration flows of the past decade have substantially altered the ethnic mix and neighborhood mixing. In addition, multi-ethnic individuals themselves are altering the level of mixing among racial and ethnic groups. The research in this article shows that those who report themselves of more than one race have high levels of residential integration both in central cities and suburbs. These residential patterns can be interpreted as further evidence of tentative steps to a society in which race per se is less critical in residential patterning. The level of integration, for Asian mixed and black mixed is different and substantially higher than for those who report one race alone. The research in this article builds on previous aggregate studies of mixed-race individuals to show substantial patterns of integration in California’s metropolitan areas.

Read the entire article here.