Mixed Race Studies

“What are you?”: Mixed race responses to the racial gaze

Ethnicities
Published online before print 2015-12-16
DOI: 10.1177/1468796815621938

Jillian Paragg
Department of Sociology
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

Mixed race scholarship considers the deployment of the term “mixed race” as an identification and theorizes that the operation of the external racial gaze is signaled through the “what are you?” question that mixed race people face in their everyday lives. In interviews conducted with mixed race, young adults in a Western Canadian urban context, it was evident that the “what are you?” question is the verbal form of the external racial gaze’s production of ambivalence on mixed race bodies. However, this study also found that mixed race people have “ready” identity narratives in response to the “what are you?” question. This paper shows the importance of these narratives (the very existence of the “ready” narratives, as well as the content of the “ready” narrative) for fleshing out the operation of the external racial gaze in the Canadian context. Respondents draw on two closely related modes of narrating origin when responding to the “what are you?” question: they respond through a kinship narrative that is heteronormative and they narrate that they inherit “national origin” “through blood.” I argue that these responses point to how the gaze produces the multiracialized body through the desire to imagine and “know” its originary point of racial mixing. Yet, the “ready” narratives are also agential: while at times they narrate to the expectations of the gaze, they also “play on” the gaze.

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The Racism-Race Reification Process: A Mesolevel Political Economic Framework for Understanding Racial Health Disparities

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Published online before print 2016-02-08
DOI: 10.1177/2332649215626936

Abigail A. Sewell, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

The author makes the argument that many racial disparities in health are rooted in political economic processes that undergird racial residential segregation at the mesolevel—specifically, the neighborhood. The dual mortgage market is considered a key political economic context whereby racially marginalized people are isolated into degenerative ecological environments. A multilevel root-cause conceptual framework, the racism-race reification process (R³p), is proposed and preliminarily tested to delineate how institutional conditions shape the health of racially marginalized individuals through the reification of race. After reviewing and critiquing the conceptual and theoretical roots of R³p, the key components of the synergistic framework are detailed and applied to clarify extant understandings of the upstream (i.e., macrolevel) factors informing racial health disparities. Using aggregated data from the 1994 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and Neighborhood Change Database merged at the mesolevel (i.e., the neighborhood cluster) with microlevel data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, exploratory analysis is presented that links dual mortgage market political economies to ethnoracial residential segregation at the mesolevel and to childhood health inequalities at the microlevel. The author concludes by considering how racial inequality is an artifact of the political economic reality of race and racism manifested from the neighborhood-level down.

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Essential Measures: Ancestry, Race, and Social Difference

American Behavioral Scientist
April 2016, Volume 60, Number 4
pages 498-518
DOI: 10.1177/0002764215613398

Aaron Gullickson, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Oregon

Race and ancestry are both popularly viewed in the United States as different but intertwined reflections on a person’s essentialized identity that answer the question of “who is what?” Despite this loose but well-understood connection between the two concepts and the availability of ancestry data on the U.S. census, researchers have rarely used the two sources of data in combination. In this article, drawing on theories of boundary formation, I compare these two forms of identification to explore the salience and social closure of racial boundaries. Specifically, I analyze race-reporting inconsistency and predict college completion at multiple levels of racial ancestry aggregation using Census data. The results suggest that, while much of the variation in these measures corresponds to popular “big race” conceptions of difference, considerable variation remains among individual ancestries.

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The Changing Face of Whiteness

Truthout
2016-06-05

William C. Anderson

When Guido Menzio sat down on a regional jet for a short flight from Philadelphia to Syracuse, New York, he certainly couldn’t have guessed what was going to happen. The 40-year-old economist was profiled as a terror suspect for being focused too intently on a math problem. The differential equation he was working on was possibly mistaken for terrorist scrawlings by the nervous passenger next to him, who was concerned that Menzio wasn’t polite enough, looked suspicious and was too distracted by his foreign scribblings.

After delaying the flight and profiling Menzio, the media would soon report on the “Ivy League economist” who was “ethnically profiled” for doing math on a plane. Focal points of this story were Menzio’s whiteness as an Italian and his stature as an Ivy League economist — both of which should assure him no suspicion from authorities, unless he should be mistaken for a person of color. Amid the reverberating outcry around Menzio’s treatment, the fact that no one should be treated that way may have gotten lost. After all, the passenger followed what is protocol for many; she saw something and she said something. But what is it she saw? She saw someone she was scared of and someone who was possibly not white…

Read the entire article here…

Race isn’t biologically real. That doesn’t mean racism doesn’t exist.

Vox
2016-06-11

Victoria M. Massie

The first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging it exists. And in the latest episode of MTV’s Decoded, host Franchesca Ramsey breaks down exactly why being colorblind to someone’s race not only doesn’t fix racism but, if anything, she says, actually makes matters worse.

“Have you ever wondered why people say, ‘Oh, I don’t see color’ as a way to fix racism?” Ramsey asks. “Yeah, that doesn’t work.”

Sure, race is not biologically real. But Ramsey points out that resting on that argument alone is part of the problem…

Read the entire article here.

Decoding Racial Ideology in Genomics

Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
May 2016
190 pages
Size: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7391-4895-2
eBook ISBN: 978-0-7391-4897-6

Johnny E. Williams, Associate Professor of Sociology
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut

Foreword by Joseph L. Graves Jr.

Although the human genome exists apart from society, knowledge about it is produced through socially-created language and interactions. As such, genomicists’ thinking is informed by their inability to escape the wake of the ‘race’ concept. This book investigates how racism makes genomics and how genomics makes racism and ‘race,’ and the consequences of these constructions. Specifically, Williams explores how racial ideology works in genomics. The simple assumption that frames the book is that ‘race’ as an ideology justifying a system of oppression is persistently recreated as a practical and familiar way to understand biological reality. This book reveals that genomicists’ preoccupation with ‘race’—regardless of good or ill intent—contributes to its perception as a category of differences that is scientifically rigorous.

• Foreword, Joseph L. Graves, Jr.
• Chapter 1: Genomics’ ‘Race’ Legacy
• Chapter 2: Socialized Interpreters
• Chapter 3: Racialized Culture—Genomic Nexus
• Chapter 4: Racialization via Assertions of Objectivity and Heuristic Practice
• Chapter 5: ‘Bad Science’ Discourse as Covering for Racial Thinking
• Chapter 6: Reorienting Genomics

Necessarily Black: Cape Verdean Youth, Hip-Hop Culture, and a Critique of Identity

Michigan State University Press
August 2015
134 pages
6 in x 9 in
Paperback ISBN: 9781611861686

P. Khalil Saucier, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Sociology
Rhode Island College

Necessarily Black is an ethnographic account of second-generation Cape Verdean youth identity in the United States and a theoretical attempt to broaden and complicate current discussions about race and racial identity in the twenty-first century. P. Khalil Saucier grapples with the performance, embodiment, and nuances of racialized identities (blackened bodies) in empirical contexts. He looks into the durability and (in)flexibility of race and racial discourse through an imbricated and multidimensional understanding of racial identity and racial positioning. In doing so, Saucier examines how Cape Verdean youth negotiate their identity within the popular fabrication of “multiracial America.” He also explores the ways in which racial blackness has come to be lived by Cape Verdean youth in everyday life and how racialization feeds back into the experience of these youth classified as black through a matrix of social and material settings. Saucier examines how ascriptions of blackness and forms of black popular culture inform subjectivities. The author also examines hip-hop culture to see how it is used as a site where new (and old) identities of being, becoming, and belonging are fashioned and reworked. Necessarily Black explores race and how Cape Verdean youth think and feel their identities into existence, while keeping in mind the dynamics and politics of racialization, mixed-race identities, and anti-blackness.

Searching for Identity: Race, adoption and awareness in the millennial generation

Medium
2016-05-19

Dwight Smith

What happens when a black boy is adopted at birth into a white world where race and racism are ghosts of the past and racial identity is a silly thing to waste time thinking about? As a transracial adult adoptee of color, my life journey reveals some insight into this very question.

And what happens when a mostly white millennial generation is raised without an accurate understanding of race, racism or their role in a racialized society? As Slate’s chief political correspondent Jamelle Bouie puts it, our generation “think[s] if we ignore skin color, racism will somehow disappear.”

Both questions are connected because I — and many of my millennial peers — came up in similar race-erasing worlds. Both questions are important to me, because my life experiences motivate me to address the racial confusion of the millennial generation.

I lead the Impact Race initiative for a global nonprofit called Net Impact, connecting our 100,000 members with the awareness, language and resources to lead for racial equity in their communities and careers. Members represent hundreds of campuses and companies across a wide variety of industries, including the local tech industry. Aspects of my journey as a transracial adoptee, and the majority white millennial generation experience in the United States, highlight the importance of pushing the conversation toward an honest, reflective look at how to understand racism and lead for racial equity.

Ignorance is bliss, until it isn’t.

I am a mixed-race black male raised in and around whiteness. Race had about as much real significance as the color of one’s shoelaces, and racism was a wrong of years gone by. In this world, to be ‘black’ (this is how I was and am categorized) meant a list of hollow stereotypes such as the expectation of athletic skill. But mostly there was just deafening silence when it came to me being black. Of course, all of this was ‘normal’ to me, in the sense that it was all I ever knew. It was also normal to all the white kids I grew up around. This is, in part, the reason that a ‘raceless’, colorblind worldview is normal to many of my white millennial peers today…

…Simply opening one’s eyes is not enough, we must seek the context to interpret that which we now see. My faith, my current understanding of the factors that influenced my childhood experiences as a transracial adoptee, and my everyday experience as a black man in America, fuel my life’s commitment to education and advocacy…

Read the entire article here.

Results of the 2016 Election

American Sociological Association
Washington, D.C.
2016-06-07

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Duke University, has been elected the 109th President of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Christopher Uggen, University of Minnesota, has been elected Vice President.

Bonilla-Silva and Uggen will assume their respective offices in August 2017, following a year of service as President-elect and Vice President-elect (2016-2017). Bonilla-Silva will chair the 2018 Program Committee that will shape the ASA Annual Meeting program in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, August 11-14, 2018. As ASA President, Bonilla-Silva will be a member of the ASA Council, which governs the association and its policies, and its chair in 2017-2018. He will also be a voting member of the ASA Committee on the Executive Office and Budget (2017-2019) and the 2018-2019 Publications Committee…

Read the entire results here.

Impeachment, culture wars and the politics of identity in Brazil

The Conversation
2016-05-26

Marshall Eakin, Professor of History
Vanderbilt University

Brazil is in the midst of its worst political crisis since the 1960s and possibly its most severe economic downturn in the last 100 years.

The economy will not – and cannot – improve until the country emerges from the political chaos of the moment and puts into place strong and legitimate leadership.

Most of the commentary on Brazil’s current crisis has focused on politics and economics. I believe that a more profound threat generated by this crisis will be to Brazilians’ sense of self – to their very identity as Brazilians.

In my 40 years studying Brazilian history and culture, I have never seen the country more polarized. Over the past decade, I have spent extended periods in Brazil researching and writing “Becoming Brazilians: Race and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Brazil,” which will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. More so than many countries, Brazil has had a powerful and dominant narrative of national identity for decades…

…Race and national identity

For much of the 20th century Brazilians of all social groups collectively forged a rich and vibrant cultural nationalism around the notion of mestiçagem — racial and cultural mixing.

The iconic intellectual Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987) produced the most influential version of this narrative. According to Freyre,

Every Brazilian, even the light-skinned fair-haired one, carries with him in his soul, when not in body and soul … the shadow, or at least the birthmark, of the Indian or the Negro.

Many diverse political regimes from the 1930s to the 1980s placed an official seal of government approval on this narrative of mestiçagem. They hoped to publicize Brazil’s supposed “racial democracy” to the world. As I argue in my book, the lived realities of the great masses of Brazilians seemed to provide abundant evidence of the creative power of mestiçagem. Carnaval and Brazilian music like samba and bossa nova arose out of this dynamic mixing. The jazz on the playing pitch of Pelé and other great players produced the world’s most beautiful soccer…

Read the entire article here.