Mixed Race Studies

4 Years Later, Race Is Still Issue for Some Voters

The New York Times
2012-05-03

Sabrina Tavernise

STEUBENVILLE, Ohio — This is the land of die-hard Democrats — mill workers, coal miners and union members. They have voted party line for generations, forming a reliable constituency for just about any Democrat who decides to run for office.

Certain precincts in this county are not going to vote for Obama,” said John Corrigan, clerk of courts for Jefferson County, who was drinking coffee in a furniture shop downtown one morning last week with a small group of friends, retired judges and civil servants. “I don’t want to say it, but we all know why.”

A retired state employee, Jason Foreman, interjected, “I’ll say it: it’s because he’s black.”

For nearly three and a half years, a black family has occupied the White House, and much of the time what has been most remarkable about that fact is how unremarkable it has become to the country. While Mr. Obama will always be known to the history books as the country’s first black president, his mixed-race heritage has only rarely surfaced in visible and explicit ways amid the tumult of a deep recession, two wars and shifting political currents…

Read the entire article here.

Brazil’s top court backs racial quotas in universities

The Australian
2012-05-01

BRAZIL’s Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that racial quotas used in universities are constitutional and are meant to redress inequalities stemming from centuries of slavery.

The ruling issued by the 10-member court concerned the case of the University of Brasilia which in 2004 set up quotes to reserve 20 per cent of admissions to black, mixed-race and indigenous students…

…The court ruling followed an appeal lodged in 2009 by the right-wing DEM party which argued that the University of Brasilia quota policy ran counter to the principle of equality and fostered racism by creating privileges based on racial criteria.

But the judges countered that quotas were a legitimate method to redress slavery-derived inequalities and discrimination that still continues to affect Afro-Brazilians…

Read the entire article here.

Number of biracial babies soars over past decade

The Washington Post
2012-04-26

Carol Morello, Demographics Reporter

The number of mixed-race babies has soared over the past decade, new census data show, a result of more interracial couples and a cultural shift in how many parents identify their children in a multiracial society.

More than 7 percent of the 3.5 million children born in the year before the 2010 Census were of two or more races, up from barely 5 percent a decade earlier. The number of children born to black and white couples and to Asian and white couples almost doubled.

“I think people are more comfortable in identifying themselves, and their children, as mixed race,” said William H. Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer who analyzed detailed census data on mixed-race infants. “It’s much more socially acceptable, more mainstream, to say, ‘That’s what we want to identify them as.’”…

…Frey said the census statistics on children with black and white parents in particular show a country that is advancing toward the day when race loses its power to be a hot-button issue.

People who identify themselves as one race tend to be older. They reflect a society in which laws prohibited interracial marriage and states such as Virginia enforced a “one drop” rule designating anyone as black if they could trace even one drop of their blood to an African American ancestor. President Obama, for example, identified himself as one race — black — on his census form, even though his mother was white…

Read the entire article here.

Multi-ethnic Koreans find help with assimilation through MACK Foundation

The Korea Times
2012-04-25

A “typical Korean” probably wouldn’t call Yang Chan-wook a typical Korean, but he wants to be seen that way. The 37-year-old is a multi-ethnic Korean, part Korean from his mother’s side and part African-American from his father’s side. And he’s working towards better understanding of multi-ethnic Koreans in Korean society with his foundation, the Movement for the Advancement of the Cultural-Diversity of Koreans, also known as MACK.

The MACK Foundation president was born in Korea, but moved around between the U.S., Germany and Korea when he was young. Yang says he really started to come to terms with his dual ethnicities after his parents divorced.

“It was around 10 or 11 when I started to identify myself with the different cultural aspects of my own life that either contradicted or fit into the environment that I was in,” says Yang. Until that point, Yang continues, “my ethnicity wasn’t really on my mind until I moved to my father’s side of the family in an all African-American community.” It was there in Chicago where Yang says that his dual-ethnicities were actually being pointed out to him and he had to start thinking about what that meant.

After that, Yang decided to dedicate his life towards helping others with similar backgrounds. He moved back to Korea in 2003. It was here in 2009 where he took the reins of MACK.

“We’re different from other multi-cultural foundations because we’re focused on Koreans accepting the diversity of its own people,” says Yang…

…Shin Hei-soo, a U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights expert, says that Korea still has many issues accepting a multi-ethnic as well as a multi-cultural society. It’s because “Koreans have long historical roots of the family tree,” Shin explains. In her hometown area in Gyeonggi Province, where they can count back to 11 generations of the family name Shin, she says even Koreans with a different last name than Shin are still treated as outsiders.

Rural and older generations might have a more conservative view about accepting mixed-race Koreans into society, says Lee Kyu-jae, a recent Hanyang University graduate. “In my opinion, mixed-race Koreans are also our citizens so we shouldn’t consider them as foreign or someone who is different.” The 26-year-old continues, “because Korea is a single-race nation, most Koreans cannot help having a sense of difference about them. So, they sometimes suffer from hardship due to this unique Korean perspective.”…

Read the entire article here.

2010 Census Shows Interracial and Interethnic Married Couples Grew by 28 Percent over Decade

United States Census Bureau
Newsroom
2012-04-25

The U.S. Census Bureau today released a 2010 Census brief, Households and Families: 2010, that showed interracial or interethnic opposite-sex married couple households grew by 28 percent over the decade from 7 percent in 2000 to 10 percent in 2010. States with higher percentages of couples of a different race or Hispanic origin in 2010 were primarily located in the western and southwestern parts of the United States, along with Hawaii and Alaska.

A higher percentage of unmarried partners were interracial or interethnic than married couples. Nationally, 10 percent of opposite-sex married couples had partners of a different race or Hispanic origin, compared with 18 percent of opposite-sex unmarried partners and 21 percent of same-sex unmarried partners.

Read the entire press release here.

Obama as Anti-American: Visual Folklore in Right-Wing Forwarded E-mails and Construction of Conservative Social Identity

Journal of American Folklore
Volume 125, Number 496, Spring 2012
pages 177-203
DOI: 10.1353/jaf.2012.0018

Margaret Duffy, Associate Professor of Journalism
University of Missouri

Janis Teruggi Page
George Washington University

Rachel Young
Missouri School of Journalism

This paper investigates the group-building potential of forwarded e-mails through a visual analysis of negative images about President Barack Obama. We argue that these e-mails are a form of political digital folklore that may contribute to constructing participants’ individual and group identities. Images amplify the impact and believability of the messages, especially when linked to familiar cultural references and experiences and may lead to increased political polarization and hostility.

Read or purchase the article here.

Film Review: Marley

Film Journal International
2012-04-18

Marsha McCreadie

Marley, the documentary by Oscar-winning Kevin Macdonald about the legendary musician and national and international symbol for individual rights, should sparkle and sing—OK, there’s some of that—but it just sort of hums along. Maybe you can’t catch this particular lightning in a bottle, but there might be another way than this respectful, straightforward, admiring approach.

 If anyone could display the spectacular yet contradictory parts of Bob Marley—a multi-talented half-black/half-white womanizer who loved spiritually and pan-nationally; a mesmerizing performer who was a quiet guy; a pride-instiller for his dirt-poor country and religious proselytizer who lived by his own rules—it should be Macdonald. The Oscar-winning British director made the tyrant Idi Amin likeable and the charming James McAvoy despicable in The Last King of Scotland; he set our hearts to pounding with the jarring edit of massacred Israeli Olympians in One Day in September. Marley is thorough, revelatory and completely fair-minded. It’s just not very exciting. Wrong for Bob Marley…

…The Marley family-approved doc includes rare, candid interviews with his children (well, two of the eleven), and three—wait, four—of his seven women. Marley comes across as introspective, also extremely competitive (one too many shots of him at soccer), emphasizing the psychoanalytic angle that he was so driven because he never really knew his white father, married to his mother Cedella but mainly absent until he died when Bob was 10. We see a photo of Norval Marley, learn what little there is to know about this British Marine captain, and find that Bob always saw himself as an outsider: never part of the white community nor of the black, as he was considered a half-caste, not black enough. In the black Jamaican community, it was rumored his white half caused his melanoma, from which he died at 36…

Read the entire review here.

The Legend of Marley: Kevin Macdonald considers reggae, Rasta and politics in new documentary

Film Journal International
2012-04-19

Doris Toumarkine

It’s taken several decades and faced many frustrating setbacks, but a richly documented and worthy film about the late reggae superstar Bob Marley has at last been realized.

Previously attached to Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme, Marley has been brought to life by Oscar-winning Scottish director Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September), who was persuaded to board the project by executive producer Chris Blackwell, the man who signed Marley to his influential Island Records label.

Just as important, Hollywood producer/financier Steve Bing’s money kicked in (through his Shangri-La Entertainment) and Marley’s family finally acceded to full cooperation and access after much dissension. Marley’s son Ziggy is an exec producer and Bing is a producer.

Expectations are no doubt soaring high for this first full-blown documentary, not just for hard-core Marley and reggae fans but for all those who value pop music and its evolution as integral to Western culture.

Providing a wealth of visual material, music and testimony from talking heads close to Marley, the Magnolia release initially conveys the artist’s extreme poverty in his native Jamaica, where he grew up the mixed-race son of a teenage black mother and older, largely absent white British father, a military man who sailed the seas or just plain drifted…

…Maybe not everything was captured. Marley had a reputation for the wandering eye (he had 11 children) and smoked a lot of weed, aka ganja, but Marley mostly stays clear of those topics.

 More to the point, the doc provides a wealth of music and suggests why the Marley reggae sound caught on so big. Music abounds, including hits from the album Exodus and the reggae smash “No Woman, No Cry,” whose rhythms were unique because, as the doc shows, Marley shifted the traditional beats…

…So what was the most surprising thing Macdonald learned about Marley?

 “I discovered how Marley was such an outcast, such an outsider even in his native country,” he replies. “As a mixed-race man, he was never really respected and he was even looked down upon because he was a Rastafarian. Yet he found his identity as a Rasta and when he became successful, everything changed.”…

Read the entire review here.

I Do Choose To Run: Personal boxes and the ethics of race

The Stanford Daily
2012-04-09

Miles Unterreiner

In an eloquently argued New York Times Sunday Review article on March 16th, entitled “As Black as We Wish to Be,” author Thomas Chatterton Williams advances a provocative and thought-provoking argument: “mixed-race blacks have an ethical obligation to identify as black — and interracial couples share a similar moral imperative to inculcate certain ideas of black heritage and racial identity in their mixed-race children, regardless of how they look.”
 
Is this a good argument? Do mixed-race individuals have an ethical obligation to identify as members of one race, rather than many or none? And is there a special obligation in the case of mixed-race African-Americans, given this country’s long history of racial discrimination?
 
I must respectfully disagree with Mr. Williams and answer all three with “no.”…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

For Asian-American Couples, a Tie That Binds

The New York Times
2012-03-30

Rachel L. Swarns

WHEN she was a philosophy student at Harvard College eight years ago, Liane Young never thought twice about all the interracial couples who flitted across campus, arm and arm, hand in hand. Most of her Asian friends had white boyfriends or girlfriends. In her social circles, it was simply the way of the world.

But today, the majority of Ms. Young’s Asian-American friends on Facebook have Asian-American husbands or wives. And Ms. Young, a Boston-born granddaughter of Chinese immigrants, is married to a Harvard medical student who loves skiing and the Pittsburgh Steelers and just happens to have been born in Fujian Province in China.

Ms. Young said she hadn’t been searching for a boyfriend with an Asian background. They met by chance at a nightclub in Boston, and she is delighted by how completely right it feels. They have taken lessons together in Cantonese (which she speaks) and Mandarin (which he speaks), and they hope to pass along those languages when they have children someday.

“We want Chinese culture to be a part of our lives and our kids’ lives,” said Ms. Young, 29, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College who married Xin Gao, 27, last year. “It’s another part of our marriage that we’re excited to tackle together.”

Interracial marriage rates are at an all-time high in the United States, with the percentage of couples exchanging vows across the color line more than doubling over the last 30 years. But Asian-Americans are bucking that trend, increasingly choosing their soul mates from among their own expanding community…

Read the entire article here.