Mixed Race Studies

Census snapshots: An evolving portrait

Chicago Tribune
2010-03-14

Oscar Avila, Tribune reporter

Dahleen Glanton, Tribune reporter

Multiracial, gay and immigrant Americans question whether 2010 form captures country’s fast-changing makeup

Look in the mirror and what do you see?

When the census form arrives in mailboxes this week, the complex answers to that question will help paint America’s evolving portrait, with repercussions for a decade and beyond.

For most people, the census will be a simple 10-minute process. For others in this nation of Barack Obama, Jessica Alba, Tiger Woods, Halle Berry, Apolo Ohno and Joakim Noah , questions of mixed race and ethnicity will prompt soul-searching over how to categorize themselves among a small but growing minority in the national fabric.

The census is a montage of self-portraits that will detail the ways a nation of nearly 309 million has changed since 2000, including migration, family size and housing patterns. While that data is easier to quantify, critics say a rote list of boxes and checkmarks can’t adequately reflect all the racial and ethnic transformations…

On Chicago’s South Side, the daughter of a black father and white mother will check both. Her brother will check black. Their children will write in “mixed” or “biracial.”

A Brazilian immigrant will mark a box that says Hispanic, though she doesn’t accept the label. A woman from Jordan won’t check Asian, though she is. A man born to a Japanese mother and white father considers himself white only at census time.

Another respondent may check four racial boxes like the multi-ethnic Woods, who invented his own identifier: “cablinasian,” a mix of Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian. Obama jokingly labeled himself a “mutt,” but he won’t find that box on the form…

…”The lesson is that, like reality, like our lives, census data are messy,” said Jorge Chapa, a University of Illinois professor who has consulted for the Census Bureau. “But the messiness does reflect the growing diversity and our complexity as a people. It’s closer to the truth.”…

Read the entire article here.

Brave new world: The complicated side-effects of Britain’s mixed-race households

The Independent (UK)
2009-08-22

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Bev is beautiful, with silky black skin and thick hair she ties in a bunch at the top, spurting like a fountain. At 15, her face reminds me of the young and feisty Winnie Mandela. Dressed in denim, she is wearing lots of African bracelets and rings on her ears. And, incongruously, pearls, several strings looped around her high neck. Her face changes like an English summer – bright and sunny one minute, then suddenly dark, brooding and sometimes stormy. She wants to talk, she tells me, otherwise she will go crazy. And what Bev tells me is a part of one of the least reported stories of family life in modern Britain, remarkable and complex, and perpetually shifting.

“My family is messy,” she explains. “There’s been divorce, remarrying, separation, step-parents. It’s hard to talk about that when we are all trying to be polite, faking it all the time. I was in a mood the other day – you know, you get into a mood. My mum came into my room, held my elbow so hard it hurt, and whispered: ‘You’ll lose me this man, too, you stupid girl.’

“Then there is RACE!” she continues. “We are black-and-white and inbetweenies, but no one mentions that either. We have to pretend that mum’s latest guy is not white, and I am not brown, and there isn’t an issue here.”

She doesn’t even take a breath as all this tumbles out. Is he unkind to her? I ask gently

“No, he’s OK, I mean doesn’t hit me or anything. But he has no idea. Comes from Norfolk or something. My mum loves all that – his fancy accent and that. She even went to Wimbledon ‘cos he gets free tickets, and then both of them were moaning about Serena and Venus having a pushy dad, and my mum says something horrible about my ex-dad, and whitie nodded – he always nods, like Noddy. As soon as I have done my GCSEs I am out of here.”

This country has more mixed-race families than any other in Europe. According to the latest social research, one in 10 young Britons lives in a mixed-race household and the number of bi-racial children is growing faster than any other “ethnic minority” group. We also have high divorce rates and – increasingly – step-families. Put all these factors together and you get a newish phenomenon: the rise of the mixed-race step-family. Social services, counsellors and academic researchers have not yet caught up with this social development. And those of us who find ourselves in these reconstituted multi-racial families make it up as we go along. I guess Bev’s mum and step-dad are having to do just that…

Read the entire article here.

Beyond Just Black and White: Why I was so eager to claim my biracial son for my own side

Newsweek.com
2009-01-24

Raina Kelley, Weekly Columnist

When I took my newly born son from the nurse’s arms, I did the expected counting of his fingers and toes. I checked under his cap for hair and flexed his little limbs. Once confident he was whole and healthy, I began to wonder how dark his skin would get. As a black woman married to one of the world’s fairest men, I worried that our son would be so light-skinned as to appear Caucasian, and I wanted him to look black…

Read the entire article here.

The End of Black History: A Postscript to My Son

Newsweek.com
2010-02-28
00:13:57

Raina Kelley, Weekly Columnist

In trying to understand what black history will mean to my son when he’s old enough to wonder, I went in search of the purpose of Black History Month. (Video: Raina Kelly, Jon Groat; Additional material courtesy Angelique Kidjo, Penn Museum)

Mixed Race and the Negotiation of Racialized Selves: Developing the Capacity for Internal Conflict

Psychoanalytic Dialogues
Volume 19, Issue 4 (July 2009)
pages 426 – 441
DOI: 10.1080/10481880903088021

Christopher Bonovitz
William Alanson White Institute; New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis, Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis

The author uses contemporary psychoanalytic theory in further understanding the negotiation of conflict and dissociation in biracial patients who are both African-American and White. Drawing on the work of contemporary theorists who have made efforts to navigate the relationship between inner and outer worlds in our understanding of race from a psychoanalytic perspective, the author examines the relationship between race, culture, and internalized self-other relationshow they interact with each other and impact splitting and dissociative processes among self-states. The author argues for a notion of the unconscious as one that contains historical trauma related to race relations that influences the developing capacity to sustain internal conflict between opposing self-states borne out of this trauma. The author shows how society works against the integration of racialized self-states and interferes with the capacity to contain conflict. Through an extended clinical vignette from an analysis of a mixed-race patient, the author looks at the interplay of self-states between a White analyst (author) and a mixed-race patient (African-American and White) as manifested through a series of enactments and the unconscious mating between dissociated self-states in both patient and analyst. The author argues that the analyst’s engagement of his or her own dissociated self-states and containment of internal conflict is critical to aiding the patient in moving toward greater integration.

Read or purchase the article here.

Couple finds a more than a century old gravestone

Beaumont Enterprise
2009-12-13

Kyle Peveto

Beneath a tool shed behind her house, Mallary Sanders and her fiance found a 118-year-old piece of history they are begging someone to take.

Last weekend, Sanders’ fiance, Justin Trusty, 24, was cleaning beneath the pier-and-beam shed when he came across the intact gravestone of a woman who died in 1891.

He told Sanders, 23, he found something that “will scare you.”

“I wasn’t at all scared,” Sanders said. “I didn’t think there was a grave under there. Now, if I had felt weird about the house….”

The couple had no idea what to do with the stone.

“I just wanted it to go back to where it belongs,” Trusty said.

The gravestone stands about 2-feet tall and is specked with mud from lying flat on the ground. Carved marble reads: in memory of DELIEDE, wife of Wm Ashworth. Deliede died June 27, 1891, at 85, according to the gravestone…

…The Ashworth family name has a well-recorded history in Jefferson and Orange counties. During the Republic of Texas and after statehood, the mixed-race Ashworth family owned thousands of acres of land and large cattle herds in an area that did not welcome free people of color.

“What I thought was interesting was their ability to prosper in a place like Texas that made it illegal to be a free black,” said Jason Gillmer, a professor of law at Texas Wesleyan University who has studied the family…

Read the entire article here.

Shades of Gray: The Life and Times of a Free Family of Color in Antebellum Texas

Jason A. Gillmer, Professor of Law
Texas Wesleyan University School of Law

2009-08-13
64 pages

The history of race and slavery is often told from the perspective of either the oppressors or the oppressed. This Article takes a different tact, unpacking the rich and textured story of the Ashworths, an obscure yet prosperous free family of color who came to Texas beginning in the early 1830s. It is undoubtedly an unusual story; indeed in the history of the time there are surely more prominent names and more famous events. Yet their story reveals a tantalizing world in which–despite legal rules and conventional thinking – life was not so black and white. Drawing on local records rather than canonical cases, and listening to the voices from the community rather than the legislatures, this Article emphasizes the importance of looking to the margins of society to demonstrate how racial relations and ideological notions in the antebellum South were far more intricate than we had previously imagined. The Ashworths never took a stand against slavery; to the contrary, they amassed a fortune on its back. But their racial identity also created complications and fissures in the social order, and their story ultimately tells us as much about them as it does about the times in which they lived.

Read the entire article here.

2010 Census: Stressed Out of the Box

The Huffington Post
2010-03-10

Marcia Dawkins, Assistant Professor of Human Communication
California State University, Fullerton

Robert M. Groves, Director of the U.S. Census Bureau, sent me a letter today. Mr. Groves told me that my 2010 Census form will be arriving sometime next week and that my “response is important. Results from the 2010 Census will be used to help each community get its fair share of government funds for highways, schools, health facilities and many other programs.” According to the Bureau, census data directly affect how more than $200 billion per year in federal and state funding is allocated. The letter went on to stress the importance of “a complete and accurate census” as an issue of fairness to my “community.” After reading this letter I have a question for Mr. Groves: Is the U.S. Census fair to me?…

Read the entire article here.

Stem Cell Donor Matching for Patients of Mixed Race

2011-04-04
21 pages

Ted Bergstrom, Aaron and Cherie Raznick Chair of Economics
University of California, Santa Barbara

Rod Garratt, Professor of Econommics
University of California, Santa Barbara

Damien Sheehan-Connor, Assistant Professor of Economics
Wesleyan University

The plight of multiracial leukemia patients who are unable to find matching stem cell donors has received much media attention. These news stories, while dramatic, are short on statistical information and long on misconceptions. We apply simple probability theory, the genetics of sexual diploid reproduction, and the theory of public goods to produce estimates of the probabilities that multiracial patients will find matching donors in the existing registry. We then compute the benefits and costs of registering more potential donors of single and mixed races.

…4.1 The concept of race

The racial categories, white, African-American, Asian-American, and Hispanic into which NMDP registrants are sorted is coarse and somewhat arbitrary. Since the recorded race of a registrant is self-declared, it indicates a social construction that does not necessarily correspond to genetic inheritance. Statistics show, however that the distribution of HLA types differs markedly between races.  For example, the probability that a randomly selected white American will match another randomly selected white is 34 times that of matching a random Asian-American, 16 times that of matching a random African-American, and 6 times that of matching a random Hispanic. These distributional differences have important implications for recruitment of registrants from racial minorities.

Our statistical measurements are built on the Kollman et al [11] estimates of haploid distributions within each race. Kollman’s estimates, like those in the earlier study by Mori et al [13], are founded on a model that makes two critical assumptions about marriage patterns.  The first assumption is that each racial group is endogamous, that is marriage occurs almost entirely within races. The second assumption is that conditional on marrying within group, the probability that two people marry is independent of their HLA types.

Since the social construct of race is more likely to influence marriage patterns than genetic classification, the use of self-declared race to determine categories seems appropriate for the model that is being estimated. Jacobs and Labov [6] collected data on all married heads of households and their spouses from a 1 percent sample of the 1990 U.S. Census. They determined the self-declared race or national origin of each member of each couple. They found that almost 98 percent of marriages of whites and 96 percent of marriages of African-Americans were endogamous. The Jacobs-Labov study shows that approximately 85 percent of Asian-Americans are married to other Asian-Americans and 77 percent of Hispanics are married to other Hispanics.67  The genetic composition of the current population depends, of course, on the marriage patterns of their parents’ generation, not on current marriage patterns. There is good reason to believe that the current population of Asian-Americans and of Hispanics are children of more endogamous populations than is indicated by current marriages. About 2/3 of the existing population of Asian-Americans were born in Asia and their ancestors for many generations would have had little exposure to non-Asians. About 1/3 of the existing population of Hispanics are immigrants from regions where the population is almost entirely Hispanic…

…A similar diffculty is found with “Hispanic” as a racial category. The Hispanic population of the United States includes significant subpopulations that differ in ethnic makeup and have had little contact with each other for many generations. About 66 percent of the Hispanic population of the United States is of Mexican extraction, 13 percent come from Central and South America, 9 percent are Puerto Rican, and 4 percent are of Cuban extraction. Genetic admixture studies of Hispanics in the U.S. reveal that Mexican-Americans on average have 30-40 percent Native American ancestry, while immigrants from the Spanish Caribbean have African genetic contributions that range from 20-40 percent and contributions of about 18 percent from the native American Arawaks and Caribs…

…Although current rates of intermarriage between African-Americans and whites are low, African-Americans carry a significant amount of genetic material obtained from white ancestors. As Kittles et al [8] observes, “The vast majority of contemporary African Americans are descendants of enslaved Africans kidnapped and transported to America during the transatlantic slave trade from 1619 to 1850.” During the period of slavery, there was substantial mixing of the white and African-American gene pool. Kittles et al reports that it is estimated that in 1860, “there were 4.5 million people of African descent in the U.S., of which 600,000 were of mixed ancestry or “mulattos”.

Geneticists have developed methods for using genetic markers to estimate admixture proportions, that is the proportions of genetic material in a single population that is inherited from members of two or more distinct ancestral populations. Several studies have estimated admixture proportions from samples of African-Americans. These studies indicate that the percentage of European admixture in the African-American population differs substantially by region, ranging from 3.5 percent in the Gullah sea island community of South Carolina, 10 percent in the rural South, about 20 percent in the industrial North, and 22-35 percent on the West Coast. [8](Figure 2), [14] The admixture of African-American genetic material in the U.S. white population appears to be much smaller. The geographic differences in the genetic makeup of the African-American population suggests that the accuracy of estimations of HLA-distributions for African Americans could be improved by disaggregating according to region of birth…

Read the entire paper here.

Beyond Black & White: Mike Tauber ´94 and Pamela Singh ´95 cross the color lines in their new book on mixed-race America

CC: online
Connecticut College Magazine
Fall 2009

Phoebe Hall

On a perfect summer day in July, Mike Tauber ´94 and Pamela Singh ´95 relax on the screened porch of their home in Fairfield, Conn[ecticut] As they try to feed lunch to their sons, Wyatt, 3, and Rohwan, 1, Tauber and Singh talk about typical parenting challenges: potty training, finding babysitters, and juggling their work schedules.

But they face not-so-typical challenges too. Like when strangers mistake Singh for the babysitter, and the white nanny as Tauber´s wife. Or when teachers assume Wyatt can´t speak English. Or when they fill out forms for schools or doctors and have to pick just one box to identify their sons´ race.

It was this issue of pigeon-holing, one with which Singh herself has struggled for years, that inspired the couple to collaborate on a coffee-table book, “Blended Nation: Portraits and Interviews of Mixed-Race America.” Published this summer by Channel Photographics, the book features individuals and families who identified themselves as multiracial on the 2000 U.S. Census, the first time they could do so…

Read the entire article here.