Mixed Race Studies

ETHS 309 D: Race & Ethnicity

Edgewood College, Madison, Wisconsin
Ethnic Studies
Spring 2013

Cynthia Rolling, Professor of Anthropology and Sociology

This course engages students in an analysis of historical and contemporary experiences of race and ethnicity in the United States as influenced by changing migration trends and economic developments. Special consideration is given to the social construction of racial categories; issues of whiteness; and multiracial identity.

Political Attitudes and Ideologies of Multiracial Americans: The Implications of Mixed Race in the United States

Political Research Quarterly
Volume 61, Number 2 (2008)
pp. 253-267
DOI: 10.1177/1065912907313209

Natalie Masuoka, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Tufts University

A contemporary rise in multiracial self-identification provokes a number of questions about the significance that this racial identity may hold for American politics. This research focuses on the political attitudes of multiracial Americans to determine how multiracial identities may influence individual public opinion. I offer a test of three competing theoretical models of multiracial political attitude formation: Classic Assimilation, Minority Trumping, and New Identity Formation. This research finds that, generally, multiracial individuals who self-identify as such develop political opinions that parallel with their minority counterparts.

Read or purchase the article here.

On This Day: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander

Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement
University of North Carolina
2012-12-05

Alison Shay

On December 5, 1925—87 years ago today—the jury in the annulment trial Rhinelander v. Rhinelander found in favor of a mixed-race woman sued for marriage annulment by her white husband.

Leonard Kip Rhinelander, a wealthy white society man, pursued and in 1924 married Alice Jones, a working class woman with British parents—one white, the other of mixed ethnicity. Only one month after their marriage, Leonard sued to annul the marriage, claiming that Alice had misrepresented her racial background.

Leonard’s family had objected to the couple’s relationship throughout their courtship, but had failed to break them up. By marrying Alice, Leonard caused her to be the first African American woman listed in The Social Register...

…In Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing, and the Protection of Whiteness (UNC Press 2009), Elizabeth Smith-Pryor argues that the Rhinelander trial encapsulated the tremendous anxieties over racial passing, class slippage, and black migration in the northern United States during this era.

Other books about the trial include Angela Onwuachi-Willig’s According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family (Yale University Press, forthcoming in 2013) and Heidi Ardizzone’s Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White (Norton 2002)…

Read the entire article here.

Is There Colorism on the Campaign Trail?

The Root
2012-12-13

Keli Goff, Political Correspondent

Experts weighed in on when skin tone matters in politics and society.

(The Root) — The latest installment of CNN’s docuseries Black in America asked the question “Who Is Black in America?” and examined the issue of colorism: bias based not just on race but also on actual skin color. The news special cited well-documented research confirming that lighter-skinned immigrants earn more than their darker-skinned counterparts. But one topic the special did not explore is whether skin-color bias has a tangible impact on American politics, particularly at the national level.

Are Americans more likely to vote for a minority candidate who is lighter-skinned? The experts we spoke with said it appears so.

David A. Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank specializing in research relating to blacks, said that the numbers speak for themselves. “You can’t think of many [black politicians] who are very dark,” he noted.

To his point, most elected (as opposed to appointed) black American politicians who have broken a significant barrier have either been extremely light-skinned or part white. Examples include Edward Brooke, the first black senator to be popularly elected; Adam Clayton Powell Jr., New York’s first black congressman; Douglas Wilder, the first black governor in the U.S.; and David Dinkins, New York’s first black mayor. Then, of course, there is President Barack Obama, who is not as light as the others, but is also not dark — and whom most Americans are aware is of biracial parentage…

…In an interview with The Root, Yaba Blay, founder of the “(1)ne Drop” project and a consulting producer on “Who Is Black in America?” explained, “In slavery, white ancestry communicated, through skin color, one’s approximation to whiteness at a time when whiteness was equated with being human, and blackness was equated with chattel. So looking white was a saving grace. [It meant] you are more human, civilized, smarter — all the more positive associations people assign to whiteness. So when we look at the larger society and the ability to see a black person as a potential leader, I think it’s absolutely connected to colorism in that historical framework.”…

…The intersection of skin color and class status among black Americans began during slavery. As explained in the textbook Black Slave Owners in Charleston, when black female slaves would give birth to children fathered by their white slave owners, some slave owners would leave property or other forms of inheritance to their children, and some would bestow freedom upon them, too. This created a class of “free persons of color” who were more likely to be fair-skinned and have some measure of economic stability, upward mobility and education…

Read the entire article here.

Olsen: A multiracial, multiethnic future

Salt Lake Tribune
Salt Lake City, Utah
2012-12-28

Erica Olsen

Recent political analysis has focused on the decline of the white vote, and a corresponding rise in the number of minority voters. According to exit polls in November, President Barack Obama won the votes of about 93 percent of African Americans, 71 percent of Hispanics (crucial to his victory in Colorado) and 73 percent of Asians. Mitt Romney took 59 percent of the white vote.

Looking at these numbers, you’d think all voters fit neatly into one — and only one — racial or ethnic category. Pretty strange, considering that the guy who got re-elected doesn’t fit neatly into one category himself. Black father, white mother: Obama may identify as African American, but it doesn’t take Nate Silver to do the math and conclude that our president is biracial…

…Mixed-race identities defy easy matching with political attitudes. In a world of Democrats and Republicans, blue states and red, mixed identities remind us that we’re all individuals, with beliefs that are mixed, as well.

As a fiction writer, identities — and the stories we tell about ourselves — grab me more than overtly political issues. Who is a Westerner? With my mixed heritage and newcomer status in the Four Corners, am I one?…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Census Bureau Rethinks The Best Way To Measure Race

National Public Radio
2012-12-27

Corey Dade, National Correspondent, Digital News

Possible revisions to how the decennial census asks questions about race and ethnicity have raised concerns among some groups that any changes could reduce their population count and thus weaken their electoral clout.

The Census Bureau is considering numerous changes to the 2020 survey in an effort to improve the responses of minorities and more accurately classify Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern and multiracial populations.

Potential options include eliminating the “Hispanic origin” question and combining it with the race question, new queries for people of Middle Eastern or North African heritage, and spaces for Asians to list their country of descent. One likely outcome could be an end to the use of “Negro.”

The stakes surrounding population counts are high. Race data collected in the census are used for many purposes, including enforcement of civil rights laws and monitoring of racial disparities in education, health and other areas…

…Broadly, the nation’s demographic shifts underscore the fact that many people, particularly Latinos and immigrants, don’t identify with the American concept of race…

Read the entire article here.

Triple Jeopardy: Family Stresses and Subsequent Divorce Following the Adoption of Racially and Ethnically Mixed Children

Journal of Divorce
Volume 4, Issue 4, 1982
pages 43-55
DOI: 10.1300/J279v04n04_03

Perihan Aral Rosenthal, MD

The adoption of racially, ethnically, or culturally different older children creates a stressful process of integration for both the children and parents. If such children are placed in families already troubled by severe marital or emotional problems, the children’s and parents’ difficulties escalate disastrously. To prevent the kind of aggravated problems described in this article, mental health professionals must educate and sensitize adoption agencies and prospective parents to the hazards.

Read or purchase the article here.

Racial endogamy in Great Britain: A cross-national perspective

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 3, Issue 2 (1980)
pages 224-235
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.1980.9993301

Richard T. Schaefer, Professor of Sociology
DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Introduction

Large numbers of Blacks and Asians have migrated to Great Britain since World War II, and especially between 1955 and 1967. These ‘coloured’ people, as they are referred to in Britain, were met with increasingly less sympathy and harsher immigration restrictions until the barriers to entry were almost insurmountable.

Initially British observers were optimistic about the likelihood of a multi-racial society succeeding in Britain. Kenneth Little advanced the ‘colour-class hypothesis’ in the early 1950s arguing that the Commonwealth immigrants were seen by the English as representatives of the natives in the Empire. The acquisition of wealth, education, and knowledge of the arts could make the immigrant acceptable to the host country. Implicit in this argument was that intolerance shown to the people from the former colonies was due to their being immigrants, not because they were coloured. Although the British experience of the last two decades has refuted this hypothesis, little data have been accumulated with respect to the ultimate measure of acceptance—intermarriage. The rate of intermarriage between races is affected by numerous factors, and may be viewed as a specific social action with significance both to the individual participants and the society of which they are member.

The experience in the Empire would have predicted little acceptance of marriage between whites and coloureds. For example, the English and Indians intermingled freely in the latter’s native country and the East India Company under British control first encouraged intermarriage in the belief that racially mixed people would serve as a ‘bridge’ between Britain and India. However, by the end of the eighteenth century the official policies had turned full circle; marriages crossing racial lines were treated with distrust and even regarded at a potential threat to the Empire.

Gunnar Myrdal outlined the theory of the ‘rank order of discrimination’ in which he postulated that the primary concern of whites during the Jim Crow era in the South in their relations with blacks, is to prevent complete intermarriage. When marital assimilation, as Milton Gordon termed it, ‘takes place fully, the minority group loses its ethnic identity in the larger host…

Read or purchase the article here.

Race, ideas, and ideals: A comparison of Franz Boas and Hans F.K. Günther

History of European Ideas
Volume 32, Issue 3, 2006
pages 313-332
DOI: 10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2006.05.001

Amos Morris-Reich, Director of the Bucerius Institute
Department of Jewish History
University of Haifa, Israel

This article compares two radically opposed views concerning “race” in the first half of the 20th century: the one of Franz Boas (1858–1942), the founder of American cultural anthropology, and the other of Hans F. K. Günther (1889–1968), the most widely read theoretician of race in Nazi Germany. Opposite as their views were, both derived from a similar non-evolutionist German anthropological matrix. The article reconstructs their definitions of racial objects and studies their analyses of racial intermixture. Although both believed that contemporary peoples were racially deeply mixed, Boas moved towards an antiracist conception of race-as-population, whereas Günther moved towards a racist conception of homogenous races in mixed peoples. The comparison shows that the major difference between them concerns their ideals or guiding principles. Their respective ideals seeped into their versions of science and transformed the nature and the significance of their respective ideas.

Read or purchase the article here.

Book Review: Exploring the Borderlands of Race, Nation, Sex and Gender

Discover Nikkei: Japanese Migrants and Their Descendants
2012-12-26

Nancy Matsumoto

Growing up in predominantly white Marin County, mixed-race yonsei Akemi Johnson hates her name and just wants to blend in. In college, though, her attitude changes. She studies race and ethnicity and travels to Japan. Though her stated purpose there is to study issues around the American bases in Okinawa, she later writes, ”My real motives were more personal and intertwined with the past, with traumas that had been born many years before.” She reflects on why her grandparents, who were imprisoned at the Tule Lake and Gila River concentration camps, never talked about those experiences. Eventually she returns to America satisfied that she has confronted her “fears of association, shame, really, of my Japanese ancestry—and won.”

Johnson’s story is just one of many that psychologist Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu tells in his latest book, When Half is Whole: Multiethnic Asian American Identities. Exploring the complex issue of identity among mixed-race Asians has been his life work. With subtleness and great empathy he guides us through what he calls “the borderlands” where transnational and multiethnic identities are formed, arguing that in an increasingly globalized world, identities are more flexible and inclusive, and can “challenge the meaning of national and racial categories and boundaries.”…

Read the entire review here.