Mixed Race Studies

Angry Black White Boy or The Miscegenation of Macon Detornay: A Novel

Random House
2005-03-08
352 pages
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4000-5487-9

Adam Mansbach

From the acclaimed author of Shackling Water comes the first great race novel of the twenty-first century, an incendiary and ruthlessly funny satire about violence, pop culture, and American identity.

Macon Detornay is a suburban white boy possessed and politicized by black culture, and filled with rage toward white America. After moving to New York City for college, Macon begins robbing white passengers in his taxicab, setting off a manhunt for the black man presumed to be committing the crimes. When his true identity is revealed, Macon finds himself to be a celebrity and makes use of the spotlight to hold forth on the evils and invisibility of whiteness. Soon he launches the Race Traitor Project, a stress-addled collective that attracts guilty liberals, wannabe gangstas, and bandwagon riders from all over the country to participate in a Day of Apology—a day set aside for white people to make amends for four hundred years of oppression. The Day of Apology pushes New York City over the edge into an epic riot, forcing Macon to confront the depth of his own commitment to the struggle.

Peopled with all manner of race pimps and players, Angry Black White Boy is a stunning breakout book from a critically acclaimed young writer and should be required reading for anyone who wants to get under the skin of the complexities of identity in America.

Read Chapter One here.

Whiteness and the city: Australians of Anglo-Indian heritage in suburban Melbourne

South Asian Diaspora
Volume 4, Issue 2, May 2012
pages 123-137
DOI: 10.1080/19438192.2012.675721

Michele Lobo, Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Arts and Education
Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

Leslie Morgan
School of Education
Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

This paper uses an auto-ethnographic approach to map how two Melburnians of Anglo-Indian heritage make sense of their belonging through connections to cities within the South Asian diaspora, in particular, Lahore, Kolkata and London. As diasporic writers of mixed descent working within the disciplines of geography and visual culture, we use food and images of public space as entry points to explore our everyday experiences as translocal subjects who inhabit several spaces simultaneously. The exploration of such stories of intercultural encounter is interesting and significant in the field of diaspora studies because as South Asians we were historically an ‘out-of-place’ group of mixed descent in a colonial context, a community without a regional home in independent India/Pakistan, and an imagination that we were entitled to a home in Britain and Australia by virtue of our whiteness and Anglo-ness. Our stories provide a nuanced understanding of the dominance, power and privilege of whiteness in colonial and post-colonial contexts and an insight into how mobility impacts on our sense of belonging.

What do you eat for breakfast?

An interview held at a participant’s home on a cold winter morning was nearing conclusion. The audio recorder was switched off, but Harry, an Anglo-Australian man, a local councillor continued to talk about how Dandenong was changing. He expressed feelings of loss, regret and anxiety when he said that Dandenong, once a white working-class neighbourhood in suburban Melbourne with ‘good-quality homes and good-quality people’ had now become stigmatised as a ‘shit hole’, ‘a ghetto’ with ‘second-class citizens’ (Harry, interview 1 May 2003). Harry then began alluding to the cultural difference between Anglo-Australians and ‘ethnics’ and used food as the principal determinant. He said that ‘they live on the smell of an oily rag. It does not cost them very much to live. They see the food, vegies. jeez, it’s so cheap. Their diet is poor, that is their staple diet until they follow the Australian way of life’ (Harry, research diary entry, 1 May 2003). When Harry described Dandenong with disgust, stigmatised recent settlers, many of who are from India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Sudan, and devalued ‘ethnic’ food as cheap, less nutritious and unhealthy. I was shocked and surprised; as a new resident, this was the first time that I had heard an Anglo-Australian who was an elected community leader speak in such a manner…

Read or purchase the article here.

Demographic Shifts Redefine What It Means to Be Korean

The New York Times
2012-11-29

Choe Sang-Hun

SEOUL, South Korea — Jasmine Lee realizes just how Korean she’s become when she breaks out in the language, forgetting that her Filipino mother on the other end of the phone can’t understand her. But she is reminded of the limits of assimilation when Koreans, impressed by her fluency, comment: “You sound more Korean than Koreans do.”

Ms. Lee, 35, who was born Jasmine Bacurnay in the Philippines, made history in April when she became the first naturalized citizen — and the first non-ethnic Korean — to win a seat in South Korea’s National Assembly. Her election reflected one of the most significant demographic shifts in the country’s modern history, a change Ms. Lee says “Koreans understand with their brain, but have yet to embrace with their heart.”

Only a decade ago, school textbooks still urged South Koreans to take pride in being of “one blood” and ethnically homogeneous. Now, the country is facing the prospect of becoming a multiethnic society. While the foreign-born population is still small compared with countries with a tradition of immigration, it’s enough to challenge how South Koreans see themselves.

“It’s time to redefine a Korean,” said Kim Yi-seon, chief researcher on multiculturalism at the government-financed Korean Women’s Development Institute. “Traditionally, a Korean meant someone born to Korean parents in Korea, who speaks Korean and has Korean looks and nationality. People don’t think someone is a Korean just because he has a Korean citizenship.”…

…One of every 10 marriages in South Korea now involves a foreign spouse. Although overall numbers of schoolchildren in South Korea have been declining — to 6.7 million this year from 7.7 million in 2007 — as a result of one of the world’s lowest birth rates, the number of multiethnic students has been climbing by 6,000 a year in the same period.

“A multicultural society is not just coming; it’s already here,” Ms. Lee, a member of the governing Saenuri Party, said in an interview at her office in the National Assembly…

…“They bring religious and ethnic strife to our country, where we had none before,” said Kim Ky-baek, publisher of the nationalist Web site Minjokcorea and a critic of the government’s policy of admitting and providing social benefits to foreign-born brides and migrant workers. “They create an obstacle to national unification. North Korea adheres to pure-blood nationalism, while the South is turning into a hodgepodge of mixed blood.”

The challenge for South Korea is whether it can “redefine the nation, embracing people who do not share the same blood into a broader Koreanness,” said Chung Ki-seon, senior researcher at the IOM Migration Research and Training Center…

…And this year, for the first time, South Korea began accepting multiethnic Korean citizens into its armed forces. Previously, the military had maintained that a different skin color would make them stand out and hurt unity…

Read the entire article here.

Laylah Ali’s show both confounds and mesmerizes

The Boston Globe
2012-02-19

Sebastian Smee,  Art Critic

Laylah Ali is an artist to reckon with. Any opportunity to see her work should not be missed, and for the next two weeks, the Jaffe-Friede Gallery, a small college gallery a short walk from the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, is offering just such an opportunity.

Born in 1968, Ali grew up in Buffalo and lives in Williamstown. She has been an artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College this winter. But the current show of drawings in pencil and black ink is the fruit of an earlier period. All were made between 2005 and 2007.

They show Ali’s inimitable cast of two-dimensional characters, many of them missing arms and other anatomical parts, some of them solo, others in groups of two or three. They are of indeterminate sex and indeterminate race. But all have extra features – strange encumbrances that resemble humps, hoods, headdresses, horns, turbans, goggles, burkas, and beards…

Read the entire review here.

Kant’s Race Theory, Forster’s Counter, and the Metaphysics of Color

The Eighteenth Century
Volume 53, Number 4, Winter 2012
pages 393-412
DOI: 10.1353/ecy.2012.0032

Sally Hatch Gray, Assistant Professor of German
Mississippi State University

This article argues for an understanding of Kant’s race theory as an integral part of his idea of nature and of humans in nature as presented in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790). It places an examination of Kant and Forster’s debate over race, which was ignited in 1785 upon the publication of Kant’s second essay on race, “Definition of a Concept of a Human Race” (“Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrace”), in the context of an illumination of the connections between aesthetics and anthropology in Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen, 1764) and Forster’s Voyage round the World (Reise um die Welt 1777). Forster responded to Kant’s new “race” classifications, which were based essentially on skin color, with “Still More about the Human Races” (“Noch etwas über Menschenraßen,” 1786). This article shows that Kant then developed his scientific theory and his idea of a teleological nature as presented in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, at least in part, in order to provide a unifying theoretical basis for his race theory so that it could withstand the scrutiny of an empirical scientific method based on deductive logic, such as that advanced by Forster. While Forster’s strict empiricism, perspectivism, and rejection of “race” as a scientific classification reflect an underlying, distinctly modern, concept of the natural world, Kant’s nature, as presented in his third Critique, reveals a metaphysically-based structure supporting a universal cosmopolitanism, but veils a particular European perspective that allows a damaging global authority on difference.

At a key moment in his 1777 travelogue A Voyage Round the World (Reise um die Welt) describing his adventures aboard Captain Cook’s second exploratory journey into the Antarctic, the narrative of the young German naturalist Georg Forster (1754-94), takes on a decidedly more excited tone. In August 1773, he and his traveling companions were enjoying the charms of the Society Islands, when, during a banquet featuring traditional dancing, the atmosphere became sexually charged. The sailors bribed the women with bits of meat to continue making seemingly indiscreet dance movements, while the hosts treated the British officers and Prussian naturalists to a peek into the dancers’ dressing room. Forster writes:

To complete our entertainment this day, the chief gave orders for performing another heeva, and we were admitted (behind the scenes} to see the ladies dressing for that purpose.  They obtained some string of beads on this occasion, with which we took it into our heads to improve upon their ornaments, much to their own satisfaction. Among the spectators we observed several of the prettiest women of this country, and one of them was remarkable for the whitest complexion we had ever seen in all these islands. Her colour resembled that of white wax a little sullied, without having the least appearance of sickness, which that hue commonly conveys; and her fine black eyes and hair contrasted so well with it, that she was admired by us all.

Forster’s excitement helps to relay the intense experience of a special event which “perfects the joys of the day” as he writes in German, “Um die Freuden dieses Tages volkommen zu machen.” In this moment, they have not only been released from the physical hardship of months at sea aboard an eighteenth-century sailing vessel, but they are taken with “einstimmige Bewunderung” a kind of “unanimous wonderment.” beyond their immediate reality in their response…

How the United States Racializes Latinos: White Hegemony and Its Consequences

Paradigm Publishers
May 2009
264 pages
6″ x 9″
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-59451-598-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59451-599-6

Edited by

José A. Cobas, Emeritus Professor of Sociology
Arizona State University

Jorge Duany, Professor of Anthropology
University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras

Joe R. Feagin, Ella C. McFadden Professor of Sociology
Texas A&M University

Mexican and Central American undocumented immigrants, as well as U.S. citizens such as Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans, have become a significant portion of the U.S. population. Yet the U.S. government, mainstream society, and radical activists characterize this rich diversity of peoples and cultures as one group alternatively called “Hispanics,” “Latinos,” or even the pejorative “illegals.” How has this racializing of populations engendered governmental policies, police profiling, economic exploitation, and even violence that afflict these groups?

From a variety of settings—New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Central America, Cuba—this book explores this question in considering both the national and international implications of U.S. policy. Its coverage ranges from legal definitions and practices to popular stereotyping by the public and the media, covering such diverse topics as racial profiling, workplace discrimination, mob violence, treatment at border crossings, barriers to success in schools, and many more. It shows how government and social processes of racializing are too seldom understood by mainstream society, and the implication of attendant policies are sorely neglected.

Contents

• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction: Racializing Latinos: Historical Background and Current Forms / José A. Cobas, Jorge Duany, and Joe R. Feagin
• Chapter 1: Pigments of Our Imagination: On the Racialization and Racial Identities of “Hispanics” and “Latinos” / Rubén G. Rumbaut
• Chapter 2: Counting Latinos in the U.S. Census / Clara E. Rodríguez
• Chapter 3: Becoming Dark: The Chilean Experience in California, 1848–1870 / Fernando Purcell
• Chapter 4: Repression and Resistance: The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin in the United States, 1848–1928 / William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb
• Chapter 5: Opposite One-Drop Rules: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Need to Reconceive Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Race Relations / Laura E. Gómez
• Chapter 6: Racializing the Language Practices of U.S. Latinos: Impact on Their Education / Ofelia García
• Chapter 7: English-Language Spanish in the United States as a Site of Symbolic Violence / Jane H. Hill
• Chapter 8: Racialization among Cubans and Cuban Americans / Lisandro Pérez
• Chapter 9 Racializing Miami: Immigrant Latinos and Colorblind Racism in the Global City / Elizabeth Aranda, Rosa E. Chang, and Elena Sabogal
• Chapter 10: Blacks, Latinos, and the Immigration Debate: Conflict and Cooperation in Two Global Cities / Xóchitl Bada and Gilberto Cárdenas
• Chapter 11: Central American Immigrants and Racialization in a Post-Civil Rights Era / Nestor P. Rodriguez and Cecilia Menjívar
• Chapter 12: Agency and Structure in Panethnic Identity Formation: The Case of Latino/a Entrepreneurs /Zulema Valdez
• Chapter 13: Racializing Ethnicity in the Spanish-Speaking Caribbean: A Comparison of Haitians in the Dominican Republic and Dominicans in Puerto Rico / Jorge Duany
• Chapter 14: Transnational Racializations: The Extension of Racial Boundaries from Receiving to Sending Societies / Wendy D. Roth
• Contributors
• Index

The Modern Girl and the Vamp: Hollywood Film in Tanizaki Jun’ichirô’s Early Novels

positions: asia critique
Volume 20, Number 4 (2012)
pages 1067-1093
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-1717672

Deborah Shamoon, Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies
National University of Singapore

Chijin no ai (Naomi, 1924) and Nikukai (A Lump of Flesh, 1923), by Tanizaki Jun’ichirô, were seminal texts in forming the image of the “modern girl” in Japan in the 1920s. In both novels, Hollywood actresses famous for playing vamp roles are central to the construction of the modern girl character. The title Chijin no ai references the Japanese title of the US film A Fool There Was (1915), starring Theda Bara as the prototypical vamp. In a US context, the vamp character embodies not only the threat of the sexual woman but also anxieties surrounding racial mixing. In importing the vamp narrative to a Japanese context, Tanizaki reproduces this racial tension. This article examines the actresses, including Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Bebe Daniels, and others, that Tanizaki uses as models for the modern girl in these two novels. The existing narrative of the Hollywood vamp informs Tanizaki’s description of the modern girl, even as that narrative is necessarily transformed in a Japanese context. Furthermore, Tanizaki in both novels also employs a narrative voice that evokes the filmic mode of seeing, including the close-up and montage. This article examines Chijin no ai and Nikukai as intersections of filmic and novelistic modes of narrative. Tanizaki’s fascination with the new technology of cinema inspired him to experiment with new modes of narrative and intertextuality in prose fiction. However, his use of the cinematic mode of narrative, as well as the vamp character, also results in the highlighting of white/nonwhite racial tension and an attraction/repulsion toward racial impurity.

Read or purchase the article here.

Genomics and Health Care Disparities: The Role of Statistical Discrimination

The Journal of the American Medical Association
Volume 308, Number 19 (2012-11-21)
pages 1979-1980
DOI: 10.1001/2012.jama.10820

Katrina Armstrong, MD, MSCE, Professor of Medicine
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

Ten years ago, 2 events occurred that have transformed biomedical research. In 2001, the draft sequence of the human genome was announced. One year later, the Institute of Medicine released “Unequal Treatment,” the first comprehensive report on racial and ethnic health care disparities in the United States.1 Although the report downplayed the contribution of genetics to disparities, enthusiasm about the human genome spread rapidly to disparities research, creating a new field focused on translating knowledge of human genetic variation into reductions in disparities in health and health care. This Viewpoint examines the potential contribution of 2 pathways in this field—the identification of genetic variation as a cause of disparities and the reduction of clinical uncertainty and statistical discrimination. The terms race and ethnicity are used to mean socially determined, generally self-reported, categories.

A common hypothesis is that advances in human genomics will reduce disparities by identifying genetic causes of disparities. In support of this hypothesis, racial and ethnic differences in genetic variant frequency have been demonstrated for many diseases. However, translating this evidence into reductions in disparities has proven challenging for several reasons. First, many variants identified have a small attributable risk and explain little of the disease burden in any group, either because of a weak association between variant and disease or because the variant is rare in the population. Second, far more genetic variation occurs within racial or ethnic groups than between groups,and disease-associated variation has no apparent predilection for the 4% to 8% of variation that can be linked to race or ethnicity. Thus, if genomic variation explains a minority of most diseases and is unlikely to be linked to a racial or ethnic group, it becomes unlikely that genomic variation between groups will be a substantial cause of disparities in most common diseases. Third, developing interventions based on this information is challenging. Although prenatal or even premarital genetic screening can reduce the burden of severe diseases if screening influences reproductive decision making, lack of acceptance of these approaches has limited their effectiveness. For other diseases, knowledge of genetic risk factors should increase the ability to target preventive interventions to high-risk individuals. However, the limited effect of genomics on risk prediction for many diseases combined with the relative paucity of effective preventive interventions for some diseases has limited the benefit of such an approach.

Another pathway by which genomics may reduce racial disparities that has received considerably less attention is its effect on clinical uncertainty and statistical discrimination. The need to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty is one of the hallmarks of medicine. This uncertainty arises on 2 levels. For many decisions, there is no credible and consistent evidence about risks and benefits of different interventions. Moreover, even when evidence exists, uncertainty arises about the effect of that evidence on the individual patient. The gap between the average effect in a population and the effect in a specific patient can be substantial, in part because of differences between patients in practice and trial participants and in part because the average effect in a trial masks substantial variation among trial participants…

Read or purchase the article here.

The concept and measurement of race and their relationship to public health: a review focused on Brazil and the United States

Cadernos de Saúde Pública/Reports in Public Health
Volume 20, Number 3, Rio de Janeiro, (May/June 2004)
pages 660-678
DOI: 10.1590/S0102-311X2004000300003

Claudia Travassos
Departamento de Informações em Saúde
Centro de Informação Científica e Tecnológica,
Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

David R. Williams, Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health; Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Race has been widely used in studies on health and healthcare inequalities, especially in the United States. Validity and reliability problems with race measurement are of concern in public health. This article reviews the literature on the concept and measurement of race and compares how the findings apply to the United States and Brazil. We discuss in detail the data quality issues related to the measurement of race and the problems raised by measuring race in multiracial societies like Brazil. We discuss how these issues and problems apply to public health and make recommendations about the measurement of race in medical records and public health research.

“Race is a social construct, but as for other aspects of social stratification, with biological consequences.”

The notion that health is influenced by the social position of individuals has been known for many centuries. Nancy Krieger notes that since Hippocrates the relationship between health and social position has been acknowledged. It has also been shown that social disparities in mortality exist for almost all causes of death in most societies, and these disparities have been increasing in recent decades in several developed countries.

Race has been used extensively in the medical and public health literature, especially in the United States, to measure social differences in health outcomes and treatment, and its use has increased in recent decades. In the US, there is a vast literature that relates race to disparities in health outcomes, which shows that race is an important predictor of health status. “Blacks” in the US are disadvantaged compared to “Whites” on most indicators of economic status and health. Despite a reduction in these racial inequalities on both of these indicators during and immediately after the Civil Rights movement (the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s), they have remained large or have widened ever since. In the US, adjustment for socio-economic status (SES) always reduces and sometimes even eliminates racial disparities in health. A recent publication of the Institute of Medicine also documented that there are large racial differences in the quality and intensity of medical treatment in the US, even after adjustment for access factors, SES, and severity of illness.

In Brazil, there are fewer studies of racial inequalities in health. Batista, using data from death certificates, has shown that “Black” men and women had the highest crude mortality rates in 1999 in the State of São Paulo. Data based on census and national household surveys show that aggregate infant mortality in Brazil in the years 1977, 1987, and 1993 was higher for “Blacks and “Pardos” (“Browns”) and that it declined at a lower rate when compared with “Whites”. Martins & Tanaka, using data from the Committee on Maternal Mortality, have also shown large differences in the risk of dying due to maternal causes in the State of Paraná in the years 1993 and 1997, which disproportionately affected “Black” and “Yellow” (Asian) women. Maternal mortality did not differ between “Parda” (“Brown”) and “White” women. Dachs, using data from the 1998 National Household Survey (PNAD), found no statistically significant difference by “skin color/ race” in self-assessed health status after adjusting for education and income level. Barros et al., based on longitudinal data, have shown worse health outcomes for “Black” children in Southern Brazil, which is reduced after adjustment for SES and various other variables (marital status, maternal age, parity, planned pregnancy, social support, smoking, work during pregnancy, and antenatal care). The study results also suggest that “Black” mothers receive lower quality of care as compared to “White” ones. There are also indications that in Brazil racial inequalities are more common in treatment than in access to health care services.

The objective of this article is to review the literature related to the concept and measurement of race with a focus on the US and Brazil. We will discuss both the measurement of race in these two multiracial societies and data quality problems. We also make recommendations about the measurement of race in medical records and public health research. Although the use of race in public health research has been discussed in relation to definitional and methodological problems in the United States, the Brazilian public health literature has not discussed in detail how such problems apply to Brazil. This article is intended to review the literature and introduce a discussion regarding broader as well as country-specific questions and problems related to the use of this category in public health…

…Despite the fact that race has been used as a surrogate for genetic information until the onset of molecular genetics, there is no scientific support to continue using race in Public Health as a marker for genetic susceptibility. Parra et al. have recently shown that skin color in Brazilians cannot be used as a genetic marker, because physical traits have been shown to be a poor predictor of African ancestry in this population. In both the United States and Brazil, although the risk of sickle-cell anemia varies by race, race is not a reliable predictor of sickle-cell anemia…

…Despite existing controversies in the biomedical literature, it is widely accepted that racial/ethnic categories are imprecise and changing measures that are historically, administratively, and politically constructed. The salience given to race, as well as the meaning and the measure of race itself in census and health data, varies across countries and across time. The history of race classification in the US and Brazil are good examples of these variations as will be discussed later in this article…

…Measuring race in admixed populations

The question of whether populations of mixed origins can be categorized into any simple, finite, discrete categories is becoming central to racial/ethnic taxonomy. Some societies have large proportions of admixed people and many others are increasingly becoming admixed. Immigration in the US, especially from Latin American countries, increased in the last few decades, making its population much more heterogeneous. The projection of the US Census Bureau is that by 2050 one half of the US population will be “Non-White” and 21% of the population will be of multiple ancestry.

Despite the possibility of answering questions with multiple races, the new OMB classification in the US is not a good solution for classifying admixed people. For miscegenation that goes back many generations, individuals simply do not know about their ancestry. Whenever people’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents descend from intermarriages of admixed people, “pure” ancestry becomes very difficult to trace. In Latin American countries such as Brazil where miscegenation occurred at very early stages, it is difficult for a large number of people to answer questions about their origins.

It can also be argued that people do not know their ancestry because origin played a distinct role in societies with early miscegenation. As a result, many people may not find a place in any of the selected discrete “races” categories. In the 2000 US census, 43% of people that identified themselves as “Hispanic or Latino” chose, in the race question, to answer “some other race” (http://www.census.gov/mso/www/rsf/racedata/sld008.htm, accessed on 10/Oct/ 2002). And they usually inserted their country of origin or an alternative term for their Hispanic ethnicity for their race.

When assessing their own race, recent immigrants from countries where race is not as central in social structure as in the US may apply criteria adopted in their original country. On the other hand, descendents of migrants are more likely to respond to the race question using different criteria from the ones used by their parents. The fact that this classification is based on pure-race categories of ancestry and the absence of a multiracial category increases the chance of misclassification or non-specification for admixed people. On the other hand, multiracial categories tend to be very heterogeneous, and the greater the admixture in a population, the lower the discriminatory power of racial classifications.

Therefore, fluidity and ambiguity of racial measurement increases as the population becomes more multicultural and admixed. The more admixed a society, the greater the misspecification and heterogeneity of racial categories based on ancestry. Bias will also affect classifications that allow people to be classified in more than one pure-race category, as in the new US classification. Multiracial categories also tend to be very heterogeneous. At the same time, US data on children born to Black/White unions indicate that infants with a Black mother and White father consistently have higher health risks than those with a White mother and Black father, suggesting that in at least some situations there may be health risks linked to the specific pattern of multiracial status.

The use of skin color may be a more adequate proxy for racial/ethnic discrimination in admixed societies than racial measurement based on ancestry. Ethnicity or nationality may also be more meaningful in societies with recent migrants…

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Othering Obama: How Whiteness is Used to Undermine Authority

Altre Modernità/Other Modernities
ISSN 2035-7680
Number 3 (2010)
pages 112-119
DOI: 10.6092/2035-7680/517

David S. Owen, Associate Professor of Philosophy; Director of Diversity Programs, College of Arts and Sciences
University of Louisville

In this paper, I argue that the sociocultural structuring property of whiteness has been utilized to marginalize President Obama and effectively undermine his presidential authority.  Whiteness functions in a largely invisible and ostensibly deracialized way to normalize the interests, needs, and values of whites, while at the same time marginalizing and devaluing the voice of people of color.  Analyzing the health care debate through this theoretical lens generates insights into how the debate reproduced the system of racial oppression, and how whiteness functions in political discourse.

Introduction

The election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency in 2008 was undoubtedly a truly historic moment. The election of a self-identified black man to the highest political office in the nation was symbolic of a degree of progress the U.S. has made towards racial justice. However, there has been considerable disagreement in public discourse about how substantive a change this Obama presidency reflects. Some have  claimed (and did so immediately after the election) that the Obama presidency signals the end of racial oppression in the U.S. Others have argued that while the Obama presidency is significant, it does not indicate that the system of racial oppression has dissolved over night. This debate was sharpened in the summer of 2009 by the public discourse concerning health care reform. To many, that discourse often devolved from rational policy critique to racist attacks of Obama. And, in fact, the topic of racism broke into explicit discourse during this period, culminating with former President Jimmy Carter accusing many of the president’s critics with racism. Much of the debate around whether or not the critics of health care reform were behaving in a racist manner turned on the question of intent: Did they, or did they not, intend to send a racist message? I will argue in this paper that this question misses the point. The system of racial oppression, which was not dissolved on election night in 2008, is maintained and reproduced by behavior that echoes and carries forward racist imagery, representations, and symbols of the past in the guise of structures of whiteness. While there were clearly explicitly racist actions taken by the health care reform critics, much of the harm and effectiveness of the racially oppressive behavior is found in what ostensibly looks like non-racial behavior. Such behavior appears to be non-racial because it presumes the norm of whiteness. These debates provide a constructive case study for understanding how people of color can be marginalized and devalued—even when they have achieved very high accomplishments…

Read the entire article here.