Mixed Race Studies

Sociology Professor Chronicles Rising Latino Culture

Inside Fordham Online
Fordham University
In Focus: Faculty and Research
2010-11-15

Patrick Verel

Already the largest minority group in the United States, Latinos will be an even bigger presence in the years to come, according to demographic studies. Clara Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of sociology in Fordham College at Lincoln Center, is making sure their stories are told.

Through 10 books, dozens of papers and consulting projects with Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street, Rodriguez has developed a deep knowledge about a group that now accounts for 15 percent of the population.

Her analyses of United States census data have resulted in papers such as “Contestations Over Classifications: Latinos, the Census and Race in the United States” (Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 2009) and “Implications and Impact of Race on the Health of Latinos,” a chapter in Health Issues in Latino Males: A Social and Structural Approach (Rutgers University Press, 2010).

As part of her study of census data, Rodriguez cast a critical eye on racial classifications in the decennial censuses. Examining how respondents who identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino reported their race, she found that 40 percent chose “some other race,” and many of them wrote in what is known as a Latino identifier, such as Dominican, Panamanian or Chicano.

This happened in the last three decennial censuses, despite the fact that the census allowed them to choose more than one racial category in the last census…

…“People who could choose more than one race didn’t choose white and black; they still chose the category ‘some other race.’ This 40 percent has increased—I think this time it was 42 percent—even though the Census Bureau has really tried to discourage this response,” she said.

“This raises the question, ‘What is race?’ Science was raising that question. Children of mixed-race families were raising that question. So are people from all over the world who came here with very different identities and are now being folded into one of our five major groups.”…

Read the entire article here.

Trends in the Naming of Tri-Racial Mixed-Blood Groups in the Eastern United States

American Speech
Volume 22, Number 2 (April, 1947)
pages 81-87

A. R. Dunlap
University of Delaware

C. A. Weslager
University of Delaware

In the eastern part of the United States, particularly in the southern and middle-Atlantic portions, are a number of populations groups, so-called ‘ethnic-island,’ whose members combine, in varying degrees, the characteristics of Caucasoid, Negroid, and Indian racial stocks. To quote W. H. Gilbert, Jr., who has written extensively of mixed-blood groups, these racial islands

seem to develop especially where environmental circumstances such as forbidding swamps and inaccessible and barren mountain country favor their growth.  Many are located along the tidewater of the Atlantic coast where swamps or island and peninsulas have protected them… Others are farther inland in the Piedmont area and are found with their backs up against the wall of the Blue Ridge or Alleghenies.  A few… are to be found on the very top of the Blue Ridge and on the several ridges of the Appalachian Great Valley just beyond.

A sufficient number of these tri-racial groups has now been reported in various sociological and ethnological journals to make possible a study of the names employed to distinguish this type of mixed-bloods from mixed-bloods of bi-racial origin, such as mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, etc., or from ‘pure’ bloods of one of the three principal racial stocks, i.e., whites, Indians, and Negroes. From the alphabetical list which follows have been excluded names of ethnic groups which perpetuate Indian tribal names for example, the Nanticokes and Houmas mentioned in Gilbert’s ‘Memorandum’; or the surviving Powhatan tribes of Virginia, the Cherokee, and other Algonkian and Iroquoian descendants in the Eastern Woodlands area with tribal organizations.

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial representations: Nishime examines Battlestar Galactica

University of Washington
Department of Communications
2010-11-15

Amanda Weber

LeiLani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communication, is a self-proclaimed science fiction fan, so it seemed natural to her to set her research sights on the TV series Battlestar Galactica. Although science fiction is generally a genre about the future, it often reflects current social issues. Nishime is a scholar on multiracial and interracial studies, Asian American media representations, and Asian American subcultural production. In her study, “Aliens: Narrating U.S. Global Identity Through Transnational Adoption and Interracial Marriage in Battlestar Galactica,” she identifies visual and narrative representations of multiracial people…

Read the entire article and watch a short video clip here.