Mixed Race Studies

Racial and Ethnic Intermarriage in the United States [Interview with Daniel T. Lichter]

Population Reference Bureau
2010-05-20

Questions and Answers with:

Daniel T. Lichter, Professor of Policy Analysis and Management and Sociology
Cornell University

Donghui Yu:
Could you please tell us some features of Asian American(partucularly Chinese American)’s intermarriage with other race? Thanks.

Daniel T. Lichter:
Asian women have among the highest rates of interracial marriage in the United States. My colleague, Yujun Wang, has shown with the 2007 American Coummunity Survey that roughly 55 percent of U.S. born Asian women (aged 18-34) married non-Asians, mostly white men. That’s a lot of out-marriage.

Compared with Asian women, Asian men have much lower rates of marriage to whites or other races. My Asian male students sometimes complain that white guys are dating Asian women, but that white women seem uninterested in them. There is lots of debate about why this is the case, and the empirical evidence is too weak to draw strong conclusions. Antecdotal explanations sometimes emphasize cultural definitions of masculinity (e.g., shorter height of Asian men) or gender roles (e.g., perceptions that Asian men may hold patriarchal gender role attitudes). We just don’t have enough hard data on these sorts of questions, which deal with highly sensitive issues that often strike a nerve.

To your last question, Chinese Americans overall have higher rates of outmarriage to whites than some other Asian groups (e.g., Asian Indians or Vietnamese). This probably reflects that fact that they have been in the U.S. for many generations (and a large percentage share common cultural traits of the majority white population, including language). But among recent Chinese immigrants—the first generation—rates of intermarriage are much lower and perhaps lower than in the past. Some of this seems to reflect the recent influx of Chinese with lower education levels from new sending areas(e.g., from Fujian province).

Chinyere Osuji:
Does interracial marriage really demonstrate a blurring of racial boundaries? If so, in what ways can we see this happening? Does this impact the lives of black-white couples? If so, in what ways?

Daniel T. Lichter:
From my perspective, the growth of interracial marriages has definitely blurred racial boundaries in the U.S. In fact, I often think of interracial marriage as the spoon that stirs the “melting pot.” For example, interracial couples bridge the family and social networks of each partner. They span racial boundaries by interacting on both sides of the racial divide and, more importantly, they bring other friends and family members with them. Of course, this assumes that both sides of the racial divide accept the interracial couple, which isn’t always the case.

Also, the mixed race children of interracial couples, by definition, blur the racial line. These children are more likely than single race children to have cross-racial friends and to marry interracially themselves. Most children of black-white couples, however, are still likely to identify themselves as black or African American rather than as mixed-race or some other racial label. President Obama identified himself as black on the 2010 decennial census, even though his mother was white and his father was black…

…Yang Jiang:
Dr Lichter,
How do you think the increase of biracial/multiracial population in the U.S affect the overall interracial marriage rates? Compared to single race counterparts, are they more likely to to inter marry or intra-marry? How should we distinguish inter- vs intra-marriages for biracial/multiracial individuals?

Daniel T. Lichter:
This is a more difficult question to answer than it appears at first blush. On the one hand, mixed-race individuals are more likely to than single-race persons to marry someone other than another mixed-race person. So if mixed-race people are treated as a separate racial category, then this would increase the overall share of interracial marriages in the United States. Zhenchao Qian and I have treated black-white mixed-race persons as black or white or mixed race in separate analyses. In the end, regardless of classification, it doesn’t have much effect on overall rates of racial intermarriage.

This is likely to change in the future. Only 2-3 percent of the population today self-identifies as having more than one race. Of course, many people who self-identify as having only one race (President Obama) may in fact be multi-racial. Is President Obama’s marriage to Michelle Obama interracial? This question makes clear the conceptual challenges of this sort of research and the subjective nature of racial self-identification…

Read the entire interview here….

Jen Chau Reflects on Her Work as a Change-Maker for Mixed-Race Communities

JVoices.com
2008-12-03

Cole Krawitz

Jen Chau, founder and director of SWIRL, (and an eagerly anticipated contributor to JVoices) will be presenting this Sunday at Inside the Activists’ Studio (which JVoices is a co-sponsor) on how activism needs a serious make-over, and tools for building a sustainable activist life. We caught up with her before the day’s event to ask her a few questions about her work, the celebration of SWIRL’s 8th Anniversary, and how the Obama campaign raised awareness of mixed-race experiences in the United States.

CK: Today you’re celebrating the 8th Anniversary of the organization you started, SWIRL, and it’s continual growth and success as a national multi-ethnic organization that challenges society’s notions of race. Tell us how this all got started, and what it’s like to watch your organization continue to grow.

JC: My work with Swirl primarily grew out of a real need for community. Since I had grown up very much between and outside of communities, I was determined to create something for those who had also experienced having “one foot in and one foot out” – mixed race individuals. Additionally, I decided at the start that Swirl would also serve interracial couples and mixed families. We have always been inclusive of anyone who feels that their experiences challenge this country’s traditional notions of “race,” culture, and identity.

Read the entire article here.

Racial Identity’s Gray Area

The Wall Street Journal
2008-06-12

June Kronholz

The Definition of Whiteness Continues to Shift

When Barack Obama, whose mother was white, identifies himself as black, and when Bill Richardson, whose father was white, identifies himself as Hispanic, who is white?

The U.S. Census Bureau says the country will be majority-minority in 2050—that is, the combined number of blacks, Asians, American Indians and Hispanics will put whites in the minority. Texas and California are already there.

But the definition of white keeps shifting. Groups have been welcomed in or booted out; people opt out, sue to get in or change their minds and jump back and forth.

The deepest racial divide, between blacks and nonblacks, endures. But there also are identity shifts among African-Americans, as Sen. Obama’s success suggests. Some make it into the middle class, where education and social mobility may help shape their identities as much as race does. Others are left behind in increasingly segregated schools and neighborhoods.

The U.S. has never found it easy to assign race, although it certainly has tried. A century ago, the people who did the counting—demographers, sociologists, policy thinkers—divided whites into three strata. They considered Nordic whites, from England, Scandinavia and Germany, the most ethnically desirable and elite, followed by the Alpine whites, from eastern and central Europe, and finally the Mediterraneans. Everyone else was identified as black, red, yellow or brown, which included South Asians.

Whiteness and the privileges that came with it were so closely guarded that in 1912, a House committee held hearings on whether Italians were really Caucasian, says Thomas Guglielmo, a historian at George Washington University. The idea was picked up from Italy, where northern, lighter-skinned Italians, were asking the same questions about the southern, darker-skinned Italians, he says. No one argued seriously that Jews and Greeks, or Irish and Poles—light-skinned but poor—weren’t white, but whether they were ethnically Caucasian was up for debate, he adds…

…”Who’s white [won’t] mean that much, but when someone is partly black, that will still be noticed by a large part of society,” says Bill Butz of the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington research group. He sees today’s black-white divide becoming a “black/nonblack” gulf…

…Opting Out of Whiteness

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, there was “some sentiment” among non-Arabs for counting Arab-Americans as nonwhite, says David Roediger, a University of Illinois race historian. Since then, the Arab-American Institute in Washington has unsuccessfully lobbied the government for a separate “Middle East and North African” category on the census. The institute puts the Arab-American population at three times larger than the Census estimates, which limits its political power and claims on government programs…

…The Melting-Pot Effect

That doesn’t mean race won’t matter, even as it becomes harder to define. Blacks still cannot jump back and forth across those shifting racial lines, which explains why Sen. Obama calls himself black even while he singled out his white grandmother in his speech claiming the Democratic nomination.

That’s not likely to change soon. Some demographers predict that within a century, there will be as many Americans who are mixed-race as there will be those whose parents are both of the same race, further blurring color lines. But that “hybridity,” as demographers call it, will be concentrated among Hispanics and Asians who marry whites and each other, not among blacks…

Read the entire article here.

Positioning American Japanese in the Context of Japanese and Okinawan Nationalism and Ethnicity

Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume II (October 2009)
18 pages

Stephanie Otani
Stanford University

have the right…
Not to justify my existence in this world.
Not to keep the races separate within me.
Not to be responsible for people’s discomfort with my physical ambiguity.
Not to justify my ethnic legitimacy…
To identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify…
To create a vocabulary to communicate about being multiracial…
To have loyalties and identification with more than one group of people.

~from the Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People, by Maria P.P. Root

They wear war in their faces. They are the symbols of foreign domination. They embody the transgression of sacred boundaries. In Okinawa, people of Japanese and American descent (or Amerasians) are first and foremost foreigners, no matter how Japanese or Okinawan their language, customs, mannerisms, or worldviews may be. Before they even speak, their face and skin signal to people the circumstances of their births. The rights claimed by Root in the “Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People” ultimately culminate in the right to first and foremost be understood as a human being as opposed to racial anomaly or mistake. As of now, these rights are insubstantial claims for those who carry signs of American parentage in their appearance throughout Okinawa and the rest of Japan. Instead, they continue to be externally categorized as gaijin or “foreigners” in their own homes.

Japan does not contain the linguistic nor legal infrastructure to accommodate them under the idea of Japaneseness. Within Japan, Okinawa is a particularly interesting and relevant site to explore issues of cultural and political legitimacy and conflicts between internal and external identity. The historical experience of Okinawa and its struggle for political sovereignty in international affairs mirrors the experience of American Japanese and their struggle to find a sense of national belonging. It is because of the contentious physical and political space Okinawa has historically inhabited that Amerasians struggle to fit into a larger Okinawan or Japanese identity.

Amerasians Within the Broader Context of Japan

In this section I will discuss the overall Japanese attitude toward multiracial people by examining the terms used to refer to multiracial people and the legal status of international couples. These two aspects of Japanese society reflect its reluctance to incorporate ethnic difference…

Read the entire article here.

Raising Multiracial Awareness in Family Therapy Through Critical Conversations

Journal of Marital and Family Therapy
Volume 31, Issue 4 (October 2005)
pages 399–411
DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-0606.2005.tb01579.x

Teresa McDowell, Associate Professor and Department Chair of Counseling Psychology
Lewis & Clark University, Portland Oregon

Lucrezia Ingoglia
Greater Lakes Mental Healthcare

Takiko Serizawa
Family Service Associates

Christina Holland
Behavioral Medicine Clinic

John Wayne Dashiell, Jr.
Tacoma, Washington

Christopher Stevens
Renton Area Youth and Family Services

Multiracial families are uniquely affected by racial dynamics in U.S. society. Family therapists must be prepared to meet the needs of this growing population and to support racial equity. This article includes an overview of literature related to being multiracial and offers a framework for working with multiracial identity development in therapy. A critical conversation approach to working with multiracial identity is shared along with case examples. The authors’ experiences developing the model via a practitioner inquiry group are highlighted.

Read or purchase the article here.

Social Origins of the Brandywine Population

Phylon (1960-)
Vollume 24, Number 4 (4th Qtr., 1963)
pages 369-378

Thomas J. Harte
Catholic University of America

ALL RACIAL ISOLATES present problems of unknown or mysterious origins. [C. A.] Weslager notes the lack of specific information for the Nanticokes of Delaware and for the Moors as well.  There is some historical evidence that when white people first settled in Robeson County, North Carolina, in the 1730’s, they found a mixed blood people inhabiting the swamps there. However, proof that these people constituted the survivors of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Lost Colony” of Roanoke Island is far from conclusive. A similar lack of specific historical data applies to the “Guineas” of West Virginia, although Gilbert believes that the history of this group can be reconstructed in a general way. Authentic historical information is also lacking for the Melungeons of Tennessee and for some Louisiana racial hybrids as well.

The present paper attempts to trace the Brandywine triracial isolate population of southern Maryland back to its earliest beginnings. Conclusive factual evidence cannot be expected for historical developments in the early period of the group’s evolution. There are, however, substantial materials to support some sound hypotheses which can serve as guides for future research on this and similar populations. The data presented below represent the cumulative results of a systematic search of public and parish records, supplemented on some points by data from personal interviews, for leads as to the origin of this deme. The analysis is largely confined to the late seventeenth century, the whole of the eighteenth century, and the early decades of the nineteenth century.

The hypothesis that racial isolates originated in illegal interracial unions between Indians, whites, and Negroes provides a particularly fruitful lead in tracing the history of the Brandywine group. This hypothesis has been proposed explicitly and implicitly by a number of students of…

Genetic Linkage of the Dentinogenesis Imperfecta Type III Locus to Chromosome 4q

Journal of Dental Research
Volume 78, Number 6 (June 1999)
pages 1277-1282
DOI: 10.1177/00220345990780061301

M. MacDougall
Department of Pediatric Dentistry
University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio

L. G. Jeffords
Department of Pediatric Dentistry,
University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio

T. T. Gu
Department of Pediatric Dentistry
University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio

C. B. Knight
Department of Pediatric Dentistry
University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio

G. Frei
Department of Pediatric Dentistry,
University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio

B. E. Reus
Department of Cellular and Structural Biology
University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio

B. Otterud
Department of Human Genetics
Eccles Institute of Human Genetics
University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City

M. Leppert
Department of Human Genetics
Eccles Institute of Human Genetics
University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City

R. J. Leach
Department of Cellular and Structural Biology
University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio

Dentinogenesis imperfecta type III (DGI-III) is an autosomal-dominant disorder of dentin formation which appears in a tri-racial southern Maryland population known as the “Brandywine isolate”. This disease has suggestive evidence of linkage to the long arm of human chromosome 4 (LOD score of 2.0) in a family presenting with both juvenile periodontitis and DGI-III. The purpose of this study was to screen a family presenting with only DGI-III to determine if this locus was indeed on chromosome 4q. Furthermore, we wanted to determine if DGI-III co-localized with dentinogenesis imperfecta type II (DGI-II), which has been localized to 4q21-q23. Therefore, a large kindred from the Brandywine isolate was identified, oral examination performed, and blood samples collected from 21 family members. DNA from this family was genotyped with 6 highly polymorphic markers that span the DGI-II critical region of chromosome 4q. Analysis of the data yielded a maximum two-point LOD score of 4.87 with a marker for the dentin matrix protein 1 (DMP1) locus, a gene contained in the critical region for DGI-II. Our results demonstrated that the DGI-III locus is on human chromosome 4q21 within a 6.6 cM region that overlaps the DGI-II critical region. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that DGI-II is either an allelic variant of DGI-III or the result of mutations in two tightly linked genes.

Read or purchase the article here.

Skin, race and space: the clash of bodily schemas in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks and Nella Larsen’s Passing

Cultural Geographies
Volume 18, Number 1 (2011-01-06)
pages 25-41
DOI: 10.1177/1474474010379953

Steve Pile, Professor of Human Geography
The Open University, United Kingdom

Nella Larsen’s novel Passing offers the opportunity to reconsider the relationship between race and space. The novel provides an account of space that is highly racialized. It describes 1920s Chicago as having heavily proscribed white and black spaces. However, race itself is far more uncertain. The novel’s two main characters, Irene and Clare, though black by blood in US American racial schematics, are both able to pass as white. Their skin colour renders their race ultimately unknowable: they can easily cross the borders between the white and the black world. By using Frantz Fanon’s notions of corporeal schemas and epidermal schemas, and by focusing on skin itself, it is possible to open up another way of seeing race and space in the novel. The paper argues that these bodily schemas ultimately clash, and come to grief, in the novel. Even so, this clash of bodily schemas enables a possible resolution to the problem of seeing the body either through black/white grids of signification and power, or through their aggregation into phenotypes or races. In this view, bodily schemas may come to define race and space, but never exclusively in one way or another.

Read or purchase the article here.

Musical Miscegenation? Rock Music and the History of Sex

e-misférica
Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics
Issue 5.2: Race and its Others (December 2008)

Tavia Nyong’o, Associate Professor of Performance Studies
New York University

Image by Bruce Yonemoto

Countering facile analogies between musical hybridity and sex across the color line that characterize certain popular discourses about American popular music, this essay explores the genealogy of “miscegenation” in U.S. political discourse. Undermining claims that “musical miscegenation” explains black influence in rock music, the essay shows how “miscegenation” emerged precisely as a means of policing and proscribing black citizenship and black/white social equality.

“So, when it comes, miscegenation will be a terror …”
—Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” 1957

When pop music critic Sasha Frere-Jones wondered aloud in the New Yorker magazine as to how, when, and why “indie rock lost its soul” in the mid-1990s, he provoked a small controversy among popular music critics, bloggers, and fans. Lamenting rock’s decreasing reliance on what he described as “the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century,” Frere-Jones targeted contemporary musicians that he considered to be guilty of divorcing (white) rock from its (black) roots (Frere-Jones 2007a). Part of his argument resembled prior cases made by music critics like Albert Murray (1990) and Kandia Crazy Horse (2004), who have also extolled the universal basis and relevance of black music. But it took a peculiar turn when he attributed the steady diminution of black heat, rhythm, and ecstasy in 1990s and 2000s rock to a cultural separatism jointly enforced by hip hop and academic political correctness…

…Miscegenation as Political Coinage

Scholars and journalists routinely employ miscegenation, with or without scare quotes, to denote the “mixing” of the so-called races. Even when they pause to think about it, even when, as with Frere-Jones when they are challenged on their use of it, they typically ignore or seem unaware that the word appeared at a particular time and place, and for a particular purpose. Whatever Ralph Emerson meant by the “smelting pot,” for example, he could not have meant “miscegenation” musical or otherwise, simply because the word did not yet exist, and because he chose not to use the closest variant with a racial connotation that did exist at the time, amalgamation. While a variety of terms for race, caste, and color “mixing” have emerged from the time of the Encounter with the New World, no single term can accurately index all of that history. Miscegenation is not the translation of the Spanish mestizaje or the Portuguese mestizagem it is commonly assumed to be, as both terms long predate it. Nor does it have any etymological relation to words like “mulatto,” “mestizo,” or, for that matter, “hybrid.” It is, to quote William Carlos Williams, a “pure product” of the U.S., a specimen of rhetorical chicanery and pseudo-scientific quackery whose astonishing success at infiltrating the language should only surprise those who doubt the immense resources of racial disavowal in the shaping of our culture…

Read the entire article here.

Ellen Craft’s Radical Techniques of Subversion

e-misférica
Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics
Issue 5.2: Race and its Others (December 2008)
16 pages

Uri McMillan, Assistant Professor of English
University of California, Los Angeles

Image by Bruce Yonemoto

This paper considers the antebellum performance(s) of fugitive slave Ellen Craft. Craft, an African-American female slave from Georgia, impersonated a white male slaveholder, Mr. William Johnson, in order to escape from slavery with her husband William. I argue that through various techniques of performance—cross-racial impersonation, prosthetics, costume, hair, and gender performance, for example—Craft radically destabilized nineteenth-century social norms, particularly racial and gender mores. An antebellum subject who manipulated her body as an elastic object, Ellen Craft made costumes out of the rigid nineteenth-century identities of “blackness” and “whiteness,” particularly 19th century white masculinity. In this paper, specifically, I analyze the corporeal techniques Craft wielded in her original performance to escape in America before moving to her appearances later on the abolitionist lecture stage in England.

Read the entire article here.