Mixed Race Studies

American Identity in the Age of Obama

Northeastern University
Amilcar Cabral Center in the John D. O’Bryant African American Institute
Boston, Massachusetts
Friday, 2011-03-25, 08:30-15:30 EDT (Local Time)

The election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States has opened a new chapter in the country’s long and often tortured history of inter-racial and inter-ethnic relations. Many relished in the inauguration of the country’s first African American president—an event foreseen by another White House aspirant, Senator Robert Kennedy, four decades earlier. What could have only been categorized as a dream in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education was now a reality. Some dared to contemplate a post-racial America. Still, soon after Obama’s election a small but persistent faction questioned his eligibility to hold office; they insisted that Obama was foreign-born. Following the Civil Rights battles of the 20th century hate speech, at least in public, is no longer as free flowing as it had been. Perhaps xenophobia, in a land of immigrants, is the new rhetorical device to assail what which is non-white and hence un-American. Furthermore, recent debates about immigration and racial profiling in Arizona along with the battle over rewriting of history and civics textbooks in Texas suggest that a post-racial America is a long way off. Indeed, in his 1995 book, Dreams from My Father, Obama observed both how far we have come and how far we yet to traverse.

This conference will provide an opportunity to discuss changing and persistent notions of American identity in the Age of Obama. What roles do race, ethnicity, ancestry, immigration status, locus of birth play in the public and private conversations that defy and reinforce existing conceptions of what it means to be American?

Morning Session 08:30 – 12:00 EDT

Paper 2: “The First Black President?: Cross-racial Perceptions of Barack Obama’s Race”

Matthew Hunt, Associate Professor of Sociology
Northeastern University

David C. Wilson, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations
University of Delaware

Barack Obama’s ancestry can aptly be described as racially-mixed given his “black” Kenyan father and “white” American mother. At the same time, Obama self-identifies as African American and is widely regarded as the country’s first black president. These latter facts, of course, stem from the socially constructed nature of racial identities, America’s malevolent racial history and pattern of racial formation (think “one drop rule”), and (related) contemporary patterns of racial classification and experience. Nonetheless, the nature of Obama’s racial status does not go uncontested in the public arena. African Americans have questioned Obama’s racial authenticity (“Is he Black enough?”). And, among many whites, Obama is seen as something other than truly “black” – a fact that made him more palatable to whites as a candidate and likely contributed to his electoral success. These issues all point to the importance of understanding how and why people view Barack Obama as occupying one or another racial status/category in America. This paper explores these issues empirically via an analysis of 2009 polling data from the Pew Research Center’s “Racial Attitudes in America II” project (N = 2,850). Our analyses center on whether Obama is seen as “black” or “mixed race.” Specifically, we explore how a host of factors – including demographics, concerns about Obama’s political focus on Whites and Blacks, perceptions of discrimination, perceptions of the nature of Obama “values, racial stereotypes, and respondents” own racial identities (including a “mixed race” option) – shape how the public views the President in terms of race. In so doing, we hope to shed light on the ways in which persons’ social locations, identities, and views on racial and societal issues contribute to how Obama’s racial status is constructed by the lay public.

Paper 3: “Racial Identification in a Post Obama era: Multiracialism, Immigration and Identity Choice”

Natalie Masuoka, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Tufts University

In 2008, 2.2% of Americans identified with two or more racial categories. Indeed, assertions of non-traditional identities evoking a mixed race (or multiracial) back-ground are more prevalent in society today, particularly among younger generations. The rise of multiracial identification is indicative of new social norms that govern racial identification which offer a more inviting environment for individuals to assert multiracial identities. Yet, as a trend of multiracial self-identification grows, it demands the attention of those that self-identify with the established racial categories, such as white or black, who must then consider and respond to these identities. I anticipate that response to multiracial identities will vary by racial background. As a general pattern, I argue that whites tend to interpret multiracial identities with normative optimism about U.S. race relations while racial minorities generally respond more unfavorably to the assertions of these identities. Because of this, racial minorities will be more critical of multiracial identities and challenge the legitimacy of these identities. Using recent public opinion data, I examine the relationship between views on multiracial identities and other racial and political attitudes and compare how this relationship may differ across whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians.

For more information, click here.

Media Advisory — Census Bureau to Hold Webinar Prior to Release of Center of Population and First Two 2010 Census Briefs

2011-03-22, 18:00Z (14:00 EDT)

Karen Humes, Assistant Division Chief
Special Population Statistics, Population Division

Nicholas A. Jones, Chief, Racial Statistics Branch
Population Division

Roberto R. Ramirez, Chief, Ethnicity and Ancestry Branch
Population Division

The U.S. Census Bureau will hold a media webinar prior to the March 24 release of the final states redistricting data, national mean center of population and release of 2010 Census Briefs on population distribution and race and ethnicity. Reporters will learn the background on race and Hispanic origin concepts and the types of race and ethnic data that will be reported in the upcoming 2010 Census releases.

The webinar will consist of a simultaneous audio conference and online presentation. Reporters will be able to ask questions during the audio conference once the presentation is complete.

Details:
Audio conference — access information
Toll free number: 888-324-7210
Participant passcode: CENSUS
Questions and answers are limited to media

Online presentation — access information
Please login early, as some setup is required:
URL: https://www.mymeetings.com/nc/join/
Conference number: PW6204276
Audience passcode: CENSUS

Census serves up racial buffet in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley Mercury News
2011-03-20

Joe Rodriguez

Who are you? What are you?

Sara Phillips, a 20-year-old computer science student from Hawaii at Santa Clara University, just may have the new look of the 21st century. When her 2010 Census form arrived last year, she gazed at the variety of ethnic and racial boxes available to her and selected four: Spanish and Filipino, same as her mother; and Japanese and white from her father’s lineage.

“I always mark as many as I can,” she said.

Choosing from this racial buffet made her one of about 87,300 people living in Santa Clara County who claimed more than one race, according to the latest results released by the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s an increase of about 9,000 from the past decade…

…Advocates, including the Berkeley-based Association of Multi Ethnic Americans, started lobbying for the distinction in the late 1960s, arguing in part that the blending of races eventually would transcend racial divisions. Curiously, some odd bedfellows opposed them.

On one side, cultural conservatives said another racial category would Balkanize America and stifle the dream of a colorblind society. On the other, traditional black, Asian and Native American groups feared the new category would dilute their numbers and political clout.

For better or worse, the mixed-race genie is out of the bottle, said professor Matthew Snipp, a sociologist who heads the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University.

“It’s going to continue to grow, and how fast is anybody’s guess,” he said. At the same time, “It’s still a relatively small part of the population.”

Although he has some Irish blood, Snipp is Native American and marked only that box on his own census form. He said the key issues in the mixed-race question still are alive and meaty.

For example, he said, federal anti-discrimination laws name and protect traditional minority groups, but not multiracial people. The Census Bureau is the only agency that collects such information. When a federal health agency wants to know which racial populations need attention and where, Census Bureau computers assign mixed-race people to one of the traditional racial groups and hands the recoded counts to the agencies.

“The bigger issue is that we still have laws in place to combat discrimination that still exists,” he said…

Read the entire article here.

Fear and Desire: Regional Aesthetics and Colonial Desire in Kate Chopin’s Portrayals of the Tragic Mulatta Stereotype

The Southern Literary Journal
Volume 43, Number 1 (Fall 2010)
pages 1-22
E-ISSN: 1534-1461 Print ISSN: 0038-4291

Dagmar Pegues

The interrogation of the category of race in Kate Chopin’s fiction represents an essential dimension of regional aesthetics, and it offers an alternative view to previous interpretations that focus primarily on feminist themes. This article examines the role of Louisiana as a specific region in the construction of the tragic mulatta stereotype in the fiction of Kate Chopin, primarily in her stories “Désirée’s Baby” and “La Belle Zoraïde,” and by analogy in her most successful novel The Awakening. I propose to extricate Chopin’s work from the virgin/whore dichotomy so often applied to white and non-white characters respectively. From a new perspective, an illumination of the portrayals of the tragic mulatta figure in Chopin’s texts invites a reconsideration of the stereotype of the tragic mulatta that typically oscillates between evocations of the exotic and the sentimental. Attempting to reclaim the category of race in regionalist fiction by examining the tragic mulatta stereotype in the selected texts, I see parallels between this pervasive image of southern local color fiction and the post-colonial paradigm, i.e. the dichotomy of the colonizer versus the colonized as it is suggested by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks as well as the notion of stereotype as a form of normalizing, yet contradictory, judgment in Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture. From this perspective, the trope of the tragic mulatta appropriated by Chopin in her fiction represents an essential point of concurrence of the issues of gender, race, and region, and it points to the underlying racial anxiety manifested by the existence of ambivalent feelings of fear and desire toward the racial Other. Consequently, the internalization of colonial commodification of the racially Other can be interpreted as the true tragic element in the…

Read or purchase the article here.

Identifying with Multiple Races: A Social Movement that Succeeded but Failed?

PSC Research Report (Report No. 01-491)
The Population Studies Center (PSC) at the University of Michigan
2004
33 pages

Reynolds Farley, Research Professor Emeritus
University of Michigan
Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research

Prior to the 1960s, civil rights organizations sought to minimize the collecting of racial information since such data were often employed to deny opportunities to minorities. By 1970, federal agencies and courts frequently used racial information to enforce civil rights laws by ensuring the minorities were appropriately represented in jobs or in schools and that equitable electoral districts were drawn. In the 1970s, advocacy groups struggled over racial definitions. In 1977, the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) defined official races and mandated the gathering of data about them. A decade later a small but highly effective multiracial movement emerged. They contended that many Americans come from several racial backgrounds and should be permitted to identify with a multiracial category. OMB, in 1997, altered the federal regulations, recognized five major races and gave everyone the option to identify with as many races as the wish.

The Census of 2000 adopted the principle that persons could identify with more than one race. About 2.4 percent–or one in 40–did so. Approximately one-third of these were multiracial because they wrote a Spanish-term for their second race. That is, 1.6 percent of the population or 4.5 million marked two or more of the five major races defined by OMB. White/Other, and White/Indian were the only multiracial groups marked by one million or more.

These innovative multiracial data have not provoked litigation nor bitter controversies as legislatures analyzed census information to reapportion electoral districts. Before to the enumeration, advocacy groups strongly endorsed the use of a multiracial category but they have not highlighted this issue now that data are becoming available from the Census. The multiracial movement succeeded in fundamentally changing the way the government collects racial data but, thus far, there are no great changes in outcomes nor are there prominent pending lawsuit focused on the rights of multiracial.

Read the entire report here.

Race or mongrel: a brief history of the rise and fall of the ancient races of earth: a theory that the fall of nations is due to intermarriage with alien stocks: a demonstration that a nation’s strength is due to racial purity: a prophecy that America will sink to early decay unless immigration is rigorously restricted

L. C. Page and Company
1908
399 pages

Alfred P. Shultz

Table of Contents

I. The Mongrel in Nature
II.  The Mongrel in History
III. The Hamites in India
IV. The Chaldeans
V.  The Phoenicians
VI.  The Carthaginians
VII.  The Egyptians
VIII. The Jews
IX.  The Gipsies
X.  The Hindoos
XI.  Hellas
XII. The Greeks
XIII. The Pan-European Mongrel in Rome
XIV. Sicily
XV. The Lombards in Italy
XVI.  Heredity and Language
XVII. Race Problems in German Lands
XVIII. The South American Mongrel
XIX.  The Monroe Doctrine
XX.  The Yellow Races
XXI.  The Anglo-Saxons
XXII. The Anglo-Saxons in America
XXIII. Immigration: Who in America?
XXIV. Immigration: Men or the Balance-sheet?
XXV. Immigration: Anglo-Saxons and Germans
XXVI. Immigration: The German-Americans
XXVII.   Immigration: The Pan-European in America
XXVIII.  The American Negro
XXIX.  Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Sometimes there is a physical impossibility preventing the male clement from reaching the female ovule, as is the case with a plant having a pistil too long for the pollen tubes to reach the ovarium. It has also been observed that, when the pollen of one species is placed on the stigma of another species, though the pollen tubes protrude, they do not penetrate the stigmatic surface.

The male element may reach the female element, but be incapable of causing an embryo to be developed. A great many of the few embryos which develop after crossing perish at a very early period. The early death of the embryo is a frequent cause of the sterility of first crosses.

Of the very few embryos that are normal at delivery a great many die within the first days of their life. Darwin writes: 11 Mr. Salter has given the result of an examination of about five hundred eggs produced from various crosses between three species of Gallus and their hybrids; the majority of these eggs had been fertilized, and in the majority of the fertilized eggs the embryos had either been partially developed and had then perished, or had become nearly mature; but the young chickens had been unable to break through the shell. Of the chickens which were born, more than four-fifths died within the first few days or, at latest, weeks, without any obvious cause, apparently from mere inability to live; so that from five hundred eggs only twelve chickens were reared.”

???own. Turn the domestic animals loose, leave them to nature, and in ten years no mongrel will exist. From the foregoing considerations we derive this conclusion:

Nature prevents the development of the mongrel; in the few cases in which nature has for the time being successfully been outraged and a mongrel produced, nature degrades that mongrel mercilessly and in time stamps it out.

Nature suffers no mongrel to live.

Read “The Origin of Species,” by Charles Darwin…

The intermarriage of people of one colour with people” of another colour always leads to deterioration. Prof. Agassiz says, ” Let any one who doubts the evil of the mixture of races, and is inclined from a mistaken philanthropy to break down all barriers between them, come to Brazil. He cannot deny the deterioration consequent upon an amalgamation of races, more widespread here than in any country in the world, and which is rapidly effacing the best qualities of the white man, the negro, and the Indian, leaving a mongrel nondescript type, deficient in physical and mental energy.

The most favourable opinion held in regard to the white-Indian half-breeds in Brazil is very poor. They are a lazy and a troublesome class, and much inferior to the original stock. (From ” Brazil,” by C. C. Andrews.)

Darwin notes in half-breeds a return toward the habits of savage life. He says: ” Many years ago, before I thought of the present subject, I was struck with the fact that in South America men of complicated descent between negroes, Indians, and Spaniards rarely had, whatever the cause might be, a good expression.” Livingstone, after speaking of a half-caste man on the Zambesi, described as a rare monster of inhumanity, remarks: “It is unaccountable why half-castes such as he are so much more cruel than the Portuguese; but such is undoubtedly the case.” Humboldt speaks in strong terms of the bad character of the Zambos, or half-castes between Indians and negroes, and this conclusion has been arrived at by various observers. An inhabitant of Africa remarked to Livingstone, that God made the white man, God made the black man, but the devil made the half-castes…

Read the entire book here.