Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
According to Alaina Roberts of the University of Pittsburgh, Native American nations “have always had this fear, and a valid fear, that when they accept black people as part of their tribe they are seen as not ‘Indian first’.”
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the
34th Annual National Council for Black Studies
Sheraton New Orleans Hotel
New Orleans, Louisiana
2010-03-17
William Berry
This study examined the representation and contextualization of interraciality and multiraciality in newspaper advertising supplements . Since the election of Barack Obama, media reports have expressed that pre-2008 constructs/contexts of race and ethnicity have evolved into what scholars have theorized as the “post-racial” era. A literature review determined that the advertising industry was among the last sites of consumerism to bring African Americans into typical roles as users of general market products/services, except when they appeared in advertisements placed in Black newspapers/magazines. A content analysis was conducted to determine the extent to which representations of multiracial families, couples, and friends—from childhood through adulthood—have appeared in advertisements from national retail chains, including JC Penney, Sears, and Wal-Mart. The study found that while interraciality and multiraciality are presented prominently in advertising supplements, these representations rarely depict individuals engaging in interactions that suggest they are family members or involved in intimate relationships, or that these engagements can be expected to occur within the home or other private, personal spaces where individuals significantly are more likely to interact closely with others of the same race or ethnic descent. Implications of the findings are that intimate interracial relationships may continue to be taboo and forbidden, in effect continuing as the “third rail” of the consumer society, consistent with how such advertisements were not produced or presented during most of the twentieth century.
Comments Off on Advertising “Interraciality” and “Multiraciality” In ObamaLand—Representations and Images in Kohl’s, Macy’s, Sears, Wal-Mart, etc.
Eric C. Thompson, Associate Professor of Sociology National University of Singapore
How can we deny the reality of race? It is a truth so many hold to be self-evident. Travel around the world, from Asia to Africa to Europe to South America: people look different in different places. Travel about in major global cities—Singapore, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, London—and physical diversity is close at hand. It would seem absurd to argue that the visible differences so apparent to our sight are socially constructed. Physiological differences—skin tone, eye shape, hair texture and the like—are not the outcome of our human imagination. The material reality of physiological differences grounds racial categorising. It is used as a point of reference and point of realisation to assert rhetorically the undeniable truth of any given scheme of racial categorisation.
The purpose of this article is to emphasise the error of such assertions. I aim also to point out the weakness of arguments for the “social construction” of race, which too often undermine their own case by denying the material reality of visible difference. I outline instead a way to incorporate the material reality of biological difference into an understanding of race as a social construct. My argument is simply this: biological difference is the material out of which our concepts of race are fashioned. These concepts are as many and varied as the diverse cultures of human societies around the world. In the case of race and other identities—such as ethnicity, gender and class—our social constructs are not fashioned out of thin air but out of material conditions. This said, the material conditions do not determine what we make of them—what we construct socially—any more than wood determines the myriad things a woodworker or craftsman might make out of a piece of timber.
In the first section of this article, I want to emphasise the socially constructed nature of “race”, “ethnicity” and similar concepts. The idea that race is a sensible way to talk about the material reality of biologically inherited diversity continues to reappear in new forms despite our best efforts to teach students and colleagues about its socially constructed nature. The attempt to depoliticise such concepts, to make them function as objective categories in the service of science or medicine, is a fraught undertaking. Race and ethnicity are deeply political categories, as many investigations into the historical circumstances of their social construction demonstrate. I will discuss this history in general ways in the case of the United States and in some greater detail in the internationally less well-known case of Malaysia, with the development of the concepts of bangsa in Malay and minzu in Chinese, which map varyingly and imperfectly onto the English terms “nation”, “race” and “ethnic group”. The imperfection of translation across Malay, Chinese and English itself demonstrates the tenuous relationship between these signifiers of types of peoples and the various extra-linguistic referents—of biology and culture—through which attempts are made to ground and reify such concepts as “race” and “ethnicity”.
But I also wish to move beyond this by now well-worn understanding of the social construction of “race”, “ethnicity” and similar concepts. The problem with social constructionist arguments, usually raised to try to dismiss racial, ethnic and other identities as ephemeral, is that they generally have no answer to the naive—though by no means foolish—realist reference to the difference and diversity of physical features, thought and behaviour which seem so true and apparent. There are people who look different from one another in patterns we map onto “racial” difference and who act differently in ways we attribute to cultural or ethnic difference. In response, I want to provide a means by which to take this sensible reality (i.e., a reality apparent to our senses) into account, to bring it into our understanding of the social construction of race, ethnicity and the like, while still maintaining the argument that biology and culture by no means determine such categories. Rather, biology and culture merely provide the raw materials from which we socially construct ideas of difference and community. As with raw materials out of which we fashion buildings or clothing, the materials we rely on have some bearing on the structures we build or the fashions we weave out of them, but they do not determine the form of the final products, let alone the uses to which we put them…
…Compare this to the United States. Barack Obama is widely considered to be America’s first “black” president. The default categorisation of racial identity in America, with Obama and others, is to classify individuals of “mixed” white and minority parentage as belonging to the minority category. In Singapore, by contrast, racial classification is a patrilineal inheritance: at birth, a child’s race is recorded as being that of the father. In the United States, President Obama is considered black or African American primarily on a biological, not a cultural, basis. But while physical appearance derived from biological inheritance may be the main touchstone of race in America, and cultural traits may be the main standard for race (or ethnicity) in Malaysia, in both countries these two race signifiers are also greatly conflated and combined. Obama, for instance, has been scrutinised for his language, mannerisms, sports preferences and, most prominently and perversely, his religious affiliations, all as a measure of how “black” or how “American” he is. Similarly, in Malaysia, although “Malay”, “Chinese” and other racial categories are associated more strongly with cultural traits, including language and religion, than with biological traits, the latter are frequently invoked when it suits a particular cause. For example, the former long-serving prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, known as a vocal proponent of the Malay community and head of the politically dominant United Malay National Organisation, was nevertheless alleged by some political opponents to be of paternal Indian biological lineage and therefore not to be a “real Malay”…
Ralina L. Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications University of Washington
In this article I analyze eight Internet images of President Barack Obama from the election campaign period of 2007–2008. These images were largely user-generated and disseminated and fall into two camps that each represent a form of anti-Black racism: overtly racist images and inferentially racist images. While representations of Obama as an ape, thug, or terrorist were generally recognized as clear forms of anti-Black racism, images I identify as inferentially racist operate within a postracial ideology in which Obama is figured as a messiah, whites’ “Black best friend,” or a mythical creature. For some viewers, these inferentially racist images did not incite the controversy of those read as overtly racist because the former were read as positive portrayals of uplift and progress. Yet, these inferentially racist images are reliant upon the same stereotypes of Blackness as the explicitly racist pictures, as Obama becomes a positive figure only when he can metaphorically transcend his Blackness.
Within a week of moving to an area of South Seattle designated by the 2010 U.S. Census as the most diverse in the country, I was cautioned by a well-intentioned, liberal White neighbor about the frequent incidence of car burglaries in the neighborhood. In our shared parking lot the neighbor told me, gesturing to her Obama/Biden bumper sticker, that her car was burgled “even though we have an Obama sticker!” I was so baffled by this comment that I mumbled a goodbye, got into my car and drove away, my mind exploding with questions. Did my neighbor think that car burglars were united in their proclivity to be Obama fans? Was she really assuming that all car vandals in South Seattle were Black? Did she mean that since she was ‘‘down with the cause’’ by publicly endorsing Obama, her car should have been immune from what she imagined to be Black-perpetrated crime? Was her bizarre performance of Obama-fandom intended to make her appear antiracist for us, the new family of color next door?
Since Obama’s presidential election campaign I have come to intimately understand that signifiers of our first African American president are deployed by some people to express anxiety, desire, guilt, discomfort, and, oftentimes, fear of Blackness. Such fear, which I read in the case of my neighbor as an assumption of Black criminality, must be seen as part-and-parcel of a more coded, more polite, but still virulent and destructive racism against African Americans that occurs, confusingly, through a celebration of Barack Obama. This complicated performance of support, when accompanied by controlling ideas of Blackness, reveals a barely sublimated anti-Black racism that flourishes in popular discourse because, in the words of Henry Giroux, ‘‘since it is assumed that formal institutions of segregation no longer exist,’’ racism against Black Americans also no longer exists (Giroux, 2003, p. 193). I use the phrase “anti-Black racism” as opposed to “racism” or ‘‘prejudice’’ not just to signal discriminatory feelings of Whites towards people of color but instead to signify the institutional, structural, and cultural forces that foment the inequality of people of African descent in our society.1 The featuring of Obama images, whether on a bumper sticker, t-shirt, poster, mug, or Facebook profile picture, is not a simple matter of one’s displaying political affiliation. As Obama is the first African American U.S. president, the production, consumption, and circulation of his image denotes conflicting emotions of race, identity, Blackness, belonging, and, yes, sometimes entrenched-yet-coded anti-Black racism…
Multiracialism cuts its teeth on the denial of this fundamental social truth: not simply that antiblackness is longstanding and ongoing but also that it is unlike other forms of racial oppression in qualitative ways—differences of kind, rather than degree, a structural singularity rather than an empirical anomaly.
Jon Kraszewski, Assistant Professor of Communication Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersery
The Real World’s focus on multiracial identity is part of the MTV’s efforts to rebrand itself as being more tolerant of all political opinions in the 2000s. Post-2000 seasons of The Real World contain two different portraits of multiracialism that appeal to viewers across the political spectrum. The liberalism in these seasons comes from multiracialism functioning as a liberal utopia free of racism, one where fluidity, not hostility, defines race relations. At the same time, these seasons appeal to conservative sensibilities by making multiracial cast members models of neoliberal self-management that conservatives recently have used to justify dismantling the welfare state and civil rights initiatives. While neither the liberal nor the conservative portraits of multiracialism on post-2000 seasons of The Real World appear to be overtly racist, I unearth subtext where The Real World articulates multiracialism to white supremacy and anti-blackness.
The Real World is one of the longest running series in American television history. Premiering in 1992. the series has already completed 22 seasons, and MTV recently contracted for four more. Scholars have interrogated the racial politics of the series, but they have equated race with either blackness, specifically the series’ stereotypical portraits of black masculinity, or tensions between urban blacks and rural whites (Bell-Jordan, 2008; Kraszewski, 2009; Orbe, 1998; Park, 2008). This focus has excluded scholarly engagement with other racial identities on the series. This essay unsettles the scholarly equation of race with blackness in The Real World by exploring the politics of multiracialism on the series in the 2000s. A list of multiracial characters on recent seasons includes Aneesa from The Real World, Chicago; Irulon and Arissa from The Real World, Las Vegas; Adam from The Real World, Paris, and Brianna from The Real World, Hollywood. These cast members has one parent who is black and one who is white. The erasure of these characters from discussions about race relates to a larger omission of mixed-race people from media studies scholarship. In Mixed Race Hollywood, Beltrán and Fojas (2008) write that despite “the veritable explosion of multiracial imagery in Hollywood film and media culture today, there has been little published scholarship to dale on the history or current representation of mixed-race individuals, romances, families, or stars on screen” (p. 2).
Analyzing a long-running series such as The Real World presents methodological and historical problems: a channel undergoes branding changes over the course of 18 years, which…
RICHMOND— Richmond’s famous Hollywood Cemetery serves as the final resting place of presidents, statesmen and generals.
Few have had the impact of Dr. Walter Plecker. His stormy legacy continues today, 150 years after his birth.
“My parents always made sure we knew the story of what Walter Plecker had done and how it had affected our people,” said Wayne Adkins, president of the Virginia Indian Tribal Alliance For Life.
“Plecker was a menace to Virginia Indians over many years,” said Stephen R. Adkins, chief of the Chickahominy Tribe. “My mom and dad, for instance, had to go to Washington DC in 1935 to get married as Indians. It was illegal to do so in Virginia under penalty of up to a year in jail.”
“Dr. Plecker was convinced that there was a need to purify the white race,” said Paul Lombardo, a law professor at Georgia State University and formerly a eugenics expert at the University of Virginia. “He thought that he was preserving the Commonwealth of Virginia, that he was maintaining the United States of America and, most importantly to him, that he was protecting the white race.”
For 34 years, starting in 1912, Dr. Plecker served as the director of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, carefully compiling birth, death and marriage records.
For Plecker, a native of Augusta County, there were only two races: white and non-white. Anyone who had what he thought was one drop of other than white blood was listed as “colored.” They were mongrels, in his view.
Plecker was a complex man who saved the lives of countless babies, including those of blacks and Indians, with updated birthing and midwife techniques, along with simple, homemade incubators for premature babies, according to historic profiles.
He was relentless. With great energy he compiled lists and wrote letters chastising whites who applied for marriage licenses with those Plecker thought were impure. Those letters are part of the extensive correspondence that are part of the vast Plecker record.
“There’s no question that Plecker was incredibly aggressive using the few prerogatives the law gave him to register people,” Lombardo said. “He used those prerogatives really to threaten people, to coerce them… Dr. Plecker once boasted that he had a list of people, by race, that rivaled the list that was kept by Hitler of the Jews.”
If he even just suspected someone had any African-American blood, they would go on his mongrel list.
Virginia’s Native Americans particularly felt his wrath. He was certain the tribes had interbred with blacks. “Like rats, when you’re not watching, they’ve been sneaking in their birth certificates though their own midwives,” Plecker wrote.
“We couldn’t claim we were Indian, it was against the law to say we were Indian,” said Kenneth Branham, chief of the Monacan Tribe. “What do we claim? We’re not black. And we’re not white.”
“That whole idea that you’re not what you believe yourself to be,” said Sharon Bryant, the newly elected Monacan chief. “That an entire community would tell you that, it becomes very oppressive to the people.”
“Whole groups of people who formerly were recognized among the tribes of Virginia simply disappeared from the records,” Lombardo said. “They were no longer considered to be Native Americans or Indians as they were called. Their children were not recognized as members of the tribes, and they’re living with that legacy right now.”
Plecker and his many supporters believed not only that the races should never intermarry, they shouldn’t even mingle. Strict segregation would last for generations.
Blacks had to have their own schools and neighborhoods. So did Indians…
…In 1924, at Plecker’s urging and with the support of many Virginians, the General Assembly passed the Racial Integrity Act, which narrowly defined race and made it illegal to for whites to marry anyone of any other race. Plecker wrote to the governors of the rest of the states, urging them to pass similar laws to save the white race.
Also, that year, Lombardo said, “there’s a sterilization law that’s passed in Virginia, upheld later in the United States Supreme Court, allowing some 60,000-plus people to be sterilized in institutions in 32 states all over the country.”
There was also a strict immigration law passed then.
The Racial Integrity Act stood until 1967, when the Loving case about an interracial couple led to a Supreme Court reversal.
But the damage to Virginia’s Indian tribes continues. There are more than 560 federally recognized Indian tribes in the country. But none of Virginia’s tribes, the ones that helped the settlers survive, have that crucial recognition that gives them, in essence, sovereign status and entitles them to nation-building assistance.
The U.S. Department of the Interior requires that tribes be able to show an unbroken bloodline. And Walter Plecker carved a hole – decades long – in their heritage…
Arlington Public Schools
Clarendon Education Center
2801 Clarendon Boulevard, Suite 308
Arlington, Virginia
2011-11-30, 10:00-12:00 EST (Local Time)
Have you ever wondered about how children from multiracial backgrounds develop their racial identity? Please join us in welcoming Dr. Ricia Weiner, Ms. Eleanor Lewis, and Ms. Veronica Sanjines, School Psychologists, who will share valuable information with families and school staff about the stages and factors that impact the development of identity in multiracial children.
In this exciting session, Dr. Weiner, Ms. Lewis and Ms. Sanjines will review current theories, explain and dispel myths and inaccuracies, and help participants understand external influences in multiracial identity development. They will also explore the impact of adoption and exposure to multiple languages on this population. Participants will learn specific factors that support successful and adaptive multiracial identity development.
How mixed-race Brits are tackling issues surrounding dual heritage
LAST MONTH, the UK’s fastest growing ethnic minority, as part of the BBC’s Mixed Britannia series, reignited the debate of what it means to be ‘mixed-race’.
Demographers have predicted that Britain’s mixed-race population will reach 1.3 million by 2020 – almost double the number recorded in 2001. Of this figure, 45 percent are mixed white and black.
But despite increasing acceptance of inter-racial relationships and more visible mixed-race people such as Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, actress Thandie Newton and Olympian Kelly Holmes, the concept of being mixed-race remains quite literally a grey area – a type of no man’s land where nothing is as simple as black or white.
Some critics find the need for mixed-race people to identify as such divisive, and argue that biologically there can be no such thing. Others argue that by merit of having a collective experience, mixed-race people should be free to align themselves in this way, and subsequently, get their voice heard when it comes to policy and decision-making.
Self-defining
Then there are those who are comfortable self-defining as black in the political sense as a means of navigating British society.
Bradley Lincoln, founder of social enterprise Mix-D, whose aim is to provide a year-round national platform for mixed-race debate, said: “When we talk about being mixed-race there is a danger of either over-celebrating or sounding like a victim.
“Mixed-race people are not foot soldiers for a new racism. It is not a homogenous group. It is not a separate ethnic grouping – but it is time to move the conversation forward, particularly within the education and the social care system where many mixed children are considered just black.”…
Ilana Gelfman, Skadden Fellow Greater Boston Legal Services
The federal doctrine of sex discrimination in employment depends on the underlying yet unstated assumption that sex is binary: one is either a man or a woman, and there is no other possibility. The existence of intersex individuals challenges this assumption. This article asks how Title VII doctrine can be applied to intersex employees. In answering, the Article considers (1) the ramifications of the ever-developing definition of “because of . . . sex” in Title VII jurisprudence as applied to sexual minorities and (2) the implications of Title VII doctrine regarding mixedrace individuals for our understanding of how the law treats (and should treat) individuals “in between” the categories. The article moves beyond previous work, which suggests that intersex individuals be protected as a third sex category under Title VII, because that work only reinforces the exact sex categorizations that should be undermined by any serious examination of intersexuality. Instead, the article proposes a new model for protection against sex discrimination in employment—that of discrimination “because of perceived sex.”
Table of Contents
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION
I. TITLE VII AND INTERSEX INDIVIDUALS: THE CONFLICT BETWEEN DOCTRINE AND REALITY
A. Title VII’s Binary Conception of Sex
B. Intersexuality Challenges the Binary
C. A Conflict Between Doctrine and Reality
II. IN SEARCH OF A DEFINITION: “BECAUSE OF…SEX” AND SEXUAL MINORITIES
A. The First Generation: The “Plain Meaning” of Sex
B. The Second Generation: Sex Stereotyping
C. The Third Generation: Discrimination Against Transgender Individuals
D. Moving Forward: Implications for Intersex Individuals
III. TROUBLE WITH CATEGORIES: ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAW AND MULTIRACIAL PLAINTIFFS
A. A Brief History: Law and the Multiracial Individual
B. Federal Anti-discrimination Law and the Multiracial Plaintiff
C. “In Between” the Categories: Multiracial and Intersex Plaintiffs Compared
IV. DOCTRINAL POSSIBILITIES: CATEGORIZING INTERSEX INDIVIDUALS FOR THEIR OWN PROTECTION
A. Why Protect Intersex Individuals at All?
B. Maintaining the Traditional Categories of Male and Female
C. Adding a Third Category: Acknowledging Intersexuality
V. RECONCEPTUALIZING SEX DISCRIMINATION: PERCEIVED SEX
NeWest Press
Spring 1999
208 pages
paperback ISBN 13: 978-1-896300-03-0
Edited by:
Anne Nothof, Professor Emeritus of English Athabasca University, Alberta, Canada
Edited by Anne Nothof, the three plays included this anthology all deal with intercultural issues in Canada with humour, wit and at times, heartbreak. They range from a village idiot in a French Canadian hamlet to arranged marriages to a multiracial relationship that is unhinged once he tells his parents that he is ‘living with a white girl.’
The anthology features biographic details of the contributing playwrights and their work:
