Mixed Race Studies

Lansing has highest percentage of people who identify as multiple-race black

Lansing State Journal
2011-11-18

Matthew Miller

Gianni Risper has a black mother, a white biological father (as opposed to the father who raised him, his mother’s husband) and a way of describing himself that isn’t found on any Census form: Italian-Caribbean-American.

“Race is becoming more muddled,” he said, and, at 19, he is part of a generation that is muddling it, more likely to be mixed race than their elders, more likely to reject the rigidity of prevailing racial categories in favor of more fluid identities.

“I try not to put myself into a category of being either black or white or just one thing,” Risper said, “because I’m not.”

And, living in Lansing, he has plenty of company.

Lansing has the highest percentage of people who identify as black and some other race of any place in the country, at least any place with a population of 100,000 or more.

According to the 2010 Census, it’s 4.1 percent, more than one out of every 25 people in the city…

…Kristen Renn, a professor of education at Michigan State University who has studied mixed-race identity in college students, said space began to open up for more complicated racial identities in the latter part of the 1990s.

“Part of this is liberal baby boomers marrying outside their race or having kids with people of other races and liberal baby boomers being very vested in raising happy children,” she said.

But the shift also coincided with the growth of the Internet, which made it easier to create communities around mixed-race identities or even specific racial combinations.

It coincided with celebrities – Renn mentioned Tiger Woods – beginning to speak publicly about their blended ancestries.

As a result, among the younger generation in particular, “it has become more OK,” she said. “There is a youth movement around mixed race.”

And if that’s more true in Lansing than other places, she sees it as a good sign.

“When people are less comfortable, they have to draw the boundaries much more clearly, ‘You’re one of them. You’re one of us. You’ve got to be one or the other,’ ” she said.

“People in more cosmopolitan areas are just used to a more diverse, global kind of population.”…

…Self-definition

Nikki O’Brien was raised by her white mother. She didn’t know her black father until she was an adult. She identifies herself as black.

“You’d think I would be more malleable in my racial identity,” she said, “but really the experience of being other or different was enough that I constantly knew that I was black and the strength and community that I pulled from that identity just pushed me.”

But O’Brien, a program adviser at MSU who spent years working with minority students, sees the conversation about mixed-race identity more as one about self-definition, including the right to identify as one race or another…

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Mixed-race Koreans urge identity rethink

The Korea Herald
2011-12-07

Kirsty Taylor

Things have come a long way since the 1970s when mixed-race Koreans here were spat upon and beaten up for being different.

The kids of that time, whose fathers were often foreign soldiers who first came here during the Korean War, used to find it hard to walk down the street for fear of discrimination.

These days, the Korean government and charities are investing heavily in programs to support multicultural families and overt discrimination against Amerasians is rare.

But African-American Korean Yang Chan-wook, who goes by his Korean name here rather than his western name of Gregory Diggs, said that small daily occurrences remind him that this society does not yet fully accept him.

“In the 1970s these kids could not go to school, but even now, mixed-race Koreans going into public schools have a pretty high dropout rate,” he said.

“Sometimes when I am on the bus people will look at me and if they think that I am not Korean they will not sit next to me or they will move when I sit down. This kind of thing is still existent. Also, it can be difficult to get people to stop speaking English with me. Even if I have been speaking in Korean with them for 20 minutes they will still try to speak in English as if they thought I could not understand…

…After living with this prejudice, Yang started the M.A.C.K. Foundation (Movement for the Advancement of the Cultural diversity of Koreans) upon returning in 2003, basing it on a similar mission started in Chicago in 1995…

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Dominican Republic Country Profile

BBC News
2011-12-06

Once ruled by Spain, the Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, a former French colony.

OVERVIEW…

…The Dominican Republic is inhabited mostly by people of mixed European and African origins. Western influence is seen in the colonial buildings of the capital, Santo Domingo, as well as in art and literature. African heritage is reflected in music. The two heritages blend in the popular song and dance, the merengue.

No blending of fortunes, however, is evident in the distribution of wealth between ethnic groups.

The Dominican Republic is one of the poorest countries in the Caribbean. There is a huge gap between the rich and the poor, with the richest being the white descendants of Spanish settlers, who own most of the land, and the poorest comprising people of African descent. The mixed race majority controls much of the commerce. …

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The Measurement of Negro “Passing”

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 52, Number 1 (July, 1946)
pages 18-22

John H. Burma

Older and popular methods of estimating the number of Negroes who pass over into the white group are no longer to be credited. Considerable misconception exists concerning passing itself, which is more frequently temporary and opportunistic than permanent and complete. In the absence of scientifically accurate counts, the lower estimates of passing are probably more reliable.

Whenever a minority group is oppressed or is the subject of discrimination, some individual members attempt to escape by losing their identity with the minority and becoming absorbed into the majority. In the United States the Negro is such a minority group. In many cases a foreigner may become indistinguishable in a country by adopting the language, customs, and dress of that country. This technique, of

TABLE 1: native whites of native parentage, by Age Groups, for 1900 and 1910

Ages		Populations		Increase or Descrease
1900	1910	1900	1910
0-4…	10-14	5,464,881	5,324,283	-140,589
5-9…	15-19	5,174,220	5,089,055	-85,165
10-14…	20-24	4,660,390	4,682,922	+22,532
15-19…	25-29	4,234,953	4,049,074	-185,879
20-24…	30-34	3,805,609	3,401,601	-404,008

course, avails the Negro little because of his high visibility.

Being a Negro in America is not just a biological matter, it is a legal and social matter as well. It has been declared, by law, how much Negro heredity makes one a Negro; and because of the determination to prevent the infusion of Negro blood into the white group, the law frequently decreed that a person of one thirty-second, one sixty-fourth, or “any discernible amount” of Negro blood was a Negro. This meant that many persons who were legally Negro had so much white blood that they were, biologically, indistinguishable from whites. This, in turn, led to a considerable number of “white Negroes” being mistaken for legal whites and being treated as such. Some of this group, we have long been aware, simply went where they were not personally known and became a permanent part of the white group.

This passing of the legal Negro for white has been well known for over one hundred and fifty years. What we have not been able to ascertain accurately was the number of these legal Negroes who passed as white. This lack of concrete knowledge did not, of course, prevent considerable speculation and opinionated estimates. By the very secrecy which must involve passing, its investigation is almost insuperably hindered, and seldom, if ever, have estimates agreed.

The first, and by far the most widely known, effort to arrive at an unbiased estimate of the number of legal Negroes who have more or less permanently passed into the white group was made by Hornell Hart rather incidentally to a study of migration. His method of analysis was a breakdown of the census returns for native whites of native parentage, by age groups. The reasoning involved hinges on the fact that this group cannot increase. Emigration might logically decrease it, as would deaths, but there should be no increases. Yet, as is seen by Table 1, Hart found a marked increase. In fact, the group who had been between…

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Patterns of gene flow between Negroes and whites in the US

Journal of Biosocial Science
Volume 8, Issue 4 (1976)
pages 309-333
DOI: 10.1017/S002193200001083X

K. F. Dyer
Department of Genetics
University of Adelaide, South Australia

A review of the pattern and magnitude of negro–white mating in the US is presented from the time of the earliest arrival of negroes in the American colonies until the present, using historical, demographic, census and genetic evidence.

The relative magnitude of negro male–white female matings compared to the converse are analysed in view of the different genetic outcomes of these two types of mating for X-linked genes. Contrary to many strongly stated opinions it is conclued from the historical evidence that, even from the earliest days of slavery, negro male–white female matings were a significant proportion of all negro–white matings. Census and demographic evidence suggests that their frequency increased so that from the time of the Civil War on they have formed a majority of inter-racial matings.

Genetic evidence based on estimates of the amout of admixture of white genes in a number of negro populations is considered. Estimates of admixture for the X-linked genes G6PD, and those for colour blindness are as high or higher than those derived from comparable autosomal genes.

Some observations on the total magnitude of negro–white mating, on the phenomenon of passing and on the relative socio-economic status of those involved are also made.

The implication of the findings on these phenomena for investigations and hypotheses concerning differences in intelligence and intellectual abilites between the races, particulary spatial ability which is thought to be strongly influenced by a gene on the X chromosome, are considered.

It is concluded that some of the assumptions made in proposing hypotheses regarding the origin and distribution of these abilities in the American negro are at variance with genetic, historical and sociological findings.