Mixed Race Studies

The meaning and measurement of race in the U.S. census: Glimpses into the future

Demography
Volume 37, Number 3 (August 2000)
pages 381-393
DOI: 10.2307/2648049

Charles Hirschman, Boeing International Professor of Sociology and Professor of Public Affaris
University of Washington

Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology
Co-Director of The Center for the Elimination of Minority Health Disparities
State University of New York, Albany

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

The 1996 Racial and Ethnic Targeted Test (RAETT) was a “mail-out mail-back” household survey with an experimental design of eight alternative questionnaire formats containing systematic variations in race, instructions, question order, and other aspects of the measurement. The eight different questionnaires were administered to random subsamples of six “targeted” populations: geographic areas with ethnic concentrations of whites, blacks, American Indians, Alaskan natives, Asian and Pacific Islanders, and Hispanics. The major conclusion is that allowing multiple responses to the “race” question in the 2000 census (and other variations in measurement that were considered in RAETT) had only a slight impact on the measured racial composition of the population. Another finding was a dramatic reduction in nonresponse to the combined race/Hispanic-origin question relative to all other questionnaire formats. We conclude that the concept of “origins” may be closer to the popular understanding of American diversity than is the antiquated concept of race.

Read the entire article here.

The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America

University of Manitoba Press
October 1985
306 pages
30 b&w illustrations, notes, index
Paper ISBN: 9780887556173

Edited by

Jacqueline Peterson, Professor Emerita of History
Washington State University

Jennifer S. H. Brown, Professor Emerita of History
University of Winnipeg

The New Peoples is the first major work to explore in a North American context the dimensions and meanings of a process fundamental to the European invasion and colonization of the western hemisphere: the intermingling of European and Native American peoples. This book is not about racial mixture, however, but rather about ethnogenesis—about how new peoples, new ethnicities, and new nationalities come into being.

Most of the contributors to this volume were participants at the first international Conference on the Métis in North America, hosted by the Newberry Library in Chicago. The purpose of that conference, and the collection that has grown out of it, has been to examine from a regionally comparative and multi-disciplinary vantage point several questions that lie at the heart of métis studies: What are the origins of the métis people? What economic, political, and/or cultural forces prompted the métis to coalesce as a self-conscious ethnic or national group? Why have some individuals and populations of mixed Indian and white ancestry identified themselves as white or Indian rather than as métis? What are the cultural expressions of métis identity? What does it mean to be métis today?

In the opening section of the book, John Elgin Foster, Olive P. Dickason, and Jacqueline Peterson grapple with the chronologies and locations of the emergent métis peoples in the first centuries after contact. In the second section, essays by John Long on the James Bay “halfbreed,” Trudy Nicks and Kenneth Morgan on an indigenous métis community at Grande Cache, Alberta, Verne Dusenberry on the landless Chippewa of Montana, and Irene Spry on the métis and mixed-bloods of Ruperts Land reveal the difficulties in generalizing about métis groups, some of whom have only recently begun to apply that label to themselves. Sylvia Van Kirk, R. David Edmunds, and Jennifer S. H. Brown explore the other side of métis genesis: the individuals and groups who never coalesced into lasting métis communities. The foreword is by Marcel Giraud and the afterword by Robert K. Thomas. First published in the mid-1980s, The New Peoples is considered a classic in the field of métis studies.

Ethnogenesis and Ethnohistory of the Seminole Maroons

Journal of World History
Volume 4, Number 2 (Fall 1993)
pages 287-305

Kevin Mulroy, Associate University Librarian
University of California, Los Angeles

At what historic moment and by what means does a ‘people’ spring into being?” ask Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer Brown in their introduction to the 1985 ground-breaking study, The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America. It is an intriguing question, and one that ethnohistorians are beginning to ask with regard to a wide range of groups living on many different frontiers. The editors of The New Peoples take strong issue with Frederick Jackson Turner’s belief that American national identity emerged on the frontier as transplanted immigrants were “fused into a mixed race.” Rather, they argue, the story is one of “genesis of composite ‘mestizo’ populations and the creation of bold and startlingly original ethnic and national identities throughout the two continents” of North and South America. “The rise of the ‘new peoples,’ ” Peterson and Brown believe, “is the most significant historical consequence of the wrenching collision and entanglement of the Old World with the New.” As Rebecca Bateman has pointed out recently, “the very processes responsible for the decimation of many cultural groups of the Americas led to ethnogenesis, the birth of new ones.” This paper will argue in favor of Peterson and Brown’s conclusions by examining the beginnings of one of these new and distinct peoples, the Seminole maroons, whose ethnogenesis took place on the southeastern frontier in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, largely as a result of such entanglements between the Old World and the New.

The Seminole maroons’ ethnogenesis and cultural development place them within the frame of reference of neoteric or cenogenic societies, explanations of which tend to stress the multiple heritages of groups formed as a result of frontier expansion. Nancie L. Solien Gonzalez has defined a neoteric group as “a type of society which, springing from the ashes of warfare, forced migration or other calamity, survived by patching together bits and pieces from its cultural heritage while at the same time borrowing and inventing freely and rapidly in order to cope with new, completely different circumstances.” Such groups tended to welcome and even encourage rapid change in order to survive and prosper. Indeed, one might say that they were created by the circumstances to which they adapted.

Coining another term, Kenneth M. Bilby has described cenogenic societies as those

born of conditions associated with the major transformations wrought by the worldwide expansion of capitalism—the large scale uprooting of peoples through wars, conquest and colonization, slavery, migration, and the forced removal of people from their ancestral lands. Most of them emerged from frontier setlings. The resulting sociocultural “fusions” were truly new creations, owing much to the past, but without precedent at the same time. Indeed, the fact that those who evolved these new societies and identities were forced to call upon several cultural pasts, not just one or two, guaranteed original outcomes.

There is considerable overlap between the Gonzalez and Bilby models, but Bilby restricts his argument to small-scale societies. He also takes issue with Gonzalez’s notion that such newly formed societies are essentially “without roots,” arguing instead that “the special kind of abrupt ethnogenesis involved in the creation of these societies does not preclude the transmission of a great deal of cultural knowledge from the past.” Bilby’s central defining characteristic lor cenogenic societies, in fact, is the importance of history and historical consciousness in the development of their self-definition and identity, a notion crucial to an understanding of Seminole maroon ethnohistory…

Read the entire article here.

“IndiVisible” Discusses African–Native American Lives

Newsdsesk: Newsroom of the Smithsonian Institution
2012-01-06

“IndiVisible: African–Native American Lives in the Americas,” a 20-panel display that outlines the seldom-viewed history and complex lives of people of dual African American and Native American ancestry, will open at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York, the George Gustav Heye Center, Thursday, Feb. 9. The exhibit will be on view through Friday, Aug. 31, in the museum’s photo corridor gallery.

“Indivisible” addresses the racially motivated laws that have been forced on Native, African American and mixed-heritage peoples. Since pre-colonial times, Native and African American peoples have built strong communities through intermarriage, unified efforts to preserve their land and taking part in creative resistance. Over time, these communities developed constructive survival strategies, and several have regained economic sustainability through gaming in the 1980s. The daily cultural practices that define the African–Native American experience through food, language, writing, music, dance and the visual arts, will also be highlighted in the exhibition…

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Situating mixed-race households in neighborhood contexts

University of Georgia
May 2007

Margaret Anne Hudson

Census 2000 counted approximately 1.7 million White/Latino mixed-race/multiethnic households in the US. Unfortunately, most research is limited to similar statistical accounting. Very little research moves beyond frequency counts to describe racial and ethnic identities in White/Latino households or the relationships of White/Latino households to segregated US urban terrain. Thus, this dissertation project is a case-study of the LA geography of White/Mexican households. White/Mexican households are the most numerous White/Latino household-type and, in LA, their population size is equal to that of Black same-race households.

Unlike previous work by geographers, I theoretically examine White/Mexican household locations with regard to racialization theory and feminist and cultural studies notions of difference; not simply race-blind theories about individual-level ethnic assimilation through out-partnerships with Whites. Using geographically-detailed and confidential 1990 census data from one in six LA area households, I link individual and household characteristics with census tracts and use dissimilarity and exposure indices, maps of neighborhood concentration rates, and residential attainment models to measure the segregation, concentration, and neighborhood racial compositions of White/Mexican households relative to: individuals from five non-Latino racial groups, groups of Mexican and other Latino individuals, and White same-race and Mexican co-ethnic households. Dissertation results indicate that neighborhood racial compositions and intra-urban residential geographies of White/Mexican households are in-between those of comparable White same-race and Mexican co-ethnic households. In contrast to White same-race households, White/Mexican households have more Mexican and Other Latino neighbors; relative to Mexican co-ethnic households, White/Mexican households have many more White neighbors. Residential attainment models find that, even after controlling for numerous household-level factors not accounted for in simple residential exposure calculations—i.e., household income and education levels, US or foreign-born nativity, and Spanish language use, etc.—White same-race and Mexican co-ethnic households that are equivalent to White/Mexican households do not share the same racially-defined residential space as White/Mexican households. Complex household-level racial affiliations appear to alter the residential locations of White/Mexican mixed-race households and, unlike predictions from assimilation theory, Mexican partnerships with Whites do not necessarily result in household residential patterns that are exactly like those of White same-race households.

ENLT 252 Mestizas, Halfies, and Others

University of Virginia
Fall 2008

How does your family background affect the way that the way that you see yourself?  How others in the United States see you?  In this class we will investigate novels, short stories, and poems that foreground the multicultural and intercultural make-up of the United States.  Our texts are an alternate form of cultural history: they depict a range of interactions between various immigrant communities and the larger “American” culture, which as it turns out, has no single definition.  Our texts are written by women who are often assigned hyphenated labels to indicate their family origins—Sandra Cisneros is Mexican-American, Diana Abu-Jaber is Jordanian-American, and so on—and many of our works feature protagonists who are of mixed racial and ethnic heritage and who negotiate among several different cultural modes.  Some recurring themes of the course will be the experience of living in between two or more languages (many of the texts incorporate untranslated pieces of languages other than English) and the language act of naming and renaming (for instance in Marilyn Chin’s “How I Got That Name: An Essay on Assimilation.”)  We will see that it is not only the ethically “other” citizens who are influenced by the American experience but indeed that their languages and voices penetrate into and profoundly shape American experience as a whole, both in terms of literary content and in terms of formal accomplishment.

 In the course we will analyze literary moments of cross-cultural contact, stereotyping, and exchange, and our goal during the semester will likewise be to create a small exemplary community in which open exchanges can occur.  We will discuss and critique the terms “mestiza” and “halfie,” among other labels for people of mixed race and mixed cultural experience, and we will compare the use and implications of these colloquial terms to the purposes and political intentions of scholarly definitions by cultural critics such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Lila Abu-Lughod. We will also be strongly interested in questions of literary form.  For instance, what is significant about a novel or poem following a linear narrative characteristic of realism, in other words producing a “straight” take on identity and history?  What is at stake in the poem or novel that takes a more postmodern approach and emphasizes a fractured, heterogeneous, hybrid experience?  Course requirements include regular and well-prepared participation, three papers, email responses to two of the readings, one class presentation, one or two periods leading discussion, and an essay-based final exam.

Possible texts include:

Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (Vintage)
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books)
Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (Bantam)
Nella Larson, Passing (Penguin)
Danzy Senna, Caucasia (Riverhead)
Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land (Vintage)
Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent (Norton)

The New Racial Dialogue: Arriving at Whiteness in the Age of Obama

Journal of African American Studies
Volume 13, Number 2 (June 2009) (“Joy Unspeakable: The First African American President”)
pages 184-186
DOI: 10.1007/s12111-008-9077-y

David H. Roane

My essay issues a challenge for whites to see the blackness of President-Elect Obama as a reflection of the similar complexity lying within themselves. By acknowledging the otherness within their whiteness, white Americans may finally grant themselves their race in a way that compels their much-needed participation in the national dialogue about race.

With the election of the nation’s first black president, there still remains the following question: how docs the “end” of public or institutional racism translate into an end of the negative biases that exist in private? To put it another way, what will the effect of having elected the nation’s first black president really have on the way people design their schools and neighborhoods, construct their families, and conceive their self-identities? What occurs in the ordinary business of people’s day-to-day life only marks true change.

For any national dialogue about race to move forward in a way that is real and significant—i.e. in a way that is personal—it will need new participants. The Age of Obama should be an age when white people can finally talk about their whiteness, not so much as a social identity (they already know how to do this and know how to leverage this quite well), but instead will come to learn what whiteness means as a culture linked to an ethnicity (something they understand much less). With that said, the problem of the 21st century is still the problem of the color line, only this time its frontier has a new set of pioneers.

So, what exactly is whiteness? Can it carry meaning beyond the typical hegemonic associations it has with the oppression of non-white groups? Can we…

Read or purchase the article here.

AMST 349: Race Across the Americas

Emory University

Seminar exploring the social construction of race comparatively and transnationally, especially the status of the descendants of enslaved Africans and mixed-race individuals in the Caribbean and Latin America.

335. Comparative Studies in Racial and cultural Identities

St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York
Cultural Encounters Courses

 This is a senior seminar designed to fulfill the goals of the Cultural Encounters program: to prompt students to synthesize and re-evaluate their academic study of cultures, their experiential learning off campus and their own social locations and identities. The course content will be a comparative analysis of racial, ethnic and cultural identities; readings will be drawn from literature, contemporary cultural studies theory and philosophy of race, gender and identity, supplemented by films shown outside of class. A significant portion of the readings will be drawn from “critical white studies,” looking at the ways white supremacy has been constructed and maintained in both historically specific and transnational ways. The course will pay particular attention to the interrelations between gender and race in different regions, especially as this is revealed through attitudes toward miscegenation and mixed-race identities. Students will be required to complete and present a major research project and to write a self-reflective analysis of their own identities and locations.

Marriages between African and Native Americans produced many children

Louisiana Weekly
2012-01-02

(Healthy Living News) —Native Americans with African ancestry produced more children than ‘full bloods’ in the early 1900s, despite the odds being against them, a new study demonstrates. Research by Michael Logan, Ph.D., of the University of Tennessee shows that increased fertility occurred at a time when things were not going particularly well for both African and Native Americans either — in social, economic and health terms. The work is published in Human Ecology…

…Dr. Logan examined the reproductive histories of 295 women of mixed Indian-Black and Indian-Black-white heritage. He found that Indian-Black marriages proved to be advantageous in terms of fertility, the average number of births, and offspring survival…

Read the entire article here.