Mixed Race Studies

Interracial marriage in US hits new high: 1 in 12

The Miami Herald
2012-02-16

Hope Yen, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Interracial marriages in the U.S. have climbed to 4.8 million—a record 1 in 12—as a steady flow of new Asian and Hispanic immigrants expands the pool of prospective spouses. Blacks are now substantially more likely than before to marry whites.

A Pew Research Center study, released Thursday, details a diversifying America where interracial unions and the mixed-race children they produce are challenging typical notions of race.

“The rise in interracial marriage indicates that race relations have improved over the past quarter century,” said Daniel Lichter, a sociology professor at Cornell University. “Mixed-race children have blurred America’s color line. They often interact with others on either side of the racial divide and frequently serve as brokers between friends and family members of different racial backgrounds,” he said. “But America still has a long way to go.”

The figures come from previous censuses as well as the 2008-2010 American Community Survey, which surveys 3 million households annually. The figures for “white” refer to those whites who are not of Hispanic ethnicity. For purposes of defining interracial marriages, Hispanic is counted as a race by many in the demographic field…

Read the entire article here.

Obama Has Shattered America’s Racial Ceiling

San Diego Union-Tribune
2012-02-12

Constance M. Carroll, Chancellor
San Diego Community College District

If he could visit 21st-century America, Alexis de Tocqueville would be amazed to find Barack Obama, an African-American, as president of the United States. However, he would not be surprised to find that, despite this powerful symbolism of progress, race is still a divisive force in the country.
 
Following his tour of this young nation in the 19th century, Tocqueville, a French historian and political activist, published “Democracy in America” in 1835. In this book, he described slavery as “the most formidable evil threatening the future of the United States.” Aware of the growing impetus to abolish this practice, Tocqueville noted, “I see that slavery is in retreat, but the prejudice from which it arose is immovable.”
 
173 years later, Americans elected an African American to hold the highest office in the nation. During election eve on Nov. 4, 2008, many wept, shared their enthusiasm with friends and family across the country, and actually believed that this was it: the end of racial strife in America. Given the nation’s difficult journey from slavery and its abolition, from Jim Crow laws and their dissolution, from segregation and its demise, to the continuing civil rights struggle to eliminate the vestiges of this dark history, Barack Obama’s election was heralded by many as the start of a new era of equality and racial peace…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-race children face new obstacles

Korea Joongang Daily
2012-02-16

Yim Seung-hye

Abandonment and abuse put them at disadvantage from the start

It was around 5 a.m. on the morning of March 20, 2010, when a woman surnamed Park from Bangbae-dong, southern Seoul, heard a baby crying and ran to her door. On her doorstep was a dark-skinned newborn in a box with a note that said, “Please take good care of my baby. His name in English is Jeromy. I don’t have enough money to support him. I really love him. He was born at home on March 19, 2010, at 10:15 a.m.”

Park called the police, and Jeromy was transferred to the Seoul Child Welfare Center, which found a permanent home for him at Eden I Ville, an infants’ home in Seongdong District, eastern Seoul.

“We predict Jeromy was born of a Korean father and a Filipino mother,” said Lee So-young, the director of Eden I Ville. “As we want all children who were abandoned to be adopted and find a family, we wanted Jeromy to be adopted as well, but because he differs in appearance from other Korean children, most of the Korean couples who have visited our center have been reluctant to consider him.”

Read the entire article here.

Littefield Lecture: The Free State of Jones: Community, Race, and Kinship in Civil War Mississippi

Littlefield Lecture
University of Texas, Austin
Applied Computational Engineering & Sciences Building (ACE), Avaya Auditorium 2.302
2012-03-06, 16:00-18:00 CST (Local Time)

Victoria Bynum, Professor Emerita
Texas State University, San Marcos

Dr. Bynum will be delivering this year’s Littlefield Lectures for the History Department of the University of Texas, Austin.  The lectures are based on research from my last two books, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War and The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies.

The man behind the legend

Edmonton Journal
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
2012-02-14

Jay Stone, Postmedia News

BERLIN – He was a musician, a spiritual leader, a ladies’ man, a smoker of heroic amounts of ganja, a political force and a religious icon. And, 31 years after his death, Bob Marley is still a chart-topper: His Legend album sells 250,000 copies a year, even now.

“Everywhere in the world people look at Bob as some kind of leader, philosopher, prophet, someone who speaks to their lives and in whom they find wisdom,” says Scottish filmmaker Kevin Macdonald. “It’s fascinating: Why is that? Nobody else has had that effect in music.”

Macdonald directed the documentary, Marley. It’s a definitive—not to say encyclopedic—biopic of a musician who was a mystery, despite his popularity as the first poet of reggae. Almost 2 and a half hours long, it includes concert footage and interviews with friends and family. It is having its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival…

…The Scottish director took over the project from Jonathan Demme, who dropped out because of the lack of historical documents with which to put together a full picture. Macdonald said he became committed to it while in Uganda shooting The King of Scotland, his film about Idi Amin.

“I went into the Kampala slums with some of my actors, and people had Bob Marley pictures, graffiti, pictures,” Macdonald said. “Twenty-five years after he died, he still had a huge impact. There’s no other musician I can think of who has that position in culture, so long after he’s dead, and so far away, in a poor part of a central African city.”

He looked at the film as a kind of detective story. Much of Marley’s identity came from the fact that he was of mixed race—his mother was black, his father white—so that, in some ways, he was an outsider in his own country. Despite Macdonald’s research, however, Marley’s father, Norval, remains a mystery: There is a photograph of him in the movie, but not much information…

Read the entire article here.

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough

International Herald Tribune (The Global Edition of the New York Times)
2012-02-15

Eusebius McKaiser, political Analyst
Wits University, Johannesburg, South Africa

JOHANNESBURG – A few weeks ago, a British friend of mine served a sumptuous confession as a starter for dinner, “I only realized recently that you’re not actually black!” We had met several years back in the English midlands, where, judging by her remark, I had passed as black. But now that she has lived in South Africa for a few months, she is fluent in the local racial vocabulary: things are not quite black and white.

Let me explain. In South Africa I’m referred to as “colored,” a term that does not have the same derogatory denotation here as it does in the United States when it is hurled at black Americans. I am not black. I am of mixed racial heritage, as my parents are and their parents were.

When racist colonial settlers arrived at the southern tip of Africa during the 17th century, their racism did not preclude sexual relations with the locals. Several generations later, the colored community is ostensibly an ethnic group just like the Xhosas or the Zulus or any of the other myriad groupings within South Africa’s borders. It makes up  9 percent of the country’s population of 50.6 million.

…The lack of adequate economic opportunity for coloreds since the dawn of democracy here — combined with their lingering, paralyzing sense of victimhood — explains why the colored community is the most class-homogenous racial grouping in South Africa: an essentially poor, lower-working-class community. Very few of its members escape that stereotype.

In the Western Cape, the province with the largest concentration of colored people in the country, rates of fetal alcohol syndrome are some of the worst in the world. This community is like the drunken uncle of the South African family, the relative you tuck away when posh visitors come around. Paradoxically, many more colored people are worse off than black Africans now than were during apartheid…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Ancestry DNA and the Manipulation of Afro-Indian Identity

Chapter in:
The First and the Forced: Essays on the Native American and African American Experience
2007
285 pages
University of Kansas, Hall Center for the Humanities

Edited by James N. Leiker, Kim Warren, and Barbara Watkins

Chapter pages: pages 141-155

Arica L. Coleman, Assistant Professor of Black American Studies
Unverisity of Delaware

Arica Coleman explains the rise in popularity of Ancestry DNA testing to determine more clearly an ancestral past for African Americans and Native Americans. In this essay, she shows that claims made by commercial companies promising to provide missing evidence for African and indigenous origins are more exaggerated than current genetic technology can deliver. Promises that a DNA test can provide a verification of Native American tribal relationships or define a link to an African tribe are misleading. Coleman argues that Ancestry DNA results are largely based on speculation and can vary from one company to the next. She also asserts that in developing identities, a shared history and ancestral consciousness, including knowledge transmitted through oral history, culture, and daily activities, should not be replaced by genetic technologies.

Read the entire chapter here.

The Real American Love Story: Why America is a lot less white than it looks

Slate
1999-10-05

Brent Staples

The PBS broadcast last month of An American Love Story—a 10-hour film about an interracial family—spawned a great deal of chatter to the effect that mixed-race couplings were the wave of the future. In fact, they are the wave of the past. Interracial marriages accounted for only 2.2 percent of all marriages in the Current Population Survey of 1992, a gain of only two-tenths of a percent over 1980, and the number of mixed couplings actually decreased slightly in 1991. The census pattern suggests that slightly more interracial couples will fall into each other’s arms in the coming years but that there will be nothing resembling a dramatic acceleration of marriage across the color line.

But America already has almost 400 years of race mixing behind it, beginning with that first slave ship that sailed into Jamestown harbor carrying slaves who were already pregnant by members of the crew. Americans have grudgingly accepted the fact that sex between masters and slaves such as Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was frequent, leading to a many-hued race of people who do not look African at all, even though they call themselves “African-American.” Outside of recent African immigrants to the United States, there are virtually no black Americans of purely African descent, which is to say no black people who lack white ancestry, left in this country.

Four centuries of race mixing have had a similar impact on Americans who define themselves as white. Convincing estimates show that by 1950 about one in five white Americans had some African ancestry. This inheritance most often arrived at the bedroom door in the form of a fair-skinned black person who had slipped over the color line to live as white. Put another way, most Americans with African blood in their veins think of themselves as white and conduct themselves as such—and check “white” when they fill out census forms…

Read the entire article here.

Brazil in black and white? Race categories, the census, and the study of inequality

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 35, Number 8, August 2012
pages 1466-
1483
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.607503

Mara Loveman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Jeronimo O. Muniz, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Federal University of Minas Gerais

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Many scholars advocate the adoption of a black-and-white lens for the analysis of racial inequality in Brazil. Drawing on a nationally representative dataset that includes race questions in multiple formats, we evaluate how removal of the ‘brown’ category from the census or other social surveys would likely affect: (1) the descriptive picture of Brazil’s racial composition; and (2) estimates of income inequality between and within racial categories. We find that a forced binary question format results in a whiter and more racially unequal picture of Brazil through the movement of many higher income mixed-race respondents into the white category. We also find that regardless of question format, racial inequality in income accounts for relatively little of Brazil’s overall income inequality. We discuss implications for public policy debates in Brazil, and for the broader scientific and political challenges of ethnic and racial data collection and analysis.

Read the entire article here.

Loving and the Legacy of Unintended Consequences

Wisconsin Law Review
2007,  Number 2
Pages 241-281

Rachel F. Moran, Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles

Table of Contents

• I. Introduction
• II. Making History Rest on Traditional Assumptions
  • A. The Significance of Race
  • B. The Meaning of Marriage
  • C. A Domestic Paradigm of Race and Intimacy
• III. Undoing Traditional Assumptions: The Unintended Consequences of Loving
  • A. New Frontiers in Race: Multiracialism and Colorblind Segregation
    • 1. The Mixed Promise of Multiracialism
    • 2. The Rise of Colorblind Segregation
  • B. New Paradigms of Intimacy: Same-Sex Marriage Advocacy and the Rise of Marriage-Minded Singlehood
    • 1. The Same-Sex Marriage Movement
    • 2. Marriage-Minded Singlehood
  • C. From the Color Line to the International Border
• IV. Conclusion

Introduction

If it can take a decade for a person to appreciate the implications of a major life event, it can take even longer to realize the significance of a turning point in the history of a nation. Perhaps for that reason, we hold commemorative events like this one.  An anniversary is an opportunity to reflect on a pivotal moment with distance and detachment and to weigh the consequences more fully than was possible at the time. On this fortieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, perhaps what is most striking is that a case deemed pathbreaking in its day now seems to have taken so much for granted.  Because the United States Supreme Court interrogated the meaning of neither race nor marriage, Loving has been invoked in a number of later struggles in ways that might have taken the Justices by surprise. This result, of course, is part of the law of unintended consequences: the more that is left unexamined, the more likely that a fresh look will reveal implications beyond those originally contemplated.

Here, I will explore Loving’s unintended consequences by considering why the Court took so much for granted and how the opinion later was deployed in unexpected ways. After briefly examining the facts and holdings in the case, I will show that the Justices accepted monoracial categories as a given, despite evidence of multiracial complexity. The Court’s treatment of race reflected the need to implement desegregation orders that turned on clearcut racial distinctions. The Justices also regarded marriage as a longstanding tradition. Already under attack for conjuring up unenumerated rights that did not appear in the Constitution, the Court was loath to suggest that marriage was anything other than an uncontroversial historical institution.

Ironically, the Court’s assumptions about race and marriage have been directly subverted by those who most openly lay claim to Loving’s legacy. Proponents of multiracialism and advocates of same-sex marriage argue that their reform proposals are a natural outgrowth of the Court’s conceptualization of freedom and equality. At the same time, Loving’s subtler consequences have gone largely unaddressed. The case arguably ushered in a jurisprudential philosophy that treats colorblindness and ongoing segregation as compatible. In addition, the decision entrenched the primacy of marriage in the law’s recognition of close personal relationships. Finally, Loving acquiesced in the presumption that romance happens only among Americans and so the decision has been of little import in dignifying and protecting the intimate attachments of noncitizens. Such a complex legacy demonstrates why a perfectly factual account of Loving simply will not do, and so it may take some time to appreciate the consequences.

Read the entire article here.