Mixed Race Studies

American Indians in Chicago struggle to preserve identity, culture and history

Chicago Tribune
2012-08-13

Dahleen Glanton, Reporter

Recession, social service funding cuts hinder efforts

Susan Kelly Power was 17 when she boarded a train to Chicago, a place that seemed a world away from the Indian reservation she grew up on in North and South Dakota.

In the 70 years since she left her family’s home on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, Power has carved out a distinctive place for herself in Chicago’s youthful American Indian community. The oldest Native American in Chicago, she is the memory keeper in a community where history is sacred.

From the controversial Battle of Fort Dearborn, which marks its 200th anniversary this week, to Chief Illiniwek, the University of Illinois mascot who was forced into retirement five years ago, activists such as Power have made it their mission to set the historical record straight. While the Battle of Fort Dearborn is considered a pivotal part of the city’s history, American Indians living in Chicago have become, for the most part, an invisible population that is struggling.

With few financial resources and no political muscle, the community of about 49,000 American Indians in the Chicago area has struggled to find a voice in a region where they are outnumbered by almost every ethnic group. Once tucked away in Uptown and now scattered throughout the city and suburbs, they could virtually go unnoticed if not for a small but vocal group of elders who refuse to back down from a good fight…

…Wiese said the economic condition of American Indians is more dire than the 2010 census indicates, largely because she believes the figures are skewed. The census form allows anyone to identify themselves as American Indian, whether they have official tribal papers or not, she said. Without those who identified themselves as mixed race, the number of American Indians in Chicago would be cut in half, to just over 13,337, the census shows.

East Indians, whites, African-Americans and Hispanics who do not have tribal documentation are identifying themselves as Native American, Wiese said, driving up the economic status of Indians to artificial levels. Meanwhile, an equal number of tribal-recognized Indians, who like many poor people living with multiple families in a residence, were not counted in the census, she said.

“We call them ‘box checkers,’ the thousands of people who say they are American Indian” but don’t have legal status, said Wiese, whose agency provides educational services for children and adults. “It hurts us when the demographics look higher than they are.”…

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Intermarriage of Races is Urged by Sociologist

Chicago Tribune
1909-08-18
page 11
Source: The Mead Project, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

Prof. William I. Thomas Predicts the Disappearance of Color Line in Prejudices of Civilized Peoples.
 
Disappearances of the racial “color lines” was predicted yesterday by Prof. William I. Thomas of the University of Chicago in a lecture in Kent theater on “Race Prejudice.”
 
“Race prejudice will grow less as race relationships become closer and as we travel more,” he said. “Already whites and Japs intermarry. There is no reason why intermarriage of races should not continue along these and other lines. The reason we marry Japs is that they are on a level with us — in many ways, at least. Their civilization and culture and ours are much alike.
 
“The questions of the future are not to be bound up in the tint of the skin by by the degree of development of the different races and occupations. The differences to be found in fair Scandinavians and dark Italians are duplicated in the case of whites and blacks.
 
“What we call the white race is the most mixed race of all. It has negro blood in it. The infusion of Indian blood into Americans has resulted in one of the finest strains possible.

“The signs of race prejudice are to be found in their extreme degree in our attitudes toward negroes. But, disagreeable as some of their traits are to us, our manners and features are even more shocking to negroes in Africa. They despise white people because our skins recall such things as ghosts, death, disease, and white mice. The time is coming when we shall not be separated as we now are by color.”

A Response to Ben Pitcher’s “Obama and the Politics of Blackness: Antiracism in the ‘post-black’ Conjuncture” [Rickey Hill]

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
Volume 12, Issue 4 (2010) (Post-Racial Politics and Its Discontents)
pages pages 347-350
DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2010.526058

Rickey Hill, Professor of Social Science
Mississippi Valley State University, Itta Bena, Mississippi

There is no “post-Black conjuncture.” Neither are we, in the United States, living in a post-racial moment. The coming of Barack Hussein Obama as the first Black person to be elected president of the United States has not signaled the end of racial domination as practice or racism as ideology. Racial domination continues to structure the lives of Black people and other nonwhite people in American society. Racism remains the active ideology that rationalizes institutional life and pervades the public and private spheres of interactions and reactions between people of color and the dominant white group. To be sure, Black people and other nonwhite people also suffer because the vast majority of them occupy the lower rungs of the economic ladder. However, while class is a determinant to economic wherewithal and access, race remains the dominant contradiction in the great socioeconomic divide.

Despite racial domination, and because of it. Blackness strives as a concrete cultural, psychological, political, and social force. Contrary to Pitcher’s thinking, “Obama’s claim on Blackness” is not “delimited by his not having been born to the descendants of slaves.” Obama’s claim on Blackness is instead enhanced because…

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Questioning Being Black and White in Canada

Canadian Dimension: for people who want to change the world
2012-08-24

Denise Hansen

“Canadians have a favourite pastime, and they don’t even realize it. They like to ask—they absolutely love to ask—where you are from if you don’t look convincingly white. They want to know it, they need to know it, simply must have that information. They just can’t relax until they have pin-pointed, to their satisfaction, your geographic and racial coordinates. They can go almost out of their minds with curiosity, as when driven by the need for food, water, or sex, but once they’ve finally managed to find out precisely where you were born, who your parents were, and what your racial makeup is, then, man, do they feel better. They can breathe easy and get back to the business of living.” —An except from Lawrence Hill’s Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada

Lawrence Hill dubs it The Question and, indeed, for most black/white mixed Canadians The Question has become a reoccurring topic of conversation fielded in classrooms, workplaces, out with new friends, in busy line-ups and crowded bars…most any public place. Most commonly asked in the form of “where are you from?”, “what’s your background?”, or put ignorantly simply as “what are you?”, The Question has become a defining aspect of the black/white mixed race experience for people of black and white descent living in Canada.

But is The Question just harmless curiosity? Or does The Question unconsciously reveal deeply held racial assumptions, sometimes even racist values? Either way, The Question puts race centre stage in a society where, ironically, the topic is often avoided, evaded at best. Is it time to take The Question as an opportunity to educate Canadians about issues of mixed race and blackness?…

…“People are socialized to uncritically accept racial categories. They want to know who mixed race people are affiliated with, perhaps as a guide to how they can engage with them,” explains Professor Leanne Taylor who studies multiracial and multiethnic identities at Brock University. Taylor adds that in Canada the idea of mixed race has even been commodified and exported internationally as the lived reality of what multiculturalism is—the message (falsely) being: ‘look at all these beautiful, mixed people as a symbol of how well people are getting along in Canada’….

Read the entire essay here.