Mixed Race Studies

Classifying racial and ethnic group data in the United States: the politics of negotiation and accommodation

Journal of Government Information
Volume 27, Issue 2 (March-April 2000)
pages 129–156
DOI: 10.1016/S1352-0237(00)00131-3

Alice Robbin, Associate Professor of Library and Information Science
Indiana University, Bloomington

“Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity,” formerly known as “Statistical Policy Directive 15,” is a classification system that has formed the basis of the U.S. government’s collection and presentation of data on race and ethnicity since 1977. During the mid-1990s, it underwent a public evaluation to determine whether the racial and ethnic group categories should be revised. This article examines the history of Statistical Policy Directive 15 from its origins through October 1997 and evaluates its consequences on political, economic, and social life. Among the many lessons that government information specialists can take away from the history of Statistical Policy Directive 15 is that classification systems are not neutral tools that objectively reflect and measure the empirical world. Classification systems cannot be isolated from the larger political setting. They are tightly linked to public policies, and, in the case of racial and ethnic group classification, they constitute highly contested social policy about which there is little public consensus.

…The Directive mandated minimum data collection for race and ethnic origin for civil rights compliance monitoring, general program administrative and grant reporting requirements that included racial or ethnic data, and statistical reporting for “federal sponsored statistical data collection where race and/or ethnicity is required.” The Directive cautioned, however, that the standard was not to be used to determine eligibility for participating in any federal program, nor were the categories to be construed as representing biological or genetic racial origins.

Four racial categories (American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black/Negro, and White) and one ethnic origin category (Hispanic) were created, along with rules for nomenclature and membership in the categories. The ethnic category of “Hispanic origin, Not of Hispanic origin” was included to comply with Public Law 94-311 of June 16, 1976 (90 Stat. 688), which required the collection, analysis, and publication of statistics for Americans of Spanish origin or descent. See Table 1 for the category names and definitions that were adopted for the minimum standard and Table 2 for the minimum standard adopted for the combined items of race and Hispanic origin.

People of biracial or multiracial heritage were required to select one category that “most closely reflect[ed] the individual’s recognition in his community”. The Directive recommended, but did not require, that self-identification be the preferred manner of data collection, although it had been standard operating practice for agencies to assign racial and ethnic group identity by observer rather than by respondent self-identification. This recommendation for self-identification established, for the first time in the history of governmental record keeping, the individual respondent as the authoritative source for personal racial identity…

…The release of the July 1997 Notice by OMB altered the public positions of nearly all the major stakeholders. In a complete turn-about, the federal agencies, including the agencies that monitored civil rights compliance, and all the minority population interest groups, expressed unanimous support for the Interagency Committee’s recommendations. Project RACE, the activist multiracial interest group that had successfully mobilized local and state groups throughout the country, stood alone in its rejection of the Interagency Committee’s recommendation of a checkoff for a multiple race response as a solution to the multiracial category. The Project RACE spokeswoman [Susan Graham] argued that the proposed method of tabulating multiple responses to the race item was “discriminatory,” and was designed to “uphold the one-drop rule and satisfy the minority communities”…

Read the entire article here.

Black and White Both Cast Shadows: Unconventional Permutations of Racial Passing in African American and American Literature

University of Arizona
2012
220 pages

Derek Adams

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

This dissertation proposes to build upon a critical tradition that explores the formation of racial subjectivity in narratives of passing in African-American and American literature. It adds to recent scholarship on passing narratives which seeks a more comprehensive understanding of the connections between the performance of racial norms and contemporary conceptions of “race” and racial categorization. But rather than focusing entirely on the conventional mulatta/o performs whiteness plot device at work in passing literature, a device that reinforces the desirability of heteronormative whiteness, I am interested in assessing how performances of a variety of racial norms challenges this desirability. Selected literary fiction from Herman Melville, Mary White Ovington, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and ZZ Packer provides a rich opportunity for analyzing these unconventional performances. Formulating a theory of “black-passing” that decenters whiteness as the passer’s object of desire, this project assesses how the works of these authors broadens the framework of the discourse on racial performance in revelatory ways. Racial passing will get measured in relation to the political consequences engendered by the transgression of racial boundaries, emphasizing how the nature of acts of passing varies according to the way hegemonic society dictates racial enfranchisement. Passing will be situated in the context of various modes of literary representation—realism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism—that register subjectivity. The project will also explore in greater detail the changing nature of acts of passing across gendered, spatial, and temporal boundaries.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ABSTRACT
• INTRODUCTION: FOR COLOREDS ONLY?: RACIAL PASSING AND A REGIME OF LOOKING
• CHAPTER ONE: AS BLACK AS IT GETS: PERFORMING BLACKNESS IN 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
• CHAPTER TWO: THIS AIN’T BLACKFACE: WHITE PERFORMANCES OF BLACK AUTHENTICITY IN MARY WHITE OVINGTON’S THE SHADOW
• CHAPTER THREE: IMAGINING BLACK AND WHITE OTHERS: BLACK PASSING IN POST-RACIAL AMEICAN LITERATURE
• CONCLUSION: RACIAL PASSING LITERATURE AND AN AMERICAN USEABLE PAST
• WORKS CITED

Read the entire dissertation here.

Double Vision

The Walrus
July/August 2012

Emily Landau, Lecturer
Department of History
University of Maryland

Poet Pauline Johnson enthralled Victorian theatregoers with a stereotype-smashing spin on her Mohawk-English heritage. Along the way, she became Canada’s first postmodern celebrity

In late 1892, Emily Pauline Johnson, a prim thirty-one-year-old bluestocking, made her first appearances as her alter ego, Tekahionwake, decked out in a leather dress, moccasins, and all the other accoutrements a Victorian audience might expect a Native woman to wear. For the better part of the previous year, Johnson, a half-Mohawk, half-English poet, had been reciting her work in the salons of English Canada. She was building momentum in the world of letters for her romantic naturalist ballads, and was renowned for her beauty, her striking stage presence, and her impassioned recitals. She had developed a niche as one of Canada’s most accomplished New Women, a cohort of late nineteenth-century feminists who were shedding the sexist shackles of the era. But as her act gathered steam, she created the onstage persona of Tekahionwake, an exaggerated, heightened riff on existing stereotypes, but also an ambassador to familiarize theatregoers with the conditions suffered by Native women.

She ordered a buckskin costume from the Hudson’s Bay Company; ironically, she couldn’t find an authentic outfit on the Six Nations reserve outside of Brantford, Ontario, where she grew up. The dress came with moccasins and a beaded belt adorned with moose hair and porcupine quills. She tore off one sleeve and replaced it with rabbit pelts, then completed the outfit with a hunting knife. (She would later add a bear claw necklace, a wampum belt, and a Huron scalp that had belonged to her grandfather.) Johnson’s audiences ate it up, and she became one of the country’s first celebrities, her distinctive costume generating the same tittering, slightly scandalized, and utterly enthralled reactions as Madonna’s cone bra or Lady Gaga’s meat dress would provoke a hundred years later.

For the next seventeen years, Johnson toured the world as Tekahionwake. She was billed by her promoter, Frank Yeigh, as the Mohawk Princess (a marketing ploy she used throughout her career), and although her branding played into the stereotypes, her stories broke them down. Her tales and poems gave agency to First Nations women, hooking her audience with a mix of poise and campy histrionics. In a trademark flourish, she shed the buckskin during intermission and returned in a staid silk evening gown and pumps, eliciting gasps from spectators as they marvelled at the transformation. The two modes of dress served as an external manifestation of Johnson’s own dual identity: the name Tekahionwake, which she came to use in both her performances and her published poetry, means “double life” in Mohawk…

…With her curly brown hair, grey eyes, and light skin, Johnson could have passed as white, but throughout her life she insisted on asserting her Mohawk heritage. Her need to exaggerate her nativeness in her persona was a conscious act, but it was also likely born of the fact that Indigenous people were — and still are — the only racial group to be legally mandated in Canada. First Nations people had to prove their heritage by establishing that they were biologically descended from a member of an Indian band, which entitled them to certain rights and protections, but diminished their individual agency and relegated them to being glorified wards of the government. (Even the blood-determined “science” of status wasn’t fixed: a Native woman could lose those protections by marrying a non-Native.)…

Read the entire article here.

Britain’s first black community in Elizabethan London

BBC News Magazine
2012-07-19

Michael Wood

The black trumpeter John Blanke played regularly at the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII

The reign of Elizabeth I saw the beginning of Britain’s first black community. It’s a fascinating story for modern Britons, writes historian Michael Wood.

Walk out of Aldgate Tube and stroll around Whitechapel Road in east London today, and you’ll experience the heady sights, smells and sounds of the temples, mosques and curry houses of Brick Lane—so typical of modern multicultural Britain.

Most of us tend to think that black people came to Britain after the war—Caribbeans on the Empire Windrush in 1948, Bangladeshis after the 1971 war and Ugandan Asians after Idi Amin’s expulsion in 1972.

But, back in Shakespeare’s day, you could have met people from west Africa and even Bengal in the same London streets.

Of course, there were fewer, and they drew antipathy as well as fascination from the Tudor inhabitants, who had never seen black people before. But we know they lived, worked and intermarried, so it is fair to say that Britain’s first black community starts here.

There had been black people in Britain in Roman times, and they are found as musicians in the early Tudor period in England and Scotland.

But the real change came in Elizabeth I’s reign, when, through the records, we can pick up ordinary, working, black people, especially in London…

Read the entire article here.

The Sexualization of Difference: A Comparison of Mixed-Race and Same-Gender Marriage

Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review
Volume 37, Number 2, Summer 2002
pages 255-288

Josephine Ross, Associate Professor of Law; Supervisor, Criminal Justice Clinic
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

I. Introduction: Mixed-Race Love as a Sexual Orientation

The past prohibition of mixed-race marriages in many U.S. states is often cited by those who support civil recognition of same-sex marriages. Advocates and scholars reason that just as it is no longer legal to deny marriage licenses on the basis of race, it should be illegal to deny marriage licenses on the basis of sex. Unfortunately, the comparison usually stops there. No effort has been made by the legal community to examine the actual lives of these two groups of outsider couples to see if the comparison holds together descriptively as well as formalistically. Nor have contemporary attitudes towards same-sex couples been compared to historical data detailing attitudes towards mixed-race sexuality during the time that mixed-race relationships were illicit. This Article will compare heterosexual mixed-race and same-sex unions (both mixed-race and monorace) in the context of history, both legal and cultural. The historical treatment of mixed-race marriages in this country supplies important information regarding the way society marginalizes certain relationships, and the connection between deprivation of marriage rights and the sexualization of relationships.

To say that a relationship is “sexualized,” means it is viewed as essentially sexual, and is not seen to be about commitment, communication or love. To understand what I mean by the word “sexualized,” consider certain reactions to an elementary school teacher who came out to his class in Newton, Massachusetts. When asked if he was married, the teacher responded that he was not, but that if he were to live with someone, he would live with a man that he would “love the way your mom and dad love each other.” This response gave rise to a parent’s complaint that the teacher had talked inappropriately about “sex;’ That story nicely encapsulates what I mean by the sexualization of same-sex love. If the teacher had answered that he would like to marry a woman whom he would “love the way your mom and dad love each other,” no one would have sexualized his response.

My argument is that the sexualization of gay relationships is similar to the way interracial relationships were sexualized in the past. For both, sexualization is a cause as well as a symptom of disempowerment. In the 1970s, social scientists began to describe the continued sexualization of black-white relationships in the United States from the time of slavery through the decade following the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia. They noted that narrative discourse around mixed-race couples was sexualized, and that mixed-race love was viewed as something pornographic and essentially different from mono-race love. Social scientists uncovered attitudes towards mixed-race couples by family members and society at large that I believe mirror attitudes towards same-sex couples.

Part II of this Article provides clues to the link between the sexualization of relationships that trespass on societal norms, and the deprivation of power and rights. Section A explores how mixed-race relationships were sexualized in the past, while Section B examines how the law has been used to restrict both mixed-race and gay couples. Section B also explores the cases that predate Loving and the reasons for denying recognition to mixed-race marriages. Those reasons are compared to arguments made by marriage opponents in same-sex marriage cases today.

Part III considers similarities in the lives of gay couples and mixed-race couples in order to demonstrate that analogizing the issue of marriage as it relates to each group is not merely a trick of logic. Section A examines the analogy between Loving v. Virginia and same-sex marriage cases. Section B reviews recent social science data that illustrates many parallel experiences of outsider couples, including the reactions of family members and society, the ways non-traditional couples cope with those negative reactions, and the reasons couples commit to one another despite adversity. By comparing mixed-race and same-sex couples, one can learn a good deal about the way society grants status and safety to certain relationships while marginalizing others.

Part IV asks whether the term “sexual orientation” should be expanded to include those in mixed-race, heterosexual relationships. How one answers this question will shed light on whether the phrase “sexual orientation” is a useful or accurate term when applied to those in gay relationships.

In the Conclusion to this Article, I urge scholars to desist from sexualizing gay relationships. Like mixed-race couples, same-sex partners are not necessarily any more sexual than their heterosexual counterparts. Gay couples, like mixed-race couples, are different not because of what they do or do not do in the bedroom, but because of the meaning ascribed to these couples in supermarkets, in dance halls, and in PTA meetings. Advocates and scholars should learn from past sexualization of mixed-race love and consider more accurate and less sexualized means to characterize same-sex love and relationships…

…The ban on mixed-race marriage did not eliminate sexual activity, but affected the nature of the sexuality, making it secret, closeted and sinful. In the case of white men and black women, the taboo distorted their relationships, suppressing affection or the appearance of affection, rendering them sexual liaisons only. As sociologist [Calvin C.] Hernton wrote, a white man “can sleep with [a black lover] discreetly, give her mulatto babies, but in all of this he must never act as if he loves her.”

Although the apartheid system in this country was intended to prevent access to white women by black men, the system was not completely successful. Hernton documented in his personal life and in his work a great deal of sexual activity between white women and black men in this era. In his opinion, women were often the aggressors because they were the ones with power during segregation. Jim Crow laws could even be said to aid the women’s conquest because although there were dreadful consequences for black men who consented and were discovered, men were sometimes more afraid to resist for fear they would be framed as rapists and face mob violence. As with white men’s liaisons with black women, the interracial sex taboo served to make liaisons between white women and black men purely sexual and clandestine…

Read the entire article here.

Special Issue: Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Volume 3 (2012): Special Issue: Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature

Table of Contents

• Introduction to Volume III—Wei Ming Dariotis
• The AALDP Interview
  • Smoke and Flowers: An Interview with Olivia Boler—Wei Ming Dariotis
• Articles
  • American Orientalism and Cosmopolitan Mixed Race: Early Asian American Mixed Race in the American Literary Imagination—Melissa Eriko Poulsen
  • The Making of a Eurasian: Writing, Miscegenation, and Redemption in Sui Sin Far—Juanita C. But
  • Betwixt and Between Past and Present: Cultural and Generic Hybridity in the Fiction of Mary Yukari Waters—Rania Samir Youssef
  • Revisiting Local History and Ghostly Memory in Shawna Yang Ryan’s Locke 1928—Chia-rong Wu
  • Realizing blacknpinay: Negotiating Notions of Authenticity in Janet Stickmon’s Crushing Soft Rubies—Teresa Hodges
  • The Abjection of James Dean: Mixed Media/Mixed Race Performances in Ai’s Poem, “James Dean”—Cathy Irwin
  • Multiracial Male Masculinity: A Critical Mixed Race Analysis of Brian Ascalon Roley’s “American Son”—Kevin Escudero
  • Teaching Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft: Exploring the Limits of Race and Ethnicity—Jaime Cleland
  • Disturbing Stereotypes: Fu Man/Chan and Dragon Lady Blossoms—Audrey Wu Clark
  • Excursus on “Hapa;” or the Fate of Identity—Nicole Myoshi Rabin
  • A Hapa Family in Chekhov’s Three Sisters—Elizabeth Liang
• Reviews
  • Review: This is All I Choose To Tell—Cathy J. Schlund-Vials

Read the entire issue here.

Organizing 101: A Mixed-Race Feminist in Movements for Social Justice

Chapter in:
Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism
Seal Press
April 2002
432 pages
ISBN-10: 1580050670
ISBN-13: 9781580050678

Edited by:

Daisy Hernandez
Bushara Rehman

Foreword by: Cherríe Moraga

Chapter Author:

Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz

pages 29-39

I have vivid memories of celebrating the holidays with my maternal grandparents. My Jido and Sito (“grandfather” and “grandmother,” respectively in Arabic), who were raised as Muslim Arabs, celebrated Christmas rather than Ramadan. Every year, my Sito set up her Christmas tree in front of a huge bay window in their living room. It was important to her that the neighbors could see the tree from the street. Yet on Christmas day Arabic was spoken in the house, Arabic music was played, Arabic food was served and a hot and heavy poker game was always the main activity. Early on, I learned that what is publicly communicated can be very different from what is privately experienced.

Because of the racism, harassment and ostracism that my Arab grandparents faced, they developed ways to assimilate (or appear to assimilate) into their predominantly white New Hampshire community. When my mother married my Jewish father and raised me with his religion, they hoped that by presenting me to the world as a white Jewish girl, I would escape the hate they had experienced. But it did not happen that way. Instead, it took me years to untangle and understand the public/private dichotomy that had been such a part of my childhood.

My parents’ mixed-class, mixed-race and mixed-religion relationship held its own set of complex contradictions and tensions. My father comes from a working-class, Ashkenazi Jewish family. My mother comes from an upper-middle-class Lebanese family, in which—similar to other Arab families of her generation—women were not encouraged and only sometimes permitted to get an education. My mother has a high-school degree and no “marketable” job skills. When my father married her, he considered it an opportunity to marry into a higher class status. Her background as a Muslim Arab was something he essentially ignored except when it came to deciding what religious traditions my sister and I were going to be raised with. From my father’s perspective, regardless of my mother’s religious and cultural background, my sister and I were Jews—and only Jews.

My mother, who to this day carries an intense mix of pride and shame about being Arab, was eager to “marry out” of her Arabness. She thought that by marrying a white Jew, particularly in a predominantly white New Hampshire town, that she would somehow be able to escape or minimize the ongoing racism her family faced. She converted to Judaism for this reason and also because she felt that “eliminating” Arabness and Islam from the equation would make my life and my sister’s life less complex. We could all say—her included—that we were Jews. Sexism and racism (and their internalized versions) played a significant part in shaping my parents’ relationship. My father was never made to feel uncomfortable or unwelcome because he had married a Muslim Arab woman. He used his white male privilege and his Zionistic point of view to solidify his legitimacy. He created the perception that he did my mother a favor by “marrying her out” of her Arabness and the strictness of her upbringing.

My mother, however, bore the brunt of other people’s prejudices. Her struggle for acceptance and refuge was especially evident in her relationship with my father’s family, who never fully accepted her. It did not matter that she converted to Judaism, was active in Hadassah or knew all of the rituals involved in preparing a Passover meal. She was frequently made to feel that she was never quite Jewish enough. My Jewish grandmother was particularly critical of my mother and communicated in subtle and not so subtle ways that she tolerated my mother’s presence because she loved her son. In turn, I felt as if there was something wrong with me and that the love that I received from my father’s family was conditional. Many years later this was proven to be true: when my parents divorced, every member of my father’s family cut off communication from my mother, my sister and me. Racism and Zionism played a significant (but not exclusive) role in their choice. My father’s family (with the exception of my Jewish grandfather, who died in the early seventies) had always been uncomfortable that my father had married an Arab woman. The divorce gave them a way out of examining their own racism and Zionism.

Today my mother realizes that her notions about marrying into whiteness and into a community that would somehow gain her greater acceptance was, to say the least, misguided. She romanticized her relationship with my father as a “symbol of peace” between Jews and Arabs, and she underestimated the impact of two very real issues: racism within the white Jewish community and the strength of anti-Semitism toward the Jewish community. At the time she did not understand that her own struggle against racism and anti-Arab sentiment was both linked to and different than anti-Semitism…

Read the entire chapter here or here.