Mixed Race Studies

2013-01-17

Hi Steven,

This note is a grateful note: just wanted to say thanks for collating such broad, broad data on such a contested subject. Mixed-race is a tough one, hey? It’s wonderful that you made a site which brought all those opinions, past and present, onto a page which I can scroll down and read to my heart’s content (or heart’s discontent, at times, since often the experiences that are told on your site aren’t happy ones at all. But let’s hope for the future.)

I’m a person who identifies as mixed-race. My father is Cape Coloured and my mother was born in Australia to Dutch parents. They met here, in Melbourne.

Thank you for letting me hear the other voices out there; some I can relate to, some I can’t, but all of them make me grateful that we can, at least, have the conversation.

Kindest regards,

Emma Jacobus
Melbourne, Australia

Bridging 1990 and 2000 census race data: Fractional assignment of multiracial populations

Population Research and Policy Review
Volume 20, Issue 6 (December 2001)
pages 513-533
DOI: 10.1023/A:1015666321798

James P. Allen, Emeritus Professor of Geography
California State University, Northridge

Eugene Turner, Professor of Geography
California State University, Northridge

In contrast to previous censuses, Census 2000 permitted individuals to mark more than one race. Because the new race tables include both single-race and mixed-race categories, measuring change during the 1990s requires some method of bridging between the two data sets.

To accomplish this bridging, we first identified biracial populations as of 1990 through the race and ancestry responses of individuals in the PUMS file. With race responses assumed to represent a person’s primary race identity, we then determined the percentage of each biracial group that preferred each race as the primary identity. The same percentages can be used to assign biracial persons from Census 2000 into single-race categories. We also provide fractional assignment percentages for selected states and for the larger specific nationality groups of mixed-race Asians.

Comparison of our 1990 estimates of the numbers in leading biracial groups with those reported in Census 2000 suggests that our fractional assignment values are reasonable for biracial groups other than those involving American Indians and Alaska Natives. For the latter biracial groups and for all groups representing three or more races, we recommend equal fractional assignment into the appropriate single-race categories.

LTAM 140 – Topic in Culture and Politics: Being Brazilian: Race, Cannibalization and Animality in Brazilian Cultural Discourse

University of California, San Diego
Winter 2010

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Luso-Brazilian Studies

This course provides an introduction to Brazilian culture through essays, poetry, fiction, music and films that consider the meaning of “being Brazilian” (brasilidade). Our focus will be on texts that construct Brazil as a mixed-race (mestiço) nation. As the two largest post-slavery countries in the Americas, Brazil and the U.S. have long been engaged in comparative evaluations of one another. For this reason, we will also look at U.S. interpretations of Brazil as a Racial Democracy, as an “exotic” relic of the plantation era–replete with carnival, soccer, and enticing women of color advertising the nation’s beaches–or, alternatively, as a “tropical hell” characterized by unending violence, an image that reproduces nineteenth-century ideas about race and criminality. We will investigate Brazilian discourses of hybridization in the context of Latin American mestizo projects, the concept of cultural cannibalism and the human/animal dialectic that sustains postcolonial power. The course will be particularly concerned with how otherness is interpreted, and how specific representations come to be accepted as fact. Who is observing and assessing?  How does ethnography produce an unequal relation between the subject who analyzes and the object that is written up as text?

LTAM 110 (A00) – Latin American Literature in Translation: “Brazilian Humanimals: Species, Race and Gender in Brazilian Literature”

University of California, San Diego
Spring 2012

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Luso-Brazilian Studies

How do gender, race and species intersect in Brazilian literary representations? What is at stake in scrutinizing the ethical dimensions of human/ animal relations? How might such questioning be relevant for understanding dominant ideas about race, racial mixing and nation that shape Brazilian cultural identity? This course focuses on a series of Brazilian texts that place animals at center stage. Situating our readings vis-à-vis other media—essays, cinema—we will consider the animal not simply as metaphor for “human” experience; instead, we will focus on the ways that a series of Brazilian authors have challenged anthropocentrism (human-centeredness) in relation to other dialectics including black/white, periphery/center and female/ male. Though we will focus principally on Brazilian texts, we will situate them in the context of cross-cultural discussions in ecocriticism and species studies.

White Negroes

Guy Foster, Assistant Professor of English

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine
Africana Studies/Gender and Women’s Studies
Spring 2013

Close readings of literary and filmic texts that interrogate widespread beliefs in the fixity of racial categories and the broad assumptions these beliefs often engender. Investigates “whiteness” and “blackness” as unstable and fractured ideological constructs. These are constructs that, while socially and historically produced, are no less “real” in their tangible effects, whether internal or external. Includes works by Charles Chesnutt, Nella Larsen, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, John Howard Griffin, Sandra Bernhard, and Warren Beatty.

Interracial Narratives

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine
Africana Studies
Fall 2012

Guy Foster, Assistant Professor of English

Examines the stories that Americans have told about intimate relationships that cross the color line in twentieth- and twenty-first-century imaginative and theoretical texts. Considers how these stories have differed according to whether the participants are heterosexual or homosexual, men or women, Black, White, Asian, Latino, or indigenous. Explores the impact historically changing notions of race, gender, sexuality, and U.S. citizenship have had on the production of these stories. Texts include literature, film, Internet dating sites, and contemporary debates around mixed-race identity and the United States census.

Afro-Asian Encounters: Reading Comparative American Racial Experiences

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine
Africana Studies/Asian Studies
Spring 2013

Wendy Thompson Taiwo, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Africana Studies

Surveys a breadth of historical and contemporary encounters between African Americans and Asian Americans in the United States. Begins with the earliest waves of Asian immigration in the mid-nineteenth century and ends with contemporary critiques of Blackness and Asianness in what some call a post-racial era. Students learn how various political, economic, and social shifts have contributed to the racial positioning of Black and Asian peoples in relation to dominant white American culture and to each other and what this means in relation to the stratification of racial identities in America. Readings center on themes of shared experiences with and conflict over labor, community-building, interracial relationships, foodways, popular representations, and public perception.

Faces In Between

Daniels Spectrum
585 Dundas Street East
Toronto, Ontario
Friday, 2013-02-01, 19:00-21:00 EST (Local Time)

A 3MW Collective art Exhibit at Regent Park Arts and Cultural Centre during Black History Month exploring mixed race identity through painting and photography.

Join us to celebrate our first show as a collective!

Cash bar and amazing art!

We are three mixed-race women artists using portraiture in both painting and photography to address ideas of mixed-race identity. The subjects in our work are people who have parents, grandparents, and ancestors from different cultural backgrounds. The faces of our “models” do not conform to society’s outdated notions of human classification. These faces are loaded with issues of colonialism, racism, shadeism, as well as questions of history and identity.

In Canada, although we have a policy of multiculturalism, people are generally not comfortable talking about race. Our work aims to highlight the experiences of mixed people. These are the people whose “race” is not clear and who are often faced with questions such as, “What are you?” or “What is your ethnic background?” These persistent questions clearly reflect our society’s discomfort with an inability to classify people by racialized norms.

For more information, click here.

Study Links Highly Segregated Counties and Lung Cancer Deaths in Blacks

The New York Times
2013-01-16

Sabrina Tavernise

African-Americans who live in highly segregated counties are considerably more likely to die from lung cancer than those in counties that are less segregated, a new study has found.

The study was the first to look at segregation as a factor in lung cancer mortality. Its authors said they could not fully explain why it worsens the odds of survival for African-Americans, but hypothesized that blacks in more segregated areas may be less likely to have health insurance or access to health care and specialty doctors. It is also possible that lower levels of education mean they are less likely to seek care early, when medical treatment could make a big difference. Racial bias in the health care system might also be a factor…

…Dr. David Chang, director of outcomes research at the University of California San Diego Department of Surgery, who wrote an accompanying editorial, said he hoped that the study would focus attention on the environmental factors involved in the stark disparities in health outcomes in the United States because they lend themselves to change through policy. Medical researchers tend to focus on factors like the genetics and the behaviors of individuals that are harder to change.

“We don’t need drugs or genetic explanations to fix a lot of the health care problems we have,” he said.

Read the entire article here.

We Need to Learn More About Our Colorful Past

The New York Times
2004-07-31

Maurice A. Barboza, Founder
Black Patriots Foundation

Gary B. Nash, Professor Emeritus of History
University of California, Los Angeles

Back in 1925, American society tended not to advise young white males about the consequences of intimacy with the black maid. Even if the 22-year-old Strom Thurmond considered himself a father, the standards of the time did not require him to give the daughter born of that intimacy any love, support or acceptance. He did, however, irretrievably give her his bloodline.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the offspring of Mr. Thurmond and his family’s black maid, 16-year-old Carrie Butler, recently announced that she intended to join the Daughters of the American Revolution based on her Thurmond bloodline. Reared apart from her father, Ms. Washington-Williams did not have the same privileges as Mr. Thurmond’s white children during his life, yet she is seeking the right to some of the privileges of her lineage.

She is not the first to do so. Ms. Washington-Williams said she was motivated by the battle of Lena Santos Ferguson to join a Washington chapter of the organization and by Ms. Ferguson’s quest to honor black soldiers. Ms. Ferguson’s grandmother, a black Virginia woman, had married a white man from Maine whose ancestor, Jonah Gay, was a patriot. In the 1980’s, Ms. Ferguson fought a four-year legal battle for full membership and to enter her local chapter. It wasn’t until the organization was faced with the potential loss of its tax-exempt status in Washington that she was permitted to join.

Perhaps more significantly, Ms. Ferguson demanded, and received, a settlement agreement that bars discrimination and requires the D.A.R. to identify every African-American soldier who served in the Revolutionary War. It was important to Ms. Ferguson that black women know of their ancestors’ contribution to the founding of this nation and that they embrace it…

…The settlement required the D.A.R. to do historical and genealogical research to find the names of black soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War. Yet, while doing this research, the D.A.R. has failed to use census records and other historical documents that could help identify the races of soldiers. It has also used a narrow classification system for race, one that increases the potential for underreporting: the D.A.R. includes only men described in historical records as “black,” “Negro” or “mulatto,” on their lists of black soldiers. However, whites of the period used a far greater range of colors to describe African-Americans. They meticulously recorded color distinctions among slaves: labels like “brown,” “yellow,” and “copper” (among others) were used consistently in advertisements for the return of runaways. Excluding those “colored” patriots puts them off-limits to prospective black D.A.R. members who might otherwise make the connection.

Yielding to pressure, in 2001, the D.A.R. published “African-American and American Indian Patriots of the Revolutionary War.” The number of names grew to 2400 names from 1,656, including an additional 744 previously assumed to be “white.” But there are still many more African-American soldiers to be identified, and while it acknowledges a handful of “brown” soldiers as black, as well as many “yellow” ones, the D.A.R. still holds to a narrow definition of an African-American.

This may give a clue to the D.A.R.’s resistance: when confronted with 64 “brown” soldiers who could have sired members, the organization conceded that as many as 57 may be listed in its index of proven Revolutionary war soldiers (patriots whose descendants became D.A.R. members). Yet, for generations, descendants of “brown” patriots married “light” or “white” mates, thus increasing the chances that white society, including organizations like the D.A.R., would be a safe harbor for their offspring. When the lists are complete, many people whose families assimilated into white society and cloaked their African heritage may learn, for the first time, of their complicated ancestry…

Read the entire article here.