Mixed Race Studies

If you do not understand White Supremacy—what it is, and how it works—everything else that you understand, will only confuse you.

Neely Fuller, Jr., The united-independent compensatory code/system/concept: A textbook/workbook for thought, speech, and/or action, for victims of racism (white supremacy), (1969).

Obama is black, first and foremost because he looks black. That alone triggers all of the reflexive prejudice and animus that define the black experience in the United States. One could engage in a philosophical discussion on the nature of racial identity, personal affinity, culture, etc., but for practical purposes, races are a product of racism and racial habits—not the other way round. And racism is rather crude and simplistic. The typical racist identifies and hates black on sight—he doesn’t care about the complexities of mixed parentage, Ivy League education, or immigration status. And even non-racists reflexively assign people a racial identity on sight. Because race is a social category and not a biological or genetic one, Obama’s mixed parentage does not determine his race. Mixed parentage may influence one’s appearance, and a person whose appearance is racially ambiguous can influence how she is perceived. In such instances, race may be a question of personal affiliation to some extent. And mixed parentage may influence how one chooses to identify. But for the most part, society assigns us our races. At any rate, Obama’s appearance is not ambiguous, and he unquestionably identifies as black.

Richard Thompson Ford, “Chats: Is Obama Black, Bi-racial, or Post-racial?” Zócalo Public Square, September 7, 2011. http://zocalopublicsquare.org/thepublicsquare/2011/09/07/is-obama-black-bi-racial-or-post-racial/read/chats/

Mixed Bloods and Other Crosses: Rethinking American Literature from the Revolution to the Culture Wars

University of Pennsylvania Press
2004
288 pages
6×9; 24 illustrations
Cloth: ISBN 978-0-8122-3844-0

Betsy Erkkilä, Henry Sanborn Noyes Professor of Literature
Northwestern University

In Mixed Bloods and Other Crosses, Betsy Erkkilä argues that it is through the historical and psychological dramas of blood as a marker of violence, or race, or sex, or kinship that Americans have struggled over the meanings of democracy, citizenship, culture, national belonging, and the idea of America itself as it was constituted and contested in its relations with others and the world. Whether blood is construed as setting up a boundary incapable of being crossed or is perceived as a site of mixing and hybridity, its imagery has saturated the literature of the American republic from the time of the founding. Erkkilä moves from a consideration of contests about territorial, sexual, racial, class, national, and aesthetic borders in the Revolutionary period and the nineteenth century to a discussion of recent contests about the boundaries of culture and the disciplines and the relation between aesthetics and politics, identity and difference, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, the local and the global.

Erkkilä’s American literature is a field of cultural and political struggle, one she examines in scenes of mixture and crossing, miscegenation and incest, doubling and hybridity that subvert, alter, or undo the boundary-building imperatives of American history. While she is concerned with the “crosses” of sex, race, class, and blood, she also looks at the ways history and “blood” impinge on the putatively pure realms of culture, literature, and aesthetics in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and the Caribbean writer C. L. R. James; she explores the ways the hybridity or mixture of social languages becomes a force for resistance and New World transformation in the writings of Phillis Wheatley and Abigail Adams, Walt Whitman and Harriet Jacobs; and she considers the ways modern subjectivity and the Freudian unconscious bear the markings of the dark, savage, sexual, and alien others that were expelled by the disciplinary logic of the Western Enlightenment and its legacy of blood in the Americas.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. Blood, Sex, and Other American Crosses
• 2. Mixed Bloods: Jefferson, Revolution, and the Boundaries of America
• 3. Revolutionary Women
• 4. The Poetics of Whiteness: Poe and the Racial Imaginary
• 5. Whitman and the Homosexual Republic
• 6. Emily Dickinson and Class
• 7. Beyond the Boundaries: C.L.R. James to Herman Melville
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments

Read the Preface here.

The lower class of women in England, are remarkably fond of the blacks, for reasons too brutal to mention; they would connect themselves with horses and asses if the laws permitted them. By these ladies they generally have a numerous brood. Thus, in the course of a few generations more, the English blood will become so contaminated with the mixture . . . as even to reach the middle, and then the higher orders of the people.

Edward Long, Candid Reflections Upon the Judgement Lately Awarded by the Court of King’s Bench, in Westminster-Hall, on What Is Commonly Called the Negroe-Cause, By a Planter (1772).

Demographic Demagoguery: Gregory Rodriguez’s views on race and the census just don’t add up

MixedRaceStudies.org
2011-04-08

Steven F. Riley

Gregory Rodriguez’s editorial titled “President Obama: Black and more so” or “President Obama: At odds with clear demographic trends toward multiracial pride” in the April 4, 2011 edition of the Los Angeles Times reveals the destructive hubris that can occur when one mixes historical amnesia, cultural insensitivity, a misinterpretation of demographic information and plain ignorance into an essay about the complexities of race in the United States.

Rather than demand that our first black President, Mr. Obama provide the nation with a “teaching moment,” perhaps Mr. Rodriguez should head back to his schoolbooks for a learning moment.  There, he may learn that so-called “racial mixing”—via coercion and consent—has been occurring in the Americas for over 500 years.  Thus we are not entering a multiracial era, we have always been multiracial. He may also learn that ‘race’ is a social, not biological construct; originally designed for the commoditization, exploitation, oppression and near extermination of African, indigenous (and later Asian) populations. Race is an evolving convention that is constantly being constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed to preserve the hegemony of those holding social and political power in the United States. Our decennial census is a tool that helps us measure our social interactions on the ground; not our dead ancestors in the ground.

Far from “bucking a trend,” the President is in fact part of the overwhelming majority of persons of mixed ancestry who proudly checked ‘black’ and only ‘black’ as their social identity on the 2010 Census. The trend is clear. This group, which is the most populous segment of the mixed-race population in the United States, is commonly referred to as African American. Mr. Rodriguez may also learn—without the aid of geneticists—that in addition to the vast majority of the nearly 39 million black Americans in this country, an even greater number of white Americans are of mixed ancestry—be it first, second, third, or any distant generation.  I find it puzzling that Mr. Rodriguez would violate one the tenets of the multiracial identity movement, by criticizing the President for exercising his freedom to choose a monoracial identity and at the same time, give his wife, the First Lady Michelle Obama—despite her known ancestral heterogeneity—(pardon the pun) a pass.  Even more puzzling is why many in the multiracial identity movement insist that President Obama embrace them because his mixed ancestry, while they simultaneously deny the very same mixed-ness of those on the ‘black’ side of Rodriguez’s so-called “racial divide.”

Mr. Rodriguez joins the chorus of commentators heralding a significant demographic shift due to a large percentage increase in the small number of people identifying as more than one race. But any first-year student of statistics will tell you that small changes can have large effects on small populations.  The 134% increase (since the 2000 Census) in the population of those who identified as both black and white is no more significant than the 118% percent increase in the black population of South Dakota!  Thus when we superimpose the 32% percent increase in the mix-race population to the nation as a whole, the percentage moves from 2.4% to only 2.9%.  Though 2000 was the first year that Americans could identify themselves as being of more than one race, it was not by any stretch, the first year that Americans were enumerated as such.  Another learning moment for Mr. Rodriguez would reveal that as far back as 1850, the census counted mulattoes (black/white) individuals.  In fact, in 1890 the categories quadroon (1/4th black) and octoroon (1/8th black) would make a one-time appearance.  The mulatto category would disappear in the 1900 census; reappear in 1910 and 1920. After 1920, this “emerging demographic trend” would come to a sudden end.

While some writers may write glowing articles about—for example—a 70% increase in the number of people checking two or more races in Mississippi (from 0.74% in 2000 to 1.15% in 2010), and how they are supposedly leading to “the softening of racial lines,” as Mr. Rodriguez puts it, a deeper interrogation actually reveals the continuing persistence of racial lines.  What you will not hear from the likes of Mr. Rodriguez is the fact that Mississippi has the lowest percentage of people checking two or more races while ironically—and not surprisingly due to its tortured racial past—at the same time, having the greatest potential for racial mixing because it is the state with the lowest white to black ratio in the nation.

Lastly, though our first comparative decennial examination of self-identified multiracial census data does indeed reveal an increase the number of individuals willing to identify as two or more races, what will censuses of future decades tell us about the identities of the children of today’s mixed-race population?  Will they identify as mixed? Will they, as some sociologists suggest, choose to identify as “traditional” racialized identities?  Will they occupy the middle or upper rungs of a Latin American-styled pigmentocracy? Or, will they transcend racialized identities altogether?  The mixed-race population may at some point in the distant future, become the fastest declining population in the United States. Mr. Rodriguez makes no attempt whatsoever to answer these questions and no attempt to envision what our society will look like if any of these scenarios come to fruition.  Rather than project his frustrations about America’s inability to enter the realm of post-raciality on President Obama, and his decision to check a single check box, perhaps Mr. Rodriguez could take a closer look at the racial attitudes of America, and while he’s at it, himself.

^©2011, Steven F. Riley

President Obama: Black and more so

Los Angeles Times
2011-04-04

Gregory Rodriguez

By checking ‘black’ as his race on the census form, President Obama is at odds with clear demographic trends toward multiracial pride. The number of Americans identifying as both white and black jumped 134% in 10 years.

It could have been a historic teaching moment. Instead, President Obama, the most famous mixed-race person in the world, checked off only one race—black—last year on his census form. And in so doing, he missed an opportunity to articulate a more nuanced racial vision for the increasingly diverse country he heads.

The president also bucked a trend. Last month, the Census Bureau announced that the number of Americans who identified themselves as being of more than one race in 2010 grew about 32% over the last decade. The number of people who identified as both white and black jumped an astounding 134%. And nearly 50% more children were identified as multiracial on this census, making that category the fastest-growing youth demographic in the country.

To be sure, the number of people—9 million, or 2.9% of the population—who identified themselves as of more than one race on their census form is still small. But the trend is clear…

…“Obama made the politically correct choice,” San Francisco State University political scientist Robert C. Smith told me last week. “If he had come to Chicago calling himself multiracial, he would have had no political career. And I think if he called himself multiracial now, black people would see it as a betrayal.”…

Who’s Black, Who’s Not, and Who Cares?

Uptown Magazine
2011-11-02

Yaba Blay, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“What are you?” It’s a question I have never been asked. I am Black. Period. The color of my skin is reflective of my Ghanaian ancestry and by its dark tone, everyone I encounter knows exactly what I am. Although I have lived most of my life acutely aware of the disadvantages assigned my complexion, it is not until recently, when I began to encounter people who identify as Black but don’t necessarily “look Black,” that I began to realize some of the privileges my dark skin carries; the most profound of which is its ability to unambiguously communicate my identity, not only to other people, but to other Black people. They know I am Black. I can rest assured that when someone in the room is talking about Black people, they realize that they are talking about my people. I also know that if I say “we” when talking about Black people, no one looks at me like I’m crazy, no one laughs at me as if I am somehow confused about my identity, and no one takes offense because they suspect I am somehow perpetrating a fraud. My Black is that Black that everyone knows is Black for a fact…

…On the one hand, we may reject our lighter skinned sisters and brothers because of their multiracial-ness, whether actual – “You’re mixed, you’re not Black” – or assumed – “You’re so light, you must be mixed.” But then on the other hand, most of us would concede that the large majority of Black people, particularly African Americans, are of mixed heritage. So, which one is it?

How did we get here? When did we abandon our cultural and political understandings of Blackness for more phenotypical ones? And do such narrow constructions of Blackness ultimately benefit us as community? Where would we be as a community if we had relied on skin color to determine Blackness a hundred years ago? No W.E.B. DuBois. No Mary Church Terrell. No Malcolm X. No Lena Horne. No Arturo Schomburg. And let’s understand the implications if we continue to use skin color as a gauge of racial identity – in essence, Herman Cain would be more Black than Ben Jealous….

Read the entire article here.

Dr Blay’s latest project “(1)ne Drop: Conversations on Skin Color, Race and Identity” seeks to challenge narrow, yet popular perceptions of what “Blackness” is and what “Blackness” looks like. To learn more about the project, visit 1nedrop.com.

Integration or Fragmentation? Racial Diversity and the American Future

Demography
Published online: 2013-02-26
DOI: 10.1007/s13524-013-0197-1

Daniel T. Lichter, Professor of Policy Analysis and Management and Sociology
Cornell University

Over the next generation or two, America’s older, largely white population will increasingly be replaced by today’s disproportionately poor minority children. All future growth will come from populations other than non-Hispanic whites as America moves toward a majority-minority society by 2043. This so-called Third Demographic Transition raises important implications about changing racial boundaries in the United States, that is, about the physical, economic, and sociocultural barriers that separate different racial and ethnic groups. America’s racial transformation may place upward demographic pressure on future poverty and inequality as today’s disproportionately poor and minority children grow into adult roles. Racial boundaries will be reshaped by the changing meaning of race and ethnicity, shifting patterns of racial segregation in neighborhoods and the workplace, newly integrating (or not) friendship networks, and changing rates of interracial marriage and childbearing. The empirical literature provides complicated lessons and offers few guarantees that growing racial diversity will lead to a corresponding breakdown in racial boundaries—that whites and minorities will increasingly share the same physical and social spaces or interact as coequals. How America’s older population of elected officials and taxpayers responds today to America’s increasingly diverse population will provide a window to the future, when today’s children successfully transition (or not) into productive adult roles. Racial and ethnic inclusion will be reshaped by changing ethnoracial inequality, which highlights the need to invest in children—now.

Read or purchase the article here.

Black and Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism by John Hoberman [Matt Wood Review]

TriQuarterly: a journal of writing, art, and cultural inquiry from Northwestern University
2013-02-04

Matt Wood, Book Review Editor

We’ve heard the statistics on black and white mortality rates in the United States. Black infants are up to three times as likely to die as babies of other races. Black patients have lower survival rates from cancer and are hospitalized twice as often as whites for preventable conditions such as high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.

How does this happen in the twenty-first century, when a black man is the president of the United States and three of the last four surgeons general have been black? Why do whites receive more potentially lifesaving cardiac procedures than blacks? Why are black patients less likely to have cancer surgery recommended to them? Why are black patients with diabetes and circulatory problems more likely to have limbs amputated?

Racism, says John Hoberman. In his scathing book Black and Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism, he documents how the racial prejudices of the larger American society have influenced the diagnosis and treatment of black patients over the past century, and how those practices continue today. The book is a relentless and thoroughly researched account of racial discrimination by the largely white medical establishment, composed of medical school faculty, editorial boards of scientific journals, and professional associations such as the American Medical Association that develop medical school curricula and influence decisions about research. While Hoberman offers an unsatisfying solution to these problems, the book is thorough enough to make anyone—physician, layperson, black, white—question his or her own racial prejudices and assumptions…

…Hoberman calls this “racialization,” or using pseudoscientific rationales to define racial differences in physiology. The idea that blacks are more primitive human beings than whites stemmed from the same historical racist ideas that European colonizers used to justify black African slavery. This later developed into subtler stereotyping. Conditions associated with the stresses of modern “civilized” life were labeled “white.” Whites supposedly suffered more from myopia and other vision problems caused by the strain of reading too much. White businessmen were prone to digestive problems and ulcers because they shouldered “the burdens and responsibilities of administration and management in business and politics.” Blacks, on the other hand, supposedly possessed an innate physical “hardiness” that made them less susceptible to these “white” diseases. Instead, they were allegedly prone to sexually transmitted infections, drug abuse, and alcoholism because of their “careless” and “primitive” lifestyles. Hoberman points out a classic example of endometriosis. As late as 1950, some doctors believed that it occurred only in white women, because they assumed sexually transmitted diseases were the source of any gynecological problems in black women…

Read the entire review here.

Biracial versus black: Thought leaders weigh in on the meaning of President Obama’s biracial heritage

theGrio
NBC News
2012-11-19

Patrice Peck

“If I’m lucky enough to have children, I won’t tell them that Barack Obama was America’s first black president.”

Thus began columnist Clinton Yates’ piece, “Barack Obama: Let’s not forget that he’s America’s first bi-racial president”. Published on The Washington Post website two days after the 2012 election, Yates’ piece explores the notion that singling out President Obama’s African heritage alone has resulted in an incomplete narrative of his identity.

“As a black man who plans to eventually start a family with my white girlfriend, I’m going to tell [my future children] that Obama was the first man of color in the White House and that America’s 44th president was biracial,” writes Yates. “What would I look like telling my kids that a man with a black father and a white mother is ‘black’ just because society wants him to be?” Yates’ stance on President Obama’s racial identity points to an on-going, complicated debate surrounding the president’s race and how he chooses to identify himself.

Since Obama’s second presidential election win, countless media outlets have analyzed the major support in voter turnout exhibited by African-Americans and Latinos for the president. At the same time, an overwhelming amount of racist backlash surged on Twitter for several days, signaling the fact that, for better or for worse, race will likely always be a predominant element to consider during Obama’s term as president.

Yet, most reports on and reactions to President Obama have failed to mention his biracial heritage. It is rarely addressed in discussions concerning how the public identifies Obama, or critiques of how the president identifies himself. Yates’ consideration of Obama as the “first bi-racial president” is rare in its vociferous proclamation to define the man by both lineages.

To widen this limited discourse, we asked some of the nation’s leading authorities on biracial and multi-racial issues to share their thoughts on the president’s self-identification as black, and the possible stakes of not addressing his bi-racial identity more directly. These leaders offer interesting and at times surprising perspectives on what it means to have not only a black man, but also a biracial man in the White House.

Here is what they told theGrio about this historic first. How do you think President Obama’s bi-racial ancestry influences the nature of his presidency?

…Steven F. Riley, founder of MixedRacesStudies.org

In the paper “Barack, Blackness, Borders and Beyond: Exploring Obama’s Racial Identity Today as a Means of Transcending Race Tomorrow,” I explained that the president is black for three different reasons. I used a sociological framework, an ethnological framework, and a psychological framework. Number one, I say he’s black because he says he is. Number two, his heterogeneity, or his mixed background, is no different from people who are black. And then lastly, I say he’s black because he looks black, from a sociological viewpoint…

…Yaba Blay, author of (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race and artistic director of the multiplatform (1)ne Drop project

Everyone seems to be negating President Barack Obama’s own story. The man himself has said publicly in print that, yes, his mother is white; yes, he is technically bi-racial, mixed race, whatever the language is people choose to use, but in this racialized society he is seen as a black man. And for that reason he identifies as black…

…Andrew Jolivétte, Associate Professor at San Francisco State University and editor of Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for the New American Majority

For mixed people, being mixed you identify differently at different times and in different situations. I think the president is no different, so [a bi-racial] child still can take pride in [the fact] that President Obama is a bi-racial president. But he’s also a black president. I don’t think that they’re mutually exclusive. And that’s what happens often in politics when it comes to policy, that it has to be one or the other, not some sort of combination of policies that can be good. Because he’s bi-racial and always compromising and trying to find the balance between two different identities, I think he tries to do the same things in terms of his policy…

…Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Professor of Ethnic Studies at Stanford University and author of When Half is Whole: Multiethnic Asian American Identities

I think his identifying [as African-American] is very positive. On the other hand, I think there’s nothing creative or innovative or groundbreaking or revolutionary about [his identifying as black.] It’s very much following the status quo of the way that a majority of people expect him to identify… I personally didn’t have a lot of expectations about his ability to really go beyond what would be the mainstream position in terms of how he labeled and located himself. I have hopes that he might help us to go beyond these kinds of rigid racial classifications and categories. I think he could do that if he was able to identify himself more openly with all the different parts of his heritage…

Read the entire article here.