Mixed Race Studies

A Postracial Society or A Diversity Paradox? Race, Immigration, and Multiraciality in the Twenty-First Century

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
Volume 9, Issue 2, Fall 2012
pages 419-437
DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X12000161

Jennifer Lee, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Frank D. Bean, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Southern states decreed that one drop of African American blood made a multiracial individual Black, and even today, multiracial Blacks are typically perceived as being Black only, underscoring the enduring legacy and entrenchment of the one-drop rule of hypodescent. But how are Asians and Latinos with mixed ancestry perceived? Based on analyses of census data and in-depth interviews with interracial couples with children and multiracial adults, I find that the children of Asian-White and Latino-White couples are much less constrained by strict racial categories. Racial identification often shifts according to situation, and individuals can choose to identify along ethnic lines, as White, or as American. Like their Irish and Italian immigrant forerunners, the Asian and Latino ethnicities of these multiracial Americans are adopting the symbolic character of European, White ethnicity. We appear to be entering a new era of race relations in which the boundaries of Whiteness are beginning to expand to include new non-White groups such as Asians and Latinos, with multiracial Asians and Latinos at the head of the queue. However, even amidst the new racial and ethnic diversity, these processes continue to shut out African Americans, illustrating a pattern of “Black exceptionalism” and the emergence of a Black–non-Black divide in the twenty-first century.

Read or purchase the article here. (Read for free until 2016-03-04!)

“The One and Only Cheerios”~ The “NEW” American Family?

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-07-10, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Join us on Wednesday July 10th, 2013 as we explore the newest General Mills Cheerios commercial that recently debuted. We will discuss the backlash and speak with an all-star guest line-up while exploring what many of us have known for years: The “NEW” American family is mixed, blended, and splendid!

Listen to the episode here.

Earnest Harris Declares: NO MORE RACE

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-07-03, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Earnest Harris, Producer/Director/Talent Manager/Writer
No More Race

Earnest Harris has written extensively on matters related to race relations, especially focused on moving beyond “racial” concepts and getting our society to a place where color and cultural differences might play less of  volatile role in how we work, play and deal with one another. His study and focus on this issue comes from seeing the unfortunate ways in which so many of our societal dealings, whether it be politics, dating, religion, neighborhoods and education are impacted by “racial” influencers. It has been his mission for most of those years as a journalist and writer to help bring people together and get beyond these superficial ways of living our lives.

An award-winning journalist, Earnest has written on this topic for New York Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Dallas Morning News, The Riverfront Times (St. Louis), National Review magazine, Politico, The Huffington  Post, Hispanic magazine and many others. He has also been a political columnist with the daily paper, The Austin American-Statesman, the editor-in-chief of a weekly newspaper in Washington, D.C., The American Weekly News, and the host of his own talk radio shows in Austin, Texas and St. Louis, Missouri.

Earnest has also directed and produced one feature film that was nationally distributed, “A Simple Promise,” and is currently working on several other films at the moment. Earnest also oversees Harris Management, a talent management company in Los Angeles, where he manages actors, directors and recording artists. Additionally, Harris taught communications for two sessions at the famed Lyndon Baines Johnson Graduate School for Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin as a Woodrow Wilson Program Instructor.

He is married and has two children.

Listen to the episode here.

Ethnic Identity Problems and Prospects for the Twenty-first Century – Fourth Edition

AltaMira Press
June 2006
436 pages
7 x 9 1/4
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7591-0972-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7591-0973-5

Edited by:

Lola Romanucci-Ross, Professor Emerita of Family and Preventive Medicine
University of California, San Diego

De George A. Vos (1922-2010), Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley

Takeyuki Tsuda, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Arizona State University

In this thoroughly revised fourth edition, with ten new chapters, the editors provide thought-provoking discussions on the importance of ethnicity in different cultural and social contexts. The authors focus especially on changing ethnic and national identities, on migration and ethnic minorities, on ethnic ascription versus self-definitions, and on shifting ethnic identities and political control. The international group of scholars examines ethnic identities, conflicts and accommodations around the globe, in Africa (including Zaire and South Africa), Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, the United States, Thailand, and the former Yugoslavia. It will serve as an excellent text for courses in race & ethnic relations, and anthropology and ethnic studies.

Lola Flash: [sur]passing

Jefferson School African American Heritage Center
420 Commerce Street
Charlottesville, Virginia
Contemporary Gallery
Exhibition Dates: 2013-06-07 through 2013-08-30

For more than 20 years Lola Flash has been committed to deconstructing racism, sexism and homophobia through challenging photographic imagery. [sur]passing is a work in progress that confronts the phenomenon known as pigmentocracy. The term, coined by cultural critic Kobena Mercer in 1994, describes a hierarchy wherein a slave’s socio-economic position could be determined by their skin color. In [sur]passing, Flash analyzes the impact of this condition on contemporary society.

Posed in front of the varied yet undefined skylines of London, New York, and South Africa, Flash’s models, both male and female, represent an array of skin-color. Their youthful energy suggests they have transcended the pecking order that has historically been the source of contention throughout the African Diaspora.

According to Flash, these portraits represent a “new generation”—one that is above and beyond “passing.” They represent a fresh pride and strength; where ambiguity and blurred borders create individuality that elevates consciousness, and advances a plethora of complex and positive imagery of [black] people all over the world…

For more information, click here. View the [sur]passing gallery here.

Q&A with artist and author Laura Kina

Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb
2013-07-11

Deborah Kalb

Laura Kina, the Vincent de Paul associate professor of Art, Media, and Design at DePaul University, is the co-editor of the new book War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art and the co-curator of an accompanying art exhibit. She lives in Chicago.

Q: How did you select these particular authors and artists to include in the book?

A: I’m a visual artist, a painter, and much of my work has been about Asian American and mixed race identity and history. As a result, I’m tapped into a network of artists, scholars, and activists working on similar topics. My co-editor Wei Ming Dariotis and I also teach classes on mixed race and Asian American studies so we were also both seeking out work by relevant artists and authors to share with our students.

This is actually how we met. She was using my art in her classes at San Francisco State University and I was using her articles on “hapa” mixed Asian American identity in my classes at DePaul University.

The kernel for our book and the related traveling exhibition happened organically over several years of research and teaching and involvement with community multiracial organizations such as MAVIN in Seattle and iPride and Hapa Issues Forum in San Francisco and then later working together with my colleague Camilla Fojas to found the Critical Mixed Race Studies biennial conference at DePaul University in Chicago…

Read the entire interview here.

Miscegenation, 1936

W. E. B. Du Bois Papers
Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963
Special Collections and University Archives
W.E.B. Du Bois Library
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
13 pages

More finalized version Du Bois’s piece on the nature and evaluation of the biodiversity of the human race, prepared for use in the Encyclopedia Sexualis. See mums312-b229-i061 for earlier version and fragments.

For more information, click here.

Negro and mulatto families questionnaire, 1928

W. E. B. Du Bois Papers
Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963
Special Collections and University Archives
W.E.B. Du Bois Library
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
2 pages

Biographical and demographic data on W. E. B. and his family.

For more information, click here.

Raceless Like Me: Students at Harvard Navigate their Way Beyond the Boundaries of Race

The Harvard Crimson
Harvard University
2011-10-13

Zoe A. Y. Weinberg, Crimson Staff Writer

One day last fall, Paula M. Maouyo ’14 sat in front of her laptop in Matthews trying to think of a topic for her Expos paper about racial identity.

When Maouyo was a child, she identified as biracial. Her father is black, originally from Chad and her mother is white and American. But by the time she was nine, she began to move away from a biracial identity.

“For a long time I just didn’t identify,” Maouyo said, though she acknowledges that when most people look at her, they immediately categorize her as black.

She had never articulated her non-identification in concrete terms. That is, until she began brainstorming for her Expos paper.

After floating around ideas and fiddling with labels and words, Maouyo suddenly conceived of a term she felt most accurately captured her own identity: araciality.

“People use apolitical and asexual,” Maouyo observed. “Why not aracial?”…

…THE RACIAL SKEPTIC

“Transcendent identity” was first described by Dr. Kerry Ann Rockquemore, a former sociology professor and author of Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America. The current working definition of racial transcendence that she offers—and the one that will be used in this article—is the conscious rejection of racial identity altogether. Not “black,” “white,” or “both” —but rather, “none.”

“My journey has taken me past constructions of race, past constructions of mixed race, and into an understanding of human difference that does not include race as a meaningful category,” wrote Rainier Spencer, the founder and director of Afro-American Studies at the University of Nevada, who identifies as racially transcendent.

Spencer grew up in a black neighborhood in Queens in the 60s with a white mother and black father. Over the years, Spencer has identified as everything from Afro-German to New Yorker to academic to baby boomer. It was not until his thirties, when he was a philosophy teacher at a northeastern college, that he began to question racial identity itself.

During the 1990s, debates about the politics of multiracial identity began to emerge in academic circles. According to Spencer, most of the discussion at the time revolved around the relative importance of multiracial versus monoracial identity.

Spencer entered the debate as a racial skeptic. “A lot of the black scholars who are against multiracial identity are very invested in black identity,” Spencer said. “I think all racial identity is bogus, and that makes me kind of unique.”

Race transcendence should not be confused with color-blindness, which advocates ignoring race without confronting the inequality and discrimination it breeds. Color-blindness implies that racism can be solved passively. Racelessness is far more complex, because people who transcend race “are actually aware of how race negatively affects the daily existence of people of color. They have very likely experienced discrimination, yet they respond by understanding those situations as part of a broad societal problem; one in which they are deeply embedded, but not one that leads to their subscription to racial identity,” according to Rockquemore as cited on a website for race transcenders…

…WHO GETS TO BE RACELESS?

A lot of people might claim not to have a race for one reason or another. According to professor Jennifer Hochschild, who teaches “Transformation of the American Racial Order?”, there are three groups of people that might refuse to identify by race: 1) disaffected (probably white) people who believe the world is post-racial and that we should all be color-blind; 2) recent immigrants for whom American racial categories simply do not resonate nor make any sense; and 3) bi-racial or multiracial people who do not identify with any particular racial category…

…White students might also check “none” for other reasons. Sometimes white students will check the “other” box is if they are uncomfortable with the social meaning of whiteness, said Natasha K. Warikoo, an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education who studies race, immigration, and inequality in educational contexts. “It signifies privilege and racial exploitation, a history that some white people are uncomfortable with,” she said. In the blank line, these students might write “Italian-American,” or “Jewish-American,” Warikoo said.

To solve this problem, Harvard could have two sections—one in which you identify for the purpose of statistics and civil rights compliance, and one in which you identify in the way that reflects your personal life. This would allow raceless students (and the perplexed white students) to identify by race, and by whatever else they like…

Read the entire article here.

Fade To Black: Racelessness In The Age of Obama

A. Little Bit of Enlightenment
2009-10-09

Anita Little

The new 21st century epithet of racelessness, which most associate with the positive qualities of a post-race society, can actually be a guise for a much more sinister motivation. The tendency of society to assign the quality of racelessness to only successful African-Americans and other minorities, denotes an underlying belief that a minority who doesn’t let go of his racial identity gives up a chance at success. Racelessness becomes code for “whiteness,” making it the norm that members must abide by to climb the social ladder. Raceless non-identity becomes the normative benchmark by which our society’s hegemonic structure judges racial outsiders. If Barack Obama had marketed himself as the African-American candidate, he would have alienated white voters and potentially lost like so many other black politicians before him who were seen as the “black candidates” such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. In the new era of race and ethnicity precipitated by President Obama’s election, the designation of racelessness to successful African-Americans reflects how America’s hegemonic structure still strives to perpetuate negative stereotypes.

Racelessness is a quickly rising form of cultureless non-identity that allows one to “rise above” the labels of race and be seen as simply human, devoid of the epithets that subject many to stereotypes. President Obama has often been praised for his ability to transcend race and become “raceless,” garnering a broad appeal to diverse demographics. Fordham suggests that academically or professionally successful African-Americans must adopt a “raceless” persona and reject their cultural links in order to achieve social mobility. Success and intellectualism are qualities that are stereotypically not assigned to the black community, so in a form of internalized and structuralized oppression, successful African-American have the title of racelessness forced upon them. These transcendent individuals are allowed to break through barriers and be accepted by the hegemonic society as equals.

The title of racelessness is often a double-edge sword however. The goal of being racially transcendent implies that race is a bog that must be overcome. One would only want to “transcend” their ethnicity if they find the label oppressive. Giving an African-American the title of racelessness can actually be a way to disassociate that person’s accomplishment from their race. Racelessness becomes code for normal and in America, the normative standard is often seen as white. Racelessness becomes the 21st century name for whiteness, a wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing. The very fact that being raceless or racially transcendent is a quality only assigned to minorities, but never whites, shows that whites are perceived as already having this quality. The other races are abnormal and need to conform to the white standard Americanness. Calling President Obama raceless may seem an innocuous claim at first, but it is dissociating him from his accomplishments as a black man. In a hegemonic structure where European Americans have dominated for centuries, achievement and success is a designation reserved for whiteness only. High-achieving minorities defy social expectations. This threatens the white hegemony and in order to maintain the status quo the individual’s race is simply erased. In order words, the black basketball player who also becomes a Rhodes Scholar is suddenly no longer seen as “black-black.” He has crossed over into the realm of racelessness, lest his success defy stereotypes and introduce the dangerous idea that all minorities are capable of such multi-platform success…

Read the entire article here.