Mixed Race Studies

Overseas adoptions rise — for black American children

Cable News Network (CNN)
2013-09-17

Sophie Brown

Editor’s note: In this series, CNN investigates international adoption, hearing from families, children and key experts on its decline, and whether the trend could — or should — be reversed.

(CNN) — Elisa van Meurs grew up with a Polish au pair, speaks fluent Dutch and English and loves horseback riding — her favorite horse is called Kiki but she also rides Pippi Longstocking, James Bond, and Robin Hood.

She plays tennis and ice hockey, and in the summer likes visiting her grandmother in the Swiss Alps.

“It’s really nice to go there because you can walk in the mountains and you can mountain bike … you can see Edelweiss sometimes,” said the 13-year-old, referring to the famous mountain flower that blooms above the tree line.

It’s a privileged life unlike that of her birth mother, a woman of African American descent from Indianapolis who had her first child at age 15. Her American family is “really nice but they don’t have a lot of money to do stuff,” said Elisa, who met her birth mother, and two siblings in 2011. “They were not so rich.”…

…Escape from racism

When Susan, a Florida resident, chose to place her son for adoption in 2006, the social worker gave her three binders with information about three prospective families. But she only needed to see the first binder of a couple from the Netherlands to make her decision. “If my mother had lived, she’d look just like (the prospective Dutch mother),” recalled the 37 year old, who asked that her last name not be used. Her own mother died when she was two months old.

Susan also wanted her son to grow up far away from the life she knew. She was a 30-year-old prostitute addicted to crack beginning a prison sentence when she learned she was pregnant. She did not know whether the child’s father was a man who raped her “for hours” or a drug dealer whom she “had done something with” one time, she said. But both men were African American, and she believed the child would face discrimination growing up in the United States.

“There’s too much prejudice over here. The white people are going to hate him because he’s half black, and the majority of black people are going to hate on him because he’s half white,” said Susan, who is Caucasian. “And then he’ll have to do extra things to prove what kind of a Negro he is, and extra things to prove what kind of a honky he is and I don’t want that. I did not want that for my kid.”

Even her own daughter, then aged 11, said “she would never accept that n***** child.”

Susan is not alone, says Adam Pertman, Executive Director of the Donaldson Adoption Institute and author of “Adoption Nation.” Many birth mothers have a perception that their black or mixed-race children will not face the same race issues in the Netherlands as in the United States.

“In the United States, as much as Americans want to believe it’s not true, we are still a country where there is a least some degree of racial prejudice. The birth mothers’ perception of Holland, in particular, was that the same was not true in Holland. There’s that feeling that maybe we can escape those issues if (the child is) somewhere else.”…

Read the entire article here.

‘It’s not written on their skin like it is ours’: Greek letter organizations in the age of the multicultural imperative

Ethnicities
Volume 13, Number 5 (October 2013)
pages 519-543
DOI: 10.1177/1468796812471127

Joanna S. Hunter, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Radford University, Radford, Virginia

Matthew W. Hughey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

Today’s students wrestle with the continued salience of racial identity on campuses that encourage the celebration of ‘diversity’ while at once digesting messages that the USA is now largely ‘post-racial’. Based on data collected through fieldwork observation, focus groups and in-depth interviews with a local Multicultural Greek Council for fraternities and sororities, we argue that ‘multicultural’ student organizations engage in a variety of racial identity tactics that simultaneously constrain and enable the perception of their racial identities. By relying on the two cultural narratives of multiculturalism—abstract and organizational—members of Greek organizations that do not conform to the White/Black binary can construct identities and a movement understood as rational, progressive and generally innocuous. Yet, in practice, the dominant expectations to perform ‘multiculturalism’ were manifest in narrow, essentialist and singular expressions of ethnic pride as an oppositional identity to Anglo-conformity and color-blindness, rather than an embrace of pluralism and multiculturalism per se. By highlighting how members of multicultural student organizations navigate this troubling paradox, our study raises important questions about the concept of multiculturalism, especially as it is constructed and enacted by the millennial generation.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Two or More Races Population: 2010

United States Census Bureau
2010 Census Briefs (C2010BR-13)
September 2012
24 pages

Nicholas A. Jones, Chief, Racial Statistics Branch
Population Division
United States Census Bureau

Jungmiwha J. Bullock
United States Census Bureau

INTRODUCTION

Data from the 2010 Census and Census 2000 present information on the population reporting more than one race and enable comparisons of this population from two major data points for the first time in U.S. decennial census history. Overall, the population reporting more than one race grew from about 6.8 million people to 9.0 million people. One of the most effective ways to compare the 2000 and 2010 data is to examine changes in specific race combination groups, such as people who reported White as well as Black or African American—a population that grew by over one million people, increasing by 134 percent—and people who reported White as well as Asian—a population that grew by about three-quarters of a million people, increasing by 87 percent. These two groups exhibited significant growth in size and proportion since 2000, and they exemplify the important changes that have occurred among people who reported more than one race over the last decade.

This report looks at our nation’s changing racial and ethnic diversity. It is part of a series that analyzes population and housing data collected from the 2010 Census and provides a snapshot of the population reporting multiple races in the United States. Racial and ethnic population group distributions and growth at the national level and at lower levels of geography are presented.

This report also provides an overview of race and ethnicity concepts and definitions used in the 2010 Census. The data for this report are based on the 2010 Census Redistricting Data (Public Law 94-171) Summary File, which was the first 2010 Census data product released with data on race and Hispanic origin and was provided to each state for use in drawing boundaries for legislative districts.

Read the entire report here.

Mixed Race Show ‘n’ Tell

Columbia College
618 Building, Multipurpose Studio
618 S. Michigan, Chicago, IL, Chicago
Tuesday, 2013-10-01, 12:00-14:00 (Local Time)

Are you multiracial? Mixed race? Biracial? Adopted across cultures? Dating someone of another culture? Ever been asked “What are you?”

Bring a special object to the Mixed Race Show N Tell, sponsored by The What Are You Project. Be prepared to share, and discuss what you’d like to do to foster mixed race community on campus.

For more information, click here.

Colour Coded Health Care: The Impact of Race and Racism on Canadians’ Health

Wellesly Institute: advancing urban health
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
January 2012
30 pages

Sheryl Nestel, Ph.D.

Scope and Purpose of the Review

Canada is home to a much-admired system of universal health care, understood as a central pillar of this nation’s overall commitment to principles of social equity and social justice. Such an understanding makes it difficult to raise the issue of racial inequities within the context of the Canadian health-care system. Indeed, as a number of Canadian health scholars have argued, with the exception of the substantial data on First Nations health, very little research has been conducted in Canada on racial inequality in health and health care (Health Canada, 2001; Johnson, Bottorff, Hilton, & Grewell, 2002; O’Neill & O’Neill, 2007; Rodney & Copeland, 2009). This literature review attempts to bring together data published between 1990 and 2011 on racial inequities in the health of non-Aboriginal racialized people in Canada. The decision not to include data on Aboriginal people in this review is by no means intended to obscure or minimize the appalling health conditions among Aboriginal people and the central role of colonialism and racism in their creation and perpetuation. It is clear, as Kelm (2005) has argued, that “social and economic deprivation, physical, sexual, cultural and spiritual abuse” (p. 397) underlie inexcusable inequities in Aboriginal health. Aboriginal health inequities were not included in this review because we chose not to subsume under an umbrella of racial inequities in health the unique history and continuing injustice of Aboriginal health conditions.

We begin our review with a discussion of the concept of race and its relationship to health outcomes and then move to a discussion of the significance of racial inequities in health and the relationship of these inequities to other forms of social inequality. We also examine mortality and morbidity data for various racialized groups in Canada and explore evidence of the role of bias, discrimination, and stereotyping in health-care delivery. Unequal access to medical screening, lack of adequate resources such as translation services, and new and important research on the physiological impact of a racist environment are also explored. This review concludes with a discussion of the limitations of available data on racial inequities in health and health care in Canada. It also surveys the challenges faced by other jurisdictions, such as the United States and Great Britain, in collecting racial data to monitor the extent of such inequities, understand their causes, and address the consequences of unequal access to health care. Finally, it offers recommendations related to the collection of racial data…

Read the entire report here.