Mixed Race Studies

Bung Mokhtar: Mixed-race Malaysians will benefit from racial voting

Malay Mail Online
Petaling Jaya, Malaysia
2014-04-01

Zurairi AR

UALA LUMPUR, Apr 1 — Malaysians with mixed-race parentage will benefit the most from voting along racial lines as they will have more than one representative, Kinabatangan MP Datuk Bung Mokhtar Radin said today.

The Barisan Nasional (BN) MP also claimed that the system suggested by Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Seri Shahidan Kassim yesterday will ensure justice for every ethnic group in Malaysia.

“For those who may have two or three ancestries, they can choose which one they prefer… They can be in both worlds,” Bung said in Parliament here.

“For me that is really good. At least, for me who has both Sungai and Malay ancestries, I can then get two or three representatives. Now, I can only get one.”

Sungai is the name of one of the many official tribes in Sabah.

Bung also refuted claims that Shahidan’s remarks is alike the now-abolished apartheid regime in South Africa, in which people voted for representatives from their own ethnic communities…

Read the entire article here.

“Hiding in Plain Sight: Mixed Blood Families and Race in the 19th-Century United States West”

Public Radio Tulsa
Studio Tulsa
Tulsa, Oklahoma
2014-03-25

Rich Fisher, General Manager & Host

Our guest on ST is Anne Hyde, the William R. Hochman Professor of History at Colorado College. She’ll be giving the 2014 H.G. Barnard Distinguished Lecture, which is presented annually by the TU Department of History, tonight (Tuesday the 25th) at the Gilcrease Museum Auditorium here in Tulsa. The lecture begins at the 7pm and is free to the public. Prof. Hyde, who mainly teaches courses on the history of Native America as well as that of North America, received her A.B. degree in American Studies from Mount Holyoke College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of California at Berkeley. She has published widely on the history of the American West, has served on editorial boards for the Pacific Historical Review and the Western Historical Quarterly, and has been elected to the Councils of the Western Historical Association and the American Historical Association. Her address at Gilcrease tonight is entitled “Hiding in Plain Sight: Mixed Blood Families and Race in the 19th-Century United States West” — and it’s derived from her book, “Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800-1860.” A reviewer for the Western Quarterly Review has called this text: “Ingenious. A magnificent scholarly achievement. A sweeping new narrative account of [western] history. A book to ponder and plunder.”

Listen to or download the interview (00:28:58) here.

Where Did “Hispanics” Come From?

Sociological Images: Inspiring Sociological Imaginations Everywhere
2014-03-29

Claude S. Fischer, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

One may well wonder where the term “Hispanic,” and for that matter, “Latino,” came from. The press and pundits are all abuzz about the Hispanic vote, Hispanic organizations, and Hispanic cultural influences. Back in the mid-twentieth century, however, they wrote about Mexicans or Puerto Ricans or Guatemalans, not about Hispanics. Of course, people of Latin American origin have become far more numerous in the United States since then and the immigration itself brings more attention. Nonetheless, the labels have changed. Starting in the 1970s, the media rapidly adopted the “pan-ethnic” term Hispanic, and to a lesser degree, Latino, and slowed down their use of specific national labels.* So did, organizations, agencies, businesses, and “Hispanics” themselves.

As recounted in her important new book, Making Hispanics, sociologist (and my colleague) G. Cristina Mora tells the story of how people as diverse as Cuban-born businessmen in Miami, undocumented Mexican farm workers in California, and third-generation part-Puerto Ricans in New York who do not even understand Spanish were brought together into one social category: Hispanic-Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American

University of Chicago Press
March 2014
256 pages
1 halftone, 5 line drawings, 3 tables
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 9780226033662
Paper ISBN: 9780226033839
E-book ISBN: 9780226033976

G. Cristina Mora, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

How did Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Cubans become known as “Hispanics” and “Latinos” in the United States? How did several distinct cultures and nationalities become portrayed as one? Cristina Mora answers both these questions and details the scope of this phenomenon in Making Hispanics. She uses an organizational lens and traces how activists, bureaucrats, and media executives in the 1970s and ’80s created a new identity category—and by doing so, permanently changed the racial and political landscape of the nation.

Some argue that these cultures are fundamentally similar and that the Spanish language is a natural basis for a unified Hispanic identity. But Mora shows very clearly that the idea of ethnic grouping was historically constructed and institutionalized in the United States. During the 1960 census, reports classified Latin American immigrants as “white,” grouping them with European Americans. Not only was this decision controversial, but also Latino activists claimed that this classification hindered their ability to portray their constituents as underrepresented minorities. Therefore, they called for a separate classification: Hispanic. Once these populations could be quantified, businesses saw opportunities and the media responded. Spanish-language television began to expand its reach to serve the now large, and newly unified, Hispanic community with news and entertainment programming. Through archival research, oral histories, and interviews, Mora reveals the broad, national-level process that led to the emergence of Hispanicity in America.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Organizations
• Introduction: Making Hispanics: Classification and the Politics of Ambiguity
• One: Civil Rights, Brown Power, and the “Spanish-Speaking” Vote: The Development of the Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish Speaking People
• Two: The Rise of a Hispanic Lobby: The National Council of La Raza
• Three: “The Toughest Question”: The US Census Bureau and the Making of Hispanic Data
• Four: Broadcasting Panethnicity: Univision and the Rise of Hispanic Television
• Conclusion: The Hispanic Category and the Development of a New Identity Politics in America
• Notes
• Index

Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860

University of Nebraska Press
2011
648 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-2405-6

Anne F. Hyde, William R. Hochman Professor of History
Colorado College

• Winner of the 2012 Bancroft Prize
• 2012 Pulitzer Prize Finalist

To most people living in the West, the Louisiana Purchase made little difference: the United States was just another imperial overlord to be assessed and manipulated. This was not, as Empires, Nations, and Families makes clear, virgin wilderness discovered by virtuous Anglo entrepreneurs. Rather, the United States was a newcomer in a place already complicated by vying empires. This book documents the broad family associations that crossed national and ethnic lines and that, along with the river systems of the trans-Mississippi West, formed the basis for a global trade in furs that had operated for hundreds of years before the land became part of the United States.

Empires, Nations, and Families shows how the world of river and maritime trade effectively shifted political power away from military and diplomatic circles into the hands of local people. Tracing family stories from the Canadian North to the Spanish and Mexican borderlands and from the Pacific Coast to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Anne F. Hyde’s narrative moves from the earliest years of the Indian trade to the Mexican War and the gold rush era. Her work reveals how, in the 1850s, immigrants to these newest regions of the United States violently wrested control from Native and other powers, and how conquest and competing demands for land and resources brought about a volatile frontier culture—not at all the peace and prosperity that the new power had promised.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgments: Adventures in the Land of the Dead
• Introduction: The Geography of Empire in 1804
• Part I: Replacing a State: The Continental Web of Family Trade
  • Chapter 1: Families and Fur: The Personal World of the Early
  • Chapter 2: Fort Vancouver’s Families: The Custom of the Country
  • Chapter 3: Three Western Places: Regional Communities
• Part II: Americans All: The Mixed World of Indian Country
  • Chapter 4: The Early West: The Many Faces of Indian Country
  • Chapter 5: Empires in Transition: Indian Country at Midcentury, 1825–1860
• Part III: From Nations to Nation: Imposing a State, 1840–1865
  • Chapter 6: Unintended Consequences: Families, Nations, and the Mexican War
  • Chapter 7: Border Wars: Disorder and Disaster in the 1850s
  • Chapter 8: The State and Its Handmaidens: Imposing Order
• Epilogue: How It All Turned Out
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Read an excerpt here.

Whiteness Without Complex?

Anthropology While White
2014-03-06

Sarah Abel, Marie Curie Fellow
EUROTAST

A couple of weeks ago I attended an event called ‘Color Without Complex‘, featuring a public conversation between image activist Michaela Angela Davis and ethnographer and publisher Dr. Yaba Blay. The discussion revolved around Blay’s recent book and accompanying exhibition, (1)ne Drop, which looks at the faces and stories of individuals who identify as black, but do not necessarily fit with common prototypes of blackness in the US. By focusing on light-skinned individuals existing at the very outer periphery of blackness, the project tests the perceptual limitations and the social implications of the one drop rule in today’s post-segregation America – a country in which contemporary notions and benchmarks of ‘race’ are still rooted in cultural and legal traditions established under slavery, colonialism and Jim Crow segregation.

The theme up for debate was colourism, a hot internet topic over the past nine months in particular, and the object of a number of recent documentaries, chat shows and news articles in the US. While social prejudice against people ‘of colour’ – as well as the pathological tendency of the Western media to showcase whiteness not only as the norm, but also as virtually the sole domain of beauty – are perhaps two of the most visible social legacies of colonialism throughout the Atlantic world and beyond, these recent debates are bringing to light skin colour prejudices within the black community. Whereas, historically, light coloured skin was prized and aspired to throughout the Americas as a path to social ascension and a means of escaping the stigma of blackness, in recent decades pan-Africanism and a multitude of black pride initiatives have caused a shift towards celebrating and embracing blackness as embodied by a dark-skinned, African ideal. Meanwhile, in some cases light-skinned blacks have become the target of double-edged prejudice: stigmatised by whites for being black, and ostracised by blacks for apparently aspiring to be white…

…And yet, I think it is worth mentioning that there was also a significant minority of white women among the audience who turned up to listen to the debate. Looking around the room, I wondered what had brought them there, like me, to listen from the sidelines into a conversation to which we were not party. In the Q&A session at the end, the (white) woman sat in front of me, holding hands tightly with her (black) husband, asked a question about healing through empathy [at 00:45:43]. Some minutes later, a young (white) woman a few rows further down asked the following question [at 01:05:05]:

“How would you defend, or maybe not necessarily defend, but how would you address a woman who is of colour, but appears to look as white as I do? How would you talk to her or address to her what her place is in relation to colourism, for example? How does colourism apply to her, because she looks white but she is a person of colour, and identifies with that?”…

Read the entire article here.