Mixed Race Studies

“I am a woman. I’m from the periphery. But I still have an advantage: I’m white” – The recognition of white privilege and racism

Black Women of Brazil: The site dedicated to Brazilian women of African descent
2015-11-05
Source: Geledés Instituto da Mulher Negra, “Sou mulher. Suburbana. Mas ainda tô na vantagem: sou branca”

Camila Castanho Miranda

I am a woman. I’m from the periphery. But I still have an advantage: I’m white.

Yesterday I heard something that captivated me to write about a topic that always touches me, but I never feel able to write about it: racism. Obviously I never suffered racism. I’m white. So I decided to write from the point of view that fits me best, that of the oppressor.

The first thing I need to say is that assuming the place of the oppressor is not being a bad person or something like that. It’s simply understanding my historical position in society. The second important thing here is that, depending on the circumstance and deepening of my family tree, I cannot be white. But it’s not what my skin and my hair say to society. So when talking about racism, I’m white indeed. I could be beige, if you will. It doesn’t matter, I’m not black. I was never oppressed because of my image.

I don’t know you, but it took me a lot to me to realize that racism existed. It’s hard to notice the little racism of everyday life when you don’t suffer from it…

Read the entire article here.

Blending shades of self

Columbia Daily Spectator
New York, New York
2015-11-05

Caroline Wallis

At a place like Columbia, where how you identify can define the spaces you occupy and the people you interact with, being of mixed race presents an extra challenge. The balancing act between multiple cultures, communities, and colors can leave one wondering where they belong. Last year, Keenan Smith, Columbia College sophomore, founded the Mixed-Race Students Society, which created a forum for multiracial students to discuss issues that directly affect those who don’t fit in one box. The students profiled in this piece aren’t all members of the Society, but they all represent an emerging community of students bringing these conversations into our discussions of race on campus…

Read the entire article here.

An Insidious Way to Underrepresent Minorities

The American Prospect
2015-11-05

Gary D. Bass, Executive Director
Bauman Foundation, Washington, D.C.

Adrien Schless-Meier, Program Associate
Bauman Foundation, Washington, D.C.

Cuts in U.S. Census funding threaten to produce an undercount of minorities and the poor and to reduce their share of federal aid.

African Americans, Hispanics, and other minority populations are in danger of losing representation in Congress as well as their share of more than $400 billion a year in federal funds for health care, education, job training, and community development. That possibility should get anyone’s attention, yet few have noticed that it will be the likely result if Congress cuts the budget for the U.S. Census Bureau to the extent it now threatens to do.

The Constitution requires a decennial census to determine congressional apportionment, and federal law relies on the numbers to allocate funds among states and localities. Historically, the census has missed large numbers of people in poverty and racial and ethnic minorities. By the 2000 and 2010 censuses, however, the national undercount had dropped to less than 2 percent, due primarily to the Census Bureau’s dogged determination to walk America’s streets and knock on the doors of the roughly 100 million U.S. residents who didn’t mail back their forms. Racial and ethnic minorities were still more likely to be missed than whites. But the Census Bureau could not have reduced the disparity in counting minorities without budgetary support.

Now, Congress is insisting that the Census Bureau spend less preparing for and conducting the 2020 census than it did on the 2010 census, even though the U.S. population is expected to have grown by more than 25 million people by 2020. The bureau has chosen not to fight this directive, which census experts call delusional. Instead, the bureau has embarked on a high-risk strategy to save $5 billion by rolling back door-to-door canvassing and conducting a largely electronic, Internet-based census…

…Adding to this uncertainty, and on top of the technology overhaul, the Census Bureau is exploring significant changes in the way it asks about race and ethnicity, which also need prior testing. The right changes could improve the quality of race and ethnicity data, but at least one approach under consideration—relying on write-in responses instead of check boxes—would do the opposite, according to civil-rights advocates…

…Resolving Confusion about Race and Ethnicity

The census might be the best source of data on race and ethnicity, but it is by no means perfect, and respondents often are confused about how to identify themselves. As currently designed, the survey first asks whether the respondent is of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin, and then offers a series of check boxes for Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, or other Hispanic origin, with a write-in box. The next question asks for the respondent’s race, with check boxes for white, black, American Indian or Alaska Native, seven Asian nationalities, four Pacific Islander groups, or “some other race,” followed by a write-in box.

About 20 million people in 2010 checked the “some other race” box—making it the third most selected race category behind white and black—and the vast majority of those were Hispanic. Vargas, who serves on the Census Bureau’s advisory committee examining the race and ethnicity question, summed up the challenge: “Once you’ve asked, are you Hispanic, yes or no, and they answer yes, I’m Mexican American, they go to the next question and are asked, so what’s your race. And people are like, wait a minute, you just asked me that. I just told you I’m Mexican. And the bureau would say, no, being Hispanic is an ethnicity. It’s not a racial category. But they don’t see themselves in the white, black, Asian, [or] Native American categories.”…

Read the entire article here.

Koreans & Camptowns: Reflections of a Mixed-Race Korean

Korean American Story
2015-11-04

Cerrissa Kim

I’ve often stood out from the crowd, and not in a way that made me feel like a rock star—far from it. Growing up in a rural town filled with dairy cows and Caucasian farmers, and then in a bedroom community lacking ethnic diversity, I was the sole Asian kid at school until fifth grade. To my classmates, I was a slanty-eyed chink. Jap. Gook. Yigger. They’d never even heard of Korea.

I don’t look like my Irish/Scottish American father, nor do I have the distinctly Korean features of my mother. Like many mixed-race people of my generation, I was Asian to the outside world, but not Korean enough to the Korean side of my family. I’ve looked for faces that resembled mine in some small way everywhere I’ve gone. I’ve scanned crowded spaces and deserted diners—anywhere I traveled—hoping for camaraderie with others who might make me feel my appearance was normal.

This past September in Berkeley, California, I opened the doors to the David Brower Center, slightly nervous and excited, I stepped into a room filled with mixed-race Korean Americans attending the one-day Koreans and Camptowns Conference. Even though I grew up with my biological parents, I still carry the scars—physical and emotional—from being ostracized and bullied for looking different from the other children in my bucolic California communities. Many of the people attending the conference were Korean adoptees (KADs) who had even more reason to search through crowds to find someone who resembled them. Not only were most KADs raised in places with no other KADs or Koreans, but they also didn’t look anything like their adoptive parents and other family members.

During and after the Korean War, camptowns were established outside of military installations, offering locals a way to earn a living— including entertaining soldiers with nightclubs and prostitution. Many of the mixed-race children born between the 1950’s and 1970’s were conceived and born in these camptowns, fathered by American and other Allied soldiers. Their mothers, the camptown women, were marginalized by society because most of them came from poor families and had to work as cooks, maids, sex workers, or other low-paying jobs to support themselves as well as their parents, grandparents and siblings. These women often waited for fathers of their children to return, hoping for a way out of the grueling camptown life. But more often than not, this didn’t happen, either because the soldiers were uninterested in going back, or because the military made it difficult—or even impossible—for them to return and marry Korean women…

Read the entire article here.