Mixed Race Studies

Multiracial Identity Recognition – Why Not? A Comparison Between Multiracialism in the United States and Brazil

University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
2015
143 pages

Ana Carolina Miguel Gouveia

Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Post-Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a LLM Master degree in Law Graduate Studies in Law

Scholars debate the importance of multiracial identity recognition as the increasing number of self-identified multiracial individuals challenges traditional racial categories. Two reasons justify the count of multiracial individuals on censuses. One is the right to self-identification, derived from personal autonomy. The other is social: the category allows governments to accurately assess affirmative action programs’ results and society’s acceptance of multiracialism. Critical Race Theory and Critical Mixed-Race Studies serve as basis for my analysis over multiracial identity formation and its recognition. Comparing multiracialism in America and Brazil, I verify that both countries are in different stages regarding categorization and social acceptance of multiracial identity. Neither uses multiracial data for social programs, though. I conclude that the growth of mixed-race individuals makes the identification of race-based social programs’ beneficiaries difficult, which demands the use of diverse criteria. Moreover, official recognition can serve to improve the way society deals with race.

Read the entire thesis here.

At a Santo Domingo Hair Salon, Rethinking an Ideal Look

The New York Times
2015-12-30

Sandra E. Garcia

On my first trip back to the Dominican Republic in 10 years, as I wandered down the streets of La Zona Colonial, I noticed how their names were weighted with history. Calle de las Damas, a street made specifically for the wives and daughters of noblemen from colonial times to walk down. Calle José Gabriel García, named for a Dominican historian and journalist, among other things, who shares a first and last name with my father and made me think of him while I was there. Calle Isabel La Católica where I felt a connection to my paternal grandmother, Isabel Mireya Garcia. Born in Bani, she lived and died on the right side of Hispaniola and raised my father in Santo Domingo.

During my trip I would text my father pictures of the streets, and he would always text me back a story from his youth that occurred close to or near the street I was on.

“That’s the street where I shook Pope John Paul II’s hand in 1979,” he texted me, referring to Calle Padre Billini.

He likened La Zona Colonial to Times Square, but to me it resembled too much of the Old World.

The cobblestones, the colonial-style houses that were more like haciendas, Christopher and Diego Columbus’s house-turned museum — this all reminded me of the Spanish who once lived here and the continuing reverence for their influence in a country whose residents have African, European and Asian ancestry.

Before I knew it, I was standing in front of the Miss Rizos Salon on Calle Isabel La Católica. This was a departure from that reverence.

Long hair that hangs down your back has so long been the prevalent beauty ideal in the Dominican Republic that many residents who mastered hair-straightening on the island emigrated to the United States and opened successful salons throughout the country…

Read the entire article here.

From the Archives: Adrian Piper’s “Blacks, Whites and Other Mythic Beings”

Art in America
2015-05-29 (Orignially published November 2001)

Eleanor Heartney

Adrian Piper, the uncompromising Berlin-based American artist and philosopher whose work applies the rigorous strictures of conceptual art to questions of race and identity, was awarded a Golden Lion award at the 56th Venice Biennale earlier this month. Piper received the honor for her participation in “All the World’s Futures,” where she showed The Probable Trust Registry. The piece asks participants to pledge to live by one or more of the following tenets: “I will mean everything I say”; “I will do everything I say I will do”; and “I will always be too expensive to buy.”

In this A.i.A. article from the November 2001 issue, reproduced below, contributing editor Eleanor Heartney reflects on Piper’s tendency “to favor the confrontational over the conciliatory” on the occasion of several traveling retrospectives of her work.

Blacks, Whites and Other Mythic Beings

By Eleanor Heartney

Adrian Piper has long pursued twin careers in art and philosophy. In response to a traveling retrospective, the author ponders the artistic consequences—and seeming contradictions—of Piper’s analytical observations about race.

Does race exist? Henry Louis Gates, Jr., among others, believes not. Labeling race a biological myth, the Harvard scholar has added that from a social and political perspective, race is best understood as a metaphor for something else and not an essence or a thing in itself. [1]

Adrian Piper’s career has been, in one sense, an exploration of this theory. As a light-skinned black woman who, she points out in works like Colored (1988) and My Calling (Cards), 1986-90, could easily pass for white, Piper questions the validity of racial categorization and examines the prevalence of social stereotyping. If race cannot be defined by science or be determined by a person’s visual appearance, she asks, why does it continue to retain such a powerful hold on the human psyche? And what, if anything, can be done to expose its artificiality in a way that will destroy its power?

Many artists have explored the subject of race in recent years, but Piper has been conducting her inquiry from a rather uncommon position. For the last quarter century she has pursued parallel careers as a visual artist with an extensive international exhibition history and as a professor of philosophy, currently on the faculty of Wellesley College. If autobiography provided the starting point for her exploration of race and racism, philosophy has shaped the form of her inquiries. But in the process, the application of abstract philosophical principles to this seemingly intractable social problem produces certain contradictions which suggest that even Piper is not immune to the insidious fictions of race…

Read the entire article here.

When surveying youth in foster care, almost one in five changed their racial self-identification over a one-year period. This reflects a higher rate of change over a shorter period of time than has been reported in the literature for adolescents in the general public. In contrast, the increased likelihood for Native American and multi-racial youth in the current study to change their racial categorization mirrors findings from earlier studies involving similarly-aged youth; the findings also suggest that a significant proportion of Hispanic youth change their ethnic categorization as well. Findings from the current study further highlight high rates of discordance between the racial and ethnic self-identification of Native American, Hispanic and multi-racial youth, and how agencies (school and child welfare) categorize them. For example, the level of discordance between self-reports of Native American youth and the racial designations made by child welfare was 90% at Time 1; youth–child welfare discordance was even higher (96.1%) for multiracial youth. Similarly, Hispanic youth were misclassified by the child welfare system over half of the time, and by school approximately one-third of the time.

Jessica Schmidt, et. al., “Who am I? Who do you think I am? Stability of racial/ethnic self-identification among youth in foster care and concordance with agency categorization,” Children and Youth Services Review, Volume 56, September, 2015, 65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2015.06.011. Also here.

Everyone’s Problem: Adrian Piper Tackles the Complexities of Race Relations Head-On

Artspace
2015-12-30

Artspace Editors

Adrian Piper receiving her Golden Lion from the 2015 Venice Biennale

The artist and philosopher Adrian Piper’s direct and subtly intellectual approach to unpacking the tangled issues of race, gender, identity, and belonging has inspired a generation of socially-conscious artists across all media, although her impact is just now being fully recognized: she was the recipient of the Golden Lion for best artist at this year’s Venice Biennale, and MoMA has recently announced plans for, in the words of Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times, “the most comprehensive exhibition to date on the conceptual artist,” set to open in 2018. In this excerpt from Phaidon’s Defining Contemporary Art, the curator Connie Butler responds to one of Piper’s most important video and installation works, Cornered from 1988.

Adrian Piper’s conceptual explorations of race and difference have made her a critical influence on subsequent generations of artists exploring race and the construction of identity. By 1988—after two decades in which she moved from a relatively traditional conceptual art practice to using her own body in her work, and to locating her subject matter in the fluidity of identity—she had begun to explore her own struggles with racial identity: namely, people’s assumptions about her race and their corresponding behavior towards her.

The pivotal video installation Cornered addresses this in the straightforward, analytical fashion common to all of Piper’s work. Viewers encounter the artist herself, a light-skinned black woman, looking out at them from a monitor placed in the corner of a room. On either side of it hang her father’s two birth certificates—one that identifies him as white, the other as black. A large table upended in front of the monitor distances us from all this, keeping Piper at a remove in space. Despite this, the artist faces us calmly and begins matter-of-factly. “I’m black. Now, let’s deal with this social fact, and the fact of my stating it, together. Maybe you don’t see why we have to deal with it together. Maybe you think this is just my problem, and that I should deal with it by myself. But it’s not just my problem. It’s our problem.”…

Read the entire article here.

My Ancestor’s Name and Race Changed in Census Records. Why?

The Root
2016-01-01

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher, Jr. University Professor; Director, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research
Harvard University

Anna L. Todd, Researcher
New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), Boston, Massachusetts

1860 U.S. census for Hardy County, Va.
U.S. census

Tracing Your Roots: Antebellum records raise questions about the racial identity and legal status of West Virginia forebears.

Dear Professor Gates:

I recently discovered that I have an ancestor listed as “mulatto” on the 1850 and 1860 census records. Her name is Amelia “Millie/Milly” A. Moreland, born in 1818 in Virginia. She is listed as living with William White Mullin and three children, Richard Winfield Scott Moreland, Anna R.C. Moreland and Mary J.V. Moreland—all children also listed as “mulatto.” By the 1900 census, son Richard changed his surname to Mullin (he was still listed as Moreland/Mooreland on the 1880 census) and was listed as “white.” He is my fourth-great-grandfather. They were located in Hardy County, Va. (now in West Virginia).

These census records are all I can find. I can’t find anything on Milly except her birth year and place, and I’m not sure if she was free or a slave. Can you help me find out more about her, please? —Amber Simmons

It just so happens that three sets of Professor Gates’ fourth-great-grandparents (all free Negroes) lived in Hardy County, Va. (now West Virginia), in the 18th and 19th centuries. In fact, many of their descendants continued to live there; in fact, Professor Gates was born in Keyser, W.Va., which is 36 miles from Moorefield, Hardy County’s county seat! So he knows this area very, very well, and finds your question especially intriguing because of this personal connection.

What does a “mulatto” designation mean in the census?

Let’s start with a surprising fact about racial designations and census takers: The status of a person listed in the federal census (black, white or mulatto) was ultimately the personal interpretation of the census taker, based on assumptions made regarding skin color and other aspects of an individual’s appearance, regardless of what the occupant of the home told her or him. Therefore, one can’t necessarily infer parentage, complexion, or much else based on that designation in a census record. However, in this case, it’s an indication that a local person was making a declaration of mixed-race ancestry (either recent or older) in your relative’s family tree…

Read the entire article here.