Mixed Race Studies

The problem for poor, white kids is that a part of their culture has been destroyed

The Guardian
2016-04-04

Paul Mason

Our culture was the one celebrated in Ken Loach movies … a scene from the film Kes. Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock

Thatcherism didn’t just crush the unions, it crushed a story – as the report that says working-class white children go backwards at school proves

The report came couched in the usual language of inclusion, technocracy and “what works”. Disadvantaged children are doing so badly at school that only one in five hits an international benchmark designed by the authors.

But the headline grabber in the paper from the liberal thinktank CentreForum concerns ethnicity: the serial losers after 28 years of marketisation, testing, a centralised curriculum and decentralised control of schools are poor white kids…

Read the entire article here.

The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race

Oxford University Press
2016-02-18
192 Pages
7 Black and white
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199386260

Carlos Hoyt, Jr.

• It is written by a person who is intimately familiar with living as an adversely racialized person
• It introduces readers to the non-racial worldview
• It provides first-person narratives of people commonalty ascribed to the black/African American racial category who eschew racial identification altogether.
• It furnishes the concept of racialization as the antidote to normalizing race as a naturally and unavoidable aspect of identity.
• It explains essentialism
• It reconciles the seeming conflict between race-conscious and color-blind ideologies
• It provides a way beyond the problems of race that plague this country

For the vast majority of human existence we did without the idea of race. Since its inception a mere few hundred years ago, and despite the voluminous documentation of the problems associated with living within the racial worldview, we have come to act as if race is something we cannot live without. The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race presents a penetrating, provocative, and promising analysis of and alternative to the hegemonic racial worldview. How race came about, how it evolved into a natural-seeming aspect of human identity, and how racialization, as a habit of the mind, can be broken is presented through the unique and corrective framing of race as a time-bound (versus eternal) concept, the lifespan of which is traceable and the demise of which is predictable. The narratives of individuals who do not subscribe to racial identity despite be ascribed to the black/African American racial category are presented as clear and compelling illustrations of how a non-racial identity and worldview is possible and arguably preferable to the status quo. Our view of and approach to race (in theory, pedagogy, and policy) is so firmly ensconced in a sense of it as inescapable and indispensible that we are in effect shackled to the lethal absurdity we seek to escape. Theorist, teachers, policy-makers and anyone who seeks a transformative perspective on race and racial identity will be challenged, enriched, and empowered by this refreshing treatment of one of our most confounding and consequential dilemmas.

Table of Contents

• Epigraph
• Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: Lethal Absurdity De Jour
• PART I: UNDERSTANDING RACE
  • 1. Simile, Metaphors and Analogs for Race
  • 2. Same World, Different Worldviews: Not ALL the Black Kids Sat Together in the Cafeteria
  • 3. The Arc of a Bad Idea: Race and Racialization in Five Epochs
• PART II: TRANSCENDING RACE
  • 4. Who Are The Race Transcenders? Narratives of Non-racial Identity Development
  • 5. Race Transcendence, Race Consciousness and Post-race
• PART III: IMPLICATIONS OF THE NONRACIAL WORLDVIEW
  • 6. Race Without Reification: Pedagogy, Practice and Policy from a Non-racial Perspective
  • 7. Beyond the Panopticon: Liberating the Tragic Essentialist and Promoting Racial Disobedience
• Appendixes:
  • Appendix A: Pre-interview Background Information Form
  • Appendix B: Semi-structured Open-ended Interview Questions and Interview Domains Matrix
• References
• Index

Of association, assimilation and mixed-race marriages

Oman Daily Observer
2016-03-21

Ali Ahmed Al Riyami

It is said that ‘love knows no bounds’ and, as such, when two people meet and fall in love there is little that can stop there union and all that it entails; especially the expected outcome, which is in fact the main reason that a man and a woman conjoin in the first place — whether consciously or unconsciously — of producing offspring and securing their gene pools. In a world that has seen the mass movement and migrations of people, across boarders and continents, it is not surprising, then, that the incidence of mixed marriages between people of different national and cultural origins, faiths and creeds takes place.

In Britain, it is reported that one in ten marriages is by a mixed race couple; something almost unimaginable and very rare just a few decades ago and yet, as the figures show, is becoming quite commonplace…

Read the entire article here.

Hapas Soon to Be the Majority in the Japanese American Community

AsAmNews: Where the conversation about Asian America Begins
2016-04-16

Louis Chan, AsAmNews National Correspondent

The future is now in the Japanese American community.

By 2020, just four years away, demographers says the majority of Japanese Americans will be multiracial/multiethnic.

A new exhibition now at the Japanese American Museum of San Jose in California runs through the end of the year. It is curated by Fred Liang and Cindy Nakashima who also co-curated an earlier version of the exhibition in 2013 at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.

“My parents married in 1965, when it was still illegal in sixteen states, but they married in Ohio, where there were no anti-miscegenation laws,” Nakashima told AsAmNews. My dad is a Nisei, my mom is a White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP). They met in graduate school.”

The interracial marriage rate in the Japanese American community is estimated at 66 percent. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court ruled in 1967, (Loving v. Virginia) that anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional, each state had control over who could and could not get legally married…

Read the entire article here.

How Soccer Helped Brazil Embrace Its Racial Diversity

Zócalo Public Square
KCRW
Santa Monica, California
2016-04-06

Joshua Nadel, Associate Professor of History
North Carolina Central University

Brazil—as two recent book titles point out, and almost any kid kicking a ball anywhere in the world can tell you—is the country of soccer. While the modern sport’s actual birthplace is England, Brazil is the spiritual center of the sport. Brazil, whose beloved canarinho team is the only one to play in all World Cups and to have won five, perfected the English invention, inspiring a more poetic, fluid version of the game. And while Brazil made modern soccer, the extent to which soccer made modern Brazil is often underappreciated.

The sport landed in Brazil (and throughout Latin America) at the moment of the creation of the modern nation state, in the late 19th century. As a result it tied into the historical narratives—the stories that Brazilians crafted about themselves—that underpinned the nascent nation. Soccer helped to knit Brazil together into one country in the early 20th century and played a key role in incorporating people of African descent into the polity.

Soccer arrived in Brazil in the 1890s, brought by British workers and Anglo-Brazilian youth who were returning from school in England. At first played in elite social clubs like the São Paulo Athletic Club, the sport soon diffused downwards to the masses, and by the first decades of the 20th century was already the most popular sport in the country. Most soccer histories in Latin America suggest two separate “births”—the foreign birth marked by arrival of sport and the dominance of expatriate teams; and the national birth, when the local youth began to beat the Europeans at their game. In Brazil a third birth exists: when Afro-Brazilians enter the field in large numbers…

Read the entire article here.

Sanctioning Matrimony: Interethnic Marriage in the Arizona Borderlands

University of Arizona Press
2016-03-31
256 pages
6.00 x 9.00
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8165-3237-7

Sal Acosta, Assistant Professor of History
Fordham University

A new look at race and ethnicity in the borderlands

Marriage, divorce, birth, baptism, and census records are the essential records of a community. Through them we see who marries, who divorces, and how many children are born. Sal Acosdta has studied a broad base of these vital records to produce the largest quantitative study of intermarriage of any group in the West. Sanctioning Matrimony examines intermarriage in the Tucson area between 1860 and 1930. Unlike previous studies on intermarriage, this book examines not only intermarriages of Mexicans with whites but also their unions with blacks and Chinese.

Following the Treaty of Mesilla (1853), interethnic relationships played a significant part in the Southwest. Acosta provides previously unseen archival research on the scope and tenor of interracial marriages in Arizona. Contending that scholarship on intermarriage has focused on the upper classes, Acosta takes us into the world of the working and lower classes and illuminates how church and state shaped the behavior of participants in interracial unions.

Marriage practices in Tucson reveal that Mexican women were pivotal in shaping family and social life between 1854 and 1930. Virtually all intermarriages before 1900 were, according to Acosta, between Mexican women and white men, or between Mexican women and blacks or Chinese until the 1920s, illustrating the importance of these women during the transformation of Tucson from a Mexican pueblo to an American town.

Acosta’s deep analysis of vital records, census data, and miscegenation laws in Arizona demonstrates how interethnic relationships benefited from and extended the racial fluidity of the Arizona borderlands.

A Contested Art: Modernism and Mestizaje in New Mexico

University of Oklahoma Press
2015
304 pages
6.125″ x 9.25″
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806148649

Stephanie Lewthwaite, Lecturer in American History, Faculty of Arts
University of Nottingham

When New Mexico became an alternative cultural frontier for avant-garde Anglo-American writers and artists in the early twentieth century, the region was still largely populated by Spanish-speaking Hispanos. Anglos who came in search of new personal and aesthetic freedoms found inspiration for their modernist ventures in Hispano art forms. Yet, when these arrivistes elevated a particular model of Spanish colonial art through their preservationist endeavors and the marketplace, practicing Hispano artists found themselves working under a new set of patronage relationships and under new aesthetic expectations that tied their art to a static vision of the Spanish colonial past.

In A Contested Art, historian Stephanie Lewthwaite examines the complex Hispano response to these aesthetic dictates and suggests that cultural encounters and appropriation produced not only conflict and loss but also new transformations in Hispano art as the artists experimented with colonial art forms and modernist trends in painting, photography, and sculpture. Drawing on native and non-native sources of inspiration, they generated alternative lines of modernist innovation and mestizo creativity. These lines expressed Hispanos’ cultural and ethnic affiliations with local Native peoples and with Mexico, and presented a vision of New Mexico as a place shaped by the fissures of modernity and the dynamics of cultural conflict and exchange.

A richly illustrated work of cultural history, this first book-length treatment explores the important yet neglected role Hispano artists played in shaping the world of modernism in twentieth-century New Mexico. A Contested Art places Hispano artists at the center of narratives about modernism while bringing Hispano art into dialogue with the cultural experiences of Mexicans, Chicanas/os, and Native Americans. In doing so, it rewrites a chapter in the history of both modernism and Hispano art.

Published in cooperation with The William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

Exploring Whiteness in a Black-Indian Village on Mexico’s Costa Chica

The Latin American Diaries
Institute of Latin American Studies
2015-06-29

Laura A. Lewis, Professor of Latin American Anthropology
University of Southampton

During the early colonial period, Mexico had one of the largest African slave populations in Latin America. Today, there are numerous historically black communities along the coast of the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca – a region known as the Costa Chica. Towards the end of the 16th century, the Spanish Crown granted tracts of land in the region to several conquistadors who had quelled local Indian resistance. These conquistadors brought to the coast cattle for ranching, and – in the colonial vernacular – blacks and mulattoes, both free and enslaved, to work as cowboys, in agriculture, and as overseers, including of Indian labor.

As time went on, two ethnic zones developed: the foothills and highlands of the Sierra Madre del Sur mountain range at the Costa Chica’s northern edge held Indian communities, while the zone closest to the coast became an ethnic mix that included Indians drawn willingly or unwillingly into the colonial ambit. On the coast, blacks, mulattoes and Indians worked together for Spaniards. Indians also taught blacks and mulattoes native healing, agricultural techniques and local building styles. Because demographics tilted towards African-descent males, informal and formal unions between them and Indian women were common. By the middle of the 17th century, many coastal belt villages were Afro-Indigenous…

Read the entire article here.

Revealing the Race-Based Realities of Workforce Exclusion

NACLA Report on the Americas
Volume 47, Number 4 (Winter 2014)
pages 26-29

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Professor of Law
Fordham University

Advocates in the fight against poverty in Latin America often center class above race as the factor that most determines Afro-descendants’ life-chances. But a growing movement is setting the record straight.

Believing that the black population will be able to reach basic equality independently from what happens with the rest of poor Colombians, within general social policy, or economic growth…is dreaming in a vacuum,” said sociologist Daniel Mera Villamizar in a 2009 El Tiempo column on the Colombian government’s workplace affirmative action measures. Mera continues: “To resolve the historic ambiguity between racism and classism…by saying that race is the determining factor, is to buy a ticket to a conflict we don’t even know.” As critics of the column noted at the time, Mera’s words were at odds with many of the demands of the growing movements for racial justice across Latin America that have proliferated over the past 15 years. These groups are engaged in the fight to raise awareness of the ways race-based discrimination in Latin America cannot be sufficiently explained by the analyses—touted by many advocates and organizations engaged in anti-poverty struggles—that class is the determining mechanism of social and economic marginalization.

There are approximately 150 million people of African descent in Latin America, representing just over 30% of the total population and more than 40% of the poor. Advocates for racial equality in Latin America testify statistically and anecdotally to the fact that Afro-descendants face the frequent perception that they are undesirable elements of society, and are marginalized in politics, media, public life, the job market, and education systems. Mera’s call to avoid conflict by holding up class above race as the most salient factor in determining the life-chances of Afro-descendants echoes the notion—still widely held in much of Latin America—of the “myth of racial democracy.”

Increasingly critiqued over the past 20 years, the myth holds that Latin America’s racial mixture (mestizaje/mestiçagem) creates racial harmony and inherently guards against racial discord and inequality. This denial of racism is often rooted in a belief system that contrasts itself to the history of Jim Crow legislation in the United States. There is no more important place to understand the persistence of race-based marginalization in Latin America than in the increasingly well documented practices of labor market discrimination…

Read the entire article here.

The Race of a Criminal Record: How Incarceration Colors Racial Perception

Social Problems
Volume 57, Issue 1 (February 2010)
pages 92-113
DOI: 10.1525/sp.2010.57.1.92

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Andrew M. Penner, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

In the United States, racial disparities in incarceration and their consequences are widely discussed and debated. Previous research suggests that perceptions of crime and the operations of the criminal justice system play an important role in shaping how Americans think about race. This study extends the conversation by exploring whether being incarcerated affects how individuals perceive their own race as well as how they are perceived by others, using unique longitudinal data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Results show that respondents who have been incarcerated are more likely to identify and be seen as black, and less likely to identify and be seen as white, regardless of how they were perceived or identified previously. This suggests that race is not a fixed characteristic of individuals but is flexible and continually negotiated in everyday interactions.

Read or purchase the article here.