Mixed Race Studies

“The Caucasian Cloak”: Mexican Americans and the Politics of Whiteness in the Twentieth-Century Southwest

The Georgetown Law Journal
Volume 95, Issue 2
Pages 337-392

Ariela J. Gross, Professor of Law and History
University of Southern California Law School

The history of Mexican Americans and Jim Crow in the Southwest suggests the danger of allowing state actors or private entities to discriminate on the basis of language or cultural practice. Race in the Southwest was produced through the practices of Jim Crow, which were not based explicitly on race, but rather on language and culture inextricably tied to race. This Article looks at three sets of encounters between Mexican Americans and the state in mid-twentieth-century Texas and California—trials involving miscegenation, school desegregation, and jury exclusion—to see the way in which state actors used Mexican Americans’ nominal white identity under the law to create and protect Jim Crow practices. First, it argues that whiteness operated primarily as a “Caucasian cloak” to obscure the practices of Jim Crow and to make them appear benign, whether in the jury or school context. If Mexican Americans were white, then they were represented so long as whites were represented. Second, it demonstrates that Mexican-American civil rights leaders as well as ordinary individuals in the courtroom did not simply identify as white; some showed a more complex understanding of “Mexican” as a mestizo race, and others pointed to the idea of race as a status produced by racist practice. Mexicans were nonwhite if they were treated as nonwhite under Jim Crow. Finally, it argues that, at least in twentieth-century Texas and California, cultural discrimination was racial discrimination, and that continuing discrimination on the basis of language ability and other cultural attributes should be scrutinized carefully under antidiscrimination law…

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
MEXICAN-AMERICAN WHITENESS BEFORE 1930
A. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
B. WHITE BY TREATY—IN RE RODRIGUEZ
C. SEX ACROSS RACIAL BORDERS: POPULAR AND LEGAL IDEAS OF THE “MEXICAN RACE”

II. THE POLITICS OF WHITENESS IN THE 1930S AND 1940S
A. JIM CROW IN THE SOUTHWEST
B. MEXICAN-AMERICAN ORGANIZATIONS AND POLITICS

III. LITIGATING MEXICAN-AMERICAN WHITENESS
A. THE 1930S SCHOOL AND JURY CASES
B. THE 1940S SCHOOL AND JURY CASES

IV. AFTER HERNANDEZ V. TEXAS: LIFTING THE CAUCASIAN CLOAK
A. FROM HERNANDEZ V. TEXAS TO CISNEROS
B. LA RAZA COSMICA

CONCLUSION

Read the entire article here.

Grad student explores questions of race through digital technology

News & Events
York Univeristy, Toronto, Ontario
2010-01-28

The technology to turn oneself into a mixed-race avatar might be confined to movies, but Brian Banton plays with racial manipulations of himself online, wrote the Toronto Star (online) Jan. 27 [2010] in a story that included five photos of him.

As a York graduate student, he explores questions of racial hybridity as related to corporate design. Much of the work is obscurely theoretical, Banton says. “But I also want to be playful. (Mixed race) is a serious issue but I don’t want to be heavy-handed.”..

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Matrix: The Role of Race Ideology in the Enforcement of Anti-Discrimination Laws, a United States – Latin America Comparison

Cornell Law Review
Volume 87, Number 5 (July 2002)
Cornell University Law School

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Professor of Law
Fordham University

This Article examines the role of race ideology in the enforcement of antidiscrimination laws.  Professor Hernández demonstrates the ways in which the U.S. race ideology is slowly starting to resemble the race ideology of much of Latin America.  The evolving U.S. race ideology is a multiracial matrix made up of four precepts: (1) racial mixture and diverse racial demography will resolve racial problems; (2) fluid racial classification schemes are an indicator of racial progress and the colorblind abolition of racial classifications an indicator of absolute racial harmony; (3) racism is solely a phenomenon of aberrant racist individuals; and (4) focusing on race is itself racist.  Because the multiracial matrix parallels much Latin American race discourse, Professor Hernández conducts a comparative analysis between U.S. and Latin American anti-discrimination law enforcement practices.  Professor Hernández concludes that the new race ideology bolsters the maintenance of race hierarchy in a racially diverse population.  Consequently, an uncritical embrace of the new race ideology will hinder the enforcement of antidiscrimination law in the United States.  Professor Hernández proposes that a greater focus on racism as a global issue that treats race as a political identity formation will assist in the recognition of the civil rights dangers of a multiracial matrix.

Read the entire article here.

African Americans and National Identities in Central America

Rina Cáceres, Professor of Diaspora Studies Program at the Centro de Investigationes Historicas de America Central
Universidad de Costa Rica

Lowell Gudmundson, Professor of Latin American Studies and History
Mount Holyoke University

Mauricio Meléndez

An interdisciplinary, multinational research program to reconceptualize and document, both visually and textually, the history of people of African descent in Central America.

Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Program, Mount Holyoke College and The Center for Central American Historical Research at the Universidad de Costa Rica.

Our collaborative research project seeks to reassess the historical presence and contributions of peoples of African descent to the national histories and identities constructed in Central America over the past two centuries. In choosing a color for the cosmic race, modern nationalist thinkers in the region systematically emphasized the European and Indigenous origins of its peoples, in terms of both historical fact and group agency. Thus they radically discounted not only the importance, role, and presence of any African heritage but also as the centrality of racial or ethnic conflict within the historical experience of non-indigenous sectors of society…

Visit the project website here.

Students’ growing refusal to state a race on forms frustrates school officials

Sacramento Bee
2010-01-18

Stephen Magagnini

Sacramento, California — About half of the 37 students in teacher Jeanne Kirchofer’s Laguna Creek High School classroom, who span nearly every combination of race and ethnicity, have joined the growing number of California students who decline to state a race on official forms and tests…

“I’m not saying we’re going to forget where we came from, but we can all see similarities from different hardships,” Belcher said. By eliminating racial categories—and racial consciousness—”we can make racial hatred go away,” she said.

Eighteen classmates agreed. “If we were all one race, then there wouldn’t be any racism,” said Mike Obi, 14, whose roots are Italian and Nigerian. He said his parents declined to state his race on his school registration form.

“We shouldn’t be judged by our race,” said senior Jessica Mae Belcher, 17, whose roots are African and Cherokee. She prefers “none of the above” because “we’re all different, but we’re all the same, too.”..

…From 2006 to 2009, the number of Elk Grove Unified School District students whose parents listed their race as “multiple/no response” went from 500 to 6,200 — a twelve-fold jump in just three years, the California Department of Education says. About one of every 10 of the district’s students now list race as “multiple/no response.”

There’s also been a dramatic rise statewide. Data show the number of K-12 students listing their race as “multiple/no response” has jumped 70 percent, from 124,000 in 2006 to 210,000 last year…

…Senior Candice Renkin, 17,—who identifies herself as white/European American—said it’s important to close the achievement gap. “By ignoring racial categories, it makes the problem worse because people can be racist and there’s no way to quantify it.” …

Read the entire article here.

Hideously diverse Britain: the college where histories collide

The Guardian
2010-01-10

Hugh Muir

It was 1940 and the 200 students of South West Essex Technical College posed ramrod straight on the sharply inclined steps; ties stiff, uniforms crisp. They were RAF ­cadets learning science and ­engineering at the place that was dubbed the People’s University. Unsurprisingly, those pictured were all white.

The place is called Waltham Forest College nowadays and the grand steps remain imposing. The porticos, by sculptor Eric Gill, have been lovingly preserved.

But last week, when the east London college recreated that recently discovered archive photograph, everything else was different. The formation was identical to that created with military precision all those years ago, but lining the steps were 200 students from ­another generation, another century. White Britons, black Britons, teenagers of Asian and African and Mediterranean and Eastern European descent. A student body with links to every continent on the planet. Speakers of 76 different ­languages. Each standing out in the cold to make a statement. “I told them it was their job to represent their era, just as the cadets in 1940 were symbolic of that time,” said lecturer Gaverne Bennett. “They bought into it.”…

Read the entire article and view the photographs here.

College applications in a post-race world: Admissions process will soon need to address class concerns

GW Hatchet
Independent Student Paper of George Washington University
2010-01-14

Evan Schwartz, Columnist

In a recent editorial for The Boston Globe, columnist Neal Gabler railed against what he referred to as “the college admissions scam” and a perceived bias in admission board selection against, well, everyone. Gabler made it seem as though anyone who is not a privileged white high school student has no chance of getting into an Ivy League or comparable university.

…Racial identity has been changing dramatically in the last few years, perhaps punctuated by the election of a mixed-race president of the United States. The concept of “whiteness” in this country has become more complicated, especially given the influx of Hispanic immigrants and the decreasing stigma attached to mixed-race couples. Over a third of the U.S. population is now composed of minority groups, and the Census Bureau predicts that white people will have a far less pronounced majority in the next several decades….

Read the entire article here.

Six degrees of Princeton’s African-American history: America writ small

Princeton Alumni Weekly
Rally ‘Round the Cannon
2010-01-13

Gregg Lange, Class of 1970

The New York Times’ recent genealogy study of Michelle Obama ’85, noting for the first time her slave and mixed-race heritage, seemingly surprised a broad swath of the populace. This indicates that we here in the History Corner of the World haven’t been doing our jobs very well. The complex intertwining of peoples and cultures living side by side for hundreds of years, their humanness grotesquely masked by slavery and then gratuitous segregation, is as near a universal experience as you can find in the United States. We were all involved; we are all affected. Get used to it.  

It is, for a nearby example, pretty much common knowledge that the saga of African-Americans at Princeton began in World War II, and gained no effective traction until the Goheen administration in the 1960s. A whites-only world, if ever there was one.

Let me instead tell you a story more than 200 years old…

Read the entire article here.

Geek Out: Mixed Race in America

University of Californa, Berkeley
Lawrence Hall of Science
2010-02-10, 19:00 to 22:00 PST (Local Time)

Geek Discourse
Tour the “Race: Are We So Different?” exhibit and participate in a discussion facilitated by Dr. Victoria Robinson of the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies and American Cultures programs on what it means to be mixed race in America. Authors of the book “Blended Nation” Mike Tauber and Pamela Singh will present several photographs and stories from the book…

For more information click here.

Racial Boundary Formation at the Dawn of Jim Crow: The Determinants and Effects of Black/Mulatto Occupational Differences in the United States, 1880 (Working Paper)

33 pages
Updated 2008-07-03

Aaron Gullickson, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Oregon

Much of the literature within sociology regarding mixed-race populations focuses on contemporary issues and dynamics, often overlooking a larger historical literature.  This article provides a historical perspective on these issues by exploiting regional variation in the United States in the degree of occupational differentiation between blacks and mulattoes in the 1880 Census, during a transitionary period from slavery to freedom.  The analysis reveals that the role of the mixed-race category as either a “buffer class” or a status threat depended upon the class composition of the white population.  Black/mulatto occupational differentiation was greatest in areas where whites had a high level of occupational prestige and thus little to fear from an elevated mulatto group. Furthermore, the effect of black/mulatto occupational differentiation on lynching varied by the occupational status of whites. In areas where whites were of relatively low status, black/mulatto differentiation increased the risk of lynching, while in areas where whites were of relatively high status, black/mulatto differentiation decreased the risk of lynching.

Read the entire paper here.