Mixed Race Studies

Left of Black S3:E9 | Racial Passing and the Rise of Multiracialism

Left of Black
John Hope Franklin Center
Duke University
2012-11-12

Mark Anthony Neal, Host and Professor of African & African American Studies
Duke University

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Clinical Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Southern California, Annenberg

Habiba Ibrahim, Associate Professor of English
University of Washington

Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

For many African Americans, the practice of ‘Passing’—where light-skinned Blacks could pass for White—remains a thing connected to a difficult racial past. In her new book, Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity (Baylor University Press), Marcia Dawkins, a professor in the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California provides a fresh take on the practice arguing that passing in the contemporary moment transcends racial performance.

Dawkins talks about her new book with Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal, via Skype.  Neal is also joined by University of Washington Professor Habiba Ibrahim for part one of a two-part interview about her new book Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press) in which she links the rise of Multiracialism in the 1990s to the maintenance of traditional gender norms.

The Future Is Now: What PR Pros and Marketers Need to Know About the “Mixed Mindset”

The Huffington Post
2012-10-17

Marcia Dawkins, Clinical Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Southern California, Annenberg

Don’t believe the hype! Multiracials are not new. They are the products of racial blending of various groups—beginning with Native Americans and European settlers–throughout US history. Multiracial identities have been leveraged for social and anti-social purposes since the dawn of print media. Even in today’s networked world we are still figuring out how this “full color” demographic fits into a historically black-and-white racial context.

Welcome to the second decade of the 21st century and to the era of the “Mixed Mindset,” which is highly mediated, intensely personal, and increasingly political. On one hand, the Mixed Mindset represents a step backward – into the history of mixing that predates a black-white only mentality. On the other hand, the Mixed Mindset represents a step forward—it’s about everyday contact and practical encounters that acknowledge racial categories, disturb racial common sense, and create a mindset within which it is okay to name and question racial meanings. The logical end of the mixed mindset is a space where many racial categories and meanings can exist simultaneously, even if they’re contradictory, making it more difficult to maintain neat and independent groupings.

Here’s how that works. The Mixed Mindset is about answering questions like “who are you?” and “what do you need?” Here are a few facts about who today’s multiracials are based on how they answered the 2010 US Census.

But to keep things moving, let’s turn our attention to what today’s multiracials are saying they need. I call these needs the three As: Adaptation, Acknowledgment and Affection…

Read the entire article here.

Marcia Dawkins Booksigning

Eso Won Books
4327 Degnan Blvd (Leimert Park Business Center)
Los Angeles, California 90008
Phone: 323-290-1048
2012-09-12, 19:00-21:00 PDT (Local Time)

Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity by Marcia Alesan Dawkins. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2012, 285 pages. Hardback ISBN: 9781602583122.

Passing (def): usually understood as an abbreviation for “racial passing.” Describes the fact of being accepted, or categorized successfully as, a member of people classifed as white.

Clearly Invisible journeys to sometimes uncomfortable but unfailingly learned places as Dawkins retells the contemporary expressions and past experiences of individuals who pass as white people. Along the way these former non-white people’s stories sound familiar but take subtle turns to reveal tensions lurking beneath the surface, non-white people who ultimately expose as much about white supremacy/racism as they conceal about themselves.

Bring your questions, put on your thinking cap and enjoy this controversial topic.

For more information, click here.

Is Obama Now Black (Enough) Because He’s White?

The Huffington Post
2012-08-02

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

With the November election less than 100 days away, the Obama campaign continues to come up against questions about the president’s racial identity. Most recently, reports that the president is “passing,” or claiming that he’s representing himself as a member of a different racial group than the one(s) to which he belongs, have resurfaced. For instance, actor Morgan Freeman recently told NPR, “America’s first black president hasn’t arisen yet. He’s not America’s first black president — he’s America’s first mixed-race president.” The logic I see behind such claims is twofold. First, the president is not really African American because his American mother is white (and, by extension, his ancestors were not enslaved). Second, that “mixed-race” and “black” are mutually exclusive ways of being…

…The revelation that the president and his mother are descendents of the “first slave” provides us all with an opportunity to acknowledge racial relationships with all their problems and awkwardness. Perhaps now, rather than merely questioning the president’s racial identity, we can pose bigger questions about the meanings of race. Questions like: Is slavery still the defining experience of African American identity? If so, who says so? Is any racial identity—multiracial, African American, white—better understood as an idea that can change over time? Wouldn’t it be real progress to admit that an increasing number of people who identify with monoracial identities like black and white might also be mixed? How do we deal with the too often painful history of racial mixing in African American communities? How many families that we know as white might actually come from a history of racial mixing and passing?…

Read the entire article here.

New Americans: Rise of the Multiracials: A Documentary

A Work-In-Progress Documentary

Eli Steele, Producer

With more Americans marrying across the color line today than before, it is inevitable that the racial makeup of America’s face will forever change. Of the nine million individuals that identified themselves as multiracial on the 2010 census, more than 50 percent were under 18 years of age, including filmmaker Eli Steele’s two children, Jack and June. By 2050, they and their multiracial peers are expected to account for 25% of the total population.
 
This fate was long predicted by early Americans such as James Madison and Frederick Douglass who knew the color line could not keep the races apart for eternity. And now that this fate is upon us, what does it mean for a country that has shed so much blood in the name of race?

With this question on his mind, Filmmaker Eli Steele, who is multiracial himself, has embarked on a journey through America to explore various aspects of the American landscape for clues to what the future holds. So far, he has encountered individuals ranging from a U.S. Army soldier who refuses to self identify his race to a radio host who identifies as Black American despite a white mother and black father. Aside from interviews, Steele plans to explore the role of multiracial individuals in key moments in American history, the ongoing demographic shifts that are rapidly redefining once firm racial boundaries, and pockets of resistance to the multiracial baby boom.
 
Steele also plans to journey into the history of his family for to be multiracial is a fate that is at once deeply personal and political. Why did the ancestors of his children make the decisions to cross the color line, especially at times where there were no societal advantages in doing so? By learning more about the world they came from and the decisions they made, Steele hopes to provide his children with a better understanding of the world and people they come from. 
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To date, Steele has discovered there are two Americas at odds with one another. There is the private America of individuals has advanced race relations to the point that 85 percent of 18 to 29 year olds and 73 percent of 30 to 49 year olds would consider marriage to another race. On the other side, there is the public America of government institutions and corporations that continue their race policies despite an obvious absurdity: if an individual is more than one race, then what is race? Will America reconcile its race policies with the irreversible trends of private America or will there always be a disconnect?

The outcome of this new front on the culture war around race will determine whether America continues its legacy of racial strife or finally looks past skin color to the person’s content of character. At the end of his journey, Steele hopes to return to his two children, Jack and June, with a better and realistic understanding of how to prepare them for the America they will live in 2050.

Interview subjects include Clay Cane, Jennifer Ceci, Jen Chau, Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Eric ‘Charles’ Jaskolski, Angela Mckee, Farzana Nayani, Jared Sexton, and Ken Tanabe.

For more information, click here.

The Future of the ‘Tan Generation’

The Root
2012-06-08

Jenée Desmond-Harris

Browner America: Marcia Alesan Dawkins says an increase in nonwhite births doesn’t mean more social justice.

(The Root)—Recent census data reveal that, for the first time, racial and ethnic minorities make up more than half of all children born in the United States, with 50.4 percent of children under age 1 identified as Hispanic, black, Asian American or members of another ethnic minority group.

In terms of the overall population, African Americans are the second-largest minority group in the nation (after Hispanics), with a 1.6 percent increase between 2010 and 2011. Minorities now make up nearly 37 percent of the overall U.S. population, and it’s predicted that by 2042, a minority of Americans will be non-Hispanic whites.

What do all these numbers mean for our understanding of race, for the issues that affect communities of color and for our very concept of who is a “minority” in this country? The Root has gathered a variety of perspectives on the significance of America’s becoming a browner nation for a series of interviews on whether, and why, we should pay attention to these demographic changes.

For the second in the series, The Root talked to Marcia Alesan Dawkins, visiting scholar at Brown University and author of the forthcoming Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity. She describes her extensive writing on racial identity as an expression of her interest in “how people figure out who they are and how they connect with others,” and has warned against rushing to assume that demographic changes will do away with America’s troubled racial past…

…The Root: Are we going to need a new vocabulary, a new word for “minority,” when minorities become the majority? As more Americans have nonwhite ancestry, will the definition of whiteness itself be affected?

Marcia Dawkins: Yes, on both counts. We are going to need new terms that reflect numerical reality and social-political reality. Part of that implies thinking about what race and ethnicity mean in general and what specific racial and ethnic, and multiracial and multiethnic, identities mean in particular. At the same time, we’ve got to remember that every racial or ethnic community has some issues and experiences in common and is also unique.

For one, these changes mean that the white-black and white-people of color binaries need to be rethought and replaced with a full-color perspective on race and ethnicity. A full-color perspective acknowledges that racial and ethnic mixing has been part of our social fabric since Europeans met and mated with Native Americans; that it continued on through African enslavement and segregation and Asian exclusion and internment; that it progressed with increased rates of Hispanic immigration and is still with us as increasing numbers of interracial and multiracial couples get together and have children today. A full-color perspective must also acknowledge that racial and ethnic mixing has been occurring for centuries in same-sex communities as well.

On one hand, sociologists predict that the definition of whiteness will expand to include Hispanic and Asian groups but will always exclude those with African-American descent in order to maintain political and social power. On the other hand, this prediction is reductive because it assumes that only those who will continue to identify as white will be privileged and that those who will continue to identify as black will be non-privileged. It also ignores the fact that, generally speaking, to be African American is to be racially mixed…

Read the entire article here.

Spinning on Margins: An Analysis of Passing as Communicative Phenomenon

Queen: a journal of rhetoric and power
Special Issue: Rehtorics of identity: Place, Race, Sex and the Person (January 2005)
From the conference held from 2005-01-20 through 2005-01-22 at the University of Redlands
21 pages

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Acts of black-to-white racial passing in the United States represent a struggle between self-identity and the social structures into which one is born. From a historical perspective, passing is a strategy of representation through which light-skinned black Americans attempt(ed) to reconcile “two unreconciled ideals:” their limited opportunities as black people in a segregated society with their idealized life goals as full American citizens in the pre-civil rights era (DuBois, 1903; Gandy, 1998). In other words, passing is a strategy employed by many light-skinned black Americans to resolve being excluded from the general white world of social activity by “the vast veil;” the physical, legal, psychological, and social obstacles structurally embedded between blacks and whites (DuBois, 1903).

This individual paper employs Structuration Theory, legal precedent, literature and rhetorical analysis to respond to the following specific interrogations: (1) is it possible to develop a vocabulary about “passing,” which is an activity based on nonverbal communication and physicality and enshrouded in a code of silence? And, in a broader sense, (2) how do acts of passing themselves become communicative behaviors that express identity?

This three-pronged analysis of the passing phenomenon will work to call the ideological and epistemological foundations of race itself into question. First, Giddens’s Structuration Theory will explain that passers note a contextual diversity/dissonance at the macro level between the general white world of social activity and the general black world of social activity. Second, a rhetorical analysis of legal precedent will highlight America’s investment in race as the basis for defining and partaking in social and material privileges that become routine and critical aspects of day-to-day life. Court cases such as Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, and People v. Dean are pivotal points in tracing whiteness from “color to race to status to property” (Harris, 1993, p. 1714). Additionally, these cases address the debate of social versus legal whiteness as the grounds for constituting full participation in society. Third, available literature, including narratives written by enslaved Africans along with novels, diaries, and memoirs from the Harlem Renaissance, recounts tales of passing and the emotional and social tolls paid in the process (Harris, 1993; Johnson, 1912; Hughes, 1933; Williams, 1991; Ifekwunigwe, 1999). Rhetorical analysis of this literature will uncover the tropes of a vocabulary of passing and reveal race as a “fantasy theme” and social resource that individuals who are not in the mainstream of white America utilize to attain economic, political, and personal fulfillment.

Read the entire article here.

Is the Tanning of America Only Skin Deep?

The Huffington Post
2012-05-17

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

It’s official: The United States is officially “tan.” According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s first population estimate by age, race, ethnicity, and sex since the 2010 Census, “50.4 percent of our nation’s population younger than age 1 were minorities as of July 1, 2011. This is up from 49.5 percent from the 2010 Census taken April 1, 2010. The population younger than age 5 was 49.7 percent minority in 2011, up from 49.0 percent in 2010.”

As expected, media flurry ensued. The Associated Press was among the first outlets to pick up the story reporting, “For the first time, racial and ethnic minorities make up more than half the children born in the U.S.” USA Today noted the nation’s changing complexion and described the Census Bureau’s report as “a sign of how swiftly the USA is becoming a nation of younger minorities and older whites.” And according to the New York Times, “such a turn has been long expected, but no one was certain when the moment would arrive.”

Now that the moment is here we must reckon with it. Today’s Census statement marks a social milestone for a nation that has struggled with issues of diversity, privilege, and power. But, as I suggest in my forthcoming book Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity, the tanning of America might be only skin deep. Or, putting it differently: Is the U.S. passing as “tan”?…

…Here’s why you should care. Because looking at tomorrow’s “tanning” generation in demographic terms only subtly promotes them as the chosen ones who can and will dismantle racism that took centuries to build. When we take this perspective we are shifting the responsibility of solving institutional and structural racism off those of us who were born before July 1, 2011 and off our legal and social histories. This is not only unfair — it’s unrealistic. Predicting the demise of racism by the rising number of nonwhite births is probably not the best way to fulfill our desire for a more just society. Wouldn’t the present-day elimination of disparities in income, employment, health care, education, crime, punishment and family structure for this new generation (as well as their parents) be more accurate measures?…

Read the entire article here.

Marcia Dawkins, Author of “Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing” on Mixed Race Radio

Mixed Race Radio
Blogtalkradio
2012-05-02, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Marcia Dawkins’ book, Clearly Invisible and the Color of Cultural Identity (Baylor University Press, 2012), is the first to connect racial passing and classical rhetoric to issues of disability, gender-neutral parenting, human trafficking, hacktivism, identity theft, racial privacy, media typecasting and violent extremism.

By applying fresh eyes to landmark historical cases and benchmark popular culture moments in the history of passing Dawkins also rethinks the representational character and civic purpose of multiracial identities. In the process she provides powerful insights called “passwords” that help readers tackle the tough questions of who we are and how we can relate to one another and the world.

For more information, click here.

TIME to Think in Full Color About Race & Ethnicity

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Ph.D.
2012-02-25

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

TIME Magazine’s latest cover story (Feb. 2/24) is called “Yo Decido. Why Latinos will pick the next President.” It reports that about 9% of all voters in 2012 will be Latino, up 26% from four years ago. While the Latin@ vote is definitely an important and interesting and game-changing political development, the most interesting thing about this story isn’t the headline or the article’s statistics. It’s the cover (left).

The cover claims to feature 20 portraits of Latin@s with captions. Some are individual or occupational descriptions like dancer, DREAMer, nutrition undergrad, car aficionado and immigration activist. Other descriptions are nation-oriented, like Mexicans, Hondurans and Guatemalans.

Here’s the problem: In reality, the cover features only 19 portraits of Latin@s and one man who passes as Latino but actually identifies himself as multiracial—half Chinese and half White. According to Michelle Woo at the OC Weekly, “That man is Michael Schennum, is the short-haired gentleman in the top row, center, behind the letter ‘M.’ He is half Chinese and half White. Not Latino. Not even a little bit.”…

…Sociologists have identified two patterns emerging in US multiracial communities. Asian / Whites and Latin@ / Whites tend to acknowledge and celebrate all aspects of their backgrounds but live life as Whites, especially if their fathers are White. Black / Whites and Black / Asian, Black / Latin@s tend to celebrate all aspects of their backgrounds but live their lives as Black…

Read the entire article here.