Mixed Race Studies

2010 Census: Think Twice, Check Once

The Huffington Post
2010-03-08

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate
Stanford University

The federal government is taking a road trip, dubbed the 2010 Census Portrait of America Road Tour, to try to convince “hard-to-count audiences” to participate in this year’s dicennial Census. One of those particularly hard-to-count groups are those who identify as racially mixed. Many will choose to take advantage of the “mark one or more races” (MOOM) option made first available on the 2000 Census. Race scholars have been hotly debating the significance of this paradigm shift, asking: just what are the Civil Rights consequences of the Census option of “mark one or more races”?

Demonized in the early twentieth century as sexually polluting and culturally degenerate, mixed race people are now all the rage. The New York Times hails them as Generation E.A.: Ethnically Ambiguous and celebrates them as ambassadors to the post-race new world order. With Obama, our self-described “mutt” President, as its poster-child, the “the Mulatto Millennium” is finally upon us…

…Few could have anticipated the community impact of their box-checking. Federal guidelines have since sought to correct for these unexpected effects, but my point is that the government accounting of race through the Census is explicitly designed to inform public policy and the distribution of resources. This is not about ethnic squabbling over spoils.

It is a recognition that the Census was never meant as–nor should it be–a site for self-expression…

Read the entire article here.

“The New Kubla Khan: Mixed Race Multi-Nationalism”

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association
2009-05-24

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English, Professor, Director of African & African American Studies
Stanford University

This paper examines how, and to what ends, people of the “mixed race experience” are being discursively contextualized as posterchildren of the “post-race,” “post-nation” era. As early as 1996, Stanley Crouch was proclaiming that “race is over;” since then, others also have rung race’s death knell: Holland Cotter in a 2001 New York Times piece, for example, has claimed that the time for “ethno-racial identity” is past, that we are now witnessing the coming of “postblack or postethnic art” that represents what Anthony Appiah recently called a “New Cosmopolitanism.” This presentation argues that “mixed race” has emerged in the context of these “post-race” cultural discourses, discourses which suggest, as Belize in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America puts it, that “race, taste and history” are “finally overcome.” Hybridity for many represents “life after race”(Naomi Zack), a step “beyond race” (Dinesh D’Sousa), a gesture “against race”(Paul Gilroy), the “new racial order” (G. Reginald Daniel), a “new frontier”(Maria Root) advanced by a “new people” (Jon Michael Spencer) who are ushering in a new world beyond race, identity, and nation. My presentation examines this problematic representation of mixed race people as post-nation vanguards in both mainstream media and in the field of pop-culture, and the send-up of the idea that “mixed race” people constitute a new nation-beyond-nationalism in Danzy Senna’s novel, Symptomatic (2005).

Stanford profs examine mixed race in U.S. society

The Dartmouth
Victoria Boggiano, The Dartmouth Staff
2008-04-18

In 2000, the U.S. Census gave Americans the chance to identify themselves by more than one race for the first time. Almost seven million people — over 80 percent of whom were under 25 — checked more than one box, Stanford University professors Harry and Michele Elam told a crowded auditorium in Haldeman Hall on Thursday. A new global “mixed-race movement” has begun, they said in their lecture, titled “The High Stakes of Mixed Race: Post-Race, Post-Apartheid Performances in the U.S. and South Africa.”

The couple’s research stems from studies they have conducted to analyze theatrical performances in the United States and South Africa. Claiming that performance is a “transformative force for institutional and social change,” the Elams examined a variety of plays from these two countries. The research provided the couple with insight into the effect of the worldwide “mixed-race movement” on race politics and cultural identities, Harry said.

“We’re arguing that analyzing mixed race as a type of social performance can help us make sense of some of these new cultural dynamics,” he said…

…In the United States, the “mixed-race movement” is comprised of an uneasy coalition of “interracial couples, transracial adoptees and a new generation of mixed-race-identified youth,” the Elams said…

Read the entire article here.