Mixed Race Studies

As intermarriage spreads, fault lines are exposed

The San Francisco Chronicle
2017-05-19

Jill Tucker, K-12 Education Reporter

Jered Snyder and Jen Zhao of Oakland got married in 2015. Asian American women are among the groups that are more likely to marry outside their race. Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

The growth of interracial marriage in the 50 years since the Supreme Court legalized it across the nation has been steady, but stark disparities remain that influence who is getting hitched and who supports the nuptials, according to a major study released Thursday.

People who are younger, urban and college-educated are more likely to cross racial or ethnic lines on their trip to the altar, and those with liberal leanings are more apt to approve of the unions — trends that are playing out in the Bay Area, where about 1 in 4 newlyweds entered into such marriages in the first half of this decade.

Among the most striking findings was that black men are twice as likely to intermarry as black women — a gender split that reversed for Asian and Pacific Islander Americans and, to researchers, underscores the grip of deeply rooted societal stereotypes…

Read the entire article here.

Ranger’s voice spans East Bay history

San Francisco Chronicle
2010-01-31

Lee Hildebrand, Special to The Chronicle

Betty Reid Soskin is a “phenomenal woman,” to borrow the title of a famous poem by Maya Angelou. In her 88 years, Betty has been a shipyard worker, proprietor of a record store, housewife and mother of four, singer and composer of art songs, community activist and, for the past three years, a ranger at Rosie the Riveter National Historical Park in Richmond.

She’s the oldest active National Park Service ranger in the country and works at the park six hours a day, five days a week, doing community outreach and giving guided tours of the now dormant Kaiser Shipyards where she worked during World War II.

Born in Detroit

She was born Betty Charbonnet in Detroit in 1921 to bilingual Creole parents from New Orleans. She has traced her European ancestry to France in the 17th and 18th centuries. The earliest relative of African heritage she’s been able to identify was her great-great-grandmother, a former slave named Celestine who married her former master, Cajun plantation owner Eduouard Breaux. Their daughter, Betty’s great-grandmother Leontine Breaux, was 19 when they married.

“Marriages were relatively common between Cajun slave owners and their slaves,” Soskin explains. “Their marriage papers are dated 1865, at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. His signature is there alongside her ‘X’. Her name is given, in French, as ‘Celestine of no last name.'”…

Read the entire article here.

Musician’s life brings more than passing interest in passing

San Francisco Chronicle
2015-07-28

Leah Garchik, Features Columnist

As colleagues at KGO-TV, Eric Christensen and John Turner — Eric was a sports producer, John a news editor/arts producer — shared a passion for exotic cultural phenomena. Retired, they’ve combined know-how with that passion to make the doc “Korla, the Movie,” about organist Korla Pandit.

Turban-wearing Pandit, who said he was born in India, had his own TV show in the late ’40s and early ’50s. He was known for playing exotic “foreign” music. He was living in Petaluma when he died, in 1998. A subsequent magazine profile revealed that he was African American, born in Missouri.

A documentary about Pandit as an exotic performer — the likes of Yma Sumac — would be interesting at any time. But now, in the midst of a national discussion about identity that intensified with the recent revelation that Rachel Dolezal had chosen to identify as black, the movie’s tale of “passing” seems particularly relevant. It will be shown Aug. 20 at the Museum of the African Diaspora…

Read the entire article here.

‘A Chosen Exile,’ by Allyson Hobbs: review

San Francisco Chronicle
2014-11-01

Imani Perry, Professor, Center for African American Studies
Princeton University

Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: History of Racial Passing in American Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014)

Family across the color line: It is now a popular enough theme that it qualifies as a subgenre of memoir. This contemporary motif has a companion in American literary history. Fiction writers beginning in the 19th century took up the phenomenon of black people so light-skinned that they chose to cross over into whiteness permanently. Passing narratives are what such stories are called. In those works, it was an almost universally tragic choice, marking an essential loss of identity.

Stanford historian Allyson Hobbs’ book “A Chosen Exile” lies between those two genres and yet is something else altogether. It is a book that is at once literary, cultural, archival and social, crossing the borders of various approaches to the study of history in order to create a collage of a fascinating yet elusive phenomenon. Intrigued by the story of a distant relative who crosses the color line, Hobbs has followed this interest to explore the practice of passing with detail and rigor. Her writing is elegant, bubbling with curiosity even as it is authoritative and revelatory.

In order to cover this subject, Hobbs had to be innovative. It’s impossible to know how many African Americans passed for white, and how many crossed back over. A creative intellectual, she uses unpublished family histories, anthropological projects, sociological journals, personal papers, correspondence, court cases, newspapers, literature and film to reveal an important set of stories caught in the thicket of race in the United States…

Read the entire review here.

Racial melting pot won’t end social disparities

San Francisco Chronicle
2012-02-12

Brenda Payton, Lecturer in Journalism
San Francisco State University

I looked at the room full of San Francisco State University students and saw the beginning of the end of race as we have defined it.
 
If that sounds a little over-the-top, here’s some background. Last semester, I taught a class in the journalism department at S.F. State. It was entitled “The Social Impact of Journalism,” and between the Arab Spring, the BART protests and the Occupy movement, we had more than enough to talk about. (Even if it was like pulling teeth to get most of them to talk. That’s another story.)

The class was huge, 120 students, and hugely diverse. The first day, I took roll and managed to butcher most of their names. The Spanish names I handled OK. The Russian, Filipino and Chinese names were more of a challenge. They corrected my mispronunciations good-naturedly.
 
After a few meetings, I realized it wasn’t only the class that was racially diverse—a number of the students were also. They appeared to be, in traditional terms, racially mixed—the face of a future when race will be diminished as a distinguishing characteristic…

…People have been debating whether our country entered a post-racial phase after we elected President Obama. A number of ironies suggest we aren’t there yet. For one, we identify him as our first African American president when he is biracial, as white as he is black. Second level of irony: With an African father and American mother, he is more accurately African American than those of us born to two African American parents. OK, that’s confusing.
 
To add to the confusion: Most African Americans are mixed-race, descendants of whites who held Africans as slaves and overseers during bondage and many descendants of American Indians. When I was growing up, even kids who were biracial were considered black, make that Negro. I have first cousins whose mother is Chinese, and I never thought of them as anything other than Negro. For even more confusion, our other cousins are so light, at one time I thought they were white but didn’t think that meant we couldn’t be first cousins. We didn’t think of ourselves as a mixed-race family. We were proud Negroes.
 
The country has always been more racially mixed than we’ve pretended. That includes white people who have discovered (or not) black ancestors. “Black” people who were light enough passed for white to escape segregation and had children who knew nothing of their racial background. Asian and Latino communities also have been racially mixed…

Read the entire article here or here.

An educational defense for multiracial identity

San Francisco Chronicle
2001-07-25

Kimberly Cooper-Plaszewski

Celebrate rather than assimilate biracial heritages

U.S. CENSUS 2000 marked the first time in history that multiracial people were given the “option” to specify more than one race to describe their racial identity.
 
On the surface, this alternative may give the impression that people choosing to identify with more than one race on their census forms are endangering the plight of many civil rights activists and organizations with regard to civil rights appropriations.
 
Yet, contrary to this grossly widespread misconception, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget has determined that while racial data will be collected offering multiple race responses, those responses that combine one minority race and white will be allocated to the minority race for use in civil rights monitoring and enforcement…
 
…Rather than focusing indefinitely on what racial groups are supposedly losing from these changes to the census, let us, for the moment, focus on the fundamental gains for all racial and ethnic groups…
 
Read the entire opinion piece here.

Mixing it up: Multiracialism redefines Asian American identity

San Francisco Chronicle
2011-02-11

Jeff Yang, Special to SF Gate

How the mainstreaming of multiracialism is forcing a more fluid definition of Asian American identity
 
Like many immigrants, my parents see identity as a bucket. My mother and father had come to America carefully bearing a pail of old-world traditions, cherished customs, shining morals and rock-ribbed ethics; they’d worked hard and sacrificed greatly to give me and my sister the things they never had. And then, they handed us the bucket—knowing that in the transfer, a little bit of culture would inevitably slosh out over the side…

…Going fourth

It’s something that needs to be considered. As multiracial identity becomes the Asian American mainstream—by 2020, it’s projected that one out of five Asians in the U.S. will be multiracial; by 2050, that ratio will exceed one in three—the population of persons with one-fourth Asian heritage or less is poised to spike.
 
“I’m half Japanese, and my husband is all Irish,” says sociologist Dr. Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain. “Our kids have very Celtic coloration—pale skin and fair hair. They’re not obviously Asian in appearance at all, and yet they still feel very connected with that part of their heritage. And that’s becoming more common, particularly among Japanese Americans, where multiracial identity is so common. There’s even a term for it I heard in California: ‘Quapa.’ If hapas are half Asians, quapas—like my kids—are quarter-Asians.”
 
Quapas have an overwhelmingly non-Asian ancestry; many don’t look Asian and don’t have Asian surnames. Yet anecdotal evidence suggests that as Asian America becomes more multiracial, a growing number of quapa Asians are affirmatively reconnecting with their Asian heritage, and actively embracing a sense of Asian American identity—challenging society’s conventional means of defining race in the process…

Read the entire article here.

Census reveals history of U.S. racial identity

San Francisco Chronicle
2010-04-18

Sally Lehrman, Fellow
Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University
also Knight Ridder San Jose Mercury News Endowed Chair in Journalism and the Public Interest

Whether or not they can lay claim to a special category, the “Confederate Southern Americans” who want to write themselves into the U.S. census section denoting “race” have a point.

Race, as the social scientists like to say, is “socially constructed.” Since the founding of this country, we have been making it up as we go. Race is a modern idea, historians and anthropologists tell us, a means to categorize and organize ourselves that we constantly adjust.

The U.S. census serves as an archive of this change, a record of classifications that have been “contradictory and confused from the very outset,” says Margo Anderson, a University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, urban studies historian and expert on U.S. census history. Begun in 1790 as a solution to the problem of how to allocate seats in Congress, the survey didn’t mention “race” originally, but the idea as we understand it today was central. How should slaves be counted? Were they entirely property or were they people? What to do with “civilized” Indians?..

…All along, the “race” category of the census has been a powerful social and political tool wielded both to discriminate and to guard against discrimination. At first, survey categories reflected ideas about the divide between black and white, which immigrants were eligible for citizenship, and how to sort categories of “Indians.” Later, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, its groupings also made it possible to measure compliance with equal treatment under the law…

Read the entire article here.