Mixed Race Studies

Unmaking Race and Ethnicity: A Reader

Oxford University Press
2016-07-20
512 Pages
7-1/2 x 9-1/4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 9780190202712

Edited by:

Michael O. Emerson, Provost and Professor of Sociology
North Park University
also Senior Fellow at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research

Jenifer L. Bratter, Associate Professor of Sociology; Director of the Program for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Culture at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research
Rice University, Houston, Texas

Sergio Chávez, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Rice University, Houston, Texas

Race and ethnicity is a contentious topic that presents complex problems with no easy solutions. (Un)Making Race and Ethnicity: A Reader, edited by Michael O. Emerson, Jenifer L. Bratter, and Sergio Chávez, helps instructors and students connect with primary texts in ways that are informative and interesting, leading to engaging discussions and interactions. With more than thirty collective years of teaching experience and research in race and ethnicity, the editors have chosen selections that will encourage students to think about possible solutions to solving the problem of racial inequality in our society. Featuring global readings throughout, (Un)Making Race and Ethnicity covers both race and ethnicity, demonstrating how they are different and how they are related. It includes a section dedicated to unmaking racial and ethnic orders and explains challenging concepts, terms, and references to enhance student learning.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• UNIT I. Core Concepts and Foundations
  • What Is Race? What Is Ethnicity? What Is the Difference?
    • Introduction, Irina Chukhray and Jenifer Bratter
    • 1. Constructing Ethnicity: Creating and Recreating Ethnic Identity and Culture, Joane Nagel
    • 2. The Racialization of Kurdish Identity in Turkey, Murat Ergin
    • 3. Who Counts as “Them?”: Racism and Virtue in the United States and France, Michèle Lamont
    • 4. Mexican Immigrant Replenishment and the Continuing Significance of Ethnicity and Race, Tomás R. Jiménez
  • Why Race Matters
    • Introduction, Laura Essenburg and Jenifer Bratter
    • 5. Excerpt from Racial Formation in the United States From the 1960s to the 1990s, Michael Omi and Howard Winant
    • 6. Structural and Cultural Forces that Contribute to Racial Inequality, William Julius Wilson
    • 7. From Traditional to Liberal Racism: Living Racism in the Everyday, Margaret M. Zamudio and Francisco Rios
    • 8. Policing and Racialization of Rural Migrant Workers in Chinese Cities, Dong Han
    • 9. Why Group Membership Matters: A Critical Typology, Suzy Killmister
  • What Is Racism? Does Talking about Race and Ethnicity Make Things Worse?
    • Introduction, Laura Essenburg and Jenifer Bratter
    • 10. What Is Racial Domination?, Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer
    • 11. Discursive Colorlines at Work: How Epithets and Stereotypes are Racially Unequal, David G. Embrick and Kasey Henricks
    • 12. When Ideology Clashes with Reality: Racial Discrimination and Black Identity in Contemporary Cuba, Danielle P. Clealand
    • 13. Raceblindness in Mexico: Implications for Teacher Education in the United States, Christina A. Sue
• UNIT II. Roots: Making Race and Ethnicity
  • Origins of Race and Ethnicity
    • Introduction, Adriana Garcia and Michael Emerson
    • 14. Antecedents of the Racial Worldview, Audrey Smedley and Brian Smedley
    • 15. Building the Racist Foundation: Colonialism, Genocide, and Slavery, Joe R. Feagin
    • 16. The Racialization of the Globe: An Interactive Interpretation, Frank Dikötter
  • Migrations
    • Introduction, Sandra Alvear
    • 17. Excerpt from Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945, George J. Sánchez
    • 18. Migration to Europe since 1945: Its History and Its Lessons, Randall Hansen
    • 19. When Identities Become Modern: Japanese Emigration to Brazil and the Global Contextualization of Identity, Takeyuki (Gaku) Tsuda
  • Ideologies
    • Introduction, Junia Howell
    • 20. Excerpt from Racism: A Short History, George M. Fredrickson
    • 21. Understanding Latin American Beliefs about Racial Inequality, Edward Telles and Stanley Bailey
    • 22. Buried Alive: The Concept of Race in Science, Troy Duster
• Unit III. Today: Remaking Race and Ethnicity
  • Aren’t We All Just Human? How Race and Ethnicity Help Us Answer the Question
    • Introduction, Adriana Garcia
    • 23. Young Children Learning Racial and Ethnic Matters, Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin
    • 24. When White Is Just Alright: How Immigrants Redefine Achievement and Reconfigure the Ethnoracial Hierarchy, Tomás R. Jiménez and Adam L. Horowitz
    • 25. From Bi-Racial to Tri-Racial: Towards a New System of Racial Stratification in the USA, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
    • 26. Indigenism, Mestizaje, and National Identity in Mexico during the 1940s and the 1950s, Anne Doremus
  • The Company You Keep: How Ethnicity and Race Frame Social Relationships
    • Introduction, William Rothwell
    • 27. Who We’ll Live With: Neighborhood Racial Composition Preferences of Whites, Blacks and Latinos, Valerie A. Lewis, Michael O. Emerson, and Stephen L. Klineberg
    • 28. The Costs of Diversity in Religious Organizations: An In-Depth Case Study, Brad Christerson and Michael O. Emerson
  • The Uneven Playing Field: How Race and Ethnicity Impact Life Chances
    • Introduction, Ellen Whitehead and Jenifer Bratter
    • 29. Wealth in the Extended Family: An American Dilemma, Ngina S. Chiteji
    • 30. The Complexities and Processes of Racial Housing Discrimination, Vincent J. Roscigno, Diana L. Karafin, and Griff Tester
    • 31. Racial Segregation and the Black/White Achievement Gap, 1992 to 2009, Dennis J. Condron, Daniel Tope, Christina R. Steidl, and Kendralin J. Freeman
    • 32. Differential Vulnerabilities: Environmental and Economic Inequality and Government Response to Unnatural Disasters, Robert D. Bullard
    • 33. Racialized Mass Incarceration: Poverty, Prejudice, and Punishment, Lawrence D. Bobo and Victor Thompson
• Unit IV. Unmaking Race and Ethnicity
  • Thinking Strategically
    • Introduction, Junia Howell and Michael Emerson
    • 34. The Return of Assimilation? Changing Perspectives on Immigration and Its Sequels in France, Germany, and the United States, Rogers Brubaker
    • 35. Toward a Truly Multiracial Democracy: Thinking and Acting Outside the White Frame, Joe R. Feagin
    • 36. Destabilizing the American Racial Order, Jennifer Hochschild, Vesla Weaver, and Traci Burch
  • Altering Individuals and Relationships
    • Introduction, Horace Duffy and Jenifer Bratter
    • 37. A More Perfect Union, Barack Obama
    • 38. What Can Be Done?, Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin
    • 39. The Multiple Dimensions of Racial Mixture in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: From Whitening to Brazilian Negritude, Graziella Moraes da Silva and Elisa P. Reis
  • Altering Structures
    • Introduction, Kevin T. Smiley and Jenifer Bratter
    • 40. The Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates
    • 41. “Undocumented and Citizen Students Unite”: Building a Cross-Status Coalition Through Shared Ideology, Laura E. Enriquez
    • 42. Racial Solutions for a New Society, Michael Emerson and George Yancey
    • 43. DREAM Act College: UCLA Professors Create National Diversity University, Online School for Undocumented Immigrants, Alyssa Creamer
• Glossary
• Credits

The Electoral Consequences of Skin Color: The “Hidden” Side of Race in Politics

Political Behavior
Volume 34, Issue 1 (March 2012)
pages 159-192
DOI: 10.1007/s11109-010-9152-7

Vesla M. Weaver, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Political Science
Yale University

Despite the significant role that skin color plays in material well-being and social perceptions, scholars know little if anything about whether skin color and afrocentric features influence political cognition and behavior and specifically, if intraracial variation in addition to categorical difference affects the choices of voters. Do more phenotypically black minorities suffer an electoral penalty as they do in most aspects of life? This study investigates the impact of color and phenotypically black facial features on candidate evaluation, using a nationally representative survey experiment of over 2000 whites. Subjects were randomly assigned to campaign literature of two opposing candidates, in which the race, skin color and features, and issue stance of candidates was varied. I find that afrocentric phenotype is an important, albeit hidden, form of bias in racial attitudes and that the importance of race on candidate evaluation depends largely on skin color and afrocentric features. However, like other racial cues, color and black phenotype don’t influence voters’ evaluations uniformly but vary in magnitude and direction across the gender and partisan makeup of the electorate in theoretically explicable ways. Ultimately, I argue, scholars of race politics, implicit racial bias, and minority candidates are missing an important aspect of racial bias.

Read the entire article here.

Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America [Eisenberg Review]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 5 (May 2013)
pages 923-925
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.748214

Martin Eisenberg
Department of Urban Studies
Queens College, City University of New York

Jennifer Hochschild, Vesla Weaver and Tract Burch. Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2012. xii + 260 pp.

In this book. Hochschild, Weaver and Burch contend that the USA is on the cusp of a democratic transformation of its racial order On the basis of survey data and demographic analyses, they are struck by the increasing heterogeneity and interactions across differences that have developed over the last two decades. Whether a democratic transformation occurs depends upon new policies that make it possible to overcome the obstacles that arc part of the old racial order. There are no certainties, but the authors arc optimistic that major “ethno-racial” boundaries will continue to blur in the near future.

The authors believe that the social forces generating the possibility of change in the racial order are immigration, multiraiialism, genomics, and the current, equalitarian cohort of young adults, all interacting with one another, and underlain by demographic and legal changes. Immigration and multiracialism contribute to blurring the traditional categories of racial difference. Nearly 50 million Latino, Caribbean Asian and African immigrants have settled in the USA since 1970. Some immigrant groups bring with them their own racial categories, and the children of some of these groups intermarry and have children at relatively high rates with whites. The authors see multiracialism as a political movement, and as a public identity. Some Americans have succeeded in asserting the legal right to identify as ‘multiracial’, not just as a single race on the US Census and other official documents. Also, multiracialism generates variations in how people identify in different situations. And, surveys show that young adults possess more democratic attitudes and interact across difference with more frequency, in ways less governed by stereotypes, and without the conflicts of the past in their collective memories.

According to the authors, genomics is the branch of genetics that studies organisms in terms of full DNA sequences. Its goal is mainly medical to discover genes and genomic interactions that cause disease and to develop effective medications. Scientists have confirmed that all human beings share 99.9% of their genetic makeup: that about 94%. of all physical variation lies within the ‘so-called’ racial groups; and that there is much overlapping of genes and phenotypes in neighbouring populations. Yet, despite the overlapping and blurring of boundaries around groups, some concepts like race or ethnicity or bio-geographic ancestry remain useful for genomic purposes to designate clusters of genes. Genomic science answers the question, ‘what is race?’ ambiguously. It thoroughly undermines the older conception of a few biologically distinct and internally homogeneous races. But it also undermines the claim that race, defined genetically, is merely arbitrary. Genomically, the authors write, races are simultaneously real, arbitrary, heterogeneous, and blurred, so it is not surprising that individual classifications are intricate and confused. And, it will continue that way until it becomes possible lo avoid racial classifications by testing for alleles and developing treatments for the genetic components of diseases among individuals. Until those procedures are developed, the authors predict continued contentiousness among biological scientists on how to conceptualize race…

Read or purchase the review here.

Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America

Princeton University Press
March 2012
282 pages
6 x 9; 17 halftones. 14 line illus. 10 tables
Cloth ISBN: 9780691152998
eBook ISBN: 9781400841943

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Vesla M. Weaver, Assistant Professor
The Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
University of Virginia

Traci R. Burch, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Northwestern University

The American racial order—the beliefs, institutions, and practices that organize relationships among the nation’s races and ethnicities—is undergoing its greatest transformation since the 1960s. Creating a New Racial Order takes a groundbreaking look at the reasons behind this dramatic change, and considers how different groups of Americans are being affected. Through revealing narrative and striking research, the authors show that the personal and political choices of Americans will be critical to how, and how much, racial hierarchy is redefined in decades to come.

The authors outline the components that make up a racial order and examine the specific mechanisms influencing group dynamics in the United States: immigration, multiracialism, genomic science, and generational change. Cumulatively, these mechanisms increase heterogeneity within each racial or ethnic group, and decrease the distance separating groups from each other. The authors show that individuals are moving across group boundaries, that genomic science is challenging the whole concept of race, and that economic variation within groups is increasing. Above all, young adults understand and practice race differently from their elders: their formative memories are 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Obama’s election—not civil rights marches, riots, or the early stages of immigration. Blockages could stymie or distort these changes, however, so the authors point to essential policy and political choices.

Portraying a vision, not of a postracial America, but of a different racial America, Creating a New Racial Order examines how the structures of race and ethnicity are altering a nation.

Contents

• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction
• PART I: THE ARGUMENT
  • 1. Destabilizing the American Racial Order
• PART II: CREATING A NEW ORDER
  • 2. Immigration
  • 3. Multiracialism
  • 4. Genomics
  • 5. Cohort Change
  • 6. Blockages to Racial Transformation
• PART III: POSSIBILITIES
  • 7. The Future of the American Racial Order
• Notes
• References
• Index

Introduction

A racial order—the set of beliefs, assumptions, rules, and practices that shape the way in which groups in a given society are connected with one another—may seem fixed. Racial orders do change, however. The change may be gradual, as when America evolved over two centuries from being a society with slaves to a slave society, or cataclysmic as when slavery or serfdom is abolished or apartheid instituted. A racial order can change for some groups but not others; the Immigration Act of 1924 denied all Asians and most Kuropcans and Africans, but not Latin Americans, the right of entry to the United States. Change in a racial order is most visible when it results from severe struggle, but it may also occur unintentionally through thousands of cumulative small acts and thoughts. And a racial order can change in some but not all dimensions; American Indians gained U.S. citizenship in 1924 but few have reacquired the land lost through centuries of conquest and appropriation.

Variation in pace, direction, activity, and object makes it difficult to see major change while it is occurring. Nevertheless, we argue that the racial order of the late twentieth century that emerged from the 1960’s civil rights movement, opening of immigration, and Great Society is undergoing a cumulative, wide-ranging, partly unintentional and partly deliberate transformation. The transformation is occurring in locations and laws, beliefs and practices. Its starting point was the abolition of institutional supports and public commitments of the pre-1960s racial order, such as intermarriage bans, legally mandated segregation, unembarrassed racism, and racial or ethnic discrimination. Once those props were removed, the changes broadly signaled by “the 1960s” could develop over the next forty years. They included a rise in immigration, Blacks’ assertion of pride and dignity, Whites’ rejection of racial supremacy (at least in public), a slow opening of schools, jobs, and suburbs to people previously excluded, and a shift in government policy from promoting segregation and hierarchy and restricting interracial unions to promoting (at least officially) integration and equality and allowing interracial unions.

As a consequence, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, new institutions and practices have been moving into place: official records permit people to identify with more than one race, anti-discrimination policies are well established in schools and workplaces, and some non-Whites hold influential political positions. At the same time, the late twentieth century’s understanding of the very meaning of race—a few exhaustive and mutually exclusive groups—is becoming less and less tenable as a consequence of new multiracial identities, immigrants’ rejection of conventional American categories, and genomic science. Social relations, particularly among young Americans, are less driven by stereotypes, more fluid and fragmented, and more susceptible to creation rather than acquiescence. Even deeply seated hierarchies of income, educational attainment and achievement, prestige, and political power are easing for some groups and in some dimensions of life. Race or ethnicity, though still important, is less likely to predict a young person’s life chances than at any previous point in American history; today’s young adults will move through adulthood with the knowledge that one need not be White in order to become the most powerful person in the world…

…Thus the late twentieth-century racial order captures less and less of the way in which race and ethnicity are practiced in the United States today and may be practiced in the foreseeable future. If transformative forces persist and prevail, the United States can finally move toward becoming the society that James Madison envisioned in Federalist #10, one in which no majority faction, not even native-born European Americans, dominates the political, economic, or social arena.

The Madisonian vision must not blind us to two concerns. If it persists, creation of a new racial order will not have only beneficial results. Some Americans are likely to be harmed by these changes and will thereby suffer relative or even absolute losses. Continuing the venerable American pattern, they will be disproportionately African American or Native American, supplemented by undocumented immigrants. All Americans are likely to lose some of the joys and advantages of a strong sense of group identity and rootedness. The greater concern, however, is that the newly created racial order will not persist and prevail. Black poverty and alienation may be too deep; White supremacy may be too tenacious; institutional change may be too shallow; undocumented immigrants may not attain a path to belonging; genomic research may usher in a new era of eugenic discrimination. In short, Americans may in the end lack the political will to finish what demographic change, scientific research, young adults’ worldviews, and the momentum of the past decade have
started…

…Our exploration of transformative forces and their blockages is spread over three parts and seven chapters. Part 1, “The Argument,” has one chapter. Chapter 1 explicates the five components of a societal racial order and suggests what is at stake in the ongoing reinvention of the American racial order. Examples show how immigration, multiracialism, genomics, and cohort change are transforming each component of the late twentieth-century racial order. Chapter 1 also points to elements of American society that could distort or block transformation of the racial order. Perhaps most important, it provides analytic justification for our expectation that creative forces will outweigh blockages, so long as Americans take steps to incorporate those now in danger of exclusion and to improve the life chances of those at the bottom.

Part 2, “Creating a New Order,” consists of five chapters. Chapters 2 through 5 respectively analyze immigration, multiracialism, genomics, and cohort change, in each case using the five components of a racial order to organize the discussion. Despite variation in the content and process of change, a consistent pattern emerges: each transformative force independently (and all of them interactively) is changing how Americans understand what a race is, how individuals are classified, how groups are relatively positioned, how state actions affect people’s freedom of choice, and how people relate to one another in the society. Chapter 6 looks at the opposite side of the creative dynamic—that is, features of the American racial order that reinforce the late twentieth-century order of clear racial and ethnic boundaries, relatively fixed group positions, intermittently prohibitive state actions, and hostile social relations. Chapter 6 focuses on four issues that directly challenge the transformative forces—the costs of a loss in group identity, wealth disparities, unprecedented levels of Black and Latino incarceration, and the possibility that illegal immigrants or Muslims might become the new pariah group. It warns that effective creation of a new racial order can itself deepen the disadvantage of the worst off even while moving toward a more racially inclusive polity.

Finally, part 3, “Possibilities,” consists of one chapter. Chapter 7 concludes by considering the likelihood that the current American racial order will look very different by the time our children reach old age. It also sketches some political and policy directions necessary to promote transformation, expand its benefits, and reduce the proportion of Americans who arc left out or harmed…

Policies of Racial Classification and the Politics of Racial Inequality

In Suzanne Mettler, Joe Soss, and Jacob Hacker (eds.). Remaking America: Democracy and Public Policy in an Age of Inequality
Russell Sage Foundation
November 2007
41 pages

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Vesla Mae Weaver, Assistant Professor
The Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
University of Virginia

Introduction: Policy, Politics, Inequality, and Race

In 1890, the United States census bureau reported that the nation contained 6,337,980 negroes, 956,989 “mulattoes,” 105,135 “quadroons,” and 69,936 “octoroons.” In the early twentieth century it also reported the number of whites of “mixed parentage,” the number of Indians with one-quarter, half, or three-quarters black or white “blood,” and the number of part-Hawaiians and part-Malays. The boundaries between racial and ethnic groups, and even the definition of race and ethnicity, were blurred and contested. By 1930, however, this ambiguity largely disappeared from the census. Anyone with any “Negro blood” was counted as a Negro; whites no longer had mixed parentage; Indians were mainly identified by tribe rather than ancestry; and a consistent treatment of Asians was slowly developing. In other work we examine how and why these classifications rose and fell; here we examine the consequences for contemporary American politics and policy.

Official governmental classification systems can create as well as reflect social, economic, and political inequality, just as policies of taxation, welfare, or social services can and do. Official classification defines groups, determines boundaries between them, and assigns individuals to groups; in “ranked ethnic systems” (Horowitz 2000), this process enshrines structurally the dominant group’s belief about who belongs where, which groups deserve what, and ultimately who gets what. Official racial categories have determined whether a person may enter the United States, attain citizenship, own a laundry, marry a loved one, become a firefighter, enter a medical school, attend an elementary school near home, avoid an internment camp, vote, run for office, annul a marriage, receive appropriate medical treatment for syphilis, join a tribe, sell handicrafts, or open a casino. Private racial categories have affected whether an employer offers a person a job, whether a criminal defendant gets lynched, whether a university admits an applicant, and whether a heart attack victim receives the proper therapy. In these and many more ways, racial classification helps to create and maintain poverty and political, social, and economic inequality. Thus systems of racial categorization are appropriate subjects for analysis through a policy-centered perspective because they are “strategies for achieving political goals, structures shaping political interchange, and symbolic objects conveying status and identity” (p. 2 of Intro). Race is also, not coincidentally, the pivot around which political contests about equality have been waged for most of this country’s history.

The same classification system that promotes inequality may also undermine it. Once categorization generates groups with sharply defined boundaries, the members of that group can draw on their shared identity within the boundary to mobilize against their subordinate position—what one set of authors call strategic essentialism (Omi and Winant 1994). Thus classification laws are recursive, containing the elements for both generating and challenging group-based inequality. For this reason—and also because demographic patterns and other social relations on which classification rests can change—categorizations are unstable and impermanent.

We explore these abstract claims by examining the past century of racial classification in the United States. That period encompassed significant change in systems of classification and their attendant hierarchies; thus we can see how classification and inequality are related, as well as tracing the political dynamics that reinforce or challenge inequality-sustaining policies. From the Civil War era through the 1920s, the Black population was partly deconstructed through official attention to mulattos (and sometimes quadroons and octoroons), then reconstructed through court decisions and state-level “one drop of blood” laws. As of 1930, a clear and simple racial hierarchy was inscribed in the American polity — with all the attendant horrors of Jim Crow segregation. However, the one-drop policy that reinforced racial inequality also undermined it. From the 1930s through the 1970s, that is, the Black population solidified though a growing sense of racial consciousness and shared fate, and developed the political capacity to contest their poverty and unequal status…

Read the entire chapter here.

“There’s No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama”: The Policy and Politics of American Multiracialism

Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
Harvard University
February 2010
Working Paper
68 pages

Jennifer Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Vesla Weaver, Assistant Professor
The Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
University of Virginia

Forthcoming publication in Perspectives on Politics, June 2010.

For the first time in American history, the United States’ 2000 census allowed individuals to choose more than one race. That new policy sets up our exploration of whether and how multiracialism is entering Americans’ understanding and practice of race. By analyzing briefly earlier cases of racial construction, we uncover three factors important to understanding if and how intensely a feedback effect for racial classification will be generated. Using this framework, we find that multiracialism has been institutionalized in the federal government, and is moving toward institutionalization in the private sector and other governmental units. In addition, the small proportion of Americans who now define themselves as multiracial is growing absolutely and relatively, and evidence suggests a continued rise. Increasing multiracial identification is made more likely by racial mixture’s growing prominence in American society – demographically, culturally, economically, and psychologically. However, the politics side of the feedback loop is complicated by the fact that identification is not identity. Traditional racial or ethnic loyalties and understandings remain strong, including among potential multiracial identifiers. Therefore, if mixed race identification is to evolve into a multiracial identity, it may not be at the expense of existing group consciousness. Instead, we expect mixed race identity to be contextual, fluid, and additive, so that it can be layered onto rather than substituted for traditional monoracial commitments. If the multiracial movement successfully challenges the longstanding understanding and practice of “one drop of blood” racial groups, it has the potential to change much of the politics and policy of American race relations.

O’Leary, O’Riley, O’Hare, and O’Hara
There’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama.
His mam’s daddy’s grandaddy was one Fulmuth Kearney
He’s as Irish as any from the lakes of Killarney
His mam’s from a long line of great Irish mamas;
There’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama.

–“There’s No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama“, Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys (Corrigan Brothers)

Read the entire paper here.

Political Discourse on Racial Mixture: American Newspapers, 1865 to 1970

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the MPSA Annual National Conference
Palmer House Hotel
Hilton, Chicago, IL
2008-04-03

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government & Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Brenna Marea Powell
Harvard University

Vesla Weaver, Assistant Professor
The Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
University of Virginia

We trace American political discourse around multiracialism, race-mixing, and mixed-race people from the end of the Civil War through the civil rights era. We use two new sources of data: counts of keywords such as “mulatto” and “multiracial” in two black and four white newspapers over 150 years, and a content analysis of themes and assumptions in almost 2,100 articles from the same newspapers, also using keywords that indicate racial mixture.

These datasets provide evidence on two analytic and two substantive points: First, the press’s treatment of mixture permits us to analyze “racial meaning,” defined as the varied ways in which Americans construe, practice, and judge group-based identities and identifications. Second, the datasets enable us to trace the timing of changes in ideas about racial meaning, and to map these changes onto a new periodization of distinct institutional treatments of racial mixture. Substantively, the dataset show vividly how much Americans argued over what counted as a race, how people were to be allocated to and across races, and what implications racial groupings should have. The contemporary racial order, which looks inevitable and orderly in hindsight, was not at all clear while it was being created. Most importantly, the language of the newspaper articles shows vividly that Americans’ debates over racial mixture and racially mixed people were (and continue to be) a critical site for contestation over racial hierarchy, advance, and equality.

Read the entire paper here.

The Shifting Politics of Multiracialism in the United States

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) 2008 Annual Meeting
Hynes Convention Center
Boston, Massachusetts
2008-08-28

38 pages

Awarded the American Political Science Association Public Policy Section 2008 prize for her paper, co-authored with Vesla Weaver, of the University of Virginia Government Department, “The Shifting Politics of Multiculturalism in the United States.”  The award will be presented at the APSA Annual Meeting, 2009-09-03 through 2009-09-06  in Toronto, Canada.

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government & Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Vesla Weaver, Assistant Professor
The Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
University of Virginia

For the first time in American history, the 2000 census allowed respondents to identify with more than one race. That change resulted, in part, from mobilization of activists and an increasing population of mixed-race partnerships and multiracial offspring.  However, despite both supporters’ and opponents’ predictions of rapid growth in multiracial identification, less than 3 percent of the population chose more than one race in 2000.  And the largest recent surveys show similar results.

This paper explores whether and how far multiracialism has become embedded in Americans’ practice and understanding of race, and considers what might happen in the foreseeable future. Starting from theories that elegantly explicate various forms of policy feedback and transformation but are weaker on causal explanations for them, we identify four factors that lead an enacted policy to endure or be blocked.  They are: whether other agencies have incentives to institutionalize the policy, whether the policy triggers development of a committed constituency, whether opposing groups remain strong, and whether the change is supported by independent societal trends. We find that the first and fourth factors encourage consolidation of multiracial identification, while the second and third work toward keeping it very low. Thus institutional procedures and underlying societal trends tend in one direction while individuals’ active and intentional choices are tending the opposite way: a fascinating and unusual situation with important implications for theories of path dependency and policy transformation.

The trajectory of multiracial identification could change the racial order in the United States, for better or for worse. If it increases, it might portend a shift in classification norms that could break down racial boundaries and even reduce interracial hostility and fear.  Alternatively, an increase could signal Americans’ desire to find one more route out of blackness and into some less denigrated status, to the detriment of African Americans. If multiracial identification does not increase, that will indicate the power of old single race understandings regardless of demographic changes, with all of their implications for prejudice and group loyalty.

Read the entire paper here.