Mixed Race Studies

I worried that it was possible for the symbolic and inspirational aspects of having a black president more than offset by the damages that could be done by the messages delivered by a black president. And it has been damaging to have Barack Obama, a black man speaking from the authoritative platform of the presidency, reinforce the widely held belief that racial inequality in the United States is, in large measure, the direct responsibility of black folk. This has been the deal breaker for me: not merely a silence on white physical and emotional violence directed against black Americans, but the denial of the centrality of American racism in explaining sustained black-white disparity.

William A. Darity, “How Barack Obama Failed Black Americans,” The Atlantic, December 22, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/how-barack-obama-failed-black-americans/511358/.

How Barack Obama Failed Black Americans

The Atlantic
2016-12-22

William A. Darity, Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics; Director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity
Duke University

The country’s first black president never pursued policies bold enough to close the racial wealth gap.

Born in 1953, I am a child of the waning years of legal segregation in the United States. My parents, on the other hand, spent about 40 years of their lives under Jim Crow, and all of my grandparents lived most of their lives under official American apartheid. At the time of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008, my mother and all four of my grandparents were deceased. But my father was alive and well—and absolutely thrilled to have lived to see the election of a black man as president of the United States. Usually deeply cynical about American politics and politicians, my dad could not comprehend my deep reservations about Barack Obama’s leadership. Indeed, he viewed any criticism of Obama as bringing aid and comfort to white supremacists.

My father hardly was alone among black Americans, across all generations. The near complete unanimity of passionate black American admiration for Obama carried with it an absolute resistance to hearing any complaints about the black president. And, indeed, there was much to admire: an exceptional resume, an attractive family with a black wife who is his professional and intellectual equal, handsome and greying toward distinguished maturity, a strategically wise moderate progressive political position, and a place as the—sometimes self-professed—messianic fulfillment of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. For many black Americans, the ascent of Barack Obama to the presidency was equivalent to the moment of jubilee.

An extraordinarily disciplined individual, Barack Obama preempted the smallest hint of scandal by admitting that he had smoked pot during his youth. He even crafted a narrative of a rise from adversity—growing up successfully by the efforts of a single parent despite a missing father—albeit a white single mother with a Ph.D. whose own parents were affluent residents of Hawaii. With every drop of respectability in place, his somewhat icy intellect coupled with his enthusiasm for basketball and for black music across a half century of styles, he was an inordinately appealing candidate, with an ideal combination of the cool and the rational…

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The Likely Persistence of a White Majority

The American Prospect
Winter 2016, Volume 27, Number 1 (2016-01-11)

Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor of Sociology
Graduate Center, City University of New York

Has the notion of demography as destiny ever enjoyed so much credence? The disappearance of a white majority in the United States by the middle of this century is now widely accepted as if it were an established fact. Projections by the Census Bureau have encouraged those expectations, and people on both the right and left have seized on them in support of their views. On the right, the anxieties about the end of white majority status have fueled a conservative backlash against the growing diversity of the country. On the left, many progressives anticipate an inexorable change in the ethno-racial power hierarchy. Numerous sites on the web offer advice and counsel on how whites can handle their imminent minority status.

But what if these different reactions are based on a false premise—actually two false premises? The first stems from the Census Bureau’s way of classifying people by ethnicity and race, which produces the smallest possible estimate of the size of the non-Hispanic white population. Whenever there is ambiguity about ethno-racial identity, the statistics publicized by the bureau count an individual as minority. This statistical choice is particularly important for population projections because of the growing number of children from mixed families, most of whom have one white parent and one from a minority group. In the Census Bureau’s projections, children with one Hispanic, Asian, or black parent are counted as minority (that is, as Hispanic or nonwhite). The United States has historically followed a “one-drop” rule in classifying people with any black ancestry as black. The census projections, in effect, extend the one-drop rule to the descendants of other mixed families. A great deal of evidence shows, however, that many children growing up today in mixed families are integrating into a still largely white mainstream society and likely to think of themselves as part of that mainstream, rather than as minorities excluded from it…

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Latino racial choices: the effects of skin colour and discrimination on Latinos’ and Latinas’ racial self-identifications

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 31, Issue 5, 2008
pages 899-934
DOI: 10.1080/01419870701568858

Tanya Golash-Boza, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Merced

William Darity, Jr., Arts & Sciences Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics
Duke University

Are predictions that Hispanics will make up 25 per cent of the US population in 2050 reliable? The authors of this paper argue that these and other predictions are problematic insofar as they do not account for the volatile nature of Latino racial and ethnic identifications. In this light, the authors propose a theoretical framework that can be used to predict Latinos’ and Latinas’ racial choices. This framework is tested using two distinct datasets – the 1989 Latino National Political Survey and the 2002 National Survey of Latinos. The results from the analyses of both of these surveys lend credence to the authors’ claims that Latinas’ and Latinos’ skin colour and experiences of discrimination affect whether people from Latin America and their descendants who live in the US will choose to identify racially as black, white or Latina/o.

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The best evidence suggests there has yet to be a sea change in the proportion of Americans selecting a multiracial identity. Furthermore, practices of racial self-classification are much less likely to have any significant implications for the direction of social policies than practices of social classification—how people are perceived and categorized racially and ethnically by others. A person’s life chances are far more greatly influenced by how others see and situate them than by the individual’s personal selection of a racial classification. Indeed, an individual’s physical attributes and their interpretation by others often are the critical factors dictating how he or she is treated by others.

William Darity, Jr., “How might social policies change as more Americans identify themselves as ‘multiracial’?,” Good Question: An Exploration in Ethics series, The Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, July 9, 2011. http://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/GQ-Darity.pdf

How might social policies change as more Americans identify themselves as “multiracial”?

The Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University
Good Question: An Exploration in Ethics series
2011-07-09

William Darity, Jr., Arts & Sciences Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics
Duke University

QUESTION: How might social policies change as more Americans identify themselves as “multiracial”?

ANSWER: Are more Americans, in fact, identifying themselves as “multiracial”? Census 2000 provided respondents with the first opportunity to select more than one racial category. At the time, 2.4 percent of all respondents—or about 6.8 million people—actually selected two categories or more for their racial self-classification. While preliminary reports from Census 2010 indicate that the number of persons checking “two or more” racial categories has risen 35% since Census 2000, the overall proportion remains at less than 3% of all Census respondents.

The best evidence suggests there has yet to be a sea change in the proportion of Americans selecting a multiracial identity. Furthermore, practices of racial self-classification are much less likely to have any significant implications for the direction of social policies than practices of social classification—how people are perceived and categorized racially and ethnically by others. A person’s life chances are far more greatly influenced by how others see and situate them than by the individual’s personal selection of a racial classification. Indeed, an individual’s physical attributes and their interpretation by others often are the critical factors dictating how he or she is treated by others….

…With regard to the connection between racial classification and social policies, there has been substantial political pressure to move away from race-targeted policies that were designed to address economic disparities in the U.S. But that pressure is not attributable to the rise in persons choosing a multiracial identity. It is due, instead, to what I believe are strong anti-black sentiments. Black Americans continuously are portrayed as undeserving of social policy initiatives uniquely designed to address their condition, particularly via popular narratives that frame blacks’ subordinate economic condition as due to their own personal irresponsibility and bad behavior…

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