Mixed Race Studies

Race and Class in Political Science

Michigan Journal of Race and Law
Volume 11, Issue 1 (Fall 2005)
pages 99-114

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

As a discipline, political science tends to have a split personality on the issue of whether the driving force behind political action is material or ideational. Put too crudely, White scholars tend to focus on structural conditions as the cause of group identity and action, whereas scholars of color tend to focus on group identity and conflict in order to explain structural conditions. More generally, the relevant debate within political science revolves less around Jacques Derrida versus Karl Marx (as in critical race studies) than around W. E. B. DuBois versus Thomas Hobbes—that is, whether “the problem of the twentieth [and other] centur[ies] is the problem of the color line” or whether people are fundamentally self-interested individualists whose social interaction is shaped by the opportunities presented in a given political structure.
 
This paper examines those propositions by discussing important recent work by political scientists in several arenas, including ethnic conflict, nationalism, and a belief in linked fate. I then briefly discuss my own research on the relationship between race and class, and on the possible malleability of racial and ethnic concepts and practices to show one way that identity-based and interest-based political analyses interact. I conclude that material forces drive most important political disputes and outcomes, but that politics is best understood through a combination of material and ideational lenses.

Introduction
 
The discipline of political science tends to have a split personality on the issue of whether the underlying driving force behind political action is material or ideational. Put too crudely, mainstream (disproportionately White) scholars tend to focus on structural conditions such as laws or the economy, the self-interest of leaders or activists, political incentives, or even geography in order to explain ethnic identification and conflict. Conversely, scholars who study racial politics (disproportionately people of color), tend to start from racial or ethnic identity and conflict in order to explain structural conditions, understandings of self-interest, or political incentives. This generalization, like most, is indeed too crude, and one can immediately identify exceptions; but, it is arguably accurate enough to be a good starting point for further exploration. I develop this argument, with reference to the most prominent work of political scientists in several subfields, in the next two sections below.
 
Few political scientists, and even fewer in mainstream, high-status departments, focus on discourse analysis growing out of continental European philosophy. Most who do are political philosophers whose central mission does not include explaining empirical phenomena. As a result, the relevant debate within political science revolves less around Derrida versus Marx than around DuBois versus Hobbes—that is, whether “the problem of the twentieth [and other] centur[ies] is the problem of the color line” or whether people are fundamentally self-interested individualists whose social interaction is shaped by the opportunities offered in a given political structure.
 
This paper begins by examining and illuminating that proposition through discussion of important recent work by political scientists. I then briefly discuss my own prior work on the relationship between race and class, and use my current research to illuminate how tensions between identity-based politics and interest-based politics play out in academic political science as well as in actual political arenas. I conclude roughly where Richard Delgado does: that material forces and access to resources drive most significant political disputes and outcomes, but that politics is most fully understood through a combination of material and ideational lenses…

…Multiracialism shows some of the same effects. The values placed on multiracial identity are at present completely mixed, even contradictory and mutually hostile. Some people of color (and Whites) embrace the new politics and culture of multiracialism as a means of breaking down the old rigid color lines, as a way to enable people to recognize and identify with their full heritage, as a necessity for good medical care, or as a new frontier for civil rights advocacy. Others see the embrace of multiracialism as merely one more attempt by outsiders to undermine Black or Hispanic solidarity, as a strategy to disrupt litigation or legislation around civil rights, voting rights, and employment discrimination, or as an underhanded way to distance oneself from Blackness (or Latino identity). Still others see it as a pragmatic reality, given rates of immigration and intermarriage, that political actors must accommodate as well as they can. Regardless of how one feels about it, there is growing evidence that the fact of being multiracial has important consequences for one’s life chances. For example, the socioecononomic status of biracial children fall consistently between those of their lower status parent and those of their higher status parent. Thus, on the one hand, the fact of having mixed racial or ethnic ancestry has real, material, consequences for one’s life – independent of the language with which we understand that fact. But on the other hand, the growth of and contestation around a multiracial movement show that the mere fact of having parents of different races is politically and personally very different from the claim of a multiracial identity and community…

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Who Will You Let Me Be?

Race, Ethnicity, and Me: Autobiographical Reflections by Trinity University Students
Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas
Fall 2008

Claire Murphy-Cook

Race, Ethnicity, and Me is a collection of autobiographical essays written by Trinity University students as an assignment for a course taught by Professor David Spener in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. In their essays, students use research findings and scholarly concepts to analyze their own experiences involving racial and ethnic identities in the United States. The collection is intended for use by students and educators as a tool for promoting dialogue about diversity issues as they affect their academic institutions and communities. The essays it contains were written by students in the fall 2008 semester.

Claire Murphy-Cook comes from what, in her words, “can only be described as an alternative family.” She has two lesbian mothers who have been in a relationship for nearly thirty years. Both her mothers are non-Hispanic whites. Her father is a mixed-race, gay man from Brazil who was asked by her mothers to be their sperm donor. He has, nonetheless, been an active presence in Claire’s life. In her essay, she describes how traveling to Brazil with him as a teenager gave her a new sense of her own identity in racial and ethnic terms.

To be mixed race means not having a place in any defined racial categories. It means being defined by standards that do not recognize who you are or where you came from, checking too many bubbles on Scantrons, and puzzling over census categorizations. What is it exactly that places us in these arbitrary categories? How does a person come to terms with the gaps in society’s perceptions about you and the way you see yourself?…

…Though I am aware that American society perceives me as white, I view myself as half Irish (white) and half Brazilian (Latina), someone multiracial. Growing up, there was always an emphasis of both of these identities; I can remember numerous times when my parents told me that I was “not just white.” They also told me that because of societal perceptions of my race that I was treated better than if than if my skin were darker. They were not so overt as to tell me that I had white privilege, but we always talked about how my dad used to be stopped and searched in the airport all the time. Then my moms would bring up how we never got stopped or searched at the airport, and tell my sister and I that it was because we were two white ladies traveling with young daughters. Although never explicitly mentioned as such, I have always been both aware and wary of my white privilege…

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The right colour

Index on Censorship
Volume 28, Issue 1, 1999
Special Issue: The Last Empire
pages 110-114
DOI: 10.1080/03064229908536514

Daniela Cestarollo

Five hundred years after the arrival of the Portuguese, Brazilians are only Just beginning to address the legacy of slavery

Brazil is at last revealing its other face. After 500 years of seeking to shape itself in the image of a white, western Catholic country, Brazil is having to come to terms with its immense ethnic diversity and the social and economic implications this brings with it. An extensive report published in 1996 by the daily Folha de São Paulo revealed to the nation that almost half its 160 million people are black. This amounts to the realisation that Brazil had the largest black population in the world after Nigeria. The report also presented figures on racial prejudice, illiteracy, unemployment and income distribution among blacks from all over Brazil. The figures shocked a nation that has always believed itself to be the racial democracy of the southern hemisphere.

The myth of racial democracy has since the 1930s marketed Brazil as the sunny country where people of all races mix happily together on the beach, on the football pitch and in the Carnival parade. However, the myth has in reality served as a buttress for one of the most perverse and sophisticated forms of modern racism. By contrast to the apartheid system of South Africa, Brazil reveals a number of examples of disguised discrimination, such as in job advertising or television programming. Job adverts, which often ask for a ‘good appearance, in reality mean that blacks are not expected to apply. Television dramas, meanwhile, typically portray blacks within extremely limited, stereotyped roles, such as domestic servants or thieves. Not surprisingly, a recent poll on racial origins showed that only 5 per cent of Brazilians identified themselves as black. Most preferred to be called brown, bronze or coffee-coloured.

Discrimination based on skin colour was made a criminal offence in 1951, but the law was completely ignored and almost no-one was aware of its existence. During the military dictatorship (1964-1985), any…

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Brazil’s unfinished battle for racial democracy

The Economist
2000-04-20

JOSILENE SALES’S career is typical of Brazil’s emerging middle class. She spent seven years working in a petrochemical plant, while studying for a degree at night classes. Having moved to a better paid job in marketing, she saved enough to start her own telemarketing firm in Salvador, a city in Brazil’s north-east, and now employs two other staff. Less typically, Ms Sales is black, something which sometimes surprises her clients when they meet her. “You just have to overcome this [reaction] with professionalism,” she says.

Ms Sales descends from the 4m or more African slaves imported to Brazil, many of them through Salvador, for two centuries the colonial capital. When the Portuguese first landed on Brazil’s north-east coast, on April 22nd 1500, they thought that the docile Indians they encountered could easily be put to work building a new colony. But the Amerindians were few in number, unwilling workers, and many fell victim to European diseases. The colonists quickly sought African labour for Brazil’s sugar plantations, and later its mines. Brazil would not abolish slavery until 1888.
 
Five centuries of miscegenation have blurred the racial boundaries between Europeans, Africans and Amerindians: today 38% of Brazilians call themselves “brown” (of mixed ancestry). Blacks are only 6% and Amerindians a mere 0.2%. Such racial mixing encouraged Brazil’s largely white elite to nourish a myth that their country had overcome the legacy of slavery and become a “racial democracy”, with no colour prejudice—unlike the strife-torn United States.

Displays of racial hatred are indeed rare in Brazil. Nor do Brazilians live in racially segregated areas. And in contrast to their counterparts in the United States, Brazilians of mixed race are likely to be seen, and see themselves, not as black but as white or brown.

But Brazil’s blacks do face prejudice. And though, or because, as Brazilians say, “money whitens”, the country’s deep social inequalities run broadly along racial lines. Brazil is still largely governed, managed and owned by whites. Blacks and browns are disproportionately poor, and find it harder than similarly qualified whites to get a job….

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Britain: More mixed than we thought

British Broadcasting Corporation
2011-10-07

Mark Easton, Home editor

New figures seen by the BBC suggest our mixed race population may be twice the size of official figures—numbering up to two million people

Looking at some new figures on ethnic minorities in Britain the other day, I glanced at a footnote and suddenly sat bolt upright in my chair.

The implications of it were clear: Britain’s mixed-race community must be at least double the size we previously thought.

The research by Dr Alita Nandi at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) used data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) to examine the experience of different ethnic groups in the UK.

As with the census and other surveys, ethnicity is defined in the UKHLS by the individual: if you regard yourself as black Caribbean or white British that is how you are counted.

Using this self-reported approach, the figures suggest that 0.88% of adults define themselves as “mixed”.

But the survey—following 100,000 people in 40,000 households—asks another question: what is the ethnicity of your parents?

The footnote puts it: “If we use this alternative definition of mixed then 1.99% of adults are of mixed parentage.”

More than twice as many over-16-year-olds are technically mixed race than describe themselves that way…

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