Mixed Race Studies

Jessica Ennis, Mo Farah and Identity Language in the British Press: A Case Study in Monitoring and Analysing Print Media

Migration Observatory
University of Oxford
2012-12-11
10 pages

William Allen, Senior Researcher

Scott Blinder, Senior Researcher

Introduction and context

Since July 2012, the Migration Observatory has been building the framework for a Media Monitoring Project. Its aim is to improve understanding of the coverage of migration and related issues in the British press. We are gathering a comprehensive set of articles from Britain’s national newspapers beginning in 2005 and to be continuously updated to the present on a weekly basis. These articles will include all mentions of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in British newspapers. From this large database (or ‘corpus’ of texts), we will get a sense not only of how much attention the press devotes to migration, but also the nature of coverage. This will include the general tone of coverage and the specific ways in which migrants are portrayed. We are interested in knowing, for example, if press is currently contributing to the widespread public perception of immigrants as asylum seekers (see the Migration Observatory report – Thinking behind the Numbers). This image may stem from high levels of asylum applications in the early 2000’s, or it may be partly the product of continued media coverage even with asylum numbers declining. Of course, simply describing and monitoring press coverage does not demonstrate a connection to public perceptions, but it can help us determine whether or not such a connection is plausible.

The media project will also be designed to respond flexibly to other questions, including those raised by organisations working on migration or related issues, from a wide range of perspectives. In this document we present results from the first such effort. The Observatory was commissioned by the think-tank British Future to investigate media use of languages of identity and origins in association with Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah.

Ennis and Farah were among the most discussed and admired British gold medallists in the Games. While clearly they were discussed mainly as athletes, their racial, ethnic, and religious background and relationships to migration were sometimes a matter of public discussion as well. Ennis is the British-born child of a white British mother and father of Jamaican/Afro-Caribbean origins (thus sometimes referred to as ‘mixed race’, although this term like many racial categories is inherently difficult to define precisely and may or may not be frequently used as a self-description). Farah, meanwhile, was born in Somalia and came to Britain as a child. He is also known to be Muslim, whereas Ennis’ religion does not appear to be a matter of public discussion. In the context of the London Olympics, a period widely thought to have produced an outpouring of national pride, their backgrounds seemed to figure in some discussions of the relationships among race, ethnicity, religion, national origins and British/English national identities.

The Migration Observatory was commissioned to attempt to quantify these trends in press coverage of both athletes, to help in discerning what sorts of identity language were most frequently used in connection with each of them. In particular, in commissioning this research, British Future were interested in finding out whether Ennis was described more in terms of her local origins (i.e. the ‘girl from Sheffield’) than her racial/ethnic background, and whether Farah described more as Somali-born than in terms of his more local origins after arriving in Britain as a child. Therefore, quantifying the presence of certain kinds of words in different types of coverage could help indicate the nature of discourses surrounding identity in British public life. The results presented below come from an analysis of the frequency of a set of identity-related words in press coverage mentioning Ennis and/or Farah. Although the words chosen were specified in advance by British Future to represent their hypotheses about the public identities of these two figures, the analysis was conducted independently by the Migration Observatory.

The analysis highlighted a few basic findings. In articles mentioning Ennis, her local origins in Sheffield were mentioned more frequently than her ethnic background, whether captured in terms of her father’s origins in Jamaica or in racial/ethnic terms such Afro-Caribbean, ‘black’, or ‘mixed race’. In articles mentioning Farah, Somalia was indeed much more common than any local origin terms. Notably, explicitly racial or ethnic terms were quite rare in these sets of articles, relative to other sorts of identity terms. There was some discussion of the so-called ‘mixed race’ category in articles mentioning Ennis, while race—at least as identified by the term ‘black’—did not arise in any significant measure in describing Farah. National identity terms appeared frequently in articles mentioning either or both athletes: ‘British’ was used in numerous ways, while ‘English’ often referred to the English language rather than English national identity, in relation to Farah’s arrival in Britain with no knowledge of the English language. Even in the absence of positive net migration, the population is projected to grow significantly in the future. Assuming net migration of zero at every age, the UK population is projected to reach 66 million by 2035 an increase of 6% from the 2010 level…

Read the entire report in HTML or PDF format.

Soledad O’Brien Is Betting on Jeff Zucker

The New York Times Magazine
2012-12-18

Andrew Goldman

Your memoir made your experience growing up in Smithtown, a largely white town on Long Island, sound like a huge drag.
It really wasn’t. It is truly not fun to be the family that sticks out in an all-white community. On the other side, I have five brothers and sisters, we all look exactly the same and we’re very, very tight. The lessons about race were not pleasant, but there are things that I loved about my childhood. In the book, I didn’t want to be the tragic mulatto.

Is “tragic mulatto” a term I should know?
Oh, yeah. Google it. At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably the tragic mulatto can’t fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I’m reading, and I’m like, Oh, my God, I think I’m in literature, but my life was never like that.

Before this, I didn’t know you had a white Australian dad and a black Cuban mom. Would you prefer to have people not think about your race at all?
It never made a difference to me if people watching knew, but I want people to understand I’m very proud of what I am. My parents have a great story. And I think your background is critical in how you approach the stories that you’re covering…

Read the entire interview here.

The Color of Colorblind: Exploring Mixed Race Identity

Vitamin W: Your Daily Dose of Women’s News, Philanthropy & Business
New York, New York
2012-12-12

Lindsay C. Harris

The Color of Colorblind: Addressing the History of Racial Classification and Mixed Racial Identity in the U.S.

Like 60 million other Americans, I cast my ballot to reelect our first black president last month. I endorsed a man whose accomplishments are certainly emblematic of progress in the fight for civil rights in this country, but who’s multiracial heritage, identity, and “degree of blackness” under constant scrutiny represents a long and complicated history of racial classification in the United States.

I understand why it may be easy for some to call this the age of colorblindness; why it may seem like “colorblind” is what we should aspire to; and why some might even think we have finally reached this elusive goal as we wave around our newest trophy—the Obamas on Capitol Hill. However, before we pat ourselves on the back and walk away thinking job well done, it’s important to examine a few realities that make our society certainly not post-race—because we could be on the verge of setting ourselves  backward under the guise of progress if we don’t.

Like Obama, I am born of a black father and a white mother. Like many children of mixed parentage, I had my share of struggles to find myself and my community. Moreover, like any adolescent I stru­ggled to feel comfortable with myself and with my body. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend some great schools and to have mentors who have helped me find my voice, critically and artistically. I identify as black and of mixed race—I am of African American, Norwegian and Native American heritage. I acknowledge that calling myself mixed race is a distinct privilege afforded to my generation, and moreover a privilege afford to me because of the way that I look (lighter skinned) and the environment in which I live (New York City). It is with this criticality that I approach not only my own identity, but my artistic body of work surrounding mixed race and complicating identity…

…I believe that identity is two-fold—how we view ourselves and how others view us. And these views are informed by the racialized and sexualized violence of our past. To talk about contemporary identity also involves talking about the history of race in this country. There is a reason that Obama identifies as black not biracial, much of it has to do with society seeing him as first and foremost a black man. How can we understand and move this country toward real progress if we ignore race, and how as mixed race individuals can we deconstruct categories all together, rather than just create new ones?…

Read the entire article here.

Latinas and Latinos of Mixed Ancestry first interest survey

Latinas and Latinos of Mixed Ancestry (LOMA)
2012-12-17

Welcome to LOMA’s first interest survey.  Your responses will help us learn more about you, the community we serve, and what we should be doing!  For more information, click here.

LOMA is a program of Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC) a 501(c)3 non-profit.

Passing for Black in Seventeenth-Century Maryland

Chapter in:

Interpreting the Early Modern World: Transatlantic Perspectives
Springer
2011
246 pages
eBook ISBN: 978-0-387-70759-4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-387-70758-7
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-4614-2709-4

Edited by: Mary C. Beaudry and James Symonds

Chapter Authors:

Julia A. King, Associate Professor of Anthropology
St. Mary’s College of Maryland

Edward E. Chaney

In the Chesapeake region of the United States, archaeologists (including ourselves) typically organize the men and women who made up colonial society into one of three categories: European, African, or Native American. Although these three categories at one time were conflated with skin color, today, they are conceived primarily (although not always) in terms of ancestry or origin. Archaeologists have used these categories to document and interpret social life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and to understand the nature and origins of altitudes toward difference, especially racial and ethnic difference. The best of this work has revealed a range of responses to post-Contact life in the region. Enslaved Africans, for example, were able to use material culture to exert some control over their material and spiritual lives. Many Chesapeake Bay Indians maintained traditional practices long after the arrival of English men and women, while others did not. Meanwhile. English men and women were doing their damndest to transplant English ways of life to the region, usually, but not always, with considerable success.

Indeed, the use of the terms European, African, and Indian to frame Chesapeake history has often served as a counterbalance to the work of the region’s very productive social history school, which focused the majority of its scholarly attention on the experiences of the English colonists who made their way to Maryland and Virginia in the seventeenth century. This work, which has contributed enormously to Chesapeake historiography, has, with some important exceptions, had the unintentional effect of displacing and even erasing the indigenous and African people who were also a part of this history. Putting Native Americans and Africans back into the landscape was a necessary corrective to what was then shaping up to be a wholly European story. The cure, however, while not worse than the disease, raises its own issues concerning the study of racial and ethnic difference. European, African, and Indian have become fixed, unchanging, a priori categories of identity, givens rather than problems for study. Not only do the categories mask considerable variability, they ignore how these identities themselves came to be constructed, and how these identities, then and now. subtly reinforce colonial hierarchies through the use of imposed identities (sec Epperson. 1999 for an early critique).

That such assumptions about race and ethnicity continue to influence the direction of Chesapeake studies is illustrated by the Smithsonian Institution’s recently opened (2009) exhibit. Written in Hone: Forensic Files from the 17th Century. The exhibit’s curators use morphological and metrical measurements collected from Chesapeake skeletons to conclude that “only three groups … were here in the 1600s and early 1700s—individuals of Native American. European, and African origins” (Smithsonian Institution, 2009). The exhibit goes on to list the biological attributes of these “origins” and then quite seamlessly link these attributes to culturally specilied groups. As historian Ken Cohen has pointed out in his review of the Smithsonian’s exhibit for the Journal of American History (2009), such determinations and linkages conflate origin and identity, imposing twentieth- and twenty-first-century racial categories on past groups and. in so doing, “[erasing] multi-racial individuals and cultural adaptations such as ‘passing.'” Cohen concludes that, for the exhibit’s visitors, “the oversimplified treatment of race [will prevent them] from understanding the dynamic experience of the seventeenth-century moment when modern definitions of race were forming but not yet crystallized.”

Cohen’s point is especially well-taken for the seventeenth-century period, when racial categories of identity were not nearly as fixed as they would become in the eighteenth century. And, even in the eightteenlh century, while these imposed categories became increasingly “real” in a social sense, we still have trouble showing how people in this period constructed their own identity. Studies of race and ethnicity in other places have revealed the role of material culture in identity formation. Yet, surprisingly few archaeological studies of the construction of racial categories have been undertaken for the Chesapeake region’s first century of colonization. In Maryland, this is largely because, or at least the argument goes, Africans constituted a small minority of the population through the end of the century. Given the profound influence of the social history school on Chesapeake historiography and its emphasis on a quantitative approach, this argument is not unexpected. The argument is unpersuasive, however, given that the indigenous population, especially in the first century of sustained contact, hardly constituted a minority, and few studies have focused on the emergence of the category Indian in the seventeenth century (but see Potter. 1993).

An important exception is Alison Bell’s (2005) study of white ethnogenesis in the colonial Chesapeake. Using patterns in Chesapeake domestic architecture first identified by Cary Carson (Carson et al.. 1981). James Deetz (1993. 1996). Henry Glassie (1975), and Dell Upton (1982, 1986), Bell concluded that changes in the construction and layout of Chesapeake dwellings through time revealed one strategy by which Anglo-Americans (her term) were able to reconfigure themselves as a new social category they called “white.” As Chesapeake planters began building houses distancing themselves from the men and women who labored on their farms, they continued to use technologies and building designs that required planters to rely on other planters (and “whites”) in a kind of traditional network lo help maintain those houses. Racism, Bell (2005:457) concluded, “slowed the development of capitalism…

Read or purchase the chapter here.