Mixed Race Studies

Race: A Philosophical Introduction, 2nd Edition

Polity Press
February 2013
240 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-7456-4965-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7456-4966-5

Paul C. Taylor, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Pennsylvania State University

In Race: A Philosophical Introduction, Second Edition, Paul C. Taylor provides an accessible guide to a well-travelled but still-mysterious area of the contemporary social landscape. As in the first edition, the book blends metaphysics and social philosophy, analytic philosophy and pragmatic philosophy of experience. In this thoroughly updated and revised volume, Taylor outlines the main features and implications of race-thinking, while engaging the ideas of such important figures as Linda Alcoff, K. Anthony Appiah, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, Sally Haslanger, and Howard Winant. The result is a comprehensive but accessible introduction to philosophical race theory and to a non-biological and situational notion of race.

The book unfolds in a sequence of five chapters, each devoted to one of the following questions: What is race-thinking? Don’t we know better than to talk about race now? Are there any races? What is it like to have a racial identity? And how important, ethically, is colorblindness? On the way to answering these questions, Race takes up topics like mixed-race identity, white supremacy, the relationship between the race concept and other social identity categories and the impact of race-thinking on our erotic and romantic lives. The second edition’s new concluding chapter explores the racially fraught issues of policing, immigration, and global justice, and interrogates the thought that Barack Obama has ushered in a post-racial age. This volume is suitable for the educated general reader as well as for students and scholars in ethnic studies, philosophy, sociology, and other related fields.

Features

• Fully updated and revised edition of this comprehensive but accessible introduction to philosophical race theory.
• Blends metaphysics and social philosophy, analytic philosophy and pragmatic philosophy of experience and engages the ideas of such important figures as Linda Alcoff, K. Anthony Appiah, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, Sally Haslanger, and Howard Winant.
• Taylor examines key topics such as mixed-race identity and white supremacy as well as timely examinations of racially fraught issues of policing, immigration, and global justice.
• This compelling volume will appeal to students and scholars in ethnic studies, philosophy, sociology, and other related fields.

Table of Contents

• Preface.
• Part I: Theory:.
  • 1. What Race-Thinking Is:.
    • The Language Of Race.
    • What We Mean By ‘Race’: What Do You Mean, ‘We’?.
    • Modern Racialism: Prehistory And Background.
    • Power, Racial Formation, And Method.
    • Conclusion.
  • 2. Three Challenges To Race-Thinking:.
    • Introduction.
    • The Anti-Racist Challenge, Take 1: Isn’t Race-Thinking Unethical?.
    • What Racism Is.
    • Classical Racialism: History And Background.
    • Early Modern Racialism.
    • High Modern, Or Classical, Racialism.
    • The Concept Of Classical Racialism.
    • The Challenge Of Human Variation: Isn’t Racial Biology False?.
    • What’s Wrong With Race.
    • The Challenge Of Social Differentiation: Isn’t The Race Concept Just In The Way?.
    • Ethnicity.
    • Nation.
    • Class.
    • Caste.
    • Intersecting Principles: Gender.
    • Conclusion.
  • 3. What Races Are:.
    • Introduction.
    • After Classical Racialism.
    • The U.S. Racial Terrain Today.
    • Varieties Of Racialism: Four Accounts And Ten Questions.
    • What Races Are – A Radical Constructionist’s Story.
    • Ten Questions.
    • Conclusion.
• Part II: Practice:.
  • 4. Existence, Experience, Elisions:.
    • Introduction.
    • Ethical Eliminativism, For And Against; Or, The Anti-Racist Challenge, Take 2.
    • The Slippery Slope And The Argument From Political Realism.
    • The Argument From Self-Realization.
    • Existence, Identity, And Despair.
    • The Basics.
    • Despair And Terror.
    • Double-Consciousness.
    • Micro-Diversity, Part I.
    • Microdiversity, Part II.
    • In-Between: Illusions Of Purity And Interstitial Peoples.
    • Experience, Invisibility, And Embodiment.
    • The Basics.
    • Invisibility And The Other Mind-Body Problem.
    • From The Ontic To The Ontological.
    • Conclusion.
  • 5. The Color Question:.
    • Introduction.
    • Color And ‘Courting’: The Ethics Of Miscegenation.
    • Colorblindness And Affirmative Action.
    • Conclusion.
• A Note On Further Reading.
• Endnotes

Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool

Princeton University Press
2005
312 pages
6 x 9
ISBN: 978-1-4008-2641-4

Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hunter College of the City University of New York

The port city of Liverpool, England, is home to one of the oldest Black communities in Britain. Its members proudly date their history back at least as far as the nineteenth century, with the global wanderings and eventual settlement of colonial African seamen. Jacqueline Nassy Brown analyzes how this worldly origin story supports an avowedly local Black politic and identity—a theme that becomes a window onto British politics of race, place, and nation, and Liverpool’s own contentious origin story as a gloriously cosmopolitan port of world-historical import that was nonetheless central to British slave trading and imperialism.

This ethnography also examines the rise and consequent dilemmas of Black identity. It captures the contradictions of diaspora in postcolonial Liverpool, where African and Afro-Caribbean heritages and transnational linkages with Black America both contribute to and compete with the local as a basis for authentic racial identity. Crisscrossing historical periods, rhetorical modes, and academic genres, the book focuses singularly on “place,” enabling its most radical move: its analysis of Black racial politics as enactments of English cultural premises. The insistent focus on English culture implies a further twist. Just as Blacks are racialized through appeals to their assumed Afro-Caribbean and African cultures, so too has Liverpool–an Irish, working-class city whose expansive port faces the world beyond Britain–long been beyond the pale of dominant notions of authentic Englishness. Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail studies “race” through clashing constructions of “Liverpool.”

Read the entire first chapter for free here in HTML or PDF format.  Excerpts are below.

“TO UNDERSTAND Black people, you’ve got to understand Liverpool.” So argued my friend Scott, a sixty-year-old Black man born and raised in that city…

…In the midst of describing the center’s aims he stopped short, interrupting himself to say, “To understand Black people, you’ve got to understand Liverpool.” He explained that Stanley House was established by charitable White people.  But their charter referred to the children of African seamen and the White women to whom they were often married as “half-castes,” a much despised term now…

Variations of that question were being posed in seaports all over Britain and in the overlapping arenas of social work, philanthropy, and academia, which would, in the mid to late nineteenth century, include physical anthropology and ethnology.  In contrast to eighteenth-century British ideas about human variation, which considered religion and clothing as key indices of civilization and posited climate as an explanation of different human potentials, the 1840s saw the emergence of a more biological argument (Wheeler 2000; Hamer 1996).  Physical types, which were correlated with areas of geographic origin, became the basis of racial distinctions and served to explain differential human capacities. Classificatory schema abounded. In this respect, Brontë’s mysterious, somewhat monstrous representation of the racially ambiguous Heathcliff is intriguing; it accords with the fearful image of the half-caste conjured up in Gothic literature and other discursive contexts.  As H. L. Malchow provocatively explains, “[O]ne may define [the Gothic] genre by characteristics that resonate strongly with racial prejudice, imperial exploration and sensational anthropology—themes and images that are meant to shock and terrify, that emphasize chaos and excess, sexual taboo and barbarism, and a style grounded in techniques of suspense and threat” (1996: 102).  Just as the unpredictable and brooding Heathcliff posed an ever-present danger, so too were the “hundreds of half-caste children” in 1920s Cardiff said to have “vicious tendencies.” These children also confused the categories of science, exhibiting, according to the press, a “disharmony of physical traits and mental characteristics” (Rich 1986: 131). In an era when science had attained unprecedented legitimacy (Lorimer 1996), the racially ambiguous or mixed person was a threat to the social order. Again, Malchow writes, “The terms ‘half-breed’ and ‘half-caste’ are double, hyphenated constructions resonating with other linguistic inadequacies and incompletes—with ‘half-wit’ or ‘half-dead’, with ‘half-naked’ or ‘half-truth’, and of course with ‘half-civilized’” (1996: 104). The person of mixed race was a pathology to be studied from both literary and “scientific” points of view. Their sexuality was of particular concern. It was one thing to be born of immoral unions in immoral circumstances; but as freaks of nature themselves, what moral predilections would they reproduce? Could they reproduce? (Malchow 1996; Young 1995)…

…Into a milieu defined, at the very least, by the above-described dynamics of colonialism, race, nationality, place, sexuality, class, and gender entered one Muriel Fletcher, infamous in present-day Liverpool for a study she conducted in 1928 under the auspices of the Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half- Caste Children. Fletcher was trained in social research at the Liverpool University School of Social Science, where her circle included eugenicist anthropologists (Rich 1986).  The subjects of Fletcher’s research were White women who were formerly involved with African men and their “half-caste” children. She published her conclusions in Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports. Ultimately, the Fletcher Report, as it is commonly called, concludes that “the colour problem” in that city owed not to the racist structuring of British society, the ideologies promulgated by the British state and its institutions, nor those circulating within Liverpool’s social welfare establishment, nor to the everyday racism of White Liverpudlians who routinely subjected colored seamen to violence. Rather, Fletcher attributed the colour problem in Liverpool to African seamen. It would be hard to state emphatically enough how thoroughly racial politics in Liverpool/Britain reflect the legacy of the Fletcher Report….

…The African man creates the White woman’s problems, while they both create the myriad crises said to befall their “half-caste” children. Fletcher uses the term half-caste in various ways. At times she distinguishes between “Anglo-Negroid” and “Anglo-Chinese” children; yet both of these groups belong to the half-caste category. Fletcher remarks at the outset, however, that “Anglo-Chinese” children are quite well-adjusted.  Since they pose no problem, we need not hear anything more about them.  As well, in the early pages, Fletcher uses the term Anglo-Negroid for children of African men and White women.  In detailing the minute phenotypical features of “half-caste” children, the Fletcher Report marks some of them “English,” as in “30 per cent. had English eyes… A little over 50 per cent. had hair negroid in type and colour. 25 per cent. had English, while the remaining 25 per cent. exhibited some curious mixtures… About 12 per cent. had lips like the average English child” (27).   She refers to these children’s social characteristics in similar terms. While she does not suggest that biological inheritance is at work, the children nevertheless manifest a troubling duality, exhibiting the worst trait of each parent.  Here speaking about “half-caste” girls, Fletcher argues, “From her mother the half-caste girl is liable to inherit a certain slackness, and from her father a happy-go-lucky attitude towards life” (34). The problems of half-caste children are not of their own making, then. They are victims. They attend earnestly to their schoolwork and seem amiable enough. But the immorality that characterizes their home life, given the low character of both parents, cannot help but be reproduced in these hapless children….

Read the entire first chapter for free here in HTML or PDF format.

To-day there are no half-castes because there are no full-castes.

Cedric Dover. Half-Caste. London, 1937. Secker & Warburg.

From the Golden Gate to the Green Mountains: A Hapa Educational Autobiography and Meta-Critical Reflection

University of Vermont
October 2012
65 pages

Noelle Brassey

A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Graduate College of The University of Vermont In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts Specializing in English

As a former UC Berkeley undergraduate and a University of Vermont graduate student, this is an educational autobiography of a self-identified Hapa, or mixed-race Asian American, through the lens of race and identity. Exploring what it means to be “white” and “privileged,” and realizing that these concepts—like identity—are fluid, this thesis adopts a dual methodology that includes personal narrative, as well as a meta-critical reflection. This thesis focuses on three memoirs: Bone Black and Wounds of Passion by bell hooks, and Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez, each of which explore themes of reclaiming voice and reconstructing identity with regards to race, class, and culture.

Read the entire thesis here.

Identity Politics: the Mixed-race American Indian Experience

Journal of Critical Race Inquiry
Volume 2, Number 1 (2012)
25 pages

Michelle R. Montgomery
University of Washington

This paper builds a Critical Race Theory approach to consider how mixed-race American Indian college students conform to, or resist, dominant black/non-black ideology. Current research on multiracials in the U.S. lacks the perspectives of mixed-race American Indians on the heightened disputes of “Indianness,” tribal enrollment, and tribal self-determination. Also under-explored is how mixed-race American Indian persons perceive themselves in racial terms, how they wish to be perceived, and how economic and historical perspectives inform their choices about racial self-identification. This paper provides an overview of the identity politics of mixed-race American Indians at a tribal college and highlights the need for tribal colleges to embrace a growing mixed-race population through self-determination education policies.

Read the entire article here.

The Manifestation of Race in Everyday Communication Interactions in New Zealand

Unitec New Zealand, Auckland, New Zealand
October 2012
281 pages

Elizabeth S. Revell

A thesis submitted to the Department of Communication Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of International Communication

This thesis examines the manifestation of race in everyday communication interactions in New Zealand using an unconventional, experimental methodology. Experimenting with a partial collaborative autoethnographic approach that involved reflexive diaries, interviews, and focus groups as data collection methods, the author and nine other co-participants took part in a collaborative autoethnographic exercise, that required them to focus, reflect on, and discuss together their perceptions of the way race was manifested in their day-to-day experiences, over the period of a month. Co-participants were encouraged to write evocatively of their experiences. The author used her mixed-race identity as an autoethnographic analytical tool as a measure towards resolving her ‘double consciousness’ (Du Bois, 1903). Her own voice, thoughts, and stories of her lived experiences are woven into the study, alongside more traditional analysis. In carrying out this investigation, the author sought not only to generate knowledge in the traditional academic sense, but to facilitate a disruptive, emancipative and emotionally engaging conversation on racism in New Zealand, between herself, her co-participants, and readers.

In answering the main research question about the manifestation of race in everyday communication interactions in New Zealand, the author found that in public contexts in New Zealand, race as a topic is taboo and racists are social pariahs amongst Western, educated, middle-class members of society. Consequentially, race is often manifested in a variety of subtle ways in everyday communication interactions, and is difficult to identify and challenge. The subtle way in which race is manifested in everyday settings masks an undercurrent of prejudice and hostility. Whether or not these hidden tensions will emerge problematically in the future remains to be seen, as New Zealanders negotiate and manage their biculturalism and multiculturalism.

In terms of the significance of race in New Zealand, the author concluded that New Zealand’s racial and ethnic identity is changing (browning), and that the longstanding New Zealand European (White) majority is decreasing in proportion and dominance. Some New Zealand Europeans are consciously and subconsciously trying to assert their authority, refusing to let the idea that a ‘true’ New Zealander is ‘White’ go because of a) a subconscious belief in the superiority of White skin and/or Western culture, and b) insecurity around what will happen to them and their lifestyle, if non-White ethnic and non-Western cultural groups continue to gain in proportion to White, Western groups. As a result, some non-White individuals are experiencing being subtly and overtly ‘othered’, excluded, disrespected, and negatively stereotyped. Being subjected to everyday racism has resulted in some non-White New Zealanders having a fractured sense of identity, and others having adopted the racist worldview of Whites.

In terms of resolving the dialectic of her mixed-race identity, the closure the author had hoped for was not achieved. Instead, she became more conscious of her own racist beliefs and actions, and convinced of the importance of continuing to challenge them.

Table of Contents

• ABSTRACT
• DECLARATION
• CANDIDATE’S DECLARATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
  • MY “DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS”: A PERSONAL NARRATIVE
    • First thing’s first: Who I am
    • But: The dreaded question
    • Fleshing out the issue
    • Defining my research topic
  • WIDER SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
  • RESEARCH PURPOSE
  • CONCEPTUAL DEFINITIONS
    • “Race”
    • “Everyday communication interaction”
  • METHODOLOGY: A PARTIAL COLLABORATIVE AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACH
  • THESIS OUTLINE
• CHAPTER 2: CONCEPTS AND CONTEXT
  • CONCEPTUAL DEFINITIONS
    • Concept 1: ‘Race’
    • Concept 2: ‘Everyday communication interaction’
  • CONTEXT
    • Multiculturalism and biculturalism in New Zealand
    • Recent signs of ethnic ‘unease’ in multicultural New Zealand
    • Use of the term ‘race’ in New Zealand
• CHAPTER 3– LITERATURE REVIEW
  • RACE IN COMMUNICATION STUDIES
    • The critical turn in communication studies
  • THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
    • Critical Theory
    • General theories of race and racism
    • Theories and concepts from sociology (on the everyday social construction of race)
    • Theories and concepts from social psychology (on contemporary racism)
  • A REVIEW OF RELEVANT RESEARCH
    • …on race and the everyday
    • …on race and the everyday in New Zealand
• CHAPTER 4: RESEARCH DESIGN
  • SITUATING AUTOETHNOGRAPHY ONTOLOGICALLY AND EPISTEMOLOGICALLY
  • METHODOLOGY
    • A qualitative approach
    • Ethnography
    • Autoethnography
    • Partial collaborative autoethnography
    • Co-participant selection
  • DATA COLLECTION METHODS
    • Solicited reflexive diaries
    • Semi-structured interviews
    • Semi-structured focus groups (briefing and debriefing sessions)
  • METHODS OF ANALYSIS
    • Thematic analysis
    • Analysis and discussion in autoethnography
    • ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
• CHAPTER 5: FINDINGS
  • PARTICIPANT POSITIONALITIES
    • Liz:
    • Ameera:
    • Yasmin:
    • Rachel:
    • Timothy:
    • Heather:
    • Lana:
    • Luke:
    • Zane:
    • Natalie:
  • EMERGENT THEMES
    • Theme 1: Everyday living in a multicultural society
      • 1a. NZ European dominance is eroding
      • 1b. New Zealanders are managing this change well
      • 1c. New Zealanders are not managing this change well
      • Concluding notes for theme one
    • Theme 2: References to ‘racisms’ past
      • 2a. Ethnic inequality and redistribution
      • 2b. Crying race
      • 2c. Old racist attitudes
      • 2d. The declining significance of race?
      • Concluding notes for theme two
    • Theme 3: Everyday awareness and negotiation of social hierarchy
      • 3a. White superiority
      • 3b. Negotiating the social ladder
      • 3c. Legitimacy
      • Concluding notes for theme three
    • Theme 4: Conversational tact – Everyday speech conventions
      • 4a. Racialised ‘neutral’ terms
      • 4b. Racial stereotyping
      • 4c. Censoring
      • Concluding notes for theme four
    • Theme 5: Everyday emotional reactions to races
      • 5a. Anger/cumulative anger towards a race
      • 5b. Disgust
      • 5c. Instant connection
      • 5d. Comfort/discomfort
      • 5e. Fear
      • 5f. Romantic attraction/indifference/repulsion
      • Concluding notes for theme five
    • Theme 6: Reacting to everyday racism
      • 6a. Emotional reactions to everyday racism
      • 6b. Dealing with everyday racism
      • Concluding notes for theme six
    • Theme 7: “Race matters to me because I look different”
      • Concluding notes for chapter seven
  • OVERALL CONCLUSION
• CHAPTER 6 – DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS
  • THEMATIC DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS
    • Theme 1: Everyday living in a multicultural society
    • Theme 2: References to ‘racisms’ past
    • Theme 3: Social status
    • Theme 4: Conversational tact – Everyday speech conventions
    • Theme 5: Emotional reactions to races
    • Theme 6: Reacting to everyday racism
    • Theme 7: “Race matters to me because I look different”
  • HOW IS RACE MANIFESTED IN EVERYDAY COMMUNICATION INTERACTIONS IN NEW ZEALAND?
  • THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RACE IN NEW ZEALAND
• CHAPTER 7: CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
  • RESOLVING MY MIXED-RACE DIALECTIC
  • LIMITATIONS
  • RECOMMENDATIONS
  • SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
• REFERENCES
• APPENDICES
  • APPENDIX A: PARTICIPANT INFORMATION FORM
  • APPENDIX B: PARTICIPANT CONSENT FORM
  • APPENDIX C: PROCEDURAL EXPLANATIONS
  • APPENDIX D: GUIDELINE SHEET FOR DIARIES
  • APPENDIX E: EXTRACT FROM A PARTICIPANT’S REFLEXIVE RESEARCH DIARY
  • APPENDIX F: DEBRIEFING SESSION MAIN CO-PARTICIPANT SHEET
  • APPENDIX G: DEBRIEFING SESSION CO-PARTICIPANT SHEET

Read the entire thesis here.

Five times more ‘G.I. babies’ than previously thought

The Phillipine Star
Manila, Philippines
2012-12-17

Jarius Bondoc

There are five times more American “G.I. babies” in the Philippines than previously thought — and they continue to multiply. This is according to a recent study by a visiting American social researcher and professor in Angeles City, Pampanga. Such finding categorizes military-origin Filipino Amerasians as a social diaspora. For, they forcibly are stripped of their citizenship, dispersed in slums, and suffer discrimination.
 
The number of abandoned offspring of US military servicemen could be 250,000 or more, analysis by P.C. Kutschera, PhD, shows. Their ranks are “expanding slowly but exponentially,” he says. He considers Filipino Amerasians born not only during the Vietnam War. Counted as well are those sired since American Occupation and Commonwealth years, to the present joint US-Philippine military exercises. Meaning, Filipino Amerasians are not only in their thirties or forties, but can also be geriatrics and newborns.
 
Previously the Filipino Amerasians were estimated to run to about 52,000. Most studies considered only the height of the Vietnam War in 1968-1975. At the time the US used the sprawling Clark Air Base in Pampanga and Subic Naval Base in Zambales as launch pads for military operations across the South China Sea. Close to 100,000 US military personnel were stationed in those largest air and naval bases outside mainland America, and in 19 smaller facilities throughout the Philippines. The Philippine Senate evicted the bases in 1992…

…Kutschera presented his research last October to the 9th International Conference on the Philippines, held at the Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University in East Lansing. (Full text at http://www.amerasianresearch.org; coauthored by Marie A. Caputi, PhD, a professor at Walden University, Minnesota.) The paper, “The Case for Categorization of Military Filipino Amerasians as Diaspora,” amplifies Kutschera’s 2010 doctoral dissertation. That earlier work is on psychosocial risk and mental disorder due to stigmatization and discrimination of Amerasians in Angeles City outside Clark Air Base…

Read the entire article here.