Should “Latino” be a Race on the Census?

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Latino Studies, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2014-10-29 16:08Z by Steven

Should “Latino” be a Race on the Census?

National Institute for Latino Policy
Guest Commentary
2014-10-26

Thomas Lopez, President
Multiracial Americans of Southern California

Few questions cause as much existential angst among Latino intellectuals as this one. The Latino origin question was added to the Census in such a hurry back in 1970, that little thought was likely given to how it would fold into the existing racial categories at the time. It has remained a separate question ever since; thus was born the ubiquitous phrase “Latino (or Hispanic) can be of any race.”  It has been stated so often that it has become more of a platitude than a validated scientific fact.  Kudos should be given to the Census Bureau for finally addressing this issue.  Even if nothing changes in the Census, just considering the question forces us into a deeper conversation about identity in general. Because in order to answer the question of whether or not Latino should be a race, one must first answer a more fundamental question: what is race?

Perhaps it would be easier to start with what race isn’t. There is no biological or genetic basis for race. The full argument supporting this assertion is beyond the scope of this commentary so we will just have to accept that as truth for now.  So what is race? Race is a social construct, which is fancy academic speak for simply being made up. That isn’t to say it doesn’t have meaning just because it is made up. We infuse numerous social constructs with meaning. However, it does create a challenge for demographers to determine what society considers a race and what it doesn’t. The key is looking at the context in which it is used…

Read the entire article here.

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The End of Race As We Know It?

Posted in Census/Demographics, Communications/Media Studies, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Passing, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States, Videos on 2014-10-29 15:06Z by Steven

The End of Race As We Know It?

Stanford+Connects
Stanford University
2014-10-09

Michele Elam, Professor of English
Stanford University

Sharing demographic shifts and a personal story about the use of her photograph in various advertisements, Professor Michele Elam traces multiracial identities from the 1940s to present day. In this talk, she explores how society understands race through context and their own cultural perceptions, and what this means for society.

For more information, click here.

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One of Us

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States on 2014-10-29 01:17Z by Steven

One of Us

Boston Magazine
November 2014 (published 2014-10-28)

Jennifer J. Roberts


Portrait of the author by Jason Grow

I was a typical Southie kid, one of six, born to a single mother, raised in a triple-decker, surrounded by Whitey Bulger’s violence and fierce Irish pride. There was only one thing that kept me on the outside: Despite my mother’s claims to the contrary, we were black.

When I was six years old, I was bused to school at John Winthrop Elementary on the Dorchester/Roxbury line. The school was in a mostly black neighborhood, about 3 miles from the South Boston neighborhood where I lived, but even then I understood it as enemy territory.

My mother had made that clear: She was ­aggressive about her stance against busing, and “those blacks.” By which she didn’t mean us. I was the youngest of six kids, and the darkest, but if you asked my mother, she’d tell you we were Irish. Virginia Roberts was a proud supporter of Jim Kelly and Billy Bulger, hugged them flamboyantly at every St. Paddy’s Day Parade. They would give her a kiss on the cheek. I would cringe. Tall, thin, and attractive, she wore a shamrock brooch on her housecoat. Her kinky hair was usually covered by a kerchief or a wig. Her skin, like mine, was a warm beige in the winter and a deep red-brown in the summer. But we were Irish, she insisted, and nothing else.

Sitting in a neighbor’s kitchen, racial slurs would buzz around like hungry mosquitoes waiting to suck my blood out and leave me cold. Inevitably one would land on my mother. “Why can’t they just stay in their neighborhood? No offense, Ginny,” waving a cigarette at my mother. “You know we don’t mean you!” My mother would swat away their words with indifference; of course they didn’t mean her! She’d scoff right along with them.

When I was a child, the origin of our shared skin tone and hair texture was a mystery. Out on the street, though, kids had theories: “I heard your grandmother was raped by a black man,” they’d say to me, or, “I heard your mother was found on a doorstep and your grandmother took her in.” What was clear to me, even as a little girl, was that my mother wanted no part of our shared racial heritage. The bubble of denial she created for herself was solid Teflon. Everything rolled right off of her and onto me. At home, I was Irish. On the street, I was something different: “jigaboo,” “nigger,” “Oreo,” “Jenny the spook.” These names were spoken to me almost as if they were endearments, nicknames. Nearly everyone in Southie had a nickname.

I was from Southie; I was one of them. I was their black girl…

Read the entire article here.

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On blackness and autism, identity and essence

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Media Archive, United States on 2014-10-29 00:54Z by Steven

On blackness and autism, identity and essence

Ray Hemachandra @ Golden Moon Publishing: Autism, spirit, beauty. Compassion. Love. Kindness. Sparks of light.
2014-02-24

Ray Hemachandra

Often I’m asked “What are you?”

Racial and ethnic identity still inform so much in our culture. The question asked really is a question of identity. “What are you?” masks the underlying question, “Who are you?”

When I was young I was black. My father, Neal Hemachandra, was black. His mother, Leathe Wade Colvert, was black. Her mother, Martha Pleasant, came from Virginia and slave plantations. She was black.

I was black even as I carried an Asian Indian name and just as much ethnic heritage: my father’s father, Balatunga Hemachandra, emigrated from Sri Lanka. I was black even as I was Jewish: my blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jewish mother’s family were immigrants from eastern Europe, and much of their family died in the Holocaust. I was black even as American Indian and black Dutch genes contributed to my father’s ancestral lines…

American history and family history confirmed this identity. One drop. My parent’s mixed marriage: they were married in New York City, where they both were born, by a prominent NYC African American judge, Hubert Delany, brother of the Delany sisters who became famous decades later. My parents’ marriage was reported in the black press in several papers up and down the East Coast

Read the entire article here.

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Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial by Ralina L. Joseph (review) [Ardizzone]

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Communications/Media Studies, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2014-10-29 00:25Z by Steven

Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial by Ralina L. Joseph (review) [Ardizzone]

African American Review
Volume 46, Number 4, Winter 2013
pages 787-790
DOI: 10.1353/afa.2013.0105

Heidi Ardizzone, Assistant Professor of American Studies
Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri

Joseph, Ralina L., Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012)

Ralina Joseph begins Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial with a personal story. Her own engagement with ongoing debates over identity, ancestry, authenticity, and race mirrored political and cultural shifts in perceptions of people of mixed ancestry at the time. As a college student in the 1990s, Joseph quickly embraced the term multiracial to describe her own “race story,” becoming a leader of Brown (University’s) Organization of Multi- and Biracial Students (BOMBS). Being multiracial became, she says, a “full blown preoccupation” (xv), resulting in her undergraduate thesis on cultural depictions of black-white women. Transcending Blackness continues this project, identifying two related images, the millennial mulatta, and the exceptional multiracial, which operate in a dialectic cultural relationship as a “two-sided stereotype” (5). Joseph defines both representations in relationship to blackness: Millennials are punished for their attempts to identify as black; exceptionals are rewarded for transcending blackness or even race itself. Rather than demonstrating that blackness might be embraced “in messy, hybridized, multiracial forms” in the cultural texts Joseph examines, blackness is the thing that “must be risen above, surpassed, or truly transcended” (4). However, Joseph also introduces a third potential option: multiracial blackness, identifying positively and simultaneously as mixed and as black or African American. While she embraces this option for herself and claims it as a dominant identity, the authors whose works she analyzes never display it in their fictional depictions of this black-unite figure. So multiracial blackness forms a third point in a now triangulated relationship that crosses the line between social experience and cultural representation.

Transcending Blackness follows a familiar literary and media studies format: The Preface, Introduction, and Conclusion bracket four chapters, each focusing on a particular genre, work, and multiracial or black-white female character. Joseph’s Introduction lays out her terms and framework, while providing a clear and concise history of people of mixed ancestry, of their treatment and categorization, and of the attitudes toward and circumstances of interracial unions. She also provides a selective trajectory of literary and media depictions of the black-white figure covering roughly a century prior to her target years of 1998-2008. This decade spans the first inclusion of the “pick one or more” option under the federal census’ racial categories, and the election of the first U.S. president who could have—but publically didn’t—exercise that option. Like the twenty years that preceded it, the 1998-2008 decade falls squarely in the overlapping postracial and postfeminist eras that Joseph identifies as key to understanding the shifting meaning of the representations of black-white women. However, her decade is a static one: Her chapters are not chronological, but organized around her analytic positioning of each text and character within her framework.

One result of this is that the four main chapters operate in some ways more as related essays than as an integrated argument. But there is a consistent analytical thread. In the first two chapters Joseph presents two examples of the new millennium mulatta to show “how blackness is cause and effect of sadness and pain for the multiracial African American figure.” The last two chapters then argue that for the exceptional multiracial “blackness is an irrelevant entity” (6). And the first chapter sets up Joseph’s argument, not just for the new millennium mulatta, but also for the absence of the multiracial blackness that Joseph is looking for but doesn’t find—at least not in the form in which she desires it to be…

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‘I Hope My Son Stays White’

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2014-10-28 21:06Z by Steven

‘I Hope My Son Stays White’

Ebony
News & Views
2014-09-02

Calvin Hennick

A White father of a biracial son admits his fears for what happens when his child gets older and can no longer ‘pass

I am a white man, and part of the privilege that comes along with that fact is this: I know, with something bordering on 100 percent certainty, how my death will not be portrayed if I am shot and killed while walking down the street unarmed.

No one will scour my social media accounts for photos of me wearing a hooded sweatshirt or flipping off the camera. No one will ignore my lack of a criminal record and decide that I’m a “thug” for unnamed reasons. It won’t matter whether I’ve smoked pot, or shoplifted, or if I was ever suspended from school.

And, especially if my hypothetical assailant turns out to be black, I can be confident that there will be no rallies to support him. His identity will not be hidden from the public for days, and no crowdfunding campaign will raise a six-figure sum to support his family through “their” difficult time.

There will be no national effort to blame me for my own death…

Read the entire article here.

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M.I.X.E.D: Multidisciplinary.Intersectional.Xchanging.Empowering.Dialogues Art Show Call for Entries

Posted in Arts, Media Archive, Wanted/Research Requests/Call for Papers on 2014-10-28 20:30Z by Steven

M.I.X.E.D: Multidisciplinary.Intersectional.Xchanging.Empowering.Dialogues Art Show Call for Entries

2014-08-29

M.I.X.E.D. is a 100% volunteer run event & art show created in order to make space for progressive discussion around mixed-race identity and our many other intersecting identities. To learn more about “intersectionality”, please visit: http://mixed-me.ca/intersectionality

This year’s event will take place on Saturday May 2nd, 2015. The accompanying art show will take place May 1, 2015 -May 8th, 2015. The opening reception will take place May 1st, 2015.

  • Visual art due date: November 3rd, 2014
  • Facilitator due date: November 3rd, 2014
  • Performance art due date: January 16th, 2015

Submission guidelines can be found here.

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Call for Submissions: “Black and White: Parenting on the Colorline,” an anthology edited by Caroline Berz, Jessie Scanlon and Kim Dacosta

Posted in Family/Parenting, Wanted/Research Requests/Call for Papers on 2014-10-28 17:51Z by Steven

Call for Submissions: “Black and White: Parenting on the Colorline,” an anthology edited by Caroline Berz, Jessie Scanlon and Kim DaCosta

When General Mills aired a Cheerios commercial featuring a family with a white mother, a black father and a biracial child, many viewers reacted positively, but the ad’s YouTube page was filled with so much vitriol that the company disabled comments. A white woman calling in to the black comedian D.L. Hughley’s radio show summed up the disgust: “Cereal is white. That has no place at the breakfast table. It’s offensive.” The Cheerios marketing team doubled down, spending $4 million to run a second ad with the family during the Super Bowl, yet many people are still uncomfortable with the very idea of a black/white family. As Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen put it, “people with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York—a white man married to a black woman with two biracial children.” These are the stories of mixed race families that gain national attention. The anger, suspicion, and ignorance they reflect can also be felt in our most mundane daily interactions. Last year, a white man shopping at Walmart with his biracial children was suspected of kidnapping. Black fathers of lighter-skinned children often draw questioning stares, while darker-skinned mothers are often mistaken for “the nanny.”

As a nation we are increasingly multiracial, but mixed race individuals and families are still perceived as an anomaly. For those of us living—and parenting—on the colorline, events like the Cheerios controversy are urgent reminders that the society we are raising our children in is far from “post-racial,” regardless of the election of the first African American/white president. Indeed, since Barack Obama moved into the White House, we’ve seen an increase in violence targeting those of African descent.

How do these issues affect the day-to-day lives of our families? How do they inform the many ways we parent our children, our hopes and dreams—and fears—for them? How do we go about the daily tasks of building and supporting our families, loving our partners, and growing into our own identities as parents when racism continues to be a defining issue in our schools, on our streets, in our government’s policies and sometimes in our own homes?

The essays anthologized in Black and White: Parenting on the Colorline will explore the multiple and complex experiences of parenting children of African and European heritage, and of families formed by transracial adoption. The collection will pay close attention to the ways in which the mixed race identities of children and parents alike are informed by gender, class, sexuality, language and citizenship. The writing will be humorous and lyrical, insightful and critical, and most of all personal, reflecting the joys and challenges of mixed-race parenting.

Topics can include (but are not limited to): pregnancy and birth; adoption; LGBTQ families; interfaith and interracial families; divorce; single-parenting; grandparenting mixed children; racial implications of different parenting philosophies; specifics of parenting mixed girls and boys; gender-nonconforming children and families; special rights children and families; experiences at playgrounds and in mothers’/parents’ groups; schools and education; notions of beauty; bullying; policing; questions of multiculturalism and diversity; individual and family identities that push the boundaries of the black/white binary.

Please send the editors a brief description of your proposed essay (250-300 words), a bio (200-250 words), and a list of previous publications. The essays can range in length and tone, though all should be accessible to a broad audience. Pieces are due on January 15 [2015], and acceptance will depend upon the strength and fit of the completed essay.

Editor Bios:

Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Caroline Berz has been engaged in active dialogue around issues of “race” and identity for as long as she can remember. She has worked closely with Facing History and Ourselves for over fifteen years first as an intern, then as a full-time staff member and most recently as a member of the National Teacher Advisory Board and adjunct online facilitator. She has piloted new material on the American eugenics movement, South Africa and Rwanda. She spent a decade as a high school history teacher in Boston area public schools teaching a variety of courses ranging from Modern European History to Modern World History to her personal favorite, a junior/senior elective on Race and Membership. In 2008, she transitioned from being in the classroom full-time to curriculum writing, film education and outreach. Helping schools and communities to become “fluent” in multiculturalism is one of her passions so she enjoys leading diversity workshops in schools for teachers, students and parents. She has a BA in US History from Tufts University and a Masters in Education from Harvard University and is mom to two young children, ages 2 and 6.

Jessie Scanlon has worked as a writer, editor, and journalist for 20 years. After graduating with honors from Brown University, she earned an internship at Wired magazine and worked her way up the masthead to become a senior editor. Along the way she co-authored Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age. After ten years on staff, she became a contributing writer for the magazine. In addition to her pieces for Wired, she has written for national magazines and newspapers including The New York Times, Slate, Popular Science, ID, Dwell, Men’s Journal, and TED.com. After four years on staff at BusinessWeek, where she spearheaded its online coverage of innovation and design, she shifted to working primarily in books. Most recently, she helped write Leading the Life You Want, a Wall Street Journal best seller. Jessie lives in Cambridge, MA, with her husband and two children.

Kim DaCosta, a sociologist, is especially interested in the contemporary production of racial boundaries. Born in Boston and raised in two of its suburbs—both largely white and blue collar—she is the fourth of her Irish mother and Black father’s six children. The experience of growing up in metropolitan Boston of the 1970s and 80s, a time and place uncomfortable with when not outright hostile to interracial families, first sparked her academic interests. Kim’s book, Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line (Stanford 2007), explores the cultural and social underpinnings of the movement to create multiracial collective identity in the United States. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and holds a PhD in sociology from Berkeley. Kim is currently a professor and dean at New York University and is the mother of three children.

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Why Latinos won’t become white

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Economics, Latino Studies, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2014-10-28 17:22Z by Steven

Why Latinos won’t become white

Al Jazeera America
2014-10-22

Gabriel Arana

Assuming Latinos will join the white majority ignores the stark divisions in a racially diverse group

In the lead-up to the midterms, President Barack Obama has been parroting the conventional wisdom about the GOP’s future: Republicans are doomed if they keep up their opposition to immigration reform and continue the inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric. “It’s anybody’s guess how Republicans are thinking about this,” he said during a town hall event in Santa Monica, California. “If they were thinking long term politically, it is suicide for them not to do this.”

Latinos make up 14 percent of the population, and their share is projected to grow to 29 percent by 2050. This demographic traditionally identifies with the Democratic Party; the toxic immigration debate in Washington, fueled by xenophobes in the GOP, will only increase that tendency. In 2006, 49 percent of Latino eligible voters identified as or leaned Democratic. By 2011, that number jumped to 67 percent. With the United States projected to become a majority-minority country by 2043, Republicans’ chances of winning the White House on the backs of white voters will grow ever slimmer.

But a counternarrative, one that would put Latino votes back in contention for the GOP, has begun to emerge. In the coming decades, Latinos could become “white” — a process in which cultural assimilation would presumably be followed by political realignment — opening them up to affiliation with the Republican Party. It’s a theory espoused most prominently by Slate political writer Jamelle Bouie, who argues in the winter issue of Democracy that “the future won’t be majority-minority; it will be a white majority, where Spanish last names are common.” But this vision of complete assimilation ignores the stark racial divisions in Latin American societies, in which socioeconomic status and skin color, as in the U.S., tend to fall along parallel lines.

Ethnic attrition

The idea of Latinos becoming white in the American sense — a vision of racial and cultural assimilation independent of self-identified race — isn’t a new one. Economists Brian Duncan at the University of Colorado and Stephen Trejo at the University of Texas at Austin call it ethnic attrition. As Latinos intermarry and climb the socioeconomic ladder, the theory goes, they are less likely to self-identify as Hispanic. Duncan and Trejo’s research shows (PDF) that while virtually all first- and second-generation Hispanic immigrants identify as Hispanic, in the third generation, those of mixed heritage start to self-select out of this group. Among third-generation immigrants with only two Hispanic grandparents, 79 percent identify as Hispanic. Among those with only one Hispanic grandparent, the number falls to 58 percent. Think of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, whose father is Cuban and whose mother is white, or comedian Louis C.K., whose grandmother is Mexican and whose other grandparents are Irish and Hungarian…

Read the entire article here.

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Today’s Irish Dancers Step Away From Stereotype

Posted in Articles, Arts, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, United States on 2014-10-28 12:53Z by Steven

Today’s Irish Dancers Step Away From Stereotype

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2014-10-27

S. J. Velasquez


Julia O’Rourke (center) wins the 2014 World Irish Dancing Championships. Here, she poses with the top five performers in her age group.
Jimmy McNulty/FeisPix

When Riverdance debuted 20 years ago, Irish step dancers — whether citizens of Ireland or any other country — looked, well, stereotypically Irish. The red-haired, freckle-faced lass doing a jumpy jig still comes to mind for many. But the All Ireland Dancing Championships, currently underway in Dublin, will show how that image no longer reflects the reality.

Take the current Irish dance “it” girl, Julia O’Rourke. She was born in New York, and has Filipino and Irish ancestry. At age 15, she is a two-time world champion and star of the Irish dance documentary Jig. That film follows dancers from around the world who are training for and traveling to the 2010 World Irish Dancing Championships.

“I really hope that I helped change that stereotype,” O’Rourke says. “[Ethnicity] really doesn’t matter anymore. It’s how you dance.” She points to the success of her friend and dance classmate Melanie Valdes, whose father is Cuban-American. “There have been so many dancers to join the community who are only part Irish or not Irish at all,” O’Rourke says, “and they’ve really made an impact.”

“I don’t think the judges even react to it anymore,” says Valdes, who has also swept titles at major competitions, capturing gold at the world championships twice. “It’s all about the dancing.”

For the most part, O’Rourke agrees, insisting that she has never been treated badly because of what she looks like. If anything, it has helped. “Because my look is different, my face doesn’t look like a typical Irish girl, it might pop out a little more to the judges,” she explains.

But diversity wasn’t always so welcome…

…Brown Skin, Spray Tans And Hot Pink Shorts

Now, some members of the Irish dance community see a distinctive look as an advantage. Drew Lovejoy, a now retired two-time world champion, is biracial and identifies as African-American. Nineteen-year-old Lovejoy, known for sporting hot pink shirts in competition, says his unique appearance gave him confidence on stage because it set him apart. He jokes that his skin tone allows him to pull off a different color palette completely…

Read the entire article here.

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