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This essay traces the role of Catholicism in the shifting racial identity of Creoles of color in New Orleans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The implementation of racially segregated Catholic parishes in New Orleans played an important role in changing the way white New Orleanians classified Creoles of color, who were once considered a distinct racial category but came to be described as simply “black.” At the same time, resistance to separate parishes demonstrated both the difficulty of instituting segregation and the creative ways that Creoles preserved a distinct identity even within a society divided along a black-white binary.

This chapter begins with the story of Yung Kuai, a Chinese Educational Mission (CEM) student who graduated from Yale but remained in America for the rest of his life where he married a Euro-American woman and raised a biracial family, which he supported by working as a diplomat at the Chinese embassy. Yung Kuai's story reveals the holes in Asian exclusion, from the welcomed presence of the CEM in New England even at the height of the anti-Chinese movement in California, and highlights the efforts of Americans such as missionaries, educators, and diplomats who treated Chinese as culturally distinct yet malleable in ways that could be turned to advantage. Fears that unilaterally imposed immigration restrictions might damage relations with China meant that initial forays into imposing controls came through diplomatic negotiations.

Theories of identity fail to recognize the flexibility of identity within its social context, a conceptualization that is particularly relevant for Japanese-Americans. This chapter is about understanding how Japanese-American individuals create and negotiate identities as multiple categories, rather than a single category. Japanese-Americans are those who have been exposed to and have internalized two cultures, requiring the synthesis of cultural norms from two groups into one behavioral repertoire. As a consequence, the sense of identity among Japanese-Americans is both individualistic and collectivistic. The Japanese self is coded to participate in both extremes, but the self must be able to switch. The contradictions that these oppositions present are managed by contextualization in place, time, and social group. The chapter explores what it means to be Japanese-American, living at the juncture of two cultures and belonging to two cultures, either by being born of mixed racial heritage or born in one culture and raised in another. Based on recent personal interviews with bicultural Japanese-Americans, the author proposes a model of ethnic identity development The discussion focuses on how Japanese-Americans have negotiated the development of their identity in the United States according to the generation of their birth and relates how this experience is uniquely Japanese-American.

Chapter 9 ‘Raising Eurasia’ shows that as Europeans used didactic visions of childhood to draw boundaries more firmly around themselves this only served to make the ‘problem’ of the Eurasian child more visible. The ambiguous, crisis-ridden figure of the Eurasian child formed a counterpoint to ideals of the child as a symbolically coherent, discontinuous presence. Eurasian children compromised efforts to yoke dichotomous, racialised models of childhood and youth to hierarchies of power. They raised powerful questions of imperial responsibility. Age proved critical to the quite different responses to these questions elaborated in British and French-governed centres to the end of the period.

The John McClellan-led Senate investigations into Teamster corruption were motivated, in part, by the senator's need to secure his political base in Arkansas. In the mid-1950s, the state's labor movement, led by Teamster official Odell Smith and former governor Sidney McMath, was putting together working-class blacks and whites into an effective political coalition. Dedicated to the expansion of public power and public education, the elimination of the poll tax, reform of the state's regressive tax code, and revocation of Arkansas's “right-to-work” amendment, the labor-led biracial coalition threatened the state's conservative elite as well as McClellan's political organization. The Senate investigations-by prompting the expulsion of the Teamsters from the AFL-CIO-damaged Arkansas's labor-led biracial coalition, making the state safer for conservative politicians like McClellan.

In 1988, sociology scholar Dr. Jewelle Taylor Gibbs was quoted as saying that, by the middle of the twenty-first century, “current racial categories in America will become almost meaningless.” In describing one of the many dilemmas faced by parents of biracial children, Gibbs remarked that these children are sometimes brought up with “unrealistic attitudes” about who and what they are. She reminded us at that time, prior to the 2000 census, that there was “no place on the census for God's children.” In the context of a society where differences are often emphasized and always weighed, one against the other, multiracial people are currently viewed as another “minority” by many, in spite of the strong possibility that a majority of U.S. inhabitants are biracial or multiracial. For those who see themselves as a monoracial minority, the struggle for self-determination, self-definition, and self-acceptance may include (among other struggles) breaking away from prevailing stereotypes, reversing negative self-concepts regarding physical characteristics that are different from the majority, overcoming institutional racism, and bigotry in interpersonal relationships.

This chapter analyzes the demographic shift that has brought the Latino population of the region to over 11 million, with 10 million Latinos living in Texas and Florida and 1.6 million relatively new immigrants settling in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. This in-migration changed the biracial workforce of the South for the first time since Reconstruction. Traditional southern culture, black and white, is changing as well. Spanish is heard on streets from suburban Atlanta to Siler City, North Carolina. The religious life of the South has become more diverse as Catholic congregations have expanded and evangelical churches have welcomed new members. A transnational South holds possibility and promise even as it challenges the region's ability to extend democracy to new groups of southerners.

This chapter will describe the social development of people increasingly identifying as multiracial, and introduce the social and legal implications of this. It will then identify the concept of multiracial-identity scholarship and its premise that the multiracial experience of discrimination is exceptional and not well understood or handled by present anti-discrimination law. It will set out the theoretical inquiry of the book as addressing the questions 1) does the increase in the number of individuals who identify as mixed-race present unique challenges to the pursuit of political equality; 2) how should law respond to multiracial racial identity in a manner that enables such persons to protect themselves from domination; and 3) does the advent of multiracial racial identity necessitate a new vision of what racial equality means?

This chapter will closely examine the context of employment discrimination as it is the arena in which the greatest number of multiracial discrimination claims are filed (as compared to other areas of discrimination law examined in later chapters). It will open with the story of Jill Mitchell, a light-skinned black and white biracial woman who experienced a dramatic change in workplace treatment after her supervisor discovered that his presumption that she was a mixed Hispanic white woman was erroneous. The chapter will delineate how Jill Mitchell’s story and the vast majority of cases filed entail allegations of non-white and specifically anti-black bias rather than prejudice rooted in hostility towards racial mixture itself. Moreover, the existing cases display judicial clarity in the administration of multiracial claimant allegations. The courts treat the claims as viable and apply anti-discrimination law in a conventional manner that permits claims to succeed unless the available evidence fails to meet legal standards. Additional onerous evidentiary burdens are not placed upon multiracial complainants. The chapter thus concludes that the cases do not justify the multiracial-identity scholar conjecture that multiracial claims are inadequately addressed.

Because the educational context was the site where the movement for multiracial identity recognition was launched, one might expect the school environment to have the clearest articulation of the contours of multiracial discrimination. Yet like all the civil rights areas discussed in the previous chapters, the multiracial complainants of racial discrimination in school settings raise concerns about being treated differently to white students based upon their non-white status rather than their mixed-race status. One paradigmatic case (of the several I will discuss in the chapter) is of a biracial high school student in La Plata, Missouri alleging in 2005 that she was not afforded the same educational opportunities as white students, was disciplined in a discriminatory fashion, and was racially harassed by white students. In short, the educational context is yet another civil rights area where self-identified multiracial complainants give voice to the continued relevance of a white/non-white racial binary of discrimination rather than the development of a unique mixed-race form of discrimination.

Distinctive from the context of workplace discrimination where multiracial complainants articulate their own legal complaints, the housing context is characterized by an absence of such direct complaints. The issue of multiraciality in housing discrimination is instead raised by partners in interracial marriages with multiracial children. Yet, like in the employment context discussed in Chapter 2, the content of the complaints are focused on the hostility with non-whiteness and blackness in particular (as all but one case encompassed non-black racial groups). One paradigmatic case (of the several discussed in the chapter) is of a white mother’s challenge to a 2003 eviction in Ohio based upon the landlord’s expressed prejudice against her two biracial sons of white and black ancestry. The landlord expressed concern that “two black boys” lived with the complainant and stated “I don’t want your money, I want your. … niggers out of my house.” While the mother may have described her sons’ personal racial identities as biracial, the discrimination she described was rooted in societal anti-black bias.

When mixed-race persons are removed from society because they have either been arrested or convicted of a criminal offense, the criminal justice system they enter is not devoid of racial hierarchy. In fact, there are ways in which the criminal justice system is even more explicitly racially stratified with whites as the bulk of law enforcement officers and non-whites as the disproportionate portion of arrestees and inmates. Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states are black and/or Latino, and convictions for drug offenses have been identified as the single most important cause of the explosion in incarceration rates in the United States. It is thus noteworthy to observe that mixed-race arrestees and prisoners describe their experiences of discrimination in ways that parallel the white versus non-white binary found in all other multiracial discrimination contexts.

This chapter will delve into the question of what fundamentally concerns multiracial-identity scholars about the discrimination cases despite the fact that the empirical record does not by and large show anti-mixture animus. For multiracial-identity scholars, the primary locus of multiracial discrimination is in any societal resistance to the assertion of multiracial identity. The chapter calls this “Personal Identity Equality” and discusses its dangers. This is because the exotification of racial mixture is something that is now being drawn upon to undermine the pursuit of racial equality public policies. Tracing the challenges to race-based affirmative action over the last ten years, this chapter will demonstrate the ways in which Supreme Court litigation has referred to the growth of mixed-race persons as undercutting the legitimacy of affirmative action policies. The chapter will also demonstrate the ways in which the Supreme Court affirmative action litigation references to mixed-race persons parallels the public discourse notion that the growth of multiracial identified persons signals the decline of racism. The chapter concludes by identifying how the association of multiracial identity with the decline of racism poses challenges to addressing the continuing discrimination against all non-white persons including those who are mixed-race.

This chapter discusses the historical narrative of West Mount Airy Neighbors based on the speech of West Mount Airy Neighbors Association (WMAN) executive director Laura Siena. She said that the neighborhood has thrived not only because of its long-standing dedication to intentional integration, but also because of the legacy that has been created through the memorialization of that dedication. Over the previous half century, public representations of West Mount Airy had been an integral part of the neighborhood's identity formation, serving at once to create internal community cohesion and to attract new, like-minded homeowners to the region. Moreover, these depictions solidified the community's reputation for biracial interracialism.

Returning to the various factors that cause some generations of Japanese Americans to emphasize ethnic heritage more than others, the concluding chapter reemphasizes that Japanese Americans have not experienced predictable, linear processes of progressive assimilation and loss of ethnic heritage over generations. Instead, each generation has negotiated its own ethnic positionality in response to a complex of historical and contemporary factors, which include racialization, the changing status of the ethnic homeland, and the prevalence of assimilation or multiculturalism. The concluding chapter ends with some thoughts about the future of the Japanese American community, including the experiences of biracial individuals, whose numbers will continue to increase in the coming decades.

Keith J. Volanto traces the history of one biracial man, James E. Youngblood, from his progenitors' trek from Alabama to Texas during the 1850s (including slaves and their white owners), his acquisition of land in 1894, and his conveyance of his property to his wife in 1946. Volanto delves into complicated race and family relationships that helped define light-skinned James E. Youngblood's life. Racial ambiguity (association with whites as a bound laborer and social distance from his black family) allowed Youngblood to emerge in post-Reconstruction Texas as a prosperous farmer. He secured economic security through domination of his own large hardworking family, agricultural diversification, self-sufficiency, and connections with markets, but this did not guarantee him full citizenship or equal rights. Youngblood prospered not because of deep connections within African American communities but almost despite these associations. Instead, connections to extended white kin allowed Youngblood to become the “Squire of Limestone County.”

Debra A. Reid addresses the tensions that emerged in a border area where North met South, rural met urban, and ethnic met American. She considers the ways that urban markets and ethnic diversity created different dynamics that African Americans negotiated to try to cross the color line that kept them landless in the post-Reconstruction Midwest. Farmers near the city raised wheat, cut cordwood, and raised hogs, as did many of their neighbors. Such economic diversity kept the families busy and mobile across race boundaries. They interacted at market, worried about crop and stock prices, and helped one another as need arose. Yet black landowning farmers and their white peers remained ideologically separate and sometimes geographically separate, with black farm families confined to black settlements. This undermined the potential that a biracial class alliance might have offered prior to the Great Depression.