Mixed Race Studies

Obama has 44 cousins in the Senate. Now can’t we all just get along?

The Guardian
204-08-07

A J Jacobs

Forget the president’s Tea Party cousin or Washington animosity. My research shows that we’re all part of one big family. A dysfunctional one, but still – come on, cousins!

It’s been a tough week for the Obama family.

On Tuesday night, Barack Obama’s second cousin – a radiologist named Milton Wolf – lost the closer-than-expected Republican primary for US Senate in Kansas. Wolf and Obama share a relatively recent ancestor, a 19th century farm laborer named Thomas McCurry. Barack leaned left, Milton leaned right – he was a Tea Party candidate who believed his second cousin was “destroying America”. But still, they are, officially, kin.

So now Barack Obama is deprived of having a cousin in the US Senate.

Or is he?…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed race kids a new phenomenon in the Netherlands? We think not.

Africa Is a Country
2014-06-11

Chandra Frank

Mieke Weisemann

This week cultural centre de Balie in Amsterdam will be hosting an event titled ‘LovingDay.nl: (In)visibly Mixed’ on “mixed race” families and relationships (BTW, the Netherlands uncritically accepts this terminology, along with the assumption that certain people are “pure” and others are “mixed”, thereby reifying 19th century race theories). Loving Day takes the end of anti-miscegenation laws in America in 1967 as its starting point to celebrate the growing number of mixed couples and children in the Netherlands. Mixed children are a growing phenomenon in the Netherlands (up from 30% to 37% from 2007 in Amsterdam) but oddly, the program claims, this growth is not visible in Dutch policy or imaging of the Dutch identity.

Being designated as “mixed race” ourselves, we don’t deny that there’s a lot to talk about, but we were mildly surprised to see that this program completely ignores the historical and socio-economical context of mixed race identities within Dutch colonial history. We say mildly, because it wouldn’t be the first time the Dutch conveniently forgot about their colonial adventures. There were clear strategies to instill and secure Dutch “purity” and a cultural sense of belonging in both South Africa and Indonesia. But of course, there were those “Others” that produced in both former colonies. Indos (people of mixed Indonesian European descent) have existed within the former Dutch-East Indies (and thus the Netherlands) for over 300 years, and the same can be said about the Coloured community in South Africa. Let’s not forget that there were and has been strong Dutch policy surrounding and creating these “mixed” identities beginning with the colonial period and existing well into the present…

Read the entire article here.

The problem with sub-Saharan Africa and DNA analysis tools

Genealogy Adventures
2014-07-08

Brian Sheffey

This is the first post in a series that covers issues I’ve experienced with reporting of sub-Saharan African results in DNA analysis. This series of posts will have a particular emphasis on DNA testing for African Americans. Over the next series of posts, I’ll be looking at the strengths and weaknesses of DNA admixture analysis tools – with tips for things to look out for.

I recently had the opportunity to upload my Ancestry.com DNA results to Gedmatch.com. And what a revelatory experience Gedmatch.com has been. To be honest, this DNA analysis service is proving fascinaing. There is just so much to explore and comprehend. I have been doing a LOT of research in order to get my head around all of the information Gedmatch has provided.

My experience with Gedmatch has better enabled me to finely tune a quibble I’ve had with my Ancestry.com results. Don’t get me wrong, Ancestry’s DNA test has done exactly what I wanted it to – put me in touch with distant (and not so distant) relations from my various family lines. It’s allowed me to find my 4x great Sheffey grandfather. And it put me on the right track towards identifying my 4 x Roane great-grandfather.

My niggle with Ancestry’s results has to do with my admixtures and the countries it genetically tied me to. These results were always going to be general in nature. Ancestry.com states as much. The quibble I had has to do with Africa. And my recent experience with Gedmatch has allowed me to better understand the nature of my quibble.

DNA test results are based on data sets. These data sets are compiled by DNA test result databases. A database can only be as precise as the data that’s put into it. In this case, precision DNA results rely on large numbers of a population 1) having a DNA test and 2) those results being added to a data set which is imported into a database. For instance, a data set with 200,000 DNA results from the Baltic region of Eastern Europe will provide more precise insights than a data set of 50,000 individuals from the same region. It also depends on how each individual is classified and sub-classified (i.e. Bulgarian, Caucasian Bulgarian, Central Asian Bulgarian, Altaic Bulgarian, etc).

This brings me to my quibble about Africa. The way African DNA test results are classified, you would thing Africa was one large country populated by a homogenous people. This simply is not the case. The continental African population is arguably one of the most heterogenous populations. The admixture analysis tools and reports I’ve used on Ancestry.com and Gedmatch simply don’t reflect this diversity of African peoples…

Read the entire article here.

A surprising number of people change their race and ethnicity from one Census to the next

The Washington Post
2014-08-06

Emily Badger, Reporter

On Census forms, the option to check a box for racial or ethnic identity presupposes that there’s an unambiguous answer: white, black, American Indian, Hispanic, etc. But identity is a fluid thing. And, it turns out, about eight percent of us change our answers to the Census questions pictured at right from one decade to the next.

Researchers at the Census Bureau and the University of Minnesota have calculated this with the most comprehensive survey yet of our shifting sense of race and ethnicity, in a new working paper based on the matched responses of 162 million Americans captured in the 2000 and 2010 censuses (a preview of their findings circulated earlier this spring is here; here is the full paper)…

Read the entire article here.

“Where a Man is a Man”?: Ancestral Possibilities in Charles Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand, F.M.C.

African American Review
Volume 46, Numbers 2-3, Summer/Fall 2013
pages 397-411
DOI: 10.1353/afa.2013.0048

Susan M. Marren, Associate Professor
University of Arkansas

This essay reads Charles Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand, F.M.C. not as a historical romance (as Chesnutt’s contemporaneous publishers deemed it) but rather as a peculiarly modernist passing novel. It argues that the novel’s hybrid possibilities stage a confrontation between an eighteenth-century standard of impartial “right reason” and the racially pluralistic world of nineteenth-century New Orleans.

Your words don’t change who I am

The Race Card Project (by Michele Norris)
2014-08-05

Blake Coffey
Van Nuys, California

In a world where being mixed is supposed to be looked at as beautiful, it’s not as easy when you are. People automatically assume that all mixed people are supposed to look mixed just like they assume all Mexicans are brown. I’m born to a mixed black/white father who looks full black and society deems him so, and a white mother. I’ve looked for people that are the same thing or mixed but not looked at as mixed but I’ve always felt left out. I don’t look at people as a certain race but they sure look at me like I am. I’m judged and denied of who I am because genetics determined that I wouldn’t come out looking mixed. Although I’ve faced racism from every race.

Today is the day when I fully accept myself for who I am. I’m not denying myself or anyone else of who I truly am…

Read the entire essay here.

Afro-Chinese marriages boom in Guangzhou: but will it be ’til death do us part’?

South China Morning Post Magazine
South China Morning Post
Hong Kong, China
2014-06-01

Jenni Marsh, Assistant Editor

Jennifer Tsang and Eman Okonkwo at their wedding in Guangzhou in April. Photo: Jenni Marsh

Guangzhou is witnessing many Afro-Chinese marriages, but the mainland’s lack of citizenship rights for husbands and a crackdown on foreign visas means families live in fear of being torn apart, writes Jenni Marsh

Eman Okonkwo’s foot-tapping at the altar is not a sign of nerves. The groom’s palms aren’t sweaty, there are no pre-wedding jitters and certainly no second thoughts. Today he is realising a dream imagined by countless African merchants in Guangzhou: he is marrying a Chinese bride.

Seven days earlier, Jennifer Tsang’s family was oblivious to their daughter’s romance. Like many local women dating African men, the curvaceous trader from Foshan, who is in her late 20s – that dreaded “leftover woman” age – had feared her parents would be racially prejudiced.

Today, though – having tentatively given their blessing – they snuck into the underground Royal Victory Church, in Guangzhou, looking over their shoulders for police as they entered the downtown tower block. Non-state-sanctioned religious events like this are illegal on the mainland.

Okonkwo, 42, doesn’t have a single relative at the rambunctious Pentecostal ceremony, but is nevertheless delighted.

“Today is so special,” beams the Nigerian, “because I have married a Chinese girl. And that makes me half-African, half-Chinese.”

In Guangzhou, weddings like this take place every day. There are no official figures on Afro-Chinese marriages but visit any trading warehouse in the city and you will see scores of mixed-race couples running wholesale shops, their coffee-coloured, hair-braided children racing through the corridors…

Guinean trader Cellou with his wife, Cherry, and their children. Photo: Robin Fall

…Chinese prejudice against Africans is normally based on three aspects: traditional aesthetic values, an ignorance of African culture and society, and the language barrier.

Furthermore, until the 1970s, foreigners were not permitted to live in the mainland, let alone marry a Chinese. When a child is born, the parents must register its ethnicity with the authorities: of the 56 boxes they can tick, “mixed-race” is not an option.

But there are factors other than racism that might lead a family to reject a mixed marriage.

Linessa Lin Dan, a PhD student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong researching Afro-Chinese relations in Guangzhou, says many African men who propose already have wives in their home countries – Muslims are permitted by their religion to take multiple spouses. Furthermore, Lin has heard tales of husbands returning to Nigeria on a business trip, leaving a mobile-phone number that doesn’t connect and disappearing.

“The Chinese wife is left with their children, and shamed for marrying a hei gui [black ghost],” says Lin…

Read the entire article here.

American Race and Charismatic License: Finding Martín de Porres in Obama

Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Volume 97, Number 3, 2014
pages 376-384
DOI: 10.1353/sij.2014.0018

Chris Garces, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Problematizing the saintly reputation of seventeenth-century Dominican servant Martín de Porres, this article explores a little-known, late medieval Spanish form of agency, or licencia, with which a mulato colonial monastic could influence his Spanish Creole superiors, perform miracles, and gain a widespread reputation for superhuman piety. I ask: under what specific conditions could licencia have been wielded by nonwhite Christian subjects to manipulate the shifting moral orders of early modern Spanish Creole hegemony? I also explore how the politicization of racialized charisma continues to depend on a logic of licencia. Tracking resonances between the Spanish Creole veneration of a mulato figure in seventeenth-century Peru with the recent election of a “mixed race” president in the United States, this article reads together theology and politics to demonstrate the fraught beauty, or legal “beatification,” of racialized charisma.

‘The concept of race is a slippery slope’: Ullenhag

The Local: Sweden’s News in English
2014-08-01

Solveig Rundquist

Integration Minister Erik Ullenhag tells The Local why he plans to remove the term “race” from all Swedish law, how he responds to his critics, and why Sweden must steer clear of xenophobia.

The decision has been more than 20 years in the making, Ullenhag said, and has been discussed extensively on both parliamentary and international levels.

“I think we should have done it before,” Ullenhag told The Local. “But at least we’re doing it now.”

The suggestion received unanimous support from the governing alliance of Sweden. On Thursday an investigation was launched into how best to implement the decision…

…In 1999 researchers with the Human Genome Project (HGP) determined that the idea of race has no roots in genetics.

“The concept of race disappeared from scientific discourse more than a decade ago,” Juha Kere, Professor of Molecular Genetics at Karolinska Institute, confirmed for The Local on Friday. “It is the broadly accepted conclusion based on worldwide genetic studies that the concept is unfounded.”

Professors across the globe have come to the same conclusion, with American anthropologist Loring Brace writing that, while there are genetic differences across the world, there is no visible line, no clear-cut categories.

“As a rule, the boy marries the girl next door throughout the whole world, but next door goes on without stop from one region to another.”

Kere explained that, while there are differences between populations, the genetic variation within each population is greater than the variation between different populations…

…But while there may be scientific consensus that “race” is indeed an outdated concept, there are those who say that the term still fills a vital function.

The National Afro-Swedish Association (Afrosvensarnas Riksförbund, ASR) has been particularly critical.

“Race may be a social construct, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a reality,” ASR spokesman Kitwamba Sabuni told The Local. “For us, this is just trying to take away the possibility to even talk about it. It’s critical.”

Zakarias Zouhir, chairman of the ASR, agreed.

“This path worries me,” Zouhir told Sveriges Television on Thursday. “It’s just sweeping it under the blue and yellow rug and pretending there is no racism in society.”…

Read the entire article here.

‘Everything I Never Told You’ Exposed In Biracial Family’s Loss

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2014-06-28

Arun Rath
All Things Considered

It’s May, 1977, in small-town Ohio, and the Lee family is sitting down at breakfast. James is Chinese-American and Marilyn is white, and they have three children — two girls and a boy. But on this day, their middle child Lydia, who is also their favorite, is nowhere to be found.

That’s how Celeste Ng’s new novel, Everything I Never Told You, begins.

It’s soon discovered that Lydia has drowned in a nearby lake, in what looks like a suicide. The incident pulls the family into an emotional vortex and reveals deep cracks in their relationships with each other.

This all takes place an era when interracial marriages are only recently legal (the Supreme Court struck down interracial marriage bans in 1967). Lydia’s death forces members of the Lee family to confront their individual insecurities and grapple with their identity as a biracial family in the Midwest.

But would it be very different for them today? Ng answered that question for NPR’s Arun Rath, host of All Things Considered.

Ng, who is a first-generation Asian-American Midwesterner, also spoke about her own experiences growing up and about the state of the American conversation on race…

Read the article here. Listen to the interview here. Download the interview here.