Mixed Race Studies

DNA Ancestry Tests: Simultaneously Powerful and Limited

KQED QUEST
KQED: Public Media for Northern California
2013-04-08

Dr. Barry Starr, Geneticist-in-Residence
Tech Museum of Innovation, San Jose, California

Using a common DNA ancestry test, President Obama would be 100% Caucasian.

Sometimes genetic tests aren’t as useful as you think they will be. For example, if President Obama were to take a common ancestry DNA test, it would almost certainly come back as 100% Caucasian. Useful, huh?

This sort of test, a mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) test, can look into the deep past but it can only see mom’s side of the family. And it isn’t even really that powerful. It not only ignores dad’s side of the family, but in reality it can only see a sliver of mom’s as well…

…The other kind of test, the Y chromosome test, can go as far back along the paternal line as the mtDNA test can along the maternal line but it suffers from the same problems. In fact, a surprising number (35%?) of African-American men actually have Caucasian Y chromosomes (well, given plantation life, maybe not so surprising). None of these men will learn anything about their African heritage with this test.

So the bottom line is don’t put too much faith into DNA testing alone. It is kind of fun to trace back your history this way but you are really only following one strand of your ancestral web back in time. The rest of the web is invisible to DNA testing…

Read the entire article here.

W.Va. historian to talk on pre-Civil War slave economy

The Charleston Gazette
Charleston, West Virginia
2013-04-09

Douglas Imbrogno

CHARLESTON, W.Va.—Ending slavery was a moral question that haunted early American history, but it was one inextricably tangled up in economics.

While West Virginia was a state born in 1863 out of the tumult over slavery and the political disputes that erupted in the Civil War, slavery long had a toehold in the Kanawha Valley. Consider the salt mining industry in this area, a slave-powered enterprise from the 1820s onward, said Greg Carroll.

“Here in the Kanawha Valley, we had upwards of 2,000 slaves working in the salt industry,” said Carroll, a retired historian with the state’s Archives and History Section.

Yet slaves were not just a subjugated labor force, but a commodity often even more valuable to their owners as property chips to be sold into other slave economies.

“Here in West Virginia, for instance, before the Civil War, you can see in the state archives newspapers advertising slaves to be sold down the river. These slaves were being sold into the cotton and sugar-producing areas of mainly Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas,” Carroll said.

Before he retired last October, Carroll was a Culture and History staff historian for 23 years, mostly focusing on American Indians, black Americans and Civil War history. He’ll combine a couple of those specialties in the free talk “Slavery in Virginia: 1619-1860,” at 6 p.m. Thursday in the Archives and History Library in the Culture Center.

He’ll describe the different slave economies across North and South America and the missed opportunities for ending slavery in the lead-up to the Civil War.

 Consider, for instance, the slaves who worked Caribbean sugar plantations or in the rice fields of the Carolinas. Yellow fever, malaria and other hazards kept slave owners away from their plantations, Carroll said.

Yet in the tobacco plantations and farms of Virginia and farther south, slave owners lived closely with their slaves—sometimes very closely.

“That also led to a paternalism that we see in the way Virginia slave owners referred to their slaves as ‘their people.’ Slaves became very valuable as the tobacco crop became valuable,” he said.

The result was a stronger slave and family culture, one that was not as Afrocentric as Caribbean and South American slave societies with their constant infusions of new slaves, Carroll said. Yet the proximity of owner to slave had other implications.

“White slave owners took sexual advantage of their female slaves,” Carroll said. “That produced a very mixed-race people that we see in the Virginia and North Carolina and Maryland slave cultures—a lot of mixed-race people.”…

Read the entire article here.

‘Mixed Kids Are the Cutest’ Isn’t Cute?

The Root
2013-04-08

Jenée Desmond-Harris, Staff Writer

“I’m a Caucasian woman with a biracial child (her father is black). I live in a predominantly white community. Why is it that whenever people discover that I have a ‘mixed’ child, they always say things like, ‘Oh, he/she must be so cute/gorgeous/adorable, those kids are always the best looking. You are so lucky.’

I know they mean well, but it seems off to me, and maybe racist. Do they mean compared to ‘real’ black children? When a German and Italian or an Asian and Jewish person have a child, black people don’t say, ‘Mixed children like yours are always the best looking.’ (Plus, it’s not true—not all black-white biracial kids are the ‘best looking.’)

Am I being overly sensitive by feeling there’s something off about these comments? If not, what’s the best way to respond?”

I chose this question for the first installment of Race Manners, The Root’s new advice column on racial etiquette and ethics, because it hits close to home. Like your daughter, I’m biracial. Like you, my white mother has developed an acute sensitivity to the subtle ways prejudice and bigotry pop up in daily life. I should know. She calls me to file what I’ve deemed her “racism reports.”

And let’s be clear. Americans of all races say bizarre things to and about mixed people, who can inspire some of the most revealing remarks about our black-white baggage. Just think of the public debates about how MSNBC’s Karen Finney, and even President Obama, should be allowed to identify…

…As Marcia Dawkins, the author of Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity, told me, “The myth that mixed-race offspring are somehow better than nonmixed offspring is an example of ‘hybrid vigor,’ an evolutionary theory which states that the progeny of diverse varieties within a species tend to exhibit better physical and psychological characteristics than either one or both of the parents.”

And just take a wild guess how this idea has popped up for black people. You got it: In order to demean and oppress African Americans, thought leaders throughout history, including the likes of Thomas Jefferson, have said that black-white mixed offspring are better, more attractive, smarter, etc., than “real” blacks and not as good or attractive or smart as “real” whites, Dawkins explains….

Read the entire article here.

Why isn’t multiculturalism accepted in society nowadays?

The Voice
London, England
2013-01-25

Kamran Assadi

Kamran Assadi on why diverse cultural identities in Britain should be embraced not questioned

I BELIEVE society and the environment you live in can alter your opinions and the way you view life.

Stereotypes can alter our thinking towards different religions, sexualities and ethnicities amongst other things. I think it is fair to say we’ve all been there and I can only talk about this from my personal experience.

I am a young British mixed-race father of Montserratian and Iranian heritage. My parents were of mixed religions (Christian and Muslim) and they taught me about both without any prejudice being passed onto me.

I’m Iranian so people associate me with terrorism. I’m also Caribbean so I get all the Black stereotypes as well. I was a victim of racial profiling whilst travelling to New York. They looked at my full Iranian name and my facial hair, and then took me for questioning in several rooms searching me for signs of terrorism.

Although I’m a mixed-race father, some people categorise me as black – putting me under the negative thumbprint of being a deadbeat absent dad which isn’t necessarily true. Why subject me to such extreme measures? Why should I be judged by a country’s politics I don’t believe and am not a part of? What does race have to do with being a good dad? My stereotypes are thrust into me like a sharp pronged fork.

Even I’ve succumbed to society’s notions of preconceived prejudices. As I looked Black and never wanted to complicate things with people who didn’t understand my culture, I just called myself Black. I even changed the pronunciation of my Iranian name to a more British phonetic so people could say it properly. I wrote a poem ‘The Black Boy’ that harked over these issues and overcoming them by being myself and being a positive influence. However as I didn’t know my Iranian family, all I could truly talk about was my Caribbean identity…

Read the entire article here.

Virgil Westdale: Farm Boy, Pilot, Soldier, Inventor, Author, and Gentleman

Japanese American National Museum
Stories
2010-09-09

Esther Newman

Virgil Westdale’s exceptional life story might never have been published had he not attended a Halloween dance. Unsure of what to wear, the World War II veteran donned his Army uniform of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, nearly sixty years after issue and still a perfect fit. On the dance floor, he met Stephanie Gerdes, who remarked, “it’s not really a costume, is it?” After many more questions spanning two years, the two collaborated on Westdale’s autobiography, Blue Skies and Thunder: Farm Boy, Pilot, Inventor, TSA Officer, and WWII Soldier of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Westdale has earned accolades in every occupation listed in the book’s lengthy subtitle through determination, talent and a strong work ethic. But his career path took an unforeseen turn because of his heritage. Westdale (born Nishimura) is half Japanese.

Virgil Westdale was born in 1918 on a farm in Indiana, the fourth of five children in the Nishimura family. Virgil’s father emigrated from Japan as a 16 year-old orphan, arriving first in Hawaii, moving on to San Francisco in 1906 and then to Denver, where he met and married his American wife of English and German heritage. After the birth of their first daughter, the family moved in with Virgil’s maternal grandparents in Toledo, Ohio and then to their grandmother’s 40-acre farm in Indiana. A good harvest of peppermint brought in enough income for the Nishimura’s down payment on a farm of their own in Michigan when Virgil was nine years old. It wasn’t an easy life and the family did without running water and electricity until long after the children were grown…

Read the entire article here.

Performing ‘Race’ and Challenging Racism

One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for her Father’s Racial Approval
Blog Updates
2013-04-08

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Playwright, Producer, Actress, Educator

It is an exciting time to be an actor, when the notion of ‘performance’ is taking on new meanings and has the potential to change the way we view the art form. Traditional definitions of ‘performance’ include the act of staging or presenting a play; a rendering of a dramatic role. Now scholar/activists like Judith Butler are exploring a new definition of performance, or ‘performativity’—looking at how we use language and behavior to construct identity.

In my solo show, One Drop of Love, I get to meld these two understandings of performance. I am an actor who portrays several different characters: my Jamaican/Pan-Africanist father, my Blackfeet–Cherokee-Danish mother, candy and fruit vendors from East and West Africa, Census Workers from the 1790s to the present, racist cops from Cambridge, MA and many others. At the same time, in taking on these roles, I explore the construction of  ‘racial’ identity, and how these identities are created through speech and acts—and not through biology…

Read the entire article here.

A White Face With A Forgotten African Family

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2012-11-24

Jacki Lyden, Host

Growing up blond-haired and blue-eyed in Southern California, Joe Mozingo always thought his family name was Italian.

But as an adult, Mozingo became skeptical of that theory when friends and co-workers began to ask him about his unusual-sounding last name.

The journey to discover the truth about the Mozingo name took him from the libraries of Los Angeles to the courthouses and plantations of Virginia and, finally, to Africa.

Mozingo spoke with weekends on All Thing Considered guest host Jacki Lyden about his first book, The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family, which chronicles that journey…

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

The Growing Need for a National Eugenic Program

Bios
Volume 7, Number 3 (October, 1936)
pages 176-187

Sue D. Comer
Mississippi Stale College for Women

This paper received second award in the 1936 undergraduate competition.

There has been much discussion during the past half century concerning Eugenics. This discussion has not been limited to scientists but has interested laymen as well who have looked upon the subject as something mysterious and new. As a matter of fact, however, Eugenics is not new. The old saying “There’s nothing new under the sun” holds true again. In very early times a sort of Eugenics program was carried out by nature herself; there was natural selection or to put it in another way the survival of the fittest. In ancient Sparta there was a rather ruthless program in which all the defective children were abandoned because there was no place for them in society. Thus on up through the years men have given the subject of human betterment consideration. “As early as the first half of the sixth century B.C. the Greek poet, Theognis of Megara, wrote: ‘We look for rams and asses and stallions of good stock, and one believes that good will come of good: yet a good man minds not to wed an evil daughter of an evil sire, if he but give her much wealth. . . . Wealth confounds our stock. Marvel not that the stock of our fold is tarnished, for the good is mingled with the base.’ ” A century later Plato set forth a eugenic plan in which the best were to mate the best and the worst, the worst. The best were to be encouraged in having large families; the worst, small families or none at all, and the children of the unfit were to be done away with. At about this same time, Aristotle had a program for eugenics which was based on the belief that the state should have the right of intervention in the interest of reproductive selection.

“For nearly two thousand years after this, conscious eugenic ideals were largely ignored. Constant war reversed natural selection, as it is doing today, by killing off the physically fit and leaving the relatively unfit to reproduce the race, while monasticism and the enforced celibacy of the priesthood performed a similar office for many of the mentally superior, attracting them to a career in which they could leave no posterity. At the beginning of the last century a germ of modern eugenics is visible in Malthus famous essay on population, in which he directed attention to the importance of the birthrate for human welfare, since this essay led Darwin and Wallace to enunciate the theory of natural selection, and to point out clearly the effects of artificial selection. It is really on Darwin’s work that the modern science of eugenics is based, and it owes its beginning to Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton.”…

…We have considered the inbreeding of the human race; now let us turn to the question of outbreeding.

The outbreeding of the human race may result happily or unhappily depending upon elements entering in the cross from either side. There is undoubtedly a difference of temperament among the races and, though this difference may seem small, it is to this that a nation may owe its success or failure. Between races of such great diversity as European and Japanese there is hardly likely to result a happy blend. “The genes now carried by each group are the foundations of at least moderately successful and distinct racial types, and it is hardly likely that a mixture of genes would produce an equally coherent and satisfactory type.” There are records of extremely successful crosses of such nature but these should not lead us to expect such lucky accidents each time. If, however, the races to be blended are of the same fundamental type, there should be no hesitancy concerning the success of the marriage on the racial score.

Professor Thorndike has made measurements in comparing the white and colored races and finds the difference to be from five to ten per cent lower intellect in the Negroes. It is evident from this information that interbreeding with the colored race will tend to lower the intellect of the population as a whole. Such a cross is undesirable, therefore, not only from a social view which everyone, particularly those in the South, readily sees but also from the biological or eugenic standpoint…

…One of the greatest dysgenic forces of both the past and the present is war. In the time of conflict the young and the most able men both physically and mentally are used in the army. By far the greater per cent of these men are either killed or seriously disabled. This leaves the weaklings to marry and bring forth the next generation. Not only is war a menace but also the preparation for war. Army and naval academies and the army service as well are factors in cutting down on the birth rate of the upper middle classes for the men, if they marry at all, marry rather late in life. War must be abolished…

Backing Barack Because He’s Black: Racially Motivated Voting in the 2008 Election

Social Science Quarterly
Volume 92, Issue 2, June 2011
pages 423–446
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6237.2011.00776.x

Ray Block Jr., Assistant Professor of Political Science/Public Administration
University of Wisconsin, La Crosse

Read or purchase the article here.

Loving in Virginia: A teacher’s work brings new life to an old case.

University of Virginia College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
Newsletter
February 2013

Caroline County, Virginia, 1958. Newlyweds Richard and Mildred Loving wake at 2 a.m. to the sound of their front door being kicked in. Before they are out of bed, the sheriff and two deputies place them under arrest. Their crime: Marriage. Richard, a white man, and Mildred, a black and American Indian woman, had violated Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, which prohibited interracial marriage. They plead guilty, are convicted on felony charges, and are banished from Virginia. The Lovings spend the next nine years trying to get home.

Most students in historian Grace Hale’s Southern History seminars find it difficult to believe that the Loving’s story is factual, and perhaps even more extraordinary that such events occurred only 55 years ago. Yet in June of 1958, 24 states, including Virginia, prohibited interracial marriage. With Hale they talk through the Voting Rights Act of 1964[5] and the Civil Rights Act of 1965[4]. But these topics, important in their own right, capture only a portion of the important history she teaches. For Hale, the history comes more alive through the story of the Lovings and their nine-year battle that resulted in the 1967 Supreme Court Decision that invalidated all state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Though she has taught the case for some time, only recently has it carried more weight to her. Just last year, HBO premiered The Loving Story, a documentary that tells the Loving’s dramatic tale, for which Hale served as an historical advisor…

Read the entire article here.