Mixed Race Studies

‘Race’ as a scientific and organizational construct: a critique

GeoJournal
Volume 41, Number 3 (March 1997)
pages 233-243
DOI: 10.1023/A:1006881215239

Georges G. Cravins, Professor of Geography
University of Wisconsin, La Crosse

“Race” for many years has been a major construct of science and society. While its importance as such has not historically been particularly pronounced on a global scale, the emergence of its most forceful architects, the Anglophone countries, to pre-eminence since World War II has significantly extended its geographical range and added to its significance as an idea within commercialized culture as well as within social organization.

In the present paper, “race” is critically examined from the following angles: 1) its role in the behavioral and medical sciences; b) its historical origins and manifestations within the Anglophone countries, particularly the United States; and c) its emergence as a “liberal” concept and operating principle since World War II. Questions of why and how “race” arose and its continued use in science, society and culture drive both the trajectory and depth of this research. “Race” is found to be a modern construct which arose as a consequence of colonialism and slavery, and was substantially constructed in its present form and substance by England and its off-spring societies, particularly the United States. “Race” was not used as a term expressing a social idea until modern times, and had no basis in the primordial civilizations which greatly influenced modern Western societies (e.g., ancient Greece and Rome). Efforts undertaken by liberals – particularly in the United States – to “humanize” the concept of “race”since the 1960″s have been largely unsuccessful. “race” is viewed as inherently hierarchical, a fact which is evident from its historical and present role in science and society.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Many a man believes himself to be the master of others who is, no less than they, slaves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Control Social (1762)

In this paper. I shall discuss the involvement of modern Western societies with the concept of ‘race,’ focusing special attention on its developmental and functional manifestations within Anglophone societies. By Anglophone* is meant the cultures and countries of the English-speaking world, most especially the United States. Canada, Britain, South Africa and Australia. My primary aim is to render a critical perspective on ‘race’ as academic idea and social praxis, so as to argue against its continued use within the human and medical sciences as well as an element of social and political policy.

Montagu (1974. p. 3) has called ‘race’ the ‘witchcraft of our time’. ‘Race’ is not only an academic or ideological construct, but also a notion whose applied manifestations and consequences arc intellectually, socially, politically and economically significant. Indeed, it is possible to discern two distinct yet mutually-supporting channels through which ‘race’ has been historically articulated: 1) as an idea around which major academic debates have been constructed within scientific communities; and 2) as an organizational construct which has played a significant role in shaping personal world views, individual and group identities and primary social relations.

As a serious organizational construct, ‘race’ owes its existence principally to Western societies, particularly the Anglophone countries. Although educated populations in most non-Western societies today are aware of the existence of ‘races’, this awareness is generally owed to diffusion through Western influences rather than to autochthonal development. Moreover, in the extent to which it functions organizationally, ‘race’ is universal neither in its societal and spatial significance, nor in its historical origins and development. Indeed, divorced from the empirical reality of social hierarchies and class divisions, and the day-to-day conflict it engenders within certain Western societies, race is meaningless, as it has long lost its significance on purely scientific grounds.

The consideration of ‘race’ in the pages that…

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Interethnic diversity of NAT2 polymorphisms in Brazilian admixed populations

BMC Genetics
Volume 11, Number 1 (2010-10-05)
pages 87-93
DOI: 10.1186/1471-2156-11-87

Jhimmy Talbot
Laboratório de Farmacogenômica e Epidemiologia Molecular
Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz

Luiz Alexandre V. Magno
Laboratório de Farmacogenômica e Epidemiologia Molecular
Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz

Cinthia VN Santana
Laboratório de Farmacogenômica e Epidemiologia Molecular
Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz

Sandra MB Sousa
Laboratório de Farmacogenômica e Epidemiologia Molecular
Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz

Paulo RS Melo
Laboratório de Farmacogenômica e Epidemiologia Molecular
Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz

Ronan X. Correa
Laboratório de Farmacogenômica e Epidemiologia Molecular
Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz

Giuliano Di Pietro
Laboratório de Farmacogenômica e Epidemiologia Molecular
Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz

Fabrício Rios-Santos
Laboratório de Farmacogenômica e Epidemiologia Molecular
Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz

Background

N-acetyltransferase type 2 (Nat2) is a phase II drug- metabolizing enzyme that plays a key role in the bioactivation of aromatic and heterocyclic amines. Its relevance in drug metabolism and disease susceptibility remains a central theme for pharmacogenetic research, mainly because of its genetic variability among human populations. In fact, the evolutionary and ethnic-specific SNPs on the NAT2 gene remain a focus for the potential discoveries in personalized drug therapy and genetic markers of diseases. Despite the wide characterization of NAT2 SNPs frequency in established ethnic groups, little data are available for highly admixed populations. In this context, five common NAT2 SNPs (G191A, C481T, G590A, A803G and G857A) were investigated in a highly admixed population comprised of Afro-Brazilians, Whites, and Amerindians in northeastern Brazil. Thus, we sought to determine whether the distribution of NAT2 polymorphism is different among these three ethnic groups.

Results

Overall, there were no statistically significant differences in the distribution of NAT2 polymorphism when Afro-Brazilian and White groups were compared. Even the allele frequency of 191A, relatively common in African descendents, was not different between the Afro-Brazilian and White groups. However, allele and genotype frequencies of G590A were significantly higher in the Amerindian group than either in the Afro-Brazilian or White groups. Interestingly, a haplotype block between G590A and A803G was verified exclusively among Amerindians.

Conclusions

Our results indicate that ethnic admixture might contribute to a particular pattern of genetic diversity in the NAT2 gene and also offer new insights for the investigation of possible new NAT2 gene-environment effects in admixed populations.

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“SAMO^© as an Escape Clause”: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Engagement with a Commodified American Africanism

Journal of American Studies
Volume 45, Issue 2  (May 2011)
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875810001738

Laurie A. Rodrigues
Department of English
University of Rhode Island

Heir to the racist configuration of the American art exchange and the delimiting appraisals of blackness in the American mainstream media, Jean-Michel Basquiat appeared on the late 1970s New York City street art scene – then he called himself “SAMO.” Not long thereafter, Basquiat grew into one of the most influential artists of an international movement that began around 1980, marked by a return to figurative painting. Given its rough, seemingly untrained and extreme, conceptual nature, Basquiat’s high-art oeuvre might not look so sophisticated to the uninformed viewer. However, Basquiat’s work reveals a powerful poetic and visual gift, “heady enough to confound academics and hip enough to capture the attention span of the hip hop nation,” as Greg Tate has remarked. As noted by Richard Marshall, Basquiat’s aesthetic strength actually comes from his striving “to achieve a balance between the visual and intellectual attributes” of his artwork. Like Marshall, Tate, and others, I will connect with Basquiat’s unique, self-reflexively experimental visual practices of signifying and examine anew Basquiat’s active contribution to his self-alienation, as Hebdige has called it. Basquiat’s aesthetic makes of his paintings economies of accumulation, building a productive play of contingency from the mainstream’s constructions of race. This aesthetic move speaks to a need for escape from the perceived epistemic necessities of blackness. Through these economies of accumulation we see, as Tate has pointed out, Basquiat’s “intellectual obsession” with issues such as ancestry/modernity, personhood/property and originality/origins of knowledge, driven by his tireless need to problematize mainstream media’s discourses surrounding race – in other words, a commodified American Africanism.

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The Free Colored People of North Carolina

Southern Workman
March 1902

Charles W. Chesnutt

From the Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive. This site maintained by Stephanie Browner.

In our generalizations upon American history—and the American people are prone to loose generalization, especially where the Negro is concerned—it is ordinarily assumed that the entire colored race was set free as the result of the Civil War. While this is true in a broad, moral sense, there was, nevertheless, a very considerable technical exception in the case of several hundred thousand free people of color, a great many of whom were residents of the Southern States. Although the emancipation of their race brought to these a larger measure of liberty than they had previously enjoyed, it did not confer upon them personal freedom, which they possessed already. These free colored people were variously distributed, being most numerous, perhaps, in Maryland, where, in the year 1850, for example, in a state with 87,189 slaves, there were 83,942 free colored people, the white population of the State being 515,918; and perhaps least numerous in Georgia, of all the slave states, where, to a slave population of 462,198, there were only 351 free people of color, or less than three-fourths of one per cent., as against the about fifty per cent. in Maryland. Next to Maryland came Virginia, with 58,042 free colored people, North Carolina with 30,463, Louisiana with 18,647, (of whom 10,939 were in the parish of New Orleans alone), and South Carolina with 9,914. For these statistics, I have of course referred to the census reports for the years mentioned. In the year 1850, according to the same authority, there were in the state of North Carolina 553,028 white people, 288,548 slaves, and 27,463 free colored people. In 1860, the white population of the state was 631,100, slaves 331,059, free colored people, 30,463.

These figures for 1850 and 1860 show that between nine and ten per cent. of the colored population, and about three per cent. of the total population in each of those years, were free colored people, the ratio of increase during the intervening period being inconsiderable. In the decade preceding 1850 the ratio of increase had been somewhat different. From 1840 to 1850 the white population of the state had increased 14.05 per cent., the slave population 17.38 per cent., the free colored population 20.81 per cent. In the long period from 1790 to 1860, during which the total percentage of increase for the whole population of the state was 700.16, that of the whites was 750.30 per cent., that of the free colored people 720.65 per cent., and that of the slave population but 450 per cent., the total increase in free population being 747.56 per cent.

It seems altogether probable that but for the radical change in the character of slavery, following the invention of the cotton-gin and the consequent great demand for laborers upon the far Southern plantations, which turned the border states into breeding-grounds for slaves, the forces of freedom might in time have overcome those of slavery, and the institution might have died a natural death, as it already had in the Northern States, and as it subsequently did in Brazil and Cuba. To these changed industrial conditions was due, in all probability, in the decade following 1850, the stationary ratio of free colored people to slaves against the larger increase from 1840 to 1850. The gradual growth of the slave power had discouraged the manumission of slaves, had resulted in legislation curtailing the rights and privileges of free people of color, and had driven many of these to seek homes in the North and West, in communities where, if not warmly welcomed as citizens, they were at least tolerated as freemen…

…One of these curiously mixed people left his mark upon the history of the state—a bloody mark, too, for the Indian in him did not pass-ively endure the things to which the Negro strain rendered him subject. Henry Berry Lowrey was what was known as a “Scuffletown mu-latto” Scuffletown being a rambling community in Robeson county, N. C., inhabited mainly by people of this origin. His father, a prosperous farmer, was impressed, like other free Negroes, during the Civ-il War, for service upon the Confederate public works. He resisted and was shot to death with several sons who were assisting him. A younger son, Henry Berry Lowrey, swore an oath to avenge the injury, and a few years later carried it out with true Indian persistence and ferocity. During a career of murder and robbery extending over several years, in which he was aided by an organized band of desperadoes who rendezvoused in inaccessible swamps and terrorized the county, he killed every white man concerned in his father’s death, and incidentally several others who interfered with his plans, making in all a total of some thirty killings. A body of romance grew up about this swarthy Robin Hood, who, armed to the teeth, would freely walk into the towns and about the railroad stations, knowing full well that there was a price upon his head, but relying for safety upon the sympathy of the blacks and the fears of the whites. His pretty yellow wife, “Rhody,” was known as “the queen of Scuffletown.” Northern reporters came down to write him up. An astute Boston detective who penetrated, under false colors, to his stronghold, is said to have been put to death with savage tortures. A state official was once conducted, by devious paths, under Lowrey’s safeguard, to the outlaw’s camp, in order that he might see for himself how difficult it would be to dislodge them. A dime novel was founded upon his exploits. The state offered ten thousand, the Federal government, five thousand dollars for his capture, and a regiment of Federal troops was sent to subdue him, his career resembling very much that of the picturesque Italian bandit who has recently been captured after a long career of crime. Lowrey only succumbed in the end to a bullet from the hand of a treacherous comrade, and there is even yet a tradition that he escaped and made his way to a distant state. Some years ago these mixed Indians and Negroes were recognized by the North Carolina legislature as “Croatan Indians,” being supposed to have descended from a tribe of that name and the whites of the lost first white colony of Virginia. They are allowed, among other special privileges conferred by this legislation, to have separate schools of their own, being placed, in certain other respects, upon a plane somewhat above that of the Negroes and a little below that of the whites…

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The mystery, myth and marvel of the Melungeons of East Tennessee

Chattanooga Parent/North Georgia Parent
2012-01-08

Jennifer Crutchfield

Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.  Even the youngest of us knows that rhyme but there is more to the story of the conquest of the New World and it was a man’s search for clues to his mysterious illness that may have answered centuries old questions.   Answering those riddles about people and places make history and its mysteries so exciting.
 
Elvis Presley, Pocahontas, Abe Lincoln and Sequoyah may share a bloodline that still exists with many Melungeon brothers who don’t even know it.  As early as 1673 English explorer James Needham wrote about people who lived with Native American tribes, Mediterranean-looking people speaking a broken 16th century Elizabethan English in the forests of the New World.

Dedicated research, advanced genetic typing, testing and a disease or two combined in one man as he battled a mysterious ailment.  Brent Kennedy had always been told that his family was of Irish, Scottish and German heritage.  Imagine his surprise when the source of his pain was diagnosed as Erythema nodosum sarcoidosis, a disease that only strikes Mediterranean men?…

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To tackle racism, we must tackle ignorance

The Times of London
2012-02-14

John Barnes

It’s not about football, it’s about destroying modern myths of colour, race and superiority
 
In 1987 a black friend of mine went into a shop to buy a coat. He asked the assistant if they had it in black and she said no, they only had it in nigger brown. She was a lovely woman, but what would we say if that happened today?
 
If I were to ask players of my generation if they had made a racist comment in a football match, anyone honest would almost certainly say yes. No one batted an eyelid 20 years ago. Now when Alan Hansen says “coloured” rather than “black” (because black used to be an insult) or Luis Suárez says “negrito”, everyone jumps up and down to distance themselves from such remarks. They believe racism has been consigned to the past…

…The Football Association ticks all the right boxes with its policies and campaigns, the Government passes legislation, the Prime Minister gets involved because someone didn’t shake someone’s hand, people queue up to say ignorance is no excuse. But they are wrong. Ignorance is the excuse. To stop it, we have to start talking seriously about race.
 
The idea that race is about colour is relatively modern. When Aristotle spoke about races he was differentiating between uncivilised barbarians and civilised Greeks. But it was introduced by governments, backed by the Church, to validate slavery and colonialism, to justify treating some people as less equal than others. Just as Linnaeus classified plants, so people were classified by the colour of their skin. Academics tried to prove differences in skull formation to give scientific support to the idea that black people were morally and intellectually inferior.
 
But race is not a scientific reality. You could find a tribe in Africa who are genetically closer to Europeans than to an African tribe a hundred miles away. Some Saudis have whiter skin than Italians.
 
The notion of “whiteness” is an ideology of superiority. Nothing similar has ever existed in black culture. Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda do not see themselves as the same. When the Labour MP Diane Abbott talked on Twitter about “divide and rule” her claims depended on a sense of black identity that wasn’t correct…

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Free Soldiers of Color

The New York Times
2012-02-17

Donald R. Shaffer, Lecturer in History
Upper Iowa University
and blogger at Civil War Emancipation

On Feb. 15, 1862, Louisiana dissolved all its militia units as part of a military reorganization law. Among the organizations disbanded was a militia unique in the Confederacy, the 1st Louisiana Native Guards. What made the New Orleans unit special was that it was composed of African-Americans.

It was natural that the only black militia regiment in the Confederacy would be found in Louisiana, and more specifically in New Orleans, which boasted French, Spanish and African roots. The Crescent City was a cosmopolitan metropolis, by far the largest in the antebellum South, with an 1860 population of over 168,000 people (in contrast, the runner-up, Charleston, S.C., had just 40,000).

A distinctive group in the diverse city was the French-speaking gens de couleur libre, or “free people of color.” The progeny of European men and women of African descent, this group carved out a place in Louisiana society somewhere between the white population and the more purely African-descended slaves. Their position largely was as an inheritance of French and Spanish rule in Louisiana, which exhibited greater toleration for mixed-raced persons. Indeed, many gens de couleur libre owned property (some even owned slaves), worked at skilled or professional occupations, and embraced the cultural trappings of respectable society. Yet as hard as they tried to gain acceptance as a third caste, the gens de couleur libre still found many whites hostile on account of their obvious if muted African ancestry. If their position was better than that of most Southern blacks, it was by no means equal to that of Louisiana whites…

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Performing Mulata-ness: The Politics of Cultural Authenticity and Sexuality among Carioca Samba Dancers

Latin American Perspectives
Volume 39, Number 2 (March 2012)
pages 113-133
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X11430049

Natasha Pravaz, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

In Rio de Janeiro, mulatas—brown-skinned women of mixed racial descent who dance the samba in Carnival parades and in nightclubs—have become multifocal symbols eliciting associations that resonate both with colonial morality and with mestiçagem, the narrative of racial and cultural mixing as a cornerstone of nationhood. Because of these associations, a dangerous border crossing takes place whenever they dance the samba in public: they may become icons of nationhood, but this may call into question their moral standing. Women who occupy this subject position attempt to maintain a modicum of respectability as they manipulate the objectifying gaze of Brazilians and foreigners to the best of their ability. They also attempt to portray their dance skills as culturally “authentic” in the search for legitimacy and racial pride. Ultimately, samba is a stage upon which the economic needs, embodied desires, and ethnic identities of Brazilian women clash and collude with the neo-colonial dreams of tourists and cosmopolitans.

Na cidade do Rio de Janeiro, as mulatas—mulheres de ascendência racial misturada que dançam o samba nos desfiles de carnaval e nas boites—se tornaram símbolos polivalentes que evocam associações ressonantes com a moralidade colonial e com o discurso da mestiçagem (mistura racial e cultural) comofundamento da brasilidade. Por causa destas associações, elas negociam um espaço perigoso cada vez que sambam em público: podem tornar-se símbolos da nação, mas isto pode gerar dúvidas sobre a sua reputação moral. As mulheres nesta posição social tentam manter um mínimo de respeito social através da manipulação dos olhares brasileiros e estrangeiros que as reificam. Em busca de legitimidade e orgulho racial, elas procuram definir suas habilidades artísticas comoculturalmente “autênticas.” Por fim, o samba é um palco onde as necessidades econômicas, os desejos encarnados e as identidades étnicas da mulher brasileira se embatem e conspiram com os sonhos neo-coloniais de turistas e cosmopolitas.

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Is racial mismatch a problem for young ‘mixed race’ people in Britain? The findings of qualitative research

Ethnicities
Volume 12, Number 6 (December 2012)
pages 730-753
DOI: 10.1177/1468796811434912

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent, UK

Peter Aspinall, Reader in Population Health at the Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent, UK

Recent evidence concerning the racial identifications of ‘mixed race’ people suggests growing latitude in how they may identify. In this article, we examine whether mixed race young people believe that their chosen identifications are validated by others, and how they respond to others’ racial perceptions of them. While existing studies tend to assume that a disjuncture between self-identification and others’ perceptions of them is problematic, this was not necessarily the case among our respondents. While a racial mismatch between expressed and observed identifications was a common experience for these individuals, they varied considerably in terms of how they responded to such occurrences, so that they could feel: (1) misrecognized (and there were differential bases and experiences of misrecognition); (2) positive about the mismatch; or (3) indifferent to how others racially categorized them in their day-to-day interactions. Some differences in responses to such mismatch emerged among disparate types of mixed people. This study also found that we need to consider national identity, and other forms of belonging, in making sense of the diverse and often multilayered identifications and experiences of mixed race young people in Britain.

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Interracial Love Is No Societal Cure-All

truthdig
2012-02-17

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

A recently released report by the Pew Center is a belated Valentine’s Day gift to interracial families. The report indicates that intermarriage across racial and ethnic lines continues to be on the rise in the U.S. and the change is a sign that acceptance is growing. Although this is definitely cause for celebration and a reason to continue the fight for marriage equality everywhere, we should remember that a fuller and more accurate historical account of interracial sex and marriage in the U.S. should focus on social and legal constraints along with demographic patterns.

One reason why is the large-scale psychological distress experienced by all racial groups resulting from a social and legal history around interracial sex and marriage that’s been fraught with challenges. Legal history tells us that interracial sexual relations have been a troubled issue since the days of colonialism and enslavement, when many African-American women were forced to give birth to mixed race children to increase the enslaved population. This means that a large number of people who can claim interracial heritage do not because they are what multiracial activist Glenn Robinson calls “mixed by force” rather than “mixed by choice.” We must also consider the many free “mixed by choice” families of various backgrounds whose marriages were not recognized in the census records because miscegenation laws got even stricter after the demise of slavery.

Then, there were female members of interracial marriages, such as New York’s Alice Rhinelander in 1925 or California’s Marie Antoinette Monks in 1939, who were accused of fraud so that their marriages could be annulled and so that they could be disinherited. So, we must remember that before the 1967 case Loving v. Virginia ended bans on interracial marriage in all territories where it was outlawed, interracial coupling was a common practice. That means there may be some validity to the critique that today’s demographic patterns may not represent as much of an increase from historical trends as is being reported. Sadly, this is difficult to prove because there are few historical records to document the trend through its 500-or-more-year history in the U.S…

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