Mixed Race Studies

The Realities of Races

Is Race “Real”?
A web forum organized by the Social Science Research Council
2006-06-07

Jonathan Marks, Professor of Anthropology
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Introduction

Anthropologists have been studying race for over 200 years now, and contrary to what seems to be conventional wisdom (at least as articulated in Leroi’s New York Times essay), they have learned quite a bit about it.

Perhaps the most significant discovery is that human groups, however constituted, are fluid, bio-cultural units. They run a broad gamut from more-or-less biological to more-or-less cultural, both in the criteria used to define the groups and in the context or circumstances that make such groups interesting or relevant to define. Thus, a category such as “achondroplastic dwarves” or “albinos” is unified by the possession of a few key phenotypes and genetic features in spite of the overall biological and cultural heterogeneity of its members. A category such as “blondes” or “Italians” is likewise constructed around some aspects of phenotype, genes, geography, or nationality. However, one can become a blonde or an Italian, while one cannot become an achondroplast or an albino.

The Nature of Race

Race was a category devised by scholars of the 18th century to summarize an ostensibly natural set of divisions within the human species. We know when, we know by whom, and we know in what forums. Prior to that time, and even into the 19th century, human variation was always interpreted as varying in local terms, not in para-continental terms. Why did race catch on then? Who knows? It is most likely related to the political economics of the age, involving sea voyage and exploitative relations with people who had more chimeric and fluid political systems than the recognizable, centralized, precisely bordered nation-states with which the Europeans were familiar. It was, in a phrase, a concept that was good to think with.

As long as you did not think too hard…

Racialized Medicine

To understand the possibilities and problems posed by “racialized medicine” we need to distinguish crucially between risk assessment and intervention.

One often hears about Ashkenazi Jews in the context of the value of race for medicine, with elevated frequencies of real alleles for breast cancer, Tay-Sachs, familial dysautonomia, Gaucher’s, etc., not to mention imaginary alleles for intelligence. But what do Ashkenazi Jews have to do with race? If by race we mean a large natural division of people, they are neither particularly large nor particularly natural. And their genetic distinctiveness is the result of demographic processes and events on the scale of centuries, perhaps barely millennia.

All human groups, however constituted, have particular medical risks. African Americans, Ashkenazi Jews, Afrikaners and Japanese, poor people, rich people, chimney sweeps, prostitutes, choreographers, and the Pima Indians all have their particular health risks. And race is not the cause of it, in fact, race will positively obscure it…

…Of what benefit would racialized medicine then possibly be? The therapeutic intervention would have to be based on the genotype, not on any racialized identity. Otherwise it would be far more likely to kill people than to cure them…

…To conclude, ultimately the issue in “racialized medicine” is about diminishing the quality of healthcare through the dissemination of incompetent biology…

Read the entire article here.

Afro-Latino forum fosters dialogue on colorism, lived experiences

The Tufts Daily
The independent student newspaper of Tufts University
2011-12-01

Brionna Jimerson

Gabrielle Hernandez

Academic study and lived experience converged last night at the Afro−Latino Roundtable Forum, where an assembly of over 50 students, faculty and visiting speakers participated in a dialogue about the Afro−Latino experience in the United States.
 
The evening event was held in the Lincoln Filene Center. Associate Professor of Art and Art History Adriana Zavala explained that, although the event was originally planned to take place last year, last night’s event came at a good time, given increased discussion in recent months on the topics of race and ethnicity on campus.
 
“We’re incredibly happy it happened this semester, since we are in the midst of talking about activating race academically on campus,” she said.
 
The discussion took place on the heels of the release of The Afro−Latin@ Reader produced by Duke University, a collection of academic articles, poems, short stories, newspaper articles and personal testimonies about Afro−Latinos in the United States context. The Reader formed the base of last night’s discussion.
 
“The Reader is an attempt to document, at multiple levels, the history of African people of Latino descent in the United States,” Miriam Jiménez Román, executive director of the afro−latin@ forum and co−editor of the Reader, said
 
The Reader aims to look at historical racial hierarchy in the Afro−Latino community while unpacking the lived experiences of colorism — discrimination based on skin tone — according to James Jennings, contributing author of the Reader and Tufts professor of urban and environmental policy and planning…

…”The Reader is an attempt to document, at multiple levels, the history of African people of Latino descent in the United States,” Miriam Jimenez Román, executive director of the afro−latin@ forum and co−editor of the Reader, said
 
The Reader aims to look at historical racial hierarchy in the Afro−Latino community while unpacking the lived experiences of colorism — discrimination based on skin tone — according to James Jennings, contributing author of the Reader and Tufts professor of urban and environmental policy and planning…

…Román shared a real−life example of how race and colorism works within power structures, especially in the context of employment.
 
“In the Carolinas, there are 35,000 Afro−Mexicans working in processing plants,” she said. “Most people don’t understand them as Afro−Mexicans, and they’re ‘passing‘ for Puerto Ricans or Dominicans, because they’re dark enough.”…

Read the entire article here.

Fifty years after Frantz Fanon: beyond diversity

Advances in Psychiatric Treatment
Volume 18, Number 1 (January 2012)
pages 25-31
DOI: 10.1192/apt.bp.110.008847

Adedapo Sikuade

Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), a West Indian of mixed race, was a French colonial psychiatrist trained in Lyon, France, who worked mainly in colonial North Africa between 1953 and 1957. He was one of the earliest psychiatrists to suggest that the lived experience of ethnic minorities within a discriminatory colonial environment could trigger mental illness. This article focuses on Fanon’s work and contributions to psychiatry, as well as his philosophy, advocacy for social inclusion and pioneering work in culturally relevant rehabilitation. It also examines what lessons could be learnt from his life’s work as a psychiatrist and traces his influence on a generation of psychiatric researchers, suggesting how his contribution may have influenced critical thought and current views.

Read or purchaes the article here.

Black, White, Other: Racial categories are cultural constructs masquerading as biology

Natural History
Volume 103, Number 12 (December 1994)
pages 32-35

Jonathan Marks, Professor of Anthropology
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

While reading the Sunday edition of the New York Times one morning last February, my attention was drawn by an editorial inconsistency. The article I was reading was written by attorney Lani Guinier (Guinier, you may remember, had been President Clinton’s nominee to head the civil rights division at the Department of Justice in 1993. Her name was hastily withdrawn amid a blast of criticism over her views on political representation of minorities.) What had distracted me from the main point of the story was a photo caption that described Guinier as being “half-black.” In the text of the article, Guinier had described herself simply as “black”

How can a person be black and half black at the same time? In algebraic terms, this would seem to describe a situation where x = 1/2 x, to which the only solution is x = 0.

The inconsistency in the Times was trivial, but revealing. It encapsulated a longstanding problem in our use of racial categories—namely, a confusion between biological and cultural heredity. When Guinier is described as “half-black,” that is a statement of biological ancestry, for one of her two parents is black. And when Guinier describes herself as black, she is using a cultural category, according to which one can either be black or white, but not both.

Race—as the term is commonly used—is inherited, although not in a strictly biological fashion. It is passed down according to a system of folk heredity, an all-or-nothing system that is different front the quantifiable heredity of biology. But the incompatibility of the two notions of race is sometimes starkly evident—as when the state decides that racial differences are so important that interracial marriages must be regulated or outlawed entirely. Miscegenation laws in this country (which stayed on the books in many states through the 1960s) obliged the legal system to define who belonged in what category. The resulting formula stated that anyone with one-eighth or more black ancestry was a “negro.” (A similar formula, defining Jews, was promulgated by the Germans in the Nuremberg Laws of the 1930s.)

Applying such formulas led to the biological absurdity that having one black great-grandparent was sufficient to define a person as black, but having seven white great grandparents was insufficient to define a person as white. Here, race and biology are demonstrably at odds. And the problem is not semantic but conceptual, for race is presented as a category of nature…

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Negra & Beautiful: The Unique Challenges Faced By Afro-Latinas

Latina
2011-11-29

Damarys Ocaña, Freelance Journalist

The frustrating ironies of being Afro-Latina hit Yuly Marshall with stunning regularity: At work at a Miami hospital, Hispanic patients of the Cuban-born radiology technician usually assume she’s African American, asking her, “Where did you learn to speak Spanish like that?” and expressing shock—even skepticism—that she’s really Latina. Other times, fellow Latinos will disparage African Americans in front of her with phrases like, “What can you expect from negros?” and then turn around and tell her, as if paying her a compliment, “But you’re not like that. You’re one of us.”
 
When Marshall talks about race issues with African American coworkers, they often tell her she has no idea what it’s really like to be black. Yet a few years ago, when Marshall dated a lighter-skinned black Latino, his parents persuaded him to break it off because of her dark skin. “They told him to find a white girl so he could adelantar la raza,” Marshall says, using a phrase that roughly means to ‘push the race forward’ by marrying a light-skinned person and producing children lighter than yourself.

“Sometimes I think, ‘When is this going to end?’” says Marshall, 31. “But I love my skin color. God created me this way, and I’m just as good as any other person.”…

…“People are increasingly identifying as Afro-Latino,” says Miriam Jiménez Román, who edited The AfroLatin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, a collection of essays by Afro-Latino writers that recently won the American Book Award. “They’re aware now that such an identity is a possibility.”
 
If it sounds strange that some young Latinas don’t know that it’s okay to be black and Latina, it’s because of the barrage of mixed messages young Afro-Latinas get.
 
Of the estimated 11 million enslaved Africans brought to the New World from the late 1400s to the 1860s, most were taken to Latin America and the Caribbean, with only some 645,000 landing in the United States. “So when you’re talking about blackness, you’re really talking about Latin America,” Jimenez says…

…Many Latin American countries have de-emphasized race for another reason, says Arlene Davila, Ph.D., a New York University professor of anthropology. “National identity was supposed to trump racial identity,” she says, supposedly making everyone equal. Black Latinos were made to feel as if trumpeting their race made them less Cuban, for example, though in reality, the political and economic power lay with light-skinned citizens…

Read the entire article here.

“White Slaves” and the “Arrogant Mestiza”: Reconfiguring Whiteness in The Squatter and the Don and Ramona

American Literature
Volume 69, Number 4 (December, 1997)
pages 813-839

David Luis-Brown, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and English
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California

In Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) and The Squatter and the Don (1885) by Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton are indisputably political novels, representing conflicts over land, class position, and racial status in California in the 1870s. These novels represent Anglos, Californios, and Indians as struggling for social position following the U.S. annexation of one-half of Mexico as a result of the Mexican War of 1846-1848. However, although most critics view these texts as political, their insufficient historicization of narrative form has led them to misconstrue as antagonistic the relationship between form and reform in these novels. Despite the canon-expanding feminist criticism of Lauren Berlant, Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins, and others, which has allowed us to read as politically engaged the previously marginalized genres of melodrama and romance, Michael Dorris associates melodrama in Ramona with improbable events, simplistic characterization, and chaste love; Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita split Squatter into “two tracks, one historical and one romantic.” Sánchez and Pita view the romance as a love story inadequate to Squatter’s historical content—conflicts over racial caste. According to the logic of such constricting definitions of romance, a politically engaged, protofeminist nineteenth-century sentimental text would be a contradiction in terms, a clearly untenable conclusion given recent feminist scholarship.

Feminist scholarship on sentimentalism has allowed us to grasp the point of view expressed by José Martí, an early admirer of Ramona. In the prologue to his 1888 translation of Ramona, Martí argues that Ramona’s sentimental qualities constitute its political strength…

Purchase the article here.

Marley class inspires UM students

South Florida Times
2009-09-08

Juliana Accioly

CORAL GABLES — On a recent weekday, students at the University of Miami watched a screen in front of a blackboard ignite with lively performances of music legend Bob Marley.

Then, suddenly, those images were juxtaposed with graphic footage of segregation and violence.

When it comes to English lectures, the ones given by Professor Rachel Panton are far from routine.

Panton’s course, titled “Mix Up, Mix Up: Reviewing Bob Marley as the Militant Mulatto” has been a recurring hit among UM undergraduates.  Since 2006, more than 400 students have enrolled in the class.  They examine Marley’s life and music through his social and political times, and his contribution to the international recognition of reggae and Rastafari as empowering black power movements.

“There is all this iconography of Bob Marley just floating out there,” Panton told the South Florida Times. “This course analyzes the context in which he became a luminary.”

The class also explores the singer’s mixed heritage. He was born the son of a Jamaican black mother and an English white father at a time when intermixing of races was not rare, but still not welcome.

Marley chose to identify himself as black.

“Marley is an interesting figure because most biracial people don’t see the dichotomy ‘either or,’ but think of themselves as ‘both and,’” said Panton, alluding to her own black-white heritage…

Read the entire article here.

“The Case Was Very Black against” Her: Pauline Hopkins and the Politics of Racial Ambiguity at the “Colored American Magazine”

American Periodicals
Volume 16, Number 1 (2006)
pages 52-73

Sigrid Anderson Cordell, Librarian for History, American Literature, and American Culture
University of Michigan

When Pauline Hopkins’s short story. “Talma Gordon,” appeared in the October 1900 issue of the Colored American Magazine, it ran opposite a photograph of a young smiling African-American boy balancing an American flag across one arm with the other arm raised in a salute (Figure 1). By linking the black child and the American flag, this picture, entitled “The Young Colored American.” attempts to align U.S. interests with those of the black community and reflects the magazine’s aim to recover the role of African Americans in American history. The figure of the child evokes both a sense of optimism and an historical link to America’s infancy. Likewise, the photograph of the  “Young Colored American” echoes the revisionist themes of “Talma Gordon.” a story which calls into question the hagiography of the American elite and instead celebrates the figure of a mixed-race woman who has been scorned by her white father, a scion of New England society. In this story. Hopkins reflects the Colored American Magazine’s mission to “perpetuat[e] … a history of the negro race” and re-write the triumphal narratives of traditional American history. As I will argue, however, the interweaving of gender and racial politics in the narrative structure of this story both reflects and complicates the politics of the journal itself.

Throughout her literary career. Pauline Hopkins (1859-1930) deliberately incorporated politics into her work and claimed a voice for African Americans, particularly African-American women. Rather than publishing in the mainstream literary journals such as Harper’s and the Atlantic that dominated the American cultural scene at the turn of the twentieth century, Hopkins wrote for periodicals specifically targeted to the black community, such as the Colored American Magazine. What sets her fiction and journalism apart from that of her female contemporaries—both black and white—is her blunt depiction…

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Wikipedia Gets $20M in Annual Fundraising Drive

The Associated Press
2012-01-03

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Wikipedia has raised $20 million in its annual plea for donations to help expand and improve the Internet’s leading encyclopedia.

More than 1 million people contributed the money during a fundraising drive that concluded Sunday. The amount pledged to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit group that oversees the volunteer-driven Wikipedia, represents a 33 percent increase from the $15 million donated during the previous year’s fundraising campaign…

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Agents of Change: Mixed-Race Households and the Dynamics of Neighborhood Segregation in the United States

Annals of the Association of American Geographers
Available online: 2011-12-08
DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2011.627057

Mark Ellis, Professor of Geography
University of Washington

Steven R. Holloway, Professor of Geography
University of Georgia

Richard Wright, Professor of Geography
Dartmouth College

Christopher S. Fowler Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow in Applied Spatial Statistics
Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
University of Washington

This article explores the effects of mixed-race household formation on trends in neighborhood-scale racial segregation. Census data show that these effects are nontrivial in relation to the magnitude of decadal changes in residential segregation. An agent-based model illustrates the potential long-run impacts of rising numbers of mixed-race households on measures of neighborhood-scale segregation. It reveals that high rates of mixed-race household formation will reduce residential segregation considerably. This occurs even when preferences for own-group neighbors are high enough to maintain racial separation in residential space in a Schelling-type model. We uncover a disturbing trend, however; levels of neighborhood-scale segregation of single-race households can remain persistently high even while a growing number of mixed-race households drives down the overall rate of residential segregation. Thus, the article’s main conclusion is that parsing neighborhood segregation levels by household type—single versus mixed race—is essential to interpret correctly trends in the spatial separation of racial groups, especially when the fraction of households that are mixed race is dynamic. More broadly, the article illustrates the importance of household-scale processes for urban outcomes and joins debates in geography about interscalar relationships.

Read or purchase the article here.