Mixed Race Studies

Biological Conceptions of Race and the Motivation to Cross Racial Boundaries

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Volume 94, Number 6 (June 2008)
pages 1033–1047
DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.94.6.1033

Melissa J. Williams, Assistant Professor in Organization & Management
Goizueta Business School
Emory University

Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Associate Professor of Psychology
Stanford University

The present studies demonstrate that conceiving of racial group membership as biologically determined increases acceptance of racial inequities (Studies 1 and 2) and cools interest in interacting with racial outgroup members (Studies 3–5). These effects were generally independent of racial prejudice. It is argued that when race is cast as a biological marker of individuals, people perceive racial outgroup members as unrelated to the self and therefore unworthy of attention and affiliation. Biological conceptions of race therefore provide justification for a racially inequitable status quo and for the continued social marginalization of historically disadvantaged groups.

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Genome Study Points to Adaptation in Early African-Americans

The New York Times
2012-01-02

Nicholas Wade, Science Reporter

Researchers scanning the genomes of African-Americans say they see evidence of natural selection as their ancestors adapted to the harsh conditions of their new environment in America.

The scientists, led by Li Jin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, report in the journal Genome Research that certain disease-causing variant genes became more common in African-Americans after their ancestors reached American shores—perhaps because they conferred greater, offsetting benefits. Other gene variants have become less common, the researchers say, like the gene for sickle cell hemoglobin, which in its more common single-dose form protects against malaria. The Shanghai team suggests the gene has become less common in African-Americans because malaria is much less of a threat.

The purpose of studying African-American genomes is largely medical. Most searches for variant genes that cause disease take place in people of European ancestry, and physicians want to make sure they have not missed variants that may be more common in African-Americans and helpful for developing treatments or diagnosis.

Such searches often reveal events in a population’s history by pinpointing genes that have changed under the pressure of natural selection…

…The Shanghai researchers used a method for studying admixture, a geneticist’s term for when two populations or races intermarry; China has several such populations, perhaps accounting for the team’s interest. Using gene chips that analyze common variations in the human genome, researchers can deconstruct the chromosomes of an African-American, say, assigning each chunk of DNA to an African or European origin.

The scientists found that of the African-American genomes in their sample, 22 percent of the DNA came from Europeans, on average, and the rest from African ancestors, a figure in line with other estimates…

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Anglo-Indian legacy slowly disappears in remote forest

The Brunei Times
2011-12-20

Ammu Kannampilly
Mccluskieganj, India

As India inched towards independence, hundreds of mixed-race Anglo-Indians feared for their future and retreated to a self-styled homeland in a thickly forested part of the country.

Ernest McCluskie, an Indian of Scottish descent established McCluskieganj in what is now the eastern state of Jharkhand, hoping to attract Anglo-Indians anxious about the impending demise of the British empire.

Nearly 80 years on, the few colonial bungalows still standing are in disrepair, the local economy survives on the back of a single school, and McCluskieganj’s ageing residents say the “chhotta England” (little England) they grew up in has vanished forever.

Anglo-Indians prospered under British rule with access to good jobs in the railways, armed forces or as customs officers…

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Profile: Sheena Gardner

Our People
Mississippi State University
2012-01-02

With a Japanese mother and an African-American father, Gardner has lived in Japan and Mississippi, experiencing a world of two cultures. Her dark skin complemented by her long, thick and curly hair distinguishes her from most other people almost everywhere she goes. Her background of growing up in a military family exposed her to many mixed-race families.

Through the years, Sheena Gardner has become comfortable answering the question, “What are you?”

While awkwardly phrased, she understands what they mean, and the Ocean Springs native loves talking about it. However, many people still feel uncomfortable having serious discussions on race…

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Comparison between two race/skin color classifications in relation to health-related outcomes in Brazil

International Journal for Equity in Health
Volume 10, Number 1, (2011-08-25)
pages 35-42
DOI: 10.1186/1475-9276-10-35

Claudia Travassos
Instituto de Comunicação e Informação Científica e Tecnológica em Saúde (ICICT/FIOCRUZ), Avenida Brasil

Josué Laguardia
Instituto de Comunicação e Informação Científica e Tecnológica em Saúde (ICICT/FIOCRUZ), Avenida Brasil

Priscilla M. Marques
Instituto de Comunicação e Informação Científica e Tecnológica em Saúde (ICICT/FIOCRUZ), Avenida Brasil

Jurema C. Mota
Escola Nacional de Saúde Pública Sérgio Arouca (ENSP/FIOCRUZ), Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

Celia L. Szwarcwald
Instituto de Comunicação e Informação Científica e Tecnológica em Saúde (ICICT/FIOCRUZ), Avenida Brasil

Background 

This paper aims to compare the classification of race/skin color based on the discrete categories used by the Demographic Census of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and a skin color scale with values ranging from 1 (lighter skin) to 10 (darker skin), examining whether choosing one alternative or the other can influence measures of self-evaluation of health status, health care service utilization and discrimination in the health services.

Methods 

This is a cross-sectional study based on data from the World Health Survey carried out in Brazil in 2003 with a sample of 5000 individuals older than 18 years. Similarities between the two classifications were evaluated by means of correspondence analysis. The effect of the two classifications on health outcomes was tested through logistic regression models for each sex, using age, educational level and ownership of consumer goods as covariables.

Results 

Both measures of race/skin color represent the same race/skin color construct. The results show a tendency among Brazilians to classify their skin color in shades closer to the center of the color gradient. Women tend to classify their race/skin color as a little lighter than men in the skin color scale, an effect not observed when IBGE categories are used. With regard to health and health care utilization, race/skin color was not relevant in explaining any of them, regardless of the race/skin color classification. Lack of money and social class were the most prevalent reasons for discrimination in healthcare reported in the survey, suggesting that in Brazil the discussion about discrimination in the health care must not be restricted to racial discrimination and should also consider class-based discrimination. The study shows that the differences of the two classifications of race/skin color are small. However, the interval scale measure appeared to increase the freedom of choice of the respondent.

Introduction

During the 20th century in Brazil, the discussion on race-related issues – either social, economic, educational and/or political ones – was restricted to certain fields of study, such as sociology and social anthropology. More recently, the debate has spread towards public health, and various studies in this area deal with race as a determining factor for health inequity. Such studies include race and/or skin color as one of their variables, but the complexity surrounding racial classification influences and, therefore, hampers the analysis of race as a variable, especially when it is considered as a social construct instead of a biogenetic entity.

The significance of phenotypic distinctions in racial classifications is related to the importance given to race as a basis for the social differentiation and stratification. Besides, in racialized social systems the placement of people in racial categories involves some form of hierarchy that produces definite social relations between races.

Opposed to the North-American bipolarity, Brazilians identify their skin color in a multiple mode, which is less categorical and more contextual. It is the product of a complex equation involving physical traits, socio-economic origin and region of residence that may result in a set of categories spread through a light-dark continuum. As shown by Sansone, Brazilian skin color terminology varies according to strategies individuals use to manage racial relations in several contexts (work, family, leisure, friendships) and also according to their age, education, and income.

The official classification of race/skin color in Brazil is composed by five categories—White [Branco], Brown [Pardo], Black [Preto], Yellow and Indigenous. Despite the controversies, some scholars have argued in favor of this classification: it refers to an objective, precise, “demographic” characteristic more suitable for census purposes than other measures that they consider more related to color identity. However, the way Brazilians identify their race/skin color may fit better in a classification spread through a light-dark continuum…

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Public Mothers: Native American and Métis Women as Creole Mediators in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest

Journal of Women’s History
Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2003
Special Issue: Revising the Experiences of Colonized Women: Beyond Binaries

Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Professor of History
Ohio State University, Newark

During the early nineteenth century, the largely Francophone, mixed ancestry residents of the western Great Lakes region were faced with massive immigration of Anglophone whites who colonized the region, imposing a new U.S. government, economy, and legal system on the old Creole communities. Many of these immigrants from different cultural backgrounds in the eastern United States brought their prejudices and fears with them, attitudes that had the power to alienate and marginalize the old residents. This article explores the ways in which some women of color found techniques to mediate between cultural groups, using hospitality, charity, and health care to negotiate overlapping ideals of womanhood common to both Anglos and Native-descended people. In so doing, they won praise from both new and old neighbors, as they used Creole patterns of network-building to smooth community relations.

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Assimilation in Eighteenth-Century Senegal

John D. Hargreaves, Burnett-Fletcher Professor Emeritus of History
University of Aberdeen, Scotland

The Journal of African History
Volume 6, Number 2 (1965)
pages 177-184

Although historians are becoming more aware of the importance of communities of West Africans with experience of European education, institutions and culture, they have so far paid little attention to the earliest of these—the African and Afro-European inhabitants of French settlements in Senegal. Even the semantics are obscure; the term habitants has been used in various ways. In 1853 Abbe Boilat, a careful observer of Woloff ancestry, wrote that at St Louis it was applied to mulattoes; gourmets, that is noirs baptisés qui sont instruits et honorables par leur bonne conduite et leur rang dans la societe: and a few Muslim Negroes of high social standing. Eighteenth-century usage was equally confusing. A count of the population of St Louis in 1779 distinguished habitans et blancs from mulâtres et nègres libres; it may be that the term habitants originally meant free persons on the establishment of the French companies’ headquarters, which Barbot calls the habitation. (Echoes of the way the term was used in French Canada may also complicate the position.) In this paper habitants will be used in a wide sense, similar to Boilat’s, to include free persons of African or part-African descent, residing in the French settlements of St Louis (with its dependent trading posts in the Senegal Valley) and Gorée (with its dependent trading posts on the coasts south of Cape Verde) who had been influenced by contemporary French culture. The nature of this influence, and of the community thus in process of formation, will form the main subject of this paper. Its treatment is purely exploratory, and no attempt has yet been made to use French manuscript material. Further research might well suggest, among other modifications, a need to make clearer distinctions between St Louis and Gorée.

The habitant community seems to have been recruited in four main ways. In the first place successive French companies, and later the Royal administration, increasingly found it expedient to employ Africans. There were usually somewhere between 100 and 250 Frenchmen in the Senegalese ‘concession’, serving as traders, accountants, and officials: surgeons and chaplains: artisans, labourers, seamen and soldiers. But conditions of service were rarely attractive to men of talent or good character; Senegal was regarded as another Siberia, fit only for malefactors and libertines, and standards of competence and morality were usually low, except sometimes in the higher appointments. Moreover, Europeans were particularly liable to be put out of action by intestinal disorders, malaria or…

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Foucault, Bakhtin, Ethnomethodology: Accounting for Hybridity in Talk-in-Interaction

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research
Volume 8, Number 2, Article 10
May 2007
18 pages

Shirley Anne Tate, Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies
Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies
University of Leeds

Theorising hybridity within Postcolonial Studies is often done at a level which seems to exclude the everyday with the exception of its relevance for the cultural productions of migrants and dominant culture’s “eating the other”. This article uses the exploration of hybridity as an everyday interactional achievement within Black “mixed race” British women’s conversations on identity to look at the production of an analytic method as process based on the task of the analyst as translator. This method as process thinks the links between FOUCAULT and BAKHTIN in the emergence of an ethnomethodologically inclined discourse analysis (eda) which is called on to make sense of a hybridity of the everyday where Black women reflexively translate discourses on identity positions in order to construct their own identifications in conversations. FOUCAULT’s discourses and BAKHTIN’s heteroglossia and addressivity allow us to theorise this movement in the talk which ethnomethodological transcription and theory enables us to first pinpoint occurring. The article begins by looking at first, how hybridity as identification emerges in talk-in-interaction through both speaker and analyst translations. Having established this, it then goes on to look at the theoretical convergences and divergences between FOUCAULT and BAKHTIN on the subject, identity and discourses in the eda enterprise. Looking at data through the lens of eda means that we must be aware of the subject positions which speakers identify as having the effect of constraining or facilitating particular actions and experiences and there is always the possibility for challenge to subjectification.

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Method as Process—Talk, Hybridity, Translation
• 3. Blurring the Line Between Theory and Story
• 4. Discourses, Translation as Reflexivity and Dialogism in Talk on Identification
• 5. FOUCAULT and BAKHTIN—”Race”, Discourses and Dialogics
• 6. FOUCAULT and BAKHTIN: Ethnomethodology, Discourse Analysis and the Membership Category “Black Woman”
• 7. Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• References
• Author
• Citation

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Racism and skin colour: the many shades of prejudice

The Guardian
2011-10-04

Bim Adewunmi

Deeply entrenched attitudes towards colour, and the increasing promotion of skin-lightening products, are placing a ‘horrible burden’ on dark-skinned women

Next week, at the international black film festival in Nashville, Bill Duke and D Channsin Berry will premiere their new documentary, Dark Girls. The film looks at the everyday experiences of dark-skinned black women in America. The blurb from the official site promises the directors will “[pull] back our country’s curtain to reveal that the deep-seated biases and hatreds of racism—within and outside of the black American culture—remain bitterly entrenched”.

When the film-makers released a preview of Dark Girls in May, it spread like wildfire across social media sites and black entertainment blogs. Commenters wrote about being moved to tears by the nine minutes of film they’d seen and many mentioned how long in coming such a film was. Why did the documentarians decide to tackle this subject and why now? For Duke, a veteran of Hollywood—co-star of Car Wash and Predator—it was down to personal experience. “It came from me being a dark-skinned black man in America, and also observing what [dark-skinned] relatives like my sister and niece have gone through. The issue exists externally of our race, but a lot of it comes within the race itself and our perception of ourselves.” Berry recalls being called “darkie” at elementary school by his fellow classmates, “and even some family members were like: ‘He is really dark. Why is he so dark?’ It left a scar. So when Bill came to me, within the first couple of seconds, I was on board.”

Shadism lurks in our collective peripheral vision and rears its ugly head every so often. Earlier this year, there was a Twitter storm over a promotional flyer for a party in Ohio whose theme was “Light Skin vs Dark Skin”. In May, the Afro Hair and Beauty show in London had a stall advertising and selling skin-lightening products. The stall was called Fair and White. In an interview with black newspaper the Voice, the co-organiser of the show, Verna McKenzie, said that she had “a responsibility to cater to the marketplace”. Two years ago, makeup giant L’Oréal was accused of lightening the skin of singer Beyoncé in ads (it denied the claim), and last year, Elle magazine was accused of doing the same to actor Gabourey Sidibe (it said “nothing out of the ordinary” had been done to the photograph). Last month, a study conducted at Villanova University in Pennsylvania found that lighter-skinned women were more likely to receive shorter prison sentences than darker-skinned women, receiving approximately 12% less time behind bars…

…Heidi Safia Mirza, professor of equalities studies in education at the Institute of Education, University of London, says: “Pigmentocracy in the Caribbean as a kind of social hierarchical system emulated from the slave days where there was favouritism if you were fairer, particularly if you were a woman.” Mirza, who has been conducting her own research looking at young black and minority ethnic women in schools, tells the story of a Sierra Leonean teenager who reported being made fun of because of her very dark skin. “It was not uncommon for dark-skinned girls to be vilified and teased and called names like ‘blick’, which means ‘blacker than black’.”

Debbie Weekes-Bernard, senior research and policy analyst for education at the Runnymede Trust, wrote Shades of Darkness, a report on the way “darker-skinned girls reflect upon themselves against lighter-skinned (in this case mixed-parentage) girls” as part of her PhD. The subjects were girls between the ages of 12 and 16…

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Were the riots about race?

The Guardian
2011-12-08

Reading the Riots: Investigating England’s summer of disorder
In partnership with the London School of Economics
Supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Open Society Foundations

Hugh Muir, Diary Editor

Yemisi Adegoke, Freelance Journalist

Some commentators were quick to call them ‘race riots’, but the true picture was more complicated

Amid the chaos and confusion of this summer’s riots, a few commentators felt the benefit of certainty. “These riots were about race. Why ignore the fact?” chided the Telegraph columnist Katharine Birbalsingh. Abroad, there seemed no need for deeper reflection. “Over 150 arrested after London hit by huge race riots,” said one US business website. “Let’s talk about those race riots in London,” urged talkshow hosts in New Zealand. Those on the other side of the debate could appear just as certain. “This is not about race at all,” Max Wind-Cowie of the left-leaning thinktank Demos told the Huffington Post…

…Of the 270 rioters interviewed by the Guardian and the LSE, 50% were black, 27% were white, 18% of mixed race and 5% Asian…

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