Mixed Race Studies

Gender, Sexuality and the Formation of Racial Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Caribbean World

Gender & History
Volume 22, Issue 3 (November 2010)
pages 585–602
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2010.01613.x

Brooke N. Newman, John Carter Brown Library Scholar (2010-2011)
University of Oxford

In recent years, scholars have directed considerable attention to the influence of gender relations and sexual practices on developing racial formations in early British America, the colonial Caribbean and the wider British empire. Understanding that unauthorised intimacies in the imperial world threatened notions of Britishness at home has greatly enhanced our knowledge of the complexity and instability of the process of collective identity formation. Building on pioneering research in early American and British imperial history, this article charts the connection between gendered concepts of ‘whiteness’ in Anglo-Caribbean contexts and in metropolitan discourses surrounding British national identity, as articulated in eighteenth-century colonial legislation and official correspondence, popular texts and personal narratives of everyday life. It explores the extent to which the socio-sexual practices of British West Indian whites imperilled the emerging conflation between whiteness and Britishness.

Read or purchase the article here.

History’s most sordid cover-up

New African
February 2004

Stella Orakwue

The history of the former European colonies’ mixed-race populations is one of the world’s biggest hidden scandals. How did these populations come about? We did not miraculously or biblically produce mixed-race babies from thin air. Most of the black women were raped…

…Her children come from the Thurmond family line because Essie Mae Washington (below) has unveiled Strom Thurmond, the American senator famous for having been the country’s leading segregationist,  as her father. Thurmond died last June, aged 100. But in 1948 “Daddy” was very much alive, and kicking out at blacks, coloureds, Negroes, call them what you will. People not as white as he was. People like, as we now know, his daughter…

For black women, it is a horror subject that is almost blindingly difficult to go near. I’m finding this very difficult to write. I hate what I have to think about. But isn’t that why lies prosper, because people find deeply disturbing subjects too hard to discuss honestly? Therefore, the liars and the lies win. And we live our lives in pain without at least knowing what the source is.

Press on. Ask any Westerner whether when they visit North and South America, when they visit Africa—especially Southern Africa—when they visit the Caribbean, whether they think that these regions’ huge numbers of mixed-race and very light-skinned people appeared fully formed from nowhere?

Who originally created these populations of light-skinned people? I know you would think from the acres of trees felled to cover stories about the handful of white women who chose to have sexual relationships with black men during empire days that somehow white women are linked to these communities, but, no, the history of former European colonies’ mixed-race populations has nothing to do with white females.

How did these populations come about then? Let me make it clear for you. They are with us because black women had babies during the empire days whose fathers were white men. But the black women did not get to choose. They were not volunteers. Let us be precise here. Most of the black women who gave birth to those babies were raped by the white men…

Read the entire article here.

Watershed Moment for Critical Mixed Race Studies
 
Laura Kina’s Art Blog
2010-11-14

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

Critical Mixed Race Studies Inaugural Conference

On November 5-6, 2010 DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois hosted the inaugural 2010 Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) conference “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies.” We had over 450 people registered and 430 people actually showed up from all over the U.S. from Hawaii to Tennessee to New York as well as scholars from Canada, Korea, and the UK…

…We want to thank everyone who participated in making CMRS 2010 happen and we are looking forward to the next steps for Critical Mixed Race Studies: founding an association and a peer reviewed online journal; planning for CMRS 2012 at DePaul University and CMRS 2014 (hopefully at the University of Washington); looking for ways us to continue to stay in touch virtually (listserv, dedicated website); and ways to keep the momentum going for CMRS for 2011. There is a lot of work to do and we’ll be sending out the business minutes shortly with ways for you all to get involved…

Read the entire article here.

A Silenced History from Belgian Congo: A Mixed Race History

Afro-Europe International Blog
2010-06-15

Sibo Kano

The Bastards in Our Colony: Hidden Stories of Belgian Metis

You haven’t heard much from me lately. I was writing a book and it’s finally finished and published. The book I wrote together with Kathleen Ghequière traces back a history of Africa and Europe that has been ignored for too much time. Some of you know about the mixed race children of Australia thanks to movies such as ‘Rabbit Proof Fence’ or even Baz Luhrmann’s latest ‘Australia’. But concerning Africa this history is unknown.

It seems as if the European colonizer didn’t have intimate relationships with the African colonized. But many children were born out of relations between white Europeans and black Africans during colonization. These children undermined the racial colonial order with their existence. These children have been hidden and their stories silenced. At least for the Belgian Congo this story is now unveiled and in this book the mixed race children of Belgium and Congo express their history freely…

Read the entire article here.

CAMD Scholars Take On Variety of Complex Racial Issues in MLK Jr. Day Presentations

Phillips Academy
Andover, Massachusetts
2008-01-28

Sally Holm

January 28, 2008 — Simone Hill ’08 had good reason to be excited last Monday. Chosen as a featured speaker for one of Phillips Academy’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day special events, the CAMD scholar presented her research on diversity, whose trail led her back more than 150 years into the dust of family history. And in the audience were not just her peers and teachers: her parents, Everett Hill ’77 and Dr. Yasmin Tyler-Hill from Atlanta, and her grandparents, from tiny Ridgeland, S.C., where the trail ended, were right there as well.

…The CAMD Scholars program was created last spring by the Office of Community and Multicultural Development (CAMD) to allow students to apply for research grants to pursue topics in multiculturalism during their summer vacations from school. Funded by the Abbot Academy Foundation, the scholarship provides a small stipend and a faculty advisor to each student selected. Three scholars presented during the fall term and three others spoke on MLK Jr. Day….

CAMD Scholar Britney Achin ’08 began her session with an exercise meant to educate her audience on the difficulties biracial teenagers face with identity in today’s social milieu. She asked everyone to answer the question “What am I?” in a brief phrase, then share it with a small group in the audience. Most seemed to find it difficult to capture complex selves—especially the offspring of interracial parents, as Achin is herself. Her research project was titled “I Am: A Study of Self Identification among Biracial Teenagers.” Mundra served as her advisor.

Achin surveyed hundreds of biracial adolescents through MySpace and Facebook, personal connections, and random interviews, asking probing personal questions of how they viewed themselves. She found that their responses clustered into five categories of identity: “Monoracials,” who defined themselves predominantly by a primary peer group; “Bidentifiers,” who identify confidently with more than one racial identity; “Sliders,” who were able to identify with whatever group in which they found themselves; “Raceless,” who refused to identify with any race, but prefer race-neutral descriptors such as “American”; and “Partial People,” who identify themselves as half a person, mostly as half-white, rarely as half-black.

Achin compared relative levels of turmoil and self-doubt, as well as confidence and self-knowledge, reflected by each group. She said she found that, without fail, PA students offered the most insightful responses. “I believe that speaks very highly of the work done by the school to make us aware of ourselves and others—our differences and similarities, racial and otherwise,” Achin said…

Read the entire article here.

West Meets East: Nineteenth-Century Southern Dialogues on Mixture, Race, Gender, and Nation

The Mississippi Quarterly
Volume 56, Number 4 (Fall 2003)

Suzanne Bost, Associate Professor of English
Loyola University

When I was growing up in the Eastern half of the United States, American history was presented to me in neatly binary terms: Cowboys and Indians, North and South, Black and White. There were binaries when my family moved out West, too, but the demarcations were in different places: North or South of the border, English or Spanish, hamburgers with or without green chile. Here, sometimes cowboys were Indians, and Mexicans were Americans. The fact that my Eastern home was North and my Western home was South complicated matters further, and I learned to accept that Southerners, though never victorious, were not always as misguided as my first teachers had suggested they were. The deconstruction of American myths and binaries began for me long before I learned to see the world through the lenses of postmodernism or the new American Studies. Moreover, this racial and national decentering occurred not by way of contemporary globalization or NAFTA but throughout American history.

Mestizaje and hybridity are popular concepts today because they lift identity from singular categories and frameworks. They are celebrated, along with Tiger Woods, fusion cuisine, and the Internet, as transracial, transnational frameworks for new, millennial Americans. For Mexicans and Mexican Americans, however, hybridity and racial and national decentering are not a postmodern horizon but rather long-standing historical facts. Racial mixture was part of the Spanish colonial strategy for, literally, “hispanicizing” the natives and acquiring their lands. As such, mixture has been central to the formation of racism, nationalism, resistance, and identity politics in most Southern Americas for centuries. In nineteenth-century Mexico, mestizaje was nationalistic, not transgressive or defiant of norms, while in the Southeastern United States, miscegenation represented a breakdown in the definition of American identity…

Read the entire article here.

Blood groups of Whites, Negroes and Mulattoes from the State of Maranhão, Brazil

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 6, Issue 4 (December 1948)
pages 423–428
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330060412

E. M. da Silva
Department of Hematology
Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Within the Brazilian “melting pot” the intensity and variation of the racial mixture rises to a high point in the State of Maranhão. Of the three main races entering into this mixture, Indian, Negro and White, remnants are still to be found in more or less pure condition. As would be expected, however, all possible combinations of these primary groups are now abundantly present. Thus the population of this State presents unlimited opportunities for research in the problems of physical anthropology growing out of race mixture.

The present study deals with the classical blood groups in Whites and Negroes and in mixtures of these two races. The observations were made in the city of São Luiz and in the village of Santo Antonio dos Pretos (Municipe of Codó), a little over 300 km southeast of the former.

The Negroes were selected on the basis of their well-known physical characteristics. The series totals 198 and includes representatives of different African groups.

The Whites are mainly from Arabian (Syrian) stock, with some Portuguese and a few Spanish individuals. The series totals 196.

The individuals of mixed origin, which we will call Mulattoes in accordance with Brazilian custom, are mostly if not all first generation crosses. Selection was made by examining…

Read or purchase the article here.

Studies in Melanin Pigmentation of the Skin of Racial Crosses in Port Moresby

Oceania
Volume 33, Number. 4 (June, 1963)
pages 287-292

R. J. Walsh
New South Wales Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service, Sydney, Australia

A. V. G. Price
Department of Public Health, Territory of Papua and New Guinea

The colour of the skin in different populations has always been of great interest but until recently few attempts have been made to study the factors determining the nature and amount of skin pigment. Perhaps the greatest difficulty lias been the lack of a reliable method of quantitative assessment. Davenport and Davenport (1910) devised a “colour top”—a rotating disc with sectors of different colours. The areas of the sectors were varied until the blended colours on rotation corresponded to the colour of the skin. Ruggles Gates (1949) approached the problem by producing a series of coloured papers which could be matched against the skin.  These methods, however, did not permit separate analysis of the multiple factors contributing to skin colour (haemoglobin and bilirubin contained in the skin, and carotene pigments, for example). Reflectance measurements of light at various wavelengths have therefore been used by a number of workers (Wiener. 1945 ; Harrison, 1957 ; Baraicot, 1958).

During a recent visit to New Guinea measurements were made of the reflectance of light from the skin of various subjects. A photo-electric reflectometer was used with a filter having maximum transmission at 650 millimicrons. The instrument was adjusted with a rheostat so that a meter reading of 100 corresponded to the reflectance from a magnesium oxide surface.  This instrument is described in another paper (Walsh, 1963) and reasons are given for believing that the reflectance value is related to the melanin content of the skin. Batnicot (1958) also concluded that the reflectance value at this wavelength is a measure of the melanin pigment.

There is now clear evidence that melanin is produced by the melanotytes of the skin from the amino acids phenylalaninc and tyrosine. In the initial stages of this production the copper-containing enzyme, tyrosinase, is important. Absence of tyrosinase, but not of melanocytes, is responsible for albinism and a deficiency of tyrosinase is probably the basis of the pathological condition known as vitiligo, A number of physical conditions, of which the most important is exposure to ultraviolet light, can increase the melanin content of the skin, and some chemical conditions inhibit production. These factors have recently been reviewed by Fitzpatrick and Szaba (1959).

However, there is no information available as to what determines the varying amounts of melanin in human skin of different ethnic groups. Obviously genetic factors must be responsible because there are great differences between people of…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Physical Form of Mississippi Negroes

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 16, Issue 2 (October/December 1931)
pages 193–201
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330160213

Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963), Professor of Anthropology and African Studies
Northwestern University

Vivian K. Cameron

Harriet Smith

During the years 1923 to 1927, research was carried on in an attempt to investigate the physical form of the American Negro, with particular reference to the question of a possible physical type being formed in the United States, and to the amount and consequences of the racial mixture that had gone into the formation of the Negro population of this country.  The results of this research may be briefly summarized as follows: first, that the American Negro, as indicated by the genealogies collected in the course of the study, represented much more racial crossing than had been generally recognized, and secondly, that in spite of this crossing, a physical type which combined the characteristics of the African and European ancestral populations hand which was relatively homogeneous in character had been formed.

Awaiting publication of the complete results of this study, a volume outlining the results was brought out. The point most generally made when this work was criticized was that since the majority of the sample utilized in the study had been measured in the north, the group studied could not be…

Read or purchase the article here.

Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease

Genome Biology 2002
Volume 3, Number 7
2002-07-01
Print ISSN 1465-6906; Online ISSN 1465-6914
DOI: 10.1186/gb-2002-3-7-comment2007

Neil Risch
Department of Genetics
Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California

Esteban Burchard
Department of Medicine
University of California, San Francisco, California

Elad Ziv
Department of Medicine
University of California, San Francisco, California

Hua Tang
Department of Statistics
Stanford University, Stanford, California

Opinion

A debate has arisen regarding the validity of racial/ethnic categories for biomedical and genetic research. Some claim ‘no biological basis for race’ while others advocate a ‘race-neutral’ approach, using genetic clustering rather than self-identified ethnicity for human genetic categorization. We provide an epidemiologic perspective on the issue of human categorization in biomedical and genetic research that strongly supports the continued use of self-identified race and ethnicity.

A major discussion has arisen recently regarding optimal strategies for categorizing humans, especially in the United States, for the purpose of biomedical research, both etiologic and pharmaceutical. Clearly it is important to know whether particular individuals within the population are more susceptible to particular diseases or most likely to benefit from certain therapeutic interventions. The focus of the dialogue has been the relative merit of the concept of ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’, especially from the genetic perspective. For example, a recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine [1] claimed that “race is biologically meaningless” and warned that “instruction in medical genetics should emphasize the fallacy of race as a scientific concept and the dangers inherent in practicing race-based medicine.” In support of this perspective, a recent article in Nature Genetics [2] purported to find that “commonly used ethnic labels are both insufficient and inaccurate representations of inferred genetic clusters.” Furthermore, a supporting editorial in the same issue [3] concluded that “population clusters identified by genotype analysis seem to be more informative than those identified by skin color or self-declaration of ‘race’.” These conclusions seem consistent with the claim that “there is no biological basis for ‘race'” [3] and that “the myth of major genetic differences across ‘races’ is nonetheless worth dismissing with genetic evidence” [4]. Of course, the use of the term “major” leaves the door open for possible differences but a priori limits any potential significance of such differences.

In our view, much of this discussion does not derive from an objective scientific perspective. This is understandable, given both historic and current inequities based on perceived racial or ethnic identities, both in the US and around the world, and the resulting sensitivities in such debates. Nonetheless, we demonstrate here that from both an objective and scientific (genetic and epidemiologic) perspective there is great validity in racial/ethnic self-categorizations, both from the research and public policy points of view…

…Admixture and genetic categorization in the United States…

What are the implications of these census results and the admixture that has occurred in the US population for genetic categorization in biomedical research studies in the US? Gene flow from non-Caucasians into the US Caucasian population has been modest. On the other hand, gene flow from Caucasians into African Americans has been greater; several studies have estimated the proportion of Caucasian admixture in African Americans to be approximately 17%, ranging regionally from about 12% to 23% [22]. Thus, despite the admixture, African Americans remain a largely African group, reflecting primarily their African origins from a genetic perspective. Asians and Pacific Islanders have been less influenced by admixture and again closely represent their indigenous origins. The same is true for Native Americans, although some degree of Caucasian admixture has occurred in this group as well [23]…

Read the entire opinion here.