Mixed Race Studies

Mixing Bodies and Beliefs: The Predicament of Tribes

Columbia Law Review
Volume 101, Number 4 (May 2001)

L. Scott Gould

This Article considers a dilemma faced by tribes in a post-inherent sovereignty world. Tribes have increasingly come to be defined through the use of blood quanta as racial entities. This practice raises the legal question whether and to what extent Congress can confer benefits on tribes pursuant to the Indian Commerce Clause without violating the equal protection component of the Due Process Clause. Professor Gould explores the current dilemma from legal, historical, and demographic perspectives. He concludes that a recent Supreme Court decision involving Native Hawaiians portends growing judicial hostility to groups that base their memberships on common ancestry. Based on recent demographic trends, the Article observes that tribes are already multi-racially diverse. In conclusion, Professor Gould urges tribes to redefine their membership criteria, risking change in order to regain sovereignty and ultimately preserve tribal cultures.

Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism: Historical Footnotes to Loving v. Virginia

University of California, Davis Law Review
Volume 21, Number 2 (1988)
pages 421-452

Paul A. Lombardo, Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law
Georgia State University

This Essay explores private correspondence contained in a restricted manuscript collection along with contemporary news accounts and government documents to explain how eugenics—a popular “scientific” movement during the 1920’s—was used to bolster the arguments in favor of the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924 that was struck down in Loving v. Virginia.  The genesis of the Act is described with reference to the private correspondence of the two Virginians [Walter Plecker and John Powell] who lobbied for its passage.  Their involvement with the white supremacist Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America is revealed as an aid to understanding the true motives behind the anti-miscegenation law.

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Race and Genetics: Attempts to Define the Relationship

BioSocieties
Volume 2, Issue 2 (June 2007)
pages 221-237
DOI: 10.1017/S1745855207005625

Duana Fullwiley, Associate Professor Anthropology
Stanford University

Many researchers working in the field of human genetics in the United States have been caught between two seemingly competing messages with regard to racial categories and genetic difference. As the human genome was mapped in 2000, Francis Collins, the head of the publicly funded project, together with his privately funded rival, announced that humans were 99.9 percent the same at the level of their genome. That same year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began a research program on pharmacogenetics that would exploit the .01 percent of human genetic difference, increasingly understood in racial terms, to advance the field of pharmacy. First, this article addresses Collins’ summary of what he called the ‘vigorous debate’ on the relationship between race and genetics in the open-access special issue of Nature Genetics entitled ‘Genetics for the Human Race’ in 2004. Second, it examines the most vexed (if not always openly stated) issue at stake in the debate: that many geneticists today work with the assumption that human biology differs by race as it is conceived through American census categories. It then presents interviews with researchers in two collaborating US laboratories who collect and organize DNA by American notions of ‘race/ethnicity’ and assume that US race categories of classification largely traduce human biogenetic difference.  It concludes that race is a practical and conceptual tool whose utility and function is often taken for granted rather than rigorously assessed and that ‘rational medicine’ cannot precede a rational approach to addressing the nature of racial disparities, difference and inequality in health and society more broadly.

…Race and nominalism
Race is a thing of our world like no other. Americans in general often use the word without much reflection. It might indeed occupy a tiny portion of what philosopher Martin Heidegger amorphously termed ‘the background’, that which just is and does not warrant our reflection until its unity ‘breaks down’. Even when the breakdown of race occurs in many areas of American social life, it is often reconstructed and made ‘whole’ again. One recent example of this was in the 2000 US census race classification that allowed respondents to report themselves as ‘mixed race’. Many African-Americans with mixed ancestry did not choose this option, but simply marked the category that best represented descriptions that they had been raised to understand themselves ‘to be’ in North America—that is ‘monoracially’ black (Lee and Bean, 2004: 233). The decision to mark oneself or not mark oneself as mixed-race differed according to where respondents lived—notably between those who lived in the deep South and those who lived in the ten states where 64 percent of all multiracial identification took place (New York and California among them, as well as Hawaii). In general, those in cosmopolitan centers, with high rates of immigration, diversity, and more demonstrated tolerance of others, were more likely to report racial mixing (Lee and Bean, 2004: 235). Perhaps more telling, when Americans acted on the liberty of marking more than one category, the National Center for Health Statistics created a formula that, in effect, ‘reallocated’ the multiracial population back into a single race group (Wellner, 2003: 2). This move, and the technology permitting it, was presented as an aid to market researchers who were vexed by the 2000 census data, which complicated their traditional formulas of ‘niche’ advertising to racial groups (Wellner, 2003: 2)…

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Race and Reification in Science

Science Magazine
Volume 307
2005-02-18
pages 1050-1051

Troy Duster, Professor of Sociology
New York University

Alfred North Whitehead warned many years ago about “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (1), by which he meant the tendency to assume that categories of thought coincide with the obdurate character of the empirical world. If we think of a shoe as “really a shoe,” then we are not likely to use it as a hammer (when no hammer is around). Whitehead’s insight about misplaced concreteness is also known as the fallacy of reification. Recent research in medicine and genetics makes it even more crucial to resist actively the temptation to deploy racial categories as if immutable in nature and society…

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Race in a Genetic World

Harvard Magazine
Volume 110, Number 5
May-June 2008

Duana Fullwiley
Photograph by Stu Rosner

“I am an African American,” says Duana Fullwiley, “but in parts of Africa, I am white.” To do fieldwork as a medical anthropologist in Senegal, she says, “I take a plane to France, a seven- to eight-hour ride. My race changes as I cross the Atlantic. There, I say, ‘Je suis noire,’ and they say, ‘Oh, okay—métisse—you are mixed.’ Then I fly another six to seven hours to Senegal, and I am white. In the space of a day, I can change from African American, to métisse, to tubaab [Wolof for “white/European”]. This is not a joke, or something to laugh at, or to take lightly. It is the kind of social recognition that even two-year-olds who can barely speak understand. ‘Tubaab,’ they say when they greet me.”

Is race, then, purely a social construct? The fact that racial categories change from one society to another might suggest it is. But now, says Fullwiley, assistant professor of anthropology and of African and African American studies, genetic methods, with their precision and implied accuracy, are being used in the same way that physical appearance has historically been used: “to build—to literally construct—certain ideas about why race matters.”

Genetic science has revolutionized biology and medicine, and even rewritten our understanding of human history. But the fact that human beings are 99.9 percent identical genetically, as Francis Collins and Craig Venter jointly announced at the White House on June 26, 2000, when the rough draft of the human genome was released, risks being lost, some scholars fear, in an emphasis on human genetic difference. Both in federally funded scientific research and in increasingly popular practice—such as ancestry testing, which often purports to prove or disprove membership in a particular race, group, or tribe—genetic testing has appeared to lend scientific credence to the idea that there is a biological basis for racial categories.

In fact, “There is no genetic basis for race,” says Fullwiley, who has studied the ethical, legal, and social implications of the human genome project with sociologist Troy Duster at UC [University of California], Berkeley. She sometimes quotes Richard Lewontin, now professor of biology and Agassiz professor of zoology emeritus, who said much the same thing in 1972, when he discovered that of all human genetic variation (which we now know to be just 0.1 percent of all genetic material), 85 percent occurs within geographically distinct groups, while 15 percent or less occurs between them. The issue today, Fullwiley says, is that many scientists are mining that 15 percent in search of human differences by continent…

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Vulnerable Multiracial Families and Early Years Services: Concerns, Challenges and Opportunities

Children & Society
Volume 10, Issue 4 (December 1996)
Pages 305 – 316
DOI: 10.1111/j.1099-0860.1996.tb00598.x

Margaret Boushel
Department of Social Work and Social Care
University of Sussex

In Britain, very young mixed-parentage children are more likely to receive state care than any other children. However, despite a dramatic increase in the number of multiracial families, their experiences have received little research attention. This article reviews the research on the experiences of vulnerable and poor multiracial families. Three areas of concern emerge—the relationship between family structure, locality and racism, disadvantage and oppression; the impact on family life of structurally reinforced and culturally defined gender roles; and the strengths and limitations of current early years research and practice. Suggestions are made about ways in which early years professionals might develop their practice with young vulnerable multiracial families.

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Building Kinship and Community: Relational Processes of Bicultural Identity Among Adult Multiracial Adoptees

Family Process
Volume 49, Issue 1 (March 2010)
pages 26-42
DOI: 10.1111/j.1545-5300.2010.01306.x

Gina Miranda Samuels, Associate Professor
School of Social Service Administration
University of Chicago

This study uses the case of transracially adopted multiracial adults to highlight an alternative family context and thus process of African American enculturation. Interpretive analyses of interviews with 25 adult multiracial adoptees produced 4 patterns in their bicultural identity formation: (1) claiming whiteness culturally but not racially, (2) learning to “be Black”—peers as agents of enculturation, (3) biological pathways to authentic Black kinship, and (4) bicultural kinship beyond Black and White. Conceptualizing race as an ascribed extended kinship network and using notions of “groundedness” from bicultural identity literature, the relational aspects of participants’ identity development are highlighted. Culturally relevant concepts of bicultural identity are proposed for practice with multiracial adoptees who have multiple cultures of origin and for whom White mainstream culture is transmitted intrafamilially as a first culture.

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Deconstructing Binary Race and Sex Categories: A Comparison of the Multiracial and Transgendered Experience

San Diego Law Review
Volume 39, Number 3 (2002)
pages 917-942

Julie A. Greenberg, Professor of Law
Thomas Jefferson School of Law, San Diego

This Article explores the potential difficulties that exist as legal institutions develop a classification of transgendered people, and suggests that an examination of how legal institutions have classified race and sex in the past can help shape the way that legal institutions shape transgendered classifications in the future. The article summarizes the development of race classifications for multiracial people. The author then examines the development of sex classifications for various legal purposes like marriage, identity, and the right to pursue discrimination claims. The author also examines how the medical community contributes to the stereotypical definitions of sex as binary and biologically determinable. The author then proceeds to evaluate some of the challenges that face the development of multiracial classifications, and how those challenges may affect the development of transgendered classifications. The author argues that in developing sex classification systems, legal institutions should be aware of the problems that can arise when seeking to adopt a single unified standard for determining sex, because where in some instances the acceptance of sex as a sociopolitical construct can promote greater acceptance of sexual minorities, it might also further contribute to discrimination.

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Beyond Just Black and White: Why I was so eager to claim my biracial son for my own side

Newsweek.com
2009-01-24

Raina Kelley, Weekly Columnist

When I took my newly born son from the nurse’s arms, I did the expected counting of his fingers and toes. I checked under his cap for hair and flexed his little limbs. Once confident he was whole and healthy, I began to wonder how dark his skin would get. As a black woman married to one of the world’s fairest men, I worried that our son would be so light-skinned as to appear Caucasian, and I wanted him to look black…

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Resolving “Other” Status: Identity Development of Biracial Individuals

Women & Therapy
Volume 9, Issue 1 & 2 (May 1990)
pages 185 – 205
DOI: 10.1300/J015v09n01_11

Maria P. P. Root

The current paper describes the phenomenological experience of marginal socio-ethnic status for biracial individuals. A metamodel for identity resolution for individuals who struggle with other status is proposed. Subsequently, multiple strategies in the resolution of ethnic identity development are proposed among which the individual may move and maintain a positive, stable self-image.

Read or purchase the article here.