Mixed Race Studies

Hideously diverse Britain: the college where histories collide

The Guardian
2010-01-10

Hugh Muir

It was 1940 and the 200 students of South West Essex Technical College posed ramrod straight on the sharply inclined steps; ties stiff, uniforms crisp. They were RAF ­cadets learning science and ­engineering at the place that was dubbed the People’s University. Unsurprisingly, those pictured were all white.

The place is called Waltham Forest College nowadays and the grand steps remain imposing. The porticos, by sculptor Eric Gill, have been lovingly preserved.

But last week, when the east London college recreated that recently discovered archive photograph, everything else was different. The formation was identical to that created with military precision all those years ago, but lining the steps were 200 students from ­another generation, another century. White Britons, black Britons, teenagers of Asian and African and Mediterranean and Eastern European descent. A student body with links to every continent on the planet. Speakers of 76 different ­languages. Each standing out in the cold to make a statement. “I told them it was their job to represent their era, just as the cadets in 1940 were symbolic of that time,” said lecturer Gaverne Bennett. “They bought into it.”…

Read the entire article and view the photographs here.

College applications in a post-race world: Admissions process will soon need to address class concerns

GW Hatchet
Independent Student Paper of George Washington University
2010-01-14

Evan Schwartz, Columnist

In a recent editorial for The Boston Globe, columnist Neal Gabler railed against what he referred to as “the college admissions scam” and a perceived bias in admission board selection against, well, everyone. Gabler made it seem as though anyone who is not a privileged white high school student has no chance of getting into an Ivy League or comparable university.

…Racial identity has been changing dramatically in the last few years, perhaps punctuated by the election of a mixed-race president of the United States. The concept of “whiteness” in this country has become more complicated, especially given the influx of Hispanic immigrants and the decreasing stigma attached to mixed-race couples. Over a third of the U.S. population is now composed of minority groups, and the Census Bureau predicts that white people will have a far less pronounced majority in the next several decades….

Read the entire article here.

Six degrees of Princeton’s African-American history: America writ small

Princeton Alumni Weekly
Rally ‘Round the Cannon
2010-01-13

Gregg Lange, Class of 1970

The New York Times’ recent genealogy study of Michelle Obama ’85, noting for the first time her slave and mixed-race heritage, seemingly surprised a broad swath of the populace. This indicates that we here in the History Corner of the World haven’t been doing our jobs very well. The complex intertwining of peoples and cultures living side by side for hundreds of years, their humanness grotesquely masked by slavery and then gratuitous segregation, is as near a universal experience as you can find in the United States. We were all involved; we are all affected. Get used to it.  

It is, for a nearby example, pretty much common knowledge that the saga of African-Americans at Princeton began in World War II, and gained no effective traction until the Goheen administration in the 1960s. A whites-only world, if ever there was one.

Let me instead tell you a story more than 200 years old…

Read the entire article here.

Legislating Women’s Sexuality: Cherokee Marriage Laws in the Nineteenth Century

Journal of Social History
Volume 38, Number 2, Winter 2004
E-ISSN: 1527-1897 Print ISSN: 0022-4529
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2004.0144

Fay A. Yarbrough, Associate Professor of History
University of Oklahoma

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the Cherokee Nation passed many laws to regulate marriage and sex. This essay first contemplates the gendered aspects of such laws by exploring the importance of Cherokee women’s marital choices and official response to those choices. In particular, Cherokee women’s choice of non-Cherokee marital partners, most frequently whites, and the concomitant introduction of outsiders into the Nation forced the Cherokee legislative branch to reformulate Cherokee women’s relationship to the production of new citizens in the Nation. Then the essay turns more explicitly to the laws’ racial implications and examines who could marry in the Cherokee Nation and why by first examining Cherokee laws regulating marriage with people of African descent. Cherokees increasingly excluded people of African descent from membership in the Nation through legislation prohibiting legal marriage between Cherokees and people of African descent. Lastly, this essay considers Cherokee legislative provisions to include whites as marriage partners and citizens in the Cherokee Nation. Ultimately, this essay finds that Cherokee officials were redefining Cherokee Indians racially and used marriage laws to write and reinforce this new definition.

Read or purchase the article here.

Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They?

PLoS Medicine
Volume 4, Number 9 (September 2007)
pages 1423-1428
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0040271

Lundy Braun
Departments of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Africana Studies
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

Duana Fullwiley, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and of Medical Anthropology
Harvard University

Anne Fausto-Sterling
Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Biochemistry, Program in Women’s Studies, and Chair of the Faculty Committee on Science and Technology Studies
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

Evelynn M. Hammonds, Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity
History of Science and of African and African American Studies programs
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Alondra Nelson
Departments of Sociology and African American Studies
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

William Quivers
Department of Physics
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Susan M. Reverby
Women’s Studies Department,
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Alexandra Shields
Harvard/MGH Cente on Genomics, Vulnerable Populations and Health Disparities,
Massachusetts General Hospital
Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts

The Trouble with Race

Is it good medical practice for physicians to “eyeball” a patient’s race when assessing their medical status or even to ask them to identify their race? This question was captured in a 2005 episode of “House M.D.,”  Fox television’s medical drama. In the episode, a black patient with heart disease refuses a hospital physician’s prescription for what is clearly supposed to be BiDil, the drug approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration only for “self-identified” African-Americans. Dr. House, on seeing the patient for followup, insists on the same prescription.  The patient again refuses, telling House, “I’m not buying into no racist drug, OK?” House, a white physician asks, “It’s racist because it helps black people more than white people? Well, on behalf of my peeps, let me say, thanks for dying on principle for us.” The patient replies, “Look. My heart’s red, your heart’s red.  And it don’t make no sense to give us different drugs.”  Who is right here, House or his patient? And what does this episode tell us about the way race plays itself out in the physician-patient clinical encounter? What of clinical importance can be learned by making a quick racial assessment?  That an ACE (angiotensin-converting enzyme) inhibitor may not be effective? That screening for sickle cell anemia is a waste of time? Sorting patients by race may seem useful during a time constrained interview, but we argue that acting on rapid racial assessment can lead to missed diagnoses and inappropriate treatments…

Racial Categories Are Historical, Not Natural

…Racial definitions are historically and nationally specific. In her comparison of the history of racial categories in the US and Brazilian census from the late 18th century to the present, political scientist Melissa Nobles demonstrated that categories emerge and are  deployed in different ways over time. For example, during the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, at the height of US anxiety about “miscegenation,” categories such as “mulatto” were vehicles for expressing and containing cultural anxiety about racial purity.  Bolstered by scientific ideas about race, data collected on the numbers of “mulattoes” were shaped by the desire to prove that “hybrids” would die out…

…A dark-skinned, curly-headed person who identifies as African American may, indeed, have much in his or her history and upbringing to justify that identification. But he or she may also have a white grandparent and several Cherokee ancestors. Thus, returning to the example of glaucoma, it is more important to know a patient’s family history than to assess his or her race.  And collecting family history ought to mean not only compiling a list of which diseases family members have, but making some attempt to assess common (familial) habits such as diet and life experiences (e.g., first- versus second-generation immigrants, living conditions, or same versus widely varied work experience and geographical locations). Similarly, when the history of passing for white is ignored, those who identify themselves as “white” are assumed to have no ancestral “black blood.”  Finally, immigration patterns constantly change. A “black” person walking into a Boston, Massachusetts clinic could easily be the child of a recent immigrant from Ethiopia or Brazil who has a genetic makeup as well as cultural and environmental exposures that differ significantly from the descendents of 19th century US slaves from the western coast of Africa…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Recognition in the 2000 Census: A Personal Perpective

Perspectives
Winter 2003
pages 48-58

Ikeita Cantú Hinojosa, JD, MSW
National Women’s Law Center, Washington, D.C

The census classification scheme chosen for race and ethnicity has become a prominent social fact in its own right and involves serious political and cultural consequences beyond its explicit policy purposes. Thus, it is not surprising that fierce controversy surrounded the federal government’s decision to rescind its “check only one race” rule for the 2000 Census and implement a “mark one or more races” option in its place. The multirace option signals an official acknowledgment of a growing multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural population in the United States. As a black Chicana often required to select either the “black, non-Hispanic” or “Hispanic” option in answering demographic inquiries that mandate a single selection, I appreciate the opportunity to provide a more accurate description of myself by choosing both applicable categories; however, I question whether the scheme chosen to count race and ethnicity in the 2000 Census was the most appropriate approach to transition from the archaic “one drop of blood” conceptualization of race to a more fluid and complex understanding of the intersectionality of multiple identities. This paper provides a personal perspective on the recent 2000 Census racial and ethnic identity debate. I argue that the multirace option chosen, though not without fault, is preferable to both the retention of the old single-race classification and the creation of a new “Multiracial” category. The single-race option of the past reinforces a view of racial identity as exclusive and rigid, the proposed “Multiracial” category could cause a harsh blow to the progress made by the oppressed to date, and the multirace option implemented for the 2000 Census has the potential to blur psychological and sociological racial and ethnic lines without detracting from civil rights initiatives, signaling a new era in the social attitudes of Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Nooksack Tribe member explores multiracial culture

The Bellingham Herald
2009-09-28

Dean Kahn

Louie Gong grew up eating American Indian bread for breakfast and Chinese dinners cooked on a camp stove.

In the evening, his Chinese and native relatives got together for mah-jongg.

Gong’s mother was of French and Scottish descent. His father was half Chinese, part Nooksack and part Squamish.

Early on, Gong was raised by his grandparents, father, stepmother and scads of relatives in a rustic community north of Abbotsford, B.C. Later, his family moved into Nooksack Indian Tribe housing near Deming.

Growing up in Whatcom County — he graduated from Nooksack Valley High in 1992 — Gong learned to navigate in a world where mixed-race people often struggle to define themselves, and where other people prefer to slot them into simple categories.

“I couldn’t quite figure out what I was,” he said, “but I knew I wasn’t part of the mainstream.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Cosmic Race by José Vasconcelos: “La Raza Cósmica” and Issues of Racial Diversity and Purity

suite101.com
2010-01-26

Melanie Zoltan, Adjunct Professor of History
Bay Path College

In “The Cosmic Race” (“La Raza Cósmica” in Spanish), José Vasconcelos argues that racial diversity and interbreeding will produce one superior race. Is it code for purity?

While The Cosmic Race (La Raza Cósmica) sounds like the name of a new video game from Nintendo starring Mario and Luigi, this essay (in book form) written by Latin American philosopher José Vasconcelos in 1925 presents arguments on racial diversity and interbreeding that set the intellectual world ablaze when it was published and that continue to be debated by scholars…

Read the entire article here.

Engineering American society: the lesson of eugenics

Nature Reviews Genetics
Volume 1, November 2000
pages 153-158

David Micklos
DNA Learning Centre
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York

Elof Carlson, Professor Emeritus
State University of New York, Stony Brook

We stand at the threshold of a new century, with the whole human genome stretched out before us. Messages from science, the popular media, and the stock market suggest a world of seemingly limitless opportunities to improve human health and productivity. But at the turn of the last century, science and society faced a similar rush to exploit human genetics.  The story of eugenics—humankind’s first venture into a ‘gene age’ — holds a cautionary lesson for our current preoccupation with genes.

Eugenics was the effort to apply the principles of genetics and agricultural breeding towards improving the human race. The term “eugenics”— meaning well born —was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, a British scientist who used data from biographical dictionaries and alumni records at Oxford and Cambridge Universities to conclude that superior intelligence and abilities were traits that could be inherited.

Most people equate eugenics with atrocities that were committed in Nazi Germany for the sake of racial purity. In this context, eugenics is easy to dismiss as purely aberrant behaviour. However, the story of eugenics in the United States is, perhaps, more important than that of Nazi Germany as a cautionary tale to take with us into our new century.  Here we describe the tale of the subtle ways in which the science of genetics was, by degrees, transformed from an agricultural experiment into a popular movement to engineer American society. The fact that eugenics flourished in the land of liberty, involved numerous prominent scientists and civic leaders, and made its intellectual home at the forerunner of the now prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory shows just how far America fell from grace during this period…

…Race mixing. Laws against interracial marriage had existed in some states since colonial times, but their number increased after the Civil War. The idea that race mixing, or miscegenation, causes genetic deterioration was proposed by Joseph Arthur Gobineau and other anthropologists in the late nineteenth century. It is worth noting that eugenicists’ conception of race included the classic divisions by skin colour, as well as differences in national origin.  Most lay-eugenicists subscribed to the Biblical idea of ‘like with like’ and that the ‘half-breed’ offspring of parents from two different races were genetically inferior to the parental stock. Davenport’s compilation in 1913 showed that 29 states had laws forbidding mixed-race marriages.  Although these laws were not always enforced, heavy fines and long prison terms showed how seriously American society considered miscegenation to be at that time.

As in the case of immigration restriction, eugenicists were more than willing to provide a supposed scientific rationale for existing
racial prejudice. In his influential book, The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant warned that racial mixing was a social crime that would lead to the demise of white civilization. Eugenicists actively supported strengthening pre-existing laws and enacting of new ones, including the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The Virginia Act and all other similar state laws were struck down by the United States Supreme Court in 1967 in Loving versus Commonwealth of Virginia…

Read the entire article here.

Watson [Program] Will Allow Reid to Study Issues Multi-Racial People Face

Davidson University
Davidson, North Carolina
2007-04-02

Rachel Andoga

“When I went abroad to Strasbourg, France, I remember meeting everybody in my program on the plane, and this one girl said to me, ‘So, can we just get this out of the way—what are you?’”
 
Amy Reid, a senior biology major and dance team captain, has heard such questions about her ethnicity for years. Her light skin and curly black hair defy pigeon-holing her as white, black, Latino or somewhere in between. Realizing that she’s not alone in ethnic no-man’s land, she wrote a successful Watson Foundation proposal that will allow her to spend the coming year exploring the concept of ethnic identity in Brazil and Namibia.

Reid’s project seeks to compare and contrast multi-racial identity development within specific communities. She chose to visit Brazil and Namibia for their unique cultural heritages. “For a long time, people believed that there was no racism in Brazil since there is such extensive interracial mixing between the native groups, descendants of African slaves, and the Portuguese,” she said. “That’s no longer the popular belief.”…

Read the entire article here.