Mixed Race Studies

Ethnicity and Ethnically “Mixed” Identity in Belize: A Study of Primary School-Age Children

Anthropology & Education Quarterly
Volume 29, Issue 1 (March 1998)
pages 44–67
DOI: 10.1525/aeq.1998.29.1.44

Sarah Woodbury Haug

This article focuses on the ehtnic identity of children in Belize. Belizean nationalism, as taught in the primary schools, is both pan-ethnic and multiethnic. However, because the increasingly widespread practice of ethnic mixing is unacknowledged, there is a discrepancy between what is taught in school and the daily life of children. This has resulted in a paradox. Whereas the overt intent is to recognize and celebrate difference, the result has been to silence children’s voices.

Teacher: “Everyone here belongs to an ethnic group. You will draw the clothing of your group.”
Mixed Mestizo/Garifuna girl: “What if you are mixed?”
Teacher: “It doesn’t matter if you are mixed… you draw the Creole outfit.”
[Teacher tells four other children of mixed ethnicity which clothing they will draw.]
Anthropologist to teacher: “What ethnic group are you?”
Teacher: “I am mixed with Creole and Spanish but my husband is an East Indian.”
Anthropologist: “What ethnic group do your children belong to?”
Teacher [laughs and waves her hand dismissively]: “They are just mixed.”
Anthropologist: “Oh. What did you do with the mixed children in your class?”
Teacher: “Well, I assigned them to a group.”

This article illuminates the subjective nature of ethnic identification in a nation-state that promotes multiculturalism and ethnic diversity within its borders. The government of Belize supports the cultures of all its ethnic groups and teaches about them in schools as part of its program of nationalism. The scene above illustrates the combination of issues that are involved in locating children of mixed ethnicity within the government’s ethnic framework in Punta Gorda, a small town of 3,500 people on the southern coast. Because ethnic mixing is unacknowledged by the Belizean government and not discussed in schools, there is a great discrepancy between what is taught in the schools, and the daily life of such children. What schools teach and what children understand are not the same. The silence on the part of the government, however, speaks loudly to children as they attempt to place themselves within the ethnic framework of their community and country.

To many adults, not only Punta Gordans, children are reflections of the adult world. They are thought of as simple creatures who absorb all that is taught to them (Jenks 1996:2; Stephens 1996:12), or viewed as a means of measuring the values of society (Ndebele 1996:322). They are not, as Stephens writes, “social actors in their own right, engaged in making sense of and recreating the social worlds they inherit” (1996:23-24). However, my research shows that children clearly are active participants in the construction of their own identity, even if their constructions are not recognized by the adult community and even if children are labeled by adults according to adult needs and perceptions…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Cast From Their Ancestral Home, Creoles Worry About Culture’s Future

New York Times
2005-10-11

Susan Saulny, National Correspondent

NATCHITOCHES PARISH, La., Oct. 9 – It is peaceful here on the Cane River, beyond the fluffy tops of high cotton and towering magnolia trees, but it is not home. For the New Orleans Creoles living in exodus here and elsewhere around Louisiana, their city was far more than home – it was homeland, the capital of an ethnic nation unique in this country.

“New Orleans was our womb and for most of us, it was going to be our grave,” said Timothy Bordenave, who is living in a cottage here, a five-hour drive away from the city, describing the deep sense of lifelong connection felt to New Orleans by many of the city’s Creoles, the population of mixed-race families who trace their roots to the city’s French and Spanish colonial era…

…Many Creoles trace their roots to immigrants and slaves from the former French and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, particularly Cuba and what is now Haiti. Historians say it was New Orleans’s position as a crossroads and port town that allowed for the easy mingling of races and nationalities that in turn gave birth, in the 18th century, to a part-European, part-Afro-Caribbean society that grew to an estimated 20,000 people in Louisiana by the mid-1800’s.

The Creole culture that developed over generations—known for a distinctive cuisine, language and music—contributed to New Orleans’s singular identity and helped define Louisiana to the world. Before Hurricane Katrina, experts estimated that 10 to 20 percent of black people in New Orleans—30,000 to 60,000 people—considered themselves Creole by way of ancestry, but even more lived lives influenced by the culture because of their proximity to it…

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Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging

Duke University Press
November 2010
320 pages
15 photographs, 4 tables
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4683-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4695-1

Eleana J. Kim, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Rochester

Since the end of the Korean War, an estimated 200,000 children from South Korea have been adopted into white families in North America, Europe, and Australia. While these transnational adoptions were initiated as an emergency measure to find homes for mixed-race children born in the aftermath of the war, the practice grew exponentially from the 1960s through the 1980s. At the height of South Korea’s “economic miracle,” adoption became an institutionalized way of dealing with poor and illegitimate children. Most of the adoptees were raised with little exposure to Koreans or other Korean adoptees, but as adults, through global flows of communication, media, and travel, they came into increasing contact with each other, Korean culture, and the South Korean state. Since the 1990s, as infants continue to leave Korea for adoption to the West, a growing number of adult adoptees have been returning to seek their cultural and biological origins. In this fascinating ethnography, Eleana J. Kim examines the history of Korean adoption, the emergence of a distinctive adoptee collective identity, and adoptee returns to Korea in relation to South Korean modernity and globalization. Kim draws on interviews with adult adoptees, social workers, NGO volunteers, adoptee activists, scholars, and journalists in the U.S., Europe, and South Korea, as well as on observations at international adoptee conferences, regional organization meetings, and government-sponsored motherland tours.

Source: Ebony Magazine, 1955

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Transliteration, Terminology, and Pseudonyms
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Understanding Transnational Korean Adoption
• Part I
  • 1. “Waifs” and “Orphans”: The Origins of Korean Adoption
  • 2. Adoptee Kinship
  • 3. Adoptee Cultural Citizenship
  • 4. Public Intimacies and Private Politics
• Part II
  • 5. Our Adoptee, Our Alien: Adoptees as Specters of Family and Foreignness in Global Korea
  • 6. Made in Korea: Adopted Koreans and Native Koreans in the Motherland
  • 7. Beyond Good and Evil: The Moral Economies of Children and their Best Interests in a Global Age
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

Hybrids and History. The Role of Race and Ethnic Crossing in Individual and National Achievement

The Quarterly Review of Biology
Volume 26, Number 4 (December, 1951)
pages 331-347

George D. Snell (1903-1996)
Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Maine

It is curious to reflect that almost the requisite three or four hundred years have passed since the intercrossing began in America; and it is possible that the United States of America may be quite near to a brilliant efflorescence of genius in thought and art, and perhaps even nore in the scientific organization of natural resources for the good of its own life and for the life of mankind” (Murphy, 1941), This quotation from a British author is based on phenomenon often noted by anthropologists and historians. Sir Flinders Petrie (1911) and numerous writers after him have remarked that the rise of great civilizations, usually and perhaps invariably, is preceded by a mixing of races, and that an incubation period of several centuries follows the first invasion of alien groups before the civilization comes to full flower.

Toynbee (1935) has attached less significance to the crossing than most writers, and his discussion of the subject may be taken as conservative. He distinguishes twenty-one civilizations, and finds clear evidence of crossing in eleven of these. Moreover, most of the remaining ten can also be said to involve crossing if some additional permissible divisions are made in the races of man. The ten civilizations in which the evidence of crossing is least clear are the Babylonic, Syriac, Arabic, Hindu, Sinic (yellow), Far Eastern (yellow), Andean, Mayan, Yucatec, and Mexican. Nine of the great white civilizations including the Hellenic, Western and Egyptic are known beyond question to be the product of hybrid peoples with the Alpine race being one of the components of the mixture and the Nordic and/or Mediterranean the other. Toynbee concludes that “the number of civilizations created by the unaided endeavours of a single race in each case would present themselves as exceptions to a prevalent law—a law to the effect that the geneses of civilizations require creative contributions from more races than one.”

There has been little agreement among those who have discussed the subject as to reason for this relation between race crossing and the progress of civilizations. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the possibility that race crossing, even between subgroups of the white race, produces individuals of exceptional vitality and vigor (hybrid vigor), and that its role in the development of civilizations lies largely or in significant part in the unusual contributions which these individuals, both as leaders and as laborers, are able to make. Few writers seem to have considered this possibility. Hooton (1926) has recognized the probable occurrence of heterosis within the white race, and Hankins (1926) has proposed heterosis as an explanation of the role of race mixture in the genesis of civilizations. Other writers have looked elsewhere in seeking to explain the phenomenon…

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‘Such fine families’: photography and race in the work of Caroline Bond Day

Visual Studies
Volume 21, Issue 2 (October 2006)
pages 106-132
DOI: 10.1080/14725860600944971

Heidi Ardizzone, Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of Notre Dame

This article examines a collection of family photographs published in an unusual 1932 anthropological study of ‘Negro-White families’. In the 1920s Caroline Bond Day, a woman of mixed ancestry herself, gathered family histories and photographs of over 300 ‘Negro-White families’ for her graduate work at Harvard University under eugenicist Ernest Hooton. Day’s subjects, recruited from her circles of friends and acquaintances, shared her goals of African American equality and uplift but were often suspicious of her chosen field. Anthropology has often been referred to as the handmaiden of colonialism and racism, and physical anthropology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not generally supportive of African American civil rights movements prior to World War II. Nevertheless, about 350 families submitted family histories and photographs and filled out surveys. Some also allowed themselves to be measured with calipers. The published study included over four hundred photographs, which collectively provide a visual mediation between Day’s political goals, her exclusive focus on mixed-race families and her use of physical anthropology and blood-quantum language. Day’s work remains controversial, but continues to be used by scholars, activists and artists in part because of its unique focus and methods.

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Heredity of Skin Color in Negro-White Crosses

Carnegie Institution of Washington
1913
106 pages
Number 188, Paper Number 20 of the Station for experimental evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, New York

Charles B. Davenport (1866-1944), Director
Eugenics Record Office, Carnegie Department of Genetics, and Biological Laboratory
Cold Spring Harbor, New York

Table of Contents

• A. Statement of the problem
• B. Method of investigation
• C. Evaluation of the data
• D. Ontogenetic development of the skin color of the negro
• E. Results:
  • I. The skin color of Caucasians in Bermuda and Jamaica
  • II. Quantitative determination of the skin color of pure-bred negroes
  • III. Skin color of the children of a negro and a Caucasian (the Fi generation)
  • IV. Skin color of the children of two mulattoes (the F2 generation)
  • V. Hypothesis
  • VI. Test of the hypothesis
  • VII. Is there a sex-linkage or sex-dimorphism in skin color?
  • VIII. Do the children “take after” the mother and father equally?
  • IX. Selection of mates—”grading up” to white
  • X. The agreement of the hypothesis with popular observation and nomenclature
  • XI. The yellow element in the skin color
  • XII. The “fixed white,” the “pass for white,” and the “white by law”
  • XIII. Reversion to black skin color
• F. Discussion of inheritance of traits associated with skin color:
  • I. Eye color
  • II. Hair color
  • III. Hair form
• G. Correlation of characteristics in hybrids
  • I. Correlation between the color of the skin and of the hair in the F2 generation
  • II. Correlation between color of the skin and form of the hair in the F1 generation
• H. Fecundity of hybrids
• I. Summary of conclusions
• K. Literature cited
• Appendix A:
  • I. Bermudian families
  • II. Jamaican families
  • III. Louisianian families
• Appendix B. Social data concerning miscegenation

Two years ago (1910) Mrs. Davenport and I published some measurements made on the color of the skin of descendants of matings between negroes and Caucasians; and we concluded that, in opposition to current belief, our data afforded evidence that there is segregation in skin color. We concluded that, while skin color is inherited in typical fashion, the pigmentation of the full-blooded negro is not dependent on two {i.e., the duplex) determiners, “but perhaps a myriad of them.” Lang (1911,*p. 122) cites these results with approval and brings them in line with other studies in which the presence of several factors for a single character is indicated, but he would query our statement “that offspring are rarely darker than the darker parent.” This statement merely summarized the empirical result obtained from the four quantitatively studied families and was not in complete harmony with the theoretical explanation offered—a disaccord upon which we laid no emphasis because our quantitative data were so limited. Our concluding sentence was as follows:

All studies indicate that blonds lack one or more units that brunets possess; that the negro skin possesses still additional units; that individuals with the heavier skin pigmentation may have slight pigmentation covered over—hypostatic, evidence of this condition appearing in the light offspring of such hybrids in the second or third generation; and that first-generation hybrids frequently show, somatically, a color grade less than that which they carry potentially and may segregate in their germ-cells.

The need for additional data was, however, recognized as great…

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African Ancestry of the White American Population

The Ohio Journal of Science
Volume 58, Number 3 (May 1958)
pages 155-160

Robert P. Stuckert
Departments of Sociology and Anthropology
Ohio State University, Columbus

Defining a racial group generally poses a problem to social scientists. A definition of a race has yet to be proposed that is satisfactory for all purposes. This is particularly true when the racial group has minority group status as does the Negro group in the United States. To many persons, however, the matter of race definition is no problem. They view humanity as being divided into completely separate racial compartments. A Negro is commonly defined as a person having any known trace of Negro ancestry or “blood” regardless of how far back one must go to find it. A concomitant belief is that all whites are free of the presumed taint of Negro ancestry or “blood.”

The purpose of this research was to determine the validity of this belief in the non-Negro ancestry of persons classified as white. Current definitions of Negro may have serious limitations when used as bases for classifying persons according to ancestry (Berry, 1951). The terms African and non-African will be used rather than Negro and white when discussing the ancestry of an individual. Each of the former pair of terms has a more specific referent which is the geographic point of origin of an individual. At the same time, the two pairs of terms are closely related. Hence, this paper is the report of an attempt to estimate the percentage of persons classified as white that have African ancestry or genes received from an African ancestor.

This raises a question concerning the relationship between having an African ancestor and receiving one or more genes from this ancestor. Since one-half of an individual’s genetic inheritance is received from each parent, the probability of a person with one African ancestor within the previous eight generations receivingany single gene from this ancestor is equal to or greater than (0.5)⁸ or 3.9063 x 10³. It has been estimated that there are approximately 48,000 gene loci on 24 chromosome pairs (Stern, 1950). The probability that an individual with one African ancestor has one or more genes derived from this ancestor is equal to 1-(1-3.9063 x10^-3)^24,000 or greater than 0.9998. Having more than one African ancestor increases this probability. One final remark needs to be made. Some degree of African ancestry is not necessarily related to the physical appearance of the individual. Many of the genes possessed by virtue of descent from an African do not distinguish the bearer from persons of non-African ancestry. They are the genes or potentials for traits which characterize the human race. Nevertheless, these genes represent an element in the biological constitution of the individual inherited from an African…

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