Mixed Race Studies

Cuban Color Classification and Identity Negotiation: Old Terms in a New World

University of Pittsburgh
2004
246 pages

Shawn Alfonso Wells

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Pittsburgh in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This thesis analyzes how the Cuban Revolution’s transnational discourse on blackness positively affected social attitudes, allowing color identity to be negotiated using color classification terms previously devalued.

In the Caribbean and Latin America, most systems of social stratification based on color privilege “whiteness” both socially and culturally; therefore, individuals negotiate their identities with whiteness as the core element to be expressed. This dissertation examines how this paradigm has been overturned in Cuba so that “blackness” is now the featured aspect of identity. This is due in part to the popular response to the government’s rhetoric which engages in an international political discourse of national identity designed to situate Cuba contextually in opposition to the United States in the global politics of color. This shift has occurred in a dialectic environment of continued negative essentialized images of Blacks although blackness itself is now en vogue. The dialogue that exists between state and popular forms of racial categorization serves to recontextualize the meanings of “blackness” and the values attached to it so that color classification terms which indicate blackness are assumed with facility in identity negotiation.

In the past, the concepts of whitening and mestizaje (race mixture) were employed by the state with the goal of whitening the Cuban population so that Cuba would be perceived as a majority white country. Since the 1959 Revolution, however, the state has publicly claimed that Cuba is an Afro-Latin nation. This pronouncement has resulted in brown/mestizo/mulatto and not white as being the national ideal. The symbolic use of mestizaje in Cuban society and the fluidity inherent in the color classification system leaves space for manipulation from both ends of the color spectrum and permits Cubans from disparate groups to come together under a shared sense of identity. The ideology of the state and the popular perceptions of the symbolism that the mulatto represents were mediated by a color continuum, which in turn was used both by the state and the populace to construct, negotiate, maintain, and manipulate color identities. This study demonstrates that although color classification was not targeted by the government as an agent to convey blackness, it nevertheless does, and the shift in how identity is negotiated using racial categories can be viewed as the response of the populace to the state’s otherwise silent dialogue on “race” and identity.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Introduction: Mulatas del Caribe
• Chapter One: The problem of race
  • Problematizing Race
  • Field Setting
  • Conducting Fieldwork in Cuba
  • Methodology
• Chapter Two: Historical Context of Color Classification in Latin America and the Caribbean
  • History of racial/color categorization in Cuba
  • The Era of Conquest and Colonization
  • The Plantation Era
    • Color classes
    • Pigmentocracy/Whitening
  • The Era of Capitalism
  • The Era of Socialism and Castro
• Chapter Three: Terms of Classification
  • Settings
    • The Census
    • The Carnet
    • The Medical Establishment
  • Cognitive Categories of Color Classification
  • Features of Classification
  • Constructing Identity
    • Blancos
    • Mestizos, Mulatos and Mestizaje
    • Negros
    • Chinos
• Chapter Four: The social significance of classification
  • Contested classifications
  • Stereotypes and Social Status
  • Shifts in meaning and preference of terms
• Chapter Five: Mulatizaje and Cubanidad
  • Mestizaje, Mulattoization and Cubanidad
    • The typical Cuban
  • Claiming Identity and Negotiating Mulatizaje
    • Extended Case Study #1
    • Case study #2
    • Case study #3
    • Case study #4
    • Case study #5
    • Case study #6
    • Case study #7
    • Case study #8
    • Case study #9
    • Case study #10
    • Case study #11
• Conclusions
• Appendices
  • Appendix A: Glosses of Color Terms.
  • Appendix B: Census Enumeration of Writs of Freedom
  • Appendix C: Racial Categories of 1827 and 1841 Censuses
  • Appendix D: Census with Conflicting Terminology
• Bibliography

LIST OF TABLES

• Table 1: Chronological Table of Data Collection Techniques
• Table 2: Census Terms.
• Table 3: Formal Labels on Documents
• Table 4: Descriptive Color Terms
• Table 5: Cognitive Map of Terminology
• Table 6: Labels of Pilesorting Groups.
• Table 7: Percentages of Informants Employing Particular Classification Terms
• Table 8: Johnson’s Hierarchial Clustering.
• Table 9: Color Continuum.
• Table 10: Informal Descriptors
• Table 11: Common Descriptors for Hair Texture
• Table 12: Common Descriptors for Facial Features.
• Table 13: Common Modifying Descriptors
• Table 14: Common Compound Terms
• Table 15: Descriptive Labels

Read the entire dissertation here.

Addressing Racial/Ethnic Health Disparities Best Practices for Clinical Care and Medical Education in the 21st Century

University of Texas, Austin
2013-09-23 through 2013-09-24

One of the primary goals of the US Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and many public health programs is the reduction of health disparities in the United States. However, significant racial/ethnic disparities persist in the prevalence of disease, access to medical care, quality of care, and health outcomes for the most common causes of death (including cardiovascular and lung disease, infectious disease, cancer, diabetes, and accidents). At this conference, nationally-recognized speakers will discuss the causes of such disparities and describe new approaches in clinical care and medical education that improve care, achieve better health outcomes, and reduce racial/ethnic health disparities. We will also discuss how these best practices can be incorporated into medical training at the new Dell Medical School at The University of Texas and at other medical schools around the country. One key goal of this conference is to help design a cutting-edge curriculum that will better prepare medical students to meet the challenges and opportunities of 21st century medicine.

Conference registration is open to anyone interested in attending this event. See the Continuing Medical Education (CME) tab for information regarding continuing education for the September 23rd portion of the conference.

The second day of the conference (September 24) is open to invited participants only. Discussions and working groups on the second day will focus on developing new pedagogical approaches and innovative learning modules for the pre-clinical curriculum at the Dell Medical School, with the goal of more effectively integrating training on human genomic variation, race/ethnicity, health disparities, and social/environmental determinants of health into the medical curriculum.

Speakers

• Deborah Bolnick, PhD
• Vence Bonham, JD [Coauthor of article “Mixed Race: ”]
• Understanding Difference in the Genome Era
• Richard Garcia, MD
• Paul Godley, MD, PhD, MPP
• Ernesto Gonzalez, MD
• Clarence Gravlee, PhD [Author or article “How race becomes biology: Embodiment of social inequality”]
• Helena Hansen, MD, PhD
• John Hoberman, PhD [Author of Black and Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism]
• Seth Holmes, MD, PhD
• Jonathan Kahn, JD, PhD [Author of Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age]
• Jay Kaufman, PhD [Contributor to What’s the Use of Race? Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference]
• Diane Magrane, MD
• Kyriakos Markides, PhD
• Jamie McGuire, MD
• Jonathan Metzl, MD, PhD
• Michael Montoya, PhD
• Rayna Rapp, PhD
• Dorothy Roberts, JD [Author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century]
• Charles Rotimi, PhD [Author of article “Are medical and nonmedical uses of large-scale genomic markers conflating genetics and ‘race’?”]
• Karen-Sue Taussig, PhD

For more information, click here.

The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millennial Mestizaje

Michigan State University Press
2013-11-01
310 pages
6 in x 9 in
Paperback ISBN: 9781611860863
eBook ISBN: 9781609173753

Pancho McFarland, Associate Professor of Sociology
Chicago State University

The population of Mexican-origin peoples in the United States is a diverse one, as reflected by age, class, gender, sexuality, and religion. Far from antiquated concepts of mestizaje, recent scholarship has shown that Mexican@/Chican@ culture is a mixture of indigenous, African, and Spanish and other European peoples and cultures. No one reflects this rich blend of cultures better than Chican@ rappers, whose lyrics and iconography can help to deepen our understanding of what it means to be Chican@ or Mexican@ today. While some identify as Mexican mestizos, others identify as indigenous people or base their identities on their class and racial/ethnic makeup. No less significant is the intimate level of contact between Chican@s and black Americans. Via a firm theoretical foundation and a collection of vibrant essays, Pancho McFarland explores the language and ethos of Chican@/Mexican@ hip hop and sheds new light on three distinct identities reflected in the music: indigenous/Mexica, Mexican nationalist/immigrant, and street hopper. With particular attention to the intersection of black and Chicano cultures, the author places exciting recent developments in music forms within the context of progressive social change, social justice, identity, and a new transnational, polycultural America.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Ruben O. Martinez
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PART 1. SETTING THE THEORETICAL CONTEXT
  • Chapter 1. Quién es más macho? Quién es más Mexicano?: Chican@ and Mexicans Identities in Rap
  • Chapter 2. Barrio Logos: Tlie Sacred and Profane Word of Chicano Emcees
• PART 2. IDENTITIES OLD AND NEW
  • Chapter 3. Sonido Indígena: Mexica Hip-Hop and Masculine Identity
  • Chapter 4. Paísas, Compas, Inmigrantes: Mexicanidad in Hip-Hop
  • Chapter 5. Barrio Locos: Street Hop and Amerikan Identity
• PART 3. MEXICANIDAD, AFRICANIDAD
  • Chapter 6. Multiracial Macho: Kemo the Blaxican’s Hip-Hop Masculinity
  • Chapter 7. The Rap on Chicano/Mexicano and Black Masculinity: Gender and Cross-Cultural Exchange
  • Chapter 8. “Soy la Kalle”: Radio, Reggaetón, and Latin@ Identity
• PART 4. HIP-HOP AND JUSTICE
  • Chapter 9. Teaching Hip-Hop: A Pedagogy for Social Justice
  • Afterword. Hip-Hop and Freedom-Dreaming in the Mexican Diaspora
• Appendix. Music Sources
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX

“Not Tainted by the Past”: Re-Constructions and Negotiations of Coloured Identities Among University Coloured Students in Post- Apartheid South Africa

University of Pittsburgh
2013
152 pages

Sardana Nikolaeva

The South African coloured identity is a profoundly complex construction that, on the one hand, is interpreted as an ambiguous and ‘in-between’ identity and, on the other hand, its own ambiguity and complexity provides multiple means and strategies of production and articulation within various contexts. This dissertation seeks to examine a production of multiple discourses by post-apartheid coloured youth in order to re-construct and negotiate their identities moving through various social contexts of everyday experiences within diverse university settings. Similarly to other minority and marginalized youth, coloured students produce various discourses and practices as the medium of counter-hegemonic formation and negotiation of their minoritized and marginalized identities. In this sense, coloured students implement produced discourses and practices as instrumental agency to create resistance and challenge the dominant discourses on their marginalized and minoritized identities, simultaneously determining alternate characteristics for the same identities. Turning to the current conceptualizations of coloured identities as heterogeneous, non-static and highly contextual, I analyze two dominant discourses produced by the coloured students: coloured as an ethnic/hybrid cultural identity and an adoption of an inclusive South African national identity, simultaneously rejecting coloured identity as a product of the apartheid social engineering. Additionally, integrating an ecological approach and ecology model of identity development, created and utilized by Renn (1998, 2004) in her work that explores how multiracial students construct their identities in the context of higher education, I develop an ecology model of coloured students’ identity development and present the data to determine what factors and opportunities, provided by microsystems, mesosystem, exosystems and macrosystem of identity development, are significant and how they influence coloured students’ identities production, development and negotiation in and out of the university environments. The dissertation analysis on coloured identities builds on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Western Cape, South Africa, including limited participant observation and semi-structured interviews with the undergraduate and graduate coloured students of the University of the Western Cape and University of Stellenbosch, the Western Cape, South Africa.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Belle: Toronto Review

The Hollywood Reporter
2013-09-12

John DeFore

The true story of a mixed-race child raised by British aristocrats is lightly fictionalized by Amma Asante.

TORONTO — Hoping to use some Jane Austen-style courtship anxiety to lend drama to an episode in 18th-century English history that is novel enough on its own, Amma Asante’s Belle centers on Dido Elizabeth Belle, the mixed-race child who was sent to be raised by the second-highest judge in England’s courts. Though the inventions of Misan Sagay’s script emphasize concerns over dowries and social rank that will be grating for many contemporary viewers, extracting little of the humor that Austen regularly found in such hangups, the picture’s sour notes are balanced by fine performances and clear historical appeal. Moviegoers should respond well, if not overwhelmingly, when Fox Searchlight brings it to theaters next spring…

Read the entire review here.

The Changing Face of America

National Geographic Magazine
October 2013
Special 125th Anniversary Issue: The Power of Photography

Lise Funderburg

Photography by Martin Schoeller

Lise Funderburg is the author of Black, White, Other and Pig Candy. When asked, “What are you?” she often describes herself as a woman of some color.

We’ve become a country where race is no longer so black or white.

What is it about the faces on these pages that we find so intriguing? Is it simply that their features disrupt our expectations, that we’re not used to seeing those eyes with that hair, that nose above those lips? Our responses can range from the armchair anthropologist’s benign desire to unravel ancestries and find common ground to active revulsion at group boundaries being violated or, in the language of racist days past, “watered down.”

Out in the world, the more curious (or less polite) among us might approach, asking, “Where are you from?” or “What are you?” We look and wonder because what we see—and our curiosity—speaks volumes about our country’s past, its present, and the promise and peril of its future.

The U.S. Census Bureau has collected detailed data on multiracial people only since 2000, when it first allowed respondents to check off more than one race, and 6.8 million people chose to do so. Ten years later that number jumped by 32 percent, making it one of the fastest growing categories. The multiple-race option has been lauded as progress by individuals frustrated by the limitations of the racial categories established in the late 18th century by German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who divided humans into five “natural varieties” of red, yellow, brown, black, and white. Although the multiple-race option is still rooted in that taxonomy, it introduces the factor of self-determination. It’s a step toward fixing a categorization system that, paradoxically, is both erroneous (since geneticists have demonstrated that race is biologically not a reality) and essential (since living with race and racism is). The tracking of race is used both to enforce antidiscrimination laws and to identify health issues specific to certain populations…

Read the entire article here. View the photographs here.

Will Interracial Relationships Ever Be Common on TV?

Bitch Magazine
2013-09-04

Sophia Seawell

I’m usually skeptical of advertising. I know companies spend millions of dollars hoping that their body lotion or paper towels or lunch meat will bring me to tears.

But ads are powerful. They’re a form of media where we see representations of ourselves and our society, just like on TV shows they interrupt. And it’s rare to see people like me—with a black father and a white mother—represented in ads.

Earlier this year, like many other people, I heard about a Cheerios ad, “Just Checking,” that featured an interracial family—a white mother, black father and their daughter—before I saw it. I was excited about it, sure, but why I was excited didn’t really register until I finally did see it for myself…

…The Cheerios ad caused stirred up some racist controversy, leaving many people wondering why interracial relationships still have the ability to alarm 46 years after the Supreme Court struck down laws that banned interracial marriages in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case. Clearly the idea that interracial relationships are not okay runs deeper than we’d like to think.

A half-century isn’t enough time to dissolve the well-engrained ideas about race and marriage that were constructed after the Civil War, when miscegenation laws spread across the country “to serve as props for the racial system of slavery, as one more way to distinguish free Whites from slaves,”  as historian Peggy Pascoe puts it. The idea that mixing of races was unnatural, against God’s will, and would lead to biological degradation made miscegenation laws a tool to define what a legitimate family was and thereby maintain white supremacy. 

At the time of the Loving v. Virginia decision, seventeen states still had miscegenation laws in place. In fact, it took Alabama until 2000 to officially amend their law. Even more recently, in 2009, a judge in Louisiana refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple.

Meanwhile, according to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of interracial marriage reached all-time high in 2010. In that year, about 15 percent of all new marriages were interracial and 8.4 percent of all existing marriages were interracial.

But films, TV, and advertising haven’t caught up to the current racial reality…

Read the entire article here.

Black and white in America: The culture and politics of racial classification

International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society
Volume 7, Issue 2 (Winter 1993)
pages 229-258
DOI: 10.1007/BF02283196

Ernest Evans Kilker

The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and external career for a variety of individuals . . . The first fruit of this imagination —and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it—is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his chances in life only by becoming aware of all those individuals in his circumstances . . . The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. —C. W. Mills

It is in race that the postmodern world today finds its most exemplary vanishing point. Race appears as if it is fixed and permanent, immune to being altered by the ideas or expressions used to address or comprehend it. Yet what does it really mean? To what extent does it have anything to say about specifiable differences between peoples, cultures and histories? The point here is when we talk about race we are never sure what we are referring to: a dilemma which posits many contradictory futures and opportunities. —Timothy Maliqualim Simone

THE POLITICS OF RACIAL CLASSIFICATION

Who is Black? Is there any “scientific” and “objective” answer or simply a cultural and “subjective one? In a racist culture, the answer to this question is fraught with political, economic, legal, familial, psychological, and sexual intended and unintended consequences. Surprisingly, the first book length sociological survey treatment of this subject, by F. James Davis appeared only last year (Davis, 1991: ix). Davis himself admits that the theoretical connections, to phenomenological, symbolic interactionist, structural, and conflict theories, which his excellent work implicitly suggests, go unexplored (Davis, 1991: x). Although we take for granted our definition of “black” which pivots on the Louisiana “one drop” or “any known black ancestry” rule (Dominquez, 1986), cross culturally its definition and meanings are extremely variable (Adams, 1969; Hoetnik, 1967; Lowenthal, 1969; Pierson, 1942; Freyre, 1963). In addition, historical studies of racial miscegenation and mulattos in the United States are few and far between (Williamson, 1980: xi; Reuter, 1918).

Because of the amount of interbreeding that has taken place over the last several thousand years, the scientific status of the biological concept of race is an especially dubious one (Simone, 1989). What exists is a spectrum and continuum of human types which share certain physical traits in an almost infinite variety of combinations (Kuper, 1975; Montagu, 1965). However, from a cultural point of view, the American belief in the biological reality of race is still a pervasive one. In our racist culture, any known black ancestry (i.e. “one drop”) can lead to the societal designation of the individual genetically as “black” — even if the individual is overwhelmingly “white.” As a result of this cultural rule, many black leaders, who were significantly and even predominantly white, were defined and defined themselves as “black.” The most dramatic example on this longand illustrious list (which would include Frederick Douglass, Booker T, Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, A. Phillip Randolph, and Adam Clayton Powell) is Walter White, head of the NAACP from 1931-1955, who anthropologists estimate could not have been more than one sixty-fourth African black (Davis, 1991:7). Walter White “passed for white” when he went “undercover” while investigating lynchings in the South for the NAACP. In addition in 1923 he deceived Edward Y. Clark, a Ku Klux Klan recruiter, into inviting him to Atlanta to advise him on recruitment. However his cover was blown before the trip could take place (Lewis, 1979: 131). In the same year he managed to embarass many a federal legislator, while lobbying for an anti-lynching bill. When they discovered White was Black, they regretted their candor (Lewis, 1979: 132). Even Malcolm X, the individual most responsible for the black consciousness and black power movement in the United States, had a white rapist for a grandfather and a mother who, for employment purposes, regularly “passed for white” (Haley, 1964: 2). Malcolm’s mother, Louise, claimed that if she scrubbed the young Malcolm hard and often enough, “I can make him look almost white” (Perry, 1991: p. 5). Once Malcolm himself converted to the nation of Islam, he regularly took “skin baths” in the sun to deepen his self-described “light” skin tone (Perry, 1991: 117)…

Read or purchase the article here.

Genetic Bio-Ancestry and Social Construction of Racial Classification in Social Surveys in the Contemporary United States

Demography
September 2013
32 pages
DOI: 10.1007/s13524-013-0242-0-0

Guang Guo, Professor of Sociology
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Yilan Fu

Hedwig Lee

Tianji Cai

Kathleen Mullan Harris

Yi Li

Self-reported race is generally considered the basis for racial classification in social surveys, including the U.S. census. Drawing on recent advances in human molecular genetics and social science perspectives of socially constructed race, our study takes into account both genetic bio-ancestry and social context in understanding racial classification. This article accomplishes two objectives. First, our research establishes geographic genetic bio-ancestry as a component of racial classification. Second, it shows how social forces trump biology in racial classification and/or how social context interacts with bio-ancestry in shaping racial classification. The findings were replicated in two racially and ethnically diverse data sets: the College Roommate Study (N = 2,065) and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 2,281).

Read or purchase the article here.

Skin pigmentation, biogeographical ancestry and admixture mapping

Human Genetics
Volume 112, Issue 4 (April 2003)
pages 387-399

Mark D. Shriver, Professor of Anthropology
Pennsylvania State University

Esteban J. Parra
Department of Anthropology
University of Toronto at Mississauga

Sonia Dios
Department of Anthropology
Pennsylvania State University

Carolina Bonilla
Department of Anthropology
Pennsylvania State University

Heather Norton
Department of Anthropology
Pennsylvania State University

Celina Jovel
Department of Anthropology
Pennsylvania State University

Carrie Pfaff
Department of Anthropology
Pennsylvania State University

Cecily Jones
National Human Genome Center
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Aisha Massac
National Human Genome Center
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Neil Cameron
Takeway Media, London

Archie Baron
Takeway Media, London

Tabitha Jackson
Takeway Media, London

George Argyropoulos
Pennington Center for Biomedical Research, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Li Jin
Department of Environmental Health
University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio

Clive J. Hoggart
Department of Epidemiology and Population Health
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Paul M. McKeigue
Department of Epidemiology and Population Health
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Rick A. Kittles
National Human Genome Center
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Ancestry informative markers (AIMs) are genetic loci showing alleles with large frequency differences between populations. AIMs can be used to estimate biogeographical ancestry at the level of the population, subgroup (e.g. cases and controls) and individual. Ancestry estimates at both the subgroup and individual level can be directly instructive regarding the genetics of the phenotypes that differ qualitatively or in frequency between populations. These estimates can provide a compelling foundation for the use of admixture mapping (AM) methods to identify the genes underlying these traits. We present details of a panel of 34 AIMs and demonstrate how such studies can proceed, by using skin pigmentation as a model phenotype. We have genotyped these markers in two population samples with primarily African ancestry, viz. African Americans from Washington D.C. and an African Caribbean sample from Britain, and in a sample of European Americans from Pennsylvania. In the two African population samples, we observed significant correlations between estimates of individual ancestry and skin pigmentation as measured by reflectometry (R²=0.21, P<0.0001 for the African-American sample and R²=0.16, P<0.0001 for the British African-Caribbean sample). These correlations confirm the validity of the ancestry estimates and also indicate the high level of population structure related to admixture, a level that characterizes these populations and that is detectable by using other tests to identify genetic structure. We have also applied two methods of admixture mapping to test for the effects of three candidate genes (TYR, OCA2, MC1R) on pigmentation. We show that TYR and OCA2 have measurable effects on skin pigmentation differences between the west African and west European parental populations. This work indicates that it is possible to estimate the individual ancestry of a person based on DNA analysis with a reasonable number of well-defined genetic markers. The implications and applications of ancestry estimates in biomedical research are discussed.

Read the entire article here.