Mixed Race Studies

Black and Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism

University of California Press
April 2012
304 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520274013
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520248908

John Hoberman

Black & Blue is the first systematic description of how American doctors think about racial differences and how this kind of thinking affects the treatment of their black patients. The standard studies of medical racism examine past medical abuses of black people and do not address the racially motivated thinking and behaviors of physicians practicing medicine today.

Black & Blue penetrates the physician’s private sphere where racial fantasies and misinformation distort diagnoses and treatments. Doctors have always absorbed the racial stereotypes and folkloric beliefs about racial differences that permeate the general population. Within the world of medicine this racial folklore has infiltrated all of the medical sub-disciplines, from cardiology to gynecology to psychiatry. Doctors have thus imposed white or black racial identities upon every organ system of the human body, along with racial interpretations of black children, the black elderly, the black athlete, black musicality, black pain thresholds, and other aspects of black minds and bodies. The American medical establishment does not readily absorb either historical or current information about medical racism. For this reason, racial enlightenment will not reach medical schools until the current race-aversive curricula include new historical and sociological perspectives.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. THE NATURE OF MEDICAL RACISM: THE ORIGINS AND CONSEQUENCES OF MEDICAL RACISM
  • Introduction
  • “Avoidance and Evasion”
  • Judging How Physicians Behave
  • Judging Physician Conduct: Privacy and the “Halo Effect”
  • The Oral Tradition
  • Physicians Share the Racial Attitudes of Their Fellow Citizens
  • The Medical Liberals
• 2. BLACK PATIENTS AND WHITE DOCTORS
  • The African American Health Calamity: The Silence
  • Medical Vulnerability and Racial Defamation
  • How Do (White) Physicians Think about Race?
  • Evidence or Medical Racism
  • Resistance to the Critique of Racial Bias in Medicine
  • Medical Liberalism and the Medical Literature
  • The Physician’s Private Sphere
  • Playing Anthropologist
  • From Racial Folklore to Racial Medicine
• 3. MEDICAL CONSEQUENCES OF RACIALIZING THE HUMAN ORGANISM
  • Racial Interpretations of Human Types and Traits
    • Introduction
    • Racial Interpretations of Black Infants and Children
    • Racial Interpretations of the Black Elderly
    • Racial Interpretations of the Black Athlete
    • Racial Interpretations of Black Musical Aptitude
    • Racial Interpretations of Losing Consciousness
    • Racial Interpretations of the Nervous System
    • Racial Interpretations of Pain Sensitivity
    • Racial Interpretations of Heart Disease
  • Racial Interpretations of Human Organs and Disorders
    • Racial Interpretations of the Eyes
    • Racial Interpretations of Black Skin
    • Racial Interpretations of Human Teeth
    • Racial Interpretations of “While” and “Black” Disorders
    • Black “Hardiness”
    • Physical Hardiness
    • Emotional Hardiness
    • Conclusion: How Human Organ Systems Acquire Racial Identities
  • Racial Folklore in Medical Specialties
    • A Century of Racial Pharmacology: From Racial Folklore to Racial Genetics
    • The Role of Racial Folklore in Obstetrics and Gynecology during the Twentieth Century
• 4. MEDICAL APARTHEID, INTERNAL COLONIALISM, AND THE TASK OF AMERICAN PSYCHIATRY
  • Introduction
  • “Africanizing” the Black Image
  • American Psychiatry as Racial Medicine
  • The Racial Primitive in American Psychiatry
  • The Task of Black Psychiatry
  • Colonial Medical Status
• 5. A MEDICAL SCHOOL SYLLABUS ON RACE
  • Introduction
  • The Doctor-Patient Relationship
  • The Problem Patient
  • Medical Authors’ Aversion to Race
  • Race and Medical Education: The Search for “Cultural Competence”
  • Two Official Versions of “Cultural Competence”
  • Physicians’ Beliefs about Racial Differences: A (Belated) Study
  • A Medical Curriculum on Race
  • Practical Advice for Physicians
  • Social Class, Misdiagnoses, and Therapeutic Fatalism
  • “Cultural Competence” as Knowledge of Stereotype Systems
  • Raceless Humanism: “Medical Humanities” and the Evasion of Difference
  • Medical Curriculum Change Is Possible: The Case of Abortion Training
• Notes
• Index

Mixed-Race Chic

The Chronicle Review
The Chronicle of Higher Education
2009-05-19

Rainier Spencer, Associate Vice Provost for Academic Affairs
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Popular wisdom suggests that we are in the midst of a transformation in the way race is constructed in the United States. Indeed, so strong and so inevitable is this shift said to be that longstanding racial dynamics are purportedly being dismantled and reconstructed even as you read these words.

According to this view, individuals of mixed race, particularly first-generation multiracial people, are confounding the American racial template with their ambiguous phenotypes and purported ability to serve as living bridges between races. This perspective is reflected in television and magazine advertising and coverage and in books both academic and nonacademic. As long as a decade ago, the sociologist Kathleen Odell Korgen wrote in From Black to Biracial: Transforming Racial Identity Among Americans (Praeger, 1998) that “today mixed-race Americans challenge the very foundation of our racial structure.”

From his well-received speech on race, in which he positioned himself as having a direct understanding of both black and white anger, to his reference to himself as a “mutt,” Barack Obama and his historic election have significantly boosted this view. Many Americans hail his background as portending our postracial future. We hear that self-styled multiracial young adults accept their mixed identity far more than did their pre-civil-rights-era predecessors; but precisely what they are actually assenting to and what it means may be little more than a fad.

People who see us accepting a new multiracial identity have long argued that it is destructive of race: that recognition and acceptance of multiracialism will bring about the demise of the American racial model. The American Multiracial Identity Movement thereby suggests that multiracial identity possesses an insurgent character, a militant stance against the idea of recognizing race in the United States.

Regardless of their contemporary popularity, such claims are without merit. Indeed, they are self-contradictory. If one holds that multiracial identity is a real and valid identity, then it can be sensible only as a biological racial identity. If words are to mean anything, and they should, it quite obviously cannot be that a multiracial identity is somehow not a biological racial identity. Rather, multiracial identity merely falls in place to join other, already existing racial categories…

…As Catherine R. Squires, a professor of journalism, writes in Dispatches From the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America (State University of New York Press, 2007), multiracialism is fundamentally ambiguous: “This ambiguity is about exoticism and intrigue, providing opportunities for consumers to fantasize and speculate about the Other with no expectations of critical consideration of power and racial categories.” Squires makes an important point, for it is crucial to be able to separate racial ambiguity that might be utilized to work consciously against racial hierarchies from racial ambiguity that is simply a form of self-interested celebration that ends up reinforcing those racial hierarchies…

Read the entire article here.

The Melanin Millennium: Skin Color as 21st Century International Discourse

Springer
2013
348 pages
32 illustrations
Hardcover ISBN 978-94-007-4607-7
eBook ISBN: 978-94-007-4608-4
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-4608-4

Edited by:

Ronald E. Hall, Professor of Social Work
Michigan State University

• Addresses the issue of skin color in a worldwide context
• Discusses the introduction of new forms of visual media and their effect on skin color discrimination
• Touches up on the issue of skin bleaching and the Bleaching Syndrome

In the aftermath of the 60s “Black is Beautiful” movement and publication of The Color Complex almost thirty years later the issue of skin color has mushroomed onto the world stage of social science. Such visibility has inspired publication of the Melanin Millennium for insuring that the discourse on skin color meet the highest standards of accuracy and objective investigation.

This volume addresses the issue of skin color in a worldwide context. A virtual visit to countries that have witnessed a huge rise in the use of skin whitening products and facial feature surgeries aiming for a more Caucasian-like appearance will be taken into account. The book also addresses the question of whether using the laws has helped to redress injustices of skin color discrimination, or only further promoted recognition of its divisiveness among people of color and Whites.

The Melanin Millennium has to do with now and the future. In the 20th century science including eugenics was given to and dominated by discussions of race category. Heretofore there remain social scientists and other relative to the issue of skin color loyal to race discourse. However in their interpretation and analysis of social phenomena the world has moved on. Thus while race dominated the 20th century the 21st century will emerge as a global community dominated by skin color and making it the melanin millennium.

Contents

• Preface
• Chapter 1. The Bleaching Syndrome: Western Civilization vis-à-vis Inferiorized People of Color; Ronald E. Hall
• Chapter 2. The Historical and Cultural Influences of Skin Bleaching in Tanzania;  Kelly M. Lewis, Solette Harris, Christina Champ, Willbrord Kalala, Will Jones, Kecia L. Ellick, Justie Huff and Sinead Younge
• Chapter 3. Pathophysiology and Psychopathology of Skin Bleaching and Implicationa of Skin Colour in Africa; A. A. Olowu and O. Ogunlade
• Chapter 4. An Introduction to Japanese Society’s Attitudes Toward Race and Skin Color; Arudou Debito
• Chapter 5. The Inconvenient Truth of India, Caste, and Color Discrimination; Varsha Ayyar and Lalit Khandare
• Chapter 6. Indigeneity on Guahan: Skin Color as a Measure of Decolonization; LisaLinda Natividad
• Chapter 7. A Table of Two Cultures; Eneid Routté-Gómez
• Chapter 8. Where are you From?; Stéphanie Cassilde
• Chapter 9. Social Work Futures: Reflections from the UK on the Demise of Anti-racist Social Work and Emerging Issues in a “Post-Race'” Era; Mekada J. Graham
• Chapter 10. Shades of Conciousness: From Jamaica to the UK; William Henry
• Chapter 11. Fanon Revisited: Race Gender and Colniality vis-à-vis Skin Color; Linda Lane and Hauwa Mahdi
• Chapter 12. Pigment Disorders and Pigment Manipulations; Henk E. Menke
• Chapter 13. Skin Color and Blood Quantum: Getting the Red Out; Deb Bakken and Karen Branden
• Chapter 14. The Impact of Skin Color on Mental and Behavorial Health in African American and Latina Adolescent Girls: A Review of the Literature; Alfiee M. Breland-Noble
• Chapter 15. Characteristics of Color Discrimination Charges Filed with the EEOC; Joni Hersch
• Chapter 16. The Consequences of Colorism; Margaret Hunter
• Chapter 17. Navigating the Color Complex: How Multiracial Individuals Narrate the Elements of Appearance and Dynamics of Color in Twenty-first Century America; Sara McDonough and David L. Brunsma
• Chapter 18. The Fade-Out of Shirley, a Once-Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity; Lorna Roth
• Chapter 19. What Color is Red? Exploring the implications of Phenotype for Native Americans; Hilary N. Weaver
• Chapter 20. From Fair & Lovely to Banho de Lua: Skin Whitening and its Implications in the Multi-ethnic and Multicolored Surinamese Society; Jack Menke
• Chapter 21. Affirmative Action and Racial Identityin Brazil: A Study of the First Quota Graduates at the State University of Rio de Janneiro: Vânia Penha-Lopes
• Index

IU Libraries Film Archive a treasure chest of educational, rare films

inside IU Bloomington
Weekly news for faculty and staff from the Indiana University Bloomington campus
2013-03-07

Lynn Schoch, Office of the Vice President for International Affairs

Many of a certain age—particularly those who were in elementary school in the ’50s and ’60s—will remember 16 mm films produced by the U.S. government, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., McGraw-Hill or National Educational Television.

They often provided the only glimpses of other worlds that U.S. school children had the opportunity to see.

By the 1970s, videotape and documentaries with large budgets and prime-time aspirations, like Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation,” began to replace the older formats.

From about 1940, IU’s Audio-Visual Center (then part of the Extension Division and later, Instructional Support Services) was the depository for U.S. government films. In time, it became the state’s most active lender of educational films to schools, museums, clubs, community centers, and churches in the state.

As the move to videotape made 16 mm films “obsolete,” the center became a repository for what other institutions and organizations no longer wanted.

In 2006 what was then a collection of 34,000 reels formed the core of the IU Libraries Film Archive. IU Libraries has supported the transition from lending library to historical archive with a dedicated film achivist in the Herman B. Wells Library, support for resources to digitize the collections and an off-site storage environment designed to minimize deterioration.

“We have the largest educational film collection in any university library,” said Rachael Stoeltje, film archivist with the IU Libraries Film Archive.

There are films available nowhere else in the world, and rarities such as 30 titles from the 1950s CBS series “You Are There” and the world’s most complete collection of Encyclopedia Britannica films…

…Darlene Sadlier, director of the Portuguese Program and a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, a program within the College of Arts and Sciences, has been using educational films from the collection for many years in her classes in Latin American cinema and culture.

“One film that is helpful in a discussion of the history of race relations in Brazil, for instance, is ‘Brazil: The Vanishing Negro,'” she said. The film is a 30-minute film produced for public television in the 1960s, showing Afro-Brazilian religious ceremonies and the daily lives of Brazil’s black population.

“It was an informative resource when it was first produced, but it was also polemical because it discussed the benefits of racial mixing, or rather whitening, of the Brazilian African population, to the detriment of its heritage,” Sadlier said. “In recent years, Brazil has recognized its African heritage with affirmative action laws and a holiday dedicated to national race consciousness. With this film, we can look back and consider how far the country has moved to acknowledge its long-held myth of ‘racial democracy.’”

Sadlier has published extensively on the histories, languages and cultures of Brazil. Her latest book deals with the Good Neighbor policy adopted by the U.S. government during World War II to cultivate stronger alliances with countries in the Western Hemisphere…

Read the entire article here.

Passing and the Problematic of Multiracial Pride (or, Why One Mixed Girl Still Answers to Black)

by Danzy Senna

Chapter in: Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture
University of Michigan Press
2005
416 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-472-09840-8
Paper ISBN: 978-0-472-06840-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-472-02545-9

Edited By:

Harry J. Elam, Jr., Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities and Professor of Drama
Stanford University

Kennell Jackson (1941-2005), Associate Professor of History
Stanford University

I have never had the comfort zone of a given racial identity. My mother is a Bostonian white woman of WASP heritage. My father is a Louisiana black man of mixed African and Mexican heritage. Unlike people who are automatically classified as black or white, I have always been up for debate. I am forever having to explain to people why it is that I look so white for a black girl, why it is that my features don’t reveal my heritage. It’s not something I should have to explain, but in America, at least, people are obsessed with this dissonance between my face and my race. White Americans in particular have a difficult time understanding why somebody of my background would choose blackness. With Tiger Woods proclaiming himself a Cablinasian, multiracial activists demanding new categories, and Newsweek declaring it hip to be mixed, it strikes most people as odd that I would call myself a black girl.

But my racial identity developed when I was growing up in Boston in the 1970s, where there were only two choices for me: black and white. For my sister, a year older than me, with curly hair and more African features, there weren’t even these choices. There was only black. And my parents, smitten with the black power politics of the time, taught my siblings and me, in no uncertain terms, that we were all black. They saw this identity as armor against the racism beyond our front door. They also knew that my sister didn’t have a choice, and to define us differently would be damaging to us as a family unit. The tact that the world saw each of us as different (my sister as light-skinned black, my brother as Puerto Rican, and me as Italian) raised complications, but didn’t change the fact that we were all one tribe…

Read the entire chapter here. (pages 83-87)

Mixed Race Across the Pacific

University of Southern California
Freshman Seminars
Spring 2013

Duncan Williams, Associate Professor of Religion

In an era when a mixed-race President of the United States proudly proclaims himself as the first Pacific President of America, how might we rethink the study of race in a global, rather than merely a regional, perspective? With the recent changes to the U.S. Census that allows for multiple racial identifications, how might race and race relations be recast when multiplicity, hybridity, and creolization marks everyone from Obama’s half-American/half-Indonesian half-sister to the so-called black golfer Tiger Woods, who is actually primarily Asian?

This course investigates how shifting the paradigm of race studies to the Asia Pacific Americas (Transpacific) experience of race disrupts and reorients the traditionally binary, black/white or white/colored Transatlantic model of race studies in the United States that emerged from a focus on the Transatlantic slave trade. By examining the legacies of Western and Japanese empires in Korea, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands and the legacies of disaporic communities in North and South Americas we will reframe the lens through which we approach race studies. Our second focus is to look at miscegenation, creolization, and how mixed race disrupts simplistic racial category formations. We will study comparative anti-miscegenation laws across transnational boundaries and the role of the offspring of mixed race unions that emerged through migrations, trade flows, and the impact of wars.

Duncan Williams is the chair of the School of Religion and director of the USC Center for Japanese Religions and Culture and the founder of the Hapa Japan Project (a database of mixed-race Japanese people from 1500s to the present) and the Mugen Project (the world’s first online bibliographical database on Buddhism).

Love in black and white

Princeton Alumni Weekly
2009-04-22

Lawrence Otis Graham ’83

Martha Sandweiss examines racial passing in America

Clarence King, a celebrated explorer, geologist, and surveyor in 19th-century America, chose to set that identity aside — and live as a working-class black man during a time of harsh racial segregation in the United States. He did it for love.

King moved back and forth between two sides of the color line: as the very public white, Newport-born, Yale-educated cartographer and researcher of the American West, and at other times as the strangely private man pretending to be a black Pullman train porter and itinerant steelworker (using the alias “James Todd”) who married an African-American woman. Martha Sandweiss, who joined Princeton’s history department this semester, explores King’s double life in her book Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, published by Penguin Press in February. 

“While racial passing was surely attempted by some light-skinned blacks who wanted to escape the economic disadvantages tied to black life at the time,” explains Sandweiss, “it was virtually unheard-of for whites to voluntarily choose to face social and economic discrimination and live as black people.” But after falling in love with a black nursemaid, Ada Copeland, in 1888, that is what Clarence King did for 13 years. His wife and their five children had no idea that he was, in fact, white, and that he was the famous Clarence King, until he confessed it on his deathbed in 1901…

Read the entire article here.

346-Comparative Ethnic Literatures (Reg. No. 22253)

University of Buffalo, The State University of New York
Spring 2013

Susan Muchshima Moynihan, Assistant Professor of English

This course brings together Asian American and African American texts to destabilize our understandings of race; to situate racial formations in political and historical moments marked by the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and national and transnational affiliations; and to consider how literary strategies facilitate political engagement with these issues. The course will proceed in four parts.

Part I “Racial Ambiguity and the Dynamics of Passing” will engage Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars and short stories and essays by Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far) and Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) to address how literary representations of the late-19th and early 20th centuries deployed mixed-race identities and attempts to pass within strict racial hierarchies marked by national and international politics…

For more information, click here.

Barack Obama and the Contest for Identity through Self-Representation: HIST-UA 413

New York University
Spring 2013

Jeffrey Sammons, Professor of History

This course will explore the life and career path of the nation’s first “black” president through a focus on his two autobiographies, which will be studied for their content, style, and grounding in the genre and relationship to select canonical texts of the more distant as well as recent past. The course also will pay close attention to representations by others of Obama by critics, supporters, and neutral commentators through a variety of media from books to film to television and radio to social media. As important as Obama is for his unprecendented political achievements, his multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-national and multi-religious background and experience make him an ideal subject for exploring personal and group identity in a time of apparently increasing concern with Otherness.

AAS 490: Special Topics in Black World Studies: Section 008: Race and “Black Indians”

University of Michigan
Winter 2013
Theme Semester Courses

Tiya Miles, Professor of American Culture, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Native American Studies

This seven week mini course is a special winter 2013 offering for the LSA Theme Semester on Race. The course will introduce students to a range of issues and experiences related to the topic and identity category of “Black Indians.” Popularized in the 1980s by a book of the same title, the term “Black Indians” is often used to identify and describe people of mixed-race African American and Native American ancestry. It is also applied to people with strong bi-cultural connections across these groups who may or may not have Black and native “blood” ties. This class will explore and analyze three major aspects of our subject matter:

1. historical contexts for the interactions of Africans, African Americans and Native Americans;
2. personal experiences stemming from mixed race and bi-cultural Afro-Native identities;
3. meanings and effects of “racial stories” that have been crafted and told about “Black Indians” over time.

Major themes and ideas that will emerge in our discussions include: indigeneity, European and U.S. colonialism, slavery, racial formation and racial hierarchy, mixed-race coupling and family making, tribal sovereignty, personal and community identities, and racial and cultural authenticity.

Textbooks/Other Materials

• Confounding the Color Line, Author: Brooks, James F.
• Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage, Author: written by William Loren Katz.
• Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: the African diaspora in Indian country, Author: edited by Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland.
• IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas, Author: general editor, Gabrielle Tayac.

For more information, click here.