Mixed Race Studies

A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic

Harvard University Press
February 2003
334 pages
6 x 9-15/16 inches
Hardcove ISBN: 9780674009462

Bruce Dain, Associate Professor of History
University of Utah

The intellectual history of race, one of the most pernicious and enduring ideas in American history, has remained segregated into studies of black or white traditions. Bruce Dain breaks this separatist pattern with an integrated account of the emergence of modern racial consciousness in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War. A Hideous Monster of the Mind reveals that ideas on race crossed racial boundaries in a process that produced not only well-known theories of biological racism but also countertheories that were early expressions of cultural relativism, cultural pluralism, and latter-day Afrocentrism.

From 1800 to 1830 in particular, race took on a new reality as Americans, black and white, reacted to postrevolutionary disillusionment, the events of the Haitian Revolution, the rise of cotton culture, and the entrenchment of slavery. Dain examines not only major white figures like Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Stanhope Smith, but also the first self-consciously “black” African-American writers. These various thinkers transformed late-eighteenth-century European environmentalist “natural history” into race theories that combined culture and biology and set the terms for later controversies over slavery and abolition. In those debates, the ethnology of Samuel George Morton and Josiah Nott intertwined conceptually with important writing by black authors who have been largely forgotten, like Hosea Easton and James McCune Smith. Scientific racism and the idea of races as cultural constructions were thus interrelated aspects of the same effort to explain human differences.

In retrieving neglected African-American thinkers, reestablishing the European intellectual background to American racial theory, and demonstrating the deep confusion “race” caused for thinkers black and white, A Hideous Monster of the Mind offers an engaging and enlightening new perspective on modern American racial thought.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. The Face of Nature
• 2. Culture and the Persistence of Race
• 3. The Horrors of St. Domingue
• 4. The Mutability of Human Affairs
• 5. Conceiving Universal Equality
• 6. Black Immediatism
• 7. The New Ethnology

Funding Race as Biology: The Relevance of “Race” in Medical Research

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology
Volume 12, Issue 2 (Spring 2011)
pages 571-618

Taunya Lovell Banks, Jacob A. France Professor of Equality Jurisprudence and Francis & Harriet Iglehart Research Professor of Law
University of Maryland School of Law

Note from Steven F. Riley: See the articles, “Fracture Risk Assessment without Race/Ethnicity Information,” and “Taking race out of the equation in measuring women’s risk of osteoporosis and fractures” about the positive results of taking “race” out of medicine.

I. INTRODUCTION: ‘DEM BONES, ‘DEM BONES, ‘DEM “BLACK” BONES

In 1940 the State of North Carolina classified my friend as “colored” despite her “white skin, blue eyes, [and] curling blond hair.” She—like her parents, grandparents, and many other black Americans—is often mistaken for white. Sixty years later when she went for a bone densitometry test—a must for postmenopausal women—the technician asked her to fill out a form that asked her race. Surprised, she asked why. The technician explained that “since the bones of black people are different than the bones of white people, the doctor needed this information to interpret the scan correctly.”

The radiologist who analyzed my friend’s bone scan acknowledged that there is a debate within the radiology community about the scientific validity of interpreting an X-ray through the lens of race. But, he claimed, it is impossible to interpret the bone scan without factoring in race because the machines that analyze the bone scan can only produce an analysis if the race of the person being analyzed is included. The doctor could not explain how the x-ray machine defined “race,” replying that the definitions “were created by the companies that built the machines.”

My friend asked if there was any way she could get more helpful advice about the condition of her bones. The radiologist thought for a moment, then suggested that perhaps my friend should have her bone densitometry test performed twice, once as “white,” then as “black.” The condition of her bones, he told her, would lie somewhere between the two results. However, my friend concluded that “one-half of a fantasy definition of ‘white’ plus one-half of a fantasy definition of ‘black’ will only yield one whole fantasy: it will not provide a sound medical diagnosis.”  Thus she marked “black” or “African American” because that had always been her legal and social identity. So what did the results really tell her doctor?

For years my friend taught and wrote about the social construction of race and knew that her doctor’s explanation about the use of race as a biological term by the radiology community was flawed. She found it reminiscent of the World War II era when the Nazis kept “separate blood banks for ‘Jewish blood’ and ‘Aryan blood,’ [and] American blood banks were separating ‘white blood’ and ‘black blood’.” The United States has a long and continuing history of “unconscionable medical research” involving black Americans.

In 1950 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), mindful of race-science’s dark and not so distant history, drafted a statement on the use of race in modern science. This statement, developed by an esteemed group of anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists, concludes: “[f]or all practical social purposes ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a [damaging] social myth.” Today most scientists agree that race and ethnicity (ethno-race) classifications are the result of social and political conditions, as opposed to biological differences. There is, however, disagreement about the scientific validity of these categories.

Even though an increasing number of scientists believe that too often ethno-race is used as a surrogate for various socioeconomic and environmental factors, for most of the late twentieth century social science and medical researchers continued to use ethno-race in a biological context.

Nevertheless, there are times when ethno-racial designations have value in medical research. As one scholar writes, “using race as a social category” to study the impact of racism on health and access to medical care is critical to eliminating health inequities based on race. But, she cautions that using race as a biological category can reflect and reinforce racial stratification as well as racist notions of inherent human difference. Several commentators call this phenomenon the reification of race, where the social concept of race is transformed “into a specific, definite, concrete, and now presumably genetic category which can feed back into preexisting lay understandings of racial difference.”…

…This article proceeds from the assumption that there are few clear instances, other than perhaps access to health care or measuring equality in medical treatment, where the use of ethno-race in medical research is appropriate. Even in those limited situations the justification for using ethno-race, how the ethno-racial categories are defined, and the method for assigning ethno-race warrant close scrutiny and oversight, especially when these studies are funded with federal money. In the next section, this article explains the scientific basis for that assertion. First, it explores the debates within the medical community about the connection between race and biology in biomedicine. Then it examines literature on race-related stress to determine whether this might be an instance where ethno-racial labels help explain health outcomes, and argues that guidelines or regulation are needed.

The third section of this article examines two sets of guidelines on the use of ethno-race in biomedical research: guidelines adopted by high impact medical journals, and federal guidelines on the use of ethno-race in federally funded biomedical research. Finding these measures inadequate, this article argues that the only way to quickly change research behavior in this area is through greater regulation and oversight of federal medical research grants. More stringent government regulation and oversight of federally funded biomedical research grants that use ethno-race may trigger changes in the medical culture faster than litigation.

In the fourth section this article proposes a regulatory scheme that offers a standard to measure the appropriateness of ethno-race in applications for federally funded biomedical research that will cause both researchers and grant reviewers to give more thought to how and why ethno-race is used in research protocols. This article concedes that this proposal is only a first step, and acknowledges that meaningful progress also requires strong and effective measures designed to change how biology is taught in undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. But without a change in the medical culture, another generation of researchers and health care providers will be trained to think about ethno-racial differences inappropriately.

Before effective remedies for the problem described can be discussed, it is important to clarify both the meaning and use of the term “race” in scientific discussions. The next section of this paper looks at debates within the scientific community about the meaning of ethno-racial labels…

Read the entire article here.

From Bang to Whimper: A Heart Drug’s Story

The New York Times
2012-12-24

Abigail Zuger, M.D.

Jonathan Kahn, Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age. Columbia University Press, December 2012, 336 pages.

On June 23, 2005, American medicine managed to take a small step forward and a giant step backward at precisely the same time, with government approval of the first medication to be earmarked for a specific racial group. It was BiDil, a drug designed to treat heart failure in blacks.

Enthusiasts hailed BiDil’s approval by the Food and Drug Administration as a landmark event in the nascent field of pharmacogenomics, which aims to create drugs tailored to fit an individual’s genetic makeup as precisely as a bespoke suit drapes its owner’s shoulders. Critics just winced and clocked one more misstep in medicine’s long history of race-related disasters.

You would think that the elucidation of the human genome would have cleared up most of the hoary untruths surrounding race and health. But as Jonathan Kahn makes clear in his worthy if convoluted review of the events surrounding the birth of BiDil, the genome has in many respects only made things worse.

It has been clear for decades that race has minimal relevance to the body’s inner workings. Research has repeatedly shown that the biologic variations among individuals of the same race are reliably great enough for race to retain little utility as a biologic predictor. You might as well sort people by height. Or, in the words of an editorial writer for Nature Biotechnology in 2005, “Pooling people in race silos is akin to zoologists grouping raccoons, tigers and okapis on the basis that they are all stripy.”…

Read the entire review here.

Why More Races Could Appear on the 2020 Census

PolicyMic
2013-01-07

Justine Gonzalez

The U.S. Census is re-evaluating how they measure race for the 2020 Census. Our country is rapidly diversifying, both culturally and racially, which makes the Census’ job that much more critical and complicated. As the 2010 Census has shown, Latinos, who often have difficulty assigning themselves a particular “race,” have replaced African Americans as the nation’s largest minority group, with 50 million in 2010 (challenging the appropriateness of the use of the term “minority”).
 
The U.S. Census currently officially recognizes five racial categories: white, black or African-American, Asian, American Indian/Alaska Native and Pacific Islander. Census data is used for a variety of purposes such as determining the makeup of voting districts, monitoring discriminatory practices in hiring, and racial disparities in education and health. The data also informs and validates the work of many community-based organizations, and allows researchers to analyze and assess the social, health and economic status of specific population groups.

Race has always been difficult to understand and many disagree on the actual benefits of assigning/ defining race as we do. The concept of race in the United States is heavily influenced by the end of slavery, segregation, waves of immigration from all over the world, and intermarriage. Our current racial categories do not recognize currently growing racial and ethnic diversity, nor do they acknowledge the current immigration trends and how they may change over time…

…The term “Latino” (or “Hispanic”) is a contested term that attempts to broadly unite a group of people who are different culturally and racially but united by (perhaps) a language, though sometimes not even that. In the 2010 Census, this problem of grouping can be seen in that the “some other race” category ranked as the third-largest racial category, and NPR claims that 97% of those respondents were of Hispanic descent.

Another trend among darker-skinned Latinos and Afro-Latinos is to check “Black” as Race along with checking “Latino.” I have always done this—on college applications, the Census and other official documents—yet it does not fully capture the complexity of my racial composition. As a Puerto Rican, born and raised in New York City (aka a Nuyorican), checking ‘Black’ is an homage to my African roots—and for others, a recognition of my dark skin. In America, the definition of white still very much implies white purity. Just one ounce of “black blood” defines someone as black. Nonetheless, on a personal level, I do not see my race as ‘Black’; that is just how society would define me. My race is inextricably connected to my ethnicity in a way that no combination of box-checking can accurately describe…

Read the entire article here.

Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story

University of Minnesota Press
2010
272 pages
23 b&w plates, 6 x 9
cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-6678-2

George Lipsitz, Professor of Black Studies and Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Considered by many to be the godfather of R&B, Johnny Otis—musician, producer, artist, entrepreneur, pastor, disc jockey, writer, and tireless fighter for racial equality—has had a remarkable life by any measure. In this first biography of Otis, George Lipsitz tells the largely unknown story of a towering figure in the history of African American music and culture who was, by his own description, “black by persuasion.”

Born to Greek immigrant parents in Vallejo, California, in 1921, Otis grew up in an integrated neighborhood and identified deeply with black music and culture from an early age. He moved to Los Angeles as a young man and submerged himself in the city’s vibrant African American cultural life, centered on Central Avenue and its thriving music scene. Otis began his six-decade career in music playing drums in territory swing bands in the 1930s. He went on to lead his own band in the 1940s and open the Barrelhouse nightclub in Watts. His R&B band had seventeen Top 40 hits between 1950 and 1969, including “Willie and the Hand Jive.” As a producer and A&R man, Otis discovered such legends as Etta James, Jackie Wilson, and Big Mama Thornton.

Otis also wrote a column for the Sentinel, one of L.A.’s leading black newspapers, became pastor of his own interracial church, hosted popular radio and television shows that introduced millions to music by African American artists, and was lauded as businessman of the year in a 1951 cover story in Negro Achievements magazine. Throughout his career Otis’s driving passion has been his fearless and unyielding opposition to racial injustice, whether protesting on the front lines, exposing racism and championing the accomplishments of black Americans, or promoting African American musicians.

Midnight at the Barrelhouse is a chronicle of a life rich in both incident and inspiration, as well as an exploration of the complicated nature of race relations in twentieth-century America. Otis’s total commitment to black culture and transcendence of racial boundaries, Lipsitz shows, teach important lessons about identity, race, and power while encapsulating the contradictions of racism in American society.

Discovery of his roots leads him to track history of Chinese in Mexico

UCLA Today
Faculty and Staff News
2010-12-06

Letisia Marquez

Growing up in a predominantly white Los Angeles County suburb, Robert Chao Romero, an assistant professor of Chicana and Chicano studies, learned to hide his Chinese background.
 
The son of a Chinese mother and Mexican father, Romero recalled starting the first grade in Hacienda Heights and a classmate telling him an anti-Chinese joke.
 
“It was just a dumb kid’s joke, but it sort of sent the message to me that being Chinese is bad,” he added…

…One tidbit that had always intrigued Romero was that his parents knew a Chinese family who had lived in Mexico for many years. He decided to look into the history of Chinese Mexicans and discovered that although Spanish professors had written about the population, he could not find a book about Chinese Mexicans in English.
 
“The more I explored the topic, the more I realized this is a rich history that’s a forgotten history for the most part,” Romero said. “And I think a large part of the reason it’s forgotten is because it’s a dark chapter, unfortunately.”
 
Years later, Romero completed “The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940,” (University of Arizona, 2010) book which details the tragic history of Chinese immigrants in Mexico…

Read the entire article here.

“Chino-Chicano”: A Biblical Framework for Diversity (Part I)

Jesus for Revolutionaries: A Blog About Race, Social Justice, and Christianity
2013-01-03

Robert Chao Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

I’m a “Chino-Chicano.” I was born in East Los Angeles and raised in the small town of Hacienda Heights. My dad is an immigrant from Chihuahua, Mexico and my mom an immigrant from Hubei in central China. The Romeros lost their family fortune during the Mexican Revolution by siding with Pancho Villa, and eventually immigrated to El Paso, Texas. They moved to East Los Angeles in the 1950’s and we’ve been here in Southern California ever since. My mom’s family immigrated to Los Angeles from China via Hong Kong and Singapore in the 1950’s. My maternal grandfather, Calvin Chao, was a famous pastor in China who launched the first Chinese branch of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. The Chaos fled their native land because my grandfather was on a communist “hit list.” As an interesting side note, my Mom’s family traces directly back to the founding emperor of the Song Dynasty!

Growing up “mixed,” I had a lot of struggles with racial identity. I was very proud of my Mexican heritage, but at a young age got sent the message that being Chinese was a bad thing. On the first day of first grade a kid walked up to me, pretended to hold an imaginary refrigerator in his hands, and said, “Here’s a refrigerator, open it up. Here’s a coke, drink it. Me Chinese, me play joke, me do pee-pee in your Coke.” Kids are so mean.  I was so scarred by that event that I denied my Chinese heritage for the next 18 years.  Once I even remember telling a friend that my mom was our housekeeper because I was embarrassed that she came to pick me up from school…

Read the entire article here.

Catching Up With Black in America’s Soledad O’Brien

Clutch Magazine
2012-12-14

Zettler Clay

A while ago, I took my little cousins to Toys “R” Us. Three of them. 8 years old, 6 years old, 4 years old. It was going smoothly enough until we came across a row of dolls.

There were two on the end. A fully-adorned Black doll on the left. A fully-adorned white doll on the right. She picked the one on the right.

My radar immediately went off. I gently suggested the melanated doll.

No dice. I strongly suggested this doll. Nothing. We weren’t getting anywhere and I was met with the confused look of a little girl whose older cousin had a problem with what she wanted. After he said she could get what she wanted.

I was short on time. She was short on understanding. So I relented.

I haven’t been able to shake this experience. The notion of colorism — the lighter the skin, the better the “doll” — hits us early in life and never leaves. It’s endemic in our community, a point brought to the surface by CNN’s latest addition to the Black in America series, Who is Black in America?

“It’s nothing wrong with seeing color,” said CNN anchor and special correspondent Soledad O’Brien. “It becomes a problem when people limit and define you by it.”…

…Classification creates forms. Forms create separateness, which leads to competition. Colonization. And a wondering lot of people left to discover who they are because of who they’re not.

But why the focus on defining minorities? What about a White in America? It is this criticism that O’Brien hears. And agrees with…

For a few candid moments, I caught up with O’Brien about defining “blackness,” future of Black in America, white supremacy’s effects on Black women and self-identification.

Me: This is a huge subject to tackle.

Soledad O’Brien: You think! (laughs)…

Me: How much has this series helped in your self-identification?

SO: I’ve always had a very strong self-identification. I’ve never struggled with my racial classification. I was very lucky. My mom used to always tell me, “don’t let anyone tell you you’re not Black. Don’t let anybody tell you you’re not Latino.” My parents instilled a very strong sense of identity. Even in the recent doc as I was talking to the young women, I kept thinking, “this is soooo not my experience.” I found that other people had many more challenges about racial ambiguity. I find it fascinating to learn about different communities and geographic history. Black people in Atlanta vs. Black people in Minneapolis (where we’re shooting now). Black people in Philly vs. Black people in New York. Just the history of these communities. I have found it rewarding to see the differences in us and how similar we are…

Read the entire interview here.

The Obama Era: A New Age in American Politics

The Huffington Post
2012-12-05

Brandon Hill
Stanford University

Barack Obama’s elections—both 2008 and 2012—have inaugurated a new political reality in America. He has rewritten history in two consecutive elections, and his groundbreaking victories will forever change the game of politics in our country. Before 2008 the political process was perceived as exclusive and elusive, accessible to only a few privileged players. But after two presidential elections of unprecedented campaign involvement and voter turnout, historically soft-spoken and underrepresented groups like African-Americans, Hispanics, gays, women, and young people are now reclaiming ownership of their political destinies. And the revolution is only just beginning.

Welcome to the Obama era.

President Obama has reengineered America’s political atmosphere, where political inclusion has now replaced the status quo. Obama brings a new face to political leadership. He is a refreshing departure from the markedly un-diverse brand of presidents and politicians that preceded him. He is real and relatable and able to reach more people, which encourages new groups to become engaged in the political process. In the Obama era, politics is no longer an enterprise reserved for old balding White men. It is no longer an old boys’ network or a country club aristocracy. Instead, it is a democracy built for and by the everyday American, and it is this inclusiveness that is politically energizing young people, women, and communities of color…

…Obama connects with a broader spectrum of people than past candidates and presidents have. Reagan alienated Black voters with his Welfare Queen caricature. Romney dyed his face orange trying to appeal to Hispanic Univision viewers. Bush refused to let Hurricane Katrina ruin the end of his vacation, surveying the ruined low-income communities from the comfort of Air Force One instead of consoling families on the ground. These types of blunders make it clear why many groups historically have felt disconnected from political leadership.

Obama’s massive appeal to minorities, women, and youth is that he is relatable. He’s real. Little Black boys find confidence in the fact that the president’s hair texture is the same as theirs. Latino parents find assurance in the fact that their president speaks their native tongue. Middle age women find solace in the fact that their president has two young daughters and will protect a woman’s right to her own body. College students across the nation find inspiration in the fact that their president can shoot the breeze with foreign heads of state, shoot down terrorist masterminds, and shoot a wicked jump shot all at the same time. Obama has both swagger and substance, a potent combination that prior commanders in chief have lacked. It’s simple. More people feel connected to the political process because now more people feel connected to their political leader.

The Obama era is a new age that politically empowers the people that the political process has historically overlooked. It is an age where those who were once voiceless have become the most vocal; where the most apathetic have claimed significant authority. Now that minorities and women and youth have taken the reins in the past two elections, I don’t see this trend changing any time soon…

Read the entire article here.

No longer your father’s electorate

The Los Angeles Times
2012-11-08

Paul West, Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Even more than the election that made Barack Obama the first black president, the one that returned him to office sent an unmistakable signal that the hegemony of the straight white male in America is over.

The long drive for broader social participation by all Americans reached a turning point in the 2012 election, which is likely to go down as a watershed in the nation’s social and political evolution — and not just because in some states voters approved of same-sex marriage for the first time.

 On Tuesday, Obama received the votes of barely 1 in 3 white males. That too was historic. It almost certainly was an all-time low for the winner of a presidential election that did not include a major third-party candidate.

“We’re not in the ’50s any more,” said William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer. “This election makes it clear that a single focus directed at white males, or at the white population in general, is not going to do it. And it’s not going to do it when the other party is focusing on energizing everybody else.”…

… “Obama lost a lot of votes among whites,” said Matt Barreto, a University of Washington political scientist. “It was only because of high black turnout and the highest Latino turnout ever for a Democratic president that he won.”

Obama planted his base in an America that is inexorably becoming more diverse. If left unchecked by Republicans, these demographic trends would give the Democrats a significant edge in future presidential elections.

Latinos were an essential element of Obama’s victories in the battlegrounds of Nevada and Colorado. States once considered reliably Republican in presidential elections will probably become highly competitive because of burgeoning Latino populations, sometimes in combination with large African American populations. North Carolina, where Obama won narrowly in 2008 and came close this time, is one. The Deep South state of Georgia is another. Texas and Arizona in the Southwest are future swing states — by 2020, if not sooner…

Read the entire article here.