Mixed Race Studies

An educational defense for multiracial identity

San Francisco Chronicle
2001-07-25

Kimberly Cooper-Plaszewski

Celebrate rather than assimilate biracial heritages

U.S. CENSUS 2000 marked the first time in history that multiracial people were given the “option” to specify more than one race to describe their racial identity.
 
On the surface, this alternative may give the impression that people choosing to identify with more than one race on their census forms are endangering the plight of many civil rights activists and organizations with regard to civil rights appropriations.
 
Yet, contrary to this grossly widespread misconception, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget has determined that while racial data will be collected offering multiple race responses, those responses that combine one minority race and white will be allocated to the minority race for use in civil rights monitoring and enforcement…
 
…Rather than focusing indefinitely on what racial groups are supposedly losing from these changes to the census, let us, for the moment, focus on the fundamental gains for all racial and ethnic groups…
 
Read the entire opinion piece here.

Blood and stories: how genomics is rewriting race, medicine and human history

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 40, Numbers 4
/5 (2006), Special Issue: Race and Contemporary Medicine
pages 303-333
DOI: 10.1080/00313220601020064

Priscilla Wald, Professor of English and Women’s Studies
Duke University

In 2003 Howard University announced its intention to create a databank of the DNA of African Americans, most of whom were patients in their medical centre. Proponents of the decision invoked the routine exclusion of African Americans from research that would give them access to the most up-to-date medical technologies and treatments. They argued that this databank would rectify such exclusions. Opponents argued that such a move tacitly affirmed the biological (genetic) basis of race that had long fuelled racism as well as that the potential costs were not worth the uncertain benefits. Howard University’s controversial decision emerges from research in genomic medicine that has added new urgency to the question of the relationship between science and racism. This relationship is the topic of Wald’s essay. Scientific disagreements over the relative usefulness of ‘race’ as a classification in genomic medical research have been obscured by charges of racism and political correctness. The question takes us to the assumptions of population genomics that inform the medical research, and Wald turns to the Human Genome Diversity Project, the new Genographics Project and the 2003 film Journey of Man to consider how racism typically inheres not in the intentions of researchers, but in the language, images and stories through which scientists, journalists and the public inevitably interpret information. Wald demonstrates the importance of understanding those stories as inseparable from scientific and medical research. Her central argument is that if we understand the power of the stories we can better understand the debates surrounding race and genomic medicine, which, in turn, can help us make better ethical and policy decisions and be useful in the practices of science and medicine.

To understand how genomic research can reproduce racism, it is necessary to understand how racism is articulated through that research as it is practised in the context of particular social formations. The articulation is produced through stories of race and genomic research, which take many forms as they make their way from the scientific community to the general public. Stories about the research reach public consciousness through such controversial decisions as the NHGC databank as well as through the discoveries and innovations emerging from the labs of pharmaceutical companies, universities and federal institutions. Accounts of genomic research offer exciting promises, ranging from new explanations (and treatments) for some of the most feared medical problems, from cancer to avian flu, to new ways of understanding (and managing) human behaviour. They also capture the public imagination with claims of new discoveries that offer insight into the mysteries of human origins and human history, and the genealogies of individuals as well as groups. The claims and promises fuse in the stories of genomic research broadcast in the mainstream media, and they in turn influence policy and funding decisions and help to shape future research. These stories are fundamental in the production of scientific and medical knowledge and, therefore, as I argue in what follows, attention to them needs to be incorporated into scientific and medical research.

…Genomic information is notoriously difficult to interpret even by researchers in the field. The frequency of alleles that mark genetic drift—the the rate of genetic changes resulting from mutations, or divergent alleles, in relatively inbred populations—tells where and when there was a divergence within a group. Those alleles are used to mark ancestry. But, as Michael J. Bamshad and Steve E. Olson note, ‘how groups are divided depends on which genes are examined; simplistically put, you might fit into one group based on your skin-color genes but another based on a different characteristic’.  The DNA that yields information about one’s ancestry—typically mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA—in fact tells only part of the story of genetic ancestry. The complexity of nuclear DNA does not yield sufficiently clear information to complete it. Moreover, as Jay Kaufman has pointed out, Risch et al. ’s study relies on the dismissal of ‘intermediate groups’, such as ‘Hispanic Americans’, whom Risch et al. acknowledge could ‘aggregate genetically with Caucasians, Native Americans, African Americans or form their own cluster’ and are therefore ‘not easily classified’, but the size of those groups attenuates their claims. They are too large to be dismissed as an exception. Intermixture is increasingly the rule…

…Pointing an accusatory finger at ‘political correctness’ not only deflects the scientific dispute, but also ignores the medical importance of the social consequences of racism, measured in health outcomes. Drawing a stark contrast between medical science and social concerns, a distinction that Risch et al. ’s article itself troubles, that accusation renders social concerns suspect except as they provide epidemiologically useful information. Neither Wade nor Risch et al . address what constitutes epidemiologically useful information. Risch et al. dismiss potential abuses of genomic information (such as those that fuel racism) as unscientific, arguing

that identifying genetic differences between races and ethnic groups, be they for random genetic markers, genes that lead to disease susceptibility or variation in drug response, is scientifically appropriate. What is not scientific is a value system attached to any such findings.

But this assertion presumes that science and medicine can be divorced from their social contexts and that information circulates in value-neutral terms. History does not support that presumption, and calling racism ‘not scientific’ does not address the value system or alleviate the problems—including health outcomes—associated with it…

…Taking racism into account does not mean refusing to collect and classify data in medical research according to race and ethnicity. On the contrary, those classifications provide important epidemiological information, as Risch et al. maintain, about the impact of social and environmental factors—including socio-economic inequities and cultural biases—on the health of individuals and groups. As Troy Duster argues, the way to ‘recognize, engage, and clarify the complexity of the interaction between any taxonomies of race and biological, neurophysiological, society, and health outcomes’ is to consider ‘how science studies deploy the concept of race’. The story of how biotechnology is revolutionizing medicine has put genomic research very much into public consciousness and has made genetic explanations of health disparities among individuals and especially groups the ‘default position’. Distinguishing between genomic and social and environmental factors in disease susceptibility and drug response is notoriously difficult, especially since, as Keita et al. note, ‘some environmental influences can be so subtle and occur so early in life as to be missed . . . ’. Yet, that distinction determines how researchers and practitioners understand and address the problem of health disparities. ‘Race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are very different as surrogates for genomics and for social and environmental factors in the assessment of health outcomes, which is why the larger stories in which the research is embedded are scientifically and medically as well as socially relevant…

Read the entire article here.

Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos

Palgrave Macmillan
April 2005
352 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4039-6567-7, ISBN10: 1-4039-6567-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4039-6568-4, ISBN10: 1-4039-6568-4

Anani Dzidzienyo, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Portuguese & Brazilian Studies
Brown University

Suzanne Oboler, Professor of Latin American and Latina/o Studies
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

In this collection, leading scholars focus on the contemporary meanings and diverse experiences of blackness in specific countries of the hemisphere, including the United States. The anthology introduces new perspectives on comparative forms of racialization in the Americas and presents its implications both for Latin American societies, and for Latinos’ relations with African Americans in the U.S. Contributors address issues such as: Who are the Afro-Latin Americans? What historical contributions do they bring to their respective national polities? What happens to their national and socio-racial identities as a result of migration to the United States? What is the impact of the growing presence of Afro-Latin Americans within U.S. Latino populations, particularly with respect to the continuing dynamics of racialization in the United States today? And, more generally, what are the prospects and obstacles for rethinking alliances and coalition-building between and among racial(ized) minorities and other groups in contemporary U.S. society?

Table of Contents

• Part I: Comparative Racialization in the Americas
  • Flows and Counterflows: Latinas/os, Blackness, and Racialization in Hemispheric Perspective—Suzanne Oboler and Anani Dzidzienyo
• Part II: The Politics of Racialization in Latin America
  • A Region in Denial: Racial Discrimination and Racism in Latin America—Ariel E. Dulitzky
  • Afro-Ecuadorian Responses to Racism: Between Citizenship and Corporatism—Carlos de la Torre
  • The Foreignness of Racism: Pride and Prejudice Among Peru’s Limeños in the 1990s—Suzanne Oboler
  • Bad Boys and Peaceful Garifuna: Transnational Encounters Between Racial Stereotypes of Honduras and the United States (and Their Implications for the Study of Race in the Americas)—Mark Anderson
  • Afro-Mexico: Blacks, Indígenas, Politics, and the Greater Diaspora—Bobby Vaughn
  • The Changing World of Brazilian Race Relations?—Anani Dzidzienyo
• Part III: The Politics of Racialization in the United States
  • Framing the Discussion of African American–Latino Relations: A Review and Analysis—John J. Betancur
  • Neither White nor Black: The Representation of Racial Identity Among Puerto Ricans on the Island and in the U.S. Mainland—Jorge Duany
  • Scripting Race, Finding Place: African Americans, Afro-Cubans, and the Diasporic Imaginary in the United States—Nancy Raquel Mirabal
  • Identity, Power, and Socioracial Hierarchies Among Haitian Immigrants in Florida—Louis Herns Marcelin
  • Interminority Relations in Legislative Settings: The Case of African Americans and Latinos—José E. Cruz
  • African American and Latina/o Cooperation in Challenging Racial Profiling—Kevin R. Johnson
  • Racial Politics in Multiethnic America: Black and Latina/o Identities and Coalitions—Mark Sawyer
  • Racism in the Americas and the Latino Scholar—Silvio Torres-Saillant
  • Witnessing History: An Octogenarian Reflects on Fifty Years of African American–Latino Relations—Nelson Peery

Triangular Mirrors and Moving Colonialisms

Etnográfica
Volume 6, Number 1 (2002)
pages 127-140

Anani Dzidzienyo, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Portuguese & Brazilian Studies
Brown University

Though there does not exist an undifferentiated colonialism category because of specificities relating to historical time conjunctions, the interfacing of such conjunctions with metropolitan projects, and the modalities of contesting colonial hegemonies and transformations in the structural/institutional relations between (ex)colonial and (ex)colonised, there is, however, the exigency for an ongoing contemplation and analysis of the reflections and refractions in the mirrors of empire and colonialism. By focussing on contradictions that characterize present-day relations between African countries and Brazil, there is the possibility for unraveling inter/intra colonial/ racial contradictions and how they impact on structures of power. Brazil, because of the widely recognized and increasingly proclaimed “africaness” becomes a mirror that simultaneously reflects and refracts multiple images of colonialism, race and empire.

Why is Brazil in this discussion, especially in view of the fact that my concerns pertain to colonialism and decolonization in Africa in the post-World War II period? Is there an implicit suggestion that there is a colonial tinge about Brazil’s African relations? Could it actually be the case that specific Brazilian articulations have veered in the direction of “colonialist” practices/perceptions? What, after all, constitutes colonialism?

For the purposes of this discussion I do not propose to offer (an)other definition for colonialism, nor do I propose to use “postcolonialism” as an analytical or descriptive concept save to note, following McClintock, that the term postcolonial suggests or imposes a certain linearity, a centering of colonialism (Euro) as the actual starting point of the life and development of societies and political economies of those areas that became entangled with or ensnared into European expansion overseas, and the creation of “colonial” models of life and governance in these sites. Postcoloniality suggests a terminal point in a process whereas, in fact, the consequences of colonialism spawned in conjunction with or opposition to specific local patterns of behavior do not simply melt away. Postcolonial sounds less confrontational than neo-colonial and appears to privilege cultural and literary constructions, highlighting formalistic processes of decolonization (flag, national anthem, heads of station). Further, it does not interrogate the continuity of the political culture and political economy constructed and left as a legacy by colonialism (see McClintock 1995).

Focussing on Brazilian-African relations offers the distinct advantage of (re)visiting Brazil’s own efforts at carving out a niche for the country, drawing upon specific historical, cultural, economic and political assests presented as a demonstration of the possibilities of South-South relations rendered even more manifest because of Brazil’s bona fides as an ex-colony – one inextricably linked to “Africa” and African polities seeking new modalities of change and development in the “post-independence” or decolonized new age…

…It is at this point that local, national and international images and perspectives jostle one another for attention in our (re)considerations of empire and end of empire. These discussions then cannot be demarcated by any specific ending of the empire because of the co-existence of past mirrors. Not that all of Africa is directly engaged with Brazil to the same extent or with equal intensity. In the following pages, an effort is made to analyze the multiple dimensions of Brazil-Africa relations without necessarily privileging the Portuguese connection but without loosing sight of its fundamentality for both Brazil and Africa. The role of race, specifically how race manifests itself in international relations – with specific reference to the representations of African-American concerns – provides a mirror for Brazil-Africa relations. Hence the attention paid to USA/Afro USA in this essay…

Read the entire article here.

Obama election stokes debate over what is biracial

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
2009-02-03

L. A. Johnson

Steve Mellon/Post-Gazette

Heather Curry believes President Barack Obama is denying his white heritage by identifying himself as African-American.

“It’s great that he’s biracial,” says Ms. Curry, 19, a Point Park University advertising major who identifies herself as biracial. “I wish he would accept it a little bit more.”

The election of Mr. Obama—the son of a white woman from Kansas and a man from Kenya—has jump-started a national dialogue on race and racial identity as America’s view of multiracial people changes.

Mr. Obama always has acknowledged his biracial background but identifies himself as African-American. With Mr. Obama, people see who and what they want to see, says Joy M. Zarembka, the Washington, D.C.-based author of “The Pigment of Your Imagination: Mixed Race in a Global Society.” “And most everyone can relate to him — whether [they’re] white, black, rich, poor, foreign, American, etc.”…

…Ms. Curry thinks the media have helped define him as only black and fears that history will forget that America’s “first black president” actually is a biracial man.

“I feel like there are not enough [biracial] role models out there,” says Ms. Curry, whose father was white and mother is black. “We need to say we’re proud of our heritage.”

Her roommate, Erica Stewart, has a different view. Ms. Stewart has a white mother and a black father. Because her mother raised her, she identifies more with white culture than black culture, but she embraces aspects of both and often is mistaken for Hispanic.

“If [Obama] feels more African-American, I don’t have issues with that,” said Ms. Stewart, 19, an art major at the Community College of Allegheny County. “If I had grown up with [my father] instead of my mom, I would have identified more as an African American.”

Friends since middle school in Erie, the two young women recall how they struggled to figure out their own racial identity, routinely seeming too black to some whites and too white to some blacks…

…Ms. Curry thinks Mr. Obama identifying as African-American could be confusing to mixed-race children, making them feel they have to choose or making them think, “If Obama says he’s black, does this mean I’m black?” She thinks biracial people shouldn’t choose one race over the other because they are both.

“I’m biracial,” she says. “I will fight somebody who calls me black.”

Mr. Obama has a special resonance with African-American people, people of African descent, people of color in general and multiracial people.

“Because he identifies as African-American rather than multiracial … there’s a certain tension there,” says G. Reginald Daniel, a University of California, Santa Barbara, sociology professor and author of “More Than Black?: Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order.”

Elliott Lewis, a mixed-race man, journalist and author of “Fade: My Journeys in Multiracial America,” finds the ongoing debate about whether Mr. Obama is black or biracial frustrating…

Read the entire article here.

Why genes don’t count (for racial differences in health)

American Journal of Public Health
Volume 90, Number 11 (November 2000)
pages 1699-1702
DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.90.11.1699

Alan H. Goodman, Professor of Biological Anthropology
Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts

There is a paradoxical relationship between “race” and genetics. Whereas genetic data were first used to prove the validity of race, since the early 1970s they have been used to illustrate the invalidity of biological races. Indeed, race does not account for human genetic variation, which is continuous, complexly structured, constantly changing, and predominantly within “races.” Despite the disproof of race-as-biology, genetic variation continues to be used to explain racial differences. Such explanations require the acceptance of 2 disproved assumptions: that genetic variation explains variation in disease and that genetic variation explains racial variation in disease. While the former is a form of geneticization, the notion that genes are the primary determinants of biology and behavior, the latter represents a form of racialization, an exaggeration of the salience of race. Using race as a proxy for genetic differences limits understandings of the complex interactions among political-economic processes, lived experiences, and human biologies. By moving beyond studies of racialized genetics, we can clarify the processes by which varied and interwoven forms of racialization and racism affect individuals “under the skin.”

…Professor Armelagos hinted at a powerful lesson: that scientific ideas can endure and be made to seem real if they have social and political–economic utility. An evolutionary framework that explained human variation had been established for more than a century, ever since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. In the 1940s, Montagu used the “new evolutionary synthesis” to explain clearly why race was a biological myth. Yet the idea of race as biology persists today in science and society.

I was aware of the power of race as a worldview in 1973. But what I understood less was the idea’s ability to persist after it had been proven unscientific. If I had been asked in the 1970s whether race would survive as a way to think about human biological variation in 2000, I would have answered emphatically, “No!” I was naive to the durability of an economically useful idea.

Acceptance of the notion of race-as-biology declined in anthropology throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. Yet, during the past decade, racialized notions of biology have made a comeback. This is especially true in human genetics, a field that, paradoxically, once drove the last nail into the coffin of race-as biology. In this commentary, I explain why race should not be used as a proxy for genetic or biological variation. I then explain and illustrate the unfounded assumptions that are needed for an acceptance that racial differences in disease are due to genetic differences among races…

…The Double Error Inherent in Genetic Explanations of Racial Differences

Two errors—2 leaps of illogic—are necessary for acceptance of the idea that racial differences in disease are due to genetic differences among races. The first leap is a form of geneticization, the belief that most biology and behavior are located “in the genes.”

Genes, of course, are often a part of the complex web of disease causality, but they are almost always a minor, unstable, and insufficient cause. The presence of Gm allotype, for example, might correlate to increased rates of diabetes in Native Americans, but the causal link is unknown. In other cases, the gene is not expressed without some environmental context, and it may interact with environments and other genes in nonadditive and unpredictable ways.

The second necessary leap of illogic is a form of scientific racialism, the belief that races are real and useful constructs. Importantly, this leap propels one from explaining disease variation as caused by genetic variation to explaining that racial differences in disease are caused by genetic variation among races.To accept this logic, one needs to also accept that genetic variation occurs along racial divides: that is, most variation occurs among races. However, we know from Lewontin’s work that this assumption is false for simple genetic systems. For a disease of complex etiology, genetics is an illogical explanation for racial differences.

Read the entire article here.

Breaking the Bonds of Race and Genomics

GeneWatch
Volume 25, Issue 1 (January-February, 2012): Genetics in 20 Years

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Twenty years ago it appeared that mainstream science finally was abandoning the concept of biological human races. From 18th century typologists to 20th century eugenicists, scientists have always been instrumental in justifying the myth that the human species is naturally divided by race. But the rejection of eugenics after World War II and discoveries by human evolutionary biologists in subsequent decades brought hope that a new science of human genetic diversity would replace the old racial science. In 2000, the Human Genome Project, which mapped the entire human genetic code, confirmed the genetic unity of the human species and the futility of identifying discrete racial groups in the remaining genetic difference. Biologically, there is only one human race. Race applied to human beings is a social grouping; it is a system originally devised in the 1700s to support slavery and colonialism that classifies people into a social hierarchy based on invented biological, cultural, and legal demarcations.

But instead of hammering the last nail in the coffin of an obsolete system, the science that emerged from sequencing the human genome has been shaped by a resurgence of interest in race-based genetic variation. Some scientists claim that clusters of genetic similarity detected with novel genomic theories and computer technologies correspond to antiquated racial classifications and prove that human racial differences are real and significant. Others are searching for genetic differences between races that could explain staggering inequalities in health and disease as well as variations in drug response, with the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries poised to convert the new racial science into race-specific products. As we wait for the promise of gene-tailored medicine to materialize, race has become an avenue for turning the vision of tomorrow’s personalized medicines into today’s profit making commodities. While uncritically importing antiquated racial categories into research, the emerging racial science has a new twist—it claims to measure biological distinctions across races and “admixed” populations with more accurate precision, and without social bias…

Read the entire article here.

A race-based detour to personalized medicine

Canadian Medical Association Journal
Volume 184, Number 7 (2012-03-12)
DOI: 10.1503/cmaj.109-4133

Roger Collier, News Staff

Few experts in medical genetics would argue that June 23, 2005 wasn’t an important day. Consensus on whether it was a good or bad day is another matter. Some claim a major step on the long road to personalized medical care was taken. Others are far less convinced, suggesting it was the day the United States government decided, unwisely, to push the field of medical genetics into the heated realm of racial politics.

On that date, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved, for the first time, a drug for a specific race, to wit, the fixed-dose combination drug isosorbide dinitrate and hydralazine (BiDil) for use as a heart disease medication within the black population, who have a much higher risk of heart failure than whites…

…The licensing of isosorbide dinitrate/hydralazine thus became a turning point in discussions on the merits of race-based medicine, a debate that continues to rage. Critics of race-specific therapies argue that focusing on genetics rather than on social and economic inequalities will not reduce disparities in health outcomes and access to care among different ethnic groups. Furthermore, they say, race is a social, rather than a biological, construct.

“Using race is a bad proxy for genetic ancestry,” says Althea Grant, chief of the Epidemiology and Surveillance Branch, Division of Blood Disorders, National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This opinion is shared by one of the world’s most famous geneticists: Craig Venter, the genetics pioneer who led the team that first sequenced the human genome in 2001. He has referred to the use of race and ethnicity in medical genetics as a crude tool and a personal pet peeve, suggesting that it will no longer be necessary once the price of sequencing genomes falls to an amount that would make it reasonable to sequence everybody’s genome, a figure he pegged at US$1000…

…The first problem with using race in medical genetics is determining which races constitute a part of someone’s background. Few people have extensive knowledge of their ancestral lineage, and skin colour and other external markers don’t tell the full story. Even people who are aware of their mixed heritage often place themselves in one camp — or are put there by others. Prominent examples include US President Barack Obama and professional golfer Tiger Woods, who are often referred to as black even though the former has a white mother and the latter’s mother hails from Thailand.

“People tend to self-identify with a particular race more than another even if there is a mix,” says Grant. “They might not even know all the ancestries that are in the mix.”

In some areas of medicine, using race as a screening tool has already been shown to create problems, both practical and ethical. That’s why states abandoned the practice of screening only black newborns for hemoglobinopathies, such as sickle cell disease, Grant and colleagues concluded (Ethn Health 2011;16:377–88). The state of Georgia, the last holdout for ethnicity-based newborn screening, discontinued its use in 1998…

“If we go back to its origins, we find that BiDil did not begin as an ethnic drug. Rather it became ethnic over time and through a complex array of legal, commercial, and medical interventions, that transformed the drug’s identity,” wrote Jonathan Kahn, a law professor at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota (www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/pageDocuments/PLMVM6FTAO.pdf). Unlike “racialized medicine, which treats race as genetic, the use of race in medical practice has many legitimate and important places. Collecting broad-based epidemiological data is perhaps foremost among these. Only by using social categories of race is it possible to identify and track racial disparities in health, health care access and outcomes.”

Read the entire article here.

Elizabeth Warren’s Birther Moment

The New York Times
2012-05-04

Kevin Noble Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

If you are 1/32 Cherokee and your grandfather has high cheekbones, does that make you Native American? It depends. Last Friday, Republicans in Massachusetts questioned the racial ancestry of Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senate candidate. Her opponent, Senator Scott Brown, has accused her of using minority status as an American Indian to advance her career as a law professor at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas. The Brown campaign calls her ties to the Cherokee and Delaware nations a “hypocritical sham.”

In a press conference on Wednesday, Warren defended herself, saying, “Native American has been a part of my story, I guess since the day I was born, I don’t know any other way to describe it.” Despite her personal belief in her origins, her opponents have seized this moment in an unnecessary fire drill that guarantees media attention and forestalls real debate…

…The Republican approach to race is to feign that it is irrelevant — until it becomes politically advantageous to bring it up. Birthers question Obama’s state of origin (and implicitly his multiracial heritage) in efforts to disqualify him from the presidency. They characterize him as “other.” For Warren, Massachusetts Republicans place doubts on her racial claims to portray her as an opportunistic academic seeking special treatment. In both birther camps, opponents look to ancestral origins as the smoking gun, and ride the ambiguity for the duration…

Read the entire opinion here.

Elizabeth Warren says she’s Native American. So she is.

The Washington Post
2012-05-04

David Treuer

Suddenly many Americans wonder what it means that Elizabeth Warren, who is vying for Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown’s U.S. Senate seat, has identified herself as having Cherokee and Delaware Indian heritage. The claim wasn’t sudden, but the furor is.

Some 20 years ago, she listed herself as a minority in a directory of law professors. Recently the authenticity of her heritage, and her reasons for claiming it, have been called into question on the campaign trail. However, the debate should not be about whether she deserves this minority status, but whether we live in a meritocracy…

…An Indian identity is something someone claims for oneself; it is a matter of choice. It is not legally defined and entails no legal benefits. Being an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe, however, is a legal status that has nothing to do with identity and everything to do with blood quantum. Members must meet requirements set by the tribe in consultation with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (Elizabeth Warren is not enrolled in a tribe and doesn’t seem to have sought such status. She doesn’t claim an Indian identity, just Indian ancestry.) Indians who are not enrolled in a tribe aren’t eligible for the aforementioned programs and benefits, including casino profits, education assistance, hunting privileges and housing…

…My father is Jewish, but I didn’t really grow up around any of my Jewish relatives, so claiming a Jewish identity — despite that heritage — would feel strange, presumptuous, disrespectful. On my mother’s side we have an ancestor by the name of Bonga, who was African and ended up at Leech Lake in Minnesota, where he married a woman of the Ojibwe tribe, and where I grew up. Despite this heritage, it would likewise feel very odd to claim that I am African or African American. (I am something like one-156th African.)…

Read the entire opinion here.