Mixed Race Studies

Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (review)

Callaloo
Volume 34, Number 1 (Winter 2011)
pages 208-210
E-ISSN: 1080-6512; Print ISSN: 0161-2492
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2011.0007

Kirin Wachter-Grene
University of Washington, Seattle

Jared Sexton. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Anxieties about American multiracial identity and practices, known in the nineteenth century as “amalgamation” or “miscegenation,” have been percolating in the national imagination for centuries. Since the 1980s, however, this cultural fascination has become explicitly politicized across sundry civic and intellectual landscapes, and since referred to as “multiracialism” or “mestizaje” (“mixture”). Broadly speaking, multiracialism, while re-structuring racial/ethnic classifications, curiously strives to provide freedom from being identified as or self-identifying as explicitly racialized. It is, in essence, a call for a supra-racial, or post-racial society. While the socio-political complications of this proposal have been the subject of recent scholarly work, the sexual politics of the multiracial movement have gone largely critically unexamined.

In his first book, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, Jared Sexton argues that multiracial politics, presented as the solution to racial controversy in the post-civil rights United States, actually reifies racial essentialism, evokes and implements antiblack racism, and denounces decades of black theoretical work and organizing traditions in its ultimate attempt to de-legitimize blackness as a viable political, social, and sexual identity. Lewis Gordon, Minkah Makalani, and Rainier Spencer have constructed similar arguments about the supposed inherent antiblack racism prevalent in multiracial politics, but Sexton, while acknowledging and extending their insights, integrates a strong argument about sexual politics into the prevailing discourse. He argues that multiracialism is not, as it claims, a political antithesis to white supremacy or sexual racism. Rather, multiracialism codifies normative sexuality within and across the color line with disastrous effects, producing a desexualization of race, and a deracialization of sex that reinforces racist sexual pathologies. Exposing the inextricable relation between sexuality and racism, specifically in regards to multiracialism’s articulations of interracial sex (defined by Sexton as a relationship in which one of the partners is black), comprises the bulk of this work. Throughout the book the terms “multiracialism” and “interracialism” are primarily used by Sexton to examine relations between blacks and whites or blacks and non-white, non-black people. Rarely does he apply the terms to analyze relations between other racial groups, a theoretical move that at times is awkwardly articulated and exclusionary, but integral to Sexton’s thesis that blackness is the matrix through which racialization is constructed, and that multiracialism engenders a denial of specifically black legitimacy.

Multiracialism strives to disarticulate mixed race individuals from the one-drop rule of hypodescent—the rule that was wielded in nineteenth-century America to render all mixed race individuals black by law. Multiracialism, Sexton argues, is an epistemological denouncement of systems of racial classification, not of racism itself. It is the goal of contemporary multiracialism to allow for mixed race individuals to self-identify as “mixed” (i.e., Sexton argues, not black). Claiming to be “mixed” and more broadly, claiming a “mestizo” (4) American nationalism is erroneous, in that it disregards the de facto Atlantic hybridity of all black subjects, and propagates a neoliberal “color blind” ideology that is really an amalgamation of whiteness actively striving to eradicate blackness from the cultural ethnic makeup. “Because the disassociation of multiracial people from racial whiteness is historically intractable,” Sexton writes, “the description of ‘the offspring of these unions’ as ‘neither one race or another’ is an artifice, a means of more subtly declaring that ‘mixed race’ should never have been viewed merely as a ‘subset’ of ‘blackness'” (74). In other words, though the multiracial movement strives to eradicate white supremacist tendencies by disarticulating notions of racial essentialism, it succeeds only in reifying those same racialized categories. If one is mixed and, in essence, claiming neither race, one is suggesting that there are pure races with which to disidentify, particularly the race of “pure” blackness because whiteness is normative and historically obstinate. Ultimately, it is this amalgamated form of “whiteness” that Sexton posits as the ideological goal of multiracial advocates…

Read the entire review here.

Obama & The Biracial Factor Book Release & Roundtable Discussion

Richard Oakes Multicultu​ral Center-SF State Student Center
1650 Holloway Avenue
San Francisco, California
2012-04-05, 16:00-18:00 PDT (Local Time)

Join book contributors, Dr. Robert Collins, Dr. Wei Ming Dariotis, Dr. Grace Yoo, Dr. Andrew Jolivétte and Cesar Chavez Research Institute Director, Dr. Belinda Reyes in a lively conversation about the 2012 Presidential election campaign and the new book, Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority.

Books will be available at the event.

‘Amerasians’ in the Philippines fight for recognition

Cable News Network (CNN)
2012-03-03

Sunshine Lichauco de Leon

Manila, Philippines (CNN) — When Susie Lopez, 43, was a little girl she would run outside her home in Angeles City, near the U.S. Clark Airbase in the Philippines, every time she heard a plane fly by.

“I would say ‘bye bye, Dad’ because the only thing I knew about my father was my dad was riding a plane,” she recalls.

The daughter of an American naval pilot and a Filipino mother, Lopez is one of an estimated 52,000 “Amerasians” fathered by American military servicemen during the decades the U.S. Navy and Air Force had bases in the Philippines.

The majority of their mothers worked as bar girls in the area’s thriving “rest and recreation” industry, where soldiers were their regular clients. When the American military left the bases in the early 1990s, these children were left behind.

On March 4, in honor of International Amerasian Day, a group of 60 Filipino Amerasians from the cities surrounding former bases will celebrate in a special way. Their “100 Letters to our Fathers” campaign will see the group – whose members range from teenage to those in their 50s—reach out with messages of love and hope to fathers almost all of them never knew. Many of the handwritten letters will be read aloud and will be accompanied by their photos and a short video showing conditions Amerasians have faced…

…They were stigmatized for being illegitimate and for being the children of prostitutes. Amerasians fathered by African American soldiers say they suffered the most extreme prejudice.

Brenda Moreno, 44, does not know the name of her African-American father or her mother. She does not know where she belongs.

She remembers a childhood where she hid at home because she looked different. “They see my color and my hair and they tease me ‘negra’. I am always crying because I don’t feel good. I tell them when I grow up I am going to change my blood so I am going to be white,” she recalls…

…Alex Magno, Professor of Political Science at University of the Philippines, explains that this racial prejudice is deeply-rooted, but was strengthened by the country’s colonial past.

“We long ago considered the Malayo-Polynesian tribes superior and the Negrito tribes inferior,” he says. “Hispanic culture merely reinforced that prejudice with its Eurocentric paradigm. Superimpose Hollywood. The standard of beauty is fair skin, tall nose, straight hair.”

Growing up with such a lack of acceptance and economic hardship has taken an emotional and psychological toll on many.

According to a three-year study conducted by Dr. Peter Kutschera, Director of the Philippine Amerasian Research Institute in Angeles City, “we have a severely socioeconomically impaired population, especially among Africans, who contend with serious physical and mental stress issues, including homelessness, alcohol and drug abuse.”…

Read the entire article here.

Does ‘Race’ Have a Future?

Philosophy & Public Affairs
Volume 35, Issue 4 (Fall 2007)
pages 293–317
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2007.00115.x

Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy
Columbia University

There are simple and powerful arguments against the biological reality of race. Although the phenotypic characteristics, the manifest features that have traditionally been used to divide our species into races, are salient for us, they are superficial, indicating nothing about important differences in psychological traits or genetic conditions that constitute some racial essence. Throughout history, allegations of deep differences in temperament and capacity, claims grounded in no evidence, have done incalculable harm. Contemporary genetic studies of human populations have revealed that there are no alleles distinctive of this race or of that, and, although a few researchers like J. Philippe Rushton—”ogre naturalists,” as Ian Hacking aptly dubs them—continue to seek such simple genetic differences, there is a widespread consensus among anthropologists that races are not “biologically real.”

If you have a particular view of natural kinds, the line of reasoning I have just sketched will appear overwhelming. Suppose you believe that natural kinds are distinguished by some special underlying feature that explains the behavior of members of the kind- like atomic number, for example, in the case of the elements-then you will infer directly from the absence of special genetic or chromosomal markers of race to the biological insignificance of racial divisions. But there is a serious mistake here. The essentialist/explanationist approaches to natural kinds that have dominated much philosophical discussion in past decades have always been woefully inadequate as accounts of biological kinds. Indeed, anyone familiar with the writings of two of the greatest evolutionary biologists of the last century, Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr, can only wonder at philosophical insistence on the idea that natural kinds have essences. As Dobzhansky and Mayr tirelessly pointed out, biological taxa are not demarcated by essential differences; in general, there is no analogue of atomic number, no genetic feature, say, that separates one species of mosquito or mushroom from another; there are occasional exceptions, cases in which species of lizards are formed by hybridization or species of grasses result from doubling, or tripling, of chromosomes, but these are relatively rare.

Many of the premises from which eliminativists about race begin are correct, and important enough to repeat, again and again: there are no genes distinctive of the groups we call races, no biological markers of psychological or behavioral differences. In their studies of nonhuman organisms, however, biologists typically do not appeal to distinctive genes in their demarcation of taxa. Once this fact is appreciated, the question of race as a biological category should be recast. Is there a biological basis for dividing species into smaller units, and does appeal to this basis generate a division of our own species into races?…

Read the entire article here or here.

Racial Classification Regarding Semen Donor Selection in Brazil

Developing World Bioethics
Volume 7, Issue 2 (August 2007)
pages 104–111
DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-8847.2007.00192.x

Rosely Gomes Costa, Pós-doutorado em Ciências Sociais pela
Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) e pela Universidade Autônoma de Barcelona (Espanha)

Brazil has not yet approved legislation on assisted reproduction. For this reason, clinics, hospitals and semen banks active in the area follow Resolution 1358/92 of the Conselho Federal de Medicina, dated 30 September 1992. In respect to semen donation, the object of this article, the Resolution sets out that gamete donation shall be anonymous, that is, that the donor and recipients (and the children who might subsequently be born) shall not be informed of each other’s identity. Thus, since recipients are unaware of the donor’s identity, semen banks and the medical teams involved in assisted reproduction become the intermediaries in the process. The objective of this article is to show that, in practice, this represents disrespect for the ethical principles of autonomy, privacy and equality. The article also stresses that the problem is compounded by the racial question. In a country like Brazil, where racial classification is so flexible and goes side by side with racist attitudes, the intermediary role played by semen banks and medical teams is conditioned by their own criteria of racial classification, which are not always the same as those of donors and semen recipients. The data presented in this paper were taken from two semen banks located in the city of São Paulo (Brazil). At the time of my research, they were the only semen banks in the state of São Paulo and supplied semen to the capital (São Paulo city), the state of São Paulo, and to cities in other Brazilian states where semen banks were not available.

Read or purchase the article here.

AMST 294-03  Mixed Race America: Identity, Culture, and Politics

Macalester College
Saint Paul, Minnesota
Spring 2012

SooJin Pate

This course is an introduction to the animating debates, themes, and issues in Critical Mixed Race Studies. Utilizing critical race theory and postcolonial analysis, we will examine the identities and experiences of multiracial or mixed race people, as well as the ways in which they have played a fundamental role in constructing race and shaping race relations, politics, and culture in the U.S. Topics in this course address the following: conquest and slavery, miscegenation laws, debates about the U.S. Census categories, U.S. militarism, representations of “mixed” people in the media, cultural expressions of “mixed” Americans, transracial adoption, queering mixed race studies, and the Mixed Race/Multiracial Movement.

Racial Hybridity, Physical Anthropology, and Human Biology in the Colonial Laboratories of the United States

Current Anthropology
Volume 53, Number S5 (April 2012)
DOI: 10.1086/662330
pages S95-S107

Warwick Anderson, Research Professor of History
University of Sydney

In the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. physical anthropologists imagined Hawai‘i as a racial laboratory, a controllable site for the study of race mixing and the effects of migration on bodily form. Gradually a more dynamic and historical understanding of human populations came to substitute for older classificatory and typological approaches in the colonial laboratory, leading to the creation of the field of human biology and challenges to scientific racism. Elite U.S. institutions and philanthropic foundations competed for the authority to define Pacific bodies and mentalities during this period. The emergent scientific validation of liberal Hawaiian attitudes toward human difference and race amalgamation or formation exerted considerable influence on biological anthropology after World War II, but ultimately it would fail in Hawai‘i to resist the incoming tide of continental U.S. racial thought and practice.

In 1920, Henry Fairfield Osborn, the forceful president of the American Museum of Natural History, wrote to a young physical anthropologist on his staff telling him how to conduct research into pure Polynesians and mixed-race people in Hawai‘i. Osborn had recently returned to New York from the islands—the territory of the United States—having found their exotic beauty enthralling and their inhabitants amenable to racial study. Like many other visitors, Osborn took surfing lessons on Waikiki with Duke Kahanamoku, the Olympic swimmer, whom he regarded as a “model chieftain type.” “Do not fail to make the acquaintance of Duke,” the keen eugenicist Osborn urged Louis R. Sullivan, “and secure his measurements, ascertaining if you can, without giving offence, whether he is full blooded.” In particular, Osborn wanted the diffident, frail anthropologist, a student of Franz Boas at Columbia University, to “obtain any data regarding swimming adaptations in the limbs and feet.” He hoped, too, that bathing and surfing in the refreshing climate would improve Sullivan’s consumptive tendencies. Additionally, Osborn demanded measurements of other types, including “fishermen,” “poi makers,” “tapa makers,” and “hula dancers.” He heard that the “Hawaiian and Chinese blend is an excellent one; in the schools, intelligent, upright, persistent.” Collecting “primitive” types was compelling because Osborn planned a Polynesian hall at the American Museum; the United States boasted a “historic connection” with Hawai‘i, and the evaluation of racially mixed peoples might offer insight into contemporary social problems on the mainland, including New York.

During the 1920s, physical anthropologists from the American Museum of Natural History and Harvard University treated Hawai‘i as a racial “laboratory,” a controlled site where they might assess an experiment in human biology (MacLeod and Rehbock 1994). They came to the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu to study the origins of Polynesians and the process of contemporary race formation in the islands, presumably the result of environmental adaptation of newcomers and hybridization between different groups. In this sense, anthropologists such as Sullivan and his successor Harry L. Shapiro pursued a Boasian program in physical anthropology, elaborating on their mentor’s earlier work on race mixing and the modification of the bodies of immigrants, and producing dynamic and historical accounts of human difference (Boas 1910; Herskovits 1953; Kroeber 1942). Even though conservative eugenicists such as Osborn and his friend Charles B. Davenport initially had promoted research in the islands, the Pacific soon became a Boasian laboratory—to their consternation—a workshop for investigators skeptical of racial typologies and fixities. Most of these rising anthropologists arrived in Hawai‘i already discontented with the complicated and contradictory typological enterprise, and experiences there propelled their drift toward racial recusancy. The vast sea of islands, with Hawai‘i in the middle, proved an exemplary site where physical anthropology could be refashioned and a new human biology might emerge…

…Race Crossing in America

Louis Sullivan, Osborn’s young emissary, was not the first mainland expert to evaluate racial diversity and mixture in Hawai‘i. After studying the decline of the northern “Negro,” the punctilious statistician Frederick L. Hoffman traveled to the islands to investigate the effects of Pacific “miscegenation.” Not surprisingly, his analysis of vital statistics revealed the supposedly baleful results of “Hawaiian mongrelization,” thereby confirming his prejudices (Hoffman 1916, 1917, 1923). Alfred M. Tozzer, the Harvard anthropologist, was rather more sympathetic. From 1916, he visited his wife’s (haole) family on Oahu each summer and measured the bodies of Chinese-Hawaiian and white-Hawaiian neighbors. After struggling with the statistics of race crossing, Tozzer, a close friend of Boas, handed over his data on 508 subjects to Leslie C. Dunn, a progressive young geneticist. While lamenting the unreliable “pedigrees,” Dunn could find no signs of “degeneracy” among the mixed offspring—by which he meant no obvious physical disharmony or mental deficiency. He noted that the first generation of European-Polynesian crosses showed native pigmentation and lacked hybrid vigor, but supposedly Hawaiian corpulence disappeared and finer European features emerged. Dunn complained of the difficulties calculating white hybrids: whites seemed too heterogeneous to fit one type or even to sort neatly into conventional Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean divisions (Dunn 1923). After further analysis, Dunn (1928:2) decided that Hawaiian-Chinese crosses generally reverted toward their Asian ancestry in what he called “this great experiment in race mixture.”

Race mixture or miscegenation excited considerable scholarly interest and public indignation in the continental United States during the early twentieth century. According to the 1910 census, the number of self-identifying “mulattoes” in the U.S. population had risen to two million, more than 20% of African Americans. This development prompted concern among some white social theorists. In 1918, Madison Grant (1918) predicted the passing of the great white race: “mongrelization” across the globe was leading to dilution and degeneration. A few years later, Lothrop Stoddard (1921) echoed Grant’s predictions. Through the 1920s and 1930s, marriage between African Americans and European Americans remained illegal in more than 40 states but not in the insular territories (Hollinger 2003; Kennedy 2003; Moran 2001; Pascoe 1996; Sollors 2000; Spickard 1989; Williamson 1980). In 1924, Virginia promulgated the “one-drop” rule to define more rigidly the boundaries of white identity. The following year, Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander scandalized New York when he sued Alice Jones for passing as white and deceptively luring him into marriage. Black men accused of lustful behavior toward white women were still being lynched in the South. In 1935, the African American intellectual W. E. B. DuBois observed that fear of race mixing was “the crux of the so-called Negro problem in the United States” (DuBois 1980 [1935]:99). Nonetheless, in places such as Harlem, New York, a self-conscious and assertive “mulatto” culture emerged during this period (Huggins 1973; Watson 1995).

American physical anthropologists and scientists tried to elucidate the biological principles of this controversial social issue. Even in the 1890s, Franz Boas, a liberal Jewish-German émigré inspired by the environmentalism of his mentor Rudolf Virchow, was scouring American Indian reservations and boarding schools looking for “half bloods” to measure. He noticed that rather than blending their ancestry, mixed children manifested features favoring one or the other parent, but he thought this segregation of heredity scarcely constituted “degeneration,” however defined. Indeed, mixing seemed to have a “favorable effect upon the race” (Boas 1902, 1940 [1894]; Stocking 1982). Miscegenation also intrigued less sympathetic physical anthropologists. “I am seeking information concerning the offspring of mulattoes,” Charles B. Davenport wrote in 1906 to Aleš Hrdlička at the Smithsonian Institution. “That is, I wish to learn if white skin color and black are produced as well as mulattoes. Are such pairs of mulattoes perfectly fertile and are their children vigorous?” The anatomist Hrdlička was stumped. He suspected three-quarters of the people of color in Washington, DC, were part white, but the “question of the mixed bloods of white and Negroes and of their progeny still awaits scientific investigation.” Over the following years, Hrdlička frequently urged the aging eugenicist to use the resources of the research station at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, to look into this question. But not until the late 1920s did Davenport enlist Morris Steggerda to measure and assess sociologically mixed-race people—and then in Jamaica. By this time their condemnation of disharmonious race crossing would appear exceptionally vehement and absurd. The scientists worried that Jamaican “hybrids,” inheriting the short arms of whites and the long legs of blacks, had trouble stooping and picking things off the ground; browns became “muddled and wuzzle-headed” (Davenport and Steggerda 1929:469)…

Read the entire article here.

TIME to Think in Full Color About Race & Ethnicity

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Ph.D.
2012-02-25

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

TIME Magazine’s latest cover story (Feb. 2/24) is called “Yo Decido. Why Latinos will pick the next President.” It reports that about 9% of all voters in 2012 will be Latino, up 26% from four years ago. While the Latin@ vote is definitely an important and interesting and game-changing political development, the most interesting thing about this story isn’t the headline or the article’s statistics. It’s the cover (left).

The cover claims to feature 20 portraits of Latin@s with captions. Some are individual or occupational descriptions like dancer, DREAMer, nutrition undergrad, car aficionado and immigration activist. Other descriptions are nation-oriented, like Mexicans, Hondurans and Guatemalans.

Here’s the problem: In reality, the cover features only 19 portraits of Latin@s and one man who passes as Latino but actually identifies himself as multiracial—half Chinese and half White. According to Michelle Woo at the OC Weekly, “That man is Michael Schennum, is the short-haired gentleman in the top row, center, behind the letter ‘M.’ He is half Chinese and half White. Not Latino. Not even a little bit.”…

…Sociologists have identified two patterns emerging in US multiracial communities. Asian / Whites and Latin@ / Whites tend to acknowledge and celebrate all aspects of their backgrounds but live life as Whites, especially if their fathers are White. Black / Whites and Black / Asian, Black / Latin@s tend to celebrate all aspects of their backgrounds but live their lives as Black…

Read the entire article here.

Election of the first black mayor

Daily Mail
1913-11-10

Source: mytimemachine.co.uk

Coloured Mayor—Majority of One at Battersea—Dramatic Speech

For the first time in the history of this country a man of colour has been elected mayor of a borough. The honour has fallen to Mr. John Richard Archer, a photographer, of Battersea Park-Road, who by thirty votes to twenty-nine was last night elected Mayor of Battersea by the Progressive Party. His opponent was Mr W G Moore, a West End tailor.

Mr Archer has hitherto kept secret the place of his birth. Last night, on donning his chain of office, he revealed the secret in a dramatic speech. He said:

“I am a man of colour. Many things have been said about me which are absolutely untrue. I think you ought to show the same respect for me as you would a white man. I am the son of a man who was born in the West Indies. I was born in a little, obscure village in England that you may never have heard of–Liverpool. I am a Lancastrian born and bred.”

“MY MOTHER WAS IRISH”

“My mother [here Mr Archer spoke with great emotion] was just my mother. She was not born in Burma , as some newspapers stated. She was not born at Rangoon . My mother was Irish.”…

Read the entire article here.

Spoilt for choice?

New Law Journal: Leading on debate, litigation & dispute resolution
Vol 162, Issue 7498
2012-01-26

Adrian Jack, Barrister & Rechtsanwalt
Enterprise Chambers

Encouraging greater judicial diversity is no easy task, says Adrian Jack

The government is consulting on creating greater diversity in the judiciary. Where candidates for judicial appointment are of similar merit, membership of a “protected category” should be a trump card, allowing the candidate with that status to be appointed over the rival.

The idea is a simple one. If a white and a black candidate are of roughly similar merit, the black candidate should be appointed. Likewise, if there were a male and a female candidate, the female should go through.

Immediately though a problem arises. What if a black man is up against a white woman? Does the black man’s ethnicity trump the other candidate’s sex? Or vice versa?

One solution in such a case would be to disregard the protected characteristic of both candidates. However, this would not necessarily increase diversity. Take a woman applying for a tribunal post. In tribunals 38% of judges are women (against 51% in the population at large), whereas the percentage of black, Asian and minority ethnic judges is 10.5%—more than the nine per cent in the population (Report of the Advisory Panel on Judicial Diversity, para 18). A woman should surely be able to argue that the black male candidate’s ethnicity should be ignored (because the tribunal judiciary is already sufficiently ethnically diverse), so giving her the tie-break.

Indeed the problems do not stop there. The consultation implies that it will be readily apparent which candidates have protected characteristics. Yet this is not so. Who is “black”? Someone of mixed race must qualify. But what of someone who is one eighth of black heritage? Or one sixteenth?

In a case of race discrimination in the employment tribunal it is normally sufficient for claimants to self-describe their ethnicity. If a claimant has such a small proportion of black ancestry that they show no physical or cultural signs of that ethnicity, then the claimant is unlikely to show that he was treated less favourably on the ground of his race…

Read the entire opinion piece here.