Mixed Race Studies

‘Race’ as a scientific and organizational construct: a critique

GeoJournal
Volume 41, Number 3 (March 1997)
pages 233-243
DOI: 10.1023/A:1006881215239

Georges G. Cravins, Professor of Geography
University of Wisconsin, La Crosse

“Race” for many years has been a major construct of science and society. While its importance as such has not historically been particularly pronounced on a global scale, the emergence of its most forceful architects, the Anglophone countries, to pre-eminence since World War II has significantly extended its geographical range and added to its significance as an idea within commercialized culture as well as within social organization.

In the present paper, “race” is critically examined from the following angles: 1) its role in the behavioral and medical sciences; b) its historical origins and manifestations within the Anglophone countries, particularly the United States; and c) its emergence as a “liberal” concept and operating principle since World War II. Questions of why and how “race” arose and its continued use in science, society and culture drive both the trajectory and depth of this research. “Race” is found to be a modern construct which arose as a consequence of colonialism and slavery, and was substantially constructed in its present form and substance by England and its off-spring societies, particularly the United States. “Race” was not used as a term expressing a social idea until modern times, and had no basis in the primordial civilizations which greatly influenced modern Western societies (e.g., ancient Greece and Rome). Efforts undertaken by liberals – particularly in the United States – to “humanize” the concept of “race”since the 1960″s have been largely unsuccessful. “race” is viewed as inherently hierarchical, a fact which is evident from its historical and present role in science and society.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Many a man believes himself to be the master of others who is, no less than they, slaves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Control Social (1762)

In this paper. I shall discuss the involvement of modern Western societies with the concept of ‘race,’ focusing special attention on its developmental and functional manifestations within Anglophone societies. By Anglophone* is meant the cultures and countries of the English-speaking world, most especially the United States. Canada, Britain, South Africa and Australia. My primary aim is to render a critical perspective on ‘race’ as academic idea and social praxis, so as to argue against its continued use within the human and medical sciences as well as an element of social and political policy.

Montagu (1974. p. 3) has called ‘race’ the ‘witchcraft of our time’. ‘Race’ is not only an academic or ideological construct, but also a notion whose applied manifestations and consequences arc intellectually, socially, politically and economically significant. Indeed, it is possible to discern two distinct yet mutually-supporting channels through which ‘race’ has been historically articulated: 1) as an idea around which major academic debates have been constructed within scientific communities; and 2) as an organizational construct which has played a significant role in shaping personal world views, individual and group identities and primary social relations.

As a serious organizational construct, ‘race’ owes its existence principally to Western societies, particularly the Anglophone countries. Although educated populations in most non-Western societies today are aware of the existence of ‘races’, this awareness is generally owed to diffusion through Western influences rather than to autochthonal development. Moreover, in the extent to which it functions organizationally, ‘race’ is universal neither in its societal and spatial significance, nor in its historical origins and development. Indeed, divorced from the empirical reality of social hierarchies and class divisions, and the day-to-day conflict it engenders within certain Western societies, race is meaningless, as it has long lost its significance on purely scientific grounds.

The consideration of ‘race’ in the pages that…

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To tackle racism, we must tackle ignorance

The Times of London
2012-02-14

John Barnes

It’s not about football, it’s about destroying modern myths of colour, race and superiority
 
In 1987 a black friend of mine went into a shop to buy a coat. He asked the assistant if they had it in black and she said no, they only had it in nigger brown. She was a lovely woman, but what would we say if that happened today?
 
If I were to ask players of my generation if they had made a racist comment in a football match, anyone honest would almost certainly say yes. No one batted an eyelid 20 years ago. Now when Alan Hansen says “coloured” rather than “black” (because black used to be an insult) or Luis Suárez says “negrito”, everyone jumps up and down to distance themselves from such remarks. They believe racism has been consigned to the past…

…The Football Association ticks all the right boxes with its policies and campaigns, the Government passes legislation, the Prime Minister gets involved because someone didn’t shake someone’s hand, people queue up to say ignorance is no excuse. But they are wrong. Ignorance is the excuse. To stop it, we have to start talking seriously about race.
 
The idea that race is about colour is relatively modern. When Aristotle spoke about races he was differentiating between uncivilised barbarians and civilised Greeks. But it was introduced by governments, backed by the Church, to validate slavery and colonialism, to justify treating some people as less equal than others. Just as Linnaeus classified plants, so people were classified by the colour of their skin. Academics tried to prove differences in skull formation to give scientific support to the idea that black people were morally and intellectually inferior.
 
But race is not a scientific reality. You could find a tribe in Africa who are genetically closer to Europeans than to an African tribe a hundred miles away. Some Saudis have whiter skin than Italians.
 
The notion of “whiteness” is an ideology of superiority. Nothing similar has ever existed in black culture. Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda do not see themselves as the same. When the Labour MP Diane Abbott talked on Twitter about “divide and rule” her claims depended on a sense of black identity that wasn’t correct…

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Obama Has Shattered America’s Racial Ceiling

San Diego Union-Tribune
2012-02-12

Constance M. Carroll, Chancellor
San Diego Community College District

If he could visit 21st-century America, Alexis de Tocqueville would be amazed to find Barack Obama, an African-American, as president of the United States. However, he would not be surprised to find that, despite this powerful symbolism of progress, race is still a divisive force in the country.
 
Following his tour of this young nation in the 19th century, Tocqueville, a French historian and political activist, published “Democracy in America” in 1835. In this book, he described slavery as “the most formidable evil threatening the future of the United States.” Aware of the growing impetus to abolish this practice, Tocqueville noted, “I see that slavery is in retreat, but the prejudice from which it arose is immovable.”
 
173 years later, Americans elected an African American to hold the highest office in the nation. During election eve on Nov. 4, 2008, many wept, shared their enthusiasm with friends and family across the country, and actually believed that this was it: the end of racial strife in America. Given the nation’s difficult journey from slavery and its abolition, from Jim Crow laws and their dissolution, from segregation and its demise, to the continuing civil rights struggle to eliminate the vestiges of this dark history, Barack Obama’s election was heralded by many as the start of a new era of equality and racial peace…

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Not White Enough, Not Black Enough

International Herald Tribune (The Global Edition of the New York Times)
2012-02-15

Eusebius McKaiser, political Analyst
Wits University, Johannesburg, South Africa

JOHANNESBURG – A few weeks ago, a British friend of mine served a sumptuous confession as a starter for dinner, “I only realized recently that you’re not actually black!” We had met several years back in the English midlands, where, judging by her remark, I had passed as black. But now that she has lived in South Africa for a few months, she is fluent in the local racial vocabulary: things are not quite black and white.

Let me explain. In South Africa I’m referred to as “colored,” a term that does not have the same derogatory denotation here as it does in the United States when it is hurled at black Americans. I am not black. I am of mixed racial heritage, as my parents are and their parents were.

When racist colonial settlers arrived at the southern tip of Africa during the 17th century, their racism did not preclude sexual relations with the locals. Several generations later, the colored community is ostensibly an ethnic group just like the Xhosas or the Zulus or any of the other myriad groupings within South Africa’s borders. It makes up  9 percent of the country’s population of 50.6 million.

…The lack of adequate economic opportunity for coloreds since the dawn of democracy here — combined with their lingering, paralyzing sense of victimhood — explains why the colored community is the most class-homogenous racial grouping in South Africa: an essentially poor, lower-working-class community. Very few of its members escape that stereotype.

In the Western Cape, the province with the largest concentration of colored people in the country, rates of fetal alcohol syndrome are some of the worst in the world. This community is like the drunken uncle of the South African family, the relative you tuck away when posh visitors come around. Paradoxically, many more colored people are worse off than black Africans now than were during apartheid…

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Brazil in black and white? Race categories, the census, and the study of inequality

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 35, Number 8, August 2012
pages 1466-
1483
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.607503

Mara Loveman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Jeronimo O. Muniz, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Federal University of Minas Gerais

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Many scholars advocate the adoption of a black-and-white lens for the analysis of racial inequality in Brazil. Drawing on a nationally representative dataset that includes race questions in multiple formats, we evaluate how removal of the ‘brown’ category from the census or other social surveys would likely affect: (1) the descriptive picture of Brazil’s racial composition; and (2) estimates of income inequality between and within racial categories. We find that a forced binary question format results in a whiter and more racially unequal picture of Brazil through the movement of many higher income mixed-race respondents into the white category. We also find that regardless of question format, racial inequality in income accounts for relatively little of Brazil’s overall income inequality. We discuss implications for public policy debates in Brazil, and for the broader scientific and political challenges of ethnic and racial data collection and analysis.

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Loving and the Legacy of Unintended Consequences

Wisconsin Law Review
2007,  Number 2
Pages 241-281

Rachel F. Moran, Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles

Table of Contents

• I. Introduction
• II. Making History Rest on Traditional Assumptions
  • A. The Significance of Race
  • B. The Meaning of Marriage
  • C. A Domestic Paradigm of Race and Intimacy
• III. Undoing Traditional Assumptions: The Unintended Consequences of Loving
  • A. New Frontiers in Race: Multiracialism and Colorblind Segregation
    • 1. The Mixed Promise of Multiracialism
    • 2. The Rise of Colorblind Segregation
  • B. New Paradigms of Intimacy: Same-Sex Marriage Advocacy and the Rise of Marriage-Minded Singlehood
    • 1. The Same-Sex Marriage Movement
    • 2. Marriage-Minded Singlehood
  • C. From the Color Line to the International Border
• IV. Conclusion

Introduction

If it can take a decade for a person to appreciate the implications of a major life event, it can take even longer to realize the significance of a turning point in the history of a nation. Perhaps for that reason, we hold commemorative events like this one.  An anniversary is an opportunity to reflect on a pivotal moment with distance and detachment and to weigh the consequences more fully than was possible at the time. On this fortieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, perhaps what is most striking is that a case deemed pathbreaking in its day now seems to have taken so much for granted.  Because the United States Supreme Court interrogated the meaning of neither race nor marriage, Loving has been invoked in a number of later struggles in ways that might have taken the Justices by surprise. This result, of course, is part of the law of unintended consequences: the more that is left unexamined, the more likely that a fresh look will reveal implications beyond those originally contemplated.

Here, I will explore Loving’s unintended consequences by considering why the Court took so much for granted and how the opinion later was deployed in unexpected ways. After briefly examining the facts and holdings in the case, I will show that the Justices accepted monoracial categories as a given, despite evidence of multiracial complexity. The Court’s treatment of race reflected the need to implement desegregation orders that turned on clearcut racial distinctions. The Justices also regarded marriage as a longstanding tradition. Already under attack for conjuring up unenumerated rights that did not appear in the Constitution, the Court was loath to suggest that marriage was anything other than an uncontroversial historical institution.

Ironically, the Court’s assumptions about race and marriage have been directly subverted by those who most openly lay claim to Loving’s legacy. Proponents of multiracialism and advocates of same-sex marriage argue that their reform proposals are a natural outgrowth of the Court’s conceptualization of freedom and equality. At the same time, Loving’s subtler consequences have gone largely unaddressed. The case arguably ushered in a jurisprudential philosophy that treats colorblindness and ongoing segregation as compatible. In addition, the decision entrenched the primacy of marriage in the law’s recognition of close personal relationships. Finally, Loving acquiesced in the presumption that romance happens only among Americans and so the decision has been of little import in dignifying and protecting the intimate attachments of noncitizens. Such a complex legacy demonstrates why a perfectly factual account of Loving simply will not do, and so it may take some time to appreciate the consequences.

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The Multiracial Epiphany of Loving

Fordham Law Review
May 2008, Volume 76, Number 6
pages 2709-2733

Kevin Noble Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

The year 1967 becomes the temporal landmark for the beginning of an interracial nation. That year, the United States Supreme Court ruled state antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia. In addition to outlawing interracial marriage, these restrictive laws had created a presumption of illegitimacy for historical claims of racial intermixture. Not all states had antimiscegenation laws, but the sting of restriction extended to other states to forge a collective forgetting of mixed race. Defenders of racial purity could depend on these laws to render interracial relationships illegitimate. Looking back to Loving as the official birth of Multiracial America reinforces the prevailing memory of racial separatism while further underscoring the illegitimacy of miscegenations past. By establishing racial freedom in marriage, Loving also sets a misleading context for the history of mixed race in America. Even though Loving instigates the open acceptance of interracialism, it unintentionally creates a collective memory that mixed race people and relationships did not exist before 1967. To imagine and realize a pre-1967 miscegenated America directly challenges the legal legitimacy of the racial reality that antimiscegenation law attempted to enforce. I approach this subject by examining contemporary claims of mixed race that are rooted in the past. This conflict usually entails opposing narratives: one venerating the involvement of a prominent historical figure as party to an interracial relationship; the other steadfastly holds that such claims are unfounded as specious. Placing miscegenation upon narratives and figures that are faintly characterized and understood as racially white turns private claims of mixed identity into public contemplations of interracial intimacy. To imagine historic figures as “Founding Fathers” of another sort destabilizes an implicit understanding of ingrained racial limitations.

..This essay takes issue with the overemphasis on Loving as the enabler for mixed race in the United States, and concomitantly, its effect on legitimating a varied interracial past. Gary Nash’s thesis demonstrates a notable irony: if our just, democratic system openly permits and justifies the “happening thing” of mixed race, why is this same valorization and recognition not extended to the pre-Loving era? Turning to a single court case to celebrate a social phenomenon that has existed at the margins of American culture mistakenly erases the past of racial amalgamation that preexisted the legality that Loving provided. In the system of the racial binary that has been established in the United States, mixtures that disrupt the notion of racial purity, particularly those that originate in the time period before Loving, are presumed to be deviant and abnormal. The collective racial memory in the United States, unlike that of Mexico or Brazil, operates from an assumption of racial purity and sexual avoidance of miscegenation. This national culture of disbelief of racial intermixture has permeated our views of history and law.

This essay argues that looking to Loving as the birthplace of interracialism reinforces the legal authority and resultant legacy of the antimiscegenation regime that it replaced. In addition to outlawing interracial marriage, these restrictive laws created a lasting presumption of illegitimacy for historical claims of racial intermixture. Defenders of racial purity could depend on these laws to render interracial relationships, whether married or unmarried, improbable and illegitimate. Not all states had antimiscegenation laws, but the sting of restriction extended to other states, forging a collective forgetting and denial of the existence of mixed race. The absence of a national, judicial acceptance of mixed race facilitated a collective belief in racial purity. Because it was illegal and immoral, it could not have occurred. As states were withholding the marital right from biracial couples, they attempted to deny and erase the intimate reality of persons, like Richard and Mildred Loving,who would have sought alternatives to the prohibitive law…

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Post-Racial? Americans and Race in the Age of Obama

The Greenlining Institute
Berkeley, California
November 2011
26 pages

Dr. Daniel Byrd, Research Director

Bruce Mirken, Media Relations Coordinator

Since the election of Barack Obama as the United States’ first African American president, there has been much discussion of whether this means the U.S. has become a “post-racial” society. Does race still matter in America? This question is particularly significant in light of the fact that within about three decades, people of color are projected to become the majority. Policy based on mistaken assumptions could cripple efforts to revive the U.S. economy. Using the most definitive survey data available, we investigated perceptions of race in America among different racial and ethnic groups and how those perceptions compare to measurable realities of U.S. society.

Table of Contents

• Executive Summary
• Recommendations
• Introduction
  • Methodology
  • America’s Changing Demographics
  • Race Relations in America
  • Perceptions of Discrimination and Inequality in America
  • Race and Health
  • Race and Income
  • Race and Treatment of Groups by the Federal Government
  • Results
  • Discussion
  • Summary
  • A Call to Action
• References
• Appendix I
• Appendix II

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Replacing History With Fiction in Arizona

The Nation
2012-02-08

Gary Younge

In 1997 black America gained a new hero when Tiger Woods putted himself into history at the US Masters. Within a few weeks, it had lost him in an unlikely fashion—to a bespoke racial identity articulated on Oprah’s couch.
  
Does it bother you being termed “African-American”? Oprah asked him.

It does,” said Woods, whose father was of African-American, Chinese and Native American descent and whose mother was of Thai, Chinese and Dutch descent. At school he would tick “African-American” and “Asian.” “Growing up, I came up with this name: I’m Cablinasian [CAucasian, BLack, INdian and ASIAN]. I’m just who I am…whoever you see in front of you.” According to an editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times, Woods could not have been more praiseworthy if he’d scored a hole in one wearing a blindfold. “He justly rejects attempts to pigeonhole him in the past,” claimed the editorial. “Tiger Woods is the embodiment of our melting pot and our cultural diversity ideals and deserves to be called what he in fact is—an American.”
 
It is a peculiar fact of modern Western rhetoric, as prevalent among liberals as conservatives, that nationality is understood as a liberating identity, whereas ethnicity, race and other markers are regarded as confining. There are far more black and Asian people in the world than there are Americans. Racial identity is no less diverse than national identity. But somehow to describe Woods as black or Asian traps him in a pigeonhole, while to define him by his nationality sets him free.
 
Such was the ostensible motivation of the Arizona officials who banned Mexican-American studies from the Tucson schools. Tom Horne, the state attorney general who surfed into office on a wave of anti-immigrant bigotry, wrote the legislation, which claims the curriculum “advocates ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” By the end of January officials were going into schools and boxing up Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, one of the books banned for “promoting ethnic resentment.”…

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Charles Marsh recounts the formation and activities of The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission.

The Civil Rights Movement as Theological Drama
The Project on Lived Theology
University of Virginia

Charles Marsh

In 1956, a new organization appeared, predisposed to the same political concerns articulated by the Citizen’s Council, but now underwritten by the state legislature.  The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was formed to broaden the scope of protecting “the Southern Way of Life.”  The commission expressed purpose was “to do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi, and her sister states, from encroachment thereon by the Federal Government”; nevertheless, it operated as “something akin to NKVD among the cotton patches,” as journalist Wilson Minor put it.  With an extensive surveillance network solidly in place, the Sovereignty Commission vigilantly monitored civil rights activists and any Mississippi citizens suspected of heterodoxy–“persons whose utterances or actions indicate they should be watched with suspicion on future racial attitudes.”  The commission pursued its ordained work by dispatching investigators and spies to gather information on civil rights workers, white liberals, and anyone else suspected of racial indiscretion.  By 1967, the commission had amassed an archive of more than ten thousand reports on people who worked for or represented “subversive, militant, or revolutionary groups.”  (By 1974, the files would grow to 87,000 names.)
 
Although the Sovereignty Commission’s principal motivation was “to prevent encroachment upon the rights of this and other states by the Federal Government” (as the charter stated), its obsession with racial purity could not be entirely explained by state’s rights fervor.  The commission’s agents seemed to spend as much energy tracking down reports of mixed-race babies and children as it did investigating the activities of subversive, militant and revolutionary groups.  Sadly, a reading of the available Sovereignty Commission files regarding rumors of interracial sex show us (in Adam Nossiter’s words) “cool accounts of lives damaged, destroyed, or threatened because black men were suspected of consorting with white women.”

Then there are reports that are stranger than fiction.  In , the director of the commission himself, Erle Johnston, Jr., wrote an eight page, single spaced report in December of 1963 explorinthe case of the woman Louvenia K. and her two sons, Edgar and Randy Edg the racial composition of the boys and their mother…

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