Mixed Race Studies

I argue that this phenomenon of the conflation of Obama and Hitler channels racial anxieties, and even outright panic, about a ‘non-white’ president taking office. I situate this panic within ‘whiteness,’ and argue that it encompasses not just the fear of a ‘black’ president, but also the fear of unsettling the purportedly settled categories of race itself. This panic may be muted by the discourse of colorblindness and post-racialism, but finds voice in these ‘hybrid’ significations of Obama.

Cynthia D. Bond, “Fear of a ‘Black’ President: Obama, Racial Panic and the Presidential Sign,” Darkmatter, Volume 9, Issue 1, (July 2, 2012). http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2012/07/02/fear-of-a-black-president-obama-racial-panic-and-the-presidential-sign/

While Goldberg and Gilroy have alluded to mixed-race metaphors in their recent work, Lewis Gordon has written more extensively about the attempts to establish ‘critical’ mixed-race studies. Reflecting on the historical discrimination and colourism in an anti-black world, Gordon has argued that it is understandable – if not morally justifiable – for working-class individuals and darker-skinned individuals to be distrustful of middle-class individuals and lighter-skinned individuals who claim to be progressive. Gordon’s use of slime to describe the aims of a wide variety of mixed-race activists and ‘sensitive’ scholars – who talk politely about racial transcendence while denying the facticity of their privileged position in an anti-black world – is a particularly interesting term since it evokes animalistic behaviour, infantile play, salesmen pitching new, hip commodities for a polyethnic culture. It also offers a transracial, transdisciplinary and transnational engagement with Francophone theory. Aside from adapting Fanon’s critique of European man, Gordon’s analysis of multiracial celebration draws on Sartre’s ontology of slime (a sticky, viscoelastic material that resists shear flow and strain linearly with time when a stress is applied,) and reminds us of Barthes’s famous description of neither-norism (a ‘mythological figure which consists in stating two opposites and balancing the one by the other so as to reject them both… It is on the whole a bourgeois figure, for it relates to a modern form of liberalism… one flees from intolerable reality … one no longer needs to choose, but only to endorse.’)

Daniel McNeil, “‘Mixture is a Neoliberal Good’: Mixed-Race Metaphors and Post-Racial Masks,” Darkmatter, Volume 9, Issue 1, (Post-Racial Imaginaries), July 2, 2012. http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2012/07/02/mixture-is-a-neoliberal-good-mixed-race-metaphors-and-post-racial-masks/

…The least proximate types of the human species are the Anglo-Saxon and the negro. Their original homes are in widely separated regions of the earth, and neither race can establish itself in the home of the other. They differ in form and size of cranium, in the colour and texture of the skin, in the character and colour of the hair, and in intelligence.

The negro seems seldom to develop in intelligence beyond childhood. Havelock Ellis says* :—” The child of many African races is scarcely if at all less intelligent than the European child ; but while the African as he grows up becomes stupid and obtuse, and his whole social life falls into a state of hide-bound routine, the European retains much of his childlike vivacity.” they are mated. The offspring of the Anglo-Saxon and the negro are fertile when bred inter se, but in a less degree than when coupled with the parent races. The fertility of mulattoes decreases with each succeeding generation, and it is said they frequently die out in the fourth. The same thing is said to occur when the mulattoes are bred to the white race, but when they are bred to the negro they are more fertile, and the perfect negro type is reached in a few generations.

Dr. J. C. Nott, who resided for many years in the southern portion of the United States, and consequently had many opportunities of studying the negroes and their mulatto offspring, puts forward the following propositions respecting the mulattoes, the offspring of the strictly white race—i.e., the Anglo-Saxon or Teuton—and the true negro* :—

1. “That mulattoes are the shortest-lived of any class of the human race.
2. That mulattoes are intermediate in intelligence between the blacks and whites.
3. That they are less capable of undergoing fatigue and hardship than either blacks or whites.
4. That the mulatto women are peculiarly delicate, and subject to a variety of chronic diseases. That they are bad breeders, bad nurses, liable to abortion, and that their children generally die young.
5. That when mulattoes intermarry they are less prolific than when crossed on the parent stocks.
6. That when a negro man married a white woman the offspring partook more largely of the negro type than when the reverse connection had effect.
7. That mulattoes, like negroes, although unacclimatized, enjoy extraordinary exemption from yellow fever when brought to Charles town, Savannah, Mobile, or New Orleans.”

Dr. Nott noticed that mulattoes the offspring of the races of Southern Europe and the negro were often long-lived and prolific.

Dr. Morton, President of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, classed species according to their disparity or affinity, in the following manner :— “Remote species of the same genus are those among which hybrids are never produced. Allied species produce inter se an infertile offspring. Proximate species produce with each other a fertile offspring.”

George A. Brown, Studies in stock breeding: An inquiry into the various phenomena connected with the breeding of the domestic animals, Walker, May and Co., Printers, 1902: 383-385.

Although race is void of biological foundation, it has a profound social reality. All too apparent are disparities in health and welfare. Despite all the evidence indicating that “race” has no biological or evolutionary meaning, the biological-race concept continues to gain strength today in science and society, and it is reinforced by those who design and market DNA-based technologies. Race is used more and more in forensics, medicine and the genetic-ancestry business. Tattersall and DeSalle confront those industries head on and in no uncertain terms, arguing that “race-based medicine” and “raced-based genomics” are deeply flawed. Individuals fall ill, not populations. Belonging to any socioculturally defined race is a poor predictor of an individual’s genes, and one’s genes a poor predictor of one’s health.

Jan Sapp, “Race Finished: Book Review,” American Scientist, April-May, 2012. http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/race-finished.

…This analysis shows that the term of choice of most respondents in general population and student samples was ‘mixed race’.  Based on the criterion of currency amongst the community described by the terms, ‘mixed race’ is clearly the strongest candidate for those contexts where a conceptual basis of ethnic/racial identity or group allegiance or membership is required. Terms invoking two groups – such as ‘mixed parentage’, ‘dual heritage’, and ‘biracial’ – are preferred by very few and ‘mixed origins’ and ‘mixed heritage’ fare little better, although few find them offensive.  Others such as ‘multi-ethnic’ and ‘mixed cultural’ have not entered the popular lexicon. Yet concern about the disputed meaning of race – and the historical legacy of the term – make the widespread adoption of ‘mixed race’ unattractive to some sociologists and anthropologists…

Aspinall, Peter J., 2009. “‘Mixed race’, ‘mixed origins’ or what? Generic terminology for the multiple racial/ethnic group population,” Anthropology Today Volume 25, Issue 2, 3-8.

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.

Dorothy E. Roberts, “Breaking the Bonds of Race and Genomics,” GeneWatch, Volume 25, Issue 1 (January-February, 2012): http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/GeneWatch/GeneWatchPage.aspx?pageId=405.

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.

Priscilla Wald, “Blood and stories: how genomics is rewriting race, medicine and human history,” Patterns of Prejudice, Volume 40, Numbers 4
/5 (2006): 316.

Given the historical fact that White supremacy has been constructed by Whites for the benefit of Whites, White supremacy is routinely interpreted as a code word for White people. However, White supremacy is more than a collection of White people. As a system, many people participate in it, and as an ideology, many people think, feel, behave, and operate according to it, and in many ways defend and uphold it—White and “non-White” alike. The institution of colorism exemplifies how “non-Whites” serve to uphold White supremacy. For example, while most individuals who bleach their skin vehemently reject accusations that they desire to be White, and in fact are aware that no amount of chemical intervention will actually render them White nor will Whites, the gatekeepers to Whiteness, ever grant them access to the racial or social category, as they seek to gain access to the privilege that has historically been afforded to lighter skin as an approximation of Whiteness, they endorse the constructed superiority of Whiteness and thus White supremacy. As such, any true understanding of White supremacy must transcend focus on White people and physical White power alone. It must address White supremacy as an ideology and confront the psychological power of Whiteness.

Yaba Amgborale Blay, “Skin Bleaching and Global White Supremacy: By Way of Introduction,” The Journal of Pan African Studies, (Volume 4, Number 4, June 2011): 7-8.

In the past, the belief that human races had substantial and clearly delimited biological differences contributed to justify discrimination and was used to oppress and foment injustices, even within the medical context. The concept of race is still loaded with ideology and carries within it relationships of power and domination. It is similar to a banana peel: empty, slippery and dangerous.

S. D. J. Pena, “The fallacy of racial pharmacogenomics,” Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research, Volume 44, Number 4 (April 2011): 272.

“The idea that Hispanic is a coherent genetic category is just silly,” [Jonathan] Kahn said in a telephone interview. “It’s one of the most diverse—genetically and culturally and historically—populations you can find. The idea that it is genetically definable and distinct is just irresponsible.”

Rob Stein, “Race reemerges in debate over ‘personalized medicine’,” The Washington Post, July 31, 2011.