Mixed Race Studies

I do not believe that any Mulatto race can be maintained beyond the third or fourth generation by Mulattos merely; they must intermarry with the pure races or perish.

Robert Knox, The Races of Men, London, 1850.

In general, the absence of options for multiethnic or multiracial individuals reveals part of the problem in using race as a risk assessment tool: it neglects to account for the extent of genetic variation that underlies the concept of race. Thus, not only does it disregard a number of people who do not fit neatly into any of the given categories, but it may also misgauge the genetic contributions of individuals who do select a specific race or ethnicity with which they identify socially.

Atalie Nitibhon. “Race and health care: problems with using race to classify, assess, and treat patients” (Masters Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, pp 19).

An inhabitant of Africa remarked to Livingstone, that God made the white man, God made the black man, but the devil made the half-castes…

Alfred P. Shultz. Race or mongrel: a brief history of the rise and fall of the ancient races of earth: a theory that the fall of nations is due to intermarriage with alien stocks: a demonstration that a nation’s strength is due to racial purity: a prophecy that America will sink to early decay unless immigration is rigorously restricted. Boston: L. C. Page & Company, 1908), 8.

Nature prevents the development of the mongrel; in the few cases in which nature has for the time being successfully been outraged and a mongrel produced, nature degrades that mongrel mercilessly and in time stamps it out.

Nature suffers no mongrel to live.

Alfred P. Shultz. Race or mongrel: a brief history of the rise and fall of the ancient races of earth: a theory that the fall of nations is due to intermarriage with alien stocks: a demonstration that a nation’s strength is due to racial purity: a prophecy that America will sink to early decay unless immigration is rigorously restricted. (Boston: L. C. Page & Company, 1908), 4.

I read the identitarian discourses surrounding Obama differently. The posing of these questions around identity betrays our subconscious recognition that we are not there yet—we remain burdened by a default racial calculus. Even the semantics of being post-racial reveals the persistence of race and racial constructions. We do not even have terminology, let alone the ideological substance, to take us beyond racial fixity. These questions further indicate our quest for a racial healing that we know has not yet been achieved. Hence the racial schizophrenia. We aredeeply conflicted. It is unclear what is reality versus what is merely our distorted perception. It is my ultimate conclusion that our distorted racial perception is our reality.

Camille A. Nelson, “Racial Paradox and Eclipse: Obama as a Balm for What Ails Us,” Denver University Law Review, Volume 86, Obama Phenomena: A Special Issue on the Election of President Barack Obama (2009): pages 743-783.

I think balancing personal experience and personal stories with an understanding of our past and also scholarly work and research… finding a balance between those.  Because that we find that people who are really interested in the emotional/personal stories tend to not have a lot of background information.  And then we find vice-versa, that the people who are really experts in history don’t know how to get on the Internet. So yes, and for stories especially… We have a lot of people really interested in storytelling but have no background in context. So we need historians who can find a way to make their information interesting to young people.

Fanshen Cox, “Community-Based Multiracial Movements: Learning from the Past, Looking toward the Future” (roundtable discussion at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois, November 5-6, 2010).

The other thing is, as Reggie [G. Reginald Daniel] said, Reggie knows that we are all multiracial.  He doesn’t need a genetic test to prove that.  I mean, we know that. Even though this can tell us new information—and I think it is an opportunity for conversation—it’s not enough because we already know it and it hasn’t been enough.  You know that slave owners knew those brown children where their children. Did it matter?  They knew those were multiracial children were related to them.  It didn’t make a difference… To me it is a political revolution that we need to see that we’re connected as human beings.  Genetics isn’t going to do it by itself.

Dorothy Roberts, “A Rx for the FDA: Ethical Dilemmas for Multiracial People in Race-Based Medicine” (panel at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois, November 5-6, 2010).

Trials contesting racial identity illustrate the ways that racial categories have come into being over the course of U.S. history.  Through them we can observe the changing meaning of race throughout our history, and the changes and continuities in racism itself, from the roots in a slave society up through the twentieth century.  Drawing lines between “races” determined not only who could be free but also who could be capable of citizenship.  Thus the trials of racial identity became trials about the attributes of citizenship for the men and women who were their subjects.

Gross, Ariela J. 2008. What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America. page 7. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Accepting the validity of the racial view, it becomes clear that the attributes and status of marginal communities are essentially functions of their physical and social environment, and not of Divine displeasure or some mysterious incompatibility of ‘blood,’ a fluid which has nothing to do with informed social discussion. Certainly, there are disharmonic and socially maladjusted individuals in such communities. Perhaps, too, their incidence is higher than it is among more integrated groups, though that remains to be proved, but they are susceptible to the same methods of improvement that are applied to ‘pure’ peoples. I subscribe without qualification to the prevention of undeniably dysgenic matings, whether exogamous or endogamous, but not to the conceit that colour and economic success are indices of desirability.

Cedric Dover. Half-Caste. London, 1937. Secker & Warburg.

For some time past the writer has been in close contact with girls of Anglo-Chinese and Anglo-Negro origin who are unable to find employment because social stigma refuses to allow them to mix in our society in the ordinary way. They are British citizens, and they are the weakest of our citizens, and as such need protection. Whatever action may be taken to prevent such intermixture in the future, if it can be proved to be undesirable, it certainly seems a bad policy of citizenship to penalize half-castes for a fault of birth for which they are in no way responsible. Liverpool, always to the fore in attempts towards civic betterment, has formed an “Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children” (Hon. Sec., Mr. G. E. Haynes, B.Sc., University Settlement, Nile Street, Liverpool), and a wholetime research worker [Muriel E. Fletcher] has been appointed. We hope that other seaport towns may soon follow this example of scientific research into a serious problem…

Rachel M. Fleming, “Human hybrids in various parts of the world,” The Eugenics Review, Volume 21, Number 4, (January 1930) 257–263.