Mixed Race Studies

Selling eugenics: the case of Sweden

Notes & Records of the Royal Society
Volume 64, Number 4
pages 379-400
DOI: 10.1098/rsnr.2010.0009

Maria Björkman
Department of Thematic Studies, Technology and Social Change
Linköping University

Sven Widmalm
Department of Thematic Studies, Technology and Social Change
Linköping University

This paper traces the early (1910s to 1920s) development of Swedish eugenics through a study of the social network that promoted it. The eugenics network consisted mainly of academics from a variety of disciplines, but with medicine and biology dominating; connections with German scientists who would later shape Nazi biopolitics were strong. The paper shows how the network used political lobbying (for example, using contacts with academically accomplished MPs) and various media strategies to gain scientific and political support for their cause, where a major goal was the creation of a eugenics institute (which opened in 1922). It also outlines the eugenic vision of the institute’s first director, Herman Lundborg. In effect the network, and in particular Lundborg, promoted the view that politics should be guided by eugenics and by a genetically superior elite. The selling of eugenics in Sweden is an example of the co-production of science and social order.

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African Ancestry of the White American Population

The Ohio Journal of Science
Volume 58, Number 3 (May 1958)
pages 155-160

Robert P. Stuckert
Departments of Sociology and Anthropology
Ohio State University, Columbus

Defining a racial group generally poses a problem to social scientists. A definition of a race has yet to be proposed that is satisfactory for all purposes. This is particularly true when the racial group has minority group status as does the Negro group in the United States. To many persons, however, the matter of race definition is no problem. They view humanity as being divided into completely separate racial compartments. A Negro is commonly defined as a person having any known trace of Negro ancestry or “blood” regardless of how far back one must go to find it. A concomitant belief is that all whites are free of the presumed taint of Negro ancestry or “blood.”

The purpose of this research was to determine the validity of this belief in the non-Negro ancestry of persons classified as white. Current definitions of Negro may have serious limitations when used as bases for classifying persons according to ancestry (Berry, 1951). The terms African and non-African will be used rather than Negro and white when discussing the ancestry of an individual. Each of the former pair of terms has a more specific referent which is the geographic point of origin of an individual. At the same time, the two pairs of terms are closely related. Hence, this paper is the report of an attempt to estimate the percentage of persons classified as white that have African ancestry or genes received from an African ancestor.

This raises a question concerning the relationship between having an African ancestor and receiving one or more genes from this ancestor. Since one-half of an individual’s genetic inheritance is received from each parent, the probability of a person with one African ancestor within the previous eight generations receivingany single gene from this ancestor is equal to or greater than (0.5)⁸ or 3.9063 x 10³. It has been estimated that there are approximately 48,000 gene loci on 24 chromosome pairs (Stern, 1950). The probability that an individual with one African ancestor has one or more genes derived from this ancestor is equal to 1-(1-3.9063 x10^-3)^24,000 or greater than 0.9998. Having more than one African ancestor increases this probability. One final remark needs to be made. Some degree of African ancestry is not necessarily related to the physical appearance of the individual. Many of the genes possessed by virtue of descent from an African do not distinguish the bearer from persons of non-African ancestry. They are the genes or potentials for traits which characterize the human race. Nevertheless, these genes represent an element in the biological constitution of the individual inherited from an African…

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Trends in Mate Selection in a Tri-Racial Isolate

Social Forces
Volume 37, Number 3 (March 1959)
pages 215-221

Thomas J. Harte
Catholic University of America

Read before the twenty-first annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society in Asheville, North Carolina, April 11, 1958.

The “Brandywine” population of Southern Maryland is a tri-racial hybrid group which manifests many of the physical and social characteristics common to other known isolates located through the eastern part of the United States.  It is reputedly descended from mixed white, Indian, and Negro stock, although its most group-conscious members tend to reject the theory of Negro intermixture in their family background.  The skin color and hair texture of members seem to substantiate the theory of some white ancestry, and although a relatively high proportion possess some physical characteristics usually associated with Negro types, in general this population is marked by a high degree of “visibility.”  The Brandywine group is predominately rural. It has a total population of approximately 5,000.  Roman Catholicism is today, and has been traditionally, the religion of almost all of its members. Sixteen surnames are common in the population; four of these are unique to the group, the remaining twelve being more or less common among Negro and/or white families in the area.

The group has succeeeded in maintaining a considerable measure of isolation from the larger Negro and white populations through endogamous marriages as well as by residential and, to some extent, occupational segregation…

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Interview: Whiteness Redux

borderlands: e-journal
Volume 3, Number 2 (2004)

Mike Hill, Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies
State University of New York, Albany

Damien W. Riggs
University of Adelaide, South Australia

1. Damien: As a research area that is rapidly growing within ‘Western nations’, how would you understand whiteness studies as both creating the potential for critique, but also the potential for reinforcing the normative status of whiteness?

2. Mike: It’s interesting that you use the word “potential.” Because one of the issues that the whiteness studies phenomena in the US has raised—productively, if painfully—is whether or not humanities research in Western nations is at this moment capable of doing anything significant at all, critical, normative, whatever. Whither whiteness, and with it, whither scholarly books as the most effective basis for political agency? From a historical vantage point this is not a flippant question. We assume that writing leads to what significant social event, exactly? On the whiteness front, we know that writing has lead, well, to more writing, more conferences, additional debate. Do we presume a connection between this relatively recent outpouring of scholarship and progressive mass movements, radical insurgencies, real social change? The relation between humanities knowledge and the masses has I believe never been more confused. But neither has it been more crucial.

…15. Damien: There has been much talk recently, particular within the US and UK, of white people engaging in a movement towards ‘race abolitionism’, and as being ‘race traitors’. Do you think this connects with work in the area of whiteness studies, and in what regards (if any) do you see it as creating the potential for challenging the racialised structures of ‘Western societies’?

16. Mike: That word “potential” again. If we could only measure such a force in some way beyond just saying “yes, this or that provides our one true hope,” or “no, it surely does not.” I’ve been somewhat critical of the race traitor movement in the US on the grounds that it was voluntaristic and prone to all sorts of ontological thefting, to fetishizing the margins, to romantically blackening up, and so on. Maybe these charges were facile, or the underlying logic not so clear. But I still wonder, as I did in an article for Postmodern Culture back in 1997, about programatically performing “treason to whiteness” in order to ensure one’s “loyalty to humanity,” as that historically imperious neo-Enlightenment slogan goes. Humanity is a nice desire. But I wonder if this term, as evoked by the race traitor group, might turn on the way white men in particular are playing out a sense of late-capitalist public disenfranchisement, variously retooling, or really, gearing up their affective relations to colour, for everyone to witness and once again applaud…

…36. Damien: Whilst it is important to recognise the very local ways in which whiteness achieves hegemony, it has also been suggested that there are broader connections between the practices of whiteness in differing countries, particularly through their relation to discourses of empire and imperialism. Where do you see some of the important international connections within the study of whiteness?…

…40. Mike: Enter here the multiracial movement, which maintains an express disavowal of whiteness and, for that matter, disavows allegiance to blackness, our two longstanding oppositional correlates. There are something like sixty multiracial organizations in the US touting the cause of civil rights, self- and state-recognition, full and frank disclosure that the population designated black is mostly mixed race (as if race is a quantifiable set of blood ratios!). As I said, it’s significant that, for them, “white” is a bunk historical fiction. But it’s a horror for the NAACP that so too is “black.” The multiracial activists seek the right to be counted as one would choose, which means the full extension of a civil rights legacy that emphasises self- over observer-enumeration. Race is addressed once again as the matter of getting identity correct in one’s own eyes and in the eyes of the state. This time though, the traditional categories of race are exhausted thevery moment that race is embraced.

41. What the old civil rights organization’s realised, especially given the enthusiasm of republican legislators to get multiracial people officially counted, is that the new abundance of race categories threaten to terminate the juridical unity of race altogether. A new and accelerated civil rights lexicon increases the number of race categories that individuals may legally claim. On this order, race is everywhere significant and nowhere identifiable in the old formalist sense. So you have the NAACP’s awkward defence of the one-drop rule of hypo-descent—formerly associated with Jim Crow—as a sort of desperate, ironic collective self-defence against the difficulties implicit in the post-civil rights epoch.

42. This latest process of governing vis-à-vis racial distinction is different from previous civil rights struggles, which tried to liberalise the state and get government justly interested in the racial identities it once denied. Under this new set of protocols, the state has admitted racial interest and with ever greater freedom and nuance. But it has done so in order to rob racial coherency of its former political significance.

43. If you pursue the multiracialism debate to its logical ends, you can start to see how an individual’s right to self-identify, paradoxically, provides an opportunity for racial identity itself to release the state from its previous civil rights obligations. In this way, the state jettisons the most important historical cite of domestic dissent the very moment it presumes to go global. You could say that the neo-nationalist end of liberalism is hereby found dormant in the logic of its once benevolent ends. In effect, all and no race relations exist in the eyes of a racially emancipated state. Multiplicity is unleashed upon identity, and the organizational capacity of government is both maximised and evaporated within the simple act of saying, “I am…”…

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The importance of being “other”: A natural experiment about lived race over time

Social Science Research
Volume 36, Issue 1 (March 2007)
pages 159-174
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2005.11.002

J. Scott Brown, Associate Professor of Gerontology, Scripps Research Fellow
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

Steven Hitlin, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Iowa

Glen H. Elder, Jr., Research Professor of Sociology and Psychology
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Despite recent concern with the measurement of race, almost no scholarship has explored the residual response category of “other” itself. The 2000 census included a significant number selecting “other,” suggesting that the option was not simply a residual response. Using a serendipitous change in the measurement of race in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we explore the social reality of the “other” category at three levels of analysis: self-identification, external attribution, and structural interpretation. Far from being a residual category, we find that “other” is a meaningful social category for about half of the Hispanics in Add Health. Current measurement conventions that distinguish between race and ethnicity, while established for laudable reasons, misrepresent the ways that Americans—Hispanic and otherwise—utilize social categories. Individuals do not treat Hispanics differently than blacks or Asians when seen as members of a meaningful social group. The separation of race from ethnicity leads to confusion and measurement difficulty. Such problems are compounded when “other” is removed as a potential response.

1. Introduction

“We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.”
W. H. Auden (1907–1973)

Concern with racial measurement has flourished in recent years (Harris and Sim, 2002; Hirschman et al., 2000) as sociologists and demographers have increasingly focused on the fluid nature of a once taken-for-granted concept. The growing number of multiracial individuals in the United States has underscored the difficulty of adequately measuring what has long been understood to be a meaningful and stable criterion for social grouping. Studies of racialfluidity and multiracial individuals have largely overlooked an important aspect of racial measurement in the US, namely, the (supposedly) residual “other” category. Originally intended to allow individuals more latitude for recording their self-understandings of race (see Snipp, 2003), this category has a substantive reality in its own right (Hirschman et al., 2000). In almost all cases in the 2000 census, the “other” category represents a proxy for “Hispanic,” demonstrating that the lived experience of millions of individuals contradicts the academic reification between race and ethnicity. An in-depth examination of the “other” category suggests that current racial measurement conventions do not accurately reflect Americans’ social reality.

Using a serendipitous change in the measurement of race in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we track individuals’ changes in racial self-identification across time when the “other” option is removed from the racial measurement item. We explore the socialreality of the “other” category at three levels of analysis: self identification, external attribution, and structural interpretation. This approach extends traditional concerns with racialmeasurement that focus on self-identification in two directions. First, it allows us to examine the process of social attribution as it reflects external views of racial/ethnic group membership. Second, we suggest that this measurement convention biases social science research findings. All three levels of analysis are based on social psychological understandings of the psychological process of social categorization that underlies the perception of race/ethnicity. We find that “other” is an important response category for Hispanics, the best proxy they have available within the currently separated race and ethnicity format. Such self-reports have profound implications for national statistics and social science analyses. We conclude with a call for altering the official racial measurement instrument to more accurately reflect the cognitive processes that individuals use to delineate their meaningful social groups.

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Our Changing Identities

The New Black Magazine
2010-10-18

Adam K. Raymond

On forms asking their racial or ethnic backgrounds, young people of multi-racial origin give different answers at different times.

As a teenager, Cameron Clark, whose mother is white and father is black, always checked “African-American” on forms that asked about his race.

“I needed to identify as being black so people would know I’m equally proud of both sides of my heritage,” said Clark whose blonde hair and blue eyes suggest that Caucasian might be a more apt description.

These days, though, Clark, a 22-year-old television reporter in Green Bay, Wisconsin, describes himself as multiracial. “I decided that identifying with one race shows you don’t embrace your other side as much,” he explained. “People need to be equally proud of both sides of their heritage, and using the label ‘multiracial’ is the most effective way to do that,” he said.

Clark is one of a large contingent of biracial young adults who have struggled with fluctuating ethnic identities.

A recent study by researchers at The University of Iowa, Miami University, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that biracial adolescents tend to change how they self-identify over time.

The researchers looked at how respondents described their race on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health over a period of five years. In the course of that time, the young adults’ answers changed.

“Ideas about race are not fixed,” said Steven Hitlin, assistant professor of sociology at Iowa University and one of the authors of the study. Racial identity, he said, seems to be “fluid.”…

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Multiethnicity and Multiethnic Families: Development, Identity, and Resilience

Xlibris
2010
384 pages
ISBN 13 Softcover: 978-1-4500-1231-7
ISBN 13 Hardcover: 978-1-4500-1232-4
ISBN 13 Ebook: 978-1-4500-0340-7

Edited By:

Hamilton McCubbin, Krystal Ontai, Lisa Kehl, Laurie McCubbin, Ida Strom, Heidi Hart, Barbara DeBaryshe, Marika Ripke and Jon Matsuoka

Guided by the increasing number of interracial marriages, cross-cultural adoptions and resulting multiethnic individuals and  families, scholars and scientists reveal the complex and persistent changes in the ethnic profile of Americans, families and their communities. 

The editors of this book selected the research of 31 nationally and internationally recognized scholars who present 14 chapters of current knowledge on the changing demographics of multiethnicity and their implications for human development and identity development, social and family relationships, functioning, stress, coping and resilience.

The senior contributing scholars and their disciplines are:  Sharon Lee, PhD, Demography; Emmy Werner, PhD, Child Development; Jonathan Okamura, PhD, Sociology; Cathy Tashiro, PhD, Nursing;  Hamilton McCubbin, PhD, Family Science; Barbara DeBaryshe, PhD, Human Development; Cardell Jacobson, PhD, Sociology; Jenifer Bratter, PhD, Psychology;  Xuanning Fu, PhD, Anthropology; Richard Lee, PhD, Psychology;  Laurie McCubbin, PhD, Counseling Psychology;  Farzana Nayani, PhD, Ethnic Studies; Jeannette Johnson,  PhD, Psychology; and Michael Ungar, PhD, Social Work.

Multiethnicity and Multiethnic Families: Development, Identity, and Resilience (Le`a Publications) addresses core theoretical, methodological and policy issues surrounding the changing demographics of multiethnic and particularly indigenous groups in the United States. The issues of historical trauma, schema, appraisal, adaptation, measurement and intervention are magnified. The introduction and fourteen chapters aim to build upon prior writings and research and to improve upon our understanding of these populations with all their complexities. Present and future research and knowledge gained on what it means to be multiethnic is vital to our efforts to shape their futures and improve upon our professional understanding and investment in enabling this emerging population to thrive as well as survive.

Chapters include:

Multiraciality and health disparities: Encountering the contradictions and conundrums of race, ethnicity, and identity, by Cathy Tashiro

Read the front matter here.

Addressing Issues of Biracial Asian Americans

Reflections on Shattered Windows: Promises and Prospects for Asian American Studies
Washington State University Press
1988
Chapter 15, pages 111-116

Edited by: G. Y. Okihiro, S. Hune, A. A. Hansen, and J. M. Liu

Stephen L. Murphy-Shigematsu

Revising the Asian American Studies curriculum

One of the more dramatic changes in the post-World War II Asian American population is the increase in those of biracial ancestry. Over the past forty years large numbers of Asian women have married Americans and come to the United States. [n 1] During this period, too, thousands of Asian American men and women have married outside their ethnic group. [n 2] The burgeoning population of biracial youth that has resulted from these developments, represents a significant change in the face of Asian America.

In the light of the above situation, one of the challenges confronting Asian American Studies is to adapt and revise a curriculum created in the early 1970s that was designed primarily for American born Chinese and Japanese. It has become necessary to redesign courses to better accommodate the needs, interests, and backgrounds of the more diverse group of Asian Americans who are presently underrepresented in the curriculum, and increasingly in Asian American Studies classes and in the general population. Those of biracial ancestry are one emerging group whose experiences and needs must be addressed in curriculum development…

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Blaxican Identity: An Exploratory Study of Blacks/Chicanas/os in California

National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Annual Conference
35th Annual Conference
2008-04-01
11 pages

Rebecca Romo
University of California, Santa Barbara

This paper explores the life experiences of Blaxicans, or multiracial individuals who are the products of unions that are composed of one biological (or birth) parent who is identified and designated as Mexicana/o or Chicana/o, and one parent who is identified and designated as African American or Black. Most research on racial intermarriage and multiracial offspring in the United States has concentrated on European American unions with African Americans or other people of color and their descendants. Research on “dual-minority unions” and their offspring is scant (Wallace 2001). The examination of how identity formation operates among multiracial offspring whose biological parents are non-white is limited and informs the basis of this investigation of Blaxican identity. In this introduction, I discuss the literature related to Blaxican identity, including: Black identity, Chicana/o identity, and dual-minority multiracial identity. The goal of this paper is to investigate how mixed-race Black and Chicana/o individuals racially identify and to examine the processes that influenced their decision of racial self-identification.

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Everyone Looks a Little Bit Asian

truthdig: drilling beneath the headlines
2010-10-27

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Like many other Hispanics, I am a member of Generation E.A. (ethnically ambiguous). Over the years I’ve been mistaken for just about every racial or ethnic combination—from Eurasian to Afro-Irish to Arab-Native American.

This guessing game is something members of Generation E.A. are used to in discussions with acquaintances, classmates, co-workers and curious passersby. Sometimes it’s even educational. But this is never something one would expect to hear from a politician, particularly a politician addressing the Hispanic Student Union at Rancho High School in Las Vegas, Nev. Yet this is exactly what happened when Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for Senate in Nevada, told a group of students that she did not know if the brown border crossers featured in her “Best Friend” commercial were all Hispanic because “some of you look a little more Asian to me.” She continued, “What we know, what we know about ourselves is that we are a melting pot in this country. My grandchildren are evidence of that. I’m evidence of that. I’ve been called the first Asian legislator in our Nevada State Assembly.”…

…But the most recent confusing remarks about race and ethnicity are different because they serve a unique purpose. They provide an opportunity to open dialogue in a campaign season that has been more focused on economics than on ethnicity. Could it be that the two are connected?

“The interesting thing about Angle’s version of racial and ethnic talk is that it is more focused on Hispanic issues than on the traditional black-white paradigm,” according to professor Ulli K. Ryder of Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. “What’s happening here is that Hispanics and Asians are being compared and confused because they both equal foreign in the U.S. racial imagination.” So, Angle is saying that these two foreign groups can melt and look alike, but that they will never look like Americans...

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