Mixed Race Studies

A White Side of Black Britain: The Concept of Racial Literacy

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 27, Issue 6
November 2004
pages 878 – 907
DOI: 10.1080/0141987042000268512

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Opposition to transracial adoption on both sides of the Atlantic, has been based, in part, on the assumption that white parents cannot understand race or racism and thus cannot properly prepare children of multiracial heritage to cope with racism. In this article I draw on a seven-year ethnographic study to offer an intensive case study of white transracial birth parents that counters this racial logic. I draw on a subset of data collected from field research and in-depth interviews with 102 members of black-white interracial families in England. I provide an analysis of three practices that I discovered among white transracial birth parents who were attempting to cultivate ‘black’ identities in their children of multiracial heritage. I offer the concept of ‘racial literacy’ to theorize their parental labour as a type of anti-racist project that remains under the radar of conventional sociological analyses of racism and anti-racist social movements.

Read or purchase the article here.

Brave new world: The complicated side-effects of Britain’s mixed-race households

The Independent (UK)
2009-08-22

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Bev is beautiful, with silky black skin and thick hair she ties in a bunch at the top, spurting like a fountain. At 15, her face reminds me of the young and feisty Winnie Mandela. Dressed in denim, she is wearing lots of African bracelets and rings on her ears. And, incongruously, pearls, several strings looped around her high neck. Her face changes like an English summer – bright and sunny one minute, then suddenly dark, brooding and sometimes stormy. She wants to talk, she tells me, otherwise she will go crazy. And what Bev tells me is a part of one of the least reported stories of family life in modern Britain, remarkable and complex, and perpetually shifting.

“My family is messy,” she explains. “There’s been divorce, remarrying, separation, step-parents. It’s hard to talk about that when we are all trying to be polite, faking it all the time. I was in a mood the other day – you know, you get into a mood. My mum came into my room, held my elbow so hard it hurt, and whispered: ‘You’ll lose me this man, too, you stupid girl.’

“Then there is RACE!” she continues. “We are black-and-white and inbetweenies, but no one mentions that either. We have to pretend that mum’s latest guy is not white, and I am not brown, and there isn’t an issue here.”

She doesn’t even take a breath as all this tumbles out. Is he unkind to her? I ask gently

“No, he’s OK, I mean doesn’t hit me or anything. But he has no idea. Comes from Norfolk or something. My mum loves all that – his fancy accent and that. She even went to Wimbledon ‘cos he gets free tickets, and then both of them were moaning about Serena and Venus having a pushy dad, and my mum says something horrible about my ex-dad, and whitie nodded – he always nods, like Noddy. As soon as I have done my GCSEs I am out of here.”

This country has more mixed-race families than any other in Europe. According to the latest social research, one in 10 young Britons lives in a mixed-race household and the number of bi-racial children is growing faster than any other “ethnic minority” group. We also have high divorce rates and – increasingly – step-families. Put all these factors together and you get a newish phenomenon: the rise of the mixed-race step-family. Social services, counsellors and academic researchers have not yet caught up with this social development. And those of us who find ourselves in these reconstituted multi-racial families make it up as we go along. I guess Bev’s mum and step-dad are having to do just that…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Slur Development Not Keeping Pace With Mixed-Race Births, Nation’s Bigots Report

The Onion
2010-03-13

WASHINGTON—A coalition of the nation’s most fervent bigots convened in Washington Monday to address growing concerns that the production of hateful new racial slurs has failed to keep pace with the rise in mixed-race births.

According to representatives from the American Racists and Bigots Council (ARBC), the growing number of children born to parents of different ethnicities has posed a real challenge to the nation’s hate-speech developers—a challenge they say threatens their way of life…

…According to statistics provided by the coalition, a rise in the birthrate of mixed-race Americans has left millions of confused racists with absolutely nothing prejudiced to say when confronted by a person of indeterminate or complex background. What frightens the coalition most is data suggesting that by 2015, ignorant bigots everywhere could be powerless when it comes to reducing mixed-raced individuals to profoundly uninformed cultural stereotypes…

Read (with tongue in cheek) the entire article here.

White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812

University of North Carolina Press
1968-09-25 (Republished: September 1995)
671 pages
8.9 x 6 x 1.4 inches
ISBN: 978-0-8078-4550-9
Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

Winthrop D. Jordan (1931-2007)

• Winner of the 1968 Francis Parkman Prize, Society of American Historians
• Winner of the 1969 National Book Award
• Winner of the 1969 Bancroft Prize, Columbia University
• Winner of the 1968 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, Phi Beta Kappa

The paperback edition of Jordan’s classic and award-winning work on the history of American race relations.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

Part One. GENESIS 1550-1700

I. First Impressions: Initial English Confrontation with Africans

1. The Blackness Without
2. The Causes of Complexion
3. Defective Religion
4. Savage Behavior
5. The Apes of Africa
6. The Blackness Within

II. Unthinking Decision: Enslavement of Negroes in America to 1700

1. The Necessities of a New World
2. Freedom and Bondage in the English Tradition
3. The Concept of Slavery
4. The Practices of Portingals and Spanyards
5. Enslavement: The West Indies
6. Enslavement: New England
7. Enslavement: Virginia and Maryland
8. Enslavement: New York and the Carolinas
9. The Un-English: Scots, Irish, and Indians
10. Racial Slavery: From Reasons to Rational

Part Two. PROVINCIAL DECADES 1700-1755
III. Anxious Oppressors: Freedom and Control in a Slave Society

1. Demographic Configurations in the Colonies
2. Slavery and the Senses of the Laws
3. Slave Rebelliousness and the White Mastery
4. Free Negroes and Fears of Freedom
5. Racial Slavery in a Free Society

IV. Fruits of Passion: The Dynamics of Interracial Sex

1. Regional Styles in Racial Intermixture
2. Masculine and Feminine Modes in Carolina and America
3. Negro Sexuality and Slave Insurrection
4. Dismemberment, Physiology, and Sexual Perceptions
5. The Secularization of Reproduction
6. Mulatto Offspring in a Biracial Society

V. The Souls of Men: The Negro’s Spiritual Nature

1. Christian Principles and the Failure of Conversion
2. The Question of Negro Capacity
3. Spiritual Equality and Temporal Subordination
4. The Thin Edge of Antislavery
5. Inclusion and Exclusion in the Protestant Churches
6. Religious Revivial and the Impact of Conversion

VI. The Bodies of Men: The Negro’s Physical Nature

1. Confusion, Order and Hierarchy
2. Negroes, Apes, and Beasts
3. Rational Science and Irrational Logic
4. Indians, Africans, and the Complexion of Man
5. The Valuation of Color
6. Negroes Under the Skin

Part Three. THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA 1755-1783
VII. Self-Scrutiny in the Revolutionary Era

1. Quaker Conscience and Consciousness
2. The Discovery of Prejudice
3. Assertions of Sameness
4. Environmentalism and Revolutionary Ideology
5. The Secularization of Equality
6. The Proslavery Case of Negro Inferiority
7. The Revolution as Turning Point

Pt. 4 SOCIETY AND THOUGHT 1783-1812
VIII. The Imperatives of Economic Interest and National Identity

1. The Economics of Slavery
2. Union and Sectionalism
3. A National Forum for Debate
4. Nationhood and Identity
5. Non-English Englishment

IX. The Limitations of Antislavery

1. The Pattern of Antislavry
2. The Failings of Revolutionary Ideology
3. The Quaker View Beyond Emancipation
4. Religious Equalitarianism
5. Humanitarianism and Sentimentality
6. The Success and Failure of Antislavery

X. The Cancer of Revolution

1. St. Domingo
2. Non-Importation of Rebellion
3. The Contagion of Liberty
4. Slave Disobedience in America
5. The Impact of Negro Revolt

XI. The Resulting Pattern of Separation

1. The Hardening of Slavery
2. Restraint of Free Negroes
3. The Walls of Separation
4. Negro Churches

Part Five THOUGH AND SOCIETY 1783-1812
XII. Thomas Jefferson: Self and Society

1. Jefferson: The Tyranny of Slavery
2. Jefferson: The Assertion of Negro Inferiority
3. The Issue of Intellect
4. The Acclaim of Talented Negroes
5. Jefferson: Passionate Realities
6. Jefferson: White Women and Black
7. Interracial Sex: The Individual and His Society
8. Jefferson: A Dichotomous View of Triracial America

XIII. The Negro Bound by the Chain of Being

1. Linnaean Categories and the Chain of Being
2. Two Modes of Equality
3. The Hierarchies of Men
4. Anatomical Investigations
5. Unlinking and Linking the Chain
6. Faithful Philosophy in Defense of Human Unity
7. The Study of Man in the Republic

XIV. Erasing Nature’s Stamp of Color

1. Nature’s Blackball
2. The Effects of Climate and Civilization
3. The Disease of Color
4. White Negroes
5. The Logic of Blackness and Inner Similarity
6. The Winds of Change
7. An End of Environmentalism
8. Persistent Themes

XV. Toward a White Man’s Country

1. The Emancipation and Intermixture
2. The Beginning of Colonization
3. The Virginia Program
4. Insurrection and Expatriation in Virginia
5. The Meaning of Negro Removal

XVI. Exodus

Note on the Concept of Race
Essay on Sources
Select List of Full Titles
Map: Percentage of Negroes in Total Non-Aboriginal Population, 1790
Index

Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism: Historical Footnotes to Loving v. Virginia

University of California, Davis Law Review
Volume 21, Number 2 (1988)
pages 421-452

Paul A. Lombardo, Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law
Georgia State University

This Essay explores private correspondence contained in a restricted manuscript collection along with contemporary news accounts and government documents to explain how eugenics—a popular “scientific” movement during the 1920’s—was used to bolster the arguments in favor of the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924 that was struck down in Loving v. Virginia.  The genesis of the Act is described with reference to the private correspondence of the two Virginians [Walter Plecker and John Powell] who lobbied for its passage.  Their involvement with the white supremacist Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America is revealed as an aid to understanding the true motives behind the anti-miscegenation law.

Read the entire article here.

Race and Genetics: Attempts to Define the Relationship

BioSocieties
Volume 2, Issue 2 (June 2007)
pages 221-237
DOI: 10.1017/S1745855207005625

Duana Fullwiley, Associate Professor Anthropology
Stanford University

Many researchers working in the field of human genetics in the United States have been caught between two seemingly competing messages with regard to racial categories and genetic difference. As the human genome was mapped in 2000, Francis Collins, the head of the publicly funded project, together with his privately funded rival, announced that humans were 99.9 percent the same at the level of their genome. That same year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began a research program on pharmacogenetics that would exploit the .01 percent of human genetic difference, increasingly understood in racial terms, to advance the field of pharmacy. First, this article addresses Collins’ summary of what he called the ‘vigorous debate’ on the relationship between race and genetics in the open-access special issue of Nature Genetics entitled ‘Genetics for the Human Race’ in 2004. Second, it examines the most vexed (if not always openly stated) issue at stake in the debate: that many geneticists today work with the assumption that human biology differs by race as it is conceived through American census categories. It then presents interviews with researchers in two collaborating US laboratories who collect and organize DNA by American notions of ‘race/ethnicity’ and assume that US race categories of classification largely traduce human biogenetic difference.  It concludes that race is a practical and conceptual tool whose utility and function is often taken for granted rather than rigorously assessed and that ‘rational medicine’ cannot precede a rational approach to addressing the nature of racial disparities, difference and inequality in health and society more broadly.

…Race and nominalism
Race is a thing of our world like no other. Americans in general often use the word without much reflection. It might indeed occupy a tiny portion of what philosopher Martin Heidegger amorphously termed ‘the background’, that which just is and does not warrant our reflection until its unity ‘breaks down’. Even when the breakdown of race occurs in many areas of American social life, it is often reconstructed and made ‘whole’ again. One recent example of this was in the 2000 US census race classification that allowed respondents to report themselves as ‘mixed race’. Many African-Americans with mixed ancestry did not choose this option, but simply marked the category that best represented descriptions that they had been raised to understand themselves ‘to be’ in North America—that is ‘monoracially’ black (Lee and Bean, 2004: 233). The decision to mark oneself or not mark oneself as mixed-race differed according to where respondents lived—notably between those who lived in the deep South and those who lived in the ten states where 64 percent of all multiracial identification took place (New York and California among them, as well as Hawaii). In general, those in cosmopolitan centers, with high rates of immigration, diversity, and more demonstrated tolerance of others, were more likely to report racial mixing (Lee and Bean, 2004: 235). Perhaps more telling, when Americans acted on the liberty of marking more than one category, the National Center for Health Statistics created a formula that, in effect, ‘reallocated’ the multiracial population back into a single race group (Wellner, 2003: 2). This move, and the technology permitting it, was presented as an aid to market researchers who were vexed by the 2000 census data, which complicated their traditional formulas of ‘niche’ advertising to racial groups (Wellner, 2003: 2)…

Read the entire article here.

Race – The Power of an Illusion

California Newsreel – Film and video for social change since 1968
2003
3 Episodes, 56 minutes each
DVD and VHS

The division of the world’s peoples into distinct groups – “red,” “black,” “white” or “yellow” peoples – has became so deeply imbedded in our psyches, so widely accepted, many would promptly dismiss as crazy any suggestion of its falsity. Yet, that’s exactly what this provocative, new three-hour series by California Newsreel claims. Race – The Power of an Illusion questions the very idea of race as biology, suggesting that a belief in race is no more sound than believing that the sun revolves around the earth.

Yet race still matters. Just because race doesn’t exist in biology doesn’t mean it isn’t very real, helping shape life chances and opportunities.

Episode 1– The Difference Between Us [transcript] examines the contemporary science – including genetics – that challenges our common sense assumptions that human beings can be bundled into three or four fundamentally different groups according to their physical traits.

Episode 2– The Story We Tell [transcript] uncovers the roots of the race concept in North America, the 19th century science that legitimated it, and how it came to be held so fiercely in the western imagination. The episode is an eye-opening tale of how race served to rationalize, even justify, American social inequalities as “natural.”

Episode 3– The House We Live [transcript] In asks, If race is not biology, what is it? This episode uncovers how race resides not in nature but in politics, economics and culture. It reveals how our social institutions “make” race by disproportionately channeling resources, power, status and wealth to white people.

By asking, What is this thing called ‘race’?, a question so basic it is rarely asked, Race – The Power of an Illusion helps set the terms that any further discussion of race must first take into account. Ideal for human biology, anthropology, sociology, American studies, and cultural studies.

Read the online transcript here.
Visit the facilitator guide website here.

Race and Reification in Science

Science Magazine
Volume 307
2005-02-18
pages 1050-1051

Troy Duster, Professor of Sociology
New York University

Alfred North Whitehead warned many years ago about “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (1), by which he meant the tendency to assume that categories of thought coincide with the obdurate character of the empirical world. If we think of a shoe as “really a shoe,” then we are not likely to use it as a hammer (when no hammer is around). Whitehead’s insight about misplaced concreteness is also known as the fallacy of reification. Recent research in medicine and genetics makes it even more crucial to resist actively the temptation to deploy racial categories as if immutable in nature and society…

Read the entire article here.

Race in a Genetic World

Harvard Magazine
Volume 110, Number 5
May-June 2008

Duana Fullwiley
Photograph by Stu Rosner

“I am an African American,” says Duana Fullwiley, “but in parts of Africa, I am white.” To do fieldwork as a medical anthropologist in Senegal, she says, “I take a plane to France, a seven- to eight-hour ride. My race changes as I cross the Atlantic. There, I say, ‘Je suis noire,’ and they say, ‘Oh, okay—métisse—you are mixed.’ Then I fly another six to seven hours to Senegal, and I am white. In the space of a day, I can change from African American, to métisse, to tubaab [Wolof for “white/European”]. This is not a joke, or something to laugh at, or to take lightly. It is the kind of social recognition that even two-year-olds who can barely speak understand. ‘Tubaab,’ they say when they greet me.”

Is race, then, purely a social construct? The fact that racial categories change from one society to another might suggest it is. But now, says Fullwiley, assistant professor of anthropology and of African and African American studies, genetic methods, with their precision and implied accuracy, are being used in the same way that physical appearance has historically been used: “to build—to literally construct—certain ideas about why race matters.”

Genetic science has revolutionized biology and medicine, and even rewritten our understanding of human history. But the fact that human beings are 99.9 percent identical genetically, as Francis Collins and Craig Venter jointly announced at the White House on June 26, 2000, when the rough draft of the human genome was released, risks being lost, some scholars fear, in an emphasis on human genetic difference. Both in federally funded scientific research and in increasingly popular practice—such as ancestry testing, which often purports to prove or disprove membership in a particular race, group, or tribe—genetic testing has appeared to lend scientific credence to the idea that there is a biological basis for racial categories.

In fact, “There is no genetic basis for race,” says Fullwiley, who has studied the ethical, legal, and social implications of the human genome project with sociologist Troy Duster at UC [University of California], Berkeley. She sometimes quotes Richard Lewontin, now professor of biology and Agassiz professor of zoology emeritus, who said much the same thing in 1972, when he discovered that of all human genetic variation (which we now know to be just 0.1 percent of all genetic material), 85 percent occurs within geographically distinct groups, while 15 percent or less occurs between them. The issue today, Fullwiley says, is that many scientists are mining that 15 percent in search of human differences by continent…

Read the entire article here.

Pathways to Permanence for Black, Asian and Mixed Ethnicity Children: Delemmas, Decision-Making and Outcomes

Research Brief
DCSF-RBX-13-08
October 2008
8 pages

Julie Selwyn
Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies
University of Bristol

P. Harris
Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies
University of Bristol

David Quinton
Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies
University of Bristol

S. Nawaz
Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies
University of Bristol

Dinithi Wijedasa
Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies
University of Bristol

Marsha Wood
Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies
University of Bristol

Recent research reviews stress the lack of information on permanency planning and pathways to permanence for black and minority ethnic (BME) children. Even basic data are missing and there are no available comparisons between children of different ethnicities. Delays differentially affect and disadvantage children of minority ethnic heritage but, beyond speculation, there are no data on the processes that underlie delays for them.

In this study differential planning and decision-making affecting the progress of BME children towards permanence will be compared retrospectively from case files with that of non-BME children over a two-year period in a sample of approximately 106 children looked-after continuously for over one year in three local authorities with high and contrasting BME populations. Progress towards permanence following a recent or current best-interests recommendation will also be tracked prospectively in a separate sample of approximately 200 BME children. For fifty of these, decision-making will be followed in real-time. Case-file data and interviews with social workers and their managers will be used. The outcomes for children of black, Asian and mixed heritages will be compared.

There will be two additional outputs: a conceptual and research review of matching – a likely key element in delay and differential pathways-; and a scoping review of current practice models for the recruitment and support of BME parents for BME children for whom permanence is the aim.

This study will provide essential new information relevant to the policy objectives of increasing the use of adoption as a permanency solution for children unlikely to return to their own families and reducing the delays in this process. With respect to the brief for this initiative, the study will:

• Investigate whether looked-after BME children are less likely to be placed for adoption and why they may wait longer for placement
• Examine the process affecting successful placement for them.
• Compare the placement pathways of Black, Asian and mixed parentage children.
• Compare three authorities will high but different BME populations.
• Examine how the government’s attempts to increase the use of adoption are being translated into practice with respect to BME children.
• Examine how social workers are applying the principles underlying adoption reform.
• Identify good practice models for the recruitment and support of BME adopters.

Read the entire paper here.