Mixed Race Studies

Race, the Jamaican Body and Eugenics/Genomics: An Autobiographic Mediation

Auto/Biography and Mediation
2010
pages 39-55

Edited by:

Alfred Hornung, Professor of English and American Studies
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Written by:

Eve Hawthorne, Professor of History
Howard University

Paul Vanouse, Associate Professor of Visual Studies
The State University of New York, Buffalo

Caribbean bodies are among the most specularized of observed objects. From religion to sociology, and through a range of genres—travel writing, missionary reports, histories, colonial administrative accounts, diaries/journals and belles lettres—these bodies have been made into available and free sites, serving for archival evidentiary data collection, statistics, literary subjects and visual voyeurism. They have been objectified both through a “torrent of words and images,” as Stephen Greenblatt has described the phenomenon of hyper-textualization that enabled imperialistic projects to gain possession of and control over the New World (145), and a “visual colonialism” achieved through scoping, according to Johannes Fabian (123).  Historically, this ‘gaze’ begins with fixing the New World indigenous Indian people as its object—the adventurer Christopher Columbus both described and brought back Indigenous people as specimen to Europe to display their difference from Europeans (Doggett 12)—but by the eighteenth century there is a marked shift to the black, African body. In contrast to the dual perspectives that had characterized the textualization of the Amerindian in which early colonial representations of aboriginal peoples were both “pragmatically political and romantically imaginative” (G. K. Lewis 32), that of the African was invariably constructed to justify his enslavement. Middle-colonial imaginings, then, with the exception of those created by the Abolitionists or liberals such as John Gabriel Stedman (Narrative of a Five-Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, 1796) were ideological productions that evolved into a potent archive of black stereotypes available for hegemonic discourses.

Colonial texts produced two views that would predominate throughout the following centuries, i.e., one of the black body’s ‘laziness,’ and one of moral laxity or ‘slackness’—particularly of the female. In Jamaica, the writing of Matthew [Monk] Gregory Lewis, the British writer and plantation owner, relies on the evolving stereotype of the lazy native:

For myself, it appears to be almost worth surrendering the luxuries and pleasures, of Great Britain: for the single pleasure of being surrounded with beings who are always laughing and singing, and who seem to perform their work with so much nonchalance, taking up their baskets as if it were perfectly optional … sauntering along with their hands dangling; stopping to chat with every one they meet. (101)

In time, Thomas Carlyle in “The Nigger Question” would give a more egregious picture of this ‘lazy’ Caribbean native, while Anthony Trollope would devote eight of his twenty-one chapters of The West Indies and the Spanish Main 1858/1860 to the same purpose. The surveillance of the female, in which it was important to declare her moral laxity, is sometimes different. Thus in one of the earliest descriptions, Mrs. Race, the Jamaican body, and Eugenics/Genomics 40 Carmichael writes in Domestic Manners and Social Conditions of the White,Coloured, and Negro Population:

The appearance of these women was disgusting;… but without exception, the arms were drawn out of the sleeves, which with the body of the gown, hung down as useless appendages; while from the waist upwards, all was in a state of nudit.… We observed several coloured women at the door and windows of houses, the dresses of some of whom would have been elegant and graceful, had they been more modest. (10-11)

The immodesty of the black female becomes an overpoweringly invasive image that overshadows that of the Abolitionists and adventurers such as Stedman. For both genders, the underlying objectification of ‘skin color’ assumed paramount importance, and became the clearest and most frequent delineator of alterity and inferiority. By the beginning of the twentieth century it would be scientized as ‘race.’

In this article we examine a twentieth-century manifestation of the collusion of power and knowledge-formation—specifically ‘Science.’ Largely, scholars have been scrupulously attentive in examining the colonization of the black body during the mid-period of Caribbean colonialism, promoted by an early science of ethnography that relied on the writer’s observation and interpretation. By the 1850s, this ethnographic authority was augmented through the field of physical anthropology that would claim greater scientific authority, ensured by works of biology such as that of Charles Darwin. The young science accommodated ideological needs by declaring hierarchical structures of difference, especially as existent in the European colonial possessions with their unmatched degrees of hybridity—or intermixtures of peoples. The new science becomes an “aggressively racist movement” (Lorimer 12), solidified under the science of eugenics. The black body and its sexuality and reproductivity were placed under constant surveillance. While this dominant science of eugenics was the popular science of nineteenth-century England, by the early twentieth century it had lost much of its appeal and potency there. Conversely, it becomes a plausible science in the U.S., and institutions and scientists were well-financed by both government and private sources, given its promise as tool of social engineering and control.

Given the waning British interest in eugenics, it was surprising for us to discover that the Caribbean body was made freely available to this racialized science as pursued by an American scientist and occurring as late as the 1920s. Race Crossing in Jamaica (1929) is a scientific text resulting from an extensive study conducted by the American eugenicist Charles B. Davenport. It seems, however, to be entirely overlooked within the historical discussion of the colonial era, yet it, too, epitomizes Western imperialism; Jamaican bodies used as raw material in the furtherance of First World goals. With its late-imperialist vision, the 512-page tome comprises anthropometric, physiological, and psychological studies of “Blacks, Whites, and hybrids” (iv). Its author is a well-known U.S. biologist who held at the time of this study the position of director of the Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor in New York State. His field investigator was Morris Steggerda, a Ph.D. student in zoology at the University of Illinois. The island of Jamaica was chosen for having what were perceived as isolated pockets of “pure-blooded negro, mulatto and White” populations of similar economic class. The methods entailed anthropomorphic and psychological examinations that included some sixty measurements of body areas including face breadth, cranial capacity and relative height in a variety of positions. The text has some 359 tables and charts, the result of a comparative analysis of three hundred and seventy “Blacks,” “Browns,” “Whites”: 197 males, 173 females. Mico College for Men and Shortwood College for Women supplied ninety-eight of these subjects; 118 came from the agricultural areas of Gordon Town and Seaford Town, and from a prison; 110 were classified as “city folk”, from Kingston’s fire and police departments, a crèche, and a prison; and forty-four Cayman Islanders were chosen who were supposedly white subjects.

Read the entire chapter here.

A shameful history: Nowhere People: How International Race Thinking Shaped Australia’s Identity [Book Review]

The Lancet
Volume 366, Issue 9495 (October 2005)
page 1428
DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67586

Caroline de Costa, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology; Director of the Clinical School
James Cook University School of Medicine, Cairns Campus, North Queensland, Australia

Nowhere People: How International Race Thinking Shaped Australia’s Identity
Henry Reynolds
Viking, 2005
Pp 204. ISBN-0-670-04118-1

A few years ago my daughter, a poised young woman, found herself in a large rural Australian town she did not know well. She sought directions from an older white woman who, glancing briefly at her appearance, gave the required information, but in the slow and careful tones one might use for the mentally impaired. This incident annoyed but did not surprise my daughter; my husband is of Sri Lankan origin, and all of our six children, of varying hues and facial features, have at times been taken to be of mixed Aboriginal descent in rural Australia, and know something of the experience that can go with this.

So it was with great personal interest that I opened Henry Reynolds’ impressive study of the history of people of “mixed-race” in the 19th and 20th centuries in all those countries where colonists confronted people of different colour and physiognomy. As a 21st-century medical practitioner well aware that we are all one species, I was dismayed to find how much medical practitioners and scientists had contributed to repressive legislation and social engineering, both in Australia and elsewhere…

Read the entire article here.

The Other Hafu of Japan

Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanses Daily News
2011-01-14

Brett Fujioka, Rafu Intern

A new documentary examines the lives of racially mixed individuals as they explore their own identities.

Is a ship the same if you take it apart piece by piece and replace its frame? No simple answer exists, as anyone who has tackled this philosophical Rubik’s cube knows.

The ethno-national equivalent to this riddle grows exceedingly more complicated with the swelling number of international unions each year. Statistics in 2004 chart that 1 in 15 marriages in Japan were international and that 1 in 30 children born there possesses a parent of non-Japanese descent. Japan’s ethnic constituency is rapidly changing and its people may need to rethink what it means to be Japanese in a country where blood and national identity are considered one and the same.

The same applies for the hafu (mixed Japanese) community. The lives for each individual half-Japanese vary from person to person and the filmmakers for the upcoming documentary, “Hafu,” and their subjects best represent this.

“Hafu” is the tentative title for an upcoming documentary in Japan following the lives of several half-Japanese individuals as they explore their identities.

Both Megumi Nishikura and Lara Perez Takagi spent most of their lives away from Japan. Takagi is half Spanish and stayed in Madrid, Sydney, Washington D.C., and Ottowa due to her diplomat father’s itinerant career. She eventually completed her higher education at the Francisco de Vitoria, Complutense and Waseda Universities before finally returning to Japan.

Nishikura, likewise, lived her childhood spread throughout the world. She stayed in Beijing, Manila, Honolulu, DC, Berlin, London, and Los Angeles and graduated from New York University.

“Lara and I have unusual stories and come from international backgrounds,” said Nishikura in an interview with the Rafu. “I don’t know if that’s representative of a lot of the mixed Japanese community.”

There’s a reason why they’re so hesitant to pinpoint a grand narrative for the hafu experience. There is no all-encompassing hafu story and the eclectic subjects of the documentary are indicative of this…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Reorganization and the United States Census 1850–1930: Mulattoes, Half-Breeds, Mixed Parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican Race

Studies in American Political Development
Volume 22, Issue 1 (March 2008)
pages 59-96
DOI: 10.1017/S0898588X08000047

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Brenna Marea Powell, Associate Director
Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation
Stanford University

Between 1850 and 1930, demographic upheaval in the United States was connected to reorganization of the racial order. Socially and politically recognized boundaries between groups shifted, new groups emerged, others disappeared, and notions of who belonged in which category changed. All recognized racial groups—blacks, whites, Indians, Asians, Mexicans and others—were affected. This article investigates how and why census racial classification policies changed during this period, only to stabilize abruptly before World War II. In the context of demographic transformations and their political consequences, we find that census policy in any given year was driven by a combination of scientific, political, and ideological motivations.

Based on this analysis, we rethink existing theoretical approaches to censuses and racial classification, arguing that a nation’s census is deeply implicated in and helps to construct its social and political order. Censuses provide the concepts, taxonomy, and substantive information by which a nation understands its component parts as well as the contours of the whole; censuses both create the image and provide the mirror of that image for a nation’s self-reflection. We conclude by outlining the meaning of this period in American history for current and future debates over race and classification.

Read the entire article here.

Racial Measurement in the American Census: Past Practices and Implications for the Future

Annual Review of Sociology
Volume 29 (August 2003)
pages 563-588
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.soc.29.010202.100006

C. Matthew Snipp, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
Stanford University

In 1977, the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) established an official classification standard for the measurement of race in the American population. In so doing, the OMB authorities created what amounted to a racial cosmology that spread throughout American society, affecting public perceptions about the racial hierarchy of American society. In 1997, the OMB issued a revised version of this classification in which small changes may profoundly affect the way policymakers and the American public think about race. At the very least, these revisions present significant challenges to social scientists who study race and ethnicity. This review begins with a brief historical overview of racial data collected by the federal government. It subsequently examines the circumstances leading up to the 1997 revisions of OMB Directive No. 15 and discusses how these revisions may affect social scientific research on the subject of race and ethnicity.

Read or purchase the article here.

A Race about Race: Race, Inter-Race and Post-Race in the Study of Human Genetics

Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism
Volume 30, Number 2 (September/October 2002)

Paul Vanouse, Associate Professor of Visual Studies
The State University of New York, Buffalo

In 1929, Charles B. Davenport, Director of the Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor in New York, co-published Race Crossing in Jamaica, a 512-page study on the “problem of race crossing, with special reference to its significance for the future of any country containing a mixed population.”  The island of Jamaica was chosen for its isolated pockets of “pure-blooded negro, mulatto and White” of similar economic class. The method of evaluation entailed primarily anthropomorphic and psychological examinations of hundreds of subjects from these three groupings. Anthropomorphic examinations included 60 measurements of body regions, including face breadth, cranial capacity and relative height in varied positions. Psychological tests included the Knox moron test and the criticism-of-absurd-sentences test. The book concluded that Blacks and Whites differ in both physical and mental capacities and that among the Browns, while some are equal to or superior to their progenitor races, “there appear[s] to be an excessive per cent over random variation who seem unable to utilize their native endowment.” In a concurrent solo publication of the same title, Davenport states this conclusion more forcefully. A population of hybrids “will be a population carrying an excessively large number of intellectually incompetent persons.” In this publication he also suggests one method to make cross-breeding permissible: “If only society had the force to eliminate the lower half of a hybrid population then the remaining upper half of the hybrid population might be a clear advantage to the population as a whole, at least so far as physical and sensory accomplishments go.”

Davenport is probably the most influential and prolific eugenic scientist in the United States, but his texts were hardly the forerunners of racist science. An often discussed, early predecessor is Paolo Mantegazza, whose iconic Morphological Tree of the Human Races (1890) is a branching timeline of human development reaching its pinnacle with the Aryan race. In 1883, Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, actually coined the term “Eugenics” (good in birth) as a science dedicated to improving human stock by getting rid of so-called undesirables and increasing the number of desirables. In its contemporary usage, Eugenics is defined as “a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed,” a distinctly more encompassing concept than Galton’s. Yet, it is ultimately the socially conservative approaches of its main promoters (separation, segregation and sterilization) that we associate with the term. “Negative Eugenics,” as it has been terme d, is concerned with limiting who can breed and with whom. For example, as Davenport laments, because of racial intermixing: “The standard races of mankind are rapidly disintegrating.”  Improvement and conservation were key contradictory goals in many of the early eugenic writings on race. (It should be noted, however, that Eugenics was in no way limited to racial concerns, and, indeed, many of the most heinous sterilization campaigns in the U.S. involved persons convicted of crimes or deemed “feebleminded.”)

Davenport’s Jamaica study sought to definitively disprove the theory of “hybrid vigor,” which was espoused by laissez-faire social Darwinists who felt that, in keeping with the theory of evolution, the fitness of the human race would be ensured because weaker, recessive genetic material would naturally be weeded out. Hybrid coupling, in Davenport’s opinion, is only viable if undesirable offspring can be eliminated, whereas conservative inbreeding produces more reliable results and preserves the integrity of the existing racial groups. As theorist Paul Gilroy has noted, the concept of race was invented during colonization to justify sub-human treatment of enslaved and colonized peoples and to reify concepts of nation and national identity. The stigmatization of racial intermixing was promoted to keep these boundaries stable. It is no surprise then that conservative, negative Eugenics was welcomed and fostered across the most fervent nationalist enterprises, especially those of the U.S., Germany and England…

Purchase the article here.

A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America, edited by Frank Shuffelton (Oxford University Press, 1993) [Review]

African American Review
Volume 29, Number 1 (Spring 1995)
pages 149-152

Raymond F. Dolle, Associate Professor of English
Indiana State University

A Mixed Race extends the recent work of ethnographic critics, such as James Clifford (The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art [1988]), and such literary critics as Werner Sollors (Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture [1986]) and William Boelhower (Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature [1987]). These critics have argued that ethnicity is not located solely in an essential cultural identity, continuity, or tradition, and that texts should not be understood as mimetic descriptions of an essential, unchanging ethnic difference (even though that is often the pretense of these texts). Rather, the center of ethnicity should be seen as a dynamic relation between cultural groups, and their texts as orchestrations of multivocal exchanges among these groups as they transform themselves (the hegemonic group included) in the process of confronting others. Thus, ethnicity is performance, a group’s continually changing self-understanding in relation to a changing larger world, a struggle for control over narratives, values, and the self. Furthermore, this process of ethnicity is carried on by means of signs and codes that are generated by the groups to negotiate relationships with other hostile or accommodating groups. So, to understand more fully the ethnic foundation of our culture, we must recognize ethnic semiosis in colonial texts. Such clarifying views have enabled the scholars in this volume to consider the circumstances, rhetorical negotiations, and representation of ethnic formation in early America…

Read the entire article here.

Oreo

Northeastern University Press (now University Press of New England)
2000 (Originially published in 1974.)
224 pages
6 x 9″

Fran Ross

Forward by Harryette Mullen

This uproariously funny satire about relations between African Americans and Jews is as fresh and outrageous today as when it was first published in 1974.

Born to a Jewish father and black mother who divorce before she is two, Oreo grows up in Philadelphia with her maternal grandparents while her mother tours with a theatrical troupe. Soon after puberty, Oreo heads for New York with a pack on her back to search for her father; but in the big city she discovers that there are dozens of Sam Schwartzes in the phone book, and Oreo’s mission turns into a wickedly humorous picaresque quest. The ambitious and playful narrative challenges accepted notions of race, ethnicity, culture, and even the novelistic form itself.

Traveling Identities: Mixed Race Quests and Fran Ross’s “Oreo”

African American Review
Volume 40, Number 1 (Spring 2006)

Tru Leverette
University of North Florida, Jacksonville

The Frontier: Where Two Come Together

Traveling to my grandmother’s funeral during my first marriage, my white husband and I walked down the narrow plane aisle toward our seats. In front of me was a black woman who stopped the line when she reached her row and asked the white man in the aisle to excuse her as she settled herself into the window seat. As she seated herself, the man looked at me and asked, “Are you two together?” I said no and proceeded past him and his bewildered look.

My husband scoffed, loudly enough for the man to hear, “That was an interesting assumption, huh?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “But you know that happens to me all the time.”

And, indeed, it does. People readily assume I “belong” with any other people of color in the vicinity, and rarely, if ever, do they assume that I “belong” with my husband. Reflecting on the incident now, I wonder how effectively I could have articulated my sense of place if I’d answered the man’s question affirmatively, though unexpectedly: “Yes, I am two together.”

Because I see myself as both black and white, I, like many other persons born to parents of different races, sometimes think of myself as moving in the space that unites the two, as traveling from one shore to another given certain contexts, and other times as sailing the river that forms the meridian between two shores. Such metaphors of movement, travel, and cruising are not uncommon in explorations of mixed race identity; in fact, the metaphor of border-crosser has been taken up readily and used to suggest a mobility and  indeterminacy that may not be as easily accessible as the metaphor suggests. Mixed race identity often has been considered a “frontier” in race relations, if I can extend the travel metaphor into the realm of quest. (1) Thus, the anecdote with which I began this essay fittingly exemplifies the role of movement, travel, and quest in explorations and definitions of mixed race identity. Alternatively, the anecdote may invoke Denise Riley’s suggestion that identity “is more accurately conceived as a state which fluctuates for the individual” (6). The notion that various components of identity come into the foreground and recede  in differing situations may be more useful in interrogating the workings of identity than that of the border crosser. We may imagine individuals traveling with identities whose components are variously enacted or shelved without imagining that these individuals are completely liberated from the constraints of identity, as if their ability to cross borders were a ticket into every desirable community and a ticket out of every undesirable situation.

These introductory comments regarding travel and quest are important to the following discussion of Oreo, the recently republished novel by Fran Ross. This novel explores the possibilities within mixed race identity as it attempts to assert a utopian sense of racial harmony and wholeness and to grapple with the theoretical and philosophical questions of mixed race and gender. Its metaphors of traveler and quester concur with discourses of mixed race that  theorize such individuals in terms of the past—as outcasts who seek an acknowledgement and understanding of their origins—and in terms of the future—as pioneers whose existence may foster the racial harmony of utopian visions. In keeping with other discourses of mixed race identity, the novel prioritizes questions of history and origins as well as future possibilities for imagining race. Within Oreo, the personal utopia sought also connects to the longing for a national utopia that would rectify the racial discord of the period in which it was written—during the Black Nationalist Movement of the 1970s. Originally published in 1974, Ross’s novel was not well received since it both literally and figuratively plays with the ideologies of race and gender that were being debated at the time. One January 1975 review describes the novel as “experimental, intelligent, and even funny in places. The dialogue, however, is a strange mixture of Uncle Remus and Lenny Bruce, and quite often unintelligible” (Salassi 146). This initial review offers a striking contrast to one following the novel’s reprinting in 2000, when it is heralded as “a true twenty-first century novel.” According to this review, the novel’s “wit is global, hybrid and uproarious; its meditation on language is simultaneously irreverent, appropriative and serious” (Foreman and Stein-Evers 36). This latter review, however, problematically champions “the goodness of ambiguity which leads everywhere,” asserting that “the triumphant  chameleon [Oreo] goes unnoticed wherever it chooses.” Such claims of liberty and unobstructed movement display precisely the dangerous assumption inherent in notions of the border crosser as they are often articulated. Oreo by no means suggests that the dualities of identity make it possible for one to escape the realities and constraints of racism, sexism, and oppression. Rather, the novel suggests that dualities allow one to play (both literally and figuratively) with the structures of identity, allow one to manipulate boundaries and seek agency in arenas where these structures might seem rigid and inaccessible, respectively…

Read the entire article here.

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Crown an Imprint of Random House
July 1995
464 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-38341-9 (0-307-38341-5)

Barack Obama, President of the United States

Nine years before the Senate campaign that made him one of the most influential and compelling voices in American politics, Barack Obama published this lyrical, unsentimental, and powerfully affecting memoir, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller when it was reissued in 2004. Dreams from My Father tells the story of Obama’s struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of a black African father and white American mother—a struggle that takes him from the American heartland to the ancestral home of his great-aunt in the tiny African village of Alego.

Obama opens his story in New York, where he hears that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has died in a car accident. The news triggers a chain of memories as Barack retraces his family’s unusual history: the migration of his mother’s family from small-town Kansas to the Hawaiian islands; the love that develops between his mother and a promising young Kenyan student, a love nurtured by youthful innocence and the integrationist spirit of the early sixties; his father’s departure from Hawaii when Barack was two, as the realities of race and power reassert themselves; and Barack’s own awakening to the fears and doubts that exist not just between the larger black and white worlds but within himself.

Propelled by a desire to understand both the forces that shaped him and his father’s legacy, Barack moves to Chicago to work as a community organizer. There, against the backdrop of tumultuous political and racial conflict, he works to turn back the mounting despair of the inner city. His story becomes one with those of the people he works with as he learns about the value of community, the necessity of healing old wounds, and the possibility of faith in the midst of adversity.

Barack’s journey comes full circle in Kenya, where he finally meets the African side of his family and confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life. Traveling through a country racked by brutal poverty and tribal conflict, but whose people are sustained by a spirit of endurance and hope, Barack discovers that he is inescapably bound to brothers and sisters living an ocean away—and that by embracing their common struggles he can finally reconcile his divided inheritance.

A searching meditation on the meaning of identity in America, Dreams from My Father might be the most revealing portrait we have of a major American leader—a man who is playing, and will play, an increasingly prominent role in healing a fractious and fragmented nation.