Mixed Race Studies

The Story in My DNA

The Huffington Post
2016-05-24

Hope Ferguson

Like many African Americans, I grew up not knowing where I came from. There was no “old country” for us. Obviously, I knew that most slaves were brought from Central and West Africa. I heard family stories about being part Native American – that the Seminole Indians had helped slaves escape from their masters by sheltering them within their tribe. That my grandfather’s mother was half Cherokee, part Scotch-Irish, as well as African. Her long black hair and high cheekbones in the one photo I saw of her bore this out.

For a while, these stories were enough. I believed that I would only really find out, if ever, in the afterlife.

When I was 29, I moved from New York City to Argyle, N.Y., a small upstate farming town that had been settled by Scots. Since Fergusons were on the original patent, I was often asked, while interviewing people by phone as a local reporter, if I was one of the Argyle Fergusons, and I would laugh, and say no, and explain that I was African American, not Scottish.

A few years ago, at a National Association for Black Journalists conference, the company African Ancestry was doing free DNA analyses for some of the attendees as a promotion. I sat transfixed as the African ancestry of various people was teased out; and listened with amazement at how the person displayed some similar traits as their ancestral land … for example, a gift with textiles.

After that, I became more curious about my ancestry…

Read the entire article here.

Race, revolution and interracial relations: Revisiting rapper Emicida’s video ‘Boa Esperança’, the most courageous video of 2015

Black Women of Brazil
2016-04-25

Note from BW of Brazil: Get ready! Today’s piece is one of those long articles in which you must read every word in order to get the full significance. The rapper known as Emicida is perhaps the most popular rapper in Brazil right now and his star continues to rise. Last year, the rapper released the video for his song “Boa Esperança”, one of the most discussed music videos of last year and for good reason and you will no doubt agree.

The video takes on the realities of race and class in modern day Brazilian society that date back all the way to the colonial era; a colonial era in which masses of Brazilian Indians were massacred and millions of imported Africans were forced to endure unthinkable conditions of cruelty, exploitation and death. As we have seen in numerous posts in the past, many black Brazilians still make references to the Casa Grande (big house/slave master’s home) to describe race relations in modern day Brazil, even as the institution of slavery officially ended in 1888, making Brazil the last country in the Western world to abolish this practice…

Read the entire article here.

White Colorism

Social Currents
Volume 2, Number 1 (March 2015)
DOI: 10.1177/2329496514558628
pages 13-21

Lance Hannon, Professor
Department of Sociology & Criminology
Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania

Perhaps reflecting a desire to emphasize the enduring power of rigidly constructed racial categories, sociology has tended to downplay the importance of within-category variation in skin tone. Similarly, in popular media, “colorism,” or discrimination based on skin lightness, is rarely mentioned. When colorism is discussed, it is almost exclusively framed in terms of intraracial “black-on-black” discrimination. In line with arguments highlighting the centrality of white racism, the present paper contends that it is important for researchers to give unique attention to white colorism. Using data from the 2012 American National Election Study, an example is presented on white interviewers’ perceptions of minority respondent skin tone and intelligence (N = 223). Results from ordinal logistic regression analyses indicate that African American and Latino respondents with the lightest skin are several times more likely to be seen by whites as intelligent compared with those with the darkest skin. The article concludes that a full accounting of white hegemony requires an acknowledgment of both white racism and white colorism.

Read or purchase the article here.

Reliability Concerns in Measuring Respondent Skin Tone by Interviewer Observation

Public Opinion Quarterly
Volume 80, Issue 2 (2016)
DOI: 10.1093/poq/nfw015
pages 534-541

Lance Hannon, Professor
Department of Sociology & Criminology
Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania

Robert DeFina, Professor
Department of Sociology & Criminology
Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania

The current study assesses the intercoder reliability of one of the most important skin tone measurement instruments—the Massey–Martin scale. This scale is used in several high-profile social surveys, but has not yet been psychometrically evaluated. The current evaluation is only possible because, for the first time, the General Social Survey’s 2010–2014 panel used the instrument to guide interviewers’ skin tone observation of the same respondents in two different years (2012 and 2014). Despite the widespread use of the Massey–Martin scale to investigate potential effects of skin tone on social attitudes and outcomes, the data suggest that the measure has low intercoder reliability. Implications for researchers and survey practitioners are discussed.

Read or purchase the article here.

Knowledge Session: Who Was Lena Horne?

I Am Hip-Hop
2015-07-07

Rishma Dhaliwal

Lena Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) was born in Brook­lyn, New York, on June 30, 1917. Her father, Edwin “Teddy” Horne, who worked in the gambling trade, left the fam­ily when Lena was three. Her mother, Edna, was an act­ress with an African Amer­ican theater troupe and traveled extens­ively. Horne was mainly raised by her grand­par­ents, Cora Cal­houn and Edwin Horne. Yet, she still moved a great deal in her early years because her mother often took her with her on the road. They lived in vari­ous parts of the South before Horne was returned to her grand­par­ents’ home in 1931. After they died, Horne lived with a friend of her mother’s, Laura Rol­lock. Shortly there­after Edna remar­ried and Horne moved in with her mother and her mother’s new hus­band. The con­stant mov­ing res­ul­ted in Lena hav­ing an edu­ca­tion that was often inter­rup­ted. She atten­ded vari­ous small-town, segreg­ated (sep­ar­ated by race) school’s when in the South with her mother. In Brook­lyn she atten­ded the Eth­ical Cul­tural School, the Girls High School, and a sec­ret­arial school…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial and multicultural community advocacy with Glenn Robinson, Ep. 66

Multiracial Family Man
2016-05-22

Alex Barnett, Host

Ep. 66 – Glenn Robinson is a White guy. He’s married to a Mexican woman, and they have 2 Biracial and Bicultural kids.

Glenn is a devoted advocate for the multiracial and multicultural communities. He aggregates and curates content for several websites aimed at the issues confronting these communities. Those websites are:

• Community Village
• Mixed American Life
• 500 Nations
• Oppression Monitor

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

Anna In-Between

Akashic Books
2010-08-17
352 pages
Paperback IBSN: 9781936070695
Hardcover IBSN: 9781933354842

Elizabeth Nunez, Distinguished Professor of English
Hunter College, the City University of New York

Anna In-Between is Elizabeth Nunez’s finest achievement to date. In spare prose, with laserlike attention to every word and the juxtaposition of words to each other, Nunez returns to her themes of emotional alienation, within the context of class and color discrimination, so richly developed in her earlier novels. Anna, the novel’s main character, who has a successful publishing career in the US, is the daughter of an upper-class Caribbean family. While on vacation in the island home of her birth she discovers that her mother, Beatrice, has breast cancer. Beatrice categorically rejects all efforts to persuade her to go to the US for treatment, even though it is, perhaps, her only chance of survival. Anna and her father, who tries to remain respectful of his wife’s wishes, must convince her to change her mind.

In a convergence of craftsmanship, unflinching honesty, and the ability to universalize the lives of her characters, Nunez tells a story that explores our longing for belonging to a community, the age-old love-repulsion relationship between mother and daughter, the Freudian overtones in the love between daughter and father, and the mutual respect that is essential for a successful marriage. One of the crowning achievements of this novel is that it shines a harsh light on the ambiguous situation of this ruling-class family who rose from the constraints of colonialism to employ their own servants. It is a strength of the novel that it understands that the political truth is not distinct from the truth of the family or the truth of love relationships; they are integrated into a unity in this novel constituting one unbroken reality as they are in real life.

The Great Migration and African-American Genomic Diversity

PLOS Genetics
2016-05-27
27 pages
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1006059

Soheil Baharian
Department of Human Genetics
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Genome Quebec Innovation Centre, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Maxime Barakatt
McGill University and Genome Quebec Innovation Centre, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Christopher R. Gignoux
Department of Genetics
Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California

Suyash Shringarpure
Department of Genetics
Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California

Jacob Errington
Department of Human Genetics
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Genome Quebec Innovation Centre, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

William J. Blot
Division of Epidemiology
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee
International Epidemiology Institute, Rockville, Maryland

Carlos D. Bustamante
Department of Genetics
Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California

Eimear E. Kenny
Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences
The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York

Scott M. Williams
Department of Genetics
Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Melinda C. Aldrich
Division of Epidemiology, Department of Thoracic Surgery
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee

Simon Gravel
Department of Human Genetics
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Genome Quebec Innovation Centre, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Fig 3. Pairwise genetic relatedness across US census regions among (A) African-Americans, (B) European-Americans, and (C) African-Americans and European-Americans. (D) Census-based prediction for African-Americans (see Materials and Methods). On each map, the line connecting two regions shows the average relatedness between individuals in those regions, and the thickness and opacity of the lines are on a linear scale between the minimum and maximum values shown above the map. Relatedness between regions with fewer than 10,000 possible pairs of individuals is not shown (see Materials and Methods for details). All numbers are in units of cM. (E) Decay of average IBD (shown in logarithmic scale) as a function of distance using IBD segments of length 18cM or longer from HRS (dots), compared to the analytical model (lines).

Abstract

We present a comprehensive assessment of genomic diversity in the African-American population by studying three genotyped cohorts comprising 3,726 African-Americans from across the United States that provide a representative description of the population across all US states and socioeconomic status. An estimated 82.1% of ancestors to African-Americans lived in Africa prior to the advent of transatlantic travel, 16.7% in Europe, and 1.2% in the Americas, with increased African ancestry in the southern United States compared to the North and West. Combining demographic models of ancestry and those of relatedness suggests that admixture occurred predominantly in the South prior to the Civil War and that ancestry-biased migration is responsible for regional differences in ancestry. We find that recent migrations also caused a strong increase in genetic relatedness among geographically distant African-Americans. Long-range relatedness among African-Americans and between African-Americans and European-Americans thus track north- and west-bound migration routes followed during the Great Migration of the twentieth century. By contrast, short-range relatedness patterns suggest comparable mobility of ∼15–16km per generation for African-Americans and European-Americans, as estimated using a novel analytical model of isolation-by-distance.

Author Summary

Genetic studies of African-Americans identify functional variants, elucidate historical and genealogical mysteries, and reveal basic biology. However, African-Americans have been under-represented in genetic studies, and relatively little is known about nation-wide patterns of genomic diversity in the population. Here, we study African-American genomic diversity using genotype data from nationally and regionally representative cohorts. Access to these unique cohorts allows us to clarify the role of population structure, admixture, and recent massive migrations in shaping African-American genomic diversity and sheds new light on the genetic history of this population.

Read the entire article here.

Tim Brannigan, a real black Irish republican

The Irish Times
Dublin, Ireland
2016-05-28

Fionola Meredith

When Tim Brannigan was born his mother persuaded a doctor to declare him a stillbirth. Then she gave him to an orphanage – coming back a year later to ‘adopt’ the son she couldn’t admit she’d had. After that he had a normal IRA–safe-house childhood

When Tim Brannigan was 19 he found out who he really was. Growing up as a black kid in 1970s west Belfast, he already knew he was different. He had been adopted as a baby, he believed. But it turned out the person who “adopted” him was his own mother, Peggy. As he tells it in his memoir, Where Are You Really From?, it is an extraordinary narrative of secrecy, desperation and deep, unbreakable devotion, played out against the flaming backdrop of the Troubles. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that Hollywood can see its cinematic potential. Brannigan recently sold the film rights to his life story to the Oscar-winning producer John Lesher, and scripting will soon be under way.

“Mum told me everything on July 13th, 1985,” Brannigan says. He remembers the date clearly because it was the day of Live Aid, Bob Geldof’s televised music fundraiser for famine relief in Ethiopia. The family had decamped to an uncle’s holiday house in Cushendall, Co Antrim, to escape the Twelfth parades in Belfast. “The drink was flowing, and my mum was sitting there with a glass in her hand,” says Brannigan. “She started asking me what I wanted to do when I got my A levels. Suddenly she said, ‘Your father was a doctor.’”

That didn’t make sense. As far as Tim knew his adoptive father was Tom Brannigan, a delivery man and sometime showband singer, whom he describes as a chancer. “He had plenty of opportunities to fly his kite, and he did.”

“Get ready,” Peggy said. “First of all, you’re not adopted.” Shocked, Tim began to weep. “Don’t cry,” his mother whispered. “People will think I’m shouting at you. And don’t tell them, or I’ll bust your face!”…

Read the entire article here.

In Due Season

Wilfrid Laurier University Press
May 2016
375 pages
ISBN13: 978-1-77112-071-5

Christine van der Mark (1917–1970)

Afterword by:

Carole Gerson, Professor of English Department
Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada

Janice Dowson, Lecturer in English literature and Academic Writing
Simon Fraser University and University of the Fraser Valley

First published in 1947, In Due Season broke new ground with its fictional representation of women and of Indigenous people. Set during the dustbowl 1930s, this tersely narrated prize-winning novel follows Lina Ashley, a determined solo female homesteader who takes her family from drought-ridden southern Alberta to a new life in the Peace River region. Here her daughter Poppy grows up in a community characterized by harmonious interactions between the local Métis and newly arrived European settlers. Still, there is tension between mother and daughter when Poppy becomes involved with a Métis lover. This novel expands the patriarchal canon of Canadian prairie fiction by depicting the agency of a successful female settler and, as noted by Dorothy Livesay, was “one of the first, if not the first Canadian novel wherein the plight of the Native Indian and the Métis is honestly and painfully recorded.” The afterword by Carole Gerson and Janice Dowson provides substantial information about author Christine van der Mark and situates her under-acknowledged book within the contexts of Canadian social, literary, and publishing history.

Christine van der Mark (1917–1970) was born and raised in Calgary. While teaching in rural Alberta schools, she attended the University of Alberta, receiving her B.A. in 1941 and her M.A. in Creative Writing in 1946. Much of her writing expressed sympathetic concern for the Métis of Northern Alberta.