Mixed Race Studies

“Employing discredited biological over cultural definitions of who is an Indian and who is not is an assault on our self-determination. We have endured 450 years of forced assimilation which included slavery and post slavery intermarriage, making our walk one of plurality. We are therefore all multiracial. Blood mixing is also believed to be the reason certain phenotypes (physical characteristics) common within Native people also occur in African American populations.”

Julianne Jennings, “The Institutional Racism Against Black Indians,” Indian Country Today Media Network.com (July 4, 2014). http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/07/04/institutional-racism-against-black-indians.

Colour-blind love is the mark of a healthy and dynamic society

The Guardian/The Observer
2014-07-05

Anushka Asthana, Political Correspondent
Sky News

In Britain, there are ever more ‘mixed’ marriages such as mine. And society is enriched by this trend

A friend tells me her mother is “fully Chinese”, while her father is slightly Spanish, a little Iraqi and “a lot” Jewish. “I tick ‘mixed other’,” she adds, laughing. Throw “white British” into the mix and you have her daughter, whom she and her husband lovingly describe as “the mongrel”.

As ethnicity winds its way down the generations, it creates a complicated yet wonderfully interesting web. Data from the Office for National Statistics suggests we can expect many more of these melting-pot families. Almost one in 10 Britons now lives with a spouse or partner from a different ethnic group…

Read the entire article here.

Census Bureau explores new Middle East/North Africa ethnic category

Pew Research Center
2014-03-24

Jens Manuel Krogstad, Writer/Editor
Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project

Organizations representing people of Middle Eastern and North African descent are asking the Census Bureau to add a new ethnic category on forms. People of this heritage are now categorized as “white,” a decades-old practice advocacy groups say is inaccurate.

The new category would be broader than the Arab ancestry data collected by the Census Bureau since 1980. The Arab-American population is small but growing, and its exact size is disputed. The Census Bureau estimates there are 1.8 million Arab-Americans in the U.S., up 51% since 2000. But the Arab American Institute Foundation estimates there are nearly 3.7 million Arab Americans living in the country. The Arab-American population is also diverse, with people claiming ties to 22 countries and various religious backgrounds…

Read the entire article here.

The Institutional Racism Against Black Indians

Indian Country Today Media Network.com
2014-07-04

Julianne Jennings

Black Indians are constantly confronted with the fact that they do not fit any of society’s stereotypes for Native Americans. Those stereotypes are imposed by both whites and sadly, other Indians. This lack of understanding of another nation’s history has interwoven ignorance thus extinguishing fact. Nevertheless, despite their own distortions and mutations of the past, it is interesting to note how the right to remember or forget are not going unnoticed; where personal biographies have intersected with historical watershed events (i.e. slavery, blood-mixing, cultural blending) is now producing historically-conscious discourse about race, racism, and who is a “real” Indian.

Raymond H. Brooks, 72, Montaukett Nation, Long Island, New York, was made furious from a recent posting he read on Facebook. The post read, “My good friend is a real Indian because he lives on an Indian reservation and the government gives him money. That’s how you can tell who a real Indian is.”

Those who hold the power, get to set the rules; and according to Brooks, “Our tribe had its status taken away in 1910 because a New York State county Judge Abel Blackmar said, “We were no longer a tribe because we had intermarried with blacks and whites. And that when he looked around the court room, He didn’t see any Indians” The tribe has been fighting to get their State recognition restored ever since. You can go to the tribes website and read their history and what is currently happening with their Bill (montauktribe.Org).

…Employing discredited biological over cultural definitions of who is an Indian and who is not is an assault on our self-determination. We have endured 450 years of forced assimilation which included slavery and post slavery intermarriage, making our walk one of plurality. We are therefore all multiracial. Blood mixing is also believed to be the reason certain phenotypes (physical characteristics) common within Native people also occur in African American populations…

Read the entire article here.

On the Mexican Mestizo

Latin American Research Review
Volume 14, Number 3 (1979)
pages 153-168

John K. Chance, Professor of Anthropology
Arizona State Univerisity

No one with even a passing acquaintance with the literature on Mexican society, not to mention the rest of Spanish America, can fail to be impressed by the frequent use of the term mestizo. Despite its ubiquity in the writings of social scientists, however, the concept of the mestizo is customarily employed in a vague fashion and usually left undefined. This is especially evident in the work of anthropologists, who for many years have been preoccupied with defining the Mexican Indian but have rarely focused their analytical powers on the mestizo. The term itself has been used rather loosely to refer to a certain group of people who presumably comprise a majority of the Mexican population, a cultural pattern shared by these people and other Latin Americans, and even a personality type.

Ethnographers frequently refer to the communities they study as being either Indian or mestizo, but rarely do they provide enough information to allow us to decide whether these are viable identities for the people themselves or distinct cultural configurations. Usually, when used as an adjective, “mestizo” is simply a shorthand descriptive term employed by the investigator. In this context, it is little more than a catch-all designation meaning non-Indian and non-Spanish, sometimes implying as well an identification with Mexican national culture. One wonders how social scientists concerned with Mexico and its people could ever get along without the term, despite the fact that it is only infrequently used by Mexicans themselves. Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán remarks: “In all cases when [Mexicans] are explicitly asked if they consider themselves mestizos, only the educated ones, that is, the intellectuals or persons who have had contact with large urban centers, agree that they are; the ordinary person is not familiar with the term or gives it another meaning.”

It seems clear that the term rarely, if at all, refers to a viable ethnic identity in Mexico today. When called upon to distinguish themselves from people of indigenous background, Mexicans are more likely to call themselves gente de razon, gente decente, vecinos, catrines, correctos, or simply mexicanos. Yet it is obviously impossible to dismiss the concept of the mestizo altogether, for it has played an important part in the rise of Mexican nationalism, and the term itself appears frequently in historical documents, particularly those of the colonial period. This paper is not directly concerned with the current usage of the term among Mexicans themselves, nor will it deal with the concept as it is used by modern ethnographers. The goal is rather to clarify the place of the mestizo in Mexican history, particularly the colonial period. While most of the data presented pertain to a single city—Oaxaca, or Antequera in colonial times—it will be argued that a similar pattern probably existed in other cities of what was once known as New Spain. The basic contention is that the historical continuity assumed by many between the colonial and modern mestizo does not in fact exist if we pay close attention to how people were racially classified in Mexican cities during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.

By far the most influential work in English that is based on this assumption is the chapter entitled “The Power Seekers” of Eric Wolf’s classic Sons of the Shaking Earth. Because Wolf’s portrait of the genesis of the mestizo and his role in the making of modern Mexico has been so influential, I will use it as a foil at many points for the development of my argument. The criticism of Wolf’s account, however, is not intended to belittle what I regard as a masterly synthesis of Mesoamerican culture history. Indeed, though it was written twenty years ago, Sons of the Shaking Earth remains remarkably current in many respects. But some of the ideas could stand revision, and this paper will attempt to show that Wolf’s treatment of the mestizo now needs to be reformulated in view of recent evidence…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Identity for the Year 2000 Census

C-SPAN
1998-05-30

Panelists discussed the federal government’s recent decision to allow individuals to define their race by more than one category on the 2000 census. They discussed the implications of this decision and its effect on areas such as social program funding and political representation. Panelists also answered media questions.

Hosted by:

National MultiCultural Institute

People in this video:

Susan Graham, President
Project RACE

Stuart Ishimaru, Counsel
United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division

Clarence Page, Columnist
Tribune Media Services

Jeffrey Passel, Director
Urban Institute, Immigration Policy Program

Elizabeth Salett, President
National MultiCultural Institute

Watch the video here.

Mexico boasts a staggering genetic diversity, study shows

Los Angeles Times
2014-06-12

Geoffrey Mohan

SHARELINES

▼ DNA offers a nuanced answer to what it means to be Mexican
▼ Ancient genetic signal survived conquest in Mexico
▼ Latino and Hispanic labels don’t do justice to Mexico’s genome

Writers, artists and historians have long pondered what it means to be Mexican. Now science has offered its answer, and it could change how medicine uses racial and ethnic categories to assess disease risk, testing and treatment..

The broadest analysis of the Mexican genome ever undertaken reveals a nation of staggering genetic diversity, where European conquest only thinly masks the ancestral DNA of Native Americans, and where some populations remain as distinct from one another as Europeans are from Chinese, according to findings published Thursday in the journal Science.

Forty researchers, who share Latino heritage as well as professional qualms over the significance of ethnic and racial categories, teamed up across borders to analyze more than 1 million variations in the building blocks of DNA. They examined more than 500 samples collected in Mexico’s remote Indian villages and polyglot cities, and from Mexican Americans in California.

“Because these populations are so rich, so genetically differentiated, you can’t just lump them all in,” said lead investigator Carlos Bustamante, a population geneticist and co-director of Stanford University’s Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics. “You really have to embrace that diversity and think about doing medical genetic studies on a very large scale.”

To illustrate their point, the researchers compared their new genetic data with the results of lung function tests for children in Mexico City and Latinos in the San Francisco Bay Area. They discovered that pulmonary function varied in ways that were mirrored in DNA. It was as if someone with a fraction of Maya ancestry had lungs that were 10 years older than someone with a bit of northern indigenous heritage…

…Researchers not involved in the study, however, caution that correlations between disease risk and ancestry may not have much of a genetic basis at all. In many cases, they might mask socioeconomic or environmental factors — where and how you live.

The suggestion that differences in DNA are responsible for observed differences in lung capacity “is an enormous leap,” said UC Berkeley sociologist Troy Duster, who has written extensively on the intersection of race, biology and public policy.

Lundy Braun, an Africana studies professor at Brown University who studies the intersection of race and medicine, said medicine’s focus on genetics may be overshadowing other avenues of research.

“The effects of social class on lung function have been largely ignored in favor of the focus on race and ethnic difference,” she said.

Braun and Duster worry that such genomic studies may unwittingly lend legitimacy to widely discredited ideas about racial disparities.

“There is always lurking danger that this kind of research, which emphasizes the genetic structure of ethnic and racial groups, fuels the notion that the biology or genetics of those groups explains their condition,” Duster said…

Read the entire article here.

To Measure More Diverse America, Solution May Be in Census Questions

The New York Times
2014-07-01

Tanzina Vega

When Alexa Aviles received her census form in 2010, she was frustrated by the choices. Like all Hispanics, Ms. Aviles, a Puerto Rican who lives in Brooklyn, was first asked to identify her ethnicity and then to answer a question about her race. Ms. Aviles, 41, who works for a nonprofit, thought, “I’m all of these!” In annoyance, she checked Hispanic, and then identified herself as white, black and “some other race.”

Mustafa Asmar, a Palestinian-American waiter in Paterson, N.J., does not like his options either. Arab-Americans are broadly classified as white in the census. “When you fill out white or other, it doesn’t really represent the Middle Eastern population,” said Mr. Asmar, 25. “I don’t feel like I’m white. I don’t know what else to put.”

As the United States becomes more diverse, the Census Bureau is grappling with how to accurately classify race and ethnicity in its next decennial count in 2020. It is an issue that plays out in divergent ways for different groups. Many Hispanics, like Ms. Aviles, are frustrated that they are prompted to select from racial categories that they believe do not represent their identity.

Many Arabs have the opposite concern: They are not asked a separate ethnicity question and are typically categorized as white, a label that many feel does not apply…

Read the entire article here.

Implications of Genetic Diversity in Mexico

Biopolitical Times
Center for Genetics and Society
2014-06-25

Pete Shanks

The category Latino is a valid cultural artifact, and often self-identified. But it’s not really a race in any modern sense of the term, and the genetic evidence surely shows that it is far too broad a grouping to be scientifically appropriate without serious qualification. Yet it is used, even in some current peer-reviewed papers.

One that does not use the term is an article published in Science this month on the genetics of Mexico. The country’s population is large and ethnically, linguistically, geographically, economically and culturally diverse. It is also genetically complex, and this article by a large and distinguished team of scientists provides new details. It also suggests some important implications for genomic research and likely for personalized medicine in general:

The genetics of Mexico recapitulates Native American substructure and affects biomedical traits

The study included 511 Native Mexican individuals from 20 indigenous groups, and 500 mestizo (mixed-race) individuals from ten states; nearly a million SNPs were analyzed for each. The variation was striking…

Read the entire article here.

Neymar and the Disappearing Donkey

Africa is a Country
2014-06-17

Achal Prabhala
Bangalore, India

By the time you read this, it’s possible that every single person on the planet will know who Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior is…

…You could come to any number of conclusions from Neymar’s remarkable transformation. For instance, you could conclude that race doesn’t exist in Brazil, which is the favourite line of a specific tribe of Brazilians – impeccable liberals all, who just happen to be upper-class, white and at the top of the heap.

Or you could conclude that everyone in Brazil is indeed mixed – which is, incidentally, the second-favourite line of the selfsame tribe.

Or you could wonder what happened to this boy.

***

It’s too easy to condemn Neymar for pretending to be white: judging by the images, he is partly white. It’s silly to accuse him of denying his mixed-race ancestry, because the simplest search throws up hundreds of images of him as a child, none of which he seems to be ashamed of. There is this: when asked if he had ever been a victim of racism, he said, “Never. Neither inside nor outside the field. Because I’m not black right?”

Actually, the word he used was preto, which is significant, since, in Brazil, when used as a colour ascribed to people – rather than things, like rice or beans – it is the equivalent of the n-word; negro and negra being the acceptable ways of describing someone who is truly black. (And moreno or morena being standard descriptors for someone dark-skinned, as well as, occasionally, euphemisms for blackness). Technically speaking, however, his logic was faultless – and even kind of interestingly honest: the Neymar who made that statement was an unworldly eighteen-year-old who had never lived outside Brazil. And in Brazil, Neymar is not black…

Read the entire article here.