Mixed Race Studies

Written records agree with Melungeon DNA results

Jack Goins’ Melungeon and Appalachian Research
October 2013

William E. Cole
University of Tennessee

Joe Stevenson Looney
University of Tennessee

Written records agree with Core Melungeon DNA Results. The Core Melungeon DNA Project was formed with Family Tree DNA on July 25, 2005. The goal of the project was to determine the origin of the Melungeons and to find matches in the data base. Our project results were submitted to a peer review board and published April 24, 2012 in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy and published by Associated Press reporter Travis Loller in May 2012, the results of the first generation are offspring of Sub-Saharan African men and white women of Northern and central European origin. http://www.jogg.info/72/files/Estes.pdf.

The majority of the male core groups were haplogroup E1b1a Sub-Saharan African and the maternal mtDNA group was European. The first mixed generation was the children from Sub-Saharan African men and white women of Northern and central European origin, the exact date of this mixing is unknown. Some from this first mixed generation eventually intermarried with white settlers in colonial Virginia and took their names. Part of this tri-racial clan may have remained in Colonial Virginia and others migrated to North Carolina who would eventually become known as Melungeons (Calloway Collins told Will Allen Dromgoole the Collins and Gibsons, had stolen those names from white settlers in Virginia where they were living as Indians, before migrating to North Carolina”). Calloway Collins was a great grandson of Benjamin whose origin was African and we also know all Africans took English surnames, even the ones who became slaves…

Read the entire article here.

Blood: The Stuff of Life

House of Anansi Press
2013-10-26
272 pages
5 x 8
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-77089-322-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-77089-324-5

Lawrence Hill

In this year’s CBC Massey Lectures, bestselling author Lawrence Hill offers a provocative examination of the scientific and social history of blood, and on the ways that it unites and divides us today.

Blood runs red through every person’s arteries and fulfills the same functions in every human being. The study of blood has advanced our understanding of biology and improved medical treatments, but its cultural and social representations have divided us perennially. Blood pulses through religion, literature, and the visual arts. Every time it pools or spills, we learn a little more about what brings human beings together and what pulls us apart. For centuries, perceptions of difference in our blood have separated people on the basis of gender, race, class, and nation. Ideas about blood purity have spawned rules about who gets to belong to a family or cultural group, who enjoys the rights of citizenship and nationality, what privileges one can expect to be granted or denied, whether you inherit poverty or the right to rule over the masses, what constitutes fair play in sport, and what defines a person’s identity.

Blood: The Stuff of Life is a bold meditation on blood as an historical and contemporary marker of identity, belonging, gender, race, class, citizenship, athletic superiority, and nationhood.

Racial Democracy: The Sociological History of a Concept

Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies
Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
2013-02-15

Antonio Sergio Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil

I will examine the coining, the uses, and meanings of the expression “racial democracy” from the 1930’s onwards including its transformation into an ideal for interracial cohabitation and of political inclusion of Blacks in postwar Brazilian modernity. It will also examine the refusal of the expression by the Black activists of the MNU (Movimento Negro Unificado) in the 1970s and their denunciation of its mythical character, as well as its current uses by anthropologists and sociologists engaged in the critique of identity politics.

Imagining Caribbean Womanhood: Race, Nation and Beauty Competitions, 1929–70

Manchester University Press
October 2013
192 pages
216 x 138 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7190-8867-4

Rochelle Rowe
University of Exeter

Over fifty years after Jamaican and Trinidadian independence, Imagining Caribbean Womanhood examines the links between beauty and politics in the Anglophone Caribbean, providing a first cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions, spanning from Kingston to London. It traces the origins and transformation of female beauty contests in the British Caribbean from 1929 to 1970, through the development of cultural nationalism, race-conscious politics and decolonisation.

The beauty contest, a seemingly marginal phenomenon, is used to illuminate the persistence of racial supremacy, the advance of consumer culture and the negotiation of race and nation through the idealised performance of cultured, modern beauty. Modern Caribbean femininity was intended to be politically functional but also commercially viable and subtly eroticised. The lively discussion surrounding beauty competitions, examined in this book, reveals that femininity was used to shape ideas about Caribbean modernity, citizenship, and political and economic freedom. This cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions will be of value to scholarship on beauty, Caribbean studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, ‘race’ and racism studies and studies of the body.

Contents

• Introduction: Caribbean beauty competitions in context
• 1. The early ‘Miss Jamaica’ competition: cultural revolution and feminist voices, 1929–1950
• 2. Cleaning up carnival: race, culture and power in the Trinidad ‘Carnival Queen’ beauty competition, 1946–1959
• 3. Parading the ‘crème de la crème’: constructing the contest in Barbados, 1958–1966
• 4. Fashioning ‘Ebony Cinderellas’ and brown icons: Jamaican beauty competitions and the myth of racial democracy, 1955–1964
• 5. ‘Colonisation in reverse’: Claudia Jones, the West Indian Gazette and the ‘Carnival Queen’ contest in London, 1959–1964
• Afterword: a Grenadian ‘Miss World’, 1970
• Bibliography
• Index

Reading Series: Quantifying Bloodlines

Brooklyn Historical Society
Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations
Othmer Library
Saturdays, 2013-11-16, 2013-12-07 and 2014-01-25; 15:00-18:00 EST (Local Time)

Quantifying Bloodlines is a monthly reading group organized by anthropologist and oral historian Jennifer Scott.  Join others interested in exploring the relationship between biology and race, as we discuss three widely acclaimed books. Each work offers different examples of tracing family history—through a surname, through biological cells, through a specific geographic locale, through four generations of women’s lives. Through stories, we will discuss how we segment heritage and explain descent, paying close attention to past and existing ideas of purity, racial and economic privilege, and scientific thinking.

All sessions meet in the Othmer Library at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Light refreshments will be provided.

Sign up for individual sessions for $20, or join us for all three at a discounted price of $45! All sessions are available for a sliding scale fee, and no-one will be turned away for lack of funds.

What’s Biology Got to Do with It? The Social Life of Genetics
November 16th, 2013, 3:00 PM
Reading: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Guest Speaker: Sociologist Ann Morning, author of The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference

What’s Purity Got to Do with It? Searching Family History and Genealogy
December 7th, 2013, 3:00 PM
Reading: The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family by Joe Mozingo

What’s History Got to Do with It? Evolving Classifications of Race
January 25th, 2014, 3:00 PM
Reading: Cane River by Lalita Tademy

Quantifying Bloodlines Reading and Discussion Series is co-sponsored by MixedRaceStudies.org

For more information, click here.

Analysis of a Tri-Racial Isolate

Human Biology
Volume 36, Number 4 (December 1964)
pages 362-373

William S. Pollitzer
Department of Anatomy
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Based on a paper presented at the meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Philadelphia, May 2, 1962

A relatively isolated population in the state of North Carolina, composed of persons who call themselves Indian but who appear to be of tri-racial origin, provides a model for the study of analysis by gene frequencies of a mixed population of White, Negro, and Indian ancestry.

A people considered Indian is known to have occupied this territory by the mid-eighteenth century; they spoke English, tilled the soil, and owned slaves. English, Scotch Highlanders, and French Huguenots migrated into the area in the eighteenth century also. Planters from neighboring states settled in this vicinity, often bringing slaves and a few free Negroes with them. The most common names of the free Negroes are the same as those of the present-day mixed population.

The origin of the Indian component of this hybrid population is open to speculation; three ideas have been advanced. The most colorful theory is that the people of the present isolate are the descendants of Raleigh’s famous “Lost Colony” who mixed with the Croatan Indians, an Algonquin-speaking tribe on the coast. Some similarity in the names of the colonists and the names in the present population, plus a few cultural traits, have been construed as evidence for this view. Another suggestion is that the Cherokee, a powerful Iroquois-speaking tribe who had general overlordship in the Western Carolinas, contributed the Indian genes to the hybrid group. Finally, the view has been advanced that the Siouan-speaking tribes who lived in the Piedmont Carolinas, e.g., the Catawba, were the Indian stock involved.

Considerable phenotypic variation is found within the isolate today, with extremes of skin color from light to dark and of hair form from very curly to straight- The morphology of the face also suggests broad racial backgrounds. It is therefore of interest to learn what the blood factors and hemoglobins tell of the composition of this population of multiple racial origins.

In 1958, in cooperation with Dr. Amoz Chernoff, blood samples were…

Unbecoming blackness: the diaspora cultures of Afro-Cuban America [Review]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 37, Issue 5, 2014
pages 889-890
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.847200

Nora Gámez Torres, Visiting scholar
Cuban Research Institute
Florida International University, Miami

Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora cultures of Afro-Cuban America, by Antonio López, New York, New York University Press, 2012, xi + 272 pp., (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8147-6547-0.

Unbecoming Blackness poses directly the question of an underdiscussed afrolatinidad in Cuban American Studies. The book opens up by analysing the lives and performances of key figures in the Afro-Cuban diaspora in the USA during the first half of the twentieth century: Alberto O’Farrill, a writer and blackface actor in the teatro bufo a theatrical Cuban genre he helped to export to New York: and Eusebia Cosme, a renowned performer of poesía negra (black poetry) and actress. This is the first significant accomplishment of the book, since these histories had to be carefully recovered and reconstructed by collecting disperse information, the ‘fragments attaches’ (14) common to black diasporas in the Americas.

The third chapter, examining the afrolatinidad and specific Puerto Rican identifications in the work of Cuban-born anthropologist Rómulo Lachatañeré and Cuban-descendent writer Piri Thomas, continues building the main theme of the book: how Afro-Cubans actively negotiate their racialization in the USA, by cither asserting or concealing their ‘Hispanic’ heritage through linguistic choices, or by forging alliances with black Americans and other Latin/o groups. In so doing, they enact an afrolatinidad that is malleable and transnational, and thus, unsettling for hegemonic Cuban and Cuban American identities, rooted in nationalism and whiteness. That performers such as Cosme and O’Farrill and scholars such as Lachatañeré travelled to the USA looking for better professional opportunities and decided to associate to ‘subaltern’ subjects such as black Americans and other Latino groups, generated an anxiety among Cuban writers and intellectuals of the time who defended the idea of mestizaje, as López shows in these chapters. The point of conflict is brilliantly captured in the following passage by Lopez: (the implication) ‘that Afro-Cubans are somehow ‘better off’ being in and belonging to an explicitly racist US nation rather than, it turns out, Cuba. This being and belonging is asserted against ‘the best interests’ of a postracial, mestizo, even negro island-Cuban nation—indeed, against the ‘best interests’ of Afro-Cubans themselves’ (9). To speak of an afrolatinidad in this context disrupts both Cuban American and Cuban fictions of national identity. Precisely due to the implications of the book for a critical debate on Cuban racial identities on and off the island, it would have been very useful for the leader to have a contextual analysis of what was happening in Cuba in different moments and in the different fields the author explores.

Less accomplished is the following chapter, in which López lacks the clarity to successfully connect ‘texts around 1979 in Miami and the overlapping histories of the illicit drug trade. African American uprising, Mariel migration‘ (16), to Cuban American reactions to the ‘blackening’ of their community after Mariel and the African Americans…

Read or purchase the article here.

TEDxHampshireCollege–Jay Smooth: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race

TEDx
Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts
2011-11-15

Jay Smooth is host of New York’s longest running hip-hop radio show, the Underground Railroad on WBAI 99.5 FM in NY, and is an acclaimed commentator on politics and culture.

In this talk, he discusses the sometimes thorny territory of how we discuss issues of race and racism, offering insightful and humorous suggestions for expanding our perception of the subject.

Is It Time to Do Away With The ‘One-Drop’ Rule?

Clutch
2013-07-10

Britni Danielle
Los Angeles

Conversations about race in America can lead to never-ending discussions, hurt feelings, and sometimes even breakthroughs. Blame it on our complicated past of slavery, racism, and legalized prejudice, but even approaching a frank discussion about race in this country can seem nearly impossible.

And yet we keep trying.

Recently, I spotted an article over on The Root which stated that Johnny Depp is a direct descendant of Elizabeth Key, a former slave who worked to secure her freedom in 1656…

…While I doubt anyone will rush to claim Depp as black (at least I hope not), how blackness gets defined in America continues to be rooted in antiquated notions of the one-drop rule…

…When pondering whether or not we should do away with the one-drop rule, it’s important to remember it was not created by those of African ancestry looking forge a shared kinship or by local/federal governments hoping to properly categorize the populace for the purpose of collecting census data (the terms “Indian,” “mulatto,” and “negro” were well established), but rather the one-drop rule was created to keep the white race “pure.” In short, it was merely another tool aimed at protecting white supremacy in America…

Read the entire article here.

Cuba is White, Black and Mixed Race Because it is Diverse

Havana Times: open-minded writing from Cuba
2013-10-22

Dmitri Prieto
Agrarian University of Havana

HAVANA TIMES — Recently, on the eve of October 10, a Cuban national holiday commemorating the date (in 1868) in which Cuban landowner Carlos Manuel de Cespedes and his retinue of (former) slaves took up arms against Spanish colonial domination, a Round Table program bearing the controversial title of “Neither Black Nor White: Cuba is Mixed Race” was aired on television.

During the Round Table discussion, Cuban scientists presented valuable and interesting evidence showing that our population’s gene pool combines the DNA of African, European and Asian / Indo-American peoples, concluding that, therefore, it would be impossible to define any Cuban “races” on the basis of genetics as such.

On the basis of this accurate insight, however, they also suggested something that I consider dangerously dubious: the notion that Cuba is a “mixed race” country…

Read the entire article here.