Mixed Race Studies

Treating a medical mosaic, doctors develop a new appreciation for the role of ethnicity in disease

The Globe and Mail
Toronto, Canada
2012-02-15

Dakshana Bascaramurty, Reporter

Baby X is born in a Canadian hospital and her tiny, wrinkled body is placed on a scale that reads 3,061 grams, or 6 pounds and 12 ounces.

Things can go one of two ways for Baby X, whose parents are immigrants from India.

According to the standard birth-weight curves used in Canada, which are modelled after norms for Caucasian newborns, this baby could be labelled as underweight, a classification that comes with a higher risk of death and lower cognitive ability. She could be subjected to a battery of unnecessary tests and follow-ups. Her concerned mother might overfeed her in hopes of speeding up her growth.

Or, if a new birth-weight curve developed at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital – one that takes into account a wide range of ethnicities – is used, Baby X will be classified as having a perfectly normal weight and will be sent home. South Asian newborns are typically smaller than those of many other ethnicities.

It’s just one example of why there is a move in Canada and other countries to collect data on their diverse populations to deliver better patient care.

Doctors and researchers are putting greater stock in ethnicity as a variable in health outcomes. A large body of research suggests certain groups are at a higher genetic risk for particular diseases. And physiologically, what is accepted as “normal” and “healthy” varies between ethnicities.

But there are no universal standards or terms of reference used to classify ethnicity, which has made it a highly fraught subject. Some say it shouldn’t be considered a variable at all, arguing that the link between ethnicity and health is manufactured. The Canadian Institute for Health Information doesn’t collect data on ethnicity, and the Canadian Medical Association has no formal policy on the best way to classify the diverse backgrounds of Canadians.

Joel Ray, who led the St. Michael’s Hospital team that developed the new newborn birth-weight curve, is baffled that an old model developed in 1969 based on the weights of 300 Caucasian newborns in Montreal – a population unreflective of modern Canada – is still used in some parts of the country. In a study published Wednesday in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada, his team analyzed 760,000 live births in Ontario and, by their measure, more than one in 10 South Asian babies was at risk of being misclassified if one of the standard Canadian birth-weight curves was used.

“They’re completely archaic – there’s no other sweet word for it,” Dr. Ray said.

Dr. Ray previously studied rates of gestational diabetes among women of various ethnic groups and found South Asians had the highest risk levels, followed by those from East Asia and the Middle East. Previous studies have lumped these three groups together under the catch-all category “Asian” – missing the heterogeneity within.

“You may as well call them human if you’re going to call someone Asian,” he said…

Read the entire article here.

Métis identity matters

Winnipeg Free Press
2011-02-09

Editorial

The question of Métis identity has befuddled Canadians, governments and the courts ever since Louis Riel occupied Upper Fort Garry in 1869 and established a provisional government. Just who were these troublemakers, who had their own language, customs and practices, and who now claimed territorial rights?

Well, they weren’t First Nations and they weren’t Europeans, and they weren’t merely “half-breeds,” but a relatively new nation born in the fur-trading culture of 18th-century North America.

That was probably good enough, as definitions go, until 1982 when the Canadian Constitution guaranteed legal rights to aboriginal peoples, including the Métis, but left it to the courts to sort out those rights. Obviously, if they had rights, whatever those rights were, it mattered who and what was a Métis…

Read the entire editorial here.

Donna Bailey Nurse: Addressing mixed race in literature

CBC Books
2012-02-28

Donna Bailey Nurse

Throughout February and March, literary journalist, teacher and author Donna Bailey Nurse will be blogging for CBC Books about black Canadian writers and their important works. In her third post, she explores the complex subject of mixed race and how different authors address have addressed it.

I read a lot about race, and I write a lot about race. I also talk a lot about race—too much—as most of my friends, white and black, will tell you. But I can’t help it. The topic rivets me; I’m especially fascinated by contemporary issues of race; by how race plays out in our modern, everyday lives.

However, the historical angle preoccupies me as well: the eras of civil rights and of Jim Crow and slavery. In fact, I am just heading out to buy a copy of Rosemary Sadlier’s biography of Harriet Tubman. Tubman, an escaped slave, led more than 300 African American slaves to freedom. I’ve been thinking about her since I was a child. I still can’t figure out how she found the courage.

Every time I read about slavery I learn something new. Lately I’ve been obsessing over information in a book by Randall Keenan. Most of us know that during slavery many white masters—often married men—fathered children with their female slaves. As a rule, the disparity of power between masters and slaves defines their sexual encounters as rape. But Keenan explains how, on occasion, affectionate, enduring relationships developed. Some white men would send the children from these unions north to be educated; and some left wills that provided for the welfare of their black families. Naturally, their white wives were enraged and humiliated. They often contested these wills and in time legislation was enacted that made it illegal for a white man to leave property to his black mistress. However, just think: There was a historical moment when a handful of white masters were prepared to publicly acknowledge their black children—a fleeting opportunity for redemption…

Read the entire article here.

Black History Month: Making truth live

The Windsor Star
2012-02-27

Elise Harding-Davis

To me, as a Canadian woman of African origins, Black History Month is meant to share factual stories and events about North America’s African-based cultures. It is also a prime time to debunk myths and validate folklore and our cherished oral histories.
 
Recent articles linking Ron Jones and me to two famous historical figures are surfacing because they bare truth. Parallel histories were crafted, theirs glorious, ours inconsequential.
 
Comparably, our family histories are just as undeniable and magnificent as those of the notable figures we are connected to. That our past was covered up and debased does not make our rightful lineage any less based in truth.
 
We are a mixture of displaced African peoples, aboriginal inhabitants and usurping European founders and pioneers of Canada and the United States, a unique hybrid creation of the North American experience. The famous, infamous and homogeneous masses are indeed our forebears.
 
We exhibit the many shades and features inherent in these cultures because they chose to mix their genetics with ours.
 
The supremacy of owning another being is intoxicating. As a result, strange mental processes led to very peculiar practices. We were not recognized as human beings. As slaves, concubines and servants, we were at the mercy and whim of those who had possession of us. Our births were generally listed with the other stock, documented in curious ways or not recorded at all, blurring the truth of our parentage.
 
Our Blackness was quantified, mulatto (half-black), quadroon (one-quarter black), octoroon (one-eighth black) and even sextaroon (one sixteenth black); a thirty-second part black blood, which could span eight generations, branded us as slaves. Over the course of 500 years of enslavement and servitude, legal lineage was changed from patriarchal, father to son, to matriarchal, mother to child…

Read the entire article here.

ENGL 3270.03: Contemporary Canadian Literature: Crossing the Line

Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Summer 2007

Dr. C. Dawson

Our study of contemporary Canadian literature will be loosely divided into three sections, each organized around the idea of “crossing the line.” In the first section the line under consideration will be the border that defines this country. By way of example, our discussion of Tom King’s wonderfully funny story “Borders” might draw on his argument that the 49th parallel is a “figment of somebody else’s imagination.” Likewise, our readings of Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill and Wade Compton’s 49th Parallel Psalm might involve a consideration of the ways they each use the metaphor of border crossing to understand their mixed-race identities.

In the second part of the course we will study a number of stories and poems about characters who are seen to have “crossed a line” in the sense that they have acted in a way that is widely perceived to be transgressive or taboo. Here, for example, we might compare the representation of sexuality in texts as different as Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness, a rock-infused Mennonite coming-of-age story, and Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage, a post-apocalyptic allegory set on Noah’s Ark.

In the final section, the line that is “crossed” has to do with genre. While building on our earlier discussions of race, nationality, and sexuality in contemporary Canadian literature, we will focus on works by Dionne Brand and Anne Carson, both of whom ostentatiously mix genres—poetry, fiction, autobiography, travelogue, opera!—with great effect.

Being Black

The Barry Morgan Show
CJAD, 800 AM
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
2012-02-10

Barry Morgan, Host

Yaba Blay, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Lafayette College

Have you ever heard of the (1)ne Drop Project? I never had until I spoke with its pioneer, Yaba Blay, visiting Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Lafayette College.
 
Blay studied people who identify as black but don’t who don’t exactly look black (many are often mistaken for Latino) to find out how they define their ‘blackness.’
 
She uses portrait documentaries (book and film), photography exhibitions, and public programming for the purpose of raising social awareness and sparking community dialogue about the complexities of Blackness as both an identity and a lived reality.
 
The (1)ne Drop effectively seeks to challenge narrow, yet popular perceptions of what “Blackness” is and what “Blackness” looks like.
 
(1)ne Drop basically hopes to awaken a long-overdue and much needed dialogue about racial identity and skin color politics.

Listen to the interview here.

Author Hill speaks on race, place, and identity at ‘City of Words’ series

University of Toronto, Scharborough
2012-02-06

Kurt Kleiner

Writer Lawrence Hill has always felt attachment to people, not places. Nevertheless, the place he grew up – Don Mills in the early 1960s – shaped him as a person and as a writer.
 
Hill is the best-selling and critically acclaimed author of The Book of Negroes and many other works of fiction and non-fiction. He spoke at UTSC on Feb. 1 about the importance of a sense of place to a writer, about the surprise success of The Book of Negroes, and about the new novel he is just completing.
 
Hill, the son of a black father and a white mother, grew up in an all-white neighborhood. He had good friends, did well in school, played hockey, and usually faced no questions about his racial identity – until suddenly someone would fling a racial slur at him.
 
“I was so confused about who I was and how to perceive myself,” he says. “Nine days out of 10 I’d just be sailing along … It would come out of the blue. But that ambiguity was a great crucible in which to become a writer.”
 
The City of Words reading series is intended to give voice to writers who come from or write about Scarborough. More generally it examines the role of geography in shaping a writer, says Karina Vernon, professor of English at UTSC and lead organizer of the reading series. Not only is Don Mills right next door to Scarborough, but many of Hill’s experiences there are similar to those of people growing up in Scarborough now.
 
“Lawrence Hill is one of the most gifted authors in Canada today, and one of the foremost theorists of the black and mixed-race experience in Canada,” Vernon said as she introduced Hill…

Read the entire article here.

Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes

University of Massachusetts Press
December, 2001
256 pages
6.125 x 9.25
ISBN (paper):  978-1-55849-310-0

Susan Sleeper-Smith, Professor of History
Michigan State University

An innovative study of cultural resilience and resistance in early America

A center of the lucrative fur trade throughout the colonial period, the Great Lakes region was an important site of cultural as well as economic exchange between native and European peoples. In this well-researched study, Susan Sleeper-Smith focuses on an often overlooked aspect of these interactions—the role played by Indian women who married French traders. Drawing on a broad range of primary and secondary sources, she shows how these women used a variety of means to negotiate a middle ground between two disparate cultures. Many were converts to Catholicism who constructed elaborate mixed-blood kinship networks that paralleled those of native society, thus facilitating the integration of Indian and French values. By the mid-eighteenth century, native women had extended these kin linkages to fur trade communities throughout the Great Lakes, not only enhancing access to the region’s highly prized pelts but also ensuring safe transport for other goods. Indian Women and French Men depicts the encounter of Old World and New as an extended process of indigenous adaptation and change rather than one of conflict and inevitable demise. By serving as brokers between those two worlds, Indian women who married French men helped connect the Great Lakes to a larger, expanding transatlantic economy while securing the survival of their own native culture. As such, Sleeper-Smith points out, their experiences illuminate those of other traditional cultures forced to adapt to market-motivated Europeans.

Contents

• Illustrations
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Fish to Furs: The Fur Trade in Illinois Country
• 2. Marie Rouensa and the Jesuits: Conversion, Gender, and Power
• 3. Marie Madeleine Réaume L’archêveque Chevalier and the St. Joseph River Potawatomi
• 4. British Governance in the Western Great Lakes
• 5. Agriculture, Warfare, and Neutrality
• 6. Being Indian and Becoming Catholic
• 7. Hiding in Plain View: Persistence on the Indiana Frontier
• 8. Emigrants and Indians: Michigan’s Mythical Frontier
• Notes
• Index

The New Black

The National Post
Toronto, Canada
The Afterword: Postings from the literary world
2012-02-03

Donna Bailey Nurse

The day after the Giller Awards I had breakfast with a friend at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto. The ceremony had been held there the night before and as I savoured my bagel and lox we discussed Esi Edugyan’s thrilling win for Half-Blood Blues.
 
“She seemed genuinely surprised,” said my friend, who was describing the event, for she had attended the gala and I had not. “She looked gorgeous. Her dress was amazing. Oh look,” she broke off, “there she is!”
 
I turned in my chair to see Edugyan and her husband, Steven Price, being seated at the table behind me. What good luck. I had been hoping to catch up with her at some point to congratulate her in person. Happily, here she was…

…Half-Blood Blues, like Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, has become a bestseller. Some critics are surprised by the wide appeal of these two books, but it makes sense to me. Black stories are popular because they touch on two concerns close to every human heart: the desire for acceptance, to feel as though we belong; and the desire to be free to be who we are meant to be. Black Canadian stories feel quintessentially Canadian. The early novels of Austin Clarke, for example, started a vigorous discussion of hyphenated identities — the idea that we are either Irish-Canadian or Italian-Canadian or black-Canadian or Asian-Canadian, and that being Canadian means being two things (at least) at once.
 
As a literature of the diaspora, black Canadian novels are destined to make their mark: They articulate a language for black experience in an ostensibly post-racial world. Currently, African-American writers and black British writers — and black writers practically everywhere — are attempting to express what it means to be black in a world that claims race doesn’t matter. In this, black Canadian writers have been given a huge head start: Canada has always professed colour blindness…

…Bi-racial heritage is emerging as this literature’s dominant theme. Half-Blood Blues, Lawrence Hill’s Any Known Blood and Kameleon Man are all titles that allude to its significance. Even The Polished Hoe concerns a heroine that is black but looks white. Nearly every major character in Half-Blood Blues is mixed race; not only Afro-German Heiro, but also Sid, who is undoubtedly descended from a slave woman and her master. Chip, as it turns out, may possess Native-American blood.
 
Mixed heritage proves a wonderfully fruitful symbol. It is sometimes used to scrutinize the bi-racial dilemma of being caught between duelling cultures. Or it may address the anxiety fair-skinned blacks may feel about whether or not to pass for white. It can symbolize the struggle of black Canadians to reconcile the African and European aspects of their culture. A turbulent interracial romance may represent the overall challenges of race relations. Bi-racial anxiety and alienation lie at the heart of Half-Blood Blues. Altogether,  the title refers to a song the band records, the characters themselves, and a world where few accept that we are all at least two things at once…

Read the entire article here.

African and American

Science Magazine
Volume 17, Number 418 (1891-02-06)
page 78
DOI: 10.1126/science.ns-17.418.78

At a meeting of the Canadian Institute, Toronto, Jan. 24, Mr. D. R. Keys, M.A., read on behalf of Mr. A. F. Chamberlain, M.A., fellow in Clark University, Worcester, Mass., a valuable and interesting paper entitled “African and American: the Contact of the Negro and the Indian.” He said that the history of the negro on the continent of America has been studied from various points of view, but in every case with regard to his contact with the white race. It must therefore be a new as well as an interesting inquiry, when we endeavor to find out what has been the effect, of the contact of the foreign African with the native American stocks. Such an investigation must extend its lines of research into questions of physiology, psychology, philology, sociology, and mythology.

The writer took up the history of the African negro in America in connection with the various Indian tribes with whom he has come into contact. He referred to the baseless theories of pre-Columbian negro races in America, citing several of these in illustration. He then took up the question ethnographically, beginning with Canada. The. chief contact between African and American in Canada appears to have taken place on one of the Iroquois reservations near Brantford. A few instances have been noticed elsewhere in the various provinces, but they do not appear to have been very numerous. In New England, especially in Massachusetts, considerable miscegenation appears to have taken place, and in some instances it would appear that the Indians were bettered by the admixture of negro blood which they received. The law which held that children of Indian women were born free appears to have favored the taking of Indian wives by negroes.

On Long Island the Montauk and Shinnacook Indians have a large infusion of African blood, dating from the times of slavery in the Northern States. The discovery made by Dr. Brinton, that certain words (numerals) stated by the missionary Pyrlaeus to be Nanticoke Indian were really African (probably obtained from some runaway slave or half-breed), was referred to. In Virginia some little contact of the two races has occurred, and some of the free negroes on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake peninsula show evident traces of Indian blood. The State of Florida was for a long t1ime the home of the Seminoles, who, like the Cherokees, held negroes in slavery, One of their chiefs was said, in 1835, to have had no fewer than one hundred negroes. Here considerable miscegenation has taken place, although the authorities on the subject seem to differ considerably on questions of fact. In the Indian Territory, to which Cherokees, Seminoles, and other Indian tribes of the Atlantic region have been removed, further contact has occurred, and the study of the relations of the Indian and negro in the Indian Territory, when viewed from at sociological standpoint, are of great interest, to the student of history and ethnography. The negro is regarded in a different light by different tribes of American aborigines. After mnentioning a few isolated instances of cointact in other parts of the United States, the writer proceeded to discuss the relations of African and Indian mythology, coming to about the same conclusion as Professor T. Crane, that the Indian bas probably borrowed more from the negro than has the negro from the Indian. The paper concluded with calling the attention of the members of the institute to the necessity of obtaining with all possible speed information regarding (1) the result of intermarriage of Indian an negro, the physiology of the offspring of such unions; (2) the social .status of the negro among the various Indian tribes, the Indian as a slaveholder; (3) the influence of Indian upon negro and of negro upon Indian mythology.

Read the entire article here.