Mixed Race Studies

The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People

University Press of Florida
1996-09-14
352 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-1451-7

Kenneth W. Porter, Professor of History Emeritus
University of Oregon

Edited by:

Alcione M. Amos, Librarian

Thomas P. Senter, M.D.

This story of a remarkable people, the Black Seminoles, and their charismatic leader, Chief John Horse, chronicles their heroic struggle for freedom.

Beginning with the early 1800s, small groups of fugitive slaves living in Florida joined the Seminole Indians (an association that thrived for decades on reciprocal respect and affection). Kenneth Porter traces their fortunes and exploits as they moved across the country and attempted to live first beyond the law, then as loyal servants of it.

He examines the Black Seminole role in the bloody Second Seminole War, when John Horse and his men distinguished themselves as fierce warriors, and their forced removal to the Oklahoma Indian Territory in the 1840s, where John’s leadership ability emerged.

The account includes the Black Seminole exodus in the 1850s to Mexico, their service as border troops for the Mexican government, and their return to Texas in the 1870s, where many of the men scouted for the U.S. Army. Members of their combat-tested unit, never numbering more than 50 men at a time, were awarded four of the sixteen Medals of Honor received by the several thousand Indian scouts in the West.

Porter’s interviews with John Horse’s descendants and acquaintances in the 1940s and 1950s provide eyewitness accounts. When Alcione Amos and Thomas Senter took up the project in the 1980s, they incorporated new information that had since come to light about John Horse and his people.

A powerful and stirring story, The Black Seminoles will appeal especially to readers interested in black history, Indian history, Florida history, and U.S. military history.

Black Indian Slave Narratives

John F. Blair, Publisher
2004
200 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-89587-298-2

Patrick Minges

Few people realize that Native Americans were enslaved right alongside the African Americans in this country. Fewer still realize that many Native Americans owned African Americans and Native Americans from other tribes. Recently, historians have determined that of the 2,193 interviews with former slaves that were collected by the Federal Writers’ Project, 12 percent contain some reference to the interviewees’ being related to or descended from Native Americans. In addition, many of the interviewees make references to their Native American owners. In Black Indian Slave Narratives, Patrick Minges offers the most absorbing of these firsthand testimonies about African American and Native American relationships in the 19th century.

The selections include an interview with Felix Lindsey, who was born in Kentucky of Mvskoke/African heritage and who served as one of the buffalo soldiers who rounded up Geronimo. Chaney Mack, whose father was a “full-blood African” from Liberia and whose mother was a “pure-blood Indian,” gives an in-depth look at both sides of her cultural heritage, including her mother’s visions based on the “night the stars fell” over Alabama. There are stories of Native Americans taken by “nigger stealers,” who found themselves placed on slave-auction blocks alongside their African counterparts.

The narratives in this collection provide insight into the lives of people who lived in complex and dynamically interconnected cultures. The interviews also offer historical details of capture and enslavement, life in the Old South and the Old West, Indian removal, and slavery in the Indian territory.

I wasn’t as dark as I am now, but kind of red-like, and when Geronimo saw me he said, “You ain’t no nigger, you’re an Indian.”

“My father may have been an Indian, but I’m a nigger because that’s the race of my mother, and the race I chose,” I said.

—From Felix Lindsey’s narrative

(ANT/NAS 493): Mixed Blood: Looking at the Relationship Between Africans and Native Americans

Creighton University
Omaha, Nebraska
Fall 2005

Rev. Raymond A. Bucko, S.J., Professor of Anthropology

In this course the relationship between Africans and Native Americans will be explored.  “Africans and Native Americans worked as slaves and as free men together.  Both groups played important role in the shaping of the history of this country and the relationships that had are often overlooked and unknown.

Learning Objectives:

1. Learn and understand the complex relationships between Africans and Native Americans.
2. Examine pre and post-Civil War African and Native relationship.

Texts:

• Katz, William Loren. Black Indians A Hidden Heritage. New York: Anthneum Books for young Readers, 1986.
• Minges, Patrick. Black Indian Slave Narratives. John F. Blair Publisher, 2004.
• Porter, Kenneth W. The Black Indians. Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 1996.

For more information, click here.

Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2007
250 pages

Anne Pollock, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia

Submitted to the Program in Science, Technology and Society In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the History and Social Study of Science and Technology At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This dissertation is an examination of intersections of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease over the course of the 20th century and today. Each of these parts has had a dynamic history, and when they are invoked together they provide a terrain for arguments about interventions in health and in justice in the present.

An enduring aspect of discourses of heart disease over the past century has been articulating connections between characterizations of the modem American way of life and of heart disease. In that process, heart disease research and practice has participated in differentiating Americans, especially by race. This dissertation uses heart disease categories and the drugs prescribed for them as windows into racialized medicine.

The chapters are organized in a way that is roughly chronological, beginning with the emergence of cardiology as a specialty just before World War II and the landmark longitudinal Framingham Heart Study that began shortly thereafter. A central chapter tracks the emergence and mobilization of African American hypertension as a disease category since the 1960s. Two final chapters attend to current racial invocations of two pharmaceuticals: thiazide and BiDil. Using methods from critical historiography of race, anthropology, and science studies, this thesis provides an account of race in medicine with interdisciplinary relevance.

By attending to continuities and discontinuities over the period, this thesis illustrates that race in heart disease research and practice has been a durable preoccupation. Racialized medicine has used epistemologically eclectic notions of race, drawing variously on heterogeneous aspects that are both material and semiotic. This underlying ambiguity is central to the productivity of the recorded category of race. American practices of medicating race have also been mediating it, arbitrating and intervening on new and renewed articulations of inclusion and difference in democratic and racialized American ways of life.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Preoccupations with Racialized Modernity in Early Cardiology
• Chapter 3: Constructing and Supplementing Framingham’s Normal White Americans: The Framingham and Jackson Heart Studies
• Chapter 4: The Durability of African American Hypertension as a Disease Category
• Chapter 5: Thiazide and Racialization of a Generic Drug
• Chapter 6: BiDil: Medi©ating the Intersection of Race and Heart Failure
• Epilogue: Tracking Plural Noninnocent Discourses
• Works Cited

…Early Framingham investigators did their research in an all-white population, but they participated in larger conversations about black/white differences, too. The Framingham investigators themselves participated in the simultaneous constructions of hypertension and African American hypertension in the 1960s, an era that saw the ascendance both of hypertension as a risk factor and of the Civil Rights Movement. Their own study’s lack of inclusion of African Americans did not preclude their participation in arguments about racial differences in hypertension. Addressing “Environmental Factors in Hypertension” in a 1967 publication, the investigators wrote:

The principal population groups among whom blood pressures have been reported to be lower than among Americans and Europeans are various primitive peoples. The sample size has usually been small, especially in the older ages, and conclusions about age trends are complicated both by this fact, and by the fact that it is often not possible to accurately determine the age of the subjects. Among those population groups studied adequately, the following may be said:

Blood pressure distributions are similar among such diverse groups as: Caucasians living in Europe, the United States, and the West Indies; among Chinese living in Taiwan, and among Japanese in Japan.

Negro populations have higher blood pressures than whites living in the same areas and studied by the same investigators, particularly among females and in the older age groups. Distributions of blood pressures among Negro populations living in the United States and in the West Indies, whether rural or urban, high or low salt eaters, are similar. Their blood pressures are higher than those of Negroes in Liberia, a principal source of Negro migration to the Western Hemisphere. Admixture of the Negro races in the Western Hemisphere makes the interpretation of this data difficult. It is in this general background of unencouraging experience that the study of particular environmental factors, which could conceivably affect the blood pressure level, must be approached.

I will return to the question of African American Hypertension as a disease category in Chapter 4, but for now attend to other aspects of this quote. Here, we can see the distance between direct evidence or argument and the invocation of a common sense of racialization of cardiovascular disease. Although their phrasing evokes neutral grammars of data, there are no citations or evidence for these assertions about “Negro populations,” suggesting that the authors conceive of these statements less as arguments than as reflecting the consensus of the field. Unable to grapple with the embodied admixture that is not merely biological but also historical and cultural, much history is paved over in word choices such as “migration” to describe the slave trade and “admixture” to describe oppressive sexual relations under slavery.

Paucity of data is not actually the problem. The investigators make an odd claim about the cause of the difficulty of research into environmental causes of racial disease disparities: that “admixture” gets in the way of interpretation. Logically, assimilation would be the kind of mixing that would pose a problem for separating out environmental causes of disease by race, but the investigators lacked a language for cultural, in addition to biological admixture. The peculiarity of the investigators’ framing should alert us both to the fact of racialized hypertension’s existence at the nexus of the biological and the environmental, and that Framingham is telling both a white story and a universal one…

Read the entire dissertation here.

“Racially-Tailored” Medicine Unraveled

American University Law Review
Volume 55, Number 2 (December 2005)
pages 395-452

Sharona Hoffman, Professor of Law, Professor of Bioethics, and Associate Director of the Law-Medicine Center
Case Western Reserve University School of Law

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• I. “Race-Based” Research and Therapeutic Practices
  • A. The Story of BiDil
  • B. “Race-Based” Research
  • C. A Growing Interest in “Race-Based” Medicine: Why Now?
• II. Does “Race” Mean Anything?
  • A. “Race” in the Medical and Social Sciences
  • B. “Race” and the Law
  • C. Shifting the Focus Away from “Race”
• III. The Dangers of “Racial Profiling” in Medicine
  • A. Medical Mistakes
  • B. Stigmatization and Discrimination
  • C. Exacerbation of Health Disparities
• IV. Violation of Anti-Discrimination Provisions
  • A. Constitution and Federal Civil Rights Laws
  • B. State Laws Prohibiting Discrimination in the Medical Arena
    • 1. Civil rights statutes
    • 2. Hospital and medical facility licensing requirements
    • 3. Patients’ bill of rights laws
    • 4. Public services regulation
    • 5. Insurance codes
  • C. Violation of Research Regulations and Guidelines
    • 1. NIH policy and guidelines
    • 2. Federal research regulations
  • D. Discrimination Theory
• V. Recommendations
  • A. Review of Research Studies by Scientific Review Boards and IRBs
    • 1. Scientific reviews
    • 2. Institutional review boards
  • B. Investigators and Health Care Providers
  • C. Public Discourse Concerning Attribute-Based Medicine:The Responsibilities of Investigators, Institutions, and the Media
• Conclusion

Introduction

F.D.A. Approves a Heart Drug for African-Americans. This June 2005 headline announced the arrival of BiDil, a heart failure edication that is approved for African-Americans only. BiDil is the first drug in pharmaceutical history that will constitute standard therapy for only one particular “race.”Health care professionals are becoming increasingly interested in “racebased” medicine in the research and therapeutic contexts. Many researchers are attempting to discern “racial” differences in disease manifestation, biological functioning, and therapeutic response rates. As this approach develops, physicians may prescribe different dosages of medication for people of separate “races” or may provide them with entirely different drugs. In light of the success of BiDil, investigators are also likely to pursue the development of additional “racially-tailored” medications. In fact, several academic and professional conferences have already devoted significant time to the discussion of “race-based” medicine. On April 18, 2005, the University of Minnesota hosted aconference entitled Proposals for the Responsible Use of Racial & Ethnic Categories in Biomedical Research: Where Do We Go From Here? Likewise, the Eighth World Congress on Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, held in 2004 in Brisbane, Australia, devoted an afternoon to ethnopharmacology.While “racial profiling” in medicine has generated significant discussion in medical and bioethics circles, it has thus far gained relatively little attention in legal literature. This Article aims to develop the discourse concerning this important topic. It argues that “race-based” medicine is an inappropriate and perilous approach. The argument is rooted partly in the fact that the concept of “race” is elusive and has no reliable definition in medical science, the social sciences, and the law.  Does “race” mean color, national origin, continent of origin, culture, or something else? What about the millions of Americans who are of mixed ancestral origins—to what “race” do they belong? To the extent that “race” means “color” in colloquial parlance, should physicians decide what testing to conduct or treatment to provide based simply on their visual judgment of the patient’s skin tone? “Race,” consequently, does not constitute a valid and sensible foundation for research or therapeutic decision-making.

Further, this Article contends that “racial profiling” in medicine can be dangerous to public health and welfare. A focus on “race,” whatever its meaning in the physician’s eye, can lead to medical mistakes if the doctor misjudges the patient’s ancestral identity or fails to recall that a particular condition affects several vulnerable groups and not just one “race.” The phenomenon can also lead to stigmatization and discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere if the public perceives certain “races” as more diseased or more difficult to treat than others. In addition, “racial profiling” could exacerbate health disparities by creating opportunities for health professionals to specialize in treating only one “race” or to provide different and inferior treatment to certain minorities. It could also intensify African-Americans’ distrust of the medical profession. Finally, “race-based” medicine might violate numerous anti-discrimination provisions contained in federal law, state law, and federal research regulations and guidelines…

…The Article will proceed as follows. Part I of the Article will describe “race-based” research and therapeutic practices and will examine the growing interest in “race-based” medicine and the reasons for it. Part II will argue that “race” is a concept that has no coherent meaning and that is potentially pernicious. Part III will focus on the dangers of “raciallytailored” medicine, and Part IV will analyze a variety of anti-discrimination mandates that could potentially be violated by the practice. Finally, Part V will detail recommendations for the development of attribute-based medicine in a manner that will promote the health and welfare of all population groups…

…This Article argues against substantial use of the concept of “race” in medical settings. A primary reason for this restriction is that “race” has no coherent meaning, and therefore, reliance upon it for research or treatment purposes can be confusing at best and can lead to significant adverse consequences at worst. This section will build the argument that based on medical science, the social sciences, and the law, “race” has no reliable definition or real meaning. Moreover, it is a pernicious concept that has been used to suggest that human beings can be divided into subspecies, some of which are morally, intellectually, and physically inferior to others. Thus, medical professionals should focus on more precise and meaningful aspects of human identity rather than on the amorphous concept of “race.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Vanishing American Negro

The American Mercury
Volume LXIV, Number 278 (February 1947)
pages 133-139

Ralph Linton (1893-1953), Professor of Anthropolgy
Yale University

In the question period following any talk on minority problems, someone invariably brings up the query, “What do anthropologists consider to be the long range solution of the Negro problem?” Though I usually avoid this point when I can, I sometimes have to reply that most anthropologists agree there will be no Negro problem in another two hundred years; by then there will not be enough recognizable Negroes left in this country to constitute a problem.

When a New York newspaper headlined this statement in reporting a lecture, the main body of which did not deal with this subject, I found myself quoted with indignation in both the white and Negro press. But I was not disturbed by these repercussions until I was misquoted, and with approval, by Senator Bilbo, who said in a campaign speech:

Dr. Linton . . . stated a few weeks ago that if the present rate of intermingling, intermarriage and interbreeding of whites and blacks in this country goes on . . . within nine generations we will have no whites and no blacks . . . only yellow. … I had rather see my race destroyed by the noted atomic bomb than to see it gradually destroyed by mongrelization of the white and black races.

This convinced me that some amplification and clarification of my statement was necessary.

The prophecy of the ultimate disappearance of the American Negro in the United States is based on three facts. First, while the number of Negroes has been steadily increasing since 1790, when the first Negro census was taken, the white population has increased so much more rapidly that the over-all proportion of Negroes to whites is steadily declining. Second, the Negro is no longer concentrated in the South but is redistributing himself more evenly over the entire country. Third, and most important, the American Negro is steadily becoming lighter…

…But the main reason for believing that the Negro will disappear as a distinct American minority is that the Negro population is becoming lighter with each successive generation. This is not a matter of paling out in a northern climate — it takes thousands ofyears to evolve a new biological type—but of steady infiltration of white blood into the Negro group…

…Miscegenation has been going on since the Negroes first arrived in America. While most of the slaves imported were black Forest Negroes from West Africa, there were also a considerable number from the West Indies, where some race mixture had already taken place. At the beginning of the slave-trade era there were still many Indians in the Southeast, and considerable interbreeding took place between Indians and slaves. Runaway slaves frequently took refuge in the Indian camps, where they were protected and frequently adopted into the tribe. Indian genes began to take the kink out of Negro hair and to thin Negro lips…

Read the entire article here.

The blonde, blue-eyed black man who one goal—racial justice

The News-Times
Danbury, Connecticut
2010-02-24

Antoinette Bosco

Barack Obama has already made history in our nation, becoming the first black candidate ever to be elected to the U.S. presidency.

But, in truth, he is following a path that has long been set by black people before him, who believed in justice and equal rights for all, and worked to get these.

This is Black History Month, a special time to remember this.
 
One of these courageous people, too long forgotten, was Walter White, born 117 years ago, called “the man most responsible for the triumph of racial justice” by Maryknoll Father Albert J. Nevins back in the early 1950s.

This priest had put together a book he called “an anthology of Christian literature,” which he hoped would “give you a little more understanding of our complex world, that it will inspire you to a greater appreciation of the principles for which Christ lived and died.”
 
I found this book, fortunately, at one of the great book fairs put on each year by the Danbury Library.
 
In it Father Nevins had included a piece written by Walter White titled “Why I Remain a Negro.” With a title like that, my curiosity took over immediately.
 
His story began, “I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blonde. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.”…

Read the entire article here.

Ethnographic Pictorialism: Caroline Gurrey’s Hawaiian Types at the Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition

History of Photography
Volume 36, Issue 2 (May 2012)
pages 172-183
DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2012.654943

Heather Waldroup, Associate Professor of Art History
Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina

In 1909, a series of photographs by Honolulu portraitist Caroline Gurrey was exhibited at the Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition (AYPE) in Seattle. The photographs, which combine elements of the Pictorialist style and ethnographic photography, are portraits of young men and women of either Native Hawaiian or mixed-race heritage. The archival record indicates that the photographs were purchased in Honolulu by a member of the Exposition’s administration, and Gurrey’s original intention for them is currently unknown. Nevertheless, the author argues that through their display at the AYPE – an exposition that stressed industry, expansion and commerce as its key themes – Gurrey’s portraits served a significant role in the articulation and visualisation of the Exposition’s central goals and the United States’s desires for settlement of the newly-acquired Territory of Hawaii by bourgeois white agriculturalists.

A portfolio of portraits of Hawaiian teenagers created by Caroline Hawkins Gurrey in 1909 tells a rich story about the intersection of American imperial interests and the persuasive powers of photography in the early twentieth century, Gurrev was already a successful portrait photographer in Honolulu when this portfolio was selected to be exhibited at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacifc Exposition (AYPE) in Seattle during the summer of 1909. She photographed a number of Honolulu’s elite, such as Sanford Dole, using the Pictorialist style, and was known for producing various photographs documenting life in contemporary Hawai‘i. The fifty photographs in the Hawaiian Types’ series—now held at the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives—were chosen and displayed by the AVPE’s administration to illustrate Hawaii’s racial landscape for a very large audience of fairgoer. The photographs’ style which combines tropes of ethnographic photography with the aesthetics of Pictorialism, underscores a key goal ol the AYPE: to combine supposed truth with aesthetic beauty in order to market Hawai‘i to potential settlers of the relatively new American territory…

Read or purchase the article here.

Is the American Negro Becoming Lighter? An Analysis of the Sociological and Biological Trends

American Sociological Review
Volume 13, Number 4 (August, 1948)
pages 437-443

William M. Kephart, Professor of Sociology
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

There is a belief in some quarters that there is a biological solution to the Negro problem; that is, in due course of time there will be no Negro problem because there will be no Negroes. They will have gradually become lighter and lighter, by virtue of the infusion of white blood, and by the preferential mating among Negroes themselves (wherein the light-skinned Ne- groes are the preferred mates), and finally will have disappeared as a minority group. This paper is an attempt to refute this theory, and in addition, perhaps, to bring up to date some of the findings on the Negro skin color.

In a recent article entitled “The Vanishing American Negro,” Ralph Linton maintains that in 200 years the American Negro will have disappeared as a minority group. Dr. Linton bases his assumption on several hypotheses. First, it is maintained that so far as total population is concerned, the overall proportion of Negroes to whites is steadily declining.

This statement needs some amplification. From 1790, when the first census was taken, until fairly recently, it is true that the proportion of Negroes in the total population declined. In 1790, 19.3 per cent of the United States population was Negro, while by 1930 this figure had been virtually halved to 9.7 per cent. This comparative diminution was due not only to a smaller net reproduction rate on the part of the Negro as compared to the white, but also to immigration. Thompson estimates that 38,000,000 immigrants entered the United States between 1820 and 1930, and (he number of Negroes included was negligible. (Since 1808, when African slave importation was prohibited by law, the number of Negroes entering the country has been extremely small.)

By 1930, however, the immigration picture had changed, and by 1940 the effects of this change could be seen in the Negro-White Census figures…

The “Passing” Question

Phylon (1940-1956)
Volume 9, Number 4 (4th Quarter 1948)
pages 336-340

Wm. M. Kephart, Professor of Sociology
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

How many Negroes are ‘passing‘ every year in the United  States?” “What percentage of the White population possesses some Negro blood?” “In time, will all the Negroes ‘pass’?” “What proportion of the present-day Negro population is pure Negro?” “Is it true that many of our so-called White marriages are producing Negro offspring?” “Are some of our top-flight radio and motion picture entertainers really Negroes?”

These questions, or questions of similar implication, have been asked sporadically for the past 200 years. Recently, however, they have broken out afresh. Sinclair Lewis’ best-seller, Kingsblood Royal, persistent rumors concerning some of our most popular entertainers, and finally estimates as to the number of Negroes who “pass” every year, have done much to revive the old questions (and superstitions) regarding the “mysteries” of skin color.

Some of the questions are scientifically answerable, some are unanswerable because of the nature of the data, and some of the questions have only hypothetical answers. Ignoring the answerable questions for a moment, let us examine those questions which either have no present answer, or at best whose answers are problematical.

I. The number of Negroes who annually “pass.”

Walter White, in his “Why I Remain A Negro” states that “Every year approximately 12,000 white-skinned Negroes disappear…” Roi Ottley, in his “Five Million White Negroes” puts the figure at between forty and fifty thousand annually, with a “total” of between five and eight million! Such a wide disparity in figures suggests the real answer, namely, nobody knows.

For obvious reasons, Negroes who do “pass” keep the matter a secret, at least to the Whites. Furthermore, many Negroes who do “pass” do so on a temporary basis; that is, many of them are discovered, move to a new cultural setting, and begin the “passing” procedure over again.

For obvious reasons, Negroes who do “pass” keep the matter a secret, at least to the Whites. Furthermore, many Negroes who do “pass” do so on a temporary basis; that is, many of them are discovered, move to a new cultural setting, and begin the “passing” procedure over again.

It is also true that a great many Negroes who could “pass” do not choose to do so—in some cases because of a genuine pride in their race, and in other cases because they derive more social and economic benefit from being an upper-class Negro than from being a lower-class white. Any attempt to arrive at an accurate figure from U. S. Census figures…