Mixed Race Studies

The study adds to established research undercutting old notions of race. You can’t use skin color to classify humans, any more than you can use other complex traits like height, [Sarah] Tishkoff says. “There is so much diversity in Africans that there is no such thing as an African race.”

Ann Gibbons, “New gene variants reveal the evolution of human skin color,” Science, October 12, 2017. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/new-gene-variants-reveal-evolution-human-skin-color.

Today’s census questions misunderstand both Hispanic and white identity

Right now, census data are distorting one of the most transformative population developments of the early 21st century. A sizable and growing number of young people come from families with one white and one minority parent, as more adults form families across racial and ethnic lines. By far the largest group among them have Hispanic and white European ancestry.

But you wouldn’t know that from the 2000 or 2010 Census results. While 2000 was the first to allow Americans to report a multiracial heritage, neither it nor the 2010 Census allowed people to check off both part Hispanic and part something else.

Why? The culprit is that the census examines race and ethnicity with two questions: first, race; and then Hispanic origins. This format was created in accordance with a 1997 Office of Management and Budget memorandum that defined the standards for collecting and classifying ethnic and racial data to which all federal agencies must adhere.

Richard Alba, “There’s a big problem with how the census measures race,” The Washington Post, February 6, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/02/06/theres-a-big-problem-with-how-the-census-measures-race.

African American populations in the U.S. formed primarily by mating between Africans and Europeans over the last 500 years.

Jessica M. Gross, “Tests of fit of historically-informed models of African American Admixture,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, (Volume 165), Issue 2, February 2018, 211. https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23343.

“I was born in the Dominican Republic,” he said. “My work, among many of the things that it wrestles with, wrestles with the kind of, the often invisible and vigorously disavowed, long shadow of enslavement. I’m very much interested in how people like me, who are part of the African Diasporic community, and how do we deal with the consequences of the fallout from the calamity that we call slavery. And most specifically, I’m kind of interested in how do bodies like mine that were raped into existence – our community doesn’t look the way it looks without systematic rape – and so how do communities like ours, with this long history of sexual violence and sexual predation, how do we as a consequence of that wrestle with the possibility of intimacy. In other words, where does love reside in bodies that spent centuries being told that they could not partake in love?” —Junot Diaz (University of Missouri, January 22, 2018)

Sara Shahriari, Abby Ivory-Ganja & Elena Rivera, “Intersection – Author Junot Díaz on Immigration, Empire and White Supremacy,” KBIA 91.3 FM, Columbia, Missouri, February 6, 2018. http://kbia.org/post/intersection-author-junot-d-az-immigration-empire-and-white-supremacy.

A Long Way from Home, Peter Carey’s 14th novel, uses the story of a light-skinned Indigenous Australian who has been brought up white to address the country’s brutal history of racism. It seems strange at first that Carey – surely Australia’s greatest living novelist, even if he hasn’t dwelled there for decades – has taken so long to get around to the subject. In a recent interview in the Australian, he said that he’d always felt that it was not the place of a white writer to tell this tale. Then something changed: “You can’t be a white Australian writer and spend your whole life ignoring the greatest, most important aspect of our history, and that is that we – I – have been the beneficiaries of a genocide.”

Alex Preston, “A Long Way from Home review – Peter Carey’s best novel in decades,” The Guardian, January 15, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/15/a-long-way-from-home-peter-carey-review.

I’m Afro-Boricua. I’m biracial—my mother is white and my father is black, both Puerto Rican. Sometimes people don’t know that I’m black, but I’m black. I was raised in a black family, by my father and grandmother, both unapologetically black and unapologetically Boricua. My sister and I look brown, and our brother looks white. Our white grandmother was racist and threw around the n-word even when referring to us, me and my sister, her grandchildren. She made us feel like we were not part of her white family. But my brother, with his blond hair and his blue eyes, she loved to claim.

My whole life people have tried to tell me who I am or who I’m supposed to be. My whole life people have tried to measure my proximity to whiteness, always asking, What are you?

Jaquira Díaz, “You Do Not Belong Here,” KR Online: Kenyon Review, September 2017. https://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/resistance-change-survival/selections/jaquira-diaz-656342/.

…Many Hispanic families in New Mexico have long known that they had indigenous ancestry, even though some here still call themselves “Spanish” to emphasize their Iberian ties and to differentiate themselves from the state’s 23 federally recognized tribes, as well as from Mexican and other Latin American immigrants.

But genetic testing is offering a glimpse into a more complex story. The DNA of Hispanic people from New Mexico is often in the range of 30 to 40 percent Native American, according to Miguel A. Tórrez, 42, a research technologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and one of New Mexico’s most prominent genealogists.

…“I have Navajo, Chippewa, Greek and Spanish blood lines,” said Mr. Tórrez, who calls himself a mestizo, a term referring to mixed ancestry. “I can’t say I’m indigenous any more than I can say I’m Greek, but it’s both fascinating and disturbing to see how various cultures came together in New Mexico.”…

Simon Romero, “Indian Slavery Once Thrived in New Mexico. Latinos Are Finding Family Ties to It.” The New York Times, January 28, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/28/us/indian-slaves-genizaros.html.

When a white person tells me ‘you’re basically white’, what I really hear is repudiation for wanting to identify with blackness. When my own racial integrity is undermined with this statement, I am told that I should allow myself to be classified by the oppressor. When the history of my ancestors is erased, I ask myself why I should not be allowed to explore the entirety of my history whilst white people alter theirs to pander to their own self-denial. And I fail to understand why they will tell me that I am ‘basically white’ sometimes, but implicitly or explicitly emphasise that I’m ‘brown’ the next.

Sam Kaner, “‘You’re basically white’: my blackness on debate,” Media Diversified, September 11, 2017. https://mediadiversified.org/2017/09/11/youre-basically-white-my-blackness-on-debate.

“Yeah, its wild how the one drop rule is still such a prevalent thing today. I often joke how I’m just as much white as I am black because my whole life I’m the “black friend” or the classic “C’mon Chase you’re not actually black?!” Comments like that are a constant, and in all honesty, every ounce of racism I have faced or will face is all fuel to the fire. I truly believe that being mixed is a privilege. It has allowed me to understand more about different backgrounds and how all races are working towards the very same goal in the end. I sometimes feel like being mixed is a bridge for one culture to start learning about another. Labeling is sustaining racism and things like black history month will constantly hinder us being equal. There is no white history month or Asian history month. We need to start understanding what is marginalizing and how to change it.” —Chase Hall

Sunny Lee, “Chase Hall,” Coveal Magazine, December 5, 2017. https://www.coeval-magazine.com/coeval/chase-hall.

There are mixed race people on both sides of [Corinne] Bailey Rae’s family – she has “brown cousins” on her mum’s English side as well as her dad’s. When she comments on her cousin’s shades, it reminds me that I’ve read that the term she prefers to use to describe herself is “brown” too. “At first we were brown and then we were half-caste and then mixed-race and then dual-heritage and then it was ok to just be black,” says Bailey Rae, obviously aware of the debate around how mixed-race people should define themselves, but disparaging. “I feel like I don’t really have a term if I’m really honest. That’s why I say it [brown] in like an almost silly way. As it’s almost like I’ve been labelled so many different things in the past 38 years that none of them feel familiar or satisfying.”

Charlie Brinkhurst Cuff, “Corinne Bailey Rae on her nomadic lifestyle, racial identity and pregnancy,” gal-dem, October 16, 2017. http://www.gal-dem.com/corinne-bailey-rae-on-her-nomadic-lifestyle-racial-identity-and-pregnancy/.