Mixed Race Studies

The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium

Stanford University Press
February 2011
312 pages
23 illustrations
Cloth ISBN-10: 0804756295; ISBN-13: 9780804756297
Paper ISBN-10: 0804756309; ISBN-13: 9780804756303

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Stanford University, Stanford, California

Cover Photo: “Baby Halfie Brown Head”, from artist Lezley Saar’s, Mulatto Nation (2003) art installation.

The Souls of Mixed Folk examines representations of mixed race in literature and the arts that redefine new millennial aesthetics and politics. Focusing on black-white mixes, Elam analyzes expressive works—novels, drama, graphic narrative, late-night television, art installations—as artistic rejoinders to the perception that post-Civil Rights politics are bereft and post-Black art is apolitical. Reorienting attention to the cultural invention of mixed race from the social sciences to the humanities, Elam considers the creative work of Lezley Saar, Aaron McGruder, Nate Creekmore, Danzy Senna, Colson Whitehead, Emily Raboteau, Carl Hancock Rux, and Dave Chappelle. All these writers and artists address mixed race as both an aesthetic challenge and a social concern, and together, they gesture toward a poetics of social justice for the “mulatto millennium.”

The Souls of Mixed Folk seeks a middle way between competing hagiographic and apocalyptic impulses in mixed race scholarship, between those who proselytize mixed race as the great hallelujah to the “race problem” and those who can only hear the alarmist bells of civil rights destruction. Both approaches can obscure some of the more critically astute engagements with new millennial iterations of mixed race by the multi-generic cohort of contemporary writers, artists, and performers discussed in this book. The Souls of Mixed Folk offers case studies of their creative work in an effort to expand the contemporary idiom about mixed race in the so-called post-race moment, asking how might new millennial expressive forms suggest an aesthetics of mixed race? And how might such an aesthetics productively reimagine the relations between race, art, and social equity in the twenty-first century?

Read an excerpt of “Obama’s Mixed Race Politics” here.

Can the “one-drop rule” tell us anything about racial discrimination? New evidence from the multiple race question on the 2000 Census

Labour Economics
Volume 16, Issue 4 (August 2009)
pages 451-460
DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2009.01.003

Robert W. Fairlie, Professor of Economics
University of California, Santa Cruz

The inclusion of multiple race information for the first time in the 2000 Census allows for a novel test for the presence of labor discrimination using the “one-drop rule.” Identifying discrimination is straightforward and essentially relies on the discontinuous nature of the one-drop rule, which treats biracial blacks similarly as monoracial blacks. If biracial blacks have levels of unmeasurable and measurable human capital that lie between the levels of monoracial blacks and whites then, absent discrimination, their wages should also lie between the wages of the two groups. Estimates from the Census indicate that biracial blacks have levels of education that lie almost perfectly between monoracial blacks and whites. In contrast, however, biracial blacks have wages that are roughly similar to monoracial blacks after controlling for education and potential work experience. Estimates from the 1980 Census also do not indicate that the parental characteristics and educational outcomes of biracial children differ from what would be expected by having both black and white parents. Several additional factors that potentially affect the human capital of biracial adults are explored. These findings provide some suggestive evidence on the “one drop rule” and the presence of discrimination in the labor market and provide new estimates of wages and educational levels of biracial blacks.

Read the entire article here.

Turkish descendants of African slaves begin to discover their identity

The National
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
2012-09-01

Piotr Zalewski

No one knows how many Afro-Turks there are but, in a country that’s beginning to acknowledge its great diversity, they’re beginning to unearth their forgotten history.

In 1961, Ertekin Azerturk, a Turkish businessman from Istanbul, placed a long-distance call. The voice of the switchboard operator who answered—a woman’s voice, sweet and crisp, like a singer’s—must have made his head spin. Must have, because from that day on, Azerturk insisted on speaking to the same operator each time he picked up the phone. During one call he found the gumption to ask his mystery girl out on a date. Her reply was as surprising to him as his request was to her. “No way,” Tomris, the operator, told Azerturk. “You won’t like me,” she explained, “because I’m dark.”

But Azerturk didn’t back down and Tomris eventually gave in. When they met, he was dumbstruck. He had understood Tomris was dark, but had never figured she would be black. (He had never previously met or even heard of a Turk who was.) Tomris was, like her voice, striking, and Azerturk was smitten. Over the Azerturk family’s objections, the pair married.

…As a child, Muge could not fully grasp why her skin was the colour it was—or why it should matter. She finally learnt, and understood, the truth in her teens. She and her brother were descendants, three generations removed, of black slaves…

Read the entire article here.

In Their Parents’ Voices: Reflections on Raising Transracial Adoptees

Columbia University Press
October 2007
240 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-14136-9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-231-14137-6

Rita J. Simon, University Professor Emerita
Department of Justice, Law and Society
American University, Washington, D.C.

Rhonda M. Roorda

Rita J. Simon and Rhonda M. Roorda’s In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories shared the experiences of twenty-four black and biracial children who had been adopted into white families in the late 1960s and 70s. The book has since become a standard resource for families and practitioners, and now, in this sequel, we hear from the parents of these remarkable families and learn what it was like for them to raise children across racial and cultural lines.

These candid interviews shed light on the issues these parents encountered, what part race played during thirty plus years of parenting, what they learned about themselves, and whether they would recommend transracial adoption to others. Combining trenchant historical and political data with absorbing firsthand accounts, Simon and Roorda once more bring an academic and human dimension to the literature on transracial adoption.

Book Review: Race in a Bottle

GeneWatch
Council for Responsible Genetics
Volume 26 Issue 1, March 2013

Lundy Braun, Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence and Professor of Medical Science and Africana Studies
Brown University

In Race in a Bottle, Jonathan Kahn tracks the contentious history of BiDil, the first drug targeted specifically to African Americans. Ironically, race-based drug treatment emerged in the wake of the sequencing of the human genome, a project that theoretically promised both to scientifically refute the notion of genetically distinct racial groups and to usher in an era of personalized medicine. Though hyped by researchers, the FDA, and the press as an important first step toward personalized medicine, BiDil is a drug administered to patients based on their membership in a group…

…Critical to Kahn’s argument regarding evidence is the fact that the clinical trials on which the company based its patent application for BiDil were never designed to compare racial difference in response to the drug. Using “care of the data” as an organizing theme, Kahn highlights one of the many troubling aspects of this controversy: the extraordinarily loose, if not sloppy, construction of what passed as evidence in the patent application and FDA hearings. From the use of misleading statistics on mortality from heart failure in African Americans, to the failure to define the central variable of race, to the design of a clinical trial (A-HeFT) that included only African Americans (and therefore could not determine differential efficacy) to the lack of any mechanistic understanding for a differential effect, Kahn shows that attention to the data was consistently problematic when it came to matters of race. The chapter on the FDA hearings is particularly illuminating…

Read the entire review here.

In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories

Columbia University Press
April 2000
480 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-231-11829-3

Rita J. Simon, University Professor Emerita
Department of Justice, Law and Society
American University, Washington, D.C.

Rhonda M. Roorda

 
Nearly forty years after researchers first sought to determine the effects, if any, on children adopted by families whose racial or ethnic background differed from their own, the debate over transracial adoption continues. In this collection of interviews conducted with black and biracial young adults who were adopted by white parents, the authors present the personal stories of two dozen individuals who hail from a wide range of religious, economic, political, and professional backgrounds. How does the experience affect their racial and social identities, their choice of friends and marital partners, and their lifestyles? In addition to interviews, the book includes overviews of both the history and current legal status of transracial adoption.

The Case for Transracial Adoption

American University Press
1994
150 pages
6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
Paperback ISBN-10: 1879383209; ISBN-13: 978-1879383203

Rita J. Simon, University Professor Emerita
Department of Justice, Law and Society
American University, Washington, D.C.

Howard Altstein, Professor of Social Work
University of Maryland, Baltimore

Marygold S. Melli, Professor of Law Emerita
University of Wisconsin Law School

This timely study analyzes the issue of adoptions that cross racial and national lines, and assesses their success and appropriateness. The book’s centerpiece is a comprehensive long-term study of the transracial adoption conducted by Rita Simon and Howard Altstein, the result of twenty years of research and analysis. The authors discuss the case often made against transracial adoption and explain the laws that govern these adoptions.

Indigo: Shelly Jyoti and Laura Kina

Curated by Greg Lunceford and Lanny Silverman
2013-01-26 through 2013-04-27

Opening Reception: Friday, 2013-01-25, 17:30-19:30 CST (Local Time)
Chicago Cultural Center
The Chicago Rooms
78 E. Washington Street
Chicago, Illinois 60638

Shelly Jyoti, Visual Artist, Fashion Designer, Poet, Researcher and Independent Curator

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design
DePaul University

Employing fair trade artisans from women’s collectives in India and executing their works in indigo blue, Indian artist Shelly Jyoti and US artist Laura Kina’s works draw upon India’s history, narratives of immigration and transnational economic interchanges.

Artist talk with Shelly Jyoti, Laura Kina, and Pushipika Frietas, President of MarketPlace: Handwork of India
The Chicago Rooms
Thursday, 2013-01-31 12:15 CST (Local Time)

• View the exhibition catalog online.
• Download a PDF of the brochure Indigo: Shelly Jyoti and Laura Kina Chicago Cultural Center.
• Watch the 2010 video on youtube Indigo: New works by Shelly Jyoti and Laura Kina.
• View opening night and installation photographs.

More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order

Temple University Press
December 2001
280 pages
7×10; 1 figure
Paperback: EAN: 978-1-56639-909-8, ISBN: 1-56639-909-2

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California at Santa Barbara

In the United States, anyone with even a trace of African American ancestry has been considered black. Even as the twenty-first century opens, a racial hierarchy still prevents people of color, including individuals of mixed race, from enjoying the same privileges as Euro-Americans. In this book, G. Reginald Daniel argues that we are at a cross-roads, with members of a new multiracial movement pointing the way toward equality.

Tracing the centuries-long evolution of Eurocentrism, a concept geared to protecting white racial purity and social privilege, Daniel shows how race has been constructed and regulated in the United States.  The so-called one-drop rule (i.e., hypodescent) obligated individuals to identify as black or white, in effect erasing mixed-race individuals from the social landscape. For most of our history, many mixed-race individuals of African American descent have attempted to acquire the socioeconomic benefits of being white by forming separate enclaves or “passing.”  By the 1990s, however, interracial marriages became increasingly common, and multiracial individuals became increasingly political, demanding institutional changes that would recognize the reality of multiple racial backgrounds and challenging white racial privilege.

More Than Black? regards the crumbling of the old racial order as an opportunity for substantially more than an improvement in U.S. race relations; it offers no less than a radical transformation of the nation’s racial consciousness and the practice of democracy.

Read the introduction here.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
  • Part I: White Over Black
  • 1. Eurocentrism: The Origin of the Master Racial Project
  • 2. Either Black or White: The United State and the Binary Racial Project
• Part II: Black No More
  • 3. White by Definition: Multiracial Identity and the Binary Racial Project
  • 4. Black by Law: Multiracial Identity and the Ternary Racial Project
• Part III: More than Black
  • 5. The New Multiracial Identity: Both Black and White
  • 6. The New Multiracial Identity: Neither Black nor White
  • 7. Black by Popular Demand: Multiracial Identity and the Decennial Census
• Part IV: Black No More or More than Black?
  • 8. The Illusion of Inclusion : From White Domination to White Hegemony
  • 9. The New Millennium: Toward a New Master Racial Project
• Epilogue: Beyond Black or White: A New United States Racial Project
• Notes
• Index

Genetic Background of Patients from a University Medical Center in Manhattan: Implications for Personalized Medicine

PLoS ONE: A peer-reviewed, open access journal
Volume 6, Number 5 (2011-05-04)
11 pages
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0019166

Bamidele O. Tayo
Department of Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology
Loyola University Chicago
Stritch School of Medicine, Maywood, Illinois

Marie Teil
Charles R. Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine
Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, New York

Liping Tong
Department of Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology
Loyola University Chicago
Stritch School of Medicine, Maywood, Illinois

Huaizhen Qin
Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology
Case Western University, Cleveland, Ohio

Gregory Khitrov
Charles R. Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine
Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, New York

Weijia Zhang
Charles R. Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine
Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, New York

Quinbin Song
Charles R. Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine
Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, New York

Omri Gottesman
Charles R. Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine
Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, New York

Xiaofeng Zhu
Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology
Case Western University, Cleveland, Ohio

Alexandre C. Pereira
University of Sao Paulo Medical School, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Richard S. Cooper
Department of Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology
Loyola University Chicago
Stritch School of Medicine, Maywood, Illinois

Erwin P. Bottinger
Charles R. Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine
Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, New York

Background

The rapid progress currently being made in genomic science has created interest in potential clinical applications; however, formal translational research has been limited thus far. Studies of population genetics have demonstrated substantial variation in allele frequencies and haplotype structure at loci of medical relevance and the genetic background of patient cohorts may often be complex.

Methods and Findings

To describe the heterogeneity in an unselected clinical sample we used the Affymetrix 6.0 gene array chip to genotype self-identified European Americans (N = 326), African Americans (N = 324) and Hispanics (N = 327) from the medical practice of Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, NY. Additional data from US minority groups and Brazil were used for external comparison. Substantial variation in ancestral origin was observed for both African Americans and Hispanics; data from the latter group overlapped with both Mexican Americans and Brazilians in the external data sets. A pooled analysis of the African Americans and Hispanics from NY demonstrated a broad continuum of ancestral origin making classification by race/ethnicity uninformative. Selected loci harboring variants associated with medical traits and drug response confirmed substantial within- and between-group heterogeneity.

Conclusion

As a consequence of these complementary levels of heterogeneity group labels offered no guidance at the individual level. These findings demonstrate the complexity involved in clinical translation of the results from genome-wide association studies and suggest that in the genomic era conventional racial/ethnic labels are of little value.

Read the entire article here in HTML or PDF format.