Mixed Race Studies

The Study of Race

American Anthropologist
Volume 65, Issue 3 (June 1963)
pages 521-531
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1963.65.3.02a00010

S. L. Washburn, Professor of Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley

Delivered as the Presidential address at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, November 16, 1962, in Chicago

The Executive Board has asked me to give my address on the subject of race, and, reluctantly and diffidently, I have agreed to do so. I am not a specialist on this subject. I have never done research on race, but I have taught it for a number of years.

Discussion of the races of man seems to generate endless emotion and confusion. I am under no illusion that this paper can do much to dispel the confusion; it may add to the emotion. The latest information available supports the traditional findings of anthropologists and other social scientists-that there is no scientific basis of any kind for racial discrimination. I think that the way this conclusion has been reached needs to be restated. The continuation of antiquated biological notions in anthropology and the oversimplification of facts weakens the anthropological position. We must realize that great changes have taken place in the study of race over the last 20 years and it is up to us to bring our profession into the forefront of the newer understandings, so that our statements will be authoritative and useful…

…If one were to name a major race, or a primary race, the Bushmen have a far better claim in terms of the archeological record than the Europeans. During the time of glacial advance more than half of the Old World available to man for life was in Africa. The numbers and distributions that we think of as normal and the races whose last results we see today are relics of an earlier and far different time in human history.

There are no three primary races, no three major groups. The idea of three primary races stems from nineteenth-century typology; it is totally misleading to put the black-skinned people of the world together-to put the Australian in the same grouping with the inhabitants of Africa. And there are certainly at least three independent origins of the small, dark people, the Pygmies, and probably more than that. There is no single Pygmy race.

If we look to real history we will always find more than three races, because there are more than three major areas in which the raciation of our species was taking place…

Read the entire article here.

In Arizona, Censoring Questions About Race

The New York Times
2012-04-01

Linda Martín Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy
Hunter College, City University of New York

In recent weeks, the state of Arizona has intensified its attack in its schools on an entire branch of study — critical race theory. Books and literature that, in the state’s view, meet that definition have been said to violate a provision in the state’s law that prohibits lessons “promoting racial resentment.” Officials are currently bringing to bear all their influence in the public school curriculum, going so far as to enter classrooms to confiscate books and other materials and to oversee what can be taught.  After decades of debate over whether we might be able to curtail ever so slightly the proliferation of violent pornography, the censors have managed a quick and thorough coup over educational materials in ethnic studies.

I have been teaching critical race theory for almost 20 years. The phrase signifies quite a sophisticated concept for this crowd to wield, coined as it was by a consortium of theorists across several disciplines to signify the new cutting edge scholarship about race. Why not simply call it “scholarship about race,” you might ask? Because, as the censors might be surprised to find, these theorists want to leave open the question of what race is — if there is such a thing — rather than assuming it as a natural object of inquiry. Far from championing a single-minded program for the purpose of propaganda, the point of critical race theory is to formulate questions about race.

Arizona’s House Bill 2281, which was signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer in May 2010, does not actually mention critical race theory, but the term has been all over the press with a “damning” image from 1990 of Barack Obama, then a Harvard law school student, hugging the law professor Derrick Bell, one of the field’s founders. State Superintendent Tom Horne devised the bill particularly to put a stop to what he describes as the “racist propaganda” of critical race theory, and now other conservatives are sounding the call against what they say is a “deeply disturbing theory.” Perhaps the negative publicity recently produced by the Republican stance on contraception has the party looking for a new target to shore up the base.

What the bill does say may sound to some ears as reasonable. It prohibits courses that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people,” that “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals,” or that are “designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.”  The reality, of course, is that ethnic studies teachers are constantly trying to get students from multiple backgrounds in our classes, and many of us have even endeavored to make these courses required for all. But the other two issues raised by the bill, concerning “resentment” and “ethnic solidarity,” are a bit more complicated…

…Yet those who believe that critical race theory aims to produce ethnic or racial “solidarity” may be surprised to find that most critical race theorists have some skepticism about the existence of race. In this they simply follow the anthropology profession, which declared some 50 years ago that the concept of race is an illusion. In a paper published in 1963, S. L. Washburn, the president of the American Anthropological Association, referred to the concept of race as “an antiquated biological notion.” He and others argued that there is simply no global coherency or consistent social practice in regard to the concept of race, and that the biological status of the term was a sham produced by suspect scientific methods. Character traits we associate with races, including intelligence, are produced, not found. Dividing people by race, others explained, was like identifying slides by the box they came in.

Many people who are familiar with the debates over racism — over its causes, its nature and its solution — may be unaware that the very category of race has been debated for decades, not only among anthropologists but also among biologists, sociologists, social psychologists and even philosophers. Human beings share over 99 percent of our genes across racial groups, and no single gene accounts for anything physical other than eye color, a rather insignificant attribute. Diseases often associated with racial groups are found in other groups, thus making them more likely to be the result of reproductive patterns than some biological foundation. If siblings — who share the largest amount of DNA — can be identified as being of different races because of the way they look (as is common in Latin America and in my own family), how can race be biological? There just is no clear cut way to map our social classifications of race onto a meaningful biological category. Debates today concern how to explain the historical development of the physical traits we associate with races, but nobody with any standing believes that the racial groups named in the Great Chain of Being actually exist. In short, scholars have become quite critical of the concept of race…

Read the entire article here.

The Case for Cablinasian: Multiracial Naming From Plessy to Tiger Woods

Communication Theory
Volume 22, Issue 1 (February 2012)
pages 92–111
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2885.2011.01399.x

LeiLani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communication
University of Washington, Seattle

This article advocates for the interdisciplinary use of critical race theory and critical rhetorical theory in communication to analyze racialized language and to evaluate the cultural and political significance of new racial discourses in the United States. The article examines the dissenting opinion in Plessy v Ferguson (1896) and the congressional hearings on the Tiger Woods Bill (1997), two key instances of public debate over multiracial categories. The article then turns to Tiger Woods’ term “Cablinasian” and the possibilities of an alternative and contestory multiracial nomenclature, shifting the critique away from Woods’ celebrity or politics and toward the legal history and rhetorical potential of the word itself.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Birth of the Mestizo in New Spain

The Hispanic American Historical Review
Volume 19, Number 2 (May, 1939)
pages 161-184

C. E. Marshall

No colonizing nation of modern times has had, perhaps, a more interesting and significant history than Spain in the new world. Protestant commercial England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries built up a largely self-sufficing economic empire. Catholic medieval Spain created an empire inhabited by races of many colors. In the English colonies of North America, the Indians were brushed aside by land-hungry settlers who quickly took away their land and shot down their wild game. In the Spanish colonies the fate of the natives was far different. For the Spanish conquest of America, somewhat like the Norman conquest of England, had as its unique result the essential fusion of conqueror and conquered in the creation of a new society. It is estimated that, at the close of three centuries of Spanish rule, the total population in Spanish America was 16,910,000. Of these 7,530,000 were Indians; 5,328,000 were of mixed blood; 3,276,000 were white and 776,000 were Negroes.

Obviously such a society did not come into existence full-grown like Athena from the head of Zeus. It certainly is not to be explained in terms of unrestrained economic exploitation and ruthless extermination of aboriginal inhabitants by colonizing whites. It was owing rather to complex religious, social, economic, political, and geographical factors which in Spanish America brought the Spaniards and Negroes into intimate contacts with the Indians, mitigated the asperities of that contact, and made the readjustments necessary to a new environment a relatively easy and natural process. To describe this process is not only to explain the origin of a new race of mixed blood and cast much light upon the history of modern Hispanic America. It is not only to write an important chapter in the history of those abiding phenomena which…

Criollo, Mestizo, Mulato, LatiNegro, Indígena, White, or Black? The US Hispanic/Latino Population and Multiple Responses in the 2000 Census

American Journal of Public Health
Volume 90, Number 11 (November 2000)
pages 1724-1727

Hortensia Amaro, Distinguished Professor of Health Sciences and of Counseling Psychology
Bouve College of Health Sciences
Northeastern University

Ruth E. Zambrana, Profesor of Womens Studies
University of Maryland

Current dialogues on changes in collecting race and ethnicity data have not considered the complexity of tabulating multiple race responses among Hispanics. Racial and ethnic identification—and its public reporting–among Hispanics/Latinos in the United States is embedded in dynamic social factors. Ignoring these factors leads to significant problems in interpreting data and understanding the relationship of race, ethnicity, and health among Hispanics/Latinos. In the flurry of activity to resolve challenges posed by multiple race responses, we must remember the larger issue that looms in the foreground—the lack of adequate estimates of mortality and health conditions affecting Hispanics/Latinos. The implications are deemed important because Hispanics/Latinos will become the largest minority group in the United States within the next decade.

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The Racial Distribution of Nephritis and Hypertension in Panama

The American Journal of Pathology
Volume 21, Number 6 (November 1945)
pages 1031-1046

Carl E. Taylor

In Panama a large scale natural experiment on the pathogenesis of human hypertension awaits scientific interpretation. The studies of Kean and of Marvin and Smith have demonstrated the presence of fairly distinct racial groups, living in contiguity and subjected to similar environmental factors, in which there is a striking difference in the incidence of hypertension. The native Panamanians, originally were Indian, but in the past 300 years there has been added to this stock the blood of Spaniards and other Europeans together with their Negro slaves. This apparently composite ethnologic group is actually fairly clearly defined in language, customs, and appearance. Relatively pureblooded Negroes were imported to Panama from the West Indian Islands for construction work on the Canal 30 to 40 years ago and with their descendants they form another rather distinct group. These racial groups were defined by Kean as follows: ‘A ‘Panamania’ is one born in Panama whose parents were both born in Panama,” and “a ”West Indian’ is a Negro who was either born in the West Indies of West Indian parentage or whose parents both were born in the West Indies.” A third racial group is made up of Caucasians, most of whom are United States citizens.

In examining 1,328 candidates for employment with the Panama Canal, Kean found that hypertension was seven times as common in the West Indians as in the Panamanians; this difference was especially marked in the younger age groups in which the ratio of Negro to Panamanian hypertensive patients ranged as high as 16 to 1. In a group of almost 2,000 pregnant females he found hypertension to be five times as frequent in the West Indians as in the Panamanians. In over 2,000 consecutive hospital admissions Marvin and Smith found that hypertension was about eight times as common in the West Indians as in the Panamanians.

Phillips found a high incidence of hypertension in Negroes in Jamaica. It is the consensus of studies 4-6 of the racial incidence of hypertension in the United States that American Negroes have about twice as much hypertension as whites. Many factors have been considered in attempting to explain this difference. Heredity has been discounted because of Donnison’s report of the relatively low blood pressure found in African Negroes living under primitive conditions. These authors suggested that hypertension in the Negro may be caused in some way by adjustment to a new civilization and a new environment.

Shattuck has reported that the Indians of Guatemala and of Yucatan have relative hypertension and that blood pressure in the mestizo or mixed racial groups was somewhat higher. Kean, in a survey of the relatively isolated Cuna Indians living on the San Blas Islands off the coast of Panama, observed that the average blood pressure of 407 adult Indians was 105mm. of Hg systolic and 69 diastolic; not a single case of hypertension was found.

The generally recognized correlation between hypertension and nephritis suggested that an analysis of the racial distribution of nephritis in Panama might contribute to our understanding of the problem…

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For Asian-American Couples, a Tie That Binds

The New York Times
2012-03-30

Rachel L. Swarns

WHEN she was a philosophy student at Harvard College eight years ago, Liane Young never thought twice about all the interracial couples who flitted across campus, arm and arm, hand in hand. Most of her Asian friends had white boyfriends or girlfriends. In her social circles, it was simply the way of the world.

But today, the majority of Ms. Young’s Asian-American friends on Facebook have Asian-American husbands or wives. And Ms. Young, a Boston-born granddaughter of Chinese immigrants, is married to a Harvard medical student who loves skiing and the Pittsburgh Steelers and just happens to have been born in Fujian Province in China.

Ms. Young said she hadn’t been searching for a boyfriend with an Asian background. They met by chance at a nightclub in Boston, and she is delighted by how completely right it feels. They have taken lessons together in Cantonese (which she speaks) and Mandarin (which he speaks), and they hope to pass along those languages when they have children someday.

“We want Chinese culture to be a part of our lives and our kids’ lives,” said Ms. Young, 29, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College who married Xin Gao, 27, last year. “It’s another part of our marriage that we’re excited to tackle together.”

Interracial marriage rates are at an all-time high in the United States, with the percentage of couples exchanging vows across the color line more than doubling over the last 30 years. But Asian-Americans are bucking that trend, increasingly choosing their soul mates from among their own expanding community…

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Religion and Racial Identity in the Movimento Negro of the Roman Catholic Church in Brazil

Iliff School of Theology and The University of Denver (Colorado Seminary)
June 1995
302 pages

Alan Doyle Myatt

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculties of The Iliff School of Theology and The University of Denver (Colorado Seminary) In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

This project is a study of the interaction of religion with the process of racial identity construction in the black movement within the Brazilian Roman Catholic Church. The fundamental problem facing the movement is how to construct a viable black identity in the midst of a social situation filled with ambiguity and opposition. The process of this social construction of racial identity is the key problem explored in this dissertation.

The multi-racial polity of Brazilian society includes many racial designations for Brazilians of African descent. These identities are supported by the notions of Racial Democracy and whitening. Racial democracy is the idea that Brazilian society contains very little racial prejudice and discrimination. Whitening is the doctrine that the extensive racial mixing in Brazil has the effect of creating an increasingly whiter society. The social status of blacks may allegedly be improved through whitening. In this context very few Brazilians choose to identify themselves as blacks.

The study uses Berger and Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge and James Scott’s theory of the resistance of subordinate peoples to domination as its theoretical framework. The thesis argued is that the movimento negro is attempting to build a black identity by drawing on the history of black resistance that has been largely hidden, and constructing a new universe of meaning. The movement draws upon liberation theology, traditional Roman Catholicism, and Afro-Brazilian religions to achieve this. The research was based on field work in Brazil and focused on the analysis of interviews with movement activists as well as movement publications, documents, and videos. Long interviews were conducted according to a prepared guide, but in an open-ended fashion.

It was found that the notions of racial democracy and whitening are not plausible and that they act to inhibit blacks from overcoming problems due to racial discrimination. It was also determined that Afro-Brazilian religions, Catholicism, and liberation theology provide resources that enable movement activists to create a new racial identity, involving an essentialist notion of blackness, that did not previously exist. The conclusion that religion is an important resource in resistance to domination was supported.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• 1. RELIGION, RACIAL IDENTITY AND THE MOVIMENTO NEGRO: THEORY AND METHOD
• 2. THE HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT OF THE MOVIMENTO NEGRO: DEFINING THE BRAZILIAN RACIAL ETHOS
• 3. THE MOVIMENTO NEGRO IN THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH: ORIGINS AND ORGANIZATION
• 4. THE DAILY STRUGGLE: PERSPECTIVES FROM WITHIN THE MOVIMENTO
• 5. THE CONSTRUCTION OF RACIAL IDENTITY AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL REALITY
• 6. CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• APPENDIX 1: INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
• APPENDIX 2: EXCERPT FROM AGENTES DE PASTORAL NEGROS: ORIGEM, HISTÓRIA E ORGANIZAÇÃO

CHAPTER 1: RELIGION, RACIAL IDENTITY AND THE MOVIMENTO NEGRO: THEORY AND METHOD

The struggle for social justice has been the dominant theme of the various theologies of liberation originating in Latin America and now spread throughout the world. While liberation theology has traditionally focused on issues of economic justice defined in terms of class conflict, more recently liberation theology has been influential in the rise of feminist and black theologies in North America. This trend has also become apparent in Latin America where in 1984 a conference called “Conference on Black Culture and Theology in Latin America” was held by the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (ASETT). The proceedings were published under the title Identidade Negra e Religião: Consulta sobre Cultura Negra e Teologia na América Latina (Black Identity and Religion: Conference on Black Culture and Theology in Latin America- ASETT 1986). The conference and book provide an example of the activity of black theologians and lay  people wrestling with the racial situation in Latin America and the implications of liberation theology when this situation is considered.

The Conference on Black Culture and Theology in Latin America was held in São Paulo with about two-thirds of the participants being Brazilian (ASETT 1986, 13, 79-80). This was a natural location as São Paulo serves as the center of the movimento negro (black movement) that has developed in the Roman Catholic Church of Brazil since the late 1970s. This study will focus on the movimento negro in the Roman Catholic Church of Brazil, documenting its origins and discussing its struggle to sustain an agenda for black liberation…

…An outline of the ethical ethos of race relations in Brazil will provide an essential context for understanding the movimento negro in Brazilian Catholicism. An exposition of this ethos will be given in chapter two. Meanwhile the two central aspects of this ethos, “racial democracy” and “whitening,” must be introduced here as a necessary prelude to the theoretical and methodological considerations that form the bulk of this chapter.

Racial democracy is the notion that Brazilian society is relatively free from the racial prejudice, discrimination, and tension found historically in the United States, South Africa, and other western nations. Supporters of this view indicate as evidence in its favor Brazil’s alleged peaceful abolition of slavery, the supposed lack of racial violence, the prominence of blacks in Brazilian historical and literary works, the absence of “Jim Crow” or apartheid laws, and the pervasive miscegenation of Brazilian society (Freyre 1986, 1963a; Degler 1986; Freire-Maia 1987; Fiola 1990).

The presence of widespread miscegenation is itself fundamental to the notion of branqueamento or “whitening” (Marcos Silva 1990, 60ff; Skidmore 1993; Fiola 1990). It is alleged that through the mixing of the various peoples of Brazil, the population as a whole is becoming more white and so being “purified” (Skidmore 1985, 13-14). Beyond the idea of biological change in the composition of Brazilian society there are also notions of social whitening. In the social sense it is said that being white is more valued than being black, leading people to adopt white values and attempt to marry lighter skinned partners (Fiola 1990).

Numerous challenges to the racial democracy and whitening theses have been raised in recent years. As will be shown in a subsequent discussion, these notions can no longer be sustained under scholarly critique. However, black activists go a step further in contending that racial democracy and whitening theories have been deliberately perpetrated by Brazilian elites in order to preserve white superiority. I will argue that racial democracy and whitening are ideologies that are widespread in Brazil and may be said to form a socially constructed ethos of race relations that is still largely accepted by many Brazilians. This ethos forms the critical aspect of the context in which the black movement in Brazil has arisen…

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Shifting Race-Consciousness Matrix and the Multiracial Category Movement: A Critical Reply to Professor Hernandez

Boston College Third World Law Journal
Volume 20, Issue 2 (May 2000)
pages 231-289

Reginald Leamon Robinson, Professor of Law
Howard University

In this article, the author posits that race as an idea begins with consciousness that reinforces that race is real and immutable. The Multiracial Category Movement can shift our race consciousness away from traditional ways of thinking, talking, and using race. The Movement moves us beyond binary race thinking, and this new thinking shifts the extant race consciousness matrix. It also frees our consciousness so that we can personally and politically acknowledge our biracial and multiracial identities, and it perforce alters the traditional political meaning of race. Legal scholars like Professor Tanya Hernandez argue for the political meaning of race against a remediating balm against the color-blind jurisprudence, weakening of civil right protections, and pigmentocracy. While these new identities can promote color-blind jurisprudence by conservatives and pigmentocracy by those fleeing the oppressive constraints of traditional racial categories, the author argues against Hernandez and for the Movement’s paradigm shifting possibilities.

Read the entire article here.

Berlin Film Festival: Critics hail new Bob Marley documentary

The Telegraph
2012-02-16

Critics at the Berlin Film Festival have been unanimous in their praise of Kevin Macdonald’s new documentary ‘Marley’, which some have called the definitive biography of the reggae singer.

Oscar-winning documentary maker Kevin Macdonald has made what critics are calling the definitive biography of reggae legend Bob Marley, aided by the singer’s family and record label who have given the project their blessing.

The first authorised film of his life had its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, and while questions about Marley remain, it goes some way to revealing the man behind the myth.

“I just felt like there weren’t any good films about him and a lot of misinformation,” Macdonald told Reuters this week…

…The film explores how Marley, who died of cancer in 1981 aged 36, was troubled by his mixed-race heritage, which was the source of bullying when he was a child. It also looks at how his many affairs and children out of wedlock took its toll on wife Rita and their daughter Cedella.
 
Marley had 11 children by seven mothers, according to several accounts of his life…

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