Mixed Race Studies

Can Science Explain the Concept of Race?

PsycCRITIQUES
Volume 57, Release 16 (2012-04-18)
Article 4
5 pages

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

Amed Logrono, Senior Human Biology Major
Brown University

A review of Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture by Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan (Eds.) New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011. 296 pp. ISBN 978-0-231-15697-4 (paperback).

As many have written, genomics has ushered in a new era of disease- and behavior-related research. At the same time, biomedical researchers have become increasingly focused on health disparities. Consequently, when, how, and whether race should be used in medicine has been the topic of an intense, sometime contentious, and very public debate.

Less widely appreciated, though of perhaps even greater consequence, is that during this same period, there has been a radical expansion of DNA technologies for identifying individuals purported to be involved in criminal activities. The stakes in the use of DNA technologies in forensics are, if anything, higher than in the sphere of biomedicine. Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture is a collection of essays, edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan, that address the intersection of race and genomics in several distinct but overlapping and mutually reinforcing spheres. It joins a growing number of books and edited volumes dedicated to exploring the origins and impact of the revitalization of the concept of race among scientists (see, e.g., Epstein, 2007; Roberts, 2011).

Race and the Genetic Revolution provides important insights into some of the most critical and highly charged applications of genomics. An important strength of this timely, engaging, and readable book—and what distinguishes it from some others—is the clarity with which it demonstrates how genomics findings in one discipline such as biomedicine are applied to other disciplines such as psychology, with the assumptions made about race unexamined…

…Although their perspectives vary, the majority of authors in this collection subscribe to the view that race is a social, not a biological, construction. They agree that historical classification systems based on physical and behavioral traits have established a hierarchy of human worth. Though it is not genetically defined, most authors argue that race is socially and politically real, with real social and biological consequences…

…That race is a social, not a genetic, construct is widely acknowledged, though not always well understood. To demonstrate the social nature of race, several authors point to changing classification systems over time and place and to the empirically demonstrated fact that the genetic variation within groups is greater than that between groups. None of the contributors denies the rich genetic variation that characterizes humans; what is at issue for the authors is whether this variation can be categorized scientifically and the uses made of the scientifically constrained data…

Read the entire review here.

Cameron reshuffle brings critic of legal aid cuts into ministry of justice

The Guardian
2012-09-05

Owen Bowcott, Legal Affairs Correspondent

New Conservative minister Helen Grant criticised coalition policy on Guardian website last year

One of the new ministerial appointees to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has previously been highly critical of the government’s key policy decision to axe £350m from the civil legal aid budget.

Helen Grant, Conservative MP for Maidstone and The Weald, practised as a legal aid solicitor for 20 years and established her own firm in Croydon helping clients through family and social welfare cases. On Tuesday, she was made a justice minister.

Writing for the Guardian’s law website last year, as the green paper on legal aid began its passage through the Commons, Grant declared: “Our country’s financial health is a priority, but not at the cost of basic social justice.

“It cannot be right that those most in need of support are left without it … We must ensure we protect those most vulnerable here at home and treat this debate with the care it deserves.” She eventually voted for the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act after it was altered through successive amendments.

Grant, 50, who has a Nigerian father and English mother, should be able to defend herself ably in political infighting: she was under-16 judo champion for the north of England and Scotland. She was briefly a member of the Labour party before becoming the Conservative party’s first black female MP. She has worked with Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice…

Read the entire article here.

Alexander Saxton, Historian and Novelist, Dies at 93

The New York Times
2012-09-01

Paul Vitello

Alexander Saxton, who would go on to become a prominent historian of race in America, summed himself up in a blurb on the dust jacket of his first novel, “Grand Crossing,” published when he was 24.

“At various times,” he said, he had worked as “a harvest hand, construction gang laborer, engine-wiper, freight brakeman, architectural apprentice, assistant to the assistant editor” of a union newspaper, railroad switchman and columnist for The Daily Worker.

Unmentioned were his upbringing on the East Side of Manhattan in a household where Thornton Wilder and Aldous Huxley were frequent dinner guests, and his schooling at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard.

But in his biographical blurb, the young Mr. Saxton accomplished the first of many self-transformations. They included passage from upper-income childhood to working-class adulthood; from Harvard student to Chicago laborer; from novelist to union organizer and Socialist; from activist to academic…

…His contributions as a cultural historian are considered his most enduring.

Mr. Saxton’s first historical book, “The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California,” became a landmark of labor history, describing how 19th- and 20th-century labor unions used racism against Chinese immigrants as a tool for unifying and organizing white union members.

“It challenged one of the foundational stories of the labor movement,” said Eric Foner, a Columbia University professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. “Instead of the story of solidarity and democracy usually told, Saxton showed how racism was one of labor’s most important organizing tools.”

The critical success of the book helped Mr. Saxton establish one of the first Asian-American studies program in the United States at U.C.L.A. in the early 1970s. 

His 1975 paper “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” [March 1975] tracing the links between blackface minstrelsy and the ideology of white supremacy, is considered one of the early texts in black history studies; and a 1990 book, “The Rise and Fall of the White Republic,” is known as one of the foundations of “critical whiteness studies,” an academic field that examines the assumptions underlying “whiteness” as a racial designation and political organizing principle….

Read the entire obituary here.

Helen Grant first black female minister in the UK

Afro-Europe International Blog
2012-09-09

Helen Grant MP has been made a Minister in David Cameron’s Ministerial reshuffle this September. She is now the first female black cabinet Minister in the UK.

Grant, 50, was born in London to an English mother and Nigerian father, but grew up in a single parent family after her parents separated and her father emigrated to the United States…

Read the entire article here.

Mulattos of St. Domingo

General Advertiser
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Wednesday, 1792-03-14 (Number 455)
Souce: Professor of History John Garrigus (University of Texas, Arlington)

Are the motley breed of landholders, gentlemen adventurers, parsimonious merchants, factors, clerks, managers, and plantation-overseers from Europe. The progenitors of this yellow tribe were generally persons who came out from France and other parts of Europe, to make fortunes rapidly, return, and spend them under their native skies. During their stay in this delightful island, the pursuits of avarice were not sufficiently powerful to restrain them wholly from more natural pursuits. No immediate objects of gratification presented but the enslaved African female, who was therefore adopted vice spousa, and while she planted sugar canes on the mountain, or attended a herd of goats in the valley, contributed to people the island with a progeny, who were neither European or African, and felt no attachment to either, further than the interest or the more immediate prospect of advantage dictated.

Natural affection had still some influence where united paternal fondness had been rendered extremely weak from the unequal condition of the progenitors. Mulattoes were generally excused from the labors of the field. They were housekeepers, and clerks; they were houseboys, and poultry men; they were waiters at tables and taverns: they were fishermen, cooks, and turnspits; they were even bound out to mechanical trades, and in the general everything in the line of domestic employment, except field slaves, who are reckoned one of the most degraded classes in the islands, and absolutely placed on a level with the mules that turn the cattle mills…

Read the entire article here.

Afro-Latino/a Identities: Challenges, History, and Perspectives

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Volume 9, Issue 1 (2012-04-20)
Article 5

Sobeira Latorre, Assistant Professor of Spanish
Southern Connecticut State University

Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, editors, The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 584 pp.

The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States explores the contradictions, complexities, and ambiguities surrounding the term “Afro-Latin@.” As editors Juan Flores and Miriam Jiménez Román argue: “The term befuddles us because we are accustomed to thinking of ‘Afro’ and ‘Latin@’ as distinct from each other and mutually exclusive: one is either Black or Latin@” (1). This distinction, as the editors rightly underscore, denies the experience of those who identify themselves or whose experiences mark them as both Black and Latino/a, and who do not fit comfortably into either category. The Afro-Latin@ Reader emerges as a noteworthy and valuable effort to validate that individual experience and to voice, document and historicize the collective experience of Black Latino/as in the US.

The editors of this groundbreaking collection argue that despite the historical relevance and rich cultural legacy of Afro-Latino/as, described as “people of African descent in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and by extension those of African descent in the United States whose origins are in Latin America and the Caribbean” (1), racial paradigms in the US remain rigid and narrow in their definition and the contributions and diverse experiences of this growing population in the United States continue to be understudied. Adopting a multidisciplinary and transnational approach to the study of Afro-descendants of Caribbean and Latin American background in the United States, The Afro-Latin@ Reader makes an invaluable contribution to the fields of Latino/a, Caribbean, African American and African diaspora Studies.

The exploration of the African heritage in the Americas is not a new scholarly topic. Different aspects of the African presence in Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, particularly around music, religion, and other socio-cultural manifestations, have been documented, especially among scholars in disciplines such as history, anthropology, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Studies on individual Latin American and Caribbean countries have also yielded significant insights into the particularities of racial discourse within distinct national contexts. More recently, this exploration is taking place within the context of the United States and has extended to fields like Latino/a, Black/African American, and Ethnic Studies…

Read the entire review here.

Obama’s race still has bearing on media coverage

The Louisiana Weekly
2012-09-04

Nadra Kareem Nittle, Contributing Writer

(Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Maynard Institute) – Long before a little-known Illinois politician ran for president, the mainstream media focused on his race. When he flourished as a presidential candidate four years ago, everyone in America knew that Barack Obama was Black.
 
Have his blackness and extensive coverage of that fact boosted his political career or made it more difficult for him to win re-election? Perhaps surprisingly, some of the nation’s best political minds are divided on this question.
 
Obama’s race dominated media coverage about him before he became president. In 2004, he made headlines for becoming only the third African-American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction. In the 2008 presidential campaign, news stories questioned whether he could connect with African-American voters because he was born to a white Kansan mother and a Black Kenyan father, neither connected to Blacks in America.
 
When Obama became the first Black president, mainstream media portrayed his historic accomplishment as a symbol of a post-racial, colorblind America. That framing is contrary to the experience of millions of African-Americans and other people of color beset by conscious and unconscious bias daily in this country.
 
As Obama’s first term nears its end, the impact of his race in mainstream media coverage remains unclear…

Read the entire article here.

Now, I have always believed that what is now widely considered one of slavery’s worst legacies—the Southern “one-drop” rule that indicted anyone with black blood as a nigger and cleaved American society into black and white with a single stroke—was also slavery’s only upside. Of course I deplore the motive behind the law, which was rooted not only in white paranoia about miscegenation, but in a more practical need to maintain social order by keeping privilege and property in the hands of whites. But by forcing blacks of all complexions and blood percentages into the same boat, the law ironically laid a foundation of black unity that remains in place today. It’s a foundation that allows us to talk abstractly about a ” black community” as concretely as we talk about a black community in Harlem or Chicago or L.A.’s South Central (a liberty that’s often abused or lazily applied in modern discussions of race). And it gives the lightest-skinned among us the assurance of identity that everybody needs to feel grounded and psychologically whole—even whites, whose public non-ethnicity is really ethnicity writ so large and influential it needs no name. Being black may still not be the most advantageous thing in the world, but being nothing or being neutral—the rallying cry of modern-day multiculturalists—has never made any emotional or real-world sense. Color marks you, but your membership in black society also gives you an indestructible house to live in and a bed to rest on. I can’t imagine growing up any other way.

Erin Aubry Kaplan, Black Talk, Blue Thoughts, and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches from a Black Journalista,  (Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2011), 16.

Race Mixture in Nineteenth-Century U.S. and Spanish American Fictions: Gender, Culture, and Nation Building (review)

The Americas
Volume 62, Number 2, October 2005
pages 280-281
DOI: 10.1353/tam.2005.0157

Nancy E. Castro
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Race Mixture in Nineteenth-Century U.S. and Spanish American Fictions: Gender, Culture, and Nation Building. By Debra J. Rosenthal. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. x, 182. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

This study adds to the growing body of scholarship in transamerican studies that, as Rosenthal puts it, “rezones the hemisphere” (p. 1). Her specific contribution focuses on nineteenth-century U.S. and Spanish American narrative, specifically Andean and Cuban works. Its theme, like that of the 2002 critical anthology she co-edited with Monika Kaup, is race mixture or miscegenation, which Rosenthal deems “formative in the history of the Americas primarily in terms of cultural constitution, political organization, nation building, civil identity, and . . . literary expression” (Ibid.). “Racial hybridity,” she argues, “can be situated at the heart of the literature of the Americas” (Ibid.). In that literature, she explains, “mixed-race characters” “somaticize” novelistic dialogism by serving as corporeal sites where “competing discourses of race” meet (p. 11). Rosenthal rightly notes, as have others, “nowhere is the anxiety of miscegenation concentrated greater than in the female body” (Ibid.). Accordingly, women’s emplotment in scripts of cross-racial desire, marriage, and incest figures prominently in the book’s analyses.

The Introduction reviews the terms associated with hybridity in a New World context, explaining why, at the risk of anachronism and mis-translation, “miscegenation,” which implies both sexual union and social taboo, is most apropos for Rosenthal’s study. Chapter 1 reads representations of American Indians by Cooper, Child, Sedgwick, Jackson, and Twain alongside those in Mera’s Cumandá and Matto de Turner’s Aves sin nido, arguing that these authors “based [national] literary sovereignty on Indian-white racial mixing” (p. 18). This chapter brings the Andean literary movements of indianismo and indigenismo to bear on representational shifts in U.S. narratives of the 1820s and 1880s. The most compelling aspects of Rosenthal’s study emerge in this discussion: first, a keen attention to generic conventions and how their deformation or misrecognition adds new twists to authorial deployments of cross-racial themes, and second, an illuminating elucidation of incest motifs in literary mixed-race unions. The remaining chapters focus on black-white race mixture. Chapter 2 explores Whitman’s appropriation of temperance-novel conventions in Franklin Evans, which figures miscegenation as racial intemperance, “a dark blot on the U.S. character and a threat to a healthy U.S. C/constitution” (p. 68). Chapter 3 treats Cuban exile Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s distinctly feminist creole nationalism, apparent in her depiction of Sab, the mulatto namesake of her anti-slavery novel. Chapter 4 provides a lively discussion of Child’s manipulation of the discourse of botanical hybridity, the “language of flowers,” and the literary equation of women’s writing with flora to envision a mixed-race future for the nation in A Romance of the Republic. Finally, Chapter 5 illustrates how William Dean Howells’s generic realism runs aground on An Imperative Duty’s unwitting repetition of the “tragic mulatta” literary topos while contrasting it with Harper’s own appropriation of it in Iola Leroy.

Rosenthal’s book successfully highlights “kinships often difficult to identify when authors are classified exclusively according to national boundaries” (p. 143). Its refreshing juxtapositions render visible texts that are “culturally distinct but narratively analogous” (Ibid.), even if the examples are weighted on the U.S. side. Nonetheless, Rosenthal’s self-identified “appositional” method (p. 14, 21), which focuses on thematic and formal continuities, at times wants for historical contextualization. Rosenthal rightly asserts that “an understanding of race mixture’s impact on the hemisphere’s literary imagination is crucial” (p. 148), but such comprehension requires greater attention to period specifics than her book unevenly provides (Chapter 1 is strongest on this count). An acknowledgment, for instance, that Child’s romance is a Reconstruction text while Howells’s attempt at realism is decidedly a post-Reconstruction “nadir” artifact would have been relevant, as would some recognition that as the…

I’m Chocolate, You’re Vanilla: Raising Healthy Black and Biracial Children in a Race-Conscious World

Jossey-Bass
May 2000
304 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7879-5234-1

Marguerite A. Wright

A child’s concept of race is quite different from that of an adult. Young children perceive skin color as magical—even changeable—and unlike adults, are incapable of understanding adult predjudices surrounding race and racism. Just as children learn to walk and talk, they likewise come to understand race in a series of predictable stages.

Based on Marguerite A. Wright’s research and clinical experience, I’m Chocolate, You’re Vanilla teaches us that the color-blindness of early childhood can, and must, be taken advantage of in order to guide the positive development of a child’s self-esteem.

Wright answers some fundamental questions about children and race including:

• What do children know and understand about the color of their skin?
• When do children understand the concept of race?
• Are there warning signs that a child is being adversely affected by racial prejudice?
• How can adults avoid instilling in children their own negative perceptions and prejudices?
• What can parents do to prepare their children to overcome the racism they are likely to encounter?
• How can schools lessen the impact of racism?
• With wisdom and compassion, I’m Chocolate, You’re Vanilla spells out how to educate black and biracial children about race, while preserving their innate resilience and optimism—the birthright of all children.

Table of Contents

• THAT MAGICAL PLACE: RACE AWARENESS IN THE PRESCHOOL YEARS
  • Chocolate and Vanilla: How Preschoolers See Color and Race
  • How Preschoolers Begin to Learn Racial Attitudes
  • When to Be Concerned That Race Is a Problem for Preschoolers
  • Raising the Racially Healthy Preschooler
• THE WANING OF RACIAL INNOCENCE: THE EARLY SCHOOL YEARS
  • Shades of Brown and Black: How Early Grade-Schoolers See Color and Race
  • Black Children’s Self-Esteem: The Real Deal
  • How School Influences Children’s Awareness of Color and Race
• REALITY BITES: RACE AWARENESS IN MIDDLE CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE
  • Fading to Black and White: How Children in the Middle Years See Race
  • How School Influences Older Children’s Ideas About Race
  • Preparing for Adolescence: The Lines are Drawn
  • A Healthy High School Experience: You Can Make the Difference
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Stages of Race Awareness
• Notes
• About the Author
• Index