Mixed Race Studies

The claims of modern genetics notwithstanding, race remains a biologically meaningless concept of human categorization. Race simply has no traceable genetic essence, and the proliferation of racial DNA testing represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of race rather than the neutral application of scientific principles.

Christian B. Sundquist, “The Meaning of Race in the DNA Era: Science, History and the Law,” The Temple Journal of Science, Technology & Environmental Law, Volume 27, Number 2 (Fall 2008): 233.

Why Obama is Black: Language, Law and Structures of Power

Columbia Journal of Race and Law
Volume 1, Issue 3
pages 468-481

SpearIt, Assistant Professor of Law
Saint Louis University

[W]ords are our tools, and, as a minimum we should use clean tools: we should know what we mean and what we do not, and we must forearm ourselves against the traps that language sets us. –J. L. Austin

When he filled out the race section of the 2010 U.S. Census survey, President Barack Obama checked the “Black, African Am., or Negro” box despite the fact that Obama is of both European-American and African ancestry. This simple fact raises a number of complicated questions and challenges the idea that race, or more properly, racism, is a thing of the past or “post” as used in “post-racial.” “Post-racial” is rhetoric for an ideology that promotes “a larger national and legal consensus that ignores the bulk of racial disparities, inequities, and imbalances in society, and pursues race-neutral remedies as a fundamental, a priori value.” Ironically, the ideology garners support from Obama’s presidential election in 2008, which launched widespread reports that the country elected its first “black” president. For many, the election provided concrete proof of improved race relations. Such believers epitomized Obama’s election as fulfilling the American promise; for others, however, he symbolized a formidable challenge to the “post-racial” posture. Hence, although the term “post” intends to point to the past, it is really about the future, a destination that has yet to be achieved. It is a way of wishing away the present and supplanting it with an idealized future. Under such pretentions, “post-racial” reflects a desire to identify with something more sublime than the status quo.

Framing Obama as a poster for “post-racial” suffers from various defects. The most fundamental is the assumption that he is “black” in the first place. Although the decision that the president indeed is “black” is practically unanimous, such a conclusion neglects his “white” heritage. President Obama could have checked black and white on the census survey, but he passed on the option. This decision raises unsettling questions for post-racial ideologues. Rather than signal arrival into the post-racial age, however, his choice on the survey could be read as a denial of whiteness or an unfair response given the survey’s purposes, which imply an obligation to represent oneself based on parental lineage as opposed to racial ideology. But what if Obama’s logic led him to identify as “white”? For many this proposition would not ring true. Yet Obama’s self-identification as “black” raises no protest. Why the double standard? Of course the question itself is rhetorical—because a rigorous baseline logic is already at play.

Although Obama’s story is not the only forceful challenge to the “post racial” concept, it affords a solid frame to consider the merits and myths. A sober read of Tea Party rhetoric and the Henry Louis Gates episode indicate that talk of “post-racial” is premature, a point further exclaimed by the resignation of Shirley Sherrod. Far from relegating racism to the back burner, events since Obama’s election have stoked racial flames and revealed that race still matters. His presidential victory might have ignited widespread faith in a “post-racial” era, but a more pessimistic read would render it a backlash from the country’s collective guilt over the Bush regime that moved voters to “reject the party of an unpopular president.” The election may have helped herald in an era of wishful thinking called “post-racial,” yet its logic, paradoxically enough, was governed by the rule of hypodescent, which can drown an oceanic man in the tide of one drop.

What follows is a critique of the “post-racial” ideology. It begins with “Language and Law,” which provides a theoretical backdrop to map how law influences common language, and more importantly, how concepts rooted in racism maintain in the American lexicon through the force of law. The next section, “White by Law,” analyzes the legal and social constructions of whiteness, a historical survey that arrives at constructions in the American context. Building from the previous parts, “Structures of Racism,” outlines how racial language and ideals of white superiority work in tandem to produce structural racism, that is, racism beyond individual bigotry. Today’s racism is not simply the aggregate of individual interactions; rather, the discrimination resides in the institutions and polity of American society, particularly in the language of law. The last section, “Beyond Binaries and Reinscribed Racism,” is a normative venture that offers ideas for stemming the force of these linguistic and conceptual burdens. Centuries of racial sedimentation have made some aspects of racism invisible to the eye, yet an analysis of the post-racial concept shows that debates on race and color are fundamentally flawed. This Essay exposes the concept as a type of wishful thinking, and more critically, how the law prevents this wish from being fulfilled.

Read the entire article here.

Signifying on Passing: (Post) Post-Racialism, (Post) Post-Modernism, and (Post) Post-Marxism

Columbia Journal of Race and Law
Volume 1, Issue 3 (July 2012)
pages 482-489

Christian B. Sundquist, Associate Professor of Law
Albany Law School

The social and legal relevance of racial passing appears to be fading as we ostensibly enter a color-blind, post-race era. During the “Age of Obama,” the notion of passing in our multi-racial society seems to many to be antiquated and unnecessary. As the nation has moved beyond state-sanctioned racial discrimination, many believe that the country also has moved beyond the need for a legal dialogue on racial passing and ambiguity. This “retreat from race,” exemplified in part by the apparent declining significance of racial passing, proclaims that the state no longer should consider race when interpreting the law or incorporating democratic values of equality and opportunity. This Essay, however, argues that the continued phenomenon of racial passing can be utilized as a conceptual vehicle to destabilize and de-legitimatize the post-racial agenda.

The continuing relevance of racial passing also underscores the significance of the lessons of Marxism. After all, the concept of “race,” and therefore the existence of racial passing, traces its lineage to the capitalist condition of racialized class distinctions and cultural hegemony (e.g., the white cultural norm). The post-racial agenda seeks to mask the commodification of persons, obscuring the salience of race and discrimination. Thus, the cry for a post-racial America is the latest attempt to lure society into a false sense of class and racial transformation. The continued presence of racial passing may lift the veil from our eyes to the conditions of racial and class exploitation that govern everyday life.

This Essay will proceed in three parts. The first section argues that the particular weltanschauung of post-racialism has obfuscated the continuing relevance of racial difference and conflict. The post-racial model seeks to skew the proletariat perception of social reality by imposing a false-consciousness that conceals existing relations of racial subordination and exploitation. In so doing, post-racialism strives to reject its theoretical Other: Marxism. However, the failings of post-racialism as a worldview are traced directly to its inability to refute the continuing salience of class and racial conflict. The second part of the Essay explores the similarities and differences between the post-racial model and the classic liberal colorblind model. The third part of the Essay concludes that the continuing relevance of racial passing should be utilized to reveal and disrupt the post-racial agenda…

Read the entire article here.

The Meaning of Race in the DNA Era: Science, History and the Law

The Temple Journal of Science, Technology & Environmental Law
Volume 27, Number 2 (Fall 2008)
pages 231-265

Christian B. Sundquist, Associate Professor of Law
Albany Law School

INTRODUCTION

What is “race”? Does the concept of race represent a natural and inevitable understanding of human difference? Does race have any biological meaning, or is it merely an artificial construct employed by society and political bodies? If race is the former, then how can modern society avoid a rebirth of racial eugenics? And yet if race is an arbitrary tool of social organization without genetic content, then how should we interpret purported forensic racial determinations based on DNA analyses?

Race is biology. Race is ancestry. Race is genetic.

The meaning of “race” is constantly questioned yet rarely understood. Early theories of race assigned social, intellectual, and moral values to perceived differences among groups of people. The perception that race should be defined in terms of genetic and biologic difference fueled the “race science” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during which time geneticists, physiognomists, eugenicists, anthropologists and others purported to find scientific justification for denying equal treatment to non-“white” persons.

Part I of this article thus examines the provenance of the “race” concept. The categorization of humans into “racial” groups was neither natural nor inevitable. The initial separation of humans into “racial” categories was understood to simply reflect inherent biological differences between groups of people. These differences supposedly accounted for natural variances in intelligence, morality, and physical and sexual prowess. As such, these pseudo-biological differences were used to justify and explain power differentials between “races” of people.

Race is constructed. Race is biologically meaningless. Race is power.

The pseudo-scientific understandings of race supplied by nineteenth-century geneticists and biologists were applied by Nazi Germany in a manner that shocked the world. As a result, the concept of race following World War II increasingly was understood as a socio-political construction with no biological meaning. Modern sociological theories thus uniformly understand race as a social grouping of persons necessary to preserve unbalanced relationships of power. Part II of this article examines this post-war refutation of nineteenth-century “race science,” as well as the core assumptions underlying modern racial theory.

Race is phenotype. Race is color. Race is language. Race is citizenship. Race is class. Race is culture. Race is assimilation. Race is law.

Reducing race to a single critical “essence” is an impossible endeavor. While one’s phenotype and color may contribute to racial categorization, so can one’s national origin, social class and language. As a result, race has a complex social meaning that depends in part on the prevailing “common understanding and meaning” of society. Not-so-antiquated notions of race once deemed Italian, Irish and Southern European immigrants and their descendants as “non-white” and cursed with inferior genetic stock. These groups eventually obtained “Whiteness” based on changing social understandings of their assimilatory potential, and the formation of a racial identity defined in opposition to “Blackness.” The elusive nature of race is similarly illustrated by the conflict between the legal racialization of Middle Eastern and Mexican persons as “white” during certain historical periods, and the social racialization of these persons as “non-white” and racially distinct during other times.

Race is subjective. Race is objective. Race is whiteness. Race is blackness. Race is fixed. Race is malleable. Race is performance.

Race is constantly in flux depending on one’s baseline understanding of the nature of race. I am black according to certain understandings of race, while other interpretations may render me white. I am Latino, Creole, Egyptian, and “other” according to some outsider interpretations of race, yet I can also be reduced to “mixed” by utilizing an alternative understanding of race. Outsider perceptions of race in turn may change according to my performance of race, and how race is performed around me.
Race is biology.

Race is ancestry. Race is genetic.

Notwithstanding the post-war rejection of a biological interpretation of race, modern genetic science has increasingly claimed the ability to identify “race” through the biological analysis of DNA samples. Law enforcement agencies in the United States and elsewhere analyze individual DNA samples to identify the likely “race” of a criminal suspect, while courts in the United States increasingly admit expert testimony stating the statistical probability that a criminal suspect belongs to a specific race based on such DNA analyses. Such a re-biologicalization of race clearly contradicts the classical post-war theory of race as a social construct. Part III of this article examines the contemporary re-interpretation of race as having some biologically traceable genetic essence.

Race is constructed. Race is biologically meaningless. Race is power.

The claims of modern genetics notwithstanding, race remains a biologically meaningless concept of human categorization. Race simply has no traceable genetic essence, and the proliferation of racial DNA testing represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of race rather than the neutral application of scientific principles. Part IV of this article argues that contemporary genetics has misapprehended the elusive nature of race in a manner strikingly similar to that of the nineteenth-century race science…

Read the entire article here.

Review of Fatal Invention, by Professor Dorothy Roberts

Race and the Law: A Critical Examination of Science, Law and the Construction of Race
2011-12-07

Christian B. Sundquist, Associate Professor of Law
Albany Law School

Professor Dorothy Roberts has recently released a vitally important book on issues of race and genetics, entitled Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011). Professor Roberts thoughtfully engages the modern legal and scientific preoccupation with genetic theories of race. Examining the “new racial science” in a variety of contexts, including pharmacology, biomedical research, immigration screening, criminal justice, ancestry testing, and genetic surveillance, Professor Roberts deconstructs the myth of intrinsic racial difference through a lively use of historical and scientific sources. While the entire book is a massive achievement in the burgeoning field of genetics and race, a few insights stand out as particularly compelling. First, Professor Roberts makes a convincing argument that it is problematic to label the racial science of yore “pseudoscience.” It is quite tempting to ridicule both the old and new forms of racial science as ignorant and biased attempts to valorize racial hierarchy. Professor Roberts notes, however, that doing so allows modern scientists to distinguish their “objective” study of biological racial difference from the ridiculous “pseudoscience” of the past. Professor Roberts observes that “what we call racial pseudoscience today was considered the vanguard of scientific progress at the time it was practiced.” (27-28). In other words, we must be careful to briskly dismiss the “racial science” of the 19^th Century as pseudoscience, lest we fall into the trap (comforting to some) of believing that current genetic examinations of racial difference are somehow distinctly free from unsound empirical assumptions and implicit bias. As Professor Roberts argues, “[t]he burning scientific questions of each period have been framed and answered in terms of race not because rational scientific inquiry compelled it, but because race was presumed to be an essential biological category.” (28)…

Read the entire review here.

The “Brown Tinge”

Evening Post, Wellington, New Zealand
Volume CVI, Issue 46
1928-08-31
page 11
Source: Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa

Future New Zealanders

“Science and history will both some day demand an explanation of the brown tinge in the future New Zealander,” said Sir Apirana Ngata in his address to the Wellington branch of the New Zealand Historical Association last evening. The present offered a unique opportunity for the study of miscegenation by means of genealogical data. The extent to which the mixture of blood had proceeded during the past four or five generations might be gauged with almost mathematical accuracy, if the genealogical method were applied to the problem. For the present and the last generation or two, other interesting problems might be elucidated by the study of the charts where the mixture of breeds was shown.

Thus the effect of miscegenation on virility, constitution, longevity, intellectuality, and morality might be gauged at first hand. Some loose generalisations, as, for instance, that the half-caste partook of the vices of the two races without the virtues of either, might be checked with the facts. Light might even be cast on aspects of Mendelism. The Scotch-Māori, the Irish-Māori, the English-Māori, the German-Māori, the Danish-Māori, the Dalmatian-Māori, the Negro-Māori, the Portuguese-Māori, and, in the present generation, the Hindu-Māori and the Chinese-Māori marriages might all be found on record. In the generation following the first crossing of pure-bloods (it that term could be used) bewildering inter-mixtures of half-breeds with half-breeds of any ot these stocks, of half-breeds with purebloods on either side, of half with quarter, or other fractional breeds might still be patiently pursued by the research student. Dr. Condliffe had expressed the hope that through the mixture of blood the Māori would add another element of romance and daring and poetry that would make the people of New Zealand different even from their kindred peoples in other parts of the Empire. If history should come to register such a result it should not miss the opportunity now offered or tracing the steps towards its attainment.

The Future Is Now: What PR Pros and Marketers Need to Know About the “Mixed Mindset”

The Huffington Post
2012-10-17

Marcia Dawkins, Clinical Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Southern California, Annenberg

Don’t believe the hype! Multiracials are not new. They are the products of racial blending of various groups—beginning with Native Americans and European settlers–throughout US history. Multiracial identities have been leveraged for social and anti-social purposes since the dawn of print media. Even in today’s networked world we are still figuring out how this “full color” demographic fits into a historically black-and-white racial context.

Welcome to the second decade of the 21st century and to the era of the “Mixed Mindset,” which is highly mediated, intensely personal, and increasingly political. On one hand, the Mixed Mindset represents a step backward – into the history of mixing that predates a black-white only mentality. On the other hand, the Mixed Mindset represents a step forward—it’s about everyday contact and practical encounters that acknowledge racial categories, disturb racial common sense, and create a mindset within which it is okay to name and question racial meanings. The logical end of the mixed mindset is a space where many racial categories and meanings can exist simultaneously, even if they’re contradictory, making it more difficult to maintain neat and independent groupings.

Here’s how that works. The Mixed Mindset is about answering questions like “who are you?” and “what do you need?” Here are a few facts about who today’s multiracials are based on how they answered the 2010 US Census.

But to keep things moving, let’s turn our attention to what today’s multiracials are saying they need. I call these needs the three As: Adaptation, Acknowledgment and Affection…

Read the entire article here.

Millionaire to Use Money Against Racial Inetermingling

The Natchez News and Courier
Natchez, Mississippi
1949-11-13

James McLean

NATCHEZ. Miss, Nov. 12. Bald, rugged George W. Armstrong is determined to make his money talk loud and long against “racial mongrelization”.

That’s a term the 84-year-old millionaire uses often in voicing opposition to intermingling of Jews, Gentiles and negroes In the same schools.

Armstrong, who says he isn’t sure how much money he has, splashed into headlines when money-poor Jefferson Military College spurned his $50,000,000 endowment offer (in mineral land rights) to teach “superiority of the Anglo-Saxon and Latin American races”.

Later he dismissed the furore his offer created as a “tempest in a teapot”, said the value of his holdings had been exaggerated, and that although he approves the doctrine of white supremacy, he had not made a formal request that the college teach it…

…Governor J. Strom Thurmond, the states rights candidate, repudiated his support, he explained. “I’m not anti-Semitic,” Armstrong said, in his slow, lip-pursing way of talking. “We’ve got some awfully good Jews here in Natchez and I like them.” But he assails Jews, whites and negroes going to school together because it “mongrelizes the American race.”…

Read the entire article here.

Afraid of the Dark

RaceFiles: On Race and Racism in our Politics and Daily Lives
2012-10-15

Scot Nakagawa, Senior Partner
ChangeLab

Reports of rapid demographic change in favor of people of color in the U.S. seem to have caused a reaction among many whites bordering on panic. Explosive increases in participation in white nationalist groups, the proliferation of vigilante border patrols, and the return of overt racism in mainstream politics all smell like fear to me. This reaction got me to thinking, why? Why are they so afraid of the possibility of becoming a minority?
 
Here’s my take. But first, a reality check. White fears are of becoming a minority are over-blown. As I’ve written elsewhere in this blog, whiteness has shifted to envelope those formerly deemed non-white many times throughout history. The Irish weren’t always considered white, nor were Jews. They were included among whites in order to maintain white advantage.
 
As racial demographics shift, so-called white Hispanics and certain Asian American ethnic minorities are likely to be enveloped by whiteness. Whether we think of ourselves as white or not, accepting the privileges already being extended to us—being cast as the “good immigrants” or buying into the idea that Asians are a “model minority” relative to so-called “problem minorities,” for instance—will put us on the wrong side of the color line. And when the stakes are so high, we can hope folks won’t take the bribe, but I wouldn’t advise betting on it.
 
So white folks can rest easy. Armageddon is probably still a way off…

Read the entire article here.

St. Stephen’s launches book about struggles with identity

City Centre Mirror
Toronto, Canada
2012-10-17

Justin Skinner

A group of talented young men and women from St. Stephen’s Community House are hoping their own experiences can help other youth navigate the stereotypes and challenges of growing up biracial.

St. Stephen’s has launched a new book titled It’s Not All Black and White: Multiracial Youth Speak Out, which contains poems, short stories and interviews with multiracial writers.

The book delves into the young authors’ own feelings and life experiences as they struggled with issues of identity.

“Growing up and being mixed race, when I’d hang out with my white friends they’d say I act too black and when I’d hang out with my black friends they’d say I act too white,” said contributor Bianca Craven…

Read the entire article here.