Mixed Race Studies

When no one else looks like you

Cable News Network (CNN)
In America: You define America. What defines you?
2012-12-15

(CNN) – “Who is Black in America?” explores how color affects identity. In this video, Danielle Ayers, a biracial woman, discusses her search for identity and the challenges of being color blind after growing up in a primarily white Mennonite community where race was not discussed.

How Personalized Medicine Became Genetic, and Racial: Werner Kalow and the Formations of Pharmacogenetics

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Volume 68, Number 1, January 2013
pages 1-48
DOI: 10.1093/jhmas/jrr046

David S. Jones, A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine
Harvard University

Physicians have long puzzled over a well-known phenomenon: different patients respond differently to the same treatment. Although many explanations exist, pharmacogenetics has now captured the medical imagination. While this might seem part of the broader interest in all things genetic, the early history of pharmacogenetics reveals the specific factors that contributed to the emergence of genetics within pharmacology. This paper examines the work of one pioneering pharmacologist, Werner Kalow, to trace the evolving intellectual formations of pharmacogenetics and, in particular, the focus on race. Working in the 1950s and 1960s, Kalow made three arguments to demonstrate the relevance of genetics to pharmacology, based on laboratory techniques, analogies to differences between other animal species, and appeals to the logic of natural selection. After contributing to the emergence of the field, Kalow maintained his advocacy for pharmacogenetics for four decades, collecting more evidence for its relevance, navigating controversies about race and science, and balancing genetics against other possible explanations of patient variability. Kalow’s work demonstrates the deep roots of the genetic and racial preoccupations in pharmacology. Understanding this history can restore attention to other explanations of individuality in medical practice, something of increasing importance given the current interest in personalized medicine.

Read the entire article here.

Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law (Davis review)

Journal of the History of Sexuality
Volume 22, Number 1, January 2013
pages 163-165
DOI: 10.1353/sex.2013.0012

Rebecca L. Davis, Associate Professor of History
University of Delaware

Campaigns to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples have inspired activists, journalists, scholars, and others to look to the history of interracial marriage for comparisons. Fay Botham’s new book appears as one consequence of these interests. Frustrated by the Roman Catholic hierarchy’s refusal to countenance marriage for same-sex partners in the early twenty-first century, Botham details the Roman Catholic Church’s relatively progressive attitude toward interracial marriage in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. She notes as well the pernicious influence of southern Protestant beliefs about racial differences to the history of interracial marriage in the United States. Historians need works that probe these intersections among religion, race, sexuality, and American culture. Unfortunately, this book’s flaws limit its usefulness.

Almighty God Created the Races tries to answer two related but distinct questions: First, how did religious ideas and arguments shape antimiscegenation laws in the United States? Second, what role did American ideals of religious freedom play in the campaign to end restrictions on interracial marriage? Botham argues that religion was determinative in both cases. Southern Protestant ideas about racial separateness undergirded the defense of slavery and subsequent rationales for banning interracial sex and marriage. “The attorneys and judges who argued for antimiscegenation laws,” she contends, “employed Protestant theologies of marriage and separate races to bolster their legal arguments” (131). Given the overwhelming predominance of Protestants on the bench, that claim hardly seems surprising, but Botham’s contribution is to tease out how deeply certain Protestant theological interpretations penetrated American jurisprudence on marriage. Botham argues that, by contrast, Roman Catholic doctrines of racial equality and marital freedom proved crucial to a court case that laid the groundwork for the eventual dismantling of state bans on interracial marriage. These arguments give too much causative weight to theology at the expense of social, cultural, and political history, but they nevertheless result in some insights.

Botham begins with an intriguing premise: that we owe the ultimate dismantling of antimiscegenation laws in the United States to Roman Catholic theologies of marriage and race. In 1947 a county clerk in Los Angeles denied Sylvester Davis Jr. and Andrea Perez a marriage license because Davis was identified as African American and Perez, whose family was of Mexican ancestry, was considered white. Davis and Perez, who were Catholic, hired Daniel Marshall, a lawyer who was both Catholic and liberal, to take their case to the California Supreme Court. Marshall argued that California’s antimiscegenation law denied the religious freedoms of interracial Catholic couples who wanted to participate in what Catholic theology defined as the holy sacrament of marriage. Chief Justice Roger Traynor, who wrote the majority opinion in Perez v. Sharp (which Botham identifies by its less common name, Perez v. Lippold), largely ignored Marshall’s first amendment argument; Botham concedes that “religious freedom . . . did not even make a ‘blip’ on Traynor’s ‘radar screen’ in terms of having any real importance to the case” (42). Botham is intrigued, however, by a concurring opinion, in which one justice agreed with Marshall that the first amendment protected the rights of interracial Catholic couples to marry. Botham argues that because the concurring opinion tipped the court to a 4–3 majority, the case “pivot[ed] on the axis of religious liberty” (49).

More plausible is the argument that Peggy Pascoe made in What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America: that Marshall prevailed in Perez in spite of his religious liberty arguments. Marshall instead piqued the court’s interest when he pointed out that most of the cases that the state of California cited as precedence for its antimiscegenation law were steeped in the increasingly discredited logic of race science. As Botham notes, Marshall pressed this point with comparisons to the race science employed in Nazi Germany; the lawyer for the state strained to explain why interracial marriages produced offspring…

The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatán

Stanford University Press
2009
456 pages
39 tables, 4 figures, 13 illustrations, 11 maps.
Cloth ISBN: 9780804749831

Matthew Restall, Professor of Latin American History and Director of Latin American Studies
Pennsylvania State University

The Black Middle is the first full-length study of black African slaves and other people of African descent in the Spanish colonial province of Yucatán, which is today part of southern Mexico. The study is based on Spanish and Maya-language documents from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, found in a dozen different archives (mostly in Spain and Mexico). Restall’s goal is to discover what life was like for a people hitherto ignored by historians. He explores such topics as slavery and freedom, militia service and family life, bigamy and witchcraft, and the ways in which Afro-Yucatecáns (as he dubs them) interacted with Mayas and Spaniards. He concludes that in numerous ways, Afro-Yucatecans lived and worked in a middle space between—but closely connected to—Mayas and Spaniards. The book’s “black middle” thesis has profound implications for the study of Africans throughout the Americas.

Jackie Kay @ 5×15

5×15
2012-10-16

Jackie Kay, Professor of Creative Writing
Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Five speakers, fifteen minutes each. True stories of passion, obsession and adventure recounted live with just two rules: no scripts and only fifteen minutes each.

The Red Dust Road

Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and Nigerian father. She was adopted by a white couple at birth and was brought up in Glasgow, studying at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and Stirling University. Her experiences of growing up inspired her first collection of poetry, The Adoption Papers (1991), which won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award. Her other collections include Other Lovers (1993), Off Colour (1998), Darling: New and Selected Poems (2007) and The Lamplighter (2008). Her collection of poetry for children, Red, Cherry Red (2007) won the 2008 CLPE Poetry Award. Her first novel, Trumpet, published in 1998, was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Award. She has also published three collections of short stories: Why Don’t You Stop Talking (2002), Wish I Was Here (2006) and her latest book, Reality, Reality (2012). Her memoir Red Dust Road (2010), a memoir about meeting her Nigerian birth father, which was short-listed for the 2011 PEN/Ackerley Prize. Jackie Kay was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 2006.

Black Mom + Indian Dad = Search for Identity

Ebony Magazine
2012-12-17

Sharda Sekaran

Sharda Sekaran can’t deny her East Indian roots, but she can’t find them either

It was my senior year of college. I sat at the end of a long oval table in a meeting room in one of the academic buildings. Surrounding me on either side were professors from different departments. Some of them I’d taken classes from, but most I had not. They were interviewing me for a fellowship for which I’d been nominated. It was a very selective process, and only three other students from my school were up for it.

I’m generally okay speaking under pressure in front of a group, but I was absolutely terrified. The professors asked my about my identity—my understanding of who I am and where I came from. I felt paralyzed by fear, and stumbled like a desperate entertainer trying to keep the audience on her side.

I could see the crestfallen face of a religion professor whom I knew wanted to like me. She watched helplessly as I spewed out one badly composed thought after another. I knew what I was saying was complete junk. I tried to distract them with academic buzzwords: “dichotomy,” “paradox,” “equilibrium,” “organic…” Nothing. All I conveyed about my identity was that I had no clue about it.

It was my own fault. The fellowship was based on self-discovery through theme-related travel for a year. The subject was meant to be of personal significance, but maybe I’d taken it too far. My topic was the gaping hole of my family grief—a search for the missing half of my cultural ancestry.

My proposal was to examine my hybrid African-American/Indian identity by studying the impact of Bollywood on the Indian Diaspora (my personal connection being, my father’s from India and my mother is African-American). I’d go to countries with Creole Indian/African mixed populations to observe how popular cinema impacted people’s idea of what makes them “Indian.”

I thought it was a good idea for a project; so did a lot of others. Thus, I found myself at the end of that table of professors. But when the panel asked me questions about Indian culture, basic things that any person with an Indian family should know, I drew blanks.

I might have saved myself by admitting that I had no relationship with my Indian-born father. He abandoned our family when I was a toddler and left me without a dad or any ties to his family. All I inherited was an Indian name and physical features that could belong in South Asia. My family history had ambiguity, but also enough clues about my origins to constantly leave me answering questions and explaining a story that’s sensitive as a wound whenever I’m forced to recount it…

Read the entire article here.

An Eagle Eye in Harlem

narratively: Local. Original. Organic. In-Depth.
2012-12-10

Jenni Monet

From Malcolm X Boulevard to pow-wow road trips, a black man from Georgia adopts a Cherokee persona despite questionable ties to any Native American roots.

Robert Banks’ one-bedroom flat is lavishly decorated with Native American artwork—sculptures and dreamcatchers that the 71-year-old Georgia native created himself. On his kitchen cupboards are hand-painted feathers with tips of burnt-orange. A grand self-portrait hangs above Banks’ dark green velvet couch, where he often sifts through pictures of his past—a family he says descends from Cherokee Indians…

Produced, shot and edited by Jenni Monet, a multimedia journalist telling stories about NYC, Native Americans and the Indigenous.

I believe that identity is two-fold—how we view ourselves and how others view us. And these views are informed by the racialized and sexualized violence of our past. To talk about contemporary identity also involves talking about the history of race in this country. There is a reason that Obama identifies as black not biracial, much of it has to do with society seeing him as first and foremost a black man. How can we understand and move this country toward real progress if we ignore race, and how as mixed race individuals can we deconstruct categories all together, rather than just create new ones?

Lindsay C. Harris, “The Color of Colorblind: Exploring Mixed Race Identity,” Vitamin W: Your Daily Dose of Women’s News, Philanthropy & Business, (December 12, 2012). http://vitaminw.co/society/color-colorblind-exploring-mixed-race-identity.

ANTH 206 American Indian Societies (FOLK 230)

University of North Carolina
Summer 2013

Why do American Indians have casinos and reservations? Who is an Indian? How do Indians feel about American history? What kinds of futures do young Indians imagine for themselves and their tribes, and how can a non-Indian participate in and contribute to building this future? Prepare for a great ride through the vigorous discussions and debates we have about these and other topics in this perspective-expanding and critical-thinking-oriented Maymester class. Through films, readings, and class discussions, students will learn about the histories of Indian tribes and about U.S. history from the perspectives of American Indians. They will also explore tribal sovereignty, reservation life, tribal leaders, Indian education, black Indians, Indian art, Indian participation in sports, and other topics in which students express interest. Classes will be discussion-based. Students will be encouraged to think critically and imaginatively in a class setting that is relaxed and informal, and the instructor’s primary motivational techniques will be positive reinforcement and encouragement. No prior study of American Indians is required.

For more information, click here.

Jackie Kay: a poetic imagining of post-racial (be)longing

darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial culture
ISSN: 2041-3254
Post-Racial Imaginaries [9.2] (2012-11-29)

Katy Massey

Jackie Kay is a prolific and well-loved writer who, though she has written in many forms, is best-known for her poetry. A mixed-race Scot who lives in the north of England, her work frequently utilises the facts of her own life as a means to ponder wider issues of identity, loss and sexual desire. Her approach challenges some of the key categories of social identification such as race, culture and belonging. Her work also spotlights some of the most cherished concepts of post-colonialism, most notably hybridity, plurality and the condition of the ‘in-between’.

In this article I suggest that, as Kay’s work explores the process of racial mixing, a ‘mixed’ reading is required in order to fully expose the subtleties within it. Such a reading is innovative in that it exposes two previously unarticulated ideas. First, the idea that mixedness can form a site of creative production as it is a condition which demands new identifications are continually brought into being. Second, that this process serves as a site of political resistance because it has a destabilising influence on fixed notions of ‘race’ and the operation of racialised thinking. It is exactly such a reading of Kay’s first autobiographical collection, The Adoption Papers, that this article attempts.

In suggesting the existence of a politically-resistant ‘mixed’ perspective, this article utilises ideas around racial mixing which have been developed in the field of in social science and cultural studies but have rarely been applied in literary criticism. For example, in the title of her book Mixed-race, Post-race: Gender, New Ethnicities and Cultural Practices Suki Ali boldly positions the state of mixedness as ‘post-race’. By positioning ‘mixed’ status as sitting outside fixed racial identifiers, and in this sense ‘post’ or beyond established discourses around race, she opens a space for thinking about ‘race’ which leaves room for uncertainty, for a ‘betweeness’ which remains undefined because perpetually in a state of re-creation…

Read the entire article here.