Mixed Race Studies

Interracial Families in 18th-Century Mexico

The Root
2013-07-23

Unknown artist working in New Spain (Mexico), De español y negra mulata, oil on canvas, 36 by 48 cm (Museo de America, Madrid)

Image of the Week: A painting captures the multiethnic population in New Spain, now Mexico.

One of the most typical, revealing products of colonial Spanish culture was the casta painting. This Iberian term means “lineage,” or “race,” and in art refers to the comprehensive representation of mixed-race couples and their offspring. Produced in a series usually consisting of 16 family groups, casta paintings categorize the uniquely complex degree of racial variation that arose within the multiethnic population of the viceroyalty of New Spain, now Mexico. These works were produced almost exclusively in the major artistic and governmental centers of Mexico City and Puebla during the 18th century. About 100 sets of casta paintings survive today from what must once have been a considerably larger number.

Casta sets were commissioned primarily by members of the ruling elite of New Spain. Their audience consisted of a fairly limited but discerning group of officials, clergy and scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. In some cases the sets were directly presented to the king in Madrid as a visual record of the diversity of his overseas realm. The miscegenation recorded in these series is also reflected in the origins of the artists themselves. With only one known exception, all identified casta painters were born in Mexico, not Spain, and many were themselves of mixed race.

In all casta series, the couples consist of men and women from the three main ethnicities living in New Spain: white, Indian and black. Those represented are types, not specific individuals. All known series begin with the union between a white man, described as a Spaniard (español), and an Indian, producing a mestizo. The sequence then continues with a new category produced by the pairing of a mestizo with another Spaniard, producing a castizo. In the next case a white man is the father as well, and so the complexion becomes lighter, and therefore of greater advantage in the racially ordered hierarchy of colonial life. The child is, in fact, described as español, the same as his or her father…

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Multiracial Child Resource Book: Living Complex Realities

MAVIN Foundation
2003
288 pages
8 x 7.9 x 0.7 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0972963909

Edited by:

Maria P. P. Root

Matt Kelley

As America experiences a multiracial baby boom, parents, teachers and child welfare professionals must be equipped with resources to help raise happy and healthy mixed heritage youth. Published in 2003, this groundbreaking, 288-page volume edited by Maria P. P. Root, Ph.D. and Matt Kelley, offers 35 chapters to assist the people who work with children to serve multiracial youth with compassion and competence. Providing both a developmental and mixed heritage-specific approach, the Multiracial Child Resource Book provides a layered portrait of the mixed race experience from birth to adulthood, each chapter written by the nation’s experts and accompanied by first-person testimonials from mixed heritage young adults themselves.

Taking race out of the equation in measuring women’s risk of osteoporosis and fractures

UCLA Newsroom
University of California, Los Angeles
2012-10-18

Enrique Rivero

For women of mixed racial or ethnic backgrounds, a new method for measuring bone health may improve the odds of correctly diagnosing their risk of osteoporosis and bone fractures, according to a UCLA-led study.

Currently, assessing osteoporosis and the risk of fractures from small accidents like falls requires a bone density scan. But because these scans don’t provide other relevant fracture-related information, such as bone size and the amount of force a bone is subjected to during a fall, each patient’s bone density is examined against a national database of people with the same age and race or ethnicity.

This approach, however, doesn’t work for people of mixed race or ethnicity because comparison databases can’t account for mixed heritage. A similar problem exists for those from smaller racial or ethnic groups for which there are not comparison databases.

“All the current ways of determining your risk for fractures require knowing your race and ethnicity correctly, and they ignore the fact that racial and ethnic groups are not homogenous,” said study co-author Dr. Arun Karlamangla, a professor of medicine in the geriatrics division at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “It also flies in the face of the current reality in Southern California, where so many people are of mixed ethnicity.”

Given that osteoporosis and hip fractures are leading causes of injury in older people, alternative means of measuring risk are needed. Now, a UCLA-led team of researchers has found a way of assessing risk without knowledge of a person’s race or ethnicity. The method involves combining bone mineral density measures with body size and bone size to create composite bone strength indices.

The findings are published in the October issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism…

…”The importance of bone size to fracture risk has been recognized by engineers and radiologists for some years now,” said the study’s lead investigator, Dr. Shinya Ishii, who started the research while a fellow in the UCLA Division of Geriatrics and is now at the University of Tokyo. “But no one, until now, has combined bone density, which is the traditional measure of osteoporosis, with bone size and body size to get at a more uniform way of assessing osteoporosis that applies across racial lines and does away with the need to know the person’s race or racial mixture.“…

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SOCI 395-005: Plessy to Martin: Race and Politics

George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia
Fall 2013

Rutledge M. Dennis, Professor of Sociology

This course examines the issues, individuals, and groups central to the intersectionality of race, culture, and politics in American life. We will begin with the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case which solidified and legitimized the nation’s “separate and equal” racial policy until Brown v. Board of Education. A critique of this case allows us to understand the intricate relations between the nation’s racial theories and policies and its public politics and culture. These racial, political, and cultural issues will provide the background from which we analyze the individuals and groups whose actions and positions presented challenges and counter-challenges to America’s image of itself as a free and democratic society. As a consequence, we will examine how racial and cultural politics were driving forces in the public debates and controversies surrounding such cases as the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama, Robert Williams in North Carolina, Emmett Till in Mississippi, Medgar Evers in Mississippi, Martin Luther King in Georgia, Angela Davis in California, O. J. Simpson in California, Rodney King in California, and currently, Trayvon Martin in Florida. The central questions in the cases presented above focus on why, and in what ways, did racial feelings, fears, and animosities surface as they did, how were intragroup and intergroup relations affected by such attitudes and behavior, and what were the short and long-term societal consequences of these attitudes and behavior.

For more information, click here.

At the very outset we must face three possible alternatives as we consider the concept of race: 1) there is such a thing as race  in mankind; 2) there is not such a thing as race in mankind; 3) even if race in mankind exists, it can have no significance save as people think of it and react to their conception of it. In the first alternative we shall turn to those physical anthropologists who treat race as a biological phenomenon, separating and classifying groups of mankind according to certain descriptive and mensurational categories. In the second alternative we must turn to those few geneticists and fewer physical anthropologists who, when they refer to mankind, use “race” in quotation marks as if by so doing they can, in effect, recognize its existence while denying its implications. In the third alternative we must turn to those social anthropologists who treat race principally in terms of social interaction.

Wilton Marion Krogman, “The Concept of Race,” in The Science of Man in the World Crisis, Ralph Linton, ed., (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 38.