Mixed Race Studies

Race: A Starting Place

Virtual Mentor: American Medical Association Journal of Ethics
Volume 16, Number 6 (June 2014)
pages 472-478

Brooke A. Cunningham, MD, PhD

Health status, access to and quality of care, and numerous social factors associated with health vary across racial groups. Many applaud the collection and use of race data to identify and monitor progress in addressing health disparities. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) requires and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommends the collection of race data in clinical research; the 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act provided financial incentives for health systems to collect race information through the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Record Incentive Program (i.e., “meaningful use” of electronic health records); and the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandated that the Department of Health and Human Services establish standards for race and ethnicity data collection. Yet, in the face of increasing amounts of “race data,” we have created few opportunities for discussing “what race measures.” Some journals require authors to explain how race is conceptualized and collected in their studies, but the requirement is not standardized and rarely met. Thus, race and racial data are frequently interpreted in conflicting ways. This article seeks to provide an overview of race as a foundation for an improved understanding of the relationship between race and health.

Many challenges await those who wish to consider the role of race in health outcomes critically. Careful consideration of race requires identifying and setting aside much tacit knowledge about race—those ideas that come easily, are taken for granted, and simply seem right. Although “race…appears obvious, intuitive, and in need of no special knowledge to discuss or analyze…[u]sing race in biomedical contexts requires great care and expertise”. Such an approach is difficult because from childhood we learn the ways that racial groups are supposed to differ from one another. Frequently the lesson has been that differences between the races are intrinsic or inherited, and those beliefs have justified discrimination against members of racial minority groups. Finally, it seems that, to many, newer understandings of race that have emerged from the social sciences seem less scientific, less reliable, and more political than the biological or genetic explanations that they seek to unseat…

…Racial categories vary across the world. Thus, identical twins separated and raised in different countries could end up identifying their race differently. Similarly, were we able to send a person back through time, his or her race might change. Social scientists point to this variation in racial categories across time and space to argue that race is a social construct. Further support for the fluidity of race also comes from recent studies that show that some people report membership in different races at different times in their lives. The race that one selects often depends upon one’s current social position…

Read the entire article here in HTML or PDF format.

“When I discovered I was black”, by Bianca Santana

Black Women of Brazil
2013-02-22
Originally published on 2010-02-12 by Bianca Santana as “quando me descobri negra”

Bianca Santana

I have been black for less than a year. Before, I was morena. My color was practically a prank of the sun. I was a morena for the Catholic school teachers, classmates – who maybe didn’t get as much sun – and for the family that never liked the subject. “But Grandma is not a descendant of slaves?”, I kept asking. “And of Indian and Portuguese as well,” was the most that they responded on the origins of my black grandmother. I even thought it was beautiful to be so Brazilian. Maybe because of this I would accept the end of the conversation…

Read the entire article here.

Race, Romance, and Rebellion: Literatures of the Americas in the Nineteenth Century. Colleen C. O’Brien. [Orihuela]

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic LIterature of the United States
Published Online: 2014-06-05
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlu027

Sharada Balachandran Orihuela, Assistant Professor of English
University of Maryland

Race, Romance, and Rebellion: Literatures of the Americas in the Nineteenth Century. Colleen C. O’Brien. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. 224 pages. $65.00 cloth; $24.50 paper; $65.00 electronic.

Colleen C. O’Brien’s Race, Romance, and Rebellion: Literatures of the Americas in the Nineteenth Century examines American rebel-romances written in the era of reform (1835-70) that engage with concepts as broad and contentious as race, gender, and rights in nineteenth-century America. In part, this project is indebted to the close relationship O’Brien sees between romanticism, with its ideals of freedom and emancipation, and rebellion, the necessary political outcome of a quest for freedom. Such rebellion is transfigured into the romances O’Brien studies, since a number of novels she examines center on transcendent affective relationships with liberatory outcomes. New world romances, she suggests, envision the expansion of rights and freedom to a range of different populations and respond to the changing geopolitical climate ushered in by colonial expansion. O’Brien thus directs her attention to cross-racial romances as existing in dialogic relation to the “myths of revolutionary origin in the United States and Haiti and the definitions of freedom each created” (xi).

For O’Brien, these myths of revolutionary origin or rebellion allude to the revolutionary fights for freedom in the American and Haitian contexts, as well as to the rejection of patriarchal authority. However, as demonstrated in her first chapter, American rebellion is also used to justify the white supremacist backlash that resulted from increasing demands for rights across the Americas. Rebellion thus addresses possibility as much as anxiety about national expansion and possible incorporation. O’Brien examines amalgamation—taken to mean both literary and geographical expansion—as well as the literary representations of cross-racial love and “the amalgamation of abolition and suffrage interests through the expansion of citizenship rights.”…

Almost Free: A Story About Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia by Eva Sheppard Wolf (review) [Lee]

Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
Volume 111, Number 2, Spring 2013
pages 252-254
DOI: 10.1353/khs.2013.0034

Deborah A. Lee, PhD, Independent Historian
Stanardsville, Virginia

Wolf, Eva Sheppard, Almost Free: A Story about Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012)

In Almost Free, Eva Sheppard Wolf explores race and freedom in the antebellum South by illuminating the interesting—if obscure—life of Samuel Johnson, a free black man of Fauquier County, Virginia. He worked hard, observed rules, won friends, and acquired considerable property and respectability, but he fell achingly short of obtaining the freedom and security he sought for himself and his enslaved family. Johnson stands out in history because, between 1812 and 1837, he petitioned the legislature ten times in that cause, with the support of many white neighbors. Wolf concludes from this case study that slavery and freedom were not mere opposites; that Johnson, in his attainment of property and respectability, occupied a “broad space . . . between freedom and slavery”; and that race was “simultaneously momentous and tenuous” (p. 3).

A tavern-keeper before and after emancipation, Samuel Johnson was resourceful and determined. After enlisting a third party to lawfully conduct the transaction, he earned five hundred dollars to purchase his freedom. Next, with much support and assistance from local whites, including a U.S. senator, he successfully petitioned for the right to remain in Virginia. This step complied with an 1806 law that otherwise required emancipated people to leave the state within a year. Only then did he complete the manumission. In the decade it took him to raise the money, however, he had married an enslaved woman named Patty and with her had two children, Lucy and Samuel Jr. To obtain more freedom and security for his family, he purchased them from their owner. Reluctant to free them without permission to remain in the state, and even more reluctant to leave Virginia, he repeatedly petitioned the legislature in their cause, with tremendous support of white neighbors. The case reached urgency as his daughter neared adulthood, so that as a free woman she could legally marry.

Wolf’s methodology and conclusions align with those of Melvin Patrick Ely in Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (2004). Their observations of considerable interracial cooperation and a wide—yet still constrained—range of possibilities for free blacks in Virginia largely refutes Ira Berlin’s earlier thesis, summed up in the title of his seminal work, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1974). In her study, Wolf focuses on the way local people, white and black, variously ignored, challenged, circumvented, and maintained racial boundaries. While this shifting ground was remarkable, she concludes that “color often mattered more than behavior,” property rights were stronger than personal rights, and dark skin sometimes conferred a kind of invisibility (p. 40). Berlin and Wolf agree that white antipathy grew and racial attitudes hardened over time, narrowing possibilities for free blacks, but rather than occurring after the American Revolution, Wolf places this phenomenon in the 1820s.

Wolf does a beautiful job of narrating this complex story with limited sources, especially from Johnson’s perspective. She engages in necessary speculation about his thought processes and emotions in a particularly effective way, describing various alternatives. It was difficult, however, to get a sense of the black community from this study, though sources such as legislative petitions suggest that an African American counterculture thrived in the region. Nonetheless, the book clearly demonstrates the value of local history and helps readers understand the South in more complex and nuanced ways. Not least, Wolf points out that the story demonstrates how much family, freedom, and autonomy mattered to people such as the Johnsons and how they also make history…

687.8: The Apple Does NOT Fall FAR from the Tree: Offspring of Interracial Marriages in Brazil

XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology: Facing an Unequal Word: Challenges for Global Sociology
International Sociological Association
Yokohama, Japan
2014-07-13 through 2014-07-19

Wednesday, 2014-07-16, 09:54 JST (Local Time)
Room: Booth 54

Kaizô Iwakami Beltrão
Ebape, FGV, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Sonoe Sugahara
Ence, IBGE, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Moema De Poli Teixeira
Ence, IBGE, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Starting from colonial times, Brazil has a long history of racial miscegenation. How do families structure themselves with respect to a concept of racial hierarchy? Several censuses and survey from the Brazilian Central Statistical Office (IBGE) incorporates some ethnic enumeration with information on race/skin color of the respondent, though mostly self-reported. Alternatives are: “White”, “Black”, “Asian”, “Mixed race” and “Native Brazilian”. Though it is possible that some subjectivity is inherent to the process, temporal consistency is observable, within a 5% error margin. Analyzing census data, one can perceive a time trend towards “whitening” of the population until 1991, with a slight reversal in 2000, resuming the “whitening” trend up to 2010 (the latest census). But how do offspring of interracial marriages self-report themselves? Among possible alternatives, is the race/skin color of the father or the mother the determinant factor? Is this choice affected by geographical region or social status? Is there a noticeable time trend in choices made?  The study analysis data from five Brazilian censuses, between 1960 and 2010, in order to identify patterns and trends among offspring of interracial marriages.

Among exogamic couples where one of the partners is “White”, this is the dominant race/skin color alternative for the offspring. When the mother is “White” the difference with respect to other alternatives is even wider, less so, when the father is “Asian”. The reported proportion of “White” children increases with socio-economic status. Among “Black”/”Mixed-race” couples, the preference is for reporting “Mixed-race” offspring, with a higher proportion of “Black” if the father is also “Black”.

For more information, click here.

JS-44.12: A Global Look at Mixed Marriage

XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology: Facing an Unequal Word: Challenges for Global Sociology
International Sociological Association
Yokohama, Japan
2014-07-13 through 2014-07-19

Wednesday, 2014-07-16, 18:00 JST (Local Time)
Room: 315

Erica Chito Childs, Sociology
Hunter College, City University of New York

Mapping attitudes toward intermarriage—who is and who is not an acceptable mate—offers an incisive means through which imaginings of belonging—race, ethnicity, nationhood, citizenship and culture—can be critically evaluated.  In particular, social constructions of race and difference involve discussions of purity, race identity and taboos against interracial sex and marriage. Drawing from qualitative interviews and ethnographic research in six countries on attitudes toward intermarriage, this paper explores these issues of intermarriage in a global context.  Through a comparison of qualitative data I collected in Australia, Brazil, Ecuador, Portugal, South Africa and the United States, I offer a theoretical framework and provide an empirical basis, to understand the concept of intermarriage and what it tells us about racial boundaries in a global context. For example, in the United States, the issue of intermarriage is discussed as interracial with less attention paid to inter-religious or inter-ethnic, to the point that those concepts are rarely used.  Similarly in South Africa, despite the end of apartheid decades ago, marriage across racial categories is still highly problematized and uncommon.  Yet globally there is less consensus of what constitutes intermarriage—sometimes intercultural, interethnic, or any number of words with localized meanings.  In South America and Australia, the debate seems to revolve more around indigenous status, citizenship and national identity such as who is Australian or who is Ecuadoran?  As indigenous populations rally for rights and representation how does this change the discourse on what intermarriage mean?  Looking globally, what differences matter? What boundaries are most salient in determining the attitudes of different groups toward intermarriage?  How are various communities responding to intermarriage, particularly if there are a growing number of “mixed” families? This research on attitudes toward intermarriage adds to our understanding of constructions of race, racism and racialized, gendered and sexualized beliefs and practices globally.

For more information, click here.

“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”: Troubling the Visual Optics of Race

Flow
Volume 17, Issue 9 (2013-03-28)

Isabel Molina-Guzmán, Associate Professor of Media and Cinema Studies; Associate Professor of Latina/o Studies; Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

On February 26, 2013, the one year anniversary of the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, FL by George Zimmerman, I stare at the beautiful face of Trayvon Martin on my television screen and online news feed. I study his cinnamon brown skin, big teddy bear brown eyes and long black lashes, trimmed tight curly black hair, well-sculpted nose and full lips. I hear the invisible and terrified cries for help, the shot, and the silence.

I am racially black and I am of Puerto Rican and Dominican ethnic descent. And I see my father, uncles, cousins. I silently remember President Barack Obama’s somber observation more than a year ago: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

The Problems with the Visual Optics of “Race”

I remember being frustrated by the news narratives that categorize Martin as black and George Zimmerman as white simply because of the color of their skin. After all, if Martin could be the son of our first mixed race president or be my son, his identity should be more complicated than the color of his skin. Martin’s gender, class, and ethnoracial complexities remain irrelevant – he was essentially, biologically, and categorically a black man. As a racial or ethnic identity, blackness remains static despite US Census reports that the black population is more racially and ethnically diverse that ever before with more than 25% of the growth among black Americans driven by immigration. Indeed Haitians are among Florida’s largest immigrant population.

Nevertheless, who is defined as black in the United States continues to be defined by the problematic rules of biological hypodescent – the one drop rule that defines anyone with one drop of “black blood” as black. How that “one drop” is often determined is by the visual resonances of blackness; and, Martin “looks” black.

Amidst civil rights protest calling for Martin’s murder to be classified as racial profiling and a hate crime, the story becomes more complicated and more troubling…

Read the entire article here.

After Tiananmen Square, New Lives On A New Continent

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2014-06-04

Michel Martin, Host

After the democracy protests were crushed in 1989, many thought China would turn inward. Instead, a million Chinese citizens moved to Africa. Howard French discusses his book China’s Second Continent.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

I’m Michel Martin, and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. We’re going to start the program today by taking note of a difficult moment in history. Twenty-five years ago today, the Chinese army attacked demonstrators who had been occupying Tiananmen Square, protesting for more democracy and freedom. The crackdown brought international condemnation. Some observers believed it would lead the communist country to become increasingly inward-looking and isolated. It turned out that did not happen. Today, China stands as a major global power, and one part of the world in which it clearly rivals the U.S. as an influence on politics and the economy is Africa. Thousands of Chinese companies have established themselves in Africa over the last two decades. China-Africa trade has surged from $10 billion in 2000 to $200 billion last year, far surpassing the U.S. and any European country. China’s top leaders make multiple trips to the continent every year. But, as author Howard French tells us in his new book, just as important as those high-level visits are the people who are rarely discussed. And they are the million or so Chinese expatriates who aren’t just passing through, but are staying and moving into all walks of life. That’s who the former New York Times bureau chief spent time with as he prepared his latest book, “China’s Second Continent: How A Million Migrants Are Building A New Empire In Africa.” And Howard French is with us now. Welcome back to the program. Thanks so much for joining us.

HOWARD FRENCH: It’s great to be with you again…

…MARTIN: If you’re just joining us, I’m speaking with Howard French. We’re talking about his new book, “China’s Second Continent: How A Million Migrants Are Building A New Empire In Africa.” The former New York Times bureau chief conducted interviews in Mandarin, French and Portuguese, among other languages, to, kind of, get to the ground level of how China is influencing the continent. One of the characters that struck a chord with me was Hao Shengli, whom you met in Mozambique. Tell us a little bit about his story, if you would. I was struck by the fact that he wanted his sons to marry local women, but I didn’t get the sense that this was a love-match he was seeking, here.

FRENCH: Hao was interesting because, unlike most of the people I profile, he was not a working-class person. He had started up several businesses in China that had done reasonably well. He had some savings. He set off to the Middle East – tried to do business there. He failed. He comes back to China. And he goes to a trade fair and meets some people in Guangzhou who tell him that there’s all kinds of opportunity in Africa. And so he then begins to fixate on Africa. And he ends up in Mozambique on the theory that, as a Portuguese speaking country, they’ll be very few Chinese people there. He spoke no Portuguese, but he figured, at least, he wouldn’t have any cutthroat Chinese competitors. And so he goes to Mozambique. He doesn’t do well in the capital. He discovers, to his disgust, that there are a lot of Chinese people there, in fact. And so he sets off for the countryside. And he ends up finagling his way into buying a very nice piece of irrigated, very rich farmland. And he gets into these relationships with the local people. And their relationship becomes ever more testy, and so he’s worrying. Even though he’s got a long-term lease, he’s wondering if the villagers won’t find a way to contest it, or the local government will take it back from him. And he settles upon a scheme, which absolutely astounded me, of bringing his teenage sons from China to settle there with him – and to have children by local women, in whose names he could place the property and control it indirectly through these people, who, as Mozambican citizens, would legally have the right to own land forever. And so that’s the scene that I stumble upon in this rural place.

MARTIN: It was interesting to me how much racism you personally encountered over the course of your travels. I mean, just the kind of day-to-day, casual reminders of distance that is certainly not polite in this country anymore. I’m thinking about when you went to this hotel in Liberia. And then you went to this room to drop off your things and wash up, and there was no towel there. And then when you told your host this, he summoned a young Chinese man who worked for him and told him to fetch me one. He says, we don’t usually give them out because most Chinese bring their own. They wouldn’t want to use one that a black person might have used. I mean, put this in some context for me. I mean, do you think that this is, kind of, growing pains, and that at some point will people have moved beyond that? What’s your sense?

FRENCH: Everywhere I went, the local Chinese person referred to the people, in whose midst they had come to settle, as black people. You know, they would say, the blacks, the blacks, the blacks, the blacks. They wouldn’t say the Ghanaians, or the Tanzanians, or the Zambians, or the this or the that. It was just, the blacks. And this refusal, or reluctance, to allow any kind of finer identity – to render them totally anonymous as just simply black, as if that was the only pertinent detail about them, was very telling for me. That whether or not this is a passing phase, I can’t really say. But for the time being, the Africans are just, essentially, serving as a backdrop for Chinese processes – somebody that will be useful for them – or a place that will be useful for them for the time being along the way, as they proceed up the ladder of hierarchies, if you will, of civilizations of nations…

Listen to the interview here. Download the interview here.

Race, Romance, and Rebellion: Literatures of the Americas in the Nineteenth Century

University of Virginia Press
October 2013
224 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 9780813934884
Paper ISBN: 9780813934891
Ebook ISBN: 9780813934907

Colleen C. O’Brien, Associate Professor of English
University of South Carolina, Upstate

As in many literatures of the New World grappling with issues of slavery and freedom, stories of racial insurrection frequently coincided with stories of cross-racial romance in nineteenth-century U.S. print culture. Colleen O’Brien explores how authors such as Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Livermore, and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda imagined the expansion of race and gender-based rights as a hemispheric affair, drawing together the United States with Africa, Cuba, and other parts of the Caribbean. Placing less familiar women writers in conversation with their more famous contemporaries—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Lydia Maria Child—O’Brien traces the transnational progress of freedom through the antebellum cultural fascination with cross-racial relationships and insurrections. Her book mines a variety of sources—fiction, political rhetoric, popular journalism, race science, and biblical treatises—to reveal a common concern: a future in which romance and rebellion engender radical social and political transformation.

“I don’t think we have any full-blooded Māori,” Dr. [Tīmoti] Kāretu said. “But it is not a problem. As long as you have a Māori (ancestor), you are Māori. It’s left to the individual to identify with their Māori or European.”

K. C. Cole, “Chickasaw and Māori Celebrate Similarities, Language and Culture,” Indian Country Today Media Network, May 31, 2014. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/05/31/chickasaw-and-maori-celebrate-similarities-language-and-culture-155051.