Mixed Race Studies

Agriculture Linked to DNA Changes in Ancient Europe

The New York Times
2015-11-23

Carl Zimmer

The agricultural revolution was one of the most profound events in human history, leading to the rise of modern civilization. Now, in the first study of its kind, an international team of scientists has found that after agriculture arrived in Europe 8,500 years ago, people’s DNA underwent widespread changes, altering their height, digestion, immune system and skin color.

Researchers had found indirect clues of some of these alterations by studying the genomes of living Europeans. But the new study, they said, makes it possible to see the changes as they occurred over thousands of years.

“For decades we’ve been trying to figure out what happened in the past,” said Rasmus Nielsen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new study. “And now we have a time machine.”

…Dr. Reich and his colleagues also tracked changes in the color of European skin.

The original hunter-gatherers, descendants of people who had come from Africa, had dark skin as recently as 9,000 years ago. Farmers arriving from Anatolia were lighter, and this trait spread through Europe. Later, a new gene variant emerged that lightened European skin even more.

Why? Scientists have long thought that light skin helped capture more vitamin D in sunlight at high latitudes. But early hunter-gatherers managed well with dark skin. Dr. Reich suggests that they got enough vitamin D in the meat they caught.

He hypothesizes that it was the shift to agriculture, which reduced the intake of vitamin D, that may have triggered a change in skin color…

Read the entire article here.

Maybe you don’t say you’re black if you’re biracial. But it’s how you’re seen

The Guardian
2015-11-22

Zach Stafford, Contributing Writer
Chicago, Illinois

No matter how I identify or how I feel, it’s my skin color that determines how I’ll be treated

Like every young black man I know, I remember the moment when my parents sat me down for “the talk” about the very real danger that comes from being young, black and male in the US. My mother and step-father sat me down one day when I was about 15 years old and told me that that now that I was getting older, I needed to be careful…

Read the entire article here.

In the past, “white” was the only racial option available to Arab American respondents, a classification that didn’t truly reflect their social standing and hurt efforts for their political empowerment in post-Sept. 11 America, said Samer Khalaf, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

“If you are going to classify me as white, then treat [me] as white,” Khalaf said. “Especially when I go to the airport. So, yeah, it’s inaccurate.”

Associated Press, “Census change may result in fewer ‘white’ Americans,” The Los Angeles Times, November 22, 2015. http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-census-changes-20151122-story.html.

Raising my biracial Jewish child

Ethical Jam
The Times of Israel
Jerusalem, Israel
2015-11-12

Ethical Jam presents contemporary ethical dilemmas and the responses of Jewish thinkers from across the world Jewish community. Ethical Jam is a project of the Center for Global Judaism (CGJ) at Hebrew College in Newton Centre, Massachusetts and of the Times of Israel, and was created by CGJ’s director Rabbi Or Rose and Hebrew College president Rabbi Daniel Lehmann. It is edited by Rabbi Sue Fendrick, Editor at CGJ.

My husband and I are both white; we have a six-year-old adopted daughter who is biracial. We are socially progressive and it is important to us to be self-aware parents of a brown-skinned child, staying updated on issues that matter to us especially as a multi-racial family, and becoming aware of and working on our own unconscious racism. We don’t live in a very diverse area, and our Jewish community is almost exclusively white; it is important to us to have more brown-skinned people in our daughter’s life, yet it feels problematic to us to target people for friendship just because they are African-American, and surely would feel problematic to them as well! Moving into a more racially diverse neighborhood would, in our city, remove us from the hub of Jewish activity which has been very important to our family. How can we find ways to make sure that Sarah’s world has people in it who look like her and with whom she may share some heritage and experience, without turning people into objects or tokens, or sacrificing the quality of our (and her) Jewish life?

Jenny Sartori says…

You’re right that, as a transracial adoptee, Sarah needs to grow up with people of color in her life. You’re also right that targeting people for friendship just because they are African-American is problematic. Instead, try putting yourselves in situations in which you are likely to meet a diverse group of people who share your own interests: join a book club, attend cultural events, join the Y or enroll your daughter in an activity in a racially diverse area. And introduce yourself to people, not because they are African-American but because they seem to be nice people with whom you share something in common. Just because you may have made a deliberate choice to put yourself in these situations doesn’t mean the efforts and the friendships are not genuine…

…Yavilah McCoy says…

…José Portuondo-Dember says…

Read the entire article here.

DNA study finds London was ethnically diverse from start

BBC News
2015-11-23

Pallab Ghosh, Science Correspondent

A DNA study has confirmed that London was an ethnically diverse city from its very beginnings, BBC News has learned.

The analysis reveals what some of the very first Londoners looked like and where they came from.

The first results are from four people: two had origins from outside Europe, another was from continental Europe and one was a native Briton.

The researchers plan to analyse more of the 20,000 human remains stored at the Museum of London.

According to Caroline McDonald, who is a senior curator at the museum, London was a cosmopolitan city from the moment it was created following the Roman invasion 2,000 years ago…

Early London: An artist’s impression of building work at the Roman Fort Wall in 200 AD (Museum of London, Peter Jackson)

“The thing to remember with the original Londoners is that they were not born here. Every first generation Londoner was from somewhere else – whether it was somewhere else in Britain, somewhere else on the continent somewhere else in the Mediterranean, somewhere else from Africa,” she said…

Read the entire article and watch the video here.

First Look at Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton in ‘The Loving Story’ (Based on Anti-Miscegenation Case)

Shadow and Act: On Cinema Of The African Diaspora
2015-11-20

Tambay A. Obenson

Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton as Mildred and Richard Loving, on the set of the movie “Loving,” being shot in Richmond, Va. (Ben Rothstein/Big Beach Films via AP)

Three years ago, director Nancy Buirski’s feature documentary, “The Loving Story,” was released. It follows the real-life story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple living in the state of Virginia where interracial coupling was illegal, and their struggles, including the US Supreme Court case named after them – Loving vs Virginia (1967); the landmark civil rights case in which the United States Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, declared Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute, unconstitutional, overturning existing laws and bringing an official end to all race-based restrictions on marriage in the United States.

Persecuted by a local sheriff, the Lovings were found guilty of violating Virginia’s law against interracial marriage and forced to leave the state. But Mildred Loving chose to fight. She wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy asking for help. He referred her to the ACLU and two young attorneys took the case.

Richard and Mildred Loving

In 1958, they went to Washington, D.C. – where interracial marriage was legal – to get married. But when they returned home, they were arrested, jailed and banished from the state for 25 years for violating the state’s so-called Racial Integrity Act…

Read the entire article here.

Editorial: Biracial in the Time of Black Lives Matter

NBC News
2015-11-22

Amity Paye

I’ll never forget the first Black Lives Matter protest I attended in New York. After years of rallying against police violence in New York, this was the first night where race was the central message. As a Black woman it spoke to the deeply personal feelings I already had about police killings.

With each victim killed by the police without recourse, I feared for my life, for my family members, my friends and my future children. But I am also biracial. A Peace Corps baby, my white mother met and later married my Black father while teaching in in Liberia. When I go home to visit family almost every face at the table, most of my closest loved ones are white.

Across the country, Black people are combating institutionalized racism and demanding justice. But what happens when the very people doing this work are biracial: biologically connected to our current Black movement and also the white power systems we are searching to change?…

Read the entire article here.

Whiteness has its privileges, among which is the privilege to be taken seriously as an intellectual, to be seen as the model patron of a library, the rightful inhabitant of a university campus, never to be viewed as a security risk to other students for his mere presence there.

Ann M. Little, “Who’s telling who to STFU at American universities? Observations on teaching at a HWCU.” Historiann: History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present, November 21, 2015. http://historiann.com/2015/11/21/whos-telling-who-to-stfu-at-american-universities-observations-on-teaching-at-a-hwcu/.

“Whether we look at race as a fixed notion or culturally constructed concept it is very real. Race itself is an invention, a creation. Many people feel race is something that’s fixed, rigid and doesn’t have variances. By looking at Afro-Latinos, you kind of get a better sense of how fluid race has been. People have constructed it in different ways depending on conditions and circumstances.” —Miriam Jiménez Román

Kim Haas, “Q&A with Miriam Jiménez Román,” Los Afro-Latinos: A Blog Following the Afro-Latino Experience, March 30, 2012. http://losafrolatinos.com/2012/03/30/qa-with-miriam-jimenez-roman/.

To end racial strife we must stop racializing others and stop racializing ourselves. Racialization is the mortar that holds together the edifice of racism, whether manifest at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, structural, institutional, or systemic level.

Carlos Hoyt, “Correcting the conversation about race,” OUPblog: Oxford University Press’s Academic Insights for the Thinking World, November 20, 2015. http://blog.oup.com/2015/11/correcting-the-conversation-about-race.