Mixed Race Studies

José Maurício Nunes Garcia

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Last modified: 2015-12-08

José Maurício Nunes Garcia (September 20, 1767 – April 18, 1830) was a Brazilian classical composer, one of the greatest exponents of Classicism in the Americas.

Born in Rio de Janeiro, son of mulattos, Nunes Garcia lost his father at an early age, and his mother perceived that her son had an inclination for becoming a musician and, for this reason, improved her work to allow him to continue his musical studies.

Nunes Garcia became a priest and, when prince John VI of Portugal came to Rio de Janeiro with his 15,000 people, Nunes Garcia was appointed Master of the Royal Chapel. He sang and played the harpsichord, performing his compositions as well as those of other composers such as Domenico Cimarosa and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He was a very prestigious musician in the royal court of John VI.

His musical style was strongly influenced by Viennese composers of the period, such as Mozart and Haydn. Today, some 240 musical pieces written by Nunes Garcia survive, and at least 170 others are known to have been lost¹. Most of his compositions are sacred works, but he wrote also some secular pieces, including the opera Le due gemelle and the Tempest Symphony…

Read the entire article here.

Going Silent: Augusta Chiwy (B. 1921)

The Lives They Lived (2015)
The New York Times Magazine
2015-12-16

Ruth Padawer, Adjunct Professor of Journalism
Columbia University, New York, New York

Augusta Chiwy as a nursing student, front row center, at St. Elisabeth Hospital in Leuven, Belgium, in 1943. Credit: Photograph from Martin King

She saw so much and could say so little about it.

In late December 1944, as German bombs rained on the Belgian town Bastogne, an American Army surgeon named Jack Prior banged on the door of a local home, desperate for help. He had heard a nurse lived there. When a middle-aged gentleman cautiously opened the door, the surgeon asked if the man’s daughter could join him at the Army’s makeshift hospital close by.

Prior knew Augusta Chiwy was black — her father was Belgian, her mother Congolese — and he knew the American Army prohibited black nurses from treating its white soldiers. But he reasoned that volunteers weren’t bound by Army rules. And anyway, he needed help.

The situation at the hospital was dire. The only medics for the 50 or so wounded soldiers were Prior, a dentist and another volunteer nurse. The team had run out of morphine and bandages, and only one can of ether remained. Electricity and running water had been cut off by the Germans, who were quickly surrounding Bastogne. This was the Battle of the Bulge, one of the deadliest of the war…

Read the entire article here.

Catherine Bliss Examines Race and Science in the Post-Genomic World

Science of Caring: A Publication of the UCSF School of Nursing
University of California, San Francisco
December 2015

Diana Austin

Catherine Bliss (photo by Elisabeth Fall)

When Catherine Bliss, assistant professor in the UC San Francisco School of Nursing Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, first set out to write a book on race and genomics, she decided to do more than just talk to scientists about their work. She went into their labs to observe what they actually did and consider what effect those practices might have on how science treats issues of race. She also interviewed them about their backgrounds and personal experiences to examine how their ideas of race were formulated. Those discussions and observations formed the basis for Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice (Stanford University Press, 2012), which explores the idea of race in a post-genomic world and the implications it has for social justice and health.

Looking at How Scientists Approach Race

Introductions from noted sociologist Troy Duster helped open the doors to the labs of well-known genome scientists, such as National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins; and she interviewed luminaries like biotechnologist Craig Venter, who was among the first to sequence the human genome. What Bliss found was that, despite the consensus among genomic scientists that there is little genetic basis for the concept of race, notions of race continue to inform and affect scientists’ work – especially in the health sciences, where the very real problems of access and inclusion for minorities prompt researchers to continue to use race as a central factor in designing projects.

Bliss says, “I would ask about their practices, and then I’d look into their labs at what they were actually doing. I asked them about the technologies they used. It turned out that some were racialized.”…

Read the entire article here.

Vienna to London: Black to Mixed-Race

Afropean: Adventures in Afro Europe
2015-03-19

Annina Chirade

I was born in Vienna, a place which has historically been a frontier between Eastern and Western Europe. I was primarily brought up in London, a city whose population reflects the reaches of the British Empire. It is also the place my parents forged new homes having left their respective homelands. My father is from Ghana and ethnically Asante (one should really say he is Asante first and foremost). My mother is a child of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and my grandmother’s post-war exile from Sudetenland – her homeland. I’m mixed-race, even though the term never seems to capture the overlapping cultural and personal narratives that exist inside of myself and my family. As a child in the ‘90s, I went back and forth between being black in Vienna and mixed-race in London…

Read the entire article here.

Augusta Chiwy, ‘Forgotten’ Wartime Nurse, Dies at 94

The New York Times
2015-08-25

Sam Roberts, Urban Affairs Correspondent

Augusta Chiwy was honored in 2011 for saving Americans during World War II. Credit Eric Lalmand/European Pressphoto Agency

Augusta Chiwy, a Belgian nurse whose unsung bravery in saving countless American soldiers wounded in the Battle of the Bulge was belatedly celebrated in 2011, died on Sunday near Brussels. She was 94.

Her death was confirmed by her biographer, Martin King.

Ms. Chiwy (pronounced CHEE-wee) was mentioned in passing only as “Anna,” a black nurse from Congo, in Stephen Ambrose’s book “Band of Brothers.” She was played by Rebecca Okot in an episode of the television series based on the book.

It took Mr. King, a British military historian, to trace her to a retirement home near Brussels, overcome a condition called selective mutism, which prevented her from speaking about her wartime experience, and finally identify her in a 2010 book published abroad titled “The Forgotten Nurse.” His TV documentary “Searching for Augusta: The Forgotten Angel of Bastogne” was released last year.

As a result of Mr. King’s efforts, 67 years after her battlefield heroism, Ms. Chiwy was awarded the Army’s Civilian Award for Humanitarian Service “for selfless service and bravery” and knighted by the king of Belgium…

A book in 2010 about Ms. Chiwy’s experiences.

…Augusta Marie Chiwy was born on June 6, 1921, in a village near the Rwandan border that is now part of Burundi. Her father, Henri, was a veterinarian from Belgium. Her mother was Congolese.

Her father took her to Bastogne when she was 9. She planned on becoming a teacher, but when the war began she turned to nursing.

She married a Belgian soldier, Jacques Cornet, in 1950. They had two children, Alain and Christine, who survive her.

She later worked in a hospital treating patients with spinal injuries. She rarely spoke about her wartime experience…

Read the entire obituary here.

Without natural genetic boundaries to guide us, human racial categories remain a product of our choices. Those choices are not totally arbitrary, biologically meaningless, or without utility. But because they are choices, we have some leeway in how we define and apply racial categories. We shouldn’t deceive ourselves; how we define race does not just reflect biology, it reflects culture, history, and politics as well.

Michael White, “Why Your Race Isn’t Genetic,” Pacific Standard, May 30, 2014. http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/why-your-race-isnt-genetic-82475.

We evaluated two distinct but not mutually exclusive scenarios for the underlying mechanism that prompted reclassification of individuals as white in the 1920 Puerto Rican census: the movement of individuals across racial boundaries (boundary crossing) and the movement of racial boundaries across individuals (boundary shifting). The underlying boundary dynamics that drove racial reclassification in the 1920 census are illuminated by the results of our counterfactual multinomial regression analysis, which suggests that changes in individual characteristics account for roughly one-fifth of the whitening between 1910 and 1920, together with our cohort analysis, which reveals clustering of the white surplus population among children and young adults (especially women), and our analyses of trends in union formation and classification of children between 1910 and 1920. Our analysis of the unusual changes in union combinations suggests that individual boundary crossing, via union with a lighter spouse, was a likely trigger of reclassification between 1910 and 1920. Intergenerational boundary crossing via miscegenation, procreation, and acceptance as “white” of physically lightened offspring may have contributed to Puerto Rico’s gradual whitening trend in the first half of the twentieth century, but it does not appear significant to explain the unparalleled increase in the enumerated white population that took place between 1910 and 1920.

Mara Loveman and Jeronimo O. Muniz, “How Puerto Rico Became White: Boundary Dynamics and Intercensus Racial Reclassification,” American Sociological Review, Volume 72, Number 6 (December 2007). 934. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/000312240707200604. (See also here.)

Panel Discussion: Social Inequalities in Health

National Institutes of Health (U.S.). Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research
Bethesda, Maryland
2015-05-08, 14:00 EDT (Local Time)

The NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research will host the Panel Discussion: Social Inequalities in Health, on May 8, 2015, at the NIH Campus, as part of the 2014-2015 BSSR Lecture Series to promote open and engaged discussion about cutting edge research in the behavioral and social sciences field.

Panelists:

• Ann Morning, PhD, New York University
• Dorothy Roberts, JD, University of Pennsylvania
• Jo Phelan, PhD, Columbia University

Watch or download the video (01:56:15) here.

National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America

Oxford University Press
2014-07-07
400 pages
22 b/w line illus., 4 b/w halftones
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199337354
Paperback ISBN: 9780199337361

Mara Loveman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

• The first comprehensive history of census-taking and nation-making in nineteen Latin American states across nearly two centuries.
• Argues that the relationship of individual states to the international system of states plays a decisive role in shaping how states classify and count citizens on their censuses.

The era of official color-blindness in Latin America has come to an end. For the first time in decades, nearly every state in Latin America now asks their citizens to identify their race or ethnicity on the national census. Most observers approvingly highlight the historic novelty of these reforms, but National Colors shows that official racial classification of citizens has a long history in Latin America.

Through a comprehensive analysis of the politics and practice of official ethnoracial classification in the censuses of nineteen Latin American states across nearly two centuries, this book explains why most Latin American states classified their citizens by race on early national censuses, why they stopped the practice of official racial classification around mid-twentieth century, and why they reintroduced ethnoracial classification on national censuses at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Beyond domestic political struggles, the analysis reveals that the ways that Latin American states classified their populations from the mid-nineteenth century onward responded to changes in international criteria for how to construct a modern nation and promote national development. As prevailing international understandings of what made a political and cultural community a modern nation changed, so too did the ways that Latin American census officials depicted diversity within national populations. The way census officials described populations in official statistics, in turn, shaped how policymakers viewed national populations and informed their prescriptions for national development–with consequences that still reverberate in contemporary political struggles for recognition, rights, and redress for ethnoracially marginalized populations in today’s Latin America.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Ethnoracial Classification and the State
• 2. Classifying Colonial Subjects
• 3. Enumerating Nations
• 4. The Race to Progress
• 5. Constructing Natural Orders
• 6. From Race to Culture
• 7. We All Count
• 8. Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index

Biological races in humans

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Volume 44, Issue 3, September 2013
Pages 262–271
DOI: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2013.04.010

Alan R. Templeton, Charles Rebstock Professor of Biology Emeritus
Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri

Highlights

• Races are highly genetically differentiated populations with sharp geographical boundaries.
• Alternatively, races can be distinct evolutionary lineages within a species.
• By either definition, races do not exist in humans but do exist in chimpanzees.
• Adaptive traits such as skin color do not define races and are often discordant with one another.
• Humans populations are interwoven by genetic interchanges; there is no tree of populations.

Races may exist in humans in a cultural sense, but biological concepts of race are needed to access their reality in a non-species-specific manner and to see if cultural categories correspond to biological categories within humans. Modern biological concepts of race can be implemented objectively with molecular genetic data through hypothesis-testing. Genetic data sets are used to see if biological races exist in humans and in our closest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee. Using the two most commonly used biological concepts of race, chimpanzees are indeed subdivided into races but humans are not. Adaptive traits, such as skin color, have frequently been used to define races in humans, but such adaptive traits reflect the underlying environmental factor to which they are adaptive and not overall genetic differentiation, and different adaptive traits define discordant groups. There are no objective criteria for choosing one adaptive trait over another to define race. As a consequence, adaptive traits do not define races in humans. Much of the recent scientific literature on human evolution portrays human populations as separate branches on an evolutionary tree. A tree-like structure among humans has been falsified whenever tested, so this practice is scientifically indefensible. It is also socially irresponsible as these pictorial representations of human evolution have more impact on the general public than nuanced phrases in the text of a scientific paper. Humans have much genetic diversity, but the vast majority of this diversity reflects individual uniqueness and not race.

Read or purchase the article here. Read the author manuscript here.