Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

As my critical contemplative response tempered my emotional one, I saw that the antiblack bias at the core of many multiracial organizations had shaped the larger discourse of mixedness and multiracial identity. While many mixed individuals and organizations are engaged and invested in social justice, discussions about mixed identity the realm of popular culture and mass media tend to frame the presence of black ancestry as a hindrance. While I believe that there is a definite mixed experience, I think that care must be taken not to cleave that experience from the broader historical continuum of how race has been constructed and reconstructed in America and that any analysis of race/identity must begin with defining whiteness and how the construction of whiteness has directly impacted the construction of all other identities in this country. As parents of black/white mixed kids and black/nonwhite mixed kids, we have to address the ways in which we’ve all internalized messages of antiblack bias and how that affects both the identity choices we make for our children and the ones we want them to make for themselves. For those outside the realm of the black/white/black/nonwhite mix, it’s still important to consider how antiblack bias relates to your child’s particular identity construction and how the historical black/white mixed binary informs how all mixed/multiracial identities are understood in our society.

Michelle Clark-McCrary, “Coming Clean About Blackness, Mixed Race Identity and the Multiracial Movement,” Is That Your Child? Thought in Full Color, (December 11, 2012). http://www.isthatyourchild.com/2012/12/coming-clean-about-blackness-mixed-race.html.

Race as Biology Is Fiction, Racism as a Social Problem Is Real: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives on the Social Construction of Race

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2015-10-18 23:27Z by Steven

Race as Biology Is Fiction, Racism as a Social Problem Is Real: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives on the Social Construction of Race

American Psychologist
Volume 60, Number 1, January 2005
pages 16–26
DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.60.1.16

Audrey Smedley
Virginia Commonwealth University Institute of Medicine

Brian D. Smedley
Virginia Commonwealth University Institute of Medicine

Racialized science seeks to explain human population differences in health, intelligence, education, and wealth as the consequence of immutable, biologically based differences between “racial” groups. Recent advances in the sequencing of the human genome and in an understanding of biological correlates of behavior have fueled racialized science, despite evidence that racial groups are not genetically discrete, reliably measured, or scientiﬁcally meaningful. Yet even these counterarguments often fail to take into account the origin and history of the idea of race. This article reviews the origins of the concept of race, placing the contemporary discussion of racial differences in an anthropological and historical context.

Read the entire article here.

Tags: American Psychologist, Audrey Smedley, Brian D. Smedley, Brian Smedley

Comments Off on Race as Biology Is Fiction, Racism as a Social Problem Is Real: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives on the Social Construction of Race

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30

Mixed Race Studies

Race as Biology Is Fiction, Racism as a Social Problem Is Real: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives on the Social Construction of Race

Pages

Categories

Calendar of Posts

Links

Meta