Mixed Race Studies

The claims of modern genetics notwithstanding, race remains a biologically meaningless concept of human categorization. Race simply has no traceable genetic essence, and the proliferation of racial DNA testing represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of race rather than the neutral application of scientific principles.

Christian B. Sundquist, “The Meaning of Race in the DNA Era: Science, History and the Law,” The Temple Journal of Science, Technology & Environmental Law, Volume 27, Number 2 (Fall 2008): 233.

Signifying on Passing: (Post) Post-Racialism, (Post) Post-Modernism, and (Post) Post-Marxism

Columbia Journal of Race and Law
Volume 1, Issue 3 (July 2012)
pages 482-489

Christian B. Sundquist, Associate Professor of Law
Albany Law School

The social and legal relevance of racial passing appears to be fading as we ostensibly enter a color-blind, post-race era. During the “Age of Obama,” the notion of passing in our multi-racial society seems to many to be antiquated and unnecessary. As the nation has moved beyond state-sanctioned racial discrimination, many believe that the country also has moved beyond the need for a legal dialogue on racial passing and ambiguity. This “retreat from race,” exemplified in part by the apparent declining significance of racial passing, proclaims that the state no longer should consider race when interpreting the law or incorporating democratic values of equality and opportunity. This Essay, however, argues that the continued phenomenon of racial passing can be utilized as a conceptual vehicle to destabilize and de-legitimatize the post-racial agenda.

The continuing relevance of racial passing also underscores the significance of the lessons of Marxism. After all, the concept of “race,” and therefore the existence of racial passing, traces its lineage to the capitalist condition of racialized class distinctions and cultural hegemony (e.g., the white cultural norm). The post-racial agenda seeks to mask the commodification of persons, obscuring the salience of race and discrimination. Thus, the cry for a post-racial America is the latest attempt to lure society into a false sense of class and racial transformation. The continued presence of racial passing may lift the veil from our eyes to the conditions of racial and class exploitation that govern everyday life.

This Essay will proceed in three parts. The first section argues that the particular weltanschauung of post-racialism has obfuscated the continuing relevance of racial difference and conflict. The post-racial model seeks to skew the proletariat perception of social reality by imposing a false-consciousness that conceals existing relations of racial subordination and exploitation. In so doing, post-racialism strives to reject its theoretical Other: Marxism. However, the failings of post-racialism as a worldview are traced directly to its inability to refute the continuing salience of class and racial conflict. The second part of the Essay explores the similarities and differences between the post-racial model and the classic liberal colorblind model. The third part of the Essay concludes that the continuing relevance of racial passing should be utilized to reveal and disrupt the post-racial agenda…

Read the entire article here.

The Meaning of Race in the DNA Era: Science, History and the Law

The Temple Journal of Science, Technology & Environmental Law
Volume 27, Number 2 (Fall 2008)
pages 231-265

Christian B. Sundquist, Associate Professor of Law
Albany Law School

INTRODUCTION

What is “race”? Does the concept of race represent a natural and inevitable understanding of human difference? Does race have any biological meaning, or is it merely an artificial construct employed by society and political bodies? If race is the former, then how can modern society avoid a rebirth of racial eugenics? And yet if race is an arbitrary tool of social organization without genetic content, then how should we interpret purported forensic racial determinations based on DNA analyses?

Race is biology. Race is ancestry. Race is genetic.

The meaning of “race” is constantly questioned yet rarely understood. Early theories of race assigned social, intellectual, and moral values to perceived differences among groups of people. The perception that race should be defined in terms of genetic and biologic difference fueled the “race science” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during which time geneticists, physiognomists, eugenicists, anthropologists and others purported to find scientific justification for denying equal treatment to non-“white” persons.

Part I of this article thus examines the provenance of the “race” concept. The categorization of humans into “racial” groups was neither natural nor inevitable. The initial separation of humans into “racial” categories was understood to simply reflect inherent biological differences between groups of people. These differences supposedly accounted for natural variances in intelligence, morality, and physical and sexual prowess. As such, these pseudo-biological differences were used to justify and explain power differentials between “races” of people.

Race is constructed. Race is biologically meaningless. Race is power.

The pseudo-scientific understandings of race supplied by nineteenth-century geneticists and biologists were applied by Nazi Germany in a manner that shocked the world. As a result, the concept of race following World War II increasingly was understood as a socio-political construction with no biological meaning. Modern sociological theories thus uniformly understand race as a social grouping of persons necessary to preserve unbalanced relationships of power. Part II of this article examines this post-war refutation of nineteenth-century “race science,” as well as the core assumptions underlying modern racial theory.

Race is phenotype. Race is color. Race is language. Race is citizenship. Race is class. Race is culture. Race is assimilation. Race is law.

Reducing race to a single critical “essence” is an impossible endeavor. While one’s phenotype and color may contribute to racial categorization, so can one’s national origin, social class and language. As a result, race has a complex social meaning that depends in part on the prevailing “common understanding and meaning” of society. Not-so-antiquated notions of race once deemed Italian, Irish and Southern European immigrants and their descendants as “non-white” and cursed with inferior genetic stock. These groups eventually obtained “Whiteness” based on changing social understandings of their assimilatory potential, and the formation of a racial identity defined in opposition to “Blackness.” The elusive nature of race is similarly illustrated by the conflict between the legal racialization of Middle Eastern and Mexican persons as “white” during certain historical periods, and the social racialization of these persons as “non-white” and racially distinct during other times.

Race is subjective. Race is objective. Race is whiteness. Race is blackness. Race is fixed. Race is malleable. Race is performance.

Race is constantly in flux depending on one’s baseline understanding of the nature of race. I am black according to certain understandings of race, while other interpretations may render me white. I am Latino, Creole, Egyptian, and “other” according to some outsider interpretations of race, yet I can also be reduced to “mixed” by utilizing an alternative understanding of race. Outsider perceptions of race in turn may change according to my performance of race, and how race is performed around me.
Race is biology.

Race is ancestry. Race is genetic.

Notwithstanding the post-war rejection of a biological interpretation of race, modern genetic science has increasingly claimed the ability to identify “race” through the biological analysis of DNA samples. Law enforcement agencies in the United States and elsewhere analyze individual DNA samples to identify the likely “race” of a criminal suspect, while courts in the United States increasingly admit expert testimony stating the statistical probability that a criminal suspect belongs to a specific race based on such DNA analyses. Such a re-biologicalization of race clearly contradicts the classical post-war theory of race as a social construct. Part III of this article examines the contemporary re-interpretation of race as having some biologically traceable genetic essence.

Race is constructed. Race is biologically meaningless. Race is power.

The claims of modern genetics notwithstanding, race remains a biologically meaningless concept of human categorization. Race simply has no traceable genetic essence, and the proliferation of racial DNA testing represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of race rather than the neutral application of scientific principles. Part IV of this article argues that contemporary genetics has misapprehended the elusive nature of race in a manner strikingly similar to that of the nineteenth-century race science…

Read the entire article here.

Review of Fatal Invention, by Professor Dorothy Roberts

Race and the Law: A Critical Examination of Science, Law and the Construction of Race
2011-12-07

Christian B. Sundquist, Associate Professor of Law
Albany Law School

Professor Dorothy Roberts has recently released a vitally important book on issues of race and genetics, entitled Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011). Professor Roberts thoughtfully engages the modern legal and scientific preoccupation with genetic theories of race. Examining the “new racial science” in a variety of contexts, including pharmacology, biomedical research, immigration screening, criminal justice, ancestry testing, and genetic surveillance, Professor Roberts deconstructs the myth of intrinsic racial difference through a lively use of historical and scientific sources. While the entire book is a massive achievement in the burgeoning field of genetics and race, a few insights stand out as particularly compelling. First, Professor Roberts makes a convincing argument that it is problematic to label the racial science of yore “pseudoscience.” It is quite tempting to ridicule both the old and new forms of racial science as ignorant and biased attempts to valorize racial hierarchy. Professor Roberts notes, however, that doing so allows modern scientists to distinguish their “objective” study of biological racial difference from the ridiculous “pseudoscience” of the past. Professor Roberts observes that “what we call racial pseudoscience today was considered the vanguard of scientific progress at the time it was practiced.” (27-28). In other words, we must be careful to briskly dismiss the “racial science” of the 19^th Century as pseudoscience, lest we fall into the trap (comforting to some) of believing that current genetic examinations of racial difference are somehow distinctly free from unsound empirical assumptions and implicit bias. As Professor Roberts argues, “[t]he burning scientific questions of each period have been framed and answered in terms of race not because rational scientific inquiry compelled it, but because race was presumed to be an essential biological category.” (28)…

Read the entire review here.