Mixed Race Studies

Historicizing “mixed-race” and post-modern amnesia

O Desafio da Diferença (Challenge of the Difference)
Universidade Federal da Bahia
Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
2000-04-09 through 2000-04-12

Grupo de Trabalho (Workshop) 5: Mixing it up with Mixed Race: Problematizing and Historicizing the Mixed Race Discourse

Katya Gibel Azoulay [Mevorach], Associate Professor of Anthropology
Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa

Americans have carried the problem of the color line into the 21st century but it is doubtful that the generation of W.E.B. Du Bois anticipated the emergence of a “multiracial” movement whose primary objective was to gain recognition of mixed-race people as a unique entity and different collective. This phenomenon is an outgrowth of “interracial” marriages which, according to the U.S. Census, indicate dramatic increases since the dismantlement of state anti-miscegenation laws in 1967. Blacks, however, are “noticeably absent” from this trend and Newsweek has estimated that approximately 20 percent of interracial marriages were between black and white partners and the overwhelming majority of these are between white women and black men [Fletcher 1998; Azoulay 1997:95]

This paper focuses on the demand for a multiracial category in the U.S. Census in order to explore two intersecting aspects of the multiracial discourse. Attention is only given to the black/white binary for it is this angle which is the most contentious and has received the most public attention. On the one hand, the idea of multiracialism eclipses the broader issue of power partially because it is premised on privileging individual rights rather than group rights. On the other hand, the celebration of multiracial people may be read as a postmodern script in which women, as mothers, occupy a central role in the formation and politicization of racial identities.

As a departure point, let us address the premise of the question posed by the multiracial movement: should racial classifications used to track broad demographic trends and monitor compliance with legislation against racial discrimination take each individual heritage into account? I suggest that the demand for a multiracial category confuses personal identities with prescriptive identities while ignoring the relationship between public policy and identifiable communities. Public policies that utilize race categories affect groups of people who may or may not subscribe to a shared collective identity but who are nevertheless perceived as a group. Government and institutional policies shaped by information gathered about social categories are not formulated for individuals but for groups. The political implications of this lead opponents and supporters of government sponsored social engineering to invoke the equal protection clause under the 14th amendment with very different interpretations. In a departure from the direction set by the U.S. Supreme Court 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education toward civil rights legislation, the courts have moved away from protecting historically disadvantaged group rights evidenced by court-ordered repeals of affirmative action policies confusing invidious discrimination with remedial racial preference.

As a preface, let me state clearly my position: race categories are public fictions which are deeply embedded in American ways of thinking and acting. Furthermore, because classifications based on the political and social category of “race” have no scientific basis, they are misused when appropriated as biological criteria into medical research in the United States [Tapper 1999]. Consequently, arguments for a multiracial category for health reasons (such as bone marrow donors) rely on a faulty notion that race categories can be adjusted for accuracy. Nevertheless, race has assumed the status of a social fact whose meanings reflect, and are reflected by, the cognitive feel of lived experience in a race-based society [Piper 1992; Scales-Trent 1995].

Read the entire paper here.

Race in Contemporary Medicine

Routledge
2007
208 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-41365-7

Edited by:

Sander L. Gilman

With the first patent being granted to “BiDil,” a combined medication that is deemed to be most effective for a specific “race,” African-Americans for a specific form of heart failure, the on-going debate about the effect of the older category of race has been renewed. What role should “race” play in the discussion of genetic alleles and populations today? The new genetics has seemed to make “race” both a category that is seen useful if not necessary, as The New York Times noted recently: “Race-based prescribing makes sense only as a temporary measure.” (Editorial, “Toward the First Racial Medicine,” November 13, 2004) Should one think about “race” as a transitional category that is of some use while we continue to explore the actual genetic makeup and relationships in populations? Or is such a transitional solution poisoning the actual research and practice.

Does “race” present both epidemiological and a historical problem for the society in which it is raised as well as for medical research and practice? Who defines “race”? The self-defined group, the government, the research funder, the researcher? What does one do with what are deemed “race” specific diseases such as “Jewish genetic diseases” that are so defined because they are often concentrated in a group but are also found beyond the group? Are we comfortable designating “Jews” or “African-Americans” as “races” given their genetic diversity? The book answers these questions from a bio-medical and social perspective.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Patterns of Prejudice.

Contents

• Introduction: On Race and Medicine in Historical Perspective. Sander L. Gilman (Emory)
• Reflections on Race and the Biologization of Difference. Katya Gibel Azoulay (Grinnell)
• Against Racial Medicine. Joseph L. Graves, Jr. (North Carolina A&T State University) & Michael R. Rose (University of California, Irvine)
• Blood and Stories: How Genomics is Rewriting Race, Medicine and Human History. Patricia Wald (Duke)
• “Why are Genetic and Medical Researchers Accepting a Category Created by Slaveholders?” A Social History of the Reification of “Race” James Downs (Princeton)
• Eugenics and the Racial Genome: Politics at the Molecular Level. Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell (University of Illinois – Chicago)
• The Risky Gene: Epidemiology and the Evolution of Race. Philip Alcabes (Hunter College School of Health Sciences)
• Folk Taxonomy, Prejudice and the Human Genome: Using Heritable Disease as a Jewish Ethnic Marker. Judith S. Neulander (Case Western Reserve University)
• The price of science without moral constraints: German and American medicine before DNA and Today. Robert E. Pollack (Columbia)
• Deadly Medicine Today: The Impossible Denials of Racial Medicine. C. Richard King (Washington State University)
• Biobanks of a “Racial Kind”: Mining for Difference in the New Genetics. Sandra Soo-Jin Lee (Stanford)

The revisionist celebration of a mixed-race identity negates and eclipses a long history of white men crossing the color line to engage in sex with Black women, usually without their consent.  It has rendered invisible violations of Black women while critiquing the strategic efficacy of privileging Black political identities. Although questions of appearance, performance and class require a separate analysis of diverse and divisive perceptions and conceptions of Blackness, the campaign for a multiracial category obscures the fact that Black/African-Americans is already a multiracial category. Legal scholar Patricia Williams skillfully encapsulates this sentiment when she writes, “what troubles me is the degree to which few people in the world, and most particularly in the United States, are anything but multiracial, to say nothing of biracial.  The use of the term seems to privilege to offspring of mixed marriages as those ‘between’ races without doing much to enhance to social status of all of us mixed-up products of illegitimacies of the not so distance past.”

Katya Gibel Azoulay [Katya Gibel Mevorach], “Jewish After Mount Sinai: Jews, Blacks and the (Multi) racial Category,” Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, Volume 9, Number 1 (Summer 2001): 31-45.

Interpreting the Census: The Elasticity of Whiteness and the Depoliticization of Race 

2007
pages 155-170 

Katya Gibel Mevorach, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Grinnell College 

From the anthology: 

Racial Liberalism and the Politics of Urban America
Michigan State University Press
2007
280 pages
6 ” x 9 ”
ISBN: 0-87013-669-0, 978-0-87013-669-6 

Edited by: 

Curtis Stokes, Professor of Political Philosophy and African American Thought
James Madison College of Public Affairs
Michigan State University 

Theresa A. Melendez, Associate Professor of Chicano/Chicana Literature
Michigan State University 

I begin with a brief review of how whiteness was established as a norm and context for considering initial media reports of U.S. Census data on race released in March 2001.  This is followed by reflections on the politically conservative ramifications of multiracialism and multiculturalism, which have had an exaggerated impact on popular interpretations of the census.  As a preface, it should be noted that although we are, collectively, caught in the trap of using race as a noun, race should be understood as a verb—a predicate that requires action.  People do not belong to a race but the are raced; in this context, race operates as a social fact with concrete material consequences for the manner in which experiences shape individual lives and their meaning. 

Let us take note of an overlooked but rather obvious observation: inequality is not distributed equally.  Therefore Americans of all colors and national origins need a constant reminder that Africans brought to the English colonies in the 1600s were strategically and explicitly excluded, by law and social custom, from the privileges and rights accorded English men.  This is a critical factor in how U.S. history has been shaped.  Emphasizing the unequal distribution of inequality underlines the continuities and clarifies the linkages between the past and the present.  Beginning in the colonial period, being white was perceived and defined as having certain privileges and rights, including right to citizenship,  to vote, to serve in the militia and bear arms, and to be a member of a jury.  Most important of all was the right of self-possession—in other words, he right to be identified as a free person and to act on that right.  Children of enslaved African females were legally designated as slaves and property of their masters, who often where their biological fathers.  As blackness quickly came to be associated with slave status, the law set the parameters within which, conceptually, people with African ancestors would be legally and socially identified as Negroes (Fields 1990)… 

…In sum, the multiracial movement has successfully blurred the lines between two very different forms of identifying: public self-identification and personal or private plural identities. From Elk magazine to Seventeen and ABC to MTV, the notion of mixed-race and multiracial identities is given positive visibility as a celebration of how much America is changing. Curiously, this multimedia arena has neglected a discussion of the limitations of a notion of multiracialism that refers only to children whose parents are raced differently. In fact, the campaign for a multiracial category completely obscures the fact that black or African American is already a multiracial category. Patricia Williams skillfully interprets this phenomenon when she writes, “what troubles me is the degree to which few people in the world, and most particularly in the United States, are anything but multiracial, to say nothing of biracial. The use of the term seems to privilege the offspring of mixed marriages as those ‘between’ races without doing much to enhance the social status of us mixed-up products of the illegitimacies of the not so distanct past” (1997, 53)…

Read the entire chapter here.

Jewish After Mount Sinai: Jews, Blacks and the (Multi) racial Category

Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal
Volume 9, Number 1 (Summer 2001)
pages 31-45

Katya Gibel Azoulay [Katya Gibel Mevorach], Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Studies
Grinnell College

My point of departure begins with the social and political fact of being both a Black woman who is Jewish and a Jewish woman who is Black in order to undermine the presupposition of inherent cultural or racial differences that favors the vocabulary of mixed or hybrid identities over the conjunction [both.. and].  Instead of being mutually exclusive, the link between Jewish and Black identities witness Stuart Hall’s “logic of coupling rather that the logic of binary opposition.”…

…The revisionist celebration of a mixed-race identity negates and eclipses a long history of white men crossing the color line to engage in sex with Black women, usually without their consent.  It has rendered invisible violations of Black women while critiquing the strategic efficacy of privileging Black political identities. Although questions of appearance, performance and class require a separate analysis of diverse and divisive perceptions and conceptions of Blackness, the campaign for a multiracial category obscures the fact that Black/African-Americans is already a multiracial category.  Legal scholar Patricia Williams skillfully encapsulates this sentiment when she writes, “what troubles me is the degree to which few people in the world, and most particularly in the United States, are anything but multiracial, to say nothing of biracial.  The use of the term seems to privilege to offspring of mixed marriages as those ‘between’ races without doing much to enhance to social status of all of us mixed-up products of illegitimacies of the not so distance past.”…

Read the entire article here.

Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It’s Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity

Duke University Press
1997
232 pages
Cloth – ISBN13 978-0-8223-1975-7
Paperback – ISBN13 978-0-8223-1971-9

Katya Gibel Azoulay [Mevorach], Professor
Anthropology and American Studies
Grinnell College, Grinnell Iowa

How do adult children of interracial parents—where one parent is Jewish and one is Black—think about personal identity?  This question is at the heart of Katya Gibel Azoulay’s Black, Jewish, and Interracial.  Motivated by her own experience as the child of a Jewish mother and Jamaican father, Gibel Azoulay blends historical, theoretical, and personal perspectives to explore the possibilities and meanings that arise when Black and Jewish identities merge. As she asks what it means to be Black, Jewish, and interracial, Gibel Azoulay challenges deeply ingrained assumptions about identity and moves toward a consideration of complementary racial identities.

Beginning with an examination of the concept of identity as it figures in philosophical and political thought, Gibel Azoulay moves on to consider and compare the politics and traditions of the Black and Jewish experience in America. Her inquiry draws together such diverse subjects as Plessy v. Ferguson, the Leo Frank case, “passing,” intermarriage, civil rights, and anti-Semitism. The paradoxical presence of being both Black and Jewish, she argues, leads questions of identity, identity politics, and diversity in a new direction as it challenges distinct notions of whiteness and blackness.  Rising above familiar notions of identity crisis and cultural confrontation, she offers new insights into the discourse of race and multiculturalism as she suggests that identity can be a more encompassing concept than is usually thought. Gibel Azoulay adds her own personal history and interviews with eight other Black and Jewish individuals to reveal various ways in which interracial identities are being lived, experienced, and understood in contemporary America.