Mixed Race Studies

In visit to Ireland, O’Bama seeks to reverse U.S. notions of race

The Philadelphia Inquirer
2011-05-25

John Timpane, Inquirer Staff Writer

President Obama’s one-day visit to Ireland was a masterly orchestration of three visuals – one imaginary, two very real.

Imaginary visual: the apostrophe in O’Bama. “My name is Barack Obama,” he said in Dublin, “of the Moneygall Obamas, and I’ve come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way.” Anglo-Irish apostrophe, Kenyan last name, American tale…

…Obama was doing much more than playing to the folks at home, with a wink to Moneygall. He was doing no less than seeking to reverse American notions of race, origin, and ethnicity.

“Clearly, a political bet is being made here that this will make beautiful political theater for 2012,” says Matt Wray, assistant professor of sociology at Temple University. “But that isn’t where the conversation ends. There’s a performance here of race and ethnicity that does suggest the terms are changing in the U.S. These images of Obama quaffing Guinness as a son of Ireland really do strike even casual observers as historically new.”

Consider the irony of a man so long under fire for his origins, comes to Ireland to celebrate one strand of those origins. He is called black because in the United States, we are messed up about origins. Why not call him “Barack Obama, America’s 44th white president?” Or “America’s third Irish American president” (after Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy)? He is as much those things as its first black president. No? Never happen? Why not?

Charles Gallagher, chairman of the Sociology, Social Work and Criminal Justice Department at La Salle University, sees the notorious “one-drop rule” of U.S. social attitudes at work: “A single ‘drop of black blood’ negates your ability to reconnect back to Europe. Race trumps all other questions of ethnic origin. Yet we know that 80 percent of all African Americans have European ancestors. Their history, which includes slavery, has cut them off both from Africa and from Europe, from being able to reclaim that great-grandfather in Sicily or Eastern Europe.”…

…Obama’s speech in Dublin told of Fulmouth Kearney, his grandfather’s grandfather, who got out of tiny Moneygall in 1850, ended up in Ohio, bought land, and started a line of middling, obscure, working Americans. How was Kearney to know his line would braid with a Kenyan line, to run within an American (yes) president? An American tale.

Gallagher says, “What Obama did is fantastic. He’s telling the truth: that ethnicity is absolutely fluid, and you can reclaim the full spectrum of your identity. It’s further blurring of the color line, and it gives permission to Americans, many of whom have incredibly diverse origins, to explore them all.”

As Wray puts it: “It speaks to the fastest-growing segment of Americans—those of mixed race—starting to rewrite the script. Obama, in his blackness, is free to explore his whiteness.”

The circle won’t be closed, of course, until millions of white Americans embrace the Africa in their pasts. Forty million claim Irish roots. How many will claim African?…

Read the entire article here.

Who Are We? Producing Group Identity through Everyday Practices of Conflict and Discourse

Sociological Perspectives
Volume 54, Number 2 (Summer 2011)
pages. 139-162
DOI: 10.1525/sop.2011.54.2.139

Jennifer A. Jones, SBS Diversity Post Doctoral Fellow
Ohio State University, Columbus

Multiracials have the flexibility to opt out of multiracial identity, to shift identities depending on context and are characterized by in-group diversity. Given this fluid space, how do multiracials come to see themselves as a collective? This article describes an empirical example of collectivization processes at work. Specifically, the author observed the process of collective identity-building though ethnographic research in a mixed-race student-run organization. This case study indicates that group identity formation is a negotiated process involving strategies to achieve a sense of belonging and cohesion. The author shows that overtime, by using experiences of social conflict to construct shared experiences, the members of this mixed-race organization developed collective identity In so doing, their experience underscores how collective identity development is socially constructed and how micropractices are essential components of group formation.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Mixing of Races and Social Decay

Eugenics Review
Volume 41, Number 1 (April 1949)
pages 11–16

The Right Rev. E. W. Barnes, Sc.D., F.R.S. (1874-1953)
Biship of Birmingham, England

I have chosen to address you on a subject of great importance. With regard to it strong differences of opinion exist. As we consider various aspects of the subject we grope our way uncertainly.

Let us begin with statements that all will accept.

Some Facts of Inheritance

First, the various races of mankind interbreed freely with one another. International enmity, racial prejudice, cultural differences all seem, speaking generally, impotent to prevent interbreeding.

Secondly, the extension of world trade and of transport facilities is steadily increasing the mixture of races and in consequence the likelihood of interbreeding.

I add a further statement that is steadily winning acceptance; physical and psychical qualities are inherited by the same laws of inheritance. As an illustration of this statement we may say that from a tuberculosis parent a tendency to tuberculosis can be inherited; likewise from a drunken parent a tendency to drunkenness can be inherited. In either case, in mating, the dangerous gene or genes may be rejected, or they may be handed on as recessives; but, if rejection or subordination does not take place, the evil tendency will show itself when the environment gives it a chance.

What we have to insist upon in addition to the above fundamental facts is that the complex of desirable qualities, or modes of behaviour and of appreciation, which we call civilization, is a recent acquisition of humanity: it may easily be destroyed or, at least, injured. Our civilization is a fragile thing, which can only be preserved by the education of each successive generation.

And the most careful education, painstaking and thorough though it be, at times fails. Such failure is, it seems, especially likely to occur when the type of civilization which the education aims at producing differs markedly from that which may be called ancestral.

Unsatisfactory “Pockets” in our Society

It is much to be regretted that we lack authoritative knowledge which will enable us to forecast such failure. There is general agreement that in our industrial areas, and in some of our villages, “pockets” of feeblemindedness exist: the children from families in these pockets are expected by elementary teachers to be-and in fact often are backward at school. It seems certain that mental dullness is inherited more often than not. But though “pockets” are formed by half-breeds, if we may for convenience so describe children who are the offspring of different racial stocks, and though children from these “pockets” fairly often prove unsatisfactory to their teachers, it is difficult to know how far their defects are due in innate limitations rather than to harmful home influences. As we put the inquiry we sometimes receive over-confident opinions: colour prejudice, which in Britain is instinctive and strong, tends to distort judgment.

There is no doubt that grave social decay often appears in places like seaports where races mix. But we must remember that, when there is no race mixture, if war leads to conditions under which children run wild, or defective housing creates circumstances leading to immorality, even good stocks will tend to decay. The best we can say is that, when conditions improve, recovery can be rapid. But, I repeat, civilization is fragile: it is a pattern of lving more easily broken than repaired…

…Mixture of Races in South Africa and West Indies

I have left until the end of my survey the most important and difficult of all aspects of the mixing of races, the problem of the Negro in South Africa and in the U.S.A. In each country the ” colour problem ” is a domestic political issue of the first magnitude. Dislike of intermarriage and fear of Negro domination show themselves in white attempts at restrictive legislation. Anxiety is greater in South Africa because there the white man is an intruder; and developments in the West Indian islands suggest that ultimately a partially coloured population will be universal. Descendants of Dutch settlers naturally wish to retain a racial heritage of which they are rightly proud. Their civilization is far higher than that of the Negroes among whom they live and distinctly higher than that of the Indians who seek admission as traders. Without Negro labour in the gold mines the industry could not be carried on as at present; and, in fact, climatic conditions make it natural that manual labour should be supplied by the Negro. We have, in fact, a situation which has recurred throughout history. Two races live side by side: the one of higher culture is dominant but increases slowly in numbers: the other becomes increasingly necessary because it supplies manual labour; it has also the higher birthrate. Inter-breeding takes place and in the end a mixed race with a lower civilization is evolved.

The Negro Problem in the U.S.A.

In the U.S.A., as is well known, the outcome of the Civil War was freedom for the slaves coupled, theoretically, with full civil rights. The actual denial of the franchise in the Southern States has been notorious. Of recent years Negroes have been migrating to the north, where their political influence is being felt. Such migration is leading to further racial admixture. In thirty American States legislation to prevent marriage between whites and Negroes exists—in one instance a Negro has been defined as one in whom there is more than three sixteenths of Negro blood. The California Supreme Court has recently declared such legislation unconstitutional. Americans, whether they like the prospect or not, must accept the fact that a Negro strain in the population is spreading. How should this outcome be regarded?

The earlier stages of disreputable intercourse between white and black belong to the past. Coloured people in all but remote areas of the United States of America have acquired a mixture of white blood. Whenever a so-called Negro makes his mark in public life, inquiry almost always shows a mixed ancestry. In fact, the American “Negro” is already of a different race from the African from whom he is partially descended. This fact is probably the cause of the wide divergence of American opinion as to the right attitude towards “black” citizens. Those who live in Southern States where the Negro strain in the coloured population is strong are prejudiced against any form of political or social equality. Those who know the qualities and potentialities of what we may call the “new” Negro have no such prejudice. The “new” Negro is already developing a characteristic culture. His religion is a form of Christianity which, though intellectually primitive, is emotionally strong. For “Negro spirituals” a musician of the quality of Walford Davies had great admiration. Some plays and stories due to “new” Negroes show the beginning of new forms of art…

Read the entire article here.

Sterility Among Hybrids

The Canadian Medical Association Journal
Volume 16, Number 6 (June 1926)
page 661-665

Frank N. Walker, M.B.
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

In choosing sterility to demonstrate some of the metabolic aberrations of hybrids, I do so because in this condition a certain number of difficult variables can be easily eliminated. We are taught that all physiological variations are congenital or acquired. Since sterility cannot be laid at the door of heredity it must be acquired. We are likewise taught that all complaints of the human body are either functional or organic. In this discourse I do not propose to discuss any form of sterility that has an anatomical cause from the pathological viewpoint. It has been estimated that in the United States there are to-day nearly two million sterile couples who are still at the age of childbearing, and it is needless to say that in miiany cases it is the disappointment of a lifetime, especially to those who take their citizenship seriously. Since I intend to discuss here only functional sterility, allow me to review briefly some of the outstanding cases of this condition found in animal breeding.

The common mule has been recognized as sterile since the days of Homer, though Columnella quotes from Mago, a Carthaginian agriculturist, that in his country the fecundity of the mule was a frequent event, although it was regarded as a prodigy in Greece and Italy. He adds that these mixed mules do not cross again with *one another, but only with the primitive species that gave them birth. Others have discussed the fact of sterility among mules in the northern climates. I am inclined to put some credence in this statement with regard to geographic latitude, as I will mention later that calcium metabolism is an important factor of infertility.

…Turning now to human beings I would begin by stating that the mulatto is not so fertile as the pure black or pure white types. Statistics show that where the coloured population of the United States has the largest number of mulattoes, the birth rate is much lower than where the coloured population is pure black. Physically the mulatto is inferior to either of the races that gave him cause. Physical deterioration may have its exceptions in racial crosses. Sulivan states that “the part Hawaiian is an inmprovement on the HIawaiian stock although the birth rate is lower”. It has been mentioned that sterility is rather common in Jewish-Gentile marriages. The cross between the European and the Australian aborigines is almost sterile…

…The harm done by racial mixtures I believe is much wider than the scope of this paper. Its importance as a factor in asthma, eczema and spasmophilia are beyond question to me. So wrapped up it seems are racial mixtures with the ailments of mankind, that I have almost reached the stage that I would dogmatically assert that “If you show me a family where the doctor is metaphorically always on the doorstep, I will show you a family of profound racial mixture.”

Let us, as the trained interpreters of the ills of mankind delve more deeply into the reasons. that bring sorrow to so many households. Whether it be the disappointment of a sterile marriage, the disheartening result of child after child being born dead, or the financial embarrassment because it is too often sterile individuals who set a community’s social pace, it matters not. The world and civilization did not reach its present status by sterility either relative or absolute. There is a cause, and thecause can be found, providing we jointly put forth our efforts to interpret our experiences, and at all times bear a virtuous tolerance toward those who attempt to assist, us, even though we differ from them in minor details…

Read the entire article here.

The study of racial mixture in the British Commonwealth: Some anthropological preliminaries

Eugenics Review
Volume 32, Number 4 (January 1941)
pages 114-120

K. L. Little
The Duckworth Laboratory
University Museum of Ethnology, Cambridge

In a recently published and noteworthy symposium entitled “Race Relations and the Race Problem,” eleven prominent American writers reviewed the sociological implications of racial contacts on the American continent, with special reference to problems arising out of the very large racial minority in the U.S.A. of some 13 million American Negroes. One of these authors, Professor S. J. Holmes, has pointed out elsewhere that there are three racial possibilities in view for the United States. The entire population may become “white”; it may become “black”; or “whites” and “blacks” may fuse together into a hybrid stock. This last possibility seems to be fairly well substantiated by the anthropometric material collected by Professor Melville J. Herskovits, who in his turn attributes the rise and growth of this new hybrid “race” to the effect of social selection.

Although the interest shown in North America to problems of racial relations in particular, and to human genetics in general, as proved by the articles in such journals as the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, is readily understandable, it stands out in very sharp relief to the lukewarm attention afforded to such matters in the countries which compose the British Commonwealth. The latter empire comprises practically speaking members of every major and minor race group in the world, and so contains the elements of most possible forms of human miscegenation, yet official information regarding the actual racial compositions of these populations is often very incomplete, and particularly so in the colonial areas where it would be most interesting. Nor, anthropologically speaking, can much of the semi-official data, as displayed, for example, in such books of reference as the Encyclopaedia Britannica by the use of phrases as “the higher-type races,” “black low type,” etc., be considered more satisfactory. The fact, however, that nothing like a complete anthropometric survey has yet been instituted even in this country, may help to explain, though not to condone, the lack of more exact information elsewhere…

…How Will Racial Relations be Affected in the Future?

In sociological science it is no more than a truism to state that the structure of no society is static. This would be clear even if the disruptions achieved by such forces as war did not make the presence of the dynamic factors which are continuously changing and modifying institutions and traditions even more obvious. It may, therefore, be thought unquestionable that present forms of racial or social segregations will undergo corresponding alteration, becoming either more elastic or more rigid in the process. In the former event then not only will the racial composition of populations change considerably, but many new “racial” populations will emerge. In this light, then, eugenic considerations involve not only the forms of racial hybridization at present in force, but the far wider possibilities of the future; since it is but reasonable to suppose that in human genetics no less than elsewhere, the biological results become more diverse as new and additional factors are added. Moreover, specific as well as general consideration seems all the more necessary, when it is remembered that answers stlll to be provided for certain ambiguously interpretable phenomena are in a sense but the preface to wider fields…

Read the entire article here.

Racial mixture in Great Britain: some anthropological characteristics of the Anglo-negroid cross (A Preliminary Report)

Eugenics Review
Volume 33, Number 4 (January 1942)
pages 112-120

K. L. Little
The Duckworth Laboratory
University Museum of Ethnology, Cambridge

With the exception of a large number of family studies secured by Miss R. M. Fleming, little anthropological attention has so far been given to the question of racial crossing in this country, although the presence of some fairly extensive hybrid communities in most of our sea-port cities affords an excellent opportunity for anthropometric investigation, particularly in respect to the Anglo-Negroid cross. The present paper, comprising a brief statistical analysis of the measurements of some ninety Anglo-Negroid or “Coloured” children, together with a smaller “White ” sample of forty drawn from the same environment, represents what it is hoped may be merely a prelude to a wider and statistically more adequate survey of the subject, especially as far as the adult element is concerned. The present data, including those of a small number of adults with one F1 adult exception, were gained entirely from a community in Cardiff, where all the subjects were born. In the course of the enquiry the opportunity was taken of examining a further sample of some eighty subjects mainly of Anglo-Arab and Anglo-Mediterranean parentage. These, however, have been omitted from the present discussion for considerations of space. The Anglo-Negroid adult sample is as yet too small for statistical treatment, and has similarly been omitted, although a few particulars as to its characters are given below.

Briefly stated, the aspects of racial crossing it is intended to cover comprise such questions as the segregation of both quantitative and qualitative physical characters in the hybrid population, the comparative variability of the respective groups, and comparative differences in growth and sex differences. In the light of these considerations it was decided to. employ as wide an assortment of characters as was practicable, and having regard to the specific racial stocks involved, i.e. Negroid and Caucasoid (White), to give special attention to those features which show clear differentiation between the parent stocks. In terms of the present facilities these may be listed as skin, hair and eye colour, lip thickness, nasal width and height and the corresponding nasal index, and the ratio of nasal depth to width. In addition, a fairly large number of characters possessing genetical rather than racial significance were chosen, and these included such features as head length, head breadth, facial length, etc., etc., from which the relevant cephalic, facial, fronto-jugal and other indices were obtained. Finally, two modifiable characters in the shape of stature and sitting height were included….

Read the entire article here.

Half-Hearted Loving

The Faculty Lounge: Conversations about law, culture, and academia
2011-06-13

Kevin Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Yesterday, June 12, marked the annual celebration of Loving Day.  This event commemorated the 1967 Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia, which invalidated the state’s Racial Integrity Act that prohibited interracial marriages.  Notably, Virginia’s law was only one of many state interracial bans.  In the mid-twentieth century, 30 states had some form of mixed marriage prohibition, all struck down by Loving in one fell swoop.  In this momentous decision, the Court paved the way for all Americans to determine their intimate associations without regard to race.

More than forty years later, interracial intimacy—dating, cohabitation, and marriage—continues to go against the norm, rather than be a part of it. The 2010 Census reports that less than eight percent of all marriages are between people of different races, with slightly higher rates for cohabitating couples.  Multiracial people remain a very small part of the national population, just under three percent in 2010…

…However, the Loving case was not the Moses that parted the racial sea, ushering in multihued phalanxes of diversity. In a modern world where people are free to make their own choices, partner selection has not changed much.   Of course, a single case like Loving is not going to convert every American into the Temple of Miscegeny, and mandate interracial kumbayahs for everyone of dating age.  In the same way that the legalization of gay marriage would not unearth a wellspring of same-sex desire, a change in law does not automatically transform personal preferences…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial students and the evolution of affirmative action

Harvard Law & Policy Review
2011-06-17

Jay Willis

Reduced to its elements, affirmative action is a relatively straightforward concept.  Colleges and universities consider an applicant’s racial and ethnic background to ensure that they enroll sufficient numbers of students from traditionally underrepresented groups. But schools are now grappling with new Department of Education regulations that, for the first time, allow students to identify themselves as members of two (or more) ethnic groups on their college and graduate school applications.  The initiative was intended to recognize the diversity of the national student body and to ensure that no student had to pigeonhole him or herself into one neatly checked box.  But the multitude of boxes suddenly available to each applicant introduces an unwelcome element of uncertainty for campus officials composing the incoming class of 2015.
 
Say a mixed-race student self-identifies as both African-American and white on his college application; the former group traditionally receives preferential treatment in affirmative action programs, while the latter does not.  Under the new reporting guidelines, how should the student be counted in terms of his contribution to the school’s diversity?  Is he African-American, and if so, does he somehow count less when calculating these statistics than does someone with two African-American parents?  Is he white, and if so, is he less white such that he counts less toward the school’s burgeoning white population?  Is there some formula by which the school could count him as both?  Or is he a member of neither category such that he and other multiracial students must be reclassified altogether?…

Read the entire article here.

School of Cultural Inquiry Seminar Series – Narrating the Nowhere People: FB Vickers’ The Mirage and “Half-Caste” Aboriginals

Australian National University
A. D. Hope Conference Room (Building 14)
2011-06-06, 16:16-17:30 (Local TIme)

Rich Pascal, Visiting Fellow
School of Cultural Inquiry
Australian National University

By the turn of the Twentieth Century, and increasingly in the decades that followed, areas located literally on the fringes of many Australian towns were populated by people consigned figuratively to a conceptual limbo.  Australians who were mostly of mixed Aboriginal and European ancestry congregated in slumlike camps and reserves.  As the century wore on, the mainstream society’s widespread belief that the so-called “tribal” Aboriginals were passing into extinction had come to be shadowed by a perception that these so-called “half-castes” and “fringe dwellers” were now the dark Others whose endurance threatened the dream of an all-white Australia.  They were, to borrow Henry Reynolds’ apt phrase, Australia’s “nowhere people.” 
 
Mostly unsighted, they were in the literal sense commonly unremarked by mainstream Australians.  And the society’s chronic inclination to render the marginalised social group translucent was nowhere more apparent than in the sphere of literary and popular narratives.  In the novels, stories, and memoirs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries their near invisibility registers as an almost total absence.  It wasn’t until the two decades following the end of the Second World War that some memoirs, novels and stories that featured them prominently were presented to the reading public.  The first book length narrative to set itself the challenge of subjectively rendering the experience of Indigenous nowhereness was FB Vickers’ The Mirage (1955), a novel that has not been well remembered.  Although well received by reviewers of the time, it was not a popular success and it was rarely mentioned in later histories of Australian literature; it has never been studied in any depth or detail.  This discussion constitutes an effort to redress the latter omission, and advances as well an argument for the book’s sociocultural importance with regard to subsequent efforts, literary and otherwise, to include the nowhere people within the national identity.

The Writer’s Almanac Podcast with Garrison Keillor [Charles Wadell Chesnutt]

The Writer’s Almanac
2011-06-20

Garrison Keillor, Host

Today in history and a poem or two.

It’s the birthday of Charles Waddell Chesnutt (books by this author), born on this day in Cleveland (1858). His parents were free mixed-race Southerners who left Fayetteville, North Carolina, for Ohio. One of his grandfathers had been a slaveholder, and Chesnutt looked white, but he always identified as black. His family moved back to Fayetteville when Charles was eight, and the boy went to a Freedmen’s Bureau school for the children of freed slaves. He became a teacher, and then principal of the State Colored Normal School in Fayetteville, which trained black teachers.

In 1880, when he was 22 years old, he wrote in his journal: “I think I must write a book. I am almost afraid to undertake a book so early and with so little experience in composition. But it has been a cherished dream, and I feel an influence that I cannot resist calling me to the task.”
 
It took Chesnutt a few years to get there. He was an established and respected citizen in Fayetteville, but in 1883 he decided that he didn’t have much of a future as a black writer in the hostile post-Civil War South. So he moved back to Cleveland with his wife and children. He passed the state bar exams and set up a stenography business, and in his spare time he wrote stories. In 1887, he published his first short story, “The Goophered Grapevine,” in The Atlantic Monthly. He was the first black fiction writer to be published in The Atlantic—although the magazine assumed that he was white until he informed them several years, and many stories, later…

Read the text here. Listen to the podcast here.  Download the podcast here.