Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Antidiscrimination Law and the Multiracial Experience: A Reply to Nancy Leong

    Antidiscrimination Law and the Multiracial Experience: A Reply to Nancy Leong

    Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal
    Volume 10, Summer 2013
    pages 191-218

    Tina F. Botts, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Pre-law Advisor
    University of North Carolina at Charlotte

    Nancy Leong’s thesis, in “Judicial Erasure of Mixed-Race Discrimination,” is that antidiscrimination law should make a switch from defining race “categorically” to defining it in terms of the perception of the would-be discriminator so as to better accommodate claims of multiracial discrimination and so as to better achieve what Leong sees as the goals of antidiscrimination law, i.e., the promotion of racial understanding, and the elimination of racism and racial discrimination. But, while Leong’s goals are admirable, the method she proposes for achieving these goals will not succeed. Antidiscrimination law cannot operate to promote racial understanding, or to eliminate racism and racial discrimination, because it was not designed to achieve these goals. Moreover, a switch in focus on the part of antidiscrimination courts from “categorical” race to “perceived” race will not render antidiscrimination law more accommodating to claims of multiracial discrimination. Such a shift would instead operate to further exclude multiracial plaintiffs from protection against discrimination. A more effective way of modifying antidiscrimination law so as to render it better able to accommodate claims of multiracial discrimination is to call courts (1) to remember that discrimination is something that happens to social groups and not to individuals, and (2) to include multiracial persons among the groups of persons specially protected from discrimination.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Mixed Breeds Are Not Negroes and May Mingle With Whites

    Mixed Breeds Are Not Negroes and May Mingle With Whites

    The Weekly Messenger
    St. Martinville, Louisiana
    1910-04-30
    page 3, column 2
    Source: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers

    The Daily Picayune

    The Supreme Court of Louisiana by a vote of three to two, Justices Nicholls and Land dissenting, has decided that the state law prohibiting concubinage between the races in Louisiana affects only pure-blooded whites and pure-blooded blacks. Where either party is of mixed blood there is no prohibition under the law. It follows under this decision that were persons are charged with concubinage, and either pleads in defense that he or she is of mixed blood, which would bar prosecution, it will be incumbent on the state to prove the purity of the race, a problem vast more difficult than the proving of race mixture.

    Justice Land, in his dissenting opinion, declares that under the decision of the court, the Gay-Shattuck law, which forbid whites and negroes to be served with liquors at the same bar, can apply to whites and blacks, and the prohibition does not extend to mulattoes to griffes, who are the offspring of negroes and mulattoes, and they have a right to be served at the same bars and tables with whites. Obviously between whites and griffes is entirely lawful under the decision of the court. Justice Land takes occasion to express bit gratification that the Legislators of Louisiana will be in session in the course of a few days and indulges the hope that the limitations imposed in these laws, which seek to distinguish between the races, will so define and establish the distinguishing terms as that nothing will be left to interference or conjecture.

    It is inevitable that confusion must occur when the law forbidding the inter marriage of the races makes use of the terms “white” and “colored” while the statute prohibiting concubinage employs the distinctions “white” and “negro.” There seems to be no agreement by the lexicographers in the matter of distinctions. Webster, edition of 1910, use “negro” and “colored” indifferently, and the Century, while defining the negro race according to specific physical characteristics, uses the word “colored” with apparent indifference, as does also the Standard Dictionary. There are more negroes in the Southern part of the United States than in any other country on the globe which has a propendorating white population, and here, in all political and social distinctions, the negros and the mixed blood have always been reckoned together, and if these conditions are to be changed there should be fixed and definite terms by which these new conditions are to be established, and not left to the inferences and conjectures of a judicial tribunal, do matter how able and learned in the law its members.

  • Ethnic minorities: defining ethnicity and race

    Ethnic minorities: defining ethnicity and race

    The Scottish Public Health Observatory
    Ethnic Minorities
    Last Updated: 2012-03-06

    Ethnicity

    Ethnicity has been defined as:

    “the social group a person belongs to, and either identifies with or is identified with by others, as a result of a mix of cultural and other factors including language, diet, religion, ancestry and physical features traditionally associated with race”. (1)

    Ethnicity is essentially self-defined and may change over time. Classification of ethnicity is essentially pragmatic, based on categories that include common self-descriptions, are acceptable to respondents and that identify variations that are important for research or policy. There is increasing recognition that people may want to identify themselves with more than one ethnic group, and the “mixed” category introduced in the UK 2001 Census attempts to do this. The standard classification of ethnic group in the UK is that used in the 2011 Census (which was slightly different in each of the four countries of the UK). Ethnicity is different from country of origin, since many countries include more than one ethnic group.

    Race

    The concept of race is controversial. It is difficult to define a rationale for racial categories and there is no consistent agreement about an objective set of categories. Classifying individuals by their physical appearance and skin colour is unreliable and of questionable validity. Genetic studies have found some evidence of broad “continental” groups which are genetically similar.(2,3) However, there is little evidence that these correspond to commonly perceived racial categories.(4) There is wider genetic variation between individuals within one “racial” group (such as “white”) than there is between such “racial” groups (5)—indeed 93% to 95% of genetic variation is within population groups. Despite these difficulties, the term race is still widely used in legal and policy contexts…

    Read the entire article here.

  • My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune: A Memoir of the Civil War Era

    My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune: A Memoir of the Civil War Era

    LSU Press
    April 2001 (Originally published in 1872)
    184 pages
    5.50 x 9.00 inches
    3 halftones
    ISBN10: 0807126896, ISBN13: 9780807126899

    Jean-Charles Houzeau (1820-1888)

    Edited by David C. Rankin
    Translated by Gerard F. Denault

    When Belgian scientist Jean-Charles Houzeau arrived in New Orleans in 1857, he was disturbed that America, founded on the principle of freedom, still tolerated the institution of slavery. In late 1864, he became managing editor of the New Orleans Tribune, the first black daily newspaper published in the United States. Ardently sympathetic to the plight of Louisiana’s black population and reveling in the fact that his dark complexion led many people to assume he was black himself, Houzeau passionately embraced his role as the Tribune’s editor and principal writer. My Passage at the New Orleans “Tribune,” first published in Belgium in 1872, is Houzeau’s memoir of the four years he spent as both observer and participant in the drama of Reconstruction.

  • Louisiana’s “Creoles of Color”: Ethnicity, Marginality, and Identity

    Louisiana’s “Creoles of Color”: Ethnicity, Marginality, and Identity

    Social Science Quarterly
    Volume 73 Issue 3, September 1992
    pages 615-

    James H. Dormon, Alumni Distinguished Professor of History and American Studies
    University of Southwestern Louisiana

    This article traces the ethnohistory of Creoles of color, beginning with an examination of the social-historical order out of which they emerged, and argues the case that Creole marginality has been the major determinant of the Creole ethnic experience. While it is impossible to pinpoint the precise timing of the ethnogenesis of the group, it was certainly in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, during which years the group emerged as part of what the historian Laura Foner has termed a “three-caste social system” in colonial Louisiana. In the eighteenth century the dominant Louisiana population–the “hegemonic” population in current usage–was that of the white European elites (or those descending directly from such elites): large landowners and planter/merchants along with colonial officials, both civil and military. The increasingly large slave population, normally perceived by Europeans as African provided the agricultural labor deemed essential to staple crop production. Within the colonial social order, blacks were separated from the white population by caste lines written into law and generally enforced by social as well as legal sanctions. Yet from the beginning, and despite legal provisions forbidding the practice, whites and blacks established sexual contact, producing offspring that shared the genes of both parents.

  • The House on Bayou Road: Atlantic Creole Networks in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

    The House on Bayou Road: Atlantic Creole Networks in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

    The Journal of American History
    Volume 100, Issue 1 (June 2013)
    pages 21-45
    DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jat082

    Pierre Force, Professor of French and History
    Columbia University

    n 1813 a free man of color named Charles Decoudreau living in New Orleans went to court to repossess a house on the edge of town he had sold two years before to Charles Lamerenx, a white man from Saint Domingue. Despite being on opposite sides of a racial divide, the men and their families had much in common as “Atlantic creoles.” In this study, I test the meaning and explanatory power of Ira Berlin’s concept of “Atlantic creole” by telling the story of two families, one “black” and one “white,” whose paths briefly crossed in New Orleans in 1811.

    Berlin’s work on “Atlantic creoles” is a powerful intervention in this field because it begins by telling a familiar story and proceeds with a much less familiar one. The familiar story is that of Africans being forcibly taken to America and stripped of their African identities, and developing a new creole or African American culture that was the product of their experience as slaves working in the plantations. Important as this story is, it captures “only a portion of the history of black life in colonial North America, and that imperfectly.” The story as usually told begins with an unadulterated “African” identity that was somehow erased or transformed by the experience of slavery and gave way to a creole identity that was a mix of various African, European, and Native American components. Inverting this story of origins, Berlin shows that the Africans of the charter generations were always already creole: their experiences and attitudes “were more akin to that of confident, sophisticated natives than of vulnerable newcomers.” Atlantic creoles originated in the encounters between Europeans and Africans on the western coast of Africa, starting in the fifteenth century, well before Christopher Columbus sailed to America. In a few coastal enclaves, …

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Pacific Islanders: a Misclassified People

    Pacific Islanders: a Misclassified People

    The Chronicle of Higher Education
    2013-06-03

    Kawika Riley, Chief Executive and Founder
    Pacific Islander Access Project
    also adjunct lecturer at George Washington University

    Imagine that you’re a parent, teacher, or counselor who helped a promising student apply for financial aid. She’s an underrepresented minority, so you encouraged her to apply to several scholarships for minority students. A few weeks later, she receives a wave of responses from them, all saying the same thing: She’s not eligible to apply. Why? Because the colleges have misclassified her; even though she’s an underrepresented minority student, they’ve decided to treat her as if she’s not.

    Now imagine that instead of one student’s being misclassified, this is happening to every student who belongs to one of the fastest-growing minority groups in America. Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders don’t need to imagine any of this. This is their reality.

    For more than 20 years, U.S. Census data have shown that Pacific Islanders are far less likely to graduate from college than is the general population. The statistics have fluctuated slightly over time, but the trend is that Pacific Islanders are about half as likely as the general population to hold bachelor’s degrees, and even less likely to receive advanced degrees.

    …Before 1997, the federal standard for racial classification grouped Asians and Pacific Islanders together. But 16 years ago, the standards were updated, and Pacific Islanders and Asians were recognized as two distinct groups. Unfortunately, the myth of a homogeneous “Asian Pacific” race persists, and the use of “API” data suggests that statistics on “Asian Pacific Islanders” reflect the conditions of both Asians and Pacific Islanders.

    They don’t….

    Read the entire article here.

  • Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America by Ayanna Thompson (Klett review)

    Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America by Ayanna Thompson (Klett review)

    Theatre Journal
    Volume 65, Number 2, May 2013
    pages 303-304
    DOI: 10.1353/tj.2013.0043

    Elizabeth Klett, Assistant Professor of Literature
    University of Houston, Clear Lake

    Ayanna Thompson’s exciting book analyzes a wide variety of sites for performing, interrogating, and dismantling Shakespeare and race in contemporary American popular culture. Arguing that “Shakespeare’s American cultural value and legacy cannot be weighed through performances in traditional venues only” (7), Thompson extends her purview beyond expected forms (such as professional theatre productions and literary and film adaptations) to include nontraditional modes of performance (such as YouTube videos and prison and youth-oriented productions). The book as a whole provides a fascinating and multilayered appraisal of the uses (and misuses) of race in American appropriations of Shakespeare and his plays.

    One of the most notable aspects of Thompson’s book is her ability to work with conflicting statements and oppositional ideas, which she often presents, at least initially, as epigraphs to her chapters. For example, she tackles the debate over so-called color-blind casting by foregrounding the very different views of August Wilson and Robert Brustein. Similarly, the book revisits the eternal tensions between universalizing and historically particularist interpretations of Shakespeare, suggesting that Shakespeare is both freeing and something from which one must be freed. Thompson does not attempt to resolve these kinds of contradictions and instabilities; instead, she revels in them, exploring what they reveal about contemporary American culture and its preoccupations with Shakespeare and race. She does take sides, however; as her first chapter warns, the book is occasionally polemical, “because this is a project that requires action and not just passive reflection” (14). Her main goal is “to bring contemporary race studies and contemporary Shakespeare studies into an honest and sustained dialogue,” contending that many performances, citations, and analyses of Shakespeare ignore or elide racial issues (3).

    The second and third chapters focus on two films and a young adult novel that engage with Shakespeare and race in varied ways. Thompson’s analysis of each is intriguing and made me want to watch the films and read the novel for myself. In Suture (1993), a film noir about two brothers, one white and one black, Thompson finds a vexed “desire for colorblindness in contemporary American life” (27); although the film strategically ignores the racial differences between them, it also exposes the seam of the racial divide in a culture that elevates stereotypically white standards of beauty. Her argument is fascinating, but the connection to Shakespeare (cited several times in the film) feels somewhat tenuous. Her analysis of Bringing Down the House (2003), a studio vehicle for Steve Martin and Queen Latifah, however, is brilliant. Unpacking the meanings implicit in the character of “William Shakespeare,” a dog owned by a rich conservative, played by Joan Plowright, Thompson concludes that in this satirical film, “Shakespeare represents the epitome of Western culture because he represents the exclusivity of white culture” (37). Targeting both bardolatry and the false universality of whiteness, this big-budget film thus reveals larger ideas circulating in American culture about the meanings of Shakespeare and race and justifies Thompson’s choice of popular materials for her analysis. She goes on to place a more obscure source, the 1992 novel Black Swan by Farrukh Dhondy, in the context of other writers (such as Maya Angelou) who have imagined a black Shakespeare. While she argues that the novel “asks the reader to interrogate if/how the identity and race of Shakespeare impact one’s understanding of the plays,” she also notes that reviewers of the novel tend to whitewash the main characters’ racial identities (55).

    Thompson’s fourth chapter is one of the strongest, offering an intelligent discussion and analysis of cross-racial casting. In it, she analyzes the rhetoric employed by classical theatre companies, such as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), to describe their approach to race and casting practices, revealing how these companies attempt to yoke Shakespearean universality and multiculturalism together to create “relevant” performances (73). Thompson does not find the results wholly satisfactory, even at well-intentioned companies like OSF. Her “holistic” approach to multicultural casting would incorporate “diversity initiatives” at every level of production to ensure…

  • Lung function, race and ethnicity: a conundrum

    Lung function, race and ethnicity: a conundrum

    European Respiratory Journal
    Volume 41, Number 6  (June 1, 2013)
    pages 1249-1250
    DOI: 10.1183/09031936.00053913

    Philip H. Quanjer
    Deptartment of Pulmonary Diseases and Department of Paediatrics
    Erasmus Medical Centre
    Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    In this issue Braun et al. make a plea for an international workshop to review aspects of race and ethnicity in relation to lung function. This is a timely initiative, as many people struggle in epidemiological and genetic studies, and in clinical practice, with the interpretation of test results in an increasingly multi-ethnic society. Our notions of race derive from Blumenbach, who defined “Four varieties of mankind, one species” (adding a fifth variety in 1781). Definitions of “race” and “ethnic” are confusing and often used interchangeably. This ambiguity is reflected in the frequent use of race/ethnicity, a transitional concept adopted for use while phasing out “race” from the USA census. At this stage the USA census recognises two ethnicities: “Hispanic or Latino”, and “not Hispanic or Latino”, and five races; Hispanic/Latino individuals have a mixed European, African and native American ancestry. American citizens were allowed to self-identify with more than one race in 2000: 2.4% self-identified as multiracial. In sharp contrast, France passed a law in 1978 barring the government from collecting all racial and ethnic data (the Act prohibits collecting “any information that shows, directly or indirectly, racial or ethnic origins, political, philosophical or religious opinions, trade union membership, moral principles, or information that relates to health or sexual life” without either the written consent of the individual or an advance recommendation of the National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties, which must first be approved by the Conseil d’État). The collection of data on race and ethnicity by governments serves administrative and statistical purposes; the classifications should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature. However, this caveat is not heeded, and the classifications are widely used in everyday life, science and medicine, where race/ethnicity is used as a proxy for other phenomena.

    Humans (Homo sapiens) originated in eastern Africa and migrated to the rest of the world. Analysis of microsatellite loci shows progressive loss of genetic diversity as our species grew and spread; genetic variability outside Africa is generally a subset of that within Africa. In general, a species is biologically defined as a group of similar organisms that can reproduce only with each other. Hence, genetically and biologically, Homo sapiens is one species, but with genetic diversity. Only 5–15% of genetic variation occurs between large groups living on different continents, the remaining variation occurring within such groups. A clustering algorithm applied to multilocus genotypes from worldwide human populations produced genetic clusters largely coincident with major geographic regions, suggesting that global human genetic diversity is a result of gradual variation and isolation by distance rather than major genetic discontinuities.

    A widely held view among anthropologists, biologists and sociologists is that race is a socio-political construct based on the notion that groups can be demarcated on the basis of important and clear differences in phenotype, skin colour, ancestry, socio-economic status (SES) and geographical location, etc. Hoffman, a highly respected statistician who was particularly interested in the “negro problem” in the US, gave scientific racism its credibility and respectability. He posited that white people were at the top of the hierarchy and social order; “minority” racial groups were both biologically inferior and barriers to progress. One of Hoffman’s arguments was that “pure blacks” had “inferior vitality” because their vital capacity (VC) was found to be 6–12% smaller than in whites; this contributed to the belief that the inferior black race, that had a higher death rate, was doomed to extinction. The word “vital” in VC, so named by Hutchinson, and the smaller VC, led Hoffman to a value judgement. His views were contested by contemporary scientists, who pointed out that SES and inequalities in access to medical care, etc. should be taken into account in studies of biological differences between ethnic groups. Nevertheless, Hoffman’s views remained very influential; they have contributed to great atrocities and still affect personal interactions and social institutions.

    Categorising subjects into racial/ethnic groups is done on the assumption that race/ethnicity is a proxy for genetic relatedness; this misrepresents genetic variation and leads to confounding. In general, in studies comparing differences in disease prevalence between two ethnic groups, if an unmeasured environmental variable (such as SES) co-varies in the same fashion as the proportion in one group, a racial difference might be due to this unmeasured variable. For example, in a study of differences in mortality between African and European Americans, Burney and Hooper concluded that the higher mortality in African Americans could only be explained by their lower forced VC, reminiscent of the views of Hoffman. Correlation does not prove causality: direct analysis of the relevant gene or causative factor is the only reliable way to evaluate risk in an individual.

    Race, ethnicity and ancestral categories falsely suggest genetic homogeneity within and heterogenity between groups; they ignore the genetic variability within groups, gene–environment interactions and differences due to socially mediated mechanisms. Therefore, many scientists advocate abolishing such categorisation in research, versus those who believe there is still a role for the continued use of self-identified race and ethnicity in biomedical and genetic research…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Defining race/ethnicity and explaining difference in research studies on lung function

    Defining race/ethnicity and explaining difference in research studies on lung function

    European Respiratory Journal
    Volume 41, Number 6  (June 1, 2013)
    pages 1362-1370
    DOI: 10.1183/09031936.00091612

    Lundy Braun, Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence and Professor of Medical Science and Africana Studies
    Brown University

    Melanie Wolfgang
    Brown University

    Kay Dickersin, Professor, Director, Center for Clinical Trials
    Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health
    U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

    The 2005 guidelines of the American Thoracic Society/European Respiratory Society recommend the use of race- and/or ethnic-specific reference standards for spirometry. Yet definitions of the key variables of race and ethnicity vary worldwide. The purpose of this study was to determine whether researchers defined race and/or ethnicity in studies of lung function and how they explained any observed differences.

    Using the methodology of the systematic review, we searched PubMed in July 2008 and screened 10 471 titles and abstracts to identify potentially eligible articles that compared “white” to “other racial and ethnic groups”.

    Of the 226 eligible articles published between 1922 and 2008, race and/or ethnicity was defined in 17.3%, with the proportion increasing to 70% in the 2000s for those using parallel controls. Most articles (83.6%) reported that “other racial and ethnic groups” have a lower lung capacity compared to “white”; 94% of articles failed to examine socioeconomic status. In the 189 studies that reported lower lung function in “other racial and ethnic groups”, 21.8% and 29.4% of explanations cited inherent factors and anthropometric differences, respectively, whereas 23.1% of explanations cited environmental and social factors.

    Even though researchers sought to determine differences in lung function by race/ethnicity, they typically failed to define their terms and frequently assumed inherent (or genetic) differences.

    Read or purchase the article here.