Mixed Race Studies

Augusta Chiwy, ‘Forgotten’ Wartime Nurse, Dies at 94

The New York Times
2015-08-25

Sam Roberts, Urban Affairs Correspondent

Augusta Chiwy was honored in 2011 for saving Americans during World War II. Credit Eric Lalmand/European Pressphoto Agency

Augusta Chiwy, a Belgian nurse whose unsung bravery in saving countless American soldiers wounded in the Battle of the Bulge was belatedly celebrated in 2011, died on Sunday near Brussels. She was 94.

Her death was confirmed by her biographer, Martin King.

Ms. Chiwy (pronounced CHEE-wee) was mentioned in passing only as “Anna,” a black nurse from Congo, in Stephen Ambrose’s book “Band of Brothers.” She was played by Rebecca Okot in an episode of the television series based on the book.

It took Mr. King, a British military historian, to trace her to a retirement home near Brussels, overcome a condition called selective mutism, which prevented her from speaking about her wartime experience, and finally identify her in a 2010 book published abroad titled “The Forgotten Nurse.” His TV documentary “Searching for Augusta: The Forgotten Angel of Bastogne” was released last year.

As a result of Mr. King’s efforts, 67 years after her battlefield heroism, Ms. Chiwy was awarded the Army’s Civilian Award for Humanitarian Service “for selfless service and bravery” and knighted by the king of Belgium…

A book in 2010 about Ms. Chiwy’s experiences.

…Augusta Marie Chiwy was born on June 6, 1921, in a village near the Rwandan border that is now part of Burundi. Her father, Henri, was a veterinarian from Belgium. Her mother was Congolese.

Her father took her to Bastogne when she was 9. She planned on becoming a teacher, but when the war began she turned to nursing.

She married a Belgian soldier, Jacques Cornet, in 1950. They had two children, Alain and Christine, who survive her.

She later worked in a hospital treating patients with spinal injuries. She rarely spoke about her wartime experience…

Read the entire obituary here.

Without natural genetic boundaries to guide us, human racial categories remain a product of our choices. Those choices are not totally arbitrary, biologically meaningless, or without utility. But because they are choices, we have some leeway in how we define and apply racial categories. We shouldn’t deceive ourselves; how we define race does not just reflect biology, it reflects culture, history, and politics as well.

Michael White, “Why Your Race Isn’t Genetic,” Pacific Standard, May 30, 2014. http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/why-your-race-isnt-genetic-82475.

We evaluated two distinct but not mutually exclusive scenarios for the underlying mechanism that prompted reclassification of individuals as white in the 1920 Puerto Rican census: the movement of individuals across racial boundaries (boundary crossing) and the movement of racial boundaries across individuals (boundary shifting). The underlying boundary dynamics that drove racial reclassification in the 1920 census are illuminated by the results of our counterfactual multinomial regression analysis, which suggests that changes in individual characteristics account for roughly one-fifth of the whitening between 1910 and 1920, together with our cohort analysis, which reveals clustering of the white surplus population among children and young adults (especially women), and our analyses of trends in union formation and classification of children between 1910 and 1920. Our analysis of the unusual changes in union combinations suggests that individual boundary crossing, via union with a lighter spouse, was a likely trigger of reclassification between 1910 and 1920. Intergenerational boundary crossing via miscegenation, procreation, and acceptance as “white” of physically lightened offspring may have contributed to Puerto Rico’s gradual whitening trend in the first half of the twentieth century, but it does not appear significant to explain the unparalleled increase in the enumerated white population that took place between 1910 and 1920.

Mara Loveman and Jeronimo O. Muniz, “How Puerto Rico Became White: Boundary Dynamics and Intercensus Racial Reclassification,” American Sociological Review, Volume 72, Number 6 (December 2007). 934. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/000312240707200604. (See also here.)

Panel Discussion: Social Inequalities in Health

National Institutes of Health (U.S.). Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research
Bethesda, Maryland
2015-05-08, 14:00 EDT (Local Time)

The NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research will host the Panel Discussion: Social Inequalities in Health, on May 8, 2015, at the NIH Campus, as part of the 2014-2015 BSSR Lecture Series to promote open and engaged discussion about cutting edge research in the behavioral and social sciences field.

Panelists:

• Ann Morning, PhD, New York University
• Dorothy Roberts, JD, University of Pennsylvania
• Jo Phelan, PhD, Columbia University

Watch or download the video (01:56:15) here.

National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America

Oxford University Press
2014-07-07
400 pages
22 b/w line illus., 4 b/w halftones
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199337354
Paperback ISBN: 9780199337361

Mara Loveman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

• The first comprehensive history of census-taking and nation-making in nineteen Latin American states across nearly two centuries.
• Argues that the relationship of individual states to the international system of states plays a decisive role in shaping how states classify and count citizens on their censuses.

The era of official color-blindness in Latin America has come to an end. For the first time in decades, nearly every state in Latin America now asks their citizens to identify their race or ethnicity on the national census. Most observers approvingly highlight the historic novelty of these reforms, but National Colors shows that official racial classification of citizens has a long history in Latin America.

Through a comprehensive analysis of the politics and practice of official ethnoracial classification in the censuses of nineteen Latin American states across nearly two centuries, this book explains why most Latin American states classified their citizens by race on early national censuses, why they stopped the practice of official racial classification around mid-twentieth century, and why they reintroduced ethnoracial classification on national censuses at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Beyond domestic political struggles, the analysis reveals that the ways that Latin American states classified their populations from the mid-nineteenth century onward responded to changes in international criteria for how to construct a modern nation and promote national development. As prevailing international understandings of what made a political and cultural community a modern nation changed, so too did the ways that Latin American census officials depicted diversity within national populations. The way census officials described populations in official statistics, in turn, shaped how policymakers viewed national populations and informed their prescriptions for national development–with consequences that still reverberate in contemporary political struggles for recognition, rights, and redress for ethnoracially marginalized populations in today’s Latin America.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Ethnoracial Classification and the State
• 2. Classifying Colonial Subjects
• 3. Enumerating Nations
• 4. The Race to Progress
• 5. Constructing Natural Orders
• 6. From Race to Culture
• 7. We All Count
• 8. Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index

Biological races in humans

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Volume 44, Issue 3, September 2013
Pages 262–271
DOI: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2013.04.010

Alan R. Templeton, Charles Rebstock Professor of Biology Emeritus
Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri

Highlights

• Races are highly genetically differentiated populations with sharp geographical boundaries.
• Alternatively, races can be distinct evolutionary lineages within a species.
• By either definition, races do not exist in humans but do exist in chimpanzees.
• Adaptive traits such as skin color do not define races and are often discordant with one another.
• Humans populations are interwoven by genetic interchanges; there is no tree of populations.

Races may exist in humans in a cultural sense, but biological concepts of race are needed to access their reality in a non-species-specific manner and to see if cultural categories correspond to biological categories within humans. Modern biological concepts of race can be implemented objectively with molecular genetic data through hypothesis-testing. Genetic data sets are used to see if biological races exist in humans and in our closest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee. Using the two most commonly used biological concepts of race, chimpanzees are indeed subdivided into races but humans are not. Adaptive traits, such as skin color, have frequently been used to define races in humans, but such adaptive traits reflect the underlying environmental factor to which they are adaptive and not overall genetic differentiation, and different adaptive traits define discordant groups. There are no objective criteria for choosing one adaptive trait over another to define race. As a consequence, adaptive traits do not define races in humans. Much of the recent scientific literature on human evolution portrays human populations as separate branches on an evolutionary tree. A tree-like structure among humans has been falsified whenever tested, so this practice is scientifically indefensible. It is also socially irresponsible as these pictorial representations of human evolution have more impact on the general public than nuanced phrases in the text of a scientific paper. Humans have much genetic diversity, but the vast majority of this diversity reflects individual uniqueness and not race.

Read or purchase the article here. Read the author manuscript here.

Why Your Race Isn’t Genetic

Pacific Standard
2014-05-30

Michael White, Assistant Professor of Genetics
Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri

DNA doesn’t determine race. Society does.

If you glanced around the room at a conference of geneticists, it would be easy to guess where in the world all the attendees’ ancestors came from. Using skin color, hair, facial features, and other physical traits, you could distinguish the East Asians from the South Asians and the Africans from the Europeans. Our broad racial categories appear to be founded on genuine biological differences between people from different geographical regions. And these differences seem to define a set of natural human groups, the product of the last 70,000 years or so when modern humans emerged from Africa to colonize the other continents, acquiring distinct physical traits as they adapted to new environments.

The concept of human races appears to be solidly grounded in present-day biology and our evolutionary history. But if you asked that conference of geneticists to give you a genetic definition of race, they wouldn’t be able to do it. Human races are not natural genetic groups; they are socially constructed categories…

Read the entire article here.

Can we choose our racial identities? Should we?

Quartz
2015-12-18

Marcie Bianco

One human race, divided. (Fanqiao Wang)

Can we choose our racial identities? Should we?

In 2015, race as an identity has seemed more malleable than ever. As Bonnie Tsui, author of American Chinatown, wrote in this week’s New York Times Magazine, Americans will necessarily develop more nuanced readings of race as the country becomes more diverse.

“Multiracial Americans are on the rise, growing at a rate three times as fast as the country’s population as a whole, according to a new Pew Research Center study released in June,” Tsui writes. This means that “the need to categorize people into specific race groups will never feel entirely relevant to this [younger] population, whose perceptions of who they are can change by the day, depending on the people they’re with.”

Yet even as Americans recognize the fluidity of identity, it’s crucial to remember the complex, systemic inequities that continue to be tied to racism. To call for an end of “race” as a category that divides us is hopeful. But to suggest that America is a “post-racial” country would be outright delusional…

Read the entire article here.

Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico by Ileana Rodríguez-Silva (review)

The Americas
Volume 72, Number 4, October 2015
pages 655-657

Isar Godreau, Researcher
Interdisciplinary Research Institute
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

Rodríguez-Silva, Ileana M., Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico (London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

In Silencing Race, Ileana Rodríguez offers a much-needed historical exploration of the silences about “race” embedded in political and public discourses about Puerto Rico. The book is divided in two parts that cover the years from 1870 to 1910. The first part is dedicated to the later years of the Spanish colonial regime, the second to the first years under US colonial rule. Rodríguez-Silva demonstrates how different class and political interests during both these periods converged to subordinate the issue of racial inequality to issues of class and national identity. She argues that class, not race, became the key category through which demands for rights and political participation were made and recognizes the varying perspectives of creole elites, former slaves, union organizers, politicians, and US labor unions. The author also explains the historical conditions that supported such silencing of racial issues and demonstrates why voicing a racialized sense of self or denouncing racism had complex and multifaceted political consequences. On the one hand, politicians sought to gain the electoral support of the predominantly black and expanding labor movement. Aware as they were of the close relationship between race and class, they often accused political rivals of being racist for not attending to workers, needs for economic uplift and equity. On the other hand, blackness and associated popular expressions of poor working-class folk were considered backward by the criollo leadership, who also limited participation of black males in party decisions.

Rodríguez-Silva argues further that a politicized black identity was associated with unrest and the anticolonial movements that had taken place in Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean, including Cuba with its 1912 race war and massacre against the black members of the Partido Independiente de Color. Explicit debates about racism were also inconvenient for political elites who wanted to project themselves to metropolitan authorities as illustrious men in charge of a multiracial society free of racial conflict. During the years of Spanish colonialism, evading the issue of racism and making claims to racial harmony proved Puerto Ricans’ capacity to renegotiate the relationship with Spain as equals (not as separatists).

Undermining racial conflict was also important for maintaining key political alliances between white criollos, artisans, and the working class. As a US colony, making claims to racial harmony proved the local elite’s capacity to negotiate the colonial relationship with the racially segregated United States. An explicit racialized discourse also stood at odds with US colonial representatives with whom annexationists, socialists, and labor union leaders were trying to negotiate better wages, employment opportunities, legal protection, and US citizenship. Hence, Rodríguez-Silva shows how, despite major ideological and class differences, politicians, intellectuals, and labor organizers sought to deracialize their politics. The book explores the silence around issues of race and racial inequality across various geographical areas, but offers the most substantive material on Ponce, its political parties, artisans’ associations, regional publications, and other aspects of public life.

The book’s introduction provides a sophisticated analysis of the role of silence in these processes. The author theorizes silence as the attempt to shape or prevent racial talk as a strategy and tool of oppression, but also as a strategy of the oppressed for survival. She persuasively argues that silence also communicates. However, defining what exactly is being silenced in the historical sources analyzed or defining her expectations for “noise” could have improved the analysis. For Rodríguez-Silva, “noise” (or the opposite of silence) seems to mean the explicit discourses that condemn racism, draw attention to Puerto Rican blackness, or call for organizing around a racialized subjectivity. Yet “race” can also encompass whiteness, whitening, racial harmony, racial mixture, or euphemisms such as “de color.”

These terms do not necessarily represent a silencing of race, but they do imply a silencing of some specific formulations of race, for example, black identity. As such, they can be understood as a deployment of race to silence other specific formulations of race. This unspoken notion of “race talk” or “racial noise” makes the overall theoretical argument about silencing less focused than one would like. It also presents what is being suppressed as an inherently “natural” thing that exists out…

Read the entire review here.

The Racialization of Legal Categories in the First U.S. Census

Social Science History
Volume 39, Number 4, Winter 2015
pages 485-519

Rebecca Jean Emigh, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Los Angeles

Dylan Riley, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

Patricia Ahmed
South Dakota State University

This paper examines the demographic categories in the first few US censuses, which are asymmetrical combinations of race and legal status not mandated by the US Constitution. State actors explicitly introduced and revised these categories; however, these state actors successfully introduced these categories into the census only when they were already widespread throughout society. Thus, more generally, the paper points to flaws in a “state-centered” view of information gathering, which stresses how state actors create census categories that, in turn, shape social conditions as they become subsequently widespread. In contrast, this paper suggests that politicians draw on widespread social categories when creating census categories, showing how state and social influences interact to create the information in censuses.

Read or purchase the article here.