Mixed Race Studies

Use of Blood Groups in Human Classification

Science Magazine
Volume 112, Number 2903 (1950-08-18)
pages 187-196
DOI: 10.1126/science.112.2903.187

William C. Boyd
Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts

—Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him!
Plato, The Republic

In recent years there has been an increasing feeling, on the part of both geneticists and physical anthropologists, that genetical methods ought to be applied to the problems of the classification of man, and a number of proposals to this effect have been made. Nevertheless, new books of anthropology, as they have been published, have been found to contain much the same old classifications based on morphological characteristics, skin color, etc., even though the authors may have started with the announced intention of making use of the newer methods. It is clear that many a worker, attempting to apply genetical methods of taxonomy to man, has been disappointed, and, in fact, one scientist, formerly quite active in the field of physical anthropology, has now given it up, and announced in a letter to me: “I tried to see what blood groups would tell me about ancient man, and found the results very disappointing.”

A careful analysis of the situation will show that such disappointment is based largely on two circumstances. First, there is the fact that the blood grouping genes affect invisible serological characteristics of the individual, and are thus never visible to the naked eye. It is to be feared that we are all too much inclined to be impressed by the visible as opposed to the invisible. Second, there is the fact that the layman’s concept of race (which is that the human species can be divided up by valid, scientific methods, into various groups that are pretty different from each other and which will look pretty different from each other) has been unconsciously retained by many scientific workers, and the hypothetical dissenting readers are unconsciously expecting that the new system we propose to introduce will also provide us with startling differences in the appearance and behavior of the different “races” we define, and will feel let down to discover that the new classification does not, when all is said about it, reveal any very dramatic results.

If the blood grouping genes had affected, not characteristics of the blood, but prominent morphological or physical characteristics such as the shape of the head, color of the skin, etc., there cannot be the slightest question that they would already have been made the chief basis of a racial classification and would have been considered entirely adequate for that purpose.

Equivalence of Genes

From our knowledge of genetics we may see that there is nothing fundamentally different between the blood grouping genes as genes, and the genes which do affect morphological features. It is simply a historical accident that fairly adequate information was obtained about the mode of transmission of blood grouping genes before any information at all equivalent in amount or value was obtained about the genes affecting physical appearance.

In view of these facts, and since there seems to be no reason to suppose that the location of a gene in a chromosome, or the nature of the particular chromosome in which the gene resides, determines in advance the main or even the subsidiary characteristics which are to be influenced by the gene, it might be instructive to let our imaginations roam a bit. The outwardly observable effects of the blood group genes are, so far as we know, zero. Therefore let us make some arbitrary assumptions as to the sort of effect which the blood grouping genes could have produced, supposing them to have affected some of the external and visible char-…

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A Critical Discussion of the “Mulatto Hypothesis”

The Journal of Negro Education
Volume 3, Number 3, The Physical and Mental Abilities of the American Negro (July, 1934)
pages 389-402

Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963)

The Two “Mulatto Hypotheses”

What is the “mulatto hypothesis?” The phrase may be used to indicate a point of view concerning the desirability or undesirability  of racial crossing, wherever this has occurred, and between whatever peoples it has taken place. The question as to the character of the hypothesis itself, however,  is somewhat difficult to answer, for there is not one position but two taken on the matter. Since each of these two positions, which are diametrically opposed, claim support from the findings of studies made on human and animal populations, it is important that they be differentiated at the outset of our discussion. The first of them holds that racial crossing is pernicious in its effects; the second maintains that inbreeding is inadvisable, since new strains must be introduced into a population if fertile, virile offspring are to be assured. Any consideration of these two “mulatto hypotheses,” then, must range beyond the confines which would be set if The Two “Mulatto Hypotheses” What is the “mulatto hypothesis?” The phrase may be used to indicate a point of view concerning the desirability or  undesirability  of racial crossing, wherever this has occurred, and between whatever peoples it has taken place. The question as to the character of the hypothesis itself, however,  is somewhat difficult to answer, for there is not one position but two taken on the matter. Since each of these two positions, which are diametrically opposed, claim support from the findings of studies made on human and animal populations, it is important that they be differentiated at the outset of our discussion. The first of them holds that racial crossing is pernicious in its effects; the second maintains that inbreeding is inadvisable, since new strains must be introduced into a population if fertile, virile offspring are to be assured. Any consideration of these two “mulatto hypotheses,” then, must range beyond the confines which would be set if only Negro-white crossing were studied, while such a consideration must similarly include not only a discussion of the results of crossing on the intellectual capabilities of mixed-bloods, but also on their physical potency and social efficiency.

The first of the two positions has perhaps been best phrased by Gates, who is one of its strongest proponents:

Crossing in mankind may be regarded as of three types: (1) Between individuals of the same race. (2) Between different, but nearly related, races; e.g., between the Nordic, Mediterranean and Alpine or East Baltic races, or between different African tribes, or Chinese and Japanese stocks. Such intercrossing goes on continually without causing comment or raising serious problems. (3) Between more distantly related races. Here we might again distinguish (a) crosses between two primitive or two advanced races from (b) crosses between an advanced and a primitive stock. It is only the last type which raises serious difficulties, and is probably undesirable from every point of view. Of course there is no sharp line between the most advanced and the most primitive races, but all intergrades occur. Nevertheless, the distinction I have drawn is certainly an important one.

This author there upon devotes some pages to a discussion of the studies that have been made on human crossed groups. Thus a study made by MacCaughey is quoted concerning the results of mixture in the “microcosmic melting-pot” of Hawaii, with the conclusion

…that such racial intermingling is usually undesirable in its results. Most of the Hawaiian-white hybrids seem to combine the least desirable traits of both parents, and intermarriages of North European and American stocks with dark-skinned races are considered biologically wasteful.

Lundborn is similarly quoted as concluding, on the basis of studies made in Sweden, “that the crossing of races degenerates the constitution and increases degradation.” After considering such studies, Gates summarizes….

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Race mixture: a social or a biological problem?

The Eugenics Review
Volume 41, Number 2 (July 1949)
pages 81-85

A. Dickinson

The ideas of the layman on race are curiously distorted. Race is commonly identified with a given language or culture, with a group living in a common habitat or possessing a single characteristic feature such as pigmentation. Men stubbornly cling to concepts of racial purity and elaborate these into theories of racial superiority or inferiority. Needless to say, this human weakness is often attended by dire results in a world in which people of differing physical traits are being herded ever more closely together as the barriers of distance are gradually broken down…

…Prevalence of Hybridization

Yet objective investigation on scientific lines clearly shows that only the broadest classification is possible in respect of physical traits, a classification which reduces the teeming millions of the world, and the multitude of self-styled races into which they divide themselves, into perhaps no more than five main groups. Likewise empirical proof has been given that intra-racial variability often exceeds inter-racial variability in respect of measurable physical traits…

…We speak in general terms. It is impossible to do more by way of an introduction to a study of race mixture, but it is clear from the foregoing generalizations that concepts of racial purity are largely invalid and that the psychic homogeneity of the human species is much greater than is commonly supposed. It is also evident that differences in language and culture are by no means coincident with differences in physical traits. A rational approach to the question is needed-one which dispenses with what can only be the dead-weight of national ideologies and which acknowledges that an excessive degree af miscegenation must have taken place over thousands of years to account for the present day distribution of physical traits and the variability about a norm which obtains in even the most race-conscious of societies. Given the psychological abhorrence of race mixture which persists as a corollary of untenable theories of racial purity, we must endeavour to assess in quantitative and qualitative terms the indisputable fact of race mixture as it exists in the world to-day…

…Social Aspects of Hybridization

This of course throws into high relief the psychological and social aspects of the question. A strong psychological prejudice against race mixture will inevitably result in the concept of hybrid inferiority. This in turn will often prevent hybrids from revealing their true potentialities. Widely regarded as social outcasts they will find it well-nigh impossible to rise to the position in society which might well be their due. As a consequence their minds will become warped and their personalities stunted. It is not surprising that hybrids, particularly those living alongside their progenitors, commonly reveal a minimum of ability, marked indolence and an astonishing proclivity towards moral laxity. Yet the condition of such people can hardly be attributed to biological factors. Rather is it due to their lack of opportunity in a society which is at once prejudiced and highly irrational in outlook. In the words of Young, ” the social behaviour of hybrids is best considered as a reflection of their cultural milieu than as resulting from biological sources.” Castle, too, makes the same point by contrasting the crossbreeding of black and white and red and white in the United States. The blacks and the mulattoes are visited with strong social disapprobation, their opportunities for advancement are limited, their numbers decrease and, if the mulatto compares favourably with his black progenitors, it is only because in the past the whites, his blood relations, have shown at least a modicum of compassion for their unfortunate offspring, whereas the lot of the pure-blooded Negro has always been an unfortunate one in the land of his enslavement. That the mulattoes will not stand comparison with the whites goes without saying. But their plight should be contrasted with that of the Indian hybrids in whose case there is no strong social prejudice. It should be borne in mind how well they thrive, how they are assimilated back into the white population, how they frequently attain positions of considerable authority and responsibility to which they are fully equal. Here the difference in the results between the aforementioned crossings are not referable to any biological harmony or disharmony, but wholly to the social attitude adopted by the whites, favourable in one case, unfavourable in the other…

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Call for Papers: Association for Feminist Anthropology Sessions

American Anthropological Association
2012-02-07

Posted by Josyln O.

The Association for Feminist Anthropology welcomes sessions to be considered for inclusion in AFA’s programming for the 111^th AAA Annual Meeting, to be held November 14-18, 2012 in San Francisco. The AAA meeting theme this year is “Borders,” so AFA particularly welcomes panels that take up “borders” from a feminist anthropological perspective. Various approaches to the theme include papers and sessions that might explore:

• Borders/collaborations/intersections between feminist anthropology and other scholarly spaces from within and beyond anthropology: critical race studies, queer studies, and/or women’s studies; linguistics and genetics; political science, geography, environmental, and/or policy studies; migration and immigration studies and/or economics and archaeology and/or ethnography; biology/history/cultural studies; masculinity and/or gender studies; educational psychologies and social work; etc., etc., etc.
• Existing or potential conversations/alliances/engagements between scholarly anthropology and everyday activism
• Geographical, political, and ecological borders and the people who move across and re-define them: histories/archaeologies/economies of trade, trafficking, and/or transnationalism; refugees, resettlements, and asylum seekers; multiple and multiplying citizenships; migration, immigration, and diasporas; etc.
• “Borders” and “borderlands” in terms of identities: liminal; queer; mestizaje; mixed-race; transgender
• The “in between” scholar working across/between/among disciplines; conducting research and participating within communities; “insider anthropology”; Lorde’s concept and Harrison’s theorizing of the “outsider within”

We are especially interested in sessions that take advantage of the meeting site of San Francisco by involving local activists, practitioners, and policy makers, whether they are anthropologists or not. If you have questions about the details of registration for non-anthropologists, please let us know…

For more information, click here.

Studies in Race Crossing: IV. Crosses of Chinese, Amerindians and Negroes, and their Bearing on Racial Relationships

Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie
Volume 47, Number 3 (March 1956)
pages 233-315

R. Ruggles Gates
Department of Anthropology
Harvard University

With 36 figures on plates 24—32 and 7 figures and 41 tables in the text

This paper is one of the fruits of an expedition to Eastern Cuba in January and February, 1952. The names of many individuals who aided these investigations in various ways will be mentioned later in the course of this work. Authorities of the Universided de Oriente in Santiago de Cuba procured the indispensable cooperation of all the families in Santiago whose data are recorded here. I wish to thank all the individuals concerned for the friendly way in which they cooperated, permitting records and photographs, as well as blood specimens to be taken, and for the interest they showed in this work. I was also able to make a study of Indians and their descendants in Eastern Cuba, which has been published elsewhere (Gates 1954a).

Introduction

Many records of the results of various racial crosses have been made, some of which will be referred to later. These studies have been partly on the inheritance of characters which are from one point of view qualitative, such as skin color, eye-folds and hair characters, but the emphasis has frequently been on purely quantitative characters, based on anthropometric measurements. These results have previously been generally treated as a matter of population statistics, not based on individual pedigrees.

Trevor (1953) has carefully analyzed the inheritance results to be derived from the investigations of metrical characters in racial crossing. Selecting the nine investigations which are sufficiently extensive to yield results having statistical significance, he finds that in some cases the hybrid series are more variable, in others less variable than the populations which are chosen as more or less representative of the original parents. This mixed result is not surprising when one recognizes that the populations chosen as “parental” must differ more or less markedly from the actual ancestors of the hybrid populations. In fact, much difficulty was encountered in selecting populations as presumptively equivalent to the parents of the various crosses, since they had to be groups in which sufficient anthropometric measurements had been made. But notwithstanding the many…

A Matter Of Honour: Being Chinese in South Africa

Jacana Media
2008
256 pages
235 x 155mm
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-77009-568-7

Yoon Jung Park, Senior Researcher in the Centre for Sociological Research
Humanities Research Village
University of Johannesburg

The South African-born Chinese community is a tiny one, consisting of 10,000 to 12,000 members in a population of approximately 45 million. Throughout much of the history of this most race-conscious country, the community has been ignored or neglected, and officially classed along with Coloureds (people of mixed race) or with Indians in that particularly South African category of ‘Asiatic’.

More recently, as China’s aid, trade and investment in Africa grow and large numbers of new Chinese immigrants stream into South Africa and other African states, Chinese South Africans are beginning to receive both media and scholarly attention. For this reason it is timely to focus on the only resident community of Chinese on the continent.

This book, based on a PhD thesis, focuses on Chinese South Africans by examining their shifting social, ethnic, racial and national identities over time. Using concepts of identity, ethnicity, race, nationalism, and transnationalism, and drawing on comparisons with other overseas Chinese communities, it explores the multi-layered identities of the South African group and analyses the way in which their identities have changed over time and with each generation.

As the book makes clear, Chinese identities in South Africa have been shaped by both external and internal forces. As regards external factors, the state—both that of China and of South Africa—played a key role in establishing the parameters of identity construction. Over time the weight of this influence changed, as a result of international political events, internal racial policies, and external trade and political relations. At the same time, individual and community agency, and the force of the ‘China myth’, played important parts in the construction of Chinese South African identity.

Origin Traditions of American Racial Isolates: A Case of Something Borrowed

Appalachian Journal
Volume 11, Number 3 (Spring 1984)
pages 201-213

David Henige
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Beginnings have an irritating but essential fragility and one that should be taken to heart by all who occupy themselves with history.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

There are many groups of localized, isolated peoples scattered throughout the eastern United States. Generally they are varying mixtures of white, black, and Indian, and this composite quality has contributed both to their distinctiveness and to perceptions of their origins. Like many other oral cultures, such as those of Africa and Oceania, these groups perceived their distant past as being characterized by constant large-scale migrations, because most traditions denied autochthonous origins and spoke instead of the movement(s) of ancestors into their present locale.

In the past few years most (though not yet quite all) historians who use oral historical materials have become convinced that while ideas and products may have moved over long distances more or less freely, as a rule people did not. It may be useful, therefore, to examine the traditions of origin of four of the so-called racial isolates of the eastern United States, for these permit some direct comparisons between the earliest available documentary sources, later traditions, and learned speculation. At the same time they throw interesting light on the interplay between practical expediency and changing points of view in the matter of origins.

Today the so-called Guineas number about 7,000 people who reside primarily in Barbour and Taylor counties in West Virginia. The name (or rather epithet) Guinea seems not to be of their own devising but has been applied to them by neighbors as a convenient all-purpose pejorative. The Guineas themselves resent the implication of black blood. So it is both surprising and unaccountable that members of the Guinea community have developed theories of the group’s origins which seek to explain the hated…

The Birth of Physical Anthropology in Late Imperial Portugal

Current Anthropology
Volume 53, Number S5, April 2012
13 pages

Gonçalo Santos, Senior Research Fellow
Max-Planck-Institut für Ethnologische Forschung

In this article I analyze the emergence of the field of physical anthropology in the metropolitan academic sphere of the Portuguese Empire during the late nineteenth century. I suggest that Portugal’s relatively peripheral position combined with a complex internal conjuncture of political instability and economic impotence gave early Portuguese physical anthropology a less explicitly “colonial” orientation than in other, more central Western European imperial powers. I describe the various national and international exchanges leading to the birth of this naturalist anthropological tradition at the University of Coimbra, drawing particular attention to the foundational role played by the technological assemblage of large osteological collections aimed at the study of the somatic characteristics of the metropolitan “white” population. I situate these technical developments in the context of wider sociocultural and politico-economic processes of both “nation building” and “empire building.” These processes had a strong effect on the kinds of questions asked and the kinds of answers that seemed compelling and acceptable to early physical anthropologists.

This article is about a long-standing tradition of scientific imagination concerned with “the systematic study of human unity-in-diversity” (Stocking 1983:5): the anthropological tradition. I focus on the emergence of a particular field of inquiry within this very broad scholarly tradition, but I analyze this process from the perspective of a peripheral arena of scientific production within the Western European core: the metropolitan academic sphere of the Portuguese Empire during the late nineteenth century. I suggest that this relatively peripheral condition combined with a complex historical conjuncture of internal political and economic crises gave early Portuguese physical anthropology a less explicitly “colonial” orientation than in other, more central Western European imperial powers. This started to change in the 1930s with the rise of a powerful dictatorial regime—Salazar’s Estado Novo—that supported the emergence of a “colonial anthropology” strongly oriented, at least until the 1950s, toward the field of physical anthropology.

The development of the discipline of physical anthropology started in Western Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and spread to other parts of the world during the second half of the nineteenth century. This process of discipline building produced a remarkable degree of international consistency, but it also engendered considerable variations, especially before the second half of the twentieth century (Blanckaert 2009; Dias 2005; Stocking 1988; Zimmerman 2001). As the editors of this supplemental issue of Current Anthropology note, these disciplinary variations remain poorly studied outside core Western European and North American areas, and this article joins recent calls to rethink the history of anthropology more inclusively (Handler 2000; Kuklick 2008) and to focus on diversity in world anthropological production (Cardoso de Oliveira 2000; Krotz 1997; L’Estoile, Neiburg, and Sigaud 2005; Ribeiro and Escobar 2006).

My contribution to this “world anthropologies” agenda is to bring to the surface a little-known Western European perspective on the origins of modern anthropology and the discipline of physical anthropology. In clear contrast to the American anthropological tradition and its four-field approach, the Portuguese anthropological tradition—as I show elsewhere (Santos 2005)—was built on two different but closely intertwined variants of anthropological research. One was more culturalist—focusing on “people,” “language,” and “customs”—and the other was more naturalist—focusing on “race,” “body,” and “fossils.” It was from within this naturalist camp that emerged in the late nineteenth century the first studies of “physical anthropology.” As in the French context (Jamin 1991; see also Blanckaert 1988, 1995, 2009), this early tradition of physical anthropology was so prominent that it was often labeled with the unmodified term “anthropology” (antropologia) and contrasted to its other half, “ethnology” (etnologia)—the ancestor of modern social-cultural anthropology and modern archaeology…

…Before plunging into an analysis of such disciplinary transformations in late nineteenth-century Portugal, I would like to give a brief account of what happened to the entire field of anthropological production from the early twentieth century onward so as to make more explicit the linkages between my “archaeological exploration” and the contemporary anthropological scene.

After a very short-lived First Republic (1910–1926), the dictatorial regime established in 1933 proved very stable and long-lasting but had a very negative effect in the academic sphere. This authoritarian regime repressed freedom of speech, rejected liberal economic reforms, and set out to build a Third Empire in Africa. Anthropologists did not oppose this enterprise and were called on to produce useful “colonial knowledge.” Physical anthropologists—most of whom still espoused a holistic conception of the discipline—played a salient role in this process. By and large, their work offered “scientific” support to the regime’s colonial rhetoric, which emphasized the civilizing mission of the Portuguese imperial expansion and opposed racial miscegenation (Pereira 2005; Santos 2005; Thomaz 2005).

This rhetoric started to change in the post–World War II period, and the major intellectual figure behind the new official ideology was the great Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre, whose work on the formation of Brazilian society praised the allegedly humanistic nature of the Portuguese colonial endeavor and civilizing engagement with miscegenation (Castelo 1999; Vale de Almeida 2002). This new official rhetoric again constrained the work of anthropologists, but it was more in tune with the liberal antiracialist and cultural relativist anthropology that became internationally dominant in the post–World War II period (Vale de Almeida 2002, 2008). Starting in the 1960s, there emerged increasing epistemological and institutional divides between physical-biological and social-cultural anthropologists, and the latter gained the upper hand in colonial affairs (Pereira 2005)…

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Making Güeras: Selling white identities on late-night Mexican television

Gender, Place and Culture
Volume 12, Number 1 (March 2005)
pages 71–93
DOI: 10.1080/09663690500082984

Jamie Winders, Associate Professor of Geography
Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York

John Paul Jones III, Professor of Geography and Development
University of Arizona, Tucson

Michael James Higgins (1946-2011), Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
University of Northern Colorado

This article examines discourses of whiteness and color in Mexico through a discussion of White Secret, a widely available skin-lightening cosmetic product. In an analysis of a televised infomercial advertising the product, we examine contextualizations of whiteness in Mexico, as figured through the product’s representations of light-skinned female bodies and advanced cosmetic technology. We consider the ways that White Secret can speak to broader conceptualizations of whiteness and identity and, furthermore, argue that such an engagement points to the need to interrogate the geographical and epistemological limits of current understandings of whiteness based in Anglo-American and Latin-American contexts.

‘la güera’: fair-skinned. Born with the features of my Chicana mother, but the skin of my Anglo father, I had it made. No one ever quite told me this (that light was right), but I knew that being light was something valued in my family. (Moraga, 1981, p. 28)

These lines from Cherrie Moraga’s 1979 essay, ‘La Güera’, succinctly describe the chromatic privilege into which she was born. With her mother’s Chicana features but her father’s white skin, Moraga, in her words, ‘had it made’. The only güera in her family, she could escape the correlation between being Chicana and being ‘less’ (p. 28), a connection that haunted her mother and other family members. Although her essay goes on to chart her denial of ‘the voice of [her] brown mother’ (1981, p. 31) and her struggles to grasp the specificities of various forms of sexual and racial oppression, Moraga’s initial discussion of an upbringing that ‘attempted to bleach me of what color I did have’ (1981, p. 28) captures several processes that we analyze in this article. As Moraga quipped, she was ‘“anglicized” ’; the more effectively we could pass in the white world, the better guaranteed our future’ (ibid.).

This article analyzes one contemporary path to that ‘white world’ as it operates within the context of Mexico. We examine discourses of whiteness and coloration through an analysis of ‘White Secret’, a cosmetic product marketed across Mexico that explicitly guarantees lighter skin and implicitly offers the lifestyle associated with such a chromatic change1. Historian Kathy Peiss (2002) has recently charted the ways that US cosmetics companies have relied upon and reinforced connections between healthy bodies, ‘made-up’ (female, white) faces and modernity, in efforts to market their products globally and create international mass markets. In this article, we trace similar links between bodies, race, cosmetic products and modernity, as we raise questions about whiteness and identity in Mexico, processes neatly packaged within a 30-minute, late-night infomercial peddling a skin-care solution that can produce in two weeks a white skin tone which previously required generations of racial miscegenation.

To think through how this skin-lightening product and its marketing strategies become legible and convincing within Mexico, we draw from a number of literatures that together help unpack the secrets of White Secret and the desire for white skin on which it depends. As Moraga’s autobiographical reflections and Peiss’s documenting of ‘American cosmetics abroad’ both make evident, in many contexts, ‘light’ was—and, we would add, still is—seen as ‘right’. White Secret is located squarely within this framing, as it explicitly promises white(r) skin and implicitly offers the improved socio-economic position of white privilege. As we subsequently suggest, what remains ‘secret’ in White Secret is why Mexican women want to move away from that ‘brown body’ of which Moraga wrote—a desire for lighter skin that signals the traces of a colonial past and present in Mexico. Postcolonial studies, driven ‘to invert, expose, transcend or deconstruct knowledges and practices associated with colonialism’ (Sidaway, 2000, p. 592), provide one particularly useful means of prising open these silences around questions of bodies, race and desire, as White Secret, as both product and text, resonates with many practices linked to colonialism and its deployment of racialized discourses. Postcolonial studies, in conjunction with whiteness studies and examinations of race and ethnicity in Latin America, create a useful theoretical framework through which to engage White Secret. It is to this White Secret that we now turn…

…Stepan (1991), in her analysis of eugenics in Latin America, suggests that historically, a whitening thesis in Mexico focused on a mestizo (mixed ‘blood’) ‘cosmic race’ rather than a ‘pure’ white race. This ‘cosmic race’, made famous by Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos, was composed, at least in theory, of a racial configuration whose racial and ethnic mix surpassed all initial ingredients. The path by which Mexico could reach this ‘cosmic race’, however, led through eugenics to a set of practices that in Latin America constituted ‘above all an aesthetic-biological movement concerned with beauty and ugliness, purity and contamination, as represented in race’ (Stepan, 1991, p. 135). At the pinnacle of this movement was lighter skin, a location at which beauty and purity were concentrated and from which the ‘brown body’ denied by Moraga was successively removed over time.

Across Mexico’s ancient practice of whitening, Latin America’s eugenics of the early 1900s and a White Secret of the twenty-first century, then, the aesthetic and the biological are imbricated in a chromatic system that revolves around purity and contamination, beauty and ugliness. In all three instances that span Mexico’s post-conquest history, the chromatic system in operation is also a hierarchy of lightness for which, as Moraga noted, light is right. In this system where darker pigments signify what Ann Laura Stoler (1995) calls the ‘enemy within’ (p. 52), being Moraga’s ‘brown’ and ‘less’ remains the unspoken…

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Race Remixed?

Living Anthropologically
2011-03-28

Jason Antrosio, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York

The 2000 U.S. Census was the first in modern times allowing respondents to check off more than one box for the mandatory race question. In 2010, the number of people checking more than one box grew enormously. At the New York Times, Susan Saulny investigates “the growing number of mixed-race Americans” in a series called “Race Remixed.”

This post uses Saulny’s numbers to do a reality check. There may be some interesting things going on with regard to personal attitudes about racial identification, but in terms of how race really matters–economic and political inequalities, or structural racism–the trends look more like retrenchment.

Race and racism in the U.S. today is best seen through economic and political inequalities. The average white household holds ten to twenty times the wealth of the average black household. This gap is growing, as reported in “The Racial Wealth Gap Increases Fourfold” (2010). And despite Barack Obama, black political power is extremely limited:…

…Given these present inequalities–which by some measures are increasing, not decreasing–I don’t find it very interesting that “many young adults of mixed backgrounds are rejecting the color lines that have defined Americans for generations in favor of a much more fluid sense of identity,” the subject of Saulny’s first article “Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above.” Personal feelings about race and identity could influence economic-political inequality, but it will not be automatic. There are already a lot of white people who say “race doesn’t matter anymore.” They are often the same people who ask “why do all the black people sit together?” or complain about affirmative action and “reverse racism.” Statements of “race doesn’t matter anymore” or rejecting color lines often are claims to a more enlightened-progressive state, better than benighted previous generations, or people of color, who are tagged as “more racist.” Saulny does briefly mention the “pessimists” who think the emphasis on mixing might “lead to more stratification.” She also writes “it is telling that the rates of intermarriage are lowest between blacks and whites, indicative of the enduring economic and social distance between them.” Still, the vast bulk of the article is about new multiracial college students celebrating mixture.

Saulny’s second article, “Black and White and Married in the Deep South” is more interesting. It is certainly worth investigating the rise of black-white marriages in places like Mississippi, where such unions were illegal 50 years ago, and where “a black man could face mortal danger just being seen with a woman of another race.” This is not to say southern states are “more racist” than northern states, which still boast the most segregated cities in the United States. Northern states have usually been able to get by on economic-geographic segregation instead of explicit legal sanction or lethal violence, although there has been plenty of legal sanction and lethal violence in northern states (see “A Dream Still Deferred” on Detroit). In any case, it is actually difficult to tell what is going on in Mississippi–is there really an increase, or are people just checking off different boxes in 2010 than they did in 2000?

The question remains as to whether inter-racial marriages can alter the structure of economic and political inequality. On this question, the graphic of “Who is Marrying Whom” is very enlightening. The numbers hint at three points I elaborate below: first, white people and the white-black household wealth gap are not going away; second, the “Hispanic” category shows signs of bifurcating into white and black; third, Asian-Americans have more securely become “probationary whites”:

What matters here is how the changing construction of whiteness intersects with the maintenance of a white/black divide that structures all race relations in the United States. Whether significant numbers of the people now called Latinos or Asian Americans–or the significant numbers of their known “mixed” offspring with whites–will become probationary whites and thus reinforce the structure is an important indicator of the future of race relations in the United States. (Trouillot 2003:151, Global Transformations)

White people are not going away

In 2009, approximately 95% of white people married each other, a figure that rises to 97% if “Hispanic (white)” is included. About five whites out of every thousand married a black person, or about 0.5%. That’s not going to change the wealth gap. Indeed, I suspect the numbers of white-black intermarriages decrease as one moves up the class ladder, but the overall number is so miniscule that further tracking is unnecessary.

There is certainly more white-black intermixture than registered by official marriage numbers. As “Census Data Presents Rise in Multiracial Population of Youths” reveals, the most common multi-racial combination chosen is white-and-black. This may simply be recognizing a long history of intermixture: “America already has almost 400 years of race mixing behind it, beginning with that first slave ship that sailed into Jamestown harbor carrying slaves who were already pregnant by members of the crew” (Brent Staples, 1999, “The Real American Love Story“). However, mixing has not altered overall white-black disparities. White people, white privilege, white-black wealth gap: no reason from the 2010 numbers to believe there will be much change….

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