Mixed Race Studies

Black, White, Other: Racial categories are cultural constructs masquerading as biology

Natural History
Volume 103, Number 12 (December 1994)
pages 32-35

Jonathan Marks, Professor of Anthropology
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

While reading the Sunday edition of the New York Times one morning last February, my attention was drawn by an editorial inconsistency. The article I was reading was written by attorney Lani Guinier (Guinier, you may remember, had been President Clinton’s nominee to head the civil rights division at the Department of Justice in 1993. Her name was hastily withdrawn amid a blast of criticism over her views on political representation of minorities.) What had distracted me from the main point of the story was a photo caption that described Guinier as being “half-black.” In the text of the article, Guinier had described herself simply as “black”

How can a person be black and half black at the same time? In algebraic terms, this would seem to describe a situation where x = 1/2 x, to which the only solution is x = 0.

The inconsistency in the Times was trivial, but revealing. It encapsulated a longstanding problem in our use of racial categories—namely, a confusion between biological and cultural heredity. When Guinier is described as “half-black,” that is a statement of biological ancestry, for one of her two parents is black. And when Guinier describes herself as black, she is using a cultural category, according to which one can either be black or white, but not both.

Race—as the term is commonly used—is inherited, although not in a strictly biological fashion. It is passed down according to a system of folk heredity, an all-or-nothing system that is different front the quantifiable heredity of biology. But the incompatibility of the two notions of race is sometimes starkly evident—as when the state decides that racial differences are so important that interracial marriages must be regulated or outlawed entirely. Miscegenation laws in this country (which stayed on the books in many states through the 1960s) obliged the legal system to define who belonged in what category. The resulting formula stated that anyone with one-eighth or more black ancestry was a “negro.” (A similar formula, defining Jews, was promulgated by the Germans in the Nuremberg Laws of the 1930s.)

Applying such formulas led to the biological absurdity that having one black great-grandparent was sufficient to define a person as black, but having seven white great grandparents was insufficient to define a person as white. Here, race and biology are demonstrably at odds. And the problem is not semantic but conceptual, for race is presented as a category of nature…

Read the entire article here or here.

Negra & Beautiful: The Unique Challenges Faced By Afro-Latinas

Latina
2011-11-29

Damarys Ocaña, Freelance Journalist

The frustrating ironies of being Afro-Latina hit Yuly Marshall with stunning regularity: At work at a Miami hospital, Hispanic patients of the Cuban-born radiology technician usually assume she’s African American, asking her, “Where did you learn to speak Spanish like that?” and expressing shock—even skepticism—that she’s really Latina. Other times, fellow Latinos will disparage African Americans in front of her with phrases like, “What can you expect from negros?” and then turn around and tell her, as if paying her a compliment, “But you’re not like that. You’re one of us.”
 
When Marshall talks about race issues with African American coworkers, they often tell her she has no idea what it’s really like to be black. Yet a few years ago, when Marshall dated a lighter-skinned black Latino, his parents persuaded him to break it off because of her dark skin. “They told him to find a white girl so he could adelantar la raza,” Marshall says, using a phrase that roughly means to ‘push the race forward’ by marrying a light-skinned person and producing children lighter than yourself.

“Sometimes I think, ‘When is this going to end?’” says Marshall, 31. “But I love my skin color. God created me this way, and I’m just as good as any other person.”…

…“People are increasingly identifying as Afro-Latino,” says Miriam Jiménez Román, who edited The AfroLatin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, a collection of essays by Afro-Latino writers that recently won the American Book Award. “They’re aware now that such an identity is a possibility.”
 
If it sounds strange that some young Latinas don’t know that it’s okay to be black and Latina, it’s because of the barrage of mixed messages young Afro-Latinas get.
 
Of the estimated 11 million enslaved Africans brought to the New World from the late 1400s to the 1860s, most were taken to Latin America and the Caribbean, with only some 645,000 landing in the United States. “So when you’re talking about blackness, you’re really talking about Latin America,” Jimenez says…

…Many Latin American countries have de-emphasized race for another reason, says Arlene Davila, Ph.D., a New York University professor of anthropology. “National identity was supposed to trump racial identity,” she says, supposedly making everyone equal. Black Latinos were made to feel as if trumpeting their race made them less Cuban, for example, though in reality, the political and economic power lay with light-skinned citizens…

Read the entire article here.

The Long Shadow of the British Empire: The Ongoing Legacies of Race and Class in Zambia

Palgrave Macmillan
2012-01-03
304 pges
13.800 x 8.250 inches, includes 10 pgs illus
ISBN: 978-0-230-34018-3, ISBN10: 0-230-34018-0

Juliette Bridgette Milner-Thornton, Adjunct Research Fellow
Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

The Long Shadow of the British Empire explores the lived experiences of formerly colonized people in the privacy of their homes, communities, workplaces, and classrooms, and the associations they created from these social interactions and the enduring legacies of their relationships. It examines the centrality of gender and social identity in the formation of non-western people in the British Empire more generally and Northern Rhodesia specifically. Combining anthropological and autoethnographical historical methods, it describes the social, economic, political, and educational disadvantages Eurafricans—more commonly known as ‘Coloured’ in Zambia—were subjected to on account of their mixed heritage and the legacies of these racist practices in their present-day lives.

Table of Contents

• White Men’s Visitations
• The Long Shadow of the British Empire
• Bodily Inscriptions and Colonial Legitimizations
• The Half-Caste Education Debate
• Imperial Networks in a Transnational Context
• Coloreds’ Status in Northern Rhodesia
• The Fault of Our European Fathers
• To Be or Not to Be: Creating Coloredness in the 1950s

The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars

Cambridge University Press
September 1993
396 pages
228 x 152 mm
ISBN: 9780521458757
DOI: 10.2277/0521458757

Elazar Barkan, Professor of International and Public Affairs
Columbia University

This fascinating study in the sociology of knowledge documents the refutation of scientific foundations for racism in Britain and the United States between the two world wars, when the definition of race as a biological concept was replaced by a cultural notion of race. Discussing the work of the leading biologists and anthropologists who wrote about race between the wars, Dr. Barkan argues that the impetus for the shift in ideologies of race came from the inclusion of outsiders—women, Jews, and leftists—into the mainstream of scientific discourse.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: ANTHROPOLOGY
  • 1. Constructing a British identity
    • Colors into races. A transition to modern British anthropology. The founding fathers. Mummies, bones and stones. The shift in British archaeology. A British glimpse at race relations.
  • 2. American diversity
    • Haunted sentinels. European skulls and the primitive mind. The Boasians. American physical anthropology. The politics of coexistence. Dionysia in the Pacific.
• PART II: BIOLOGY
  • 3. In search of a biology of race
    • NewGenics. The statistician’s fable. Race crossing in Jamaica. A Canadian in London: rigid Reginald Ruggles Gates.
  • 4. The limit of traditional reform
    • A racist liberal: Julian Huxley’s early years. Herbert Spencer Jennings and progressive eugenics. A conservative critique: Raymond Pearl. Bridging race formalism and population genetics.
  • 5. Mitigating racial differences
    • Lancelot Hogben. “Africa view” – Huxley’s changing perspectives. J. B. S. Haldane: a defiant aristocrat. Medicine and eugenics: expanding the environment. Eugenics reformed.
• PART III: POLITICS
  • 6. Confronting racism: scientists as politicians
    • 1933 – Early hesitations. Britain – Race and Culture Committee. We Europeans. The American scene. An international interlude. The Paris Congress. The population committee. Out of the closet.
• EPILOGUE
• Bibliography
• Index

Results of Inbreeding on Norfolk Island

Science  Magazine
Volume 65, Number 1693 (1927-06-10)
page x
DOI: 10.1126/science.65.1693.0x-s

Providing the original stock is sound, inbreeding among human beings results in no deterioration, physical or mental. Nor does mixture of widely differing races produce an inferior type.  Such are the conclusions of Dr. Harry L. Shapiro, ethnologist of the American Museum of Natural History, from a recent study of the inhabitants of Norfolk Island, a small island north of New Zealand.  They are the Tahitian-English half-castes whose history dates back  the mutiny of the crew of the ship Bounty in 1789.  At pesent there are more than 600 of these islanders and they are the descendants of twelve Tahitian women and nine Englishmen, part of the mutinous crew.

In 1789 the crew of the Bounty, a vessel sailing in the southern Pacific, mutinied, casting the captain adrift in a small boat and making for Tahiti. Here nine of the crew, fearing capture, sailed to Pitcairn, a small uninhabited island east of Tahiti. They took with them twelve Tahitian women and nine Tahitian men.  On Pitcairn the women were divided among the Englishmen as wives.  The Tahitian men were allowed no women. This lead to jealousy and the Tahitian men where killed, leaving no descendants.  The Tahitian women and the Englishmen all of them sound stock established a  line of half-castes.  They were completely isolated and they multiplied rapidly.

By 1856 the population was to great for the small space of Pitcairn. More that 150 moved to Norfolk Island which was at that time uninhabited. To-day there is a population of 600 on Norfolk Island and 175 on Pitcairn, all descendants of the original Tahitians and English.  It is of the Norfolk Islanders that Dr. Shapiro has made a study.

Dr. Shapiro has found these islanders to be of sound physique, taller than the average English and Tahitians, and of good mentality.  There is only one feeble-minded person, he said, on Norfolk Island.  Their education has of necessity been rudimentary for generations, but they are now provided with teachers by the Australian Government under the jurisdiction of which they come.  And the teachers are getting excellent results.

Thus, according to Dr. Shapiro, the Norfolk Islanders prove that, when the stock is sound to begin with, intensive in-breeding makes for no decrease in stamina.  Likewise, race mixture, in his opinion, brings go deterioration.

The idea that the half-caste is inferior, he maintained, comes largely from the fact that pure races have always look down on the half-caste. In Norfolk Island, he said, the half-caste has a chance to show his worth, for there is no discrimination against him, as the entire population is half-caste.  And Norfolk Island, he pointed out, is one of the only places in thw world with no stigma is attached to half-castes.

Race Problems in America

Science Magazine
Volume 29, Number 752 (1909-05-28)
pages 839-849
DOI: 10.1126/science.29.752.839

Franz Boas

The development of the American nation through amalgamation of diverse European nationalities and the ever-increasing heterogeneity of the component elements of four people have called attention to the anthropological and biological problems involved in this process. I propose to discuss here these problems with a view of making clear the hypothetical character of many of the generally accepted assumptions. It will be our object to attempt a formulation of the problens, and to outline certain directions of inquiry, that promise a solution of the questions involved, that, at the present time, can not be answered with scientific accuracy. It is disappointing that we have to accept this critical attitude, because the events of our daily life bring before our eyes constantly the grave issues that are based on the presence of distinct types of man in our country, and on the continued influx of heterogeneous nationalities from Europe. Under the pressure of these events, we seem to be called upon to formulate defnite answers to questions that require the most painstaking and unbiased investigation. The more urgent the demand for final conclusions, the more needed is a critical examination of the phenomena and of the available methods of solution…

…I think we have reason to be ashamed to confess that the scientific study of these questions has never received the support either of our government or of any of our great scientific institutions; and it is hard to understand why we are so indifferent towards a question which is of paramount importance to the welfare of our nation. The anatomy of the American negro is not well known; and, notwithstanding the oftrepeated assertions regarding the hereditary inferiority of the mulatto, we know hardly anything on this subject. If his vitality is lower than that of the fullblooded negro, this may be as much due to social causes as to hereditary causes. Owing to the very large number of mulattoes in our country, it would not be a difficult matter to investigate the biological aspects of this question thoroughly; and the importance of the problem demands that this should be done. Looking into a distant future, it seems reasonably certain that with the increasing mobility of the negro, the number of fullbloods will rapidly decrease; and since there is no introduction of new negro blood, there can not be the slightest doubt that the ultimate effect of the contact between the two races must necessarily be a continued increase of the amount of white blood in the negro community. This process will go on most rapidly inside of the colored community, owing to intermarriages between mulattoes and full-blooded negroes. Whether or not the addition of white blood to the colored population is sufficiently large to counterbalance this leveling effect, which will make the mixed bloods with, a slight strain of negro blood darker, is difficult to tell; but it is quite obvious, that, although our laws may retard the influx of white blood considerably, they can not hinder the gradual progress of intermixture. If the powerful caste system of India has not been able to prevent intermixture, our laws, which recognize a greater amount of individual liberty, will certainly not be able to do so; and that there is no racial sexual antipathy is made sufficiently clear by the size of our mulatto population. A candid consideration of the manner in which intermixture takes place shows very clearly that the probability of the infusion of white blood into the colored population is considerable. While the large body of the white population will always, at least for a very long time to come, be entirely remote from any possibility of intermixture with negroes, I think that we may predict with a fair degree of certainty a condition in which the contrast between colored people and whites will be less marked than it is at the present time. Notwithstanding all the obstacles that may be laid in the way of intermixture, the conditions are such that the persistence of the pure negro type is practically impossible. Not even an excessively high mortality and lack of fertility among the mixed type, as compared with the pure types, could prevent this result. Since it is impossible to change these conditions, they should be faced squarely, and we ought to demand a careful and critical investigation of the whole problem…

Read the entire article here.

Methods of Racial Analysis

Science Magazine
Volume 63, Number 1621 (1926-01-22)
pages 75-81
DOI: 10.1126/science.63.1621.75

E. A. Hooton

Significance of the Term “Race”

The term “race” as applied to man is commonly employed with no accurate and well-defined meaning. One often sees references to the “white race,” the “Jewish race,” the “Latin race,” the “Irish race.” Such indiscriminate use of the word “race” implies a confusion of criteria. To speak of the “white” race is to assume that race is a matter of skin pigmentation; to refer to the “Jewish race” is to differentiate race on a basis of religion; a “Latin race” implies a linguistic criterion, and finally any reference to an “Irish race” must mean a race characterized either by geographical position or, failling that, temperament. Such confusions of usage are usually confined to the non-anthropological writing public. All anthropologists agree that the criteria of race are physical characters. The tests of racial distinction are the morphological and metrical variations of such bodily characters as hair, skin, nose, eyes, stature—differences in shape and proportions of the head, the trunk and the limbs.

Although there exists among anthropologists this general agreement as to the physical basis of race, there is no such unanimity of opinion with respect to the further implications of a classification of mankind on the score of bodily attributes.

One school of anthropologists is disposed to deny that there are any cultural or psychological correlates of race. For these the somatological variations whereby race is determined are of little significance, except as convenient characters for classificatory purposes. They regard them principally and ultimately as effects of environment, though perhaps immediately heritable. Pigmentation may be dismissed by such as a result of climate, stature as a consequence of nutrition, head-form as a manifestation of individual variation or a by-product of separately inherited size-factors. Logically, such anthropologists refuse to recognize that language, material culture, mental capacity or social organization stand in any biological, mathematical or rational relationship to races as determined by these plastic and transitory’ physical characters.   For them race is a congeries of environmentally determined bodily features, significant principally because it effects differences in outward appearance which arouse the prejudice of the ignorant…

Read or purchase the article here.

The African Presence in Brazil: Slavery, Resistance, Miscegenation and Strategic Popularization of Afro-Brazilian Music Culture

Kalamazoo College
2004
69 pages

Danielle Dubois Flax

This thesis intends to investigate the history of slavery in Brazil, its effects on the demographic, psychological and political reality of Afro-Brazilians, and most essentially: how representations of Afro-Brazilian music and culture that were de-valorized, persecuted and outlawed for such extended periods of time became appropriated by the powerful, white Brazilian communities and subsequently became the quasi-official symbols of Brazilian culture. This research also focuses on Samba as one of these appropriated cultural symbols that, as the focus of Hermano Vianna’s book, The Mystery of Samba, made an “unexplained leap from infamous outcast to (virtually official) national emblem, a transformation conventionally mentioned only in passing…”(12).

Login to read the thesis here.

Creole Is, Creole Ain’t: Diachronic and Synchronic Attitudes toward Creole Identity in Southern Louisiana

Language in Society
Volume 29, Number 2 (June, 2000)
pages 237-258

Sylvie Dubois, Gabriel Muir Professor of French Studies
Louisiana State University

Megan Melançon, Associate Professor of English
Georgia College

Creole identity in Louisiana acquired diverse meanings for several ethnic groups during the French and Spanish regimes, before and after the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, and through the last part of the 20th century. In spite of a strong shift toward “Black” identity by many African Americans in the state, those who are fluent Creole French speakers now seem to be the repository of Louisiana Creole identity. This article presents a diachronic study of the different meanings applied to Creole identity which resulted from dramatic social, political, and economic changes. It also delimits and defines the actual attributes of Creole identity within two representative African American communities. Because of the historical and political conditions underlying Creole identity, African Americans who still identify as Creoles insist on linguistic attributes, rather than on the criterion of race, as essential characteristics of their ethnic identity.

European colonization during the 17th and 18th centuries gave rise to numerous Creole societies all over the world. In the 1869 edition of the Larousse dictionary, the French term créole referred to those born in, or native to, the local populace; but the 1929 edition depicted Creole as correctly designating only a Caucasian population—further noting that, “by way of analogy, it could be used to refer to non-Caucasian peoples of current or former colonies” (Dominguez 1986:15). A recent English dictionary (American Heritage 1992) gives five definitions of the word créole which pertain to identity: (a) A person of European descent born in the West Indies or Spanish America; (b) a person descended from or culturally related to the original French settlers of the southern US, especially Louisiana; (c) a person descended from or culturally related to the Spanish and Portuguese settlers of the Gulf States; (d) a person of mixed Black and European ancestry who speaks a creolized language; and (e) a Black slave born in the Americas, as opposed to one brought from Africa. In Louisiana, “the term came early to include any native, of French or Spanish descent by either parent, whose non-alliance with the slave race entitled him to social rank. Later, the term was adopted…

Islands and autochthons: Coloureds, space and belonging in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe (Part 1)

Journal of Social Archaeology
Volume 4, Number 3 (October 2004)
pages 405-426
DOI: 10.1177/1469605304046423

Julia Katherine Seirlis
Department of Anthropology
University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

This article, the first in a two-part series, examines the ramifications of the complex relationships between race and space for definitions of the nation and national identity in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe. Most generally, the workings of race and space helped polarize Rhodesia and Zimbabwe between what was set up as ‘white’ and ‘black’, and limit the struggle for power and claims on belonging to those two poles. Racial identity was inscribed into spatial sensibilities and organization so that white space (the city) functioned as a series of islands and black space (the countryside) activated organic assertions of autochthony. More specifically, race and space informed the creation of an intermediate racial category, ‘Coloured’, with no substantive claim to a ‘real’ or ‘full’ identity and with no authoritative claim to the physical soil of the country.

Read or purchase the article here.