Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The claim that persons identifying as multiracial suffer health risks due to the lack of a federal multiracial category is without foundation. On March 1 and 2, 1993, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry conducted their Workshop on the Use of Race and Ethnicity in Public Health Surveillance. One of the general principles agreed upon by workshop participants was that “the concept of race as assessed in public health surveillance is a social measure. Biological or genetic reference, or both, should be made with extreme caution.” Clearly, the call for instituting a multiracial category for purposes of disease screening is medically insupportable. According to epidemiologists and workshop participants Robert Hahn and Donna Stroup, medical screening by biological race is not desired since “what is measured as ‘race’ in public health surveillance is not a biological characteristic, but rather a self-perception for which phenotypic characteristics may be one among many criteria… Even were distinctive biological markers of race determined, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to assess such markers in common surveillance processes and in the census.”

Rainier Spencer, Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, (Boulder: Westview Press,1999), 158.

hypodescent

Posted in Definitions, Social Science on 2009-06-16 21:17Z by Steven

Hypodescent is the practice of determining the classification of a child of mixed-race ancestry by assigning the child the race of his or her more socially subordinate parent. Because Caucasians were historically socially dominant in the Western world, mixed-race children in slave societies were most frequently assigned the status of their non-Caucasian parent. This was also to keep them classified as property, which slaves were. In some colonial societies, however, especially the Catholic Portuguese, Spanish and French, a third class of “people of color” developed.

Wikipedia

Tags: hypodescent

Mix-d:

Posted in Definitions, United Kingdom on 2009-06-16 21:10Z by Steven

mix-d: (pronounced “mixed”) Describes a position of pride and place where one can bring all sides of their cultural identity together and express an identity which is similar to but not specifically like either. By dropping the term race we make a step forward and begin to talk about a fully lived experience rather than constantly referring to an outdated social construct which keeps us trapped in the past.

Bradley Lincoln, The Multiple Heritage Project

race

Posted in Definitions, Excerpts/Quotes, United States on 2009-06-13 21:10Z by Steven

“…’race’ as it is understood … was a social mechanism invented in the eighteenth century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: … European settlers, conquered Indians, and Africans brought in to supply slave labor… [Race] … subsumed a growing ideology of inequity devised to rationalize European attitudes and the treatment of the conquered and enslaved peoples…”

American Anthropological Association 1998 Statement on Race

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Mixed Race Studies

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