Mixed Race Studies

Biohistorical approaches to “race” in the United States: Biological distances among African Americans, European Americans, and their ancestors†

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Special Issue: Race Reconciled: How Biological Anthropologists View Human Variation
Volume 139, Issue 1 (May 2009)
pages 58-67
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.20961

Heather J.H. Edgar, Research Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Curator of Human Osteology, Maxwell Museum of Anthropology
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

†Author’s: Note: This study explores the effects of cultural concepts of race on changes in subpopulations in the United States. While some aspects of biology may correlate with cultural constructions of race, use of the term “race” here does not imply its biological validity under any definition. When not otherwise indicated, the words “race” or “racial” are used in this article to describe social categories.

Folk taxonomies of race are the categorizations used by people in their everyday judgments concerning the persons around them. As cultural traditions, folk taxonomies may shape gene flow so that it is unequal among groups sharing geography. The history of the United States is one of disparate people being brought together from around the globe, and provides a natural experiment for exploring the relationship between culture and gene flow. The biohistories of African Americans and European Americans were compared to examine whether population histories are shaped by culture when geography and language are shared. Dental morphological data were used to indicate phenotypic similarity, allowing diachronic change through United States history to be considered. Samples represented contemporary and historic African Americans and European Americans and their West African and European ancestral populations (N = 1445). Modified Mahalanobis’ D² and Mean Measure of Divergence statistics examined how biological distances change through time among the samples. Results suggest the social acceptance for mating between descendents of Western Europeans and Eastern and Southern European migrants to the United States produced relatively rapid gene flow between the groups. Although African Americans have been in the United States much longer than most Eastern and Southern Europeans, social barriers have been historically stronger between them and European Americans. These results indicate that gene flow is in part shaped by cultural factors such as folk taxonomies of race, and have implications for understanding contemporary human variation, relationships among prehistoric populations, and forensic anthropology.

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How race becomes biology: Embodiment of social inequality

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Special Issue: Race Reconciled: How Biological Anthropologists View Human Variation
Volume 139, Issue 1 (May 2009)
pages 47–57
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.20983

Clarence C. Gravlee, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Florida, Gainesville

The current debate over racial inequalities in health is arguably the most important venue for advancing both scientific and public understanding of race, racism, and human biological variation. In the United States and elsewhere, there are well-defined inequalities between racially defined groups for a range of biological outcomes—cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke, certain cancers, low birth weight, preterm delivery, and others. Among biomedical researchers, these patterns are often taken as evidence of fundamental genetic differences between alleged races. However, a growing body of evidence establishes the primacy of social inequalities in the origin and persistence of racial health disparities. Here, I summarize this evidence and argue that the debate over racial inequalities in health presents an opportunity to refine the critique of race in three ways: 1) to reiterate why the race concept is inconsistent with patterns of global human genetic diversity; 2) to refocus attention on the complex, environmental influences on human biology at multiple levels of analysis and across the lifecourse; and 3) to revise the claim that race is a cultural construct and expand research on the sociocultural reality of race and racism. Drawing on recent developments in neighboring disciplines, I present a model for explaining how racial inequality becomes embodied—literally—in the biological well-being of racialized groups and individuals. This model requires a shift in the way we articulate the critique of race as bad biology.

Read the entire article here.

Growing Up Mixed, Blended In The New American Family

National Public Radio
Tell Me More
2011-03-29

Michel Martin, Host

New census figures show that the number of mixed-race Americans has grown by nearly 50 percent in the last ten years. And that rise in number is most pronounced in the South. Census data also reveals that 17 percent of kids in the U.S live in blended families. In Tell Me More’s weekly parenting conversation, host Michel Martin explores the experiences of mixed-race and blended families. Weighing in on the discussion is Suzy Richardson, founder of the website, MixedandHappy.com, Karyn Langhorne Folan, author of Don’t Bring Home A White Boy: And Other Notions That Keep Black Women from Dating Out and NPR editor Davar Ardalan.

Read the transcript here. Listen to the story here (00:17:41).

More Iowans identifying as mixed race

The Daily Iowan
The Independent Daily Newspaper for the University of Iowa Since 1868
2011-04-19

Alison Sullivan

Photo: Christy Aumer/The Daily IowanSophomore Tevin Robbins poses in the window of the second floor at the Afro-American Cultural Center on April 5. Robbins is currently majoring in psychology but has switched his major from engineering to better accompany other areas of his life.

University of Iowa student Tevin Robbins sat lounging on the couch at the UI’s Latino Native American Cultural Center with friend, Michael Harbravison, on a Friday evening.

Robbins’ light coffee-crème complexion is juxtaposed by his hair — a thick, rusty-red mass sitting on top of his head.

“I don’t even know what type of skin color I am,” Robbins said. The 19-year-old, part Cherokee, African American, and white, makes the statement not out of confusion but merely the inability to choose.

Robbins is one among an increasing number of Iowans who identify as more than one ethnicity, according to data from the 2010 U.S. Census released in March. The number is still small—fewer than 2 percent of Iowans identified themselves as more than one race—but it is a 68 percent jump from 2000.

Growing up for Robbins was difficult because of his complexion. Too light, he said, to pass as African American, but dark enough to not pass as white. He never felt accepted in any one “group.”

“Why do I have to choose to identify as something?” he said. “I’m not one ethnicity.”

The 2010 census was the first time researchers were able to use the comparable data. In Johnson County, there has been a 77 percent increase. And at the University of Iowa, 223 students identified as two or more ethnicities in the fall of 2010—an increase from the 133 students in 2009, when the UI first began collecting such data.

Overall, the census shows a 60 percent increase in minorities in Iowa.

“This is a group whose choices have changed,” said Mary Campbell, a UI associate professor of sociology.

Campbell said roughly 40 years ago, people who had more than one ethnicity faced the pressures to identify with a single one, but now, social change has eased such constraints…

Read the entire article here.  View the slideshow here.

The Octoroon: A Play, In Four Acts

First Performed at the Winter Garden Theatre
New York, New York
December, 1859

Dion Boucicault, ESQ (1820-1890)

Text from James A. Cannavino Library, Marist University, Poughkeepsie, New York

Read the entire play here.