Mixed Race Studies

Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History

Rutgers University Press
2012-03-15
368 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-5255-2
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-5254-5

Keith Wailoo, Townsend Martin Professor of History and Public Affairs
Princeton University

Alondra Nelson, Associate Professor of Sociology
Columbia University

Catherine Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology; Faculty Associate
Institute for Health
Rutgers University

Our genetic markers have come to be regarded as portals to the past. Analysis of these markers is increasingly used to tell the story of human migration; to investigate and judge issues of social membership and kinship; to rewrite history and collective memory; to right past wrongs and to arbitrate legal claims and human rights controversies; and to open new thinking about health and well-being. At the same time, in many societies genetic evidence is being called upon to repair the racial past and to transform scholarly and popular opinion about the “nature” of identity in the present.

Genetics and the Unsettled Past considers the alignment of genetic science with commercial genealogy, with legal and forensic developments, and with pharmaceutical innovation to examine how these trends lend renewed authority to biological understandings of race and history.

This unique collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to explore the emerging and often contested connections among race, DNA, and history. Written for a general audience, the book’s essays touch upon a variety of topics, including the rise and implications of DNA in genealogy, law, and other fields; the cultural and political uses and misuses of genetic information; the way in which DNA testing is reshaping understandings of group identity for French Canadians, Native Americans, South Africans, and many others within and across cultural and national boundaries; and the sweeping implications of genetics for society today.

In this interview for Dalton Conley’s book, You May Ask Yourself, Alondra Nelson describes her research on genetic testing and how it is changing the way people think about race.

Honor Bound: Race and Shame in America

Rutgers University Press
2012-03-27
288 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-5270-5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-5269-9

David Leverenz, Professor Emeritus of English
University of Florida

As Bill Clinton said in his second inaugural address, “The divide of race has been America’s constant curse.” In Honor Bound, David Leverenz explores the past to the present of that divide. He argues that in the United States, the rise and decline of white people’s racial shaming reflect the rise and decline of white honor. “White skin” and “black skin” are fictions of honor and shame. Americans have lived those fictions for over four hundred years.

To make his argument, Leverenz casts an unusually wide net, from ancient and modern cultures of honor to social, political, and military history to American literature and popular culture.

He highlights the convergence of whiteness and honor in the United States from the antebellum period to the present. The Civil War, the civil rights movement, and the election of Barack Obama represent racial progress; the Tea Party movement represents the latest recoil.

From exploring African American narratives to examining a 2009 episode of Hardball—in which two white commentators restore their honor by mocking U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder after he called Americans “cowards” for not talking more about race—Leverenz illustrates how white honor has prompted racial shaming and humiliation. The United States became a nation-state in which light-skinned people declared themselves white. The fear masked by white honor surfaces in such classics of American literature as The Scarlet Letter and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and in the U.S. wars against the Barbary pirates from 1783 to 1815 and the Iraqi insurgents from 2003 to the present. John McCain’s Faith of My Fathers is used to frame the 2008 presidential campaign as white honor’s last national stand.

Honor Bound concludes by probing the endless attempts in 2009 and 2010 to preserve white honor through racial shaming, from the “birthers” and Tea Party protests to Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” in Congress and the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. at the front door of his own home. Leverenz is optimistic that, in the twenty-first century, racial shaming is itself becoming shameful.

To Die in this Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965

Duke University Press
1998
336 pages
11 b&w photographs, 2 maps
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-2098-2
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-2084-5

Jeffrey L. Gould, Rudy Professor of History
Indiana University, Bloomington

Challenging the widely held belief that Nicaragua has been ethnically homogeneous since the nineteenth century, To Die in This Way reveals the continued existence and importance of an officially “forgotten” indigenous culture. Jeffrey L. Gould argues that mestizaje—a cultural homogeneity that has been hailed as a cornerstone of Nicaraguan national identity—involved a decades-long process of myth building.

Through interviews with indigenous peoples and records of the elite discourse that suppressed the expression of cultural differences and rationalized the destruction of Indian communities, Gould tells a story of cultural loss. Land expropriation and coerced labor led to cultural alienation that shamed the indigenous population into shedding their language, religion, and dress. Beginning with the 1870s, Gould historicizes the forces that prompted a collective movement away from a strong identification with indigenous cultural heritage to an “acceptance” of a national mixed-race identity.

By recovering a significant part of Nicaraguan history that has been excised from the national memory, To Die in This Way critiques the enterprise of third world nation-building and thus marks an important step in the study of Latin American culture and history that will also interest anthropologists and students of social and cultural historians.

Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil

Rutgers University Press
1997-10-01
192 pages
20 b & w photos
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-2364-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8135-2365-1

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

This groundbreaking ethnographic study analyzes everyday practices that leave intact the myth that Brazil is a racial democracy.

In Racism in a Racial Democracy, France Winddance Twine asks why Brazilians, particularly Afro-Brazilians, continue to have faith in Brazil’s “racial democracy” in the face of pervasive racism in all spheres of Brazilian life. Through a detailed ethnography, Twine provides a cultural analysis of the everyday discursive and material practices that sustain and naturalize white supremacy.

This is the first ethnographic study of racism in southeastern Brazil to place the practices of upwardly mobile Afro-Brazilians at the center of analysis. Based on extensive field research and more than fifty life histories with Afro- and Euro-Brazilians, this book analyzes how Brazilians conceptualize and respond to racial disparities. Twine illuminates the obstacles Brazilian activists face when attempting to generate grassroots support for an antiracist movement among the majority of working class Brazilians. Anyone interested in racism and antiracism in Latin America will find this book compelling.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Vasalia: The Research Site
• 3. Mapping the Ideological Terrain of Racism: The Social, Sexual, Socioeconomic, and Semiotic Contours
• 4. Discourses in Defense of the Racial Democracy
• 5. Embranquecimento: Aesthetic Ideals and Resistance to Mestiçagem
• 6. Memory: White Inflation and Willful Forgetting
• 7. Strategic Responses to Racism: Preserving White Supremacy
• Appendix A: Interview Schedule
• Appendix B: Biographical Data on Interviewees
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index

Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States

University of Wisconsin Press
July 1986
328 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-299-10914-1

Carl N. Degler (1921-2015), Margaret Byrne Professor of American History Emeritus
Stanford University

Carl Degler’s 1971 Pulitzer-Prize-winning study of comparative slavery in Brazil and the United States is reissued in the Wisconsin paperback edition, making it accessible for all students of American and Latin American history and sociology.

Until Degler’s groundbreaking work, scholars were puzzled by the differing courses of slavery and race relations in the two countries. Brazil never developed a system of rigid segregation, such as appeared in the United States, and blacks in Brazil were able to gain economically and retain far more of their African culture. Rejecting the theory of Gilberto Freyre and Frank Tannenbaum that Brazilian slavery was more humane, Degler instead points to a combination of demographic, economic, and cultural factors as the real reason for the differences.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• I. The Challenge of the Contrast
  • Contrast in History
  • Contrast in Cultural Response
  • Contrast Acknowledged
  • An Explanation Advanced
• II. Slavery Compared
  • Who Protects the Slave’s Humanity?
  • Manumission: How Easy, How Common?
  • Rebellions and Runaways
  • The International Slave Trade As Cause
  • Slave Rearing As Consequence
  • A Harsher Slavery
  • To Arm a Black Slave
  • Who Identifies with Negroes?
  • The Hidden Difference
• III. The Outer Burdens of Color
  • The Geography of Color Prejudice
  • Who Is a Negro?
  • Permutations of Prejudice
  • Measures of Discrimination
• IV. The Inner Burdens of Color
  • Negroes Alone Feel the the Weight
  • Eventually the Veil Falls
  • The Flight from Blackness
  • The Black Mother on Two Continents
  • Black Panthers Not Allowed
  • Sex, but Not Marriage
  • “A Negro with a White Soul”
  • The Heart of the Matter
• V. The Roots of Difference
  • Consciousness of Color
  • The Historical Dimension
  • The Mulatto Is the Key
  • The Beginnings of the Mulatto Escape Hatch
  • White Wife Against White Man
  • A Path Not Taken
  • Cultural and Social Values Make a Differance
  • Democracy’s Contribution
  • The Differences As National Ideologies
• VI. A Contrast in the Future?
  • The Gap Narrows
  • Negroes See a New Contrast
  • A Brazilian Dilemma
  • Always That
  • Indelible Color
• Index

A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother

Riverhead an Imprint of Penguin Press
2011-05-03
384 pages
9.25 x 6.25in
Hardcover ISBN: 9781594487972
Paperback ISBN: 9781594485596

Janny Scott

A major publishing event: an unprecedented look into the life of the woman who most singularly shaped Barack Obama—his mother.

Barack Obama has written extensively about his father, but little is known about Stanley Ann Dunham, the fiercely independent woman who raised him, the person he credits for, as he says, “what is best in me.” Here is the missing piece of the story.

Award-winning reporter Janny Scott interviewed nearly two hundred of Dunham’s friends, colleagues, and relatives (including both her children), and combed through boxes of personal and professional papers, letters to friends, and photo albums, to uncover the full breadth of this woman’s inspiring and untraditional life, and to show the remarkable extent to which she shaped the man Obama is today.

Dunham’s story moves from Kansas and Washington state to Hawaii and Indonesia. It begins in a time when interracial marriage was still a felony in much of the United States, and culminates in the present, with her son as our president- something she never got to see. It is a poignant look at how character is passed from parent to child, and offers insight into how Obama’s destiny was created early, by his mother’s extraordinary faith in his gifts, and by her unconventional mothering. Finally, it is a heartbreaking story of a woman who died at age fifty-two, before her son would go on to his greatest accomplishments and reflections of what she taught him.

There are numberless examples in history, showing with terrible clarity how each time Aryan blood has become mixed with that of inferior peoples the result has been an end to the culture-sustaining race. North America, the population of which consists for the most part of Germanic elements, which mixed very little with inferior coloured nations, displays humanity and culture very different from that of Central and South America, in which the settlers, mainly Latin in origin, mingled their blood very freely with that of the aborigines. Taking the above as an example, we clearly recognize the effects of racial intermixture. The man of Germanic race on the continent of America having kept himself pure and unmixed, has risen to be its master; and he will remain master as long as he does not fall into the shame of mixing the blood.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, E.T.S. Dugdale, ed. & trans. (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1933), 121.

The Racial Paradox of Tribal Citizenship

American Studies
Volume 46, Numbers 3 & 4 (Fall-Winter 2005)
pages 163-185
Indigenous Studies Today
Volume 1 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006)

Steve Russell, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice
Indiana University

As I begin to write this my tribal election season is at hand. As usual, all the candidates claim to be “traditional.” This is a claim easy to make and hard to disprove. What is traditional? We are now over half Christian, and more of us speak English than speak Cherokee. Many of the accoutrements of contemporary identity have roots in recent times: frybread, ribbon shirts, jingle dresses, powwows. On the other hand, some items of earlier provenance, such as blowguns and turbans, surprise some modern Cherokees. We date our first written laws from 1808. We have lived under a series of written constitutions, the longest lasting those of 1839 and 1975. Is written law traditional? More to the point of this article, is the current Cherokee law of citizenship, a race-based law like that of most American Indian tribes, traditional?

I hope to show that the idea of “race” is, in Partha Chatterjee’s phrase describing nationalism, “a derivative discourse.” It is not only derived from European colonial discourse, but it has done and continues to do harm to Indian nations on a scale similar to that of smallpox and measles. Pathogens are typically ranked by body count, and so my task here will be to demonstrate that race theory is an Old World pathogen that diminishes the numbers of American Indians on a scale that invites comparison to “guns, germs, and steel.” It is perhaps instructive to read Chatterjee’s words and substitute “race” for “nationalism”:

Nationalism as an ideology is irrational, narrow, hateful and destructive. It is not an authentic product of any of the non-European civilizations which, in each particular case, it claims as its classical heritage. It is wholly a European export to the rest of the world. It is also one of Europe’s most pernicious exports, for it is not a child of reason or liberty, but of their opposite: of fervent romanticism, of political messianism whose inevitable consequence is the annihilation of  freedom.

Can “race” properly be considered, like nationalism, an ideology? According to the American Anthropological Association:

. . . physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them. Today scholars in many fields argue that “race” as it is understood in the United States of America was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: the English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian peoples, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor. . . . As they were constructing U.S. society, leaders among European-Americans fabricated the cultural/behavioral characteristics associated with each “race,” linking superior traits with Europeans and negative and inferior ones to blacks and Indians…. Ultimately, “race” as an ideology about human differences was subsequently spread to other areas of the world. It became a strategy for dividing, ranking, and controlling colonized people used by colonial powers everywhere.

The AAA Statement refers in a part not quoted above to the “Great Chain of Being” theory as the philosophical basis for ranking people by race, a religious theory that looked to early anthropology for scientific support. Cultural anthropology was in turn supported in its endorsement of racial hierarchy by disciplines thought to be more empirical in content: archaeology and physical anthropology. Outside of Indian law, the primary postbellum legal expression of the “Great Chain of Being” was anti-miscegenation law, representing a legal endorsement of racist ideology that was not declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court until 1967…

Read the entire article here.

Bearing the burden of whiteness: the implications of racial self-identification for multiracial adolescents’ school belonging and academic achievement

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 5 (May 2013)
pages 747-773
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.628998

Ruth Burke
Department of Sociology
University of Pennsylvania

Grace Kao, Professor of Sociology, Education, and Asian American Studies
University of Pennsylvania

Previous literature on racial self-identification among multiracials demonstrates that self-identification differs by context. Moreover, among multiracial adolescents, identity, usually measured in school, is correlated with achievement. In addition, a few studies have indicated that for half-white, half-minority adolescents, school achievement falls in between the achievements of their monoracial counterparts. Using the in-school and in-home components of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we examine the relationship between racial self-identification and school belonging and achievement. We find that among black/white and Asian/white adolescents, adolescents who self-identify as white are particularly disadvantaged in school, reporting lower grade point averages (GPA) than their multiracial counterparts. Our conclusions suggest that multiple contextual measures of self-identification better capture the relationship between racial identification and academic achievement among multiracial adolescents.

Read or purchase the article here.

Going back to the Census figures quoted in The New York Times, it’s one thing to claim that the multiracial population may increase 50 percent, but when the original figure is only 2.4 percent of Americans, a 50 percent increase simply means that the 2010 multiracial population could end up around 3.6 percent of the population. The number 50 surely sounds more impressive than the smaller 3.6 figure. Manipulating these numbers can create misleading impressions, sometimes done with intention.

Peter M. Nardi, “Skeptic’s Café: Understanding Popular Uses of Percentages,” Pacific Standard, April 30, 2011. https://psmag.com/understanding-popular-uses-of-percentages-2cba925821e8.