Mixed Race Studies

Migration and Race Mixture from the Genetic Angle

The Eugenics Review
Volume 51, Number 2 (July 1959)
pages 93-97

Sir Macfarlane Burnet, O.M., F.R.S., Director
Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research

This paper was prepared at the request of the Department of Immigration for discussion by delegates at the Australian Citizenship Convention. The views expressed in it are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Department.

From the long-term point of view, immigration is chiefly important to Australia for the overall changes that it will eventually make in the genetic character of our population. Every growing country that receives substantial immigration from other parts of the world is in a sense a melting-pot from which new combinations of body-build, of skin colour, and even of personality, may eventually emerge. The process is immensely complex and can only be described in broad outline. In many ways our description can be no more than an attempt to interpret the human observations in terms of genetic ideas that have been developed from the study of such very different animals as fruit ffies and mice. Yet the very fact that basically similar gentic laws are evident in the behaviour of mice, of fruit flies, and of bacteria, makes us confident that they are equally applicable to man…

…Advantages and Disadvantages of Race Mixture

Extensive reading has failed to locate a single example where it can be shown that hybrid races or individuals living under circumstances where no social disability attached to their condition, were demonstrably inferior to both parents. Where healthy typical individuals of each race are concerned, the offspring can be expected to show greater physical health than either and-though here the evidence is slighter-a greater likelihood of exceptional mental ability.

Serious attempts have been made to show that where different racial groups mingle, there the likelihood of an outcropping of genius is highest. Kretchmer considered that where the Alpine race containing Neanderthal genes made contact with Nordics in the German speaking parts of Europe, there had appeared an exceptional number of outstanding men. Toynbee generalized that “the geneses of civilization require creative contributions from more races than one”. It seems to be the general rule that there is a lag period of a few centuries between the beginnings of race mixture in a given region and the full flowering of a new culture or civilization.

There are potential genetic disadvantages of race mixture and it is probably true that particularly in later generations than the primary hybrid, occasional individuals with discordant characters, e.g. teeth over-large for the jaw that carries them, can be seen. It has not been shown decisively that such discordancies are more frequent than in people not descended from recent racial mixture…

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Post-Racial America? Multiracial Identification and the Color Line in the 21st Century

Nanzan Review of American Studies
Volume 30 (2008)
pages 13-31

Jennifer Lee, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

The United States is more racially diverse than at any point in history. Once a largely black-white society with a distinct color line separating these two groups, the country has moved far beyond black and white due to contemporary immigration. Today, immigrants and their children comprise almost 66 million people, or about 23% of the U. S. population, but unlike the earlier waves of immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, America’s recent newcomers have been mainly non-European, with 85% originating from Latin America, Asia, or the Caribbean (Lee and Bean 2004; U. S. Bureau of Census 2002; U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service 2002). The shift in national origins―from Europe to Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean―is the single most distinctive aspect of the “new immigration” in the United States (Bean and Stevens 2003; Waldinger and Lee 2001).

America’s immigrant newcomers have undeniably altered the racial landscape of the United States. In 1970, Latinos and Asians comprised only 5% and 1% of the U. S. population, but today, they account for 13% and 4%, respectively. The Latino population has grown so rapidly that Latinos now outnumber blacks, and have become the nation’s largest minority group in the United States. While smaller in size, the Asian population is the fastest growing group in the country (Lee and Zhou 2004). America’s Latino and Asian populations are expected to continue to grow so that by 2050, they are projected to constitute 30% and 8% of the U. S. population. Clearly, today’s immigrants have transformed the United States from a largely black-white society to a newly multi-racial one…

…In this paper, I use patterns of multiracial identification as the analytical lens by which I gauge the placement of the contemporary color line in the United States. Multiracial identification speaks volumes about the meaning of race in American society, and in particular, signals where racial group boundaries are fading most rapidly and where they continue to endure. Multiracial reporting is a significant harbinger of racial change because the willingness of an individual to identify in multiracial terms reflects a jettisoning of the exclusive bases of racial categorization that have long marked the construction of race in the United States. It also reflects the diminishing significance of the current American racial scheme, which some sociologists believe will become increasingly less relevant in each generation until it disappears into obscurity….

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Mixed-Race Identity in a Nineteenth-Century Family: The Schoolcrafts of Sault Ste. Marie, 1824-27

Michigan Historical Review
Volume 25, Number 1 (Spring, 1999)
pages 1-23

Jeremy Mumford, Visiting Assistant Professor of History
Brown University

In the autumn of 1824 the Schoolcraft family set out from Sault Ste. Marie, at the mouth of Lake Superior in northern Michigan Territory, to visit New York City. For Jane, who had seldom left the remote village where she was born, this was her first visit. It was the first time Henry had returned to his home state since his appointment as federal Indian Agent in Sault Ste. Marie in 1822 and his marriage a year later. And everything was new, of course, for their son Willy who was only four months old.

The Schoolcrafts were apprehensive about the reception they would meet in the metropolis. Jane was the daughter of Oshauguscodaywayqua, a Chippewa woman from an influential lakeshore family, and John Johnston, an Irish gentleman and fur trader. In the language of her time, both Jane and her child were half-breeds.  To her relief, Jane and Willy received only friendly attention on this visit. When Henry left to do some business in Washington, some friends, Mr. and Mrs. Conant, invited Jane to leave her lodging house and stay with them. She wrote to Henry of repeated visits, interesting conversation, and “marked kindness” from many acquaintances.  The strongest impression the Schoolcrafts took away from their visit was of kindly interest in Jane and Willy, who were received as “another Pocahontas” and her “bright American boy.”

In making a family excursion to the great eastern city, the Schoolcrafts signaled ambitions within a wider arena beyond their village. One purpose of the visit was to discuss a book of Indian oratory on which Henry intended to collaborate with Samuel Conant and in which Jane may have been involved. The other was to improve Henry’s political contacts in Washington. Henry was ambitious for both literary and political fame, as well as for the prospects of his first child, William Henry Schoolcraft, the bright American boy.

For both parents, their sojourn in the East prompted reflection on their responsibilities and their future. Sick in bed, Jane wrote from New York to Henry in Washington that she was unused to being separated from him and missed him. He wrote to her of his prayer that their “sweet, interesting little boy [would] be permitted to grow up to man’s estate, and that his mother may be spared to nurture him up.” He mused: “What an interesting chain of thought is connected with the idea of a home, and a wife, and a child.”

Inevitably, this chain of thought had to take account of the meaning of Jane’s and Willy’s mixed race. The Schoolcrafts were starting their family in the shadow of a very different model of family-building: what was called in the upper Great Lakes la facon du pays or “the custom of the country.” Traditionally, white men lived with and had children by Indian or mixed-blood women, only to leave their families behind when they returned east, entrusting them to other men’s protection or abandoning them altogether. Jane’s parents were unusual in the permanence of their relationship, but even they did not formalize their marriage until she was twenty.  In visiting the East together as a family, Jane and Henry (who were properly married by a visiting clergyman) broke the custom of the country and expressed their determination to start a family that was just as legitimate in New York as it was in Sault Ste. Marie.

They were opposing not only the custom of the country but also the direction of educated opinion. Jane’s and her children’s mixed ethnicity, while not uncommon, was a subject of increasing distrust. When Jane was three years old, President Jefferson predicted that white and Indian people would “blend together, … intermix, and become one people.” But during her lifetime Americans moved toward a harsher theory of racial boundaries. By the 1840s some scientists argued that a mixed-race person was a “hybrid” of biologically separate species, “a degenerate, unnatural offspring, doomed by nature to work out its own destruction.” During the years of Henry’s and Jane’s marriage, mixed-race families became ever more suspect.

To build a secure foundation for their family, the Schoolcrafts used whatever resources they could find. They looked hopefully to Jane’s Chippewa connections, which promised substantial support. Her dowry of 2,000 pounds (about $10,000) came from her parents’ business in Chippewa furs. She and Henry stood to enlarge it through gifts of land made by the tribe to Jane and Willy as mixed-blood Chippewa. Jane also contributed to her family’s fortunes in another way: by teaching Henry about Chippewa culture and folktales, she laid the foundation for Henry’s later fame as an writer about Indians.

This essay will trace two attempts the Schoolcrafts made, in the first years of their marriage, to turn Jane’s Chippewa inheritance into a family asset. These attempts were quite different, one in the realm of literature, the other in real estate. In each case, however, the nature of the inheritance made its use problematic. For Jane, her connection to the Chippewa culture she recorded undermined her position as a genteel woman of letters. For Willy, his connection to the Chippewa lands he stood to receive undermined his future as a citizen and a man of property. For the Schoolcrafts, mother and son, Indian legacies had apparent advantages but hidden liabilities. To follow them is to begin to unravel the question of race, and of mixed-race identity, in one American family…

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Some Asians’ college strategy: Don’t check ‘Asian’

The Associated Press
2011-12-04

Jesse Washington, National Writer/Race and Ethnicity

Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white.

“I didn’t want to put ‘Asian’ down,” Olmstead says, “because my mom told me there’s discrimination against Asians in the application process.”

For years, many Asian-Americans have been convinced that it’s harder for them to gain admission to the nation’s top colleges.

Studies show that Asian-Americans meet these colleges’ admissions standards far out of proportion to their 6 percent representation in the U.S. population, and that they often need test scores hundreds of points higher than applicants from other ethnic groups to have an equal chance of admission. Critics say these numbers, along with the fact that some top colleges with race-blind admissions have double the Asian percentage of Ivy League schools, prove the existence of discrimination.

The way it works, the critics believe, is that Asian-Americans are evaluated not as individuals, but against the thousands of other ultra-achieving Asians who are stereotyped as boring academic robots.

Now, an unknown number of students are responding to this concern by declining to identify themselves as Asian on their applications.

For those with only one Asian parent, whose names don’t give away their heritage, that decision can be relatively easy. Harder are the questions that it raises: What’s behind the admissions difficulties? What, exactly, is an Asian-American — and is being one a choice?…

…Susanna Koetter, a Yale junior with an American father and Korean mother, was adamant about identifying her Asian side on her application. Yet she calls herself “not fully Asian-American. I’m mixed Asian-American. When I go to Korea, I’m like, blatantly white.”

And yet, asked whether she would have considered leaving the Asian box blank, she says: “That would be messed up. I’m not white.”

“Identity is very malleable,” says Jasmine Zhuang, a Yale junior whose parents were both born in Taiwan…
…Steven Hsu, a physics professor at the University of Oregon and a vocal critic of current admissions policies, says there is a clear statistical case that discrimination exists…

Hsu, the physics professor, says that if the current admissions policies continue, it will become more common for Asian students to avoid identifying themselves as such, and schools will have to react.

“They’ll have to decide: A half-Asian kid, what is that? I don’t think they really know.”…

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Anglo-Indian Identity, Knowledge, and Power: Western Ballroom Music in Lucknow

The Drama Review
Volume 48, Number 4 (Winter 2004)
Pages 167-182
DOI: 10.1162/1054204042442053

Dr. Bradley Shope, Assistant Professor of Music
Texas A&M Universtity, Corpus Christi

From the 1920s to the 1940s, Anglo-Indians relished Western popular music. For this marginalized group, this music was a way of promoting respectability. And though the music mimicked styles from America and Europe, its celebration was distinctly local.

Beginning in the first half of the 20th century, Western ballroom and dance music began to make its way into Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, as well as other cities in North India. It was imported via gramophone disks, radio broadcasts, and sheet music coming from Europe and America. In the 1930s, an increasing number of dance halls, railway social institutes, auditoriums, and cafes were built to cater to a growing number of British and Americans in India, satisfying their nostalgia for the live performance of the foxtrot, the tango, the waltz, the rumba, big-band music, and Dixieland. Influenced by sound and broadcast technology, sheet music, instrument availability, the railway system, and convent schools teaching music, an appreciation for these styles of music was found in other communities. Especially involved were Portuguese Goans and Anglo-Indians, defined here as those of European and Indian descent who were born and raised in India. For these two groups, it served to assert their identities as distinct from other South Asians and highlighted that their taste for music reached beyond the geographical boundaries of India. Numerous types of media, institutions, and venues contributed to this vibrant Western music performance culture in Lucknow in the early 20th century. James Perry, an elderly Goan musician, and Mr. John Sebastian and Mr. Jonathan Taylor, two elderly Anglo-Indian ex-railway workers, were involved in its performance and appreciation. By drawing from multiple field interviews in North India conducted with these individuals between 1999 and 2001, and by describing the character of the performance culture, I will highlight the role of music in creating socioeconomic mobility and a distinct identity among Anglo-Indians in Lucknow, and address issues of power relations and colonialism with reference to the consumption of the music.

Just before and during World War II, Lucknow was considered a strategic military defense location because of the fear of bombing campaigns in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) by the Japanese military. A large portion of the Allied Eastern Command was moved inland and established in Lucknow to counter…

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121C-Mixed Race in America

University of California, Santa Cruz

Examines what it means to be of mixed race in America along historical, social, political, and cinematic lines. Theories on racial and identity formation applied to understanding multiracial experiences of various racial groups in the U.S.

Black Mexico: Race and Society from Colonial to Modern Times

University of New Mexico Press
2009
296 pages
6 x 9 in, 21 halftones, 4 maps
paperback ISBN: 978-0-8263-4701-5

Edited by:

Ben Vinson III, Professor of history and Director of the Center for Africana Studies
Johns Hopkins University

Matthew Restall, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies
Pennsylvania State University

The essays in this collection build upon a series of conversations and papers that resulted from “New Directions in North American Scholarship on Afro-Mexico,” a symposium conducted at Pennsylvania State University in 2004. The issues addressed include contested historiography, social and economic contributions of Afro-Mexicans, social construction of race and ethnic identity, forms of agency and resistance, and contemporary inquiry into ethnographic work on Afro-Mexican communities. Comprised of a core set of chapters that examine the colonial period and a shorter epilogue addressing the modern era, this volume allows the reader to explore ideas of racial representation from the sixteenth century into the twenty-first.

Contributors:

Joan Bristol, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
Patrick Carroll, Texas A & M University, Corpus Christi
Andrew B. Fisher, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota
Nicole von Germeten, Oregon State University, Corvallis
Laura A. Lewis, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia
Jean-Philibert Mobwa Mobwa N’djoli, Congolese native living in Mexico City
Frank “Trey” Proctor III, Denison University, Granville, Ohio
Alva Moore Stevenson, University of California, Los Angeles
Bobby Vaughn, Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont, California