Mixed Race Studies

Before state’s high court: role of race in identifying a face

Seattle Times
2012-03-03

Ken Armstrong, Staff Reporter

In a case out of Seattle’s University District, the Washington State Supreme Court is being asked to determine whether jurors should be told that eyewitnesses who identify strangers across racial lines — for example, a white man identifying a black man — are more likely to be mistaken.

In State of Washington v. Bryan Edward Allen, two issues intersect that could hardly be of greater importance to the functioning of the criminal-justice system: the role of race, and the reliability of eyewitnesses.

The case, argued Thursday before the state Supreme Court, is also about sunglasses. We’ll get to that later.

On an August evening in 2009, in Seattle’s University District, Gerald Marcus Kovacs called 911 and said a stranger on the street had just threatened to kill him. Within minutes, police picked up Bryan Allen at a nearby bus stop. Officers took Kovacs to Allen and asked: Is this the guy? “Yeah, definitely, that is 100 percent him,” Kovacs told police.

Two months later, Allen was convicted of felony harassment. He received a sentence of 14 months.

Kovacs is white. Allen is black.

Allen’s appeal argues that when the case was tried in King County Superior Court, the judge should have instructed jurors that when someone from one race identifies a stranger from another race, the chances of a mistake go up.

An assemblage of professors and legal advocacy groups — including the Innocence Network, the Washington Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington Foundation, and the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality — filed briefs in support, saying a wealth of research shows that people often struggle to distinguish faces outside their own racial group…

…Arguing the other side, Deborah Dwyer, a King County prosecutor, did not challenge the science on cross-racial identifications. Instead, she took issue with having a trial judge tackle the matter rather than having an expert witness testify.

The proposed instructions would not only violate the state’s constitution, Dwyer said, but invite all kinds of “practical difficulties.”

“Our society now is increasingly made up of mixed-race people. Well, what race are they? To take an example we could all relate to: President Obama. He is of mixed racial heritage. If he’s an eyewitness to a crime, is he presumed to be able to identify white people and black people? Or, perhaps, neither?”

Dwyer also asked: “Does race include ethnicity?” Some studies say Chinese people struggle to distinguish Japanese people, and vice versa. Would trial judges need to instruct jurors in cases like that? And if someone’s race isn’t entirely clear, how is a judge to figure that out?…

Read the entire article here.

Race is a Social Construction

Living Anthropologically
2012-02-18

Jason Antrosio, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York

I usually avoid the phrase “race is a social construction.” It’s become too much of a mantra, it’s too much of a shortcut, and it is wildly misunderstood and misinterpreted. A perhaps better phrase–still concise but more accurate, and hopefully less susceptible to misinterpretation, is from John H. Relethford: Race is a “culturally constructed label that crudely and imprecisely describes real variation” (Race and global patterns of phenotypic variation 2009:20).

It is important to spell out what that means, and what people were after with the “race is a social construction” phrase. I am going to go out on an optimistic limb here and say that some recent posts on popular genetic-sorting blogs–Gene Expression and Dienekes–demonstrate these bloggers 1) acknowledge the genetic clustering data exhibits much more complexity and tells a much more complex story of human movement and mixing than is popularly understood; and 2) therefore acknowledge that the lived experience of racial classification can be much more real than the kinds of genetic clustering they are outlining; so that 3) correctly understood they are at least tacitly acknowledging that indeed “race is a social construction.”

Now before any of these bloggers or the people who inhabit their comment streams jump in and crush me, I want to make clear that this is an optimistic reading of some recent posts; that these comments apply to the main bloggers and not necessarily the commenters; and that since I am not a regular reader of these blogs, this may not be a new development even as I am reading a difference in tone…

Read the entire article here.

The “ethnology” of Josiah Clark Nott

Journal of Urban Health
Volume 50, Number 4 (April 1974)
pages 509–528.

C. Loring Brace, Ph.D.
Museum of Anthropology
University of Michigan

It is only rarely that a person so completely transcends the ethos of his age that the recorded results of his scientific endeavors can be read a century or more later with any real profit, and apart from the desire to gain some historical perspective on the time in question. Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein, among others, can still be read with instruction, not so much for their conclusions, but for the methods by which these were reached. This is because the conclusions, while now taken for granted, are no more intuitively obvious today than when they were first advanced.

Except for the rare transcending genius, the best minds of an age tend to typify the thinking of the time rather than to advance it. It is no surprise, then, to discover that the ablest figures in the American South prior to the Civil War, including Josiah Clark Nott, were unanimous in the defense of their “peculiar institution,” slavery. Although educated Southerners were unanimous in their defense of slavery, they diverged widely in their justification for doing so. As the 19th century progressed, two camps emerged which were engaged in vigorous, prolonged, and often acerbic debate at the time the Civil War broke out. Both sides took it as self-evident that Negroes were inferior and slavery justified, but they differed in their attempts to explain how racial differences arose in the first place.

The issue, at bottom, involved the relation between scientific and historical reality, and the written accounts in the Protestant Bible. On the one side it was argued that the words in the Bible were inspired by God and must therefore be literally true-all men, black and white, slave and free, were the descendants of Adam and Eve. On the other, the argument suggested that the inspiration in Holy Writ was largely moral and that the geographic and scientific information reflected the human fallibility and ignorance of the human authors. Neither side questioned the rectitude of a world view dominated by Protestant Christianity; both declared that, by definition, the basic teachings of science and religion must be in agreement. However, since there were apparent discrepancies between the views of the two realms, disputes arose over which should bend to accommodate the other…

…On August 12, 1845, Nott wrote to his friend John Henry Hammond, governor of South Carolina, that “the negro question was the one that I wished to bring out and embalmed it in Egyptian ethnography, etc., to excite a little more interest.”‘ He was referring specifically to his second published foray into the realm of “anthropology,” which had appeared just the year before and which set the tone and the dimensions of everything he was to write in an anthropological vein for the next 20 years. Once started, his involvement snowballed. As he wrote Hammond in a subsequent letter, September 4, 1845, “the nigger business has brought me into a large and heterogeneous correspondence,” and he declared his intention “to follow out the Negro, moral and physical in all his ramifications.”

Nott’s first anthropological contribution, entitled “The Mulatto a Hybrid-Probable Extermination of the Two Races If the Whites and Blacks Are Allowed to Intermarry,” was published in i843 in the highly respectable American Journal of the Medical Sciences.’ In this article, Nott became the first American public figure to declare that whites and blacks belonged to separate species of the genus Homo. As he stated, “this I do believe, that at the present day the Anglo-Saxon and Negro races are, according to common acceptation of the terms, distinct species, and that the offspring of the two is a Hybrid” (italics Nott’s) . To support this conclusion he reprinted figures from a paper that had appeared the year before in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, written by an anonymous author who signed himself Philanthropist.

The figures purported to show that the life spans of mulattoes are the shortest of any kind of human population, indicating that in the long run they were destined for eventual extinction. While it was not so acknowledged, the data on which these conclusions were based originally came from the census of  1840, which was filled with unverifiable claims and gross errors and slanted in a blatantly proslavery manner. Nott could hardly have been ignorant of the problems associated with the data of the census since these had been exposed in the very same Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, but he used them anyway without apology or qualification. In this instance, as in many others in his “anthropological” career, it is clear that the lip-service he gave to science was mainly camouflage to cover the racist advocacy that lay beneath.

Despite the weakness in his case, Nott’s hybridity argument drew favorable notice from Morton and helped enlist the latter in the ensuing debate. The ostensible issue was the criterion for the establishment of valid species. If members of different populations either could not crossbreed or, having done so, could only produce offspring that were sterile or of reduced viability and fertility, then the populations could be considered as different biological species. All agreed that the failure to crossbreed or the production of sterile offspring-the mule, for example-indicated a valid specific difference. The argument concerned the evidence for cases of reduced viability and fertility. In Mobile, Ala., Nott lacked the library resources as well as the time and inclination to pursue the matter beyond its initial stages. Morton, however, had the inclination; he also had the collections of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. He had just completed the second of his two principal contributions to anthropological research, his Crania Aegyptiaca, in which he had demonstrated that the physical characteristics of Caucasian and Negro populations were just as distinct in ancient Egypt as they are today. With the dates of Egyptian antiquity established by the follow-up of Champollion’s translation of the Rosetta stone, and with a concept of the antiquity of human existence assumed to be on the order of those appended to the English Bible by Archbishop Ussher, Morton felt that human racial distinctions must have existed “in the beginning. Realizing that such an opinion was likely to stir up controversy, Morton was diffident about advancing it, but he finally did so with qualified caution in his defence and expansion of Nott’s hybridity position…

Read the entire article here.

The Mulatto a Hybrid-probable extermination of the two races if the Whites and Blacks are allowed to intermarry

The American Journal of the Medical Sciences
Volume 6, Issue 11 (July 1843)
pages 252-256

Josiah C. Nott, M.D.
Mobile, Alabama

The reader will probably be astonished at this late clay to sec so novel an assertion us that the mulatto is a hybrid; but I hope ho will read and ponder upon the diets given below before be concludes that it has no foundation in reason.

A writer in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, under the signature of ” Philanthropist,” has made the following important and interesting statements:—

• “From authentic statistics and extensive corroborating information, obtained from sources, to me of unquestionable authority, together with my own observation, I am led to believe that the following statements are substantially correct.
• 1st, ” That the longevity of the pure Africans is greater than that of the inhabitants of any other part of the globe.”
• 2d, “That the mulattoes, i. e. those born of parents one being African and the other Caucasian or white, are decidedly the shortest lived of any class of the human race.”
• 3d, “That the mulattoes are no more liable to die under the age of 25* than the whites or blacks; but from 85 to 40, their deaths are as 10 to 1 of either the whites or blacks between those ages—from 40 to 55, 50 to 1–and from 55 to 70, 100 to 1.”
• 4th, “That the mortality of the free people of colour in the United States, is more than 100 per cent, greater than that of the slaves.”
• 5th, “That those of unmixed African extraction in the “free states” are not more liable to sickness or premature death than the whiles of their rank and condition in society; but that the striking mortality, so manifest amongst the free people of colour, is in every community and section of the country, invariably confined to the mulattoes.”

The following extracts are from the same writer:—

“It was remarked by a gentleman eminent for his intellectual attainments and distinguished for his correct observation, and who had lived many years in the Southern States, that he did not believe be had ever seen a mulatto 70 years of age.”…

Read or purchase the article here.

Does ‘Race’ Have a Future?

Philosophy & Public Affairs
Volume 35, Issue 4 (Fall 2007)
pages 293–317
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2007.00115.x

Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy
Columbia University

There are simple and powerful arguments against the biological reality of race. Although the phenotypic characteristics, the manifest features that have traditionally been used to divide our species into races, are salient for us, they are superficial, indicating nothing about important differences in psychological traits or genetic conditions that constitute some racial essence. Throughout history, allegations of deep differences in temperament and capacity, claims grounded in no evidence, have done incalculable harm. Contemporary genetic studies of human populations have revealed that there are no alleles distinctive of this race or of that, and, although a few researchers like J. Philippe Rushton—”ogre naturalists,” as Ian Hacking aptly dubs them—continue to seek such simple genetic differences, there is a widespread consensus among anthropologists that races are not “biologically real.”

If you have a particular view of natural kinds, the line of reasoning I have just sketched will appear overwhelming. Suppose you believe that natural kinds are distinguished by some special underlying feature that explains the behavior of members of the kind- like atomic number, for example, in the case of the elements-then you will infer directly from the absence of special genetic or chromosomal markers of race to the biological insignificance of racial divisions. But there is a serious mistake here. The essentialist/explanationist approaches to natural kinds that have dominated much philosophical discussion in past decades have always been woefully inadequate as accounts of biological kinds. Indeed, anyone familiar with the writings of two of the greatest evolutionary biologists of the last century, Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr, can only wonder at philosophical insistence on the idea that natural kinds have essences. As Dobzhansky and Mayr tirelessly pointed out, biological taxa are not demarcated by essential differences; in general, there is no analogue of atomic number, no genetic feature, say, that separates one species of mosquito or mushroom from another; there are occasional exceptions, cases in which species of lizards are formed by hybridization or species of grasses result from doubling, or tripling, of chromosomes, but these are relatively rare.

Many of the premises from which eliminativists about race begin are correct, and important enough to repeat, again and again: there are no genes distinctive of the groups we call races, no biological markers of psychological or behavioral differences. In their studies of nonhuman organisms, however, biologists typically do not appeal to distinctive genes in their demarcation of taxa. Once this fact is appreciated, the question of race as a biological category should be recast. Is there a biological basis for dividing species into smaller units, and does appeal to this basis generate a division of our own species into races?…

Read the entire article here or here.

Passing, Traveling and Reality: Social Constructionism and the Metaphysics of Race

Noûs
Volume 38, Issue 4 (December 2004)
pages 644–673
DOI: 10.1111/j.0029-4624.2004.00487.x

Ron Mallon, Associate Professor of Philosphy
University of Utah

Among race theorists, the view that race is a social construction is widespread. While the term ‘social construction’ is sometimes intended tomeanmerely that race does not (as once believed) constitute a robust, biological natural kind, it often labels the stronger position that race is real, but not a biological kind. For example, Charles Mills (1998) writes that, ‘‘the task of those working on race is to put race in quotes, ‘race’, while still insisting that nevertheless, it exists (and moves people)’’(xiv, italics his). It is to “make a plausible social ontology neither essentialist, innate, nor transhistorical, but real enough for all that” (xiv). Racial constructionism, thus conceived, is a metaphysical position that contrasts both with the view that race is an important biological kind (racial naturalism) and with the more recent claim that race does not exist (racial skepticism). The desire for a constructionist metaphysics of race emerges against the background of a cluster of normative disputes, including:

1. Labeling Practices: Is the use of any racial terms to pick out various human groups or subgroups by arbitrary bodily features useful or permissible?
2. Terminology: Should term x be used in social life, social theory or social science?
3. Significance of Racial Identity: What is the value of racial identification of oneself or others? Is racial identification morally significant? Is the social enforcement of racial identification morally permissible? Is it morally required?

To simplify, we can characterize these normative disputes as disputes over the value of ‘race’ talk. By ‘‘‘race’ talk’’ I mean talk that uses ‘race’ and other race terms including terms such as ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘Asian’, etc. to classify people (including oneself) or differentially treat them. A rough characterization of these normative disputes has it that at one pole of these debates short-term eliminativists want to eliminate ‘race’ talk quickly (e.g. Appiah 1995, D’Souza 1996, Muir 1993, Webster 1992, Zack 1993). At the opposite extreme, long-term conservationists hold that racial identities and communities are beneficial and that ‘race’ talk—suitably reformed from the excesses of racism—is essential to fostering them (e.g. Outlaw 1990, 1995, 1996). In between these two extremes, there are many who believe that race talk is necessary (and perhaps inevitable) in at least some domains in the short term because of the pervasive existence of racial division and the effects of such division in modern life but who differ with regard to its long term value.

Normative disputes give rise to a concern with the metaphysics of race because of the role metaphysical arguments play in supporting normative conclusions. For example, Naomi Zack argues that “the ordinary concept of race in the United States has no scientific basis” (1993, 18), and K. Anthony Appiah writes that, ‘‘the truth is that there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask ‘race’ to do for us’’ (1995, 75). According to Zack and Appiah, ‘race’ talk makes reference to a set of racial properties that literally do not exist, and, for each, this provides a reason to eliminate such talk as mistaken. According to this line of argument, the correct metaphysical position (racial skepticism) provides a reason to endorse a particular answer to the normative question (eliminativism). Like their eliminativist opponents, short and long-term conservationists about ‘race’ talk argue from a metaphysical (constructionist) account of race to conclusions about the need for ‘race’ talk. We can see this appeal in Lucius Outlaw’s claim that, ‘‘For most of us that there are different races of people is one of the most obvious features of our social worlds’’ (1990, 58), as well as in Mills’s insistence that race “exists” and “moves people.” Such theorists argue that theories or policies that do not make reference to race leave something out (e.g. Outlaw 1995, Mills 1998, Omi and Winant 1986, 1994, Root 2000, Sundstrom 2002).

But what is this thing? Constructionist theorists are loath to embrace racial skepticism, but they (like racial skeptics) wish to avoid a commitment to racial naturalism. Instead, constructionists hope to chart a third metaphysical option, one that holds that race exists, but as a product of particular social practices. But what, exactly, does it mean for race to be socially constructed? In recent years, a variety of philosophers including Robert Gooding-Williams (1998), Mills, Adrian Piper (1992), Michael Root (2000), and Iris Marion Young (1989) have turned their attention to this metaphysical question. In what follows, I argue that despite the progress these accounts represent, they nonetheless fail to arrive at an adequate constructionist account of race. The reason, I suggest, is that constructionists are committed to three mutually unsatisfiable constraints on an acceptable account of race, and no univocal account can satisfy all three. Faced with this failure, one might be tempted to abandon constructionism for racial skepticism. Another alternative is to abandon one or another of the proposed constraints in favor of an attenuated constructionism. I argue, however, that we need not choose between these alternatives. Once we set aside the worry about which account is appropriately considered an account of race, we see that skepticism and the various attenuated forms of constructionism are best understood not as metaphysical rivals at all. Rather, these positions share a broad base of metaphysical agreement.

Here’s how I proceed. In Section 1, I briefly discuss the widely endorsed view that race is not a biological natural kind. Then, in Section 2, I focus on whether constructionists can account for the phenomena of passing. Passing occurs whenever a member of some category is perceived (and allows herself to be perceived) as a member of another, mutually exclusive category, for example a white person passing as black, or a black person passing as white. Walter Benn Michaels (1994) charges that constructionist accounts of race cannot account for passing. I show how a constructionist account of race drawing on work by Gooding-Williams (1998), Mills (1998), and Piper (1992)—a version of what I call a thin account of race—can answer Michaels’s critique. In Section 3, I turn to discuss the claim by Root and others that race ‘does not travel’ beyond a particular cultural-historical site, and I will show that constructionists can make sense of such claims by endorsing an interactive kind account of race. Constructionists thus have ready answers for the challenges raised by passing and not traveling. Unfortunately, the two answers invoke two different accounts of what race is and thus do not provide us with a univocal account of race. For this reason, I consider a third, institutional account of race. Such an account, I suggest, can accommodate both passing and not traveling. But, in Section 4, I argue that institutional accounts fail to meet a third condition of adequacy on a constructionist account of race: accounting for the reality of race. I conclude that no single constructionist account of race can accommodate all the theoretical needs to which constructionists wish to put it. In Section 5, I argue that the failure to find a univocal constructionist account leads us to a variety of alternative accounts of race that abandon one or more of the adequacy constraints I have suggested. But rather than choose between these accounts, I argue the divisions among them are not metaphysically significant. In confronting racial phenomena, skepticism and the varieties of constructionism share a broad base of metaphysical agreement, and an adequate racial theory should exploit this agreement and work to distinguish all the features of racial phenomena that matter…

Read the entire article here.

Race and global patterns of phenotypic variation

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 139, Issue 1 (May 2009) Special Issue: Race Reconciled: How Biological Anthropologists View Human Variation
pages 16–22
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.20900

John H. Relethford, Distinguished Teaching Professor of Anthropology
State University of New York, Oneonta

Phenotypic traits have been used for centuries for the purpose of racial classification. Developments in quantitative population genetics have allowed global comparison of patterns of phenotypic variation with patterns of variation in classical genetic markers and DNA markers. Human skin color shows a high degree of variation among geographic regions, typical of traits that show extensive natural selection. Even given this high level of geographic differentiation, skin color variation is clinal and is not well described by discrete racial categories. Craniometric traits show a level of among-region differentiation comparable to genetic markers, with high levels of variation within populations as well as a correlation between phenotypic and geographic distance. Craniometric variation is geographically structured, allowing high levels of classification accuracy when comparing crania from different parts of the world. Nonetheless, the boundaries in global variation are not abrupt and do not fit a strict view of the race concept; the number of races and the cutoffs used to define them are arbitrary. The race concept is at best a crude first-order approximation to the geographically structured phenotypic variation in the human species.

Read or purchase the article here.

Racial Classification Regarding Semen Donor Selection in Brazil

Developing World Bioethics
Volume 7, Issue 2 (August 2007)
pages 104–111
DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-8847.2007.00192.x

Rosely Gomes Costa, Pós-doutorado em Ciências Sociais pela
Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) e pela Universidade Autônoma de Barcelona (Espanha)

Brazil has not yet approved legislation on assisted reproduction. For this reason, clinics, hospitals and semen banks active in the area follow Resolution 1358/92 of the Conselho Federal de Medicina, dated 30 September 1992. In respect to semen donation, the object of this article, the Resolution sets out that gamete donation shall be anonymous, that is, that the donor and recipients (and the children who might subsequently be born) shall not be informed of each other’s identity. Thus, since recipients are unaware of the donor’s identity, semen banks and the medical teams involved in assisted reproduction become the intermediaries in the process. The objective of this article is to show that, in practice, this represents disrespect for the ethical principles of autonomy, privacy and equality. The article also stresses that the problem is compounded by the racial question. In a country like Brazil, where racial classification is so flexible and goes side by side with racist attitudes, the intermediary role played by semen banks and medical teams is conditioned by their own criteria of racial classification, which are not always the same as those of donors and semen recipients. The data presented in this paper were taken from two semen banks located in the city of São Paulo (Brazil). At the time of my research, they were the only semen banks in the state of São Paulo and supplied semen to the capital (São Paulo city), the state of São Paulo, and to cities in other Brazilian states where semen banks were not available.

Read or purchase the article here.

Sources of Racialism

Journal of Social Philosophy
Volume 41, Issue 3 (Fall 2010)
Special Issue: New Thinking in Race Theory. Edited by Paul C. Taylor and Ronald Robles Sundstorm
pages 272–292
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.2010.01498.x

Ron Mallon, Associate Professor of Philosphy
University of Utah

Work in social philosophy on racial classification generally shares a commitment to “social constructionism” in two quite distinct senses of that term. In the first sense, to be constructionist is to hold that race (the subject of racial classification) does not exist as a biological kind in the way ordinary or folk ideas of race seem to assume and is therefore “merely a construction.” Call this constructionist view anti-racialism and the folk view it opposes racialism. As we understand it here, racialism involves the idea that humans can be divided into natural groups whose members have characteristic, unseen differences that explain group-typical properties, including physical, psychological and characterological properties, and anti-racialism is the denial of this view.

But much of this work is also committed to social constructionism in a quite different, empiricist sense: it holds that racial classification itself is primarily the product of social and cultural practices, which is to say that we (as individuals and as cultural groups) have the theoretical representations of race that we do, rather than some other theories or no theories at all because of historically and culturally specific conventions, decisions, practices, and so forth. Call this second sort of social constructionism representational constructionism.

Recent work by evolutionary and cognitive psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers has posed a challenge to representational constructionism (e.g.. Gil-White 1999. 200la.b; Hirschfeld 1996; Kurzban. Tooby. and Cosmides 2001; Machery and Faucher 2005a.b). While these theorists join in the endorsement of anti-racialism, they go on to explain folk racial theories at least in part as the result of cognitive mechanisms which are culturally canalized, species-typical and domain-specific. To call them “culturally canalized” is here to say that they have a property associated with (and often considered a condition for) innateness: they develop stably across a wide range of different cultural environments.’To say they are “species-typical” is to say that, like having two arms and legs, eyes, ears. hair, and so forth, these cognitive capacities are traits that humans typically possess. And to say that they are “domain-specific” is to say that, unlike domain-general cognitive capacities (like memory, attention, or perception) that are employed across a wide range of problem domains, these mechanisms are specialized for solving a particular sort of problem. But while evolutionary-cognitive theorists hold that racial cognition is subserved by culturally canalized, domain-specific mechanisms that were shaped by evolution in ways that adapted them to solving certain problems, they do not hold that these mechanisms are adaptations for…

Read or purchase the article here.

AMST 294-03  Mixed Race America: Identity, Culture, and Politics

Macalester College
Saint Paul, Minnesota
Spring 2012

SooJin Pate

This course is an introduction to the animating debates, themes, and issues in Critical Mixed Race Studies. Utilizing critical race theory and postcolonial analysis, we will examine the identities and experiences of multiracial or mixed race people, as well as the ways in which they have played a fundamental role in constructing race and shaping race relations, politics, and culture in the U.S. Topics in this course address the following: conquest and slavery, miscegenation laws, debates about the U.S. Census categories, U.S. militarism, representations of “mixed” people in the media, cultural expressions of “mixed” Americans, transracial adoption, queering mixed race studies, and the Mixed Race/Multiracial Movement.