Mixed Race Studies

Biological Distance and the African American Dentition

Ohio State University
2002
229 pages

Heather Joy Hecht Edgar

A DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Gene flow occurs whenever two human populations come in contact. African Americans are the result of gene flow between two biologically disparate groups: West Africans and Americans of European descent. This project utilized characteristics of dental morphology to trace genetic relationships among these three groups. Dental morphological traits are useful for this purpose because they are heritable, do not remodel during life (although they can be lost to wear or pathology), and can be compared equally among samples from past and present populations. The results of this research provide new knowledge about human microevolution in a biocultural setting. By analyzing observations from a variety of samples from African Americans, European Americans, West Africans, and western Europeans, conclusions were made on patterns of genetic change through time and space.

The specific hypothesis addressed is that since gene flow has been continuous among West Africans, African Americans, and European Americans in the American colonies and subsequently in the United States, the more recent a sample of African Americans observed, the more they tend toward the average, genetically, of West Africans and Europeans. Dental characteristics reflect this heritage and the pattern of temporally limited genetic similarities. In addition to testing this hypothesis, several predictions were made and tested regarding the historical patterns of admixture in African Americans. These predictions involved whether gene flow has occurred at a constant rate, whether African Americans with greater admixture were more likely to take part in the Great Migration, and whether the dental morphology of the Gullah of South Carolina is especially like their West African ancestors.

The results of this research indicate that while admixture of European American genes into the African American gene pool has been continuous over the last 350 years, it has not occurred at a constant rate. Cultural trends and historical events such as the Civil War and the Jim Crow era affected the rate of admixture. A final product of the current research is a series of probability tables that can be used to determine the likely racial affiliation of an unknown individual. These tables are useful in historic archaeological and forensic settings.

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Picturing the Mix: Visual and Linguistic Representations in Kip Fulbeck’s Part Asian, 100% Hapa

Critical Studies in Media Communication
Volume 29, Issue 5 (2012)
pages 387-402
DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2012.691610

Nicole Miyoshi Rabin
University of Hawaii, Manoa

In response to perceived invisibility within a black/white racial paradigm governed by hypodescent, various multiracial people have begun to speak out against a lack of recognition of their multiplicitous identities. Along with state recognition (i.e., the 2000 census), many of these multiracial identity activists desire a sense of community built around racial multiplicity. In an attempt to develop a community, various methods have been employed, and this article focuses on one such implementation of community building. Using a semiotic approach combined with the literary method of close reading, this article will explore and analyze the photographic book project, Part Asian, 100% Hapa, by Kip Fulbeck. The article will examine how an “imagined community” of Hapas is created through the project and photographs themselves, but also how the photos work to homogenize the very multiplicity they seek to represent. I will look at the use of photographs as a means of subverting the common usage of the body as a racial signifier and thereby show the limitations of racial language. Finally, I will explore the linguistic elements of representation: how do the Hapa subjects’ self-descriptions work against or with the photograph and the project as a whole? Thinking about how those photographed in the book respond to the book’s central focus of a stabilized Hapa identity is a critical approach that has the benefit of disrupting the limitations of our racial language, our need for stabilized racial identities, and any homogenization that occurs through the aesthetic project itself. I hope to question the photographic project so that multiracial people can avoid becoming complicit in a new form of racial domination and/or racialization, while also respecting the work that this project has done for Hapas’ visibility.

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The church exists in the wake of this racial world, and for this rea­son mixed bodies still trouble the waters. Mulattos were bodies that troubled the waters for all of us because they existed on both sides in a space that could not sustain such a possibility. That we no longer char­acterize mixed-race children as mulatto does not mitigate the growing fact of these interracial children. But perhaps even more important, these children continue to pose a problem because the patterns of faith, educa­tion, and marriage still flow along the trenches of a world forged by race. The ambivalence of our racial condition is no clearer than in both the election of a mixed-race president, Barack Obama, as well as in the vehe­ment questioning of his faith, birth, and citizenship. Just as darker and lighter Americans alike are reimagining the possibility of political life in the United States, so too are the numbers of militias swelling, and chants of “we want our country back” growing. The possibility of post-racial is only an illusory bridge. To enter into such divisions we must recognize interracial children and their perpetuation in our own lives in the subtle and glaring ways we seek to reinforce our difference and refuse the pos­sibility of becoming something different.

Brian Bantum, Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity, (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2010), 9-10.

Racial Democracy in the Americas: A Latin and U.S. Comparison

Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
Volume 35, Number 6 (November 2004)
pages 749-762
DOI: 10.1177/0022022104270118

Yesilernis Peña
University of California, Los Angeles

Jim Sidanius, Professor of Psychology
Harvard University

Mark Sawyer, Professor of Political Science
University of California, Los Angeles

The “racial democracy” (Iberian exceptionalism) thesis claims that racial prejudice in Latin America is not only lower than that found in the United States but is essentially absent altogether. We explored the plausibility of this thesis by the use of both explicit and implicit prejudice measures among Blacks and Whites from the United States and three Caribbean nations. In general, the results showed significant racial prejudice against Blacks and in favor of Whites in all four nations. African Americans were the only participants not to show significant implicit prejudice either in favor of or against Blacks. In addition, North Americans (i.e., participants from the United States) displayed lower implicit and explicit racial prejudice than participants in each of the three Latino nations. Overall, the results clearly contradicted the thesis of racial democracy and suggest that Latin America may not be nearly as egalitarian as some have argued.

The thesis known as “Racial democracy theory” (also referred to as Iberian exceptionalisin) argues that, relative to the United States, the nations of Latin America are largely free of the ferocious racial prejudice that has characterized race relations in the US for most of the 19th and 20th centuries (see Degler, 1986: Freyre 1951: Hoetink, 1967: Pierson, 1942: Tannenbaum, 1947). Racial democracy theorists base these conclusions upon the fact that, compared to North America. the nations of Latin America experienced a marked absence of post-manumission institutionalized racism (e.g.. segregation & Jim Crow laws), a general absence of race-based group violence (e.g.. lynching, race-base hate crimes), or racial protest, and a strikingly high rate of miscegenation. It is argued that, the extent to which racial inequality is still discernible in Latin American societies, this inequality is almost exclusively due to the residual effects of past racially contingent resource allocation and not to the effects of ongoing racial prejudice.

Racial democracy theorists attribute Latin American’s racial egalitarianism to three major factors. First, unlike the European colonists of North America, the Iberian conquerors of Latin America had the experience of living under the political and social hegemony of the Moors, a dark-skinned people, for nearly 800 years. Having experienced these dark-skinned conquerors as their political and cultural “superiors.” the Iberian colonists could not then regard the dark-skinned African and Indian slaves as sub-human with the same degree of celerity as the North American colonists found possible. Second, contrary to the Calvinist and Puritan doctrines of North American Protestantism. Catholicism regarded Native Americans, and even African Slaves, as people with souls and equally beloved of God: thus, the Catholic conquerors were less aversive to intermixing with them. Finally, in contrast to the colonists of North America, the early Latin American colonists did not venture into the New World with intact families. As a result, the Iberian colonists established sexual and emotional relationships with the Indian and African slave women rather quickly, creating a more positive attitude toward those of African descent and resulting in the high rates of miscegenation we see today in Latin America (Degler, 1986: Freye, 1946. 1951). As a result, they argue that broad based social movements like the Civil Rights movement in the US were not necessary because of the more egalitarian nature of race relations in Latin America…

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