Mixed Race Studies

For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Hasn’t Begun

The New York Times
2013-03-23

Roberto Zurbano, Editor and Publisher
Casa de las Américas Publishing House

Translated from Spanish by Kristina Cordero

CHANGE is the latest news to come out of Cuba, though for Afro-Cubans like myself, this is more dream than reality. Over the last decade, scores of ridiculous prohibitions for Cubans living on the island have been eliminated, among them sleeping at a hotel, buying a cellphone, selling a house or car and traveling abroad. These gestures have been celebrated as signs of openness and reform, though they are really nothing more than efforts to make life more normal. And the reality is that in Cuba, your experience of these changes depends on your skin color.

The private sector in Cuba now enjoys a certain degree of economic liberation, but blacks are not well positioned to take advantage of it. We inherited more than three centuries of slavery during the Spanish colonial era. Racial exclusion continued after Cuba became independent in 1902, and a half century of revolution since 1959 has been unable to overcome it…

…Raúl Castro has announced that he will step down from the presidency in 2018. It is my hope that by then, the antiracist movement in Cuba will have grown, both legally and logistically, so that it might bring about solutions that have for so long been promised, and awaited, by black Cubans.

An important first step would be to finally get an accurate official count of Afro-Cubans. The black population in Cuba is far larger than the spurious numbers of the most recent censuses. The number of blacks on the street undermines, in the most obvious way, the numerical fraud that puts us at less than one-fifth of the population. Many people forget that in Cuba, a drop of white blood can — if only on paper — make a mestizo, or white person, out of someone who in social reality falls into neither of those categories. Here, the nuances governing skin color are a tragicomedy that hides longstanding racial conflicts…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium

Stanford University Press
February 2011
312 pages
23 illustrations
Cloth ISBN-10: 0804756295; ISBN-13: 9780804756297
Paper ISBN-10: 0804756309; ISBN-13: 9780804756303

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Stanford University, Stanford, California

Cover Photo: “Baby Halfie Brown Head”, from artist Lezley Saar’s, Mulatto Nation (2003) art installation.

The Souls of Mixed Folk examines representations of mixed race in literature and the arts that redefine new millennial aesthetics and politics. Focusing on black-white mixes, Elam analyzes expressive works—novels, drama, graphic narrative, late-night television, art installations—as artistic rejoinders to the perception that post-Civil Rights politics are bereft and post-Black art is apolitical. Reorienting attention to the cultural invention of mixed race from the social sciences to the humanities, Elam considers the creative work of Lezley Saar, Aaron McGruder, Nate Creekmore, Danzy Senna, Colson Whitehead, Emily Raboteau, Carl Hancock Rux, and Dave Chappelle. All these writers and artists address mixed race as both an aesthetic challenge and a social concern, and together, they gesture toward a poetics of social justice for the “mulatto millennium.”

The Souls of Mixed Folk seeks a middle way between competing hagiographic and apocalyptic impulses in mixed race scholarship, between those who proselytize mixed race as the great hallelujah to the “race problem” and those who can only hear the alarmist bells of civil rights destruction. Both approaches can obscure some of the more critically astute engagements with new millennial iterations of mixed race by the multi-generic cohort of contemporary writers, artists, and performers discussed in this book. The Souls of Mixed Folk offers case studies of their creative work in an effort to expand the contemporary idiom about mixed race in the so-called post-race moment, asking how might new millennial expressive forms suggest an aesthetics of mixed race? And how might such an aesthetics productively reimagine the relations between race, art, and social equity in the twenty-first century?

Read an excerpt of “Obama’s Mixed Race Politics” here.

Can the “one-drop rule” tell us anything about racial discrimination? New evidence from the multiple race question on the 2000 Census

Labour Economics
Volume 16, Issue 4 (August 2009)
pages 451-460
DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2009.01.003

Robert W. Fairlie, Professor of Economics
University of California, Santa Cruz

The inclusion of multiple race information for the first time in the 2000 Census allows for a novel test for the presence of labor discrimination using the “one-drop rule.” Identifying discrimination is straightforward and essentially relies on the discontinuous nature of the one-drop rule, which treats biracial blacks similarly as monoracial blacks. If biracial blacks have levels of unmeasurable and measurable human capital that lie between the levels of monoracial blacks and whites then, absent discrimination, their wages should also lie between the wages of the two groups. Estimates from the Census indicate that biracial blacks have levels of education that lie almost perfectly between monoracial blacks and whites. In contrast, however, biracial blacks have wages that are roughly similar to monoracial blacks after controlling for education and potential work experience. Estimates from the 1980 Census also do not indicate that the parental characteristics and educational outcomes of biracial children differ from what would be expected by having both black and white parents. Several additional factors that potentially affect the human capital of biracial adults are explored. These findings provide some suggestive evidence on the “one drop rule” and the presence of discrimination in the labor market and provide new estimates of wages and educational levels of biracial blacks.

Read the entire article here.

Turkish descendants of African slaves begin to discover their identity

The National
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
2012-09-01

Piotr Zalewski

No one knows how many Afro-Turks there are but, in a country that’s beginning to acknowledge its great diversity, they’re beginning to unearth their forgotten history.

In 1961, Ertekin Azerturk, a Turkish businessman from Istanbul, placed a long-distance call. The voice of the switchboard operator who answered—a woman’s voice, sweet and crisp, like a singer’s—must have made his head spin. Must have, because from that day on, Azerturk insisted on speaking to the same operator each time he picked up the phone. During one call he found the gumption to ask his mystery girl out on a date. Her reply was as surprising to him as his request was to her. “No way,” Tomris, the operator, told Azerturk. “You won’t like me,” she explained, “because I’m dark.”

But Azerturk didn’t back down and Tomris eventually gave in. When they met, he was dumbstruck. He had understood Tomris was dark, but had never figured she would be black. (He had never previously met or even heard of a Turk who was.) Tomris was, like her voice, striking, and Azerturk was smitten. Over the Azerturk family’s objections, the pair married.

…As a child, Muge could not fully grasp why her skin was the colour it was—or why it should matter. She finally learnt, and understood, the truth in her teens. She and her brother were descendants, three generations removed, of black slaves…

Read the entire article here.

In Their Parents’ Voices: Reflections on Raising Transracial Adoptees

Columbia University Press
October 2007
240 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-14136-9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-231-14137-6

Rita J. Simon, University Professor Emerita
Department of Justice, Law and Society
American University, Washington, D.C.

Rhonda M. Roorda

Rita J. Simon and Rhonda M. Roorda’s In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories shared the experiences of twenty-four black and biracial children who had been adopted into white families in the late 1960s and 70s. The book has since become a standard resource for families and practitioners, and now, in this sequel, we hear from the parents of these remarkable families and learn what it was like for them to raise children across racial and cultural lines.

These candid interviews shed light on the issues these parents encountered, what part race played during thirty plus years of parenting, what they learned about themselves, and whether they would recommend transracial adoption to others. Combining trenchant historical and political data with absorbing firsthand accounts, Simon and Roorda once more bring an academic and human dimension to the literature on transracial adoption.

Book Review: Race in a Bottle

GeneWatch
Council for Responsible Genetics
Volume 26 Issue 1, March 2013

Lundy Braun, Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence and Professor of Medical Science and Africana Studies
Brown University

In Race in a Bottle, Jonathan Kahn tracks the contentious history of BiDil, the first drug targeted specifically to African Americans. Ironically, race-based drug treatment emerged in the wake of the sequencing of the human genome, a project that theoretically promised both to scientifically refute the notion of genetically distinct racial groups and to usher in an era of personalized medicine. Though hyped by researchers, the FDA, and the press as an important first step toward personalized medicine, BiDil is a drug administered to patients based on their membership in a group…

…Critical to Kahn’s argument regarding evidence is the fact that the clinical trials on which the company based its patent application for BiDil were never designed to compare racial difference in response to the drug. Using “care of the data” as an organizing theme, Kahn highlights one of the many troubling aspects of this controversy: the extraordinarily loose, if not sloppy, construction of what passed as evidence in the patent application and FDA hearings. From the use of misleading statistics on mortality from heart failure in African Americans, to the failure to define the central variable of race, to the design of a clinical trial (A-HeFT) that included only African Americans (and therefore could not determine differential efficacy) to the lack of any mechanistic understanding for a differential effect, Kahn shows that attention to the data was consistently problematic when it came to matters of race. The chapter on the FDA hearings is particularly illuminating…

Read the entire review here.

In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories

Columbia University Press
April 2000
480 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-231-11829-3

Rita J. Simon, University Professor Emerita
Department of Justice, Law and Society
American University, Washington, D.C.

Rhonda M. Roorda

 
Nearly forty years after researchers first sought to determine the effects, if any, on children adopted by families whose racial or ethnic background differed from their own, the debate over transracial adoption continues. In this collection of interviews conducted with black and biracial young adults who were adopted by white parents, the authors present the personal stories of two dozen individuals who hail from a wide range of religious, economic, political, and professional backgrounds. How does the experience affect their racial and social identities, their choice of friends and marital partners, and their lifestyles? In addition to interviews, the book includes overviews of both the history and current legal status of transracial adoption.