Mixed Race Studies

Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics

University of Minnesota Press
February 2014
304 pages
29 b&w photos
6 x 9
Cloth/jacket ISBN: 978-0-8166-8357-4

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

In the antebellum South, plantation physicians used a new medical device—the spirometer—to show that lung volume and therefore vital capacity were supposedly less in black slaves than in white citizens. At the end of the Civil War, a large study of racial difference employing the spirometer appeared to confirm the finding, which was then applied to argue that slaves were unfit for freedom. What is astonishing is that this example of racial thinking is anything but a historical relic.

In Breathing Race into the Machine, science studies scholar Lundy Braun traces the little-known history of the spirometer to reveal the social and scientific processes by which medical instruments have worked to naturalize racial and ethnic differences, from Victorian Britain to today. Routinely a factor in in clinical diagnoses, preemployment physicals, and disability estimates, spirometers are often “race corrected,” typically reducing normal values for African Americans by 15 percent.

An unsettling account of the pernicious effects of racial thinking that divides people along genetic lines, Breathing Race into the Machine helps us understand how race enters into science and shapes medical research and practice.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Measuring Vital Capacity
• 1. “Inventing” the Spirometer: Working-Class Bodies in Victorian England
• 2. Black Lungs and White Lungs: The Science of White Supremacy in the Nineteenth-Century United States
• 3. Filling the Lungs with Air: The Rise of Physical Culture in America
• 4. Progress and Race: Vitality in Turn-of-the-Century Britain
• 5. Globalizing Spirometry: The “Racial Factor” in Scientific Medicine
• 6. Adjudicating Disability in the Industrial Worker
• 7. Diagnosing Silicosis: Physiological Testing in South African Gold Mines
• Epilogue: How Race Takes Root
• Notes
• Index

Are You My Cousin?

The New York Times
2014-01-31

A. J. Jacobs

I love my family, but I’m glad I don’t have to buy birthday presents for all my cousins. I’d be bankrupt within a week.

My family tree sprawls far and wide. It’s not even a tree, really. More like an Amazonian forest. At last count, it was up to nearly 75 million family members. In fact, there’s a good chance you’re on some far-flung branch of my tree, and if you aren’t, you probably will be soon. It’s not really my tree. It’s our tree.

The previously staid world of genealogy is in the midst of a controversial revolution. A handful of websites have turbocharged family trees with a collaborative, Wikipedia-like approach. You upload your family tree, and then you can merge your tree with another tree that has a cousin in common. After that, you merge and merge again. This creates vast webs with hundreds of thousands — or millions — of cousins by blood and marriage, provided you think the links are accurate. One site, Geni, has what it calls the World Family Tree, with about 75 million relatives in more than 160 countries and all seven continents, including Antarctica…

…My journey started a few months ago. I got an email from a stranger named Jules Feldman who lives on a kibbutz in Israel. He had read one of my books. He wrote: “We have in our database about 80,000 relatives of yours. You are an eighth cousin of my wife who, in my opinion, is a fine lady.” I’m also, he said, related to Karl Marx and several European aristocrats.

The email had a bit of a creepy National Security Agency privacy-invasion vibe. But it was also, in a strange way, profoundly comforting. There I was, alone in my office, connected to 80,000 other humans. In a world where extended families lose touch as they spread across time zones, this seemed remarkable…

…Last year, Yaniv Erlich, a fellow at the Whitehead Institute at M.I.T., presented preliminary results of his project FamiLinx, which uses Big Data from Geni’s tree to track the distribution of traits. His work has yielded a fascinating picture of human migration.

Second, a megatree might just make the world a kinder place. I notice that I feel more warmly about people I know are distant cousins. I recently figured out that I’m an 11th cousin four times removed of the TV personality Judge Judy Sheindlin. I’d always found her grating. But when I discovered our connection, I softened. She’s probably a sweetheart underneath the bluster.

That’s a trivial example, I know. But imagine how someone from the Ku Klux Klan might feel when he connects with his African-American relatives. They won’t be singing Kumbaya, but could it nudge him toward more tolerance? I hope so…

Read the entire article here.

Is ruling in the genes? All presidents bar one are directly descended from a medieval English king

The Daily Mail
London, England, United Kingdom
2012-08-04

Snejana Farberov

What do Barack Obama, Thomas Jefferson, George W. Bush and the other past U.S. presidents have in common? Besides holding the coveted title of commander-in-chief, it appears that all of them but one are cousins.

The remarkable discovery was made by 12-year-old BridgeAnne d’Avignon, of Salinas, California, who created a ground-breaking family tree that connected 42 of 43 U.S. presidents to one common, and rather unexpected, ancestor: King John of England.

‘They all have the trait of wanting power,’ d’Avignon told the station WFMY.

King John, also known as John ‘Lackland’, is renowned for signing the Magna Carta in 1215, which limited the monarch’s power and helped form the British Parliament.

D’Avignon, a seventh-grader at Monte Vista Christian School in Watsonville, started the project in hopes of tracing back her own bloodline in France, but somewhere along the way she decided to take her genealogical quest to the highest level.

In order to create the family tree, the 12-year-old spent months scouring through over 500,000 names in search of the ‘presidential Adam.’…

…The teen also found out that she is the 18th cousin of President Obama. She even wrote to her new-found relative a letter to share her findings with him…

Read the entire article here.

Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of Anticolonial Nationalism in the Gold Coast

The American Historical Review
Volume 119, Issue 1 (February 2014)
pages 78-110
DOI: 10.1093/ahr/119.1.78

Carina E. Ray, Associate Professor of African and Afro- American Studies
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts

In the summer and fall of 1919, the African-owned Gold Coast press was awash with news stories and impassioned commentary about the postwar race riots that had recently devastated Liverpool, Cardiff, and other major port cities in Britain. Angered by the sexual politics underlying the riots, Gold Coast commentators were quick to point out that the ports’ white rioters were not the only ones aggrieved by interracial sexual relations. Atu, a regular columnist for the Gold Coast Leader, responded to news that black men were targeted for repatriation after being attacked on the ports’ streets for “consorting with white women” by reminding his readers “that in their own country white men freely consort with coloured women, forming illicit alliances, and in many cases leaving on the coast abandoned offspring to the precarious protection of needy native families.” He continued, “It does not require much skill to diagnose the canting hypocrisy underlying” the riots, but the question now was whether “any sensible man [could] suppose that these men will return to their homes to view with complacency the spectacle of white men associated with  coloured women.” In a few short lines, Atu vivified the “tensions of empire” created  by the movement of African men between metropole and colony, and their different  systems of raced and gendered sexual access.

Not long after, the Leader published a series of commentaries under the provocative  title “Immoral Sanitation.” The unnamed author of the series’ first installment declared that unseemly sexual liaisons between African women and European men had transformed the “social life” of Sekondi, a busy coastal town in the Gold Coast’s Western Province, into “a condition of depravity.” Elsewhere in the colony,  “a woman who boldly acknowledges herself the kept mistress of a European is thrown out of society and virtually looked down upon by men and women of respectability,”  claimed the writer. In Sekondi, however, he accused “energetic advocates of this dishonourable mode of life” of enticing young women into sexual relationships with European men, whose “carnal lust” was causing the moral deterioration of the town’s womenfolk. The claims made in the “Immoral Sanitation” series, argued Leader columnist Atu, were more broadly applicable to “other parts of the country where this traffic,” which he likened to “prostitution on the part of African women by a class of white men of a low caste,” was carried on.

The Leader’s lurid tales of illicit relationships between profligate white men and debauched African women during the early twentieth century contrast sharply with historical accounts of respectable marriages between entrepreneurial African women and European men during an earlier time period in coastal West Africa. These unions produced West Africa’s prominent Afro-European trading families and are often credited with successfully integrating European men into local West African societies and empowering African women during the long period of contact preceding the nineteenth-century advent of formal colonial rule. Interracial marriages contracted in accordance with African customary law, and less frequently those recognized as lawful by the religious and administrative bodies associated with the European presence on the coast, were indeed regular features of the region’s littoral trading enclaves. Constrained by a dearth of sources, scholars have had comparatively little to say about the range of coercive and less seemly sexual encounters, including concubinage, prostitution, and rape, that also characterized the interracial sexual economies of West Africa’s coastal trading hubs. While it is difficult to speculate about native Gold Coasters’ reactions to these relationships prior to the twentieth century, scattered commentary from as early as 1902 in the Leader, the colony’s most politically radical newspaper, suggests that disquiet over them was not new. With the appearance of the “Immoral Sanitation” series and likeminded commentaries, however, this simmering discontent boiled over into full-blown condemnation of local interracial sexual relations. These rare primary sources vividly illustrate how a diverse group of politically marginalized yet highly politicized Gold Coast men from the colony’s embattled intelligentsia, along with disillusioned demobilized soldiers and seamen in post–World War I Britain, used these illicit relationships to challenge the moral legitimacy of British colonial rule. On the one hand, by portraying African women as either immoral race traitors or innocents in need of protection from predatory Europeans, these men were able to claim a leadership role as moral stewards of the nation. On the other hand, by casting European men as sexually promiscuous interlopers, they challenged the very idea that Europeans were morally suited to rule the colonial world…

Read or purchase the article here.

“Turning Up Their Noses at the Colonel”: Eastern Aristocracy, Western Democracy, and Richard Mentor Johnson

Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
Volume 111, Number 4, Autumn 2013
pages 525-561
DOI: 10.1353/khs.2014.0022

Miles Smith
Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas

In February 1849, the Kentucky legislature debated who would represent the state and fill the open seat in the U.S. Senate. At the completion of the election that followed the debate, the count stood at ninety-two for Whig leader Henry Clay and forty-five for the Democrat, Colonel Richard Mentor Johnson. After his defeat, the onetime Indian fighter and hero of the War of 1812, U.S. representative, senator, and vice president, finally retired from public life. Virtually unknown to the twenty-first-century public, Johnson remains best known to historians for his domestic life. The standard narrative, embraced since the mid-nineteenth century, asserts that Johnson maintained a slave mistress whom he regarded as his common-law wife. He acknowledged their two pretty daughters and introduced them into polite society. During the election of 1836, some genteel Southerners (Virginians especially, the story goes), offended by Johnson’s scandalous domestic and racial situation, obstructed the democratic nomination process and sent the election of the vice president into the Senate, where the senators elected Johnson along party lines.

Historians painted Johnson’s lack of support as an indication of southern displeasure over his relationship with Julia Chinn. In fact, it was Johnson’s egalitarian politics that finally proved to be what aristocratic planters in the old southern states feared. Along with openly engaging in miscegenation (what Johnson’s contemporaries called amalgamation), Johnson championed radical policies aimed at politically displacing southern elites with yeomen farmers and workers. Carolina and Virginia patricians feared Johnson’s brand of political egalitarianism. While Jefferson promoted the political aesthetic of being a simple farmer, he was, in fact, a Piedmont grandee. Jeffersonians ostensibly promoted agrarian equality, but certainly these supposed democrats were nothing more than planters who needed a political vehicle to protect agrarianism and their aristocratic prerogatives. Richard Johnson conceptualized Jacksonian democracy and subsequently the Democratic Party as a truly egalitarian institution where planters, small farmers, and even urban workers and immigrants found equal voice for their needs and concerns. While his relationship with Julia Chinn provided an acceptable public pretext to hamper Johnson’s political aspirations, Tidewater Jeffersonian aristocrats feared the rise of frontier farmers, largely because these backwoods Americans considered merit and service more important than station and acreage. To coastal patricians, Johnson and western democracy represented a very real threat to the political preeminence of the Tidewater and Carolina planters.

Jacksonian Democracy is somewhat inappropriately named. In the South and in the slaveholding West, large planters exercised an outsized influence in local and regional political matters during the so-called Era of the Common Man. And while Andrew Jackson exemplified the movement and served as its rallying figure, he did not “found” American democratic politics. In fact, many early Jacksonians were anything but common men. Andrew Jackson, James Polk, John Tyler, and other prominent Jacksonians garnered the political support of small farmers and workers, but each guarded the prerogatives of the planter class jealously. As Edward Pessen pointed out in his magisterial Jacksonian America, a broadened suffrage allowed American farmers and wage laborers to vote for men who assumed the aesthetic of the common man for political purposes. Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin updated and nuanced Pessen’s thesis, but their argument is simple: Democrats and Whigs were largely similar, and the terms democracy and aristocracy were more often than not political rhetoric. This statement is true, but not universally so…

Help Out a New Study Looking at Sharing Preferences for Biracial Children!

Tufts University
2014-02-06

Sarah Gaither, M.S.
Social Psychology Ph.D. Candidate
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Do you have a child (age 3-8 years) that is either biracial Black/White or biracial Asian/White and live in the Boston area? We have a new study looking at sharing preferences in mixed-race kids!

We are running an in-lab psychology study looking at learning and sharing preferences of mixed-race children at Tufts University in Medford which takes around 30 minutes to complete! We can arrange for free parking if needed and your child will also get some cool stickers to take home. Plus you will be helping out one of the first studies involving biracial children!

If you are interested or want more information, please email us at tuftssociallab@gmail.com and mention the study name: “Biracial Sharing Study.”

‘Mixed’ [Watson Review]

Inside Higher Ed
2014-01-31

Andrea Watson

Garrod, Andrew, Christina Gómez, Robert Kilkenny, Mixed: Multiracial College Students Tell Their Life Stories (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). 208 pages.

Mixed (Cornell University Press) is a collection of 12 autobiographical essays written by college students who identify as multiracial. Unlike most books that focus on children with white and black parents, this one is by and about young adults with multiple racial backgrounds. Each chapter is written by a different author, who starts with family history and moves along from early years to college years. All of the contributors are Dartmouth students.

Thomas Lane is one of the authors. In his chapter, “The Development of a Happa,” he describes what it was like growing up with a Japanese mother and a white father. He discusses how he felt stuck between two worlds, but associated more with the white side until college. “Before college I knew I was ethnically Asian, but I refused to accept the Asian culture. Since coming to Dartmouth, however, I have learned to appreciate all aspects of being Japanese.”

“In My World 1+1=3,” by Yuki Kondo-Shah, is by a young woman who has a Japanese mother and a Bangladeshi father. She writes that she identified as Japanese when she lived in Japan, but when she moved to the United States, at 7, she had to figure out where she fit in. The author says growing up, she always felt stuck between her two identities and could never fully identify with one or the other. “While I spent most of my childhood being Japanese and my college years identifying as a mixed-race minority, I began my professional career as an Asian American.”

Ana Sofia De Brito wrote the “Good Hair” chapter. As a Cape Verdean, she says her father would always push her to date lighter-skinned men over dark-skinned men, because she would “destroy the race” if she married one. “Although I have never had a strong preference for any particular type and have dated boys from various backgrounds and races, at college my preference has focused on men with darker skin.” Within her family, De Brito is considered white because of her European features, but she writes that she identifies as black because society pressures her to choose; she can’t be “other.”…

Read the entire review and interview with editor Andrew Garrod here.

Mixed: Multiracial College Students Tell Their Life Stories

Cornell University Press
2013-12-17
208 pages
6 x 9 in.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8014-5251-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8014-7914-4

Edited by:

Andrew Garrod, Professor Emeritus of Education
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Christina Gómez, Professor of Sociology and Latino & Latin American Studies
Northeastern Illinois University

Robert Kilkenny, Executive Director; Clinical Associate
Alliance for Inclusion and Prevention
School of Social Work
Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts

Mixed presents engaging and incisive first-person experiences of what it is like to be multiracial in what is supposedly a postracial world. Bringing together twelve essays by college students who identify themselves as multiracial, this book considers what this identity means in a reality that occasionally resembles the post-racial dream of some and at other times recalls a familiar world of racial and ethnic prejudice.

Exploring a wide range of concerns and anxieties, aspirations and ambitions, these young writers, who all attended Dartmouth College, come from a variety of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Unlike individuals who define themselves as having one racial identity, these students have lived the complexity of their identity from a very young age. In Mixed, a book that will benefit educators, students, and their families, they eloquently and often passionately reveal how they experience their multiracial identity, how their parents’ race or ethnicity shaped their childhoods, and how perceptions of their race have affected their relationships.

Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I. Who Am I?
  • 1. Good Hair / Ana Sofia De Brito
  • 2. So, What Are You? / Chris Collado
  • 3. In My World 1+1 = 3 / Yuki Kondo-Shah
  • 4. A Sort of Hybrid / Allison Bates
• Part II. In-Betweenness
  • 5. Seeking to Be Whole / Shannon Joyce Prince
  • 6. The Development of a Happa / Thomas Lane
  • 7. A Little Plot of No-Man’s-Land / Ki Mae Ponniah Heussner
  • 8. Finding Blackness / Samiir Bolsten
• Part III. A Different Perspective
  • 9. Chow Mein Kampf / Taica Hsu
  • 10. A Work in Progress / Anise Vance
  • 11. We Aren’t That Different / Dean O’Brien
  • 12. Finding Zion / Lola Shannon
• About the Editors

12 Beautiful Portraits Of Black Identity Challenging the “One-Drop” Rule

PolicyMic
New York, New York
2014-02-06

Amirah Mercer

What are you?” they’d ask, head tilted and eyes squinted.

“Black,” I’d reply.

“No … but like, what else are you? I know it’s not all black.”

So went a typical interrogation by my peers as a kid. With skin lighter than even some who identify as White, and hair that streaks blond in the sun, I’ve never been offended by the question, although I have since changed my response. To the more politically correct question that I’m asked in adulthood — “Where are you from?” — I would recite my ethnic makeup, followed by a definitive, “But I identify as Black.” (If I feel like being a wise ass, I’ll simply reply with “New Jersey.”)

How do you define a racial identity? Can “blackness” be defined simply by a person’s skin tone, hair texture and facial features? Can we define it by the way someone walks or the way they talk? Can it be a product of someone’s cultural affinities, regardless of what she looks like?

These are the questions that Dr. Yaba Blay and photographer Noelle Théard encourage us to wrestle with in (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race. Featuring the perspectives of 58 people who identify as part of the larger “racial, cultural, and social group generally referred to and known as Black,” the book combines candid memoirs and striking portraits to explore the complexities of Black identity and celebrate an individual’s right to self-identify.

(1)ne Drop’s title derives from the “one-drop rule” — a (successful) attempt to define blackness in America as one drop, or at least 1/32, of Black ancestry for the economic, social, and political purposes of distinguishing a Black person from a White person. I say “successful,” because the one-drop rule still holds cultural weight today, especially with regard to how we value light and dark skin. For this reason, Dr. Blay aims to “challenge narrow yet popular perceptions of what Blackness is and what Blackness looks like.”

“I think the context that we live in shapes the way you identify yourself, and the way others identify you,” says Dr. Blay. And therein lies the power of (1)ne Drop. From Zun Lee, a man who has always identified as Black despite being phenotypically Asian, to Sembene McFarland, a woman whose vitiligo bizarrely blurs other people’s perception of her race, to James Bartlett, a man who is mistaken for Italian, Arab or Hispanic depending on what U.S. city he’s in, (1)ne Drop narrates a story of blackness that is not bound by looks, but that is fluid and empowered by the act of self-identification.

Below are 12 portraits of participants, including their self-identification and a piece of their personal story from (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race:…

Read the entire article and view the portraits here.

The Young White Faces of Slavery

The New York Times
2014-01-30

Mary Niall Mitchell, Joseph Tregle Professor of Early American History
University of New Orleans

For Northern readers scanning the Jan. 30, 1864, issue of Harper’s Weekly for news from the South, a large engraving on page 69 brought the war home in an unexpected way. Drawn from a photograph, it featured eight recently freed slaves from Union-occupied New Orleans. At the back of the portrait stood three adults, Wilson Chinn, Mary Johnson and Robert Whitehead. In the foreground were five children — Charles Taylor, Rebecca Huger, Rosa Downs, Augusta Broujey and Isaac White — ranging in age from 7 to 11. Their gaze was trained on the camera, but in the context of the magazine, the effect was that they all seemed to be looking at the reader.

Instead of the coarse garments worn by most enslaved people in the South, they were well dressed, the men and boys in suits and Mary Johnson and the girls in dresses and petticoats. But it was not their attire that confounded readers. Rather, the pale skin and smooth hair of four of the children — Charles, Augusta, Rebecca and Rosa — overturned a different set of Northern expectations about the appearance of people enslaved in the South: that a person’s African-American heritage would always, somehow, be visible and that only “negroes” could be slaves. The caption beneath the group, like the portrait itself, was meant to provoke the armchair viewer’s unease: “Emancipated Slaves” it proclaimed, “White and Colored.”

It was no accident that the young “white” slaves resembled the children of the magazine’s white middle-class readership, which is to say Northern children who were far removed from the threat of enslavement, or so their parents liked to think. The sponsors of the group from New Orleans anticipated precisely the kind of effect such children might have on Northern middle-class readers. As “the offspring of white fathers through two or three generations,” the Harper’s Weekly editors explained, “they are as white, as intelligent, as docile, as most of our own children.”…

…Not surprisingly, the lightest-skinned children caused the most stir among Northern editors and audiences. The two lightest-skinned girls, Rebecca and Rosa, seemed to have the greatest appeal, judging from the large number of cartes de visite that survive of them. About Rebecca, Harper’s Weekly wrote: “to all appearance, she is perfectly white. Her complexion, hair, and features show not the slightest trace of negro blood.” With their fair skin and elegant dress, Rebecca and Rosa evoked for most viewers the “fancy girls” sold in the New Orleans slave market. The fate that awaited these girls as concubines to white men was clear to most viewers at the time. Their tender youth compelled Northerners to renew their commitment to the war and rescue girls like these…

Read the entire article here.