Mixed Race Studies

One of [Richard] Lewontin’s pathbreaking works was to find out how much genetic diversity exists within species. This was at a time when we did not know how many genes humans had. Lewontin’s inspired guess was 20,000, far smaller than what most biologists thought then and remarkably close to what is known today. Most biologists then also believed that races had significant biological differences, which was one of the reasons why they thought that there was a much larger number of genes carrying different traits. Lewontin and geneticist John Hubby used a technique, protein gel electrophoresis, developed by Hubby, to quantify the genetic diversity in fruit flies. At that time, fruit flies were the favorite target for testing genetic theories in the laboratory. This pathbreaking exercise traced evolution at the species level to changes at the molecular level—a foundation for the field of molecular evolution—using statistical methods. The result was startling. Contrary to what most biologists believed, the exercise showed a surprising amount of genetic diversity within a given population and further revealed that evolution led to stable and diverse populations within a species. Later on, Lewontin used this method on human blood groups, to show that the result of stable genetic diversity held true for humans as well. The other result of the human blood group study was that it showed that 85.4 percent of the genetic diversity in humans was found within a population, and only 6.3 percent between ‘races.’ Race was not a biological construct but a social one.

Prabir Purkayastha/Globetrotter, “The great scientific crusader who debunked the biological myths about race,” AlterNet, August 5, 2021. https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/richard-lewontin/.

Willa Brown: Pioneer for Female & African American Aviation

Civil Air Patrol
2020-03-30

Lt. Col. Carlos Montague, MDWG Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Officer
Maryland Wing

“Willa Beatrice Brown, a 31-year-old Negro American, serves her country by training pilots for the U.S. Army Air Forces.” – NARA – 535717 (circa 1941-1945)

CAP recognizes Women’s History Month with a profile of aviator and civil rights pioneer Willa Brown.

There are many pioneering names in African American aviation. Figures like Eugene Bullard, Bessie Coleman, Charles Alfred Anderson, John Forsythe, Thomas Allen, Janet Harmon Bragg and Herman Banning all set out against the odds of social and racial injustice, to achieve excellence.

And then there’s Willa Beatrice Brown Chappell, a pioneer for both women’s equality and civil rights.

Brown was born in Glasgow, Kentucky, in 1906 to a biracial family with a Native American mother and an African American father. Understanding that education was important, Brown graduated from the Indiana State Normal School, now Indiana State University, majoring in commerce and earning her bachelor’s degree in business.

Later she would receive a master’s degree in business administration from Northwestern University and became a teacher at Roosevelt High School in Gary, Indiana. Eventually she moved to Chicago and became a social worker.

“Any time you are a first in anything, that’s a challenge. Willa Brown was the first African American woman in the United States to get a private pilot license, get licensed and certified as a mechanic, and earn a commercial pilot’s license,” said the Rev. Sandra Campbell, a former manager with the Federal Aviation Administration…

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Aaron’s Book

The Devil’s Tale: Dispatches from the Davin M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
2021-07-27

Blake Hill-Saya

Above: Portrait in oils of Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore painted by his daughter Lyda Moore Merrick. Located in the North Carolina Collection, Stanford L. Warren Branch of the Durham County Library, Durham, N.C.

Too often we relegate the lives of our ancestors to the basket of nostalgia. We think that because our modern times have dressed us up in different clothes and surrounded us with technology that the lives and struggles of our ancestors can’t speak with any real directness to ours. It is easy in the rush and rattle of the present to allow seasoned historians to define us in macrocosm while overlooking the importance of our own more granular history; a thread waiting to be pulled in the warp and woof of who we think we are. Libraries and historical archives exist to help us pull that thread and expand our understanding of history and our place in it.

Eight years ago, I was chosen by the Durham Colored Library board of directors, led by chairperson C. Eileen Watts Welch, to follow my own ancestral thread and write a biography of my great- great-grandfather, Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore. The dream of this historical biography of Durham’s first Black physician far predates my involvement; it actually predates me. Dr. Moore’s daughter, my great-grandmother, Lyda Moore Merrick, dreamed of a book about her Papa. My grandfather, Dr. Charles DeWitt Watts, a legendary surgeon and healthcare activist in his own right, also dreamed of this book. His dream inspired his daughter, C. Eileen Watts Welch, to make this biography a reality. The Durham Colored Library, an organization founded by Dr. Moore himself in 1913 and now a non-profit focused on uplifting Black narratives, sponsored the project…

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The great scientific crusader who debunked the biological myths about race

AlterNet
2021-08-05

Prabir Purkayastha/Globetrotter

On July 4, Richard Lewontin, the dialectical biologist, Marxist and activist, died at the age of 92, just three days after the death of his wife of more than 70 years, Mary Jane. He was one of the founders of modern biology who brought together three different disciplines—statistics, molecular biology and evolutionary biology—that mark the discipline today. In doing so, he not only battled crude racism masquerading as science, but also helped shed light on what science really is. In this sense, he belongs to the rare group of scientists who are equally at home in the laboratory and while talking about science and ideology at a philosophical level. Lewontin is a popular exponent of what science is, and more pertinently, what it is not.

Lewontin always harked back to what being radical means: going back to fundamentals in deriving a viewpoint. This method is important, as it makes radical inquiry a powerful tool in science, compared to lazier ways of relating positions to certain class viewpoints. What is the relation between genes and race, class, or gender? Does social superiority spring from superior genes, or from biological differences between the sexes? As a Marxist and activist, Lewontin believed that we need to fight at both levels: to expose class, race and gender stereotypes as a reflection of power within society, and also at the level of radical science, meaning from the fundamentals of scientific theory and data…

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Interracial worlds, friendships, marriages—Black and white lives inextricably linked, for good and for bad, with racism and with hope—are all but erased by [Courtney E.] Martin and [Robin] DiAngelo, and with them the mixed children of these marriages, who are the fastest-growing demographic in the country. I found nothing of my own multiracial family history in these books; my husband’s Black middle-class family is nowhere to be found either, inconvenient for being too successful, too educated, too adept over generations to need Martin’s handouts or DiAngelo’s guidance on dealing with white people. The world these writers evoke is one in which white people remain the center of the story and Black people are at the margins, poor, stiff, and dignified, with little better to do than open their homes and hearts to white women on journeys to racial self-awareness.

Danzy Senna, “Robin DiAngelo and the Problem With Anti-racist Self-Help,” The Atlantic, September 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/09/martin-learning-in-public-diangelo-nice-racism/619497/.

“Latinidad Is Cancelled”: Confronting an Anti-Black Construct

Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture
Volume 3, Issue 3 (July 2021)
pages 58-79
DOI: 10.1525/lavc.2021.3.3.58

Tatiana Flores, Professor of Latino & Caribbean Studies and Art History
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Adopting a hemispheric perspective, this essay problematizes the construct of latinidad by foregrounding how it reproduces Black erasure. I argue that “Latin America,” rather than being a geographical designator, is an imagined community that is Eurocentric to the degree that its conceptual boundaries exclude African diaspora spaces. I then turn to understandings of whiteness across borders, contrasting perceptions of racial mixture in the United States and the Hispanophone Americas. Lastly, I examine works by (Afro-)Latinx artists whose nuanced views on race demonstrate the potential of visual representation to provide insight into this complex topic beyond the black-white binary.

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