Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Race-Based Medicine: Déjà Vu All Over Again?

    Race-Based Medicine: Déjà Vu All Over Again?

    Biopolitical Times: The weblog of the Center for Genetics and Society
    2012-09-18

    Osagie K. Obasogie, Associate Professor of Law
    University of California, San Francisco
    Also: Senior Fellow
    Center for Genetics and Society

    Race-based medicine has been one of the more contentious issues in pharmaceutical research and development over the past few years. Some argue that drugs specifically labeled to treat particular racial groups offer an invaluable way to fight racial disparities in health by targeting at-risk populations. Others claim that race-based medicine inappropriately treats race as a biological cause of racial disparities when broader social and environmental factors may offer better explanations.

    Much of this debate involves the FDA’s 2005 approval of BiDil, which became the first drug to be labeled for a specific racial group – African Americans with heart failure. The heat generated from this debate has largely faded due to BiDIl’s market failure.  But, it seems like a new drug may reignite a few flames.

    Tradjenta was developed by Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly to treat Type 2 diabetes. But results from a Phase III clinical trial recently showed that Tradjenta was particularly beneficial for controlling African Americans’ blood sugar levels…

    …Is another BiDil on the horizon? It’s important to acknowledge that Tradjenta had already received FDA approval to treat type 2 diabetes in the general population prior to the announcement of these race-specific results. This is different from BiDil, where investigators sought a race-specific indication from the FDA because they could not otherwise win regulatory approval as a race-neutral drug. Despite these differences, treating racial disparities in diabetes as a naturally observed group difference that can be at least partially resolved with a pill shares some similarities with the BiDil saga. In both cases, there is a tendency to naturalize racial disparities as a function of group difference rather than having a deeper engagement with the social determinants of health.

    This leads to an important question: if Tradjenta already received approval for use in the general population, why would it not be effective in African Americans? Put differently, why go through the time and expense of conducting a clinical trial to demonstrate efficacy in a particular racial group when the drug has already been approved for everyone regardless of race?

    It’s unclear how these recent clinical trial results might be used. Perhaps this is another example of using a clinical trial as a marketing device in the hopes of capturing a larger share of the market…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Deep Roots and Tangled Branches

    Deep Roots and Tangled Branches

    The Chronicle of Higher Education
    2006-02-03

    Troy Duster, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology
    University of California, Berkeley
    Also Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge
    New York University

    People who know their biological parents and grandparents typically take the information for granted. Some have a difficult time empathizing with the passionate genealogical quests of adoptees and, increasingly, products of anonymous sperm banks and other new technologies where one or both genetic contributors are unknown. In recent years, new legislation has enabled people to search for information about genetic progenitors – even in cases where there had been a signed agreement of nondisclosure. The laserlike focus of that search can be as relentless as Ahab’s hunt for the white whale.

    Mystery of lineage is the stuff of great literature. Mark Twain made use of it for biting social commentary in his Pudd’nhead Wilson, a story about the mix-up of babies born to a slave and a free person. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière, and Dickens built grand tragedy and enduring comedy on the theme. In England in 2002, a white Englishwoman gave birth to mixed-race twins after a mix-up at an in vitro fertilization clinic. Imagine what Shakespeare would have done with that!

    If one person’s passions can be so riled by such a puzzle, imagine the emotions involved when the uncertainty applies to a whole group – say, of 12 million people. The middle passage did just that to Americans of recent African descent. Names were obliterated from record books, and slaves were typically anointed with a new single first name. Sometimes no names were recorded, just the slaves’ numbers, ages, and genders. Some African-Americans have deliberately and actively participated in the erasure, showing no desire to pursue a genealogical trail. For others, fragments of oral history generate a fierce longing to do the detective work.

    That is the case among the prominent subjects featured in “African American Lives,” a two-night, four-part PBS series scheduled for February 1 and 8. The host and executive co-producer is Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the department of African and African-American studies at Harvard. Gates has assembled eight notably successful African-Americans, among them the media entrepreneur Oprah Winfrey, the legendary music producer Quincy Jones, and the film star Whoopi Goldberg. Each participant, along with Gates, is the subject of some serious professional family-tree tracing. There are surprises for each of them, and the series has undeniable human-interest appeal…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Racial Labels Have Limited Use In Personalizing Medicine

    Racial Labels Have Limited Use In Personalizing Medicine

    Shots: NPR’s Health Blog
    2011-05-09

    Eliza Barclay

    For all the fanfare around personalized medicine, the idea has been fairly slow to take off.

    Boosters have said if doctors had a patient’s DNA information it would be revolutionary: They could look for genetic risk of certain diseases or mutations that determine whether certain drugs are likely to work or not.

    The cost of DNA sequencing keeps falling, yet genetic sequencing for medical use isn’t commonplace. In the meantime, doctors can, in theory, consider a patient’s race in anticipating health conditions that could pose a higher risk.
     
    But a study published recently in PLoS One suggests that using race as a stand in for truly personalized genetic information may not work, especially in the most diverse cities (like New York and Los Angeles) that attract immigrants from around the world.

    There’s a lot of genetic variability among races. And the genetic risk profiles for many people with mixed ancestry don’t fit neatly into any category…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The statutory mode of expression to cover persons of mixed white and Negro blood is an awkward one and makes doubtful just what proportion of Negro blood will disqualify one from marrying a pure white person or Malayan.

    White persons and Malayans are forbidden to intermarry and both are forbidden to marry Negroes or persons of Negro descent to the third generation. The statutory mode of expression to cover persons of mixed white and Negro blood is an awkward one and makes doubtful just what proportion of Negro blood will disqualify one from marrying a pure white person or Malayan. It is suggested that if the person in question has some non-Negro blood and that if all of his parents and grand-parents also had some, he is eligible for purposes of the statute, even though he is predominantly Negro.

    John S. Strahorn Jr., “Void and Voidable Marriages in Maryland and Their Annulment,” Maryland Law Review, Volume 2, Issue 3 (1938): 231.

  • Slooooooow Sales for BiDil®

    Slooooooow Sales for BiDil®

    Biopolitical Times: The weblog of the Center for Genetics and Society
    2006-10-18

    Osagie K. Obasogie, Associate Professor of Law
    University of California, San Francisco
    Also: Senior Fellow
    Center for Genetics and Society

    Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that sales for BiDil®—the first drug to receive FDAapproval to treat a specific race—are unexpectedly slow. Marketed as treating heart failure in African-Americans, BiDil® was expected to generate $130 million in sales this year; thus far, only a little over $5 million has come in. Estimates show that only 1% of the 750,000 Blacks suffering from heart failure are using it.

    There’s no shortage of explanations for why Black people are about as unlikely to take BiDil® as they are to name a newborn child Katrina…

    …But, perhaps there’s another explanation that the Wall Street wing tips are missing: a sense of history.

    During a conference I attended earlier this year on BiDil® and race specific medicines, an older Black woman in the audience stood up and said “If I were sick and somebody told me that they had a drug just for Black people to help me, I’d say to them: give me what the white people are taking.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Biopolitics of Mixing: Thai Multiracialities and Haunted Ascendancies

    The Biopolitics of Mixing: Thai Multiracialities and Haunted Ascendancies

    Ashgate Publishing
    October 2012
    198 pages
    234 x 156 mm
    Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7546-7680-5
    ebook ISBN 978-1-4094-2502-1

    Jinthana Haritaworn, Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and Environment at the Faculty of Environmental Studies
    York University, Canada

    Debates over who belongs in Europe and who doesn’t increasingly speak the language of mixing, but how are the figures commonly described as ‘mixed’ actually embodied? The Biopolitics of Mixing invites us to reckon with the spectres of pathologization past and present, placing the celebration of mixing beside moral panics over terrorism and trafficking and a post-race multiculturalism that elevates some as privileged members of the neoliberal community, whilst ghosting others from it. Drawing on a broad archive including rich qualitative interviews conducted in Britain and Germany, media and policy debates, popular culture, race-based research and queer-of-colour theories, this book imagines into being communities in which people and places normally kept separate can coexist in the same reality.

    As such, it will appeal to scholars across a range of sociological and cultural studies, including critical race, ethnic and migration studies, transnational gender and queer studies, German and European studies, Thai and Southeast Asian studies, and studies of affect, performativity, biopolitics and necropolitics. It should be read by all those interested in thinking critically on the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability.

    Contents

    • Introduction: haunted origins
    • Where are you from?
    • From monster to fashion model: regenerating racialized bodies
    • Is it better to be mixed race?
    • Hybrid nations, mixed feelings: from marginal man to Obama
    • Exceptional cities, exceptional citizens: metronormativity and mimeticism
    • Reckoning with prostitutes: performing Thai femininity
    • Conclusion: where do we want to go?
    • Bibliography
    • Index

  • Ian Thomson: Jamaica was modern before Britain

    Ian Thomson: Jamaica was modern before Britain

    The Independent
    London, England
    2012-10-04

    Miguel Cullen

    To mark Black History Month the author of “Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica” talks to Miguel Cullen about the ways Jamaica is punching above its weight

    Jamaica is a country that exceeds its limitations. For example India’s GDP is 180 times that of the West Indian country and Jamaica could fit inside it 300 times. Yet Jamaica won twice as many medals at the London Olympics, 12 to India’s six.

    Musically it shines beyond its scope too: between the mid-1950s and 2000 Jamaica had produced one new music recording per 1,000 people each year – making it per capita the world’s most prolific generator of recorded music.

    Jamaican culture has long been fashionable and on Google Trends, a means of measuring how highly words feature in the search engine. In the list of most-searched countries “Jamaica” comes a tight second to “Russia,” a country so big it makes Jamaica look like a minnow.

    In view of Jamaica’s small financial and physical scale, it’s logical to think of it as a statistical freak of nature, an anomaly, to have such a broad world standing. How could such a tiny island, which is only this year celebrating 50 years of independence from the UK, compete with superpowers like India and Russia?

    It was with this question in mind that, on the eve of Black History Month in the UK, I visited the London home of Ian Thomson, the author of the hugely successful (and controversial) Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica…

    …The book won the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. It combines serpentine, fragile descriptions of Jamaica’s natural beauty with an unafraid look at the horrors of Jamaican violence, in a way that is intransigent and unique.

    “Jamaica was modern before Britain was,” Thomson tells me, sitting in his study overlooking the greenery of Alexandra Park. “What fascinated me about these Caribbean countries was that for me they’re the first modern societies – they were the first countries to have intermingling, mixed race people, across the colour bar.”

    “When Jamaicans came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, they were often very surprised by the conservative reactions to some of them being mixed race – mixed racing had been going on for centuries in the Caribbean. So in a sense you could say that although Jamaica is in some ways parochial, in other ways it’s incredibly forward-thinking.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Portuguese and Luso-Asian Legacies in Southeast Asia, 1511-2011, Volume 1: The Making of the Luso-Asian World: Intricacies of Engagement

    Portuguese and Luso-Asian Legacies in Southeast Asia, 1511-2011, Volume 1: The Making of the Luso-Asian World: Intricacies of Engagement

    Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
    2011
    323 pages
    Soft cover ISBN: 978-981-4345-25-5
    See Volume 1 here.

    Edited by:

    Laura Jarnagin, Visiting Professorial Fellow
    Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore
    also Associate Professor Emerita in the Division of Liberal Arts and International Studies at Colorado School of Mines (Golden, Colorado)

    “In 1511, a Portuguese expedition under the command of Afonso de Albuquerque arrived on the shores of Malacca, taking control of the prosperous Malayan port-city after a swift military campaign. Portugal, a peripheral but then technologically advanced country in southwestern Europe since the latter fifteenth century, had been in the process of establishing solid outposts all along Asia’s litoral in order to participate in the most active and profitable maritime trading routes of the day. As it turned out, the Portuguese presence and influence in the Malayan Peninsula and elsewhere in continental and insular Asia expanded far beyond the sphere of commerce and extended over time well into the twenty-first century.

    Five hundred years later, a conference held in Singapore brought together a large group of scholars from widely different national, academic and disciplinary contexts, to analyse and discuss the intricate consequences of Portuguese interactions in Asia over the longue dure. The result of these discussions is a stimulating set of case studies that, as a rule, combine original archival and/or field research with innovative historiographical perspectives. Luso-Asian communities, real and imagined, and Luso-Asian heritage, material and symbolic, are studied with depth and insight. The range of thematic, chronological and geographic areas covered in these proceedings is truly remarkable, showing not only the extraordinary relevance of revisiting Luso-Asian interactions in the longer term, but also the surprising dynamism within an area of studies which seemed on the verge of exhaustion. After all, archives from all over the world, from Rio de Janeiro to London, from Lisbon to Rome, and from Goa to Macao, might still hold some secrets on the subject of Luso-Asian relations, when duly explored by resourceful scholars.”

    —Rui M. Loureiro
    Centro de Historia de Alem-Mar, Lisbon

    “This two-volume set pulls together several interdisciplinary studies historicizing Portuguese ‘legacies’ across Asia over a period of approximately five centuries (ca. 1511-2011). It is especially recommended to readers interested in the broader aspects of the early European presence in Asia, and specifically on questions of politics, colonial administration, commerce, societal interaction, integration, identity, hybridity, religion and language.”

    —Associate Professor Peter Borschberg
    Department of History, National University of Singapore

    Table of Contents

    • Preliminary pages
    • PART I: ADAPTATIONS AND TRANSITIONS IN THE SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIAN THEATRES, SIXTEENTH THROUGH EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
      • 1. Supplying Simples for the Royal Hospital: An Indo-Portuguese Medicinal Garden in Goa (1520-1830), by Timothy D. Walker 
      • 2. Malacca in the Era of Viceroy Linhares (1629-35), by Anthony Disney
      • 3. From Meliapor to Mylapore, 1662-1749: The Portuguese Presence in Sao Tome between the Qut.b Shahi Conquest and Its Incorporation into British Madras, by Paolo Aranha
      • 4. Eighteenth-Century Diplomatic Relations between Portuguese Macao and Ayutthaya: The 1721 Debt Repayment Embassy from Macao, by Stefan Halikowski Smith
      • 5. Continuities in Bengal’s Contact with the Portuguese and Its Legacy: A Community’s Future Entangled with the Past, by Ujjayan Bhattacharya
    • PART II: DISPERSION, MOBILITY AND DEMOGRAPHY FROM THE SIXTEENTH INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES
      • 6. The Luso-Asians and Other Eurasians: Their Domestic and Diasporic Identities, by John Byrne
      • 7. The Population of the Portuguese Estado da India, 1750-1820: Sources and Demographic Trends, by Paulo Teodoro de Matos
      • 8. Flying with the Papagaio Verde (Green Parrot): An Indo-Portuguese Folkloric Motif in South and Southeast Asia, by K. David Jackson
    • PART III: MIXED LEGACIES: THE PORTUGUESE AND LUSO-ASIANS IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES
      • 9. Portuguese Communities in East and Southeast Asia during the Japanese Occupation, by Felicia Yap
      • 10. Indo-Portuguese Literature and the Goa of Its Writers, by Everton V. Machado
      • 11. Binding Ties of Miscegenation and Identity: The Narratives of Henrique Senna Fernandes (Macao) and Rex Shelley (Singapore), by Isabel Maria da Costa Morais
      • 12. Portuguese Past, Still Imperfect: Revisiting Asia in Luso-Diasporic Writing, by Christopher Larkosh
    • Bibliography
    • Index

    See Volume 1 here.

  • Individualism, Success, and American Identity in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

    Individualism, Success, and American Identity in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

    African American Review
    Volume 30, Number 3 (Autumn, 1996)  
    pages 403-419

    Kathleen Pfeiffer, Professor of English
    Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan

    The title character in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man embodies the paradox of race and color because he is both legally black and visibly white. The Ex-Colored Man’s response to this paradox defies his audience’s expectations: He believes that it’s possible for blacks to aspire and succeed in America, yet he decides to seize his own opportunity for success by passing as white. Passing in general and the Ex-Colored Man’s narrative in particular have long been viewed as instances of racial self-hatred or disloyalty. Both are predicated, so the argument goes, on renouncing blackness—an “authentic” identity—in favor of whiteness, an “opportunistic” one. These previous interpretations have insisted on a “racially correct” way of reading the text. However, such readings try to categorize a character who often resists categories. Must the Ex-Colored Man’s embrace of the potential for success to which his white skin avails him be seen simply as his co-optation by a culture founded on “white” values? Must passing necessarily indicate a denial of “blackness,” or racial self-hatred and nothing more?

    When we look at the Ex-Colored Man as a person who values individualism, who is idiosyncratic, undisciplined, and inclined towards improvisation, we invite a much richer and more complex reading. When we recognize that the Ex-Colored Man demonstrates ambivalence about whiteness as well as blackness, we avail ourselves of the novel’s more complicated nuances. Not strictly fiction, yet not entirely autobiographical, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man reveals the instability of generic distinctions in much the same way that the Ex-Colored Man’s passing reveals the instability of racial distinctions. A textual changeling, the book is taxonomically slippery, encoding into its very pages the sort of disarray and ambivalence which passing evokes; the book’s own stubborn resistance to easy categorization thus suggests the constructed nature of distinctions separating texts as well as races. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, like the ideology of segregation, incorporates fundamentally contradictory attitudes. In turn, the Ex-Colored Man demonstrates the degree to which this segregation logic permeates our most deeply embedded beliefs about identity, race, and the U.S.A.

    Because the book first appeared anonymously in 1912, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was, understandably, construed by its initial readers as the genuine autobiography of a light-skinned black man who had successfully passed into white society. It was, in fact, a fictional account written by James Weldon Johnson. The narrative’s opening paragraphs offer contradictory motives for the document that follows. At once a divulger of secrets, a confidence man, a trickster figure, and a confes-…

  • Constitutionality Of Miscegenation Statutes: McLaughlin v. Florida

    Constitutionality Of Miscegenation Statutes: McLaughlin v. Florida

    Maryland Law Review
    Volume 25, Issue 1 (1965)
    pages 41-48

    Lee M. Miller

    The appellants, a Negro man and a white woman, were convicted of violating a Florida statute which proscribed cohabitation between Negro and white persons who are not married to each other. The Florida Supreme Court upheld the conviction. On appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States, the appellants claimed: (1) The statute was invalid as a denial of equal protection of the laws since it applied only to members of certain races, and (2) they were denied due process and equal protection of the laws because a Florida law prohibiting interracial marriage prevented them from establishing the defense of common law marriage. The appellants thus hoped to reach the issue of whether the state’s prohibition of interracial marriage contravened the fourteenth amendment. The Supreme Court, basing its decision on the single issue of equal protection (appellants’ first claim), set aside the conviction and invalidated the cohabitation statute. Finding this claim to be dispositive of the case, the Court refrained from expressing any view as to the constitutionality of the law prohibiting interracial marriages.

    The provisions of state statutes banning interracial marriage, often called miscegenation statutes, vary considerably, but today all states which have such statutes ban Negro-white marriages, and all declare the proscribed interracial marriages void. Most statutes provide criminal penalties, thus making race an element of a crime. The Maryland statute, for example, proscribes Negro-white and Malay-white marriages and has a mandatory penitentiary sentence.

    At one time or another, over half the states had miscegenation statutes. Although these statutes have been repealed by twenty state legislatures, they remain in effect in nineteen other states. Six states have included miscegenation prohibitions in their state constitutions. The highest courts of only two states have held their miscegenationn statutes unconstitutional. Alabama declared its statute unconstitutional in 1872 but reversed itself five years later; California declared its statute unconstitutional in 1948. State courts and lower federal courts have upheld the constitutionality of such statutes. The Supreme Court of the United States has never ruled on the issue. In two cases reaching that Court in recent years, certiorari was denied in one and the issue bypassed in the other.”…

    Read the entire article here.