Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Is the Future Mestizo and Mulatto? A Theological-Sociological Investigation into the Racial and Ethnic Future of the Human Person within the U.S.

    Is the Future Mestizo and Mulatto? A Theological-Sociological Investigation into the Racial and Ethnic Future of the Human Person within the U.S.

    Zygon Center for Religion and Science
    Third Annual Student Symposium on Science and Spirituality
    Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago, Illinois
    2011-03-25
    13 pages

    Kevin Patrick Considine
    Loyola University, Chicago

    My study is a theological investigation into the racial and ethnic future of the human person within a changing racial context. I examine the concept of mestizaje/mulatez, which has its theological roots in the work of Virgilio Elizondo, and perform a mutually critical correlation between it and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s and George Yancey’s sociologies of the changing racial structure. Elizondo is pointing towards God’s creation of an eschatological people of cultural and biological hybridity who embody a new creation that transcends racial categorization and is made incarnate in the person of the Galilean Jesus. At the same time, mestizaje/mulatez contains ambiguity in that it possesses both liberating and oppressive possibilities for the future of humankind and its struggle against racialized suffering. Nevertheless, I contend that mestizaje/mulatez embodies a small sacrament of salvation, a cautious hope, for the redemption of the human community from racial suffering within an emerging multiracial context.

    Read the entire paper here.

  • The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism

    The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism

    University of Minnesota Press
    2008
    272 pages
    6 x 9
    Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-5005-7
    Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-5004-0

    Estelle Tarica, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture
    University of California, Berkeley

    The only recent English-language work on Spanish-American indigenismo from a literary perspective, Estelle Tarica’s work shows how modern Mexican and Andean discourses about the relationship between Indians and non-Indians create a unique literary aesthetic that is instrumental in defining the experience of mestizo nationalism.

    Engaging with narratives by Jesús Lara, José María Arguedas, and Rosario Castellanos, among other thinkers, Tarica explores the rhetorical and ideological aspects of interethnic affinity and connection. In her examination, she demonstrates that these connections posed a challenge to existing racial hierarchies in Spanish America by celebrating a new kind of national self at the same time that they contributed to new forms of subjection and discrimination.

    Going beyond debates about the relative merits of indigenismo and mestizaje, Tarica puts forward a new perspective on indigenista literature and modern mestizo identities by revealing how these ideologies are symptomatic of the dilemmas of national subject formation. The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism offers insight into the contemporary resurgence and importance of indigenista discourses in Latin America.

  • Racial Identities, Genetic Ancestry, and Health in South America: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Uruguay

    Racial Identities, Genetic Ancestry, and Health in South America: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Uruguay

    Palgrave Macmillan
    October 2011
    272 pages
    Includes: 10 pages of figures, 10 pages of tables
    5.500 x 8.250 inches
    ISBN: 978-0-230-11061-8, ISBN10: 0-230-11061-4

    Edited by

    Sahra Gibbon, Wellcome Trust Fellow
    Department of Social Anthropology
    University College London

    Ricardo Ventura Santos, Professor of Biological Anthropology and Public Health
    Oswaldo Cruz Foundation
    also Associate professor of Anthropology
    National Museum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Mónica Sans, Associate Professor and Director of the Biological Anthropology Department
    University de la Republic in Uruguay

    This unique edited collection brings together biologists, geneticists, and social and biological anthropologists to examine the connections between genetics, identity, and health in South America. It addresses a wide range of theoretical issues raised by the rapid changes in the field of genetic sciences. Contributors come from Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, the UK, and the United States, providing a comparative cultural perspective for scholars, researchers, and students.

    Table of Contents

    • Preface; N.Redclift
    • PART I: DOING AND DEFINING “BIO-CULTURAL” ANTHROPOLOGY AS APPLIED TO GENETICS
      • Anthropology, Race, and the Dilemmas of Identity in the Age of Genomics; R.Ventura Santos & M.Chor Maio
      • The Inexistence of Biology Verses the Existence of Social Races: Can Science Inform Society?; S.D.J.Pena & T.S.Birchal
      • Ethics/Bioethics and Anthropological Fieldwork; A.L.Caratini
    • PART II: ADMIXTURE MAPPING AND GENOMICS IN SOUTH AMERICA AND BEYOND
      • Admixture Dynamics in Hispanics: A Shift in the Nuclear Genetic Ancestry of a South American Population Isolate; L.Ruiz
      • Pharmacogenetic Studies in the Brazilian Population; G.Suarez-Kurtz & S.D.J.Pena
      • Admixture Mapping and Genetic Technologies; B.Bertoni
      • The Significance of Sickle Cell Anemia within the Context of the Brazilian Government’s ‘Racial Policies’ (1995-2004); P.H.Fry
    • PART III: GENETIC ADMIXTURE HISTORY, NATIONHOOD AND IDENTITY IN SOUTH AMERICA
      • Gene Admixture and Type of Marriage in a Sample of Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area; F.R.Carnese
      • Ethnic/Race Self-Adscription, Genetics, and National Identity in Uruguay; M.Sans
      • Forced Disappearance and Suppresion of Identity of Children in Argentina: Experiences after Genetic Identification; V.B.Penchaszadeh
      • Molecular Vignettes of the Columbian Nation: The Place of Race and Ethnicity in Networks of Biocapital; C.A.Barrigan
    • Afterward/Commentaries; R.Rapp, T.Disotell, M.Montoya & P.Wade

  • The Political Ontology of Race

    The Political Ontology of Race

    Polity
    2011-10-17
    DOI: 10.1057/pol.2011.15

    Michael Rabinder James, Associate Professor of Political Science
    Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania
     
    Race theory is dominated by two camps. Eliminativists rely on a biological ontology, which contends that the concept of race must be biologically grounded, in order to repudiate the very term, on grounds that it is epistemologically vacuous and normatively pernicious. Conservationists use a social ontology, in which race is based on social practices, in order to retain racial categories in remedial social policies, such as affirmative action and race-based political representation. This article attempts to reorient this debate in two ways. First, it challenges the idea that racial identity is entirely unchosen by defending a political ontology of race that, unlike the biological and social ontologies, affirms the role of non-white agency in determining the political salience of ascribed racial identity. It then transcends the normative impasse between eliminativism and conservationism by contending that all three ontologies are potentially valuable and dangerous, depending on where they are applied. The biological ontology is defensible for evolutionary and medical research, the social ontology for affirmative action and anti-discrimination policy, and the political ontology for political representation.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Daniel Sharfstein, “The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White” Penguin, 2011

    Daniel Sharfstein, “The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White” Penguin, 2011

    New Books in African American Studies
    Discussions with Scholars of African Americans about their New Books
    2011-11-01

    Vershawn Young, Associate Professor of English
    University of Kentucky

    Daniel Sharfstein’s The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin Press, 2011) is the latest and perhaps best book in the growing genre of neo-passing narratives. The Invisible Line easily rests between Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and Blis Broyard’s One Drop, though it is different and in ways richer than both. Part American history, part legal analysis (Sharfstein is a legal scholar), part ethnographic study, it is a wholly gripping and exquisitely written narrative that tracks the racial passing of three black families over several centuries, leading us right up to their living “white” descendents today. You will certainly learn a lot about the history of race in the United States from The Invisible Line and, if you’re like me, you won’t be able to put it down.

    Download the interview here. (00:57:52.)

  • Escape into Whiteness

    Escape into Whiteness

    The New York Review of Books
    2011-11-24

    Brent Staples

    Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827.

    Tickets to the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial were a hot item in the spring of 1922. Tens of thousands of people converged on the Mall for a day of celebration that included parades, music, and speeches by President Warren Harding and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft, under whose presidency the memorial had been initiated.

    One of the better-known black Washingtonians on hand that sunny Memorial Day was Whitefield McKinlay, former collector of customs at Georgetown and real estate manager to many of the city’s light-skinned mulatto elite. Nearing his seventieth birthday, McKinlay had lived through the best and the worst of what the post–Civil War world had to offer people of color. He had enrolled in the University of South Carolina during the heady days of Reconstruction and then been expelled when the Democrats rose to power there and created a particularly virulent form of the Jim Crow state. He had seen black politicians swept into office by newly enfranchised black voters and swept out again when the franchise was revoked.

    Through this same process, Washington, D.C., had been transformed from what one of McKinlay’s more prominent real estate clients had termed “The Colored Man’s Paradise”—a place of considerable freedom and opportunity—into what the historian David Levering Lewis aptly describes as a “purgatory,” where Negroes were barred from hotels and restaurants, driven from federal jobs, and generally persecuted by Southerners in Congress who seemed intent on erasing the colored presence from the city. Though he does not deal at length with McKinlay, Daniel Sharfstein, an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt, brings this part of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Negro society vividly to life in his authoritative and elegantly written The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White…

    Read or purchase the book review here.

  • Playing in the dark/ playing in the light: Coloured identity in the novels of Zoë Wicomb

    Playing in the dark/ playing in the light: Coloured identity in the novels of Zoë Wicomb

    Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa
    Volume 20, Issue 1, 2008
    pages 1-15
    DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2008.9678286

    J. U. Jacobs, Senior Professor of English and Fellow
    University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

    Zoë Wicomb’s three fictional works—You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), David’s Story (2000) and Playing in the Light (2006)—all engage with the question of a South African ‘coloured’ identity both under apartheid with its racialised discourse of black and white, and in the context of the post apartheid language of multiculturalism and creolisation. This essay examines the representation of ‘colouredness’ in Wicomb’s writing in terms of the two different conceptions of cultural identity that Stuart Hall has defined: an essential cultural identity based on a single, shared culture, and the recognition that cultural identity is based not only on points of similarity, but also on critical points of deep and significant difference and of separate histories of rupture and discontinuity. The politics of South African ‘coloured’ identity in Wicomb’s works reveals a tension between, on the one hand, acceptance of the complex discourse of colouredness with all its historical discontinuities, and, on the other, the desire for a more cohesive sense of cultural identity, drawn from a collective narrative of the past. In David’s Story the possibility of an essential cultural identity as an alternative to the unstable coloured one is considered with reference to the history of the Griqua ‘nation’ in the nineteenth century. And in Playing in the Light the alternative to colouredness is examined with reference to those coloured people under apartheid who were light enough to pass for white and crossed over, reinventing themselves as white South Africans. The essay approaches coloured identity through the lens of postcolonial diaspora theory, and more specifically, diasporic chaos theory.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Brazil: Census “Reveals” Majority of Population is Black or Mixed Race

    Brazil: Census “Reveals” Majority of Population is Black or Mixed Race

    Global Voices
    2011-11-29

    Written by: Paula Góes

    Translated by: Maisie Fitzpatrick

    [All links lead to Portuguese language pages except when otherwise noted.]

    For the first time in Brazilian history, the national census has shown that the majority of the population, 50.7% of a total 190,732,694 people, is black or mixed race. The 2010 census revealed that most of the black population is concentrated in the north and northeast of the country, and that it has the highest rate of illiteracy among the over-15 age group (between 24.7% and 27.1%).

    Research has shown that there is still marked inequality in terms of income throughout the country, with the richest strata of society earning 42 times more than the poorest. Half of the Brazilian population lives on less than 375 reais per month [approximately USD $200], an amount less than the minimum wage (510 reais [approximately USD $275] at the time that the studies were carried out). Of the 16.2 million people living in extreme poverty (approximately 8.5% of the population), which is classified as having an income of 70 reais [approximately USD $38] per month or less, 70.8% are black.

    In short, the average wages for black and mixed race Brazilians are 2.4 times lower than those earned by citizens of white and Far Eastern origin. In addition to this, they die younger as a result of difficult living conditions, violence and poor access to healthcare. Released on the eve of Black Awareness Day [en], these figures give rise to concerns about the situation of the Brazil’s black population…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal

    The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal

    Duke University Press
    November 2011
    160 pages
    20 illustrations
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5210-5
    Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5199-3

    Orin Starn, Professor of Cultural Anthropology
    Duke University

    Perhaps the best golfer ever, Tiger Woods rocketed to the top of a once whites-only sport. Endorsements made him a global brand and the world’s richest athlete. The child of a multiracial marriage, Woods and his blond, blue-eyed wife, Elin Nordegren, seemed to represent a new postracial America. Then, in late 2009, Woods became embroiled in a sex scandal that made headlines worldwide. In this concise yet far-reaching analysis, Orin Starn brings an anthropologist’s perspective to bear on Tigergate. He explores our modern media obsession with celebrity scandals and their tawdry ritualized drama, yet he offers much more than the usual banal moralizing about the rich and famous. Starn explains how Tiger’s travails and the culture of golf reflect broader American anxieties—about race and sex, scapegoating and betrayal, and the role of the sports hero. The Passion of Tiger Woods is required reading for all those interested in the high-stakes world of professional golf, the politics of sports and celebrity, and the myths and realities surrounding the flawed yet riveting figure who remains among the most famous athletes of our time.

    Table of Contents

    • Prologue
    • 1. Golf Backward Spells “Flog”
    • 2. The Tiger Woods Revolution
    • 3. Tigergate, Celebrity Scandal, and the Apology Society
    • 4. Internet Wars, Sex Addiction, and the Crucifixion of Tiger Woods
    • 5. Postracial Fantasies, Racial Realpolitik
    • 6. Tiger’s Penis
    • 7. Out of the Woods?
    • Notes
    • Bibliography
    • Acknowledgments
    • Index

  • Stuck at the border of the reserve: Self-identity and authentic identity amongst mixed race First Nations women

    Stuck at the border of the reserve: Self-identity and authentic identity amongst mixed race First Nations women

    University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada
    January 2010
    330 pages
    Publication Number: AAT NR64501
    ISBN: 9780494645017

    Jaime Mishibinijima Miller

    A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of Graduate Studies of The University of Guelph by for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

    The lowered self-esteem of First Nations people is evident in the disparities in health that exist in comparison with the rest of the Canadian population. High risk behaviors such as alcohol and drug use, and poor decisions relating to health and wellness are the outcome of decades of negative perceptions of self brought on by the lateral violence of colonialism. This research demonstrates how different determinants of First Nations identity (legal and policy based, social and culturally based definitions, and the self-identification ideology) interplay and influence a sense of authenticity which informs self-worth and the ability to realize health and wellness for twelve First Nations women on Manitoulin Island. First Nations identity is multi-layered and for women who only have one First Nations parent, and who often have Bill C-31 Indian status, identity becomes complicated and painful. Using life histories, the research participants demonstrate that an authentic identity is difficult to navigate because of the stigmatization they feel by non First Nations people for being a First Nations woman, and also the lateral violence they experience in their communities for being “bi-racial”, not growing up on their reserve, not knowing language and culture, and often having either Bill C-31 Indian status or no status at all. The medicine wheel is used to explore this topic and a Nanabush story provides the context to understand it.

    Purchase the dissertation here.