Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Linda Martín-Alcoff: Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self [Review]

    Linda Martín-Alcoff: Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self [Review]

    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
    2006-06-22

    Linda Martín-Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self, Oxford University Press, 2006, 326pp., ISBN 0195137353.

    Ronald Sundstrom, Associate Professor of African American Studies
    University of San Francisco

    Linda Martín Alcoff’s book, Visible Identities, offers a conception of social identities that collects together her work on the metaphysics, epistemology, and politics of ethnicity, race, and gender. The idea of visibility has a unifying role in Alcoff’s metaphysical and epistemological account of those social identities. Likewise, visible is what social identities should be in Alcoff’s vision of political life. Visible identities, according to Alcoff, are a resource in a pluralistic democracy, and are not to be eschewed for a simple American identity beyond hyphens, race, ethnicity, and gender difference. That political point is the fundamental point of this book, and it is delivered through Alcoff’s metaphysical analysis of race, ethnicity, and gender.

    Alcoff’s attempt to make a political argument through metaphysical analysis immediately calls to mind the distinction between those two areas of inquiry and their presumed separateness. Richard Rorty captured this distinction by framing it in terms of the two questions “what are we?” and “who are we?” The first question is concerned with metaphysics, while the latter is political. The “who are we?” question seeks to discover some unifying thing or idea that, in Rorty’s words, “makes us less like a mob and more like an army.” Rorty’s point, in part, was that those questions were distinct and that an answer to the first did not determine the answer to the second. Answers to the “who” question are always hopeful, for they point to not what we are but who we hope to be. Thus, the political question is a constituting one that points to an ongoing formative project, and it requires the political community to work through time to achieve their collective ideal identity. Who the US should hope to be, according to Rorty, is a nation that “achieves” its constitutional ideals by learning the necessary lessons from the Civil Rights and Feminist movements, yet not losing focus on the political process of building a national moral community that takes primary pride in its collective national identity.

    Alcoff would disagree with the completeness of the distinction that Rorty drew. She argues in Visible Identities that “what” we are, as well as “where” we are—in terms of our social location—has political implications, although not the deterministic implications that racial nationalists would desire. Furthermore, she clearly disagrees with the condition regarding identity that is required by Rorty’s great left liberal hope: that strongly felt identities be put aside in favor of a unifying national identity…

    …Other features of Alcoff’s account of social identities are familiar ideas in debates about the metaphysics of social identities. She defends a dialogical account of the self that incorporates her use of hermeneutics and phenomenology, and argues that individuals participate in multiple and hybrid identities. Of course, the familiarity of the latter idea is due in no small part to the influence that her essay “Mestizo Identity” has had on race theory. That essay is renamed, “On Being Mixed,” and is the twelfth chapter of Visible Identities. The upshot of these features of her account is to further weaken the three objections she analyzes, especially the assumption that such identities lead to narrow, isolated, and separated self-conceptions that undermine national political life…

    …Alcoff’s account of identity exposes important features of “visible identities” that make them radically particular experiences. While she places the social identities she analyzes within the context of group interaction, her emphasis on hybridity and multiplicity allows for enough divergence so that three problems with identity are avoided. This feature of her account is developed in her discussion of mixed race and mestizo identity. She also, however, reminds us that these complex and radically particular identities have historically served as points of political organization, and argues that they should engender larger political participation. Alcoff develops this line of thought in the first chapter, as well as in her chapters on Latino and mixed race identity. In that analysis she avoids, however, the dangers of the institutionalization of those identities, which precisely lead to critiques of identity politics. Groups become centers of power that seek social reproduction and offer measures to encourage loyalty, compel membership, and exclude those who exercise their individual autonomy by not conforming to the group’s will. They seek to suppress the very multiplicity and hybridity which Alcoff depends upon to save identity from the criticisms of liberals. For the sake of their own visibility, groups engender the invisibility of other embodied identities…

    Read the entire review here.

  • Editorial: Implications of racial distinctions for body composition and its diagnostic assessment

    Editorial: Implications of racial distinctions for body composition and its diagnostic assessment

    American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
    Volume 71, Number 6 (June 2000)
    pages 1387-1389
    Print ISSN: 0002-9165; Online ISSN: 1938-3207

    Noel W. Solomons, Scientific Director and co-Founder
    Center for Studies of Sensory Impairment, Aging and Metabolism (CeSSIAM)

    Shiriki Kumanyika, Professor of Epidemiology
    University of Pennsylvania

    In a truly just and equitable society, the welfare of all would be fulfilled. In a “colorblind” society, the health and nutritional needs of few would be satisfied. A conservative trend toward “colorblindness” in the public and political domain (eg, efforts to end affirmative action) emanates from tactics to hide the social stratification barriers that continue to preclude the full achievement of equity. Public health scientists and social epidemiologists entertain colorblindness as a defense against nonsensical ethnic comparisons that might, inadvertently, perpetuate rather than help to redress effects of racism (1). However, colorblindness denies the reality that people do come in different shades and that these shades have been a basis for much social stratification and discrimination—often with a premium on being lighter-skinned or white (2).

    In their comprehensive review article in this issue, “Measures of body composition in blacks and whites: a comparative review,” Wagner and Heyward (3) have done a service for the readership by highlighting differences in various measures of body composition between people designated as ‘black’ or ‘white.’ By reviewing, accepting, and publishing the treatise, the Journal has also served its readers well with respect to fostering a continued discourse on this troublesome issue of how ‘race’ influences the science and applications of nutrition. “Race is inconvenient for objectivity-seeking scientists, because it is an ill-defined, misused, and politically-charged concept (2).” Nevertheless, as we noted previously (4–6), being able to entertain—with eyes wide-open and with rigorous methods—scientific hypotheses about differences between people of European and African heritage has important, enduring public health implications. Avoiding the issue of race or approaching racial issues timidly might make for convenient politics, but it may result in bad science and even worse policy.

    Wagner and Heyward (3) portray the ambiguities in the interplay among evolving body-composition techniques and different amounts and densities of fat, muscle, and skeleton across ‘races’ in black and white relief. On close reading, their point is not so much that blacks and whites are different, but that the way that body-composition techniques are used requires more attention to human diversity. They acknowledge that the monolithic classifications of whiteness and blackness obscure biological experiences and differentiation, and that the concept of distinct (ie, genetically homogenous) racial subgroups among humans has now been rejected in the field of anthropology. It is worth commenting further on what these observed differences between blacks and whites might actually signify on a strictly biological level. For example, most of the studies reviewed by Wagner and Heyward contrast blacks and whites from North America, yet to generalize the findings from US black and white subpopulations to those of Europeans and Africans is too far a stretch of the scientific imagination. Cross-cultural studies within populations of African descent cited by Wagner and Heyward (3) show clearly that ‘black’ subjects in the United States are not identical to their contemporary Caribbean and West African brethren.

    …The US Census Bureau once attempted to capture the reality of admixture between people of African and European descent by including the designation mulatto (a person who was three-eighths to five-eighths black), quadroon (a person who was one-quarter black), and octoroon (a person who was one-eighth black) (7). However, throughout most of American history, the conventional “racial” semantics have favored a binary schema in which people with any identifiable proportion of African ancestry were classified as ‘black’ and in which a rather heterogeneous set of light-skinned people were classified as ‘white’ (7). Thus, what began as the stark polarization of “freeman” or “slave” in colonial America has remained in binary terms throughout postbellum history. This lumping of all people with any African ancestry together as ‘blacks’—although not done universally, eg, in Brazil—has never been challenged successfully in the United States, perhaps because of a fundamental resistance to acknowledging that admixture has occurred between people of African and European descent from slavery onward. As a reminder, we have the recent controversy over whether Thomas Jefferson’s descendants from his slave consort should be admitted to the Jefferson family burial grounds to eternally rest beside descendants of his Anglo, patrician wife. The Howard University sociologist E Franklin Frazier, a prominent dissenter of binary polarization, proposed the 3 classifications black proletariat, brown middle class, and yellow aristocracy (8). This classification system, while capturing a real stratification within the African-American population, was also a not-so-subtle commentary on the direct relation of admixture with European blood to social status. The binary classification may be salient for describing the effective social meaning of ‘race’ in US society—privilege associated with not having and disadvantage associated with having African ancestry…

    Read the entire editorial here.

  • Reliability of race assessment based on the race of the ascendants: a cross-sectional study

    Reliability of race assessment based on the race of the ascendants: a cross-sectional study

    BMC Public Health
    Volume 2, Number 1 (2002-01-16)
    DOI: 10.1186/1471-2458-2-1
    5 pages

    Sandra C. Fuchs
    Department of Social Medicine, School of Medicine
    Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

    Sylvia M. Guimarães
    Department of Internal Medicine, School of Medicine
    Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

    Cristine Sortica
    School of Medicine
    Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

    Fernanda Wainberg
    School of Medicine
    Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

    Karine O. Dias
    School of Medicine
    Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

    Mariana Ughini
    School of Medicine
    Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

    José Augusto S. Castro
    Department of Internal Medicine, School of Medicine
    Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

    Flavio D. Fuchs
    Department of Internal Medicine, School of Medicine
    Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

    Race is commonly described in epidemiological surveys based on phenotypic characteristics. Training of interviewers to identify race is time-consuming and self identification of race might be difficult to interpret. The aim of this study was to determine the agreement between race definition based on the number of ascendants with black skin colour, with the self-assessment and observer’s assessment of the skin colour.

    …Methods

    A cross-sectional study was conducted on a sample of 50 women aged 14 years or older, which were systematically selected from an outpatient clinics of a University affiliated hospital in Porto Alegre, southern Brazil. Participants included in the study answered to a pre-tested and structured questionnaire, which collected information on the number of black ascendants (parents and grandparents), school attendance, and included a self-assignment of the colour of skin as well as the observer assessment of skin colour.
     
    In a preliminary phase, a training was provided to the observers to standardise the identification of the skin colour and in the details of several phenotypic characteristics employed in Brazil before [10] such as the colour of hair, lines and hands’ palm surface. Following the training, the principal investigator and the research assistants observed 28 women and compared their findings of the physical features. The research team reached full agreement for skin colour (white, mixture or black), hair colour (blonde, light brown, medium brown, dark brown or black), lines and hands’ palm surface (pink palm and colourless lines, pink palm and red lines or white palm and dark lines) for the last 15 women observed. We also investigated the race of ascendants, through the question: “Which are the race of your ascendants: parents and grandparents?”. A total of six research assistants were certified for the study.
     
    During the study, after the informed consent was obtained, one interviewer applied the questionnaire asking questions to the participants and the research team independently registered the information on physical characteristics, observing the women under sunlight. All interviewers were blinded to each other answers. Skin colour was described by the observers as white, mixed or black, the self-assigned skin colour used white, black, mixed, and local words meaning light mulatto and dark mulatto. The race of the parents and grandparents was investigate using a heredogram, which incorporated two generations to the assess the inheritance. Even though information could be reported for a maximum of six ascendants some women did not know the father or grandparents. Therefore, we collapsed the categories with more than 3 ascendants of black origin in the category of at least three black ascendants. There was investigated a sample of 50 women, which did not include the 28 women at the training phase. This sample size was sufficient to detect an agreement of at least 85%, with an error of 10%, and a confidence interval of 95%. In order to calculate the kappa coefficients, self-reported mixed skin colour was collapsed with light mulatto and dark mulatto. Analysis were carried out through Chi-square for contingency tables and kappa statistics to calculate to what extent the observers agreed beyond what we would expect by chance alone [15]. Kappa coefficients were calculated from observation of six interviewers and the skin colour self-assigned by the participant. The Kappa statistic was calculated for each two categories (white vs. non white; black vs. non black and mixed vs. non mixed) and a global Kappa with 95% confidence interval for all three categories. Kappa greater than 0.75 was taken as an excellent agreement, between 0.75 and 0.40 intermediate to good agreement, and below 0.40, poor agreement. The reliability of self-assigned black, mixed, or white skin colour with the number of black ascendants was obtained by weighted kappa. Weights were giving to the frequencies in each cell of the table according to their distance from the diagonal that indicates agreement [16]. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of our Institution and all participants gave their informed consent to participate…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Y-STR diversity and ethnic admixture in White and Mulatto Brazilian population samples

    Y-STR diversity and ethnic admixture in White and Mulatto Brazilian population samples

    Genetics and Molecular Biology (Former title: Brazilian Journal of Genetics)
    Volume 29, Number 4 (São Paulo  2006)
    pages 605-607
    DOI: 10.1590/S1415-47572006000400004
    ISSN 1415-4757

    Luzitano Brandão Ferreira
    Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
    Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

    Celso Teixeira Mendes-Junior
    Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
    Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

    Cláudia Emília Vieira Wiezel
    Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
    Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

    Marcelo Rizzatti Luizon
    Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
    Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

    Aguinaldo Luiz Simões
    Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
    Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

    We investigated 50 Mulatto and 120 White Brazilians for the Y-chromosome short tandem repeat (Y-STR) markers (DYS19, DYS390, DYS391, DYS392 and DYS393) and found 79 different haplotypes in the White and 35 in the Mulatto sample. Admixture estimates based on allele frequencies showed that the admixture of the white sample was 89% European, 6% African and 5% Amerindian while the Mulatto sample was 93% European and 7% African. Results were consistent with historical records of the directional mating between European males and Amerindian or African females.

    The Brazilian population is a result of interethnic crosses of Europeans, Africans and Amerindians, and is one of the most heterogeneous populations in the world. When the first European colonizers arrived (1500 AD), 1-5 million Amerindians already lived in the region that now is known as Brazil (Salzano and Callegari-Jacques, 1988). Before 1820, European colonization was almost exclusively composed of Portuguese while between 1820 and 1975 the great majority of immigrants were from Portugal and Italy, followed by a small number by people from Spain, Germany, Syria and Japan (Carvalho-Silva et al., 2001). Between the 16th and 19th centuries approximately 3.5 million Africans were brought as slaves to Brazil, coming mainly from West, West-Central and Southeast Africa (Curtin, 1969). The colonization of Brazil involved mostly European men, many of whom produced children with Amerindian and African females.

    Although the classification of races is wrong from genetic standpoint (Templeton, 1998), Brazilians are classified for census purposes based on color. According to the last Brazilian government census of the 170 million Brazilians, 84 million were males, of which 52% were White, 39% were Brown, 6% were Black and 3% were classified in other categories (IBGE, 2000). Mulatto is the term commonly used in Brazil to designate the offspring result from the union of White and Black people. We used five Y-chromosome short tandem repeat (Y-STR) markers, recognized as good markers for population studies, to investigate genetic polymorphism and ethnic admixture in White and Mulatto Brazilian population samples.

    We investigated 170 healthy, unrelated, individuals seeking paternity investigation at the Ribeirão Preto University Hospital, in the city of Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo state, Southeastern Brazil. The race of the individuals in the sample was determined based on their biomedical records, 120 individuals being White and 50 Mulatto, from Ribeirão Preto and the surrounding towns…

    Read the enire article here.

  • Racial inequalities and perinatal health in the southeast region of Brazil

    Racial inequalities and perinatal health in the southeast region of Brazil

    Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research
    Volume 40, Number 9 (September 2007)
    pages 1187-1194
    DOI: 10.1590/S0100-879X2006005000144
    ISSN 1678-4510

    L. M. Silva
    Departamento de Saúde Pública
    Universidade Federal do Maranhão, São Luís, MA, Brasil

    R. A. Silva
    Departamento de Saúde Pública
    Universidade Federal do Maranhão, São Luís, MA, Brasil

    A. A. M. Silva
    Departamento de Saúde Pública
    Universidade Federal do Maranhão, São Luís, MA, Brasil

    H. Bettiol
    Departamento de Puericultura e Pediatria, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
    Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brasil

    M. A. Barbieri
    Departamento de Puericultura e Pediatria, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
    Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brasil

    Few studies are available about racial inequalities in perinatal health in Brazil and little is known about whether the existing inequality is due to socioeconomic factors or to racial discrimination per se. Data regarding the Ribeirão Preto birth cohort, Brazil, whose mothers were interviewed from June 1, 1978 to May 31, 1979 were used to answer these questions. The perinatal factors were obtained from the birth questionnaire and the ethnic data were obtained from 2063 participants asked about self-reported skin color at early adulthood (23-25 years of age) in 2002/2004. Mothers of mulatto and black children had higher rates of low schooling ( £ 4 years, 27.2 and 38.0%) and lower family income ( £ 1 minimum wage, 28.6 and 30.4%). Mothers aged less than 20 years old predominated among mulattos (17.0%) and blacks (14.0%). Higher rates of low birth weight and smoking during pregnancy were observed among mulatto individuals (9.6 and 28.8%). Preterm birth rate was higher among mulattos (9.5%) and blacks (9.7%) than whites (5.5%). White individuals had higher rates of cesarean delivery (34.9%). Skin color remained as an independent risk factor for low birth weight (P < 0.001), preterm birth (P = 0.01), small for gestational age (P = 0.01), and lack of prenatal care (P = 0.02) after adjustment for family income and maternal schooling, suggesting that the racial inequalities regarding these indicators are explained by the socioeconomic disadvantage experienced by mulattos and blacks but are also influenced by other factors, possibly by racial discrimination and/or genetics.

    Introduction

    Natives, mulattos, blacks, and whites occupy unequal places in the social networks, with differential aspects related to birth, growth, disease, and dying. Racial inequality is not limited to socioeconomic indicators related to quality of life, income and schooling but also occurs in health indicators. In the United States, which have a tradition of research on racial questions, the rates of preterm birth, low birth weight and infant mortality are higher among blacks than among whites (1,2).

    Although Brazil is considered to be a country in which racial discrimination is not so significant and in which “racial democracy” prevails, significant socioeconomic inequalities related to diverse ethnic groups exist in this country (3,4). Even in cities in the south of the country, where there is better access to health services, black women have fewer opportunities to receive ideal prenatal care, with repercussions on perinatal health (5-7). In the town of Pelotas, black children have a higher prevalence of low birth weight, preterm birth and restricted intrauterine growth (8). In a study conducted in Rio de Janeiro, black mothers had lower schooling, a greater proportion of smokers and lower prenatal care attendance, cohabited less, and had a higher prevalence of pregnancy during adolescence (9). In Brazil in general, infant mortality is higher among blacks and native Indians (10).

    The race/ethnic group category is not useful as a biological category, but is a social construct (11,12). In Brazil, the term race is normally used to refer to phenotype (physical appearance) rather than to ancestrality (origin), as is the case in the US. While US research is based on categories of “pure” races, in Brazil the “brown” or “mulatto” category is commonly used also to refer to cross-bred individuals (13). The determination of race in health studies is usually done by the interviewer, whereas the more recommended procedure is self-classification (11).

    Few studies regarding ethnic inequalities and perinatal health have been conducted in Brazil, mainly due to low availability and/or quality of the data or to inadequate instruments for the measurement of race/ethnic origin. Questions related to the inequalities existing between individuals of mulatto and black skin colors have not been fully clarified, with these groups being usually analyzed as non-white in relation to whites. It has not been clarified whether the inequalities existing between ethnic groups regarding perinatal factors are due to socioeconomic factors or to other cultural or genetic factors. To clarify these questions, a study was conducted to analyze a cohort of individuals born in Ribeirão Preto, SP, in which skin color self-reported in adulthood in 2002/2004 was related to the social, economic, obstetrical, and perinatal characteristics of the subjects at birth in 1978/79.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Recasting the Real: Reconstructivism: A Response to Hybridity in Contemporary Art Methodologies

    Recasting the Real: Reconstructivism: A Response to Hybridity in Contemporary Art Methodologies

    The University of Alabama McNair Journal
    The McNair Scholars Program
    Volume 7 (Spring 2007)
    pages 65-84

    Suzanah Moorer

    While many artists are taking an interdisciplinary approach to art making, currently there is not a critical consensus on the direction and significance of hybrid artwork in American culture. Responding to Nikos Papastergiadisʼs summary of this situation, “Scholars and writers have not proposed a new philosophical framework that can assist people to make sense of their experience [with hybrid artwork],” I have borrowed the philosophical framework “Reconstructivism” from cultural criticism in an effort to further the understanding of hybridity in art today. In this project, I have first explored the parameters of Reconstructivism as it relates to the practical methodology of a sample of contemporary artistsʼ practice. Second, using a Reconstructivist methodology, I have created a body of work that is hybrid in both form and content, which culminated in an installation which includes a work of short fiction, a cycle of prints, an assemblage of objects, sound, and video. The content of the work addresses the construction of identity for biracial persons of African-American and Caucasian descent as influenced by social forces in the American South. Finally, I offer a Reconstructivist analysis of the work to elucidate the ways in which Reconstructivism can function as a “philosophical framework” to help people better understand hybrid artwork.

    …My Reconstructivist Body of Work

    More than “who are you?” I have been asked the question “what are you?” As a child, questions like this confused me. My reaction prompted the curious to give me options: “black or white.” I first tried responding with “or”; it was the most logical option between the two, syntactically. The answer is not simple. Before the day of the “multi-racial” race box on census documents, miscegenated people disrupted the binary system of racial classification. Because of my experience as a miscegenated person in the South, hybridity is not simply a model of interpretation for me but rather a mode of existence. The reality and significance that I perceive from the hybrid perspective compel me to create artwork that addresses the social conflict that surrounds the hybrid entity. I seek to communicate the reality of this split situation to the viewer.

    Using a Reconstructivist methodology, I have created a body of work called “Halve” that is hybrid in both form and content. This body of work culminated in an installation which includes a work of short fiction, a cycle of prints, an assemblage of objects, and looped video projection. The environment that I have sought to reconstruct through an art installation is that of racial tension in the American South. Specifically, the installation addresses the perception of identity in the biracial subject (of both African-American and Caucasian descent) as influenced by social forces. The foundation of this work has come from my own personal mythology which I have constructed in the form of a short fiction, “Ribbons for Magnolia.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Hybridity gets fashionable

    Hybridity gets fashionable

    Andréia Azevedo Soares

    LabLit.com: the culture of science fiction & fact
    2009-10-24

    The novel White Teeth offers a different perspective on science

    Even if you haven’t read the novel White Teeth by Zadie Smith, you probably remember it—unless you were lying comatose at the beginning of this century. White Teeth was considered to be the literary find even before it was fully written and, immediately after its release, rapturous reviews popped in the media like wild rabbits. Critics praised the “multi” issues cleverly addressed in this multi-layered, multicultural and multiethnic story—but overlooked much of the science that lies in it. Yes, although you may not clearly recall it, there is a scientist in White Teeth.

    As a fictional character, Marcus Chalfen seems to represent this century’s emerging group of biotechnology researchers. It is his wife, Joyce Chalfen, who introduces him to the readers. Joyce portrays her husband as a geneticist deeply focused on both social and scientific progress. Promoting the chimeric fusion of embryos, it was possible to generate “mice whose very bodies did exactly what Marcus told them”. Dr. Chalfen believes that he controls every single cell of the Future Mouse©, his ultimate genetically engineered creation.

    …White Teeth is a story about many things. Zadie Smith knits together, in a tragicomic epic, a variety of tantalizing themes such as gender, race, class, eugenics and religion embedded in a saga of three multicultural families in North London. One of them are the Chalfens (who have Jewish ancestry), and the two others are the Joneses and the Iqbals. The patriarchs of the latter families, the British Archie and Indian Samad, happen to be close friends who met by chance during the Second World War and who cherished ever since a mutual and sincere friendship. Samad is married to an Indian woman and is a father of twins, Magid and Millat. His sons share the same genetic material, but each one responds to the environment in uneven ways. Archie is married to a Jamaican woman and is the father of Irie. He considers life to be a matter of chance. Every time Archie must to make a decision, he tosses a coin. His daughter, Irie, also believes in accidents but feels herself a victim of “genetic fate”. Like Zadie Smith herself, Irie Jones carries in her veins a double ancestry: “Irie believed she had been dealt the dodgy cards: mountainous curves, buck teeth and thick metal retainer, impossible Afro hair.”

    In White Teeth, we should understand hybridity in its broader cultural meanings—and these meanings are not necessarily correct in scientific terms. Here, hybridity can be a chimera produced in a lab but also racial or cultural mixing. In that sense, it is possible to say that London is, due its multicultural or multiethnic condition, a sort of capital of hybridism. Different ingredients are combined in the same pot and the result can be both fun and tragic, as Zadie Smith shows. The author’s attitude towards her characters and plotline is also a hybrid one—and, if we consider that the tragicomic is also a mixture of genres, this is also quite telling.

    People are enduringly enthralled with hybridity. In the past, naturalists believed that species, when intercrossed, were doomed to be infertile “in order to prevent the confusion of all organic forms”, as Darwin wrote in his The Origin of Species. In fact, sterility turned out to be associated with close interbreeding rather than hybridity. Now there is a relatively fresh idea that people who have different racial or cultural backgrounds are tailored to be more tolerant, cosmopolitan, creative and so forth. Or even more successful—like Barack Obama or Zadie Smith herself…

    Read the entire essay here.

  • Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism [Review: Spickard]

    Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism [Review: Spickard]

    American Studies
    Volume 50, No. 1/2: Spring/Summer 2009
    pages 125-127

    Paul Spickard, Professor of History
    University of California, Santa Barbara

    Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. Jared Sexton. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2008.

    One of the major developments in ethnic studies over the past two decades has been the idea (and sometimes the advocacy) of multiraciality. From a theoretical perspective, this has stemmed from a post-structuralist attempt to deconstruct the categories created by the European Enlightenment and its colonial enterprise around the world. From a personal perspective, it has been driven by the life experiences in the last half-century of a growing number of people who have and acknowledge mixed parentage. The leading figures in this scholarly movement are probably Maria Root and G. Reginald Daniel, but the writers are many and include figures as eminent as Gary Nash and Randall Kennedy.

    A small but dedicated group of writers has resisted this trend: chiefly Rainier Spencer, Jon Michael Spencer, and Lewis Gordon. They have raised no controversy, perhaps because their books are not well written, and perhaps because their arguments do not make a great deal of sense. It is not that there is nothing wrong with the literature and the people movement surrounding multiraciality. Some writers and social activists do tend to wax rhapsodic about the glories of intermarriage and multiracial identity as social panacea. A couple of not-very-thoughtful activists (Charles Byrd and Susan Graham) have been co-opted by the Gingrichian right (to be fair, one must point out that most multiracialists are on the left). And, most importantly, there is a tension between some Black intellectuals and the multiracial idea over the lingering fear that, for some people, adopting a multiracial identity is a dodge to avoid being Black. If so, that might tend to sap the strength of a monoracially-defined movement for Black community empowerment.

    With Amalgamation Schemes, Jared Sexton is trying to stir up some controversy. He presents a facile, sophisticated, and theoretically informed intelligence, and he picks a fight from the start. His title suggests that the study of multiraciality is some kind of plot, or at the very least an illegitimate enterprise. His tone is angry and accusatory on every page. It is difficult to get to the grounds of his argument, because the cloud of invective is so thick, and because his writing is abstract, referential, and at key points vague…

    Login to read the review here.

  • Speaking About Southern Unionists… and Mixed-Race People: A Report and an Announcement

    Speaking About Southern Unionists… and Mixed-Race People: A Report and an Announcement

    Renegade South: histories of unconventional southerners
    2011-05-07

    Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
    Texas State University, San Marcos

    I just returned from a wonderful visit to Leiden University in the Netherlands, where I spoke generally about Civil War Southern Unionists and specifically about The Free State of Jones as part of that university’s yearly American Studies Lecture Series. In commemoration of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, this year’s theme was “The American Civil War After 150 Years: An Unfinished War?”

    I was impressed by the deep interest in the American Civil War displayed by Leiden students and faculty. I’m happy to report there were no arguments between True Believers in either the noble “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy, or the total benevolence of Northern motives and goals in thwarting the South’s secession from the Union. Rather, discussions centered on understanding that many Southerners–white as well as black–opposed secession and the creation of the Confederacy, and that many more turned against the Confederacy as the war dragged on. How common across the South was guerrilla warfare such as that of Jones County, Mississippi?, they wanted to know. Who was Newt Knight? This question led to a discussion about the deep need displayed by Civil War partisans to turn Newt into either a murderous traitor to ”The South,” or, conversely, into an abolitionist whose racial views anticipated the modern Civil Rights Movement…

    …There was special interest among the Leiden audience in the mixed-race community that grew out of Newt Knight’s wartime collaboration with Rachel Knight, the former slave of his grandfather, Jackie Knight. Many of the questions centered on issues of racial identity and the historical importance–and limits–of the “one drop rule” in determining such identities. Members of the audience were fascinated by the variety of racial identities assumed by, as well as imposed upon, descendants of Newt Knight, his white wife Serena, and the two mixed-race women–Rachel Knight and her daughter George Ann–by whom he had children.  Historically, they understood, race is a social, political, and legal construction rather than a biologically rational system…

    Read the entire article here.

  • When examining the issue of multiracial identity, it is important to understand the legacy of white supremacy.

    When examining the issue of multiracial identity, it is important to understand the legacy of white supremacy.  It is a theory and practice based on the irrational opinion that white Europeans (mainly Anglo-Saxon and Northern European origin) are inherently superior to non-Anglo-Saxon origin peoples—particularly those of African and Asian ancestry.  Moreover, it is also a theory and practice that hover over the subject and analysis of miscegenation.  Absurd as it is, we have an approximate 500-year history of European domination and subjugation of African and Asian peoples, yet wherever Europeans have colonised they have sexually intermingled with the indigenous populations.  Apart from this obvious paradox, it is a taboo subject that should be exposed, yet rarely does this occur in an academic sense.

    Mark Christian. Multiracial Identity: An International Perpective (Palgrave: Hampshire, England, 2000), p 105.