Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Skin Color of Mulattoes

    Skin Color of Mulattoes

    Journal of Heridity
    Volume 5, Number 12 (December 1914)
    pages 556-558

    Charles B. Davenport, Director
    Department of Experimental Evolution
    (Carnegie Institution of Washington)
    Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York

    Apparently Four Factors Involved—Segregation in Second Generation—Skin Pigment Developed After Birth—No Correlation Between Color of Skin and Curliness of Hair in Offspring of Mulatto Marriages.

    The method of heredity in negro-white crosses has long been cited as a demonstration of the failure of modern principles of heredity in their application to some specific cases. Skin color is said to show a typical blending, as in the mulatto, and it is generally assumed that all of the offspring of two mulattoes resemble their parents in skin color; and if a mulatto be crossed with a white that all of the offspring will be of a shade still lighter than the mulatto parent, namely, of a quadroon color. The current theory also has a great social importance because according to it, “once a negro, always a negro;” since the negro characteristics can not be wholly eliminated even by successive matings with white. However, as a concession, certain States even in our South permit the offspring of a person containing one-eighth negro blood and a pure white to pass as a white citizen and to marry, legally, a white person. That is, after matings of a mulatto and her offspring for two further generations with white persons the final generation may pass for white…

    VARIATION IN MULATTO PROGENY
    The family of a white man of colored ancestry, and a mulatto woman. All seven sons and daughters are shown in the photograph. The infant is the lightest, with 8% black in the skin; this will doubtless darken with age. The son at the extreme right of the picture has 22% black in his skin; the boy at the extreme left has 26% black. (Fig. 17.)

     

    OFFSPRING OF WHITE X MULATTO MATING
    Part of the “W” family, including a medium colored mother and six of her seven children by a white man; also a little first cousin of the other children, who is directly in front of the mother. Note the great variation in the facial coloration of full brothers and sisters. The skin color of the youngest child is the same as that of a typical white infant, namely, 5% black, whereas the oldest boy of the group has a skin color of 32%black, considerably darker than his mother. (Fig. 18.)

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Chinese in the Caribbean [Book Reveiw]

    The Chinese in the Caribbean [Book Reveiw]

    Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
    Volume 3, Issue 1 (Spring 2005)
    8 paragraphs
    ISSN 1547-7150

    Kathryn Morris

    Andrew R. Wilson, Editor. The Chinese in the Caribbean. Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2004, xxiii+230 pp.

    The Hakka are a migratory people. We move outwards on the tides of history. Most of us have relatives in Surinam, Panama, the British West Indies, as well as Singapore, Malaysia and other parts of South-east Asia. After several more generations in Canada, will it still be significant that we sojourned for a few generations in Jamaica? For now and as far we can see, that is how we identify ourselves and that is also how we are perceived by the wider Canadian community . . . In this generation we became part of a North American community, with significant concentration in Miami, New York, Toronto and other U.S. and Canadian cities and even London, England, as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan.

    —Patrick A. Lee, Canadian Jamaican Chinese 2000.

    Culturally, the signifier “Chinese” in the Caribbean context has evolved into a broad term that encompasses the latest group of emigrants to the region; the hyphenated (Trinidadian, Jamaican, etc.), third- or fourth-generation, mixed-ancestry Chinese; and the countless members of the Chinese Caribbean Diaspora who are still “on the move.” Toronto, home to a large population of people who define themselves as Chinese—insert Caribbean country here—Canadian, has become a major center for Chinese Caribbean diasporan activity aimed at maintaining connections to the Caribbean and to China. For example, Patrick Lee’s work, excerpted above, presents pictorial and narrative histories of Jamaican Chinese families spanning five generations; Lee’s work pays tributes to his father, Lee Tom Yin’s earlier work, Chinese in Jamaica (1957), which commemorated the 100-year anniversary of the Chinese arrival in Jamaica. Reaching further out into the world, the celebrity of Jamaican reggae artist Sean Paul, who claims Chinese among his ancestors, has put the Chinese-Caribbean connection in the international spotlight. This substantial community is now a dragon with a foot on every continent and is growing in size and visibility. Andrew R. Wilson’s The Chinese in the Caribbean, which begins with the statement, “The macro-historical significance of Chinese emigration [since the 1830s] is undeniable,” is the latest publication to bring critical attention to this Caribbean and global phenomenon (vii).
     
    The Chinese in the Caribbean is a collection of eight essays that together provide a fairly detailed overview about the Chinese presence in the Caribbean. Divided into three parts—The British West Indies, Cuba, and Re-Migration and Re-Imagining Identity—this book manages to be accessible to those seeking introductory information on the topic, and yet detailed enough for scholars to engage in topical research.
     
    Read the entire reveiw here.

  • Hybrid Types of the Human Race: Racial Mixture as a Cause of Conspicuous Morphological Changes of the Facial-type

    Hybrid Types of the Human Race: Racial Mixture as a Cause of Conspicuous Morphological Changes of the Facial-type

    The Journal of Heredity
    Volume 12, Number 6 (June 1921)
    pages 274-280

    Herman Lundborg (1868-1943)
    Race-Biological Institution, Uppsala, Sweden

    It has been possible for recent hereditary research to show that some racial qualities are inherited according to Mendel’s law. In 1913, Eugen Fischer, the anthropologist, made a close study of questions of this kind and laid a scientific foundation for hybrid research in the human world.

    The morphological race-characters, which are formed through an early and complete ossification—for instance the form, the length, the breadth of the skull etc.—seem to be depending upon heredity in a higher degree than, for instance, the length of the body, which is more easily modified by environmental factors, which depend upon an ossification completed at a later period. I have treated this latter question in a recent communication.

    During my travels and investigations in the far north of Sweden, among the population there, which has originated through strong race-mingling among Lapps, Finns and Swedes principally, I could not help noticing that the types vary in a very high degree, and that not unfrequently certain obvious changes of the facial type appear, which do not appear among individuals of a purer race. The numerous recombinations of the genetic structure are probably important causes for this circumstance. There will spring up, it seems to me, in these racial hybrids, besides qualities depending solely on the germ-plasm, in many respects stronger modifications, which probably are to be considered as a partial atrophy. Similar phenomena are often observed in crossings in the vegetable and the animal world…

    List of Figures

    • RACIAL MIXTURE IN ROYAL FAMILIES
    • TYPES OF RACIAL MIXTURE IN SWEDEN
    • RACIAL MIXTURES IN SWEDEN
    • MIXED TYPES OF UNCIVILIZED PEOPLES

    Read the entire article here.

  • Why Barack Obama Is Black: A Cognitive Account of Hypodescent

    Why Barack Obama Is Black: A Cognitive Account of Hypodescent

    Psychological Science
    Volume 22, Number 1     (January 2011)
    pages 29-33
    DOI: 10.1177/0956797610390383

    Jamin Halberstadt, Associate Professor of Psychology
    University of Otago

    Steven J. Sherman, Chancellor’s Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences
    Indiana University, Bloomington

    Jeffrey W. Sherman, Professor of Psychology
    University of California, Davis

    We propose that hypodescent—the assignment of mixed-race individuals to a minority group—is an emergent feature of basic cognitive processes of learning and categorization. According to attention theory, minority groups are learned by attending to the features that distinguish them from previously learned majority groups. Selective attention creates a strong association between minority groups and their distinctive features, producing a tendency to see individuals who possess a mixture of majority- and minority-group traits as minority-group members. Two experiments on face categorization, using both naturally occurring and manipulated minority groups, support this view, suggesting that hypodescent need not be the product of racist or political motivations, but can be sufficiently explained by an individual’s learning history.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Another Woolly-Hair Mutation in Man

    Another Woolly-Hair Mutation in Man

    The Journal of Heredity
    Volume 25, Number 9 (September 1934)
    pages 337-340

    C. Ph. Schokking
    Rotterdam, Holland

    A Dutch peasant family living near Leiden carries a dominant gene for a type of woolly hair characteristic of the Negro races. This is not to be explained as due to race crossing for two reasons.  In the first place there is no tradition in the family of an infusion of Negro blood and no other evidence of anything but pure Dutch ancestry. Furthermore, hair form behaves in racial crosses not as a simple dominant character but as a “blending” character (in which to or more genes are involved).  Thus simple mendelian inheritance of hair form is not found in Negro-white crosses. Among such hybrids various degrees of curly and wavy hair are observed, and in later generations wooly hare may appear but only where both parents are partly Negro. Thus the occurrence of woolly hair in this family is clear due to mutation rather than race hybridization.

    While studying twins in Leiden in 1929 and 1930, I encountered a pair of non-identical twin sisters, one of whom had remarkably curly hair. Since little is known of the inheritance of such genuine woolly hair among Europeans, I followed up the history of this pair. It soon transpired that in the village of Rijnsburg, near Leiden, whence the girls came, many woolly-haired persons were to be found, and that all of these belonged to the same family. After a deal of effort I was able to put together a pedigree chart covering five generations (Figure 3). The founder of the family had already died and no photograph of him was to be had, but an old Rijnsburger, who knew both this man and his father, was able to give me definite information that both of them had woolly hair…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Skin Color of Children from White By Near-White Marriages

    The Skin Color of Children from White By Near-White Marriages

    The Journal of Heredity
    Volume 38, Number 8 (August 1947)
    pages 233-234

    Curt Stern (1902-1981), Professor of Zoology and Genetics [Read a biographical memoir by James V. Neel here.]
    University of California, Berkeley

    It is well known that the inheritance of color differences in negro-white crosses is based on multiple genes, as first postulated by Gertrude C. and Charles B. Davenport in 1910. Most textbooks present the specific hypothesis first proposed by Davenport  that two pairs of genes are involved which act cumulatively and with intermediate effects in heterozygotes, so that negro pigmentation may be symbolized by AABB, white by aabb and various shades of diverse hybrid pigmentation by AABb, and AaBB (dark mulatto) AAbb, aaBB, and AaBb (mulatto), and aaBb and Aabb (light mulatto). In a general way this hypothesis fits the data on negro-white hybrids collected by Davenport. Undoubtedly, however, it is at best only a first approximation. Pigmentation is greatly variable in either whites or negroes. While it is known that much of this variability is inherited, little information is available as to the specific genetic conditions underlying the degrees and types of pigmentation found in either group. Correspondingly limited is our knowledge of the interaction of the “minor” genes for pigment variability with each other and with the “major” ones in negro-white crosses.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Arnold K. Ho & Dr. Jim Sidanius to be Featured Guests on Mixed Chicks Chat

    Arnold K. Ho & Dr. Jim Sidanius to be Featured Guests on Mixed Chicks Chat

    Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Heidi W. Durrow
    Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
    Episode: #188 – Arnold K. Ho & Dr. Jim Sidanius
    When: Wednesday, 2011-01-12, 22:00Z (17:00 EST, 16:00 CST, 14:00 PST)

    Arnold K. Ho
    Department of Psychology
    Harvard University

    Jim Sidanius, Professor of Psychology and African and African American Studies
    Harvard University


    Jim Sidanius is a Professor in the departments of Psychology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He has published more than 150 scientific papers and books discussing the political psychology of gender, group conflict, institutional discrimination and the evolutionary psychology of intergroup prejudice.

    Arnold K. Ho is interested in social perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs that function to maintain social hierarchies.  In one line of research, he examines the perception of multiracial individuals and its implications for racial hierarchies.  In another line of research, he examines hierarchy enhancing attitudes and beliefs and individual differences in the preference for group-based hierarchy (i.e., social dominance orientation).

    Selected Bibliography:

    Listen to the episode here.

  • Immigration, Intermarriage, and the Challenges of Measuring Racial/Ethnic Identities

    Immigration, Intermarriage, and the Challenges of Measuring Racial/Ethnic Identities

    American Journal of Public Health
    Volume 90, Number 11 (November 2000)
    pages 1735-1737
    DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.90.11.1735

    Mary C. Waters, M. E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology
    Harvard University

    This commentary reviews recent demographic trends in immigration and intermarriage that contribute to the complexity of measuring race and ethnicity. The census question on ancestry is proposed as a possible model for what we might expect with the race question in the 2000 census and beyond. Through the use of ancestry data, changes in ethnic identification by individuals over the course of their lives, by generation, and according to census question directions are documented. It is pointed out that the once-rigid lines that divided European-origin groups from one another have increasingly blurred. All of these changes are posited as becoming more likely for groups we now define as “racial.” While it is acknowledged that race and ethnicity will become increasingly difficult to measure as multiple racial identities become more common and more likely to be reported, it is argued that monitoring discrimination is crucial for the continued collection of such data.

    Read the entire article here.

  • New Challenges in Measuring Race in the United States

    New Challenges in Measuring Race in the United States

    2010 National Conference on Health Statistics
    Omni Shorem Hotel, Washington, D.C.
    2010-08-17
    46 pages/slides

    Reynolds Farley, Research Professor Emeritus
    University of Michigan
    Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research

    The Multiracial Movement of the 1990s [page/slide 2]

    • After Census 1990, a small social movement developed calling for a fundamental change in the way the federal statistical system classified people by race. Susan Graham played an important role in this.
    • Rather than forcing persons to identify with one single race only, they insisted upon the addition of a “Multiple Races” category.
    • Some leading advocates of this change were white women married to African-American men who found that their children were almost always classified as black by those who collected statistical data or tabulated persons by race. See: Kim M. Williams, Mark One or More Civil Rights in Multiracial America

    Who Identifies with Multiple Races? [page/slide 9]

    • Age differences are great. In 2008, 5% of those under 10 were identified with two or more races; fewer than 1% for those over age 64 did so.
    • Race differences are substantial. In 2008, 52% of the Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander population identified with a second race; 45% of American Indians did so. For whites, it was only 3%
    • Educational Attainment differences in identifying with multiple races were small.
    • Geographic Differences in Identifying with Two or More Races are Large. In 2008, 21% of the residents of Honolulu and 10% in Anchorage identified with 2 or more races. In Birmingham, Alabama, Jackson, Mississippi, Portland, Maine and Sarasota, Florida; fewer than 1% identified with 2 or more races.

    Measuring Race Will Be Increasingly Challenging [page/slide 26]

    • A substantial increase in interracial marriages implies that the multiple race population is growing rapidly
    • There is widespread consensus that race is a social construct. Perhaps, many people wish to construct their own racial identity.
    • Question order and question wording effects are very large

    Read the entire presentation here.

  • Race: I’m Just Who I am

    Race: I’m Just Who I am

    Time Magazine
    1997-05-05

    Jack E. White, Washington

    Tamala M. Edwards, Washington

    Elaine Lafferty, Los Angeles

    Sylvester Monoroe, Los Angeles

    Victoria Rainert, New York

    His nickname notwithstanding, professional golfer Frank (“Fuzzy”) Zoeller saw Tiger Woods quite clearly. He gazed upon the new king of professional golf, through whose veins runs the blood of four continents, and beheld neither a one-man melting pot nor even a golfing prodigy but a fried-chicken-and-collard- greens-eating Sambo. Zoeller saw Woods, in short, as just another stereotype, condemned by his blackness to the perpetual status of “little boy.”

    Zoeller soon paid a price for saying openly what many others were thinking secretly. K Mart, the discount chain with a big African-American clientele, unceremoniously dumped him as the sponsor of a line of golf clothing and equipment, and he abjectly withdrew from the Greater Greensboro Open tournament. “People who know me know I’m a jokester. I just didn’t deliver the line well,” Zoeller tearfully explained. But his real crime was not, as he and his defenders seem to think, merely a distasteful breach of racial etiquette or an inept attempt at humor. The real crime was falling behind the times. The old black-white stereotypes are out of date, and Zoeller is just the latest casualty of America’s failure to come to grips with the perplexing and rapidly evolving significance of racial identity in what is fast becoming the most polyglot society in history.

    If current demographic trends persist, midway through the 21st century whites will no longer make up a majority of the U.S. population. Blacks will have been overtaken as the largest minority group by Hispanics. Asians and Pacific Islanders will more than double their number of 9.3 million in 1995 to 19.6 million by 2020. An explosion of interracial, interethnic and interreligious marriages will swell the ranks of children whose mere existence makes a mockery of age-old racial categories and attitudes. Since 1970, the number of multiracial children has quadrupled to more than 2 million, according to the Bureau of the Census. The color line once drawn between blacks and whites—or more precisely between whites and nonwhites—is breaking into a polygon of dueling ethnicities, each fighting for its place in the sun.

    For many citizens the “browning of America” means a disorienting plunge into an uncharted sea of identity. Zoeller is far from alone in being confused about the complex tangle of genotypes and phenotypes and cultures that now undercut centuries-old verities about race and race relations in the U.S. Like many others, he hasn’t got a clue about what to call the growing ranks of people like Woods who inconveniently refuse to be pigeonholed into one of the neat, oversimplified racial classifications used by government agencies–and, let’s face it, most people. Are they people of color? Mixed race? Biracial? Whatever they like?…

    Read the entire article here.