Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Characterizing the Admixed African Ancestry of African Americans

    Characterizing the Admixed African Ancestry of African Americans

    Genome Biology
    Volume 10, Issue 12 (2009)
    R141
    DOI: 10.1186/gb-2009-10-12-r141

    Fouad Zakharia
    Department of Genetics
    Stanford University School of Medicine

    Analabha Basu
    Institute for Human Genetics
    University of California, San Francisco

    Devin Absher
    HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, Huntsville, Alabama

    Themistocles L. Assimes
    Division of Cardiovascular Medicine
    Stanford University School of Medicine

    Alan S. Go
    Division of Research
    Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, California

    Mark A. Hlatky
    Department of Health, Research and Policy
    Stanford University School of Medicine

    Carlos Iribarren
    Division of Research
    Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, California

    Joshua W. Knowles
    Division of Cardiovascular Medicine
    Stanford University School of Medicine

    Jun Li
    Department of Human Genetics
    University of Michigan

    Balasubramanian Narasimhan
    Department of Health, Research and Policy
    Stanford University School of Medicine

    Steven Sidney
    Division of Research
    Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, California

    Audrey Southwick
    Department of Infectious Diseases
    Stanford University School of Medicine

    Richard M. Myers
    HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, Huntsville, Alabama

    Thomas Quertermous
    Division of Cardiovascular Medicine
    Stanford University School of Medicine

    Neil Risch
    Institute for Human Genetics
    University of California, San Francisco

    Division of Research
    Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, California

    Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
    University of California, San Francisco

    Hua Tang
    Department of Genetics
    Stanford University School of Medicine

    Background: Accurate, high-throughput genotyping allows the fine characterization of genetic ancestry. Here we applied recently developed statistical and computational techniques to the question of African ancestry in African Americans by using data on more than 450,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) genotyped in 94 Africans of diverse geographic origins included in the HGDP, as well as 136 African Americans and 38 European Americans participating in the Atherosclerotic Disease Vascular Function and Genetic Epidemiology (ADVANCE) study. To focus on African ancestry, we reduced the data to include only those genotypes in each African American determined statistically to be African in origin.

    Results: From cluster analysis, we found that all the African Americans are admixed in their African components of ancestry, with the majority contributions being from West and West-Central Africa, and only modest variation in these African-ancestry proportions among individuals. Furthermore, by principal components analysis, we found little evidence of genetic structure within the African component of ancestry in African Americans.

    Conclusions: These results are consistent with historic mating patterns among African Americans that are largely uncorrelated to African ancestral origins, and they cast doubt on the general utility of mtDNA or Y-chromosome markers alone to delineate the full African ancestry of African Americans. Our results also indicate that the genetic architecture of African Americans is distinct from that of Africans, and that the greatest source of potential genetic stratification bias in case-control studies of African Americans derives from the proportion of European ancestry.

    …Although much attention has been paid in the genetics literature to the continental admixture underlying the genetic makeup of African Americans, less attention has been paid to the within-continental contribution to African Americans, in particular from the continent of Africa. Studies have focused primarily on the matrilineally inherited mitochondrial DNA(mtDNA) and patrilineally inherited Y chromosome. These two DNA sources have gained wide prominence owing, in part, to their use by ancestry-testing companies to identify the regional and ethnic origins of their subscribers. Yet these two sources provide a very narrow perspective in delineating only two of possibly thousands of ancestral lineages in an individual.

    The majority of African Americans derive their African ancestry from the approximately 500,000 to 650,000 Africans that were forcibly brought to British North America as slaves during the Middle Passage. These individuals were deported primarily from various geographic regions of Western Africa, ranging from Senegal to Nigeria to Angola. Thus, it has been estimated that the majority of African Americans derive ancestry from these geographic regions, although more central and eastern locations also have contributed.  Recent studies of African and African-American mtDNA haplotypes and autosomal microsatellite markers also confirmed a broad range of Western Africa as the likely roots of most African Americans…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Will there ever be a rainbow Japan?

    Will there ever be a rainbow Japan?

    CNN International
    CNN Go
    2010-12-01

    Tracy Slater

    Government statistics suggest multiculturalism is on the rise, but social organizations for mixed-race Japanese say ‘hafus’ still face challenges

    Japan, which closed its borders from 1639 to 1854 and later colonized its neighbors, has an uneasy history with foreigners, national identity, and multiculturalism.

    Yet government statistics and grassroots organizations say multiculturalism in the famously insular country is now on the rise…
    Japan: The new melting pot?

    Japan’s national government recently announced it is turning to travelers in a foreigner-friendly mission to boost diversity — at least in tourist spots — by paying them to provide feedback on how to increase accessibility for non-Japanese speakers.

    David Askew, associate professor of law at Kyoto’s Ritsumeikan University, identifies more profound changes.

    In 1965, a mere 1 in 250 of all marriages in Japan were international, he notes. By 2004, the number had climbed to 1 in 15 across the nation and 1 in 10 in Tokyo…

    Celebrating diversity

    A handful of new organizations are tied, at least in part, to the increase in multicultural marriages.

    Groups such as Mixed Roots Japan and Hapa Japan, founded by children of mixed-Japanese couples, aim to celebrate the broadening scope of Japanese identity, both nationally and globally.

    “There is a real need now to recognize that Japan is getting more multiracial,” says Mixed Roots founder Edward Sumoto, a self-described “hafu” of Japanese/Venezuelan ethnicity. “The Japanese citizen is not simply a traditional Japanese person with Japanese nationality anymore.”

    The issue of the identity of hafu is also being explored in a new film titled “Hafu,” currently under production by the Hafu Project.

    In support of multiracial families, Mixed Roots holds Halloween and Christmas parties, picnics and beach days…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Cross ’12, Castagno ’12 Participate in Mixed Race Conference

    Cross ’12, Castagno ’12 Participate in Mixed Race Conference

    The Wesleyan Connecton
    Welyean University’s Newsletter
    2010-12-02

    Olivia Drake

    Rachel Cross ’12 and Alicia Castagno ’12 participated as panel members in a session of the Critical Mixed Race Conference sponsored by dePaul University in Chicago Nov. 5-6 [2010].

    The conference was attended by academicians and students (primarily graduate students) from across the country. Cross and Castagno co-taught a Wesleyan student forum on mixed race last year and were on a panel discussing the development and teaching of this topic as students. In the question and answer period someone asked how many student-taught classes on mixed race there were in the country. A member of the University of Washington group said that as far as they could find out, only the UW and Wesleyan had student-taught classes…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Re-Emergence of Race as a Biological Category: The Societal Implications—Reaffirmation of Race

    The Re-Emergence of Race as a Biological Category: The Societal Implications—Reaffirmation of Race

    The Iowa Law Review
    Volume 94, Number 5 (July 2009)
    pages 1547-1587

    Alex M. Johnson, Jr., Perre Bowen Professor of Law; Thomas F. Bergin Teaching Professor of Law and Director, Center for the Study of Race and Law
    University of Virginia

    Table of Contents

    • I. INTRODUCTION
    • II. PLACING RACE IN CONTEXT: DEFINING THE ISSUE
      • A. AN HISTORICAL ANALYSIS
      • B. REALISTS AND ANTIREALISTS—COMPETING CONSTRUCTIONS OF RACE IN THE LEGAL COMMUNITY
    • III. THE SOCIETAL COSTS OF USING RACE IN BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH
    • IV. ETHNICITY VERSUS RACE: DEVELOPING A NEW, SOFTER PARADIGM
    • V. CONCLUSION

    As the Dean of the University of Minnesota Law School in 2005, I was privileged to host and attend a conference at the Law School entitled, “Proposals for the Responsible Use of Racial and Ethnic Categories in Biomedical Research: Where Do We Go from Here?”1 To say the least, it was a fascinating conference replete with interesting speakers engaged with topical and controversial issues. The papers presented and discussed were proof of the success of the conference and the relevance of issues addressed.2 Professor Susan Wolf prepared a concise summary of those articles for Nature Genetics, and the reader is encouraged to review that summary before continuing with this Article.

    Although the conference quite appropriately focused on the topic at hand—the use of racial categories in biomedical research—my thoughts kept drifting to a related, and perhaps more important, issue: the re-emergence of race as a biological category rather than as a social construct. I also pondered the implications of that development in a society in which race continues to be the most prominent social issue, even though an African-American was recently sworn in as President of the United States.6 I kept returning to this thought because of the topics addressed during the conference, topics which were not new to me.

    As a scholar who has written several articles about “race” and its place in in legal scholarship, have given a lot of thought as to how “race” impacts every significant facet of American society and how this society’s history is inextricably tied to its legacy of slavery and the vestiges (for example, “separate but equal” comes to mind) of that awful chapter in American history. I have gone so far as to advocate, in two separate articles, the destabilization of racial categories as a vehicle to eliminate “race” and, ultimately, the effects of race (i.e., racism and racialism) in American society.

    As a result, during the twenty-plus years I have been researching, writing, and thinking about race and race-related issues, I have always been puzzled by an event that happens regularly: the release of medical reports and studies that report differential results, findings, or outcomes based on the race of the test subjects. It is fairly common for some reporter to quote a statistic indicating that African-Americans have a higher rate of, say, hypertension than whites…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Destabilizing Racial Classifications Based on Insights Gleaned from Trademark Law

    Destabilizing Racial Classifications Based on Insights Gleaned from Trademark Law

    California Law Review
    Volume 84, Number 4 (July, 1996)
    pages 887-952

    Alex M. Johnson, Jr., Perre Bowen Professor of Law; Thomas F. Bergin Teaching Professor of Law and Director, Center for the Study of Race and Law
    University of Virginia

    Analogy to trademark law offers solutions to the problematic binary system of race classification in the US by exposing and deconstructing the notion of whiteness as a property right. Maintaining the racial dichotomy between blacks and whites preserves whiteness as the position of privilege and blackness as the marginalized other. Promotion of multi-racial categories would make racial identification generic and would destroy the value of marking as a way of protecting the property right of being white. Ethnic identities could be retained because of the benefits of voluntary identification.

  • What Are You?”: Exploring Racial Categorization in “Nowhere Else on Earth”

    “What Are You?”: Exploring Racial Categorization in “Nowhere Else on Earth”

    The Southern Literary Journal
    Volume 39, Number 1 (Fall, 2006)
    pages 33-53

    Erica Abrams Locklear, Assistant Professor of Literature & Language
    University of North Carolina, Asheville

    In his introduction to the 1985 collection of essays entitled “Race,” Writing, and Difference, Henry Louis Gates rightfully asserts: “Race, as a meaningful criterion within the biological sciences, has long been recognized to be a fiction” (4), Even so, contemporary disputes centered on race remain one of American most glaring problems. Although laws supporting atrocities such as the Jim Crow South rest in the past, the systems of classification that inspired them still operate on many different levels of present-day American society, ranging from the way people describe themselves, to the labels people place on difference, to the way the American government decides what fraction of “blood” constitutes race. Fiction writer Josephine Humphreys explores the complexities, falsifications, and implications of racial classification for the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina in her historically based novel Nowhere Else on Earth. First published in 2000, the work’s 2001 Penguin edition includes a readers guide following the text in which Humphreys explains her impetus for writing about the Lumbee people. She admits that when she first encountered a Lumbee aboard a train, upon discovering ihat the woman was not white, Humphreys asked, “What are you?”, She goes on to remember that the young woman explained the story of the Lumbee people, as well as the infamous tale…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • The Coe Ridge Colony: A Racial Island Disappears

    The Coe Ridge Colony: A Racial Island Disappears

    American Anthropologist
    Volume 74, Issue 3 (June 1972)
    pages 710–719
    DOI: 10.1525/aa.1972.74.3.02a00350

    Lynwood Montell
    Western Kentucky University

    The ninety year history of a racial isolate in the Kentucky–Tennessee border is examined. Peopled by a mixed population of Whites, Blacks, and, occasionally, Indians, the community received notoriety as an enclave for fugitives from the law of neighboring jurisdictions. Its demise came in 1958 as a result of changing land use and increasing tensions between the residents and those of the environing White society.

    It has been said that the American Negro has in his veins not the blood of one race alone, or of two, but of three (Porter 1932: 287); the reference, of course, being to the Indian and White races. Such was certainly the case with the Coe Ridge racial island, comprising a people in southern Cumberland County, Kentucky, who called themselves Negro but who freely and proudly admitted to an early blood intermixture with the Cherokees of western North Carolina and a later infusion of White blood on multiple occasions on the Kentucky frontier. This racial group was concealed from the glare of the outside world in the raw yet beautiful hillcountry of southern Kentucky near the point where the Cumberland River disappears into Clay County, Tennessee, after meandering from Wolf Creek Dam across Russell, Cumberland, and Monroe Counties in Kentucky. It was here that the now legendary Black Coe bastion flourished, withered, and then perished before the relentless assault of the White man’s world.

    Placed on Coe Ridge as a result of slave emancipation following the Civil War, the Coe racial island withstood for ninety years the attempts of resentful White neighbors to remove this single blot within an otherwise homogeneous White Society. The Black Coe people fought so fiercely in defense of their lives and property that, by the time the settlement finally succumbed to economic and legal pressures in the late 1950s, it was notorious in folk legend across the upper South as a place of refuge for White women shunned by their own families and communities and as a breeding ground for a race of rather handsome mulattoes, as a stronghold of moonshining and bootleggers, and as a battle ground for feuds that produced a harrowing list of ambushes, street murders, stabbings, and shootings. After years of raids, arrests, and skirmishes with federal agents and local lawmen, the Negroes’ resistance was broken, and they departed the hill country enclave for the industrial centers north of the Ohio River…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Physical Anthropology and Genetics of Marginal People of the Southeastern United States

    The Physical Anthropology and Genetics of Marginal People of the Southeastern United States

    American Anthropologist
    Volume 74, Issue 3 (June 1972)
    pages 719–734
    DOI: 10.1525/aa.1972.74.3.02a00360

    William S. Pollitzer
    University of North Carolina

    Admixture of White, Negro, and Indian peoples of the Southeastern United States from colonial days on has led to some unique populations isolated by social status. In time they formed distinctive gene pools. On the basis of physical traits and serological factors, it has been possible to reconstruct the approximate genetic contribution of parental populations to the hybrid ones. Some inherited diseases have also been concentrated in these isolates. Both differential fertility and changing social factors may affect the future of these populations.

    Over vast spans of time populations of mankind have evolved many physical differences. In accordance with well established genetic principles, they arose because mutations in the genes controlling such traits occurred at random but conferred upon the individuals selective advantages. Thus, heavy pigmentation of the skin may have been an advantage to those living in the extreme sunlight of the tropics. Some anthropologists believe that body form and facial features may similarly represent adaptations to extremes of temperature and humidity. Geographical barriers such as oceans and deserts serve to isolate populations and emphasize their distinctive characteristics, although gradients exist between the physical traits of related people. Man’s increasing capacity for food production, most notably in the neolithic era when the cultivation of crops and domestication of animals greatly increased his food resources, contributed to the growth of populations. Particular groups of people of similar appearance expanded in numbers and later in territory, giving the impression that the earth was populated with a few “races.” An earlier generation of anthropologists, searching for distinct types, classified all people on the basis of a few physical traits such as skin color, hair form, head shape or nose width. More modern students of mankind have recognized that there are indeed only clines or gradients in all of these traits and that mixture is a universal phenomenon.

    Can we then speak of “races” of man at all? While the concept of fixed types remains in the popular thinking, many scientists have gone to the opposite extreme and denied the reality of race at all. My own position is an intermediate one in which I liken human populations to the surface of the earth. Here is a small elevation and, there, a larger one; here is a single contour and, there, a doubled one. Shallow valleys separate some high ground; deep valleys separate others. Who can say, then, what is to be labeled a hill and what is to be called a mountain? Shall we use one name or two names for closely related projections? Where we draw the line-what labels we attach-these are arbitrary decisions; but the rises and the falls in the earth’s surface are facts of nature. So it is with human populations. How finely we wish to divide them, how broadly we lump them or the designations we give to them will inevitably vary; but large populations with distinctive features are still recognizable. It is, of course, mating preferences for physical characteristics which govern the collection of genes in so-called gene pools; and it is our culture which determines these choices. In that sense, those physically recognized groupings which we may popularly refer to as “races” are dependent upon our culture both for their formation and for their definition…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Slimy subjects? Barack Obama, Mixed-Race Metaphors & Neoliberal Multiculturalism

    Slimy subjects? Barack Obama, Mixed-Race Metaphors & Neoliberal Multiculturalism

    The Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation
    University of Hull
    Oriel Chambers
    27 High Street, Hull, HU1 1NE [Map]
    Thursday, 2010-12-02, 16:30-18:00Z

    Daniel McNeil, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
    University of Newcastle

    Public Lecture.  For more information, click here.

  • University of Kent research reveals diversity of multiracial identification and experience in Britain today

    University of Kent research reveals diversity of multiracial identification and experience in Britain today

    University of Kent
    Press Office
    2010-11-04

    Research from the University has revealed that while there is evidence of a growing consciousness and interest in mixed race identities among 18-25 year olds in Britain today, Britain cannot yet speak of a coherent or unified mixed group or experience.

    The research, which was conducted by Peter Aspinall, Dr. Miri Song and Dr. Ferhana Hashem from the University’s School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research (SSPSSR), set out to explore the ways in which mixed race young adults thought about and understood their ethnic and racial identifications.

    Key Findings Include:…

    • …In a ‘forced choice’ question (where respondents were forced to choose the group, or ‘race’, which was most important to them), many were not able (or unwilling) to prioritise only one group. This suggests the growing prominence of ‘mixed’, hybrid identification. Furthermore, some respondents who refused to choose claimed to transcend racial identification and categorization completely.
    • In general, the identity options perceived and experienced by Black/White mixed young people were more constrained than those of other mixes involving ‘White’, such as ‘Chinese and White’ , ‘South Asian and White’, and ‘Arab and White’. Many, though not all, part-Black respondents reported that they were seen as monoracially Black. This finding is interesting, since Britain has never had a codified ‘one-drop rule’ (in which anyone with a known Black ancestor was known as Black) as in the USA. The differences were statistically significant…

    Read the entire article here.