Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • The Estimation of Admixture in Racial Hybrids

    The Estimation of Admixture in Racial Hybrids

    Annals of Human Genetics
    Volume 35, Issue 1 (July 1971)
    pages 9–17
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-1809.1956.tb01373.x

    Robert C. Elston, Professor & Chair, Distinguished University Professor
    Case Western Reserve University

    When a racial hybrid population has arisen from the intermarriage of two or more parental populations, a problem of interest is to determine what the relative contributions are from each parental population to the hybrid. Various distance measures have been proposed whereby, on the basis of several traits, the distance between the hybrid and each of the parental populations can be estimated: these distances are then sometimes interpreted, as a first approximation, as being inversely proportional to the parental contributions (Pollitzer, 1964). In the particular case that all the traits considered are discrete in nature and each is determined by alleles at a single locus (or system of tightly linked loci), it is possible to estimate the parental contributions more directly. It in the purpose of this paper to reconsider two main methods of doing this when the traits involved are determined by a random set of independently assorting loci.

    Robers &. Hiorns (1962, 1965) proposed a least-squares solution to the problem, and Krieger et al. (1965) gave a maximum-likelihood solution. Both methods, as given by these authors, can be improved. We shall here restate both methods, using a common notation, and point out the improvements possible; furthermore, some resumes of using these method will also be presented, so that the methods may be compared empirically.

    Least-Squares Method

    Suppose ther are p (> 1) parental populations and for each we have gene frequency estimates of the same k genes.  Let X = (xij) be a k x p matrix, xij being the estimate of the ith gene frequency in the jth parental population. Let the k x 1 vector y have as its elements the corresponding gene frequency estimates in the hybrid population; and let the proportion of the hybrid population’s genes that come from the jth parental populatio be µij the jth element of th p x 1 vector µ.  Then if the estimates are all exactly equal to the gene frequencies; and if the k chosen genes represent perfectly all the genes for which there has been no selection or drift, y-Xµ = 0, where 0 is the null vector. The least squares estimate of µ is that value of µ, m say, which minimizes the sum of squares of the diserepancies given by y-Xµ, i.e. which minimizes (y — Xµ)′(y — Xµ), where the prime denotes transposition. The least squares estimate is accordingly

    m = (X′X)-1 X′y provided X′X is non-singular.

    Now it should be noted that the k genes fall into allelic systems, the sum of the gene frequencies for each syatem being unity in each population. Thus, for example, the gene frequency for M and N add to unity, and it is impossible to estimate a gene  frequency for M without at the same time implicitly estimating a gene frequency for N. When Roberts & Hiorns (1963) use (1) to obtain least squares estimates they eliminate one allele from each system, so that tho rows of X and y can no longer be grouped by system with the column totals for each group adding…

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  • Multiple Realities: A Relational Narrative Approach in Therapy With Black–White Mixed-Race Clients

    Multiple Realities: A Relational Narrative Approach in Therapy With Black–White Mixed-Race Clients

    Family Relations
    Volume 52, Issue 2 (April 2003)
    pages 119–128
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3729.2003.00119.x

    Kerry Ann Rockquemore

    Tracey A. Laszloffy

    Notions of a racial identity for persons with one Black and one White parent have assumed the existence of only a singular identity (first Black and later biracial). Emerging empirical research on racial identity formation among members of this group reveals that multiple identity options are possible. In terms of overall health, the level of social invalidation one encounters with respect to racial self-identification is more important than the specific racial identity selected. Here a relational narrative approach to therapy with Black–White mixed-race clients who experience systematic invalidation of their chosen racial identity is presented through a detailed case illustration.

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  • Theorizing Interracial Families and Hybrid Identity: And Australian Perspective

    Theorizing Interracial Families and Hybrid Identity: And Australian Perspective

    Educational Theory
    Volume 49, Issue 2 (June 1999)
    pages 223–249
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1999.00223.x

    Carmen Luke, Emeritus Professor of Education
    University of Queensland

    Allan Luke, Research Professor
    Queensland University of Technology

    This essay is a theoretical exploration at how interracial families are sites for the development and articulation of hybrid identity: complex ways of representing and positioning oneself within larger social constructs of racial, social class, gender, and cultural difference. Our aim here is to examine the significance of place, locality, and situated “racializing practices” in the constitution of  identity. We draw on Stuart Hall’s concepts of “New Times” and “hybridity” to argue that interracial subjects or family formations have always been and continue to be of cultural and political concern in both postcolonial and post-industrial nation states and economies. Our cases and illustrations come from the context of the current public and political debate over immigration and multiculturalism, in Australia, a debate that highlights once again the centrality of “race” in the popular imaginary. Working from postcoloinial and feminist theory, we argue that “between two cultures” theorizations, and extant research and social policies on multiculturalism do not adequately account for the hybridity and multiply situated character of several generations of interracial subjects. Throughout we offer comments from interracial families we interviewed. In closing, we turn to more specific narratives of the development of racializmg practices and racial identities in two specific local sites: the cities of Darwin and Brisbane.  We conclude by drawing implications from this study for multicultural and antiracist educational theorizing and practices.

    The Study

    This essay draws on interview narratives from the initial phase uf a three year study ot mtciethmc families in Australia, In the first two years of the study (1996-1997), we interviewed couples in 42 visibly mixed-race marriages, where one partner was visibly Caucasian, white Australian and the other was of visibly Indo-Asian background. Because a key focus was on the effects of the visibility of mixed-race families in what historically has been a predominantly white Anglo-European society, we selected cuuples where one member was of visible racial difference. Because we were also concerned with understanding how the development of…

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  • Race Categorization and the Regulation of Business and Science

    Race Categorization and the Regulation of Business and Science

    Law & Society Review
    Volume 44, Issue 3-4 (September/December 2010)
    pages 617–650
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5893.2010.00418.x

    Catherine Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology
    Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research
    Rutgers University

    John D. Skrentny, Director, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies and Professor of Sociology
    University of California, San Diego

    Despite the lack of consensus regarding the meaning or significance of race or ethnicity amongst scientists and the lay public, there are legal requirements and guidelines that dictate the collection of racial and ethnic data across a range of institutions. Legal regulations are typically created through a political process and then face varying kinds of resistance when the state tries to implement them. We explore the nature of this opposition by comparing responses from businesses, scientists, and science-oriented businesses (pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies) to U.S. state regulations that used politically derived racial categorizations, originally created to pursue civil rights goals. We argue that insights from cultural sociology regarding institutional and cultural boundaries can aid understanding of the nature of resistance to regulation. The Food and Drug Administration’s guidelines for research by pharmaceutical companies imposed race categories on science-based businesses, leading to objections that emphasized the autonomy and validity of science. In contrast, similar race categories regulating first business by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and later scientific research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) encountered little challenge. We argue that pharmaceutical companies had the motive (profit) that NIH-supported scientists lacked and a legitimate discourse (boundary work of science) that businesses regulated by the EEOC did not have. The study suggests the utility of a comparative cultural sociology of the politics of legal regulation, particularly when understanding race-related regulation and the importance of examining legal regulations for exploring how the meaning of race or ethnicity are contested and constructed in law.

    …Drug companies and their industry association representatives argued that other conflicts could arise in using these categories outside the United States. Test subjects outside the United States would be unwilling, they claimed, to answer questions that many Americans might not find objectionable. A number of the pharmaceutical companies commented that in clinical studies conducted outside the United States, the Latino or Hispanic ethnicity question would render meaningless information from places such as Spain, where all subjects could be classified as Hispanic but whose cultural experiences and history may be more in alignment with France than with those of American Hispanics. Equally troubling as the Hispanic question was the lack of group specificity for the Asian category and uncertainty related to how multiracial subjects should be counted. In raising these concerns about how to identify and count Australian Aborigines, Spaniards, or Asians, these companies and organizations challenged the scientific integrity, applicability, and generalizability of the OMB categories. The lack of external validity violated a central tenet of the scientific method…

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  • Gene admixture in human populations: Models and predictions

    Gene admixture in human populations: Models and predictions

    American Journal of Physical Anthropology
    Volume 29, Issue Supplement S7 (1986)
    pages 1–43
    DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330290502

    Ranajit Chakraborty, Robert A. Kehoe Professor and Director of Center for Genome Information
    University of Cincinnati

    Brief accounts of methods for estimating proportions of admixture in populations and individuals of hybrid origin are presented with the objective of appraising their underlying assumptions. In view of the uncertainties introduced by assumptions under which admixture estimates are obtained, it is concluded that the reliability of estimates derived from different methods cannot be formally compared. With examples from several admixed populations, it is shown that all methods do not necessarily give discordant results when identical data are used to obtain admixture estimates.

    Even though past experiences using admixed populations to detect selection or to understand disease etiology have not been very successful, it is believed that admixed human populations can be regarded as a natural experiment. Hence, they are suitable for microevolutionary and epidemiological studies.

    The proper identification of ancestral populations and the degree of asymmetry in gene flow (sex-biased admixture) are important issues in admixture studies. These aspects can be examined in the statistical properties of allele frequency distributions, but corroboration of particular models should be made from in-depth investigations of historical demography and social structure of admixed populations.

    Future studies of admixture with DNA polymorphism data may resolve some of the uncertainties associated with current techniques of detecting genetic polymorphisms. Because of the abundance of genetic data, it is argued that morphological traits are of limited use in resolving current problems of human admixture studies.

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  • Biracial Identity

    Biracial Identity

    The Lion’s Roar
    Issue 27-2     (September 2010)
    Student-Run Newspaper of Newton South High School
    Newton, Massachusetts

    Caroline Rosa, Managing Editor

    Rachel Leshin, Managing Editor

    Approaching the lunch table where her black friends were seated, sophomore Kayla Burton tried beginning to bridge the racial gap between her friend groups. But when she tried to introduce her white friend, one black girl at the table told her “we don’t want her over here.”

    She asked Burton to either tell her friend to go away or to leave with her. Burton, a biracial student who identifies as half black and half white, said she was shocked. “It was the most immature thing I’ve ever heard,” she said. She then told her friends, who were laughing, that it was the most judgmental thing she had ever heard in her life.

    Burton, along with many other biracial students at South, has a unique viewpoint concerning race relations.

    Despite the racism she has witnessed first hand, Burton said she embraces her identity. “I love being biracial because you get to see both points of views,” she said.

    Senior George Kurosawa also said he finds being biracial beneficial. Kurosawa said it allows him to have “more in common with more people.”

    Senior Jenny Gerstner said she is glad that she is is grateful for her half Korean, half white background as well. “I think when you grow up with having two different races it does make you more aware of other people, just because you’re exposed to more,” she said.

    Burton thinks her mixed identity allows her to understand both sides of race issues. “It’s definitely helpful to be biracial because if a black person got mad at me, and they say ‘you white people’ they can’t say that because I’m black too,” she said.

    Though Gerstner is mixed racially, people often classify her as white at first glance while acknowledging that “there’s something a little off about it,” she said. Gerstner herself identifies more as white.

    Like Gerstner, Kurosawa said he connects more to one half of his background. “We live in America, so more often I fit into the white role,” he said. Kurosawa said the extent of his connection to Japanese culture is visiting family in Japan and eating large amounts of rice at home.

    Contrastingly, junior Sam Russell, who has a black father and a white mother, connects more with his black identity. Having grown up in Newton, Russell often stood out as the one of the only black students in his elementary and middle school classes, and peers often assume him to be fully black. Russell identifies this way because “growing up in a white society, anyone with a different color kind of gets separated.”…

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  • The Monster Inside: 19th Century Racial Constructs in the 24th Century Mythos of Star Trek

    The Monster Inside: 19th Century Racial Constructs in the 24th Century Mythos of Star Trek

    The Journal of Popular Culture
    Volume 31, Issue 1     (Summer 1997)
    pages 23–35
    DOI: 10.1111/j.0022-3840.1997.3101_23.x

    Denise Alessandria Hurd

    That is the ineffaceable curse of Cain. Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black—bright red as the rest may be, that one drop poisons all the flood. Those seven bright drops give me love like yours, hope like yours—ambition like yours—life hung with passions like dew-drops on the morning flowers; but the one black drop gives me despair, for I’m an unclean thing—forbidden by the laws—I’m an Octoroon!

    Zoe in The Octoroon, 1859

    Myself, I think I got the worst of each… that [my Klingon side] I keep under tight control… some times I feel there’s a monster inside of me, fighting to get out… My Klingon side can be terrifying, even to me.

    K’Ehleyr from Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1989

    Judging from the above two quotes, not much has changed in 130 years of racial image management, The language may have become less poetical by the time of Star Trek, and the “Other” race less specifically marked as an existing ethnic group, but the construction of the Other, especially the Hybrid Other, even down to the implication of an inevitable atavistic biological essentialism when two races are mixed, remains the same. In the world of Star Trek, the society of the future is a pattern card of egalitarian homogeneity. Prejudice is gone and brotherhood reigns supreme, at least theoretically. It is just those pesky “alien” cultures that repeat outmoded cultural conflicts. Or is it? In this article I wish to examine how this television series, whose original intent was to explore and disprove the encoded prejudices of contemporary society by displacing this debate onto a future and presumably Utopian society, still tends to reify a particularly loaded image from nineteenth century psychology and anthropology in the United States: The Tragic Mulatto.

    Beginning with the character of Spock in The Original Series (TOS) and on down to B’Elanna Torres on the newest series. Star Trek:  Voyager, (STV) the following familiar crisis is enacted: A Hybrid character…

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  • In Memoriam: Peggy Pascoe (1954-2010)

    In Memoriam: Peggy Pascoe (1954-2010)

    Perspectives on History
    November 2010

    Estelle Freedman, Edgar E. Robinson Professor of History
    Stanford University

    Scholar of gender, race, and the U.S. West; 2009 winner of AHA’s William H. Dunning Prize and Joan Kelly Prize

    Peggy Pascoe, the Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History and professor of ethnic studies at the University of Oregon, died at home in Eugene, Oregon, on July 23, 2010. She leaves behind an exceptional professional legacy, not only in her prize-winning scholarship on women and multicultural relations in the West, but also through the careers of the students and colleagues she mentored over the decades…

    Pascoe was part way through the manuscript for her book on miscegenation law when she learned in 2005 that she had ovarian cancer. Initially she did not think that she would be able to complete the study. In 2007, at a panel held in her honor at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, several colleagues commented on her draft chapters, which helped inspire her to go back to work on the book even as she endured multiple rounds of chemotherapy. The scholarly result was stunning. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford, 2009) provides a sweeping and detailed account of the criminalization of interracial marriage and resistance to that process from the 1860s through the 1960s. It is also a superb history of the shifting meaning of “race” in American culture and the ways that gender and race are always mutually constructed. One of the most acclaimed books in U.S. social, cultural, and legal history, it received the Ellis W. Hawley and the Lawrence W. Levine Prizes from the Organization of American Historians; the John H. Dunning Prize and the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association; and the J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association…

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  • “The devil made the mulatto”: Race, religion and respectability in a Black Atlantic, 1931-2005

    “The devil made the mulatto”: Race, religion and respectability in a Black Atlantic, 1931-2005

    University of Toronto
    2007
    312 pages
    Publication Number: AAT NR39517
    ISBN: 9780494395172

    Daniel R. McNeil, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
    Newcastle University, United Kingdom

    According to The Historical Journal there has only been one scholarly study of mixed- race history. This text—New People: Mulattoes and Miscegenation in the United States—fails to address events after 1930 in any detail, and ends its historical analysis with a discussion of the mixed-race people who committed themselves to a “New Negro” group. In an attempt to cover this gap in the academic literature, my dissertation analyses the creative artistry of individuals who were born after 1930 and were told, by governmental agencies in the US, UK and Canada, that they had a Black father and a white mother. My first case study looks at Philippa Schuyler, the daughter of George Schuyler, the most prominent African American journalist of the early twentieth century. I acknowledge that George Schuyler’s journalistic peers marketed his daughter as a “Negro” child prodigy during the 1930s and 1940s, but I also document how she fashioned herself as a “mulatto” writer or a vaguely aristocratic “off-white” femme fatale during the 1950s and 1960s. My second case study looks at Lawrence Hill, a writer who grew up in the suburbs of Toronto during the 1950s and 1960s and has achieved a degree of prominence in Canada by casting himself as a middle-class Black “race man” like his African American father, the first director of the Ontario Human Rights Agency. Subsequent case studies investigate the legacy of the “Black is beautiful” movements of the 1960s on a wider variety of individuals—from working-class folks in Nova Scotia and Merseyside to American idols—and provide further evidence for my argument that a Black identity has been masculinized in opposition to the stigma attached to a “mulatto” identity associated with young “brown girls”. In doing so, I draw heavily on the work of Otto Rank, W.E.B Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. In particular, I link Rank’s ideas about creative artistry – that it was a masculine attempt to give birth to a new self, community or nation—to the theories of Du Bois and Fanon that defined “honest intellectuals” in a Black Atlantic against mixed-race women and children.

    Purchase the dissertation here.

  • Sources of Self-Categorization as Minority for Mixed-Race Individuals: Implications for Affirmative Action Entitlement

    Sources of Self-Categorization as Minority for Mixed-Race Individuals: Implications for Affirmative Action Entitlement

    Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology
    Volume 16, Issue 4 (October 2010)
    Pages 453-460
    DOI: 10.1037/a0020128

    Jessica J. Good, Assistant Professor of Psychology
    Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina

    George F. Chavez
    Department of Psychology
    Rutgers University

    Diana T. Sanchez, Associate Professor of Psychology
    Rutgers University

    Multiracial individuals are in the unique position of being able to categorize themselves as members of multiple racial groups. Drawing on self-categorization theory, we suggest that similarity to the minority ingroup depends on self-perceptions of physical appearance and connectedness to the minority ingroup. Moreover, we argue that similarity to the ingroup determines self-categorization as minority, which predicts category-based entitlements such as perceived eligibility for minority resources (e.g., affirmative action). Using path analysis, we found support for this model on a convenience sample of 107 mixed-race minority–White participants. The results suggest that affective processes rather than observable characteristics such as prototypical physical appearance better predict self-categorization among mixed-race individuals.

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