Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

recent posts

about

  • Right now, census data are distorting one of the most transformative population developments of the early 21st century. A sizable and growing number of young people come from families with one white and one minority parent, as more adults form families across racial and ethnic lines.

    Today’s census questions misunderstand both Hispanic and white identity

    Right now, census data are distorting one of the most transformative population developments of the early 21st century. A sizable and growing number of young people come from families with one white and one minority parent, as more adults form families across racial and ethnic lines. By far the largest group among them have Hispanic and white European ancestry.

    But you wouldn’t know that from the 2000 or 2010 Census results. While 2000 was the first to allow Americans to report a multiracial heritage, neither it nor the 2010 Census allowed people to check off both part Hispanic and part something else.

    Why? The culprit is that the census examines race and ethnicity with two questions: first, race; and then Hispanic origins. This format was created in accordance with a 1997 Office of Management and Budget memorandum that defined the standards for collecting and classifying ethnic and racial data to which all federal agencies must adhere.

    Richard Alba, “There’s a big problem with how the census measures race,” The Washington Post, February 6, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/02/06/theres-a-big-problem-with-how-the-census-measures-race.

  • They considered themselves white, but DNA tests told a more complex story

    They considered themselves white, but DNA tests told a more complex story

    The Washington Post
    2018-02-06

    Tara Bahrampour

    As more Americans take advantage of genetic testing to pinpoint the makeup of their DNA, the technology is coming head to head with the country’s deep-rooted obsession with race and racial myths. This is perhaps no more true than for the growing number of self-identified European Americans who learn they are actually part African.

    For those who are surprised by their genetic heritage, the new information can often set into motion a complicated recalibration of how they view their identity.

    Nicole Persley, who grew up in Nokesville, Va., was stunned to learn that she is part African. Her youth could not have been whiter. In the 1970s and ’80s in her rural home town, she went to school with farmers’ kids who listened to country music and sometimes made racist jokes. She was, as she recalls, “basically raised a Southern white girl.”

    But as a student at the University of Michigan: “My roommate was black. My friends were black. I was dating a black man.” And they saw something different in her facial features and hair.

    “I was constantly being asked, ‘What are you? What’s your ethnic background?’ ”…

    …The test results can present an intriguing puzzle. When a significant amount of African DNA shows up in a presumably white person, “there’s usually a story — either a parent moved away or a grandparent died young,” said Angela Trammel, an investigative genealogist in the Washington area. “Usually a story of mystery, disappearance — something.”

    For Persley, 46, the link turned out to be her grandfather, who had moved away from his native Georgia and started a new life passing as white in Michigan. He married a white woman, who bore Persley’s father…

    Read the entire article here.

  • There’s a big problem with how the census measures race

    There’s a big problem with how the census measures race

    The Washington Post
    2018-02-06

    Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor of Sociology
    Graduate Center, City University of New York


    Activists hold signs during a news conference in front of the Supreme Court in 2015. (Getty Images)

    Will the 2020 Census be accurate? A number of observers have been worrying about that question for several reasons. For instance, the Justice Department has been trying to insert a citizenship question on the census form; such a question could discourage many immigrants from completing the form. As a result, cities and regions with large numbers of immigrants could see their populations seriously undercounted, with troubling results for political representation, services and funding.

    But there’s another reason to be worried, one that hasn’t gotten much attention. The Census Bureau just announced that its 2020 form will not fundamentally change the questions it uses to ask about ethnic and racial origins. This may seem like a minor technical issue — but it will have major real-world implications. If it does not incorporate already-tested improvements into these questions, the census will deliver a less accurate picture of the United States.

    And as a result, census statistics will continue to roil the public discussion of diversity, by exaggerating white decline and the imminence of a majority-minority United States. Political figures and pundits who oppose immigration and diversity could exploit that, peddling an alarmist narrative that doesn’t fit with the long-standing reality of mixing between immigrant and established Americans….

    Read the entire article here.

  • What Doctors Should Ignore

    What Doctors Should Ignore

    The New York Times
    2017-12-08

    Moises Velasquez-Manoff


    Joan Wong

    Science has revealed how arbitrary racial categories are. Perhaps medicine will abandon them, too.

    Sickle cell anemia was first described in 1910 and was quickly labeled a “black” disease. At a time when many people were preoccupied with an imagined racial hierarchy, with whites on top, the disease was cited as evidence that people of African descent were inferior. But what of white people who presented with sickle cell anemia?

    Doctors twisted themselves into knots trying to explain those cases away. White sickle cell patients must have mixed backgrounds, they contended — a black forebear they didn’t know about perhaps, or one they didn’t want to mention. Or maybe white patients’ symptoms didn’t stem from sickle cell anemia at all, but some other affliction. The bottom line was, the disease was “black,” so by definition white people couldn’t get it.

    Today, scientists understand the sickle cell trait as an adaptation to malaria, not evidence of inferiority. One copy of the sickle cell trait protects against malaria. Having two can cause severe anemia and even death. Scientists also know that the trait is common outside Africa across the “malaria belt” — the Arabian Peninsula, India and parts of the Mediterranean Basin. And people historically considered white can, in fact, carry it. In the Greek town of Orchomenos, for example, the gene is more prevalent than it is among African-Americans.

    We know all this, and yet the racialization of the disease, the idea that it occurs only in people of sub-Saharan African descent, persists. “When I talk to medical students, I get this all the time — ‘Sickle cell is a black trait,’ ” Michael Yudell, chairman of the department of community health and prevention at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University, told me.

    That’s worrisome for many reasons, he says, chief among them that it may result in subpar medical care for some patients. Case in point: California’s universal blood disorder screening program has identified thousands of nonblack children with the sickle cell trait and scores with the disease — patients who, had doctors stuck to received “wisdom,” might have been missed.

    Professor Yudell belongs to a growing chorus of scholars and researchers who argue that in science at least, we need to push past the race concept and, where possible, scrap it entirely. Professor Yudell and others contend that instead of talking about race, we should talk about ancestry (which, unlike “race,” refers to one’s genetic heritage, not innate qualities); or the specific gene variants that, like the sickle cell trait, affect disease risk; or environmental factors like poverty or diet that affect some groups more than others…

    Read the entire article here.

  • 10 Thoughts on Anna Holmes’ New York Times Op-Ed ‘Black With (Some) White Privilege’

    10 Thoughts on Anna Holmes’ New York Times Op-Ed ‘Black With (Some) White Privilege’

    Very Smart Brothas
    The Root
    2018-02-13

    Panama Jackson, Senior Editor


    Scott Olson/Getty Images

    Anna Holmes, the founder of Jezebel and editorial director at Topic.com, recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled, “Black With (Some) White Privilege.” Full disclosure: I’m part of a currently running, very interesting and insightful documentary series she executive-produced called The Loving Generation, which explores the lives and identities of kids born of one black and one white parent after the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision in 1967 that struck down state laws banning interracial marriage.

    Holmes calls the children of interracial marriage born between 1960 and 1985 “the Loving Generation,” though where I’m from, we just call us mixed. Or black. Mostly black. Or “You know you black, right?”

    Anyway, I have quite a few qualms about the piece, especially as a mixed person who identifies as black whose picture is included in the actual op-ed—which, petty or not, makes me feel as if I co-signed the opinions and perspective. I did not. All of us who are pictured in the op-ed are also part of a supplement to the documentary series. I can’t speak for anybody else involved, but I took issue with much of the op-ed because our experiences as mixed people are varied in a way that the piece mutes…

    Read the entire article here.

  • African American populations in the U.S. formed primarily by mating between Africans and Europeans over the last 500 years.

    African American populations in the U.S. formed primarily by mating between Africans and Europeans over the last 500 years.

    Jessica M. Gross, “Tests of fit of historically-informed models of African American Admixture,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, (Volume 165), Issue 2, February 2018, 211. https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23343.

  • 50 Years of Loving: Interracial Romantic Relationships and Recommendations for Future Research

    50 Years of Loving: Interracial Romantic Relationships and Recommendations for Future Research

    Journal of Family Theory & Review
    Volume 9, Issue 4, December 2017
    Pages 557–571
    DOI: 10.1111/jftr.12215

    Natalie S. de Guzman
    Department of Human Development
    University of California, Davis

    Adrienne Nishina, Associate Professor of Human Development & Family Studies
    University of California, Davis

    In honor of the 50th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia (1967), the landmark civil rights case that invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage in the United States, this review describes the field’s past and future directions for studying interracial romantic relationships. We briefly present history, theories, and research about interracial and interethnic romantic relationships, and provide suggestions for future research. We also highlight the need for flexible racial and ethnic categories as demographics and distinctions shift in the United States by proposing the use of adaptable panethnic (a set of related ethnic groups that have been combined and collectively labeled) categories, rather than racial categories, or the use of more specific ethnic or nationality categories depending on a variety of factors. Finally, we discuss multiracial and multiethnic individuals in the research on romantic relationships, acknowledging that multiracial and multiethnic individuals are both the offspring of such unions and a rapidly growing demographic.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Goodbye ‘Racial Democracy’? Brazilian Identity, Official Discourse and the Making of a ‘Black’ Heritage Site in Rio de Janeiro

    Goodbye ‘Racial Democracy’? Brazilian Identity, Official Discourse and the Making of a ‘Black’ Heritage Site in Rio de Janeiro

    Bulletin of Latin American Research
    Special Issue: Reflections on Repression and Resistance: The Vivid Legacies of Dictatorship in Brazil
    Volume 37, Issue 1, January 2018
    Pages 73–86
    DOI: 10.1111/blar.12636

    André Cicalo
    King’s College London, London, United Kingdom

    This article explores the racial thinking in Brazilian governance exposed during the creation of a Circuit of African Heritage in the port area of Rio de Janeiro from 2011 on. The Circuit and the policy discourses that have surrounded its establishment are visibly framed within a philosophy of ethno-racial recognition and multiculturalism, which apparently suggests a rupture from the long-established discourse of mixture and racial democracy in Brazil. Nonetheless, a careful analysis of the creation of the Circuit of African Heritage indicates that policy discourse is not conclusively unsettling the country’s traditional faith in a shared, colour-blind national identity.

    Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

  • Tests of fit of historically-informed models of African American Admixture

    Tests of fit of historically-informed models of African American Admixture

    American Journal of Physical Anthropology
    Volume 165, Issue 2, February 2018
    Pages 211–222
    DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.23343

    Jessica M. Gross
    Department of Anthropology
    University of New Mexico

    African American populations in the U.S. formed primarily by mating between Africans and Europeans over the last 500 years. To date, studies of admixture have focused on either a one-time admixture event or continuous input into the African American population from Europeans only. Our goal is to gain a better understanding of the admixture process by examining models that take into account (a) assortative mating by ancestry in the African American population, (b) continuous input from both Europeans and Africans, and (c) historically informed variation in the rate of African migration over time.

    Materials and methods

    We used a model-based clustering method to generate distributions of African ancestry in three samples comprised of 147 African Americans from two published sources. We used a log-likelihood method to examine the fit of four models to these distributions and used a log-likelihood ratio test to compare the relative fit of each model.

    Results

    The mean ancestry estimates for our datasets of 77% African/23% European to 83% African/17% European ancestry are consistent with previous studies. We find admixture models that incorporate continuous gene flow from Europeans fit significantly better than one-time event models, and that a model involving continuous gene flow from Africans and Europeans fits better than one with continuous gene flow from Europeans only for two samples. Importantly, models that involve continuous input from Africans necessitate a higher level of gene flow from Europeans than previously reported.

    Discussion

    We demonstrate that models that take into account information about the rate of African migration over the past 500 years fit observed patterns of African ancestry better than alternative models. Our approach will enrich our understanding of the admixture process in extant and past populations.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • “Race, It Would Appear, Complicates Things”: An Irish Immigration Story

    “Race, It Would Appear, Complicates Things”: An Irish Immigration Story

    Away
    Travel Journal
    2018-01-23

    Emma Dabiri


    Emma Dabiri is Irish, but when the inevitable “Where do you come from?” is asked, the answer rarely satisfies the inquisitor. Photo by @thediasporadiva.

    In this series, we’re highlighting the stories of people who remain connected to their home countries—either those with immigrant parents or those who are immigrants themselves. With “We Are All Immigrants: Stories About the Places We’re From,” you’ll hear from those most acutely affected by changing policies and a shifting reality, those who exist as part of multiple cultures at once. Here, London-based professor and writer Emma Dabiri explores what being an immigrant means to her and to her family.

    And although my parents were born and raised in countries not their own, I’m not sure that the term immigrant applies to them in the way it does to me.

    I was born in Dublin and have lived in London for almost 20 years—since I finished school—which quite straightforwardly makes me an Irish immigrant. Ostensibly I am Irish, but when the inevitable “Where do you come from?” is asked, that answer, rarely, if ever, satisfies people. Race, it would appear, complicates things…

    Read the entire article here.