Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • A Study of Tri-Racial Isolates in Eastern United States

    A Study of Tri-Racial Isolates in Eastern United States

    Human Heredity
    Volume 6, Number 3, 1956/1957
    DOI: 10.1159/000150862
    pages 410–412

    C. J. Witkop
    National Institute of Dental Research, National Institutes of Health, Public Health Service, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.A.

    There are known to exist in the eastern part of the United States some 28 well defined tri-racial isolates. These groups represent gene pools of various proportions of Caucasian, Negro, and American Indian races. These groups are known as mixed bloods in their own communities. They are not accepted into the white community and do not consider themselves Negroes. As a result, they maintain their racial integrity by in-marriage within a few family names. They all represent the remnants of eastern Indian tribes.

    A preliminary survey of each group was made by a questionnaire letter to the county health officer in whose district these groups reside. On the basis of subsequent studies it has been shown that about 10% of the genetically determined conditions that actually exist in these groups are reported by this method. One of these groups was selected for a detailed genetic study.

    Detailed Study

    A detailed study of the medical, dental, mental health, and social aspects of one of these groups comprising 5 000 living members is in progress in southern Maryland. We are trying to determine all of the hereditary pathological traits present in the group. This group was selected for study for the following reasons:

    1. This group marries for the most part within only 14 family surnames. 2. Records indicate that the group has in-married for nearly 250 years. 3. These people reside in a limited geographic area of 2 counties of…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Poll Finds Hope Is Running High for Next Mayor of New York City

    Poll Finds Hope Is Running High for Next Mayor of New York City

    The New York Times
    2013-12-13

    Kate Taylor and Dalia Sussman

    With Bill de Blasio’s inauguration less than a month away, New Yorkers are highly optimistic about his mayoralty — but they remain skeptical that he can achieve major changes on some of the core issues that defined his candidacy, like the widening gap between the rich and poor and the scarcity of affordable housing, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.

    Despite his four years as the city’s public advocate, Mr. de Blasio — who surged from behind late in the primary season to capture the Democratic nomination, and then coasted to a landslide victory in November — remains unfamiliar to many New Yorkers. More than half of city residents said they did not yet know enough about the mayor-elect, who takes office on Jan. 1, to form an opinion of him.

    Still, 73 percent of city residents said they were generally optimistic about the next four years. About two-thirds said Mr. de Blasio would bring about real change in the way things are done. And while most said the Bloomberg administration favored the wealthy, a plurality said they expect Mr. de Blasio to treat rich, poor and middle-class New Yorkers equally. A majority said they believe he would have a positive effect on schools…

    …Mr. de Blasio, whose wife, Chirlane McCray, is black, featured her and their two children prominently in his mayoral campaign, and captured 96 percent of the black vote in the general election, according to an exit poll by Edison Research. More than half of black New Yorkers polled said they believed that having the first biracial couple as mayor and first lady would help transform race relations in the city.

    Mr. de Blasio has made clear that his wife will play an active role in his administration. Half of city residents, including a majority of women and six in 10 blacks, said they supported this, though 85 percent said they did not know enough about Ms. McCray to have an opinion of her…

    Read the entire article here.

  • A Show of Justice: Racial ‘Amalgamation’ in Nineteenth Century New Zealand

    A Show of Justice: Racial ‘Amalgamation’ in Nineteenth Century New Zealand

    Auckland University Press
    1974
    400 pages
    230 x 150 mm, illustrations
    Paperback ISBN: 9781869401214

    Alan Ward

    First published in 1974, A Show of Justice remains the essential and definitive text on official policies towards the Māori people in the nineteenth century. Professor Ward shows how an understanding of the past explains why Māori today, formally equal under the law, continue having to demand rights assured under the Treaty of Waitangi and why major issues have yet to be recognised and addressed. A Show of Justice also has a glossary of Māori terms, a full index and notes.

  • Campaign highlights abuse of mixed-race Irish in institutional care

    Campaign highlights abuse of mixed-race Irish in institutional care

    The Irish Times
    Dublin, Ireland
    2013-11-18

    Marie O’Halloran, Parliamentary Reporter

    ‘I was in a class all of my own, beneath everybody else along with the dogs and the pigs’

    A campaign has been launched for recognition of mixed-race survivors of institutional abuse who believe they suffered racism while in State care.

    Rosemary Adaser and Evon Brennan of the campaign group Call to Action Mixed Race Irish, have 20 members, but believe there are about 200 Irish people of mixed race who were in institutional care here between the 1950s and 1980s.

    Ms Brennan, a London-based singer-songwriter, said they were looking at the “colour-specific nature of abuse”. That abuse “has been under the radar all these years” and they want an acknowledgement that “Ireland in the ’50s and ’60s was a racist country”…

    …Ms Adaser said: “The key point is that if you were mixed race back in the ’50s and ’60s you were 99 per cent sure of being put in an institution.”

    Put into State care at the age of three months, she was in homes on the Navan Road, Dublin, and spent 11 years in St Joseph’s, Kilkenny, where her baby son was forcibly taken from her by the nuns when she was 17.

    ‘Performing monkey’

    “I have absolutely nothing good to say about it. I was the only black girl there, seen as an oddity, treated as an alien, at best a performing monkey, at worst a savage, a savage to be civilised.

    “I was in a class all of my own, beneath everybody else along with the dogs and the pigs on the farm. That’s where I was told I belonged.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Colloquium: Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind

    Colloquium: Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind

    University of Pennsylvania
    103 McNeil Building
    3718 Locust Walk
    Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-6299
    Wednesday, 2014-01-29, 12:00-13:00 EST (Local Time)

    Osagie K. Obasogie, Professor of Law
    University of California, Hastings College of the Law

    Professor Obasogie’s research attempts to bridge the conceptual and methodological gaps between empirical and doctrinal scholarship on race. This effort can be seen in his recent work that asks: how do blind people understand race? By engaging in qualitative research with individuals who have been totally blind since birth, this project provides an empirical basis from which to rethink core assumptions embedded in social and legal understandings of race. His first article from this project won the Law & Society Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize in addition to being named runner-up for the Distinguished Article Award by the Sociology of Law Section of the American Sociological Association.  This research provides the basis for Professor Obasogie’s first book, Blinded By Sight, which is forthcoming with Stanford University Press.

    His scholarship also looks at the past and present roles of science in both constructing racial meanings and explaining racial disparities. This is tied to his interest in bioethics, particularly the social, ethical, and legal implications of reproductive and genetic technologies. Obasogie’s second book, Beyond Bioethics: Towards a New Biopolitics (with Marcy Darnovsky) is currently under contract with the University of California Press…

    For more information, click here.

  • Race Medicine: Treating Health Inequities from Slavery to the Genomic Age with Prof. Dorothy Roberts

    Race Medicine: Treating Health Inequities from Slavery to the Genomic Age with Prof. Dorothy Roberts

    Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice
    Brown University
    Steven Robert ’62  Campus Center, Petteruti Lounge
    75 Waterman Street
    Providence, Rhode Island 02912
    Tuesday, 2013-12-10, 17:30 EST (Local Time)

    Dorothy E. Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
    University of Pennsylvania

    Dorothy Roberts is the fourteenth Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania, where she holds appointments in the Law School and Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. Professor Roberts is the author of the award-winning books Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Random House/Pantheon, 1997) and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books/Civitas, 2002), as well as co-editor of six books on constitutional law and gender. She has also published more than eighty articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review. Her latest book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, was published by the New Press in July 2011.

    Professor Roberts has been a professor at Rutgers and Northwestern University, a visiting professor at Stanford and Fordham, and a fellow at Harvard University’s Program in Ethics and the Professions, Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Fulbright Program. She serves as chair of the board of directors of the Black Women’s Health Imperative, on the board of directors of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, and on the advisory boards of the Center for Genetics and Society and the Family Defense Center. She also serves on the Standards Working Group of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (stem cell research). She recently received awards from the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the 2010 Dorothy Ann and Clarence L. Ver Steeg Distinguished Research Fellowship.

    Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice with support from the Associate Provost for Diversity, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, the Office of Medical Education, and the Science and Technology Studies Program.

    For more information, click here.

  • Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind

    Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind

    Stanford University Press
    November 2013
    288 pages
    Cloth ISBN: 9780804772785
    Paper ISBN: 9780804772792

    Osagie K. Obasogie, Professor of Law
    University of California, Hastings College of the Law
    Also University of California, San Francisco, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences

    Colorblindness has become an integral part of the national conversation on race in America. Given the assumptions behind this influential metaphor—that being blind to race will lead to racial equality—it’s curious that, until now, we have not considered if or how the blind “see” race. Most sighted people assume that the answer is obvious: they don’t, and are therefore incapable of racial bias—an example that the sighted community should presumably follow. In Blinded by Sight, Osagie K. Obasogie shares a startling observation made during discussions with people from all walks of life who have been blind since birth: even the blind aren’t colorblind—blind people understand race visually, just like everyone else. Ask a blind person what race is, and they will more than likely refer to visual cues such as skin color. Obasogie finds that, because blind people think about race visually, they orient their lives around these understandings in terms of who they are friends with, who they date, and much more.

    In Blinded by Sight, Obasogie argues that rather than being visually obvious, both blind and sighted people are socialized to see race in particular ways, even to a point where blind people “see” race. So what does this mean for how we live and the laws that govern our society? Obasogie delves into these questions and uncovers how color blindness in law, public policy, and culture will not lead us to any imagined racial utopia.

  • Lenny Kravitz’s Halfway Mark

    Lenny Kravitz’s Halfway Mark

    The New York Times
    2013-12-06

    Amy Chozick, National Political Reporter

    You grew up between the Upper East Side and Bed-Stuy. Which neighborhood did you feel more comfortable in?

    Well, after I was in first grade, Monday through Friday was Upper East Side going to P.S. 6, and Friday night through Sunday night was Bed-Stuy. But I didn’t like one more than the other. I had two different lives, and in fact two different names. My name in Bed-Stuy was Eddie.

    Why?

    These people that lived next door to my grandmother’s were from down South, and they had very thick Southern accents — they were extremely country. I remember being about 6 years old, and they said, “What’s your name, boy?” I said, “Lenny.” They said, “Eddie?” I said, “No, Lenny.” They said, “Eddie?” I said, “Lenny,” and they said, “Oh, Eddie.” So that was it, I was Eddie…

    …Do you think things have changed in terms of being biracial? 

    Kids now and young adults, they don’t even know about this. Say you were 10 years old when Obama first took office; your thing is: What are you talking about? All my friends are mixed, and the music I listen to is mixed…

    …I read that when you started out in the ’80s, producers were telling you your music wasn’t black enough or white enough.

    They would always say, “Look, we’ll sign you, we’d love to give you a deal, but you cannot do this, you have to make this kind of music.” I always told them back off — and believe me, I needed the money. I was living in a car. I still don’t know to this day what stopped me…

    Read the entire interview here.

  • Passing for white and straight: How my looks hide my identity

    Passing for white and straight: How my looks hide my identity

    Salon
    2013-12-08

    Koa Beck
    Brooklyn, New York

    I’m neither straight nor white, but I’m frequently mistaken for both — and it’s taught me a lot about privilege

    I first became aware of my passing as a young child confronted with standardized testing. My second grade teacher had walked us through where to write our names in capital letters and what bubbles to fill in for our sex, our birth date and ethnicity. But in the days before “biracial” or “multiracial” or “choose two or more of the following,” I was confronted with rigid boxes of “white” or “black” – a space that my white father and black-Italian mother had navigated for some time.

    But even at 8 years old, I knew I could mark “white” on the form without a teacher’s assistant telling me to do the form over with my No. 2 pencil. I could sometimes be “exotic” on the playground to the grown-ups who watched us for skinned knees and bad words. But with hair that had yet to curl and a white-sounding last name, I was at first glance – and many after – a dark-haired white girl with a white father who collected her after school…

    …Because with my invisibility has come her privilege, an experience that has undeniably marked most of my life.  Due to my passing, I have the W.E.B. Du Bois-patented “double consciousness” for the opportunities that have been placed before me, scholastic and professional, from generally white and hetero establishments that look at me and always see their own. Is it the presumed commonality that garnered me those interviews? Those smiles? Those callbacks? Those firm handshakes?

    When I read statistics about how employers are more likely to hire white people than people of color, I know that I can count myself in the former, despite the fact that I identify as the latter. I’m hyper-aware that when a bank, a company or any public office hears the sound of my voice and reads my legal first name (under which this article does not appear), they assume that they’re talking to a white woman, and therefore give me better service…

    …My privilege in passing reflects a racism and heterosexism that continues to flourish, despite romantic notions that racial mixing and gay marriage will create a utopian future free of prejudices…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana

    Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana

    University of Illinois Press
    January 2004
    280 pages
    6 x 9 in.
    1 black & white photograph
    Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07149-2

    Translated by:

    Norman R. Shapiro, Professor of French
    Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut

    A collection of the first published works of Creole poets of the 1800s, in French, appearing beside the new English translations by the award-winning translator Norman R. Shapiro

    Creole poets have always eluded easy definition, infusing European poetic forms with Louisiana themes and Native American and African influences to produce an impressive variety of often highly accomplished and always strikingly engaging verses. The first major collection of its kind, Creole Echoes contains over a hundred of these poems by more than thirty different poets—Louisiana residents of European, African, and Caribbean origin.

    The poems gathered here exhibit the Creole poets’ wide range of theme, tone, and sensibility. Somber elegies, whimsical verse, animal fables, love sonnets, odes to nature, curses, polemics, and lauds all find voices here.