Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Prematurity and Low Birth Weight as Potential Mediators of Higher Stillbirth Risk in Mixed Black/White Race Couples

    Prematurity and Low Birth Weight as Potential Mediators of Higher Stillbirth Risk in Mixed Black/White Race Couples

    Journal of Women’s Health
    Volume 19, Issue 4 (2010-04-26)
    pages 767–773.
    DOI:  10.1089/jwh.2009.1561

    Katherine J. Gold, M.D., M.S.W., M.S.
    University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

    Sonya M. DeMonner, M.P.H.
    University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

    Paula M. Lantz, Ph.D.
    University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

    Rodney A. Hayward, M.D.
    University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

    Objective: Although births of multiracial and multiethnic infants are becoming more common in the United States, little is known about birth outcomes and risks for adverse events. We evaluated risk of fetal death for mixed race couples compared with same race couples and examined the role of prematurity and low birth weight as potential mediating risk factors.

    Methods: We performed a retrospective cohort analysis using data from the 1998–2002 California Birth Cohort to evaluate the odds of fetal death, low birth weight, and prematurity for couples with a mother and father who were categorized as either being of same or different racial groups. Risk of prematurity (birth prior to 37 weeks gestation) and low birth weight (<2500 g) were also tested to see if the model could explain variations among groups.

    Results: The analysis included approximately 1.6 million live births and 1749 stillbirths. In the unadjusted model, compared with two white parents, black/black and black/white couples had a significantly higher risk of fetal death. When all demographic, social, biological, genetic, congenital, and procedural risk factors except gestational age and birth weight were included, the odds ratios (OR) were all still significant. Black/black couples had the highest level of risk (OR 2.11, CI 1.77-2.51), followed by black mother/white father couples (OR 2.01, CI 1.16-3.48), and white mother/black father couples (OR 1.84, CI 1.33-2.54). Virtually all of the higher risk of fetal death was explainable by higher rates of low birth weight and prematurity.

    Conclusions: Mixed race black and white couples face higher odds of prematurity and low birth weight, which appear to contribute to the substantially higher demonstrated risk for stillbirth. There are likely additional unmeasured factors that influence birth outcomes for mixed race couples.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Racial Passing in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain

    Racial Passing in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain

    A Vertentes
    Universidade Federal de São João del Rei
    Volume 19, Number 2
    13 pages

    Maria Luiza Cardoso de Aguiar
    Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

    The so-called racial passing is defined, mainly, as a phenomenon through which black people who are light-skinned pass for whites, in order to achieve social and economic advantages which are usually more easily available to white people. Based on problematizations around the concepts of passing, the present article intends to analyze, comparatively, two important works from the 20th century: The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912/1989), written by James Weldon Johnson, and The Human Stain (2000), written by Philip Roth. The analysis of these works aims at investigating how the issue of passing is portrayed in each of the novels, in order to highlight the fact that, although the protagonists at stake share many similarities, such as the desire to free themselves from the decisiveness of pre-established categories like race, the experience of passing is heterogeneous and it is differently constructed and operated in each of the novels.

    O chamado passing racial trata, principalmente, do fenômeno no qual negros de pele mais clara e de traços mestiços se passam por pessoas brancas, a fim de, mais comumente, conseguirem vantagens sociais e econômicas, frequentemente mais acessíveis aos brancos do que aos negros. A partir de problematizações em torno dos conceitos de passing, o presente trabalho visa a analisar comparativamente duas importantes obras da literatura norte-americana do século XX: The autobiography of an ex-colored man (1912/1989), de James Weldon Johnson, e The human stain (2000), de Philip Roth. Pretende-se investigar como a questão do passing é retratada em cada uma das obras, a fim de se destacar que, apesar de os protagonistas em questão apresentarem muitas similaridades e desejarem que categorias pré-estabelecidas não sejam decisivas em suas trajetórias, a experiência do passing é heterogênea, sendo construída e operada diferentemente em cada um dos romances.

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Correspondence Between Interracial Births and Multiple-Race Reporting

    The Correspondence Between Interracial Births and Multiple-Race Reporting

    American Journal of Public Health
    Volume 92, Number 12 (December 2002)
    pages 1976–1981

    Jennifer D. Parker, PhD
    Office of Analysis, Epidemiology, and Health Promotion
    National Center for Health Statistics, Hyattsville, Maryland

    Jennifer H. Madans, PhD, OD Co-Deputy Director / OD Associate Director for Science / OPBL Associate Director
    Office of Surveillance, Epidemiology, and Laboratory Services
    Centers for Disease Control

    • Objectives. Race-specific health statistics are routinely reported in scientific publications; most describe health disparities across groups. Census 2000 showed that 2.4% of the US population identifies with more than 1 race group. We examined the hypothesis that multiple-race reporting is associated with interracial births by comparing parental race reported on birth certificates with reported race in a national health survey.
    • Methods. US natality data from 1968 through 1998 and National Health Interview Survey data from 1990 through 1998 were compared, by year of birth.
    • Results. Overall multiple-race survey responses correspond to expectations from interracial births. However, there are discrepancies for specific multiple-race combinations.
    • Conclusions. Projected estimates of the multiple-race population can be only partially informed by vital records. (Am J Public Health. 2002;92:1976–1981)

    Eliminating racial disparities is an important national health objective; as a result, many policy and summary reports report race-specific health statistics to monitor trends and identify problem areas. Scientific research papers analyze race-specific data in hopes of understanding the disparities and, ultimately, finding ways to reduce them.

    In 1997, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a revision to the long-standing directive for the collection of race and ethnicity data within the federal statistical system, known as OMB-15. Among other modifications designed to reflect the changing racial and ethnic profile in the United States, the 1997 standard requires that new data collections allow individuals to report 1 or more race groups when responding to a query on their racial identity. Analysts examining previously available data hypothesized that up to 2% of respondents to surveys or administrative collections would report 2 or more groups under the new standard. About 2.4% of the US population, nearly 7 million people, reported 2 or more race groups in the 2000 decennial census.

    The impact of multiple-race reporting on statistics used for health policy and research is not yet known. It is likely that multiple-race respondents differ from each other and from their single-race counterparts on many measures of health and access to care. The extent of these differences will depend on many factors. All considered, multiple-race reporting will influence public health policy for both the newly tabulated multiple-race groups and the remaining single-race groups, which will be changed as a result of a wider choice of racial identification. Interracial births have increased over the past 3 decades. In the early 1970s, 1.4% of infants were born to parents who reported different race groups; by 1998, this percentage had increased to 4.3%. It would be reasonable to assume that individuals with parents of different races would identify with and report more than 1 group when responding to surveys and other data collections. However, how interracial births affect multiple-race reporting is unclear.

    This report compares year- and race-specific national estimates of interracial births with year-specific survey estimates of multiple-race reporting. We compared the distribution of parental race for births from 1968 through 1998 with the reporting of more than 1 race for survey respondents in the 1990–1998 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) who were born from 1968 through 1998. If all individuals with interracial parents reported both race groups on the survey, we would expect the distribution of multiple-race responses on the NHIS to coincide with the distribution of interracial births from birth records for the appropriate age–year combination. For example, the race distribution for births in 1970 would correspond to the race reported among the respondents who were aged 20 years in the 1990 NHIS, who were 21 in the 1991 NHIS, and so on. We would also expect that the inclusion of individuals with 1 or both parents who themselves identify with more than 1 race group may increase the percentages of multiple-race responses in the NHIS even more. Although neither the NHIS nor the birth certificate were developed to provide national race distributions, both data sources are routinely used to provide national estimates of races-specific health outcomes…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Interracial births in Baltimore, 1950-1964

    Interracial births in Baltimore, 1950-1964

    Public Health Reports
    Volume 81, Number 11 (November 1966)
    pages 967-971

    Sidney M. Norton, Director of the Bureau of Vital Records
    Baltimore City Health Department, Baltimore, Maryland

    Also Assistant, Department of Chronic Diseases
    School of Hygiene and Public Health
    Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

    During the course of routine, periodic examinations of birth certificates for accuracy and completeness, the Bureau of Vital Records in the Baltimore City Health Department has observed an increasing number of interracial births in Baltimore from year to year over the past decade. Although such births do not occur in large numbers, they are indicative of a contemporary social phenomenon which is taking place in numerous U.S. urban areas.

    In Baltimore this social phenomenon is manifested by children born to white and Negro parents, white and Filipino parents, and white and oriental parents. These children represent the legitimate issue of interracial marriages and, to a lesser extent, the natural offspring of unwed parents.

    The bona fide interracial unions are of special interest because Maryland law prohibits the intermarriage of a white person and a Negro to the third generation, a white person and a member of the Malay race, and a Negro to the third generation and a member of the Malay race. (On March 28, 1966, the Maryland House of Delegates defeated a bill previously passed by the State Senate to repeal the 305-year-old law prohibiting white-Negro marriages and the 1935 amendment which broadened the original statute by further prohibiting marriages between whites or Negroes with members of the Malay race.)

    There is no provision in the statute which prohibits Japanese-white, Chinese-white, or Chinese-Negro marriages. Obviously, the marriages prohibited in Maryland were contracted in jurisdictions which have no racial restrictions.

    Maryland is 1 of 19 States which have an anti-miscegenation statute, a law prohibiting white-Negro marriages. With the exception of the Union of South Africa, no other country has such a law. The legislation prohibiting the marriage of Malays with white persons or Negroes in Maryland is aimed specifically at Filipinos, who are said to represent many different racial and cultural backgrounds.

    Despite this interdiction, resident Filipinos and white women have been intermarrying outside of Maryland with increasing frequency over the past several years. Many of the Filipinos in Baltimore are physicians who have come for postgraduate training in medicine. As for other mixed marriages, white persons and American Indians marry frequently and without any legal restrictions. Also noteworthy are the great numbers of U.S. military personnel who married Chinese, Japanese, and Korean women as well as the numbers of Negro servicemen, particularly those who were stationed in England and Germany, who married white women and subsequently brought their wives to the United States.

    This study was undertaken to determine the complete incidence of interracial births in Baltimore from 1950 to 1964 by racial origin, country of birth, ages of parents, occupation of father, and legitimacy status of the child. When an interracial birth occurs in a Baltimore hospital, as did all those reported here, the medical records staff doublechecks to assure the accuracy of the registration…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Interracial marriages in Maryland

    Interracial marriages in Maryland

    Public Health Reports
    Volume 85, Number 8 (August 1970)
    pages 739-747

    Sidney M. Norton, Director of the Bureau of Vital Records
    Baltimore City Health Department, Baltimore, Maryland

    Also Lecturer, Department of Chronic Diseases
    School of Hygiene and Public Health
    Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

    A Statistical Report

    Nullification of all miscegenation legislation in Maryland became effective June 1, 1967, by action of the Maryland General Assembly in September 1966. Laws were repealed(a) penalizing ministers who had united persons of the white and Negro races in marriage and (b) prohibiting marriages between the white and Negro races and members of the Malay race. The State of Maryland took more than 300 years to remove from its statutes the law banning marriages between whites and Negroes—an act the Supreme Court subsequently held had infringed on an individual’s freedom of choice to marry, which should not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations.

    Methodology

    The data in my report refer to recorded interracial marriages in the State from June 1, 1967, to December 31, 1968. I have emphasized the types of intermarriages occurring most frequently: (a) those between whites and Negroes, (b) between whites and Orientals, and (c) between whites and members of the Malay race.

    The following procedures are observed in all marriage license bureaus in the State. Either of the contracting parties may apply for the license. After the couple is sworn in by a clerk of the court, the marriage laws of Maryland are quoted to them, and a series of questions relating to the prospective groom and bride are asked. Their replies are given under oath and entered on the application form for the marriage license by the clerk of the court. The questions include name, residence, age, color, nativity, marital status, and information concerning former marriages, if any.

    Criteria used to identify and classify the various races were based on guidelines established for court clerks when issuing marriage licenses to couples of different races. The following racial delineations were contained in a memorandum from a Maryland deputy attorney general to the clerk of the Court of Common Pleas in Baltimore:

    • The white race is made up of the Caucasian peoples of the world.
    • The Negro race is the black race.
    • The yellow race is made up of the Mongolian peoples and includes the Chinese and Japanese.
    • The Malay race is the brown race and includes the inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula and Oceania. The Polynesian race is a branch of the Malay race.
    • The red race is made up of the American Indians.

    The directive also stated that under Maryland law, the following persons may legally intermarry:

    • Persons of the white race with persons of the red and yellow races.
    • Persons of the yellow race with persons of the white, Malay, red, and Negro races.
    • Persons of the Negro race with persons of the red and yellow races.
    • Malayans with persons of the red and yellow races.
    • Persons of the red race with persons of the white, Negro, Malay, and yellow races.
    • Persons of the same race.

    The following statutory provisions relate to marriages in Maryland: (a) the minimum age at marriage is 18 years for a man and 16 years for a woman except if the woman is pregnant or has given birth to a child and (b) the clerk of any court in which a marriage is licensed or recorded is required to transmit a report of eachmarriage to the State department of health.

    Records of marriages filed with the Maryland State Department of Health during the study period were investigated to ascertain the number and types of interracial marriages and to analyze particular characteristics of grooms and brides (age, marital status, and resident status), political subdivision of the State in which the marriage had taken place, and type of ceremony for each such marriage.

    Results

    Of the 512 interracial marriages in Maryland from June 1, 1967, through December 31, 1968 (table 1), 310 were between whites and Negroes. Twice as many Negro men and white women intermarried as white men and Negro women. For the first 7 months of the study (June 1 through December 31, 1967), the ratio of Negro men marrying white women, compared with white men marrying Negro women, was 2.6 to 1; in 1968 the proportion was 1.8 to 1.

    White-Malay marriages occurred 1.6 times more often between Malay grooms and white brides than between white grooms and Malay brides. The ratio between these two types of unions was slightly higher for the 7-month period in 1967 than in 1968. About an equal number of white men married Oriental women (46) as Oriental men (44) selected white women…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Unraveling the Concept of Race in Brazil: Issues for the Rio de Janeiro Cooperative Agreement Site

    Unraveling the Concept of Race in Brazil: Issues for the Rio de Janeiro Cooperative Agreement Site

    Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
    Volume 30,  Issue 3, 1998 
    Special Issue: HIV/AIDS Interventions For Out-of-Treatment Drug Users
    pages 255-260
    DOI: 10.1080/02791072.1998.10399700

    Hilary L. Surratt
    The Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies
    University of Delaware

    James A. Inciardi (1939-2009), Co-Director of the Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies; Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice
    University of Delaware

    Scholars throughout the Americas have spent much of the 20th century studying race and its meaning in Brazil. Racial identities in Brazil are dynamic concepts which can only be understood if situated and explored within the appropriate cultural context. Empirical evidence of the fluidity of racial identification quickly came to the authors’ attention within the context of a prevention initiative targeting segments of the Rio de Janeiro population at high risk for HIV/AIDS. Because the main objective of this program was to slow the spread of AIDS through an intervention designed to promote behavioral change, comparisons of client data at the baseline and follow-up assessments for the core of the analyses. Through quality control procedures used to link client information collected at different points in time, it was revealed that 106 clients, or 12.5% of the follow-up sample, had changed their racial self-identification. The authors’ attempts to engage project staff in a dialogue about the fluidity of racial identity among these clients have provided some insight into what might be called the “contextual redefinition” of race in Brazil. Within the framework of this study, the ramifications of this phenomenon are clear. Racial comparisons of HIV risk, sexual activity, drug use, and behavioral change, which are part and parcel of U.S.-based research, would appear to be of little utility in this setting.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • When Ethnic Ambiguity Becomes a Privilege

    When Ethnic Ambiguity Becomes a Privilege

    SunDryed Affairs
    2011-06-08

    Wendell Hassan Marsh

    Taking a look at recent box office results, it is the ethnically ambiguous star and ambiguously ethnic films that appear to be making bank.

    Ambiguity reaches around and hugs the color line while supporting the weight of overlapping identities. It’s not a question of black or white, but black and white, and Asian, and Latino, and Muslim, and gay ad infinitum.

    Take Fast Five for example. The entire Fast and Furious franchise has been celebrated as a celebration of today’s multicultural pluralism. This iteration in particular with its romps in Brazilian favelas practically makes ethnic ambiguity a theme.

    The two leading forces at odds in the film are Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson, two of the most ethnically ambiguous figures in Hollywood most can think of. Even though the ethnically ambiguous man on the run (Diesel) dukes it out with the ethnically ambiguous G-man (Johnson) in some incredible fight scenes, they eventually put their differences aside long enough to stick it to the unambiguously corrupt (kind of) white power structure in Brazil.

    But to make it happen, they have to assemble, you guessed it, an ethnically ambigious team who “can fit in everywhere” as one sequence says showing a tanned Asian guy (Sung Kang) with long, California boy hair. There’s also the sexy former Mossad (Israeli intelligence) agent who he falls in love with while flying down the German Autobahn on the way to Tokyo. Then of course you have the two brothers (of both the blood and the black variety), but they are speaking Spanish! Throw in a few more race-bending Latinos and a couple of old-school American Negro types and you have quite the ethnically ambiguous party!…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Racial Identity and the Shadow of Jim Crow in the Black Community

    Racial Identity and the Shadow of Jim Crow in the Black Community

    (1)ne Drop Project
    2013-10-07

    Kimberly Bernita Ross
    Michigan State University

    My grandmother Bernice was born in New Orleans in 1918 to a Black mother and a White father at a time when interracial marriage was illegal. Her mother, Roseanna, a maid in a White home, had a relationship with her employer’s son. Grandma Bernice was born with blue eyes, straight hair, and white skin, and was raised by a brown-skinned mother in the Jim Crow south. Her life was marred with instances of social confusion, isolation and abuse from others because society was not prepared to handle racial ambiguity. To say however, that Grandma Bernice was merely the iconic tragic mulatto, as depicted in 19th century American literature, like Nella Larsen’s novels, Quicksand and Passing, would simplify her experience and bypass an opportunity to analyze racial identity. These depictions, at times, reduce struggles with racial identity to individual human drama, divorcing this inner conflict, from the racist society that created it. Today, at a time when some people seem to have race fatigue, the truth is, as we continue to become a more cosmopolitan world, it would be to our collective advantage to become more race savvy, beginning by looking at the past. My grandmother’s story reveals the impact of state imposed identity and how in the Black community, racism and Jim Crow still overshadow our relationships and perceptions of racial identity…

    Read the entire essay here.

  • Tell Me a Story: Genomics vs. Indigenous Origin Narratives

    Tell Me a Story: Genomics vs. Indigenous Origin Narratives

    GeneWatch
    Council for Responsible Genetics
    Volume 26, Number 4, Religion & Genetics (Aug-Oct 2013)
    pages 11-13

    Kim TallBear, Associate Professor of Anthropology
    University of Texas, Austin

    On April 13, 2005 the Indigenous Peoples’ Council on Biocolonialism issued a press release opposing the Genographic Project, which aimed to sample 100,000 indigenous and other traditional peoples to “trace the migratory history of the human species” and “map how the Earth was populated.” IPCB critiques Genographic, and the Human Genome Diversity Project before it, as the contemporary continuation of colonial, extractive research. The analysis is also a fundamental historical examination of Western science. IPCB foregrounds the intellectual and institutional authority that science, a powerful tool of colonizing states, has to appropriate indigenous bodies – both dead and living – material cultural artifacts, and indigenous cultural narratives in the service of academic knowledge production.

    Critics point out that such knowledge rarely serves indigenous peoples’ interests and can actively harm them. In the 19th and early 20th centuries massacre sites and graves were plundered for body parts to be used in scientific investigations that inform today’s anthropological and biological research on Native Americans. Throughout the 20th century, indigenous peoples around the world witnessed the too common practice of “helicopter research” – quick sampling without return of results or benefit to subjects. Indigenous DNA samples and data taken in earlier decades when ethics standards were lax continue to be used and cited in contemporary investigations, bringing those injustices into the 21st century. And new, more ethical research still takes time from other pressing projects and needs. Informed community review and collaboration with researchers will increase community benefit, but informed participation has costs. It takes resources to build capacity to sit at the table as equals instead of as vulnerable subjects – as simply the raw materials for science…

    Read the entire article here.

  • New recognition for first black U.S. doctor with medical degree

    New recognition for first black U.S. doctor with medical degree

    American Medical News
    2010-11-08

    Kevin B. O’Reilly

    Dr. James McCune Smith’s descendants unveiled a new headstone in a ceremony to commemorate his achievements as a physician, essayist and abolitionist.

    The New York City burial site of the nation’s first black medical degree-holder received a new headstone—one provided by his white descendants in a recent public ceremony.

    Dr. James McCune Smith received his medical degree at the University of Glasgow in Scotland in 1837, forced to go overseas for his education due to U.S. colleges’ racist admissions policies. Historians say the training provided at European medical schools at that time was, ironically, superior to that offered in the U.S.

    Greta Blau, Dr. Smith’s great-great-great-granddaughter, learned that she was descended from the doctor after finding his name inscribed in a family Bible. She recognized the name from a history paper she had written years earlier in college.

    After confirming the family connection through genealogical research, Blau learned that Dr. Smith’s five surviving children passed, lived and identified as white in society after he died in 1865.

    Dr. Smith treated both black and white patients in New York City. He was the first black doctor to write a medical case report—presented to the New York Medical and Surgical Society in 1840.

    He also was the first black physician to have a medical scientific paper published, in the New York Journal of Medicine in 1844, and was a prominent essayist who attacked slavery and racial theories positing blacks’ inferiority. He was a friend of Frederick Douglass and wrote the introduction to his 1855 autobiography…

    Read the entire article here.