Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Native American people is the only race in America that has to prove that they’re Indian…

    “Native American people is the only race in America that has to prove that they’re Indian,” she [Dwanna L. Robertson] quoted one study participant. “If you’re black and you say, ‘I’m black,’ and nobody will question it. If you’re white, you say, ‘I’m white” and nobody questions it, but if you’re Indian they want to see your CDIB [Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood] card. ‘Well, you say you’re Indian (but) let’s see your card.”…

    Carol Berry, “Dwanna L. Robertson: Indian Identity Still Controversial,” Indian Country Today Media Network, (August 28, 2012). http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/08/21/dwanna-l-robertson-indian-identity-still-controversial-130176.

  • Reconstructing Race

    Reconstructing Race

    The Western Historical Quarterly
    Volume 34, Number 1 (Spring, 2003)
    pages 6-26

    Elliott West, Distinguished Professor of History
    University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

    During what might be called the Greater Reconstruction, 1846–1877, territorial acquisitions as well as southern slavery forced a new racial dialogue between West and South, unsettled racial relations and presumptions, and finally led to a new racial order encompassing western as well as southern people of color.

    I live in a town that doesn’t know where it is. Fayetteville is in northwestern Arkansas—that’s clear enough—but when somebody asks us locals to explain just where in this wide republic that is, things get dicey. The architecture and the lovely fall colors suggest the Midwest. The pace of life, the accents, and the studied eccentricities all speak of the South. Some put us elsewhere. At a party soon after I arrived, I told a colleague’s wife my field of study. “Oh, the West is a wonderful place to live!”she said in her soft Carolinian rhythm. I asked when she had lived there. She looked at me, as if at a slow nephew, and answered: “Why, now.”

    Living and working along the seams of national regions is a fine encouragement to wonder about the differences and continuities among them—in appearance, in habits and points of view, and beneath all that, in their histories. Two things I know for sure. The South thinks it is different from the rest of the country, and it is race that southerners use most often to explain their separateness. The tortured relations of black and white, slavery and its rage and guilt, the war that ended slavery and the tormented generations that followed, the centuries-long embrace, intimate and awful on so many levels—all that, we’re told, has set southerners apart and has made the South the central stage of America’s racial drama…

    …If anybody back then was curious about the shiftiness of race relations and categories, they should have visited the area where I live now, the area called at the time “the border,” a southwesterly arc of a thousand miles from western Missouri and eastern Kansas down to what is called the border today, the Rio Grande Valley. Here, where South touched West, was a grand display of the seemingly limitless combinations of racial arrangements and identities. Imagine a tour of the border during the fifteen years after the war. We would start in Kansas with a new look at the Exodusters, whose move from South to West was, paradoxically, both a rejection of, and an aggressive claim to, a traditional racial order. We might listen to the freedman J. H. Williamson praising former slaves as the rightful inheritors of manifest destiny. In cultural terms, he was saying, blacks were whites, and out West they would fulfill the promise of Jamestown and Plymouth, saving the wilderness from those who would never do it justice. “The Indians are savage and will not work,” he argued. “We, the negro race, are a working people” who would, he implied, subdue the land and build towns, churches, and schools. Frederick Douglass also reminded white America of the freedman’s privileged status as an insider. The only reason the African American had not been hunted down like the Indian, he told the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1869, was that “he is so close under your arm, that you cannot get at him.” This closeness, however, had made “the Negro . . . more like the white man than the Indian, in his tastes and tendencies, and disposition to accept civilization. . . . You do not see him wearing a blanket, but coats cut in the latest European fashion.” From Kansas we would move southward into Indian Territory among the Creek freedmen. These former slaves argued, to the contrary, that they were Indians, or at least so mixed in blood and history that distinctions were meaningless. The point was worth making, since being Indian meant keeping the political power and an economic stake that mixed blood leaders were trying to take away. Here we might listen to the ex-slave Warrior Rentie ridiculing his mixed blood opponents, those “Indians, or rather would be Indians, . . . who have the strong vein of Negro blood . . . [men] who hardly know whether [they are] black, red or white.”

    Next we would travel to central Texas into a variation of what Albert Hurtado calls in California an “intimate frontier” full of households of whites, Indians, blacks, Hispanics, and mixes of all four. We would see this familial snarl helping create new social and legal forms on this piece of the border. This troubled region was the temporary home of Buffalo Soldiers, black and Seminole cavalrymen who fought Plains Indians and who also patrolled southward along our final stop, the national boundary with Mexico. Here we would see these blacks and Indians and black Indians clash with Hispanics moving as always back and forth across this porous border.  If our visit was in 1875 we would see the racial ambiguities mixing with changing politics, with bewildering results. When black troops clashed with Mexican Americans not far from Brownsville, Texas, authorities—Redeemer Democrats hardly known for their Hispanic sympathies—suddenly embraced these locals as noble white citizens most dreadfully abused by degraded black invaders sent by foul Republicans. Philip Sheridan shook his head at the confused identities along the stream that itself was always shifting restlessly in its bed. “It is hard to tell who is who, and what is what, on that border, . . .” he wrote William Sherman. “The state of affairs is about as mixed as the river is indefinite as a boundary line.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • “Our America” That is Not One: Transnational Black Atlantic Disclosures in Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes

    “Our America” That is Not One: Transnational Black Atlantic Disclosures in Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes

    Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture
    Volume 22, Number 3 (Fall 2000)
    pages 87-113
    DOI: 10.1353/dis.2000.0007

    Monika Kaup, Associate Professor of English
    University of Washington

    In the past two decades, discontent with the exclusions operative in nationalist frameworks of American and Latin American Studies has placed issues of transnationalism, hybridization, and a diasporic view of cultures at the center of attention. As a provisional academic base for this desire to think more globally, scholars have invented a new tradition, so to speak the transnational and burgeoning field of hemispheric American Studies. Thus, the recent collection, José Martí’s “Our America”: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies, calls for such a change of paradigms. In their introduction, the editors single out Cuba, the birthplace of poet and revolutionary José Martí, as a fertile location for their project:

    For Cuba lies at the intersection of Our America’s two principal transnational cultural formations: the geocultural system we have come to know as the Black Atlantic and the complex region of interactions among the Spanish, Native American, and English peoples (extending from the Caribbean to California) that we have come to call the Latino Borderlands. (Belnap and Fernández 11)

    Cuba’s nationalism, from José Martí and Cuba’s late-19th century Wars of Independence to post-1959 formations under Castro, has always been a mestizo and mulato nationalism. One reason was that in Cuba abolition was not a consequence, but a condition of independence (Sommer, Foundational Fictions 125): in contrast to the U.S. and most of Latin America with the exception of Puerto Rico, Cuba achieved independence only in 1898, thanks to the full participation of Afro-Cubans in the anti-colonial wars against Spain, whose investment in Cuban independence was motivated by their desire for racial justice. Indeed, Cuba’s population in the modern era, “slightly over half Spanish in origin and slightly under half black or mulatto, with a small number of Chinese” (Bethell 20), suggests an encounter of the two distinct NewWorld diasporas known as the “Black Atlantic” and Martí’s Spanish-speaking “Our America” on equal terms.

    While the discourse of mestizaje and racial amalgamation nourishes Cuba’s nationalism, and while the notion of cubanidad is built on the myth of racial synthesis, this symbolic reconciliation has repressed actual and continuing conflicts of race and their memory. Indeed, 20th century Cuban history, culture, and literature bear testimony to the uncanny reassertion of resistant diasporic black voices sublated into the dominant mestizaje nationalism. One major purpose of this essay is to examine the relationship between the Black Atlantic and José Martí’s “Our America” cultural formations intersecting in Cuba, as pointed out in the passage quoted above as a troubled and unstable one. Whereas “Our America” stands for the homecoming of Blacks in the interracial nationalism of Martí’s Latin America, the Black Atlantic stands for the continuing homelessness of Blacks in the Americas, and the memory of exile, displacement, and the violence of the Middle Passage…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice

    The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice

    SUNY Press
    October 2008
    200 pages
    Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-7585-0
    Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-7586-7

    Ronald R. Sundstrom,Professor of Philosophy
    University of San Francisco

    Considers the effects of the browning of America on philosophical debates over race, racism, and social justice.

    This book considers the challenge that the so-called browning of America poses for any discussion of the future of race and social justice. In the philosophy of race there has been little reflection about how the rapid increase in the Latino, Asian American, and mixed-race populations affects the historical demands for racial justice by Native Americans and African Americans. Ronald R. Sundstrom examines how recent demographic shifts bear upon central questions in race theory and social and political philosophy, including color blindness, interracial intimacy, and the future of race.

    Sundstrom cautions that rather than getting caught up in romantic reveries about the browning of America, we should remain vigilant that longstanding claims for racial justice not be washed away.

    Table of Contents

    • Acknowledgments
    • Introduction
    • 1. Frederick Douglass’s Political Apostasy
    • 2. Color Blindness and the Browning of America
    • 3. The Black-White Binary as Racial Anxiety and Demand for Justice
    • 4. Interracial Intimicies: Racism and the Political Romance of the Browning of America
    • 5. Responsible Multiracial Politics
    • Conclusion
    • Notes
    • Bibliography
    • Index

  • Biological Distance and the African American Dentition

    Biological Distance and the African American Dentition

    Ohio State University
    2002
    229 pages

    Heather Joy Hecht Edgar

    A DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

    Gene flow occurs whenever two human populations come in contact. African Americans are the result of gene flow between two biologically disparate groups: West Africans and Americans of European descent. This project utilized characteristics of dental morphology to trace genetic relationships among these three groups. Dental morphological traits are useful for this purpose because they are heritable, do not remodel during life (although they can be lost to wear or pathology), and can be compared equally among samples from past and present populations. The results of this research provide new knowledge about human microevolution in a biocultural setting. By analyzing observations from a variety of samples from African Americans, European Americans, West Africans, and western Europeans, conclusions were made on patterns of genetic change through time and space.

    The specific hypothesis addressed is that since gene flow has been continuous among West Africans, African Americans, and European Americans in the American colonies and subsequently in the United States, the more recent a sample of African Americans observed, the more they tend toward the average, genetically, of West Africans and Europeans. Dental characteristics reflect this heritage and the pattern of temporally limited genetic similarities. In addition to testing this hypothesis, several predictions were made and tested regarding the historical patterns of admixture in African Americans. These predictions involved whether gene flow has occurred at a constant rate, whether African Americans with greater admixture were more likely to take part in the Great Migration, and whether the dental morphology of the Gullah of South Carolina is especially like their West African ancestors.

    The results of this research indicate that while admixture of European American genes into the African American gene pool has been continuous over the last 350 years, it has not occurred at a constant rate. Cultural trends and historical events such as the Civil War and the Jim Crow era affected the rate of admixture. A final product of the current research is a series of probability tables that can be used to determine the likely racial affiliation of an unknown individual. These tables are useful in historic archaeological and forensic settings.

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • Picturing the Mix: Visual and Linguistic Representations in Kip Fulbeck’s Part Asian, 100% Hapa

    Picturing the Mix: Visual and Linguistic Representations in Kip Fulbeck’s Part Asian, 100% Hapa

    Critical Studies in Media Communication
    Volume 29, Issue 5 (2012)
    pages 387-402
    DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2012.691610

    Nicole Miyoshi Rabin
    University of Hawaii, Manoa

    In response to perceived invisibility within a black/white racial paradigm governed by hypodescent, various multiracial people have begun to speak out against a lack of recognition of their multiplicitous identities. Along with state recognition (i.e., the 2000 census), many of these multiracial identity activists desire a sense of community built around racial multiplicity. In an attempt to develop a community, various methods have been employed, and this article focuses on one such implementation of community building. Using a semiotic approach combined with the literary method of close reading, this article will explore and analyze the photographic book project, Part Asian, 100% Hapa, by Kip Fulbeck. The article will examine how an “imagined community” of Hapas is created through the project and photographs themselves, but also how the photos work to homogenize the very multiplicity they seek to represent. I will look at the use of photographs as a means of subverting the common usage of the body as a racial signifier and thereby show the limitations of racial language. Finally, I will explore the linguistic elements of representation: how do the Hapa subjects’ self-descriptions work against or with the photograph and the project as a whole? Thinking about how those photographed in the book respond to the book’s central focus of a stabilized Hapa identity is a critical approach that has the benefit of disrupting the limitations of our racial language, our need for stabilized racial identities, and any homogenization that occurs through the aesthetic project itself. I hope to question the photographic project so that multiracial people can avoid becoming complicit in a new form of racial domination and/or racialization, while also respecting the work that this project has done for Hapas’ visibility.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • The church exists in the wake of this racial world, and for this rea­son mixed bodies still trouble the waters.

    The church exists in the wake of this racial world, and for this rea­son mixed bodies still trouble the waters. Mulattos were bodies that troubled the waters for all of us because they existed on both sides in a space that could not sustain such a possibility. That we no longer char­acterize mixed-race children as mulatto does not mitigate the growing fact of these interracial children. But perhaps even more important, these children continue to pose a problem because the patterns of faith, educa­tion, and marriage still flow along the trenches of a world forged by race. The ambivalence of our racial condition is no clearer than in both the election of a mixed-race president, Barack Obama, as well as in the vehe­ment questioning of his faith, birth, and citizenship. Just as darker and lighter Americans alike are reimagining the possibility of political life in the United States, so too are the numbers of militias swelling, and chants of “we want our country back” growing. The possibility of post-racial is only an illusory bridge. To enter into such divisions we must recognize interracial children and their perpetuation in our own lives in the subtle and glaring ways we seek to reinforce our difference and refuse the pos­sibility of becoming something different.

    Brian Bantum, Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity, (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2010), 9-10.

  • Racial Democracy in the Americas: A Latin and U.S. Comparison

    Racial Democracy in the Americas: A Latin and U.S. Comparison

    Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
    Volume 35, Number 6 (November 2004)
    pages 749-762
    DOI: 10.1177/0022022104270118

    Yesilernis Peña
    University of California, Los Angeles

    Jim Sidanius, Professor of Psychology
    Harvard University

    Mark Sawyer, Professor of Political Science
    University of California, Los Angeles

    The “racial democracy” (Iberian exceptionalism) thesis claims that racial prejudice in Latin America is not only lower than that found in the United States but is essentially absent altogether. We explored the plausibility of this thesis by the use of both explicit and implicit prejudice measures among Blacks and Whites from the United States and three Caribbean nations. In general, the results showed significant racial prejudice against Blacks and in favor of Whites in all four nations. African Americans were the only participants not to show significant implicit prejudice either in favor of or against Blacks. In addition, North Americans (i.e., participants from the United States) displayed lower implicit and explicit racial prejudice than participants in each of the three Latino nations. Overall, the results clearly contradicted the thesis of racial democracy and suggest that Latin America may not be nearly as egalitarian as some have argued.

    The thesis known as “Racial democracy theory” (also referred to as Iberian exceptionalisin) argues that, relative to the United States, the nations of Latin America are largely free of the ferocious racial prejudice that has characterized race relations in the US for most of the 19th and 20th centuries (see Degler, 1986: Freyre 1951: Hoetink, 1967: Pierson, 1942: Tannenbaum, 1947). Racial democracy theorists base these conclusions upon the fact that, compared to North America. the nations of Latin America experienced a marked absence of post-manumission institutionalized racism (e.g.. segregation & Jim Crow laws), a general absence of race-based group violence (e.g.. lynching, race-base hate crimes), or racial protest, and a strikingly high rate of miscegenation. It is argued that, the extent to which racial inequality is still discernible in Latin American societies, this inequality is almost exclusively due to the residual effects of past racially contingent resource allocation and not to the effects of ongoing racial prejudice.

    Racial democracy theorists attribute Latin American’s racial egalitarianism to three major factors. First, unlike the European colonists of North America, the Iberian conquerors of Latin America had the experience of living under the political and social hegemony of the Moors, a dark-skinned people, for nearly 800 years. Having experienced these dark-skinned conquerors as their political and cultural “superiors.” the Iberian colonists could not then regard the dark-skinned African and Indian slaves as sub-human with the same degree of celerity as the North American colonists found possible. Second, contrary to the Calvinist and Puritan doctrines of North American Protestantism. Catholicism regarded Native Americans, and even African Slaves, as people with souls and equally beloved of God: thus, the Catholic conquerors were less aversive to intermixing with them. Finally, in contrast to the colonists of North America, the early Latin American colonists did not venture into the New World with intact families. As a result, the Iberian colonists established sexual and emotional relationships with the Indian and African slave women rather quickly, creating a more positive attitude toward those of African descent and resulting in the high rates of miscegenation we see today in Latin America (Degler, 1986: Freye, 1946. 1951). As a result, they argue that broad based social movements like the Civil Rights movement in the US were not necessary because of the more egalitarian nature of race relations in Latin America…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Law and the Boundaries of Place and Race in Interracial Marriage: Interstate Comity, Racial Identity, and Miscegenation Laws in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, 1860s-1960s

    Law and the Boundaries of Place and Race in Interracial Marriage: Interstate Comity, Racial Identity, and Miscegenation Laws in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, 1860s-1960s

    Akron Law Review
    Volume 32, Number 3 (1999)
    pages 557-575

    Peter Wallenstein, Professor of History
    Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

    In North Carolina in 1869, Wesley Hairston, a black man, and Puss Williams, a white woman, went on trial in Forsythe County for “fornication and adultery.” They claimed they were married, but the judge instructed the jury that no such marriage could be valid in North Carolina. When the jury convicted both defendants, they appealed the judge’s instruction and the jury’s verdict. The North Carolina Supreme Court dashed their hopes when it declared: “The only question in this case is, whether the intermarriage of whites and blacks is lawful.” A unanimous appeals court rejected the “pretended marriage” and upheld the convictions.

    Hairston and Williams did not see their convictions as consistent with the facts. They thought they had both contracted a marriage and found instead that they had each committed a felony. Other couples ran into similar problems. Brought to court, some argued that they had entered a valid marriage and, having moved into another state, they should not be subject to the enforcement of its laws against interracial marriage. Others, challenging the premise that they did not share one racial identity, argued that, since they were both black or both white, the miscegenation law should not reach their marriage.

    This essay draws from case materials in three states to explore two of the main problems in enforcing—or escaping conviction under—laws in the United States against interracial marriage during the hundred years after the Civil War. Questions of interstate comity and racial identity, though not both involved in every miscegenation case, would remain issues in many such cases as long as laws against interracial marriage remained in effect. Only in 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia and declared such laws unconstitutional, would the boundaries of race and place no longer have any bearing on the law of marriage between a man of one race and a woman of another…

    …3. But What Race Is She Really?

    In October 1881, John Crawford and Maggie Dancey went on trial for violating South Carolina’s new law against interracial marriage. After courting in North Carolina, they had decided to marry. The couple had heard that North Carolina had a stringent law against their doing so but, believing that South Carolina had no such law, they thought they had a remedy. Crawford moved back south across the state line to his home in York County, and Dancey soon followed from her family’s home in Mooresville, just north of Charlotte. They approached a black preacher, Edward Lindsay, about their wishes, and he assured them that they could marry in South Carolina. The ceremony took place, and their arrests soon followed.

    The newlyweds’ marriage did not involve the question of comity, but it definitely involved another thorny issue, the question of racial identity. John Crawford testified that the fair-skinned woman he had married came from a family that, back in her hometown, was regarded as mixed-race. He had seen his wife’s grandmother, a “bright mulatto,” he said. The family attended a black church, associated only with African Americans, and despite their color, seemed to fall on the black side of the great racial divide. The couple’s argument was that, even though Maggie was of “fair complexion,” with “flaxen or light auburn hair and light blue eyes,” she was black just the same as her “dark mulatto” husband. If proved, the couple had not, after all, broken the law.

    The fact that the only evidence in the case consisted of the defendants’ own testimony left the court perplexed. Because Maggie Dancey went on trial some distance from her family’s residence, no local witnesses could help the court with testimony regarding the Dancey family’s racial reputation. The judge called upon a white medical doctor, W. J. Whyte, to offer his expert testimony, but the doctor, after a brief examination in the waning light of day, reported the woman’s identity difficult to pin down. The judge held the trial over to the next morning. The doctor tried again but complained that the microscope with which he examined the woman’s hair and skin seemed inadequate to the task. If forced to choose, he held to his original opinion that Maggie Dancey was a white woman, but he could not be certain.

    The judge put the matter in the hands of the jury. He told them that if they were unsure, they should resolve their doubt in favor of the woman. After an hour’s deliberation, the jury reported its verdict. Maggie Dancey was white, and John Crawford was not. Both were guilty…

    Read the entire article here.

  • “Slave genes” myth must die

    “Slave genes” myth must die

    Salon
    2012-07-24

    Amy Bass, Associate Professor of History
    The College of New Rochelle, New Rochelle, New York

    Michael Johnson links African-American sprinters to slavery, and revisits a particularly ugly pseudo-science

    In 1988, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder (in)famously stated that the prowess of African-American football players could be traced to slavery, saying “the black is a better athlete to begin with because he’s been bred to be that way … [They] jump higher and run faster.” The reaction to such obviously racist remarks was fast and furious: Amid the uproar, CBS Sports fired him. So when Olympic gold medalist Michael Johnson predicted this month that African-American and West Indian track athletes would dominate the London Olympics because of the genes of their slave ancestors, I paid little attention, thinking there was no way this could become a viable conversation yet again. “All my life I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it’s impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn’t left an imprint through the generations,” Johnson told the Daily Mail. “Difficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendants like me—I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us.”

    As a historian, what I find to be stunning about what he said is the claim that the supremacy of black athletes in track had never “been discussed openly before.” Actually, with his words, Johnson plunged himself into a century-old debate that seems to rear its (rather ugly) head every four years, just in time for the opening of sport’s largest global stage. Johnson supported his theory with the example of the men’s 100m final at the Beijing Olympics: Three of the eight finalists came from Jamaica, including record-breaking winner Usain Bolt, and two from Trinidad; African-Americans Walter Dix and Doc Patton and Dutch sprinter Churandy Martina, who hails from Curacao, rounded out the line.

    But racial assumptions don’t work as easily as simply noting that four years ago all eight finalists in the quest to be “world’s fastest man” likely had ancestors who were slaves, because race is, well, never simple, but rather works as an amoebic identity formation that changes throughout history. It’s a social construction deeply entangled with definitions of class, gender, sexuality and so on…

    …Such scientists first engaged in racialized theories of athletic aptitude in the 1930s, during the large-scale breakthrough of African-Americans in track and field:  following DeHart Hubbard’s gold medal at the Paris Olympics in 1924; the success stories of Ed Gordon, Eddie Tolan and Ralph Metcalfe; and, of course, Jesse Owens’ legendary performance at the Berlin Games in 1936. Although the number of African-American track champions would greatly decline in subsequent decades, the belief in some sort of quantifiable connection between race and physical ability would not wane, with scientists creating comparative analyses between “white” and “black” calf muscles, bone densities, heel lengths and so on. “Is there some difference between Negroes and white in proportions of the body,” asked Iowa State physical educator Eleanor Metheny, “which gives the Negro an advantage in certain types of athletic performance?”

    While one such study was plagued with what to do about subjects of “mixed parentage,” and Metheny admitted that “Negro” was heterogeneous by its very constitution, few scientists defined “Negro” or “white” beyond skin color, never pausing to wonder how they quantified categories that were subjective to begin with.  These scientists easily translated the racially infused stereotypes of the 19thcentury minstrel stage, in which physical traits such as fat lips, wide-open red mouths and large noses existed alongside the perceived innate ability to dance and sing, to have athletic bodies.  In doing so, these studies – which took place in labs at Harvard, Vanderbilt and Duke – produced some of sport’s most venerable racist convictions: Black athletes are more adept at sprinting, more relaxed, make better running backs than quarterbacks, and jump farther, all of which reduced their athleticism to a solely physical condition with no room for intellectual capacity, training nor discipline.

    One notable exception was W. Montague Cobb, Howard University, the first black physical anthropologist in the United States. His extensive work on “the physical anthropology of the American Negro” never referenced slavery directly, but did make several assertions regarding the environmental and physical challenges African-Americans historically faced as a means for survival in the modern world. Yet Cobb, whose most famous subject was Owens himself, refused to simplify the complexities of race, which he insisted could not be a fixed category because of “interbreeding.” Indeed, he concluded, Owens was more “Caucasoid rather than Negroid in type” based on measurements of his foot, heel bone and calves. Jesse Owens, according to Cobb, did not have the body of a “Negro star.”…

    Read the entire article here.