Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Tag: The Abusable Past

Hence, even if mixed-race identity is assumed to be the organizing principle, it is anti-Blackness and the systemic striving to achieve whiteness that operates as the driving force of Puerto Rican society.

2020-06-26

Puerto Rico, a colony of the United States since 1898―and a colony of Spain for 400 years before ―was very much subjected, by the empires and local criollo elites, to eugenicist ideas. “Race” science, in the first-half of the twentieth century, allowed criollo elites to create new racializing parameters while inserting “progressive” measures of social…
Shilling for U.S. Empire: The Legacies of Scientific Racism in Puerto Rico

2020-06-26

Marein’s article disregards this long history of U.S. imperialism through anthropometrics to argue that after the U.S. “annexation” of Puerto Rico, the lives of Puerto Ricans improved substantially. The author uses anthropometrics to construct his argument without understanding and questioning the long history of scientific racism in the archipelago or in his own methodology.