{"id":11852,"date":"2011-01-31T00:00:07","date_gmt":"2011-01-31T00:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11852"},"modified":"2011-01-31T00:07:30","modified_gmt":"2011-01-31T00:07:30","slug":"black-and-white-the-relevance-of-race-unfinished-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11852","title":{"rendered":"Black and White: The Relevance of Race-Unfinished Business"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black and White: The Relevance of Race-Unfinished Business<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi chapter at Agusta State University<\/a>
\nActivities for Fall 2001
\n2001-10-05
\n5 pages<\/p>\n

Christopher Murphy
\n<\/strong>Department of History and Anthropology
\nAugusta State University, Augusta, Georgia<\/em><\/p>\n

Several centuries ago, as Europeans first explored the distant, unknown reaches of the globe, it became clear that populations around the world differed enormously in appearance and behavior. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the emerging study of anthropology undertook to carefully measure and describe these physical variations and scientifically classify the \u201craces\u201d of humankind, as they were called, based on the results.<\/p>\n

Initially, the criteria of racial classification were based on relatively rough and ready observable traits: skin color, body configuration, facial features, hair form, measurements of skull shape and volume and so on. Eventually, anthropologists recognized a people\u2019s customary learned patterns of behavior as separate from their physique. Among social scientists customary behavior came to be called culture and physical characteristics came to be known as race…<\/p>\n

…Anthropologist Conrad Kottak<\/a> has pointed out an interesting aspect of social race attribution connected to interracial mating. When such matings occurred, the offspring was routinely assimilated to the race of the minority parent, a phenomenon Kottak calls \u201chypodescent<\/a>\u201d. This practice was undoubtedly caused in part by the fantasy fear of whites that interracial unions would somehow \u201cdilute\u201d or \u201ccorrupt\u201d the racial qualities which many of them believed had led to their dominance. If whites were superior people, the founders of modern civilization as they liked to believe, only disaster could follow from such intimacy between the races.<\/p>\n

Preventing all sexual contact between races and consequent miscegenation proved impossible, but putative racial purity had more than one line of defense. By clearly identifying the mixed race offspring as \u201cBlack\u201d with the disabilities that status then carried, hypodescent ensured that these individuals could not enter the white world since the races lived in parallel, but unequal, social universes. If not for this practice, which was reinforced by law in some states and custom everywhere until after the Civil Rights movement<\/a>, it might have been possible that the child\u2019s status would follow that of the superordinate parent…<\/p>\n

Read the entire paper here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Black and White: The Relevance of Race-Unfinished Business The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi chapter at Agusta State University Activities for Fall 2001 2001-10-05 5 pages Christopher Murphy Department of History and Anthropology Augusta State University, Augusta, Georgia Several centuries ago, as Europeans first explored the distant, unknown reaches of the globe, it became […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,459,8,14,20],"tags":[5353,5352],"class_list":["post-11852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-history","category-media-archive","category-papers","category-usa","tag-augusta-state-university","tag-christopher-murphy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11852\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}