{"id":2960,"date":"2009-11-10T02:09:11","date_gmt":"2009-11-10T02:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=2960"},"modified":"2011-11-14T02:56:20","modified_gmt":"2011-11-14T02:56:20","slug":"genealogy-as-social-memory-making-the-public-personal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=2960","title":{"rendered":"Genealogy as Social Memory: Making the Public Personal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Genealogy as Social Memory: Making the Public Personal<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The 7th Annual Committee on Historical Studies, Sociology Department and International Labor Working Class History Journal Joint Conference
\nHistory Matters: Spaces of Violences, Spaces of Memory<\/em>
\nNew School for Social Research
\n2004-04-23 through 2004-04-24<\/p>\n

Karla Hackstaff<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of Sociology
\nNorthern Arizona University<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cRace, like nature and sex, is replete with all the rituals of guilt and innocence in the stories of nation, family, and species. Race, like nature, is about roots, pollution, and origins. An inherently dubious notion, race, like sex, is about the purity of lineage; the legitimacy of passage; and the drama of inheritance of bodies, property, and stories\u201d
\n(Haraway 1995, p. 213).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In May 2002, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation which runs Monticello and is comprised of the descendants of Thomas<\/a> and Martha Jefferson voted to deny membership and associated burial rights to the descendants of Sally Hemings<\/a>\u2014a slave who appears to have had children by Thomas Jefferson<\/a> (San Francisco Chronicle, May 12, 2002, p. D4<\/em>).\u00a0 This decision was somewhat surprising because in 1998 genetic tests appeared to confirm what Hemings\u2019 relatives had claimed through oral history for years\u2014that at least one, if not all, of Sally Hemings\u2019 children had descended from Thomas Jefferson. Still, the white descendants concluded that the historical and scientific evidence was \u201cinsufficient.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…First, within sociology there is a large and growing literature on the formation of racial\/ethnic identities, relations, and the accompanying constructions of inequalities (e.g. Azoulay 1997; Brah and Coombes 2000; Collins 2000; DaCosta 2000; Haraway 1995; Nagel 1994; Omi and Winant 1994; Pedraza and Rumbaut 1996; Song 2001; Waters 1990; Worchel 1999). Given that race, ethnicity, and nationality organize many genealogical associations, clearly, race and ethnicity are constructed in the process of doing genealogy. Although \u2018race\u2019 as a biological construction has been widely rejected, it is no less real for being a social construction. As many scholars have shown, racialethnic constructions must be sustained, and are neither invariant nor universal.\u00a0 Ethnoracial identities are sustained through various practices, policies, and institutions\u2014including families.\u00a0 Because interracial relations have been taboo, we still assume and to a large degree produce families that appear monoracial (DaCosta 2000). Intermarriage has grown substantially in recent decades\u2014there were ten times as many couples categorized as interracial in 1990 as had been the case in 1960; still, in 1990 interracial marriages were just three percent of all marriages in the United Stated (DaCosta 2000, p. 9-10). By 2000, six percent of marriage households were interracial (Simmons and O\u2019Connell 2003). \u00a0The practices of adoption agencies and sperm banks often, if not always, produce monoracial families as well. In short, ethnoracial identities continue to be crucial to family constructions…<\/p>\n

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

Genealogy as Social Memory: Making the Public Personal The 7th Annual Committee on Historical Studies, Sociology Department and International Labor Working Class History Journal Joint Conference History Matters: Spaces of Violences, Spaces of Memory New School for Social Research 2004-04-23 through 2004-04-24 Karla Hackstaff, Associate Professor of Sociology Northern Arizona University \u201cRace, like nature and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[459,8,14,6940,394],"tags":[1070,918,477],"class_list":["post-2960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-media-archive","category-papers","category-slavery","category-socialscience","tag-karla-hackstaff","tag-sally-hemings","tag-thomas-jefferson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2960","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=2960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2960\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}