Mixed Race Studies

Is there ‘a’ mixed race group in Britain? The diversity of multiracial identification and experience

Critical Social Policy
Volume 30, Number 3 (August 2010)
pages 337-358
DOI: 10.1177/0261018310367672

Miri Song, Reader in Sociology
University of Kent

In contemporary British society, references to ‘mixed race’ people and to various forms of mixing abound. But to what extent can we say that there is ‘a’ mixed race group in Britain today? If such a group exists, what commonalities underlie the experience of being mixed? In addressing this question, I draw on a study of the racial identifications of different types of mixed young people in Britain. I find that the meanings and significance of race and mixedness in these young people’s lives can vary considerably both across and within specific mixed groups. In conclusion, I argue that while there is evidence of a growing consciousness and interest in being mixed, we cannot (yet) speak of a coherent mixed group or experience in Britain.

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Black, White and Other… Worldwide

The Huffington Post
2010-07-27

Marcia Dawkins

Even though the 21st century is seeing an exponential increase in reports of multiracial ancestry worldwide, exactly what makes a person multiracial remains a puzzling concept. According to the Association of Multiethnic Americans and Project RACE, the definition of a multiracial/interracial person is either someone whose parents were of more than one race or racial background, or someone who had parents that were of different racial groups. But what about those who identify with more than one racial background, irrespective of their parents’ identities? Or, those who identify with a racial background completely different from those of their parents?

Case in point: Nmachi Ihegboro, a blond haired and blue-eyed white baby born earlier this month to proud black Nigerian parents Ben and Angela Ihegboro in London UK. Nmachi’s parents are somewhat mystified about how they could create a white child and they are not the only ones. According to the New York Post, genetics experts are also baffled. So far they have offered three theories: (1) Nmachi “is the result of a gene mutation unique to her. If that is the case, Nmachi would pass the gene to her children — and they, too, would likely be white. (2) She’s the product of long-dormant white genes… that might have been carried by” her ancestors “for generations without surfacing until now.” Genetics professor Sykes of Oxford University thinks that some form of mixed race ancestry would seem to be necessary, and notes that sometimes multiracial women can carry some genetic material for white children and some genetic material for black children. It is also conceivable that the same holds true for multiracial men. (3) “While doctors have said Nmachi is not an outright albino, or lacking in all pigment, they added that the child may have some kind of mutated version of the genetic condition — and that her skin could darken over time.”…

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More than a Metaphor: Blood as Boundary for Korean Biracial Identity

NCA 95th Annual Convention
Chicago Hilton & Towers
Chicago, Illinois
2009-11-11

Myra Washington

When Hines Ward was named MVP of Super Bowl XL, his Black and Korean biracial status became the touchstone for conversations about mixed-race people in Korea. His “homecoming” trip generated a frenzied discourse around the limits of Korean identity and the location of bi/multiracial individuals within it. Ward’s racial representation allows for the analysis of nationhood, citizenship, difference and race as imagined through blood metaphors.

Read the entire paper here.

Black and White, or Shades of Gray? Racial Labeling of Barack Obama Predicts Implicit Race Perception

Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy
Published Online: 2010-07-26
DOI: 10.1111/j.1530-2415.2010.01213.x

Lori Wu Malahy
University of Washington

Mara Sedlins
University of Washington

Jason Plaks, Associate Professor of Psychology
University of Toronto

Yuichi Shoda, Professor of Psychology
University of Washington

The present research capitalized on the prominence and multiracial heritage of U.S. 2008 presidential election candidate Barack Obama to examine whether individual differences in classifying him as Black or as multiracial corresponded to differences in implicit perception of race. This research used a newly developed task (Sedlins, Malahy, & Shoda, 2010) with digitally morphed mixed-race faces to assess implicit race perception. Participants completed this task four times before and one time after the election. We found that people who labeled Obama as Black implicitly perceived race as more categorical than those who labeled Obama as multiracial. This finding adds to the growing literature on multiracial perception by demonstrating a relationship between the explicit use of multiracial and monoracial race classification and implicit race perception. The results suggest potential implications for governmental, educational, and judiciary usage of racial categories.

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Fluidity without Postmodernism: Michelle Cliff and the “Tragic Mulatta” Tradition

African American Review
Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1998)
pages 673-689

Suzanne Bost, Associate Professor of English
Loyola University

I am writing the story of my life as a statue… I wish they had carved me from the onyx of Elizabeth Catlett.  Or molded me from the dark clay of Augusta Savage.  Or cut me from mahogany or cast me in bronze.  I wish I were dark plaster like Meta Warrick Fuller’s Talking Skull.  But I appear more as Edmonia Lewis’s Hagar—wringing her hands in the wilderness—white marble figure of no homeland—her striations caught within.  (Cliff, Land 85)

In “The Laughing Mulatto (Formerly a Statue) Speaks,” Michelle Cliff invokes past stereotypes of the mulatto and the sculptors who remolded them. From Edmonia Lewis (1844-1909)—the half-black, half-Chippewasculpor who gained international fame with the help of abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Maria Child—to Augusta Savage (1892-1962)—the Harlem Renaissance artists who sculpted busts of W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Marcus Garvey—black artists have been reconstructing images of African Americans.  The speaker of “The Laughing Mulatto” identifies with racial “betweeenness,” yet she also subverts racist conventions that privilege the whiteness within biracial African Americans. She wishes that her skin were darker: onyx, mahogany, or bronze, not white marble (Cliff, Land 85).  Her wish implicitly compares race to workable materials, as if racial identity were something that could be chiseled and molded by an artist…

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Endogenous Race in Brazil: Affirmative Action and the Construction of Racial Identity among Young Adults

Working Paper
2010-01-10

Andrew M. Francis, Professor of Economics
Emory University

Maria Tannuri-Pianto, Professor of Economics
University of Brasilia

Brazil is not only characterized by racial diversity but also by socioeconomic inequality. This complexity, plus the recent adoption of racial quotas by a handful of universities, makes Brazil an ideal place to study the construction of racial identity. In this paper, we examine applicants and students of the University of Brasilia, which established racial quotas in July 2004 reserving 20% of available admissions slots for students who self-identified as black. Using admissions data as well as a student survey conducted by the authors, we explore the determinants of racial identity, including socioeconomic status, parents’ race, academic performance, and quotas in admissions. We find that, holding skin tone constant, socioeconomic status and academic performance vary inversely with black identity. The evidence suggests that young adults in mixed race families are more likely to identify with their mother’s race than their father’s, and that this pattern relates to gender and father’s absence during childhood. We also find that quotas in university admissions increased the likelihood that applicants and students self-identified as non-white, and that this phenomenon was attributable, in part, to actual change in racial identity.

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Racial Self-Categorization in Adolescence: Multiracial Development and Social Pathways

Child Development
Volume 77, Number 5, September/October 2006
Pages 1298–1308

Steven Hitlin, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Iowa

J. Scott Brown
Carolina Population Center
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Glen H. Elder, Jr.
Carolina Population Center
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Research on multiracial individuals is often cross-sectional, obscuring the fluid nature of multiracial selfcategorization across time. Pathways of racial self-identification are developed from a nationally representative sample of adolescents aged 14 – 18, measured again 5 years later. A significant proportion of multiracial adolescents change racial self-identification across time. Youth who ever report being multiracial are 4 times as likely to switch self-identification as to report consistent multiracial identities. Across this time, more multiracial adolescents either add a racial category (diversify) or subtract one (consolidate) than maintain consistent multiracial self-categorization. Exploratory multinomial analyses show few differences between these pathways on select psychological and social characteristics. Results lend quantitative support to qualitative studies  indicating the fluidity of racial self-categorization.

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Segregation of the Free People of Color and the Construction of Race in Antebellum New Orleans

Southeastern Geographer
Volume 48, Number 1, May 2008
pages 19-37
E-ISSN: 1549-6929
Print ISSN: 0038-366X
DOI: 10.1353/sgo.0.0010

Amy R. Sumpter, Instructor of Geography
Georgia College and State University

Louisiana and the city of New Orleans have a complicated colonial and racial history. A large free population of color living amidst enslaved people of color attests to fluidity in racial constructions present in the colonial period in Louisiana. Throughout the French (1682–1763) and Spanish (1763–1803) colonial periods and the first five decades of U.S. statehood (1803–1850), racial constructions changed remarkably. Cultural conflict, an increasing number of American whites, and fear of insurrection contributed to growing hostility toward the free people of color and remaining colonial racial practices. Historical evidence, state and municipal legislation, and 1850 U.S. Census data show that free people of color tended to reside in specific “Creole” areas within the city, demonstrating that free people in the city were segregated by race.

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From Eugenics to Genomics: A History of the Race Concept and Its Impact on Contemporary Health Disparities

American Public Health Association Annual Meeting
San Diego, California
2008

Michael Yudell, PhD, MPH, Assistant Professor, Department of Community Health and Prevention
Drexel University

At the dawn of the 21st century, the idea of race—the belief that the peoples of the world can be organized into biologically distinctive groups, each with their own physical, social, and intellectual characteristics—is understood by most natural and social scientists to be an unsound concept. The way scientists think about race today, after all, is different than it was in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement when some promoted black genetic inferiority as an argument against egalitarian social and economic policy, and certainly different than one or two centuries ago as scientific justifications for slavery and later Jim Crow were articulated. In other words, race, its scientific meaning seemingly drawn from the visual and genetic cues of human diversity, is an idea with a measurable past, identifiable present, and uncertain future. These changes are influenced by a range of variables including geography, politics, culture, science, and economics.

Today, despite the growing consensus among scientists that race is not, in fact, a useful classificatory tool, an understanding of human difference and diversity remains a hallmark of contemporary scientific practice, and thus presents a seeming contradiction—how can one study human difference without talking about race? On the one hand, beginning in the 1930s, advances in population genetics and evolutionary biology led many to conclude that the race concept was not a particularly useful or accurate marker of biological difference. By the 1970s, many prominent biologists, including the geneticists Richard Lewontin and L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, came to see the race concept as a deeply flawed way to organize human genetic diversity that is inseparable from the social prejudices about human difference that spawned the concept in the 18th century and have accompanied its meaning since. Historians and social scientists believe that race is socially constructed, meaning that the biological meaning of race has been constrained by the social context in which racial research has taken place…

…During the first three decades of the 20th century, eugenicists and many geneticists fiercely advocated “the belief that human races differed hereditarily by important mental as well as physical traits, and that crosses between widely different races were biologically harmful.” American eugenicists dedicated considerable resources to the study of black-white differences during the first three decades of the 20th century, and sought to apply these ideas to the public sphere. Well-respected geneticists wrote openly that “miscegenation can only lead to unhappiness under present social conditions and must, we believe, under any social conditions be biologically wrong.” In his seminal work on race and intelligence, Race Crossing in Jamaica (1929), Charles Davenport, a Harvard trained biologist and the titular head of the American eugenics movements from the outset of the 20th century until the 1930s, wrote “we are driven to the conclusion that there is a constitutional, hereditary, genetical basis for the difference between the two races [whites and blacks] in mental tests. We have to conclude that there are racial differences in mental capacity.” In their influential text Applied Eugenics (1933), eugenicists Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson, who endorsed segregation as a “social adaptation,” wrote “that the Negro race differs greatly from the white race, mentally as well as physically, and that in many respects it may be said to be inferior when tested by the requirements of modern civilization and progress.” Moreover, they suggested “negroes, both children and adults, have been found markedly inferior to white in vital capacity… Differences in temperament and emotional reaction also exist, and may be more important than the purely intellectual differences.” It must be stated that the genetic claims of racial difference advocated by eugenicists—from differences in intelligence to disease rates to musicality—have all been shown to be false.

Eugenic propagandists gave race an unalterable permanence; neither education, nor change in environment or climate, nor the eradication of racism itself could alter the fate of non-whites. In the United States, the impact of eugenics on matters of human difference was felt widely. In Virginia, as head of the State’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, eugenicist and white supremacist Walter Plecker helped to shape the State’s segregation policies. For example, Plecker helped push Virginia’s anti-miscegenation Racial Integrity Act of 1924, and used that law to expose individuals he believed were passing as white in an attempt to stop what he feared to be the mongrelization of the races…

Read the entire paper here.

Ancestry Testing and DNA: Uses, Limits – and Caveat Emptor

GeneWatch
Council for Responsible Genetics
Volume 22, Issue 3-4 (July-August 2009)
2009-07-30
Pages 16-18

Troy Duster, Professor of Sociology
New York University

Direct consumer use of DNA  tests for ancestry tracing has taken off in the last five years, and we are not just talking about probes for first-generation genetic lineage as in the “Who’s your daddy?” tests popularized on daytime television.  Since 2002, nearly a half-million people have purchased tests from at least two dozen companies marketing direct-to-consumer kits.  The motives for testing range from the desire for ancestral links to those who lived on other continents five-hundred plus years ago to a more modest interest in reconstructing family histories.  For many African-Americans, the quest to find a link to regions and peoples of sub-Saharan Africa can take on a spiritual or even messianic quest, at least partially explained by the fact that the Middle Passage across the Atlantic during the slave trade explicitly and purposefully obliterated linguistic, cultural, religious, political and kinship ties.  The 2006 PBS television series, African American Lives, brought this quest into sharp relief.  First celebrity and later ordinary Blacks were mesmerized by stories of DNA matches that claimed to reveal or refute specific ancestral links to Africa, to Native American heritage, and surprising to some, East Asian or European populations.

In sharp contrast, CBS’ 60 minutes aired a dramatic segment in the fall of 2007 (October 7) that portrayed a direct and sharp challenge to the claims-making about such ancestry testing.  The segment began with Vy Higgensen, an African-American woman from New York’s Harlem triumphantly affirming her connection to “new kin” (one of whom was a white male cattle rancher from Missouri).  But as the program unfolds, we see a disturbing cloud of doubt drift over the last part of the segment that ends with a less than subtle hint at specious claims.  A first test from the company African Ancestry, claims that Higgensen is linked to ancestors in the Sierra Leone, the Mende people.  She rejoices. “I am thrilled!  It puts a name, a place, a location, a people!”  But then she is shown the results of a second test, from another company, Relative Genetics, which claims that she instead has a genetic match to the Wobe tribe of the Ivory Coast.  She seems unruffled.  Yet a third test, from Trace Genetics, claims that her ancestors are from Senegal, the Mendenka.  Now she seems agitated, visibly concerned, confused – and most certainly disappointed that what began as a definitive match to a particular group or region of Africa has now turned into a “you pick which one you want to believe” game.

What can DNA tell us about our genetic lineage, and where does it fall short? What explains Vy Higgensen’s multiple results from different testing sites? Flawed methodology? Partial truths hyped as definitive findings? Did the testing companies use different methods or deploy different reference populations – or both?…

…There is a yet more ominous and troubling element of the reliance upon DNA analysis to determine who we are in terms of lineage, identity, and identification. The very technology that tells us what proportion of our ancestry can be linked, proportionately, to sub-Saharan Africa (ancestry-informative markers) is the same being offered to police stations around the country to “predict” or “estimate” whether the DNA left at a crime scene belongs to a white or black person. This “ethnic estimation” using DNA relies on a social definition of the phenotype (the observable physical or biochemical characteristics of an organism, determined by both genetic makeup and environmental influences). That is, in order to say that someone is 85 percent African, we must know who is 100 percent African. Any molecular, population, or behavioral geneticist who uses the term “percent European” or “percent Native American” is obliged to disclose that the measuring point of this “purity” (100 percent) is a statistical artifact that begins not with the DNA, but with a researcher adopting the folk categories of race and ethnicity…

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