Mixed Race Studies

The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics

MIT Press
January 2009
368 pages
7 x 9, 35 illus.
Paper ISBN-10: 0-262-58275-9; ISBN-13: 978-0-262-58275-9

Evelynn M. Hammonds, Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies (and Dean of Harvard College)
Harvard University

Rebecca M. Herzig, Professor of Women and Gender Studies
Bates College, Lewiston, Maine

The Nature of Difference documents how distinctions between people have been generated in and by the life sciences. Through a wide-ranging selection of primary documents and insightful commentaries by the editors, it charts the shifting boundaries of science and race through more than two centuries of American history. The documents, primarily writings by authoritative, eminent scientists intended for their professional peers, show how various sciences of race have changed their object of study over time: from racial groups to types to populations to genomes and beyond. The book’s thematic and synthetic approach reveals the profoundly diverse array of practices—countless acts of observation, quantification, and experimentation—that enabled the consequential categorizations we inherit.
 
The documents—most reproduced in their entirety—range from definitions of race in dictionaries published between 1886 and 2005 to an exchange of letters between Benjamin Baneker and Thomas Jefferson; from Samuel Cartwright’s 1851 “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race” to a 1950 UNESCO declaration that race is a social myth; from a 1928 paper detailing the importance of the glands in shaping human nature to a 2005 report of the discovery of a genetic basis for skin color. Such documents, given context by the editors’ introductions to each thematic chapter, provide scholars, journalists, and general readers with the rich historical background necessary for understanding contemporary developments in racial science.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. DICTIONARY DEFINITIONS OF “RACE”
• 2. ANATOMICAL OBSERVATIONS
• 3. IMMUNITY AND CONTAGION
• 4. EVOLUTION AND DEGENERATION
• 5. TECHNIQUES OF MEASUREMENT
• 6. GLANDULAR DIFFERENCES
• 7. HYBRIDITY AND ADMIXTURE
• 8. TOWARD GENETICS
• 9. THE END OF RACE?
• Index

Nationality demands solidarity. And you can never get solidarity in a nation of equal rights out of two hostile races that do not intermarry. In a Democracy you can not build a nation inside of a nation of two antagonistic races, and therefore the future American must be either an Anglo Saxon or a Mulatto. And if a Mulatto, will the future be worth discussing?

Thomas Dixon, Jr. (1864-1946)

In my first marriage I paid my compliments to my mother’s race; in my second marriage I paid my compliments to the race of my father.

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)

…being mulatto is longing for oneself [o mulato é saudade de si mesmo] just like the despised hermaphrodite outcries the conflict between the sexes… the mestiço is thus an unexpected being in the plan of the world, an unfortunate experiment of the Portuguese.

Mendes Correia, 1940: 122

Mixed race Britain: charting the social history

The Guardian
2011-10-04

Laura Smith

While mixed race is one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the UK, there is nothing new in people from different cultures getting together

Olive was just 15 when she met the man who was to become her husband. It was 1930s Cardiff and the trainee nurse had become lost on her way home from the cinema to the Royal Infirmary. “I stopped and asked this boy the way to Queen Street. And we started talking and I think we fell in love there and then.”

The “boy” Olive met on the street that night was Ali Salaman, a young Yemeni working as a chef in his own restaurant, the Cairo Café, a popular hang-out in the city’s Tiger Bay neighbourhood. Despite being told by her priest that she was marrying a heathen, the Methodist teenager married Ali Salaman when she was 16 and they went on to have 10 children.

With mixed race now measured in the national census and one of the fastest growing ethnic groups, it is often viewed as a contemporary phenomenon. But Chamion Caballero, senior research fellow at London South Bank University’s Weeks centre, says: “There is a long history of racial mixing in the UK that people don’t talk about.”

Caballero has co-authored as yet unpublished research with Peter Aspinall, reader in population health at the University of Kent, that puts contemporary mixing into perspective.

It demonstrates that unions between white British women and men from immigrant communities were commonplace in areas where they were thrown together in the 1920s, 30s and 40s: from South Shields and Liverpool’s Toxteth to Cardiff’s Tiger Bay and London’s Docklands. The Era of Moral Condemnation: Mixed Race People in Britain, 1920-1950, shows that although they faced prejudice from some, mixed race families created new communities in which those from different backgrounds swapped cultural traditions. It also explores how official perceptions of mixed race families contrasted with the way people experienced it…

…Aspinall says the dominance of eugenics during this period was central to such attitudes. “If you look at the aims of the British Eugenics Society in the 1930s there was this explicit statement about the dangers of what they called race crossing,” he says. Marie Stopes, then a prominent eugenicist, advocated that all “half castes” should be “sterilised at birth”. Connie Hoe, the daughter of a Chinese father and white mother, was one of dozens of mixed race children who were experimented on by the eugenics society to test the relationship between physical appearance and intellect…

Read the entire article here.

Glenn Robinson to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #227? – Glenn Robinson
When: Wednesday, 2011-10-05, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Glenn Robinson, Lover of Human Rights, Social Justice, Dignity & Respect

Glenn is the creator of the blogs Community Village and Mixed American Life and is an Irish, German, Dutch, English & Austrian American married to a Spanish & Aztec Mexican-American. They have two children and encourage them to identify however they want. Glenn is interested in progressive immigration reform, universal health care and desegregation within schools and communities. He is a life long learner with interests in sociology, anthropology, psychology, history and politics.

The “Inky Curse”: Miscegenation in the White American Literary Imagination

Social Science Information
Volume 22, Number 2 (March 1983)
pages 169-190
DOI: 10.1177/053901883022002002

Daniel Aaron, Victor S. Thomas Professor of English and American Literature, Emeritus
Harvard University

To dramatize my lurid title, I begin by quoting from and paraphrasing a letter written in 1889 to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the influential Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. The writer was Maurice Thompson, a Georgia-born novelist and poet who, after serving in the Confederate Army, had settled in Indiana, where he had studied law and become a minor man of letters (see Wheeler, 1965). Thompson publicly applauded the abolition of slavery, but in the 1880’s he became obsessed by what he called “the first steps of negro influence in art” and “the final rush of the African to absolute domination”.

The circumstance which prompted the letter was Gilder’s rejection of Thompson’s astonishing long poem, “A Voodoo Prophecy”, which the self-styled “squire of poesy” found unsuitable for his readers (Wheeler, p. 98).

Gilder had good reasons for his misgivings. The speaker of Thompson’s poem, “the prophet of the dusky race”, recalls how his people had been torn from their African homeland and doomed to the lash and manacle. Now mastered by a “black and terrible memory”, a “tropic heat” still bubbling in his veins, still quintessentially savage, the prophet spurns the white oppressors’ “whine/Of fine repentence” and warns of the day when their whiteness will darken under him…

Read or purchase the article here.