Mixed Race Studies

The penalties of miscegenation

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 6, Issue 3, 1972
pages 10-12
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.1972.9969062

Mary Dines (1927-2011)

Paragraph 24 of “Commonwealth Citizens: Control after Entry: Immigration Rules” (Cmd. 4295) reads:

“If a man who was admitted as a visitor or student, or in some other temporary capacity, marries a woman who is a resident in the United Kingdom, he is not on that account to be granted an extension of stay or any other variation of conditions to enable him to settle here unless refusal would be undesirable because of the degree of hardship which, in the particular circumstances of the case, would be caused if the woman had to live outside the United Kingdom in order to be with her husband after marriage…”

These instructions are based on a rule announced by the Home Secretary in January 1969 as an “administrative procedure” and the principles involved were never submitted to Parliament in the form of a Clause or an amendment to a Bill. At the time, Mr. Callaghan stated that the intention was to put an end to the facility allowed to male fiancés to settle in the U.K. after marriage which then existed. This facility, he claimed, was being abused, particularly by Asians, as a means of seeking entry to the U.K. without an employment voucher. It is not proposed to go into the arguments about male fiancés at this stage and indeed experience has shown that this matter was used as a camouflage for the real motives behind the introduction of the new rules. A careful study of the wording confirms this and it should be noted that the Home Office say that the man marrying a resident here “is not on that account to be granted an extension of stay” (my italics).

In any discussion on racial prejudice in Britain the question of miscegenation is bound to arise. Even in colonial times the British showed a marked aversion to mixed marriages. Significantly the majority of those that did take place were between “other ranks” of occupying armies and local women in places like…

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Becoming black, becoming president

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 45, Issue 1-2, 2011
pages 62-85
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2011.563145

Richard H. King, Professor Emeritus of American and Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham

Speculation about the relationship between Barack Obama’s election to the presidency and race in the United States was rife prior to, during and after his successful campaign. King looks at three aspects of this issue. First, as a kind of outsider, Obama had to prove himself black enough for African Americans of the traditional sort and not too dangerous for Whites. How did he achieve this? Second, Obama’s election was made possible by changes in the voting behaviour of white Americans, particularly in the North, and the way that African Americans like Obama gained a foothold in, and at times control of, urban political machines, such as, in his case, Chicago. How have American historians treated this shift in white voting behaviour? Finally, the central question of how race still impinges on President Obama’s performance as president. King concludes with a look at issues such as colour blindness and whiteness, the nature of black political identity and solidarity, and the variety of political roles from which a black leader such Obama can choose.

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Taking racism into account does not mean refusing to collect and classify data in medical research according to race and ethnicity. On the contrary, those classifications provide important epidemiological information, as Risch et al. maintain, about the impact of social and environmental factors—including socio-economic inequities and cultural biases—on the health of individuals and groups. As Troy Duster argues, the way to ‘recognize, engage, and clarify the complexity of the interaction between any taxonomies of race and biological, neurophysiological, society, and health outcomes’ is to consider ‘how science studies deploy the concept of race’. The story of how biotechnology is revolutionizing medicine has put genomic research very much into public consciousness and has made genetic explanations of health disparities among individuals and especially groups the ‘default position’. Distinguishing between genomic and social and environmental factors in disease susceptibility and drug response is notoriously difficult, especially since, as Keita et al. note, ‘some environmental influences can be so subtle and occur so early in life as to be missed . . . ’. Yet, that distinction determines how researchers and practitioners understand and address the problem of health disparities. ‘Race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are very different as surrogates for genomics and for social and environmental factors in the assessment of health outcomes, which is why the larger stories in which the research is embedded are scientifically and medically as well as socially relevant.

Priscilla Wald, “Blood and stories: how genomics is rewriting race, medicine and human history,” Patterns of Prejudice, Volume 40, Numbers 4
/5 (2006): 316.

Against racial medicine

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 40, Numbers 4
/5 (2006), Special Issue: Race and Contemporary Medicine
pages 481-493
DOI: 10.1080/00313220601020189

Joseph L. Graves Jr., Dean of University Studies; Professor of Biological Sciences
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Greensboro

Michael R. Rose, Director of the University of California Network for Experimental Research on Evolution; Professor of Biological Sciences
University of California, Irvine

Some scholars claim that recent studies of human genetic variation validate the existence of human biological races and falsify the idea that human races are socially constructed misconceptions. They assert that analyses of DNA polymorphisms unambiguously partition individuals into groups that are very similar to lay conceptions of race. Furthermore, they propose that this partitioning allows us to identify specific loci that can explain contemporary health disparities between the supposed human races. From this, it appears that racial medicine has risen again. In this essay Graves and Rose construct a case against racial medicine. Biological races in other species are strongly differentiated genetically. Because human populations do not have such strong genetic differentiation, they are not biological races. Nonetheless, the lack of population genetic knowledge among biomedical researchers has led to spuriously racialized human studies. But human populations are not genetically disjoint. Social dominance may lead to medical differences between socially constructed races. In order to resolve these issues, medicine should take both social environment and population genetics into account, instead of dubious ‘races’ that inappropriately conflate the two.

Racial medicine has risen again

Charles B. Davenport, one of the most respected scientists of the first decades of the twentieth century, argued that laziness was a hereditary trait. Davenport claimed in particular that laziness was a heredity character of Southern Whites. Later epidemiological studies determined that ‘white trash’ laziness was actually the result of heavy infections caused by the nematode necator americanus.  But, for Davenport and many other biologists of his time, the phenotypic differences displayed by particular populations were proof positive of the existence of human races. They believed that these races differed in readily observable features, such as skin colour and body proportions, and also in those they could not directly observe, such as intellect, morality, character, disease predisposition and resistance. In 1921, for example, Ernest Zimmerman published a report on differences in the manifestation of syphilis in Blacks and Whites. Such thinking helped to sanction the now infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment.  Modern biologists recoil with horror when asked to revisit this sad episode in the history of science.

The rationale for the Tuskegee experiment was the underlying assumption that the Negro was genetically inferior to Whites. Thus, the perceived differences in incidence rates and progression of disease were thought to reside in characteristics intrinsic to the race, as opposed to the social conditions under which visibly darker-skinned persons of African descent lived in the United States. (It is significant that many ‘white Americans’ have African ancestors but ‘pass as white’, an anomaly to which we will return below.) Therefore, the Tuskegee experiment suffered not only from its moral shortcomings, but also from poor experimental design. The results of the experiment could not have distinguished between any genetically based difference in disease progression, since many environmental and social differences between African Americans and the Swedish cohorts with which they were to be compared were not properly controlled. With hindsight, the scientific problems of this experiment are obvious. What is not recognized is that modern discussions of race and medicine have not moved very far beyond the misconceptions that gave birth to the Tuskegee research programme...

…The identification of human races is not based on cogent biology

While humans have always recognized the existence of physical differences between groups, they haven’t always described those differences in racial terms. Racial theories of human differentiation were not a consistent theme of the ancient world, and really did not begin to flourish until after the European voyages of discovery in the fifteenth century. European naturalists of the eighteenth century were divided about the characterization of human differences. Almost all agreed that there was only one human species, yet they disagreed about whether there was a legitimate way to rank the various groups of humans hierarchically. For example, Carl Linneaus’s Systema Naturae (1735) classified human races partly on the basis of subjectively determined behavioural traits. It is not clear, however, what Linnaeus meant by the use of the term ‘race’. It seems that his classification scheme was describing subspecies of humans based on morphological features. According to it, European traits were clearly superior to others, and Africans were assigned the lowest rung in the hierarchy.

Such racist ideas were transplanted to America during colonial times, along with other biological absurdities. During American chattel slavery, the socially defined race of the offspring of slavemasters and slave women was ‘Negro’. Virginia law classified Eston Hemmings, who was 87.5 per cent European according to genetic ancestry, as ‘Negro’. Geneticists now suspect that Thomas Jefferson was his father, based on family genealogies and a genetic marker specific to the Jefferson family found in Eston’s descendants.

The one-drop rule (also called ‘hypo-descent’) in the United States differs from definitions of ‘blackness’ in Canada, Mexico, Britain and Brazil. Individuals, therefore, could move from one country to another and be classified differently according to the social custom. Indeed, in the United States, individuals have been born as a member of one race and died as a member of another. European ethnic groups, such as the Irish and Italians, did not become ‘white’ until the twentieth century. Such ‘races’ are clearly based on social conventions, as opposed to biological measures of genetic ancestry. Socially produced racial ideology from the very beginning influenced the collection and interpretation of data relating to human biological variation…

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Blood and stories: how genomics is rewriting race, medicine and human history

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 40, Numbers 4
/5 (2006), Special Issue: Race and Contemporary Medicine
pages 303-333
DOI: 10.1080/00313220601020064

Priscilla Wald, Professor of English and Women’s Studies
Duke University

In 2003 Howard University announced its intention to create a databank of the DNA of African Americans, most of whom were patients in their medical centre. Proponents of the decision invoked the routine exclusion of African Americans from research that would give them access to the most up-to-date medical technologies and treatments. They argued that this databank would rectify such exclusions. Opponents argued that such a move tacitly affirmed the biological (genetic) basis of race that had long fuelled racism as well as that the potential costs were not worth the uncertain benefits. Howard University’s controversial decision emerges from research in genomic medicine that has added new urgency to the question of the relationship between science and racism. This relationship is the topic of Wald’s essay. Scientific disagreements over the relative usefulness of ‘race’ as a classification in genomic medical research have been obscured by charges of racism and political correctness. The question takes us to the assumptions of population genomics that inform the medical research, and Wald turns to the Human Genome Diversity Project, the new Genographics Project and the 2003 film Journey of Man to consider how racism typically inheres not in the intentions of researchers, but in the language, images and stories through which scientists, journalists and the public inevitably interpret information. Wald demonstrates the importance of understanding those stories as inseparable from scientific and medical research. Her central argument is that if we understand the power of the stories we can better understand the debates surrounding race and genomic medicine, which, in turn, can help us make better ethical and policy decisions and be useful in the practices of science and medicine.

To understand how genomic research can reproduce racism, it is necessary to understand how racism is articulated through that research as it is practised in the context of particular social formations. The articulation is produced through stories of race and genomic research, which take many forms as they make their way from the scientific community to the general public. Stories about the research reach public consciousness through such controversial decisions as the NHGC databank as well as through the discoveries and innovations emerging from the labs of pharmaceutical companies, universities and federal institutions. Accounts of genomic research offer exciting promises, ranging from new explanations (and treatments) for some of the most feared medical problems, from cancer to avian flu, to new ways of understanding (and managing) human behaviour. They also capture the public imagination with claims of new discoveries that offer insight into the mysteries of human origins and human history, and the genealogies of individuals as well as groups. The claims and promises fuse in the stories of genomic research broadcast in the mainstream media, and they in turn influence policy and funding decisions and help to shape future research. These stories are fundamental in the production of scientific and medical knowledge and, therefore, as I argue in what follows, attention to them needs to be incorporated into scientific and medical research.

…Genomic information is notoriously difficult to interpret even by researchers in the field. The frequency of alleles that mark genetic drift—the the rate of genetic changes resulting from mutations, or divergent alleles, in relatively inbred populations—tells where and when there was a divergence within a group. Those alleles are used to mark ancestry. But, as Michael J. Bamshad and Steve E. Olson note, ‘how groups are divided depends on which genes are examined; simplistically put, you might fit into one group based on your skin-color genes but another based on a different characteristic’.  The DNA that yields information about one’s ancestry—typically mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA—in fact tells only part of the story of genetic ancestry. The complexity of nuclear DNA does not yield sufficiently clear information to complete it. Moreover, as Jay Kaufman has pointed out, Risch et al. ’s study relies on the dismissal of ‘intermediate groups’, such as ‘Hispanic Americans’, whom Risch et al. acknowledge could ‘aggregate genetically with Caucasians, Native Americans, African Americans or form their own cluster’ and are therefore ‘not easily classified’, but the size of those groups attenuates their claims. They are too large to be dismissed as an exception. Intermixture is increasingly the rule…

…Pointing an accusatory finger at ‘political correctness’ not only deflects the scientific dispute, but also ignores the medical importance of the social consequences of racism, measured in health outcomes. Drawing a stark contrast between medical science and social concerns, a distinction that Risch et al. ’s article itself troubles, that accusation renders social concerns suspect except as they provide epidemiologically useful information. Neither Wade nor Risch et al . address what constitutes epidemiologically useful information. Risch et al. dismiss potential abuses of genomic information (such as those that fuel racism) as unscientific, arguing

that identifying genetic differences between races and ethnic groups, be they for random genetic markers, genes that lead to disease susceptibility or variation in drug response, is scientifically appropriate. What is not scientific is a value system attached to any such findings.

But this assertion presumes that science and medicine can be divorced from their social contexts and that information circulates in value-neutral terms. History does not support that presumption, and calling racism ‘not scientific’ does not address the value system or alleviate the problems—including health outcomes—associated with it…

…Taking racism into account does not mean refusing to collect and classify data in medical research according to race and ethnicity. On the contrary, those classifications provide important epidemiological information, as Risch et al. maintain, about the impact of social and environmental factors—including socio-economic inequities and cultural biases—on the health of individuals and groups. As Troy Duster argues, the way to ‘recognize, engage, and clarify the complexity of the interaction between any taxonomies of race and biological, neurophysiological, society, and health outcomes’ is to consider ‘how science studies deploy the concept of race’. The story of how biotechnology is revolutionizing medicine has put genomic research very much into public consciousness and has made genetic explanations of health disparities among individuals and especially groups the ‘default position’. Distinguishing between genomic and social and environmental factors in disease susceptibility and drug response is notoriously difficult, especially since, as Keita et al. note, ‘some environmental influences can be so subtle and occur so early in life as to be missed . . . ’. Yet, that distinction determines how researchers and practitioners understand and address the problem of health disparities. ‘Race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are very different as surrogates for genomics and for social and environmental factors in the assessment of health outcomes, which is why the larger stories in which the research is embedded are scientifically and medically as well as socially relevant…

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Onerous passions: colonial anti-miscegenation rhetoric and the history of sexuality

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 45, Issue 4, 2011
pages 319-340
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2011.605843

Nadine Ehlers, Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Ehlers’s analysis revisits Foucauldian conceptualizations of the history of sexuality in order to map the inextricability of race, gender and sexuality as they emerged in the context of the early American colonies. The salience of such an analysis lies in its ability to extend the terrain of Foucault’s history, and brings new considerations to bear regarding the specific configurations of race, gender and sexual intersections in North American history. If, as Foucault insists, sexuality is a set of effects produced in bodies, behaviours and social relations, Ehlers reorients these claims to consider how these effects were racialized within the rubric of colonial anti-miscegenation rhetoric. Through such a tracing, it becomes evident that, from the early colonial context, sexuality was deployed to produce ‘ideal’ sexuality as a bastion of whiteness: that is, to configure and maintain ‘ideal’ sexuality as white.

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The Arabs of Africa

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 6, Issue 1 (1972)
pages 1-9
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.1972.9969036

Ali Mazruia, Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities
State University of New York, Binghamton

The combination of acculturation and inter-mating between races might be called a process of biocultural assimilation Some degree of integration between groups is achieved by the process of mixing blood and fusing cultural patterns. There are two concepts here which need to be further refined. One is the concept of symmetrical acculturation and the other is the concept of symmetrical miscegenation. Symmetrical acculturation arises when a dominant group not only passes on its culture to the groups it dominates but is also significantly receptive to the cultural influence of its subjects or captives.

There have been occasions in history when acculturation has been asymmetrical, and yet the receiving group has been the politically dominant. The classical example is that of Greek influence on the Roman conquerors. A more common example is the kind of asymmetry in which the politically dominant culture transmits itself to its subjects and captives and receives little in return. The British cultural influence in much of Africa has been of the second category. We might call this descending asymmetry, and call the Greek-Roman example a model of ascending asymmetry.

As for symmetrical miscegenation, this would arise in a situation where two racial communities inter-marry and produce a comparable number of both men and women who crossed the racial boundary to seek partners from another community. In very isolated circumstances, and even there with some qualifications, such symmetry is conceivable, where one race or ethnic group is patrilineal and the other is matrilineal. The matrilineal group might not mind its women crossing the border and marrying men from the other country. The patrilineal group, in like manner, might permit the men to be exogamous. By the matrilineal race the child is regarded as sharing the race of its mother; while the patrilineal wing recognises the child’s racial affinity to its father. Tensions in such situations are conceivable, precisely in the duality of citizenship and the pulls of potentially conflicting loyalties. A much more prevalent phenomenon is that of asymmetrical miscegenation. In the great majority of cases where black people have inter-married with non-black people, a lack of symmetry has been a continuing characteristic. In this paper, we shall pay special attention to racial mixture as between the Arabs and black Africans. We are going to do this in a broad comparative perspective, relating the Afro-Arab experience to the different histories of racial mixture in the United States, in Latin America and in South Africa. These three, when combined with the Afro-Arab model, provide four distinct patterns of the relationship between miscegenation and social structure.

All four models of miscegenation are asymmetrical but In significantly different ways. In each case the dominant ethnic group has produced many more husbands in the racial mixture than wives. Over 70% of the so-called black population of the United States has white blood. But overwhelmingly the white blood has come through white males rather than white females…

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Barack Obama as the post-racial candidate for a post-racial America: perspectives from Asian America and Hawai’i

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 45, Issue 1 & 2  (Special Issue: Obama and Race) (2011)
Pages 133-153
DOI: 110.1080/0031322X.2011.563159

Jonathan Y. Okamura, Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of Hawai’i

Okamura reviews the 2008 US presidential campaign and the election of Barack Obama as a ‘post-racial candidate’ in terms of two different meanings of ‘post-racialism’, namely, colour blindness and multiculturalism. He also discusses his campaign and election from the perspective of Asian America and Hawai’i given that Obama has been claimed as ‘the first Asian American president’ and as a ‘local’ person from Hawai’i where he was born and spent most of his youth. In both cases, Obama has been accorded these racialized identities primarily because of particular cultural values he espouses and cultural practices he engages in that facilitate his seeming transcendence of racial boundaries and categories generally demarcated by phenotype and ancestry. Okamura contends that proclaiming Obama as an honorary Asian American and as a local from Hawai’i inadvertently lends support to the post-racial America thesis and its false assertion of the declining significance of race: first, by reinforcing the ‘model minority’ stereotype of Asian Americans and, second, by affirming the widespread view of Hawai’i as a model of multiculturalism.

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Prologue: the riddle of race

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 45, Issue 1 & 2 (Special Issue: Obama and Race) (2011)
Pages 4-14
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2011.563141

Emily Bernard, Associate Professor of English and ALANA [African Americans, Latinos/as, Asian Americans and Native Americans] US Ethnic Studies
University of Vermont

James Vellacott, ‘President Obama shakes the hand of PC Michael Zamora on the way into Number 10’, London, 1 April 2009. Credit: Mirrorpix.

Bernard explores the myth of racelessness as it is currently circulating in American social discourse. The election of the first black American president has unleashed the term across the cultural landscape, from the mainstream media to the classrooms in which she teaches African American literature. Students use the term as a twenty-first-century incarnation of the civil rights-era concept of colour blindness. But racelessness does not represent an aspiration for equality as much as it represents an ambition to turn away from the realities of difference. It is code for a common ambition to avoid the realities of institutional racial inequalities, as well as personal experiences of cultural difference. The myth of racelessness intersects uncomfortably with current academic discourse that promotes the view of race as a social construction. Scientifically proven and irrefutably true, this discourse does not allow any room for the social experience of race and racial difference as it is lived by everyone every day, whether we like it or not. The election of President Barack Obama is a portal on to this current confusion about the concept of race, specifically, and blackness, in particular. Many pundits have speculated that Obama would not have been electable if he had had dark skin, if he were irrefutably black, in colour and culture. The fact that he himself has elected to call himself ‘black’ serves as the platform of Bernard’s essay on the case of race in the United States.

Post black

A classroom at an Ivy League university. A black professor at the helm. The audience, a palette of skin colours. Black, white and brown bodies have come here for answers: answers to the puzzle of race.

The professor calls herself African American but she was born in Italy, not in the United States, and has she never been to Africa. Her racial identity is born of a sense of affinity; it is, essentially, a choice. Because her skin is brown, no one questions this choice. Everyone in this room, in fact, equates this affinity with authority, which is why her lecture on the meaning of race goes unchallenged.

Today, the professor is not really talking about race, but not-race. She tells us, her multicoloured audience, that race no longer holds meaning, that it never held meaning, that it is a fiction or, in academic language, a construction.

Most of us, including me, nod our heads. That is, except for one young woman, a student at the law school, who raises her hand and waits to be recognized.

‘Look, I don’t really understand what you mean when you say that “race is a construction”. Race is real, and I know what it is. I’m black. It’s where I’m from and how I live.’

The professor turns to address the woman directly. Her tone is agreeable and her gestures are sympathetic, but her language does not change. She continues to speak in the artful theoretical vocabulary that has brought her to international prominence. She seems as frustrated as the young woman that her words cannot bridge the gulf between them. In the academic world in which I was trained, we were taught to view lived experience with suspicion, and to dismiss emotion as a meaningful category of analysis. Time is up. People stand to speak to the professor, to thank her for her insights and congratulate her on her work, except for the law student, who heads directly for the door.

Such dramas are being played out in classrooms around the country these days, including my own…

…Race is a fiction. When we use it to narrate our experience in the world, we take the easy way out, and neglect other factors that name and place us. The easy way out is a one-way street; our real lives are lived at the intersections, where race meets class meets gender and so on. Inextricably intertwined is what we are; the boundaries to which we pledge ourselves do not exist. Underneath the umbrella of race, categories like gender, sexuality, class, even geography, are also invisibly huddled. Each of these categories contains its own story, a story that intersects with the story of race, but a story that race alone cannot encompass. In other words, a different kind of blackness—a different story—is lived in, say, Northern California than in rural Mississippi. To be gay, black and rich—or straight, white and poor—in these respective places adds more meaning to the experience of race than the term ‘race’ can communicate. Identity honours no borders, neither in language nor in life.

But the fact that race is a fiction does not rob it of meaning. Certainly, race is an invention, but that doesn’t make it untrue…

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How to read Michelle Obama

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 45, Issue 1 & 2 (Special Issue: Obama and Race) (2011)
Pages 95 – 117
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2011.563149

Maria Lauret, Reader in American Studies
University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom

Michelle Obama’s role as the first African American First Lady is more than merely symbolic. Her self-representation as a professional woman, mother and spouse is directed towards a wider representativeness that is new in American political discourse. As a descendant of slaves and slave owners whose American ancestry can be traced back to the 1850s, she can lay claim to an African American legacy that the President lacks. As a result, some of her more controversial statements during the presidential campaign about the black family, class mobility and national pride need to be read in the context of an African American literature and historiography that challenges the American creed of equality, liberty and unconditional love of one’s country. Michelle Obama’s family history, her Princeton undergraduate thesis and her own words in interviews are analysed here in the discursive context of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing, and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave-girl, as well as the historiography of the civil rights movement. Such a reading reveals how Michelle Obama’s background weaves the legacy of slavery into the American fabric, and shows that a redemptive construction of American history—in which the success of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the Obama presidency are taken as fulfilment of the American creed (and of Martin Luther King’s dream)—must be refused if a new national self-definition with African America at its heart is to take its place.

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