Interesting article on history of race mixing in the U.S.

Parent Cafe
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<p>''In an article published on Wednesday, The Times reported on Michelle Obama’s ancestry, tracing her maternal line back to her great-great-great-grandparents, a slave girl and a white man, and their son, Dolphus T. Shields, who was born in the 1850s.</p>

<p>While these findings tell of Michelle Obama’s roots, for many Americans her family’s story will also bring into focus a common narrative, which runs through the history of this nation. We asked some historians and writers, why has it taken so long for Americans to appreciate these deep multiethnic connections…</p>

<p>[wrote Henry Louis Gates]</p>

<p>As we have shown in the “African American Lives” series on PBS, fully 58 percent of African Americans have at least 12.5 percent European ancestry. Only 5 percent, in spite of widespread myths to the contrary, have as much Native American ancestry. And between 30 and 35 percent of all African American males can trace their paternal lineage (their y-DNA) to a white man who impregnated a black female most probably during slavery.</p>

<p>The illegality of miscegenation, the prevalence of sexual abuse and rape, guilt, shame, and disgrace kept these relationships hidden.</p>

<p>What this means is that, in defiance of the law and social convention, an enormous amount of “race-mixing” has long been occurring in the United States, about which we, as a society, have for just as long been in deep denial. I have never given an admixture DNA test of a black person who turned out to be 100 percent African, no matter how dark or “African” they appear to be…"</p>

<p>Others who commented were:</p>

<p>Annette Gordon-Reed, historian and author, “The Hemingses of Monticello”
John McWhorter, author, “Our Magnificent ■■■■■■■ Tongue”
Martha Hodes, professor of history, New York University
Mark D. Shriver, professor of anthropology and biology
Mary Frances Berry, professor of social thought, University of Pennsylvania
Ira Berlin, professor of history, University of Maryland
Ishmael Reed, author
[One</a> Family’s Roots, a Nation’s History - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com](<a href=“One Family's Roots, a Nation's History - The New York Times”>One Family's Roots, a Nation's History - The New York Times)</p>

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<p>I remember my grandmother telling me stories about when my mother was attending a local high school ( in the early 1950’s) and seeing the mixed race couples. She had lived most of her life in a very rural community in the midwest and had barely ever even seen anyone who wasn’t white.
It was a huge shock to her.</p>

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<p>If you can find it, Calvin Trillin wrote about the “race clerks” in LA. As the name implies, their job was to assign a race to a person, an idea that of course requires mixed races. A law suit developed when a person challenged the designation. The article ends, as I remember, with a person saying they weren’t black, that in church their family always sat in front of the black people … and behind the white people. </p>

<p>Another take is Mark Twain’s vicious and funny Pudd’nhead Wilson, which in part concerns two babies switched at birth, one born to a slave and the other not.</p>

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<p>Growing up in Virginia, I remember when it was not only frowned upon, but ILLEGAL for “races” to “mix.” I guess people were in denial about why most “black” people were varying shades of brown.</p>

<p>There are still areas of the country where they look askance at mixed-race couples and their children, but thankfully there are large areas where people aren’t so…stupid.</p>

<p>Just recently, in filling out a patient health update at the doctor’s, I declined to fill in the blank for “race” as a sort of protest. They can look at me and put in white if they want, but if I were biracial, or the parent of a biracial child, I would not want to have to choose a “race.” Thankyouverymuch.</p>

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<p>Haha. If I WERE biracial, I would insist upon putting “brown” on every form that asked. Who, me? Can’t you see I’m brown? </p>

<p>We should be like Brazil, where people are more thoroughly mixed and no one seems to notice.</p>

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<p>“We should be like Brazil, where people are more thoroughly mixed and no one seems to notice.”</p>

<p>It’s a myth that Brazil is free of racism.</p>

<p>"The idea that it’s a ``racial democracy’’ has long been one of Brazil’s most cherished myths. But as it participates in the U.N. conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, the government is having to deal with a problem back home. Although Afro-Brazilians make up nearly half the population of 170 million, they make up 63 percent of the nation’s poor and less than 16 percent of graduating university students last year, according to government figures.

The illiteracy rate for Afro-Brazilians is 26 percent, compared to 10 percent for whites. In the job market, things aren't much better. A black man earns on average 48 percent less than his white counterpart in the same job, according to the Sao Paulo State Socio-Economic Research Foundation, which monitors labor statistics.

Although racial discrimination is a crime, help-wanted ads often require ``good appearance'' - which is widely taken as code for white.</p>

<p><code>Poverty in Brazil has a color,‘’ read an opinion article this week in the financial daily Gazeta Mercantil, considered Brazil’s Wall Street Journal.</code>From the racial viewpoint, Brazil and the USA are different - there, whites and blacks are equal but live separately; here, they are together but unequal.‘’
[Brazil</a> Grappling With Racism](<a href=“http://aad.english.ucsb.edu/docs/muello1.html]Brazil”>http://aad.english.ucsb.edu/docs/muello1.html)</p>

<p>They also categorize people into more racial categories than people do in the U.S.</p>

<p>“Compared to 19th-century United States, 20th-century Brazil was characterized by a relative absence of sharply defined racial groups. This pattern reflects a different history and different social relations. Basically, race in Brazil was recognized as the difference between ancestry (which determines genotype) and phenotypic differences. Racial identity was not governed by a rigid descent rule. A Brazilian child was never automatically identified with the racial type of one or both parents, nor were there only two categories to choose from. Over a dozen racial categories are recognized in conformity with the combinations of hair color, hair texture, eye color, and skin color. These types grade into each other like the colors of the spectrum, and no one category stands significantly isolated from the rest. That is, race referred to appearance, not heredity.
Through this system of racial identification, parents and children and even brothers and sisters were frequently accepted as representatives of opposite racial types. In a fishing village in the state of Bahia, an investigator showed 100 people pictures of three sisters and they were asked to identify the races of each. In only six responses were the sisters identified by the same racial term. Fourteen responses used a different term for each sister. In another experiment nine portraits were shown to a hundred people. Forty different racial types were elicited. It was found, in addition, that a given Brazilian might be called by as many as thirteen different terms by other members of the community. These terms are spread out across practically the entire spectrum of theoretical racial types. A further consequence of the absence of a descent rule was that Brazilians apparently not only disagreed about the racial identity of specific individuals, but they also seemed to be in disagreement about the abstract meaning of the racial terms as defined by words and phrases. For example, 40% of a sample ranked moreno claro as a lighter type than mulato claro, while 60% reversed this order. A further note of confusion is that one person might employ different racial terms to describe the same person over a short time span. The choice of which racial description to use may vary according to both the personal relationships and moods of the individuals involved. The Brazilian census lists one’s race according to the preference of the person being interviewed. As a consequence, hundreds of races appeared in the census results, ranging from blue (which is blacker than the usual black) to pink (which is whiter than the usual white).”</p>

<p>[Social</a> interpretations of race - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_interpretations_of_race]Social”>Race (human categorization) - Wikipedia)</p>