Kamala Harris’ purported Irish ancestry highlights complicated backstory of identity and enslavement

2024-09-06

New Routes to Mixed “Roots”

Genealogy · 2022 · 3 citations

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Genealogy

Developments in reproductive (e.g., assisted reproduction, surrogacy) and genetic technologies (commercial DNA ancestry testing) have opened new routes to mixedness that disrupt the relationship between multiracialism and family. Discussions of racial mixedness, both academic and lay, tend to refer to persons born to parents of different racialized ancestry. Multiracialism is also understood as an outcome of extended generational descent—a family lineage comprised of ancestors of varied “races”. Both modes of mixed subjectivity rely on a notion of race as transmitted through sexual reproduction, and our study of them has often focused on the implications of this boundary crossing for families. These routes to mixedness imply a degree of intimacy and “knownness” between partners, with implications for the broader web of relationships into which one is born or marries. Assisted reproduction allows for the intentional creation of mixed-race babies outside of sexual reproduction and relationship. These technologies make possible mixed race by design, in which one can choose an egg or sperm donor on the basis of their racial difference, without knowing the donor beyond a set of descriptive characteristics. Commercial DNA testing produces another route to mixedness—mixed by revelation—in which previously unknown mixed ancestry is revealed through genetic testing. Ancestry tests, however, deal in estimations of biogenetic markers, rather than specific persons. To varying degrees, these newer routes to mixedness reconfigure the nexus of biogenetic substance and kinship long foregrounded in American notions of mixedness, expand the contours of mixed-race subjectivity, and reshape notions of interracial relatedness.

Chapter 18. Interracial Intimacy on the Commodity Frontier

Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2019-12-31

Mixed Race Identities

Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · 2015-04-16

"Tense and Tender Ties": a review of Janny Scott'sA Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother (2011)

Transition: An International Review · 2012-01-01 · 2 citations

Psychologically conflicted, confused, traitorous, tragic, and deracinated: the public vocabulary used to describe multiracial people has hardly changed since the days when state laws banned marriage between black and white. Zeroing in on interracial kinship, Kimberly DaCosta close reads Janny Scott ’s biography of Barack Obama’s mother.

Multifaceted Identity of Interethnic Young People: Chameleon Identities

Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · 2011-09-01 · 13 citations

Framing Racial Inequality

Sociological Forum · 2010-05-26

5 Creating Multiracial Identity and Community

Stanford University Press eBooks · 2007-03-14

Making Multiracials

Stanford University Press eBooks · 2007-03-14 · 172 citations

When in 1997 golfer Tiger Woods described his racial identity on Oprah as "cablinasian," it struck many as idiosyncratic. But by 2003, a New York Times article declared the arrival of "Generation E.A."—the ethnically ambiguous. Multiracial had become a recognizable social category for a large group of Americans. Making Multiracials tells the story of the social movement that emerged around mixed race identity in the 1990s. Organizations for interracial families and mixed race people—groups once loosely organized and only partially aware of each other—proliferated. What was once ignored, treated as taboo, or just thought not to exist quickly became part of the cultural mainstream. How did this category of people come together? Why did the movement develop when it did? What is it about "being mixed" that constitutes a compelling basis for activism? Drawing on extensive interviews and fieldwork, the author answers these questions to show how multiracials have been "made" through state policy, family organizations, and market forces.

12 Selling Mixedness: Marketing with Multiracial Identities

Lynne Rienner Publishers eBooks · 2006-01-01 · 2 citations