An Interesting Piece on Race in Barbados

I just encountered an interesting discussion of “Race/Colour in Barbados” on the blog What Crazy Looks Like.

The epigraphic quotation from Rihanna, “I was bullied at school for being white…Now I’m in a much bigger world,” was fascinating to me largely in clearly illustrating a fundamental difference in the social organization of race in the U.S. and in the Caribbean, for “being white” is one of the last things Rihanna would be likely taken to be in the U.S.

At the same time, the following quotation from the blog post is a useful set of statements about race anywhere in the Americas, even while the particular details that are relevant in any given place will vary:

“Even when we remind ourselves of just how fluid and contested race is we fail to reveal that race is in itself a fiction.
When we refuse to see the difference between historical racial privilege and racial slurs we foreclose on any opportunity to dismantle the fiction of race.
And when we recognise race as constructed we refuse to see its construction does not make it any less ‘real’.”

Beringia and Human Migration to the Americas

Anyone interested in the ongoing debates about human migration into the Americas may want to take a look at a recent news article at Science Daily, New Ideas About Human Migration From Asia To Americas. The article reports on a recent study by Ripan Malhi and colleagues at the University of Illinois published in the Public Library of Science.

The following is from the Science Daily article:

“What puzzled them originally was the disconnect between recent archaeological datings. New evidence places Homo sapiens at the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site in Siberia – as likely a departure point for the migrants as any in the region – as early as 30,000 years before the present, but the earliest archaeological site at the southern end of South America is dated to only 15,000 years ago.
“These archaeological dates suggested two likely scenarios,” the authors wrote: Either the ancestors of Native Americans peopled Beringia before the Last Glacial Maximum, but remained locally isolated – likely because of ecological barriers – until entering the Americas 15,000 years before the present (the Beringian incubation model, BIM); or the ancestors of Native Americans did not reach Beringia until just before 15,000 years before the present, and then moved continuously on into the Americas, being recently derived from a larger parent Asian population (direct colonization model, DCM).
“Thus, for this study the team set out to test the two hypotheses: one, that Native Americans’ ancestors moved directly from Northeast Asia to the Americas; the other, that Native American ancestors were isolated from other Northeast Asian populations for a significant period of time before moving rapidly into the Americas all the way down to Tierra del Fuego.
“Our data supports the second hypothesis: The ancestors of Native Americans peopled Beringia before the Last Glacial Maximum, but remained locally isolated until entering the Americas at 15,000 years before the present.”
“The team’s findings appear in a recent issue of the Public Library of Science in an article titled, “Beringian Standstill and Spread of Native American Founders.”

Charles Wagley and Social Race in the Americas

I've just posted an overview discussion about Charles Wagley's article "On Social Race in the Americas" on the blog that I write for a course that I teach at the University of West Florida, "Peoples and Cultures of the World." For those not familiar with the Wagley article, it was originally published in the 1950s and is a foundational piece for the study of patterns of social race in the Western Hemisphere. Anyone interested in topics of race, the Americas, or history of anthropology might be interested in looking at it.

"More on Why Race Matters"

I'd like to direct attention to the June 1 post on Nicolette Bethel's Blog, "More on Why Race Matters" . As with the previous post on the same blog, "On Why Race Matters" (which I cited in my own post, "Talking About Race"), Bethel's discussion provides an insightful commentary on the contemporary Bahamas that also speaks to the issue of race in a variety of other American contexts.