Mixed Race Studies

The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing

New York University Press
April 2013
288 pages
22 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 9780814772492
Paper ISBN: 9780814772508

Greg Carter, Associate Professor of History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Barack Obama’s historic presidency has re-inserted mixed race into the national conversation. While the troubled and pejorative history of racial amalgamation throughout U.S. history is a familiar story, The United States of the United Races reconsiders an understudied optimist tradition, one which has praised mixture as a means to create a new people, bring equality to all, and fulfill an American destiny. In this genealogy, Greg Carter re-envisions racial mixture as a vehicle for pride and a way for citizens to examine mixed America as a better America.

Tracing the centuries-long conversation that began with Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s Letters of an American Farmer in the 1780s through to the Mulitracial Movement of the 1990s and the debates surrounding racial categories on the U.S. Census in the twenty-first century, Greg Carter explores a broad range of documents and moments, unearthing a new narrative that locates hope in racial mixture. Carter traces the reception of the concept as it has evolved over the years, from and decade to decade and century to century, wherein even minor changes in individual attitudes have paved the way for major changes in public response. The United States of the United Races sweeps away an ugly element of U.S. history, replacing it with a new understanding of race in America.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Thomas Jefferson’s Challengers
• 2. Wendell Phillips, Unapologetic Abolitionist, Unreformed Amalgamationist
• 3. Plessy v. Racism
• 4. The Color Line, the Melting Pot, and the Stomach
• 5. Say It Loud, I’m One Drop and I’m Proud
• 6. The End of Race as We Know It
• 7. Praising Ambiguity, Preferring Certainty
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author

Introduction

In April 2010, the White House publicized Barack Obama’s self-identification on his U.S. census form. He marked one box “Black, African Am., or Negro,” settling one of the most prevalent issues during his 2008 presidential campaign: his racial identity. This choice resounded with the monoracial ways of thinking so prevalent throughout U.S. history. People who believed he was only black because he looked like a black person or because many others (society) believed so or because of the historical prevalence of the one-drop rule received confirmation of that belief. The mainstream media had been calling him the black president for over a year, so they received confirmation of this moniker.

Many people who had followed the adoption of multiple checking on the census found his choice surprising. Surely, as president, he would be aware of the ability to choose more than one race. To pick one alone went against everything activists wanting to reform the government’s system of racial categorization had worked for in the 1990s. Many found it surprising that the man who had called himself “the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas” would choose one race. After all, he had used this construction far more times than he had called himself black, giving the impression that he embraced his mixture along with identifying as black. That snippet, along with images of his diverse family, had been part of what endeared him to mixed-race supporters. Similarly, his campaign’s deployment of his white relatives built sympathy with white voters. Some people argued that he had failed to indicate what he “was” by choosing one race. He made the diverse backgrounds in his immediate family a footnote. But, recalling Maria P. P. Root’s “A Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People,” a pillar of contemporary thought on mixed race, they had to respect his prerogative. He had the right to identify himself differently than the way strangers expected him to identify.

Three lessons emerged from this episode: How one talks about oneself can be different from how one identifies from day to day. How one identifies from day to day can be different from how one fills out forms. And on a form with political repercussions, such as the census, one may choose a political statement different from both how one talks and how one identifies. Obama had always been a political creature; he never did anything for simple reasons. By the regulations, the administration could have withheld the information for seventy-two years. Instead, it became a small yet notable news piece in real time. Publicizing his participation in the census could motivate other minorities (beyond those who knew the history of multiple checking) to do so as well. More likely, he was thinking about the 2012 election. His response to the 2010 census could influence voters later on. If the number of those who would have hurt feelings over a singular answer was less than those who would find offense in a multiple answer, then a singular answer was the best to give. Even though mixed-race Americans took great pride in Obama’s ascendance, they were a small faction to satisfy.

Then why did Obama take so much care to cast himself as a young, mixed-race hope for the future? Because even though the number of people who identify as mixed race is small, they hold immense figural power for the nation as symbols of progress, equality, and utopia, themes he wanted to associate with his campaign. In other words, he piggybacked onto positive notions about racially mixed people to improve his symbolic power. At the same time, he nurtured the stable, concrete, and accessible identity that people so used to monoracial thought could embrace, not the ambiguous one that challenged everyone.

Interpretation of current events such as this can disentangle the complexities we encounter here and now. However, while historical analysis always enriches the understanding of current events, writing history about current events presents a pitfall: they are moving targets resisting our attempts to focus on them. Similarly, following figures such as Obama lures us into announcing sea changes in racial conditions. Americans of all walks like indicators of progress. But addressing racial inequality calls for more than well-wishing. As a guiding principle, we should remember to appreciate that these are stories that have no resolution, much like the story of racialization in general. The meanings of mixture, the language we use to describe it, and its cast of characters have always been in flux.

Even before colonial Virginia established the first anti-intermarriage laws in 1691, efforts to stabilize racial identity had been instrumental in securing property, defending slavery, and maintaining segregation. The study of interracial intimacy has labeled racially mixed people either pollutants to society or the last hope for their inferior parent groups. To this day, many Americans label each other monoracially, interracial marriage remains a rarity, and group identities work best when easy to comprehend. However, at the same time that many worked to make racial categorization rigid, a few have defended racial mixing as a boon for the nation. Ever since English explorer John Smith told the story of the Indian princess Pocahontas saving his life in 1608 (a founding myth of the United States), some have considered racial mixing a positive. These voices were often privileged with access to outlets. Many were men, and many were white. This study reconsiders the understudied optimist tradition that has disavowed mixing as a means to uplift a particular racial group or a means to do away with race altogether. Instead, this group of vanguards has praised mixture as a means to create a new people, to bring equality to all, and to fulfill an American destiny. Historians of race have passed over this position, but my narrative shows that contemporary fascination with racially mixed figures has historical roots in how past Americans have imagined what radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips first called “The United States of the United Races.”…

Read the entire Introduction here.

Alien Citizen: Review

www.ReviewPlays.com
ALIEN CITIZEN
Asylum Lab
2013-05-13

Jose Ruiz

Elizabeth Liang steps on the solo stage to tell the world what it’s like to be a TCK (Third Culture Kid).  These are people who, as children, traveled the globe intermittently because their parents were sent to diplomatic, business or military assignments and the family had to constantly adjust to new schools, new friends, new customs and new languages.  Her father worked for a multi-national company and was sent to several different countries during her formative years.

That in itself is fodder for a fascinating story of growing up with indeterminate roots.  When the story comes from Elizabeth Liang, whose ethnic heritage spans three continents, from her paternal roots in China, to her birth roots in Central America, to her mother’s varied European background, it becomes more than just a story…

Read the entire review here.

‘War Baby’ is something to see, if you can let go

The Chicago Tribune
2013-05-08

Lori Waxman, Instructor of Art History, Theory and Criticism
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

It was the Hello Kitty tepee that did it for me.

Some exhibitions can be so challenging that it takes a particularly unexpected artwork for the viewer to finally let go and get into the swing of things. “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art,” currently up at the DePaul Art Museum and featuring work by a dozen-and-a-half artists, is one such show. A riotously colored digital print by Debra Yepa-Pappan featuring a purple-haired Native American woman, lifted from an iconic Edward S. Curtis photograph and set against a background of space-age tepees, one of them marked with the equally iconic and silent face of everybody’s favorite Japanese cat, is one such artwork.

Hilarious and weird and crazily of its time — i.e., now — Yepa-Pappan’s collage lifted my thoughts up and over the various stumbling blocks that “War Baby/Love Child” presents. Curated by Laura Kina, an artist and DePaul professor, and Wei Ming Dariotis, a professor of Asian-American Studies at San Francisco State University, the cogitative but overdetermined exhibition sets up a Catch-22. It wants to recognize the complex realities of a fast-growing segment of the American population — the 2.6 million who identify as Asian plus one or more other races — and to prove how far beyond stereotype those people go. And yet, two gargantuan cliches give their name to the exhibition itself.

The term “war babies” generally refers to the children of Asian or Pacific Islander women and the U.S. soldiers who were stationed in their home countries during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. “Love children” were born of the free love of a post-civil rights and flower-child era, and, as listed in the extensive exhibition catalog, their makeup includes Eurasians and Hapas (Mixed White Asians), Mixed Bloods (Mixed Asian Native Americans), Blasians (Mixed Black Asians) and Mestizaje (Mixed Latino Asians).

“War Baby/Love Child” thus finds itself in the counterintuitive position of wanting to replace its own title with a dozen less-loaded ones. Wall labels are one tool, and the ones here list an astonishing array of mixed identities as well as direct quotes from most of the artists, many of whom speak about personal experiences growing up amid racial presumption…

Read the entire article here.

HIST 574–Modern U.S. History: Miscegenation, Mixed Race, and Interracial Relationships

Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts
Summer 2013

Ulli Ryder, Lecturer of History and Africana Studies

This class will explore the conditions for and consequences of crossing racial boundaries in the United States. It will take a multidisciplinary approach, utilizing historical scholarship, literature, legal scholarship, and communication studies, along with several feature and documentary film treatments of the subject. Students will gain a deeper understanding of the ways race has been socially constructed; the connections between race and power in the U.S.; and the possibilities of a non-racist future.

FILM: Mixed-Race People Tell Their Stories in ‘Hafu’

The Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanese Daily News
2013-05-03

J.K. Yamamoto, Rafu Staff Writer

“Hafu,” a new documentary about mixed-race people in Japan, will be screened Wednesday, May 8, at 7:30 p.m. at the Japanese American National Museum, First and Central in Little Tokyo, as part of the 29th L.A. Asian Pacific Film Fest.

Directed by Lara Perez Takagi and Megumi Nishikura, the film had its Los Angeles premiere on April 5 at JANM during the Hapa Japan Conference. The Bay Area premiere was on April 7 at UC Berkeley.

The title, the Japanese pronunciation of “half,” is the most common term in Japan for people who are half Japanese. It is similar to the Hawaiian word “hapa,” which originally meant someone half Native Hawaiian and half Caucasian.

The film focuses on five stories that reflect the diversity of the Hafu experience:…

…At the L.A. premiere, Koji Sakai of JANM noted the connections between “Hafu” and the museum’s ongoing exhibition “Visible & Invisible: A Hapa Japanese American History”: “In a lot of ways the community, or people in general, think of Hapa as a new phenomenon, but in reality Hapas have been there from the very beginning in our community, and it’s time we acknowledge and support that.”

Duncan Ryuken Williams, co-director of the USC Center for Japanese Religions and Cultures, convener of Hapa Japan 2013, and co-curator of “Visible & Invisible,” had high praise for “Hafu”: “It’s a really thoughtful and inspirational film … The film directors did a great job of picking these five individuals. I think you’ll agree they represent the spectrum, the range of possible people in this Hafu experience … I’ve followed the making of this film and I know it’s a major labor of love for the two film directors. They put a lot into making this happen with the help of dozens of people who volunteered their time, most of whom were Hafu individuals.”…

Read the entire article here.

“Black No More”?: Walter White, Hydroquinone, and the “Negro Problem”

American Studies
Volume 47, Number 1 (Spring 2006)
pages 5-30

Eric Porter, Professor of American Studies
University of California, Santa Cruz

In an August 1949 Look magazine article—”Has Science Conquered the Color Line?”—NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White pondered the social implications of monobenzyl ether of hydroquinone, an antioxidant used in rubber and plastics manufacturing that had recently been found to remove melanin from human skin. Government investigators had publicly identified this effect in 1940, after investigating complaints by black and Mexican workers at a Texas tannery who developed pale patches of skin on their hands, arms and torsos because of the presence of hydroquinone in their protective gloves. Hydroquinone would eventually be used medicinally to treat severe forms of vitiligo (a disease involving the progressive loss of melanin which makes one’s skin appear mottled) by removing the remaining melanin from patients’ skin, thus evening out their skin tone. It has also been used as a fading compound to treat different kinds of localized hyper-pigmentations and is still found in often-dangerous skin lightening cosmetic products sold to people with dark complexions across the globe.

In 1949, however, the ultimate medical, cosmetic, and social impacts of hydroquinone were still unknown. White wrote his article after traveling to Chicago to meet with scientists engaged in research on the substance. Afterwards, he took it upon himself to speculate on its future in ways that echoed George Schuyler’s 1931 prototypical black science fiction novel Black No More, in which Dr. Junius Crookman, a fictional Harlem physician, devises a way to induce vitiligo “at will” and “solve the American race problem” by turning dark skins pale. Unfortunately for White, his speculations, which might be described as a bad piece of journalism that degenerated into an involuntary piece of science fiction, rendered him a lightning rod for criticism. For the civil rights leader seemed to suggest that hydroquinone provided a solution to the problems of segregation, racism, and colonialism in the post-World War II world by enabling non-white peoples to bleach their skins.

White’s article baffled his contemporaries. Not only did he seem to be advocating an absurd, demeaning, and physically damaging political strategy; some were also struck by the irony that the comments about hydroquinone came from the blond-haired, blue-eyed Executive Secretary of the NAACP. Early in his tenure with the organization, White had been sent to the South to gather information for the organization’s anti-lynching crusade and did so, risking his life in the process, by passing as a white traveling salesman. His career as a “race man” and his leadership of the NAACP since 1931 both affirmed as well as called into question definitions of racial identity, which in turn prompted questions about his role at the organization’s helm…

…What I will argue, however, is that, whatever White’s professional motivations, the ideas embedded in “Has Science Conquered the Color Line?” and especially in a somewhat longer, unpublished version of the piece, the resonances of these ideas with other bits of White’s public commentary, and responses to the Look article by black leaders and lay people alike—all give insight into some of the political and moral dilemmas revolving around race, science, and civil and human rights during the immediate postwar period. Moreover, they illustrate how a scientific, political, and moral imperative to abandon racial thinking had entered African American political and popular discourse by the end of the 1940s. This imperative emanated from decades of research seeking to debunk race as a biological category, and it was given new immediacy by both the horrors of Nazi racial science put into practice and a post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki faith in science, technology, and rational thought as vehicles by which to overcome the problems of the world (the racist and genocidal applications of the bombing notwithstanding). The notion that race was irrational and irrelevant was increasingly prominent, albeit in complicated ways, through the 1940s within a broader, transnational context of academic writing, journalistic reportage, and the rhetoric of statecraft. But it had a particular and no less complicated resonance among African Americans during the immediate post-World War II era.

White’s article and the controversies it elicited demonstrate how dilemmas around race and rights, conditioned by scientific research on race, were, in fact, significant components of black racial formations at mid-century. The imperative to move beyond race affected other political and personal choices—for example, national versus international affiliation, the primacy of race or class in social analysis, integrationist versus nationalist civil rights agendas, race consciousness versus color blindness in personal deportment and interpersonal relations—facing African Americans. And it caused people to ponder the usefulness of the sense of black virtue that constituted their own understanding of what it meant to be human.

This essay moves next to an assessment of “Has Science Conquered the Color Line?” and issues that arose as White, a middle-class “race man” capable of passing as white, tried to debunk the idea that race had a biological basis while maintaining a link to his racial community. The investigation continues by examining the controversy surrounding White’s piece, which demonstrates how political leaders and lay people alike addressed the limitations and value in racial affiliation and racial transcendence. In the process, it explores some of the conceptual and political questions about race, science, and rights that emerged as black leaders like White contemplated the Faustian bargain of linking domestic civil rights struggles to U.S. foreign policy goals and a concomitant ethos of color blindness. The conclusion revisits the idea that engagements with scientific accounts of race were significant to African American racial formations at mid-century, and it ponders the implications of these engagements in light of scholarly claims about the importance of black political cultures and racial discourses during this period…

Read the entire article here.

Violent Liaisons: Historical Crossings and the Negotiation of Sex, Sexuality, and Race in The Book of Night Women and The True History of Paradise

small axe: a caribbean journal of criticism
Volume 16,Number 2, 38 (2012)
pages 43-59
DOI: 10.1215/07990537-1665668

Sam Vásquez, Associate Professor of English
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Increased criticism and representations of violence in contemporary Jamaica often account for these tensions by citing poverty or gang and political rivalries in the post-independence era. However, both Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women (2009) and Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise (1999) take these explorations a step further, specifically examining women’s responses to violence and reminding readers that present-day sexual violence creates conditions of entrapment, hostility, and lawlessness reminiscent of the barbarities of slavery and colonialism. In so doing, the authors highlight the ways historical gender and racial stereotypes inform contemporary understandings of Caribbean gender and sexuality. Anchoring this discussion in recent theories about sex and sexuality and specifically examining mixed-race and white Caribbean women, Sam Vásquez argues that both authors use neo–slave narrative tropes to simultaneously problematize acts of violence against these individuals and demonstrate how women engaged and even utilized limiting colonial paradigms.

Read or purchase the article here.

BeDevil: Colonialism and the children of miscegenation

Journal of International Communication
Volume 19,  Issue 1, 2013
Special Issue: South-North conversations
pages 43-58
DOI: 10.1080/13216597.2012.754363

Wajiha Raza Rizvi
Hashmi Media Institute, Karachi, Pakistan

BeDevil (1993) addresses the marginalization of Aboriginal Australians in the events, symbolism, and media hype surrounding the bicentenary of European settlement in Australia in 1988. Tracey Moffatt challenges the racial stereotypes by gearing a political process of reform and self-recognition though her postmodernist ‘identity search’-driven work aiming at appropriation of hegemonic spectacle. BeDevil disrupts the hegemony of the pure original canon that excluded Aboriginal Australians from the mainstream. This sort of exclusion practice is a known phenomenon worldwide, more so happens in the postcolonial Third World countries like Pakistan and India as both exclude their ethnic minorities from the mainstream media. The paper echos back to Moffatt’s stories of bedeviling experiences with tales of similar issues around race, gender, and normality from Islamic Republic of Pakistan, wherein post-Independence immigrants are constantly struggling for appropriation and redefinition of their identities. The Pakistan born children of miscegenation are considered immigrants by descent despite the facts concerning Islamic origins, two nations’ theory, migration, and over 60 years residency. The paper compares the mutually bedeviling experiences of ‘othering’ and a struggle with the notions of shared social conscience and histories between children of miscegenation in Australia and Pakistan in the context of the Australian trilogy.

Read or purchase the article here.

This, That, Both, Neither: The Badging Of Biracial Identity In Young Adult Realism

The Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults
The official research journal of the Young Adult Library Services Association
2013-04-22

Sarah Hannah Gómez, Graduate Student
School of Library and Information Science
Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts

Editor’s Note: “This, That, Both, Neither” was accepted for the peer reviewed paper session at YALSA’s third annual Young Adult Literature Symposium held November 2-4, 2012 in St. Louis. The theme of the conference was “Hit me with the next big thing.”

Only in the lifetime of the Millennial generation has it become legally acceptable to mark more than one race on a federal form. In the 2010 Census, 2.9 percent of respondents indicated that they were two or more races, with even more assigning themselves other designations that speak to the many types of multiracial identities common today. As this population grows in real life, it also flourishes in young adult literature, where ever more protagonists identify with more than one racial or ethnic group and must decide how to assert themselves and what to call themselves. This paper explores some of these novels and tracks each character’s progress towards creating a “badge” of identity.

Introduction

Every year when I was a student, my school district held awards ceremonies to honor distinguished students of color from all grade levels. There was an African American ceremony, a Hispanic ceremony, and presumably an Asian American and Native American one as well. High-achieving students were invited to their respective ceremonies as well as any students of color, although I’m not entirely sure. I didn’t even know the awards existed until seventh grade, when two girls in my homeroom asked me why I hadn’t been at the African American ceremony the evening before.

I hadn’t been invited.

“Oh.” It hit me. “The district has me down as white.”

If you’d been looking at me when I said that, you would be confused. I don’t exactly look like a character in a Nella Larsen novel. But it wasn’t a lie. I am white. I’m also black. And I’m adopted, so I also share a second mixed identity with my sister, one in which we are ethnically Jewish and Latina.

My mother knew that her children were mixed, and she wanted us to have the advantage of going to a diverse magnet elementary school, so when we started kindergarten, she checked the box marked “white.” This was the late 1980s and early 1990s, when you were only allowed to be one race. And so, without having to lie, my mother helped me and my sister pass as white—at least on paper…

…I share this story not because I’m writing my autobiography, but because this is an experience shared by other mixed-race individuals, an increasingly larger part of the young American population. These teens, I believe, are the future of young adult (YA) literature. For fifteen years now, Americans have been able to officially identify as mixed. As people who identify as mixed-race begin to publish novels that tell their stories, it seems natural that their fictional worlds will represent the worlds they see around them. As Michele Elam notes, “the census box represents the new nonviolent resistance, a finger in the eye of the racial status quo,”  and we all know YA literature to be about testing boundaries and making bold statements…

Read the entire article here.

Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940

Australian National University Press
October 2008
372 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 1921313994; ISBN-13: 978-1921313998
Online ISBN: 9781921536007

Edited by:

Bronwen Douglas, Senior Fellow in Pacific and Asian History
The Australian National University

Chris Ballard, Fellow in Pacific and Asian History
The Australian National University

From the 18th century, Oceania became the principal laboratory of raciology for scholars, voyagers, and colonisers alike. By juxtaposing encounters and theory, this magisterial book explores the semantics of human difference in all its emotional, intellectual, religious, and practical dimensions. The argument developed is subtle, engrossing, and gives the paradigm of ‘race’ its full use value. Foreign Bodies is a model of analysis and erudition from which historians of science and everyone interested in intercultural relations will greatly profit.

This book is also available as a free download in PDF, HTML and mobile device formats. Please read Conditions of Use before downloading the formats.

Contents

• 1. Introduction: Foreign Bodies in Oceania Bronwen Douglas
• Part One — Emergence: Thinking the Science of Race, 1750–1880
  • 2. Climate to Crania: science and the racialization of human difference Bronwen Douglas
• Part Two — Experience: the Science of Race and Oceania, 1750–1869
  • 3. ‘Novus Orbis Australis’: Oceania in the science of race, 1750–1850 Bronwen Douglas
  • 4. ‘Oceanic Negroes’: British anthropology of Papuans, 1820–1869 Chris Ballard
• Part Three — Consolidation: the Science of Race and Aboriginal Australians, 1860–1885
  • 5. British Anthropological Thought in Colonial Practice: the appropriation of Indigenous Australian bodies, 1860–1880 Paul Turnbull
  • 6. ‘Three Living Australians’ and the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, 1885 Stephanie Anderson
• Part Four — Complicity and Challenge: the Science of Race and Evangelical Humanism, 1800–1930
  • 7. The ‘Faculty of Faith’: Evangelical missionaries, social anthropologists, and the claim for human unity in the 19th century Helen Gardner
  • 8. ‘White Man’s Burden’, ‘White Man’s Privilege’: Christian humanism and racial determinism in Oceania, 1890–1930 Christine Weir
• Part Five — Zenith: Colonial Contradictions and the Chimera of Racial Purity, 1920–1940
  • 9. The Half-Caste in Australia, New Zealand, and Western Samoa between the Wars: different problem, different places? Vicki Luker
• Epilogue
  • The Cultivation of Difference in Oceania Chris Ballard
  • Index