Mixed Race Studies

Griqua Identity: A Bibliography

2010
47 pages

Allegra Louw, Librarian
African Studies Library
University of Cape Town

Introduction

Most scholars acknowledge that the origins of the Griqua people are rooted in the complex relationships between autochthonous KhoeSan, slaves, Africans and European settlers. Coupled with the intricacies that underpin the issue of Griqua identity—and often as equally contested—is the matter of terminology.

Christopher Saunders and Nicholas Southey describe the Griquas as

Pastoralists of Khoikhoi and mixed descent, initially known as Bastards or Basters, who left the Cape in the late 18th century under their first leader, Adam Kok 1 (c.1710-c.1795).

They explain the name “bastards” as

[The] term used in the 18th century for the offspring of mixed unions of whites with people of colour, most commonly Khoikhoi but also, less frequently, slaves.”

Even in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, issues of identity and ethnicity continue to dominate the literature of the Griqua people. As the South African social anthropologist, Linda Waldman, writes:

The Griqua comprise an extremely diverse category of South Africans. They are defined neither by geographical boundaries nor by cultural practices.

Waldman goes on to illustrate the complexities surrounding attempts to categorise the Griqua people by explaining how the Griqua have been described by some as a sub-category of the Coloured people, by others as either constituting a separate ethnic group, by others as not constituting a separate ethnic group, and by still others as a nation…

Read the entire bibliography here.

Coloured Identity: South Africa, A Select bibliography

November 2010
74 pages

Allegra Louw, Librarian
African Studies Library
University of Cape Town

Introduction

According to Mohamed Adhikari, a leading scholar on Coloured Identity, the concept of “Colouredness” functioned as a social identity from the time of the formation of the South African state in 1910 to the present. He believes that Coloured identity did not undergo a process of continuous change during the era of white rule in South Africa, but remained essentially stable. This was because of

the Coloured people‘s assimilationism, which spurred hopes of future acceptance into the dominant society; their intermediate status in the racial hierarchy, which generated fears that they might lose their position of relative privilege and be relegated to the status of Africans; the negative connotations with which Coloured identity was imbued, especially the shame attached to their supposed racial hybridity; and finally, the marginality of the Coloured people, which caused them a great deal of frustration.

For the sociologist Zimitri Erasmus, “Coloured identities are not based on ‘race mixture’, but on cultural creativity, creolized formations shaped by South Africa‘s history of colonialism, slavery, segregation and apartheid.” She sees Coloured identities as cultural identities comprising detailed bodies of knowledge, specific cultural practices, memories, rituals and modes of being. Coloured identities were formed in the colonial encounter between colonists (Dutch and British), slaves from South and East India and from East Africa, and conquered indigenous peoples, the Khoi and San.

The South African Population Registration Act (Act 30 of 1950) defined a ‘Coloured person’ as a person who is not a white person or a Bantu. Section 5 (1) and (2) distinguished the following subgroups: Cape Coloureds, Malay, Griqua, Other Coloureds, Chinese, Indians and Other Asiatics.

There are those who deny the existence of a ‘Coloured’ identity. In the late 1990s, political activist and academic Neville Alexander wrote that coloured identity was white-imposed, reactionary and indicative of new forms of racism. Similarly, Zimitri Erasmus cites Norman Duncan, in an interview in the Cape Times, asserting that “…there‘s no such thing as a coloured culture, coloured identity. Someone has to show me what it is…”.

An interesting phenomenon is the proliferation of organisations which emerged after the April 1994 elections. Amongst these were the Kleurling Weerstandsbeweging vir die Vooruitgang van Bruinmense (Coloured Movement for the Progress of Brown People), the December First Movement and the Coloured Forum. A more recent development was the emergence of the Bruin Belange Inisiatief (Brown Interests Initiative) which was formed in July 2008. Most of these organisations were based in the Western Cape, and were formed not only for access to material resources, but also for political and social recognition.

This bibliography has been compiled to aid research on Coloured identity in South Africa, particularly in the Western Cape. It comprises all the divergent views on this phenomenon but is by no means complete. The bibliography is dynamic and will be updated from time to time.

Read the entire bibliography here.

Identifications and cultural practices of mixed-heritage youth

Paper presented in the eConference on “Mixedness and Mixing: New Perspectives on Mixed-Race Britons”
Commission for Racial Equality
2007-09-04 through 2007-09-06
4 pages

Martyn Barrett, Professor of Psychology
University of Surrey

David Garbin, Research Fellow
Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism
University of Surrey

John Eade, Professor of Sociology & Anthropology
Roehampton University

Marco Cinnirella, Senior Lecturer in Psychology
Royal Holloway University of London

This paper summarises findings from a research study which investigated how 11- to 17-year-old mixed-heritage adolescents living in London negotiate the demands of living with multiple cultures. The study also explored how these adolescents construe themselves in terms of race, ethnicity and nationality. It was found that these individuals had multiple identifications which were subjectively salient to them, and that they were very adept at managing their various identities in different situations. There was no evidence of a sense of marginality, or of being ‘caught between two cultures’, and there was no difference in the strength of British identification exhibited by these mixed-heritage adolescents and white English adolescents of the same age. However, the identities and cultural practices of the mixed-heritage adolescents were fluid and context-dependent, and they appreciated the advantages of being able to negotiate and interact with multiple ethnic worlds.

…Findings from the quantitative phase

The quantitative questionnaires revealed that, in the full mixed-heritage sample of 126 youth, British identification was weaker than both ethnic and religious identification; ethnic and religious identifications were of equal strength. It is noteworthy that there was no difference in the strength of British identification exhibited by the mixed-heritage and white English participants. When the black Caribbean-white mixed-heritage participants were analysed as separate group, it was found that they had the highest levels of identification with Britishness out of all the minority ethnic groups, and there were no significant differences in the strength of these participants’ ethnic, British and religious identifications. However, for the black African-white participants, ethnic identification was stronger than British identification, with religious identification being between the two. Analysed individually, neither of the two black-white mixed-heritage groups differed from white English children in their strength of British identification…

Read the entire paper here.

Revisioning Black/White Multiracial Families: The Single-Parent Experience

American Sociological Association,
Atlanta Hilton Hotel, Atlanta, Georgia
2003-08-16
18 pages, 5,006 words

Rachel Sullivan

In the literature on Black/White multiracial families, there is a significant group of families missing from most research. These are households that are lead by a single parent of a biracial child. While data on the relative prevalence of single parenthood in multiracial populations is sparse, my research indicates that a significant percentage of multiracial families are headed by single parents. Nearly half of the Black/White biracial infants and toddlers in my study where born to a unmarried parent (National Maternal and Infant Health Survey 1988, 1991). This study also indicates that these families are much like other single parent families demographically. In most cases they fall somewhere between black and white single parent households; however, in areas where there are differences they tend to be closer to African American families.

…Since so much of the research is narrowly focused on identity and marriage,  single parents of biracial children, who are divorced, widowed, or never married, are rarely discussed. One reason this group is overlooked is because of the methodological  techniques used to analyzed multiracial families. Research on marriage uses often uses Census data to find intermarried couples; however, the level of analysis is generally the couple, so married couples are identified and then sorted into various racial combinations. Since so much of the research is narrowly focused on identity and marriage,  single parents of biracial children, who are divorced, widowed, or never married, are  rarely discussed. One reason this group is overlooked is because of the methodological  techniques used to analyzed multiracial families. Research on marriage uses often uses Census data to find intermarried couples; however, the level of analysis is generally the couple, so married couples are identified and then sorted into various racial combinations…

Read the entire paper here.

Black and White: The Relevance of Race-Unfinished Business

The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi chapter at Agusta State University
Activities for Fall 2001
2001-10-05
5 pages

Christopher Murphy
Department of History and Anthropology
Augusta State University, Augusta, Georgia

Several centuries ago, as Europeans first explored the distant, unknown reaches of the globe, it became clear that populations around the world differed enormously in appearance and behavior. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the emerging study of anthropology undertook to carefully measure and describe these physical variations and scientifically classify the “races” of humankind, as they were called, based on the results.

Initially, the criteria of racial classification were based on relatively rough and ready observable traits: skin color, body configuration, facial features, hair form, measurements of skull shape and volume and so on. Eventually, anthropologists recognized a people’s customary learned patterns of behavior as separate from their physique. Among social scientists customary behavior came to be called culture and physical characteristics came to be known as race…

…Anthropologist Conrad Kottak has pointed out an interesting aspect of social race attribution connected to interracial mating. When such matings occurred, the offspring was routinely assimilated to the race of the minority parent, a phenomenon Kottak calls “hypodescent”. This practice was undoubtedly caused in part by the fantasy fear of whites that interracial unions would somehow “dilute” or “corrupt” the racial qualities which many of them believed had led to their dominance. If whites were superior people, the founders of modern civilization as they liked to believe, only disaster could follow from such intimacy between the races.

Preventing all sexual contact between races and consequent miscegenation proved impossible, but putative racial purity had more than one line of defense. By clearly identifying the mixed race offspring as “Black” with the disabilities that status then carried, hypodescent ensured that these individuals could not enter the white world since the races lived in parallel, but unequal, social universes. If not for this practice, which was reinforced by law in some states and custom everywhere until after the Civil Rights movement, it might have been possible that the child’s status would follow that of the superordinate parent…

Read the entire paper here.

New Challenges in Measuring Race in the United States

2010 National Conference on Health Statistics
Omni Shorem Hotel, Washington, D.C.
2010-08-17
46 pages/slides

Reynolds Farley, Research Professor Emeritus
University of Michigan
Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research

The Multiracial Movement of the 1990s [page/slide 2]

• After Census 1990, a small social movement developed calling for a fundamental change in the way the federal statistical system classified people by race. Susan Graham played an important role in this.
• Rather than forcing persons to identify with one single race only, they insisted upon the addition of a “Multiple Races” category.
• Some leading advocates of this change were white women married to African-American men who found that their children were almost always classified as black by those who collected statistical data or tabulated persons by race. See: Kim M. Williams, Mark One or More Civil Rights in Multiracial America

Who Identifies with Multiple Races? [page/slide 9]

• Age differences are great. In 2008, 5% of those under 10 were identified with two or more races; fewer than 1% for those over age 64 did so.
• Race differences are substantial. In 2008, 52% of the Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander population identified with a second race; 45% of American Indians did so. For whites, it was only 3%
• Educational Attainment differences in identifying with multiple races were small.
• Geographic Differences in Identifying with Two or More Races are Large. In 2008, 21% of the residents of Honolulu and 10% in Anchorage identified with 2 or more races. In Birmingham, Alabama, Jackson, Mississippi, Portland, Maine and Sarasota, Florida; fewer than 1% identified with 2 or more races.

Measuring Race Will Be Increasingly Challenging [page/slide 26]

• A substantial increase in interracial marriages implies that the multiple race population is growing rapidly
• There is widespread consensus that race is a social construct. Perhaps, many people wish to construct their own racial identity.
• Question order and question wording effects are very large

Read the entire presentation here.

Not Quite White: Race Classification and the Arab American Experience

This paper was first presented at a symposium on Arab Americans by:
The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies
Georgetown University
1997-04-04

(This is also a chapter in Arabs in America: Building a New Future)

Issues of race and identity are certainly dominant factors in American social history. The dual legacies of slavery and massive immigration – and how they have intersected over time—deeply conditioned the ways in which the citizenry relates to race, and how the government intercedes to classify the population.

Throughout the more than 100 years that Arabs have immigrated to the U.S., there has been the need to clarify, accommodate and reexamine their relationship to this peculiar American fixation on race. In each historical period, Arabs in America have confronted race-based challenges to their identity. Today, the constituency known as Arab American is situated at an interesting social crossroads, where issues of minority and majority affiliation demand more attention—and reflection.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine race classification policy as it has impacted the Arab American experience. Rather than approach the question of identity development from within the ethnic boundaries (which continues to be ably and amply studied), this view is principally to examine the externally—imposed systems of classification in the American context: how and why they have developed, changed over time, and how they have related historically to Arab immigrants and ethnics…

…The effect of racial classification on Arab Americans thus became one of the topics that continued to be debated throughout the three-year review process. Under the heading of “emerging categories”, the AAI proposal was presented at the next major phase of the review process, a workshop sponsored by the National Research Council in February 1994 to discuss further the federal standards and make recommendations to the Office of Management and Budget. The other principal emerging category issue proposed was the addition to the race choices of a multi-racial check off for individuals of mixed parentage who in the current framework are obliged to select one identifying race. Although other refinements to the federal guidelines were entertained, such as reclassifying Hawaiians as Native Americans and merging Hispanics into the race categories, the mixed race question was clearly the most controversial recommendation, one that generated the most organized public pressure and one that virtually every stakeholder requiring data on race—including the minority communities—oppose on the grounds that it skews continuity of race data and, in effect, serves to undermine policies that implement affirmative action.

Though overshadowed by the mixed race issue, the Arab American proposal continued to be raised in the final phase of the federal review: a series of public hearings sponsored by the OMB around the country during the summer of 1994. By then, a similar proposal for a specific “Arab American” category—as a linguistically-based identifier—was introduced by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). Testimony for the regional category (Middle East/North African) with ethnic subgroups (Arab, Iranian, Turk, Cypriot, Assyrian, etc.) was presented alongside support for a distinctly Arab American classifier—a mixed signal cited in the OMB report as a lack of consensus over the definition of the population in question. This was in fact one of several findings cited by the OMB as not justifying further research in this area at this time; another factor was the relatively small size of the population. By September 1997, the review process was complete and the OMB decided against the Arab American proposals, leaving open the possibility of study at some future date…

Read the entire paper here.

Applying Self-Discrepancy Theory to Biracial Identity and Adjustment: A Proposed Study

Social-Personality Brown Bag Series
University of California, Davis
Location: Young 166
2010-11-08, 12:10-13:30 PST (Local Time)

Lauren Berger

Research suggests that biracials may have poorer mental health than monoracials and a recent meta-analysis (Shih & Sanchez, 2005) cites a lack of research testing potential mediators of the link between biracial identity and adjustment. The proposed study aims to examine Higgin’s Self-Discrepancy Theory (1987, 1989) model of vulnerability as one such mediator of the relationship. Discrepancies between self-state representations have been found to be related to different kinds of emotional distress and self-esteem.  We hypothesize that both internal and external (dis-confirming feedback from others) identity discrepancies will be related to lower levels of biracial adjustment. The extent to which the individual is comfortable with conflicting messages will also be examined as a moderator. Some aspects of the study are not yet finalized and feedback/comments would be much appreciated!

Defying the Civil Rights Lobby: The American Multiracial Movement

Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change
University of Memphis
April 2007
35 pages

Kim M. Williams, Associate Professor of Public Policy
Harvard University

Throughout the 1990s a handful of advocates argued to stunning if partial success that it was both inaccurate and an affront to force multiracial Americans into monoracial categories. They called for the addition of a multiracial designator on the U.S. Census to bolster the self-esteem of multiracial children; furthermore, they maintained that the recognition of racial mixture could help defuse American racial polarization. Fearing the potential dilution of minority numbers and political power, ironically, civil rights groups emerged as the staunchest opponents of the multiracial category effort. Nevertheless, from 1992 to 1998, six states passed legislation to add a multiracial category on state forms. Further, in 1997 the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced an unprecedented “mark one or more” (MOOM) decision, which did not add a multiracial category to the census, but nevertheless, allowed Americans to identify officially with as many racial groups as they saw fit. Although in some ways its immediate impact might seem negligible, I argue in in Race Counts: American Multiracialism & Post-Civil Rights Politics [Mark One or More: Civil Rights in Multiracial America] (The University of Michigan Press, Forthcoming) that MOOM will eventually reach deeply into the nation’s civil rights agenda. Ultimately this recent restructuring of the American racial classification system, in tandem with coexisting trends, could push the nation to rethink the logic of civil rights enforcement.

The multiracial movement started with a handful of adult-based groups that formed on the West Coast in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Currently there are approximately thirty active adult-based multiracial organizations across the United States and about the same number of student organizations on college campuses. Most of the adult-based groups are oriented toward social support more than political advocacy, but in 1988, a number of these local organizations joined forces to create the Association for Multi-Ethnic Americans (AMEA). At that point, the primary political goal of this new umbrella group was to push the Census Bureau to add a multiracial category on the 1990 census. Soon after the establishment of AMEA, two other national umbrella organizations formed: Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally) and A Place for Us. Beyond agenda setting, this small, disorganized social movement exerted little to no influence over the aforementioned outcomes. At the height of movement activity it involved no more than 1,000 individuals in a loose network of groups (Figure 5.1) scattered across the country and only twenty or so core, committed activists at the helm…

Read the entire paper here.

A Critical Race Theory Approach to Understanding Cinematic Representations of the Mixed Race Experience

Center for Race & Gender
University of California, Berkeley
2010-12-08

10/5/2010 CRG Forum: Mixed Race/Mixed Space in Media Culture & Militarized Zones
“A Critical Race Theory Approach to Understanding Cinematic Representations of the Mixed Race Experience”

Kevin Escudero, Ethnic Studies

This presentation focuses on the developmental trajectory of the portrayal of mixed race people in mainstream media.  Primarily looking at film, but also analyzing other media texts such as photography, stand-up comedy and particular sub-genres of film (Disney, television series, etc.) this presentation seeks to understand the ways in which different forms of media have portrayed mixed race people pre and post-Loving.  While much work has been done on the depiction of mixed race people in media post-Loving, there is a need for such work to be contextualized within the pre-Loving depictions of mixed race.  Furthermore, very little attention has been given to the ways in which pre-1967 depictions of mixed race characters (e.g. the tragic mulatto) oftentimes reflect as well as perpetuated racist stereotypes of mixed race people.  These depictions of mixed race people during the anti-miscegenation era are what I argue, has given rise to the utilization by mixed race people of multiple forms of self-expression available through various media in the post-Loving era.

Listen to the presentation here.