Mixed Race Studies

Historicizing “mixed-race” and post-modern amnesia

O Desafio da Diferença (Challenge of the Difference)
Universidade Federal da Bahia
Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
2000-04-09 through 2000-04-12

Grupo de Trabalho (Workshop) 5: Mixing it up with Mixed Race: Problematizing and Historicizing the Mixed Race Discourse

Katya Gibel Azoulay [Mevorach], Associate Professor of Anthropology
Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa

Americans have carried the problem of the color line into the 21st century but it is doubtful that the generation of W.E.B. Du Bois anticipated the emergence of a “multiracial” movement whose primary objective was to gain recognition of mixed-race people as a unique entity and different collective. This phenomenon is an outgrowth of “interracial” marriages which, according to the U.S. Census, indicate dramatic increases since the dismantlement of state anti-miscegenation laws in 1967. Blacks, however, are “noticeably absent” from this trend and Newsweek has estimated that approximately 20 percent of interracial marriages were between black and white partners and the overwhelming majority of these are between white women and black men [Fletcher 1998; Azoulay 1997:95]

This paper focuses on the demand for a multiracial category in the U.S. Census in order to explore two intersecting aspects of the multiracial discourse. Attention is only given to the black/white binary for it is this angle which is the most contentious and has received the most public attention. On the one hand, the idea of multiracialism eclipses the broader issue of power partially because it is premised on privileging individual rights rather than group rights. On the other hand, the celebration of multiracial people may be read as a postmodern script in which women, as mothers, occupy a central role in the formation and politicization of racial identities.

As a departure point, let us address the premise of the question posed by the multiracial movement: should racial classifications used to track broad demographic trends and monitor compliance with legislation against racial discrimination take each individual heritage into account? I suggest that the demand for a multiracial category confuses personal identities with prescriptive identities while ignoring the relationship between public policy and identifiable communities. Public policies that utilize race categories affect groups of people who may or may not subscribe to a shared collective identity but who are nevertheless perceived as a group. Government and institutional policies shaped by information gathered about social categories are not formulated for individuals but for groups. The political implications of this lead opponents and supporters of government sponsored social engineering to invoke the equal protection clause under the 14th amendment with very different interpretations. In a departure from the direction set by the U.S. Supreme Court 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education toward civil rights legislation, the courts have moved away from protecting historically disadvantaged group rights evidenced by court-ordered repeals of affirmative action policies confusing invidious discrimination with remedial racial preference.

As a preface, let me state clearly my position: race categories are public fictions which are deeply embedded in American ways of thinking and acting. Furthermore, because classifications based on the political and social category of “race” have no scientific basis, they are misused when appropriated as biological criteria into medical research in the United States [Tapper 1999]. Consequently, arguments for a multiracial category for health reasons (such as bone marrow donors) rely on a faulty notion that race categories can be adjusted for accuracy. Nevertheless, race has assumed the status of a social fact whose meanings reflect, and are reflected by, the cognitive feel of lived experience in a race-based society [Piper 1992; Scales-Trent 1995].

Read the entire paper here.

Heredity and Racial Science for Elementary and Secondary Schools (Erblehre und Rassenkunde für die Grund- und Hauptschule) 2nd edition

Verlag Konkordia
Bühl-Baden, Germany
1937

Karl Bareth, Author

Alfred Vogel, Author

Source: German Propaganda Archive, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan

Archived and Translated by:

Randall Bytwerk, Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences
Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan

Background: This is a teacher’s guide to racial instruction, covering the 4th through the 8th grades. I provide a translation of sections that strike me as particularly interesting. Bareth was an experienced teacher, and Vogel’s title is Rektor. Vogel also produced a set of posters to be used in classroom instruction. Published in 1937, before the alliance with Japan, there is some material on the “Yellow Peril.” Such material disappeared later.

…b) Race mixing among humans.

We have already spoken about one racial mixing. That had to do with the racial development of the German people. May we also speak of it as bastardization? If we look into the face of the German people, peering deeply into its spiritual life, we are absolutely convinced that the joining of these six races into one whole people was not a bastardization. Their genetic traits joined in a wonderful and harmonious way to form the German people, from which our German culture sprang.

We speak of bastardization in the case of a mixed race (Mischlinge) that develops from fundamentally different races or racial mixtures, as, for example, one between Europeans and Negroes, Europeans and Asians, Europeans and Indians, Europeans and Jews, etc. Such mixed race individuals carry the contradictory trains of both races, resulting in a confusion. Bastards are unhappy people. A bastard of European and Negroid decent has some of the characteristics of the white race, and some characteristics of the black race. He unsuited both for the jungles and hot sun of the south, but also for the north. Two souls live and compete within the breast of the bastard. He never finds peace and a harmonious, balanced life. The hard laws of blood force him to live a life of racial confusion and fragmentation…

Read the entire guide here.

“‘Tubbee’ and His Nieces: A Colloquy on White Men, Choctaw Women, Intermarriage and ‘Indianness’ in the Choctaw Intelligencer, 1851”

Southeastern Oklahoma State University
Native American Symposium
2005-Proceedings of the Sixth Native American Symposium
pages 21-30

Richard Mize

The Choctaw Intelligencer’s editorial commentary varied greatly when it came to Choctaw–Chickasaw relations with the United States in 1849-1852. The most poignant opinions expressed in the Intelligencer, published in Doaksville, Choctaw Nation, came from letter writers and centered on the roles of men and women and what it meant to be “Indian.” Spanish, British and French colonialists had disrupted traditional gender roles of all Southeastern tribes centuries before. By 1851, traditional roles were being turned on their heads in Indian Territory. Traditional Choctaws reacted with hostility to the gender bias imposed by American missionaries and the patriarchal role foisted on men accustomed to a tradition of matrilineal property rights and autonomy. Later in the 1850s, civil war threatened between traditionalists and proponents of assimilation, with social tension exacerbated by sharp increases in the number of white intruders. Concepts of race, likewise, were in flux. Americans and many elite natives considered “mixed bloods” to be above “full bloods,” but below whites. “Tubbee” and his nieces and other native writers touched on all of these issues in letters to the editor of the Choctaw Intelligencer in 1851. The words in the letters are themselves artifacts of native literacy, considered then as the most important mark of “progress.” Historian Jill Lepore observed that Indian literacy, among nineteenth-century Americans as well as pro-assimilation natives, “most of all, marked the line between savagery and civilization…

Read the entire paper here.

Re-Visioning Wildfire: Historical Interpretations of the Life and Art of Edmonia Lewis

Southeastern Oklahoma University
Native American Symposium
2005-Proceedings of the Sixth Native American Symposium
pages 31-39

Julieanna Frost
Concordia University

As a feminist historian, one of my major goals is to reclaim the histories of women and to broadcast the diversity of the female experience. In many ways creating a multicultural curriculum is a form of political activism for me. Regarding inclusive history, I strongly agree with Gloria Joseph, who stated that learning history “will help to shatter the prevailing mythology that inhibits so many from acting more decisively for social change and to create a more just society and viable future for all.” My first brief introduction to Edmonia Lewis came in the article “Object Into Subject: Some Thoughts on the Work of Black Women Artists” by Michelle Cliff, which was included in the anthology Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. This piece created a desire for me to learn more about the life and work of Wildfire Mary Edmonia Lewis (ca. 1843 – ca. 1911).

In art encyclopedias and critiques, Lewis is often noted as the first African American female sculptor. To be more accurate, her father was African American and her mother was Anishinabe. Orphaned as a child, she was raised among her mother’s people. The majority of her work was accomplished between 1866 and 1876. Her art has primarily been read as a representation of her Black heritage, ignoring her strong connection to her Native American heritage. In an attempt to rectify this oversight, this paper will examine how her Anishinabe ancestry influenced Lewis’s life and artwork, and explain why scholars tend to ignore this ancestry.

Much of Lewis’s early life and later life went unrecorded. It is believed that she was born near Albany, New York around 1843 and named Wildfire. Her father was a free Black and her mother was Anishinabe. Lewis also had a brother, Sunrise. It appears that Lewis spent most of her early years with the Anishinabe. In an interview, Lewis related,

Mother was a wild Indian and was born in Albany, of copper color and with straight black hair. There she made and sold moccasins. My father, who was a Negro, and a gentleman’s servant, saw her and married her … Mother often left home and wandered with her people, whose habits she could not forget, and thus we were brought up in the same wild manner. Until I was twelve years old, I led this wandering life, fishing and swimming … and making moccasins.

In 1849, Lewis’s mother died and her maternal aunts took her in and raised her. Lewis recalled, “when my mother was dying, she wanted me to promise that I would live three years with her people, and I did.”…

…One reason Lewis is viewed as an African American artist is based upon the social construction of race, as it existed during her lifetime. Dating back to the 17th century, laws that affected Africans and a small number of Native Americans were passed in the English colonies that made slavery an inheritable condition that passed from mother to child. To make the institutionalization of slavery complete, most English colonies outlawed intermarriage between whites and “colored” people by the 18th century. In addition, the legal system did not recognize marriages between “colored” people, although such common law arrangements existed from the colonial period when Blacks and Indians were utilized as indentured servants and later as slaves for life. Nash noted that, “institutions created by white Americans have disguised the degree of red-black intermixing by defining the children of mixed red-black ancestry as black and using the term mulatto in many cases to define half-African, half-Indian persons.” This typology served the economic interests of the ruling class, since classifying these people as Black typically bestowed slave status upon them. Additionally, this classification decreased the population of Native American nations because whites did not acknowledge Black Indians as belonging to the tribe. In contrast to the white practice of racial classification, most of the Native American nations granted full tribal membership to mixed race people if the mother was a member of the tribe. At the time of her birth the Anishinabe also accepted mixed-bloods into the tribe. Although Lewis had an Anishinabe mother and lived among this nation during her formative years, white society classified her as black…

Read the entire paper here.

The Identity Development of Multiracial Youth. ERIC/CUE Digest, Number 137

Education Resources Information Center (ERIC)
ERIC Identifier: ED425248
November 1998
9 pages

Wendy Schwartz

In the past several decades, individuals have been responding more actively to political and personal pressures to identify with a specific group that shares their background. For many people of mixed racial, ethnic, and cultural heritage, making such an identification is complicated. It is important for society to foster the positive development of these individuals, and it is even more important for educators and counselors to know how best to serve the special developmental and educational needs of multiracial students. A key factor in the lives of multiracial children is how they are labeled by themselves, their families, and society in general. A model of the identity development of multiracial children and youth has been proposed by W. Poston (1990). This model suggests that families may foster identity choices for their children that encompass “human,” “multiracial,” and “monoracial” options. At present, many of the important official tallies of individuals in the United States allow for only one racial or ethnic designation. However, in the year 2000, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget will allow individuals to identify themselves with as many racial designations as appropriate. By 2003, schools will also have to change the ways in which students report race, and this may affect the way in which multiracial students see themselves. Individuals who are socialized as multiracial usually benefit from their heritage, but there are disadvantages to being multiracial. One of the disadvantages is the complicated nature of the identity development process for multiracial youth. Another pressure on multiracial youth is societal racism in general and bias against interracial marriage in particular. Given the existence of the prejudices, it is likely that educators and counselors will also harbor some of these ideas, even unconsciously. It is important that educators and counselors consider their personal views carefully to ensure that they do not further complicate the development of the multiracial student’s identity. Learning about and respecting the beliefs, attitudes, and concerns of multiracial students is crucial for educators.

Read the entire paper here.

Black Indian With a Camera: The Work of Valena Broussard Dismukes

Southeastern Oklahoma University
Native American Symposium
2005-Proceedings of the Sixth Native American Symposium
pages 40-46

Sarita Cannon
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In this paper, I examine the liberatory photography of a living African-Choctaw-French American artist, Valena Broussard Dismukes. I am especially fascinated by the way in which Dismukes takes the camera, an object that had previously been used as a weapon of oppression against Native Americans and people of African descent, and uses it to capture the spirit of twenty-first-century Black Indians on their own terms. In her series of portrait photographs entitled “Red-Black Connection: The Cultural Heritage of Black Native Americans,” Dismukes highlights the varied experience of Black Indians in the United States and forces her viewers to reevaluate their notions of what a “real” Indian and what a “real” Black person look like….

…The verbal narratives that accompany many of the portraits highlight many issues that contemporary Black Indians face, including the difficulty of tracing their lineage and the responses they receive from others about their authenticity or lack thereof. However, generally the narratives celebrate Black Indian Identity. A few of Dismukes’ subjects discuss how their own family members obscured their “true” ancestry. For instance, Elnora Tena Webb Mitchell (of Cherokee/Blackfeet descent) writes, “My grandparents and other members of my family were identified as Native American. However, there is much information about our ancestry that is kept secret. Being Native American is not revered nor honored by many family members.” It is interesting to note here that it is not the Black blood that is repressed, but rat her it is the Indian ancestry. It was not always advantageous to be identified as Black rather than Native. This choice depended upon historical and geographical context. Still others note how they are viewed as “wannabes” who are trying to distance themselves from Blackness. Gene “Quietwalker” Holmes of Comanche descent says, “There have been people from both communities who react to my heritage on a negative basis and ask, ‘Who or what are you trying to be?’” But Carol Munday Lawrence of Cherokee descent responds to these attacks simply by saying that she is merely discovering her multiple selves: “I fully understand why some fear that to claim Native American, or any other heritage, is to reject one’s Blackness, but this is not about ‘going Native.’ Knowing who your people are, and embracing them all unconditionally, can only enrich your life.” And Stella Vaugh playfully embraces this historical moment in which she can identify as a multiracial person: “In fact, I’m having fun boasting about my mixed-race. I jokingly say I’m 57 Heinz Variety. My mother’s mother is Cherokee and Irish. My father’s mother is Bohemian and his father is Choctaw. I am told that one of my ancestors is black and I’m still searching for that beautiful person.” Vaugh proudly embraces her multiple heritage and openly acknowledges the mystery that still surrounds her ancestry. She symbolizes the twenty-first century Black Indian who is coming out” after living much of her life in a space where she felt the need to repress parts of her identity. If Dismukes’ project can give at least one person the opportunity to feel a sense of dignity about who she is and introduce her to a community of people who also live at the crossroads of Native and African American cultures, then it is, without a doubt, a meaningful political and artistic endeavor…

Read the entire paper here.

Multiracial Identity Development

Arlington County Public Schools
Arlington County, Virginia
Clarendon Education Center
2011-11-30
28 pages/ 55 slides

Ms. Eleanor Lewis, M.A., CAGS, School Psychologist
Arlington Public Schools

Ms. Veronica Sanjines, M.A., CAG, School Psychologist
Arlington Public Schools

Dr. Ricia Weiner, Ph.D., School Psychologist
Arlington Public Schools

Special Education Parent Resource Center: Workshop Handouts

View the entire presentation here.

Racialisation in Brazil [Karina Round]

Mapping Global Racisms Project (2012- )
University of Leeds
Working Papers
10 pages

Karina Round

This paper is going to explore the processes of racialisation in Brazil, a country were race is supposed to be irrelevant. Racialisation is the dynamic and complex process through which racial categories, concepts and divisions become embedded into social practices. In 2001 the United Nations World Conference against Racism acknowledged that no country could claim to be free of racism and that racism is a worldwide concern and requires a global response. Brazil is a highly fascinating case study to investigate because of the racial divisions, categories and hierarchies that have become deeply rooted in society. Brazilians envisage themselves living in a truly anti-racist nation, a “racial democracy” and this has been embedded in their minds for decades, as a result many academics have strived to give visibility to racism in Brazil. Looking back to when I was a tourist Brazil in 2010, I witnessed the renowned Rio Carnival and what I saw was a country in celebration of its mixed cultural heritage, but little did I know the extent to which racism was fixed into Brazilian’ society. This essay is going to first give a general overview of the situation in Brazil, focusing on Brazil’s principal inequalities. It will then be spilt into four different themes. The first topic will look at the myth of racial democracy and how this has become embedded in Brazilian lives. The second topic will centre on the racial categorisations that exist in the Brazilian system. The third topic focuses on how racism and racial discrimination plays a huge part in educational inequalities and the black population’s exclusion from the labour market. Lastly, this essay will look at the indigenous population’s marginalised position within Brazil.

Read the entire paper here.

Of Mongrels and Men: The Shared Ideology of Anti-Miscegenation Law, Chinese Exclusion, and Contemporary American Neo-Nativism

bepress Legal Series
Working Paper 458
2005-02-16

Geoffrey A. Neri, Associate
Miller Barondess, LLP

Table of Contents

• I. INTRODUCTION
• II. BIRTH OF THE “ABOMINATION”: THE DEVELOPMENT OF ANTI-MISCEGENATION LAW
  • A. Origins and Early History
  • B. Anti-Miscegenation Ideology
    • 1. Monogenism and Christian Fundamentalism
    • 2. Polygenism and Pseudoscience
    • 3. Social Darwinism
    • 4. A Beacon of Light in the Dark Age of Racist Ideology
• III. THE “YELLOW PERIL”: ANTI-MISCEGENATION LAW AND CHINESE EXCLUSION
  • A. Chinese Migration to the United States in the 19th Century
    • 1. Pull Factors
    • 2. Push Factors
  • B. Anti-Chinese Immigration Legislation
  • C. The “Chinese Exclusion Case” and Plenary Power Doctrine
  • D. “Negroes or Mulattoes . . . and Mongolians”: The Anti-Miscegenation Expands to Include the Chinese
  • E. Effects of Anti-Miscegenation Law and Chinese Exclusion on Chinese Transnational Movement
• IV.MORE WHIMPER THAN BANG: THE END OF CHINESE EXCLUSION AND THE ANTI MISCEGENATION STATUTE
  • A. The End of Chinese Exclusion
  • B. The Demise of the Anti-Miscegenation Statute
    • 1. Early Challenges
    • 2. Loving
• V. THE CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE OF ANTI-MISCEGENATION LAW AND THE PERIOD OF CHINESE EXCLUSION
  • A. The Good News . . . More Progressive Racial Norms in the Modern Era
  • B. The Bad News . . . Neo-Nativism Serves up “Old Poison in New Bottles”
• VI.CONCLUSION

“We want no more mixture of races. . . . No strong nation was ever born of mongrel races of men.”
—U.S. Senator La Fayette Grover (addressing the “Chinese Problem”), June 30, 1872

I. INTRODUCTION

A complex interaction of push and pull factors created a substantial wave of Asian migration to the United States in the 19th century. In brief, acute political and economic instability and dislocation in China arising from European imperialism, internal conflict, and famine “pushed” Chinese laborers to the United States, while a demand for cheap, reliable labor brought on by burgeoning industrialization in the American West, the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, and the 1849 California gold strike at Sutter’s Creek “pulled” them. Due to America’s historic policy of open borders, this migration was virtually unrestricted and the rapid influx of Chinese immigrants into the American West almost immediately provoked “widespread concerns about the relationship between race and national identity” in the United States. The Chinese were perceived as possessing characteristics that amounted to unbridgeable racial differences and “fears of hybridity” proliferated, prompting one California legislator to warn that “were the Chinese to amalgamate at all with our people, it would be a hybrid of the most despicable, a mongrel of the most detestable that has ever afflicted the earth.

Anti-miscegenation laws, state laws prohibiting sex and/or marriage between individuals of different “races” originally crafted to prevent the mixing of whites and blacks, were quickly extended to regulate the interaction between whites and the Chinese, the new “other” race. In a process dubbed “Negroization” by historian Dan Caldwell, the Chinese were charged with the same negative racial qualities—“[h]eathen, morally inferior, savage, and childlike . . . lustful, sensual”—that had previously been hoisted on blacks and the rhetoric of anti-black racism became the rhetoric of anti-Chinese racism. This process of reassignment occurred a number of times as subsequent groups of Asian immigrants came to the United States and anti-miscegenation laws were extended further to apply to them: Japanese, Koreans, Indians, Filipinos and eventually all Asian immigrants were subject to the prohibition against commingling with whites.

This Article will examine the anti-miscegenation statute as well as other exclusionary laws specifically applied to the Chinese diaspora in America throughout the 19th and 20th century, describing the impact these racially restrictive laws had on Chinese transnational migration during the period. It will present the anti-miscegenation statute as an emblem of the broader concern of American nativism—a concern with defining and policing American political and civic culture, with protecting American republicanism from the perceived threat posed by foreigners deemed “unassimilable.” This Article will then situate the anti-miscegenation statute within the larger framework of the xenophobic ideology animating exclusionary laws in general—an ideology in which amalgamation between white and nonwhite persons is assumed to threaten the purity of the white American body politic as much as the white American body.

Viewed in this manner, the anti-miscegenation statute, far from being a relic of America’s racist past, is especially relevant to contemporary arguments regarding immigration. For although the primary thesis of anti-miscegenation law—the assertion that nonwhites are incompatible with whites physically—has been disproven (or at least driven underground) by modern science, a dangerous corollary to that thesis—the notion that certain classes of immigrants, by virtue of their race and/or country of origin, are incompatible with American civic and political culture—endures. The modern nativist revival, this Article will conclude, invokes the specter of anti-miscegenation law and Chinese exclusion in charging that the most recent wave of migration to the United States, comprised mostly of Latinos and Asians, “cannot or will not assimilate” and threaten to degrade and undermine “national identity”…

Read the entire paper here.

“Multiracial” Today, but “What” Tomorrow? The Malleability of Racial Identification Over Time

Paper presented at the Population Association of America 2005 Annual Meeting
2005-03-31 through 2005-04-02
Philladelphia, Pennsylvania
27 pages

Jamie Mihoko Doyle
Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology
University of Pennsylvania

Grace Kao, Professor of Sociology, Education, and Asian American Studies
University of Pennsylvania

We use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the change in racial identification among Multiracial Adolescents and Monoracial Adolescents as they make the transition from adolescence to adulthood. In general, we find that Multiracial youth exhibit more volatile racial identities than Monoracial youth. Youth who reported Native-American & White in Wave I were the least likely to maintain this identity (22%), while about 50% of Asian-white and black-white youth maintained their identities. In empirical analyses, we find that youth with more highly educated mothers have more stable racial identities between two waves of the survey. Physical appearance, as described by the interviewer at Wave I, is an important predictor of change between Wave I and Wave III responses. Our results suggest that while racial identity is malleable, it is still conditioned on variation in physical appearances.

Read the entire paper here.