Mixed Race Studies

The New Normal

The Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanese Daily News
2013-04-11

Mia Nakaji Monnier, Rafu Staff Writer

Hapa Japan Festival and JANM exhibit celebrate mixed Japanese and Japanese Americans

Outside the newest exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum hangs a banner. Up close, visitors can make out individual pictures—each about the size of a postage stamp. These are family photos: grinning kids in kimono, extended families three rows deep posing in the yard, teenagers gathered around Grandpa and his birthday cake. But take a few steps back, and the photos disappear like the strokes of an impressionist painting. Together, they add up, to make enka star Jero.

Why Jero?

Duncan Williams, one of the curators of the exhibit, “Visible & Invisible: A Hapa Japanese American History,” says Jero represents the future: not just the of Japanese America, but of America in general. Born Jerome White in Pittsburgh, Pa., Jero is mixed— three quarters African American, one quarter Japanese. Yet he’s become famous in Japan for singing traditional enka songs, which he grew up hearing from his Japanese grandmother.

Jero, to Williams, represents the complex identity of a growing group of Americans, whose looks and cultural identifications don’t fit into neat or expected categories. Up close, in those stamp-sized family photos, the kids in kimono have light skin, dark hair; black, white, Latino features. They don’t fit the typical image of Japan, or Japanese America, and yet, statistically, they’re fast becoming the new norm.

“The Japanese American community is now on the cusp of becoming majority multiracial,” said Williams, while leading a tour of the exhibit. By the 2020 Census, the majority of Japanese Americans will be mixed, or Hapa, making “Visible & Invisible” relevant—and, to many Japanese Americans of mixed race or ethnicity, a moving affirmation of their place in the community…

Read the entire article here.

Hafu: The Mixed-Race Experience in Japan

Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival
29th Edition
2013-05-02 through 2013-05-12

2012
87 minutes
Directed by: Megumi Nishikura and Lara Perez Takagi
English, Japanese

Screening: Wednesday, 2013-05-08, 19:30 PDT (Local Time): National Center for the Preservation of Democracy

HAFU is more than a mere documentary about mixed race Japanese, or so called Hafu. The film seeks to break with the “one nation, one culture, one race” paradigm which has shaped much of contemporary Japan’s self-image, and makes a compelling argument for the hybrid reality of Japanese identity today. At the same time, Megumi Nishikura and Lara Perez Takagi, both Hafu themselves, render visible the hardship of those subjects who do not comfortably fit into common categories of belonging, and offer them a platform to be heard. What happens if my looks do not match my nationality, or if my language does not reflect my home country? Who defines the compatibility of subjects and their identities in the first place?

Most of the featured protagonists grew up in Japan, but cannot escape the role of the foreigner. As a Venezuelan citizen, Ed has to renew his visa every few years, despite being raised by his Japanese mother in Japan. Every time again, he is confronted with his identification as an outsider to Japanese society and the prospect of being expelled from the country he identifies both as home and hostile. Fusae is part of that same community of “foreigners within.” Part Korean and part Japanese, she appears with a strong sense of belonging at first, “I was born in Kobe, so this is where I want to work and pay taxes.” After a while, however, Fusae allows a deeper look into the traumatic experience of being mixed race in Japan and the tears she sheds reveal the inner turmoil that defines the lives of many other Hafus: of David, born to a Japanese father and Ghanaian mother, who surprised the other kids with the fact that his blood was not green, but red as theirs; of Sophia, who grew up in Australia ashamed of her bento box lunch and secretly wishing to be blond like her class mates. What all of the here depicted Hafus share, is the longing to belong. Not just to be acknowledged, as Ed puts it, but to be understood and accepted.

—Feng-Mei Heberer

For more information, click here.

Racial Myths

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
UNESCO Publication 891
1951
51 pages

Juan Comas (1900-1979), Professor of Anthropology
Mexican School of Anthropology

CONTENTS

• I. General observations on racial prejudices and myths
• II. The myth of blood and of the inferiority of cross-breeds
• III. Colour prejudice: the Negro myth
• IV. The Jewish myth
• V. The myth of «Aryan» or «Nordic» superiority Origin of the Aryans
  • Doctrine of Aryanism and Teutonism .
  • Anthroposociology and social selection
  • The «Aryan» thesis of contemporary nazism and fascism
  • The alleged «Anglo-Saxon» type
  • «Celticism»
  • Criticism and refutation of these theories
• VI. Conclusion
• Bibliography

…II. THE MYTH OF BLOOD AND OF THE INFERIORITY OF CROSS-BREEDS

Human miscegenation has been and is the subject of infinite debate. Opinions on the subject are conditioned by the views of the disputants on race and racial differences, the opponents of miscegenation starting from the assumption of racial inequality, whereas its defenders take the view that the differences between human groups are not such as to constitute an objection to cross-breeding between them. Hence the first thing needed in the study of the problems raised by human inter-breeding is a clear definition of what is meant by race and the selection of criteria for deciding whether or not any pure races exist.

Even under the loosest definition, race implies the existence of groups presenting certain similarities in somatic characteristics which are perpetuated according to the laws of biological inheritance, allowing for a margin of individual variation.

The peoples of Europe are of such mongrel origin that any attempt at classification according to only two characteristics (colour of eyes and hair) would exclude two-thirds of the population in any region studied; the addition of a third characteristic (cranial formation) would leave us with a still smaller fraction of the population presenting the required combination of all three characteristics; and with the inclusion of stature and nasal index, the proportion of «pure» types would become infinitesimal.

We may take it then that there are no pure human races; at the very most it would be possible to define a pure race in terms of the incidence of one selected somatic characteristic, but never in terms of all or even of the majority of hereditary traits. Nevertheless there is a widespread belief that there was a time in antiquity when racial types were pure, that miscegenation is of relatively recent date, and that it threatens humanity with a general degeneration and retrogression. This belief lacks the slightest support from science. The mixing of races has been going on since the very beginning of human life on earth, though obviously the improvement of communications and the general increase in population has stimulated it in the last two centuries. Migration is as old as the human race, and automatically implies cross-breeding between groups. It is quite possible that the Cro-Magnon type of the upper Paleolithic interbred with Neanderthal man, as seems to be indicated by the discovery of remains displaying intermediate characteristics. Moreover the existence of Negroid and Mongoloid races in prehistoric Europe is a further proof that cross-breeding is not a recent phenomenon, and that the oldest populations of Europe are no more than the product of such miscegenation over thousands of years. Yet they show neither the disharmony nor the degeneration which many writers believe to result from racial interbreeding.

History shows us that all the areas in which a high culture has developed have been the scene of the conquest of an indigenous race by foreign nomadic groups, followed by the breaking down of caste divisions and the creation of new amalgams; these, though regarded as racially homogeneous nations, were in fact no more than new  nationalities comprising different races.

Those who, like Jon A. Mjöen, consider miscegenation dangerous for the future of mankind, assert that it is a source of physical degeneracy and that immunity against certain diseases diminishes. They allege that prostitutes and vagrants are commoner among half-bred than among purebred races, while an increased incidence of tuberculosis and other diseases is observable among the former group, with a diminution of mental balance of vigour and, an increase in criminal tendencies (Harmonic and Disharmonic Race Crossing and Harmonic and Unharmonic Crossings, 1922). These data are not valid because the writer does not specify the types of individuals studied nor the general characteristics of the races which have interbred; he ought also to prove that the specific families whose interbreeding produced the half-breeds examined were physically and mentally healthy and free of any sign of degeneracy or disability. Mjöen also entirely overlooks the influence of the social background on the subjects’ behaviour.

C. B. Davenport also demonstrates (in The Effects of Racial Miscegenation, 1917) the existence of disharmonic phenomena in half-breeds-relatively small digestive organs in a bulky body, well developed teeth in weak jaws, large thighs out of proportion to the body, etc. It is not disputed that there are individuals displaying such characteristics, but it has not been shown that the phenomena are due to miscegenation; similar cases are found among old families while generally speaking crossbreeding between black and white produces well proportioned individuals…

…The notion of humanity as being divided into completely separate racial compartments is inaccurate. It is based on false premises, and more particularly on the «blood» theory of heredity which is as false as the old racist theory. «Of one blood» is a phrase without meaning, since the genes or factors of heredity have no connection whatever with the blood, and are independent elements which not only do not amalgamate but tend to become most sharply differentiated. Heredity is not a fluid transmitted through the blood, nor is it true that the different «bloods» of the progenitors are mixed and combined in their offspring.

The myth of «blood» as the decisive criterion regarding the value of a cross persists even in our own day and men still speak of «blood» as the vehicle of inherited qualities, «of my own blood», «the voice of blood», «mixed blood», «new blood», «half blood», etc. The terms, «blue blood» and «plebeian blood» have become a permanent part of everyday speech as descriptions of the descendants of aristocratic and plebeian families respectively, the last being used in a depreciative sense. «Blood» is also to mean nationality: «German blood», «Spanish blood», «Jewish blood», etc. The criterion reaches the nadir of absurdity in such cases as the classification in the United States of those individuals as «Negroes» or «Indians» who have one-sixteenth part of Indian blood» or «black blood»—that is, when one of their sixteen direct ancestors (great-great-grandparents) was a Negro or an Indian…

…Accordingly we can sum up the position more or less as follows: (a) miscegenation has existed since the dawn of human life; (b) miscegenation results in a greater somatic and psychic variability and allows of the emergence of a great variety of new gene combinations, thus increasing the range of hereditary characteristics in the new population group; (c) speaking biologically, miscegenation is neither good nor bad, its effects being dependent in every case on the individual characteristics of the persons between whom such crossbreeding takes place. As, in general, miscegenation occurs more frequently between individuals on the lower social levels and in unsatisfactory economic and social circumstances, the causes of certain anomalies observable must be sought in this fact rather than in the fact of miscegenation as such; (d) examples of «pure races» or of isolated human groups having developed a high culture independently are the exception; (e) on the contrary the great majority of areas of high civilization are inhabited by obviously cross-bred groups….

Read the entire book here.

MIT Scholar Vivek Bald uncovers forgotten history of South Asian immigrants’ New York City arrival

New York Daily News
2013-01-17

Erica Pearson

New book chronicles little-known story of Muslims from what’s now Pakistan and Bangladesh, who built a multiracial community in Harlem decades before they were legally allowed to immigrate to the U.S.

Virtually all Asian immigration to the U.S. was banned when Aladdin Ullah’s father — who left East Bengal to work on a British steamer — jumped ship in the 1920s and settled in New York.

Like hundreds of other Muslim sailors at the time, he found a home in Harlem — marrying a Puerto Rican woman and opening one of the city’s first Indian restaurants. He stayed there until his death in 1983.

“I see, now that I’m older, he kind of romanticized what Harlem was to him,” said Ullah, 44, a comedian and playwright who grew up in the George Washington Carver Houses.

“I think my father looked at Harlem as where, ‘Here is where people greet you, These people embraced me for what I am.’ ”

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and filmmaker Vivek Bald, is the author of “Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America,” published this month by Harvard University Press.

Bald believes Ullah’s family is the last in East Harlem with a direct connection to a little-documented community that thrived decades before the first large waves of South Asian immigration to the U.S…

… In many ways, the histories of these early immigrants became lost because they were forced into the shadows, Bald said. Race-based immigration laws — starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and extending until the quota system was overhauled in 1965 — made their presence illegal.

“If you were an Asian person, with very few exceptions you were legally barred from entering the U.S. like other immigrants,” said Bald. “You were not deemed fit to become a citizen, and in many states you could not legally own property.”

But in Harlem, Bengali immigrants married into African-American and Puerto Rican families and found jobs as doormen or dishwashers. In the 1940s, Bengali vendors sold hotdogs from carts along Madison, Lexington and Third Aves…

Read the entire article here.

America’s Oldest Negro Community

Ebony (via The History and Genealogy of the Mixed-blood Descendants of the Native Americans of the State of Delaware and parts of Eastern Shore Maryland and Southern New Jersey)
February 1952
pages 42-46

Gouldtown traces it’s history back 250 years, began with an interracial marriage

The march of history has all but bypassed Gouldtown, N.J., a sprawling farm community 40 miles from Philadelphia, but the Negro townsfolk still preserve their unique heritage and identity and are quietly proud of their past. The continuity of Gouldtown’s main families remains unbroken for 250 years and local legends still abound about how it all started. Today’s generation of Gouldtowners dwell less on tradition than their forebears did. But they know the main facts of their history, especially how their town came to be born. They are aware of Gouldtown’s origins and conversant with the picturesque personalities that shared in its development. But they have refused to be isolated by the sweep of history and the quickened tempo of modern living.

Gouldtown has been called the oldest colored settlement in America, and it may quite possibly be. The New Jersey land on which it stands was bought by its founder, John Fenwick, an English nobleman, in 1675. The community derived its name from a black man named Gould who married Elizabeth Fenwick, granddaughter of the wealthy colonist. The union caused a scandal which rocked the area for miles around and inflamed Fenwick with shame and rage. Intermarriage between Negroes and whites in those days was rare. The couple were subjected to scorn and ridicule but remained together as man and wife and raised children who became the first of a long line of hardy farmers.

All of the Goulds of present-day Gouldtown are their descendants. Today there are over 800 Goulds still living in the five square miles that comprise the community. A total of 1,000 persons bearing the name of Pierce inhabit the section, along with 300 Murrays, 200 Cuffs and 100 Wrights. These are the five principal family names of Gouldtown…

…The Civil War afforded the community of free Negroes an opportunity to show their solidarity with their enslaved brothers in the South. Anti-Confederate feeling was so strong in Gouldtown that all the men offered to fight. The community officially informed President Lincoln that it could raise a regiment of colored men burning with a great zeal to help defeat the armies of the slaveholders. When that offer was rejected by the government, the entire community felt rebuffed. Scores of Gouldtown men quietly slipped away from their homes and joined the Union Army as white men…

Read the entire article here.

Chocolate and Corn Flour: History, Race, and Place in the Making of “Black” Mexico

Duke University Press
April 2012
292 pages
43 photographs, 2 maps
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5132-0
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5121-4

Laura A. Lewis, Professor of Anthropology in Modern Languages and Linguistics
University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom

Located on Mexico’s Pacific coast in a historically black part of the Costa Chica region, the town of San Nicolás has been identified as a center of Afromexican culture by Mexican cultural authorities, journalists, activists, and foreign anthropologists. The majority of the town’s residents, however, call themselves morenos (black-Indians). In Chocolate and Corn Flour, Laura A. Lewis explores the history and contemporary culture of San Nicolás, focusing on the ways in which local inhabitants experience and understand race, blackness, and indigeneity, as well as on the cultural values that outsiders place on the community and its residents.

Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, Lewis offers a richly detailed and subtle ethnography of the lives and stories of the people of San Nicolás, as well as of community residents who have migrated to the United States. San Nicoladenses, she finds, have complex attitudes toward blackness—both their own and as a racial and cultural category. They neither consider themselves part of an African diaspora nor do they deny their heritage. Rather, they acknowledge their hybridity and choose to identify most deeply with their community.

‘Una Raza, Dos Etnias’: The Politics Of Be(com)ing/Performing ‘Afropanameño’

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Volume 3, Issue 2, 2008
DOI: 10.1080/17442220802080519
pages 123-147

Renée Alexander Craft, Assistant Professor of Communications Studies
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

This article analyzes 20th-century black identity in Panamá by examining how two distinct points on a spectrum of Panamánian blackness came to fit strategically (although sometimes contentiously) under the category ‘Afropanameño’ at the end of the 20th century. The dynamism of contemporary blackness in Panamá exists around the politics of Afrocolonial (Colonial Black) and Afroantillano (Black West Indian) identities as they have been created, contested, and revised in the Republic’s first century. This essay examines the major discourses that shaped ‘blackness’ in four key moments of heightened nationalism in 20th-century Panamá. I refer to these moments as: Construction (1903–1914), Citizens versus Subjects (1932–1946), Patriots versus Empire (1964–1979), and Reconciliation (1989–2003).

In Panamá, Blacks are not discriminated against because they belong to a low social class, they belong to a low social class because they are discriminated against (Justo Arroyo, African Presence in the Americas)

Los blancos no van al cielo, por una solita mafia; les gusta comer pañela sin haber sembrado caña	[Whites do not go to heaven for a single reason They like to eat sweet candy Without sowing sugar cane]
		Chorus to a Congo song

On Friday 26 May and Saturday 27 May 2006, I witnessed the inauguration of the first ‘Festival Afropanarneno’ in the Panamá City convention center. Supported by the Office of the First Lady, the Panamánian Institute of Tourism and the Special Commission on Black Ethnicity, the event included 20 booths featuring black ethnicity exhibitions, artistic presentations, food and wares representing the provinces of Panamá, Coclé, Bocas del Toro, and Colón—the areas with the highest concentrations of Afropanarneño populations. As the Friday celebration drew to its apex, a special commission appointed by President Martín Torrijos in 2005 presented him with the fruits of their year-long endeavor: a report and an action plan on the ‘Recognition and Total Inclusion of Black Ethnicity in Panamánian Society’. Using public policy advances in other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean to bolster their case (such as Colombia’s 1993 Law of Black Communities, Brazil’s 1998 Body of Laws against Racial Discrimination, Nicaragua’s 1996 Law of Autonomy of the Atlantic Coast, and Peru’s 1997 Anti-discriminatory Law, 1997), the Special Commission built on the progress made through ‘El Día de la Etnia Negra’ [‘The Day of Black Ethnicity’] to open a wider space for the recognition of social, economic, and cultural contributions of black ethnicity to the nation-building process.

Instituted into law on 30 May 2000, ‘El Día de la Etnia Negra’ is an annual civic recognition of the culture and contributions of people of African descent to the Republic of Panamá (Leyes Sancionadas). The date 30 May coincides with the date in 1820 when King Fernando VII abolished slavery in Spain and its colonies, including Panamá. Significantly, the law stipulates that the Ministry of Education and the Institutes of Tourism and Culture should organize relevant activities to commemorate the holiday, and that all schools and public institutions should celebrate it as a civic proclamation of ‘black ethnicity’ contributions to the culture and development of Panamá (Van Gronigen-Warren & Lowe de Goodin, 2001, p. 83). I have witnessed black ethnicity day celebrations in the cities of Panamá, Colón and/or Portobelo (located in the province of Colón) each year from 2000 to 2006 and have watched them grow from a celebration limited to 30 May to an informal, week-long commemoration, to its most recent form ‘El Mes de la Etnia Negra’ [‘The Month of Black Ethnicity’].

This essay analyzes 20th-century black identity in Panamá by examining how two distinct points on a spectrum of Panamánian blackness came to fit strategically (although sometimes contentiously) under the category ‘Afropanarneño’ at the end of the 20th century. The dynamism of contemporary blackness in Panamá exists around the politics of Afrocolonial and Afroantillano identities as they have been created, contested, and revised in the Republic’s first century. In the micro-Diaspora of Panamá, black identity formations and cultural expressions have been shaped largely by the country’s colonial experience with enslaved Africans via Spain’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade, and neo-colonial experience with contract workers from the West Indies via the United States’ completion and 86-year control of the Panamá Canal. Blackness in Panamá forks at the place where colonial blackness meets Canal blackness…

…As in most Latin American and Caribbean countries, centuries of intermarriage between African, indigenous and, in the case of Panamá, Spanish populations yielded a large mestizo (mixed race) classification. Throughout the 20th-century, the Congo tradition has consistently been identified by the community and the State as a black performance tradition even though the bodies of its practitioners have been categorized by demographic data as ‘mestizo’. Four centuries of evolving interchange and dialectical assimilation in a territory the size of South Carolina has rounded the edges of Panamánian blackness and whiteness without removing them as opposing place-holders on a spectrum of privilege. Considering ‘whiteness’ at the apex of privilege and ‘blackness’ at the base, Afro-Colonials remain on or near the bottom, even within the category of mestizo. As Peter Wade (2003, p. 263) argues regarding mestizaje in Colombia, ‘black people (always an ambiguous category) were both included and excluded: included as ordinary citizens, participatory in the overarching process of mestizaje, and simultaneously excluded as inferior citizens, or even as people who only marginally participated in “national society”‘…

…Part of the animosity directed toward West Indians was caused by Canal Zone Jim Crow policies, which not only segregated West Indian workers as ‘black” and therefore inferior, but also constructed a blackness elastic enough for all Panamánian workers, regardless of ethnicity, to fit uneasily and resentfully alongside them. Although the system of paying salaried workers in gold and of day laborers in silver began under the French-controlled Canal, these labels took on racial connotations under United States control, which translated ‘gold roll’/’silver roll’ into ‘whites only’/’blacks only’.

Not only did the US system treat Panamánian Canal workers as black immigrants in the belly of their own country, but it privileged West Indians over them because West Indians spoke English. Living in substandard conditions, in the staunchly segregated society of the Canal and paid a fraction of ‘gold roll’ salaries, West Indian workers still received wages almost double those of Panamánians outside the Zone. Further, the more fluid Panamánian ethnoracial caste system that had produced darker-skinned Panamánian presidents and allowed for greater upward mobility within the system by acquisition of wealth, education and/or marriage stiffened as a response to US Jim Crow attitudes and legislation (LaFeber, 1979, pp. 49-51). For these reasons, many Panamánians, including Afro-Colonials, who often fell victim to the same Jim Crow attitudes that oppressed West Indians, resented them. To make matters worse, their collusion with the United States through English had rendered Panamánians foreign within their own home country. This enduring sense of injustice exploded into a mid-century nationalist movement that inverted the paradigm privileging Spanish and relinquishing the citizenship rights of non-Spanish speakers, thus pitting Afro-Colonial communities against West Indians…

Read the entire article here.

The Future of the Colored Race

North American Review
Boston, Massachusetts
Number 142 (May 1886)
pages 437-440

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)

It is quite impossible, at this early date, to say with any decided emphasis what the future of the colored people will be. Speculations of that kind, thus far, have only reflected the mental bias and education of the many who have essayed to solve the problem.

We all know what the negro has been as a slave. In this relation we have his experience of two hundred and fifty years before us, and can easily know the character and qualities he has developed and exhibited during this long and severe ordeal. In his new relation to his environments, we see him only in the twilight of twenty years of semi-freedom; for he has scarcely been free long enough to outgrow the marks of the lash on his back and the fetters on his limbs. He stands before us, to-day, physically, a maimed and mutilated man. His mother was lashed to agony before the birth of her babe, and the bitter anguish of the mother is seen in the countenance of her offspring. Slavery has twisted his limbs, shattered his feet, deformed his body and distorted his features. He remains black, but no longer comely. Sleeping on the dirt floor of the slave cabin in infancy, cold on one side and warm on the other, a forced circulation of blood on the one side and chilled and retarded circulation on the other, it has come to pass that he has not the vertical bearing of a perfect man. His lack of symmetry, caused by no fault of his own, creates a resistance to his progress which cannot well be overestimated, and should be taken into account, when measuring his speed in the new race of life upon which he has now entered. As I have often said before, we should not measure the negro from the heights which the white race has attained, but from the depths from which he has come. You will not find Burke, Grattan, Curran and O’Connell among the oppressed and famished poor of the famine-stricken districts of Ireland. Such men come of comfortable antecedents and sound parents…

…My strongest conviction as to the future of the negro therefore is, that he will not be expatriated nor annihilated, nor will he forever remain a separate and distinct race from the people around him, but that he will be absorbed, assimilated, and will only appear finally, as the Phoenicians now appear on the shores of the Shannon, in the features of a blended race. I cannot give at length my reasons for this conclusion, and perhaps the reader may think that the wish is father to the thought, and may in his wrath denounce my conclusion as utterly impossible. To such I would say, tarry a little, and look at the facts. Two hundred years ago there were two distinct and separate streams of human life running through this country. They stood at opposite extremes of ethnological classification: all black on the one side, all white on the other. Now, between these two extremes, an intermediate race has arisen, which is neither white nor black, neither Caucasian nor Ethiopian, and this intermediate race is constantly increasing. I know it is said that marital alliance between these races is unnatural, abhorrent and impossible; but exclamations of this kind only shake the air. They prove nothing against a stubborn fact like that which confronts us daily and which is open to the observation of all. If this blending of the two races were impossible we should not have at least one-fourth of our colored population composed of persons of mixed blood, ranging all the way from a dark-brown color to the point where there is no visible admixture. Besides, it is obvious to common sense that there is no need of the passage of laws, or the adoption of other devices, to prevent what is in itself impossible…

Read the entire essay here.

Beginnings of Miscegenation of Whites and Blacks

The Journal of Negro History
Volume 3, Number 4 (October 1918)
pages 336-453

Carter G. Woodson, Founder

Although science has uprooted the theory, a number of writers are loath to give up the contention that the white race is superior to others, as it is still hoped that the Caucasian race may be preserved in its purity, especially so far as it means miscegenation with the blacks. But there are others who express doubt that the integrity of the dominant race has been maintained.[442] Scholars have for centuries differed as to the composition of the mixed breed stock constituting the Mediterranean race and especially about that in Egypt and the Barbary States. In that part of the dark continent many inhabitants have certain characteristics which are more Caucasian than negroid and have achieved more than investigators have been willing to consider the civilization of the Negro. It is clear, however, that although the people of northern Africa cannot be classed as Negroes, being bounded on the south by the masses of African blacks, they have so generally mixed their blood with that of the blacks that in many parts they are no nearer to any white stock than the Negroes of the United States.

This miscegenation, to be sure, increased toward the[Pg 336] south into central Africa, but it has extended also to the north and east into Asia and Europe. Traces of Negro blood have been found in the Malay States, India and Polynesia. In the Arabian Peninsula it has been so extensive as to constitute a large group there called the Arabised Negroes. But most significant of all has been the invasion of Europe by persons of African blood. Professor Sergi leads one to conclude that the ancient Pelasgii were of African origin or probably the descendants of the race which settled northern Africa and southern Europe, and are therefore due credit for the achievements of the early Greek and Italian civilizations.[443]

There is much evidence of a further extension of this infusion in the Mediterranean world.

“Recent discoveries made in the vicinity of the principality of Monaco and others in Italy and western France,” says MacDonald, “would seem to reveal … the actual fact that many thousand years ago a negroid race had penetrated through Italy into France, leaving traces at the present day in the physiognomy of the peoples of southern Italy, Sicily, Sardinia and western France, and even in the western parts of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. There are even at the present day some examples of the Keltiberian peoples of western Scotland, southern and western Wales, southern and western Ireland, of distinctly negroid aspect, and in whose ancestry there is no indication whatever of any connection with the West Indies or with Modern Africa. Still more marked is this feature in the peoples of southern and western France and of the other parts of the Mediterranean already mentioned.”[444]

Because of the temperament of the Portugese this infusion of African blood was still more striking in their country. As the Portugese are a good-natured people void of race hate they did not dread the miscegenation of the races. One finds in southern Portugal a “strong Moorish, North African element” and also an “old intermixture with those[Pg 337] Negroes who were imported thither from Northwest Africa to till the scantily populated southern provinces.”[445] This miscegenation among the Portugese easily extended to the New World. Then followed the story of the Caramarii, the descendants of the Portugese, who after being shipwrecked near Bahia arose to prominence among the Tupinambo Indians and produced a clan of half-castes by taking to himself numerous native women.[446] This admixture served as a stepping stone to the assimilation of the Negroes when they came…

Read the entire article here.

Notions of race in modern-day Mexico addressed in lecture, exhibit

The Daily Tar Heel
2013-04-03

Tat’yana Berdan

The Daily Tar Heel is the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The complicated and nuanced issue of race in Mexico is often overlooked, but The Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History hopes to spark an inclusive conversation.

The Stone Center is presenting a conversation with Christina Sue and Laura Lewis, two scholars with extensive knowledge of the issue of race in modern-day Mexico.

In addition to the talk, the Stone Center is also unveiling a new photo exhibit, “La Costa Chica,” by Wendy Phillips, a UNC alumna.

“Here at the Stone Center, we have a tradition of discussing these types of issues,” said Clarissa Goodlett, the Center’s program and public communications officer.

Goodlett said the Center chose to host this particular event as part of its ongoing exploration of the idea of diaspora and where people of African descent live today.

Christina Sue, assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and one of the authors speaking at the event, said she is looking forward to engaging in conversation with Laura Lewis, the other author that will be present.

“I hope we can both learn from each other, and I hope it will further our understanding of Mexico,” Sue said.

Sue said her book, “Land of the Cosmic Race: Race Mixture, Racism, and Blackness in Mexico,” discusses the ideas or race, racism and race mixing in modern day Mexico.

Sue said the book, which was inspired by what Sue observed doing field research in Veracruz, Mexico, focuses on the difference between the Mexican government’s attitude towards the issue of race versus the reality faced by mixed race people living in Mexico…

Read the entire article here.