Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Indians, Caboclos and Curibocas: Historical Analysis of a Process of Miscegenation; Rio Negro (Brazil), 18th and 19th Centuries

Chapter in: Amazon Peasant Societies in a Changing Environment (2009)
Springer
Part I
pages 55-68
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9283-1_4

Décio de Alencar Guzmán

The author analyses the process of mixing (mestiçagem) in the Rio Negro region during the 18th and 19th Centuries. After presenting the main features of this mestiçagem’s components (the Amerindian, the European and the African), the author concentrates on the inter-racial marriage policies prescribed by the Portuguese Crown, as part of a group of projects geared towards the exploitation of human resources in Portuguese America. Guzmán believes that one of the main hindrances to the advance of the studies about the Amazonian caboclo societies is the belief that they are independent and self-regulated social systems. Such a conception has prevented a more accurate understanding of such societies as a product of historical transformations.

Read or purchase the chapter here.

The Sociological Implications of Demographic Diversity

Michael Banton, Emeritus Professor of Sociology
Univeristy of Bristol

from

Atlantic Crossings: International Dialogues on Critical Race Theory
C-SAP Monograph Series
2011
283 pages
ISBN: 1 902191 47 1
Edited by: Kevin Hylton, Shirin Housee, Andrew Pilkington & Paul Warmington
pages 154-175
Read the entire book here.

Any consideration of the relevance to the United Kingdom of Critical Race Theory should take account of the special factors in the USA that stimulated and shaped the character of the movement. It should also acknowledge the distinction between social theory and social practice. Social practice has usually to be considered within the frameworks of national institutions, whereas social theory has to promote comparison within and between societies.

In comparing practice in different countries, it is essential to allow for the way in which decisions taken at one point in time limit the alternatives that are available subsequently. Economists and political scientists analyze this limitation as a sign of path dependence. The influence of path dependence upon developments in five states, the USA, France, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom, will be summarised. With creation of the Council of Europe (COE) and the European Union (EU), all five are adopting common policies.

Path dependence

The course of US history was profoundly influenced by an `unthinking decision‟ whereby, as a clergyman complained in 1680, `these two words, Negro and Slave‟ are `by custom grown Homogeneous and Convertible‟ (Jordan 1968:44, 97). The division of the population into blacks and whites established the framework for chattel slavery. To a later generation (e.g. Gross 2008) it appears as if whites in the USA prior to the civil war of 1861-65 thought of their relations with blacks in the terms now known as `racial‟, but in the early decades of that century whites represented blacks as culturally rather than biologically backward and justified slavery primarily on the grounds that it was authorized by the Bible. It was the abolition of slavery that led them to take up doctrines of inherent black inferiority. This change provided the intellectual framework for post-emancipation segregation, and for the power structure that confronted the Civil Rights movement of the nineteen-sixties. That movement further polarized relations between blacks and whites in order thereby to reduce segregation. Because by the nineteen-eighties it appeared as if the gains of the civil rights era were being cut back, the critical legal studies movement was born in the law schools; it developed into Critical Race Theory, which is a movement rather than a theory, and which held its first conference in 1989.

The continuing influence of the black-white division was evident in the US Census of 2000. Question 5 asked `Is this person Spanish / Hispanic / Latino?‟ and required the person answering to tick an appropriate box. Question 6 asked `What is this person‟s race?‟ and offered a set of boxes, beginning with three categories: `White‟, `Black, African Am., or Negro‟ and `American Indian or Alaska Native‟. Question 6 had its origins in a time when attention focused on the categories black and white. Public discourse perpetuates the dichotomy, as if persons of mixed origin and intermediate colour were anomalies. The inauguration of a President who is of equally black and white origin, and of intermediate colour, may help undermine the tendency for the word race to evoke an obsolete conception of distinct social categories…

Read the entire chapter here.

Introduction: Re-imagining coloured identities in post-Apartheid South Africa

Introduction to: Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town
Kwela Books
2001
320 pages
ISBN-10: 0795701365
ISBN-13: 978-0795701368

Edited by:

Zimitri Erasmus, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
University of Cape Town

Introduction by:

Zimitri Erasmus, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
University of Cape Town

Hou jou linne binne (Keep your linen hidden). Hou jou koek in jou broek (Keep your fanny in your panties). Vroeg ryp, vroeg vrot (Early to ripen, early to rot). Such expressions abound in coloured communities in South Africa. They stipulate the bounds of sexual behaviour for young coloured women. Such expressions are considered undignified in my family. With our roots in the rural outback, the family’s journey to the city, combined with a Protestant work ethic, has made it now middle class and ‘respectable’. Although not said in quite the same way, the message of my family was that girls who ‘came home with babies’ were ‘not respectable’. Many of my peers as a matter of fact were ‘not respectable’. The price for coming home pregnant was clear: my father would disown me. In my imagination, informed by countless examples in my community, this meant living on the streets, consigned to the fate of being a ‘halfcaste outcast’. These were the possibilities in my young life: respectability or shame.

Today, looking back, I can see how these possibilities were shaped by the lived realities not only of gender and class but also of ‘race’. I can see how respectability and shame are key defining terms of middle class coloured experience. For me, growing up coloured meant knowing that I was not only not white, but less than white; not only not black, but better than black (as we referred to African people). At the same time, the shape of my nose and texture of my hair placed me in the middle on the continuum of beauty as defined by both men and women in my community. I had neither ‘sleek’ hair nor boesman korrels [or ‘bushman hair’ is a derogatory term used to refer to kinky hair]. Hairstyling and texturising were (and still are) key beautification practices in the making of womanhood among young coloured women. In my community practices such as curling or straightening one’s hair carried a stigma of shame. The humiliation of being ‘less than white’ made being ‘better than black’ a very fragile position to occupy. The pressure to be respectable and to avoid shame created much anxiety. These were discomfiting positions for a young woman to occupy…

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Race, the Jamaican Body and Eugenics/Genomics: An Autobiographic Mediation

Auto/Biography and Mediation
2010
pages 39-55

Edited by:

Alfred Hornung, Professor of English and American Studies
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Written by:

Eve Hawthorne, Professor of History
Howard University

Paul Vanouse, Associate Professor of Visual Studies
The State University of New York, Buffalo

Caribbean bodies are among the most specularized of observed objects. From religion to sociology, and through a range of genres—travel writing, missionary reports, histories, colonial administrative accounts, diaries/journals and belles lettres—these bodies have been made into available and free sites, serving for archival evidentiary data collection, statistics, literary subjects and visual voyeurism. They have been objectified both through a “torrent of words and images,” as Stephen Greenblatt has described the phenomenon of hyper-textualization that enabled imperialistic projects to gain possession of and control over the New World (145), and a “visual colonialism” achieved through scoping, according to Johannes Fabian (123).  Historically, this ‘gaze’ begins with fixing the New World indigenous Indian people as its object—the adventurer Christopher Columbus both described and brought back Indigenous people as specimen to Europe to display their difference from Europeans (Doggett 12)—but by the eighteenth century there is a marked shift to the black, African body. In contrast to the dual perspectives that had characterized the textualization of the Amerindian in which early colonial representations of aboriginal peoples were both “pragmatically political and romantically imaginative” (G. K. Lewis 32), that of the African was invariably constructed to justify his enslavement. Middle-colonial imaginings, then, with the exception of those created by the Abolitionists or liberals such as John Gabriel Stedman (Narrative of a Five-Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, 1796) were ideological productions that evolved into a potent archive of black stereotypes available for hegemonic discourses.

Colonial texts produced two views that would predominate throughout the following centuries, i.e., one of the black body’s ‘laziness,’ and one of moral laxity or ‘slackness’—particularly of the female. In Jamaica, the writing of Matthew [Monk] Gregory Lewis, the British writer and plantation owner, relies on the evolving stereotype of the lazy native:

For myself, it appears to be almost worth surrendering the luxuries and pleasures, of Great Britain: for the single pleasure of being surrounded with beings who are always laughing and singing, and who seem to perform their work with so much nonchalance, taking up their baskets as if it were perfectly optional … sauntering along with their hands dangling; stopping to chat with every one they meet. (101)

In time, Thomas Carlyle in “The Nigger Question” would give a more egregious picture of this ‘lazy’ Caribbean native, while Anthony Trollope would devote eight of his twenty-one chapters of The West Indies and the Spanish Main 1858/1860 to the same purpose. The surveillance of the female, in which it was important to declare her moral laxity, is sometimes different. Thus in one of the earliest descriptions, Mrs. Race, the Jamaican body, and Eugenics/Genomics 40 Carmichael writes in Domestic Manners and Social Conditions of the White,Coloured, and Negro Population:

The appearance of these women was disgusting;… but without exception, the arms were drawn out of the sleeves, which with the body of the gown, hung down as useless appendages; while from the waist upwards, all was in a state of nudit.… We observed several coloured women at the door and windows of houses, the dresses of some of whom would have been elegant and graceful, had they been more modest. (10-11)

The immodesty of the black female becomes an overpoweringly invasive image that overshadows that of the Abolitionists and adventurers such as Stedman. For both genders, the underlying objectification of ‘skin color’ assumed paramount importance, and became the clearest and most frequent delineator of alterity and inferiority. By the beginning of the twentieth century it would be scientized as ‘race.’

In this article we examine a twentieth-century manifestation of the collusion of power and knowledge-formation—specifically ‘Science.’ Largely, scholars have been scrupulously attentive in examining the colonization of the black body during the mid-period of Caribbean colonialism, promoted by an early science of ethnography that relied on the writer’s observation and interpretation. By the 1850s, this ethnographic authority was augmented through the field of physical anthropology that would claim greater scientific authority, ensured by works of biology such as that of Charles Darwin. The young science accommodated ideological needs by declaring hierarchical structures of difference, especially as existent in the European colonial possessions with their unmatched degrees of hybridity—or intermixtures of peoples. The new science becomes an “aggressively racist movement” (Lorimer 12), solidified under the science of eugenics. The black body and its sexuality and reproductivity were placed under constant surveillance. While this dominant science of eugenics was the popular science of nineteenth-century England, by the early twentieth century it had lost much of its appeal and potency there. Conversely, it becomes a plausible science in the U.S., and institutions and scientists were well-financed by both government and private sources, given its promise as tool of social engineering and control.

Given the waning British interest in eugenics, it was surprising for us to discover that the Caribbean body was made freely available to this racialized science as pursued by an American scientist and occurring as late as the 1920s. Race Crossing in Jamaica (1929) is a scientific text resulting from an extensive study conducted by the American eugenicist Charles B. Davenport. It seems, however, to be entirely overlooked within the historical discussion of the colonial era, yet it, too, epitomizes Western imperialism; Jamaican bodies used as raw material in the furtherance of First World goals. With its late-imperialist vision, the 512-page tome comprises anthropometric, physiological, and psychological studies of “Blacks, Whites, and hybrids” (iv). Its author is a well-known U.S. biologist who held at the time of this study the position of director of the Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor in New York State. His field investigator was Morris Steggerda, a Ph.D. student in zoology at the University of Illinois. The island of Jamaica was chosen for having what were perceived as isolated pockets of “pure-blooded negro, mulatto and White” populations of similar economic class. The methods entailed anthropomorphic and psychological examinations that included some sixty measurements of body areas including face breadth, cranial capacity and relative height in a variety of positions. The text has some 359 tables and charts, the result of a comparative analysis of three hundred and seventy “Blacks,” “Browns,” “Whites”: 197 males, 173 females. Mico College for Men and Shortwood College for Women supplied ninety-eight of these subjects; 118 came from the agricultural areas of Gordon Town and Seaford Town, and from a prison; 110 were classified as “city folk”, from Kingston’s fire and police departments, a crèche, and a prison; and forty-four Cayman Islanders were chosen who were supposedly white subjects.

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Chapter One: Barbara Jordan: American Hero

New York Times
1998-12-13

Mary Beth Rogers

Mary Beth Rogers, Barbara Jordan: American Hero, (New York: Bantam, 1998).

BARBARA CHARLINE JORDAN was born February 21, 1936, the third daughter and last child of Benjamin Meredith and Arlyne Patten Jordan. The fortunes of Ben and Arlyne were good enough to pay Dr. Thelma Patten, a relative of Arlyne’s father, John Ed, to deliver the baby at home instead of in Houston’s charity hospital, where the first two Jordan girls had been born. Ben Jordan saw his daughter almost immediately after the delivery, and his first comment was, “Why is she so dark?”

From that moment, skin and body—color, hue, texture, size, condition—began to determine who Barbara Jordan was and how she reacted to her life. She learned quite early that the degree of blackness for a black child mattered. It mattered to her father, and it mattered in the white world, which would be beyond her imagination until she was almost an adult. It also mattered in the black world, her world, the Fifth Ward of Houston, Texas, and would hit her with full force when she was in the all-black Phillis Wheatley High School in the early 1950s. There, her color, her size, her hair texture, and her features would determine and limit her choices. “Color-struck” teachers favored light-skinned students, who were given the honors and awards, the opportunities for college and jobs. They even escaped the harshness of encounters with the white law. A common saying in the African American neighborhoods was, “The lighter the skin, the lighter the sentence.”…

The pain of being a dark-skinned female goes back to slavery and intensified with Reconstruction. The preferential treatment of lighter-skinned, mixed-race African Americans by whites had “laid the groundwork for a pattern of color classism in black America.” It was the lighter-skinned African Americans who had the first opportunities for education and the benefits of freedom in post-Reconstruction America. Certain churches, neighborhoods, colleges, sororities and fraternities, social clubs, even political clubs, harbored a light-colored elite. At one time African Americans had their own “Blue Vein Society“; admission to this Nashville group depended on skin color. An applicant had to be fair enough for the spidery network of purplish veins at the wrist to be visible to a panel of expert judges.

The separate social and educational paths taken by light-skinned and dark-skinned African Americans during Reconstruction divided their world. By the turn of the century, the light-skinned mulattos were the intellectual and political leaders. They were the doctors, lawyers, teachers, writers, and entertainers, admired and emulated by the rest.

The prevalence of skin prejudice began to weaken after the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, and all but disappeared in the African American community with the resurgence of black pride in the 1960s and 1970s. But even before black pride, before “Black is beautiful,” before “I am somebody,” Barbara Jordan got comfortable with herself. By the time she was in the third grade, in 1944, she knew in her guts that she was somebody special. It did not matter to her how black she was. If someone didn’t like her because of her color, she just thought, “Well, those are stupid people, and I don’t have time to deal with them.” Quite early, she had the self-confidence to transcend the limits of her body, whether imposed by color, culture, physical capability—or stupidity! It was a pattern of being and behavior that stayed with her until the day she died. To all who thought that black was not as good as white, her retort was, “That’s a colossal lie!”

Read the rest of the chapter here.

Mitsawokett to Bloomsbury: Archaeology and History of a Native-American Descendant Community in Central Delaware

Chapter 5. A Larger Ethnic Community

2008
383 pages
Delaware Department of Transportation Project 88-110-01
Federal Highway Administration Project F-NH-1003(13)
Delaware Department of Transportation Archæological Series Number 154
Carolann Wicks, Secretary

Original and redraft prepared by

Edward F. Heite and Cara L. Blume
Heite Consulting, Inc., Camden, Delaware

Redraft of original compiled by

Heite Consulting, Inc., Frederica, Delaware

DelDOT [Delaware Department of Transportation] has edited all cultural resource documents on this website. The documents were edited to protect the location of archaeological sites, any culturally sensitive material, and all State Historic Preservation Office (archaeological) cultural resource forms. Section 304 of the National Historic Preservation Act, as amended in 1992, 36 CFR pat 800.11 of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation’s regulations implementing Section 106 of that same Act, Section 9(a) of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, and Delaware Code Title 7, Chapter 53 and 5314 provide the legal authority for restricting access to information on the location and nature of archaeological resources.

At least three Bloomsbury households belonged to a distinct local ethnic enclave. Similar, related, communities existed along the Eastern Seaboard

The preservation planning regime requires that each property must be considered in terms of its larger cultural and historical context. An obvious context for the subject property is the post-contact history of “isolate” populations of Native American descent in Delaware, not previously noticed by the planning process. While creation of a new full-blown planning context is not appropriate in a site-specific study, some information is necessary in order to place the site in its own proper ethnic milieu.

An ethnic group may be defined by any combination of such traits as consanguinity, shared foodways, settlement patterns, and common customs. A Kent County isolate community included several Bloomsbury residents. By some definitions, this closed community can be described as a distinct ethnic group, part of a series of similar, interrelated, ethnic enclaves along the eastern seaboard.

Members of Delaware’s racial isolate communities have been known by a bewildering variety of labels over the years. Labels have shifted, depending upon the era and individual points of view. It is useful to analyse the meaning behind these labels, remembering that they reflect observer bias.

As the local group developed, similar communities were coming into existence up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Genealogical research firmly connects the local community with nearby groups. On a larger scale, similar circumstances and surname similarities suggest that there was, at an early date, an informal network of such communities over long distances. In any case, research for this project indicates that the local “isolate” community was not an isolated or a unique phenomenon.

These isolate groups share certain characteristics that are consistent from North Carolina northward at least to New Jersey. Shared attributes of the various communities include:

1. Iberian surnames appear in all the communities as early as the seventeenth century, and always before the middle of the eighteenth century.
2. Families with documented Native American heritage are related to at least some members of each community. Some of the documented Native American families are found among several communities, and migrations can be traced.
3. At least by the middle of the eighteenth century, each community had begun to intermarry, thereby removing themselves from the larger local pool of prospective marriage partners.
4. People moved among the communities and married, thereby suggesting that they early recognized and embraced one another as similar cultural communities.
5. Aside from the term “Mulatto” applied with increasing frequency as time passed, most community members were not identified racially until after the Revolution…

Read the entire chapter here.

Interpreting the Census: The Elasticity of Whiteness and the Depoliticization of Race 

2007
pages 155-170 

Katya Gibel Mevorach, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Grinnell College 

From the anthology: 

Racial Liberalism and the Politics of Urban America
Michigan State University Press
2007
280 pages
6 ” x 9 ”
ISBN: 0-87013-669-0, 978-0-87013-669-6 

Edited by: 

Curtis Stokes, Professor of Political Philosophy and African American Thought
James Madison College of Public Affairs
Michigan State University 

Theresa A. Melendez, Associate Professor of Chicano/Chicana Literature
Michigan State University 

I begin with a brief review of how whiteness was established as a norm and context for considering initial media reports of U.S. Census data on race released in March 2001.  This is followed by reflections on the politically conservative ramifications of multiracialism and multiculturalism, which have had an exaggerated impact on popular interpretations of the census.  As a preface, it should be noted that although we are, collectively, caught in the trap of using race as a noun, race should be understood as a verb—a predicate that requires action.  People do not belong to a race but the are raced; in this context, race operates as a social fact with concrete material consequences for the manner in which experiences shape individual lives and their meaning. 

Let us take note of an overlooked but rather obvious observation: inequality is not distributed equally.  Therefore Americans of all colors and national origins need a constant reminder that Africans brought to the English colonies in the 1600s were strategically and explicitly excluded, by law and social custom, from the privileges and rights accorded English men.  This is a critical factor in how U.S. history has been shaped.  Emphasizing the unequal distribution of inequality underlines the continuities and clarifies the linkages between the past and the present.  Beginning in the colonial period, being white was perceived and defined as having certain privileges and rights, including right to citizenship,  to vote, to serve in the militia and bear arms, and to be a member of a jury.  Most important of all was the right of self-possession—in other words, he right to be identified as a free person and to act on that right.  Children of enslaved African females were legally designated as slaves and property of their masters, who often where their biological fathers.  As blackness quickly came to be associated with slave status, the law set the parameters within which, conceptually, people with African ancestors would be legally and socially identified as Negroes (Fields 1990)… 

…In sum, the multiracial movement has successfully blurred the lines between two very different forms of identifying: public self-identification and personal or private plural identities. From Elk magazine to Seventeen and ABC to MTV, the notion of mixed-race and multiracial identities is given positive visibility as a celebration of how much America is changing. Curiously, this multimedia arena has neglected a discussion of the limitations of a notion of multiracialism that refers only to children whose parents are raced differently. In fact, the campaign for a multiracial category completely obscures the fact that black or African American is already a multiracial category. Patricia Williams skillfully interprets this phenomenon when she writes, “what troubles me is the degree to which few people in the world, and most particularly in the United States, are anything but multiracial, to say nothing of biracial. The use of the term seems to privilege the offspring of mixed marriages as those ‘between’ races without doing much to enhance the social status of us mixed-up products of the illegitimacies of the not so distanct past” (1997, 53)…

Read the entire chapter here.

Biracial Americans: The Advantages of White Blood

Chapter 8 of An Historical Analysis of Skin Color Discrimination in America
Springer
2010
200 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4419-5504-3

Chapter: pages 109-126
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4419-5505-0_8

Ronald E. Hall, Professor of Social Work
Michigan State University

Similar to that of Native Americans, the genesis of victim-group discrimination for biracial Americans is rooted in traditions of slavery and the antebellum South. Biracial Americans during the antebellum period more often than not were the sons and daughters of the slave master class and having light skin on occasion may also have been of Native American ancestry. Whether biracial Americans were mixed blood by having white or Native ancestry their phenotype, light skin set them apart from the darker-skinned African-American populations whose bloodline had not yet been mixed.

Life for biracial Americans during the antebellum was both privileged in some respects and oppressive, in other ways similar to unadulterated dark-skinned blacks. Due to the one-drop theory of racial identity, whites made no distinctions between blacks and biracial Americans, despite the fact that, by genetic proportion, some biracial Americans were more white than black. In the interest of maintaining slavery and the myth of white supremacy, any known African ancestry defined even those who were characterized by blond hair and blue eyes as black. Defined as black, they were subject to discrimination, could be enslaved, relegated to second-class citizenship, and have no more legal access to the institutions of government than any other black person. Some resented being defined solely as black and in numerous ways discriminated against blacks, which included separating themselves from the black community, often friends and family members. During the antebellum, biracial Americans temporarily passed for white when seeking employment and permanently passed when considering marriage to a white fiance. Permanent passing was a critical form of victim-group discrimination that required that they never again acquaint themselves directly or indirectly with those to whom they were related by blood. Biracial Americans who could not withstand the emotional turmoil associated with their conflicting physical characteristics were designated as “mulatto.” Mulatto was the antebellum term applied to mixed-race or biracial African-Americans who, but for a trace of black blood, were otherwise considered white. Their tragedy was inspired by the contradiction in who they wanted to be—white—and who society required they be—black- Subsequently, they occupied a mid-level racial status, which constantly challenged their quest for identity and group acceptance. However, despite their being defined as black, being of light skin and often having white features accorded many biracial Americans who were…

Read or purchase the chapter here.

Addressing Issues of Biracial Asian Americans

Reflections on Shattered Windows: Promises and Prospects for Asian American Studies
Washington State University Press
1988
Chapter 15, pages 111-116

Edited by: G. Y. Okihiro, S. Hune, A. A. Hansen, and J. M. Liu

Stephen L. Murphy-Shigematsu

Revising the Asian American Studies curriculum

One of the more dramatic changes in the post-World War II Asian American population is the increase in those of biracial ancestry. Over the past forty years large numbers of Asian women have married Americans and come to the United States. [n 1] During this period, too, thousands of Asian American men and women have married outside their ethnic group. [n 2] The burgeoning population of biracial youth that has resulted from these developments, represents a significant change in the face of Asian America.

In the light of the above situation, one of the challenges confronting Asian American Studies is to adapt and revise a curriculum created in the early 1970s that was designed primarily for American born Chinese and Japanese. It has become necessary to redesign courses to better accommodate the needs, interests, and backgrounds of the more diverse group of Asian Americans who are presently underrepresented in the curriculum, and increasingly in Asian American Studies classes and in the general population. Those of biracial ancestry are one emerging group whose experiences and needs must be addressed in curriculum development…

Read the entire chapter here.

“What is In My Blood?”: Contemporary Black Scottishness and the Work of Jackie Kay [Book Chapter]

Literature and Racial Ambiguity
Rodopi B.V.
2002-09-15
328 pages
ISBN-10: 9042014180
ISBN-13: 978-9042014183
pp. 1-25(25)

edited by Teresa Hubal and Neil Brooks

Peter Clandfield, Assistant Professor of English Studies
Nipissing University, North Bay, Ontario, Canada

The work of the Scottish writer Jackie Kay (b. 1961) not only refutes simplistic definitions of race and racial attributes, but also challenges utopian idea(l)s about racial and cultural hybridity as a condition that, in itself, resolves problems arising from racial differences—that is, from dissimilarities, conflicts, and things in between. In her 1985 poem “So you think I’m a mule?,” Kay, who is of mixed black-white (African-British) biological parentage, voices what sounds like an unequivocal rejection of white attempts to theorise about people of obviously complex racial ancestry:

If you Dare mutter mulatto
hover around hybrid
hobble on half-caste
and intellectualize on the
“Mixed race problem”,
I have to tell you:
take your beady eyes offa my skin;
don’t concern yourself with
the  “dialectics of mixtures”;
don’t pull that strange blood crap
on me Great White Mother.
Say I’m no mating of a she-ass and a stallion
no half of this and half of that
to put it plainly purely
I am black (lines 29-43)

This 66-line poem is given in full as an epigraph to Heidi Safia Mirza’s Introduction to Black British Feminism: A Reader (Routledge, 1997), where it serves as a strong statement about the determination of black British women to set their own agendas. In the context of Kay’s own evolving career, though, the poem’s significance is much more ambiguous. While its speaker states emphatically that she is black and is “not mixed up” (line 50) about race, mixedrace voices in Kay’s more recent works are less certain. Without being “mixed up” in the sense of being confused or incoherent, these works delineate complex emergent forms of racial and cultural identity that undermine fixed concepts not only of Britishness, blackness, or black Britishness but also of hybridity itself…

Read the entire chapter here.