Mixed Race Studies

‘Mutts like Me’: Multiracial Students’ Perceptions of Barack Obama

Qualitative Sociology
Volume 35, Number 2 (2012)
pages 183-200
DOI: 10.1007/s11133-012-9226-4

Michael P. Jeffries, Assistant Professor of American Studies
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Existent sociological studies of multiracialism in the United States focus on identity construction, the cultural and legislative battle over multiracial categorization, and the implications of demographic shifts towards an increasingly “mixed race” population. This article engages literature from each of these areas, and uses data from in-depth interviews with self-identified multiracial students to document their perceptions of President Barack Obama and trace the symbolic boundaries of multiracial identity. Interviews are specifically directed towards the influence of race on Obama’s identity management and political career, the relationship between Obama and respondents’ multiracial identity, and Obama’s impact on America’s racial history. Respondents hold favorable opinions of the President despite his inconsistent affirmation of multiracial identity. They believe that emphasis on Obama’s blackness rather than multiracialism is the unfortunate result of both personal choices and political pressures. In addition, the cohort insists that racism remains is a major factor in Obama’s career and in America at large.

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Imagining Jefferson and Hemings in Paris

TransAtlantica: American Studies Journal
1 | 2011 : Senses of the South / Référendums populaires
10 pages, 20 paragraphs

Suzanne W. Jones, Professor of English
University of Richmond

In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, cultural critic bell hooks argues that “no one seems to know how to tell the story” of white men romantically involved with slave women because long ago another story supplanted it: “that story, invented by white men, is about the overwhelming desperate longing black men have to sexually violate the bodies of white women.” Narratives of white exploitation and black solidarity have made it difficult to imagine consensual sex and impossible to imagine love of any kind across the color line in the plantation South. hooks predicted that the suppressed story, if told, would explain how sexuality could serve as “a force subverting and disrupting power relations, unsettling the oppressor/oppressed paradigm” (57-58). By rethinking and reimagining the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, contemporary novelists, filmmakers, and historians have exposed this “suppressed story,” the bare bones of which were first made public in 1802 by journalist James Callendar during Jefferson’s first term as U.S. President and then covered up by professional historians for almost 175 years.

As novelist Ralph Ellison pointed out, historical fiction must sometimes serve as the repository for historical truth when the collective historical memory has repressed the facts. In 1979 Barbara Chase-Riboud’s best-selling novel Sally Hemings allowed readers to enter the mind and heart of the shadowy figure that historian Fawn Brodie had brought back into the public consciousness in 1974, and in so doing enabled readers to believe that Jefferson might have had a long-term relationship with her. Chase-Riboud’s fictional portrait clearly upset Jefferson’s defenders, but the word that CBS might make the novel into a miniseries unnerved them, causing historians Virginius Dabney and Dumas Malone to intervene. Although they claimed that they were worried about historical accuracy, historian Annette Gordon-Reed believes that they were even more worried by the nature of the medium itself: “If a beautiful woman appears on screen as a capable and trustworthy person, […] all talk about impossibility [of a liaison] would be rendered meaningless” (Jefferson and Hemings, 182-83). Over fifteen years later, the film and the miniseries that eventually were produced have proved Gordon-Reed right. Today visitors to Jefferson’s Monticello routinely view, seemingly without surprise or dismay, a twenty-minute documentary that briefly mentions the liaison…

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‘Too black or not black enough’: Social identity complexity in the political rhetoric of Barack Obama

European Journal of Social Psychology
Volume 42, Issue 5, August 2012
pages 564–577
DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.1868

Martha Augoustinos, Professor of Psychology
University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia

Stephanie De Garis
School of Psychology
University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia

The election of the first African-American President of the United States, Barack Obama, has been widely recognised as an extraordinary milestone in the history of the United States and indeed the world. With the use of a discursive psychological approach combined with central theoretical principles derived from social identity and self-categorisation theories, this paper analyses a corpus of speeches Obama delivered during his candidacy for president to examine how he attended to and managed his social identity in his political discourse. Building on a social identity model of leadership, we examine specifically how Obama mobilises political support and social identification by building an identity for himself as a prototypical representative of the American people, notwithstanding the protracted public debate within both the White and Black American communities that had questioned and contested Obama’s identity. Moreover, we demonstrate how Obama managed the dilemmas around his identity by actively crafting an in-group identity that was oriented to an increasingly socially diverse America—a diversity that he himself exemplified and embodied as a leader. As an ‘entrepreneur’ of identity, Obama’s rhetorical project was to position himself as an exceptional leader, whose very difference was represented as ‘living proof’ of the widely shared collective values that constitute the ‘American Dream’. Drawing on social identity complexity theory, we suggest that by providing more inclusive and complex categories of civic and national identity, Obama’s presidency has the potential to radically transform what it means to be a prototypical in-group member in America.

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American Indian Identity and Blood Quantum in the 21st Century: A Critical Review

Journal of Anthropology
Volume 2011 (2011)
Article ID 549521
9 pages
DOI: 10.1155/2011/549521

Ryan W. Schmidt
Department of Anthropology
University of Montana

Identity in American Indian communities has continually been a subject of contentious debate among legal scholars, federal policy-makers, anthropologists, historians, and even within Native American society itself. As American Indians have a unique relationship with the United States, their identity has continually been redefined and reconstructed over the last century and a half. This has placed a substantial burden on definitions for legal purposes and tribal affiliation and on American Indians trying to self-identify within multiple cultural contexts. Is there an appropriate means to recognize and define just who is an American Indian? One approach has been to define identity through the use of blood quantum, a metaphorical construction for tracing individual and group ancestry. This paper will review the utility of blood quantum by examining the cultural, social, biological, and legal implications inherent in using such group membership and, further, how American Indian identity is being affected.

1. Introduction

Identity in American Indian communities and the ability to define tribal membership has continually been a subject of contentious debate. To obtain federal recognition and protection, American Indians, unlike any other American ethnic group, must constantly prove their identity, which in turn, forces them to adopt whatever Indian histories or identities are needed to convince themselves and others of their Indian identity, and thus their unique cultural heritage. Is there an appropriate means to recognize and define just what and who is an Indian? Should it be necessary for federal officials and tribes to continually reconstruct definitions to suit the present sociopolitical climate for American Indian identity? These questions need to be answered in light of American Indian identity politics, including how race serves as a basis for the exclusion or inclusion of “mixed bloods” within tribal communities and the United States society as a whole. In this context, identity has become one of the great issues of contestation in an increasingly multicultural and “multiracial” society.

One approach to answer these complex questions since initial contact between Native American tribes and European Americans has been to define identity through the use of blood quantum, a metaphorical, and increasingly physiological construction for tracing individual and group ancestry. Initially used by the federal government to classify “Indianness” during the late 1800s in the United States, many American Indian tribes have adopted the use of blood quantum to define membership in the group. This paper will explore the utility of blood quantum by examining the cultural, biological, political, and legal implications inherent through such a restricted use of group membership. In addition, blood quantum (and other genetic methods) as a way of tracing descent will be critiqued in favor of adopting a cultural-specific approach that allows inclusive membership and criteria not based upon one’s genetic and biophysical makeup. By reducing the reliance on blood quantum to define membership, American Indians can start moving away from an imposed racial past which was artificially created in the first place…

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The Indians and the Metis: genealogical sources on Minnesota’s earliest settlers

Minnesota History Magazine
Volume 46, Number 7 (Fall 1979)
pages 286-296

Virginia Rogers

Editors Preface

GENEALOGISTS have long hesitated to do research on Minnesota’s Indian and métis or mixed-blood population. The fact that Indian and related métis peoples participated in a largely ond culture may have convinced them that few sources were available. Even historians, although aware of the existing sources, have shunned a study which appeared to them to have little value for the writing of general history. In spite of such common prejudices, institutions like the Minnesota Historical Society for a long time have been accumulating resources of real value in genealogical studies of Indians and métis.

What written records are available on people who left few written records of their own? What are the specific problems involved in doing genealogical research on Indian and métis families? How can research on individual members of the Indian and métis communities aid in understanding the culture to which they belonged? We hope that in examining the pages that follow, readers of Minnesota History, whatever their ethnic, cutural, or professional background, will be stimulated to take an increasing interest in an area of genealogical research that has been ignored too long. In the process, perhaps they will become aware of the special value of genealogical research for all students of history.

THE STUDY of ordinary individuals of the past is a fairly new interest in the United States. Generalizations about how the individual farmer or farmwife or worker lived centuries ago may have long interested people, but the facts of the individual’s life and the specifics of his familyy relationships, except in the case of the great or famous, was until recent years the province of the genealogist and the local historian…

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A Seminole Warrior Cloaked in Defiance

Smithsonian Magazine
October 2010

Owen Edwards

A pair of woven, beaded garters reflects the spirit of Seminole warrior Osceola

Infinity of nations,” a new permanent exhibition encompassing nearly 700 works of indigenous art from North, Central and South America, opens October 23 at the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City, part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). The objects include a pair of woven, beaded garters worn by Billy Powell of the Florida Seminole tribe.
 
Billy Powell is hardly a household name. But his Seminole designation—Osceola—resonates in the annals of Native American history and the nation’s folklore. Celebrated by writers, studied by scholars, he was a charismatic war leader who staunchly resisted the uprooting of the Seminoles by the U.S. government; the garters testify to his sartorial style.
 
Born in Tallassee, Alabama, in 1804, Powell (hereafter Osceola) was of mixed blood. His father is thought to have been an English trader named William Powell, though his­torian Patricia R. Wickman, author of Osceola’s Legacy, believes he may have been a Creek Indian who died soon after Osceola was born. His mother was part Muscogee and part Caucasian. At some point, likely around 1814, when he and his mother moved to Florida to live among Creeks and Seminoles, Osceola began to insist he was a pure-blood Indian.
 
“He identified himself as an Indian,” says Cécile Ganteaume, an NMAI curator and organizer of the “Infinity of Nations” exhibition…

…“He was a bit flamboyant,” says historian Donald L. Fixico of Arizona State University, who is working on a book about Osceola. “Someone in his situation—a man of mixed blood living among pure-blood Seminoles—would have to try hard to prove himself as a leader and a warrior. He wanted to draw attention to himself by dressing in a finer way.”…

Read the entire article here.

Navigating Interracial Borders: Black-White Couples and Their Social Worlds

Rutgers University Press
2005-05-18
264 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-3586-9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-3585-2
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8135-3757-3

Erica Chito Childs, Associate Professor of Sociology
Hunter College, City University of New York

Is love color-blind, or at least becoming increasingly so? Today’s popular rhetoric and evidence of more interracial couples than ever might suggest that it is. But is it the idea of racially mixed relationships that we are growing to accept or is it the reality? What is the actual experience of individuals in these partnerships as they navigate their way through public spheres and intermingle in small, close-knit communities?

In Navigating Interracial Borders, Erica Chito Childs explores the social worlds of black-white interracial couples and examines the ways that collective attitudes shape private relationships. Drawing on personal accounts, in-depth interviews, focus group responses, and cultural analysis of media sources, she provides compelling evidence that sizable opposition still exists toward black-white unions. Disapproval is merely being expressed in more subtle, color-blind terms.

Childs reveals that frequently the same individuals who attest in surveys that they approve of interracial dating will also list various reasons why they and their families wouldn’t, shouldn’t, and couldn’t marry someone of another race. Even college students, who are heralded as racially tolerant and open-minded, do not view interracial couples as acceptable when those partnerships move beyond the point of casual dating. Popular films, Internet images, and pornography also continue to reinforce the idea that sexual relations between blacks and whites are deviant.

Well-researched, candidly written, and enriched with personal narratives, Navigating Interracial Borders offers important new insights into the still fraught racial hierarchies of contemporary society in the United States.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Interracial Canary
1. Loving across the Border: Through the Lens of Black-White Couples
2. Constructing Racial Boundaries and White Communities
3. Crossing Racial Boundaries and Black Communities
4. Families and the Color Line: Multiracial Problems for Black and White Families
5. Racialized Spaces: College Life in Black and White
6. Black_White.com: Surfing the Interracial Internet
7. Listening to the Interracial Canary
Appendix: Couples Interviewed
Notes
Bibliography
Index

The Mixed-race MilkBite™

Brad’s Blog: musings on sociology, religion, higher ed, and whatever else is going on in my life
2012-04-16

Bradley Koch, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Georgia College & State University

Here are a few commercials for the new MilkBite™ from Kraft. They play on stereotypes about mixed-race individuals.

There are other spots on Kraft’s YouTube page, most playing on these same themes. The problem with a marketing campaign like this is that it trivializes the experience of people with multiple racial/ethnic identities who are still often met with derision and confusion. The first ad above perpetuates the self-fulfilling prophecy about “confused” identities. As a child, I remember my own parents telling me that they didn’t have a problem with interracial couples but worried about how others might react to their children. The second ad exotifies (exoticizes?) mixed-race identities…

Read the entire essay here.

The Croatan Indians of Sampson County, North Carolina: Their Origin and Racial Status. A Plea for Separate Schools (Electronic Edition)

The Seeman Printery, Durham, North Carolina
1916
65 pages

George Edwin Butler (1868-1941)

Text transcribed by Apex Data Services, Inc.
Images scanned by Tampathia Evans
Text encoded by Apex Data Services, Inc., Tampathia Evans and Jill Kuhn Sexton
First edition, 2002

CONTENTS

• A Petition of the Indians of Sampson County
• HISTORICAL SKETCH
  • Historical
  • The Croatans
  • White’s Lost Colony
  • Their Wanderings and Location
  • Political and Educational History
  • First Separate Schools for Croatans
  • Marriage with Negroes Forbidden
  • Separate Schools in Other Counties
  • Separate Schools in Sampson
  • Why the Indian School in Sampson was Repealed
  • Indian Tax Payers in Sampson
  • Easily Recognized as Indians
  • They Were Never Slaves
  • Formerly Eroneously Classed as Negroes
  • Laws of State Recognize Them as Separate Race
  • State Provides Colleges for Whites and Negroes but not for Indians
  • Indians Justly Proud of Their History
  • Better Educational Facilities Should be Provided
  • Indian Taxes in Sampson
  • Sampson Exceeds all Other Counties, Except Robeson, in Indian Polls and Property
  • Family Relationship Between Robeson and Sampson Croatans
  • New Bethel Indian School
  • Shiloh Indian School
  • The Indian Photographs and Pictures
• SKETCH OF PROMINENT INDIAN FAMILIES OF SAMPSON
  • The Emanuel Family
  • The Maynor Family
  • The Brewington Family
  • The Jones Family
  • The Simmons Family
  • The Jacobs Family
  • Indian Families of Sampson

ILLUSTRATIONS

• The Croatan Normal School at Pembroke Frontispiece
• New Bethel Indian School
• Shiloh Indian Sunday School
• Jonah Manuel and Family
• Enoch Manuel and Wife
• William J. Bledsole and Wife
• Luther Bledsole and Children and Henry Bledsole and Wife
• Hardy A. Brewington
• Group of Boys and Girls
• Lee Locklear, Steve Lowrey, French Locklear
• Levander Manuel
• June Brewington
• C. D. Brewington
• Jonathan Goodman
• William Simmons
• Betsy J. Simmons
• Enoch Manuel, Jr., and Family
• Henry Bledsole and Wife

Read the entire book here.

“Mixed-Blood” Indians in Southern New England

TalkingFeather Radio
Blogtalk Radio
2009-07-15

The historical connections of Native Americans and African people is not a topic that is often discussed in classrooms, nor is it found in elementary, middle and high school history books. The trading that went on with Africans who sailed to this continent and Indigenous people of Mexico, the islands and parts of Central America before Columbus is often overlooked. Relationships were forged by trade and by blood for hundreds of years and yet many people do not know about this rich story. Our guest on the Talking Feather is Julieanne Jennings, who is Cheroenhaka Nottaway Native American, will talk about this history as it relates to the New England Indigenous people. For more than 15 years, she has been teaching children and adults about the history and culture of the Native people in southern New England. She currently teaches a first year program liberal arts colloquium entitled “Mixed-Blood Indians in Southern New England at Eastern Connecticut State University. Jennings is the author of several books and journal articles, and has co-authored Understanding Algonquian Indian Words and A Cultural History of the Native People of Southern New England. In 2009, she received Congressional Recognition from the United States Senate from Rhode Island’s Women of the Year Award event for cultural enrichment. Join us in this dialogue as we dispel the myths and get to the truth.

Download the episode here.