Mixed Race Studies

New Group Embraces Diversity

Daily Nexus
University of California, Santa Barbara
Issue 76, Volume 90
2010-02-10

Ali Limonadi, Reporter

A new student organization at UCSB hopes to create a safe space and open forum for multicultural, mixed-race and mixed-ethnicity students.

The Mixed Student Union registered as an official group with the Office of Student Life roughly two weeks ago, after the founding members returned from the Students of Color Conference 2010, held at UC San Diego. According to its members, the MSU is a club dedicated to opening dialogue amongst mixed-heritage UCSB students about their personal experiences in relation to their varied ancestry…

Read the entire article here.

Ethnic and Urban Intersections in the Classroom: Latino Students, Hybrid Identities, and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

Multicultural Perspectives
Volume 9, Issue 3 (July 2007)
pages 21-28
DOI: 10.1080/15210960701443599

Jason G. Irizarry, Assistant Professor of Multicultural Education
Neag School of Education, University of Connecticut

Drawing from data collected through classroom observations and in-depth interviews, this article describes and analyzes practices identified as culturally responsive by Latinos students in an urban, multiethnic/racial context. The findings suggest that culturally responsive pedagogy must be more broadly conceptualized to address the cultural identities of students who have complex identities because of their experiences with peers of many varied identities, those whose urban roots have resulted in hybrid identities, and those who are multiethnic/multiracial. Based on these findings, the article forwards the concept of “cultural connectedness” as a framework for practicing a non-essentializing, dynamic approach to culturally responsive pedagogy that acknowledges the hybrid nature of culture and identity.

Read or purchase the article here.

But One Race: The Life of Robert Purvis

State University of New York Press
January 2007
293 pages
Hardcover ISBN10: 0-7914-7007-5; ISBN13: 978-0-7914-7007-7
Paperback ISBN13: 978-0-7914-7008-4

Margaret Hope Bacon (1921-2011)

Biography of famous black abolitionist and voting rights advocate, Robert Purvis.

Born in South Carolina to a wealthy white father and mixed race mother, Robert Purvis (1810–1898) was one of the nineteenth century’s leading black abolitionists and orators. In this first biography of Purvis, Margaret Hope Bacon uses his eloquent and often fierce speeches to provide a glimpse into the life of a passionate and distinguished man, intimately involved with a wide range of major reform movements, including abolition, civil rights, Underground Railroad activism, women’s rights, Irish Home Rule, Native American rights, and prison reform. Citing his role in developing the Philadelphia Vigilant Committee, an all black organization that helped escaped slaves secure passage to the North, the New York Times described Purvis at the time of his death as the president of the Underground Railroad. Voicing his opposition to a decision by the state of Pennsylvania to disenfranchise black voters in 1838, Purvis declared “there is but one race, the human race.” But One Race is the dramatic story of one of the most important figures of his time.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Ancestral Chart of the Purvis Family
• Introduction
• 1. Of Southern Birth
• 2. The City of Brotherly Love
• 3. Present at the Beginning
• 4. World Traveler
• 5. “We are Not Intruders Here”
• 6. To Aid the Fleeing Slave
• 7. A Time of Loss
• 8. Gentleman Farmer
• 9. “This Wicked Law”
• 10. “Are We Not Men?”
• 11. “A Proud Day for the Colored Man”
• 12. “Equality of Rights for All”
• 13. The Freedmen’s Savings Bank
• 14. “We are To the Manner Born”
• 15. “His Magnificent Record”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Read the first chapter here.

Racial Identity in Balance

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2004-01-07

Naomi J. Miller, Professor of English and the Study of Women and Gender; Director of Institutional Diversity and Assistant to the President
Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts

I consider myself multiracial. Technically, I am half Japanese, a quarter Czech, and a quarter English-Dutch. By definition, then, I am an “other” in American society. Or at least I am according to conventional definitions of race and ethnicity, which require people to check the box marked “other” when they don’t fit into one of the pre-established categories.

And yet, every day those of us who are multiracial live “outside the box,” as tired as that phrase may be. We are not “other” to ourselves. And we need not allow ourselves to be defined in contrast to, or in opposition to, an assumed standard of racial singularity. But we do need to educate those around us about the reality of feeling boxed in by definitions of racial identity that confront not only multiracial individuals, but every individual who checks a box whose category is not an adequate definition of his or her identity…

…I’m writing from where I live, as a multiracial parent in a “mixed-race marriage,” that has produced mega-multi-racial children. To me, these issues are not abstractions for a campus diversity report: they are, fundamentally, my responsibility and my life.

My husband is half black, half German-Jewish, and so my four children are a veritable rainbow coalition among themselves.  Interestingly enough, partly because we live in Arizona, some of the racial/ethnic identities that are not included in their background (such as Hispanic and Native American) are ones that are associated with their multiracial appearance…

Read the entire article here.

PAGE ONE — No Biological Basis For Race, Scientists Say / Distinctions prove to be skin deep

San Fransisco Gate Chronicle
1998-02-23

Charles Petit, Chronicle Science Writer

This is one of a series of articles in “About Race,” a year-long public journalism project in which The Chronicle, KRON-TV, BayTV and KQED-FM are examining various aspects of race relations in the Bay Area.

The President’s Initiative on Race, designed to attack prejudice by bringing people of different races together to talk, may have overlooked something.

Namely, that the very concept of race is bogus and has no basis in biology, according to most scientists.

“This dialogue on race is driving me up the wall,” said Jefferson Fish, a psychologist at St. John’s University in New York who has written extensively about race in America. “Nobody is asking the question, ‘What is race?’ It is a biologically meaningless category. It is a cultural term that Americans use to describe what a person’s ancestry is…

…Despite this, many Americans still believe in three great racial groups, a system developed in Europe and North America in the 18th century…

…If anything, the president’s initiative should have been on racism, say the scientists. For, even without race, racism can exist as a belief that ancestry is a significant factor in cultural and behavioral differences among peoples…

…In years past, children of mixed marriages “were assigned the racial (and legal) status of the more subordinate parent,” said Faye Harrison, an anthropologist at the University of South Carolina [now University of Florida].

“That rule, called . . . the ‘one drop rule’ (for one drop of blood), has worked to classify me as African American, period,” said Harrison. “Despite the fact that I, like most other African Americans I know, have a mixed heritage and mixed ‘race’ genealogy. But that multicultural or multiracial reality is part of my extended family’s private transcript, not our public identity as blacks, as African Americans.”

Studies show that the ancestry of American blacks is about 70 percent African, with the rest European and American Indian….

Read the entire article here.

Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

University of North Carolina Press
April 2004
288 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 19 illus., 2 charts, notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-2868-7
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8078-5531-7

Daylanne K. English, Associate Professor of English & Chair
Macalester College

Challenging conventional constructions of the Harlem Renaissance and American modernism, Daylanne English links writers from both movements to debates about eugenics in the Progressive Era. She argues that, in the 1920s, the form and content of writings by figures as disparate as W. E. B. Du Bois, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen were shaped by anxieties regarding immigration, migration, and intraracial breeding.

English’s interdisciplinary approach brings together the work of those canonical writers with relatively neglected literary, social scientific, and visual texts. She examines antilynching plays by Angelina Weld Grimké as well as the provocative writings of white female eugenics field workers. English also analyzes the Crisis magazine as a family album filtering uplift through eugenics by means of photographic documentation of an ever-improving black race.

English suggests that current scholarship often misreads early-twentieth-century visual, literary, and political culture by applying contemporary social and moral standards to the past. Du Bois, she argues, was actually more of a eugenicist than Eliot. Through such reconfiguration of the modern period, English creates an allegory for the American present: because eugenics was, in its time, widely accepted as a reasonable, progressive ideology, we need to consider the long-term implications of contemporary genetic engineering, fertility enhancement and control, and legislation promoting or discouraging family growth.

Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction

University of North Carolina Press
December 2004
416 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 22 illus., notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-2902-8
Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-5567-6

Michele Mitchell, Associate Professor of History
New York University

Between 1877 and 1930–years rife with tensions over citizenship, suffrage, immigration, and “the Negro problem”–African American activists promoted an array of strategies for progress and power built around “racial destiny,” the idea that black Americans formed a collective whose future existence would be determined by the actions of its members. In Righteous Propagation, Michele Mitchell examines the reproductive implications of racial destiny, demonstrating how it forcefully linked particular visions of gender, conduct, and sexuality to collective well-being.

Mitchell argues that while African Americans did not agree on specific ways to bolster their collective prospects, ideas about racial destiny and progress generally shifted from outward-looking remedies such as emigration to inward-focused debates about intraracial relationships, thereby politicizing the most private aspects of black life and spurring race activists to calcify gender roles, monitor intraracial sexual practices, and promote moral purity. Examining the ideas of well-known elite reformers such as Mary Church Terrell and W. E. B. DuBois, as well as unknown members of the working and aspiring classes, such as James Dubose and Josie Briggs Hall, Mitchell reinterprets black protest and politics and recasts the way we think about black sexuality and progress after Reconstruction.

Read the prologue here.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Usage and Terminology
• Prologue. To Better Our Condition One Way or Another: African Americans and the Concept of Racial Destiny
• 1. A Great, Grand & All Important Question: African American Emigration to Liberia
• 2. A Black Man’s Burden: Imperialism and Racial Manhood
• 3. The Strongest, Most Intimate Hope of the Race: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Afro-American Vitality
• 4. The Righteous Propagation of the Nation: Conduct, Conflict and Sexuality
• 5. Making the Home Life Measure Up: Environment, Class and The Healthy Race Household
• 6. The Colored Doll Is a Live One: Material Culture, Black Consciousness, and Cultivation of Interracial Desire
• 7. A Burden of Responsibility: Gender, “Miscegenation,” and Race Type
• 8. What a Pure, Healthy, Unified Race Can Accomplish: Collection Reproduction and the Sexual Politics of Black Nationalism
• Epilogue. The Crossroads of Destiny
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

A Reappraisal of the Constitutionality of Miscegenation Statutes

Cornell Law Quarterly
Volume 42, Issue 2 (Winter 1957)
pages 208-222

Andrew D. Weinberger, LL.B., D. HUM, Member of the New York Bar, New York City & Visiting Professor of Law
Nationzal University of Mexico

Today [in 1957], 21 States of the Union by statute forbid marriages on racial grounds. These statutes are neither uniform in the racial groups against whom the ban is applicable, nor in defining membership in the various ethnic groups. Thus, while in Utah white-Mongolian marriages are illegal and void, in North Carolina they are permitted. In Arkansas, where white-Negro marriages are void, a Negro is defined as “any person who has in his or her veins any Negro blood whatever.” In Florida, one ceases to be a Negro when he has less than “one-eighth of . . . African or Negro blood”; and in Oklahoma, anyone not of “African descent” is miraculously transmuted into a member of the white race.

The racial groups affected by such statutes include Mongolians, Malays, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, Ethiopians, American Indians, Cherokees, Mestizos, Halfbreeds, and “the brown race.” The sole racial group (other than white persons) affected by all twenty-one statutes is the Negro…

Read the entire article here.

Legal Transplants: Slavery and the Civil Law in Louisiana

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series
Working Paper 32
May 2009
37 pages

Ariela J. Gross, Professor of Law and History
University of Southern California Law School

Can Louisiana tell us something about civil law vs. common law regimes of slavery? What can the Louisiana experience tell us about a civil law jurisdiction “transplanted” in a common-law country? Louisiana is unique among American states in having been governed first by France, then by Spain, before becoming a U.S. territory and state in the nineteenth century. Unlike other slave states, it operated under a civil code, first the Digest of 1808, and then the Code of 1825. With regard to the regulation of slaves, these codes also incorporated a “Black Code,” first adopted in 1806, which owed a great deal to both French and Spanish law. Comparisons of Louisiana with other slave states tend to emphasize the uniqueness of New Orleans’ three-tier caste system, with a significant population of gens de couleur libre (free people of color), and the ameliorative influence of Spanish law. This reflects more general assumptions about comparative race and slavery in the Americas, based on the work of Frank Tannenbaum and other historians of an earlier generation, who drew sharp contrasts between slavery in British and Spanish America. How does the comparison shift if we turn our attention away from slave codes, where Tannenbaum focused, to the “law in action”? At the local level, one can see the way slaves took advantage of the gap between rules and enforcement, and to fathom racial meanings at the level of day-to-day interactions rather than comparisions of formal rules. This essay surveys three areas of law involving slaves – manumission, racial identity, and “redhibition” (breach of warranty) – to compare Louisiana to other jurisdictions, and particularly to its common-law neighbors.

…The first major slave codes in the North American colonies date to 1680-82. They draw numerous distinctions on the basis of race rather than status, including laws against carrying arms and against leaving the owner’s plantations without a certificate. A penalty of thirty lashes met “any Negro” who “lift up his hand against any Christian.” In 1691, English women were fined for having a bastard child with a negro. In 1705, all mulatto children were made servants to the age of 31 in Virginia; Maryland and North Carolina adopted the same rule within the next several decades.

By the time the U.S. became a republic, only those of African descent were slaves, and all whites were free. Yet there were a significant number of individuals and entire communities of mixed ancestry with ambiguous racial identity along the Eastern seaboard. In the southeast, Indian tribes both absorbed runaway slaves and, in the late eighteenth century, adopted African slavery. In addition to the 12,000 people designated in the Census as “free people of color” in Virginia, there were 8000 in Maryland in 1790, 5000 in North Carolina, 1800 in South Carolina, and 400 in Georgia…

Read the entire paper here.

“The Caucasian Cloak”: Mexican Americans and the Politics of Whiteness in the Twentieth-Century Southwest

The Georgetown Law Journal
Volume 95, Issue 2
Pages 337-392

Ariela J. Gross, Professor of Law and History
University of Southern California Law School

The history of Mexican Americans and Jim Crow in the Southwest suggests the danger of allowing state actors or private entities to discriminate on the basis of language or cultural practice. Race in the Southwest was produced through the practices of Jim Crow, which were not based explicitly on race, but rather on language and culture inextricably tied to race. This Article looks at three sets of encounters between Mexican Americans and the state in mid-twentieth-century Texas and California—trials involving miscegenation, school desegregation, and jury exclusion—to see the way in which state actors used Mexican Americans’ nominal white identity under the law to create and protect Jim Crow practices. First, it argues that whiteness operated primarily as a “Caucasian cloak” to obscure the practices of Jim Crow and to make them appear benign, whether in the jury or school context. If Mexican Americans were white, then they were represented so long as whites were represented. Second, it demonstrates that Mexican-American civil rights leaders as well as ordinary individuals in the courtroom did not simply identify as white; some showed a more complex understanding of “Mexican” as a mestizo race, and others pointed to the idea of race as a status produced by racist practice. Mexicans were nonwhite if they were treated as nonwhite under Jim Crow. Finally, it argues that, at least in twentieth-century Texas and California, cultural discrimination was racial discrimination, and that continuing discrimination on the basis of language ability and other cultural attributes should be scrutinized carefully under antidiscrimination law…

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
MEXICAN-AMERICAN WHITENESS BEFORE 1930
A. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
B. WHITE BY TREATY—IN RE RODRIGUEZ
C. SEX ACROSS RACIAL BORDERS: POPULAR AND LEGAL IDEAS OF THE “MEXICAN RACE”

II. THE POLITICS OF WHITENESS IN THE 1930S AND 1940S
A. JIM CROW IN THE SOUTHWEST
B. MEXICAN-AMERICAN ORGANIZATIONS AND POLITICS

III. LITIGATING MEXICAN-AMERICAN WHITENESS
A. THE 1930S SCHOOL AND JURY CASES
B. THE 1940S SCHOOL AND JURY CASES

IV. AFTER HERNANDEZ V. TEXAS: LIFTING THE CAUCASIAN CLOAK
A. FROM HERNANDEZ V. TEXAS TO CISNEROS
B. LA RAZA COSMICA

CONCLUSION

Read the entire article here.