Mixed Race Studies

Exploring the Pastoral Dynamics of Mixed-Race Persons

Pastoral Psychology
Volume 52, Number 4 (March 2004)
Pages 315-328
DOI: 10.1023/B:PASP.0000016936.79800.89

Peter Yuichi Clark, Assistant Professor of Pastoral Care
American Baptist Seminary of the West, Berkeley, California

The number of persons in the United States who identify with more than one racial group is a steadily growing segment of the larger population. Yet pastoral care literature has not focused much attention to date on the spiritual care of multiracial people in America. This article intends to begin that conversation by examining their intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics, suggesting four directions of caring, and then exploring five implications for offering compassionate and relevant ministry.

Read or purchase the article here.

Interracial Families and the Racial Identification of Mixed-Race Children: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study

Social Forces
Volume 84, Number 2 (December 2005)
pages 1131-1157
DOI: 10.1353/sof.2006.0007

David L. Brunsma, Professor of Sociology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

In this article, a nationally-representative sample of kindergarten-aged children is used from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study to explore the structure of parental racial designation of mixed-race children. The variation in these parental designations of a variety of mixed-race children is described. Parental racial designations in the three most common majority-minority interracial couplings – White/Hispanic, Black/White and Asian/White – are predicted using multinomial logistic regression models. The results may indicate a movement by the parents of these multiracial children away from minority status through racial labeling and towards “multiracial” and “White” – movements that are predicated upon gender, class and context. Critical discussions of the implications of these results as well as directions for future research are offered.

Read or purchase the article here.

‘Toubab La!’ Literary Representations of Mixed-Race Characters in the African Diaspora

Cambridge Scholars Publishing
July 2007
453 pages
ISBN13: 9781847182319
ISBN: 1-84718-231-3

Ginette Curry, Professor of English
Florida International University

The book is an examination of mixed-race characters from writers in the United States, The French and British Caribbean islands (Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia and Jamaica), Europe (France and England) and Africa (Burkina Faso, South Africa, Botswana and Senegal). The objective of this study is to capture a realistic view of the literature of the African diaspora as it pertains to biracial and multiracial people. For example, the expression “Toubab La!” as used in the title, is from the Wolof ethnic group in Senegal, West Africa. It means “This is a white person” or “This is a black person who looks or acts white.” It is used as a metaphor to illustrate multiethnic people’s plight in many areas of the African diaspora and how it has evolved. The analysis addresses the different ways multiracial characters look at the world and how the world looks at them. These characters experience historical, economic, sociological and emotional realities in various environments from either white or black people. Their lineage as both white and black determines a new self, making them constantly search for their identity. Each section of the manuscript provides an in-depth analysis of specific authors’ novels that is a window into their true experiences.

The first section is a study of mixed race characters in three acclaimed contemporary novels from the United States. James McBride’s The Color of Water (1996), Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998) and Rebecca Walker’s Black White and Jewish (2001) reveal the conflicting dynamics of being biracial in today’s American society. The second section is an examination of mixed-race characters in the following French Caribbean novels: Mayotte Capécia’s I Am a Martinican Woman (1948), Michèle Lacrosil’s Cajou (1961) and Ravines du Devant-Jour (1993) by Raphaël Confiant. Section three is about their literary representations in Derek Walcott’s What the Twilight Says (1970), Another Life (1973), Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967) and Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1995) from the British Caribbean islands. Section four is an in-depth analysis of their plight in novels written by contemporary mulatto writers from Europe such as Marie N’Diaye’s Among Family (1997), Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara (1997). Finally, the last section of the book is a study of novels from West African and South African writers. The analysis of Monique Ilboudo’s Le Mal de Peau (2001), Bessie Head’s A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings (1990) and Abdoulaye Sadji’s Nini, Mulâtresse du Sénégal (1947) concludes this literary journey that takes the readers through several continents at different points in time.

Overall, this comprehensive study of mixed-race characters in the literature of the African diaspora reveals not only the old but also the new ways they decline, contest and refuse racial clichés. Likewise, the book unveils how these characters resist, create, reappropriate and revise fixed forms of identity in the African diaspora of the 20th and 21st century. Most importantly, it is also an examination of how the authors themselves deal with the complex reality of a multiracial identity.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I. THE UNITED STATES
  • Chapter 1: James McBride’s The Color of Water (1996): A Journey Beyond Black and White
  • Chapter 2: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998): The Surviving Canary
  • Chapter 3: Rebecca Walker’s Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2001): The Chameleon Experience
• PART II. THE FRENCH CARIBBEAN ISLANDS
  • Chapter 4: Mayotte Capécia’s I am a Martinican Woman (1948): “My father is Black, My Mother is Brown, and I, Am I White?” (Martinican Riddle)
  • Chapter 5: Michèle Lacrosil’s Cajou (1961): The Anti-Narcissus
  • Chapter 6: Raphaël Confiant’s Ravines du Devant-Jour (1993): Ethnostereotypes in Martinique
• PART III. THE BRITISH CARIBBEAN ISLANDS
  • Chapter 7: The Racial Paradox of Derek Walcott in What the Twilight Says (1970), Derek Walcott: Another life (1973) and Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967)
  • Chapter 8: Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1995): A Near-White Jamaican Woman’s Quest for Identity
• PART IV. EUROPE
  • Chapter 9: Marie N’Diaye’s Among Family (1997): A Desperate Search for Caucasian Identity
  • Chapter 10: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000): The Concept of Englishness in the 21st Century
  • Chapter 11: Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara (1997): Transculturality in England: Oyinbo, Whitey, Morena, Nig Nog, Nigra!
• PART V. AFRICA
  • Chapter 12: Monique Ilboudo’s Le Mal de peau (2001): Colonization and Forced Hybridity
  • Chapter 13: Bessie Head’s A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings (1990): White-on-Black and Black-on-Black Racial Oppression in Southern Africa
  • Chapter 14: Abdoulaye Sadji’s Nini, Mulâtresse du Sénégal (1947): “Toubab La!”
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Primary Sources
• Critical Sources
• Index

Read a preview  here.

The Blurring of the Lines: Children and Bans on Interrracial Unions and Same-Sex Marriages

Fordham Law Review
May 2008
Volume 76, Number 6
pages 2733-2770

Carlos A. Ball, Professor of Law and Judge Frederick Lacey Scholar
Rutgers University School of Law, Newark

When Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter drove from their hometown of Central Point, Virginia, to Washington, D.C., on June 2, 1958, in order to get married, Mildred was several months pregnant Later that year—a few weeks before the couple pled guilty to having violated Virginia’s antimiscegenation law—Mildred gave birth to a baby girl. Richard and Mildred had two more children, a son born in 1959 and a second daughter born a year after that.

The legal commentary on Loving v. Virginia usually does not discuss the fact that the couple had children. In some ways, this is not surprising given that their status as parents was not directly relevant to either their violation of the Virginia statute, or to their subsequent constitutional challenge to that law. Concerns about the creation of interracial children, however, were one of the primary reasons why antimiscegenation laws were first enacted in colonial America and why they were later adopted and retained by many states. It is not possible, in other words, to understand fully the historical roots and purposes of antimiscegenation laws without an assessment of the role that concerns related to interracial children played in their enactment and enforcement.

The offspring of interracial unions were threatening to whites primarily because they blurred the lines between what many of them understood to be a naturally superior white race and a naturally inferior black race. As long as there was a clear distinction between the two racial categories—in other words, as long as the two categories could be thought to be mutually exclusive—then the hierarchical racial regimes represented first by slavery, and later by legal segregation, could be more effectively defended. The existence of interracial children destabilized and threatened the understanding of racial groups as essentialized categories that existed prior to, and independent of, human norms and understandings. To put it differently, interracial children showed that racial categories, seemingly distinct and immutable, were instead highly malleable. Therefore, from a white supremacy perspective, it was important to try to deter the creation of interracial children as much as possible, and the ban on interracial marriage was a crucial means to attaining that goal.

Although it is possible to disagree on how much progress we have made as a society in de-essentializing race, it is (or it should be) clear that an essentialized and static understanding of race is both descriptively and normatively inconsistent with the multicultural American society in which we live. In fact, it would seem that we have made more progress in deessentializing race than we have in de-essentializing sex/gender. One of the best examples of this difference in progress is that while we no longer, as a legal matter, think of the intersection of race and marriage in essentialized ways, legal arguments against same-sex marriage are still very much grounded in an essentialized (and binary) understanding of sex/gender.

The conservative critique of same-sex marriage is premised on the idea that men and women are different in essential and complementary ways and that these differences justify the denial of marriage to same-sex couples.  One of the most important of these differences relate to the raising of children. The reasoning—which is found in the arguments of conservative commentators, in the briefs of states defending same-sex marriage bans, and in some of the judicial opinions upholding those bans—is that there is something unique to women as mothers and something (separately) unique to men as fathers that makes different-sex couples able to parent in certain valuable ways that same-sex couples cannot.

These arguments continue to resonate legally and politically because our laws and culture continue to think about sex/gender in essentialized and binary ways. In fact, one of the reasons why same-sex marriage is so threatening to so many is that the raising of children by same-sex couples blurs the boundaries of seemingly preexisting and static sex/gender categories in the same way that the progeny of interracial unions blur seemingly preexisting and static racial categories…

Read the entire article here.

Biracial and Multiracial Students: New Directions for Student Services, Number 123

Jossey-Bass an imprint of John Wiley & Sons
October 2008
88 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-470-42219-9

Edited by

Kristen A. Renn, Associate Professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education
Michigan State University

Paul Shang, Assistant Vice President and Dean of Students
University of Oregon

Editors and contributors of this important work have designed it to meet the needs of student affairs professionals who have previously had few resources on which to draw in understanding the experiences and identities of mixed race students.

Within a multiracial framework, the authors address the contemporary context for understanding racial issues on campus; several approaches to identity developments; experiences of students and faculty; and student services, programs, and policy, including a Canadian perspective.

A substantial amount of literature addresses developmental and service needs of monoracial students of color (Asian and Pacific Islander, Black, Latino, Native American), Student affairs educators have observed an increase in the number of biracial and multiracial college students: students who have parents from more than one federally defined racial or ethnic background such as Asian-White, Latino-Black, or Native-White-Latino. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, this population is only going to increase. This volume is sure to become an indispensable resource for student affairs professionals serving the needs of this increasing student population.

This is the 123nd volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Student Services, an indispensable resource for vice presidents of student affairs, deans of students, student counselors, and other student services professionals.

Each issue of New Directions for Student Services offers guidelines and programs for aiding students in their total development: emotional, social, physical, and intellectual.

Table of Contents

Editor’s Notes

1. An Introduction to Social and Historical Factors Affecting Multiracial College Students (Paul Shang)
   This chapter introduces the volume by describing social and higher education challenges that impact the identities and experiences of traditional age biracial and multiracial college students.
2. Research on Biracial and Multiracial Identity Development: Overview and Synthesis (Kristen A. Renn)
   This chapter presents three main bodies of research on identity development of biracial and multiracial college students: foundational theories, ecological models, and psychological studies of the impact of multiracial identity.
3. Exploring the Experiences and Self-Labeling of Mixed-Race Individuals with Two Minority Parents (Donna M. Talbot)
   A student development researcher describes a qualitative study of ten mixed-race young adults whose parents are from different minority monoracial groups (Black, Latino/Hispanic, Asian, or Native American).
4. Student Perspectives on Multiracial Identity (Alissa R. King)
   In the context of research on multiracial student experiences, this chapter provides personal reflections of a multiracial individual on campus at a time when Who am I? and What are you? questions prevail.
5. Multiracial Student Services Come of Age: The State of Multiracial Student Services in Higher Education in the United States (Michael Paul A. Wong, Joshua Buckner)
   The authors describe emerging services to serve multiracial students, the service traditions from which these services evolve, how they are staffed, and their relationships with student organizations.
6. The Space in Between: Issues for Multiracial Student Organizations and Advising (C. Casey Ozaki, Marc Johnston)
   Based on research and experience working with multiracial student organizations and leaders, the authors describe the functions and challenges of these student groups and provide suggestions for student affairs educators who work with them.
7. Being Multiracial in a Wired Society: Using the Internet to Define Identity and Community on Campus (Heather Shea Gasser)
   This chapter describes established and emerging technologies, including online social networking, blogs, and wikis, that affect how multiracial students form communities and express their identities.
8. Bicultural Faculty and Their Professional Adaptation (Michael J. Cuyjet)
   An associate professor and graduate school dean describes the ways that minority faculty members, monoracial and biracial, must learn to be bicultural to thrive in the dominant culture of higher education at predominantly White institutions.
9. Looking North: Exploring Multiracial Experiences in a Canadian Context (Leanne Taylor)
   A Canadian scholar describes a particular context for understanding mixed-race college student experiences outside the United States and raises questions for higher education policy and student services practice.
10. Student Affairs and Higher Education Policy Issues Related to Multiracial Students (Angela Kellogg, Amanda Suniti Niskodé)
    This chapter describes student affairs policy issues that have particular impact on multiracial students, such as collecting and reporting data on student race/ethnicity, implementing campus programs and services, and enacting affirmative action.

Notes

Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture

Duke University Press
July 2000
272 pages
12 b&w photographs
Cloth ISBN: 0-8223-2479-2, ISBN13: 978-0-8223-2479-9
Paperback ISBN: 0-8223-2515-2, ISBN13: 978-0-8223-2515-4

Gayle Wald, Professor of English
George Washington University

As W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in The Souls of Black Folk, the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial “order.” Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities for racial “passing,” a practice through which subjects appropriate the terms of racial discourse. To erode race’s authority, Gayle Wald argues, we must understand how race defines and yet fails to represent identity. She thus uses cultural narratives of passing to illuminate both the contradictions of race and the deployment of such contradictions for a variety of needs, interests, and desires.

Wald begins her reading of twentieth-century passing narratives by analyzing works by African American writers James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen, showing how they use the “passing plot” to explore the negotiation of identity, agency, and freedom within the context of their protagonists’ restricted choices. She then examines the 1946 autobiography Really the Blues, which details the transformation of Milton Mesirow, middle-class son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, into Mezz Mezzrow, jazz musician and self-described “voluntary Negro.” Turning to the 1949 films Pinky and Lost Boundaries, which imagine African American citizenship within class-specific protocols of race and gender, she interrogates the complicated representation of racial passing in a visual medium. Her investigation of “post-passing” testimonials in postwar African American magazines, which strove to foster black consumerism while constructing “positive” images of black achievement and affluence in the postwar years, focuses on neglected texts within the archives of black popular culture. Finally, after a look at liberal contradictions of John Howard Griffin’s 1961 auto-ethnography Black Like Me, Wald concludes with an epilogue that considers the idea of passing in the context of the recent discourse of “color blindness.”

Wald’s analysis of the moral, political, and theoretical dimensions of racial passing makes Crossing the Line important reading as we approach the twenty-first century. Her engaging and dynamic book will be of particular interest to scholars of American studies, African American studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Race, Passing, and Cultural Representation
• 1. Home Again: Racial Negotiations in Modernist African American Passing Narratives
• 2. Mezz Mezzrow and the Voluntary Negro Blues
• 3. Boundaries Lost and Found: Racial Passing and Cinematic Representation, circa 1949
• 4. “I’m Through with Passing”: Postpassing Narratives in Black Popular Literary Culture
• 5. “A Most Disagreeable Mirror”: Reflections on White Identity in Black Like Me
• Epilogue: Passing, “Color Blindness,” and Contemporary Discourses of Race and Identity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown

The Journal of American History
Volume 91, No. 1
June 2004
pp. 119–144

Jane Dailey, Associate Professor of American History
University of Chicago

The religious history of the civil rights movement is strangely one-sided. “God was on our side,” the activists have said, and scholars have tended to agree. But the opponents of civil rights also used religion in their cause. Jane Dailey argues that historians have underestimated the role of religion in supporting segregation as well as in dismantling it. Viewing the civil rights movement as a contest over Christian orthodoxy helps explain the arguments made by both sides and the strategic actions they took. Dailey examines the connections among antimiscegenation anxiety, politics, and religion to reveal how deeply interwoven Christian theology was in the segregation ideology that supported the discriminatory world of Jim Crow.

…This article explores how religion served as a vessel for one particular language crucial to racial segregation in the South: the language of miscegenation. It was through sex that racial segregation in the South moved from being a local social practice to a part of the divine plan for the world. It was thus through sex that segregation assumed, for the believing Christian, cosmological significance. Focusing on the theological arguments wielded by segregation’s champions reveals how deeply interwoven Christian theology was in the segregationist ideology that supported the discriminatory world of Jim Crow. It also demonstrates that religion played a central role in articulating not only the challenge that the civil rights movement offered Jim Crow but the resistance to that challenge…

…Although rebutted at the time and later, Ariel’s argument remained current through the middle of the twentieth century, buttressed along the way by such widely read books as Charles Carroll’s The Negro a Beast (1900) and The Tempter of Eve (1902), both of which considered miscegenation the greatest of sins. Denounced for its acceptance of separate creations, The Negro a Beast was nonetheless enormously influential. Recalling the door-to-door sales campaign that brought the book to the notice of whites across the South, a historian of religion lamented in 1909 that “during the opening years of the twentieth century it has become the Scripture of tens of thousands of poor whites, and its doctrine is maintained with an appalling stubbornness and persistence.” In this tradition, miscegenation—or, more commonly, amalgamation or mongrelization—was the original sin, the root of all corruption in humankind.

The expulsion from Paradise did not solve the problem of miscegenation. By the time of Noah race mixing was so prevalent that, in the words of one civil rights–era pamphleteer, “God destroyed ‘all flesh’ in that part of the world for that one sin. Only Noah was ‘perfect in his generation’ … so God saved him and his family to rebuild the Adamic Race.” That perfection did not last long, however; according to some traditions, the cursed son of Ham, already doomed to a life of servitude, mixed his blood with “pre-Adamite negroes” in the Land of Nod. Again and again God’s wrath is aroused by the sin of miscegenation, and the people feel the awful weight of his punishment: Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed for this sin, as was the Tower of Babel, where, in a failed effort to protect racial purity, God dispersed the peoples across the globe. King Solomon, “reputed to be the wisest of men, with a kingdom of matchless splendor and wealth was ruined as a direct result of his marrying women of many different races,” and the “physical mixing of races” that occurred between the Israelites and the Egyptians who accompanied Moses into the wilderness “resulted in social and spiritual weakness,” leading God to sentence the Exodus generation to die before reaching the Promised Land. For evidence that the God of Noah remained as adamantly opposed to racial mixing as ever, white southern believers could look back a mere fifteen years to the Holocaust. The liquidation of six million people was caused, D. B. Red explained in his pamphlet Race Mixing a Religious Fraud (c. 1959), by the sexual “mingling” of the Jews, who suffered what Red represents as God’s final solution to the miscegenation problem: “Totally destroy the people involved.” Here, surely, was proof that segregation was “divine law, enacted for the defense of society and civilization…

Read the entire article here.

The Age of Jim Crow

W. W. Norton & Company
October 2008
434 pages
5.4 × 8.2 in
Paperback ISBN 978-0-393-92758-0

Jane Dailey, Associate Professor of American History
University of Chicago

America’s racial history has been marked by both hard-won progress and sudden reversals of fortune.

In The Age of Jim Crow, Jane Dailey introduces readers to a fascinating collection of documents on race and segregation in America that were created between the end of the Civil War and the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement a century later.  Organized around two themes, Dailey highlights the role of law in creating, maintaining, and — ultimately — helping to undo segregation.   She also traces the effects of interracial sex and marriage as they shaped the era of Jim Crow.  The Age of Jim Crow focuses throughout on sexuality and gender politics as they play out across the legal, social and economic, political, and cultural arenas.

View the Table of Contents here.

What Answer?

Prometheus Books
Originally Published in 1868
316 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59102-050-9

Anna E. Dickinson

With an Introduction by

J. Matthew Gallman, Professor of History
University of Florida

This first and only novel by Anna E. Dickinson, a well-known 19th-century orator, abolitionist, and advocate of racial equality and women’s rights, attracted tremendous interest when it first appeared in the fall of 1868, and was enthusiastically endorsed by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Set in the midst of the Civil War, this controversial work of fiction traces the tragic history of an interracial marriage, which is doomed to disaster by the intolerance of a northern society that refuses to accept racial equality. The central love story provoked strong reactions from supporters and critics alike. Dickinson’s friends praised the power of her tale and the poignancy of the lovers’ fate, while some critics voiced disgust at the very notion of miscegenation. To portray such a relationship only three years after the Civil War was to many an act of remarkable audacity.

Though the work will never be praised as a masterful literary creation, its themes of racial tension and justice have given it enduring value. Also lending the story interest are Dickinson’s impassioned descriptions of two infamous historical incidents – the terrible New York City Draft Riots of July 1863 and the storming of Fort Wagner by black troops of the famed 54th Massachusetts regiment. Even more important is the glimpse she provides into the conflicted attitudes of average white Northern citizens toward blacks just after the War. A scene on a Philadelphia streetcar depicting the mixed reactions of the passengers to a confrontation between a drunken white bigot and a wounded black soldier seems to forecast the Rosa Parks bus incident and the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement almost one hundred years later.

With an interesting and informative introduction by J. Matthew Gallman, this new edition of a unique work long out of print will be welcome in courses on African American and American history.

Bayou Folk

Prometheus Books
Originally Published by Houghton Mifflin in 1894
Pages: 286
Paperback ISBN: 1-57392-975-1

Kate Chopin

The author who today is probably best known for her novel The Awakening initially established her literary reputation with short stories about life in rural Louisiana during the late nineteenth century. Born Katherine O’Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri, she later married Oscar Chopin, a Creole cotton trader and commission merchant, and lived in and around New Orleans for more than a decade until her husband’s death. During these years, while raising six children on a Southern plantation, Chopin became acquainted with Creoles, Cajuns, and newly freed blacks. After her husband’s death she returned to St. Louis and began writing, drawing from her recent experience in Louisiana to create her fiction.

The stories collected in Bayou Folk present remarkably vivid snapshots of daily life in a now vanished world. Many of them highlight the relations between blacks and whites in a society where the rules of engagement still reflected the entrenched patterns of slavery some two decades after the Civil War. As she was ahead of her time regarding women’s rights in The Awakening, where she depicted a woman unafraid to throw off traditional restraints, Chopin was also farsighted about race relations in Bayou Folk. Perhaps the story Désirée’s Baby about the birth of a mixed-race baby to two ‘white’ parents best expresses the uneasy relationship between blacks and whites in the old South, and the moral outrage of its strict codes against miscegenation.

Chopin’s gifts for capturing the dialects of the region and for telling a compelling story in memorable vignettes provide the reader with a richly rewarding experience.