Mixed Race Studies

Tripping on the Color Line: Black-White Multiracial Families in a Racially Divided World

Rutgers University Press
October 2000
192 pages
Cloth ISBN: 0-8135-2843-7
Paper ISBN: 0-8135-2844-5

Heather M. Dalmage, Professor of Sociology and Director
Mansfield Institute for Social Justice
Roosevelt University

A sociological analysis of the experiences and challenges faced by black-white multiracial families

At the beginning of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that the central problem facing the United States in the new century would be that of the “color line.” Now, with another century upon us, many people are found straddling the color line. They come from the growing number of multiracial families in America, families seeking their places in a racially polarized society.

In interviews with individuals from black/white multiracial families, Heather M. Dalmage examines the challenges they face and explores how their experiences demonstrate the need for rethinking race in America. She examines the lived reality of race in the ways multiracial families construct their identities and sense of community and politics. The lack of language to describe multiracial experiences, along with the methods of negotiating racial ambiguity in a racially divided, racist society are central themes of Tripping on the Color Line. By connecting her interviewees stories to specific issues, such as census categories, transracial adoption, and intermarriage, Dalmage raises the debate to a broad discussion of the idea of race and its impact on social justice.

The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction

Rutgers University Press
2004-09-29
202 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-3481-7
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-3482-4

Eve Allegra Raimon, Professor, Arts & Humanities
University of Southern Maine

Since its inception, the United States has been intensely preoccupied with interracialism. The concept is embedded everywhere in our social and political fabric, including our sense of national identity. And yet, in both its quantitative and symbolic forms, interracialism remains an extremely elusive phenomenon, causing policy makers and census boards to wrangle over how to delineate it and, on an emblematic level, stirring intense emotions from fear to fascination. In The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited, Eve Allegra Raimon focuses on the mixed-race female slave in literature, arguing that this figure became a symbolic vehicle for explorations of race and nation-both of which were in crisis in the mid-nineteenth century. At this time, judicial, statutory, social, and scientific debates about the meaning of racial difference (and intermixture) coincided with disputes over frontier expansion, which were never merely about land acquisition but also literally about the “complexion” of that frontier. Embodying both northern and southern ideologies, the “amalgamated” mulatta, the author argues, can be viewed as quintessentially American, a precursor to contemporary motifs of “hybrid” and “mestizo” identities. Where others have focused on the gendered and racially abject position of the “tragic mulatta,” Raimon reconsiders texts by such central antislavery writers as Lydia Maria Child, William Wells Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet Wilson to suggest that the figure is more usefully examined as a way of understanding the volatile and shifting interface of race and national identity in the antebellum period.

Read an excerpt here.

Will “Multiracial”: Survive to the Next Generation?: The Racial Classification of Children of Multiracial Parents

Social Forces
Volume 86, Number 2 (December 2007)
pages 821-849
DOI: 10.1353/sof.2008.0007

Jenifer L. Bratter, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Institute for Urban Research
Rice University

Will multiracial identification resonate with future generations? Using the 2000 U.S. Census, I analyze the impact of a multiracial parent on the classification of children in four types of multiracial families (e.g., white/non-white, black/non-black). Compared to families where parents are of two different single-race backgrounds, parental multiracial identity decreased the likelihood of multiracial classification due to the use of labels reflecting a shared single-race category (e.g. white-Asian mother and white father). When parents’ races did not overlap, multiracial classification was more common in households if the other parent was white or American Indian. These results suggest that intergenerational transmission of a multiracial identity is more common in contexts of racial diversity.

“The Ineffaceable Curse of Cain”: Racial Marking and Embodiment in Pinky

Camera Obscura
43 (Volume 15, Number 1),
2000
pp. 94-121

Elspeth Kydd

Look at my fingers, are not the nails of a bluish tinge . . . that is the ineffaceable curse of Cain . . .
Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana

The 1949 film Pinky presents a central mulatto character as a method for focusing attention on issues of race and racism.  As one of a series of liberal films released shortly after the Second World War, Pinky approaches issues of race and racism as “social problems.” Yet this film, as do others of this movement, demonstrates more ambiguities around racial categorizations than it offers solutions for dealing with postwar racial tensions.  Made during the Hays Code‘s ban on the representation of miscegenation, Pinky confronts the issue of interracial relations more overtly than many other films of its time by focusing its narrative on the difficulties experienced by a mixed-race woman. The character of Pinky faces crises over passing, as she is torn between her “birthright” and the “mess of pottage”  that she would gain by identifying as white.

Pinky uses the mulatto character to gain audience sympathies, exploring the effects of Southern racism by subjecting the almost-white main character to racially motivated degradations.  Significantly, the film embodies the mulatto through a white actress, producing an ambiguous interplay of audience identifications.  The film engages multiple deployments of the mulatto character: Through the actress, through the social context of the Hays Code, through the visual conventions it deploys, and through its narrative, which draws on…

Read or purchase the entire article here.

Mixed Race: Understanding Difference in the Genome Era

Social Forces
Volume 86, Issue 2, December 2007
pages 795-820
E-ISSN: 1534-7605, Print ISSN: 0037-7732
DOI: 10.1353/sof.2008.0011

Elizabeth M. Phillips
National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health

Adebola O. Odunlami
National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health

Vence L. Bonham
National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health

This article presents the findings of a qualitative study of multiracial individuals’ understanding of identity, race and human genetic variation. The debate regarding the correlation between race, genetics and disease has expanded, but limited empirical data has been collected regarding the lay public’s perspective. Participants in this study explore their identity and its relationships to their health care interactions. Participants also share their views on race-based therapeutics, health disparities and the connections between race, ancestry and genetics. Their voices highlight the limitations of racial categories in describing differences within our increasingly diverse communities. The genomic era will be a pivotal period in challenging current understandings and uses of racial categories in health.

Read or purchase the article here.

A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America

Oxford University Press
March 2003
296 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4
ISBN13: 978-0-19-507523-6
ISBN10: 0-19-507523-4

Edited by

Frank Shuffelton, Professor Emeritus of English
University of Rochester

This collection of new essays enters one of the most topical and energetic debates of our time–the subject of ethnicity. The recent vigorous debates being waged over questions raised by the phenomenon of multiculturalism in America highlight the fact that American culture has arisen out of an unusually rich and interactive ethnic mix. The essays in A Mixed Race suggest that American society was inescapably multicultural from its very beginnings and that this representation of cultural differences fundamentally defined American culture. While recent scholarship has looked extensively at the ethnic formation of modern American culture, this study focuses on the eighteenth century and colonial American values that have been previously overlooked in the debate, arguing that a culture shaped by responses to ethnic and racial difference is not merely a modern circumstance but one at the base of American history. Written by a group of first-class contributors, the essays in this collection discuss the representation of cultural differences between European immigrants and Native Americans, the circumstances of the first African-American autobiographical narratives, rhetorical negotiations among different European-American cultural groups, ethnic representation in the genre literature of jest books and execution narratives, and the ethnic conceptions of Michel de Crevecoeur, Phillis Wheatley, and Thomas Jefferson. A Mixed Race offers agile and original yet scholarly readings of ethnicity and ethnic formation from some of our best critics of early American culture. Moving from questions of race and ethnicity to varieties of ethnic representation, and finally to individual confrontations, this volume sheds light on the confrontations of ethnically diverse peoples, and launches a timely, full-scale investigation of the construction of American culture.

Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity (review)

The American Indian Quarterly
Volume 33, Number 4
Fall 2009
E-ISSN: 1534-1828
Print ISSN: 0095-182X
DOI: 10.1353/aiq.0.0078

Gary C. Cheek Jr.

Jolivétte, Andrew J., Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity, Lexington Books, 2006.

“Who is white?” Jolivétte asks in the first chapter of his recent Louisiana Creoles, posing a controversial question that concerns both racial and ethnic identity. Part of the issue, he states, is a matter of family history, and the other is based on choice. Here he explores ideas about racial and ethnic identity, mixing and definition. At its core the book discusses the internal struggle of Louisiana Creoles with mixed heritage to define themselves among family and friends, within local communities, and among Americans at large. The author then explores how members of Creole communities have fought to acknowledge their unique blend of cultural traditions and heritage, particularly by including Native American lineage, to forge a multiracial ethnic identity and why they choose to define themselves as such.

The study approaches questions about race, ethnicity, and choice both sociologically and anthropologically. Jolivétte includes portions of his research tools in the appendices. These include a survey, interview questions, and a list of Creole organizations, periodicals…

Purchase or read the entire review here.

“Miscegenation” Making Race in America

University of Pennsylvania Press
2002
216 pages
6 x 9, 19 illus.
Cloth: ISBN 978-0-8122-3664-4
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8122-2064-3

Elise Lemire, Professor of Literature
Purchase College, State University of New York

In the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, as the question of black political rights was debated more and more vociferously, descriptions and pictorial representations of whites coupling with blacks proliferated in the North. Novelists, short-story writers, poets, journalists, and political cartoonists imagined that political equality would be followed by widespread inter-racial sex and marriage. Legally possible yet socially unthinkable, this “amalgamation” of the races would manifest itself in the perverse union of “whites” with “blacks,” the latter figured as ugly, animal-like, and foul-smelling. In Miscegenation, Elise Lemire reads these literary and visual depictions for what they can tell us about the connection between the racialization of desire and the social construction of race.

Previous studies of the prohibition of interracial sex and marriage in the U.S. have focused on either the slave South or the post-Reconstruction period. Looking instead to the North, and to such texts as the Federalist poetry about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, James Fenimore Cooper‘s Last of the Mohicans, Edgar Allan Poe‘s “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and the 1863 pamphlet in which the word “miscegenation” was first used, Lemire examines the steps by which whiteness became a sexual category and same-race desire came to seem a biological imperative.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: The Rhetorical Wedge Between Preference and Prejudice
• 1. Race and the Idea of “Preference” in the New Republic: The Port Folio Poems About Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings
• 2. The Rhetoric of Blood and Mixture: Cooper’s “Man Without a Cross”
• 3. The Barrier of Good Taste: Avoiding A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation in the Wake of Abolitionism
• 4. Combating Abolitionism with the Species Argument: Race and Economic Anxieties in Poe’s Philadelphia
• 5. Making “Miscegenation”: Alcott‘s Paul Frere and the Limits of Brotherhood After Emancipation
• Epilogue: “Miscegenation” Today
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments

Mestizo Democracy: The Politics of Crossing Borders

Texas A&M University Press
2003
320 pages
6.125 x 9.25
Paper ISBN: 978-1-58544-346-8

John Francis Burke, Professor of Political Science and Chair
University of St. Thomas, Houston

Foreword by Virgilio Elizondo

It can come as no surprise that the ethnic makeup of the American population is rapidly changing. That there are political repercussions from these changes is also self-evident. How the changes can, must, and should alter our very understanding of democracy, though, may not be obvious. Political theorist John Burke addresses these issues by offering a “mestizo” theory of democracy and tracing its implications for public policy.

The challenge before the United States in the coming century, Burke posits, will be to articulate a politics that neither renders cultures utterly autonomous from each other nor culminates in their homogeneous assimilation. Fortuitously or ironically, the way to do this comes from the very culture that is now necessitating the change.

Mestizo is a term from the Mexican socio-political experience. It means “mixture” and implies a particular kind of mixture that has resulted in a blend of indigenous, African, and Spanish genes and cultures in Latin America. This mixture is not a “melting pot” experience, where all eventually become assimilated; rather, it is a mixture in which the influences of the different cultures remain identifiable but not static. They all evolve through interaction with the others, and the resulting larger culture also evolves as the parts do. Mestizaje (the collective noun form) is thus process more than condition.

John Burke analyzes both American democratic theory and multiculturalism within political theology to develop a model for cultivating a democratic political community that can deal constructively with its cultural diversity. He applies this new model to a number of important policy issues: official language(s), voting and participation, equal employment opportunity, housing, and free trade. He then presents an intensive case study, based on a parish “multicultural committee” and choir in which he has been a participant, to show how the “engaged dialogue” of mestizaje might work and what pitfalls await it.

Burke concludes that in the United States we are becoming mestizo whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not. By embracing the communitarian but non-assimilationist stance of intentional mestizaje, we can forge a future together that will be not only greater than the sum of its parts but also freer and more just than its past.

John Francis Burke is a professor of political science and chair of the department at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. He is an active lay minister in a Houston Catholic parish characterized by diversity. With a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame, he brings strong training in western political philosophy and religious studies to his study of mestizo culture in the United States.

Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850–2000

University of Georgia Press
2003-01-27
284 pages
Trim size: 6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8203-2325-1
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8203-2781-5

Suzanne Bost, Associate Professor of English
Loyola University

In this broadly conceived exploration of how people represent identity in the Americas, Suzanne Bost argues that mixture has been central to the definition of race in the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean since the nineteenth century. Her study is particularly relevant in an era that promotes mixed-race musicians, actors, sports heroes, and supermodels as icons of a “new” America. Bost challenges the popular media’s notion that a new millennium has ushered in a radical transformation of American ethnicity; in fact, this paradigm of the “changing” face of America extends throughout American history.

Working from literary and historical accounts of mulattas, mestizas, and creoles, Bost analyzes a tradition, dating from the nineteenth century, of theorizing identity in terms of racial and sexual mixture. By examining racial politics in Mexico and the United States; racially mixed female characters in Anglo-American, African American, and Latina narratives; and ideas of mixture in the Caribbean, she ultimately reveals how the fascination with mixture often corresponds to racial segregation, sciences of purity, and white supremacy. The racism at the foundation of many nineteenth-century writings encourages Bost to examine more closely the subtexts of contemporary writings on the “browning” of America.

Original and ambitious in scope, Mulattas and Mestizas measures contemporary representations of mixed-race identity in the United States against the history of mixed-race identity in the Americas. It warns us to be cautious of the current, millennial celebration of mixture in popular culture and identity studies, which may, contrary to all appearances, mask persistent racism and nostalgia for purity.