Mixed Race Studies

“I’m quite interested in thinking about that notion of the hyphen. That little thing that’s in-between. Let’s say, “Chinese-Canadian,” or “Japanese-Canadian.” I like to challenge those two poles, those two hegemonous poles who want to claim a part of me. Because I feel like I’ve lived in-between and I like the in-between.  It’s a place that I would like to spruce-up a bit. I like to, you know, put some nice furniture in the in-between place.” —Fred Wah

Anne Marie Nakagawa, “Between: Living in the Hyphen,” National Film Board of Canada, (2005): 00:0:28-00:01:02.

Psychologically, the mulatto is an unstable type.

In the thinking of the white race, the mulattoes generally are grouped with the backward race and share with them the contempt and dislike of the dominant group. Nowhere are they accepted as social equals. The discrimination varies all the way from the more or less successfully concealed contempt of the Brazilian white for the socially ambitious metis, to the open and bitter hatred of the South African for the “coloured man” and the Native boy, but it seems to be present everywhere. The origin of the half-castes was everywhere an irregular one; this is a point about which prejudice can always center. Their nearer approach in physical appearance to the white type is simply taken as evidence of additional irregularities in ancestry. The two things—the lower ancestry and the presumption of a dubious origin—are the focal points about which the white man’s contempt for the mixed-blood group centers.

By the native race, the mixed-blood group is generally accepted as superior. The possession of white blood is an evidence of superiority. The ancestral blot excites no prejudice. The mulattoes are envied because of their color and enjoy a prestige among the darker group because of it.

Between these two groups, one admiring and the other despising, stand the mixed-bloods. In their own estimation, they are neither the one nor the other. They despise the lower race with a bitterness born of their degrading association with it, and which is all the more galling because it needs must be concealed. They everywhere endeavor to escape it and to conceal and forget their relationship to it. They are uncertain of their own worth; conscious of their superiority to the native they are nowhere sure of their equality with the superior group. They envy the white, aspire to equality with them, and are embittered when the realization of such ambition is denied them. They are a dissatisfied and an unhappy group.

It is this discontented and psychologically unstable group which gives rise to the acute phases of the so-called race problem. The members of the primitive group, recognizing the hopelessness of measuring up to the standards of the white race, are generally content and satisfied with their lower status and happy among their own race. It is the mixed-blood man who is dissatisfied and ambitious. The real race problem before each country whose population is divided into an advanced and a backward group, is to determine the policy to be pursued toward the backward group. The acute phase of this is to determine the policy to be adopted toward the mixed-bloods. To reject the claims and to deny the ambition of the mulattos may cause them to turn back upon the lower race. In this case, they may become the intellectual leaven to raise the race to a higher cultural level, or they may become the agitators who create discord and strife between the pure-blood races. To form them into a separate caste between the races, is to lessen the clash between the extreme types and, at the same time, to deprive the members of the lower race of their chance to advance in culture by depriving them of their natural, intellectual leaders. To admit the ambition of the mulattoes to be white and to accept them into the white race on terms of individual merit, means ultimately a mongrelization of the population and a cultural level somewhere between that represented by the standards of the two groups.

Edward Byron Reuter, The Mulatto In The United States: Including A Study Of The Role Of Mixed-Blood Races Throughout The World, (Boston: The Gorham Press, 1918). 102-104. http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7040137M/The_mulatto_in_the_United_States

Scientific and colonial discourses of racial mixture first converged on the issue of interracial marriage in the colonies. Scientific conceptions of the negative genetic consequences of racial mixture were already an element of nineteenth-century German colonial policies as articulated on the issue of Rassenmischehe, or racially mixed marriages between white colonial settlers and indigenous colonial peoples. Only six years before the Rhineland occupation, Reichstag debates on racially mixed marriages prefigured many of the same arguments and fears voiced later in the newspaper protest campaign. Although interracial marriage was not illegal under German imperial law, colonial officials began refusing to register interracial unions in the colonies in 1890. In 1905 Governor Friednch von Lindequist issued the first such measure in the form of a decree banning interracial marriages in German Southwest Africa. Reflecting the dominant views of the scientific community at the time, he cited what he saw as the dangerous effect of racial mixture on the purity of the white race: “Such unions do not preserve, but rather diminish the race. As a rule the offspring are physically and emotionally weak and unite in themselves the negative traits of both parents.” In 1907, the colonial High Court in Windhuk ruled that the marriage bans were retroactively valid, effectively nullifying mixed marriages concluded before the 1905 ban. The court’s ruling stated, “Any person whose ancestry can be traced to natives either paternally or maternally must be viewed and treated as a native.” Consequently, many people who had been considered white Germans and who had considered themselves white Germans suddenly were counted as natives. Following Lindequist’s administrative order, similar decrees were passed banning mixed marriages in the German colonies of East Africa in 1906 and Samoa in 1912. In response to this 1912 decree, protests broke out in the Reichstag, prompting delegates to debate the legality of these colonial decrees in light of their conflict with imperial law. But the objections raised in protest against the bans did not focus in any fundamental way on juridical arguments regarding the question of the precedence of imperial over colonial legislation. Rather, delegates raised explicitly moral arguments against the bans, which presented marriages between German colonialists and nonwhite colonial natives as a threat to sexual morality and existing racial hierarchies of difference.

Tina M. Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 43-44.

Chapter 8 brings us closer to the present, introducing pressures that challenge the role of statistical races in today’s policy environment. One pressure is multiraciality as exemplified in the “mark one or more” census option introduced in 2000. This option is a profound criticism of two centuries of American racial counting. There are not three or four or five races, each in its own census box; there are multiple combinations, permutations, mixtures. Millions of young Americans know and accept this, and they are increasingly impatient with a census that isn’t better at recognizing it. A second pressure pulling in a similar direction is diversity as a policy goal, now widely embraced from the military to the corporation to the university. The complexities of the diversity agenda destabilize the racial classification. The third pressure is the color-blind movement. This is in response to the dilemma of recognition, a phrase indicating that making race groups beneficiaries of policy can itself intensify group identities. There is strong political sentiment that this contradicts basic American individualistic values—freedom, choice, mobility, and merit-earned rewards. In dismay over racial group–based policy, opponents are advancing color-blind proposals in law and politics.

Kenneth Prewitt, What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 10-11.

Postwar responses to black occupation children represent a formative moment in the racial reconstruction of postfascist Germany. Military occupation between 1945 and 1949 produced some 94,000 occupation children. However, official and public attention fixed on a small subset, the so-called “farbige Mischlinge” or “colored mixed-bloods,” distinguished from the others by their black paternity. Although they constituted a small minority of postwar German births—numbering only about 3,000 in 1950 and nearly double that by 1955—West German federal and state officials, youth welfare workers, and the press invested the children with considerable symbolic significance.

The years after 1945 were constituent for contemporary German racial understanding, and postwar debates regarding “miscegenation” and “Mischlingskinder” were central to the ideological transition from National Socialist to democratic approaches to race. The term “Mischling,” in fact, survived the Third Reich and persisted well into the 1960s in official, scholarly, media, and public usage in West Germany. But its content had changed. Rather than refer to the progeny of so-called mixed unions between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans as it had during the Third Reich, immediately after the war it came to connote the offspring of white German women and foreign men of color. Thus “Mischling” remained a racialized category of social analysis and social policy after 1945, as before. But the definition of which races had mixed, as well as the social significance of such mixing, had fundamentally altered.

Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eleym and Atina Grossmann, After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). 31-32.

And so it’s always powerful for me to visit countries outside of the United States generally, but obviously for an African American, and an African American President to be able to visit this site I think gives me even greater motivation in terms of the defense of human rights around the world.

Barack Obama, “Remarks by President Obama After Tour of Maison Des Esclaves,” (Gorée Island, Senegal) The White House: Office of the Press Secretary, (Washington, D. C., June 27, 2013). http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/27/remarks-president-obama-after-tour-maison-des-esclaves.

When two proximate species of mankind, two races bearing a general resemblance to each other in type, are bred together—e.g.. Teutons, Celts, Pelasgians, Iberians, or Jews—they produce offspring perfectly prolific: although, even here, their, peculiarities cannot become so entirely fused into a homogeneous mass as to obliterate the original types of either. One or the other of these types will “crop-out,” from time to time, more or less apparently in their progeny.  When, on the other hand, species the most widely separated, such as the Anglo-Saxon with the Negro, are crossed, a different result has course. Their mulatto offspring, if still prolific, are but partially so; and acquire an inherent tendency to run out, and become eventually extinct when kept apart from the parent stocks.  This opinion is now becoming general among observers in our slave States; and it is very strongly insisted upon by M. Jacquinot.  This skillful naturalist (unread in cis-Atlantic literature) claims the discovery as original with himself; although erroneously, because it had long previously been advocated by Estwick and Long, the historians of Jamaica; by Dr. Caldwell; by Professors Dickson and Holbrook, of Charleston, S. C.; and by numerous other leading medical men of our Southern States.  There are some 4,000,000 of Negroes in the United States; about whom circumstances, personal and professional, have afforded me ample opportunities for observation. I have found it impossible, nevertheless, to collect such statistics as would be satisfactory to others on this point; and the difficulty arises solely from the want of chastity among mulatto women, which is so notorious as to be proverbial. Although often married to hybrid males of their own color, their children are begotten as frequently by white or other men, as by their husbands. For many years, in my daily professional visits, I have been in the habit of meeting with mulatto women, either free or slaves; and, never omitting an opportunity of inquiry with regard to their prolificacy, longevity of offspring, color of parents, age, &c., the conviction has become indelibly fixed in my mind that the positions laid down in the beginning of this chapter are true.

J. C. Nott, “Hybridity of Animals, Viewed in Connection with Mankind,” in Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological Researches, Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania or Races and Upon their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History [Second Edition], J. C. Nott and Geo. R. Gliddon, (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854), 397-398.

One of the most fruitful sources of genetic variation in man is race mixture. Although the term is something of a misnomer, its usage is firmly established. Actually anything from the latest international marriage of an American heiress with a British peer to the miscegenation of Australian aborigines with Europeans is called race mixture. In no case does race mixture in man represent the crossing of pure-line races such as might be possible in the laboratory, for pure-line human races do not exist. The very fact that pure human races are not to be found in nature—a situation which, paradoxically, “race mixture” has done much to bring about—makes it impossible to draw a hard and fast line between miscegenation of related peoples and the crossing of genetically distinct populations. The process of mixture, however, whether or not between closely related or widely diverse stocks is one that tends to create new gene combinations and therefore increased variation. The gene distributions which are known, the geographic continuities of physical variation and the prehistoric as well as the historic records are abundant evidence for the belief that mixture has always been a significant factor in man’s past. That it will involve a larger proportion of the world’s population in the future is not unlikely in view of the increasing contacts between the peoples of the earth. In the New World great areas are even now inhabited by populations of mixed blood. In the colonial empires of European nations, half-caste groups quickly become established. The migrations and resettlements of the past which brought millions of diverse Europeans to the United States, the dislocations of the present war, the opening up of Asiatic Russia, also provide fertile opportunities for reshuffling the genes of mankind. Up to the present only a handful of students have concerned themselves with the biological consequences of race mixture. Propagandists and Nordophiles like Madison Grant, echoing the racist literature of Germany, see nothing but evil in the process. At least, the evil was inevitable as far as the Nordics were concerned, for in the view of the racists the manifest supremacy of the Nordics could only suffer deterioration by miscegenation since they had no peer with which to mingle in equality. Although this extreme view was characteristic mainly of certain popular writers distinguished by their zeal rather than their scientific attainments, several geneticists have suggested that in crossing divergent races serious disharmonies were likely to develop. Castle among others has effectively disproved these claims, but there still lingers a common belief that the mulatto, for example, is inferior, at least physically, to either Negro or white. The high rate of tuberculosis among mulattoes is sometimes cited as evidence of this. Careful studies of the environment, however, usually reveals that in this condition other factors than race are determinants.

Contrary to belief that race mixture leads to deterioration, an actual superiority in some instances may characterize the half-caste population. Fischer’s study of the Rehobother Bastards, a cross between South African Boers and Hottentots (certainly as divergent a pair of stocks as might be expected to mate) disclosed evidence of a hybrid vigor which in fertility surpassed the performances of either Boers or Hottentots. In a study of the Polynesian-English descendants of the Mutineers of the Bounty, I found in the early generations a marked superiority over the parental stocks not only in physical size but also in the birth rate. Boas’s investigations on half-breed Indians indicated something of the same order. Such a phenomenon as hybrid vigor or heterosis is well known in biology and is now commercially applied in the propagation of hybrid corn, whose increased yields over pure-line strains has led to its wide adoption in agriculture. Experimental animals display the same results in certain crosses. There is then every reason to suppose that the increase of size, vigor, and fertility which is sometimes found in human hybrids is part of the same general biological principle. While it would be erroneous to assume that race mixture in every case leads to an enhanced biological status, it is worth considering as one of the possible explanations of the recurrent epochs of outstanding intellectual activity that mark European history. The intermingling of various strains that preceded the classic development of Greece and the miscegenation that accompanied the “Volkerwanderung” of the millennium before the Renaissance suggest that an unusually active reshuffling of genes produces a heightened vitality that finds expression in high peaks of civilization. This is not a novel construction of European history, but it does receive added credence from recent observations on race mixture.

H. L. Shapiro, “Society and Biological Man,” The Science of Man in the World Crisis, Ralph Linton, ed., (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945).

At the very outset we must face three possible alternatives as we consider the concept of race: 1) there is such a thing as race  in mankind; 2) there is not such a thing as race in mankind; 3) even if race in mankind exists, it can have no significance save as people think of it and react to their conception of it. In the first alternative we shall turn to those physical anthropologists who treat race as a biological phenomenon, separating and classifying groups of mankind according to certain descriptive and mensurational categories. In the second alternative we must turn to those few geneticists and fewer physical anthropologists who, when they refer to mankind, use “race” in quotation marks as if by so doing they can, in effect, recognize its existence while denying its implications. In the third alternative we must turn to those social anthropologists who treat race principally in terms of social interaction.

Wilton Marion Krogman, “The Concept of Race,” in The Science of Man in the World Crisis, Ralph Linton, ed., (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 38.

Whiteness is the unspoken, invisible default setting of American life. We frame our conversations about race in terms of how white people see and what they think they see. We imagine that nonwhite Americans want to be more like white Americans. We imagine that to be American is to be white. When racial minorities complain about the slurs of a Paula Deen or a prank like the faked names of the Asiana pilots, they are often told by whites to stop being so sensitive or to take the context of tradition or history or humor into account. That ability, to dismiss and minimize people of color for being oversensitive, is itself one of the privileges that whiteness confers. The broader privilege that whites have by occupying the omniscient vantage point in media and civic life has to be named and then undone.

Eric Liu, “Trayvon Martin and Making Whiteness Visible,” Time Magazine (July 17, 2013). http://ideas.time.com/2013/07/17/trayvon-martin-and-making-whiteness-visible