Mixed Race Studies

On the other side of the coin, implementing the one-drop rule as a way to attach non-Black people to Blackness is equally detrimental to this conversation. The one-drop rule was only a practice found within the United States and was an “unspoken” law that never existed on the books. It was merely a way to stop Blacks fathered by their masters from gaining economic or social wealth by inheritance.

It is no secret that many diasporans or Black descendants of enslaved Africans have European ancestry but that wouldn’t make them white.

Keka Araujo, “Rep. Ocasio-Cortez Explains Her Race and Ethnicity ,” DiversityInc, February 15, 2019. https://www.diversityinc.com/Good-News/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-black-ancestry-doesnt-mean-black.

After studying textiles at Middlesex Polytechnic, [Andrea] Levy worked briefly as a designer, a dresser and a receptionist. But it was not until she was 26 that a racial awareness session with colleagues at an Islington sex education project gave her a “rude awakening”.

“We were asked to split into two groups, black and white.” Levy wrote. “I walked over to the white side of the room. It was, ironically, where I felt most at home – all my friends, my boyfriend, my flatmates, were white. But my fellow workers had other ideas and I found myself being beckoned over by people on the black side. With some hesitation I crossed the floor.”

As someone who was “scared” to call herself a black person, the experience was shocking enough to send her to bed for a week. But the writing course she had begun part-time came to her rescue, sending her back to explore the shame and denial that had marked her childhood and to rediscover her Jamaican roots.

Richard Lea, “Andrea Levy, chronicler of the Windrush generation, dies aged 62,” The Guardian, February 15, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/15/andrea-levy-chronicler-of-the-windrush-generation-dies-aged-62.

A mixed-race body moving through homogenous spaces often inspires attempts at conversations of classification. Whether through the form of a sudden, uneasy speechlessness followed by a mumbled comment, or an incessant stream of questions, this body of mine often seems to inspire the same disquietude in others that I experience within myself. In a crowded Tokyo mall, I once found myself the subject of a Japanese man’s gaze. When I moved to avoid him, climbing the stairs to the next floor, he positioned himself silently beside me, all the while staring at my face, my posture, my hands, my body. Only when I turned to exit did he open his mouth to mumble, “Jyun-japa?” (“Pure Japanese?”). He lifted his eyes to mine and I felt myself overcome by a blanketing silence.

Nina Coomes, “What Miyazaki’s Heroines Taught Me About My Mixed-Race Identity,” Catapult, October 16, 2017. https://catapult.co/stories/fans-what-miyazakis-heroines-taught-me-about-my-mixed-race-identity.

The first question that arises is as to who is a “White” within the meaning of the statute. Even those states which have formulated statutory definitions are not in agreement. Georgia with its very extensive definition provision sets out that a “White” includes only those persons who have no ascertainable trace of the prohibited intermixture in their blood line.²² The Arizona statute prohibits anyone with “Caucasian blood” from marrying the other races enumerated.²³ Virginia states that a “White” is a person with no admixture except 1/16 or less of American Indian.²⁴ Many other states in their statues treat as “White” anyone with 1/8 or less of any of the other prohibited races;²⁵ Oregon sets it at ¼.²⁶

William E. Foster, “A Study of the Wyoming Miscegenation Statutes,” Wyoming Law Journal, Volume 10, Number 2 (1956). 133-134. https://repository.uwyo.edu/wlj/vol10/iss2/5/.

By drawing on their Hapa identity while situating themselves within historically Black and Brown musical and cultural aesthetics these artists are contributing to what ethnomusicologist, T. Carlis Roberts calls the “new Black” movement in music, a trend that embraces broader definitions of what it means to be Black and Brown. According to Roberts, “Not only has this process resulted in more visible diversity in media and other social realms, it has productively worked to unseat the Black–white dichotomy as the paradigm of racial conversation.”³ Musicians like [Jhené] Aiko are unseating several racial dichotomies.

Sonia C. Gomez, “Jhené Aiko and the Problem of Multiracial Self-Representation,” Discover Nikkei, January 29, 2019. http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2019/1/29/jhene-aiko/.

Instead of enforcing segregation policies to sanction white superiority, Argentine authorities sought to eliminate blackness through European immigration and miscegenation. The constant arrival of European males through immigration made this goal attainable. For example, [Domingo] Sarmiento often touted mulatos as proof of progress because they “had the brute force of the African and the intellect of the European.”⁵ By the turn of the twentieth century, it seemed that the whitening project had achieved success. In 1905 Juan José Soiza Reilly wrote in the magazine Caras y Caretas, “The [black] race is losing in the mixture its primitive color. It becomes gray. It dissolves. It lightens. An African tree is producing white flowers.”⁶

Erika Denise Edwards, “A Tale of Two Cities: Buenos Aires, Córdoba and the Disappearance of the Black Population in Argentina,” The Metropole: The Official Blog of the Urban History Association, May 31, 2018. https://themetropole.blog/2018/05/31/a-tale-of-two-cities-buenos-aires-cordoba-and-the-disappearance-of-the-black-population-in-argentina/.

Family lore says Carl Warwick was Native American. His birthplace isn’t far from land that still belongs to Native American tribes. But his birth certificate, World War II draft registry and Social Security filing all say “negro.” So do the records I’m waiting for from the school he attended in the ‘30s – the New Jersey Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth.

Shannon Wink, “How a work project uncovered my true family roots [NewsWorks],” Shannon Wink: Communications, content and digital strategy, June 26, 2012. https://shannonawink.com/2012/06/25/how-a-work-project-uncovered-my-true-family-roots-newsworks.

In her new book, “White Identity Politics,” the Duke political scientist Ashley Jardina examines the increasing relevance of white identity in America. Drawing on data from American National Election Studies surveys and her own research, Jardina finds that about thirty to forty per cent of white Americans say that white identity is important to them, and she adds an interesting twist—that this group only partly overlaps with the group of white Americans who hold racist views. According to Jardina’s analysis, about thirty-eight per cent of white people who highly value their white identity are at or below the mean level of racial resentment, while forty-four per cent of white people who say their racial identity is less important are at or above that level. “For those invested in racial equality, this outcome should be of little comfort,” Jardina writes, of white Americans asserting their identity, with or without explicit racial resentment. In the past, she notes, when white people have been asked to share resources and power, they have not responded “by leveling the field; instead, they have expanded the scope of who is considered white, allowing the racial hierarchy to remain more firmly in place.”

Isaac Chotiner, “The Disturbing, Surprisingly Complex Relationship Between White Identity Politics and Racism,” The New Yorker, January 19, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/the-disturbing-surprisingly-complex-relationship-between-white-identity-politics-and-racism.

[Barack] Obama even has animal species named after him, like placida barackobamai, a sea slug.

Chris Woodyard, “More cities add Barack Obama’s name to landmarks, highways,” USA TODAY, January 13, 2019. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/01/13/barack-obama-former-president-african-american-black-naming-renaming-freeway-highway/2539917002/.

Why and how race became the key to enslaveability was a question posed and resolved using myriad strategies across the early modern Atlantic as traders and setters constructed paradigms that enabled the exchange of human commodities and the enslaved constructed paradigms that enabled their response to the New World order. Children born to parents who occupied positions increasingly seen as racially distinct posed political, ideological, and economic problems. Their indeterminacy needed to be fixed. Recall the preamble: “Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman shall be slave or free.” The word doubts names mixed-race children as excess, as both circulating and unregulated, and ultimately as a source of chaos.²³ The law imposes order as it both configures those children as property and asserts its right to do so. It also points to a very specific legal case involving Elizabeth Keye (to which I will turn below) that compelled the Virginia legislators to make explicit the implicit logic that regulated the slave markets and the probate courts across Atlantic slave societies. In the context of a nascent colonial setting, then, these reproducing women and their chaotic children were grounds on which claims to sovereign authority rested.

Jennifer L. Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Volume 22, Number 1 (55) (March 3, 2018), 6. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-4378888.