Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Blood Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South

University of Georgia Press
2005-03-28
60 pages
Illustrated, Trim size: 5.5 x 8.25
ISBN: 978-0-8203-2731-0

Theda Perdue, Atlanta Distinguished Term Professor of Southern Culture
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

On the southern frontier in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European men—including traders, soldiers, and government agents—sometimes married Native women. Children of these unions were known by whites as “half-breeds.” The Indian societies into which they were born, however, had no corresponding concepts of race or “blood.” Moreover, counter to European customs and laws, Native lineage was traced through the mother only. No familial status or rights stemmed from the father.

“Mixed Blood” Indians looks at a fascinating array of such birth- and kin-related issues as they were alternately misunderstood and astutely exploited by both Native and European cultures. Theda Perdue discusses the assimilation of non-Indians into Native societies, their descendants’ participation in tribal life, and the white cultural assumptions conveyed in the designation “mixed blood.” In addition to unions between European men and Native women, Perdue also considers the special cases arising from the presence of white women and African men and women in Indian society.

From the colonial through the early national era, “mixed bloods” were often in the middle of struggles between white expansionism and Native cultural survival. That these “half-breeds” often resisted appeals to their “civilized” blood helped foster an enduring image of Natives as fickle allies of white politicians, missionaries, and entrepreneurs. “Mixed Blood” Indians rereads a number of early writings to show us the Native outlook on these misperceptions and to make clear that race is too simple a measure of their—or any peoples’—motives.

Family Identity: Black-White Interracial Family Health Experience

Journal of Family Nursing
(2006)
Vol. 12, No. 1
Pages 22-37
DOI: 10.1177/1074840705285213

Marcia Marie Byrd, PhD, RN
College of St. Catherine

Ann Williams Garwick, PhD, RN, LP, LMFT, FAAN
University of Minnesota

The purpose of this interpretive descriptive study was to describe how eight Black-White couples with school-aged children constructed their interracial family identity through developmental transitions and interpreted race to their children. Within and across-case data analytic strategies were used to identify commonalities and variations in how Black men and White women in couple relationships formed their family identities over time. Coming together was the core theme described by the Black-White couples as they negotiated the process of forming a family identity. Four major tasks in the construction of interracial family identity emerged: (a) understanding and resolving family of origin chaos and turmoil, (b) transcending Black-White racial history, (c) articulating the interracial family’s racial standpoint, and (d) explaining race to biracial children across the developmental stages. The findings guide family nurses in promoting family identity formation as a component of family health within the nurse-family partnership with Black-White mixed-race families.

Intimacy and the Atlantic World

American Historical Association
124th Annual Meeting
Friday, 2010-01-08 14:50 PST (Local Time)
Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego
Manchester Ballroom F (Hyatt)
San Diego, California

Jennifer L. Palmer, Collegiate Assistant Professor of History
University of Chicago

In 1755 the merchant Aimé-Benjamin Fleuriau returned to his native city of La Rochelle, a bustling port on France’s Atlantic coast, after twenty years in the colonies where he made his fortune in indigo and sugar produced by slaves who worked his plantation. But he did not return alone: he brought five of his mixed-race children with him, his sons and daughters by a woman named Jeanne, one of his former slaves. The children’s gender determined their varied paths: the boys returned to Saint-Domingue where they supervised their father’s plantation, while the girls remained close to their father in La Rochelle. With his support, his daughters Jeanne-Marie and Marie-Charlotte set up house just a few blocks from where Aimé-Benjamin lived in the most splendid house in town with his new, white French wife and children. In spite of the ocean between them, Jeanne-Marie and Marie-Charlotte remained in touch with their brothers in the colonies, and made every effort to reinforce these family ties that distance threatened to pull asunder. In doing so, they drew on family strategies long-established in Europe and deployed them to define their own trans-oceanic, multi-racial family unit. This paper argues that intimacy provides a critical lens through which to view the Atlantic world. It was in the context of the family that enduring relationships between white men and people of color were most common, and examining how such intimate family relationships were constructed and maintained provides insight into how Europeans, including black and mixed-race Europeans, participated in and shaped the Black Atlantic. The results of such a view are sometimes surprising: free women of color, who might at first glance seem among the least influential members of a society that valued rank, name, and status, found ways to shape family structures and strategies.

Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America

University of Wisconsin Press
December 1989
544 pages
6 x 9, 4 tables
Paperback ISBN-10: 0-299-12114-3
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-299-12114-3

Paul R. Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

Named an “Outstanding Book on Human Rights in the United States” by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights.

Counseling Multiracial Families

SAGE Publications
1999
208 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780761915911
Hardcover ISBN: 9780761915904

Bea Wehrly, Professor Emeritus of Counselor Education
Western Illinois University

Kelley R. Kenney, Professor of Counseling & Human Services
Kutztown University, Kutztown, Pennsylvania
Multicultural Education and Consulting, Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania

Mark Kenney, Adjunct Professor
Kutztown University, Kutztown, Pennsylvania
Multicultural Education and Consulting, Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania

Multiracial families (families in which one member of the family has a different racial heritage than the other member(s) of the family) comprise a rapidly growing U.S. population. Counseling Multiracial Families addresses this population that has been neglected in the counseling literature. In the first chapter, readers are given a comprehensive history of racial mixing in the United States special needs and issues of multiracial families as well as special strengths of multiracial families are addressed. Challenges of interracially married couples are explored as are the social and cultural issues related to parenting and child rearing of multiracial children in today’s society. The results of biracial identity development research are translated into counseling practice with the children, adolescents, and adults in multiracial families.

Table of Contents

• Historical Overview
• Multiracial Individuals, Interracial Couples and Families
• Interracial Marriage
• Current Conditions and Challenges
• Multiracial Individuals
• Issues across the Lifespan
• Other Multiracial Families
• Intervention and Treatment of Multiracial Individuals, Couples and Families
• Case Studies

Phillip Handy examines how children form racial identities in multiracial families

Research Highlights
Rutgers University
2009-04-22

The election of America’s first mixed-race president has created new interest in what it’s like to grow up as a multiracial child. A Rutgers senior majoring in sociology and psychology has already received input from about 930 multiracial people from across the country to help provide some answers.

Phillip Handy, who grew up in Howell and has a white mother and an African-American father, was actually pondering the phenomenon before the presidential campaign ever began. In 2006, he helped form an organization called Fusion, the Rutgers Union of Mixed People, aimed at uniting people who identify with, or are interested in, the multiracial experience. A year ago, Handy was included in a New York Times article and video about mixed race.

Handy’s early interest in the field has now blossomed into academic research, which he will discuss in a panel presentation at the Aresty Undergraduate Research Symposium called Race and Gender in the Family: A Mixed-Race Perspective.

Handy’s work explores how the strength of the relationship between a multiracial child and his or her parent of the same gender impacts racial identity and awareness. He hypothesizes that the children closer to the same-gender parent will gravitate toward that parent’s characteristics. In addition, he predicts that this effect will be more prominent in families where gender roles are more clearly defined…

Read the entire article here.

How Did You Get to Be Mexican? A White/Brown Man’s Search for Identity

Temple University Press
1999
264 pages
6×9
EAN: 978-1-56639-651-6
ISBN: 1-56639-651-4

Kevin R. Johnson, Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies
University of California, Davis

This compelling account of racial identity takes a close look at the question “Who is a Latino?” and determines where persons of mixed Anglo-Latino heritage fit into the racial dynamics of the United States. The son of a Mexican-American mother and an Anglo father, Kevin Johnson has spent his life in the borderlands between racial identities. In this insightful book, he uses his experiences as a mixed Latino-Anglo to examine issues of diversity, assimilation, race relations, and affirmative action in contemporary United States.

Read the introduction here.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Introduction
2. A “Latino” Law Student? Law 4 Sale at Harvard Law School
3. My Mother: One Assimilation Story
4. My Father: Planting the Seeds of a Racial Consciousness
5. Growing Up White?
6. College: Beginning to Recognize Racial Complexities
A Family Gallery
7. A Corporate Lawyer: Happily Avoiding the Issue
8. A Latino Law Professor
9. My Family/Mi Familia
10. Lessons for Latino Assimilation
11. What Does It All Mean for Race Relations in the United States?
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Lara

Bloodaxe Books
2009
192 pages
Paperback ISBN: 1 85224 831 9

Bernardine Evaristo

Lara is a powerful semi-autobiographical novel-in-verse based on Bernardine Evaristo’s own childhood and family history. The eponymous Lara is a mixed-race girl raised in Woolwich, a white suburb of London, during the 60s and 70s. Her father, Taiwo, is Nigerian, and her mother, Ellen, is white British. They marry in the 1950s, in spite of fierce opposition from Ellen’s family, and quickly produce eight children in ten years. Lara is their fourth child and we follow her journey from restricted childhood to conflicted early adulthood, and then from London to Nigeria to Brazil as she seeks to understand herself and her ancestry.

The novel travels back over 150 years, seven generations and three continents of Lara’s ancestry. It is the story of Irish Catholics leaving generations of rural hardship behind and ascending to a rigid middle class in England; of German immigrants escaping poverty and seeking to build a new life in 19th century London; and of proud Yorubas enslaved in Brazil, free in colonial Nigeria and hopeful in post-war London. Lara explores the lives of those who leave one country in search of a better life elsewhere, but who end up struggling to be accepted even as they lay the foundations for their children and future generations.

This is a new edition of Bernardine Evaristo’s first novel Lara, rewritten and expanded by a third since its first publication in 1997.

Proposed Session: Multiracial/ethnic families

XVII ISA World Congress of Sociology
Sociology on the Move
International Sociological Association
2010-07-11 through 2010-07-17
Gothenburg, Sweden

Programme Coordinators

Rudy R. Seward, Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, and Associate Chair of Sociology
University of North Texas, USA

Ria Smit, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Johannesburg, South Africa

Organizers:

Cynthia M. Cready, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of North Texas, USA

George Yancey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of North Texas, USA

Empirical and theoretical papers that address any aspect of multiracial/ethnic families are invited for this session. Possible topics include: attitudes toward racial/ethnic dating and intermarriage and multiracial/ethnic families; trends in racial/ethnic dating and intermarriage; individual- and community-level effects on racial/ethnic dating and intermarriage; the impact of racial/ethnic dating and intermarriage on other aspects of individual and community life; representations of multiracial/ethnic families in the media; interracial/ethnic adoption; socialization in multiracial/ethnic families; racial/ethnic identity of children from multiracial/ethnic families; identity issues among adults in multiracial/ethnic families; developmental outcomes of children from multiracial/ethnic families; theoretical and methodological approaches and challenges to the study of multiracial/ethnic families; and the interaction of social policy and multiracial/ethnic families.

For more information, click here.

Love’s Revolution: Interracial Marriage

Temple University Press
January 2001
240 pages
6×9
3 tables 1 figure
Paper: EAN: 978-1-56639-826-8; ISBN: 1-56639-826-6
Cloth: EAN: 978-1-56639-825-1; ISBN: 1-56639-825-8

Maria P. P. Root

When the Baby Boom generation was in college, the last miscegenation laws were declared unconstitutional, but interracial romances retained an aura of taboo. Since 1960 the number of mixed race marriages has doubled every decade. Today, the trend toward intermarriage continues, and the growing presence of interracial couples in the media, on college campuses, in the shopping malls and other public places draws little notice.

Love’s Revolution traces the social changes that account for the growth of intermarriage as well as the lingering prejudices and false beliefs that oppress racially mixed families. For this book author Maria P.P. Root, a clinical psychologist, interviewed some 200 people from a wide spectrum of racial and ethnic backgrounds. Speaking out about their views and experiences, these partners, family members, and children of mixed race marriages confirm that the barriers are gradually eroding; but they also testify to the heartache caused by family opposition and disapproving strangers.

Root traces race prejudice to the various institutions that were structured to maintain white privilege, but the heart of the book is her analysis of what happens when people of different races decide to marry. Developing an analogy between families and types of businesses, she shows how both positive and negative reactions to such marriages are largely a matter of shared concepts of family rather than individual feelings about race. She probes into the identity issues that multiracial children confront and draws on her clinical experience to offer child-rearing recommendations for multiracial families. Root’s “Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People” is a document that at once empowers multiracial people and educates those who ominously ask, “What about the children?”

Love’s Revolution paints an optimistic but not idealized picture of contemporary relationships. The “Ten Truths about Interracial Marriage” that close the book acknowledge that mixed race couples experience the same stresses as everyone else in addition to those arising from other people’s prejudice or curiosity. Their divorce rates are only slightly higher than those of single race couples, which suggests that their success or failure at marriage is not necessarily a racial issue. And that is a revolutionary idea!

Read an exceprt from Chapter 1 here.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1. Love and Revolution
2. Love and Fear
3. Sex, Race, and Love
4. The Business of Families
5. Open and Closed Families
6. The Life Cycle and Interracial Marriage
7. Parents, Children, and Race
8. Ten Truths of Interracial Marriage
Appendix
Notes
References
Index