Mixed Race Studies

Race, Hybridity, and Miscegenation

Thoemme Continuum
2005-06-30
657 pages
ISBN: 1843711044
EAN/ISBN13: 9781843711049

Edited by:

Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy
Pennsylvania State University

Kristie Dotson, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Michigan State University

Volumes 1 and 2 of this 3 volume set collect the major contributions to the scientific debate on the unity of the human race in the 1850s, focusing particularly on the idea of hybridity. Volume 3 republishes the major contributions to the political debate on miscegenation.

This set brings together very rare primary sources of two central debates in the USA from the second half of the 19th century and early 20th century. Many of the essays in all three volumes have not been republished since their original publication and are extraordinarily hard to find. Volumes 1 and 2 collect the major contributions to the scientific debate on the unity of the human race in the 1850s focusing particularly on the idea of hybridity, which since Ray and Buffon had been central to species definition. The main book-length contributions to the debate were recently republished in “American Theories of Polygenesis” (Thoemmes Press, 2002). However, alongside these books and feeding off them are passionate debates which helped to define scientific racism for that time, not only in the US, but also Europe, because to a certain extent Europeans were willing to defer to American observers for their knowledge of Africans and particularly the effects of racism. Volume 3 republishes the major contributions to the political debate on miscegenation.The term “miscegenation” was coined in the anonymous text “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro”, now attributed to David Croly. Some of the works included are overtly racist in highly objectionable ways and serve to document a context that is too often ignored. A particular feature of this volume is the inclusion of works by African-American authors. Some of the authors and texts included have been forgotten, but even the better-known texts can be properly understood now they are restored to their context. The debates about hybridity and miscegenation are not only of deep historical significance, they are also of interest in the light of the contemporary rehabilitation of the idea of hybridity in the work of Homi Bhabha, as well as the current interest in the idea of “mixed race”.  The set comes with two separate introductions by editor Robert Bernasconi. These substantial essays (5,000-10,000 words each) record the history of the debates including reference to works not here republished, brief biographical information on the authors included, and insights into the larger intellectual and political context.

The Idea Of Race

Hackett Publishing Company
2000
256 pages
Cloth ISBN: 0-87220-459-6, ISBN-13: 978-0-87220-459-1
Paper ISBN: 0-87220-458-8, ISBN-13: 978-0-87220-458-4

Edited by

Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy
Pennsylvania State University

Tommy L. Lott, Professor of Philosophy
San José State University

A survey of the historical development of the idea of race, this anthology offers pre-twentieth century theories about the concept of race, classic twentieth century sources reiterating and contesting ideas of race as scientific, and several philosophically relevant essays that discuss the issues presented. A general Introduction gives an overview of the readings. Headnotes introduce each selection. Includes suggested further readings.

Table of Contents
Introduction

The Classification of Races

1. Francois Bernier, “A new division of earth, according to the different species or races of men who inhabit it”
2. Francois-Marie Voltaire, “Of the Different Races of Men,” from The Philosophy of History
3. Immanuel Kant, “Of the Different Human Races”
4. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humankind
5. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, On the Natural Variety of Mankind
6. G. W. F. Hegel, “Anthropology,” from The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Science

Science and Eugenics

1. Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races
2. Charles Darwin, “On the Races of Man,” from The Descent of Man
3. Francis Galton, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims”

Heredity and Culture

1. Franz Boas, “Instability of Human Types”
2. Alain Locke, “The Concept of Race as applied to Social Culture”
3. Ashley Montagu, “The Concept of Race in the Human Species in the Light of Genetics”

Race and Political Ideology

1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Conservation of Races
2. Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race”
3. Leopold Senghor, “What is Negritude?”

Racial Identity

1. Linda Alcoff, “Mestizo Identity”
2. Michael Hanchard, “Black Cinderella? Race and the Public Sphere in Brazil”
3. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States.

The Racial Contract

Cornell University Press
1997
192 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8014-8463-6
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8014-3454-9

Charles W. Mills, John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy
Northwestern University

Winner of the Myers Outstanding Book Award, given by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America

The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged “contract” has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence “whites” and “non-whites,” full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence. The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state.

Holding up a mirror to mainstream philosophy, this provocative book explains the evolving outline of the racial contract from the time of the New World conquest and subsequent colonialism to the written slavery contract, to the “separate but equal” system of segregation in the twentieth-century United States. According to Mills, the contract has provided the theoretical architecture justifying an entire history of European atrocity against non-whites, from David Hume’s and Immanuel Kant’s claims that blacks had inferior cognitive power, to the Holocaust, to the kind of imperialism in Asia that was demonstrated by the Vietnam War.

Mills suggests that the ghettoization of philosophical work on race is no accident. This work challenges the assumption that mainstream theory is itself raceless. Just as feminist theory has revealed orthodox political philosophy’s invisible white male bias, Mills’s explication of the racial contract exposes its racial underpinnings.

Philosophical aspects of the ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’

Anthropological Theory
Volume 1, Number 4 (December 2001)
pages 445-465
DOI: 10.1177/14634990122228836

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

I apply philosophical analysis to the ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’ (American Anthropological Association, 1998) and the commentary on its earlier draft published in the Anthropology Newsletter (1997). Racial essentialism is the theory that there are distinct and general human biological traits that determine racial membership and cause the presence of specific racial traits. This theory is false, as is the belief that a taxonomy of human races, or race, exists. But the 1998 ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’ fails to repudiate racial essentialism explicitly. Instead, the Statement denies that race determines culture or psychology and thereby misses the broad logical point that race cannot determine anything, because it does not exist. In the Anthropology Newsletter discussion of Kennewick Man, which appeared to be a debate about racial essentialism, contributors spoke past one another in confusing population-based measures of human diversity with race. The same confusion clouds contemporary concerns about the relevance of common-sense racial categories to medical diagnosis and treatment. Education is the solution to the public’s ignorance about the scientific foundation for its ideas about race. It is an empirical question whether such education will remedy racism or unjust treatment based on the false racial taxonomy. Although mixed-race categories are no more real than ‘pure’ ones, their acceptance may help unsettle the prevailing false taxonomy of race.

Read the entire article here.

Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects

University of Texas Press
2004
6 x 9 in.
225 pages
ISBN: 978-0-292-74345-8
Print-on-demand title

Edited by:

SanSan Kwan, Associate Professor of Dance, Performance Studies
University of California, Berkeley

and

Kenneth Speirs (1964-2013), Professor of English
University of California, Berkeley

Foreword by

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

The United States Census 2000 presents a twenty-first century America in which mixed-race marriages, cross-race adoption, and multiracial families in general are challenging the ethnic definitions by which the nation has historically categorized its population. Addressing a wide spectrum of questions raised by this rich new cultural landscape, Mixing It Up brings together the observations of ten noted voices who have experienced multiracialism first-hand.

From Naomi Zack’s “American Mixed Race: The United States 2000 Census and Related Issues” to Cathy Irwin and Sean Metzger’s “Keeping Up Appearances: Ethnic Alien-Nation in Female Solo Performance,” this diverse collection spans the realities of multiculturalism in compelling new analysis. Arguing that society’s discomfort with multiracialism has been institutionalized throughout history, whether through the “one drop” rule or media depictions, SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Speirs reflect on the means by which the monoracial lens is slowly being replaced.

Itself a hybrid of memoir, history, and sociological theory, Mixing It Up makes it clear why the identity politics of previous decades have little relevance to the fluid new face of contemporary humanity.

Table of Contents

• Preface (Naomi Zack)
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction (SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Speirs)
• I. Issues and Trends
  • 1. American Mixed Race: The United States 2000 Census and Related Issues (Naomi Zack)
  • 2. Misceg-narrations (Raquel Scherr Salgado)
• II. Multiracial Subjects
  • 3. A Passionate Occupant of the Transnational Transit Lounge (Adrian Carton)
  • 4. Miscegenation and Me (Richard Guzman)
  • 5. “What Is She Anyway?”: Rearranging Bodily Mythologies (Orathai Northern)
  • 6. Resemblance (Alice White)
  • 7. “Brown Like Me”: Explorations of a Shifting Self (Stefanie Dunning)
  • 8. Toward a Multiethnic Cartography: Multiethnic Identity, Monoracial Cultural Logic, and Popular Culture (Evelyn Alsultany)
  • 9. Keeping Up Appearances: Ethnic Alien-Nation in Female Solo Performance (Cathy Irwin and Sean Metzger)
  • 10. Against Erasure: The Multiracial Voice in Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years (Carole DeSouza)
• About the Contributors

American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
March 1995
420 pages
6 1/4 x 9 1/4
Cloth ISBN: 0-8476-8012-6 / 978-0-8476-8012-2
Paper ISBN: 0-8476-8013-4 / 978-0-8476-8013-9

Edited by Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

This exciting multidisciplinary collection brings together twenty-two original essays by scholars on the cutting edge of racial theory, who address both the American concept of race and the specific problems experienced by those who do not fit neatly into the boxes society requires them to check.

List of Contributors
Linda Alcoff, Debra A. Barrath, Jennifer Clancy, Susan Clements, F. James Davis, Abby L. Ferber, Carlos A. Fernandez, Freda Scott Giles, David Theo Goldberg, Susan R. Graham, Helena Jia Hershel. M. Annette Jaimes, Cecile Ann Lawrence, Zena Moore, Maria P.P. Root, Laurie Shrage, Stephen Satris, Carol Roh Spaulding, Mariella Squire-Hakey, Teresa Kay Williams, Bruentta R. Wolfman, and Naomi Zack.

Table of Contents

• Introduction – Naomi Zack
• Autobiography
  • Five Arrows – Susan Clements
  • Color Fades Over Time – Brunetta R. Wolfman
  • Racelessness – Cecile Ann Lawrence
  • Check the Box That Best Describes You – Zena Moore
  • What Are They? – Stephen Satris
• Art
  • From Melodrama to the Movies – Freda Scott Giles
  • The Theater of Identity – Teresa Kay Williams
  • The Go-Between People – Carol Roh Spaulding
• Social Science
  • The Hawaiian Alternative to the One-Drop Rule – F. James Davis
  • Some Kind of Indian – M. Annette Jaimes
  • Exploring the Social Construction of Race – Abby L. Ferber
  • Therapeutic Perspectives on Biracial Identity Formation and Internalized Oppression – Helena Jia Hershel
• Public Policy
  • Grassroots Advocacy – Susan R. Graham
  • Testimony of the Association of Multi Ethnic Americans – Carlos A. Fernàndez
  • Multiracial Identity Assertion in the Sociopolitical Context of Primary Education – Jennifer Clancy
  • Yankee Imperialism and Imperialist Nostalgia – Mariella Squire-Hakey
• Identity Theory
  • The Multiracial Contribution to the Psychological Browning of America – Maria P. P. Root
  • Made in the USA – David Theo Goldberg
  • Mestizo Identity – Linda Alcoff
  • Race and Racism – Debra A. Barrath
  • Ethnic Transgressions: Confessions of an Assimilated Jew – Laurie Shrage
  • Life After Race – Naomi Zack

Race and Mixed Race

Temple University Press
October 1993
232 pages
6×9
paper: EAN: 978-1-56639-265-5, ISBN: 1-56639-265-9
    
Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

In the first philosophical challenge to accepted racial classifications in the United States, Naomi Zack uses philosophical methods to criticize their logic. Tracing social and historical problems related to racial identity, she discusses why race is a matter of such importance in America and examines the treatment of mixed race in law, society, and literature.

Zack argues that black and white designations are themselves racist because the concept of race does not have an adequate scientific foundation.  The “one drop” rule, originally a rationalization for slavery, persists today even though there have never been “pure” races and most American blacks have “white” genes.

Exploring the existential problems of mixed race identity, she points out how the bi-racial system in this country generates a special racial alienation for many Americans. Ironically suggesting that we include “gray” in our racial vocabulary, Zack concludes that any racial identity is an expression of bad faith.

Table of Contents

Part I: The Existential Analysis
1. Introduction: Summary, Method, and Structure
2. The Ordinary Concept of Race
3. White Family Identity
4. Black Family Identity
5. Demography and the Identification of the Family
6. Mixed-Race Family Identity

Part II: The History of Mixed Race
7. Introduction to the History of Mixed Race
8. The Law on Black and White
9. Marooned!
10. The Harlem Renaissance: Cultural Suicide
11. Genocidal Images of Mixed Race
12. Mulattoes in Fiction
13. Alienation

Part III: The Philosophy of Anti-Race
14. Nobility versus Good Faith
15. Black, White, and Gray: Words, Words, Words

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

The (Mono-) Racial Contract: Mixed-Race Implications

Canadian Political Science Association
79th Annual Conference
2007-05-30 through 2007-06-01

Paper Dated: 2007-05-17

Debra Thompson, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Ohio University

Nearly a decade ago, Charles Mills brought ‘race’ into mainstream political theory through his theory of the Racial Contract; namely, that all social contracts are underwritten by the meta-political system of domination which privileges whites over nonwhites. Yet in Mills’ analysis – like most literature in the social sciences – the subjectivity of mixed-race identities is scarcely considered. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to consider the implications of the Racial Contract for (s)he who is neither white nor nonwhite: the mixed-race subject. I contend applying the terms of the Racial Contract within the context of multiraciality in Canada will demonstrate both the unique racial positioning of the mixed-race subject and will further solidify Mills’ contention that the Racial Contract is explanatorily superior to the raceless social contract.  Using The Racial Contract as a theoretical and methodological guide, this paper will follow three of Mills’ main arguments, incorporating mixed-race subjectivities and proving that: the Racial Contract has unique political, moral and epistemological implications for multiracials in Canada; the Racial Contract norms (and races) the individual, establishing not just personhood and subpersonhood, but also liminal personhood; and the ideological conditioning required by the Racial Contract involves a solidification of discrete racial categories, thus rendering the mixed-race subject as theoretically and vernacularly invisible. Using historical and contemporary examples from Canadian law and society, the scholarly contribution of this work is its merging of Canadian content and foci with the emerging, American-dominated literature known as critical mixed-race theory…

…Though a powerful legal paradigm in the U.S. dictated the racial identities of mixed-race children as ‘nonwhite’ from birth, the phenomenon of ‘passing’ erupted while miscegenation laws were still firmly in place. The lighter one’s skin happened to be, the finer his or her hair, the further away from a nonwhite racial identity (s)he could move, the less stigmatisation from dominant society (s)he faced. ‘Passing,’ therefore, always refers to passing as white. This phenomenon reinforces racial aesthetics as one of the means through which the biological construction of ‘race’ was able to negate the existence of multiraciality.  If a multiracial person could pass for white and gain access to social and economic opportunities denied to people of colour, self-identifying as such was never a solidification of mixed-race heritage. Rather, it was a forced denial borne from the necessity to identify as something – but the choice of categories were strictly divided in broad strokes of black, white, yellow and red, leaving no room for anything that was some (or even all) of the above. Further, this phenomenon elucidates another aspect of multiraciality deemed threatening by the dominant race: that of identifiability. Using ‘race’ to distinguish between persons and subpersons, the Racial Contract requires a means of identifying each from the other. Those who blur this distinction indeed pose a problem for the maintenance of the racial hierarchy itself. Subpersons must be kept firmly in place through proactive measures; being able to identify them was crucial to the Racial Contract’s continued existence. The alleged racial determinants of identity (and therefore destiny) were superficial morphological characteristics such as hair texture, eye, nose, and mouth shape and size, and, above all else, skin colour. Without these tell-tale signs of inferiority, the hierarchy itself would be in danger…

Read the entire paper here.

Signs of Race in Poststructuralism: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race

University Press of America, Inc.
March 2009
176 pages
6 1/2 x 9 1/2
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7618-4505-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7618-4506-5

Robert Young, Associate Professor of English
University of Alabama

This book presents a class-based analysis of poststructuralism and race.  The author positions this fundamental question at the heart of his project: why does race still work if it is commonly misunderstood to be a social construct?  The answer is that race works because it operates like a commodity, and like any commodity, as long as it generates value (understood in the widest possible sense: economic, political, and cultural-ideological value), it will remain in circulation.  This study should contribute to our understanding of race by linking questions of use value to exchange value.

Robert Young is associate professor of English at University of Alabama.  He specializes in African-American literary and cultural theory.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Race as Commodity Fetish
• Chapter 2: Putting Materialism back into Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race
• Chapter 3: The Linguistic Turn, Materialism, and Race: The Postmodern Crisis in African-American Literary Theory and Richard Wright‘s Critique of Ideology
• Chapter 4: The Politics of Race and Psychoanalysis: Richard Wright’s Critique of Bourgeois Subjectivity in Savage Holiday
• Chapter 5: Oral Textualities, Oral (Blues) Poetics, and Oral Erotics: Disabling the Exchange Economy in Gayl Jones‘ Corregidora
• Bibliography

The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice (Review)
by Ronald R. Sundstrom

SUNY Press
2008, 190pp., $24.95 (pbk.)
ISBN: 9780791475867

Notre Dame Philisophical Reviews
2009-06-29

Reviewed by Lucius T. Outlaw (Jr.)
Vanderbilt University

The United States is undergoing the most profound demographic changes in the country’s history so that in a few decades, if not sooner, persons identified (and identifying themselves) as white and tracing their ancestry to Europe will have become part of the nation’s racial and ethnic plurality, no longer its numerically dominant racial group. This historic development portends others equally historic and transformative, among these the gradual — possibly even dramatic — displacement of white people as the dominating group politically, economically, socially, even culturally…

…Some persons envision a United States no longer ordered by racial or ethnic considerations, where color-consciousness has been dissipated by practicing color-blindness, and by the demographic predominance of “brown” Americans to such an extent that the sorting of persons into hierarchically valued, color-coded racial and ethnic groups will not have a demographic basis.  Such was the wish of Frederick Douglass: that the nation’s racial population groups would intermingle and interbreed — in his words “amalgamate’ — to such an extent that a new “blended” race, neither black nor white, would emerge and rescue our country from the scourge of color-conscious, color-valuing racialisms and racisms…

…In the midst of all of the many aspects of invidious racial and ethnic oppressions that have been devised and practiced across the history of the United States, the aspect most sensitive and productive of the most grotesque violence has been that having to do with the most intimate and consequential of human involvements: intimate relations, intimate sexual relations especially, between persons of different and differently ranked racial groups. These are subjects, Sundstrom argues, that have been systematically avoided by contemporary thinkers who wrestle with race matters. He would have us stop avoiding the subject, not least because of the foundational importance of intimate relations for the formation and continuation of polities. Without such relationships, there can be no polities. There can be no resolution of our racial and ethnic difficulties without being forthright about intimate and sexual interracial matters.  These, argues Sundstrom, must not be relegated to the realm of privacy and thus put off limits to philosophers and theorists of the social and political. Moreover, he would not have these matters be wedded to the “browning of America” as their presumed resolution, as Frederick Douglass had hoped out of anguished alienation and desperation. Chapter four, “Interracial Intimacies: Racism and the Political Romance of the Browning of America” is required reading for us all, if social justice is not to be evaded.

So, too, chapter 5, “Responsible Multiracial Politics”. Here the reader will experience, as well as come to understand, the personal existential weight and philosophical significance for Sundstrom of political endeavours for persons whose identities are neither easily nor accurately given fulfilling, coherent, authentic, and healthy articulation and lived-experience if forced into a seemingly singular, unitary, and thus supposedly harmonious racial designation. Persons who are descendants of multiracial, multiethnic unions — even when the races and ethnic groups are understood as social, rather than biological, constructs — need the terms and concepts by which they can identify, identify with, and live their important various heritages, by which they can, in all appropriate instances, ‘remember their grandmothers’.  Needed, too, are modes of politics that sanction and nurture this important existential work as another crucial aspect of multiracial, multiethnic democratic polities, modes of politics by which persons of complex identities can be made ready for and welcomed to shared and responsible political life.  Social justice without evasion…

Read the entire review here.