Mixed Race Studies

A 400 Year Old History of Tri-Racial People: In Real Life

Mixed Race Radio
2013-01-16, 17:00Z (12:00 EST)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director
Chowan Discovery Group

Marvin T. Jones is the Executive Director of the Chowan Discovery Group (CDG).  The mission of the CDG is to research, document, preserve and present the 400+ year-old history of the landowning tri-racial people of color of the Winton Triangle, an area centered in Hertford County, North Carolina. Founded in 2007, the Chowan Discovery Group (http://www.chowandiscovery.org/) co-produced in 2009 its first major presentation, a stage production, scripted by Jones, called The Winton Triangle. The book, Carolina Genesis: Beyond the Color Line, features Jones’ summary of the Triangle’s history.

In addition to writing articles, Jones has made many presentations about the Winton Triangle’s history on national and regional radio, at colleges and universities, museums and to civic groups.  In 2011, the North Carolina Office of Archives and History accepted three of his nominations for highway historical markers.

Jones is the owner of Marvin T. Jones & Associates, a professional photography company in Washington, D.C.  He has been published in well-known magazines and has worked in South America, the Caribbean and Africa.  Howard University and Roanoke-Chowan Community College hosted Jones’ exhibit on Somalia.

For more information, click here.

New Orleans and the African Diaspora

American Historical Association
From the Suppliment to the 127th Annual Meeting
2012-12-23

Laura Rosanne Adderley, Associate Professor of History
Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana

Many people conceptualize the study of the “African diaspora” as focused on black experience beyond or separate from “African American” experience in the United States. But black experience in the United States fits fully within the wider African diaspora. Similarly, while black populations in New Orleans shared many—perhaps even most—of their experiences with the rest of the United States, they also lived through distinctive waves of multiple European colonizers and black and white emigration, with the concomitant rise of locally specific cultural production, social experience, and racial norms.

Africans in Early New Orleans

The city’s distinctive place in the development of African diaspora history and culture in the Americas began with the arrival of over 5,000 enslaved Africans in the first decade after the city’s founding in 1718. Legal enslavement of Africans and their descendants would continue in the city until the Civil War a century and a half later. Over the course of that period, people of African descent, both free and enslaved, regularly made up one third or more of the city’s population. A second large influx of new African arrivals came in the 1780s, halfway through the period from 1763 to 1802 when the city fell under Spanish rule. The relatively high percentage of enslaved people of African descent in the city and its environs, their critical role in building many of the city’s oldest neighborhoods (including the French Quarter), and generally making colonial life and commerce possible, has led historian Larry Powell to note that “France may have founded Louisiana as we know it, but it was [enslaved people] from Senegal and Congo who laid the foundation.” The legacy of the labor of enslaved Africans literally surrounds every visitor to the city…

…Racial Patterns and Racial Politics

Another distinctive aspect of New Orleans’s black diaspora developed in the late 18th century as Spanish legal practices increased the population of free people of color through much more liberal rules allowing masters to manumit or free enslaved people. Many, although by no means all, of those manumitted were people of mixed race. The presence of this large population of sometimes white-appearing mulattoes, looked similar to patterns in parts of the Caribbean, and contributed to New Orleans’s often-exaggerated reputation as a city of widespread racial mixture and greater racial tolerance than elsewhere in the United States. As several scholars have noted, ideas about what the mulattoes and quadroons of New Orleans signified were much more powerful in shaping perceptions of the city than knowledge of the day-to-day lives of people of mixed race, which could be alternately prosperous or relatively impoverished, comparatively privileged or fraught with racial and social uncertainty, and many steps in between. For all the significance of the large population of people of mixed race, most residents of the city continued to fit generally into communities defined largely as black or white, in ways similar to racial experience elsewhere in North America. Also, for all the comparisons with Caribbean slave societies, most parts of Louisiana—with notable exceptions in some sugar plantation areas in the 19th century—did not have slavery-era population ratios comparable to the overwhelming black majorities that existed in many Caribbean islands…

Read the entire article here.

Black in America: It’s not just about the color of your skin

In America: You define America. What defines you?
Cable News Network
2012-12-15

Moni Basu

(CNN) – What is black? Race. Culture. Consciousness. History. Heritage.
 
A shade darker than brown? The opposite of white?
 
Who is black? In America, being black has meant having African ancestry.
 
But not everyone fits neatly into a prototypical model of “blackness.”
 
Scholar Yaba Blay explores the nuances of racial identity and the influences of skin color in a project called (1)ne Drop, named after a rule in the United States that once mandated that any person with “one drop of Negro blood” was black. Based on assumptions of white purity, it reflects a history of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.
 
In its colloquial definition, the rule meant that a person with a black relative from five generations ago was also considered black.

Your take on black in America
 
One drop was codified in the 1920 Census and became pervasive as courts ruled on it as a principle of law. It was not deemed unconstitutional until 1967.
 
Blay, a dark-skinned daughter of Ghanian immigrants, had always been able to clearly communicate her racial identity. But she was intrigued by those whose identity was not always apparent. Her project focuses on a diverse group of people—many of whom are mixed race—who claim blackness as their identity.
 
That identity is expanding in America every day. Blay’s intent was to spark dialogue and see the idea of being black through a whole new lens…

…Black and white
 
California author Kathleen Cross, 50, remembers taking a public bus ride with her father when she was 8. Her father was noticeably uncomfortable that black kids in the back were acting rowdy. He muttered under his breath: “Making us look bad.”
 
She understood her father was ashamed of those black kids, that he fancied himself not one of them.
 
“My father was escaping blackness,” she says. “He didn’t like for me to have dark-skinned friends. He never said it. But I know.”
 
She asked him once if she had ancestors from Africa. He got quiet. Then, he said: “Maybe, Northern Africa.”
 
“He wasn’t proud of being black,” she says.
 
Cross’ black father and her white mother never married. Fair-skinned, blue-eyed Cross was raised in a diverse community.
 
Later, she found herself in situations where she felt shunned by black people. Even light-skinned black people thought she was white.
 
“Those who relate to the term ‘black’ as a descriptor of color are unlikely to accept me as black,” she says. “If they relate to the term ‘black’ as a descriptor of culture, history and ancestry, they have no difficulty seeing me as black.”
 
At one time in her life, she wished she were darker—she might have even swallowed a pill to give her instant pigment if there were such a thing. She even wrote about being “trapped in the body of a white woman.” She didn’t want to “represent the oppressor.”
 
She no longer thinks that way.
 
She doesn’t like to check the multiracial box. “It erases everything,” she says.
 
She doesn’t like biracial, either. Or mixed. It’s not her identity.
 
“There’s only one race,” she says, “and that’s the human race.”
 
“I am a descendant of a stolen African and Irish and English immigrants. That makes me black—and white—in America…

Read the entire article here.

‘Searching for Zion’: Emily Raboteau’s Hunt for the Promised Land

The Daily Beast
2013-01-13

Mindy Farabee

A writer set out around the world to find the mythical ‘promised land’ of the African diaspora. Emily Raboteau speaks about the Jewish search for the same, African-American tourism to Ghana, and Barack Obama’s ties to this search.

Mention the notion of Zion, author Emily Raboteau notes, and most people will think almost automatically of Israel. But for citizens of the African diaspora, Zion, with its promised land of abundance and freedom from oppression, has carried profound cultural significance since the days of slavery, when the saga of Hebrew slaves fleeing Egyptian captors served as a galvanizing narrative.

In Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, Raboteau’s self-described “strange admixture” of travelogue, cultural anthropology, and historical study, the author uses this promised land as a point of departure, lighting out for Israel, Ethiopia, Jamaica, Ghana, and the post-Katrina American South to talk to immigrants and others who have wrestled with displacement.

Her new book likewise stumbles across complications everywhere. In this edited interview below, she talks about family ghosts, the other side of heritage tourism, and the state of Zion today…

Read the entire interview here.

Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora

Grove/Atlantic
January 2013
320 pages
6×9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8021-2003-8
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9379-7

Emily Raboteau

A decade in the making, Emily Raboteau’s Searching for Zion takes readers around the world on an unexpected adventure of faith. Both one woman’s quest for a place to call “home” and an investigation into a people’s search for the Promised Land, this landmark work of creative nonfiction is a trenchant inquiry into contemporary and historical ethnic displacement.

At twenty-three, Emily Raboteau traveled to Israel to visit her childhood best friend. While her friend appeared to have found a place to belong, Raboteau couldn’t say the same for herself. As a biracial woman from a country still divided along racial lines, she’d never felt at home in America. But as a reggae fan and the daughter of a historian of African-American religion, Raboteau knew of Zion as a place black people yearned to be. She’d heard about it on Bob Marley’s Exodus and in the speeches of Martin Luther King. She understood it as a metaphor for freedom, a spiritual realm rather than a geographical one. In Israel, the Jewish Zion, she was surprised to discover black Jews. Inspired by their exodus, Raboteau sought out other black communities that had left home in search of a Promised Land. Her question for them is the same she asks herself: have you found the home you’re looking for?

On her journey back in time and across the globe, through the Bush years and into the age of Obama, Raboteau visits Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana, and the American South to explore the complex and contradictory perspectives of Black Zionists. She talks to Rastafarians and African Hebrew Israelites, Evangelicals and Ethiopian Jews, and Katrina transplants from her own family—people who have risked everything in search of territory that is hard to define and harder to inhabit.

With Searching for Zion, Raboteau overturns our ideas of place and patriotism, displacement and dispossession, citizenship and country in a disarmingly honest and refreshingly brave take on the pull of the story of Exodus.

The Evolution of Mixed-Race Historiography and Theory: Inaugural Sawyer Seminar

University of Southern California, Univeristy Park Campus
Doheny Memorial Library (DML)
East Asian Seminar Room (110C)
Friday, 2013-01-18, 14:00-17:00 PST (Local Time)

Presented by the Center for Japanese Religions and Culture’s “Critical Mixed-Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach” Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminars Series at the University of Southern California.

How has the study of mixed race been historicized and theorized in Western academia? Has our understanding of mixed race changed in the 21st century, or is our public discourse still bound by past ideology, experience, and debate? Does theorizing mixed race bind or liberate us from the ideological pitfalls of racialist thinking?

Conference Convenors:

Duncan Williams, Associate Professor of Religion
University of Southern California

Brian C. Bernards, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
University of Southern California

Velina Hasu Houston, Associate Dean for Faculty Recognition and Development, Director of Dramatic Writing and Professor
University of Southern California

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

Ariela Gross, John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History
University of Southern California

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

Falguni Sheth, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory
Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts

For more information, click here.

You Have No Right: Jane Webb’s Story

Out of the Box: Notes for the Archives @ Library of Virginia
Virginia Memory: Library of Virginia
2012-11-14

Greg Crawford, Local Records Coordinator

The colonial era Northampton County court records tell a fascinating story of a woman named Jane Webb. Born of a white mother, she was a free mulatto, formerly called Jane Williams. In 1704, Jane Webb had “a strong desire to intermarry with a certain negro slave … commonly called and known by the name of Left.” Webb informed Left’s owner Thomas Savage, a gentleman of Northampton County, of her desire to marry Left and made an offer to Savage. She would be a servant of Savage’s for seven years and would let Savage “have all the children that should be bornd [sic] upon her body during the time of [Jane’s] servitude,” but for how long the children were to be bound is not clear. In return, Savage would allow Jane Webb to marry his slave, and after Jane’s period of servitude ended, Savage would free Left. Also, neither Savage nor his heirs could claim any child born to Jane Webb and Left after her period of servitude. Savage agreed to Jane Webb’s offer, and an agreement was written and signed by both parties.

Jane Webb fulfilled her part of the agreement and served Savage for seven years. During that time, she had three children by her husband Left—Diana or Dinah Webb, Daniel Webb, and Francis Webb. After she completed her term of service in 1711, Jane Webb “in a kindly manner” demanded her husband from Savage as well as her children. Apparently, Jane Webb and Savage were at odds on how long the children she bore during her servitude were supposed to be bound to him, and Savage refused to free Left and the children. In April 1711, Savage submitted a letter to the county court of Northampton requesting that Jane Webb’s children be bound to him and his heirs, to which the court agreed…

Read the entire article here.

The End of Race History? Not Yet

Center for Genetics and Society
2012-12-14

Osagie K. Obasogie, Associate Professor of Law
University of California, Hastings

Have we gone beyond race? Many argue society has now overcome centuries of strife to become “post-racial”—a moment that law professor Sumi Cho of DePaul University in Chicago refers to as “the end of race history”.

Two seemingly disparate developments have been used to lend support to this claim. In politics, Barack Obama’s 2008 election as the first racial minority-member to become US president has been lauded as a racially transcendent moment. In science, the completion of the Human Genome Project’s first draft in June 2000 offered seemingly definitive evidence that race is not real. As geneticist Craig Venter noted at the HGP announcement, “the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis”…

…Two recent books by legal scholars address these issues. Jonathan Kahn’s Race in a Bottle provides a stunning case study of BiDil, the first drug to receive approval by the US Food and Drug Administration as a race-specific therapy. It was designed to treat African-Americans suffering from heart failure—based mainly on a mistaken belief that there are meaningful disparities in heart failure outcomes between blacks and whites caused by biological differences. Although BiDil was initially created as a race-neutral drug, Kahn offers a compelling account of the many influences that turned what is in essence a combination therapy of two widely available generic treatments into a pill “for black people only”…

…Dorothy Roberts’s Fatal Invention, now out in paperback, extends this insight to examine how the re-emergence of biological race is having a broader impact—not only on innovations such as genetic ancestry-testing and racialised aspects of DNA forensics, but also on how we think about basic notions of racial difference. Advocates of biological race argue that today’s use of race in biomedicine is different from past usages within science that supported racism, eugenics and questionable research practices…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Subordination in Latin America: The Role of the State, Customary Law, and the New Civil Rights Response

Cambridge University Press
October 2012
254 pages
2 maps; 1 table
228 x 152 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781107024861
Paperback: 9781107695436
Adobe Ebook Reader ISBN: 9781139786676

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Professor of Law
Fordham University, New York

There are approximately 150 million people of African descent in Latin America yet Afro-descendants have been consistently marginalized as undesirable elements of the society. Latin America has nevertheless long prided itself on its absence of U.S.-styled state-mandated Jim Crow racial segregation laws. This book disrupts the traditional narrative of Latin America’s legally benign racial past by comprehensively examining the existence of customary laws of racial regulation and the historic complicity of Latin American states in erecting and sustaining racial hierarchies. Tanya Katerí Hernández is the first author to consider the salience of the customary law of race regulation for the contemporary development of racial equality laws across the region. Therefore, the book has a particular relevance for the contemporary U.S. racial context in which Jim Crow laws have long been abolished and a “post-racial” rhetoric undermines the commitment to racial equality laws and policies amidst a backdrop of continued inequality.

Features

• Provides a comprehensive examination of the entire Latin American region with regard to racial inequality
• Hernández is the first author to thoroughly consider the role of customary law in erecting and sustaining racial hierarchies
• Offers a comprehensive examination of development of racial equality laws across the region

Contents

• Maps
• 1. Racial Innocence and the Customary Law of Race Regulation
• 2. Spanish America Whitening the Race – the Un(written) Laws of Blanqueamiento and Mestizaje
• 3. Brazilian “Jim Crow”: The Immigration Law Whitening Project and the Customary Law of Racial Segregation – a Case Study
• 4. The Social Exclusion of Afro-Descendants in Latin America Today
• 5. Afro-Descendant Social Justice Movements and the New Antidiscrimination Laws
• 6. Brazil: At the Forefront of Latin American Race-Based Affirmative Action Policies and Census Racial Data Collection
• 7. Conclusion: The United States–Latin America
• Connections
• Appendix A: Afro-Descendant Organizations in Latin America
• Appendix B: Typology of Latin American Racial Antidiscrimination Measures
• Bibliography
• Index

I don’t think there is much racism in [Latin] America because we are a mix of races of all kinds of Europeans, Africans, Asians, and other races that were or will be; but I understand that in many other parts there is racism, above all in the United States and Europe, is where there is the most racism.¹

There are approximately 150 million people of African descent in Latin America, representing about one-third of the total population (see Maps 1 and 2). Yet, these are considered conservative demographic figures given the histories of undercounting the number of persons of African descent on Latin American national censuses and often completely omitting a racial/ethnic origin census question. At the same time, persons of African descent make up more than 40 percent of the poor in Latin America and have been consistently marginalized and denigrated as undesirable elements of the society since the abolition of slavery across the Americas. Yet, the view that “racism does not exist” is pervasive in Latin America despite the advent of social justice movements and social science researchers demonstrating the contrary. When the BBC surveyed Latin Americans in 2005 regarding the existence of racism, a significant number of respondents emphatically denied the existence of racism. Many, for instance, made statements such as “Ibero-Americans are not racist,” and “Ibero-America is not a racist region, for the simple fact that the majority of the population is either indigenous, creole, or mixed.”

Thus the denial of racism is rooted in what many scholars have critiqued as the “myth of racial democracy” – the notion that the racial mixture (mestizaje/mestiçagem) in a population is emblematic of racial harmony and insulated from racial discord and inequality. Academic scholarship has in the last twenty years critiqued Latin American “mestizaje” theories of racial mixture as emblematic of racial harmony. Yet, Latin Americans still very much adhere to the notion that racial mixture and the absence of Jim Crow racial segregation are such a marked contrast to the U.S. racial history that the region views itself as what I term “racially innocent.” Indeed, the extensive survey data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project’s “Americas Barometer 2010” demonstrates that biased Latin American racial ideologies have not completely evolved despite the existing scholarly critiques of mestizaje as a trope of racial innocence. For instance, in the Americas Barometer 2010 survey of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru, the vast majority of the country populations (of all races) agreed with the mestizaje notion that “racial mixture is good for the country.” In fact, more than 75 percent of all respondents agreed with the statement and largely endorsed the idea of interracial marriages. Yet, the Americas Barometer data also show that for those Latin Americans who did express disagreement with the idea of their children marrying black partners, the opposition level was dramatically greater from white respondents in contrast to black respondents. Specifically, in those countries where the Americas Barometer asked whether there was disagreement with one’s own children marrying a black person, such as Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Ecuador, the opposition by whites to interracial black marriages was on average 60 percent greater than the opposition of blacks to such marriages. (Other countries were asked about marriage to a person of indigenous descent.) These results thus accord with the long-standing data that marriage patterns in Latin America are generally racially endogamous.

The Americas Barometer 2010 data also indicate that white respondents in several Latin American countries are considerably more likely than other groups to state a preference for lighter skin. For instance, in Colombia, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic, on average 26 percent of white respondents agreed that they would prefer lighter skin, in contrast to the 13 percent average of black respondents who prefer lighter skin. In Mexico and Peru, blacks on average had greater rates of preference for lighter skin (37%) than whites (26%). In Brazil the rate of white preference for lighter skin closely approximated blacks’ lighter-skin preference rate. Even socialist Cuba continues to manifest a preference for whiteness and a white opposition to interracial marriage. Moreover, in a 2004 comparison of implicit and explicit racial bias in the United States, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, the rates of both implicit and explicit racial bias were higher in all three Latin American contexts as compared to the United States. Thus despite the overwhelming articulation of mestizaje as an indicator of racial harmony across much of Latin America and the different ways that it is articulated within each country, attitudes of racial distinction and superiority persist beneath the celebration of racial mixture. In part, the absence of a legal critique of the Latin American comparisons to the Jim Crow United States has enabled the Latin American “racial innocence” stance to remain. This book seeks to fill in that gap in the literature and provide the legal critique.

Specifically, this book is about the ways in which the Latin American denial of racism operating in conjunction with the notion that true racism can only be found in the racial segregation of the United States veils the actual manifestations of racism in Latin America. I will argue that an examination of the role of the state after the abolition of slavery in regulating race through immigration law and customary law disrupts this picture of Latin America as “racially innocent.” I will then assess the ways in which the contemporary Latin American antidiscrimination laws seek to eradicate the legacy of racial inequality wrought by the historic racism of the state. Finally, I will conclude the book with insights as to how the examination of the Latin American context may be helpful to the U.S. racial justice movement today, given the growing denial of the existence of racism in the United Sates. In doing so, I shall adopt the term “Afro-descendants,” which Latin American race scholars and social justice movement actors use to encompass all persons of African descent in Latin America who are affected by antiblack sentiment whether or not they personally identify as “black” or adopt a mixed-race identity such as mulatto or mestizo. This book will not focus upon the racial inequality issues of indigenous groups in Latin America given the extensive literature that already exists regarding that topic. Instead the analysis will focus upon the particular history of Afro-descendants’ relationship to the state as formerly enslaved subjects seeking visibility as citizens and full participants in the national identity despite the societal denial of racism…

Census Race Change For Hispanics Sparks Criticism

The Huffington Post
2013-01-09

Tony Castro

Some Latino civil rights groups are questioning the U.S. Census consideration of designating Hispanics a race of their own, fearing the loss of national original designations.

The change, making “Hispanic” a racial instead of an ethnic category, would eliminate the check-off boxes for national origins such as Mexican, Cuban and Puerto Rican.

“There is no unanimity on what any of this stuff means,” says Angelo Falcón, director of the National Institute for Latino Policy and co-chair of a coalition of Latino advocacy groups that recently met with Census officials.

“Right now, we’re very comfortable with having the Hispanic (origin) question… Hispanic as a race category? I don’t think there’s any consensus on that.”

Scholars oppose “Hispanic” being considered a race

Fordham University law professor Tanya Hernández, author of the new book Racial Subordination in Latin America, is among the scholars opposing the proposal to join race and ethnicity as a “Hispanic” category.

“Census data is used in very important ways, for example to monitor compliance regarding civil rights and racial disparities,” says Hernandez, who fears that eliminating existing racial categories would have a negative impact…

Read the entire article here.