Mixed Race Studies

Banneker’s family tree still bears rich fruit

The Baltimore Sun
2006-06-12

Gregory Kane

And so Molly Welsh, an Englishwoman sentenced to indentured servitude in 17th-century Maryland, wed an African slave named Bannaka. And they begat four daughters, one of whom was named Mary.

And Mary wed a slave named Robert, who took her last name, which, by the time of their nuptials, had become Bannaky. Mary and Robert begat one son and three daughters. One of the daughters, Jemima, wed Samuel D. Lett. From that union came eight children, including a son named Aquilla.

“Aquilla Lett eventually moved to Ohio,” Gwen Marable said Saturday afternoon. A number of generations later, “that’s how I came to be born in Ohio,” she said. Marable eventually found her way to Maryland. She may be in these parts for good.

“The project has really kept me here,” Marable said.

That project would be the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum in Baltimore County. That son Mary and Robert Bannaky had was none other than Benjamin Banneker—the farmer, astronomer, mathematician, surveyor and publisher—whose farm once sat on the site where the park is now located. Marable described herself as a collateral descendant of Banneker, not a direct descendant…

…”It’s been said that she married Bannaka to keep him from running off,” said Cole Wiggins, a board member of the Friends of the Banneker Historical Park and Museum. “But don’t quote me on that. It’s never been proved.”

Actually, wisecracking husbands might say that Welsh’s marrying Bannaka might have been the sure way to make him run off. What may be closer to the truth is that marriages between white, female indentured servants and black men—whether slave or “free men of color”—could have been quite common at the time…

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Romancing the Raj: Interracial Relations in Anglo-Indian Romance Novels

History of Intellectual Culture
Volume 4, Number 1 (2004)
ISSN 1492-7810

Hsu-Ming Teo, Senior Lecturer and Head of Modern History
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

This article examines Anglo-Indian romance novels written by British women during the period of the Raj. It argues that these love stories were symptomatic of British fantasies of colonial India and served as a forum to explore interracial relations as well as experimenting with the modern femininity of the New Woman. With the achievement of Indian independence in 1947, British interest in India as a locus for romance rapidly declined, thus demonstrating that these novels were never concerned with India but with British lives and British colonialism.

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Q&A: Professor examines those ‘outside the color lines’ in new book

University of Wisconsin-Madison
News
2012-10-20

Jenney Price

The history of segregation in the United States is often seen in black and white. Leslie Bow, professor of English and Asian American studies, is interested in the experiences of communities that fell outside those color lines. In her new book, Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South, Bow examines what segregation demanded of people who did not fall into the category of black or white — including Asians, American Indians and people of mixed race.

Wisconsin Week: What did segregation mean for people who — as you described it — stood outside the color lines? You posed the question, “Where did the Asian sit on the segregated bus?’

Leslie Bow: I think what’s most interesting to me about a project like this is that we often conflate race with African-Americans or see race as a black-white issue. When we say “multiculturalism” … we don’t think conceptually or theoretically about the challenge that poses to the way we think about racial history in the United States…

…WW: You mentioned your parents, who are Chinese-American. They attended white schools in Arkansas but didn’t socialize with and weren’t invited to the homes of their white classmates and I wondered how much their experience impacted your research interests?

LB: Definitely, because it was something that they themselves did not talk about. What I found was that they mediated that experience by creating a third level of segregation where there was limited social engagement with either whites or blacks. Their social context was wholly Chinese-American at the time. So, to me that was just the jumping off point for really an exploration of ambiguity, which is very much the bread and butter of literary studies: How you come to this process of interpreting multiple meanings within any given text…

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“What About the Children?” The Psychological and Social Well-Being of Multiracial Adolescents

The Sociological Quarterly
Volume 47, Issue 1 (February 2006)
pages 147–173
DOI: 10.1111/j.1533-8525.2006.00041.x

Mary E. Campbell, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Iowa

Jennifer Eggerling-Boeck
University of Wisconsin–Madison

We used the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the social and psychological well-being of multiracial adolescents. Using two different measures of multiracial identity, we investigated the ways in which these adolescents compare to their monoracial counterparts on five outcomes: depression, seriously considering suicide, feeling socially accepted, feeling close to others at school, and participating in extracurricular activities. We found that multiracial adolescents as a group experience some negative outcomes compared to white adolescents, but that this finding is driven by negative outcomes for those with American Indian and white heritage. We found no consistent evidence, however, that multiracial adolescents as a group face more difficulty in adolescence than members of other racial and ethnic minority groups. The results were similar, whether the multiracial population is defined by self-identification or by their parents’ racial identifications.

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Race, Theory, and Scholarship in the Biracial Project

Chapter in:

Race Struggles
University of Illinois Press
2009
352 pages
6.125 x 9.25 in.; 4 tables
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07648-0

Edited by:

Theodore Koditschek, Professor of History
University of Missouri, Columbia

Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Associate Professor of History; Associate Professor of African American Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Helen A. Neville, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Educational Psychology
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Chapter Author:

Minkah Makalani, Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Since the early 1990s, there has emerged in the United States a push to racially reclassify persons with one black and one white parent as biracial. A central feature of what I am calling the biracial project is a cohort of scholars, themselves biracial identity advocates, who argue that such an identity is more appropriate for people of mixed parentage (PMP) than a black one. These scholars maintain that when PMP identify as biracial, they gain a more mentally healthy racial identity, have fewer experiences of alienation, and are able to express their racial and cultural distinction from African Americans. In addition to the presumed personal benefits of such an identity, these scholars suggest that a biracial identity is a positive step in moving society beyond race and toward a color-blind society. What remains troubling about this scholarship, though, is a tendency to conceptualize PMP as a distinct racial group, and the inattention to the potentially negative political impact such a reclassification would have on African Americans.

Historically and currently, white supremacy in the United States has hinged on the oppression of people of African descent. The position of African Americans in the political economy has served as the basis for developing a racialized social system, restructuring that system at different historical moments, and incorporating new social groups into the racial hierarchy as races. Asserting a new racial group premised on a claim to an inherent (biological) whiteness and a rejection of blackness taps into the intricacies, logics, and values of that very system. It is therefore important to remember that the push for a biracial racial category arose and made its greatest strides amid predictions that by the year 2050 whites will be a numerical minority. More than a question of self-identity, the push for a biracial identity concerns substantiating the existence of a new race to be positioned as an intermediary between blacks and whites in a reordered racialized social system. Indeed, in the United States there have always been multiple racial groups situated below whites in the racial hierarchy. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has recently argued that, increasingly, different groups are beginning to hold a position of “honorary whiteness” within that hierarchy. Taking into account the structures of race in Latin America and the Caribbean, I remain unconvinced that an honorary white racial status in the United States would include PMP, as Bonilla-Silva suggests, though I agree with his claim that various racialized groups that were previously denied the privileges of whiteness increasingly enjoy advantages, privileges, and access to centers of power that continue to be denied black people and those whom Bonilla-Silva calls the “collective black.” Far from helping to erase existing color lines or challenging the new racial formations described by Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Bonilla-Silva, it would draw yet another color line. And unlike certain Asian and Latino groups, a new biracial race stakes its claim, quite literally, on possessing whiteness.

The biracial project approaches racial identity as racial identification, or the assertion of a racial category. Using identity as a synonym tor race has also entailed inadequate attention to the complexities of identity. Consequently, these works rarely engage the psychological scholarship on black identity formation, not to mention the historical, sociological, and cultural interrogations of blackness that have appeared in Black Studies over the past century. Most troubling is the inattention, if not utter aversion, to the history of PMP considering themselves black and struggling over the meanings of blackness.

It is hardly coincidental that these scholars presume certain antiracist attributes to inhere in a biracial identity. In asserting the subversive character of a biracial identity, Maria P. P. Root maintains that it “may force us to reexamine our construction of race and the hierarchical social order it supports.” Naomi Zack and G. Reginald Daniel more plainly argue that a biracial identity hastens the end of racial categories altogether by challenging popular notions of race. For Zack in particular, a biracial identity serves as the basis for “ultimately disabus(ing) Americans of their false beliefs in the biological reality of race,” thus leading society away from racial classifications and hastening racisms demise. Still, the progressive qualities of a biracial identity are more apparent than real, largely asserted with little research substantiating the claims of its proponents.

The presence of a biracial race would certainly disrupt popular ideas about race, but as scholars supporting biracial identity root it in biological notions of race “mixture,” it seems unlikely that such a disruption would result in the end of racial classifications. Work on race in the Caribbean and Latin America shows that a racially mixed identity is entirely consistent with a racialized social system. Moreover, recent work interrogating-color blindness has shown that this is the current dominant racial ideology, suggesting that a color-blind society as a goal is more likely to ensure the persistence of racism than its decline. I therefore find especially troubling the claims by Naomi Zack, G. Reginald Daniel, Kathleen Odell Korgen, Paul R. Spickard, Maria P. P. Root, and others discussed below, that the biracial project represents a progressive social movement.” In my view, based both on the popular push for such a reclassification and the scholarship discussed here, this project is less concerned with ending racism than with responding to the racialization of all people of African descent in the United States as black.

Situating the discussion of biracial identity in the context of race and racial oppression as structural relationships, I provide a detailed review of the theoretical and prescriptive literature advocating a biracial identity. Specifically, I am concerned with this racial projects theoretical basis for a biracial identity, how it conceptualizes race and racism, the place of the one-drop rule in this conceptualization, and the defense of biracial identity as an antiracist tool…

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A quantitative method of morphological assessment of hybridization in the U. S. Negro-White male crania

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 41, Issue 2 (September 1974)
pages 269–278
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330410209

Sudha S. Saksena
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Muskingum College [Muskingum University], New Concord, Ohio

Portions of this paper are based on a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Indiana, Bloomington, Indiana, in 1967. Part of this paper appeared in abstract form in American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Vol. 29, No. 1, 1968, pp. 124–125.

The study develops a morphological method of assessing the amount of parental components in a U.S. Negro-White Hybrid sample and tests to what extent a multivariate discriminant analysis actually reflects the morphological pattern of hybridization.

To formulate norms of description for the parental and hybrid populations, a seventeenth century London Farringdon Street series of 94 crania was selected to represent the British White ancestral component and the data on the cadaverand-skeletal series in the T. W. Todd collection of Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, were used in the selection of 115 Unmixed Negro and 115 Negro-White Hybrid male crania.

The conclusions are: (1) the morphological scores of the Negro-White Hybrid series shows a biological overlap with the two parental series in the proportion of 1:3 (i.e., 25% White to 75% Negro). This overlap reflects the probable porportion of ancestral mixture in the ratio of one-fourth White to three-fourths Negro in the Negro-White Hybrid sample; and (2) the morphological approach to the assessment of the parental components with multivariate discriminant analysis as a tool, proves to be highly reliable in providing a biologically meaningful index of relationship.

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Mothers and Their Biracial Children: Growing Up Biracial in a One Race Fits All Society

Cedarville University, Cedarville, Ohio
November 2009
86 pages

Kristin Felts-Keller

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Education

This thesis is a qualitative study on the Mothers of biracial children and the formation of a biracial identity in a one race fits all society. The goal of this study was to gain a deeper understanding and explore the concerns mothers of biracial children hold for their children. It is not intended to be applied to the general population but it does however, give us an insight into what it means to be biracial, how it is perceived as a race and how the Mothers of these children teach their children to cope with their race and form a positive sense of self-identity.

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The Species Problem: Nineteenth-Century Concepts of Racial Inferiority in the Origin of Man Controversy

American Anthropologist
Volume 72, Issue 6 (December 1970)
pages 1319–1329
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1970.72.6.02a00060

John S. Haller, Jr., Emeritus Professor of History
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

The species problem and its implications in the origin of man controversy had grown in importance in prewar America owing largely to the question of slavery. Implicit in the problem was the position of the so-called inferior races in society. The monogenists, despite their emphasis on environmentalism, were no more favorable to the Negro, except in their remote theoretical stance. The Civil War—not Darwin—brought the controversy to an end in America, but it continued to rage in Europe. The apparent synthesis of the schools during the 1870s did not disturb the stereotyped ideas of racial inferiority. The “inferior races” remained the basis of evolutionary discussion, leaving them as remote outcasts of the evolutionary struggle.

Though most nineteenth-century anthropologists were busily engaged in the technical aspects of somatometry, a good number of them were also concerned with the more problematic question of man’s origin. Like somatometry, the speculation into origin grew out of the awareness of differences in the broad spectrum of genus Homo. The taxonomic system of Linnaeus not only precipitated an intensive study of comparative structures, but led also to the question of whether the various “races” of man originated in one primitive stock. Were the Negroes, Hottentots, Eskimos, and Australians really men in the full sense of the term, sharing in the intellectual endowments of the European, or were they half-brutes, not belonging to what the French scientist Bory de Saint-Vincent called the “race adamique”? Defined in other terms, the problem concerned whether humanity descended from a monogenetic type, or whether humanity had distinct polygenetic ancestors. If it were true that these peoples were really subspecies, or subraces, then, some argued, they should become subject to the superior races. The subsequent controversy between the monogenists and polygenists became the longest of the internecine battles among the physical scientists of man. Though ostensibly concerned only with origin, the controversy highlighted a major confrontation between science and religion. It also illuminated the peculiar role played by the “inferior races” to the higher categories of man, a role that was fundamentally the same in both schools and remained unchanged during the decades before and after Darwin. The apparent synthesis of the two opposing schools during the 1870s seemed not to disturb the continuity of race stereotypes and the ideas of racial inferiority…

…The early polygenists favored the term “species” in their belief in the diversity of man. In the context of their definition, species were “fixed” and did not naturally cross with other species, except under artificial conditions. Although there was occasional fertility between the separate species, the product of the union was sterile or tending toward sterility, proving the “unnaturalness” of the original union. The concept of species was important to those nineteenth-century scientists who drew their schematization of the universe from the logical and spatial arrangement of the chain of being. For if one hybrid were capable of increase, the divine arrangement of the creator would have been distorted and a destructive imbalance set into the order of the world. All living things formed one chain of universal being from the lowest to the highest. None of the species originally formed were extinct. Nature proceeded according to divine plan and admitted of no improvement. The continuation of this belief into the nineteenth century precipitated an enormous amount of speculation as to whether the mulatto was more or less fertile than either of the two original stocks. The general consensus was that the mulatto was less fertile, and hence, an artificial hybrid tending toward extinction.As the nineteenth-century polygenists turned to the term “race” rather than “species” to define human types, so they borrowed the word “mongrel” in exchange for “hybrid” to identify the offspring of mixing (Vogt 1864: 441; Huxley 1876:412). In doing so, however, they created a confusion in terminology because the monogenist’s criteria for “species,” “race,” “mongrel,” and “hybrid” remained unchanged…

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Reconstructing Molly Welsh: Race, Memory and the Story of Benjamin Banneker’s Grandmother

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
September 2008
194 pages

Sandra W. Perot

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department of History

Molly Welsh, oral tradition captured in the nineteenth century tells us, was a white Englishwoman who worked as an indentured servant. The same tradition has it that she owned slaves, although she is said to have married (or formed a union with) one of them. I aim not only to recover the life of Molly Welsh Banneker, but also to consider its various tellings—probing in particular at Molly’s shifting racial status. By examining a multiplicity of social and cultural aspects of life for seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Maryland women, I test whether these various narratives are even possible or plausible reconstructions of the Molly Welsh story. My project thus sheds light on the woman Molly Welsh was, how her story was constructed, what factors contributed to the retelling of her story, and why and at what point various narratives deviate from each other. By comparing the various Molly Welsh/Benjamin Banneker narratives it is possible to uncover or at least posit the most reliable narrative, while at the same time coming to a greater understanding of how such historically undocumented stories are constructed and what part memory plays in their reconstruction. An extensive bias informs many of these narratives, shaped by the various “memories” generated by family loyalty, by the growing tensions between the North and the South over slavery, by Reconstruction, and by new standards in historical accuracy that appeared with the founding of the American Historical Association in 1884.
 
While Molly Welsh may appear to be a near-silent character in her grandson Benjamin Banneker’s story, it is possible that new discoveries will be made that further verify (or refute) the long-standing tradition that Molly Welsh was a white English dairymaid transported to Maryland and that she married one of her own slaves by whom she had four daughters. Recent interest in new ways of approaching history, a greater acceptance of oral traditions as an important historical source, and a renewed appreciation for exploring stories of the untold masses, including women and minorities, may someday locate Molly’s voice and allow her to speak for herself. The chances of uncovering Molly Welsh’s story through documentary sources has improved with the recent emergence of powerful databases and electronic search tools have made many things possible that once were not (ancestry.com, the Old Bailey records for example). And then, perhaps Molly might come to represent other seventeenth-century women who married or had children with African men, like Eleanor Atkins who had a “Molattoe” child and who subsequently received twenty-four lashes for her crime, Elizabeth Day who admitted before the court that she had an illegitimate “Malatto” child by a “Negro man named Quasey belonging to her master,” or Eleanor Price who pleaded guilty to “Fornication with a Negro Man named Peter Belonging to Mr. John Walker,” received twenty-one lashes, and whose child, Jeremiah, was bound out until the age of twenty-one. Through their stories we might come to accept that one of the few choices these women had may have been with whom they had a child, though even this is subject to question. Regardless, Molly Welsh’s story is one that does not appear to stand alone. Through her we might see how women survived their indentures and prospered, or managed at the very least to endure life in Maryland, women whose lives until now never managed to become a footnote in anyone’s biography.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: LOCATING MOLLY WELSH: MEMORY AND MYTH IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MARYLAND
• I THE DAIRYMAID AND THE PRINCE
• II “OF THE DEEPEST DYE”: EARLY NARRATIVES
• III “A REMARKABLY FAIR COMPLEXION”: THE EMERGENCE OF MOLLY WELSH
• IV “ACT WELL YOUR PART, THERE ALL THE HONOR LIES”: THE RECONSTRUCTION OF MOLLY WELSH’S CHARACTER
• V “THE TALE AS IT WAS TOLD FOR A HUNDRED YEARS ON THE RIDGE”: EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY AFRICAN-AMERICAN SCHOLARS REVITALIZE MOLLY’S STORY
• VI “TRUE NOBILITY’S CONFINED TO NONE”: MOLLY IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
• VII “BUT WHAT ARE COLOURS? DO COMPLEXIONS CHANGE?” TWENTYFIRST CENTURY PERSPECTIVES ON MOLLY WELSH.114
• VIII EPILOGUE
• APPENDICES
  • I CHRONOLOGY OF PRINT CONCERNING ANCESTRY OF BENJAMIN BANNEKER
  • II BANNEKER FAMILY TREE
  • III INTERNET RESPONSES TO MOLLY WELSH
  • IV MARYLAND LAWS DIRECTLY PERTAINING TO SLAVERY, RACE, INDENTURED SERVITUDE, WOMEN, AND MARRIAGE IN SEVENTEENTH- AND EARLY-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MARYLAND
  • V 1685 INDENTURE
  • VI A BRIEF EXAMINATION OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY TRANSPORTATION RECORDS
  • BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Racial classifications in the US census: 1890–1990

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 16, Issue 1 (1993)
pages 75-94
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.1993.9993773

Sharon M. Lee, Adjunct Professor of Sociology
University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

This article examines racial classifications on United States population census schedules between 1890 and 1990 to provide insights on the changing meanings of race in US society. The analysis uses a sociology of knowledge perspective which assumes that race is an ideological concept that can be interpreted most productively by relating its definition and measurement to the larger social and political context. Four themes are identified and discussed: (i) the historical and continuing importance of skin colour, usually dichotomized into white and non‐white, in defining race and counting racial groups; (ii) a belief in ‘pure’ races that is reflected in a preoccupation with categorizing people into a single or ‘pure’ race; (iii) the role of census categories in creating pan‐ethnic racial groups; and, (iv) the confusing of race and ethnicity in census racial classifications. Each theme demonstrates the potential or actual role of official statistics, exemplified by census racial data, in reflecting and guiding changes to the meaning and social perceptions of race. A detailed examination of racial classifications from the 1980 and 1990 Censuses shows that the influence of political interests on racial statistics is particularly important. The article concludes with a discussion of whether official statistical recorders such as population censuses should categorize and measure race, given the political motivations and non‐scientific character of the classifications used.

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