Mixed Race Studies

Questioning Being Black and White in Canada

Canadian Dimension: for people who want to change the world
2012-08-24

Denise Hansen

“Canadians have a favourite pastime, and they don’t even realize it. They like to ask—they absolutely love to ask—where you are from if you don’t look convincingly white. They want to know it, they need to know it, simply must have that information. They just can’t relax until they have pin-pointed, to their satisfaction, your geographic and racial coordinates. They can go almost out of their minds with curiosity, as when driven by the need for food, water, or sex, but once they’ve finally managed to find out precisely where you were born, who your parents were, and what your racial makeup is, then, man, do they feel better. They can breathe easy and get back to the business of living.” —An except from Lawrence Hill’s Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada

Lawrence Hill dubs it The Question and, indeed, for most black/white mixed Canadians The Question has become a reoccurring topic of conversation fielded in classrooms, workplaces, out with new friends, in busy line-ups and crowded bars…most any public place. Most commonly asked in the form of “where are you from?”, “what’s your background?”, or put ignorantly simply as “what are you?”, The Question has become a defining aspect of the black/white mixed race experience for people of black and white descent living in Canada.

But is The Question just harmless curiosity? Or does The Question unconsciously reveal deeply held racial assumptions, sometimes even racist values? Either way, The Question puts race centre stage in a society where, ironically, the topic is often avoided, evaded at best. Is it time to take The Question as an opportunity to educate Canadians about issues of mixed race and blackness?…

…“People are socialized to uncritically accept racial categories. They want to know who mixed race people are affiliated with, perhaps as a guide to how they can engage with them,” explains Professor Leanne Taylor who studies multiracial and multiethnic identities at Brock University. Taylor adds that in Canada the idea of mixed race has even been commodified and exported internationally as the lived reality of what multiculturalism is—the message (falsely) being: ‘look at all these beautiful, mixed people as a symbol of how well people are getting along in Canada’….

Read the entire essay here.

Cultural versus Social Marginality: The Anglo-Indian Case

Phylon (1960-)
Volume 28, Number 4 (4th Quarter, 1967)
pages 361-375

Noel P. Gist

Human history has been replete with examples of peoples destined to exist on the margin of two or more cultures. One of these marginal peoples is the Anglo-Indian community in India. This community, whose history goes back to the earliest arrivals in India of Europeans, first the Portuguese, later the Dutch and French, and finally the British, represents a racial blending resulting from conventional or unconventional unions between European men and Indian women.

In her history of the Eurasian (Anglo-Indian) group in India, Goodrich argues convincingly that a community consciousness, based upon ethnic similarities, emerged only after the British dealt categorically, not just individually, with persons of mixed European and Indian ancestry. As objects of fluctuating and inconsistent policies of acceptance and rejection, the Anglo-Indians eventually developed a protective psychological armor through a growing sense of community solidarity. By the middle of the eighteenth century they had come to think of themselves as a community apart.

This community identification has persisted to the present, though its strength has varied from one historic period to another, and indeed from one individual to another. For most Anglo-Indians the community provides a psychological and social refuge in a society that has never fully accepted them. Many are proud to be identified with the community and as dedicated members work diligently for the common weal. But there are others who apparently take little pride in being Anglo-Indians and who try to conceal their ethnic identity if it is considered a handicap.

Perhaps the first sociologist to deal conceptually with marginality was Robert E. Park, whose ideas were later elaborated and systematized by Everett Stonequist. In the initial formulation of the theory of…

A British Ireland, or the limits of race and hybridity in Maria Edgeworth’s novels

Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
2009-09-21
73 pages

Kimberly Philomen Clarke

A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English

Ireland was united with Wales, Scotland, and England in 1801. However, separated by distance, religion, British prejudice, and Ireland’s colonial status, Ireland was excluded from identifying with the British. Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth actively works against this image of Irish subjection as she displaces Irish colonial otherness on to Creole, West Indian, and Africanist character associated with black imagery. Instead of making Ireland a metaphor for Anglo-colonial relations, Edgeworth positions the Creole and black characters as a colonial figures who cannot satisfactorily become British.

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE
  • HYBRIDITY AND EXTERNAL DIFFERENCES IN BRITAIN: THE MONSTEROUS HYBRIDISM OF THE EAST AND WEST
  • RACIAL HYBRIDITY AND INTERNAL DIFFERENCES
  • MARIA EDGEWORTH’S APPROACH TO IRISH IDENTITY AND BRITISH HYBRIDITY
  • MULTIPLICITY IN THE ABSENTEE, ORMOND, AND ENNUI
  • LIMITATIONS OF EDGEWORTH’S BRITISH HYBRIDITY
• CHAPTER TWO
  • RACIAL AND AFRICANIST ATTITUDES TOWARD THE IRISH
  • AFRICANISM AND IRISH LITERARY BLACKNESS IN EDGEWORTH’S ENNUI
  • BELINDA AND THE EXCLUSION OF BLACK HYBRIDITY
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

Hybridity, a blending or cross-breeding of cultures, elements or race, defines the twenty-first century, and not simply through hybrid technology in the types of cars we drive. Most notably, in November 2008, the United States elected its first biracial president who has become a conspicuous symbol of America’s growing multicultural and multiracial society. This prevalence of racial and cultural hybridity in Western society symbolizes a desire for this diversity even while it catalyzes existing fears of such multiracial mingling. These are not new fears, nor are they present only in American society. This uneasy relationship with racial hybridity appears in the nineteenth-century literature of Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth in her exploration and analysis of whiteness and Irish cultural and racial identity in Britain.

The similarities between twenty-first century and nineteenth-century attitudes about hybridity elucidate Edgeworth’s racial politics and the continued relevancy of racial identity – both its fixity and fluidity – in the construction of a national identity. Her novels reflect her desire to legitimize and resolve her Anglo-Irish identity (her loyalty to England and her emotional ties to Ireland) as well as her struggle to define British racial and cultural makeup at a time when Britain’s literary voice and national complexion became more diverse from within and from influences beyond its own borders.

My understanding of Edgeworth’s novels and her approach to race in Britain has been influenced by my understanding of the relationship between the Irish-American and African-American communities in the United States in the nineteenth century. As Noel Ignatiev explains in his 1995 How the Irish Became White, Irish immigrants and African-Americans were grouped together as part of America’s working and poverty classes during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as they competed against each other for employment and fought the political system and each other in order to gain citizenship and acceptance in the States. Edgeworth depicts the relationship between the Irish and Afro-Caribbean community in a similar way, even if it existed on smaller scale in Britain. Historically, these groups were seen as racial outsiders who threatened hegemonic white identity in America and Great Britain. While the popularity of such modern-day figures as Tiger Woods or Barack Obama show Western society’s willingness to embrace multiracial identity, Edgeworth’s attempts to integrate Ireland into Great Britain’s social, religious, and racial consciousness reveal nineteenth-century efforts and shortcomings in tackling issues of racial hybridity that existed two centuries ago and still survive today.

Being Irish in nineteenth-century Britain was an othered cultural and racial identity that destabilized the illusion of British whiteness. The negative stereotypes of poverty-stricken, uneducated, rebellious Irish Catholic outsiders conjured fears that an Irish presence would muddy the image of pure-blooded whiteness. Despite her gestures in embracing the singularity of Irish culture as part of Britain’s diverse society, Edgeworth exhibits her ambivalence toward hybridity by limiting Irish identity and implicitly policing British racial identity…

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Russian Creoles of Alaska as a Marginal Group

Social Forces
Volume 22, Number 2 (December 1943)
pages 204-208

Margaret Mary Wood
Russell Sage College

The interest in Alaska which has been aroused by its strategic importance in the present world-war conflict is bringing to the fore as worthy of attention many problems of this distant American frontier to which little heed has hitherto been given. Among these problems the marginal position of the Russian Creoles in Alaska is one which is of special sociological interest. The position of this group is not only characterized by the difficulties which are commonly associated with the marginal position of racial hybrids, but it is also further complicated by a number of cultural difficulties which arc in many respects unique. These latter difficulties must be seen in the light of the history of the group to be rightly understood.

The present Russian Creoles in Alaska are the descendants of mixed marriages between the Russians and the Alaskan natives which occurred during the period of Russian rule in Alaska. The term “creole” was legally defined by the Russian authorities to mean the children of Russian fathers and the native women, and it was used in this sense in the Russian colonies. In the southern United States and in the West Indies, however, the term is used differently and only includes children of Spanish or French descent born in America of European parents. Historians in writing about Alaska have, for the most part, adopted the Russian use of the term; but it has not found a ready acceptance with the American settlers in Alaska who tend to designate the Creoles as “natives” or “half-breeds.” Both of these terms are keenly resented by the Creole group as I learned to my regret when I was teaching at Kodiak in 1916. I inadvertently referred to the Creoles as natives in making a distinction between some of their customs and those of the American group in Kodiak.   My tactless remark was repeated in garbled form to the local school board, all of whom were Creoles, and stirred up a furore which cost me my position for the following year, deservedly enough perhaps. The question of their name is one concerning which the Creole group are exceedingly sensitive.

Precise statistics of the Creoles in Alaska are lacking, but their number is not large. Russian records for Alaska in 1860 give the number of Creoles who had been baptized into the Russian Church as 1,676. In the United States census report of 1880, Ivan Petroff, who enumerated the Alaskan population for the government, gives their number as 1,756. In more recent census reports the Russian Creoles are not distinguished from other natives of mixed blood in Alaska. The 1930 census gives 7,825 as the number of natives of mixed blood out of a total native population of 29,983, but does not list the Russian Creoles separately. They probably do not constitute more than a third to a half of the natives of mixed blood, however, for racial diffusion is occurring rapidly in Alaska. This diffusion is to be expected. It is the natural outcome of a situation in which a pioneer breed of white men, isolated from women of their own race, are in contact with a docile and not unattractive native people.   The Russians recognized this situation in Alaska with greater frankness and tolerance than it has since been accorded under American rule.

Under the jurisdiction of the Russian American Company, which was chartered in 1799, order was introduced into the Russian colony and the earlier…

Beautiful stereotypes: the relationship between physical attractiveness and mixed race identity

Identities: Global Studies in Power and Culture
Volume 19, Number 1, 2012-01-01
pages 61-80
DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2012.672838

Jennifer Patrice Sims

The idea that mixed race individuals are physically attractive is a commonly accepted stereotype. Past research in which whites (Australians and British) and Asians (Japanese) were asked to rate the attractiveness of a racially heterogeneous group of faces has shown that mixed race phenotype was judged the most attractive. In this study, I examine whether there is empirical evidence for this Biracial Beauty Stereotype in the United States. Using the data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, I examine self and interview ratings of respondents’ physical attractiveness and, in an extension of the previous literature, conduct multinomial logistic regressions to ascertain whether level of attractiveness is associated with different racial identification choices for mixed race individuals. My results indicate that there is in fact a belief in mixed race individuals’ superior beauty in America; but, with regard to identity, beauty is not associated with identity for all mixed race groups.

Read or purchase the article here.

Caribbean Fashion Week: Remodeling Beauty in “Out of Many One” Jamaica

Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture
Volume 14, Number 3, September 2010
pages 387-404
DOI: 10.2752/175174110X12712411520377

Carolyn Cooper, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies
University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

The elitist Jamaican motto, “Out of Many, One People,“ privileges racial hybridity as the quintessential marker of national identity. Conversely, populist constructions of Jamaican identity acknowledge the primacy of the African majority. The “mixed-race“ ideal inscribed in the national motto becomes the aesthetic standard for judging “beauty“ and “ugliness.“ Beauty contests, for example, become sites of contestation in which competing representations of the face of the nation jostle for recognition. Identifying with marginalized African-Jamaican aspirants who often fail to win these competitions, discontented patrons routinely claim the right to assert alternative models of beauty that challenge the authority of the “out of many one“ aesthetic. The emergence of a modeling industry in Jamaica that valorizes idiosyncratic style has opened up a space in which black images of beauty take center stage. Caribbean Fashion Week is the major platform for displaying internationally acclaimed Jamaican models. Showcasing a high percentage of decidedly black male and female models wearing spectacular designer clothes, Caribbean Fashion Week enables multiple readings of the body as cultural text. The permissive modeling aesthetic engenders capricious images of beauty that contest the very conception of the “model“ as a mold into which a singular figure of beauty is impressed.

Read or purchase the article here.

Afua Hirsch: Our parents left Africa – now we are coming home

The Guardian
2012-08-25

Afua Hirsch, West Africa Correspondent

As a child in London, Afua Hirsch was embarrassed by her African roots. Then, in February, she became a ‘returnee’, choosing to live in her parents’ birthplace, Ghana. Her story is echoed across the continent: attracted by economic opportunity and a new sense of optimism, the African diaspora is starting to come back.

When I was a teenager, my mother overheard me telling my peers that I was Jamaican, a clearly absurd statement from a half-Ghanaian, half-English girl whose first name is one of the most common in a major African language.

My mother, born and raised in Ghana, was mortified. Although in part I was living out the now well-documented struggle of mixed race youngsters to grasp their identity, mainly I was just embarrassed. It wasn’t cool to be African in those days and in my ignorant teenage way, I was acting out a much bigger crisis of confidence, one that had been swallowing Africans and spitting them out as permanent economic migrants in Europe and America ever since the end of colonialism…

…For my mother, that was the wake-up call she needed to organise our first trip to the west African land of her birth, an essential re-education in our roots. In 1995, we visited the Ghanaian capital, Accra, for the first time. I remember the usual things that people comment on when visiting equatorial African nations for the first time – the assault of hot air when stepping off the plane, which I confused with engine heat, the smell of spice and smoked fish on the air, and – most significantly for me – the fact that everyone was black. It sounds obvious but I had never really seen officials in uniform – immigration authorities, police, customs officers – with black skin. I don’t think I had realised that there was a world in which black people could be in charge…

Read the entire article here.

AALR Mixed Race Initiative

The Asian American Literary Review
2012-08-26

Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, co-Editor-in-Chief

Thanks to political organizing, scholarship, and the arts, not to mention media coverage, mixed race has become hyper-visible.  So what’s next?  The Asian American Literary Review (AALR) Mixed Race Initiative, launching this Fall 2012 and running until Spring 2014, won’t simply be a reexamination of race or a survey of mixed voices, important as both are.  We envision our role as that of provocateur—inspiring new conversations and cross-pollinations, pushing into new corners.

The initiative will feature a special issue on mixed race to debut in Fall 2013, all of the contributions for which will be collaborative, “mixed” in nature, bringing together folks across racial and ethnic boundaries, across scholarly disciplines, artistic genres, countries, languages, and generations.  What are the nerve centers of mixed race?  How does mixed race mark fault lines the world over?  We invite you to tell us.  Call-for-papers in early-mid September 2012.

The second phase of the initiative will be an international, multi-institution synchronous teaching program to run in Fall 2013 and Spring 2014.  You agree to teach our special issue as a course text (for anywhere from a week to a month during the allotted time period) and we plug you into a vast network of scholars and students across the world, in classrooms ranging from indigenous studies to cultural psychology, from Latin American Studies to literary studies, from art history to race theory.  We’ll supply a shared online curriculum and coordinate various cross-classroom exchanges, with the goal of staging a real, livetime, region to region and country to country conversation about race and mixed race.  So far classrooms at 40 colleges and universities in five countries have signed on, and we hope yours will join in too.  Let’s work together to make a new model for virtual, transnational education and build new social, civic, and intellectual communities.

If you’d like to learn more about the project, click here.  If you’d like to participate in the teaching program, assist as a volunteer coordinator, or donate in support of the project, please contact us at editors@aalrmag.org.

AALR is a Washington, D.C.-based 501(c)(3) arts nonprofit.

Reconstructing Race

The Western Historical Quarterly
Volume 34, Number 1 (Spring, 2003)
pages 6-26

Elliott West, Distinguished Professor of History
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

During what might be called the Greater Reconstruction, 1846–1877, territorial acquisitions as well as southern slavery forced a new racial dialogue between West and South, unsettled racial relations and presumptions, and finally led to a new racial order encompassing western as well as southern people of color.

I live in a town that doesn’t know where it is. Fayetteville is in northwestern Arkansas—that’s clear enough—but when somebody asks us locals to explain just where in this wide republic that is, things get dicey. The architecture and the lovely fall colors suggest the Midwest. The pace of life, the accents, and the studied eccentricities all speak of the South. Some put us elsewhere. At a party soon after I arrived, I told a colleague’s wife my field of study. “Oh, the West is a wonderful place to live!”she said in her soft Carolinian rhythm. I asked when she had lived there. She looked at me, as if at a slow nephew, and answered: “Why, now.”

Living and working along the seams of national regions is a fine encouragement to wonder about the differences and continuities among them—in appearance, in habits and points of view, and beneath all that, in their histories. Two things I know for sure. The South thinks it is different from the rest of the country, and it is race that southerners use most often to explain their separateness. The tortured relations of black and white, slavery and its rage and guilt, the war that ended slavery and the tormented generations that followed, the centuries-long embrace, intimate and awful on so many levels—all that, we’re told, has set southerners apart and has made the South the central stage of America’s racial drama…

…If anybody back then was curious about the shiftiness of race relations and categories, they should have visited the area where I live now, the area called at the time “the border,” a southwesterly arc of a thousand miles from western Missouri and eastern Kansas down to what is called the border today, the Rio Grande Valley. Here, where South touched West, was a grand display of the seemingly limitless combinations of racial arrangements and identities. Imagine a tour of the border during the fifteen years after the war. We would start in Kansas with a new look at the Exodusters, whose move from South to West was, paradoxically, both a rejection of, and an aggressive claim to, a traditional racial order. We might listen to the freedman J. H. Williamson praising former slaves as the rightful inheritors of manifest destiny. In cultural terms, he was saying, blacks were whites, and out West they would fulfill the promise of Jamestown and Plymouth, saving the wilderness from those who would never do it justice. “The Indians are savage and will not work,” he argued. “We, the negro race, are a working people” who would, he implied, subdue the land and build towns, churches, and schools. Frederick Douglass also reminded white America of the freedman’s privileged status as an insider. The only reason the African American had not been hunted down like the Indian, he told the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1869, was that “he is so close under your arm, that you cannot get at him.” This closeness, however, had made “the Negro . . . more like the white man than the Indian, in his tastes and tendencies, and disposition to accept civilization. . . . You do not see him wearing a blanket, but coats cut in the latest European fashion.” From Kansas we would move southward into Indian Territory among the Creek freedmen. These former slaves argued, to the contrary, that they were Indians, or at least so mixed in blood and history that distinctions were meaningless. The point was worth making, since being Indian meant keeping the political power and an economic stake that mixed blood leaders were trying to take away. Here we might listen to the ex-slave Warrior Rentie ridiculing his mixed blood opponents, those “Indians, or rather would be Indians, . . . who have the strong vein of Negro blood . . . [men] who hardly know whether [they are] black, red or white.”

Next we would travel to central Texas into a variation of what Albert Hurtado calls in California an “intimate frontier” full of households of whites, Indians, blacks, Hispanics, and mixes of all four. We would see this familial snarl helping create new social and legal forms on this piece of the border. This troubled region was the temporary home of Buffalo Soldiers, black and Seminole cavalrymen who fought Plains Indians and who also patrolled southward along our final stop, the national boundary with Mexico. Here we would see these blacks and Indians and black Indians clash with Hispanics moving as always back and forth across this porous border.  If our visit was in 1875 we would see the racial ambiguities mixing with changing politics, with bewildering results. When black troops clashed with Mexican Americans not far from Brownsville, Texas, authorities—Redeemer Democrats hardly known for their Hispanic sympathies—suddenly embraced these locals as noble white citizens most dreadfully abused by degraded black invaders sent by foul Republicans. Philip Sheridan shook his head at the confused identities along the stream that itself was always shifting restlessly in its bed. “It is hard to tell who is who, and what is what, on that border, . . .” he wrote William Sherman. “The state of affairs is about as mixed as the river is indefinite as a boundary line.”…

Read the entire article here.

“Our America” That is Not One: Transnational Black Atlantic Disclosures in Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes

Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture
Volume 22, Number 3 (Fall 2000)
pages 87-113
DOI: 10.1353/dis.2000.0007

Monika Kaup, Associate Professor of English
University of Washington

In the past two decades, discontent with the exclusions operative in nationalist frameworks of American and Latin American Studies has placed issues of transnationalism, hybridization, and a diasporic view of cultures at the center of attention. As a provisional academic base for this desire to think more globally, scholars have invented a new tradition, so to speak the transnational and burgeoning field of hemispheric American Studies. Thus, the recent collection, José Martí’s “Our America”: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies, calls for such a change of paradigms. In their introduction, the editors single out Cuba, the birthplace of poet and revolutionary José Martí, as a fertile location for their project:

For Cuba lies at the intersection of Our America’s two principal transnational cultural formations: the geocultural system we have come to know as the Black Atlantic and the complex region of interactions among the Spanish, Native American, and English peoples (extending from the Caribbean to California) that we have come to call the Latino Borderlands. (Belnap and Fernández 11)

Cuba’s nationalism, from José Martí and Cuba’s late-19th century Wars of Independence to post-1959 formations under Castro, has always been a mestizo and mulato nationalism. One reason was that in Cuba abolition was not a consequence, but a condition of independence (Sommer, Foundational Fictions 125): in contrast to the U.S. and most of Latin America with the exception of Puerto Rico, Cuba achieved independence only in 1898, thanks to the full participation of Afro-Cubans in the anti-colonial wars against Spain, whose investment in Cuban independence was motivated by their desire for racial justice. Indeed, Cuba’s population in the modern era, “slightly over half Spanish in origin and slightly under half black or mulatto, with a small number of Chinese” (Bethell 20), suggests an encounter of the two distinct NewWorld diasporas known as the “Black Atlantic” and Martí’s Spanish-speaking “Our America” on equal terms.

While the discourse of mestizaje and racial amalgamation nourishes Cuba’s nationalism, and while the notion of cubanidad is built on the myth of racial synthesis, this symbolic reconciliation has repressed actual and continuing conflicts of race and their memory. Indeed, 20th century Cuban history, culture, and literature bear testimony to the uncanny reassertion of resistant diasporic black voices sublated into the dominant mestizaje nationalism. One major purpose of this essay is to examine the relationship between the Black Atlantic and José Martí’s “Our America” cultural formations intersecting in Cuba, as pointed out in the passage quoted above as a troubled and unstable one. Whereas “Our America” stands for the homecoming of Blacks in the interracial nationalism of Martí’s Latin America, the Black Atlantic stands for the continuing homelessness of Blacks in the Americas, and the memory of exile, displacement, and the violence of the Middle Passage…

Read the entire article here.