Mixed Race Studies

…These emerging beliefs provided the legal community with a framework within which to justify increasingly rigid separation between blacks and whites and increasingly stringent definitions of blackness. One clear example may be found in Judge Thomas M. Norwood‘s remarks in 1907, entitled “Address on the Negro,” in which he reflected upon his experiences dealing with black defendants over the years. After detailing the inferiority of the black race, Norwood explained to his audience that miscegenation was a horrible threat to the nation. Even though the law forbade interracial sex, having legal prohibitions on the books was not sufficient to curb the evil: “illicit miscegenation thrives and the proof stalks abroad in breeches and petticoats along our streets and highways.” This proof was the mixed-race issue of such unions.

Norwood’s beliefs about black inferiority did not permit him to blame “pure” blacks for the increases in racial mixing. He placed the blame squarely on white men, who made and enforced the laws against miscegenation and prevented black men from crossing the color line, while simultaneously “wallow[ing] with dusky Diana with impunity.” This practice by white men, in Norwood’s view, was particularly damaging to white women. Women married to men who engaged in interracial sex would bear the shame of knowing that their children had black half siblings. Their white daughters would flinch at having to acknowledge a black child’s salute of them as sisters.

While Norwood saw “full-blooded Negroes” as childlike, easily led, humble, and nonthreatening, he believed that mulattoes, due to the admixture of whiteness, were a genuine threat both in their prominence and in their attitudes. He argued that all prominent black persons in the United States had white or Native American ancestry to thank for their abilities and that all were hostile to whites. His solution to this problem, which would have been unconstitutional even under the prevailing racist standards, was to “Draw a dead line between the races. Tell the Negro, when he crosses it the penalty is death. Tell the white man, when he crosses it the penitentiary is there.” …

Julie Novkov, “Racial Constructions: The Legal Regulation of Miscegenation in Alabama, 1890–1934,” Law and History Review Summer 2002.

Racial Formation in the New Millennium

Routledge
 2008-03-01
256 pages
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-95025-1

Michael Omi, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley

Howard Winant, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

First published in 1986, and then again in 1994, Omi and Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States is considered a classic text on race and ethnicity. Racial Formation in the New Millennium builds upon the ideas set forth in Omi and Winant’s classic text – providing a sophisticated and up-to-date overview of race and ethnicity in the United States. In this volume, they include current issues and controversies related to racism, race/class/gender interrelationships, modern life and racial politics.

Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd Edition

Routledge
Publication Date: 1994-03-22
240 pages
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-90864-1

Michael Omi, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley

Howard Winant, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

First published in 1986, Racial Formation in the United States is now considered a classic in the literature on race and ethnicity. This second edition builds upon and updates Omi and Winant’s groundbreaking research. In addition to a preface to the new edition, the book provides a more detailed account of the theory of racial formation processes. It includes material on the historical development of race, the question of racism, race-class-gender interrelationships, and everyday life. A final chapter updates the developments in American racial politics up to the present, focusing on such key events as the 1992 Presidential election, the Los Angeles riots, and the Clinton administration’s racial politics and policies.

A Reader on Race, Civil Rights, and American Law: A Multiracial Approach

Carolina Academic Press
2001
864 pages
ISBN-10: 0-89089-735-2
ISBN: 978-0-89089-735-5
LCCN: 2001092052

Timothy Davis, W. and Ruth H. Turnage Professor of Law
Wake Forest University

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

George A. Martinez, Professor of Law
Southern Methodist University, Dedman School of Law

This anthology offers a range of legal and related literature analyzing the major issues of race and civil rights in the modern United States. Unlike previous works, which have tended to focus on the relationship between Caucasians and African Americans, this anthology considers race and civil rights issues from a wide range of minority perspectives — African American, Asian American, Latino, and Native American.

The debate over race issues is examined in numerous contexts, including the role of race in laws affecting education, housing, employment, voting rights, immigration, and the administration of criminal justice. In this anthology, editors Davis, Johnson, and Martinez explore broader themes such as the history of racial subordination of African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos; affirmative action; hate speech; and the subordination of women of color. In setting the stage for an examination of race in these diverse contexts, the anthology’s first selections explore the concept of race.

The anthology is geared toward, but not limited to, law school classes focusing on civil rights and race relations. The selections are of such a nature that the anthology should also appeal to anyone interested in foundational readings in this area. Each chapter begins with an introduction that strives to provide a framework from which the reader can analyze the current debates over issues of race in the United States.

View the table of contents here.

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

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

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

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

Read the introduction here.

Table of Contents

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

I-Dentity: The Biracial Woman as a Bridge In Third-Wave Feminism

Erica Jackson
Fall 1993

This is by no means intended to be an exhaustive discussion of the biracial experience in America, which is in no way monolithic.  In fact, it is inspired by the belief that race (whether singular or plural)  is an outdated concept and so it alone does not determine self-image, and if it does, not necessarily in the ways we stereotype each other, nor to the degree of signifigence generally attached to it in the mass media. 

Toward that end, this paper will suspend disbelief in the concept of race, in order to explore the dimensions and constructions of race.  If nothing else, I hope it raises questions about the assumptions we  carry with us.  A biracial person is first and foremost a person, with all the shared and unique qualities of any other.

Assumptions about the biracial become self-fulfilling prophecies. Like all assumptions (regarding women, or blacks, for example), they limit the possibilities of both the person making them and the person about whom they are made, and in their ability to connect.  While mixed race people are a natural link between the races of which they are a part, images of them have  instead been used for divisive purposes.

This is especially disturbing as it applies to relationships among and between white, biracial and black women.  Rather than connecting on the basis of interests or other shared experience, the relationship between blacks and biracials is often predicated upon the latter’s partial denial of heritage.  This illustrates a basic problem in race relations.  By viewing race as a fundamental identification, it becomes defined in very narrow terms and experiences, alienating blacks both from non-blacks with whom they might share profound experiences and from other black/part black biracial individuals whose experience is very different from their own.
 
Theories aside, the author questions the ability of one so tied to the issue as herself to be objective.  Are my assertions and reflections simply based on the idealism with which I judge events?  Could I be reinventing my experience to accommodate my beliefs?  Am I nit-picking or merely whining about realities I should simply accept?  Perhaps objectivity is overrated and empiricism does not always apply.  After all, if we don’t tell our own stories, who will tell them for us?  So far, no one…

Read the entire article here.

The New Color Complex: Appearances and Biracial Identity

Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research
2001
Volume 3, Number 1
Pags 29-52

David L. Brunsma, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Missouri, Columbia

Kerry Ann Rockquemore, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Illinois at Chicago

Ethnic identity research has largely focused on the identity choices of White ethnics (Alba, 1990; Ignatiev, 1995; Waters, 1990). One key factor in these choices is bodily appearance. We extend this research to Black and White Biracial individuals and examine the role that physical appearance plays in their “choices” of racial identity.  We test Rockquemore’s (1999) taxonomy of Biracial identity using survey data from a sample of 177 Biracial respondents. The results indicate that Biracial individuals do make choices within circumscribed cultural contexts and these understandings are influenced not by skin color, but by an actor’s assumption of how others perceive his or her appearance.

Read the entire article here.