Mixed Race Studies

Racial Boundary Formation at the Dawn of Jim Crow: The Determinants and Effects of Black/Mulatto Occupational Differences in the United States, 1880 (Working Paper)

33 pages
Updated 2008-07-03

Aaron Gullickson, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Oregon

Much of the literature within sociology regarding mixed-race populations focuses on contemporary issues and dynamics, often overlooking a larger historical literature.  This article provides a historical perspective on these issues by exploiting regional variation in the United States in the degree of occupational differentiation between blacks and mulattoes in the 1880 Census, during a transitionary period from slavery to freedom.  The analysis reveals that the role of the mixed-race category as either a “buffer class” or a status threat depended upon the class composition of the white population.  Black/mulatto occupational differentiation was greatest in areas where whites had a high level of occupational prestige and thus little to fear from an elevated mulatto group. Furthermore, the effect of black/mulatto occupational differentiation on lynching varied by the occupational status of whites. In areas where whites were of relatively low status, black/mulatto differentiation increased the risk of lynching, while in areas where whites were of relatively high status, black/mulatto differentiation decreased the risk of lynching.

Read the entire paper here.

Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century

University of Pennsylvania Press
2007
200 pages
6 x 9, 7 illus.
Cloth ISBN 978-0-8122-4056-6

Fay A. Yarbrough, Associate Professor of History
University of Oklahoma

“We believe by blood only,” said a Cherokee resident of Oklahoma, speaking to reporters in 2007 after voting in favor of the Cherokee Nation constitutional amendment limiting its membership. In an election that made headlines around the world, a majority of Cherokee voters chose to eject from their tribe the descendants of the African American freedmen Cherokee Indians had once enslaved. Because of the unique sovereign status of Indian nations in the United States, legal membership in an Indian nation can have real economic benefits. In addition to money, the issues brought forth in this election have racial and cultural roots going back before the Civil War.

Race and the Cherokee Nation examines how leaders of the Cherokee Nation fostered a racial ideology through the regulation of interracial marriage. By defining and policing interracial sex, nineteenth-century Cherokee lawmakers preserved political sovereignty, delineated Cherokee identity, and established a social hierarchy. Moreover, Cherokee conceptions of race and what constituted interracial sex differed from those of blacks and whites. Moving beyond the usual black/white dichotomy, historian Fay A. Yarbrough places American Indian voices firmly at the center of the story, as well as contrasting African American conceptions and perspectives on interracial sex with those of Cherokee Indians.

For American Indians, nineteenth-century relationships produced offspring that pushed racial and citizenship boundaries. Those boundaries continue to have an impact on the way individuals identify themselves and what legal rights they can claim today.

Legislating Women’s Sexuality: Cherokee Marriage Laws in the Nineteenth Century

Journal of Social History
Volume 38, Number 2, Winter 2004
E-ISSN: 1527-1897 Print ISSN: 0022-4529
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2004.0144

Fay A. Yarbrough, Associate Professor of History
University of Oklahoma

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the Cherokee Nation passed many laws to regulate marriage and sex. This essay first contemplates the gendered aspects of such laws by exploring the importance of Cherokee women’s marital choices and official response to those choices. In particular, Cherokee women’s choice of non-Cherokee marital partners, most frequently whites, and the concomitant introduction of outsiders into the Nation forced the Cherokee legislative branch to reformulate Cherokee women’s relationship to the production of new citizens in the Nation. Then the essay turns more explicitly to the laws’ racial implications and examines who could marry in the Cherokee Nation and why by first examining Cherokee laws regulating marriage with people of African descent. Cherokees increasingly excluded people of African descent from membership in the Nation through legislation prohibiting legal marriage between Cherokees and people of African descent. Lastly, this essay considers Cherokee legislative provisions to include whites as marriage partners and citizens in the Cherokee Nation. Ultimately, this essay finds that Cherokee officials were redefining Cherokee Indians racially and used marriage laws to write and reinforce this new definition.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance

Temple University Press
November 2002
256 pages
Cloth EAN: 978-1-56639-981-4, ISBN: 1-56639-981-5
Paper: EAN: 978-1-56639-982-1, ISBN: 1-56639-982-3

Steve Martinot, Adjunct Professor
San Francisco State University

A significant re-writing of the history of class formation in the US

An important history of the way class formed in the US, The Rule of Racialization offers a rich new look at the invention of whiteness and how the inextricable links between race and class were formed in the seventeenth century and consolidated by custom, social relations, and eventually naturalized by the structures that organize our lives and our work.

Arguing that, unlike in Europe, where class formed around the nation-state, race deeply informed how class is defined in this country and, conversely, our unique relationship to class in this country helped in some ways to invent race as a distinction in social relations. Martinot begins tracing this development in the slave plantations in 1600s colonial life. He examines how the social structures encoded there lead to a concrete development of racialization. He then takes us up to the present day, where forms of those structures still inhabit our public and economic institutions. Throughout, he engages historical and contemporary thinkers on the nature of race in the US, creating a book that at once synthesizes significant critiques of race while at the same time offers a completely original conception of how race and class have operated in American life throughout the centuries.

A uniquely compelling book, The Rule of Racialization offers a rich contribution to the study of class, labor, and American social relations.

Read an excerpt from the introduction here.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The History And Construction Of Slavery And Race
2. Racialization And Class Structure
3. The Contemporary Control Stratum
4. The Meanings Of White Racialized Identity
Notes
Index

Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They?

PLoS Medicine
Volume 4, Number 9 (September 2007)
pages 1423-1428
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0040271

Lundy Braun
Departments of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Africana Studies
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

Duana Fullwiley, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and of Medical Anthropology
Harvard University

Anne Fausto-Sterling
Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Biochemistry, Program in Women’s Studies, and Chair of the Faculty Committee on Science and Technology Studies
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

Evelynn M. Hammonds, Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity
History of Science and of African and African American Studies programs
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Alondra Nelson
Departments of Sociology and African American Studies
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

William Quivers
Department of Physics
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Susan M. Reverby
Women’s Studies Department,
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Alexandra Shields
Harvard/MGH Cente on Genomics, Vulnerable Populations and Health Disparities,
Massachusetts General Hospital
Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts

The Trouble with Race

Is it good medical practice for physicians to “eyeball” a patient’s race when assessing their medical status or even to ask them to identify their race? This question was captured in a 2005 episode of “House M.D.,”  Fox television’s medical drama. In the episode, a black patient with heart disease refuses a hospital physician’s prescription for what is clearly supposed to be BiDil, the drug approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration only for “self-identified” African-Americans. Dr. House, on seeing the patient for followup, insists on the same prescription.  The patient again refuses, telling House, “I’m not buying into no racist drug, OK?” House, a white physician asks, “It’s racist because it helps black people more than white people? Well, on behalf of my peeps, let me say, thanks for dying on principle for us.” The patient replies, “Look. My heart’s red, your heart’s red.  And it don’t make no sense to give us different drugs.”  Who is right here, House or his patient? And what does this episode tell us about the way race plays itself out in the physician-patient clinical encounter? What of clinical importance can be learned by making a quick racial assessment?  That an ACE (angiotensin-converting enzyme) inhibitor may not be effective? That screening for sickle cell anemia is a waste of time? Sorting patients by race may seem useful during a time constrained interview, but we argue that acting on rapid racial assessment can lead to missed diagnoses and inappropriate treatments…

Racial Categories Are Historical, Not Natural

…Racial definitions are historically and nationally specific. In her comparison of the history of racial categories in the US and Brazilian census from the late 18th century to the present, political scientist Melissa Nobles demonstrated that categories emerge and are  deployed in different ways over time. For example, during the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, at the height of US anxiety about “miscegenation,” categories such as “mulatto” were vehicles for expressing and containing cultural anxiety about racial purity.  Bolstered by scientific ideas about race, data collected on the numbers of “mulattoes” were shaped by the desire to prove that “hybrids” would die out…

…A dark-skinned, curly-headed person who identifies as African American may, indeed, have much in his or her history and upbringing to justify that identification. But he or she may also have a white grandparent and several Cherokee ancestors. Thus, returning to the example of glaucoma, it is more important to know a patient’s family history than to assess his or her race.  And collecting family history ought to mean not only compiling a list of which diseases family members have, but making some attempt to assess common (familial) habits such as diet and life experiences (e.g., first- versus second-generation immigrants, living conditions, or same versus widely varied work experience and geographical locations). Similarly, when the history of passing for white is ignored, those who identify themselves as “white” are assumed to have no ancestral “black blood.”  Finally, immigration patterns constantly change. A “black” person walking into a Boston, Massachusetts clinic could easily be the child of a recent immigrant from Ethiopia or Brazil who has a genetic makeup as well as cultural and environmental exposures that differ significantly from the descendents of 19th century US slaves from the western coast of Africa…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Recognition in the 2000 Census: A Personal Perpective

Perspectives
Winter 2003
pages 48-58

Ikeita Cantú Hinojosa, JD, MSW
National Women’s Law Center, Washington, D.C

The census classification scheme chosen for race and ethnicity has become a prominent social fact in its own right and involves serious political and cultural consequences beyond its explicit policy purposes. Thus, it is not surprising that fierce controversy surrounded the federal government’s decision to rescind its “check only one race” rule for the 2000 Census and implement a “mark one or more races” option in its place. The multirace option signals an official acknowledgment of a growing multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural population in the United States. As a black Chicana often required to select either the “black, non-Hispanic” or “Hispanic” option in answering demographic inquiries that mandate a single selection, I appreciate the opportunity to provide a more accurate description of myself by choosing both applicable categories; however, I question whether the scheme chosen to count race and ethnicity in the 2000 Census was the most appropriate approach to transition from the archaic “one drop of blood” conceptualization of race to a more fluid and complex understanding of the intersectionality of multiple identities. This paper provides a personal perspective on the recent 2000 Census racial and ethnic identity debate. I argue that the multirace option chosen, though not without fault, is preferable to both the retention of the old single-race classification and the creation of a new “Multiracial” category. The single-race option of the past reinforces a view of racial identity as exclusive and rigid, the proposed “Multiracial” category could cause a harsh blow to the progress made by the oppressed to date, and the multirace option implemented for the 2000 Census has the potential to blur psychological and sociological racial and ethnic lines without detracting from civil rights initiatives, signaling a new era in the social attitudes of Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Nooksack Tribe member explores multiracial culture

The Bellingham Herald
2009-09-28

Dean Kahn

Louie Gong grew up eating American Indian bread for breakfast and Chinese dinners cooked on a camp stove.

In the evening, his Chinese and native relatives got together for mah-jongg.

Gong’s mother was of French and Scottish descent. His father was half Chinese, part Nooksack and part Squamish.

Early on, Gong was raised by his grandparents, father, stepmother and scads of relatives in a rustic community north of Abbotsford, B.C. Later, his family moved into Nooksack Indian Tribe housing near Deming.

Growing up in Whatcom County — he graduated from Nooksack Valley High in 1992 — Gong learned to navigate in a world where mixed-race people often struggle to define themselves, and where other people prefer to slot them into simple categories.

“I couldn’t quite figure out what I was,” he said, “but I knew I wasn’t part of the mainstream.”…

Read the entire article here.

‘Multiracial Identity’ documentary film and discussion

Portland State University
228 Smith Union
Wednesday, 2010-03-03, from 18:30-21:00 PST (Local Time)

This new documentary explores the social and political impact of adding a Multiracial Category (the fastest growing demographic in America) as a stand-alone racial group on the US Census. Different racial and cultural groups see multiracialism differently. For some Whites, multiracialism represents the pollution of the White race. For some Blacks it represents an attempt to escape Blackness. And for some Asians, Latinos and Arabs, multiracialism represents the dilution of the culture. Preview this 88-minute film, followed by refreshments and join the discussion with filmmaker Brian Chinhema, Sarah Ross, Director, HONEY (Honoring our New Ethnic Youth) Inc., Thomas Wright, Director, Oregon Council on Multiracial Affairs, and Dana Stone, Adjunct Faculty, University of Oregon Couples & Family Therapy.

Sponsored by Multicultural Center, the Presidents Commission on the Status of Women, and the Center for Academic Excellence. For more information, contact Patrice Hudson, Co-Chair, Presidents Commission on the Status of Women at (503)725-8327 or pjhudson@pdx.edu.

Multiracial Politics or the Politics of Being Multiracial?: Racial Theory, Civic Engagement, and Political Participation in a Contemporary Society

Jungmiwha Bullock
University of Southern California

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary, multi-method, and multi-site project that investigates where race as a social construction and outdated biological explanations of race contradict in the twenty-first century, using grassroots mobilization around multiracial identity as the point of departure. Although many scholars claim that ideas about biology as a determinant of race have long been set aside to adopt the view that race is indeed a social construction, this dissertation argues that this is true to the extent it has occurred in theory, but not in actual practice. Based on the extensive field research and data collected between 2004 and 2009, it is evident that when the identity or population under question involves two or more races (herein referred to as the “multiracial population”), the race-as-biology slippage is much more sharpened and pronounced, staunchly applied, and hardly if ever questioned. While it may be true that most groups are affected by this latent slippage in the discourse, I have observed that a unique phenomenon occurs specifically where “blood” and subsequently, “blood quantum”, continues to stand in as a metonym for multiracial identity in both private and public discourses. As long as “blood” as a signifier of race continues to be used both in public and private dialogue, and in social science research more broadly, I argue that race-as-biology dogma will continue to limit equal access to culturally competent healthcare, coverage in basic concerns in public policy, and educational accountability where race is still a measure by which resources are allocated. In order for society to engage in a more holistic discussion about race and politics, this dissertation proposes we begin to differentiate between “multiracial politics” from that which I consider “the politics of being multiracial.” It is precisely through the convergence of these two concepts that I locate my project. I hope to contribute a nuanced language we can incorporate for future research, public policy, and theory construction on the basis of race and ethnicity, and other structures of identity on a broader scale. The principal methods implemented in this ethnographic study includes case studies, interviews, participant and field observations, content analysis, and archival research collected primarily in the cities of Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago, and Sacramento.

Table of Contents

• CHAPTER 1/INTRODUCTION: “Multiracial Politics or the Politics of Being Multiracial?: The Theoretical and Pragmatic Challenges of Racialized Biology, Social Construction, and Hegemonoracial Ideology in a Contemporary Society”
• CHAPTER 2: “The Multi-Whos?: Unpacking the Historical Discourse on Defining the Multiracial Population in the United States Census and Social Science Research, 1850 to 2000”
• CHAPTER 3: “Simultaneous Identities: Comparative Interviews Among a Diverse Combination of Multiracial Experiences”
• CHAPTER 4: “From Manasseh to AMEA: A Case Study of Multiracial Community Building and Grassroots Activism through the Association of MultiEthnic Americans”
• CHAPTER 5: “Civically Engaging Identities: Keys to Effective Mobilization Toward Building a Collective Multiracial Community”
• CHAPTER 6/CONCLUSION: “Multiracial Politics: Critiques, Challenges, and Strategies”

The Cosmic Race / La Raza Cósmica

Johns Hopkins University Press
1997 (originally published in 1925)
160 pages
Paperback: 9780801856556

José Vasconcelos
translated, with an introduction, by Didier T. Jaén
afterword by Joseba Gabilondo

“The days of the pure whites, the victors of today, are as numbered as were the days of their predecessors. Having fulfilled their destiny of mechanizing the world, they themselves have set, without knowing it, the basis for the new period: The period of the fusion and the mixing of all peoples.” — from The Cosmic Race

In this influential 1925 essay, presented here in Spanish and English, José Vasconcelos predicted the coming of a new age, the Aesthetic Era, in which joy, love, fantasy, and creativity would prevail over the rationalism he saw as dominating the present age. In this new age, marriages would no longer be dictated by necessity or convenience, but by love and beauty; ethnic obstacles, already in the process of being broken down, especially in Latin America, would disappear altogether, giving birth to a fully mixed race, a “cosmic race,” in which all the better qualities of each race would persist by the natural selection of love.