Mixed Race Studies

The Politics of Biracialism [Issue]

The Black Scholar
Journal of Black Studies and Research
Fall 2009 (2009-09-22)
Volume 39, No. 3/4

Guest Editors:

Laura Chrisman, Professor of English
University of Washington

Habiba Ibrahim, Assistant Professor of English
University of Washington

Ralina Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington

Why a biracial issue, and why now? As black Americans we have mixed ancestry; one might ask what is gained by giving this obvious fact the attention of a special issue. Rather than focus on this broad history, however, we instead highlight here the situations of first-generation biracial black people. Perhaps this does not simplify matters. Foregrounding their specific experiences, identities, and concerns may stir up the anger of those who feel judged “not black enough” and the anger of those who feel betrayed and devalued by self-identifying biracial individuals. The politics of biracialism, seen this way, are individualistic, diminishing our community’s cohesion. Yet we feel that the time is right for an exploration of the topic. Biracial or multiracial studies is fast-growing and itself extremely varied in its methods, disciplines, and orientation. Acknowledging the important and interesting work that has been produced in the last two decades, we provide a forum for such work. Another factor in our choice of topic is the emergence, in 2008, of Obama as a presidential candidate. Both his blackness and his first generation biracialism have prompted new consideration, within black communities and within the U.S. population as a whole, of the operations and meanings of race, nation, family and community within the U.S.A. This gives us additional incentive to explore biracialism in the present moment. Our moment differs from the fraught late 1990s when the multiracial social movement campaigned for recognition in the 2000 Census, and was opposed by influential black voices. The present adds some confidence and optimism: to profile biracialism now, we suggest, is not to jeopardize black collectivity so much as it is to recognize and join the healthy debates that are flourishing within and beyond black studies…

Table of Contents

• Introduction to “The Politics of Biracialism” / Laura Chrisman
• Interracial Intimacies, Barack Obama, and the Politics of Multiracialism / Kimberly McClain DaCosta
• Review Essay: Performing the Twenty-first Century Tragic Mulatto: Black, White, and Jewish: Autobioraphy of Shifting Self by Rebecca Walker / Ralina Joseph
• Toward Black and Multiracial “Kinship” After 1997, or How a Race Man Became “Cablinasian” / Habiba Ibrahim
• Poetry: “The Art of Loving” / Madeleine Clifford
• Baby janay and Naomi Pabst: Negotiating Race Mixing, Adoption, and Transnationality / Naomi Pabst
• Reframing the National Family: Race Mixing and Re-telling American History / Catherine Squires
• Race, Multiraciality, and Barack Obama: Toward a More Perfect Union? / G. Reginald Daniel
• Books Reviews
  • Amalgamation Schemes: Anti-blackness and the Critique of Multiracialism by Jared Sexton / LeiLani Nishime
  • Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America  by Catherine R. Squires / Manoucheka Celeste
  • Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon by Jane Rhodes / Madhavi Murty
  • Mixed Race Hollywood Edited by Mary C. Beltrán and Camilla Fojas / Sarita Cannon

Skin Deep: How Race and Complexion Matter in the “Color-Blind” Era

Univerisity of Illinois Press
October 2003
256 pages
Dimensions: 6 x 9 in. 
Illustrations: 11 Line Drawings, 11 Tables
Paper ISBN: 978-1-929011-26-1

Edited by:

Cedric Herring, Professor of Sociology
Univeristy of Illinois, Chicago

Verna M. Keith, Professor of Socilology
Florida State University

Hayward Derrick Horton, Professor of Sociology
State University of New York, Albany

A collection of essays questioning the truth of American’s color-blind society from outside and inside communities of color.

Shattering the myth of the color-blind society, the essays in Skin Deep examine skin tone stratification in America, which affects relations not only among different races and ethnic groups but also among members of individual ethnicities. Written by some of the nation’s leading thinkers on race and colorism, these essays ask whether skin tone differentiation is imposed upon communities of color from the outside or is an internally-driven process aided and abetted by community members themselves. They also question whether the stratification process is the same for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. Skin Deep addresses such issues as the relationship between skin tone and self esteem, marital patterns, interracial relationships, socioeconomic attainment, and family racial identity and composition. The essays also grapple with emerging issues such as biracialism, color-blind racism, and 21st century notions of race.

History 270: Topics In American History – Mixed Race Identity in American Culture

Spring 2010

Greg Carter, Assistant Professor of History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Through most of the United States’ history, laws have been in place to prevent interracial intimacy and the production of mixed-race offspring, and the Tragic Mulatto figure, victim of confusion and isolation, has remained in the popular imaginary since the nineteenth century, reappearing in novels, movies, and even social science writing that addresses the challenges of multicultural societies. At the same time, writers have equated American identity with the creation of new, hybrid men since Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur asked “What then is the American, this new man?” in 1782. While less prevalent than ideas that disparage racial mixing, fascination with it has always gone hand in hand with ideas of citizenship, American identity, and progress. Why has there been a combination of appeal with mixed-race Americans along with an antipathy towards them as “half-breeds,” “intermediary,” or marginal”? Have stereotypes of them altered through the past two hundred years? Do they reflect how mixed-race people identify themselves? Lastly, how have these issues changed in the decades since the Supreme Court invalidated anti-miscegenation laws in 1967? This course aims to answer these questions through a variety of interdisciplinary sources. We will be reading fiction, essays, newspaper articles, and texts from the behavioral and social sciences that address a number of topics, including: the one-drop rule, abolition, assimilation, racial passing, the proposed “Multiracial” category for the Census, and representations in popular culture…

Read the entire syllabus here.

The Amerasian Problem: Blood, Duty, and Race

International Relations
Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2007)
pages 86-102
DOI: 10.1177/0047117807073769

Sue-Je Lee Gage, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Ithaca University

The concept of ‘mixed blood’ is not a new one; however, it was not until 1982 that an unprecedented policy entitled ‘The Amerasian Act’ was created by the US government. Focusing on the author’s ethnographic fieldwork in South Korea and the US, this article will unpack the assumptions underlying the seemingly religious statement ‘the American thing to do’ in terms of US policy, where ostensibly scientific notions of ‘race’, blood and identity are employed.

Read or purchase the article here.

In the Mix: Issue of Mixed Race Stirs Controversy for Census [Interview with Ralina L. Joseph]

International Examiner
Volume 32, Number 2
2010-01-21

Yayoi Lena Winfrey

A highly anticipated event for mixed-race people takes place this year. Although it may seem officious and routine for most, the upcoming U.S. Census is actually an exciting undertaking for those considering themselves multiethnic. That’s because for only the second time in history, there will be an opportunity to select more than one race on Census forms. Those who don’t claim a multiracial identity may not get why that’s so important. But for anyone who’s ever been forced to pick only one parent’s ethnic heritage as her own, it’s a major feat.

Ralina L. Joseph’s interest in multiethnic identity began with her undergraduate studies at Brown University. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communications and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Departments of American Ethnic Studies and Women Studies at the University of Washington. Discovering that her own personal mixed race experience was what others were discussing as a collective experience, she began exploring the subject.

“I think that the first generation of scholarship, of literary and cultural production of activism on mixed race and trying to articulate a mixed race identity, is very much about a coming out moment; the naming and claiming of being mixed,” says Joseph.

But by the time she was ready to graduate, Joseph was “suspicious” of the way multiracial activism was pushing multiracial categories in the Census, and longed to produce work that looked at the multiracial experience in regard to other groups of color…

…Further, what constitutes a mixed race heritage is debatable. Recently, a group called Multi Generation Multiracials (MGM’s) challenged First Generation Multiracials (FGM’s). Although both groups have mixed ancestry, FGM’s have one white and one black parent while MGM’s may have two parents, or even grandparents, that are mixed. MGM’s, who aren’t able to ‘officially’ claim a biracial heritage, argue that they are often more mixed looking than FGM’s who, because of their parents’ visibility, can automatically declare a dual ethnicity….

Read the entire article here.

Also, see Dr. Joseph’s lecture series, Mixed Race in the United States running through 2010-03-03.

The Color of Testamentary Freedom

Southern Methodist University Law Review
Volume 62
p. 1783
2009

Kevin Noble Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Wills that prioritize the interests of nontraditional families over collateral heirs test courts’ dedication to observing the posthumous wishes of testators. Collateral heirs who object to will provisions that redraw the contours of “family” are likely to profit from the incompatibility of testamentary freedom and social deviance. Thus, the interests of married, white adults may claim priority over nonwhite, unmarried others. Wills that acknowledge the existence of moral or social transgressions—namely, interracial sex and reproduction—incite will contests by collateral heirs who leverage their status as white and legitimate in order to defeat testamentary intent.

This Article turns to antebellum and postwar will contests between disinherited white heirs and mixed-race devisees to question the role of courts in defining “family” and the expectancy of collaterals to uphold this limitation. While other studies have separately examined the myth of testamentary freedom and argued for the legitimacy of diverse families, scholars have paid less attention to the color of inheritance. Drawing on Cheryl Harris’s groundbreaking work on property and racial expectation interests, this Article illustrates the centrality of whiteness in the validation of testamentary transfers. At the same time, it questions the legal resistance to nontraditional families, which substantially weakens the aspirational theory of donative freedom—the cornerstone of Trusts & Estates. Through the intersection of wills law and family law, this Article initiates a critical inquiry of the influence of race in testamentary transfers.

Read the entire article here.

Slaves in the Family: Testamentary Freedom and Interracial Deviance

2008
50 pages

Kevin Noble Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

This Article addresses the deviance of interracial sexuality acknowledged in testamentary documents. The language of wills calls into question the authority of probate and family law by forcing issues of deviance into the public realm. Will dramas, settled in or out of court, publicly unearth insecurities about family. Many objections to the stated intent of the testator generate from social prejudices toward certain kinds of interpersonal relationships: nonmarital, homosexual, and/or interracial. When pitted against an issue of a moral or social transgression, testamentary intent often fails. In order for these attacks on testamentary validity to succeed, they must be situated within an existing juridical framework that supports and adheres to the hegemony of denial that refuses to legitimate the wishes of the testator. Disinherited white relatives of white testators regularly challenged wills disposing a majority of an estate to paramours and children of African descent. In the nineteenth century, testators who eschewed traditional devises to spouses, relatives, and institutions in favor of mistresses, slaves, or both often incited will contests of testamentary incapacity, undue influence, or fraud. This Article is a case study of In Re Remley, an antebellum will contest between disinherited white collateral heirs and the intended black and mulatto devisees. It retains timeless value in its demonstration of the incompatibility of testamentary freedom and social deviance. I conclude that subjective conceptions of kinship, in particular those unpopular relationships that defy social norms, prevent the idea of testamentary freedom from reaching diverse articulations of family.

Read the entire article here.

Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640

Indiana University Press
2005-02-02
288 pages
1 bibliog., 1 index, 6.125 x 9.25
Paper ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21775-2; ISBN: 0-253-21775-X

Herman L. Bennett, Professor of Latin American History
City Univerisity of New York

The African community in colonial Mexico under Spanish and Catholic rule.

In this study of the largest population of free and slave Africans in the New World, Herman L. Bennett has uncovered much new information about the lives of slave and free blacks, the ways that their lives were regulated by the government and the Church, the impact upon them of the Inquisition, their legal status in marriage, and their rights and obligations as Christian subjects.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Africans, Absolutism, and Archives
1. Soiled Gods and the Formation of a Slave Society
2. “The Grand Remedy”: Africans and Christian Conjugality
3. Policing Christians: Persons of African Descent before the Inquisition and Ecclesiastical Courts
4. Christian matrimony and the Boundaries of African Self-Fashioning
5. Between Property and Person: Jurisdictional Conflicts over Marriage
6. Creoles and Christian Narratives
Postscript
Glossary
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index