Mixed Race Studies

Passing as Mixed Race

Open Salon
2010-03-03

Marcia Dawkins, Assistant Professor of Human Communication
California State University, Fullerton

Alexandre Dumas has always been one of my favorite writers. Works like The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo and Georges took me on countless adventures in worlds and times much different from my own. But there’s a kinship I’ve always felt with the author despite our differences in gender, nationality and history—being of mixed race. Dumas was the grandson of a freed Haitian slave and a French nobleman. When describing his racial profile to a man who insulted him for being different he’s reported to have said, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.” Though my own background is different from Dumas’s, and feels even more complex, that multiracial kinship is one of the reasons why I look forward to the U.S. release of the new biopic that opened in Paris on February 10th, L’Autre Dumas, or The Other Dumas…

Read the entire article here.

Changing the stereotypes

The Daily
University of Washington
2010-02-25

Kristen Steenbeeke

Sophomores Gabbie Duncalf and Fitsum Misgano were taking a class about mixed race when they first learned about the organization Mixed.

After hearing that the group — which caters specifically to mixed-race students but is open to anyone — was lacking officers, they decided to join during spring quarter of last year. Since then, the club has been an outlet for them to discuss mixed-race topics as well as an opportunity to spend time with other students who identify as mixed.

“As a mixed person, I have always felt hesitant to join monoracial organizations,” said Duncalf, whose mother is Filipino and father is Caucasian. “I feel different, and I don’t know if I fit in there, so I like that with Mixed, I can talk about race in different ways … I can talk to people who feel the same way and who want to change the way we talk about race.”

Discussions about new perceptions of race are important, not only among students but in society as a whole. Ralina Joseph, a communications professor at the UW, has made it her goal to change the way we talk about race, especially by disregarding the idea that multiracialism is a separate entity and using it to “deconstruct notions of race.”

“I think that I would encourage multiracial students to not only identify themselves with a multiracial group, but also to see themselves as a part of their larger racial and ethnic communities,” Joseph said…

Read the entire article here.

Barack Obama’s rise marks America’s first multiracial decade

Yahoo News
2009-12-09

Thomas Kelley

Everyone has a day of awakening when it comes to race. For me, it was a cool September day when I was eight years old. My family had recently moved to Colorado from Tennessee and like any child starting a new school, I was nervous. In the administrator’s office, my mother and I waited to go over my files. Nearby was another family—a white mother and a black father with their son and daughter. They were also arriving for their first day and the boy was around my age.

To my surprise, my mother turned to me and quietly told me she was worried for the children. We were living in a predominantly white suburb and she later explained to me that being black in our society was hard enough, but being half black, half white, was even harder. There was greater potential for rejection from both sides of the racial divide. Because of this, she wondered if entering a black-white relationship was always fair to the kids. In some ways, I understood my mother’s reservations, but I was also astonished. The simple reason why is because I’m biracial too, half Asian and half white.

That was more than 25 years ago. Today, the multiracial American has become an undeniable fact of life in the 21st century. From the actress Jessica Alba to the trend-scriber Malcolm Gladwell to the Olympic champion Apolo Anton Ohno, many multiracial Americans have reached superstar status in the last decade. And the biggest phenomenon of them all is President Barack Obama.

This isn’t a new story…

…“I think that President Obama has been trying, with really remarkable skill, to get Americans to begin to think of the United States as a fundamentally multiracial society,” historian Peggy Pascoe says. “And that strikes me as a really important move, partly because it will help dismantle the long history of white supremacy in the United States but also because it will help the United States fit more comfortably in the global world and the 21st century.”…

…For many activists and scholars, racial statistics still present a quandary of sorts. Naomi Zack, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon, who is multiracial herself and has written extensively on multiracial issues, acknowledges the 2000 and 2010 Census changes as a key advance. But she also argues for a stand-alone multiracial category and the eventual abolition of “race” itself. She argues that race is not a biological category but a concept, something that the Census acknowledges in its own briefs.

Read the entire article here.

Biracial Identity: Beyond Black and White

The Boston College Chronicle
2003-02-13
Volume 11, Number 11

Sean Smith, Chronicle Editor

Sociologist’s expertise built on experience, not just scholarly inquiry

The man in the next seat had been eyeing her furtively for a while, so Asst. Prof. Kerry Ann Rockquemore (Sociology) figured it was only a matter of time before the question came.

What are you?”

There was neither malice nor menace in her fellow airplane passenger’s voice, but Rockquemore – recalling the event in a recent interview – knew what he was asking: He wanted to know her racial and ethnic background.

The daughter of a black father and white mother, Rockquemore was no stranger to questions and misperceptions about her appearance. That very day, one person had spoken Spanish to her, apparently thinking she was Latina, and a casual remark by the attendant at her flight check-in indicated that he took her for Italian.

“What are you?”…

Read the entire article here.

Through Russwurm’s Eyes: ‘The Conditions and Prospects of Haiti’

Campus News
Bowdoin College
2010-03-01

John B. Russwurm, the College’s first African-American graduate and thought to be the third African-American to graduate from an American college, delivered a commencement address in 1826 that resonates nearly 184 years later.

The speech, “The Condition and Prospects of Haiti,” was delivered 22 years after Haiti won independence from France…

…About John B. Russwurm

Russwurm was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, the illegitimate son of a white planter and a black slave. His father, John Russwurm, of a wealthy Virginia family, went to Jamaica after completing his education in England. He sent his son, John Brown Russwurm, to Quebec at age eight so that he might receive a good education. Soon after moving to Maine, his father married Susan Blanchard. Russwurm then came to live with his father’s family, where he was accepted by his step-mother as one of her own. Russwurm stayed with the family even after his father died, continuing his education at Hebron Academy in Hebron, Maine. His step-mother and her new husband helped him to enroll at Bowdoin in 1824….

Read the entire article here.
Read Russwurm’s entire speech here.

Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820–1920

University of Massachusetts Press
July 2002
296 pages
6 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-55849-341-7
Paper ISBN: 978-1-55849-417-6

James M. O’Toole, Clough Professor of History
Boston College, Boston, Massachusets

• An alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club
• Winner of the New England Historical Association Book Award

The remarkable saga of a mixed-race family in nineteenth-century America

Through the prism of one family’s experience, this book explores questions of racial identity, religious tolerance, and black-white “passing” in America. Spanning the century from 1820 to 1920, it tells the story of Michael Morris Healy, a white Irish immigrant planter in Georgia; his African American slave Eliza Clark Healy, who was also his wife; and their nine children. Legally slaves, these brothers and sisters were smuggled north before the Civil War to be educated.

In spite of the hardships imposed by American society on persons of mixed racial heritage, the Healy children achieved considerable success. Rejecting the convention that defined as black anyone with “one drop of Negro blood,” they were able to transform themselves into white Americans. Their unlikely ally in this transition was the Catholic church, as several of them became priests or nuns. One brother served as a bishop in Maine, another as rector of the Cathedral in Boston, and a third as president of Georgetown University. Of the two sisters who became nuns, one was appointed the superior of convents in the United States and Canada. Another brother served for twenty years as a captain in the U.S. Coast Guard, enforcing law and order in the waters off Alaska.

The Healy children’s transition from black to white should not have been possible according to the prevailing understandings of race, but they accomplished it with apparent ease. Relying on their abilities, and in most cases choosing celibacy, which precluded mixed-race offspring, they forged a place for themselves. They also benefited from the support of people in the church and elsewhere. Even those white Americans who knew the family’s background chose to overlook their African ancestry and thereby help them to “get away” with passing.

By exploring the lifelong struggles of the members of the Healy family to redefine themselves in a racially polarized society, this book makes a distinctive contribution to our understanding of the enduring dilemma of race in America.

View a 58 minute-long discussion from 2002-12-04 with the author here.

Malaga Island: A Brief History

Compiled by the Students of ES 203 Service Learning Project
Bowdoin College
2003

Adrienne Heflich

Anna Troyansky

Samantha Farrell

Malaga Island is located in Casco Bay, near the mouth of the New Meadows River, and is roughly a half-mile long by a quarter-mile wide in size. It sits approximately one hundred yards from the mainland of Phippsburg. Malaga Island, which means “cedar” in the Abnaki Indian language, is heavily wooded, and has been uninhabited since 1912. The island is rich in archaeological deposits from its past residents. Remains from the pre-colonial Indian and Malagaite mixed-race settlements are largely unexcavated and are believed to be remarkably intact. Currently local fishermen use the island for lobster-trap storage.

Malaga Island was a very unique community. The black and mixed-race population of individuals and families was an anomaly in a state over 99% white. The concentration of minorities in the Malaga Island community caused fear and uneasiness in neighboring white communities on the mainland. Drifters and outsiders of mainland communities, both black and white, settled there in the mid-1800s. By 1900 the population had peaked at 42 individuals and interracial marriages were common on the island. Save for its racial diversity, Malaga resembled most other poor fishing communities on the Maine coast.

The Malagaites’ main source of income was subsistence fishing and limited farming. Tensions rose over issues of resource use as the Malagaites’ fishing directly competed with the economy on the mainland. More importantly, their dark skin, questionable morals, and apparent idleness (all thoroughly exaggerated in biased local and regional press) aroused suspicion and antipathy. In efforts to address the Malaga “problem”, in 1903 a missionary family established an informal school on Malaga in attempts to “reform” the inhabitants. The school was funded at first by private donations, and subsequently subsidized by state funding.

Tensions between the mainland and the island rose significantly at the turn of the century along with the burgeoning tourism industry on the Maine coast; Malaga was an eyesore for the mainland. Harpswell and Phippsburg disavowed jurisdiction over the community and the island was identified as “No Man’s Land,” becoming a ward of the state. In 1912, Governor Plaisted evicted the community of Malaga from their land and homes. Resettlement was prohibited and many Malagaites lacking the means to move elsewhere, were displaced to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded in Pineland. Some Malagaites strapped their houses to rafts and drifted up and down the river in search of a safe port. However, they were unwanted and stigmatized by the events of 1912. Private owners eventually bought the island, and possession shifted hands numerous times before it was finally acquired by MCHT.

The diaspora of the Malagaites remains a dark chapter in Maine and local history.  Descendents still bear the stigma of their infamous ancestors. An unspoken code of silence still remains, perhaps out of shame, perhaps out of ignorance. Myth still surrounds the factual events. It is hoped that in the near future, the Malagaite and precolonial Indian archeological remains will be excavated, undoubtedly unearthing a very fascinating history.

Read the entire paper here.

RACE: Are We So Different?

A Project of the American Anthropological Association
2007

We expect people to look different. And why not? Like a fingerprint, each person is unique. Every person represents a one-of-a-kind, combination of their parents’, grandparents’ and family’s ancestry. And every person experiences life somewhat differently than others.

Differences… they’re a cause for joy and sorrow. We celebrate differences in personal identity, family background, country and language. At the same time, differences among people have been the basis for discrimination and oppression.
 
Yet, are we so different? Current science tells us we share a common ancestry and the differences among people we see are natural variations, results of migration, marriage and adaptation to different environments. How does this fit with the idea of race?

Looking through the eyes of history, science and lived experience, the RACE Project explains differences among people and reveals the reality – and unreality – of race.  The story of race is complex and may challenge how we think about race and human variation, about the differences and similarities among people.

Visit the project website here.

Blended Nation: A Portrait of Mixed-Race America

Yes! Magazine
2010-02-10

The fear and xenophobia in the aftermath of 9/11 got Mike Tauber and Pamela Singh thinking about how race and ethnicity are based on visual cues.

They began photographing a network of mixed-race friends in the spring of 2002, eventually working with organizations like Swirl, a national, multiracial organization that challenges notions of race; and the Mavin Foundation, an organization that raises awareness about the experiences of multiracial people.

Read the entire article here.
To view a photo essay that samples the book, click here.

Blended Nation: Portraits and Interviews of Mixed-Race America

Channel Photographics
2009-08-11
140 pages
11 x 11 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-9773399-2-1

Mike Tauber

Pamela Singh

What are you? On the 2000 U.S. Census, for the first time, multiracial individuals were allowed to indicate more than one race. Nearly seven million Americans did so. Blended Nation: Portraits and Interviews of Mixed Race America features individuals from this rapidly growing demographic of mixed race Americans across the country who identify as more than one race.

Through words and images, Mike Tauber and Pamela Singh explore the concept of race in America through the prism of the very personal experiences of people of mixed race heritage. Ann Curry writes in her Foreword, “As dad would say, ‘You are the best of both worlds,’ and so are the people you see on these pages, who cannot but strengthen America’s dream, as they are living proof it comes true.”