Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Black and White Race and Public Policy

Hypatia
Volume 10, Issue 1 (February 1995)
Pages 120 – 132
Special Issue: Feminist Ethics and Social Policy, Part 1
DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.1995.tb01356.x

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

The American folk concept of race assumes the factual existence of races. However, biological science does not furnish empirical support for this assumption. Public policy derived from nineteenth century slave-owning patriarchy is the only foundation of the “one-drop rule” for black and white racial inheritance. In principle, Americans who are both black and white have aright to identify themselves racially. In fact, recent demographic changes and multiracial academic scholarship support this right.

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Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country

Duke University Press
2006
392 pages
7 illustrations, 1 table

Edited by:

Tiya Miles, Professor of American Culture, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Native American Studies
University of Michigan

Sharon Patricia Holland, Associate Professor of English; African & African American Studies
Duke University

Contributors: Joy Harjo, Tiya Miles, Eugene B. Redmond, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Sharon Patricia Holland, Tiffany M. McKinney, David A. Y. O. Chang, Barbara Krauthamer, Melinda Micco, Celia E. Naylor-Ojurongbe, Deborah E. Kanter, Robert Warrior, Virginia Kennedy, Tamara Buffalo, Wendy S. Walters, Robert Keith Collins, Ku’ualoha Ho’omanawanui, Roberta J. Hill

Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds explores the critically neglected intersection of Native and African American cultures. This interdisciplinary collection combines historical studies of the complex relations between blacks and Indians in Native communities with considerations and examples of various forms of cultural expression that have emerged from their intertwined histories. The contributors include scholars of African American and Native American studies, English, history, anthropology, law, and performance studies, as well as fiction writers, poets, and a visual artist.

Essays range from a close reading of the 1838 memoirs of a black and Native freewoman to an analysis of how Afro-Native intermarriage has impacted the identities and federal government classifications of certain New England Indian tribes. One contributor explores the aftermath of black slavery in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations, highlighting issues of culture and citizenship. Another scrutinizes the controversy that followed the 1998 selection of a Miss Navajo Nation who had an African American father. A historian examines the status of Afro-Indians in colonial Mexico, and an ethnographer reflects on oral histories gathered from Afro-Choctaws. Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds includes evocative readings of several of Toni Morrison’s novels, interpretations of plays by African American and First Nations playwrights, an original short story by Roberta J. Hill, and an interview with the Creek poet and musician Joy Harjo. The Native American scholar Robert Warrior develops a theoretical model for comparative work through an analysis of black and Native intellectual production. In his afterword, he reflects on the importance of the critical project advanced by this volume.

Table of Contents

• Foreword: “Not Recognized by the Tribe” / Sharon P. Holland
• Preface: Eating out of the Same Pot? / Tiya Miles
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds / Tiya Miles and Sharon Patricia Holland
  1. A Harbor of Sense: An Interview with Joy Harjo / Eugene B. Redmond
  2. An/Other Case of New England Underwriting: Negotiating Race and Property in Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge / Jennifer D. Brody and Sharon P. Holland
  3. Race and Federal Recognition in Native New England / Tiffany M. McKinney
  4. Where Will the Nation Be at Home? Race, Nationalisms, and Emigration Movements in the Creek Nation / David A. Y. O. Chang
  5. In Their “Native Country”: Freedpeople’s Understandings of Culture and Citizenship in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations / Barbara Krauthamer
  6. “Blood and Money”: The Case of Seminole Freedmen and Seminole Indians in Oklahoma / Melinda Micco
  7. “Playing Indian”? The Selection of Radmilla Cody as Miss Navajo Nation, 1997-1998 / Celia E. Naylor
  8. “Their Hair was Curly”: Afro-Mexicans in Indian Villages, Central Mexico, 1700-1820 / Deborah E. Kanter
  9. Lone Wolf and DuBois for a New Century: Intersections of Native American and African American Literatures / Robert Warrior
  10. Native Americans, African Americans, and the Space That Is America: Indian Presence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison / Virginia Kennedy
  11. Knowing All of My Names / Tamara Buffalo
  12. After the Death of the Last: Performance as History in Monique Mojica’s Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots / Wendy S. Walter
  13. Katimih o Sa Chata Kiyou (Why Am I Not Choctaw)? Race in the Lived Experiences of Two Black Choctaw Mixed-Bloods / Robert Keith Collins
  14. From Ocean to o-Shen: Reggae Rap, and Hip Hop in Hawai’i / Ku’ualoha Ho’omanawanui
  15. Heartbreak / Roberta J. Hill
• Afterword / Robert Warrior
• References
• Contributors
• Index

Becoming Modern Racialized Subjects: Detours through our pasts to produce ourselves anew

Cultural Studies
Volume 23, Number 4 (July 2009)
pages 624-657
DOI: 10.1080/09502380902950948

Hazel V. Carby, Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies
Yale University

This essay is a close engagement with the work of Stuart Hall which has been central to the project of unraveling the complexities of difference, divisions in history, consciousness and humanity, embedded in the geo-political oppositions of colonial center and colonized margin, home and abroad, and metropole and periphery. Hall has exposed the temporal enigma that haunts the relation between colonial and post-colonial subject formation. In response, the essay focuses on the geo-politics rather than the linear temporality of encounters in an examination of the sources of tension, contention and anxiety that arise as racialized subjects are brought into being through narration in examples drawn from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano and post-colonial Caribbean novelists. The essay concludes by positing an alternative narrative for the emergence of the modern racialized state in Britain, one that has its origins in official responses to the presence of black American troops and West Indian civilian and Royal Air Force (RAF) personnel on British soil during World War II, rather than to the Caribbean migrants who arrived on the Empire Windrush in 1948.

…It was not only black subjects that were policed and disciplined. Black servicemen were dialogically constituted in their blackness in and through their potential and actual encounters with white women who were also to be ‘managed’. Reynolds records the ‘intensive efforts [that] were made to guide the conduct of British women’. For women who were in the armed service ‘military discipline was invoked’ to discourage them from fraternizing with black soldiers and by January 1944 these policies hardened when ‘the Women’s Territorial Auxillary issued an order ‘‘forbidding its members to speak to colored American soldiers except in the presence of a white [person]’’’. These systems of surveillance were not only instituted and regulated by the military they were also enabled and maintained by members of local constabularies who ‘routinely reported women soldiers found in the company of black GIs to their superiors.’ Even civilian women were prosecuted by their local police who evoked ‘a variety of laws’ to take them into custody when they were found ‘in company of black soldiers’ (Reynolds 1996, p. 229).

White women were counseled by families, friends and authorities alike, against marriage with black men; black American soldiers who wished to marry British women were refused permission to do so by their Commanding Officers and quickly transferred. Black journalist Ormus Davenport, ‘himself a wartime GI, claimed that there had been a ‘‘gentleman’s agreement’’ to prevent mixed marriages’. But ‘in the 8th Air Force Service Command where most of the American Air Force blacks were concentrated, a total ban on such marriages was quite explicit’ (Reynolds 1996, p. 231). The result was disastrous for their offspring…

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