Mixed Race Studies

The use of the term “colored” was coined by mixed-race people (Ottley 1968:95).  In the eighteenth century this population and their descendants created their own caste system, which was marked by color and class. In one case in South Carolina, mixed-race people formed the Brown Fellowship Society, an exclusive mulatto organization that I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 2.  Mixed descendants of French and Spanish settlers in New Orleans also distinguished themselves by adopting the terms gens de couleur or people of color.  This term carried with it all the connotations of higher case associated with nonblackness and mixed ancestry.  In the first half of the nineteenth century, “colored” also became the term of polite usage among free Negroes of the North.

Objections to the term “colored” were duly noted in the African American press. In the September 24, 1831, edition of The Liberator, an editorial declared that “the term ‘colored’ is not a good one.  Whenever used, it recalls to mind the offensive distinction of color.”  T. Thomas Fortune, a leading journalist in the first quarter twentieth century, also declared that the word was a vague misnomer and had “neither geographical nor political significance, as applied to race” (a quoted in Barry and Blassingame 1982:391). Nevertheless, many people, especially middle- and upper-class African Americans, used the term “colored” (Isaacs 1964:70).  The need for a name that was self-defined and descriptive remained.

Obiagele Lake, Blue Veins and Kinky Hair: Naming and Color Consciousness in African America (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003), 11.

Blue Veins and Kinky Hair: Naming and Color Consciousness in African America

Praeger Publishers
2003-06-30
160 pages
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-89789-558-3
eBook ISBN: 978-0-313-05864-6

Obiagele Lake

The author explores how Africans in America internalized the negative images created of them by the European world, and how internalized racism has worked to fracture African American unity and thereby dilute inchoate efforts toward liberation. In the late 1960s, change began with the “Black Is Beautiful” slogan and new a consciousness, which went hand in hand with Black Power and pan-African movements. The author argues that for any people to succeed, they must first embrace their own identity, including physical characteristics. Naming, skin color, and hair have been topical issues in the African American community since the 18th century. These three areas are key to a sense of identity and self, and they were forcefully changed when Africans were taken out of Africa as slaves.

The author discusses how group and personal names, including racial epithets, have had far-reaching and deep-seated effects on African American self perception. Most of her attention, however, is focused on issues of physical appearance which reflect a greater or lesser degree of racial blending. She tells us about exclusive African American organizations such as The Blue Vein Society, in which membership was extended to African Americans whose skin color and hair texture tended toward those of European Americans, although wealthy dark-skinned people were also eligible. Much of the book details the lengths to which African American women have gone to lighten their complexions and straighten their hair. These endeavors started many years ago, and still continue, although today there is also a large number of women who are adamantly going natural. Her historical look at the cultural background to African American issues of hair and skin is the first monograph of its kind.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Renaming African People
• Mulattoes and Color Consciousness in the United States
• Hair and Color Consciousness in African America
• Hair and Skin Color in Africa and the Africa and the African Diaspora
• The Delinking of African Hair
• Appendix A: Mixed Race Names
• Appendix B: Percentage Selecting Traits Across Race Labels
• Appendix C: Names Used by African Americans in U.S. History
• Appendix D: African American Orginizations Bearing the term “African”
• Appendix E: Original Version of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”
• Appendix F: Rendition of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”
• Appendix G: “Yellow Rose of Texas” Marching Song
• Appendix H: Brown Fellowship Society Members, 1790-1869
• Appendix I: Brown Fellowship Society Slave Owners
• Appendix J: Facts About Hairdressing Innovations
• References Cited
• Index

The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future

Cinema Journal
Volume 44, Number 2 (Winter, 2005)
pages 34-49

Leilani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington

Applying the literature of passing to cyborg cinema makes visible the politics of cyborg representations and illuminates contemporary conceptions of mixed-race subjectivity and interpolations of mixed-race bodies. The passing narrative also reveals the constitutive role of melancholy and nostalgia both in creating cyborg cinema and in undermining its subversive potential.

Read the entire article here.