Mixed Race Studies

Ethnic Studies 064: Mixed Race Descent in the Americas

Mills College, Oakland, California
Fall 2010

Melinda Micco, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies

This is an introductory course that examines the historical and theoretical development of identities and of communities of multiracial and multiethnic people. In the academy, in government, and in popular culture, the lives and experiences of racially mixed people, and how others perceive them, have become topics of intense debate and scrutiny since the late-1990s. Mostly recently, newly elected President Barack Obama’s racial and ethnic identity highlighted the issues and played a significant role in the 2008 presidential elections.

This course will examine the historical evolution of such terms as the “marginal man” and the “150% man” to understand the present concerns of racial and ethnic stereotyping. We will engage questions such as: Who are “mixed-race” people in the US? How are they perceived, described, and treated in various communities? What are the effects of various federal and state policies, such as anti-miscegenation laws, American Indian “relocation,” immigration, and Japanese American internment? What is the legacy of race-based chattel slavery on both African-American and non-African-American communities? What are racial and color hierarchies and how do they affect mixed-race people? What are real lived experiences of mixed-race people in the US?

Required Text

• Gaskins, P. F. (1999). What are you?: Voices of Mixed-Race Young People. New York: Macmillan.
• Ifekwunigwe, J. O. (Ed.) (2004). Mixed Race Studies: A Reader. New York: Routledge.
• Spickard, P. R., & Burroughs, W. J. (Eds.) (2000). We Are A People: Narrative and Multiplicity in Constructing Ethnic Identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

For more information, click here.

Redeeming the “Character of the Creoles”: Whiteness, Gender and Creolization in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue

Journal of Historical Sociology
Volume 23, Issue 1 (March 2010)
pages 40–72
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6443.2009.01359.x

Yvonne Fabella, Lecturer of History
University of Pennsylvania

This article examines the political significance of white creolization in pre-revolutionary French Saint Domingue. Eighteenth-century Europeans tended to view white creoles as having physically, morally, and culturally degenerated due to the tropical climate, the monotony of plantation life, and their interaction with enslaved and free people of color. Yet elite white colonists in Saint Domingue claimed that white creoles possessed certain positive traits due to their new world birth, traits that rendered them physically stronger and potentially more virtuous than the French. Focusing on little-known publications authored by the white creole Moreau de Saint-Méry, this article highlights the deployment of gendered notions of virtue and noble savagery in debates over white creolization. Moreau’s claims, when placed in the context of a conflict between local colonial magistrates and the French Colonial Ministry, challenge interpretations of white creolization as an undesirable, subversive side-effect of colonial slavery. Rather, white colonial men claimed that white colonists knew best how to ensure the obedience of the enslaved precisely because of their creolization.

Read or purchase the article here.

Revolutionizing Romance: Interracial Couples in Contemporary Cuba

Rutgers University Press
2010-03-01
232 pages
3 illustrations. 2 tables and 1 map
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4723-7
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4722-0
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8135-4923-1

Nadine T. Fernandez, Associate Professor of Social Sciences
State University of New York, Empire State College

Scholars have long heralded mestizaje, or race mixing, as the essence of the Cuban nation. Revolutionizing Romance is an account of the continuing significance of race in Cuba as it is experienced in interracial relationships. This ethnography tracks young couples as they move in a world fraught with shifting connections of class, race, and culture that are reflected in space, racialized language, and media representations of blackness, whiteness, and mixedness. As one of the few scholars to conduct long-term anthropological fieldwork in the island nation, Nadine T. Fernandez offers a rare insider’s view of the country’s transformations during the post-Soviet era. Following a comprehensive history of racial formations up through Castro’s rule, the book then delves into more intimate and contemporary spaces. Language, space and place, foreign tourism, and the realm of the family each reveal, through the author’s deft analysis, the paradox of living a racialized life in a nation that celebrates a policy of colorblind equality.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Interracial Couples from Colony to Revolution
• 2. Socialist Equality and the Color-Blind Revolution
• 3. Mapping Interracial Couples: Race and Space in Havana
• 4. The Everyday Presence of Race
• 5. Blackness, Whiteness, Class, and the Emergent Economy
• 6. Interracial Couples and Racism at Home
• Epilogue