Mixed Race Studies

Vikings Possibly Carried Native American to Europe

Discovery News
2010-11-17

Medieval texts suggest the Vikings arrived in the New World more than 1,000 years ago.

THE GIST

• DNA analysis reveals that four families in Iceland possess genes typically found in Native Americans or East Asians.
• Genealogical evidence revealed that these families shared a distant ancestor from the same region.
• The Vikings may have brought back a Native American woman with them after they arrived in the New World.

The first Native American to arrive in Europe may have been a woman brought to Iceland by the Vikings more than 1,000 years ago, a study by Spanish and Icelandic researchers suggests.

The findings boost widely-accepted theories, based on Icelandic medieval texts and a reputed Viking settlement in Newfoundland in Canada, that the Vikings reached the American continent several centuries before Christopher Columbus traveled to the “New World.”

Spain’s CSIC scientific research institute said genetic analysis of around 80 people from a total of four families in Iceland showed they possess a type of DNA normally only found in Native Americans or East Asians…

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Graduate Student Profile: Chelsea Guillermo-Wann (Education)

UCLA Graduate Quarterly
University of California, Los Angeles
Fall 2010
pages 6-7

Growing up in Santa Barbara, Chelsea Guillermo-Wann started “developing concepts of white and brown” while she was still in grade school, concepts that gave her a different understanding of her white mother and brown father—his heritage both Mexican and Filipino. The town was “very stratified in terms of race and socioeconomic status,” she says, and she saw that her father was treated differently than her mother—mistreated, that is—although both had college degrees. This “led me to question issues of social stratification and racism,” she says…

..Now beginning her third year as a Ph.D. student, Chelsea is drawing up a dissertation proposal likely to focus on something she knows a lot about: being multiracial in the academic world. Although a growing number of students represent more than one race or ethnicity, very little research has been done about their experience, beyond issues of identity formation. There’s even some question about whether they can be considered a group, she says…

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“The Horrid Alternative”: Miscegenation and Madness in the Frontier Romance

Journal of American & Comparative Cultures
Volume 24, Issue 3 (Fall/Winter 2001)
Pages: 137-151
DOI: 10.1111/j.1537-4726.2001.2403_137.x

Harry J. Brown, Assistant Professor of English
DePauw University

In a speech delivered to a gathering of Delaware and Mohican Indians, Thomas Jefferson foresaw the destiny of the United States as a “marriage” of its various races, declaring that, in ”the natural progress of things,” Indians and whites “would meet and blend together… intermix, and become one people” (Wald 25). He invites (the Indians to “mix with us by marriage” and grandly prophesies, “your blood will run in our veins and will spread with us over this great island” (Wald 26). But even as Jefferson imagined the new nation as a “marriage” of whites and Indians, the subsequent generation of writers who assumed the responsibility of telling the story of th nation found it difficult to imagine what such a marriage would yield.

In her survey of American frontier writing in The Land Before Her (1984), Annette Kolodny observes a “studied literary silence on the subject of white-red intermarriage” (70). Scholars have since suggested that the uneasiness of the frontier romance with miscegenation stems from the sacred myths of  racial, national, and patriarchal accendance. Racial mixing represents a fundamental contradiction to the national ideology of racial separatism; therefore, the frontier romance, intent upon the creation of a “national” literature, registers this contradiction as a tense “silence.”

I will examine this “silence” more closely in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok: A Tale of Early-Times (1824), James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of The Mohicans (1826), and Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, or A Tale of Early Times in ihe Massachusetts (1827).  As these romances are confronted and confounded by the specter of miscegenation, they drift from the daylight world of the “historical,” the native realm of a solid “national” literature, into the nightmare world of me “gothic,” where racial hybridity is manifested not exactly as “silence” but more sharply as madness, degeneracy, and horror. Within these novels we find an intersection of science and sensationalism as the widely-held racial theory of “diminishing fertility” manifest itself in the romance as insanity or living death, the ineveitable “curse” invoked by the “unnatural” mingling of white and Indian blood. The presence of miscegenated women and “half-breed” figures confounds the foundational categories of the national identity imagined by these romances—white and red, civilization and nature, future and past—and, consequently, these figures are represented as irrational, perverse, or doomed, the recurring “nightmare” invading America’s dream of itself.

At the same time, a tradition of “hybrid texts” resists this widely disseminated myth of degeneration and present alternative visions of racial mixing to those provided by the critically sanctioned historical romances. James E. Seaver’s A Narrative of the the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824), for example, published in the same years as Hobomok and equal to The Last of the Mohicans in popularity, offers a way to “read against” the The popularily of the narrative further suggests that, contrary to critical assumptions, audiences were perhaps more receptive to Jefferson’s idea of a racially mixed American future than were romance writers and reviewers.  Jemison’s over-looked success tells us that while reviewers strongly objected to considering miscegenation as part of the formula for a national literature, common readers were apparently less troubled by the prospect of a heterogeneous nation and less insistent on the separation of races as a necessary component of national identity. This apparent gap between the critical and popular responses suggests that…

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Some Refelctions on Eugenics and Religion

Eugenics Review
Volume 18, Number 1 (April 1926)
pages 7-14

The Right Rev. E. W. Barnes, ScD., Hon. D.D., F.R.S. (1874-1953)
Bishop of Birmingham, England

The Galton Lecture delivered before the Eugenics Education Society at their Meeting in London on Tuesday, February 16th, 1926.

Eugenics is the science of human betterment. Its object is to discover how we may breed better human beings. The eugenist seeks to improve human racial stocks in the belief that he can thereby quicken the process of civilisation. He fixes attention primarily on the individual and not on his surroundings. He is concerned with nature rather than nurture, with the innate qualities which the individual inherits rather than with the environment in which those qualities have an opportunity of growth and expression. Eugenics and Sociology are thus complementary to one another. The extravagant eugenist says that the swine makes the stye. The extravagant sociologist says that the stye makes the swine. Neither statement expresses the full truth and even expert biologists differ widely as to the extent to which the balance of truth inclines one way or the other.

It cannot he disputed that the innate good qualities which a man inherits fail to develop in bad surroundings. Ignorance, dirt, vicious example and abject poverty degrade personality. They prevent the growth of that which is best in a child and stimulate its baser instincts. So strong in the life of a child are the influences of what the psychologists call association and suggestion that many think that environment is of more importance than heredity. It must be admitted that our knowledge as to what constitutes ‘heredity’ lacks precision. We are ignorant as to how far a child receives from its parents at conception a set of physical and psychical fundamentals which no environment will change. But statistical enquiries in general confirm the common saying that ‘like begets like.’ We have, moreover, to remember that civilisation is a racial product. The forces of association and suggestion which act on any individual within it, no less than most of his physical surroundings, are the creation of the race. If the racial stock be good such forces and physical conditions will gradually become more beneficial. If the stock be poor, both its physical environment and mental atmosphere will gradually degenerate. The ultimate creative power of a civilisation resides in the innate racial qualities of the people which make it, whatever be the process by which those qualities were initially produced.

No nation is homogeneous. Probably all races result from a blend of peoples of different types. A so-called pure race is one which has lived so long free from alien intrusion that a uniform type has been gradually evolved. In such a race the fundamentals due to heredity have been thoroughly mixed. Among its members there is therefore a naturally strong social cohesion. Individuals think, feel, and act in much the same way. In particular there will be uniformity of religious outlook. For a pure race what Disraeli called ‘the religion of all sensible men’ is a definite entity.

When a nation is mixed and, in particular, when one race imposes itself upon another there can be no such unity. At first the apparent civilisation will be that of the dominant race. Culture will be created by the ruling aristocracy: and the populace will accept organisation by which it benefits, though this be based on principles and ideas with which it has little sympathy or understanding. This situation probably existed when Greek civilisation reached its zenith. Ultimately the ruling stocks, died out, dissipated by war or luxury. Such of their descendants as survived were the offspring of mixed marriages, racially impure. Now when two races are thus mixed the individual seems to lack stability of organisation. The characteristics derived from his parents are associated rather than blended. Probably it is only after a fairly large number of generations that a new type of harmony is created. In the early generations the physical characters of one or other of the parental types may be dominant: but the recessive strain cannot be ignored; and I believe that in the fundamentals of the mind there is disharmony. The distrust of half-castes is not the outcome of mere prejudice. They are often unstable in character. In popular phrase ‘you never know what they will do next.’ It is impossible to foretell which side of their mental inheritance will be uppermost on any particular occasion.

After a sufficient number of generations a mixed race evolves a unity, a unity in diversity, of its own. Which of the two strands which go to make it is dominant? The answer seems to be that which is indigeneous to the soil. Black and white in England mate and white survives. Black and white in Jamaica mate and black survives. There seems little doubt that in ancient Greece the original population gradually asserted itself. Most certainly the great intellectual achievements of the Golden Age were gradually ignored; they were submerged by primitive folk-beliefs thrust up from the populace. Moreover where the physical characters of one of two mixed races prove the stronger, the mental qualities of that race are usually dominant; and vice versa. The half-caste in Jamaica not only becomes darker in successive generations but he also becomes more negroid in his habit of mind. Language, as we know, is no criterion of racial origin. But ideas and especially religious ideas are a very good criterion as to which strain in a mixed race has proved the stronger. The religious practices and beliefs of the black Republic of Hayti are not, according to good observers, vastly different from those of the African jungle…

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Hope, Fear, Shame, Frustration: Continuity and Change in the Expression of  Coloured Identity in White Supremacist South Africa, 1910-1994

Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume 32, Number 3 (September, 2006)
pages 467-487

Mohamed Adhikari, Associate Professor of Historical Studies,
University of Cape Town

This article seeks to explain the basic impulses behind coloured exclusivity in white supremacist South Africa and to elaborate on continuity and change in the processes of coloured self-definition by identifying the core attributes of coloured identity and outlining the ways in which they operated to reinforce and reproduce that identity. The central argument is that coloured identity is better understood not as having evolved through a series of transformations, as conventional historical thinking would have it and as the existing literature assumes, but as having remained remarkably stable throughout the era of white rule. It is argued that this stability derived from a core of enduring characteristics that informed the manner in which colouredness functioned as an identity during this period. This is not to contend that coloured identity was static or that it lacked fluidity, but that there were both important constraints on the ways in which it was able to find expression and sufficiently strong continuities in its day-to-day functioning for coloured identity to have remained recognisably uniform despite radical changes in the social and political landscape during this time. The principal constituents of this stable core are the assimilationism of the coloured people, which spurred hopes of future acceptance into the dominant society; their intermediate status in the racial hierarchy, which generated fears that they might lose their position of relative privilege and be relegated to the status of Africans; the negative connotations, especially the shame attached to racial hybridity, with which colouredness was imbued; and finally, the marginality of the coloured community, which severely limited their options for social and political action, giving rise to a great deal of frustration.

Read or purchase the article here.

The “Sabines”: A Study of Racial Hybrids in a Louisiana Coastal Parish

Social Forces
Volume 29, Number 2 (December, 1950)
pages 148-154

Vernon J. Parenton

Roland J. Pellegrin

Read before the thirteenth annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Biloxi, Mississippi, April 15, 1950.

Historically, the position of the racial and  cultural  hybrid in rural American society has received but little attention from sociologists. Beginning with the twentieth century, however, and especially since 1930, a number of social scientists have centered their investigations on such marginal groups. The acculturative processes associated with the formation of hybrid groups are as difficult to analyze as they are sociologically interesting. Nevertheless the complexity of these processes may be viewed as a challenge rather than as a barrier to social investigations.

Among those areas of the United States where hybrid groups arc found, Louisiana constitutes an interesting socio-cultural laboratory for such research. Partly because of the heterogeneous racial and ethnic character of the state’s population, with its concomitant diversity of cultures, and partly because of its geographical position, Louisiana contains a number of racial and cultural “islands,” the inhabitants oi which range in color from brown to near white. This paper is a preliminary report on a tri-racial group, derisively called the “Sabines,” who inhabit the marshy fringe of a Louisiana parish bordering the Gulf of Mexico. These persons, of mixed white, Indian, and Negro ancestry, have a unique history.

Historical Background

The first white men to explore the Gulf Coast found several Indian tribes inhabiting the area. These tribes may be classified into five linguistic groups: the Muskhogean, Natchez, Tunican, Chitimachan, and Atakapan. In Louisiana the most important group was the Muskhogean, which was, composed of a variety of tribes, including the Houma, Washa, Chawasha, Bayogoula, Chakchiuma, and several others.  The Indian element present in the Sabines of today is derived from a variety of these Muskhogean tribes, but principally from the Houmas…

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Chinese Interracial Families

Undergraduate Research Journal
Indiana University, South Bend
1998

Lin Liu, Honors Freshman Research Seminar Participant

In an increasingly multi-cultural America, the Chinese population as well as the number of Chinese interracial families has risen significantly among all other nationalities. Since the 1940’s, the Chinese population has soared. There have been many contributing factors. These factors include World War II, the Immigration Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Movement, and the ruling of anti-miscegenation laws as unconstitutional. But despite this continual increase over the years, many Chinese and Chinese interracial families still face barriers such as subtle and blatant racism. From history and current statistics we see these families have overcome many obstacles to become what they are today. But there is no reason for these barriers to remain in place because these families are special in their own way.

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