Mixed Race Studies

Trials contesting racial identity illustrate the ways that racial categories have come into being over the course of U.S. history.  Through them we can observe the changing meaning of race throughout our history, and the changes and continuities in racism itself, from the roots in a slave society up through the twentieth century.  Drawing lines between “races” determined not only who could be free but also who could be capable of citizenship.  Thus the trials of racial identity became trials about the attributes of citizenship for the men and women who were their subjects.

Gross, Ariela J. 2008. What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America. page 7. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

The Marrow of Tradition: Electronic Edition

Boston; New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1901
329 pages

Electronic Edition
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
1997
Text scanned (OCR) by Kathy Graham
Text encoded by Teresa Church and Natalia Smith
Filesize: ca. 600KB

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-CH database “A Digitized Library of Southern Literature, Beginnings to 1920.”

• Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed, and the trailing part of a word has been joined to the preceding line.
• All quotation marks and ampersand have been transcribed as entity references.
• All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as ” and ” respectively.
• All single right and left quotation marks are encoded as ‘ and ‘ respectively.
• Indentation in lines has not been preserved.
• Running titles have not been preserved.
• Spell-check and verification made against printed text using Author/Editor (SoftQuad) and Microsoft Word spell checkers.

Partial summary by Mary Alice Kirkpatrick from 2004:

…Chesnutt’s ambitious and complex novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), was based on the 1898 race riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, which some of Chesnutt’s relatives survived. This event left a considerable number of African Americans dead and expelled thousands more from their homes. Set in the fictional town of Wellington, The Marrow of Tradition centers on two prominent families, the Carterets and the Millers, and explores their remarkably intersected lives. Major Philip Carteret, editor of The Morning Chronicle newspaper, emerges as the unabashed white supremacist who, along with General Belmont and Captain George McBane, seeks to overthrow “Negro domination,” setting in motion those events that culminate in the murderous “revolution.” Dr. William Miller, following his medical education in the North and abroad, has returned home to “his people,” establishing a local black hospital in Wellington. Dr. Miller’s wife, Janet, is the racially mixed half-sister of Major Carteret’s wife, Olivia. Not surprisingly, Olivia Merkell Carteret struggles to suppress the truth of her father’s scandalous second marriage to Julia Brown, his black servant and Janet Miller’s mother. The novel also contains several intricate subplots involving a wide cast of secondary characters: a heroic rebel’s vow to avenge his father’s wrongful death; a staged robbery that results in an ostensible murder; romantic entanglements; and endless doublings and pairings of both white and black characters. Yet throughout The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt depicts the problems afflicting the New South, offering an invective that criticizes the nation’s panicked responses to issues of social equality and miscegenation…

Read the entire summary here.

Read the entire novel here in HTML or XML/TEI format.

A Critical Race Theory Approach to Understanding Cinematic Representations of the Mixed Race Experience

Center for Race & Gender
University of California, Berkeley
2010-12-08

10/5/2010 CRG Forum: Mixed Race/Mixed Space in Media Culture & Militarized Zones
“A Critical Race Theory Approach to Understanding Cinematic Representations of the Mixed Race Experience”

Kevin Escudero, Ethnic Studies

This presentation focuses on the developmental trajectory of the portrayal of mixed race people in mainstream media.  Primarily looking at film, but also analyzing other media texts such as photography, stand-up comedy and particular sub-genres of film (Disney, television series, etc.) this presentation seeks to understand the ways in which different forms of media have portrayed mixed race people pre and post-Loving.  While much work has been done on the depiction of mixed race people in media post-Loving, there is a need for such work to be contextualized within the pre-Loving depictions of mixed race.  Furthermore, very little attention has been given to the ways in which pre-1967 depictions of mixed race characters (e.g. the tragic mulatto) oftentimes reflect as well as perpetuated racist stereotypes of mixed race people.  These depictions of mixed race people during the anti-miscegenation era are what I argue, has given rise to the utilization by mixed race people of multiple forms of self-expression available through various media in the post-Loving era.

Listen to the presentation here.

Racial identity in biracial children: A qualitative investigation

Journal of Counseling Psychology
Volume 40, Number 2, (April 1993)
pages 221-231
DOI: 10.1037/0022-0167.40.2.221

Christine Kerwin

Joseph G. Ponterotto

Barbara L. Jackson

Abigail Harris

Describes a qualitative study of issues salient in the development of racial identity for schoolchildren of Black/White racial heritage. Semistructured interviews were conducted individually with 9 Black/White biracial children and their parents (a total of 6 families). Major findings from this study tend to run counter to problems conjectured in the counseling and related literature. For example, in contrast to deficit models, participant children and adolescents did not appear to perceive themselves as “marginal” in 2 cultures. The majority of participant children, adolescents, and adults demonstrated sensitivity to the views, cultures, and values of both the Black and White communities. Developmental transitions associated with different ages were identified. Emergent themes yielded hypotheses with implications for future research.

Read or purchase the article here.

Biracial Americans: The Advantages of White Blood

Chapter 8 of An Historical Analysis of Skin Color Discrimination in America
Springer
2010
200 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4419-5504-3

Chapter: pages 109-126
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4419-5505-0_8

Ronald E. Hall, Professor of Social Work
Michigan State University

Similar to that of Native Americans, the genesis of victim-group discrimination for biracial Americans is rooted in traditions of slavery and the antebellum South. Biracial Americans during the antebellum period more often than not were the sons and daughters of the slave master class and having light skin on occasion may also have been of Native American ancestry. Whether biracial Americans were mixed blood by having white or Native ancestry their phenotype, light skin set them apart from the darker-skinned African-American populations whose bloodline had not yet been mixed.

Life for biracial Americans during the antebellum was both privileged in some respects and oppressive, in other ways similar to unadulterated dark-skinned blacks. Due to the one-drop theory of racial identity, whites made no distinctions between blacks and biracial Americans, despite the fact that, by genetic proportion, some biracial Americans were more white than black. In the interest of maintaining slavery and the myth of white supremacy, any known African ancestry defined even those who were characterized by blond hair and blue eyes as black. Defined as black, they were subject to discrimination, could be enslaved, relegated to second-class citizenship, and have no more legal access to the institutions of government than any other black person. Some resented being defined solely as black and in numerous ways discriminated against blacks, which included separating themselves from the black community, often friends and family members. During the antebellum, biracial Americans temporarily passed for white when seeking employment and permanently passed when considering marriage to a white fiance. Permanent passing was a critical form of victim-group discrimination that required that they never again acquaint themselves directly or indirectly with those to whom they were related by blood. Biracial Americans who could not withstand the emotional turmoil associated with their conflicting physical characteristics were designated as “mulatto.” Mulatto was the antebellum term applied to mixed-race or biracial African-Americans who, but for a trace of black blood, were otherwise considered white. Their tragedy was inspired by the contradiction in who they wanted to be—white—and who society required they be—black- Subsequently, they occupied a mid-level racial status, which constantly challenged their quest for identity and group acceptance. However, despite their being defined as black, being of light skin and often having white features accorded many biracial Americans who were…

Read or purchase the chapter here.

‘One-drop rule’ persists: Biracials viewed as members of their lower-status parent group

Harvard Gazette
Harvard Science: Science and Engineering at Harvard University
2010-12-09

Steve Bradt, Harvard Staff Writer

Arnold K. Ho (right), a Ph.D. student in psychology at Harvard, and James Sidanius, a professor of psychology and of African and African-American studies at Harvard, researched the “one-drop rule.” They say their work reflects the cultural entrenchment of America’s traditional racial hierarchy, which assigns the highest status to whites, followed by Asians, with Latinos and blacks at the bottom.

The centuries-old “one-drop rule” assigning minority status to mixed-race individuals appears to live on in our modern-day perception and categorization of people like Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, and Halle Berry.

So say Harvard University psychologists, who’ve found that we still tend to see biracials not as equal members of both parent groups, but as belonging more to their minority parent group. The research appears in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“Many commentators have argued that the election of Barack Obama, and the increasing number of mixed-race people more broadly, will lead to a fundamental change in American race relations,” says lead author Arnold K. Ho, a Ph.D. student in psychology at Harvard. “Our work challenges the interpretation of our first biracial president, and the growing number of mixed-race people in general, as signaling a color-blind America.”…

…“One of the remarkable things about our research on hypodescent is what it tells us about the hierarchical nature of race relations in the United States,” says co-author James Sidanius, professor of psychology and of African and African-American studies at Harvard. “Hypodescent against blacks remains a relatively powerful force within American society.”…

Read the entire article here.

Half-Caste (An Excerpt)

Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies
Volume 2, Number 1, (2008)
6 pages

Angela Ajayi

At about the age of nineteen, a year after I arrived for college in the United States, I stopped thinking of myself as “half-caste.” The word, so loaded in its literal meaning and with its colonial roots, was used with frequency and ease to refer to those of us who had European mothers and African fathers in Nigeria.

For a long time—from early childhood to late teens—I accepted the word, not giving it much thought since it wasn’t necessarily used in a negative way. In fact, if you were “half-caste,” you were different in a way that was usually considered interesting and more attractive. The “half-caste” women, for instance, were often sought after and desired by Nigerians for love affairs; the men deemed good-looking. Or so I observed, growing up in Plateau State, Nigeria, where more than a handful of mixed-race families lived.

In the first decades following Nigeria’s independence from the British in 1960, many Nigerian men received scholarships to study in Europe and the former Soviet Union. They left for their studies—and some of them returned, after many years, with foreign wives. My father was one of these men who came home with a European wife. While studying veterinary medicine in Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine, he met my mother and married her in a tumultuous time of discrimination and racial prejudice against black students in the Soviet Union…

Read the entire excerpt here.

Alumni Profile • Angela Ajayi ’97

The Calvin Spark
The Magazine for Alumni and Friends of Calvin College
Fall 2005

Working at the big question

Who am I and how do I fit in this world?

While every person struggles with these questions, they come to Angela Ajayi ’97 with some particular twists. The daughter of a Nigerian veterinarian and a Ukrainian caterer, Ajayi attended Hillcrest International School in Jos, Nigeria, prior to coming to Calvin. She was encouraged to take a practical course through college, in order to assume a professional life upon her return to Nigeria. But the pre-dentistry major discovered in her English classes “something about literature that gave me a sense of being alive.” She struggled, she said, with what to do. “I was thinking about the future. What would I do with an English major? But passion won.”..

Read the entire article here.

‘You Can Get Lost in Cape Town’: Transculturation and Dislocation in Zoë Wicomb’s Literary Works

Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies
Volume 2, Number 3 (2008)
10 pages

María Jesús López Sánchez-Vizcaíno, Professor of English
University of Córdoba

In Zoë Wicomb’s novels and short stories, main characters tend to share Wicomb’s coloured condition—mixed-race identity as defined by South African apartheid legislation—and her diasporic experience as a South African living in Scotland. Transculturation, dislocation and inbetweenness emerge as central notions for the experience of many of Wicomb’s characters, who often occupy an ambivalent and fluid space in which different cultural worlds and identities come into conflict and negotiation.

Read the entire article here.

Multiethnic Children Portrayed in Children’s Picture Books

Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal
Volume 17, Number 4, (August 2000)
pages 305-317
DOI: 10.1023/A:1007550124043

Erin Michelle Cole
Department of Social Work
University of Wyoming

Deborah P. Valentine, Director and Professor of Social Work
Colorado State University

The portrayal of multiethnic children in picture books provides a unique opportunity for social workers, other helping professionals, and parents to work more effectively with a population of preschool multiethnic children. Twenty-two picture books portraying multiethnic children and their families are identified and evaluated. Their relevance for social work practice with children and families is discussed.

Read the entire article here.