Mixed Race Studies

North of America: Racial hybridity and Canada’s (non)place in inter-American discourse

Comparative American Studies: An International Journal
Volume 3, Number 1 (March 2005)
pages 79-88
DOI: 10.1177/1477570005050951

Albert Braz, Associate Professor of English
University of Alberta, Canada

Canada is one of the largest countries in the Americas, indeed the world. Yet, for such a territorial behemoth, it is barely acknowledged in inter-American discourse. There are two main explanations for this peculiar state of affairs. First, Canada remains extremely ambivalent about its spatial location. Second, hemispheric studies have become increasingly oriented along a US/Hispanic America axis. Even more than Brazil, the other forgotten giant, Canada is seldom considered in continental dialogues, whether they originate in the USA or in Spanish America. This general elision is regrettable for a series of reasons, notably the fact that the Canadian experience can complicate some of the verities about (inter) American life and culture, as is illustrated by racial hybridity.

Canada! . . . Canada is so far away, it almost doesn’t exist.
—Jorge Luis Borges

I don’t even know what street Canada is on.
—Al Capone

Canada is one of the largest countries in the Americas, indeed the world; or, as Richard Rodriguez jokes, at least for the people of the USA, it is ‘the largest country in the world that doesn’t exist’ (Rodriguez, 2002: 161). In any case, for such a territorial colossus, Canada is barely acknowledged in inter-American discourse. There are two main explanations for this peculiar state of affairs. First, Canada remains extremely ambivalent about its spatial location. Second, hemispheric studies have become increasingly oriented along a US/Hispanic America axis. Thus, even more so than Brazil, the other forgotten giant, Canada is seldom considered in continental dialogues, whether they originate in the USA or in Spanish America. This general elision of Canada, I will argue in my article, is regrettable for several reasons. To begin with, you can hardly attain a real understanding of the continent if you exclude such a large portion of its landmass. No less significant, the Canadian experience can complicate some of the verities about (inter) American life and culture. This is particularly true of racial hybridity. For such prominent figures as Símon Bolívar, José Martí, José Vasconcelos and Roberto Fernández Retamar, racial crossing is one of the key elements that differentiates ‘Nuestra America’ from Anglo-America, the USA. However, what they do not seem to realize is that two racially-mixed communities or nations, the Métis and the Halfbreeds, blossomed in the so-called Great White North. Moreover, the leader of one of those groups, Louis Riel, became one of the great exponents of racial hybridity and continental identity in the Americas. Indeed, as I will try to demonstrate, Riel’s writings underscore the urgency of placing inter-American studies in a truly continental context; that is, of bringing the north of America into America…

Read the entire article here.

Recasting The Half-Caste

Journal of Women’s History
Volume 22, Number 4, Winter 2010
E-ISSN: 1527-2036 Print ISSN: 1042-7961
pages 263-267

Kumari Jayawardena

In Sri Lanka, serious book reviews are not only few and far between, but authors also do not usually reply to reviews of their books. So while it was a real windfall to receive four reviews simultaneously, to comment briefly in reply is a rather unusual task. However, I really appreciate the reviews, and thank Shefali Chandra, Hilary Jones, Shoshana Keller, and Emma Teng for their perceptive insights and for opening up this discussion.

On a personal note, my academic background is multidisciplinary. I am not a “historian” with a degree in history, but a political scientist who specialized in industrial relations. My interests moved on to feminist history and I continue to be active in the women’s movement. Using these experiences, I have written on several issues ranging from working-class agitation to ethno-nationalism, feminism, peasant rebellion, and the rise of capitalism in Sri Lanka. In this book, I combine many of these themes, and as Shefali Chandra noted, I deal with “race, caste, class, sexuality, and nationalism”—a wide sweep, using examples from several countries.

I should also make it clear that my book is not a history of Euro-Asians, but a political study of the roots of colonial dissenting movements, including feminism, and the role of Euro-Asians as pioneers of struggles for democratic rights and against semifeudalism in South Asia. The word “Euro-Asian” is coined to include persons of mixed European and Asian origin in the maternal or paternal line. Emma Teng calls this “an important contribution” and states that the “highly fraught” issue of nomenclature “has been of great symbolic importance for those struggling for recognition,”—especially, if I may add, since those of mixed origin have historically been referred to by derogatory names. In Sri Lanka, the Euro-Asian “public intellectuals,” who had been educated in English, were inspired by the French Revolution and the European “Enlightenment.”…

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Reverse Passing? Kidding… Right?

The Root
2010-12-14

Jenée Desmond-Harris

A report that biracial people are denying their white parents seems absurd to me—but I’m paying attention anyway.

Ever heard of Barack Obama? You know, the first black president? The one who won an election and near-deity status in the African-American community while openly discussing his white mother in books, interviews and stump speeches?

Yeah, me, too. This is just one of the reasons I’m scratching my head at the findings of a new study that people with one white and one black parent “downplay their white ancestry,” in part to gain the acceptance of other black people. The authors dub this phenomenon “reverse passing” and call it “a striking phenomenon.” I’m beyond stumped. In a summary of the results, the sociologists behind “Passing as Black: Racial Identity Work Among Biracial Americans” report that this occurs especially in “certain social situations”—ostensibly, around other black people—where having a white parent “can carry its own negative biases.”

Let’s be clear: Although the study does conclude that people are “exercising considerable control over how they identify” racially these days, we’re not talking about having the freedom to elect to call oneself black. Rather, according to the lead author, University of Vermont sociologist Nikki Khanna, those who self-identify as biracial or multiracial “adopt an identity that contradicts their self-perception of race.” In other words, they’re being purposely disingenuous. They’re exchanging honesty for social benefits, in a mirror-image version of the well-known phenomenon of passing as white…

…While I don’t relate to the results of this study, I won’t dismiss them. My first reaction—after sheer confusion—was to feel superior to the study subjects. (Maybe they should have gone to an HBCU, where I got the message loud and clear that you can be black in any way that makes sense to you. Maybe they should be in social circles like mine. When polled on Facebook, many black acquaintances said that they always figured I had a white or mixed parent, and—surprise!—they didn’t de-friend me.)…

Read the entire article here.

Passing as Black: How Biracial Americans Choose Identity

Time Magazine: Healthland
Friday, 2010-12-16

Meredith Melnick, Reporter and Producer

The practice of passing—identifying with and presenting oneself as one race while denying ancestry of another—reached its peak during the Jim Crow era. Needless to say, the notion of having to “pass” as white is outdated and offensive, but as sociologists Nikki Khanna and Cathryn Johnson report in a new study, passing is still alive and well today. It just happens in the other direction.

For their study, Khanna and Johnson interviewed 40 biracial American adults about their racial identity, and were surprised by what they found: most people tended to suppress or reject their white ancestry altogether and claim to be entirely African American. It wasn’t simply about calling oneself black, but also aggressively changing one’s behavior, looks and tastes to appear more “black.”…

…The question is whether strongly identifying with a racial minority really qualifies as passing. The researchers argue that it does, because it involves a concerted effort to reveal one portion of ancestry while concealing and rejecting another. The volunteers in the study also behaved strategically to project their race—something that sociologists call “identity work.” The authors of the current study prefer to call it “performing race”: they characterize the racial identities of their subjects as a strategically constructed, outwardly projected performance, and in this sense they liken it to the behavior of those who passed during the Jim Crow era…

Read the entire article here.