Mixed Race Studies

Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted

1893
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The Project Gutenberg EBook
2004-05-14
#12352

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)

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Anglo-Indians in Hollywood, Bollywood and Arthouse Cinema

Journal of Intercultural Studies
Volume 28, Issue 1 (February 2007)
pages 55-68
DOI: 10.1080/07256860601082939

Glenn D’Cruz, Senior Lecturer of Performance Studies
Deakin University, Australia

Apart from a few disparaging remarks about offensive stereotypes by Anglo-Indian writers and politicians such as Gloria Jean Moore, Frank Anthony and Gillian Hart, critics have paid very little attention to the representation of “mixed-race” Anglo-Indians in the cinema. Drawing on screen theory and recent theories of cinema spectatorship, this essay provides a comparative analysis of how Hollywood, Bollywood and arthouse films represent Anglo-Indians. More specifically, it analyses three paradigmatic films: Bhowani Junction (1956), Julie (1975), and 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981). Combining formal analysis of narrative structure, mise-en-scne and genre with historical analysis, the paper examines the ideological work performed by these texts, which use Anglo-Indians to dramatise specific political conflicts in India such as those generated by the British partition of India in 1947 and the more recent issue of globalisation.

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Stepping into the Same River Twice: Internal/External Subversion of the Inside/Outside Dialectic in Alice Walker’s “The Temple of My Familiar”

Journal of Bisexuality
Volume 2, Issue 2 & 3 (October 2002)
pages 53-71
DOI: 10.1300/J159v02n02_04

Sikorski Grace, Associate Professor of English
Anne Arundel Community College, Maryland

Passing novels, exemplified here by E. Lynn Harris’s Invisible Life, often perpetuate the representation of bisexuality and/or bi-racial identity as a tension on the border between communities and bodies that threatens to break down or leak when tested. Alice Walker offers an alternative representation of sexual and racial terrain for such hybrid identities. In The Temple of My Familiar, the characterization of Lissie, a multiple reincarnation, and the use of skin as a charged metaphor bring categories of sexual and racial purity to the point of collapse, suggesting the potential to reimagine identity as plural, fluctuating, regenerative, erogenous and permeable. 

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Surveying the Intersection: Pathology, Secrecy, and the Discourses of Racial and Sexual Identity

Journal of Homosexuality
Volume 26, Issue 2 & 3 (December 1993)
pages 1-20
DOI: 10.1300/J082v26n02_01

Marylynne Diggs

“Surveying the Intersection: Pathology, Secrecy, and the Discourses of Racial and Sexual Identity” cautions against the risks of metaphorical imperialism in readings of codified gay and lesbian representation. Taking issue with Foucault’s suggestion that the secret of the nineteenth century was the secret of sex, I suggest that, in the nineteenth-century American culture, where African-American identity and equality were among the most controversial issues of the century, the secrets of identity were secrets of race as well. Because scientific and literary representations of pathological and/or secret, essential identities are sites of intersection in the discources of homosexual and mixed-race identity, they should be investigated as intersections, rather than read as codifications of sexual difference. Surveying the discourses of scientific racism, genetics, and eugenics, and doing readings of Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy and Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s The Stones of the Village, I suggest that Harper’s representation of the mulatto leader can be read as an act of resistance to the representation of the mulatto as a degenerate, hybrid species; and that in Dunbar-Nelson’s story, the thematics of passing, secrecy, and the fear of detection, while having a recognizable homoerotic quality, should not be read simply as a codification of homosexual difference and panic. I conclude with a call for more work on historicizing the intersection of racial and sexual identity in the discouces of pathology and degeneration.

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The Devil and the One Drop Rule: Racial Categories, African Americans and the U.S. Census

Michigan Law Review
Volume 95, Number 5 (March 1997)
pages 1161-1265

Christine B. Hickman, Associate Professor of Law
California Western School of Law

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• I. Treatment of Mixed-Race People: The Early Legal Record
  • A. The First African Americans and the First Race Mixing
  • B. Mulattoes: Black by Law
  • C. A Study in Contrasts: Exclusion of Mulattoes from De Crèvecoeur’s “New Race of Men”
  • D. The Census and the Mulatto Category, 1850-1910
• II. Proposals for a Multiracial Category: Critiquing the Discourse
  • A. The One Drop Rule: The Misapprehension of the Historical Context
    1. Misperceptions of the One Drop Rule: Gotanda’s Theories of Racial Purity, Objectivity and Subordination in Recognition
    2. The One Drop Rule and “Buying into the System of Racial Domination”
    3. Lessons from the South African Experience
  • B. Rebiologizing Race
    1. The Collapse of Biological Race
    2. Proposals for a Broad Genetically Based Multiracial Category
    3. The Proposal for a Majoritarian Classification System
    4. Biological Passing for Black
    5. The Harlem Renaissance and Cultural
    6. Race, Biology and the Law: The Racial Credential Cases
  • C. The Dangers of Redefining Black: Distancing.
    1. Finding Solutions for the Lighter Part of the Race
    2. Sanitizing our Attacks on Racism
    3. Conclusion
• III. From the One Drop Rule to the Discourse on Race
  • A. There is Race
  • B. Race as a Metaphor
  • C. Essential vs. Cultural Concepts of Race
  • D. Race as a Choice
    1. Appiah, Lee, and the Choice of Our Racial Identity
    2. Choice Today
    3. The Choice of Our Race by Daily Actions
• IV. A Proposal for the Census
  • A. The Broad, Blood-based Multiracial Category
  • B. Counting Loving’s Children on the Race Line
    1. Multiracial Status as Race
    2. The False Choice Between Race and Multirace
    3. The Multiracial Category on the “Race” Line: Guaranteed Inaccuracy
  • C. A Line of Their Own.
• Conclusion

For generations, the boundaries of the African-American race have been formed by a rule, informally known as the “one drop rule,” which, in its colloquial definition, provides that one drop of Black blood makes a person Black. In more formal, sociological circles, the rule is known as a form of “hypodescent” and its meaning remains basically the same: anyone with a known Black ancestor is considered Black. Over the generations, this rule has not only shaped countless lives, it has created the African-American race as we know it today, and it has defined not just the history of this race but a large part of the history of America.

Now as the millennium approaches, social forces require some rethinking of this important, old rule. Plessy v. Ferguson, which affirmed the right of states to mandate “equal but separate accommodations” for White and “colored” train passengers, is a century old. Brown v. Board of Education, which effectively overruled Plessy and instituted the end of de jure discrimination, was decided over a generation ago. Nearly thirty years have passed since the Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, invalidated any prohibition against interracial marriage as unconstitutional. Since the 1967 Loving decision, the number of interracial marriages has nearly quadrupled. This trend has even extended to Black-White couples, whose intermarriage rate has traditionally lagged behind that of other racial and ethnic groups. For the first time, opinion polls indicate that more Americans approve of interracial marriage than disapprove. The number of children born to parents of different races has increased dramatically, and some of the offspring of these interracial marriages have assumed prominent roles in American popular culture.

Some of these children of interracial marriages are now arguing cogently for a reappraisal of hypodescent. Their movement has sprung to public consciousness with the recent bid by multiracial organizations, over the objections of civil rights groups, to put a “multiracial” category in the “race” section of the forms that will be used when the next decennial census is conducted in the year 2000. This proposal has immense practical importance because the census provides the nation with its main source of racial and ethnic data. For example, implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 all depend on racial and ethnic statistics culled from the census, and the addition of a new category could change the count of the existing racial groups and alter the way these laws are implemented.

One wing of this new multiracial movement argues that a new “multiracial box” should be made available for the growing number of children of interracial marriages. Another wing of this movement, in books and law review articles, suggests that the addition of this category should be part of a wholesale redefinition of the racial identities of most Americans. The thinking of both wings of the multiracial movement is informed by their rejection of hypodescent and the “one drop rule.” To date, the participants in this discourse have emphasized the racist notions of White racial purity that gave rise to the one drop rule. They have concluded that the effects of this old rule are mainly evil and that the consequences of abandoning it will be mainly good. Based in part on such reasoning, the more activist wing of this movement has proposed several neat, symmetrical, and radical redefinitions of African-American racial identity. Under one such proposed definition, any Black person with White or Native American ancestry would become “multiracial.” Under another, any Black person with a “majority of [his] origins in the original peoples of Europe” would become European American.

My purpose in this article is to critique this discourse. I agree that the one drop rule had its origins in racist notions of White purity. However, many scholars have misunderstood the way that this rule has shaped the Black experience in America, and this misunderstanding has distorted their proposals for a new multiracial category on the census forms. As we examine the one drop rule and its importance in the current discourse, we should recall the famous exchange between Faust and Goethe’s Devil:

Faust: Say at least, who you are?

Mephistopheles: I am part of that power which ever wills evil yet ever accomplishes good.

So it was with the one drop rule. The Devil fashioned it out of racism, malice, greed, lust, and ignorance, but in so doing he also accomplished good: His rule created the African-American race as we know it today, and while this race has its origins in the peoples of three continents and its members can look very different from one another, over the centuries the Devil’s one drop rule united this race as a people in the fight against slavery, segregation, and racial injustice…

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Civilisation, Culture and the Hybrid Self in the work of Robert Ezra Park

Journal of Intercultural Studies
Volume 27, Issue 4 (November 2006)
pages 413-433
DOI: 10.1080/07256860600936911

Vince Marotta, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

Contemporary discussions on hybridity in cultural and ethnic studies have overlooked the work of the Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park. Park’s idea of the “marginal man” and his work on cultural and racial hybridity can shed further light on the construction and representation of the hybrid self. The contribution that Park has made to a social theory of hybridity has been overshadowed by research conducted within post-colonial and cultural studies. I do not suggest that recent conceptualisations of hybridity are inadequate; rather that Park has something to contribute to contemporary accounts and in some cases anticipates some of the themes and issues surrounding the concept of hybridity. The following examination connects Park’s work on hybridity with ideas such as civilisation, culture and modernity and argues that a mild form of primitivism underlines his notion of the “marginal man”.

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PSU MFA Monday Lecture Series: Laylah Ali

Portland State University Campus (at the corner of SW Broadway & Hall)
Shattuck Hall Annex
1914 SW Park Ave, Room 198
Portland, Oregon
2011-01-31, 19:30-20:30 PST (Local Time)

Laylah Ali, Associate Professor of Art
Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Free to the public

Laylah Ali was born in Buffalo, New York in 1968, and lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She received a BA from Williams College and a MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Laylah Ali has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; ICA, Boston; MCA Chicago; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and MASS MoCA, among others. Her work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2003) and the Whitney Biennial (2004).

PSUs Art Dept. offers free public Art lectures almost every Monday night of the school year. Local, National and International, interdisciplinary artists visit Portland to speak about their work.

The PMMNLS is supported in part by: PICA, Portland Center for Public Humanities, Wealth Underground Farm, Bear Deluxe Magazine, Northwest Film Center. If you or your organization is interested in becoming supporters of the PMMNLS please contact the art department.

For a complete list of MFA Monday Night Lectures please click here.

Researching mixed race in education: perceptions, policies and practices

Race Ethnicity and Education
Volume 10, Issue 3 (September 2007)
pages 345-362
DOI: 10.1080/13613320701503389

Chamion Caballero, Senior Research Fellow
Families & Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

Jo Haynes, Lecturer in Sociology
University of Bristol

Leon Tikly, Professor in Education and Deputy Director of Research
University of Bristol

 Although the ‘Mixed’ primary and secondary school population is rapidly growing in both size and recognition, pupils from mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds are largely invisible in current educational policies and practices regarding minority ethnic pupils. In light of initial Local Education Authority-level data which suggested that pupils from Mixed White/Black Caribbean backgrounds were significantly underachieving and over-represented in school exclusions, the authors of this article conducted a research project which, through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, explored the educational attainment, experiences and needs of this group of pupils. Drawing on the qualitative data from the project, this article will discuss three key areas of findings. Firstly, by presenting data from the case study interviews with pupils, parents, teachers and specialist educational (local Ethnic Minority Achievement Service) advisors, the authors will discuss how the perceptions of the White/Black Caribbean pupils they encountered in the schools encompassed both traditional constructions of ‘mixedness’—which conceptualise mixed identities as inherently problematic—and emerging ‘new wave’ constructions—which conceptualise mixed identities not only as unproblematic, but as positive and celebratory. Secondly, the authors discuss the extent to which these perceptions and their potential impact on pupils’ achievement are supported or challenged by existing educational policies and practices. They conclude by highlighting some of the methodological and theoretical challenges encountered in researching mixedness in the educational context and discuss the implications of these for both their research project and the field of ‘mixed race studies’ as a whole.

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