Mixed Race Studies

African Americans began to migrate from black to white as soon as slaves arrived on American shores.  In seventeenth-century Virginia, social distinctions such as class and race were fluid, but the consequences of being black or white were enormous.  It often meant the difference between slavery and freedom, poverty and prosperity, persecution and power.  Even so, dozens of European women had children by African men, and together they established the first free black communities in the colonies.  With every incentive to become white—it would give them better land and jobs, lower taxes, and less risk of being enslaved—many free blacks assimilated into white communities over time…

Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. page 3.

“Abominable Mixture”: Toward the Repudiation of Anglo-Indian Intermarriage in Seventeenth-Century Virginia

The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Volume 95, Number 2 (April, 1987)
pages 157-192

David D. Smits, Professor of History
The College of New Jersey

Students of Amerindian-white relations have long ascribed to the English colonists an aversion to race mixing, especially through intermarriage, with the North American natives. To be sure, it is recognized that there was some Indian-white interbreeding, and even marriage, on all Anglo-American frontiers, but proportionately less than in Franco- and Hispanic-America. Virginia’s well-known marriage of John Rolfe to Pocahontas did not establish a widely imitated precedent for Anglo-Indian matrimony in the colony. A 1691 Virginia law prohibiting Anglo-Indian marriage and informal sexual unions surely indicates that they occurred; with a few notable exceptions, however, the Englishman who took a native wife, concubine, or mistress violated the colony’s mores…

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I do not believe that any Mulatto race can be maintained beyond the third or fourth generation by Mulattos merely; they must intermarry with the pure races or perish.

Robert Knox, The Races of Men, London, 1850.

On the Phenomena of Hybridity in the Genus Homo

Published for the Anthropological Society, by Longman, Green, Longman, & Roberts (London)
1864
144 pages
Scan Date/Time: 2007-12-04 21:43:57

Dr. Paul Broca 1824-1880, Secretary General
Anthropological Society of Paris
(Also Honorary Fellow, Anthropological Society of London)

Edited by C. Carter Blake, F.G.S., F.A.S.L, Honorary Secretary,
Antrhopological Society of London

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Dedication
• Editor’s Preface
• Glossarial Note
• SECTION I
  • General remarks on the interbreeding of human races
  • Pretended examples of hybrid races (note on the Griquas of Southern Africa)
  • Significations of the words race and type
• SECTION II
  • On Eugenesic Hybridity in the Genus Homo
• SECTION III
  • Examples tending to prove that the interbreeding of certain human races is not Eugenesic
  • Remarks on the interpretation of human hybridity
  • Relative infecundity of the interbreeds between the White and Negro
  • Relative sterility of some Mulattoes in the first generation
  • Moral or physical inferiority of some Mulattoes
  • Malay and mixed breeds
  • Relative sterility of the interbreeds between the Europeans and the Australians or Tasmanians
  • Observations of Count Strzelecki; discission
  • Conclusions on human hybridity
• SECTION IV
  • Recapitulation and Conclusion

That very ingenious writer, M. A. de Gobineau, whose efforts have been directed towards bringing the light of modern ethnology to bear upon the political and social history of nations, but who, in this very difficult and almost entirely now inquiry, has more than once indulged in paradoxical generalisations, has thought proper to affirm, in his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1855), that the crossing of races constantly produces disastrous effects, and that, sooner or later, a physical and moral degeneration is the inevitable result thereof. It is, therefore, chiefly to this cause that he attributes the decline of the Roman Republic and the downfall of liberty, which was soon followed by the decline of civilisation. I am very far from sharing his opinion, and, were this the proper place, I might show that the social corruption and the intellectual degradation which prepared the ruin of the Roman power was due to quite different causes. M. Grobineau’s proposition appears to me by far too general; and I am still more opposed to the opinion of those who advance that every mixed race separated from the parent stocks is incapable of perpetuation. It has even been asserted that the United States of America, where the Anglo-Saxon race is still predominant, but which is overrun by immigrants of various other races, is, by that very circumstance, threatened with decay, inasmuch as this continuous immigration may have the effect of producing a hybrid race containing the germ of future sterility. Do we not know that, on tho faith of this prognostication, a certain party has proposed the restriction of foreign immigration, and even in England there have been serious men who have predicted, from ethnological causes, the overthrow of the United States, just as Ezekiel predicted the ruin of Alexandria.

When we see the prosperity and the power of the new continent grow with such unexampled rapidity, we can certainly put no faith in such a prediction. Still there must have been a certain number of fundamental facts, which led even monogenists to deny the viability of all crossed races. They must have sought in vain among the nations of the earth for a race manifestly hybrid, with well-defined characters, intermediate between two known races, perpetuating itself without the concurrence of the parent races.

“When the facts quoted above,” says M. Georges Pouchet, “are not sufficient to prove that a mongrel breed cannot be engendered, can we anywhere find one ? Do we find a people conserving a medium type between two other types ? We see them nowhere just as little as we see a race of mules. The fact is, that such a race, such a type can only have an ephemeral subjective existence.”

The question, where do we find hybrid races subsisting by themselves, has been asked before M. Pouchet. Dr. Prichard, in replying to it, could only find throe instances:—1. The Griquas, the progeny of the Hottentots and the Dutch. 2. The Cafusos of the forests of Varama (Brazil) a race described by Spix and Martius, and, according to them, the offspring of indigenous Americans and African Negroes. 3. The mopheaded Papuans inhabiting the island of Waigion and the surrounding islands and the northern part of New Guinea, and who, according to MM. Quoy and Gaimard, are a hybrid race, the issue of a union of Malays and the Papuans proper.

These three examples have been objected to, and are indeed liable to objections. We know next to nothing about the Cafusos, and no one can positively assert that they have remained unmixed with the indigenous race ; but we know for certain that the Griquas have risen since the commencement of this century around a Protestant mission, by the fusion of some Dutch-Hottentot bastaard families with a large number of the Hottentot race, the Bosjesmen, and the Kaffir race. This example then proves, by no means, that a mixed race can perpetuate itself separately…

…If, indeed, it were true that there are only five races of men on the globe, and if it were capable of demonstration that either of them, in mixing with another, produced eugenesic Mulattos capable of constituting a mixed race enduring by itself, without the ulterior concurrence of the parent races, the embarrassment would not yet be at an end. After having succeeded to establish such a demonstration for two of the chief races, it would by no means necessarily result that the intercrossings of the nine other combinations are eugenesic like the first. We should then be obliged to prove (what is evidently impracticable), by ten successive examples, that the ten possible intercrossings between the five fundamental races are all equally and completely prolific.  The difficulty is such, that Dr. Prichard, after much research, could only find the three instances already cited and refuted. These facts having proved inconclusive, and other facts which we shall mention presently having induced the theory that certain intermixtures are imperfectly prolific, the pentagenists were led to the opinion that the possibility of a definitive intermixture of races is by no means established, and that, on the contrary, this possibility may be denied.

The pentagenists occupied themselves at first chiefly with the intermixture of the five chief races; but even from this point of view, and taking the term race in a general sense, their negation, though, it must be admitted, far from being justifiable, is still founded upon a more solid basis, and less removed from the truth than the opposed affirmation. Hence it was considered valuable ad interim. But the principle of non-intermixture of races being once promulgated, the confusion of terms soon became apparent. The negation which was at first applied merely to the artificial groups formed by the re-union of races of the same type was applied to natural races, and thus arose that frightful proposition, that no mixed races can subsist in humanity…

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Segregated Miscegenation: On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the North American and Latin American Literary Traditions

Routledge
2003-02-28
Pages: 144
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-94349-9

Carlos Hiraldo, Professor of English
LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York

Through the comparative study of literatures from the United States and Latin America, Segregated Miscegenation questions received notions of race and nation. Carlos Hiraldo examines the current understanding of race in the United States alongside alternative models of racial self-definition in Latin America. His provocative analysis traces the conceptualization of blackness in fiction and theories of the novel, and troubles the racial and ethnic categories particular to each region’s literary tradition.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Coloring Latinos, Coloring the United States
  • The Novel as Popular Culture
  • Race in Latin America
  • Latinos as a U.S. Race
  • The Novel in the Dissemination and Reconfiguration of Notions about Race
• Chapter One: Novel Concepts: The Role of the Novel in Developing Ideas of Nation and Race in the Americas
  • Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukacs, and the “New World” of the Novel
  • Benedict Anderson and the Novel as a Tool of National Imagination
  • Fredric Jameson and the Many Worlds in the Americas
  • Novels and the Fictionalization of Racial Attitudes
• Chapter Two: Enslaved Characters: Nineteenth-Century Abolitionist Novels and the Absence of Bi-racial Consciousness
  • Differences between Bi-racial and Mulatto Characters
  • The Myth of Racial Purity versus the Dreams of a Miscegenated Paradise
  • The Limitations of Nineteenth-Century Racial Representations
  • Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Bi-racial Characters in Nineteenth-Century U.S. and Latin American Literatures
  • Sab as a Nineteenth-Century Cuban Romantic Tale about Race
  • The Complicit Ignorance of Cecilia Valdes
  • A Thin Line between Black and White in Martin Morua Delgado’s Sofia and Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson
  • Race without Romance in Antonio Zambrana’s El negro Francisco
• Chapter Three: Mulatto Fictions: Representations of Identity-Consciousness in U.S. and Latin American Bi-racial Characters
  • Mulatto Characters as Racial and Cultural Nexus
  • Passing the Tragic Mulatta in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature
  • Gabriela and the Sexualized Mulatia in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature
  • Pobre negro, The Violent Land, and the Limits of Mulatto Characters in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature
  • Joe Christmas and the Unmerry Existence of Mulatto Characters in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature
  • Go Down, Moses and the Mumbled Recognition of Racial Confluence in the United States
  • The Bluest Eye and the Persistence of Anti-mulatto Fiction in the United States
• Chapter Four: Identity Against the Grain: Latino Authors of African European
  • Heritage and Their Encounters with the Racial Ideology of the United States
  • Latino Authors and the “One Drop” Rule
  • Piri Thomas, Julia Alvarez, and the Limitations of Choosing Sides in the U.S. Racial Divide
  • Esmeralda Santiago and Negi’s Persistent Puertoricanness in the Face of the “One Drop” Rule
• Chapter Five: Choosing Your Own Face: Future Trends of Racial
  • Discourses in the United States
  • Latino Influence in Other Cultural Products
  • The Latin American Racial Paradigm behind the “Wigga”
  • The Rock, Tiger Woods, and a Universal Race
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Brackish Bayou Blood: Weaving Mixed-Blood Indian-Creole Identity Outside the Written Record

American Indian Culture and Research Journal
Volume 32, Number 2 (2008)
Special Issue: Indigenous Locations Post-Katrina: Beyond Invisibility and Disaster
Online Date: 2008-08-22
pages 93-108
ISSN: 0161-6463

L. Rain Cranford-Gomez

As a child on the Gulf of Mexico, evacuation to higher ground for floods, hurricanes, and tornado warnings were common. At the end of August 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the homelands of this author’s father and grandfather in Louisiana. Hundreds of miles of wetlands, already threatened, were turned to open water; vital brackish waters were flooded with seawater, thus damaging the delicate balance between fresh and salt that many plants and animals need for their habitats. Vital records and historic documents were flooded, damaged, besieged with mold, and lost to the ravages of wind and water. However, these records do not tell the only stories in Louisiana. In the wake of the devastation that has impacted Louisiana communities, in particular Creole and Indian communities, it makes other forms of record-keeping, such as historic oral narratives and material culture, vitally important as they seek to preserve their histories as Indians, Louisiana Creoles, and uniquely mixed-blood people in Louisiana. This article is taken from a greater conversation, a work in progress. The text presented in this article should be read as a story and a conversation that seeks to open possible dialogues and interaction, shared histories, narratives, and cooperation between Louisiana Indians and Louisiana Creoles as manifested in shared material culture practices and mixed racial-cultural inheritance. By revisiting the racial mixing of Creole identity from a metis/mestizo perspective, “reading” Indian and Creole basketry as a material culture source that speaks for a people, and sharing personal reflections, the author hopes to illustrate converging narratives and dialogues further rooting Louisiana Creoles in an indigenous history; a metis/mestizo people separate but linked to their indigenous land and kin ties. The author urges other scholars to explore further the indigenous connections between Louisiana Creoles and Louisiana Indians with a particular focus on those of both Louisiana Indian and Creole descent.

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The Melungeons: A Mixed-Blood Strain of the Southern Appalachians

Geographical Review
Volume 41, Number 2 (April, 1951)
pages 256-271

Edward T. Price, Professor Emeritus of Geography
University of Oregon

In the native vocabulary of East Tennessee and adjacent parts of neighboring states the word “Melungeon” is widely used. To some people it is only a general derogatory term to be bestowed on anyone who momentarily arouses their antagonism. Middle Tenneseeans are said to have applied it to their former East Tennessee enemies in the bitter period after the Civil War. And at times the Melungeons have had to fill the place of the bogeyman in holding children in the straight and narrow path “The Melungeons will get you!”‘

The persistent folk tale, however, insists that the Melungeons are unusual racially; it identifies them as a dark-skinned mixed-blood group of uncertain origin whose center is on Newman’s Ridge in Hancock County (Fig. 1). An Oriental appearance is occasionally attributed to them, but they are most commonly thought to be at least partly of Portuguese descent. The peculiarity of the mixture, however, is its supposed inability to blend color in crosses with whites: the Melungeon appearance may be lost for a generation or two, only to show up again in full strength. Relatively few people know the Melungeons as a group; more have seen individuals. But the elements of the legend are widely known, even to those who may not seriously entertain the possibility of its reality.

Newman’s Ridge and the adjacent Blackwater Valley are said to have been settled by the Melungeons before the wave of white settlers from the eastern states reached the area;3 it is suggested that they stemmed from sailors shipwrecked on the Carolina coast.

The Melungeons are said to have been disfranchised by the restrictions placed on free persons of color in the Tennessee Constitution of 1834…

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The Vertical and Horizontal Dimensions of the Word Race

Ethnicities
Volume 10, Number 1 (March 2010)
pages 127-140
DOI: 10.1177/1468796809354529

Michael Banton, Emeritus Professor of Sociology
Univeristy of Bristol

The word race has been used both to classify humans and to account for differences between those assigned to the resulting classes or taxa. The two dimensions (horizontal and vertical) are inherent in the conception of race. Initially, the word was used in ways that gave more expression to the sense of descent embodied in the vertical dimension. Since the early 19th century, the word has been used in ways that express the sense of classification reflected in the horizontal dimension. Some histories of thought about human origins and divisions have assumed, wrongly, that a ‘scientific concept of race’ was at some time established within anthropology.

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Cimmerii or Eurasians and Their Future

Simon Wallenburg Press
2007 (Originally Published in 1929)
English
84 pages
ISBN: 1843560135
ISBN-13: 9781843560135

Cedric Dover

A belief in Eugenics was widespread in the early half of the last centenary and amongst its prominent believers were George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. This iniquitous social philosophy supposed that Northern Europeans were superior in civilization to such races as Indians. Anglo Indians who were of mixed blood were considered, even more inferior since they inherited the worst characteristics of both races. Anglo Indians came under attack from government scientists who wrote papers on Eugenics and used the Anglo Indians as examples how the human race could be degraded by intermarriage. Cedric Dover’s book Cimmerii was written as defence against this racist attack on India’s Anglo Indians. A remarkable pioneering book written before the Second World War, it thoroughly disproved the eugenics theory by recounting the achievements of the Anglo Indian race. It is a shame this brilliant book did to find its way to Europe after it was published, as it would have contributed in discrediting the pseudo science of eugenics. The belief in Eugenics led to the killing, institutionalising and outright genocide of races perceived as inferior or undesirable. The book would have defended the Jews who like the Anglo Indians were deemed a threat to racial purity. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, many ideas about “racial hygiene” were publicly renounced by politicians and members of the scientific community. But the work of Cedric Dover will forever stand out, as the work of one brave man who stood up and defended his small Anglo Indian community in a little book, and in doing so, struck the first blow against an evil that was to sweep through Europe a decade later. Cimmerii? Or Eurasians and Their Future by Cedric Dover is the fourth book in the Anglo Indian Heritage series. The Others are: Herbert Alick Stark ‘Hostages To India Britain’s Betrayal in India: The Story of the Anglo Indian Community These are the Anglo Indians by Reginald Maher. The books are called the Anglo Indian Heritage books as they chronicle the rich and colourful history of the Anglo Indian Community. This small community has had outstanding achievements at every level of society for hundreds of years but that record of achievement has been hidden, passed over or co-opted as British and Indian History. These Books are an attempt to fairly represent the history of the community by works by Anglo Indians themselves.

Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic

University Press of Florida
2009-07-05
176 pages
6 x 9
Cloth: ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-3374-7, ISBN 10: 0-8130-3374-8
Paper: ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-3675-5, ISBN 10: 0-8130-3675-5

Kimberly Eison Simmons, Associate Professor Anthropology & African American Studies
University of South Carolina

In Latin America and the Caribbean, racial issues are extremely complex and fluid, particularly the nature of “blackness.” What it means to be called “black” is still very different for an African American living in the United States than it is for an individual in the Dominican Republic with an African ancestry.

Racial categories were far from concrete as the Dominican populace grew, altered, and solidified around the present notions of identity. Kimberly Simmons explores the fascinating socio-cultural shifts in Dominicans’ racial categories, concluding that Dominicans are slowly embracing blackness and ideas of African ancestry.

Simmons also examines the movement of individuals between the Dominican Republic and the United States, where traditional notions of indio are challenged, debated, and called into question. How and why Dominicans define their racial identities reveal shifting coalitions between Caribbean peoples and African Americans, and proves intrinsic to understanding identities in the African diaspora.