Mixed Race Studies

A Mixed Race Take On What It Means To Be ‘Free’

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2011-06-24

NPR Staff

A lonely young New Yorker finds a puppy while jogging. A middle class couple tries navigating the treacherous waters of admission to a sought-after preschool. A new mother grows jealous of the chic and thin mom living across the hall.

It’s all stuff you may have seen before—but not quite. At least not if Danzy Senna has anything to say about it.

These are all characters in Senna’s new collection of short fiction, titled You Are Free. The stories start with the familiar, but soon take subtle turns to reveal racial and other tensions lurking not too far below the surface.

Senna herself is mixed race. Her father is half African-American and half Mexican, while her mother is Irish and English. Growing up in Boston, Senna was raised to self-identify as black.

“I think growing up black or growing up biracial is something that’s part of your daily language and your daily awareness of the world you’re living in,” she tells NPR’s Michel Martin.

But she doesn’t see her work being about race or mixed race. Instead, Senna uses race as the background of her fiction, as a way to understand the culture and characters…

Read the entire story here.
Read the transcript of the interview here.
Listen to the interview here (00:13:32).

White women’s complicity and the taboo: Faulkner’s layered critique of the “miscegenation complex”

Women’s Studies
Volume 22, Issue 4 (1993)
pages 497-506
DOI: 10.1080/00497878.1993.9978998

Karen M. Andrews
Kobe College, Japan

In Faulkner’s social milieu, the proscription against miscegenation between white women and black men was so deeply ingrained as to be “common sense.” White male hegemony promoted a double standard which tolerated one form of miscegenation, between white men and black women, while virulently prohibiting the other form. Miscegenation virtually came to mean only the taboo form, thus silencing the reality of white male exploitation of black women. As James Kinney argues, the “post-war apologists for racism tried to convert the rape victim into the rapist, to reverse reality in order to justify past and present inhumanity” (227).

In works such as Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, Faulkner critiques the sexual and racial injustices wrought by this double standard. Moreover, he exposes the whites’ paranoid and often violent reactions to the taboo—the “miscegenation complex”—in several novels, particularly Light in August, and in stories, such as “Dry September,” [Read the full text here.] “Elly” and “Mountain Victory.” In “Dry September,” probably the most anthologized of his short fiction, Faulkner demystifies the “miscegenation complex” by exposing the complicity of whites, male and female, who exploit the taboo for personal and political gain.

“Dry September” entails a multilayered critique of the miscegenation/rape complex. At the most obvious level of analysis, Faulkner employs the character Hawkshaw as a counterhegemonic voice among the radical racists, Unlike the other white men gathered about the barbershop, Hawkshaw critiques the belief that any rumor of the interracial taboo involves a black…

Read or purchase the article here.

Why this Supreme Court could be the best hope for gay-marriage advocates

The Washington Post
2011-06-24

Justin Driver, Assistant Professor of Law
University of Texas, Austin

Eight years ago Sunday, the Supreme Court handed down a significant victory for gay equality when it declared anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas. In response, Justice Antonin Scalia bitterly dissented, predicting that the court’s opinion would inexorably lead the judiciary to permit marriages for gays and lesbians.

It took the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court less than five months to vindicate Scalia’s prediction when it cited Lawrence in finding that the state’s own constitution protects same-sex marriage. The conservative justice has not, however, had an opportunity to directly consider the merits of same-sex marriage.

…Many advocates of same-sex marriage who worry that it is too early for a federal lawsuit cite the quest decades ago to eliminate bans on interracial marriage. The court did not invalidate such laws during the 1950s, they note, when interracial marriage remained extremely divisive. Instead, it waited to issue Loving v. Virginia until 1967, when only 16 states retained anti-miscegenation statutes. “So long as interracial marriage intensely divided the country, the Warren Court was not prepared to insist upon a norm of equality,” Yale law professor William N. Eskridge Jr. and attorney Darren Spedale wrote in May 2009. They further suggested that it would be daft to believe that the current court would issue a favorable same-sex marriage decision while opposition remained strong. Judge Richard Posner ventured a similar analysis for the New Republic last year: “Until homosexual marriage becomes as uncontroversial in most states as racial intermarriage had become by 1967, the Court will, in all likelihood, stay its hand.”

But in 1967, most Americans did not welcome interracial marriage. To suggest otherwise is profoundly misleading. While Americans registered greater approval of such marriages in the late 1960s than in the previous decade, national opinion remained clearly opposed, even after the Supreme Court decided Loving. A Gallup poll in the 1950s revealed that nine out of 10 whites disapproved of interracial marriage; in 1968, a Gallup poll showed that three out of four whites continued to frown on interracial unions. The 1968 figures taking account of all races were not much different: 73 percent of Americans disapproved of the practice.

The modest number of states that had anti-miscegenation laws when Loving was decided, moreover, hardly indicates that citizens in the other 34 states considered race irrelevant to marriage. A clear majority of Americans deemed race exceedingly relevant and had no compunction about expressing this belief to pollsters. In fact, Gallup did not register a majority approving of interracial marriage until 1997—three decades after Loving recognized the constitutional right.

By contrast, even some of the bleakest same-sex marriage polls of recent years would have cheered advocates of interracial marriage in the age of Loving. A 2008 Quinnipiac University poll, for instance, found that 55 percent of respondents opposed gay marriage. And the most recent round of data, collected this year by Gallup, CNN-Opinion Researchand the ABC News-Washington Post poll, found that slightly more than 50 percent of adults responded approvingly to questions regarding same-sex marriage…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

‘Horror and beauty in rare combination’: The miscegenate fictions of Octavia butler

Women: A Cultural Review
Volume 7, Issue 1 (1996)
pages 28-38
DOI: 10.1080/09574049608578256

Roger Luckhurst, Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature
Birkbeck, University of London

Octavia Butler’s work is virtually unknown, and yet her ten novels and one short story collection constitute an astonishingly intricate and sustained meditation on the imbrication of race and gender across cultural and scientific discourses. By her own reckoning the only black woman science-fiction writer currently working, she has, since 1976, investigated the ambivalent legacies of slavery by sending a twentieth-century woman back in time to a Maryland plantation in 1815 (Kindred), envisioned a classically ‘sci-fi’ future (Patternmaster) only to explode its conventionality by tracing this future’s racial genealogy back first to contemporary Los Angeles (Mind of My Mind and Clay’s Ark) and then to seventeenth-century Africa (Wild Seed), and has also produced a stunning trilogy about inter-species hybridization which is at once rigorously within the bounds of revisionist evolutionary theory and yet also allegorizes a passage from the horror of miscegenation to the emergence of a literally catastrophic difference (Xenogenesis: Dawn Adulthood Riles, Imago).

Butler’s chance for recognition might have arrived in 1984 when her short story, ‘Bloodchild’ won both the Hugo and Nebula prizes, the science-fiction community’s major internal awards. A subtle and disconcerting story, ‘Bloodchild’ slyly rewrites the gendered anxieties of the ‘body horror’ genre by…

Read or purchase the article here.

Hybridity Theory and Kinship Thinking

Cultural Studies
Volume 19, Issue 5 (2005)
pages 602-621
DOI: 10.1080/09502380500365507

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

A parallel is posited between the ways hybridity and kinship are thought about in Western contexts, challenging the idea that kinship and biology tend to lead to narrow, roots-oriented, essentialized definitions of identity. Rather than being the opposite of rhizomic, diasporic hybridity, kinship and biology partake of the tension between roots and routes that is characteristic of all hybridity. Anthropological evidence on the character of Western kinship thinking is examined to elucidate some features of its flexibility. Theories of hybridity are seen as being themselves a type of kinship thinking.

Introduction

Concepts of hybridity—and related ones of mestizaje, syncretism, creolization, mélange , métissage , mixture—have been widely deployed in cultural theory, especially in relation to fields in which racial and ethnic identifications are made (Anzalduá 1987, Bhabha 1994, Garcıá Canclini 1995, Gilroy 2000, Hale 1996, 1999, Ifekwunigwe 1999, Kapchan & Strong 1999, Nelson 1999, Smith 1997, Werbner & Modood 1997, Young 1995). The concept of diaspora, although not at first sight nor necessarily associated with processes of mixing, may be deployed to the same kind of effect, evoking a context or dynamic which creates mixing (Brah 1996, Hall 1996, Gilroy 2000).

In much of this work, there is a current that sees hybridity as potentially subversive of dominant ideologies and practices and leading to the dislocation and destabilization of entrenched essentialisms, often with a focus on racial and ethnic categories and boundaries, and frequently in colonial and post-colonial contexts. On the other hand, there is also an awareness that hybridity carries with it some other possibilities and meanings, which are seen in a less positive light. These possibilities revolve around ideas of roots, genealogical kinship links, biology and essentialism. As Kapchan and Strong (1999, p. 242) put it, ‘There is hybridity that may refer to and reify history and genealogy, for example, and hybridity that seems to make a mockery of it’. In a similar vein, Young (1995, pp. 24
/5) distinguishes between ‘organic’ and ‘intentional’ modes of hybridity (see below). We are faced with a dualism in hybridity theory between potentially positive hybridity, which is dynamic, progressive, diasporic, rhizomic, subversive, anti-essentialist, routes-oriented and based on collage, montage and cut-and-mix; and a potentially negative hybridity, which is biological, genealogical, kinship-based, essentialist, roots-oriented and based on simple ideas of combining two wholes to make a third whole.

I argue that this dualism involves a narrow and stereotyped understanding of biology and kinship. Both of these domains are in fact characterized by dynamic processes of cultural practice which display their own tensions between roots and routes, between essentialisms and non-essentialisms, between being and becoming. Recognizing this does not dissolve the basic dualism outlined above—it makes biology and kinship straddle the divide, as hybridity itself is said to do—but it re-situates kinship and biology in important ways. It carries the theoretically and politically important implication that identities which invoke either kinship and/or biology (e.g. blood, genes) as tropes of belonging and identification should not necessarily or automatically be seen as essentialist (or needing justification in terms of their ‘strategic essentialism’), exclusivist, politically conservative, absolutist or fundamentalist…

…An illustration of the kinship assumptions that underlie thinking about processes of mixture is furnished by the recent literature on mixed-race identities in the USA. Root argues that mixed-race people ‘expose the irrationality by which the [racial] categories have been derived and enforced’ (Root 1996a, p. xxv). This idea that the US system of racial reckoning is irrational is supported by Spickard who describes the ‘illogic’ of American racial categories. Part of his argument is that all racial categorizations are illogical because they do not accord with the facts of biology—which, as he recognizes, only makes the categories illogical if they pretend to be based on biology. But ‘what is most illogical is that [in the USA] we imagine these racial categories to be exclusive’ (Spickard 1992, p. 20). For example, one could only—until 1997—check one census box for racial identity and this census practice broadly reflected social usage. To take the most common example, it is illogical to have to be either black or white, when so many people are black-white mixes. The US ‘one-drop rule’ that classifies anyone with ‘one drop of black blood’ as black is the mainstay of the either/or system—a system arguably now losing its dualist rigidity (Root 1996b, Azoulay 1997). This rule determines that ‘a white woman can give birth to a Black child, but a Black woman can never give birth to a white child’ (Nash 1995, p. 950, citing Barbara J. Fields). In one brutal sense, this system is highly logical: it defines a clear rule and follows it to a logical conclusion. In what sense, then, is it illogical, except insofar as any racial categorization is illogical? The intuition that the US system is illogical comes, I believe, from a sense of the ‘logic’ of a Western cognatic kinship model that assumes that a child gets equal amounts of its constitution from both parents. This does not necessarily mean people think a child born to a ‘black’ parent and a ‘white’ parent is literally physically half black and half white—although this mode of thought may, indeed, be widespread, in view of the fact that people routinely talk of having, say, black or white ‘blood’ in their veins, or of being, say, a quarter West Indian or half Scottish. Whether or not the kinship logic is understood in physical terms, it can also simply supply a way of thinking about the allegiances and ties that such a child would have ‘logically’ (i.e. ‘naturally’ by the precepts of Western kinship reckoning). It is against the background of this assumption that the US system appears illogical…

Read the entire aritcle here.

Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia. – book reviews

Journal of Social History
Volume 28, Number 2 (Winter 1994)

George Reid Andrews, Distinguished Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh

Peter Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, 432 pages, Paperback ISBN-10: 9780801852510; ISBN-13: 978-0801852510.

The numbers tell the story: the heart of the New World African diaspora lies, not north of the border, but south. During the period of slavery, ten times as many Africans came to Spanish and Portuguese America as to the United States. People of African ancestry found considerably more favorable conditions in North America for their survival and increase than they did in Latin America; nevertheless, by 1990 the estimated 100 million Afro-Latin Americans still outnumbered Afro-North Americans by a factor of more than three to one and accounted for almost twice as large a proportion of their respective national populations.

Though the historiography on Afro-Latin America has expanded greatly during the last twenty years, it continues to differ in at least one important respect from comparable work on the United States: it focuses almost entirely on slavery, and essentially comes to an end at the moment of abolition. While historians in the United States have devoted extensive attention to the post-emancipation period in this country and to the subsequent evolution of race relations during the twentieth century, Magnus Morner’s evaluation, written a quarter of a century ago, still holds true today: historians of Latin America “seem to lose all interest in the Negro as soon as abolition is accomplished. In any case, he disappears almost completely from historical literature.”

race in the region has been shaped by anthropologists and sociologists: Thales de Azevedo, Roger Bastide, Florestan Fernandes, Gilberto Freyre, Marvin Harris, Carlos Hasenbalg, Octavio Ianni, Clovis Moura, Joao Baptista Borges Pereira, and Charles Wagley in Brazil; Angelina Pollak-Eltz in Venezuela; Jaime Arocha and Nina de Freidemann in Colombia; Norman Whitten in Ecuador, to name just a few. Even this literature is not abundant; and, significantly, much of it has been produced by scholars who are not native to the countries they study. Latin American sociologists have proven reluctant to contest their societies’ self-image as “racial democracies”; and as Peter Wade suggests for the case of Colombia, the belief that people of African ancestry have been satisfactorily integrated into their national societies has tended to remove them as objects of study for local anthropologists, who focus instead on the less assimilated, more “primitive” Amerindian populations.

So when three major new works on Afro-Latin America (written, in keeping with the pattern just noted, by foreign anthropologists) appear in a relatively short space of time, it is an event worthy of notice. Only one of those works, Peter Wade’s Blackness and Race Mixture, focuses specifically on questions of race. Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s Death Without Weeping is concerned with “slow starvation … as a primary motivating force in social life” and “the effects of chronic hunger, sickness, death, and loss on the ability to love, trust, have faith and keep it.” (Scheper-Hughes: 15) And John Burdick’s Looking for God in Brazil seeks to explain why Catholic liberation theology and “base communities,” hailed during the 1970s and 80s as engines of progressive political change, are now being displaced among poor and working-class Brazilians by evangelical Protestantism and Afro-Brazilian umbanda. But in order to answer these questions, Scheper-Hughes and Burdick both carried out field research in communities which are majority Afro-Latin American. And since all three authors were able to talk directly to the subjects of their research, they portray those communities with a depth and richness of detail that historians forced to work with sketchy and fragmentary documentary evidence can only rarely achieve.

Paralleling (and in part inspired by) recent scholarship on Brazil, Peter Wade begins by questioning Colombia’s semi-official image of itself as a racial democracy, a mestizo society created by a centuries-long process of race mixture among Europeans, Indians, and Africans. He has little trouble demonstrating that, like other Latin American societies, Colombia is in fact a racial hierarchy in which whiteness is highly valued over blackness and Indianness. Whites are correspondingly over-represented in the upper and middle classes, and nonwhites are over-represented in the working class and among the poor.

Thus far this is familiar ground. Wade pushes on beyond the existing literature, however, by noting that racial groups are unequally distributed not just in Colombia’s class structure; they are unequally distributed across the country’s regions as well. This leads him to ask how the ideology and practice of racial hierarchy vary between areas which are predominantly black and those which are predominantly white. The book thus becomes a comparative study within Colombia, focusing on the Choco, a lowland tropical rain forest bordering Panama, and the highland region of Antioquia…

Read the entire review here.