Mixed Race Studies

D’Eichthal and Urbain’s Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche: Race, Gender, and Reconciliation after Slave Emancipation

Nineteenth-Century French Studies
Volume 39, Numbers 3 & 4 (Spring-Summer 2011)
pages 240-258
E-ISSN: 1536-0172 Print ISSN: 0146-7891

Naomi J. Andrews, Assistant Professor of History
Santa Clara University

This article is a close reading of Gustave d’Eichthal and Ishmayl Urbain’s Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche (1839), written during the decade prior to the “second” French emancipation in 1848. The article argues that the hierarchical gendering of race described in the letters is reflective of metropolitan concerns about potential for social disorder accompanying slave emancipation in the French colonies. In arguing for social reconciliation through interracial marriage and its offspring, the symbolically charged figure of the mulatto, the authors deployed gendered and familial language to describe a stable post-emancipation society.

Read or purchase the article here.

Who Belongs to Whom?: Codes, Property, and Ownership in Madame Charles Reybaud’s “Les Épaves”

Nineteenth-Century French Studies
Volume 39, Numbers 3 & 4 (Spring-Summer 2011)
pages 229-239
E-ISSN: 1536-0172 Print ISSN: 0146-7891

Molly Krueger Enz, Assistant Professor of French
South Dakota State University

French Romantic writer Madame Charles Reybaud explores the coupling of gender and race by depicting the legal restrictions imposed upon married women and slaves in her novella “Les Épaves” (1838). Both groups have a lack of power and are treated as inferior in a colonial, patriarchal society. This article examines the parallels between Madame Éléonore de la Rebelière, the Creole wife of a Belgian plantation owner, and Donatien, a former slave. They are both subordinated by Monsieur de la Rebelière: Donatien because of being a mixed-race épave and Éléonore because of her status as a married, Creole woman.

Read or purchace the article here.

Christian view on segregation

Association of Citizens Councils
Winona, Mississippi
1954-11-04
16 pages
Source: Digital Collections of the University of Southern Mississippi Libraries
USM Identifier: mus-mcc032

Rev. G. T. Gillepsie, D.D., President Emeritus
Belhaven College, Jackson Mississippi

From the McCain (William D.) Pamphlet Collection; In this pamphlet published by the White Citizens’ Council of Winona, Mississippi, Gillespie states that racial separation is the way to support racial harmony. He says that Soviet Communists are behind the Civil Rights movement, because they want to break down the barriers between races so that racial amalgamation will occur. He contends that school integration will lead to intermarriage, and he cites Biblical and pseudoscientific reasons that segregation must continue. He also quotes Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Booker T. Washington.

A reprint of an address made before the Synod of Mississippi of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. on November 4, 1954.

The problem of race relations is not new. It is as old as civilization. Whenever in the history of the race two peoples of significantly different characteristics have come in contact with each other, or have sought to occupy the same area, a problem of race relations has inevitably developed. The closer the contact, and the more nearly the numerical strength of the two groups has approached equality, the more difficult and acute the problem has become.

The problem of racial relations throughout the world today has been greatly accentuated by the rapid development of modern means of communication and transportation, which have brought all the peoples of the world into much closer contact than ever before.

The problem has also been complicated by the worldwide spread of Karl Marx’s doctrine of Internationalism and the Classless society, combined with the vigorous propaganda of Soviet Communism to bring about a world revolution and the breakdown of all national and racial distinctions and to effect the complete amalgamation of all races.

The Anglo-Saxon and English-speaking people have steadfastly opposed and resisted the mixture of their racial stock with that of other peoples, especially where the physical and cultural characteristics were widely dissimilar, and wherever they have gone, around the world, they have consistently instituted and maintained a pattern of segregation which uniformly provided an effective check against the process of amalgamation, and which has preserved the racial integrity of the English-speaking peoples of the world.

The race problem in America arises inherently out of the concentration of large masses of the negro race in areas predominantly Anglo-Saxon in racial type and in culture, and where the principle of racial segregation has been generally upheld by legal, social and moral sanctions.

Comparatively little of the opposition to the principle of segregation has come spontaneously from the pure-blood negroes, or from the masses of the negro population; more strenuous opposition has come from the negroes of mixed blood, who have migrated from the South to Northern cities, and who bitterly resent the tensions and discrimination to which they find themselves and their families subjected in their efforts to secure recognition in Northern communities. It is not without significance, however, that a very considerable part of the violent agitation against segregation stems from sources outside the negro race, and outside of America, and coincides with the worldwide movement for racial amalgamation which has its fountainhead in Moscow.

…In Northern or Western communities, where negroes number usually less than five per cent of the total population, the admission of a few negro children to the public schools does not present any serious problem, and even if an occasional interracial marriage should occur, it would have little appreciable effect upon the cultural pattern or the blood-stream of community life, but in the South, where negroes constitute a large proportion, and in some areas a majority, of the population, the integrated school with its blurring of all racial distinctions presents a serious threat to the whole cultural pattern of community life, and points unmistakably to the gradual but eventual merging of the two distinct racial types into a mulatto race. This is not a baseless and fantastic phobia, but a well grounded and reasoned conviction which determines the attitude of Southern parents, and gives assurance that they cannot and will not acquiesce in a program which means the surrender of the birthright of their children and of generations yet unborn…

…4.  Segregation Does Not Necessarily Involve Discrimination.

Whenever two individuals or groups of widely different physical characteristics are brought into close contact, it is likely or even inevitable that some discrimination should occur, especially where the situations are competitive; but such discrimination is a spontaneous human reaction and cannot be charged against the principle of segregation.

As a matter of fact, segregation, by reducing the number of points of contact, tends to lessen friction and tension, and especially if there is clear recognition on the part of both races that the chief reason for segregation is the desirability of preventing such intimacies as might lead to intermarriage and the amalgamation of the races, then the chief occasion for misunderstanding and discrimination is removed…

Read the entire pamphlet here.

Mixed schools and mixed blood

Citizen’s Council of Mississippi: States’ Rights-Racial Integrity
1956
14 pages
Source: Digital Collections of the University of Southern Mississippi Libraries
USM Identifier: mus-mcc029

Herbert Ravenel Sass

From the McCain (William D.) Pamphlet Collection; In the pamphlet, Sass argues that segregation is an American institution and that the Civil Rights movement is a Communist propaganda machine dedicated to weakening the United States through biological amalgamation of its races. He says that African Americans have a better life than any other population descended from Africans around the world. He also erroneously compares the separation of the races to the biological speciation of birds.

Herbert Ravenel Sass, author, presents the fundamental case for the white South. A native of Charleston, South Carolina, an independent, and an Episcopalian, Mr. Sass is imbued with a tradition which he believes is based on unchanging truth. His argument goes to the very heart of the controversy: Would integrated schools lead to mixed blood?

What may well be the most important physical fact in the story of the United States is one which is seldom emphasized in our history books. It is the fact that throughout the three and a half centuries of our existence we have kept our several races biologically distinct and separate. Though we have encouraged the mixing of many different strains in what has been called the American “melting pot,” we have confined this mixing to the white peoples of European ancestry, excluding from our “melting pot” all other races. The result is that the United States today is overwhelmingly a pure white nation, with a smaller but considerable Negro population in which there is some white blood, and a much smaller American Indian population.

The fact that the United States is overwhelmingly pure white is not only important; it is also the most distinctive fact about this country when considered in relation to the rest of the New World. Except Canada, Argentina, and Uruguay, none of the approximately twenty-five other countries of this hemisphere has kept its races pure. Instead (though each contains some pure-blooded individuals) all these countries are products of an amalgamation of races—American Indian and white or American Indian, Negro, and white. In general the pure-blooded white nations have out-stripped the far more numerous American mixed-blood nations in most of the achievements which constitute progress as commonly defined.

These facts are well known. But now there lurks in ambush, as it were, another fact: we have suddenly begun to move toward abandonment of our 350-year-old system of keeping our races pure and are preparing to adopt instead a method of racial amalgamation similar to that which has created the mixed-blood nations of this hemisphere; except that the amalgamation being prepared for this country is not Indian and white but Negro and white. It is the deep conviction of nearly all white Southerners in the states which have large Negro populations that the mingling or integration of white-and Negro children in the South’s primary schools would open the gates to miscegenation and widespread racial amalgamation.

This belief is at the heart of our race problem, and until it is realized that this is the South’s basic and compelling motive, there can be no understanding of the South’s attitude…

Read the entire pamphlet here.

Interracial Relationships and Loving v. Virginia

CityLine Boston
WCVB Boston
2011-06-15

Karen Holmes Ward, Director of Public Affairs and Community Services; Host and Executive Producer of CityLine

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Ken Tanabe, President and Founder
LovingDay.org

Dr. Dawkins discusses the ongoing impact of interracial romantic relationships, multiracial identities and passing in the United States with Loving Day founder Ken Tanabe and CityLine host Karen Holmes Ward.

Notes by Steven F. Riley: There are several significant inaccuracies in this video.

1. Interracial marriage was in fact legal, not illegal, in most states 44 years ago.  Only 16 states had bans on interracial marriage at that time.
2. Ms. Ward’s comment, “No steps were taken to change the law until one appropriately named couple fought for their rights…” is grossly inaccurate.  There was no one “law” to ban such marriages in the United States. Each state had its own anti-miscegenation statute.  Most importantly, the battle to end anti-miscegenation (anti-interracial marriage) laws in the United States was a 50 year struggle which included such landmark cases like California Supreme Court: Perez v. Sharp (1948), U.S. Supreme Court: McLaughlin v. Florida (1964) and ending of course, with Loving v. Virginia (1967).
3. Mr. Tanabe’s comment, “After the case, for the first time, interracial marriage was legalized in the United States.” is incorrect.  Loving v. Virginia did not legalize interracial marriage in the United States.  It legalized interracial marriage only in the remaining 15 states (Maryland repealed its law during the case) that still had bans on such marriages.  In fact, there were 10 states that never enacted any bans on interracial marriage. Mr. Tanabe seems to have forgotten that Mildred and Richard Loving (the plaintiffs in the case) were legally married in Washington, D.C. in June of 1958, six months before they were arrested for violating the section of the law which prohibited interracial couples from being married out of state and then returning to Virginia.

To get a comprehensive view of anti-miscegenation laws and their impact on race relations in the United States, please read Peggy Pascoe’s multiple award winning book, What Comes Naturally, Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. Also, please read my thoughts about the misreprentation of the Loving v. Virginia case in contemporary discourses.

Amalgamation! Race, Sex, and Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel

Praeger
1985-08-22
259 pages
ISBN: 0-313-24275-5/978-0-313-24275-5

James Kinney

This book is likely out of print.

The Caste Taboo in William Faulkner’s “Elly” and “Mountain Victory”

EuroAmerica: A Journal of European and American Studies
Volume 25, Number 3 (September 1995)
pages 1-24
Online ISSN:1991-7864; Print ISSN: 1021-3058  

Wen-ching Ho
Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Simca, Republic of China

Miscegenation is “the ultimate horror.”
—Flannery O’Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge (414)

In William Faulkner’s social milieu, white male hegemony fostered a double standard which condoned one form of miscegenation, between white men and black women, while vehemently prohibiting the other form. Both condonement and prohibition had to do with maintaining the existing racial structure. To be more specific, one means of ensuring white dominance was, as James Kinney has pointed out, to extend their mastery over blacks to the bed, where the sex act itself served as ritualistic reenactment of the daily pattern of social dominance. Another means of sustaining white dominance was to deny the offspring produced from miscegenetic liaisons. By relegating mulattoes to the status of blacks, whites could maintain the sharpness of racial distinctions and the attendant power relationships. A corollary of the imposed classification is the evolution after Reconstruction of a more stringent line of racial demarcation called the “one-drop rule.” The rule classed as a Negro any individual with a known trace of Negro blood in his veins. The notion that “one drop of black blood makes a Negro” eventually came to color all discussions on the subject of miscegenation, particularly the taboo form.

As Gunnar Myrdal has noted, the entire Negro problem in America hinges upon this social definition of “race,” with which came the whole stock of valuations, beliefs, and expectations in the two groups, causing and constituting the order of color caste (117). Joel Williamson expresses a similar view when he says summarily that one central fact about the transformation of race relations during the years from 1850 to 1915 is that the whites of the South led the nation in turning from a society in which some blackness in a person might be overlooked to one in which not a single iota of color was excused (109). Booker T. Washington explained the situation quite graphically at the turn of the century: “It is a fact that, if a person is known to have one per cent of African blood in his veins, he ceases to be a white man. The ninety-nine per cent of Caucasian blood does not weigh by the side of one per cent of African blood. The white blood counts for nothing. The person is a Negro every time” (158).

Closely associated with the evolution of the one-drop rule were three strains of thought that interacted to shape white America’s attitudes toward interracial mixture and the nature of mulattoes: polygenism, Lamarckism, and Darwinism. Polygenism contributed ideas about racial differences and inferiority, especially through its emphasis upon notions of racial “genius” and of race as a supraindividual entity. Lamarckism offered an explanation for the evolution of races and the development of the racial essence which, once in the blood, passed on to succeeding generations. The Darwinian notion of hereditary variation not only reinforced feelings of racial superiority and inferiority but in its concentration on evolutionary change also underscored the need for care in terms of which characteristics should be perpetuated or eliminated.

These strains of thought operated together to shape the racial thought in the half-century after Emancipation. They provided late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century academicians the theoretical basis for “scientific” ideas about race in general and miscegenation in particular. The academicians shared the following beliefs: (1) Negroes were temperamentally, physically, and intellectually different from whites; (2) Negroes were also inferior to whites in at least some of the fundamental qualities where-in the races differed, especially in intelligence and in the temperamental basis of enterprise or initiative; (3) Such differences and differentials were either permanent or subject to change only by a very slow process of development; and (4) Because of these permanent or deep-seated differences, miscegenation, especially in the form of intermarriage, was dangerous, for the crossing of such diverse types invariably resulted in a short-lived and unproliflc breed…

Read the entire article here.

Living as Others in Japan

Japanese Studies Association of Australia 2011 Biennial Conference
Internationalising Japan: Sport, Culture and Education
University of Melbourne, Melbourne Law School
185 Pelham Street
Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia
2011-07-04 through 2011-07-07

Wednesday, 2011-07-06, 11:00-12:30 AEDT (Local Time)
Room 102

This panel will present two historical papers about individuals whose lives were affected by the Pacific War, and a third paper which examines issues involving intercultural communication between Japanese and non-Japanese people. The two historical stories focus on how their respective individuals navigated their life course as “Others” in Japan. Hamilton will shed light on children born to Japanese mothers and Australian fathers during the Allied Occupation in Kure. Tamura’s paper is on a businessman of mixed heritage, English and Japanese, born in Kobe, who was interned in Japan. Parry’s paper provides a look into intercultural communication between Australian students in a homestay among ten Japanese host parents.

Kure Kids
Walter Hamilton

Walter Hamilton has recently completed a book on the mixed-race children of the Occupation, under the working title of Lest We Beget: The Mixed-Race Legacy of Occupied Japan. (www.lestwebeget.com).

Nearly sixty years have passed since the post-war occupation of Japan. It might be assumed historians will have exhausted all there is to say about its political, economic and social effects. But one unexplored aspect remains vividly alive: the hidden ancestral links that bind Australians, Americans, Britons and others to Japanese blood-relations never known, never met: the unclaimed, mixed-race offspring left in Japan when the troops departed. Their fathers would not or could not acknowledge them: an estimated 10,000 children, including several hundred fathered by Australians.

So familiar is the idea of military conquest leading to the birth of “unwanted” children outside marriage – across racial, class and cultural divides – they tend to be dismissed as a natural corollary of war. Their appearance in occupied Japan came as no surprise. The “Madame Butterfly” tradition provided a high-toned model of Western men exploiting Japanese women. As if their biological inevitability made them what they were, the children attracted scant attention from Western writers, who acquiesced in facile assumptions about their fate. Surely they were disowned by their fathers, lamented by their mothers and thrust to the lower depths of society. The eminent American historian John Dower has called them “one of the sad, unspoken stories” of the occupation. Japanese historical and fictional treatments of the issue also suffer from a determination to link the children exclusively to prostitution, moral collapse and national humiliation.

Australia joined the occupation not expecting to convert the former enemy but to punish and ostracise him. With immigration restrictions, in some respects, even tighter than they were in 1941, permission was denied for troops in Japan to marry across the race divide. Anyone defying the ban risked being forcibly removed from his de facto wife and children. Although these measures were relaxed in 1952 to admit the first Japanese war brides, no such right was extended to the unacknowledged or orphaned children of Australian servicemen. In addition, the federal government maintained an elaborate deception to stop the children being adopted by Australian families. Bogus welfare arguments were used to cover a purely political determination. The moment the strategy showed signs of faltering, it was reinforced through public monies being deployed to keep the children in Japan. There were almost no exceptions, even for the sons and daughters of brave men who had fought and died in the Korean War. In the words of a leading churchman of the day, the Reverend Alan Walker: “There have been few more disgraceful incidents in the whole miserable history of Australia’s racial immigration policy.”

This paper will introduce several individuals born in or near the city of Kure, in Hiroshima prefecture, where the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) was based from 1946 until the withdrawn of the last Korean War contingent in 1956. The Kure Kids encountered discrimination because of their physical appearance, dysfunctional family life, low socioeconomic status and social isolation. But the lives of these Japanese “others” represented much more—in quality, variety and achievement—than is suggested by the conventional portrayal of “sad, unspoken stories.”

Between Father Land and Mother Land: a British-Japanese Dual National and his Pacific War
Keiko Tamua

In war, individuals are categorized either as friend or foe, and enemy nationals are seen and treated with suspicion and fear. In December 1941, when the Pacific War started, about 700 out of 2134 civilians of the Allied nations who were residing in Japan were arrested or interned as enemy aliens. Most of them had lived in Japan for a number of years and had become part of the community. Some civilians were repatriated to their home countries on exchange boats in 1942 and 43, but others decided to remain in Japan even though they knew they were going to be interned or kept under police surveillance. Most of them had mixed heritage through their parents and/or having Japanese spouse; they thought their home was Japan rather than Britain or the USA, and they felt they could not leave without their family members.

F. M. Jonas was one of these expatriates who were caught in the war. He was born in Osaka in 1878, having a British father and a Japanese mother. He had established himself as a respectable British businessman in pre-war Kobe, running a stevedore business at the port. He was highly regarded both in the expatriate and Japanese communities, having been vicechairman of the Kobe Foreign Chamber of Commerce, and president of the Kobe Regatta and Athletic Club – the premier expatriate social club in Kobe. When the war started Jonas was arrested by the Japanese authorities, and later interned as an enemy alien. However, he managed to secure release from internment through British-Japanese dual citizenship, and he changed his name to Morii Kamejirō. When the war ended, he tried to re-establish his formal status as a British national. He died in 1950 before final resolution was officially made. Did he claim citizenship of convenience to suit the circumstances, to avoid internment, and consequently did he betray his father land? Or did he have legitimate reasons to do so? What were the consequences of his action for himself and his family? Japanese nationality laws upheld the principle of paternal succession until 1985, and dual citizenship has never been recognized. How did Jonas convince the authorities of his dual nationality? In this paper, I will discuss the life course of F. M. Jonas, who lived between father land and mother land in the middle of the Pacific War. Through Jonas’ story, I will explore, from a historical point of view, how the nationality of mixed decent people has been interpreted and handled in Japan and Britain.

For more information, click here.