Mixed Race Studies

Converging Spectres of an Other Within: Race and Gender in Prewar Afro-German History

Callaloo
Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2003)
pages 322-341
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2003.0036

Tina Campt, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program
Barnard College

This article examines two of the earliest historical contexts in which Germans articulated a public discourse on its black population. The essay explores the discourse of racial endangerment enunciated in the German colonies in the debates on the status of racially-mixed marriages and the Afro-German progeny of these relationships and links this discourse to a second recurrence of the spectre of racial mixture in the interwar years, the figure of the “Rhineland Bastard.” Setting these discourses in relation to one another, the article maps the trajectory of an imagined spectre of racial danger that served as a powerful and resilient construct for the expression of German national anxieties on blackness in the first half of the twentieth century.

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Too White to be Regarded as Aborigines: An historical analysis of policies for the protection of Aborigines and the assimilation of Aborigines of mixed descent, and the role of Chief Protectors of Aborigines in the formulation and implementation of those policies, in Western Australia from 1898 to 1940.

University of Notre Dame, Australia
March 2008
328 pages

Derrick Tomlinson

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame Australia

For much of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, public policies for Western Australia’s Indigenous peoples were guided by beliefs that they were remnants of a race in terminal decline and that a public duty existed to protect and preserve them. If their extinction was unavoidable, the public duty was to ease their passing. The Aborigines Act 1905 vested the Chief Protector of Aborigines (after 1936 the Commissioner for Native Affairs), with lawful responsibility for the pursuit of that duty. All Aborigines caught by the terms of the Act, in particular Aboriginal children under the age of 16, and after 1936 girls and women under the age of 21, were wards of the Chief Protector and the Act entrusted him with extensive powers for managing their lives. The historical progression of public policies for the protection of Aborigines is analysed in this thesis. Particular attention is paid to developments guided by A.O. Neville, the third Chief Protector of Aborigines and first Commissioner for Native Affairs from 1915 to 1940. In that time, inadequacies in the law and its false assumptions about the destiny of the Aboriginal race were exposed. Those who framed the Aborigines Act 1905 failed to address the possibility that the race might not be extinguished, but might be transformed by interaction with the dominant white community. They did not anticipate a need to manage an emergent, fertile, and anomic half-caste populace, too black for the mainstream white community to accept as equals, but too white to be regarded as Aborigines. In the face of these and other challenges, public policy shifted under Neville’s guidance from protecting the racial integrity of Aborigines by segregating them from contaminating influences of the white community, towards the absorption of Aborigines, in the first instance those of mixed racial descent, by the white population. Critics of the latter policy have condemned it as being directed towards sinister objectives of ‘biological absorption’, ‘constructive miscegenation’, or, at the extreme, ‘genocide’. It is argued in this thesis that public policy in Western Australia was directed towards none of those objectives. Breeding out the colour was never the intention. Public policy progressively after 1915 was guided by an aspiration that Aborigines might be elevated in public estimation to a level where they might be accepted by the white community. A.O. Neville believed that in the longer term inter-racial marriage might even become acceptable and that ultimately ‘coloureds’ might breed out, but not that public programs should be directed towards that purpose.

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Nonetheless, correctly and jointly, these articles recognize that we live in a society dominated and dictated by white supremacy. To understand multiracial Americans, we must place individuals with this identity within this context. Additionally, this collection does what no other has: It includes in this recognition the role that class can and does play when it comes to understanding a multiracial identity and construction.

Beth Frankel Merenstein, “Book Review: Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity,” Teaching Sociology,Volume 39, Number 2 (2011): 214-216. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0092055X11403292.

Mental Conflicts of Eurasian Adolescents

The Journal of Social Psychology
Volume 5, Issue 3 (August 1934)
pages 402-408
ISSN: 0022-4545 (Print), 1940-1183 (Online)
DOI: 10.1080/00224545.1934.9921608

Linden B. Jenkins

The article presents information on mental conflicts of Eurasian adolescents. In the early colonizing days when only young unmarried men were sent out there seemed to be no expressed attitude toward mixed marriages or concubinage. Eurasians were looked upon as a “natural result” of the conditions under which “empire builders” were forced to live. Mixed marriages then began to be looked upon as contrary to tradition and Eurasians became an “ever-present reminder that taboos have been violated and caste integrity threatened.” These Eurasians are generally so marked physically as to set them off from both parents, and, being excluded from either full-blood group, they constitute a third distinct class. One of the great tragedies to the Eurasion personality is the fact that the struggle to adjust himself to his environment results in the capitulation of his “ego.” The “inferior ego” is a most significant problem for the Eurasian adolescent. Hygienic mental adjustment begins at the point where the adolescent is learning the hard lesson that other individuals be- sides himself exist and have rights similar to his own.

In Malaysia there have been European contacts with the native peoples since the early exploration days of the Portuguese and, as a consequence, there is today a hybrid population of about fifteen thousand “Eurasians” in British Malaya alone. They are of a variety of mixtures—the more common type being Portuguese-Malay. Other mixtures are those of the Dutch, British, and Americans with the Malays, Indians, Javanese, and Chinese.

In the early colonizing days when only young unmarried men were sent out there seemed to be no expressed attitude toward mixed marriages or concubinage. Eurasians were looked upon as a “natural result” of the conditions under which “empire builders” were forced to live.  At a much…

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Notes on the state of Virginia: Africans, Indians and the paradox of racial integrity

Union Institute and University
June 2005
277 pages
AAT 3196614
Publication Number: AAT 3196614
ISBN: 9780542425899

Arica L. Coleman, Assistant Professor of Black American Studies
Unverisity of Delaware

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Arts and Sciences a Concentration in African American – Native American Relations at the Union Institute and University, Cincinnati, Ohio

W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous statement, ‘The problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the color line,’ invokes images of the century’s racial antagonisms between Blacks and whites. However, racial antagonism in Virginia also occurred between African Americans and Amerindians, as the question regarding who was an Indian and who was a Negro became paramount to Amerindian survival. Central to this problem was the enforcement of a law the Virginia General Assembly passed on March 20, 1924, entitled ‘An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity.’ This legislation, the first such law to be passed in the United States, was the culmination of Virginia’s three hundred year campaign to insure the ‘purity’ of the white race. Racial purity, in early twentieth-century Virginia, was defined by the absence of African ancestry. Therefore, one could be of Indian-white admixture and remain racially pure. But an Indian-Black admixture, even one drop of black ‘blood,’ and one was transformed from pure to impure, and in jeopardy of being ethnically reclassified. By denying the historical relationship between African and Indian peoples in the Commonwealth, this paradox informed the state recognition process and helped many to successfully maintain their aboriginal status. However, the problem of the color line continues in the twenty-first century because racial integrity remains the dividing factor in African-Indian relations. The following discourse examines the changing state of African-Indian relations in Virginia from the Colonial period to the present. Chapter 1 provides a historical overview of the United States racial formation project in relation to Africans and Indians; chapter 2 examines Thomas Jefferson’s racial theories concerning African-Indian admixture, racial identity, and their influence on Virginia’s twentieth-century racial purity campaign; chapter 3 examines the historical relationship between African and Indians by tracing the Indian presence in the slave and free ‘colored’ populations of colonial and antebellum Virginia; chapter 4 examines the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, its impact on African-Indian relations, and the debate it provoked among such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey; chapter 5 provides a critical analysis of twentieth-century anthropological advocates Frank Speck and Helen Rountree, their activism on behalf of the Virginia Tribes, and the ways their advocacy contributed to the racial integrity cause; chapter 6 is a case study which examines Central Point, Virginia, the home of Richard and Mildred Loving (Loving v Virginia), to interrogate race and self identity, namely the self identity of Mildred Loving as an Indian woman; the Epilogue examines the contemporary activism of Virginia residents of mixed African-Indian heritage whose alternative historical consciousness defies racial politics and promotes decolonization, reclamation and empowerment.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapters
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia Revisited
  • 3. The Changing State of African and Indian Relations in Virginia
  • 4. Towards State [Un] Recognition: Native Identity and the One Drop
  • 5. The Present State of Virginia Indians: The Predicament of Of Race and Culture
  • 6. “Tell The Court I Love My [Indian] Wife:” Interrogating Race and Self Identity in Loving v. Virginia
• Epilogue – Coming Together: Decolonization and Empowerment, Reclaiming Ourselves
• Appendices
  • A. An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity
  • B. Loving Marriage license
  • C. Weyanoke Holiday Card
  • Works Cited

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