Mixed Race Studies

My academic research is on racial categories in national censuses.  When I first started reading about the push to get a “mixed-race” category on the U.S. census in the 1990s, I was absolutely on the side of the multiracial movement. I thought the census should recognize our identities, no matter how complicated they may be.  Then I kept reading and realized that the multiracial activists were only concerned with recognition and didn’t care that it potentially came at the expense of civil rights agendas.  Being counted is crucial in the U.S.—and elsewhere. It is linked to money, political power, grassroots mobilization and even community cohesion.  Having a separate mixed-race category threatened all that—and the hard-fought victories of the civil rights movement.  The multiracial organizations that testified before Congress in the 1990s were mostly white mothers of multiracial children who did not want their children to have to choose one race over another.  But they failed to recognize what else was at stake—though the census was once an instrument used to manage and control racial populations, it now has a political power that racial minorities can access and use to advance their claims. The entire U.S. civil rights regime rests on the idea of discrete racial categories. One group’s recognition could lead to another’s oppression.  But the mixed-race activists didn’t care—they went on to argue (unsuccessfully) for their cause and even struck alliances with Republicans, including Newt Gingrich, whose ten steps for better race relations in the U.S. included adding a multiracial category to the census and doing away with affirmative action.

Debra Thompson, “The language and the Ethics of Mixed Race,” In Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out, edited by Adebe De Rango-Adem and Andrea Thompson (Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2010), 267.

In contrast to Blacks and Asians, anti-miscegenation laws were seldom applied to Native Americans and never mentioned Latinos. The reasons for the lenient treatment of Latinos and Native Americans are quite similar. In both cases, these groups first came into contact with Whites when frontiers were being settled. At the outset, Whites had much to gain by forming friendly alliances with Indian tribes or Mexican natives. On occasion, these alliances could be cemented through intermarriage. Consider, for example, the Anglo settlers who arrived in northern Mexico to make their fortunes in the early to mid-1800s. Mexico, newly freed from Spanish rule, hoped to capitalize on the sparsely populated furthermost reaches of its territory by attracting foreign investors. However, Mexican officials did not want Anglos simply to come to their country, exploit the land, and leave with their fortunes. Instead, the government wanted to encourage permanent settlement, and an excellent way to do this was to reward those who put down roots there. As a result, Mexico offered naturalization opportunities and corresponding trade advantages to Anglos who married Mexican women. Indeed, the expectation was that Anglo settlers would be loyal to Mexican wives, not manipulate or abandon them after using them to personal advantage…

Rachel F. Moran, “Love with a Proper Stranger: What Anti-Miscegenation Laws Can Tell Us About the Meaning of Race, Sex, and Marriage,” Hofstra Law Review, Volume 32, Issue 4, (2004): 1663-1679.

Latinos are “Mixed,” Too

News Taco: The Latino Daily
2011-07-14

Chantilly Patiño, blogger
Bicultural Mom

Most times, Americans don’t think of Latinos as being mixed or multicultural, but in reality Latinos are leaders of multiculturalism and mixed families.  Start off with the fact that most Latinos come from a combination of European and Native ancestry, a mixing that began with the colonization of the Americas.

But beyond that there are other historical mixings, including African ancestry, Latinos in the U.S. are also in the unique position of straddling the borders of two dominating cultures, popular American culture and that of their own Latino heritage.  This puts Latinos in an excellent position to understand a variety of perspectives and address multiculturalism with ease…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race Season

BBC Press Office
BBC Two Summer & Autumn 2011
Diverse, stimulating and rewarding television on BBC Two
2011-06-22

Mixed-race Britain is put under the spotlight this autumn in a collection of revealing new programmes. With a mix of drama and documentaries, the season provides a window into the varied lives of mixed-race people living in the UK and helps us understand what the increase in mixed-race people means for the way we live in Britain today.

Mixed Britannia

George Alagiah explores the remarkable and untold story of Britain’s mixed-race community in a new three-part series uncovering a tale of illicit love, tragedy and triumph.

With previously unseen material and unheard testimony, charting events from the turn of the 20th century to the present day, George examines the social factors that have influenced the shape of today’s mixed-race Britain. He discovers the love between merchant seamen and liberated female workers; how the British eugenics movement physically examined mixed-race children in the name of science; how pioneering white couples adopted mixed-race babies; and how Britain’s mixed-race population exploded with the arrival of people from all over the globe—making it one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the UK…

…Mixed Race

This documentary explores the historical and contemporary social, sexual and political attitudes to race mixing. From the strict application of “anti-miscegenation” laws in the USA and South Africa to the emergence of Mestizo cultures in the colonies of South America, the programme examines the complex history of interracial relationships around the world…

For more information, click here.

Mulatto Theology: Race, Discipleship, and Interracial Existence

Duke University
2009
290 pages

Brian Keith Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Religion in the Graduate School of Duke University

To exist racially “in-between,” being neither entirely of one race nor another, or more simply stated being a mulatto or interracial, has been characterized in the outlook that tends to mark existence in the modern world as a tragic state of being. It is from this outlook of loneliness and isolation that the term the “tragic mulatto” emerged. The dissertation Mulatto Theology: Race, Discipleship, and Interracial Existence will theologically interpret these lives so as to interrogate the wider reality of racialized lives that the mulatto’s body makes visible. As such, mulatto bodies are modulations of a racial performance in which all are implicated. The mulatto’s body is significant in that it discloses what is most pronouncedly masked in modern (and particularly white) identities.

Culture, identities (individual and communal) are not only interconnected, but they are mixtures where peoples become presenced in the lives and practices of other “alien” peoples. This mixture requires careful reflection upon the formation of all identities, and the ways in which these identities become visible within the world. Given this arc of identity any reflection upon Christian identity must articulate itself within the inherent tensions of these identities and the practices that mark such identities within the world. Through this work I hope to show how European theology itself has failed to account for its own dominant enclosure of identities, but also how Christian reflection itself might find a way out of this tragic reality.

In examining the formation and performance of mulatto bodies this dissertation suggests these bodies are theologically important for modern Christians and theological reflection in particular. Namely, the mulatto’s body becomes the site for re-imagining Christian life as a life lived “in-between.” The primary locus of this re-imagination is the body of Christ. A re-examination of theological reflection and Scripture regarding his person and work display his character as uniquely mulatto, or the God-man. But not only is his identity mulatto, but his person also describes the nature of his work, his re-creation of humanity. So understood Christian bodies can be construed as “interracial” bodies—bodies of flesh and Spirit that disrupt modern formations of race. The Christian body points to a communal reality where hybridity is no longer tragic, but rather constitutive of Christian discipleship. This new, hybrid and “impure” way of existing witnesses to God’s redemptive work in the world.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I – Renunciation: Racial Discipleship; or Disciplining the Body
  • Chapter 1 – I Am Your Son White Man! The Mulatto and the Tragic
  • Chapter 2 – Neither Fish Nor Fowl: Presence as Politics
• Part II – Confession: Christ, the Tragic Mulatto
  • Chapter 3 – What Child is This? or How can this Be? The Mulatto Christ
  • Chapter 4 – I Am the Way: Mulatto Redemption and the Politics of Identification
• Part III – Immersion: Christian Discipleship; or The New Discipline of the Body
  • Chapter 5 – You Must Be Re-Born: Baptism Mulattic Re-Birth
  • Chapter 6 – The Politics of Presence: Discipleship and Prayer
• Bibliography
• Biography

Read the entire dissertation here.