Mixed Race Studies

California’s Hispanic Heritage: A View Into the Spanish Myth

The Journal of San Diego History
San Diego Historical Society Quarterly
Volume 19, Number 1 (Winter 1973)

Manuel Patricio Servin, Professor of Southwestern and Mexican-American History
Arizona State University, Tempe

No aspect of Borderlands’ history has been more distorted than that of the Spanish colonization of the Southwest. Despite the writings of eminent historians on the racially mixed background of the Spanish-speaking pioneers, the myth that the early settlers, and consequently the old families, were preponderantly of Spanish stock persists in many quarters.

Members of old families, whose mixed-blood ancestors early adopted the Spanish ideals of success, proudly extol their Spanish lineage and background. Viewing history through special lenses, the descendants of early settlers, as well as their Anglo-American friends and relatives, seem to focus only on the Spanish conquistadores, explorers, and settlers of the Borderlands. Overlooking their unbleached mestizo, mulatto, and Indian ancestors, these anointed Spanish-speaking pioneers see themselves as the descendants of intrepid Castilian gentlemen.

This act of self-deception appears to afflict almost the entire Borderlands’ area. New Mexico, perhaps because of its long history and galaxy of noble-like conquistadores, more than any other area suffers from this Spanish fever. The names of Don Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, Don Antonio de Espejo, and Don Juan de Oñate dominate the history of the state. Consequently, New Mexico is generally considered Spanish and its Spanish-speaking inhabitants are consequently Hispanos—not Mexicans of mixed Spanish, Indian, and African stock. Texas, with its so-called Spanish founders of San Antonio, also suffers from a similar affliction. The Spanish-speaking rico, the person of status, is consequently the descendant of either the notoriously indolent Canary Islander or of an alleged Spaniard or criollo. California, where earlier American historians over glorified the Spanish period of the province as well as the names of Junípero Serra and Gaspar de Portolá, relishes in its Spanish origins and traditions. Its distinguished families, suffering from an acute case of color blindness, call themselves californios, descendants of supposed Spaniards.

The recognition of the role that colonial Mexicans—that is, the role that the persons of mixed-blood—played in settling the Borderlands and especially California does not reject the essential part that Spaniards performed in the exploration, colonization, and missionization of the Southwest. Spanish peninsulares overwhelmingly were the adelantados, the officials, and the priests who explored, governed, and served settlers. But to claim that the settlers were preponderantly Spaniards—as the Californios assert—must be rejected as historically untenable. These settlers, as the study of California’s settlement shows, were not Spanish, but overwhelmingly mixed-bloods from Indian, Spanish, and also Negro stock…

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The first mixed race student is admitted to Wheaton

Wheaton College History
Wheaton College, Newton, Massachusetts
2011-02-02

Deanna Hauck

The first African-American student to attend Wheaton probably did so unbeknownst to the school. In 1856-57, Mary E. Stafford of Cumberland Island, Georgia attended Wheaton. She was the daughter of a white father [Robert Stafford] and an African-American mother [Elizabeth Bernardey], and seems to have been able to pass as white, since it was not known that she was of mixed race until many years after she had actually attended Wheaton.

Source: General Files: 1856-1857: J. Ehrenhard and M. Bullard, “Stafford Plantations, Cumberland Island National Seashore, Georgia,” p. 16.

Also see: Robert Stafford of Cumberland Island: Growth of a Planter

The Anglo-Indians: A Disorganized Marginal Group

Social Forces
Volume 14, Number 2 (December 1935)
pages 263-268

Paul Frederick Cressey, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Wheaton College, Newton, Massachusetts

FOUR centuries of European contact with India have left a biological residue of many thousand people of mixed European and Indian stock. Since 1911 this group has been officially designated by the government of India as the Anglo-Indian Community. Elsewhere in Asia racial hybrids of European and Oriental stock are commonly known as Eurasians. The Anglo-Indians are by far the largest group of such hybrids in Asia.

The distribution of the Anglo-Indians accurately reflects their history. They are concentrated in those areas where the maximum European contact has occurred. In the four largest port cities, Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Rangoon, live one-third of all the Anglo-Indians, while an additional one-third live in other parts of the provinces in which these cities are located. Anglo-Indians are predominantly city dwellers, and their life and problems have an urban setting. In 1931 the Anglo-Indian population of India and Burma was returned by the official census as 138,395. This represents an increase of 11.4 per cent during the preceding decade, and 12.1.9 per cent for the last fifty years. The increase in the total population of India in these same periods has been 10.1 per cent and 31.3 per cent respectively. There is a tendency for many persons of light complexion to return themselves as British, and some Indian Christians are enumerated as Anglo-Indians. The Census of India recognizes these errors and estimates the corrected total for Anglo-Indians to be approximately 165,000. In 1931 the sex ratio was 1,061 Anglo-Indian males for every 1,000 females.

Many European stocks are represented among these hybrids, including British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese. The term Anglo-Indian is thus something of a misnomer, but the largest single stock is British, and the group is predominantly British in its cultural affiliations. On the Indian side the stock is almost entirely of Hindu origin, only a very few persons being of Moslem descent.   There is no…

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How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon

Verso Books
October 2008
Hardback, 240 pages
Paperback, 272 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9781844672752
Paperback ISBN: 9781844674343

David R. Roediger, Foundation Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History
University of Kansas

An absorbing chronicle of the role of race in US history, by the foremost historian of race and labor.

In this absorbing chronicle of the role of race in US history, David R. Roediger explores how the idea of race was created and recreated from the 1600’s to the present day. From the late seventeenth century—the era in which DuBois located the emergence of “whiteness”—through the American revolution and the emancipatory Civil War, to the civil rights movement and the emergence of the American empire, How Race Survived US History reveals how race did far more than persist as an exception in a progressive national history. Roediger examines how race intersected all that was dynamic and progressive in US history, from democracy and economic development to migration and globalization.

Exploring the evidence that the USA will become a majority “non-white” nation in the next fifty years, this masterful account shows how race remains at the heart of American life in the twenty-first century.

Interracial Marriage and Admixture in Hawaii

Biodemography and Social Biology
Volume 17, Issue 4 (1970)
pages 278-291
DOI: 10.1080/19485565.1970.9987885

Clarence E. Glick, Professor of Sociology
University of Hawaii

Michener’s phrase “the golden men of Hawaii” reflects a popular romantic interest in the blending of ethnic elements that has been going on in Hawaii for almost two centuries. More seriously, if less romantically, scholars have been analyzing interracial marriages and intermixture and attempting to trace their effects on the emergent population of Hawaii (Adams, 1937; Hormann, 1948; Lind, 1967; Cheng and Yamamura, 1957; Taeuber, 1962; Schmitt, 1965). A landmark study, Genetics of Interracial Crosses in Hawaii, published by the geneticist Newton E. Morton and his associates in 1967, has given us a valuable comparison of “mixed” and “unmixed” children bom in Hawaii, through a detailed analysis of nearly 180,000 births registered during the eleven-year period 1948-58.

Part of the focus of the present paper is upon demographic, cultural, and social factors that must have affected genetic changes in Hawaii’s population, even though some of these considerations must be somewhat impressionistic. Moreover, it is necessary to interpret the usual measures of interracial marriage and racial admixture on which studies of genetic changes in Hawaii might be based. Such an interpretation points to an even greater breakdown in traditional mating patterns and subsequent genetic recombinations than the statistical evidence indicates.

CHANGING DEFINITIONS OF “RACIAL” CATEGORIES

Hawaii is fortunate in having census data for a longer period than any other area in the Pacific. Census reports go back to 1847, but there have been many variations in the “racial” categories used as well as in the actual racial make-up of the people designated by certain categories (Schmitt, 1968). These variations reflect changing social definitions of ethnic groups in Hawaii’s population and the changing circumstances under which interracial marriage has taken place. The 1853 census, for example, used the terms “natives” and “half-natives” for groups later called “Hawaiians” and “Part-Hawaiians”. The general term “foreign population” was subdivided to differentiate Portuguese from other Europeans, Americans from Europeans, and Chinese and Filipinos as other categories of foreigners. The term “half-castes” was used from 1866 to 1890. The censuses of 1910, 1920, and 1930 attempted to differentiate between “Caucasian-Hawaiians” and “Asiatic-Hawaiians”; those of…

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The Hybrid in Hawaii as a Marginal Man

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 39, Number 4 (January 1934)
pages 459-468

William C. Smith
William Jewell College

Several factors conspire to make the hybrid in Hawaii occupy a position markedly different from that of the mixed-blood in other areas. The relative absence of race prejudice on the part of the Hawaiians has created an atmosphere which is favorable both to intermarriage and to persons of mixed blood. There are certain differences between the several groups. The Chinese-Hawaiian is, by consensus, a superior product and is accorded a high status. The Caucasian-Hawaiian is given a lower rating and consequently is more sensitive and self-conscious. There is a considerable group of multiple hybrids, the results of several crosses. These tend to form a group of their own since they cannot readily attach themselves to any of the pure-blood groups as do the dual hybrids. The mixed-bloods of all sorts are drawn together, and within this group there is little hesitancy with reference to intermarriage. This entire group mingles rather freely with the Hawaiians, but there is considerable social distance between them and the Nordics. The hybrid plays an important role in the life of Hawaii. As a participant in two or more cultures he acts as an intermediary and interpreter. The presence of a considerable number of hybrids has been responsible for the relative absence of race prejudice. The hybrids are increasing in numbers and in importance, and it is in the minds of these persons that the conflicts and fusions of culture are taking place. To understand fully the life of Hawaii, attention must be directed to this marginal group.

A study of the hybrids, or racial crosses, in the Hawaiian Islands is interesting because of the contact of so many racial and cultural groups. They constitute one of the major population groups of the Territory. According to the Census of 1930 there are 12,592 Asiatic-Hawaiians and 15,632 Caucasian-Hawaiians out of a total population of 368,336. In addition there are a number of Asiatic-Caucasians and other crosses distributed among the various ancestral groups.

The situation of the hybrids in Hawaii differs markedly from that of the Eurasian in India or the mulatto in continental United States. They are not all in the same situation, however, for there are certain differences in the treatment accorded the various crosses. In the main they are not sensitive as to their mixed ancestry. It is not at all unusual to hear someone say, “I am of mixed blood, and I am proud of it.”

Several factors determine their status in Hawaii. For several centuries the Hawaiians had lived in isolation, which precluded the cultivation of prejudices. When Europeans began to make frequent…

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Beyond Liverpool, 1957: Travel, diaspora, and migration in Jamal Mahjoub’s The Drift Latitudes

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Volume 46, Number 3 (September 2011)
pages 493-511
DOI: 10.1177/0021989411409813

Jopi Nyman, Professor
University of Eastern Finland, Finland

This essay discusses the novel The Drift Latitudes (2006) by the Anglo-Sudanese author Jamal Mahjoub. By telling the stories of the German refugee Ernst Frager and his two British families, I argue that Mahjoub’s novel utilizes the tropes of transnational travel and migration to present a critique of discourses of purity and nationalism. Through its uncovering of silenced family narratives, the novel hybridizes British and European identities and underlines the need to remember the stories of ordinary people omitted from official histories. As the novel’s supposedly British families appear to possess transnational links with Sudan, Germany, and the Caribbean, the novel reconstructs European identity as transnational and in need of historical reassessment. As a further contribution to the importance of hybrid identity, the story of black cultural identity and its construction in post-Second World War Liverpool is told in tandem with the importance of black music as a means of constructing black diasporic identity.

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The Drift Latitudes

Chatto & Windus
2006-02-02
320 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0701178222

Jamal Mahjoub

Liverpool, 1958, and German refugee and inventor Ernst Frager is in search of a sense of belonging. What he finds is an unusual nightclub on the Merseyside docks, and Miranda: hat-check girl, aspiring jazz singer and daughter of West Indian immigrants. Their doomed love affair will have repercussions for the children waiting for Ernst back in London, but also for the daughter Miranda gives birth to. Almost half a century later, Jade finds herself grappling with the very questions that drove her father into the arms of her mother, and realising that a successful career cannot define an identity; nor can you separate your existence from all the many other stories connected to it …

Like the jazz that snakes its way though this beautiful novel, The Drift Latitudes is about how we improvise our lives and the chances we take. From the Nubian boy who flees the tedium of home to find the bright lights of New York’s jazz scene, to Ernst’s daughter Rachel who turns her back on Europe and follows her husband to the Sudan, it is about the movement of people around our globe and the interdependence of our dreams. Awash with memorable characters, filled with unputdownable stories, this is a brilliantly intricate novel that lingers in the mind long after its final note.

German science and black racism—roots of the Nazi Holocaust

The FASEB Journal (The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology)
Volume 22, Number 2 (2008)
pages 332-337
DOI: 10.1096/fj.08-0202ufm

François Haas, Associate Professor
Department of Rehabilitation Medicine
New York University

The Nazi’s cornerstone precept of “racial hygiene” gave birth to their policy of “racial cleansing” that led to the murders of millions. It was developed by German physicians and scientists in the late 19th century and is rooted in the period’s Social Darwinism that placed blacks at the bottom of the racial ladder. This program was first manifested in the near-extermination of the African Herero people during the German colonial period. After WWI, the fear among the German populace that occupying African troops and their Afro-German children would lead to “bastardization” of the German people formed a unifying racial principle that the Nazis exploited. They extended this mind-set to a variety of “unworthy” groups, leading to the physician-administered racial Nuremberg laws, the Sterilization laws, the secret sterilization of Afro-Germans, and the German euthanasia program. This culminated in the extermination camps.

If the physician presumes to take into consideration in his work whether a life has value or not, the consequences are boundless and the physician becomes the most dangerous man in the state.

Christopher Willhelm Hufeland (1762–1836)

ALTHOUGH THE SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENTS has been a repeating theme throughout human history, only the Nazi-led extermination of millions of people deemed undesirable was framed in the scientific context of “racial hygiene.” At the core of Nazi philosophy was the view of the nation as a living organism. Using Herder’s concept of Volk, Hitler viewed German society as an organism with its own health. “Our people is also a biological entity… German people forms one great relationship, a blood society… This biological unity of people will be known as the people-body.” Because individual human beings were regarded as functional or dysfunctional parts of this larger whole and thus affecting the health of the people-body, racial hygiene became seminal to Hitler’s thinking. As Bavarian Cabinet Minister Hans Schemm declared in 1934, “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”

The rise of science-based medicine combined with physicians’ roles in national health reform during the late 19th century to give physicians first-time political leverage and continuous and unprecedented levels of public recognition. Hitler and the Nazis reached out early to physicians:

I could, if need be, do without lawyers, engineers, and builders, but… you, you National Socialist doctors, I cannot do without you for a single day, not a single hour. If…you fail me, then all is lost. For what good are our struggles, if the health of our people is in danger?

Physicians responded in kind (Table 1 ): “The National Socialist Physicians’ League proved its political reliability to the Nazi cause long before the Nazis seizure of power, and with an enthusiasm, and an energy, unlike that of any other professional group.”

Central to this affinity was the 19th century etiologic notion evolving from Social Darwinism that certain diseases (e.g., mental illness, feeblemindedness, criminality, epilepsy, hysteria, alcoholism) are genetically determined. The physicians who had developed this theory—primarily psychiatrists, neurologists, and anthropologists—became Germany’s eugenicists and authored the country’s racial policy, and it was primarily these physicians and their disciples who eventually led the Nazi government’s policy of ethnic cleansing. This program evolved in a series of discrete steps of ever-increasing barbarism that emerged during the German colonial period in Africa and terminated in the extermination camps of the Holocaust…

The African colonies and concentration camps also served racial scientific inquiry. Post-mortems were performed to study causes of death and bodies of executed prisoners were preserved and shipped to Germany for dissection (Fig. 1 , (14) ). A 1907 chronicle reported that: “A chest of Herero skulls was recently sent to the Pathological Institute in Berlin, where they will be subjected to scientific measurements.”

Probably the most well-known study was the physician Eugen Fisher’s evaluation of Basters, the mixed-blood children of Dutch men and Nama women. He argued that “Negro blood” was of “lesser value” and that mixing it with “white blood” would destroy European culture, and advised that Africans should be exploited by Europeans as long they were useful, after which they could be eliminated…

…In 1920, Doctor F. Rosenberger wrote in the Medical Review, “…Shall we stand in silence and allow it to happen that in the future the banks of the Rhine shall echo not with the songs of beautiful and intelligent white Germans, but with the croaks of stupid, clumsy, half-animal and syphilitic mulattos?” This reiterated the threat first articulated during Germany’s colonial period that racially mixed offspring (called Mischlings) will destroy the purity of the German white race. As Colonial Secretary Solf had incited people in 1912, “You send your sons to the colonies: do you want them to return with wooly-haired grandchildren?…Do you want your girls to return with Hereros, Hottentots and bastards?. …We are Germans, we are white, and we want to stay white…

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Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-first Century

School for Advanced Research Press
2011
280 pages
1 map, 3 tables, 6 appendices, notes, references, index
7 x 10

Circe Dawn Sturm, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Texas, Austin

In Becoming Indian, author Circe Sturm examines Cherokee identity politics and the phenomenon of racial shifting. Racial shifters, as described by Sturm, are people who have changed their racial self-identification from non-Indian to Indian on the US Census. Many racial shifters are people who, while looking for their roots, have recently discovered their Native American ancestry. Others have family stories of an Indian great-great-grandmother or -grandfather they have not been able to document. Still others have long known they were of Native American descent, including their tribal affiliation, but only recently have become interested in reclaiming this aspect of their family history. Despite their differences, racial shifters share a conviction that they have Indian blood when asserting claims of indigeneity. Becoming Indian explores the social and cultural values that lie behind this phenomenon and delves into the motivations of these Americans—from so many different walks of life—to reinscribe their autobiographies and find deep personal and collective meaning in reclaiming their Indianness. Sturm points out that “becoming Indian” was not something people were quite as willing to do forty years ago—the willingness to do so now reveals much about the shifting politics of race and indigeneity in the United States.

Read the beginning of Chapter 1 here.

Table of Contents

1. Opening
2. What Lies Beneath: Hidden Histories and Racial Ghosts
3. Racial Choices and the Specter of Whiteness
4. Racial Conversion and Cherokee Neotribalism
5. Shifting Race, Shifting Status: Citizen Cherokees on “Wannabes”
6. Documenting Descent and Other Measures of Tribal Belonging
7. States of Sovereignty: Tribal Recognition and the Quest for Political Rights
8. Closing