Mixed Race Studies

Caught up in a scientific racism designed to breed out the black

The Sydney Morning Herald
2008-02-14

Debra Jopson

She was removed as a toddler and raped as a ward of the state. Valerie Linow knows only too well the tragedy of assimilation policy, writes Debra Jopson.

The stolen child Valerie Linow is certain she knows why she and thousands of fellow Aborigines were taken from their families and placed in institutions or with white foster families.
 
“It was because of the colour of their skin, to make the country whiter and whiter. The way to do it was to get the half-castes out of the way,” she says.
 
Compassionate Australians recoil from that idea, but the historical record shows that this humble pensioner from Miller, near Liverpool, transported to Bomaderry Children’s Home when she was just two, is right….

…In 1933 a Sunday newspaper quoted Dr Cecil Evelyn Cook, dazzlingly qualified as an anthropologist, biologist, bacteriologist, chief medical officer and “chief protector” of Aborigines in North Australia, who pronounced there was no “throwback” to the black once enough white blood was bred in. “Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth generation, all native characteristics of the Australian Aborigine are eradicated. The problem of our half-castes will be quickly eliminated by the complete disappearance of the black race, and the swift submergence of their progeny in the white,” he said.

“The Australian native is the most easily assimilated race on earth, physically and mentally. A blending with the Asiatic, though tending to increase virility, is not desirable. The quickest way out is to breed him white,” Cook said.
 
Scientists and social scientists who calibrated how many drops of white blood made a person civilised gave politicians throughout Australia who were worrying about the “half-caste problem” the arguments needed to remove indigenous children from their families.
 
The Melbourne University ethnographer Professor Baldwin Spencer, who was made chief protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory in 1911-12, said: “No half-caste children should be allowed to remain in any native camp.”
 
In an official 1913 report he wrote: “In practically all cases, the mother is a full-blooded Aborigine, the father may be a white man, a Chinese, a Japanese, a Malay or a Filipino.
 
“The mother is of very low intellectual grade, while the father most often belongs to the coarser and more unrefined members of the higher races. The consequence of this is that the children of such parents are not likely to be, in most cases, of much greater intellectual calibre than the more intelligent natives, though, of course, there are exceptions to this.”
 
It seemed only right to give children with enough drops of white blood a chance to join the superior race and for 50 years, from 1919, the NSW Government used its power to take indigenous young from their families and make them wards of the state…

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Biracial and Biethnic Identity Development in Vietnamese/Caucasian Adults

Alliant International University, San Francisco Bay
May 2011
75 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3467139
ISBN: 9781124783406

Tien Vu

A Clinical Dissertation Proposal Presented to the Faculty of The California School of Professional Psychology, San Francisco Bay Campus Alliant International University

The current study explored factors that contribute to Vietnamese/White biracial identity. Three interview participants who were raised in the United States experienced less racism and discrimination than the two interviewees raised overseas. All of the participants currently have healthy and strong biracial and biethnic identity development. These findings suggest that Vietnamese/White individuals are more resilient and are more likely to have healthy outcomes than previous research has suggested.

Table of Contents

• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• I. Introduction
• II. Literature Review
  • Ethnic Identity Research
  • Biracial People
  • Asian-American Immigration
  • Biracial Asian-Americans
  • Vietnamese Immigration to the United States
  • Vietnamese Biracial Individuals
• III. Methods
• IV. Results
• V. Discussion
• VI. Implications
• References
• Appendix A: Research Study Flyer
• Appendix B: Script of Subject Screening
• Appendix C: Consent Form
• Appendix D: Background Information Form
• Appendix E: Interview Guide
• Appendix F: Follow-Up Phone Script

Purchase the dissertation here.

Variability in Race Hybrids

American Anthropologist
Volume 40, Issue 4 (October-December 1938)
pages 680–697
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1938.40.4.02a00090

Wilson D. Wallis

In his revised edition of The Mind of Primitive Man, Professor Boas warns against assuming “on the basis of a low variability that a type is pure, for we know that some mixed types are remarkably uniform. This has been shown for American Mulattoes, Dakota Indians, and made probable for the city population of Italy.” In a footnote to that passage he refers to the studies of Herskovits, Sullivan, and Boas, respectively, presumably in support of this position. Inasmuch as the test of variability used in those studies is the standard deviation of dimensions, and, for reasons which I shall indicate, this is not an acceptable test of variability for this purpose, it seems proper to reexamine the data on variability of race hybrids.

Although several studies have been devoted to the results of race crossing, there are few definitive results. Some studies suggest hybrid vigor, that is, increase in dimensions over one or both parental strains. Other studies indicate that race hybrids are inferior to one or both parental strains. Some indicate that hybrids are less variable than parental strains; others, that they are more variable. The character of the results may, of course, depend upon the races crossed and upon proximity to original crossing; but on these matters there is little well attested information. Sullivan and Boas find half-breeds among Sioux and other groups taller than pure bloods among each sex. Wissler, in a series of Oglala Dakota, finds half bloods slightly shorter than full bloods. As Sullivan remarks: “No satisfactory solution of these contradictory results can be given so long as our series are incomplete in lacking the measurements on the whites with whom the Indians have mixed.” When all the data are considered, it is not clear that in race crossing any physical trait behaves as a Mendelian recessive or dominant-despite portrayals in fiction. In Hawaiian-European hybrids in Hawaii, however, Dunn finds evidence that the brachycephaly of Hawaiians is inherited as a dominant, and the European type of head (? dolchocephaly) reappears as a recessive in later hybrid generations. Hawaiians are said to contribute to the cross relatively more dominant factors than do Europeans. He finds evidence, also, of “segregation of ‘racial’ characters such as nose form, hair form, hair and skin color in diverse combinations in the F and backcross generation.” There is, however, no evidence of Mendelian inheritance in the ratios with which these traits occur, and no evidence of Mendelian inheritance of a cluster of traits…

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Ambiguous Belongings: Negotiating Hybridity in Cape Town, 1940s-1990s

Kronos: Journal of Cape History
Number 25, Pre-millennium issue (1998/1999)
pages 227-238

Sean Field
University of Cape Town

You know you are in-between. You, you don’t fit with the Africans. You don’t fit with the coloureds. You live a normal life, but, you know you don’t fit into everything, you know? It’s with, with apartheid and whatnot, you were forced in-between (Mr. I.Z.).

Introduction

Cultural purity is a myth.For example, the apartheid system was constructed around the belief that pure ‘racial’, ethnic and cultural identities were not only real but that they were a desirable basis for ordering and controlling South Africa. However, at the messy level of personal experience and life strategies, the boundaries and categories of cultural identity are constantly blurred and impure. This paper documents and interprets storied fragments of interviewees who were individually classified as ‘African’ or ‘coloured’ under apartheid. These stories were selected from a broader collection of 54 oral history interviews conducted for a Doctoral study on the history of Windermere. Windermere was a part-brick, part-iron shanty community on the urban periphery of the city. This culturally mixed community emerged at the turn of the century and was eventually destroyed between 1958 to 1963 by the politicians and bulldozers of the apartheid regime.

The rise and demise of the Windermere community of Cape Town, serves as social landscape for the focus on these energetic and emotional men and women. While resident in Windermere they were either friends or neighbours, in the aftermath of forced removals they lived in separate racially defined African and coloured group areas on the Cape Flats. While the cultural hybridity of identities are often erased or concealed, for many South Africans—not only South Africans classified ‘coloured’—this hybridity was more visible to public scrutiny. To varying degrees, the seven interviewees quoted in this paper, experienced living ‘in-between’ (or in another sense across or through) the apartheid classifications ‘African’ and ‘coloured’.

I will argue that the mixed feelings and painful choices, experienced through living these hybrid identities must not be forgotten or ignored. A historical analysis of oral stories and story telling will be informed by psychoanalytic theory. The cultural hybridity of these interviewees have been shaped by different social, kinship and linguistic histories. They have experienced ambiguous cultural belongings, which have been interwoven with many other belongings. It is especially their sense of spatial belonging for a time and place called ‘Windermere’ which has helped them cope with their ambiguous culturalbelongings. It is particularly important that the feelings people invest in their sense of self and identity, and how others· make them feel about themselves, should be incorporated as an integral part of understanding  hybrid identity formation. It is also crucial to be sensitively aware of the forms of pain experienced by living in-between, through and across the boundaries and spaces constructed by the apartheid system…

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Protest and Accommodation: Ambiguities in the Racial Politics of the APO, 1909-1923

Kronos: Journal of Cape History
Number 20 (November 1993)
pages 92-106

Mohamed Adhikari, Associate Professor of Historical Studies
University of Cape Town

Historical writing on the coloured community of South Africa has tended to accept coloured identity as given and to portray it as a fixed entity. The failure to take cognizance of the fluidity of coloured self-definition and the ambiguities inherent to the process has resulted in South African historiography presenting an over-simplified image of the phenomenon. The problem stems partly from an almost exclusive focus on coloured protest politics which has had the effect of exaggerating the resistance of coloureds to white racism and the advance of segregationism. Furthermore, little consideration has been given to the nature of coloured identity or to the manner in which it shaped political consciousness within the coloured community. This is particularly true of analyses of the period following the inauguration of the Union of South Africa in 1910, a time when the legitimacy of coloured identity was not in any way questioned within the coloured community and when coloured protest politics was dominated by one body, the African Political Organization (APO).

These inadequacies are clearly evident in recent academic writing on coloured history. Richard van der Ross, in his account of the history of coloured political organization, for example, appears oblivious of the need to investigate these issues despite previously having written a polemical book on coloured racial identity. Gavin Lewis view that coloured identity is a ‘white imposed categorization’ is a simplistic formulation which ignores a wide range of evidence to the contrary. Ian Goldin’s book, written from a neo-Marxist perspective, at one point acknowledges the complexity of coloured identity but then proceeds to treat it as little more than a ploy the white supremacist state used to divide and rule the black population.

By exploring how ambiguities and contradictions within coloured identity helped shape the political consciousness of coloureds this article seeks to draw attention to complexities of their political experience hitherto neglected by historians. It thereby also hopes to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of a crucial period in the political history of the coloured community. Special emphasis is placed on the ways in which the marginality and the intermediate status of this social group resulted in ambivalences in their political outlook. The APO, the first newspaper to be directed specifically at a coloured readership, is an ideal vehicle for such an enquiry. As the mouthpiece of an organization at the very heart of coloured communal life at a time when the direct testimony of coloured people in the historical record is scarce, the APO provides unique insights into the social identity and political attitudes within the coloured community…

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More metro Atlantans say they’re multiracial: Fast-growing segment represents a cultural shift that’s nationwide

Atlanta Journal-Constitution
2011-09-03

Bo Emerson

When Evelyn Brown-Wilder was growing up in Tuscaloosa, Ala., in the 1950s, life was a matter of warring opposites. Though some of her ancestors were white and her face was pale, the law said she was black. She wrapped both arms around that identity.

Her daughter, Sonya Colvin-Boyd, lives in a different world and chooses a different identity. When it came time for Colvin-Boyd to indicate her race on her 2000 U.S. census form, she picked both white and black. “We’re all mixed,” said the Powder Springs resident.
 
Claiming both races puts her in one of the fastest-growing segments of America’s population. It’s a trend that reveals seismic shifts in both outward social and cultural relations and inward notions of individual identity.
 
Across metro Atlanta’s counties, the last decade saw a doubling or tripling of the number of people identifying themselves as being of more than one race, according to the Census Bureau. In Gwinnett County, the number of respondents checking two or more races rose from 12,673 in 2000 to 25,292 in 2010, a 99 percent jump. In Fulton County, the number rose from 11,853 to 20,279, a 71 percent increase. In Henry County, the numbers went up 269 percent…

…Yet mixed ancestry is a matter of fact for most Americans whose ancestors include people from Africa; they operate in a world of gradations where skin color sometimes determines status. “A lot of darker-complected blacks saw it as the ‘house Negro’ syndrome versus the ‘field Negro’ syndrome,” said Troy Gordon, 42, who teaches elementary school in Lithonia. Gordon is a copper-skinned mix of African-American and American Indian, and his light skin drew “flak” when he was younger.
 
He knew, growing up, that “black” was a whole range of colors, from his white great-grandmother, to his “paper-sack brown” aunt and his green-eyed, red-haired uncle. “I was black,” said Gordon, “but you’d see family pictures and say, ‘Wow, who’s this white lady?’”
 
Such conversations were limited back then. Today, there are many more talks about their multiracial heritage with his light-skinned 4-year-old son Chase. Chase’s mother is white, and he considers himself white, though he pronounces it “wipe.”…

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Generation, Degeneration, Miscegenation

Intstitute for Research on Women
IRW Distinguished Lecture Series 2011-12: (De)Generations: Reimagining Communities
Rutgers University
Thursday, 2012-04-12
(16:00 EDT reception; 16:30 EDT lecture)

César Braga-Pinto, Associate Professor of Brazilian Studies
Northwestern University

Focusing on the cases of Brazil and the U.S., this presentation proposes to articulate the role played by gender representations in debates around miscegenation in the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Generation, understood in its vertical, genealogical, reproductive aspect is one of the most contested issues in the late 19th century both in Brazil and the U.S., and it is always haunted by miscegenation and the threat of degeneration. This paper aims to understand how horizontal calls for the formation of a new generation (in the sense of brotherhood, nationality, contemporaneity and intellectual-literary communities) in the beginning of the 20th century struggles to resolve the pessimism associated with mixed-race subjects and communities.

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Speaking from the Margins: The Voice of the ‘Other’ in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy and Jackie Kay

Academica Press
2010-06-15
124 pages
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-933146-92-8/ 1933146-92-3

Özlem Aydin

Speaking from the Margins: The Voice of the ‘Other’ in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy and Jackie Kay studies Carol Ann Duffy and Jackie Kay as poets who identify and represent some key forms of “otherness” may take in the British society of the 1980s and the 1990s. Indeed, although Duffy’s poetry is political and concerned with the British society of the 1980s and the 1990s, particularly with the condition of the underprivileged and people pushed to the margins of society as a result of Thatcherite policies, criticism of her poetry is more concerned with her feminist representation of gender in her work. Thus, it is important that her poetry of the 1980s and the 1990s is recognised as a poetry of the “other” as Duffy in this poetry gives specifically a panorama of Thatcherite Britain through the voice of the “other”. Similarly, this thesis analyses Jackie Kay’s poetry as a poetry which is critical not only of Britain but also is particularly concerned with the condition of the racial and the sexual other in the 1980s and the 1990s Britain. Although “The Adoption Papers” has often been discussed and analysed mostly by focusing on the issues of identity and adoption, “Severe Gale 8”, the sequel to “The Adoption Papers”, Other Lovers and Off Colour have not been the focus of much academic study from the aspect of the voice given to the racial and the sexual other.

This research monograph studies Jackie Kay and Carol Ann Duffy as poets representing the voice of the “other” in the 1980s and the 1990s British society because there is a considerable lack of criticism on this particular aspect of their poetry. The works of these two poets are part of contemporary British poetry in which as Kennedy puts it “the heterogeneity of the ‘ex-centric’, the marginal and the peripheral is raided in order to revitalise and refurbish the homogeneity of the centre. Diversity is used to underwrite a new uniformity” (“Mapping Value”).

• Introduction
• Overview of the 1980s and the 1990s poetry scene in the United Kingdom given to serve as a background framework for the poetry of the two poets under study.
• Part I: The Voice of the “Other” in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy
  • After a brief introduction to the social and economic background of contemporary British society and its impact on the poetry of the 1980s and the 1990s, the voice of the “other” in selected poems of Carol Ann Duffy from her poetry collections Standing Female Nude (1985), Selling Manhattan (1987), The Other Country (1990) and Mean Time (1993) will be studied in Chapter I.
• Part II: The Voice of the “Other” in the Poetry of Jackie Kay
  • The poetry of Jackie Kay from The Adoption Papers (1991), Other Lovers (1993) and Off Colour (1999) are studied closely with respect to the racial and sexual “other” she represents concerning the voice of the other in society.
• Conclusion
  • The study of the relevantly selected poetry of Carol Ann Duffy and Jackie Kay shows that Duffy, through her use of the dramatic monologue, and Kay, by using her own experiences present the voice of the “other” in their poetry. Duffy gives voice to the outcasts in the society such as the criminal, the mentally ill, the rejected, the silenced, the marginalized, the unemployed and the immigrant, and Kay herself already an “other” as a black girl adopted and raised by a Scottish family deals with racial issues, racial and sexual otherness in contemporary Britain. Both Duffy and Kay have their poetry represent the contemporary Britain through the experience and voice of the “other”.

Race, Racism, and Multiraciality in American Education

Academica Press
2006
504 pages
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 1-933146-27-3

Christopher Knaus, Associate Professor of Education
California State University, East Bay

This research monograph analyses and describes how multiracial undergraduates have come to think about race and racism. The work begins with an overview of the problem of race and racism in education, then discusses the way in which race is typically construed along a continuum of mono-racial thinking( a surprisingly inept conceptualization given the increasing birth rates of mixed or multiracial school populations). The text is then split into seven distinct case studies based on individuals with multiracial, multicultural and ambiguous racial identities and their K-12 experience. Since this work is part of a growing field of research that incorporates a critical analysis of race and racial identity theory it also moves the discussion into areas of multiracial experience and concludes with analysis of higher education’s role in developing awareness of the dynamics and suggestions for practioners in helping the student navigate the question “ What are you?” in a society so long divided along traditional color lines.

ASEM 2535: The Multiracial Individual

The Womens College, University of Denver
Fall Quarter, 2011

Arthur C. Jones, Clinical Professor and Chair of Culture and Psychology

From the beginning of its history, the United States has always been a place where bi-ethnic and bi-racial romantic alliances have been common, producing children with multi-ethnic and multi-racial roots. This was inevitable in a country that evolved as an international “melting pot,” including Native American peoples, enslaved Africans, and successive waves of immigrants and refugees from around the world. Yet, it was not until the year 2000 that the U.S. Census included a category that allowed respondents to indicate a bi-racial or multi-racial heritage/identity. This course will explore the historical racial tensions in the U.S. that have made it difficult to acknowledge the reality of multi-racial peoples in its midst, and will trace the trends in culture and national consciousness that made it possible for a change to occur in the 2000 Census. We will survey the varying ways in which multiracial people have been regarded by the larger society in different social contexts, as well as the ways in which the sociological, psychological, and political dynamics of multiracial identity have changed over time, and have impacted the experience of multiracial people themselves. Finally, we will examine the contemporary social and psychological dynamics of race and ethnicity in the U.S., including the continuing controversy surrounding the very idea of a multiracial identity.

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