Mixed Race Studies

Interview with Zara Paul: A Future Leader

London School of Economics
2011-10-26

Zara Paul recently graduated from LSE. She has been listed among the top 100 black graduates of the UK in the Future Leaders magazine 2011-12. In this interview she talks about her time at LSE, her passion for music, what being mixed race means to her and how she sees herself as being ‘massive’ in the next 10 years.

How did you feel when you heard that you had been selected among the top 100 black graduates of the country?

I felt absolutely brilliant! It didn’t sink in until I went to the actual Future Leaders event. I was surrounded by so many intellectuals and academics and politicians. I thought it was a great privilege. I couldn’t believe it…

…Tell us about your family history. Where do you trace your ‘roots’ to and are those ‘roots’ part of your identity?

My mum is Scottish-Irish and my dad is Jamaican. In my school, as a mixed race person coming from a council estate, I always stood out. I think that made me a bit stubborn, it made me think I am still going to be a little nightmare but I am also going to be smart and get my A levels and GCSEs behind me. I think being stubborn is a really good thing, to a degree. I did my dissertation on whether your identity changes dependent on your location. In a rural area, you may be black; in a multicultural area, you are who you are.

Do you believe in celebrating your mixed race status?

I love being mixed race. I can fit into so many social groups, most people can’t do that; so it’s something I think I should embrace. For example, when I did research into the riots, people found talking to me easier because of my mixed race status. In my heart however, I did think that when we are talking about equality why do we have to have separate awards for ‘black graduates’?…

Read the entire interview here.

New Categories Listings for MixedRaceStudies.org

2011-10-02

Steven F. Riley

Over the next few days, I will be removing three frequently used tags (indexed items) and converting them into categories (which are listed on the right-hand side).

Thanks to Dr. G. Reginald Daniel for letting me flush out my ideas with him.

Slavery

Over three centuries of human bondage of peoples of African decent in the Americas has and continues to have an immense impact on the lives of people of color today.  At the time of the first recorded, black/white “mixed-race” birth in 1620, according to historian Audrey Smedley, “the concept of race did not exist.” In the American colonies, the institutionalization of slavery necessitated the creation of laws that would attempt to prevent the unions between African and European colonists.  It is perhaps not a stretch to state that without slavery there would be no “race,” and of course, no “mixed-race.”

Brazil

Because of the long history of miscegenation in Brazil, the country is often thought of—erroneously—as a racial democracy.  This is a well-documented myth.  As Joan R. Dassin puts it, “Traditionally celebrated in Brazil as the means to ensure the tranquil mingling of the Portuguese, indigenous, and African races, miscegenation has long been glorified as the basis of the “cordial” national character.”

Barack Obama

I created this site in early 2009 in anticipation of an increased number of discourses surrounding multiraciality (and race) as a direct result of the election of Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States. I was not disappointed. What I did not anticipate though, was the the sheer number of discourses about Obama not just ones inspired by Obama.  As reluctant as I am to add a person as a category, the influence of Barack Obama cannot be dismissed.

Globalizing a Race to Publish an Encyclopedia

American Nineteenth Century History
Volume 11, Issue 1 (2010)
pages 79-94
DOI: 10.1080/14664651003616966

Michael Benjamin, Independent Scholar
African American Print Culture
Cleveland, Ohio, USA

In 1912, Daniel Alexander Payne Murray published a prospectus for his “Historical and Biographical Encyclopedia of the Colored Race throughout the World.” He promised to publish what literary historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., would describe as the “Grail” for black scholars. As Murray planned his encyclopedia in the first decade of the twentieth century, persons of African descent in the United States were killed and assaulted because of their race, and racial identification was as critical an issue as it was also ambiguous. Moreover, despite its ambiguity, or perhaps, because of it, race, in 1912 and since the Naturalization Act of 1790, had everything to do with American citizenship. In Murray’s time, whether a person was identified on the one hand as “white” or “octoroon” versus an identity as “black,” “Negro,” “mulatto,” or “quadroon” influenced whether or not that person could exercise his rights as an American citizen (with her rights barely entering the question). However, race, as Murray understood with its skin color codes shading the meaning of American citizenship, was much more a social construction than it was biological evidence of a person’s hereditary origins. Formulating a strategy in support of black American citizenship, Murray developed a global interpretation of the black American experience from a pragmatically ambiguous cultural practice to compose an identity for himself, his people, and his proposed encyclopedia.

Read or purchase the article here.

Black devils, white saints and mixedrace femme fatales: Philippa Schuyler and the winds of change

Critical Arts
Volume 25, Issue 3 (2011)
Special Issue: The Afropessimism Phenomenon
pages 360-376
DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2011.615140

Daniel R. McNeil, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
Newcastle University, United Kingdom

This article sheds new light on abstract definitions of Afropessimism by analysing the self-fashioning of Philippa Schuyler in southern and central Africa during the Cold War. Schuyler had achieved prominence as an African-American child prodigy in the 1930s and 40s, and a peripatetic concert pianist in the 1950s, before becoming an ultra-conservative writer who opposed African decolonisation in the 1960s. Rather than relying on the tired cliché of the American tragic mulatto to explain Schuyler’s existential choices, or limiting the scope of her story to an (Afro)Americocentric frame, this article argues that her virulent anti-black racism threatened purportedly respectable forms of colonial whiteness. In doing so it uses a New Historicist approach to contend that pessimistic positions about resistance can be combined with the study of practices that unveil the ironies and limits of power. In addition, it addresses Frantz Fanon’s diagnosis of ‘the woman of colour and the white man,’ and argues that Fanon’s work in the 1950s and 60s can be used to question Schuyler’s desire to 1) condemn the ‘force vitale’ of Negritude, 2) praise white colonialists and 3) adopt an ‘off-white’ identity.

Read or purchase the article here.

The pot that called the kettle white: Changing racial identities and U.S. social construction of race

Identities
Volume 5, Issue 3 (1998)
Special Issue: Foundational Concepts: Gender, Race, and Locality
pages 379-413
DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.1998.9962622

Norberto Valdez, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
Colorado State University

Janice Valdez
Continuing Education Department
Colorado State University

Ethnic and racial identities are deeply enmeshed in broader social processes of change. While ethnicity and race are important factors in consciousness and behavior, they are profoundly affected by the material conditions of life. Conceptually, ethnicity and race are often reified and essentialized, that is, they are attributed qualities that presumably give them independent explanatory power. This study analyzes primary sources to trace how descendants of freed slaves in colonial Virginia emerged as three apparently distinct racial populations. Factors such as national formation, the rise of slavery, and racial typologies all contributed to a restrictive social structure. Yet some individuals and families negotiated aspects of their racial identities through intermarriage, migration, legal processes, and revised genealogies in the search for opportunity. This study attempts to demystify thinking about race and ethnicity by revealing the social forces that influence the form and content of racial and ethnic identity.

Read or purchase the article here.

Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix [Review: Harman]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Available online: 2011-10-21
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.623133

Vicki Harman, Lecturer in the Centre for Criminology and Sociology
Royal Holloway, University of London

Rainier Spencer. Reproduction Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix, Boulder, CO: Lyne Rienner Publishers, 2010, 355 pp.

From the outset, Reproducing Race promised to be a controversial read. The repeated use of the term ‘mulatto’ (not confined to historical discussions, as is conventional) stood out and created a sense of anticipation at the arguments to follow. This book centres on the significance of Generation Mix, defined as ‘people (typically, but not necessarily, young people) who consider themselves to be the immediately mixed or first generation offspring of parents who are members of different biological racial groups’ (p. 2). Young people who have parents from different racial backgrounds have been celebrated in the media and within much sociological literature as representing a more tolerant and potentially post-racial future. This book offers a critique of celebratory accounts of multi-racialism in the USA and the ideas underpinning the American Multiracial Identity Movement. Rainier Spencer argues that ‘racial ambiguity, in and of itself, is no guarantee of political progressiveness, racial desiabilisation, or, indeed, of anything in particular’ (p. 3). Furthermore, Generation Mix does not radically change the racial order; it simply adds another category because whiteness is still at the top of the racial hierarchy while African-Americans remain at the bottom.

The book is divided into three parts representing different temporal spaces. In part one, ‘The Mulatto Past’, Spencer considers historical portrayals of mulattoes in the USA from the late nineteenth century, drawing on novels, plays, films and academic literature. Chapter 4 is an absorbing discussion of literature by mulatto writers about marginality and racial passing. Such accounts are used to critique the adoption of the marginal man thesis by sociologists, such as Park, Reuter and Stonequist…

The second part, ‘The Mulatto Present’, introduces more contentious arguments about the current racial landscape. Spencer contends that Generation Mix is not new and is in fact indistinguishable from mulattoes, although the American Multiracial Identity Movement attempts to deny ‘mulattoness’. Furthermore, despite celebratory media and academic accounts, members of Generation Mix are not special because African-Americans are also mulattoes, and there is no real difference between those who are recently and historically mixed…

…Notwithstanding the caricature of white mothers, this is a challenging and thought-provoking book, presenting a number of intellectually stimulating and sometimes unusual arguments. In teaching the sociology of race and ethnicity, such a text is likely to act as a useful stimulus. It has the potential to encourage critical engagement with competing perspectives on the significance of racial categories and racial mixing in the past, present and future contexts.

Read or purchase the review here.

Comparative studies of full and mixed blood North Dakota Indians

Psychological Monographs
Volume 50, Number 5 (1938)
pages 116-129
DOI: 10.1037/h0093522

C. W. Telford

The early comparative studies of Indian-white mixtures in America uniformly reported superior mental test performances of mixed as compared with full blood Indians. The tests used in these investigations were principally standard group intelligence tests of the language type, which reflect very markedly the different social, cultural, and educational backgrounds of the subjects. In this investigation the Peterson Rational Learning Test was used, an ideational learning test which seems to draw little on past experience and training, and which stimulates the subjects to approximately maximal effort throughout the performance. The subjects of the present study were students of the various Indian schools of North Dakota and of one school on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Eastern Montana. The degrees of Indian blood represented by the subjects were obtained from the government records. Positive values indicate that the mixed bloods excel while negative values show full blood superiority. Unless a minus sign appears before a figure, the value will be assumed to be positive. In other words, as the tests become more and more of the informational and achievement nature, the differences increasingly favor the mixed blood; or, conversely, as the tests depend more and more on basic learning and manipulative abilities, the differences between the two groups tend to disappear.

Read or purchase the article here.

Test performance of full and mixed-blood North Dakota Indians

Journal of Comparative Psychology
Volume 14, Number 1 (August 1932)
pages 123-145
DOI: 10.1037/h0069966

C. W. Telford

225 Indian pupils scattered through the kindergarten to the sixth grade, inclusive, were given the Goodenough intelligence test. The average IQ of the Indian children was 88, as compared with 100 for whites and 77-79 for negroes. The rational learning test, the mare and foal test, and the Healy puzzle “A” test were given to 35 12-year-olds. The Indians were superior to whites on the mare and foal test. On the Healy “A” test they were intermediate between whites and negroes. This was true for the rational learning test. The differences between Indians and whites were greater for speed than accuracy. There was no correlation of any significance between performance and amount of Indian blood.

Read or purchase the article here.

Professor Daniel J. Sharfstein to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #230 – Professor Daniel Sharfstein
When: Wednesday, 2011-10-26, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

Daniel Sharfstein is the author of The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White.

Selected Bibliography:

• The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827.
•  “Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the One-Drop Rule, 1600–1860,” Minnesota Law Review, Volume 91, Number 3 (February 2007): 592-656.
• “The Secret History of Race in the United States,” The Yale Law Journal, Volume 112, Issue 6 (March 2003): 1473-1509.
• “Passing Fancy,” Legal Affairs – The Magazine at the Intersection of Law and Life (September/October 2003).

Listen to the interview here. Download the episode here.