Mixed Race Studies

Statistics On Miscegenation

Franklin Repository
1864-04-27
page 1, column 6

Source: Valley of the Shadow: Civil War Era Newspapers, University of Virginia Library

Summary: The Repository details the disproportionate number of “mulattoes” in the South relative to the North.

Full Text of Article:

There were 411,613 mulatto slaves in the south in 1840, of whom 69,979 were in Virginia; 43,281 in Kentucky, and 36,900 in Georgia. These numbers are considerably beyond the legitimate proportion of those States. There were also 176,739 free mulattoes in the United States in 1860, of whom 106,770 belonged to the south, and 69,969 to the free States. Of the free mulattoes Virginia contained 23,485, which number, added to her slave mulattoes makes a total of miscegenated population of 93,824. Her mulatto slaves alone exceeded the total number of mulattoes in the free States.

The whole number of mulattoes, slave and free, in the Union, in 1860, was 588,352, of whom 69,969 belonged to the free States, and 518,383 to the slave States—a number greater than the combined white population of Arkansas, Delaware and Florida—greater than the white population of Maryland—almost twice as great as that of South Carolina, and twice as great as the combined populations of Delaware and Florida. The mulatto population of Virginia alone exceeds the number of whites in Delaware or Florida.

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Franklin Repository
1863-12-09
page 4, Column 4

Source: Valley of the Shadow: Civil War Era Newspapers, University of Virginia Library

Summary: Argues that “amalgamation” is common in the South and “very rare” in the North. A Southern correspondent concerned with the number of mixed marriages occurring wanted “amalgamation” outlawed. The Repository claims that the grooms are Southerners or foreigners because “amalgamation” is no stranger to a social system that includes slavery. In the free North, on the other hand, mixed marriages are “very rare.”

Full Text of Article:

A clerical correspondent writes us from the Southern coast protesting against the rapid tendency to amalgamation. He says that he has been called upon to perform the marriage service repeatedly where the bride was mulatto, quadroon or octoroon, and he calls upon Congress to arrest this unnatural mingling of the races, which, to use his own language, “threatens the annihilation of the white race in the United States.”

We beg our correspondent to quiet his fears on the subject. He cites some half a dozen cases to vindicate his apprehensions; but not one of them presents the union of a northern man with the southern negress. All the happy grooms were either southerners or foreigners, and they have been adopting no novel social system. Slavery has never fastened its desolation on any land without carrying the social evil of amalgamation with it; and the crime has been peculiar to the chivalric and opulent rather than to the lowly. Had our correspondent cast a thought as to the origin of the mulatto, quadroon and octoroon brides of whom he speaks, he might have cherished a reasonable suspicion that amalgamation is not just dawning upon the world, but has blotted and blurred the whole social organization of the South ever since slavery came with its endless train of crime.

In the North, where the negro race is free and not the legitimate prey of a brutal master’s lust, amalgamation is very rare, and embraces only the most abandoned of both sexes; and we regard the destruction of Slavery as the only hope of dealing a death-blow to that unnatural evil. Slavery has been its parent, its shield, its apologist and stripped it of its hideous moral deformity by bringing virtuous wives and daughters and sensual sons in daily contact with it; and when its great foundation is destroyed, the whole structure of social pollution will fall with it. The remedy is not in Congress, but in the moral tone of the people, and that seems to be progressing well toward a better and brighter Nationality, free from the blistering stains of both legalized and lawless mingling of the distance races of the Continent.

A Very Sad Occurrence

Staunton Vindicator
1869-08-27
page 3, Column 2

Source: Valley of the Shadow: Civil War Era Newspapers, University of Virginia Library

Summary: The paper prints an account of the killing of Jacob Scherer by John Stanley. Stanley had been co-habiting with a woman of mixed race. Scherer led a party to break up the union. They broke into the house and Stanley shot Scherer in the process. Stanley was arrested for murder. The article includes a transcript of the testimony before the grand-jury.

(Names in announcement: Jacob Scherer, John B. Scherer Sr., John Stanley, Ginnie Sorrel, Clinedinst, Anderson, Dr. B. B. Donaghe, James Gilmore, Joseph Ryan, Trayer, N. S. White, Dr. Fauntleroy, J. T. Parrent, Robert Campbell, M. G. Harman)

Full Text of Article:

Our people were startled, about midnight Saturday night last, by the announcement that Jacob Scherer, third son of Jno. B. Scherer, Sr., had been killed by Mr. John Stanley.

Jacob Scherer was a young, unmarried man, about twenty years of age, full of fun, sociable, of an amiable disposition, which caused all our people to esteem him highly, and it may well be imagined, that the announcement that he had been cut down, in the vigor of life, caused a thrill of pain in the very breast of every one.

Mr. Stanley is a man of middle age, with a wife and one child, a son, about 15 or 16 years old, and was regarded as a steady, quiet, well-meaning man.

The circumstances attending the killing are as follows:

A party of some eight or ten young men, learning that Mr. Stanley was co-habiting with a mulatto girl, named Ginnie Sorrel, blacked their faces and went to her house, on Market Street, Saturday night last, for the purpose of breaking up the illicit connexion. Several entered the house and immediately a pistol was fired, killing Jacob Scherer, almost instantly.

Mr. Stanley was identified by several of the party present, as the one who fired the shot, and was arrested, at his house, about two hours after and lodged in jail.

The examination of the case was entered into before Justices Pearce, Clinedinst and Anderson, on Tuesday morning last. We give below a synopsis of the testimony of the witnesses examined…

Read the entire article here.

The American Race

Semi-Weekly Dispatch
Franklin County, Virginia
1861-05-17
page 1, Column 3

Source: Valley of the Shadow: Civil War Era Newspapers, University of Virginia Library

Summary: Reasons that America’s population has increased by one-third in the past ten years because of the intermarriage in the United States of the races of Celts, Teutons, Anglo-Saxons, and North American Indians. This mixing of the races has made the “stock” more “vigorous” and will ultimately produce a peculiar “American race,” which will exhibit the different positive characteristics of all these distinct peoples.

Full Text of Article:

The present census reveals the astonishing fact that the population of the United States has increased thirty-three per cent, within the last ten years. The Roman Empire, approaching the culmination of its power, increased about thirty per cent each hundred years, but no nation in recorded times has afforded any parallel to the advancement of our own. Spain has been depopulating for a thousand years; England is not three times more populous than three centuries ago, and Italy is no more important numerically than she was in the days of Pliny; but within three quarters of a country the population of the United States has risen from three to thirty millions. It is a common error to attribute this vast increase to immigration from foreign countries; but of the twenty-three millions enumerated in ’50, not three millions were of foreign birth. Vast as the annual immigration is, it bears no proportion to the yearly increase by birth, which in itself, independent of immigration, averages thirty per cent, every ten years of the present century. This wonderful fecundity is not unexplained by physical law; it is observed that in populous countries of Europe where the same people continually intermarry, the increase is comparatively insignificant; on the same principle the aristocracy of England is observed to diminish rather than multiply, because interest and pride confine people to intermarriage to people of the same race, and often within the circle of consanguinity. But in the United States various races amalgamate; the stock becomes more vigorous, there is less of disease and early death, and the population consequently increases with a prodigious ratio… …It is computed that at least one-third of the population of the U. States are descendants of the Puritans, who were Anglo-Saxons; this strong-willed, enterprising and indomitable race, intermingling with others, has preserved ascendancy and produced a people superior in physical strength and in those attributes of mind most required in the rapid development of the great Empire of the West. Humiliating as the institution of any analogy may appear to man of the immortal mind, he must submit to the laws governing the rest of animal creation in which the union of distinct stocks produces improvement. Some of the finest examples of physical beauty have resulted from the intermarriage of Europeans and North American Indians; and, indeed, instances are not wanting where the offspring has been endowed with wonderful intellectual strength…

Read the entire article here.

The 2012 Lorraine W. Frank Lecture & Humanities Awards: Featuring Rita Dove

Arizona Humanities Council
Tempe Mission Palms
60E. 5th Street
Tempe, Arizona 85281
2012-04-12

Free & Open to the Public

In celebration of National Poetry Month, the Arizona Humanities Council is proud to present Rita Dove as the keynote speaker for the 2012 Lorraine W. Frank Lecture. Rita Dove will share poems from her most recent book, Sonata Mulattica, about a young mulatto violinist’s encounters with Beethoven.

Discussing the research that went into the book, she will reveal how she came to be uniquely suited to the task of rescuing the mixed race violinist George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower from the shadows of history, and how history comes alive through art.

Rita Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995. Among her many honors are the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities and the 2006 Common Wealth Award. In 1996, President Bill Clinton bestowed upon her the National Humanities Medal. From 1981 to 1989, Rita Dove taught creative writing at Arizona State University. She currently is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA.

For more information, click here.

CCIG Forum 24: ‘Mixing’/’Non-mixing’? The in/significance of race in mixed raciality, family narratives and welfare practices

Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance
Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
Library Seminar Rooms 1 & 2
2011-12-06, 10:00-17:00Z

Keynote speakers: Chantal Badjiie (Editorial Lead on the Mixed Race Season on the BBC, TBC), Petra Nordqvist (University of Manchester), Monica Dowling (Open University).

That Britain has one of the fastest growing mixed race population in the world, with 3% of children under 16 being classified as mixed race and 10% of children under 16 living in a family with more than one ethnicity, is an accepted fact. What is less clear is whether this should be celebrated as evidence of a long history of tolerance and mixing among ordinary people, e.g. from the port cities of Cardiff, Liverpool, London, South Shields in the interwar period right up to the contemporary moment in all the major cities and towns, or whether it represents a major challenge to politicians, policy makers and practitioners across a wide range of services and the public at large. While the MOBO awards are an example of the former approach, the claims that multiculturalism has failed and the recent changes to the Adoption Statutory Guidance by the English government indicate the anxieties that continue to surround issues of race, ethnicity and culture. Added to this, research into the physical preferences of those seeking to start a family via methods of assisted conception suggests that ideas about and discourses of race and ethnicity inform these preferences, albeit in a benign and unconscious way.

How can these contradictory patterns be understood? What are their implications for how relationships and families are conceived and researched? What dilemmas of practice arise for those working in policy development and implementation in a wide number of health and welfare areas? What light can a psychosocial approach to the issues offer? What analytical traction and theoretical development can be gained from approaching the issue of mixed-raciality through the concerns of those involved in non-traditional modes of family and household formation, such as assisted conception? What gets lost and what gets brought into the foreground when we focus on the factors that get counted in ‘the mix’?

These are pressing issues for social scientists concern with questions of citizenship, identity and governance as much as they are for those concerned with the development of policy and practice equipped for the realities of contemporary Britain. Jointly convened by the Psychosocial and Families and Relationships Research Programmes of CCIG, this Forum will explore these issues.

For more information, click here.

From Barefoot Madonna to Maggie the Ripper

Kendall Blog
Kendall College of Art and Design
Ferris State University, Grand Rapids, Michigan
2011-11-07

Pamela Patton, Editor
Kendall Portfolio

Margaret Garner or The Modern Medea (1867)

I always find lectures by visiting art historians fascinating. Looking at works of art in historical context, examining the details, and hearing the backstories leaves me hungry to learn more. Such was the case on Wednesday, November 2 when I attended a lecture by Jo-Ann Morgan describing cultural history from the 19th century…
 
…Morgan’s lecture was titled “From Barefoot Madonna to Maggie the Ripper: Mulatto Women in Nineteenth Century Visual Culture.” “Mulatto” isn’t a word heard often these days, and is defined as, “the first general offspring of a Black and White parent; or, an individual with both White and Black ancestors. Generally, Mulattoes are light-skinned, though dark enough to be excluded from the White race.”

“Maggie the Ripper” is Margaret Garner, a 23-year-old enslaved Black woman in pre-Civil War America. She and her family had escaped in January 1856 across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati, but were captured. When she was apprehended, she had cut the throat of her youngest daughter, and was attempting to kill her other children and presumably herself, rather than be returned to slavery. Margaret Garner’s defense attorney moved to have her tried for murder in Ohio, in order to get a trial in a free state as well as to challenge the Fugitive Slave Law as well…

Garner was described in newspapers as mulatto with “white blood,” and “delicate” and “intelligent” eyes. By the time Kentucky-born Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835-1907), son of a slaveholder, and former Confederate soldier, chose, in 1867, to paint the famous slave fugitive, Garner’s case had all but faded from memory, but perceptions of mixed-race women had changed markedly from gentle, light-skinned madonnas, often painted cradling a babe and wearing a shawl draped about them, reminiscent of images of Mary (as shown in the painting, “The Last Slave Auction in St. Louis”). Gone were Garner’s delicate features, and instead, the frantic woman has the face of a cornered animal, teeth bared and holding a knife dripping with blood, while her dead daughter lay at her feet.

In her lecture, Morgan reminded the audience that prior to the Civil War, Black and Mulatto women were considered nothing more than breeding stock, and the children they bore, whether Black or mixed-race, were little more than property to be sold for profit. After the War, as abolition spread across the country, the same women and children were a guilty reminder of the indiscretion of slave owners, and the image of Mulatto women began to change…

Read the entire article here.

Advertising “Interraciality” and “Multiraciality” In ObamaLand—Representations and Images in Kohl’s, Macy’s, Sears, Wal-Mart, etc.

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the
34th Annual National Council for Black Studies
Sheraton New Orleans Hotel
New Orleans, Louisiana
2010-03-17

William Berry

This study examined the representation and contextualization of interraciality and multiraciality in newspaper advertising supplements . Since the election of Barack Obama, media reports have expressed that pre-2008 constructs/contexts of race and ethnicity have evolved into what scholars have theorized as the “post-racial” era. A literature review determined that the advertising industry was among the last sites of consumerism to bring African Americans into typical roles as users of general market products/services, except when they appeared in advertisements placed in Black newspapers/magazines. A content analysis was conducted to determine the extent to which representations of multiracial families, couples, and friends—from childhood through adulthood—have appeared in advertisements from national retail chains, including JC Penney, Sears, and Wal-Mart. The study found that while interraciality and multiraciality are presented prominently in advertising supplements, these representations rarely depict individuals engaging in interactions that suggest they are family members or involved in intimate relationships, or that these engagements can be expected to occur within the home or other private, personal spaces where individuals significantly are more likely to interact closely with others of the same race or ethnic descent. Implications of the findings are that intimate interracial relationships may continue to be taboo and forbidden, in effect continuing as the “third rail” of the consumer society, consistent with how such advertisements were not produced or presented during most of the twentieth century.

Racial Realities: Social Constructs and the Stuff of Which They Are Made

Global Dialogue
Volume 12, Number 2 (Summer/Autumn 2010)—Race and Racisms

Eric C. Thompson, Associate Professor of Sociology
National University of Singapore

How can we deny the reality of race? It is a truth so many hold to be self-evident. Travel around the world, from Asia to Africa to Europe to South America: people look different in different places. Travel about in major global cities—Singapore, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, London—and physical diversity is close at hand. It would seem absurd to argue that the visible differences so apparent to our sight are socially constructed. Physiological differences—skin tone, eye shape, hair texture and the like—are not the outcome of our human imagination. The material reality of physiological differences grounds racial categorising. It is used as a point of reference and point of realisation to assert rhetorically the undeniable truth of any given scheme of racial categorisation.
 
The purpose of this article is to emphasise the error of such assertions. I aim also to point out the weakness of arguments for the “social construction” of race, which too often undermine their own case by denying the material reality of visible difference. I outline instead a way to incorporate the material reality of biological difference into an understanding of race as a social construct. My argument is simply this: biological difference is the material out of which our concepts of race are fashioned. These concepts are as many and varied as the diverse cultures of human societies around the world. In the case of race and other identities—such as ethnicity, gender and class—our social constructs are not fashioned out of thin air but out of material conditions. This said, the material conditions do not determine what we make of them—what we construct socially—any more than wood determines the myriad things a woodworker or craftsman might make out of a piece of timber.
 
In the first section of this article, I want to emphasise the socially constructed nature of “race”, “ethnicity” and similar concepts. The idea that race is a sensible way to talk about the material reality of biologically inherited diversity continues to reappear in new forms despite our best efforts to teach students and colleagues about its socially constructed nature. The attempt to depoliticise such concepts, to make them function as objective categories in the service of science or medicine, is a fraught undertaking. Race and ethnicity are deeply political categories, as many investigations into the historical circumstances of their social construction demonstrate. I will discuss this history in general ways in the case of the United States and in some greater detail in the internationally less well-known case of Malaysia, with the development of the concepts of bangsa in Malay and minzu in Chinese, which map varyingly and imperfectly onto the English terms “nation”, “race” and “ethnic group”. The imperfection of translation across Malay, Chinese and English itself demonstrates the tenuous relationship between these signifiers of types of peoples and the various extra-linguistic referents—of biology and culture—through which attempts are made to ground and reify such concepts as “race” and “ethnicity”.
 
But I also wish to move beyond this by now well-worn understanding of the social construction of “race”, “ethnicity” and similar concepts. The problem with social constructionist arguments, usually raised to try to dismiss racial, ethnic and other identities as ephemeral, is that they generally have no answer to the naive—though by no means foolish—realist reference to the difference and diversity of physical features, thought and behaviour which seem so true and apparent. There are people who look different from one another in patterns we map onto “racial” difference and who act differently in ways we attribute to cultural or ethnic difference. In response, I want to provide a means by which to take this sensible reality (i.e., a reality apparent to our senses) into account, to bring it into our understanding of the social construction of race, ethnicity and the like, while still maintaining the argument that biology and culture by no means determine such categories. Rather, biology and culture merely provide the raw materials from which we socially construct ideas of difference and community. As with raw materials out of which we fashion buildings or clothing, the materials we rely on have some bearing on the structures we build or the fashions we weave out of them, but they do not determine the form of the final products, let alone the uses to which we put them…

…Compare this to the United States. Barack Obama is widely considered to be America’s first “black” president. The default categorisation of racial identity in America, with Obama and others, is to classify individuals of “mixed” white and minority parentage as belonging to the minority category. In Singapore, by contrast, racial classification is a patrilineal inheritance: at birth, a child’s race is recorded as being that of the father. In the United States, President Obama is considered black or African American primarily on a biological, not a cultural, basis. But while physical appearance derived from biological inheritance may be the main touchstone of race in America, and cultural traits may be the main standard for race (or ethnicity) in Malaysia, in both countries these two race signifiers are also greatly conflated and combined. Obama, for instance, has been scrutinised for his language, mannerisms, sports preferences and, most prominently and perversely, his religious affiliations, all as a measure of how “black” or how “American” he is. Similarly, in Malaysia, although “Malay”, “Chinese” and other racial categories are associated more strongly with cultural traits, including language and religion, than with biological traits, the latter are frequently invoked when it suits a particular cause. For example, the former long-serving prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, known as a vocal proponent of the Malay community and head of the politically dominant United Malay National Organisation, was nevertheless alleged by some political opponents to be of paternal Indian biological lineage and therefore not to be a “real Malay”…

Read the entire article here.

Imagining Obama: Reading Overtly and Inferentially Racist Images of our 44th President, 2007–2008

Communication Studies
Volume 62, Issue 4, 2011
Special Issue:“Race Matters” in the Obama Era
pages 389-405
DOI: 10.1080/10510974.2011.588074

Ralina L. Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington

In this article I analyze eight Internet images of President Barack Obama from the election campaign period of 2007–2008. These images were largely user-generated and disseminated and fall into two camps that each represent a form of anti-Black racism: overtly racist images and inferentially racist images. While representations of Obama as an ape, thug, or terrorist were generally recognized as clear forms of anti-Black racism, images I identify as inferentially racist operate within a postracial ideology in which Obama is figured as a messiah, whites’ “Black best friend,” or a mythical creature. For some viewers, these inferentially racist images did not incite the controversy of those read as overtly racist because the former were read as positive portrayals of uplift and progress. Yet, these inferentially racist images are reliant upon the same stereotypes of Blackness as the explicitly racist pictures, as Obama becomes a positive figure only when he can metaphorically transcend his Blackness.

Within a week of moving to an area of South Seattle designated by the 2010 U.S. Census as the most diverse in the country, I was cautioned by a well-intentioned, liberal White neighbor about the frequent incidence of car burglaries in the neighborhood. In our shared parking lot the neighbor told me, gesturing to her Obama/Biden bumper sticker, that her car was burgled “even though we have an Obama sticker!” I was so baffled by this comment that I mumbled a goodbye, got into my car and drove away, my mind exploding with questions. Did my neighbor think that car burglars were united in their proclivity to be Obama fans? Was she really assuming that all car vandals in South Seattle were Black? Did she mean that since she was ‘‘down with the cause’’ by publicly endorsing Obama, her car should have been immune from what she imagined to be Black-perpetrated crime? Was her bizarre performance of Obama-fandom intended to make her appear antiracist for us, the new family of color next door?

Since Obama’s presidential election campaign I have come to intimately understand that signifiers of our first African American president are deployed by some people to express anxiety, desire, guilt, discomfort, and, oftentimes, fear of Blackness. Such fear, which I read in the case of my neighbor as an assumption of Black criminality, must be seen as part-and-parcel of a more coded, more polite, but still virulent and destructive racism against African Americans that occurs, confusingly, through a celebration of Barack Obama. This complicated performance of support, when accompanied by controlling ideas of Blackness, reveals a barely sublimated anti-Black racism that flourishes in popular discourse because, in the words of Henry Giroux, ‘‘since it is assumed that formal institutions of segregation no longer exist,’’ racism against Black Americans also no longer exists (Giroux, 2003, p. 193). I use the phrase “anti-Black racism” as opposed to “racism” or ‘‘prejudice’’ not just to signal discriminatory feelings of Whites towards people of color but instead to signify the institutional, structural, and cultural forces that foment the inequality of people of African descent in our society.1 The featuring of Obama images, whether on a bumper sticker, t-shirt, poster, mug, or Facebook profile picture, is not a simple matter of one’s displaying political affiliation. As Obama is the first African American U.S. president, the production, consumption, and circulation of his image denotes conflicting emotions of race, identity, Blackness, belonging, and, yes, sometimes entrenched-yet-coded anti-Black racism…

Read the entire article here.