Mixed Race Studies

Color Differentiation in the American Systems of Slavery

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Volume 3, Number 3 (Winter, 1973)
pages 509-541

Donald L. Horowitz, James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science
Duke University

In the comparative study of race relations, the evolution of group identity constitutes a central process. Although group boundaries tend to be taken as given, they are more fluid than is often supposed. The criteria of membership may change, and the inclusiveness of the groups may expand or contract accordingly.

The forces promoting the redefinition of ethnic group boundaries are only imperfectly understood. This applies particularly to the emergence of new groups. While the study of assimilation lias received much attention, the study of differentiation has not. Ethnic contact and the progeny it produces, for example, provide opportunities for the creation of new ethnic categories. But the opportunities arc not always taken. In some cases, distinctive “mixed-blood” groups emerge; in others, the offspring are incorporated in one or another of the original groups.

Examples of this process of group differentiation may be found in the history of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Some slave systems differentiated “mulattoes” from Africans and bestowed varying degrees of separate status; others suppressed such possible distinctions. Everywhere rules were formulated to define the boundaries of the respective groups, to specify the criteria of identification, to categorize marginal cases, and to permit individual exceptions to the rules of group membership…

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Black Pluralism in Post Loving America

Chapter in: Loving vs. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage

Cambridge University Press
May 2012
300 pages
Hardback ISBN-13: 9780521198585
Paperback ISBN-13: 9780521147989

Edited by

Kevin Noble Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Rose Cuison Villazor, Associate Professor of Law
Hofstra University

Chapter Author

Taunya Lovell Banks, Jacob A. France Professor of Equality Jurisprudence and Francis & Harriet Iglehart Research Professor of Law
University of Maryland School of Law

The face of late twentieth and early twenty-first century America has changed, as have attitudes about race, especially about persons with some African ancestry. Since 1967, the number of multi-racial individuals with some African ancestry living in the United States has increased dramatically as a result of increased out-marriage by black Americans and the immigration of large numbers of multiracial individuals from Mexico, the Caribbean, as well as Central and Latin America. Many members of the post-Loving generation came of age in the 1990s with no memories of de jure racial segregation laws or the need for the 1960s civil rights legislation to combat overt racial discrimination. Accordingly, they see race, racism and identity through different lens. In other words, we are witnessing a significant generational shift in thinking that is beginning to be reflected in popular culture and scholarly literature about race and identity, but not in the courts. American judges and policy-makers, composed primarily of the children of Brown v. Board of Education, remain stuck in a racial jurisprudence and rhetoric of the late twentieth century.

This chapter analyzes the experiences of and public dialogues about children of interracial parentage and how their differential treatment by non-blacks, as well as blacks, raises legal issues courts are not prepared to address. One emerging question is whether mixed-race individuals are more likely to experience situational blackness—whether one can be black for some but not for other purposes, and if so, when one is black for anti-discrimination purposes. This question is even more sharply drawn when questions about “racial authenticity” arise for individuals whose African ancestry is less apparent. As this chapter explains, the overriding question in both cases is whether interracial parentage confers some type of benefit and disadvantage on Afro-descendant children not experienced by individuals whose formal racial classification is black, and if so whether anti-discrimination law should take these differences into account.

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 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s “Passing”

Modern Language Studies
Volume 32, Number 2 (Autumn, 2002)
pages 109-138

Lori Harrison-Kahan, Full-time Adjunct Faculty in English
Boston College

In a scene from Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing, a white man, John Bellew, enters his Chicago hotel room to find his wife, Clare, taking tea with two of her childhood friends. To the astonishment of the two women, Bellew greets his wife with an unusual pet name: “Nig.” When Clare asks her husband to explain his form of address to the stunned women, he replies, “When we were first married, she was as white as—as—well as white as a lily. But I declare she’s gettin’ darker and darker. I tell her if she don’t look out, she’ll wake up one of these days and find she’s turned into a nigger” (171). The moment is rich in dramatic irony, for unbeknownst to Bellew, his wife and her two friends are African Americans who are passing as white.

Although Bellew calls his wife “Nig” as a “joke” (171), the interpellation works to erase Clare’s given name, which connotes clearness, light, and whiteness. That Clare responds to this nickname seals the process of subjection. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon notes the power of interpellation to constitute and deform the black body through a racialized naming such as “nigger” or “Negro.” In Fanon’s famous example of racial interpellation, the cry “Look a Negro!” pairs the derogatory naming with the fixing of the look. The simultaneous gaze (“Look”) and naming (“a Negro”) freeze the black man into “an object in the midst of other objects” (109). In Passing, Clare’s husband warns her that if she “don’t look out”—…

Study: Multiracial groups and social position, segregation in America

The JHU Gazette
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore Maryland
2011-12-19

Amy Lunday, Homewood

The American social hierarchy places people of mixed-race ancestry below whites but above blacks, while additional social stratifications along color lines are simultaneously taking place within the nation’s multiracial groups, according to a Johns Hopkins University sociologist’s study of U.S. Census data.

Pamela R. Bennett, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, studied the residential location of people who identified themselves with more than one racial group when filling out their 2000 and 2010 census forms…

…In both cases, she found that multiracial groups occupy a social position between blacks and whites, and that the multiracial groups themselves have their own racial stratifications. Bennett found a lesser degree of segregation among people who are of both black and white heritage when compared to those whose identities are fully black. Yet the black-white multiracials appear to be more segregated than Asian-white or American Indian–white multiracials across several segregation measures…

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Islands and autochthons: Coloureds, space and belonging in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe (Part 1)

Journal of Social Archaeology
Volume 4, Number 3 (October 2004)
pages 405-426
DOI: 10.1177/1469605304046423

Julia Katherine Seirlis
Department of Anthropology
University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

This article, the first in a two-part series, examines the ramifications of the complex relationships between race and space for definitions of the nation and national identity in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe. Most generally, the workings of race and space helped polarize Rhodesia and Zimbabwe between what was set up as ‘white’ and ‘black’, and limit the struggle for power and claims on belonging to those two poles. Racial identity was inscribed into spatial sensibilities and organization so that white space (the city) functioned as a series of islands and black space (the countryside) activated organic assertions of autochthony. More specifically, race and space informed the creation of an intermediate racial category, ‘Coloured’, with no substantive claim to a ‘real’ or ‘full’ identity and with no authoritative claim to the physical soil of the country.

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Power, Perception, and Interracial Sex: Former Slaves Recall a Multiracial South

The Journal of Southern History
Volume 71, Number 3 (August, 2005)
pages 559-588

Fay A. Yarbrough, Associate Professor of History
University of Oklahoma

My father’s name wuz Robert Stewart. He wuz a white man. My mother wuz named Ann. She wuz part Indian. Her father wuz a Choctaw Indian and her mother a black woman—a slave.” This is how Charley Stewart, a former slave, described his lineage. Stewart was not alone in claiming parents and grandparents of mixed racial heritage; there are many references to mixed-race ancestry in the interviews of ex-slaves collected by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s. The interviews also contain candid observations about interracial unions in general and about how people of African descent understood relationships that crossed social. legal, and racial boundaries. The former slaves described various combinations of racial unions and their ramifications for the participants, families, fellow slaves, and offspring. This article will consider the words of ex-slaves, using the WPA collection and a selection of biographies and autobiographies of slaves, and will re-create descriptions of and attitudes toward interracial sex during the nineteenth century. These accounts…

The Hybrid and the Social Process

Phylon (1940-1956)
Volume 6, Number 4 (4th Quarter, 1945)
pages 327-336

Jitsuichi Masuoka

An intermixture of blood is an invariable outcome of human migration, contact, and association. To this statement there seems to be no historical exception. Races and peoples, however much they may be physically and culturally dissimilar, if they come together at all, associate to produce individuals of nondescript physical type. In its essence, the hybridization of peoples and races is a biological process, but as it has a wider social implication, it may be studied as a part and parcel of social processes.

A study of changes in genetic factors, as a consequence of racial intermixing, belongs properly to the science of human genetics. Race mixture in its wider ramification is a sociological problem for reasons generally recognized but not always fully understood. Man’s sex appetite, as of all other human impulses, is everywhere culturally channeled, and in this broad sense, one may well speak of race mixture as falling within the orbit of sociology. Moreover, as the intermixture of races runs counter to the existing sex mores of the societies in contact and, as it undermines, in the long run, the pre-existing social order, the problem of race mixture comes to have a sociological rather than biological import. In this way it comes about that the problems of “race mixture” and “race problem” are inseparable in the minds of many; thus, making an objective study of racial hybridization difficult. Race mixing is freighted with heightened emotions and sentiments and intellectual stupidities rampage in this area of discourse. It seems important, therefore, that this problem be examined as a phase of general social process. By viewing it within this wider frame of reference, one may attain a reasonable degree of objectivity toward race mixture.

Much has been written about racial miscegenation by students of biology, psychology, and social sciences. But, the hybrid as a personality type received its first clear definitive statement from Reuter and Park. “The hybrids,” Reuter writes, “tend to be distinct in social position, cultural status, and personality organization: sociologically as well as racially, they are hybrid.” Resulting chiefly from their accessibility to wider cultural opportunities, the mixed-blood individuals occupy the status superior to that of the natives but inferior to that of the whites. However, this superior social position of the hybrid is not to be taken as an evidence of innate intellectual superiority. It should, as Reuter points…