Mixed Race Studies

2011 Brigitte M. Bodenheimer Lecture on Family Law by Professor Angela Onwuachi-Willig: “According to Our Hearts: What Does the Rhinelander v. Rhinelander Case Teach Us about Race, Law, and Family?”

University of California, Davis
School of Law
Kalmanovitz Appellate Courtroom
2011-11-08, 16:00-18:00 PST (Local Time)
Run Time: 01:05:58

Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Charles M. and Marion J. Kierscht Professor of Law
University of Iowa

The 2011 Brigitte M. Bodenheimer Lecture on Family Law features Professor Angela Onwuachi-Willig. She delivers a lecture entitled, “According to Our Hearts: What Does the Rhinelander v. Rhinelander Case Teach Us about Race, Law, and Family?”

Professor Angela Onwuachi-Willig explores the social and legal meanings of the Rhinelander v. Rhinelander case by examining its various lessons regarding law and society’s joint role in framing the normative ideal of family as monoracial.

The Rhinelander trial of 1925 involved a lawsuit in which wealthy, white Leonard Kip Rhinelander sued his wife, Alice Beatrice Rhinelander, for an annulment based on fraud. Leonard alleged that Alice claimed to be white when she was actually “of colored blood.” Legend has it that the two were madly in love, but Rhinelander’s father encouraged the annulment proceeding because he did not approve of the relationship.

Professor Onwuachi-Willig analyzes the case as a representation of the simultaneously tragic and inspiring story about race and race relations in the United States.

A former member of the UC Davis law faculty, Professor Onwuachi-Willig is the Charles M. and Marion J. Kierscht Professor of Law at the University of Iowa. She specializes in the areas of Employment Discrimination, Family Law, Feminist Legal Theory, and Race and the Law.

Established in 1981 in memory of Professor Brigitte M. Bodenheimer, this endowed lecture brings scholars and practitioners to King Hall to discuss recent developments affecting the family.

Public Mothers: Native American and Métis Women as Creole Mediators in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest

Journal of Women’s History
Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2003
Special Issue: Revising the Experiences of Colonized Women: Beyond Binaries

Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Professor of History
Ohio State University, Newark

During the early nineteenth century, the largely Francophone, mixed ancestry residents of the western Great Lakes region were faced with massive immigration of Anglophone whites who colonized the region, imposing a new U.S. government, economy, and legal system on the old Creole communities. Many of these immigrants from different cultural backgrounds in the eastern United States brought their prejudices and fears with them, attitudes that had the power to alienate and marginalize the old residents. This article explores the ways in which some women of color found techniques to mediate between cultural groups, using hospitality, charity, and health care to negotiate overlapping ideals of womanhood common to both Anglos and Native-descended people. In so doing, they won praise from both new and old neighbors, as they used Creole patterns of network-building to smooth community relations.

Read the entire article here.

Assimilation in Eighteenth-Century Senegal

John D. Hargreaves, Burnett-Fletcher Professor Emeritus of History
University of Aberdeen, Scotland

The Journal of African History
Volume 6, Number 2 (1965)
pages 177-184

Although historians are becoming more aware of the importance of communities of West Africans with experience of European education, institutions and culture, they have so far paid little attention to the earliest of these—the African and Afro-European inhabitants of French settlements in Senegal. Even the semantics are obscure; the term habitants has been used in various ways. In 1853 Abbe Boilat, a careful observer of Woloff ancestry, wrote that at St Louis it was applied to mulattoes; gourmets, that is noirs baptisés qui sont instruits et honorables par leur bonne conduite et leur rang dans la societe: and a few Muslim Negroes of high social standing. Eighteenth-century usage was equally confusing. A count of the population of St Louis in 1779 distinguished habitans et blancs from mulâtres et nègres libres; it may be that the term habitants originally meant free persons on the establishment of the French companies’ headquarters, which Barbot calls the habitation. (Echoes of the way the term was used in French Canada may also complicate the position.) In this paper habitants will be used in a wide sense, similar to Boilat’s, to include free persons of African or part-African descent, residing in the French settlements of St Louis (with its dependent trading posts in the Senegal Valley) and Gorée (with its dependent trading posts on the coasts south of Cape Verde) who had been influenced by contemporary French culture. The nature of this influence, and of the community thus in process of formation, will form the main subject of this paper. Its treatment is purely exploratory, and no attempt has yet been made to use French manuscript material. Further research might well suggest, among other modifications, a need to make clearer distinctions between St Louis and Gorée.

The habitant community seems to have been recruited in four main ways. In the first place successive French companies, and later the Royal administration, increasingly found it expedient to employ Africans. There were usually somewhere between 100 and 250 Frenchmen in the Senegalese ‘concession’, serving as traders, accountants, and officials: surgeons and chaplains: artisans, labourers, seamen and soldiers. But conditions of service were rarely attractive to men of talent or good character; Senegal was regarded as another Siberia, fit only for malefactors and libertines, and standards of competence and morality were usually low, except sometimes in the higher appointments. Moreover, Europeans were particularly liable to be put out of action by intestinal disorders, malaria or…

Purchase the article here.

Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico

Indiana University Press
2009
248 pages
6.125 x 9.25
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-253-22331-9

Herman L. Bennett, Professor of Latin American History
City Univerisity of New York

Asking readers to imagine a history of Mexico narrated through the experiences of Africans and their descendants, this book offers a radical reconfiguration of Latin American history. Using ecclesiastical and inquisitorial records, Herman L. Bennett frames the history of Mexico around the private lives and liberty that Catholicism engendered among enslaved Africans and free blacks, who became majority populations soon after the Spanish conquest. The resulting history of 17th-century Mexico brings forth tantalizing personal and family dramas, body politics, and stories of lost virtue and sullen honor. By focusing on these phenomena among peoples of African descent, rather than the conventional history of Mexico with the narrative of slavery to freedom figured in, Colonial Blackness presents the colonial drama in all its untidy detail.

Foucault, Bakhtin, Ethnomethodology: Accounting for Hybridity in Talk-in-Interaction

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research
Volume 8, Number 2, Article 10
May 2007
18 pages

Shirley Anne Tate, Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies
Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies
University of Leeds

Theorising hybridity within Postcolonial Studies is often done at a level which seems to exclude the everyday with the exception of its relevance for the cultural productions of migrants and dominant culture’s “eating the other”. This article uses the exploration of hybridity as an everyday interactional achievement within Black “mixed race” British women’s conversations on identity to look at the production of an analytic method as process based on the task of the analyst as translator. This method as process thinks the links between FOUCAULT and BAKHTIN in the emergence of an ethnomethodologically inclined discourse analysis (eda) which is called on to make sense of a hybridity of the everyday where Black women reflexively translate discourses on identity positions in order to construct their own identifications in conversations. FOUCAULT’s discourses and BAKHTIN’s heteroglossia and addressivity allow us to theorise this movement in the talk which ethnomethodological transcription and theory enables us to first pinpoint occurring. The article begins by looking at first, how hybridity as identification emerges in talk-in-interaction through both speaker and analyst translations. Having established this, it then goes on to look at the theoretical convergences and divergences between FOUCAULT and BAKHTIN on the subject, identity and discourses in the eda enterprise. Looking at data through the lens of eda means that we must be aware of the subject positions which speakers identify as having the effect of constraining or facilitating particular actions and experiences and there is always the possibility for challenge to subjectification.

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Method as Process—Talk, Hybridity, Translation
• 3. Blurring the Line Between Theory and Story
• 4. Discourses, Translation as Reflexivity and Dialogism in Talk on Identification
• 5. FOUCAULT and BAKHTIN—”Race”, Discourses and Dialogics
• 6. FOUCAULT and BAKHTIN: Ethnomethodology, Discourse Analysis and the Membership Category “Black Woman”
• 7. Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• References
• Author
• Citation

Read the entire article here or here.

Racism and skin colour: the many shades of prejudice

The Guardian
2011-10-04

Bim Adewunmi

Deeply entrenched attitudes towards colour, and the increasing promotion of skin-lightening products, are placing a ‘horrible burden’ on dark-skinned women

Next week, at the international black film festival in Nashville, Bill Duke and D Channsin Berry will premiere their new documentary, Dark Girls. The film looks at the everyday experiences of dark-skinned black women in America. The blurb from the official site promises the directors will “[pull] back our country’s curtain to reveal that the deep-seated biases and hatreds of racism—within and outside of the black American culture—remain bitterly entrenched”.

When the film-makers released a preview of Dark Girls in May, it spread like wildfire across social media sites and black entertainment blogs. Commenters wrote about being moved to tears by the nine minutes of film they’d seen and many mentioned how long in coming such a film was. Why did the documentarians decide to tackle this subject and why now? For Duke, a veteran of Hollywood—co-star of Car Wash and Predator—it was down to personal experience. “It came from me being a dark-skinned black man in America, and also observing what [dark-skinned] relatives like my sister and niece have gone through. The issue exists externally of our race, but a lot of it comes within the race itself and our perception of ourselves.” Berry recalls being called “darkie” at elementary school by his fellow classmates, “and even some family members were like: ‘He is really dark. Why is he so dark?’ It left a scar. So when Bill came to me, within the first couple of seconds, I was on board.”

Shadism lurks in our collective peripheral vision and rears its ugly head every so often. Earlier this year, there was a Twitter storm over a promotional flyer for a party in Ohio whose theme was “Light Skin vs Dark Skin”. In May, the Afro Hair and Beauty show in London had a stall advertising and selling skin-lightening products. The stall was called Fair and White. In an interview with black newspaper the Voice, the co-organiser of the show, Verna McKenzie, said that she had “a responsibility to cater to the marketplace”. Two years ago, makeup giant L’Oréal was accused of lightening the skin of singer Beyoncé in ads (it denied the claim), and last year, Elle magazine was accused of doing the same to actor Gabourey Sidibe (it said “nothing out of the ordinary” had been done to the photograph). Last month, a study conducted at Villanova University in Pennsylvania found that lighter-skinned women were more likely to receive shorter prison sentences than darker-skinned women, receiving approximately 12% less time behind bars…

…Heidi Safia Mirza, professor of equalities studies in education at the Institute of Education, University of London, says: “Pigmentocracy in the Caribbean as a kind of social hierarchical system emulated from the slave days where there was favouritism if you were fairer, particularly if you were a woman.” Mirza, who has been conducting her own research looking at young black and minority ethnic women in schools, tells the story of a Sierra Leonean teenager who reported being made fun of because of her very dark skin. “It was not uncommon for dark-skinned girls to be vilified and teased and called names like ‘blick’, which means ‘blacker than black’.”

Debbie Weekes-Bernard, senior research and policy analyst for education at the Runnymede Trust, wrote Shades of Darkness, a report on the way “darker-skinned girls reflect upon themselves against lighter-skinned (in this case mixed-parentage) girls” as part of her PhD. The subjects were girls between the ages of 12 and 16…

Read the entire article here.

The Case of Loving v. Bigotry

The New York Times
2012-01-01

Julie Bosman

Photography by: Grey Villet

In 1958, Richard and Mildred Loving were arrested in a nighttime raid in their bedroom by the sheriff of Caroline County, Va. Their crime: being married to each other. The Lovings—Mildred, who was of African-American and Native American descent, and Richard, a bricklayer with a blond buzz cut—were ordered by a judge to leave Virginia for 25 years. In January, the International Center of Photography is mounting a show [2012-01-20 through 2012-05-06] of Grey Villet’s photographs of the couple in 1965. That exhibit is complemented by an HBO documentary, ‘‘The Loving Story,’’ directed by Nancy Buirski, which will be shown on HBO on Feb. 14…

Read the entire text and view the photographs here.

Were the riots about race?

The Guardian
2011-12-08

Reading the Riots: Investigating England’s summer of disorder
In partnership with the London School of Economics
Supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Open Society Foundations

Hugh Muir, Diary Editor

Yemisi Adegoke, Freelance Journalist

Some commentators were quick to call them ‘race riots’, but the true picture was more complicated

Amid the chaos and confusion of this summer’s riots, a few commentators felt the benefit of certainty. “These riots were about race. Why ignore the fact?” chided the Telegraph columnist Katharine Birbalsingh. Abroad, there seemed no need for deeper reflection. “Over 150 arrested after London hit by huge race riots,” said one US business website. “Let’s talk about those race riots in London,” urged talkshow hosts in New Zealand. Those on the other side of the debate could appear just as certain. “This is not about race at all,” Max Wind-Cowie of the left-leaning thinktank Demos told the Huffington Post…

…Of the 270 rioters interviewed by the Guardian and the LSE, 50% were black, 27% were white, 18% of mixed race and 5% Asian…

Read the entire article here.

Born Along the Racial Fault Line

The New York Times
2011-11-06

Janet Maslin

My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir By Mark Whitaker. Illustrated. 357 pages. Simon & Schuster.

As a social studies major in his junior year at Harvard, Mark Whitaker attended a debate on the subject of ethnicity. One participant was the chairman of the department. Mr. Whitaker stood up to raise some questions.

“What would you tell someone who didn’t have a clear ethnic identity?” he asked. “For example, what would you tell someone who had one parent who was black and another who was white? Who had one parent who was American and another who was European? Who had moved dozens of times as a child and didn’t have a specific place to call home?” Everyone in the room knew that Mr. Whitaker was talking about himself.

“I guess I would say that that’s too bad,” the professor answered. “In the future I hope we don’t have too many more people like you.”

Mr. Whitaker recounts this story in “My Long Trip Home,” a book filled with as much family tumult as Jeannette Walls described in “The Glass Castle” and a racial factor to boot. It’s a story that registers not only for its shock value but also for the perspective and wisdom with which it can now be told…

Read the entire review here.

The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars

Cambridge University Press
September 1993
396 pages
228 x 152 mm
ISBN: 9780521458757
DOI: 10.2277/0521458757

Elazar Barkan, Professor of International and Public Affairs
Columbia University

This fascinating study in the sociology of knowledge documents the refutation of scientific foundations for racism in Britain and the United States between the two world wars, when the definition of race as a biological concept was replaced by a cultural notion of race. Discussing the work of the leading biologists and anthropologists who wrote about race between the wars, Dr. Barkan argues that the impetus for the shift in ideologies of race came from the inclusion of outsiders—women, Jews, and leftists—into the mainstream of scientific discourse.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: ANTHROPOLOGY
  • 1. Constructing a British identity
    • Colors into races. A transition to modern British anthropology. The founding fathers. Mummies, bones and stones. The shift in British archaeology. A British glimpse at race relations.
  • 2. American diversity
    • Haunted sentinels. European skulls and the primitive mind. The Boasians. American physical anthropology. The politics of coexistence. Dionysia in the Pacific.
• PART II: BIOLOGY
  • 3. In search of a biology of race
    • NewGenics. The statistician’s fable. Race crossing in Jamaica. A Canadian in London: rigid Reginald Ruggles Gates.
  • 4. The limit of traditional reform
    • A racist liberal: Julian Huxley’s early years. Herbert Spencer Jennings and progressive eugenics. A conservative critique: Raymond Pearl. Bridging race formalism and population genetics.
  • 5. Mitigating racial differences
    • Lancelot Hogben. “Africa view” – Huxley’s changing perspectives. J. B. S. Haldane: a defiant aristocrat. Medicine and eugenics: expanding the environment. Eugenics reformed.
• PART III: POLITICS
  • 6. Confronting racism: scientists as politicians
    • 1933 – Early hesitations. Britain – Race and Culture Committee. We Europeans. The American scene. An international interlude. The Paris Congress. The population committee. Out of the closet.
• EPILOGUE
• Bibliography
• Index