Mixed Race Studies

Just Between Sisters: Gender, Race, Class, Sexuality, and Relationships of Mixed-Race Women and Girls (AMS) (HRJ) (GEN) (HUM) HUMN 7302

Southern Methodist University
Fall 2012

Evelyn L. Parker, Associate Professor of Practical Theology

In 1967 the US Supreme Court ruled state miscegenation laws unconstitutional. Instituted in 1691, the state laws sought to prevent sexual mixing across racial lines protecting the “purity” of European Americans. Since 1967 the population of mixed-race children has more than tripled. Among the demands of mixed-race people have been new census policy that recognizes various ways of expressing their identity. Additionally, the mixed-race movement has raised awareness about their experiences and inspired the development of Mixed-race Studies in academic settings. Among the many issues of Mixed-race Studies there are questions about female relationships and intersectional questions of race, gender, class, and sexuality that merit examination. The intersectional questions refer to Kimberle Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, ways in which race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of black women’s lives. Crenshaw argues that the intersection of racism and sexism operate in black women’s lives in ways that a single dimensional analysis fails to reveal. This course builds on Crenshaw’s concept to explore the various ways race, gender, class and sexuality intersect in shaping the identity of mixed-race women and girls and their relationships with other women and girls. Through the use of novels, memoirs, and film, this course focuses on intersectional and relational questions of first generation African/African Diasporic (black) and European (white) mixed-race women and girls. This course may be applied to the following curricular field concentrations: American Studies, Gender Studies, Human Rights and Social Justice, and Humanities.

Mix-d: Museum

Mix-d:™
2012-02-27

Chamion Caballero, Senior Research Fellow
London South Bank University

Peter Aspinall, Reader in Population Health at the Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent, UK

The overall aim of the project is to explore the potential of translating knowledge through technology. Working together with Mix-d, the team will draw on findings from the British Academy project to develop the ‘Mix-d Museum’, an online repository of material and interactive resources.

Hello and a big welcome to our blog! We are delighted to be working with Mix-d: to share the findings of our research on mixed race people, couples and families in early 20th century Britain through the creation of the Mix-d: Timeline. The Timeline will provide highlight many key events in the history of racial mixing and mixedness in twentieth century Britain, as well provide an insight into the everyday lives and experiences of mixed race people, couples and families during this time.

For this first blog entry, we thought we’d say a bit about why we started the research project that the Timeline will draw on and what we found along the way.

As researchers interested in mixed race people, couples and families, we were aware that the little history that had been told about this group—particularly around the interwar period—had assumed that theirs was an inherently negative or problematic experience. We were also aware that such perceptions continued to influence how mixed people, couples and families were seen in Britain today…

…We had hoped to find some records and personal accounts relating to these families and people, but what we found far exceeded our expectations. The project sourced a fantastic range of archival material, including official documents, autobiographical recordings and photo and film material, which has helped us to understand more about the experiences of these families and the effect that official attitudes to racial mixing and mixedness had on their lives…

Read the entire blog post here.

Studs Terkel’s study of race in the US: 20 years on

The Guardian
2012-03-13

Gary Younge

What have we learned in the two decades since the oral historian Studs Terkel published his classic book Race? In the introduction to a new edition, Gary Younge weighs up what has changed – and what hasn’t

Cultures do not come by their obsessions lightly. They tend them over generations, feeding them with myths, truths, pain, resentment, collective generalisations and individual exceptions. They pick at them like scabs until they bleed, and then mistake the consequent infection for the original wound. And then, like a hardy virus, the obsessions survive all attempts at inoculation by mutating into new and more stubborn strains.

Race in America, as Studs Terkel points out in the subtitle to his book (“What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession”), published 20 years ago this year, is one such obsession. “No African came in freedom to the shores of the New World,” wrote 19th-century French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville in his landmark book Democracy in America. “The Negro transmits to his descendants at birth the external mark of his ignominy. The law can abolish servitude, but only God can obliterate its traces.”

By 1992, when Race was published, the laws had been abolished two generations prior, leaving the traces to engrave a deep and treacherous crevice between de jure and de facto. So there was never any risk that in the two decades since Terkel conducted most of these interviews, the book would be relegated to a period piece. True, numerous references to Louis Farrakhan, Harold Washington and Ronald Reagan certainly root the contributions in their time. Remarkable things have also happened to race in America since the book came out: black Americans have been eclipsed by Latinos as the largest minority; the black prison population has increased exponentially; a Republican right wing is on the ascendancy; and there is, of course, a black president…

Read the entire article here.

Mexico’s black history is often ignored

Los Angeles Times
2008-04-13

John L. Mitchell, Times Staff Writer

In Mexico, the story of the country’s black population has been largely ignored in favor of an ideology that declares that all Mexicans are “mixed race.” But it’s the mixture of indigenous and European heritage that most Mexicans embrace; the African legacy is overlooked.

“They are saying we are all the same and therefore there is no reason to distinguish yourself,” said Padre Glyn Jemmott, a Roman Catholic priest from Trinidad and Tobago who has had a parish of a dozen Costa Chican pueblos since 1984.

“What they are not saying is that in ordinary life in Mexico, lighter-skinned Mexicans are accepted and have first place,” he said.

Jemmott, a co-founder of Mexico Negro, an organization that seeks to promote cultural pride and political strength in the coastal pueblos, said many Costa Chicans often don’t fully understand what it means to be black in Mexico until they leave their region.

Some tell stories of being confronted in other parts of the country by police who refuse to believe they’re Mexican and sometimes accuse them of being there illegally…

…They were not taught the details of their history: that Spanish slavers took Africans to colonial Mexico (New Spain) in the 16th century, long before the first slaves arrived in Jamestown, Va.; that during the colonial period there were more Africans than Europeans in Mexico.

The Costa Chicans were also not taught that some of the blacks were not slaves; that blacks lived throughout what is now Mexico, working in mining, sugar plantations and fishing.

In some instances black Mexicans were explorers and co-founders of settlements, including Los Angeles.

Jose Maria Morelos, one of Mexico’s leaders for independence, was a mulatto, as was Vicente Guerrero, Mexico’s second president, who abolished slavery in 1822…

Read the entire article here.