Mixed Race Studies

Canada’s famous first black doctor

National Review of Medicine
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Volume 1, Number 4 (2004-02-28)

Marvin Ross

Born in Toronto in 1837, Dr Anderson Abbott was a close friend of Abe Lincoln but refused to serve in the US Colored Troops

Not only was Anderson Ruffin Abbott the first black man to graduate from medical school in Canada (University of Toronto, 1861), he is described in a US history textbook as “probably the most famous British North American-born surgeon to serve coloured soldiers during the Civil War.” He was also a close friend of Abraham Lincoln, whose widow presented him with the shawl Lincoln wore to his first inauguration.

Dr Abbott’s father, Wilson, was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1801 to free parents but he eventually moved to Canada in 1835 to escape prejudice in the US. Wilson prospered in Toronto where he became an influential real estate dealer and city alderman. Anderson, who was born in 1837, studied medicine at the University of Toronto and graduated in 1861. While working as an intern, or medical licentiate as it was then known, in 1863 he petitioned President Lincoln to be allowed to join the Union Army.

He became one of only eight black surgeons serving, which brought him to the president’s attention and led to their friendship. Dr Abbott, however, refused to serve in the United States Colored Troops—a segregated unit. Instead, he opted to work as a contract surgeon. He explained why in a 1907 letter, writing that he felt equal to operating on any man and that having been born in a land where all men are free, he was not going to submit to government-endorsed segregation. His heroic act had a negative side effect, though: because of his refusal to serve in the segregated regiment, his widow was denied a Civil War Widow’s Pension…

…His son, Wilson R. Abbott, also became a doctor and practised as a lung and heart surgeon in Chicago. But unlike his father, he wasn’t relegated to a segregated black hospital—not because the laws had changed, but because he worked at a white hospital by passing. Anderson Abbott had married a woman from St Catharines, Ontario who was of mixed racial background. His son, Wilson, married a white woman and they and their descendents began to live as whites. Ms Slaney only learned that she was part black in 1975 at age 24 when she was approached by the Ontario Black History Society to ask about her great-great grandfather. No one had ever told her that half her family was black and, as she pointed out that at the time, “I didn’t even know any black people.” Her story and that of her black ancestor is the subject of her book Family Secrets: Crossing the Colour Line.

Read the entire article here.

Afro-Mexican: A Short Study on Identity

University of Kansas
April 2009
63 pages

Ariane Rose Tulloch

Submitted to the graduate degree program in Anthropology and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master’s of Arts.

Up until the early 19th century, blacks outnumbered white Spaniards in most major Mexican cities (Vaughn 2008). Nowadays, the black population has been localized to two areas: Veracruz and the Costa Chica. This study looks at whether Afro-Mexicans in the Costa Chica region had developed a racial consciousness, and if so, to what extent. Data gathered about Afro-Mexicans was analyzed using the Minority Identity Development Model (Atkinson et al 1983) which captured the complexities of minority-majority relations in a multi-ethnic society. Not all Afro-Mexicans had developed a strong sense of Afro-Mexican identity, but instead accepted their classification into the dominant mestizo group. Others see themselves as Afro-Mexicans in their own right, possibly due to having been influenced by activist group in the U.S. and elsewhere. The latter group sees itself and others in a positive yet autonomous light, corresponding to the final stages of the Minority Identity Development Model.

Read the entire thesis here.

Identity of Biracial College Students

San Jose State University
May 1999
77 pages

MyTra Fitzpatrick

A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of Child Development San Jose State University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts

This thesis examined the identity of biracial college students and the relationship between parenting styles (authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive) and biracial identity development. Biracial subjects were defined as individuals having parents who were from two different ethnic/racial groups. Of the total of 104 subjects, 65 students were classified into one of three mixed-groups categories according to the two ethiucities of their parents: Asian/Euro-American, Asian/Latino, and Latino/Euro-American. Results showed that students identified strongly with one or both ethnicities, and that strong bicultural identity was associated with positive self-esteem. The majority of parents utilized authoritative parenting styles, regardless of their ethnic mix. While authoritative parents were more likely to have offspring who exhibited higher levels of bicultural identity and self-esteem, these results were not statistically significant. These findings are consistent with the parenting styles literature and with studies showing positive identity for biracial students.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables
• Chapter 1: Introduction to the Problem
  • Interracial Marriages
  • Definition of Biracial Individuals
  • Statement of the Problem and Purpose of this Study
• Chapter 2: Review of the Literature
  • Research on Biracial Individuals
  • Identity Development: Definitions and Theories
  • Identity Development of Ethnic Minority Individuals
  • Identity Development of Biracial Individuals
  • Parenting Styles and the Relationship to Biracial Adolescents’ Social and Emotional Development
    • Baumrind’s Four Dimensions of Parental Behavior
    • Baumrind’s Three Parenting Style Typologies
    • Ethnic Differences in Parenting Styles
• Chapter 3: Methodology
  • Participants
  • Materials
  • Procedure
• Chapter 4: Results
• Chapter 5: Discussion and Conclusions
• References
• Appendix A

List of Tables

1. Who Students Live With by Ethnicity of Parents
2. Percent of Students who Identified with Their Mom vs. Their Dad
3. Identity Strength for Group 1 by Ethnicity of Parents
4. Identity Strength for Group 2 by Ethnicity of Parents
5. Bicultural Identity from Low to High by Ethnicity of Parents
6. Mean Scores for Identity Items by Primary Identity Group
7. Reasons Student Select for Identifying with Primary Ethnic Identity Group
8. Mean Score of Self-Esteem by Primary Ethnic Identity
9. Mean Score of Self-Esteem by Bicultural Identity
10. Mean Score of Self-Esteem by Ethnicity of Parents
11. Parenting Styles by Ethnic Mix-Groups of Parents
12. Percent of Parents Using Each Parenting Styles by Bicultural Identity of Child.
13. Mean Self-Esteem Scores by Parenting Styles

Read the entire thesis here.

The Language Trap: U.S. Passing Fiction and its Paradox

University of Kansas
2009
181 pages

Masami Sugimori, Instructor of English
University of South Alabama

Submitted to the graduate degree program in English and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Through exploration of William Faulkner’s, James Weldon Johnson’s and Nella Larsen’s “passing novels,” this dissertation points out that narrative representation of racial passing facilitates and compromises the authors’ challenge to the white-dominant ideology of early-twentieth-century America. I reveal that, due to their inevitable dependence on language, these authors draw paradoxically on the white-dominant ideology that they aim to question, especially its system of binary racial categorization. While the “white” body of a “passing” character serves the novelists as a subversive force in white-supremacist society (which depends on the racial other to define “whiteness”), language, which is essentially ideological, traps the writers in racial binary and continually suggests that, while the character looks white, s/he is really black. Accordingly, the authors have to write under the constraints of the problem that American discourse of race must and, for the most part, does systematically suppress its own essential fictiveness.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Passing Paradox: Representing Racial Chaos within the Symbolic Order
• Chapter 1: Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!
• Chapter 2: Signifying, Ordering, and Containing the Chaos: Whiteness, Ideology, and Language in William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust
• Chapter 3: Narrative Order and Racial Hierarchy: James Weldon Johnson’s Double-Consciousness and “White” Subjectivity in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Along This Way
• Chapter 4: Ordering the Racial Chaos, Chaoticizing the Racial Order: Nella Larsen’s Narrative of Indeterminacy and Invisibility in Passing
• Conclusion: Toward a Language for the Real, Chaotic and Unnamable
• Notes
• Works Cited

Read the entire dissertation here.

Biracial in America: Forming and Performing Racial Identity

Lexington Books (a division Rowman & Littlefield publishing group)
2011-08-28
224 pages
Cloth ISBN: 0-7391-4574-6 / 978-0-7391-4574-6
Electronic ISBN: 0-7391-4576-2 / 978-0-7391-4576-0

Nikki Khanna, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Vermont

Elected in 2008, Barack Obama made history as the first African American President of the United States. Though recognized as the son of his white Kansas-born mother and his Kenyan father, the media and public have nonetheless pigeonholed him as black, and he too self-identifies as such. Obama’s experiences as a biracial American with black and white ancestry, although compelling because of his celebrity, however, is not unique and raises several questions about the growing number of black-white biracial Americans today: How are they perceived by others with regard to race? How do they tend to identify? And why? Taking a social psychological approach, this book identifies influencing factors and several underlying processes shaping racial identity. Unlike previous studies which examine racial identity as if it was a one-dimensional concept, this book examines two dimensions of identity—a public dimension (how they identify themselves to others) and an internalized dimension (how they see themselves internally)—noting that both types of identity may not mesh, and in fact, they may be quite different from one another. Moreover, this study investigates the ways in which biracial Americans perform race in their day-to-day lives. One’s race isn’t simply something that others prescribe onto the individual, but something that individuals “do.” The strategies and motivations for performing black, white, and biracial identities are explored.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1: Questions of Identity
• Chapter 2: Black and White in America: Then and Now
• Chapter 3: Through the “Looking Glass”: Reflected Appraisals and the One Drop Rule
• Chapter 4: The Push and Pull of Day-to-Day Interactions
• Chapter 5: Social Comparisons and Social Networks
• Chapter 6: Identity Work: Strategies and Motivations
• Chapter 7: Concluding Thoughts

“If You’re Half Black, You’re Just Black”: Reflected Appraisals and the Persistence of the One-Drop Rule

Sociological Quarterly
Volume 51 Issue 1 (Winter 2010)
Pages 96 – 121
Published Online: 2010-01-15
DOI: 10.1111/j.1533-8525.2009.01162.x

Nikki Khanna, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Vermont

Despite growing interest in multiracial identity, much of the research remains atheoretical and limited in its approach to measuring identity. Taking a multidimensional approach to identity and drawing on reflected appraisals (how they think others see them), I examine racial identity among black-white adults in the South and the lingering influence of the one-drop rule. Most respondents internally identify as black and when asked to explain these black identities, they describe how both blacks and whites see them as black. I argue that the one-drop rule still shapes racial identity, namely through the process of reflected appraisals.

…To address this gap in the literature, I draw on interview data with 40 black-white biracial adults currently living in the South and examine how reflected appraisals shape their racial identities. Because I am looking at racial identity among people with black ancestry, I also look at how the one-drop rule influences the reflected appraisal process (and hence identity). Few studies seriously engage reflected appraisals as a determinant of racial identity, and none examine the way in which the one-drop rule affects reflected appraisals. Additionally, I interview black-white biracial people who are currently living in the South for two reasons. First, the one-drop rule is historically rooted in Southern slavery and the Jim Crow segregation in the South, and recent empirical research suggests that the one-drop rule continues to shape black identities in the South (Harris and Sim 2002; Brunsma 2005, 2006).  Second, little attention has been given to this region in previous studies. While quantitative studies suggest that the one-drop rule still impacts identity in the South, little qualitative work examines black-white identity within this context (see Rockquemore and Brunsma 2002a for an exception)….

Read the entire article here.

Narrative Order, Racial Hierarchy, and “White” Discourse in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Along This Way

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.
Volume 36, Number 3, Fall 2011
page 37-62
DOI: 10.1353/mel.2011.0041

Masami Sugimori, Instructor of English
University of South Alabama

African Americans became increasingly mobile during the early twentieth century, as exemplified by the Great Migration that began around 1910. Reflecting the general anxiety about such racial mobility, the March 2, 1911, issue of The Independent included an article about racial passing, “When Is a Caucasian Not a Caucasian?” Referring to the downfall of a “white” family whose part-black ancestry, unknown even to themselves, accidentally became public, the anonymous author discusses the “stupidity” and “cruelty” of the one-drop law and advises “all white negroes” to leave the South and live as “white people” so that, “as the bleaching process goes on, the conundrum will cease to concern them, When is a Caucasian not a Caucasian?” Despite the author’s insight into the precarious nature of racial categories, the article’s logic is predicated on the assumption of stable whiteness. On the one hand, along with its title, the article’s rhetorical question “Who knows where . . . it [the family’s tragedy] may strike next?” emphasizes that any white person can really be nonwhite. On the other hand, to highlight the “stupidity” and “cruelty” of white supremacy, the writer must posit an unquestionably pure-white man as the society’s representative. Thus, concerning the husband who annulled his marriage to an unwitting passer under Louisiana’s “infamous law against intermarriage,” the article states that “[t]here was no question that he was a full Caucasian” (479) despite its ongoing claim of the endless questionability of pure whiteness.

One finds such simultaneous refutation and affirmation of clear-cut racial classification in James Weldon Johnson’s novel about passing published a year later, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). As Samira Kawash points out. the novel’s scrutiny of the racial binary even problematizes “the simple black passing for white’ logic of passing . . . and its attendant model of race as the expression of a prior, embodied identity,” so that the “Ex-Coloured Man’s relation to blackness is shown…

Black & White: Search for roots uncovers forgotten family secret

National Post
Toronto, Canada
2012-02-17

Sarah Boesveld, General Assignment Writer

About 20 years ago, David Dossett watched his grandfather politely shut down a woman who called to say she was a relative and that their family had come to Canada from Jamaica and that they were black. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Mr. Dossett said to his granddad, businessman John B. Sampson, who seemed amused by this idea. Their family — Mr. Dossett’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side — had come to Canada from Scotland in 1907 and settled in Toronto. No one disputed that. But while doing some casual family tree sleuthing online a few years ago, Mr. Dossett, an IT manager and father of four, stumbled upon a tree that looked a lot like his. As it turns out, it belonged to the woman who called his grandfather that day — Jenny Sampson from Illinois. And so began Mr. Dossett’s “obsessive” hunt for a family’s past that had remained a secret for over 100 years. In the end, he discovered his family is not Protestant and Scottish, but Jamaican and Jewish. Not everyone is pleased about the discovery — much of which was broadcast last week on an episode of The Generations Project on Brigham Young University TV. Mr. Dossett spoke with the Post’s Sarah Boesveld from his hometown of Kingston, Ont.:

Q Jenny Sampson had been doing research independently before you began to question your family’s roots and identity. What had she found?

A When I was looking at her family tree, it was describing my family, it was describing me. And the tree said the family was Jewish, that they lived on an estate in Jamaica called Gaza. The name “Gaza” sounds very Jewish, so I’m thinking “Wow.” I contacted the person whose name was on the website — it ended up being her husband — and Jenny emailed back, explained the whole thing — that her family had come to Toronto in 1907, that they came as mulatto Hebrews. When it really sank into me that this was true I started thinking “What are the odds that my family is from Jamaica?” The odds turned out to be pretty good…

…Q Why do you think your family kept their heritage a secret even years after they immigrated?

A Deep down inside I think people [in my family] are concerned about having Jewish or black heritage. My mother’s cousin was concerned her father, my great-uncle the decorated war hero [and top-ranked army official] Franklin Augustus Sampson, would be looked down on if it was revealed our family lied about their heritage. But what are they going to do? Yank medals away from people? He’s dead. My grandfather lied about his heritage because he said he was born in Toronto, not Jamaica. A lot of people lied when they enlisted in WWI, lied about their age, lied about their ethnicity. One of my cousins found out many years ago through a blood test that there was either Asian or African blood in her system. When she took the blood test, she went into grandfather’s office, she threw it down on his desk in front of him and said “Explain this.”

Q How did your mother react?

A She doesn’t believe it. She says we’re from Scotland, but doesn’t provide details. She’s going through stages of dementia, but even without that she wouldn’t believe it. Jenny told me her mother is no longer speaking to her. If this had happened maybe 20 years earlier, I could have been a little concerned about it too.

Q Did you feel betrayed at all that your family kept this from you?

A Initially I was, but then I became aware of why this was done. I think what I find most discouraging is the way people were treated when they came to the country, if they weren’t from this white background. We have a past we don’t like to talk about. It’s too bad that Canada wasn’t as open a country as it could have been…

…Q You say there are likely thousands of other families out there who may actually be of black heritage despite their families’ white complexions.

A In the late 1800s there was a mass exodus of Jews from Jamaica. The perception was that they were becoming too powerful, so laws were passed to limit what they could own and how much they could acquire. I bet there are a lot of people out there that aren’t searching because they just don’t know. Maybe they just assume they’re from Scotland. Other than myself going to Queen’s University, no one in my family has a kilt, I don’t like bagpipes, I don’t eat oatmeal, I don’t like haggis. Nothing about me would indicate I’m Scottish except for my appearance — I have reddish hair because my grandfather married an Irish woman. They were very pale and I burn quite easily…

Read the entire article here.

The Ordinary Conception of Race in the United States and Its Relation to Racial Attitudes: A New Approach

Journal of Cognition and Culture
Volume 9, Issue 1 (2009)
pages 15-38
DOI: 10.1163/156853709X414610

Joshua Glasgow, Lecturer of Philosophy
Sonoma State University
also Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington.

Julie L. Shulman, Assistant Professor of Pyschology
Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California

Enrique G. Covarrubias

Many hold that ordinary race-thinking in the USA is committed to the ‘one-drop rule‘, that race is ordinarily represented in terms of essences, and that race is ordinarily represented as a biological (phenotype- and/or ancestry-based, non-social) kind. This study investigated the extent to which ordinary race-thinking subscribes to these commitments. It also investigated the relationship between different conceptions of race and racial attitudes. Participants included 449 USA adults who completed an Internet survey. Unlike previous research, conceptions of race were assessed using concrete vignettes. Results indicate widespread rejection of the one-drop rule, as well as the use of a complex combination of ancestral, phenotypic, and social (and, therefore, non-essentialist) criteria for racial classification. No relationship was found between racial attitudes and essentialism, the one-drop rule, or social race-thinking; however, ancestry-based and phenotype-based classification criteria were associated with racial attitudes. These results suggest a complicated relationship between conceptions of race and racial attitudes.

Science of desire: Race and representations of the Haitian revolution in the Atlantic world, 1790-1865

University of Notre Dame
July 2008
489 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3436234
ISBN: 9781124353197

Marlene Leydy Daut, Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation reads representations of the Haitian Revolution with and against the popular historical understanding of the events as the result of the influence of enlightenment philosophy or the Declaration of the Rights of Man on Toussaint L’Ouverture; or what I have called a “literacy narrative.” This understanding is most visible in texts such as C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938) and reproduces the idea that Toussaint read Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes (1772) and thus became aware that slavery was contrary to nature and was inspired to lead the revolt. Instead, I show how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understandings of the Revolution were most often mediated through the discourse of scientific debates about racial miscegenation–an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century obsession with what happens when white people produce children with black people–making the Revolution the result of the desire for vengeance on the part of miscegenated figures, whose fathers refused to recognize or defend them, rather than a desire for the ideals of liberty and equality; or what I have called the “mulatto vengeance narrative.”

Chapter one examines the figure of the “tropical temptress” in the anonymously published epistolary romance La Mulâtre comme il y a beaucoup de blanches (1803). Chapter two takes a look at “evil/degenerate mulattoes” in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (1855) and Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826). In chapter three I analyze the trope of the “tragic mulatto/a” in French abolitionist Alphonse de Lamartine’s verse drama Toussaint L’Ouverture (1850); the Louisiana born Victor Séjour’s short story, “The Mulatto” (1837); and Haitian author Eméric Bergeaud’s Stella (1859). Chapters four and five look at the image of the “inspired mulatto” in French novelist Alexandre Dumas’s adventure novel, Georges (1843); black American writer William Wells Brown’s abolitionist speech turned pamphlet, “St. Domingo; its Revolutions and its Patriots” (1854); and the Haitian poet and dramatist Pierre Faubert’s play, Ogé; ou le préjugé de couleur (1841; 1856). By insisting on a discourse of science as a way to understand these representations, I show how these texts contributed to the pervasive after-life of the Haitian Revolution in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World, on the one hand, but also created an entire vocabulary of desire with respect to miscegenation, revolution, and slavery, on the other.

CONTENTS

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
  • Part 1: Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution
  • Part 2: Literacy Narratives and the Haitian Revolution
  • Part 3: Notes on Terminology
• Chapter 1: Tropical Temptresses: Desire and Repulsion in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue
  • Part 1: The Color of Virtue
  • Part 2: Colonialism and Despotism
  • Part 3: Desire and Abolition
• Chapter 2: Black Son, White Father: Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”
  • Part 1: Victor Hugo’s Parricide
  • Part 2: Melville’s “Usher of the Golden-Rod”
• Chapter 3: Between the Family and the Nation: Parricide and the Tragic Mulatto/a in 19th-century Fictions of the Haitian Revolution
  • Part 1: Séjour’s Oedipal Curse
  • Part 2: Toussaint’s Children
  • Part 3: Bergeaud’s Romantic Vision
• Chapter 4: The “Inspired Mulatto:” Enlightenment and Color Prejudice in the African Diaspoa
  • Part 1: Alexandre Dumas and the Haitian Revolution
  • Part 2: Economics and Civilization
  • Part 3: The “Never-to-be-forgiven course of the mulattoes”
• Chapter 5: “Let Us Be Humane After the Victory:” Pierre Faubert’s New Humanism
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.