Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Blessing

The New York Times
2008-06-18

Francis Wilkinson, Executive Editor
The Week

Being from an interracial marriage has shaped Obama’s political stance.

Far from the storied hollows of Appalachia, and well before the Rev. Jeremiah Wright lit up the cable news channels or the “elitist” label was fixed to Barack Obama’s lapel right where his flag pin ought to have been, a group of older white voters drew a firm line on his candidacy. On Feb. 5, Mr. Obama prevailed by just 10,000 votes in Missouri, a general election swing state. His victory margin was cramped by the fact that he lost white voters over age 60 by nearly 40 percentage points, 67 percent to 28 percent. And it had nothing to do with bowling.

It’s possible that older white people just don’t know where Barack Obama is coming from. Then again, perhaps the problem is they do. One useful gauge of racial tolerance over the years has been the percentage of Americans who approve of interracial marriage. In 1961, when Mr. Obama’s African father and white mother were married, they joined an exceedingly small and extremely unpopular minority. According to the 1960 census, of more than 40 million married couples living in the United States that year, a mere 51,000, or 0.1 percent, consisted of a black and a white. A Gallup poll from 1958, just three years before Mr. Obama was born, found that only 4 percent of white people approved of such marriages, one point greater than the poll’s margin of error.

Both racial attitudes and the frequency of interracial marriage have changed significantly since then. But approval is far from universal. A 2007 Gallup poll found that among whites over age 50, less than two thirds, or 64 percent, approve of marriage between a black person and a white person. Subtract a few points for those who were reluctant to appear intolerant on the survey, and you wind up with roughly 4 in 10 white people over age 50 refusing to support interracial marriage. It hardly seems far-fetched that voters who oppose black-white unions in the first place might have some difficulty supporting the product of such a union as their president…

As a young man, Mr. Obama recognized that he would have difficulty functioning as half white, half black in a racially polarized society. He made a choice, one predetermined to a significant degree by the color of his skin. If the wounds from that painful process and from his racially complicated youth seem to have magically healed, it’s not because he has rolled away the heavy stone of prejudice and ushered in a post-racial morning in America. It’s because Mr. Obama views public denial of his own life experience as a political imperative. To succeed, he has trained his formidable will not just on changing the future, but the past.

Read the entire essay here.

Double Native: A moving memoir about living across two cultures

University of Queensland Press
2012-01-03
304 pages
ISBN: 978 0 7022 3917 5

Fiona Wirrer-George Oochunyung

Growing up ‘on country’ on the west coast of Queensland’s Cape York Peninsula in the 1970s and ’80s, Fiona Wirrer-George Oochunyung had an idyllic traditional life. At the age of 16, she decided to pursue her dream of performing and moved to Sydney to attend the NAISDA Dance College. There she studied with the legendary Page brothers before they founded Bangarra Dance Theatre and met her future husband and father of her three daughters.

But the missing piece of her life was her father. As a young woman, she finds her father and carves out a fragile relationship with him. This inspires her to better understand her Austrian ancestry and how it meshes with her Indigenous identity.

Fiona Wirrer-George Oochunyung is the model of a modern woman: mother and professional; performer and creator; teacher and student, urban dweller and remote community inhabitant. As such she shares the joys and challenges that come with growing up in a divided community and carving out a career as a solo parent.

Double Native is a powerful and candid memoir that offers a rare insight into the burgeoning years of the contemporary Indigenous dance movement and what it means to straddle two cultures.

Beyond Black and White: Color and Mortality in Post Reconstruction Era North Carolina

Explorations in Economic History
Published online: 2012-07-13
DOI: 10.1016/j.eeh.2012.06.002

Tiffany L. Green, Postdoctoral Fellow
Health Disparities Research Scholars Training Program
Center for Demography and Ecology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Tod G. Hamilton, Research Fellow
Department of Society, Human Development, and Health
School of Public Health
Harvard University

A growing empirical literature in economics and sociology documents the existence of differences in social and economic outcomes between mixed-race blacks and other blacks. However, few researchers have considered whether the advantages associated with mixed-race status may have also translated into differences in mortality outcomes between subgroups of blacks and how both groups compared to whites. We employ previously untapped 1880 North Carolina Mortality census records in conjunction with data from the 1880 North Carolina Population Census to examine whether mulatto, or mixed-race blacks may have experienced mortality advantages over to their colored, or non-mixed race counterparts. For men between the ages of 20-44, estimates demonstrate that all black males are more likely than whites to die. Although our results indicate that there are no statistically significant differences in mortality between mulatto and colored blacks, there are some indications that mulatto males may have enjoyed a slight mortality advantage compared to their colored counterparts. However, we find a substantial mortality advantage associated with mixed-race status among women. These findings indicate that mixed-race women, rather than men, may have accrued any mortality advantages associated with color and white ancestry.

Highlights

• We use data from the 1880 North Carolina Mortality Census to explore inter- and intra- racial mortality differences.
• Our analyses demonstrate that net of a variety of controls black males have greater probability of dying in 1880 than whites.
• We confirm that mulatto (mixed race) women have more favorable mortality profiles than colored (non-mixed race) women, and that mortality differences between white and mulatto women are statistically insignificant.

Read or purchase the article here.

Honoring Robert Lee Vann

The State of Things
WUNC 91.5, North Carolina Public Radio
2012-07-10

Frank Stasio, Host

Sarah Edwards, Co-Host

Guests

Marvin Jones
Chowan Discovery Group

Cash Michaels, Editor, Chief Reporter/Photographer and Columnist
The Carolinian

North Carolina native Robert Lee Vann was a pioneer of journalism during his lifetime. He served as editor of “The Pittsburgh Courier” which was the largest black newspaper in circulation until Vann’s death in 1940. He was recently commemorated in his hometown of Ahoskie, NC with a long-earned historical marker. Marvin Jones of the Chowan Discovery Group and Cash Michaels, editor of The Carolinian, join host Frank Stasio to talk about both Vann’s legacy and the legacy of the black press.

Listen to interview here. Download the interview here.

Playing the Interracial Card

The New York Times
2012-07-12

Kevin Noble Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

“The Miscegenation Ball” Source: Smithsonian Museum of American History (1864) Color print of a dance occuring at the Lincoln Central Campaign Club in New York Sept. 22, 1864. A portrait of Lincoln hangs on the wall. Black women fashionably dressed dance and converse with white men.

What is the most reliable way to destroy a political career? Financial shenanigans, criminal records or college antics are all reliable showstoppers, but it’s usually the salacious sex scandal that brings the house down. Jack Ryan, who ran for the Senate against Barack Obama (for a while), brought us Parisian sex clubs. Mark Sanford, former governor of South Carolina, famously hiked the Appalachian Trail. And former senator John Edwards offered a scorching mess of “What To Expect When You’re Expecting.”

Add race to the question — particularly interrace — and political prurience goes into overdrive. The confluence of miscegenation and politics speaks to America’s fundamental anxiety about racial boundaries. It’s been a rug-puller of careers as long America has been a republic.

When the candidate is one race, and the spouse/partner/“friend” is another, opponents find a combustible cocktail to stir voter insecurities. Ask the ghost of Thomas Jefferson, who weathered decades of criticism about his relationship with “Dusky Sally” [Sally Hemings], his mixed-race slave who bore six mixed-race children. Consider Richard Johnson, vice president under Martin Van Buren, whom the press condemned for taking a “jet-black, thick-lipped, odiferous negro wench” as his common-law wife. Fast forward to Harold Ford Jr., who was maligned during his 2006 Senate campaign in Tennessee as a white woman-loving playboy. For these figures — just a few of many — the color line drew rings around their reputation.

Why would an interracial relationship become a dangerous political liaison? For most people, sex and relationships are private actions, but for public figures, intimate life turns into news. Add race to the mix, and it raises eyebrows. Obama had a white girlfriend in college? Sarah Palin may or may not have dated a black athlete? There are European royals of black and Asian descent? (Lichtenstein and Denmark.) At minimum, such pairings are imaginatively interesting. But why does it matter?…

…Miscegenation is the original race card. Accusations have affected all political persuasions and races, to a point where the fixation becomes the candidate’s defining element. Jefferson is certainly not alone in the accusations against him. Abraham Lincoln’s opponents published a campaign cartoon, “The Miscegenation Ball,” that lampooned an interracial regime where white men and black women freely dance, flirt and carouse. And Strom Thurmond, who infamously denounced integration of homes, schools and pools, was ultimately revealed to have a mixed pool of his own…

Read the entire essay here.

How Do Children of Mixed Partnerships Fare in the United Kingdom? Understanding the Implications for Children of Parental Ethnic Homogamy and Heterogamy

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Volume 643, Number 1, September 2012
pages 239-266
DOI: 10.1177/0002716212444853

Lucinda Platt, Professor of Sociology
Institute of Education, University of London

Many claims are made about the significance of interethnic partnerships for individuals and for society. Such partnerships continue to be seen as a “barometer” of the openness of society and have spawned extensive analysis investigating their patterns, trends, and determinants. But we know little about the experience of children growing up in families of mixed parentage. In the United Kingdom, the increase in the self-defined “mixed” population is often celebrated. But there has been little quantitative sociological analysis that has investigated the circumstances of the children of mixed ethnicity partnerships. Using two large-scale UK datasets that cover a similar period, this article evaluates the extent to which mixed parentage families are associated with circumstances (both economic and in terms of family structure) that tend to be positive or negative for children’s future life chances and how these compare to those of children with parents from the same ethnic group. It shows that there is substantial variation according to the outcome considered but also according to ethnic group. Overall, children in mixed parentage families do not unequivocally experience the equality of outcomes with majority group children that the assimilation hypothesis implies.

Read or purchase the article here.

Introducing the Mix-d: Professionals’ Pack

Mix-d:
2012-07-13

Everything you need to work confidently with the mixed-race subject.

The Mix-d: Professionals’ Pack is an essential guide for teachers, facilitators, mentors and professional carers.

The pack will equip you, your staff and organisation with the resources and knowledge to deal confidently with all aspects of the mixed-race topic…

For more information, click here.

Race mixture or miscegenation excited considerable scholarly interest and public indignation in the continental United States during the early twentieth century. According to the 1910 census, the number of self-identifying “mulattoes” in the U.S. population had risen to two million, more than 20% of African Americans. This development prompted concern among some white social theorists. In 1918, Madison Grant (1918) predicted the passing of the great white race: “mongrelization” across the globe was leading to dilution and degeneration. A few years later, Lothrop Stoddard (1921) echoed Grant’s predictions. Through the 1920s and 1930s, marriage between African Americans and European Americans remained illegal in more than 40 states but not in the insular territories (Hollinger 2003; Kennedy 2003; Moran 2001; Pascoe 1996; Sollors 2000; Spickard 1989; Williamson 1980). In 1924, Virginia promulgated the “one-drop” rule to define more rigidly the boundaries of white identity. The following year, Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander scandalized New York when he sued Alice Jones for passing as white and deceptively luring him into marriage. Black men accused of lustful behavior toward white women were still being lynched in the South. In 1935, the African American intellectual W. E. B. DuBois observed that fear of race mixing was “the crux of the so-called Negro problem in the United States” (DuBois 1980 [1935]:99). Nonetheless, in places such as Harlem, New York, a self-conscious and assertive “mulatto” culture emerged during this period (Huggins 1973; Watson 1995).

Warwick Anderson, “Racial Hybridity, Physical Anthropology, and Human Biology in the Colonial Laboratories of the United States,” Current Anthropology, Volume 53, Number S5 (April 2012): S95-S107. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/662330.

The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia

Melbourne University Publishing
March 2002
364 pages
235 x 154 mm, 25 b/w illustrations & 4 maps
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-522-84989-9

Warwick Anderson, Research Professor of History
University of Sydney

Winner of the Australian Historical Association W.K. Hancock Prize 2004

In this lucid and original book, Warwick Anderson offers the first comprehensive history of Australian medical and scientific ideas about race and place.

In nineteenth-century Australia, the main commentators on race and biological differences were doctors. The medical profession entertained serious anxieties about ‘racial degeneration’ of the white population in the new land. They feared non-white races as reservoirs of disease, and they held firm beliefs on the baneful influence of the tropics on the health of Europeans.

Gradually these matters became the province of public health and biological science. In the 1930s anthropologists claimed ‘race’ as their special interest, until eventually the edifice of racial classification collapsed under its own proliferating contradictions.

The Cultivation of Whiteness examines the notion of ‘whiteness’ as a flexible category in scientific and public debates. This is the first time such an analytic framework has been used anywhere in the history of medicine or of science. Anderson also provides the first full account of experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s on Aboriginal people in the central deserts.

This very readable book draws on European and American work on the development of racial thought and on the history of representations of the body. As the first extensive (and entertaining) historical survey of ideas about the peopling of Australia, it will help to reshape debate on race, ethnicity, citizenship and environment.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The Temperate South
  • 1. Antipodean Britons
  • 2. A Cultivated Society
• The Northern Tropics
  • 3. No Place for a White Man
  • 4. The Making of the Tropical White Man
  • 5. White Triumph in the Tropics?
  • 6. Whitening the Nation
• Aboriginal Australia
  • 7. From Deserts the Prophets Come
  • 8. The Reproductive Frontier
• Conclusion: Biology and Nation
• Notes
• Bibliography of Works Cited
• Index

American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South

Liverpool University Press
May 2012
256 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781846317538

Edited by:

Celia Britton, Professor of French and Francophone Studies
University College London

Martin Munro, Professor of French and Francophone Studies
Florida State University

The Francophone Caribbean and the American South are sites born of the plantation, the common matrix for the diverse nations and territories of the circum-Caribbean. This book takes as its premise that the basic configuration of the plantation, in terms of its physical layout and the social relations it created, was largely the same in the Caribbean and the American South. Essays written by leading authorities in the field examine the cultural, social, and historical affinities between the Francophone Caribbean and the American South, including Louisiana, which among the Southern states has had a quite particular attachment to France and the Francophone world. The essays focus on issues of history, language, politics and culture in various forms, notably literature, music and theatre. Considering figures as diverse as Barack Obama, Frantz Fanon, Miles Davis, James Brown, Édouard Glissant, William Faulkner, Maryse Condé and Lafcadio Hearn, the essays explore in innovative ways the notions of creole culture and creolization, terms rooted in and indicative of contact between European and African people and cultures in the Americas, and which are promoted here as some of the most productive ways for conceiving of the circum-Caribbean as a cultural and historical entity.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – Martin Munro and Celia Britton
• Creolizations
  • Lafcadio Hearn’s American Writings and the Creole Continuum – Mary Gallagher
  • Auguste Lussan’s La Famille creole: How Saint-Domingue Emigres Bcame Louisiana Creoles – Typhaine Leservot
  • Caribbean and Creole in New Orleans – Angle Adams Parham
  • Creolizing Barack Obama – Valerie Loichot
  • Richard Price or the Canadian from Petite-Anse: The Potential and the Limitations of a Hybrid Anthropology – Christina Kullberg
• Music
  • ‘Fightin’ the Future’: Rhythm and Creolization in the Circum-Caribbean – Martin Munro
  • Leaving the South: Frantz Fanon, Modern Jazz, and the Rejection of Negritude – Jeremy F. Lane
  • The Sorcerer and the Quimboiseur: Poetic Intention in the Works of Miles Davis and Edourard Glissant – Jean-Luc Tamby
  • Creolizing Jazz, Jazzing the Tout-monde: Jazz, Gwoka and the Poetics of Relation – Jerome Camal
• Intertextualities: Faulkner, Glissant, Conde
  • Go Slow Now: Saying the Unsayable in Edouard Glissant’s Reading of Faulkner – Michael Wiedorn
  • Edouard Glissant and the Test of Faulkner’s Modernism – Hugh Azerad
  • The Theme of the Ancestral Crime in the Novels of Faulkner, Glissant, and Conde – Celia Britton
  • An American Story – Yanick Lahen
• Notes on Contributors
• Index