Mixed Race Studies

Miss., US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey to read poetry at JSU

Clarion-Ledger
Jackson, Mississippi
2012-08-21

Special to The Clarion-Ledger
 
Pulitzer Prize winner and current Mississippi and United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey will read her poetry at Jackson State University at 3 p.m. Sept. 20 in room 166/266 of the Dollye M.E. Robinson College of Liberal Arts Building.

This event will be hosted by the Margaret Walker Center at JSU and is free and open to the public.

In January, Trethewey was named the Mississippi Poet Laureate for a four-year term. Soon after, she was named the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress. Trethewey is the first person to serve simultaneously as a state and U.S. laureate.

Read the entire article here.

“No more kiyams”: Métis women break the silence of child sexual abuse

University of Victoria,  British Columbia, Canada
2004
146 pages

Lauralyn Houle

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF SOCIAL WORK In the Faculty of Human and Social Development

“No more kiyams” Métis women break the silence of child sexual abuse, is a glimpse into the lives of four M&is women who were raised in an Aboriginal community and who speak to the effects and the obstacles of trying to heal from an abuse that affects not only them, but also their families and communities.

As Métis people, the women in this thesis bring to light, the generational abuses that affect the healing process. They give a picture of how healing is a very personal journey but at the same time a collective process. Rose, Betsy, Angela and Rena provide us with insight into why healing from child sexual abuse needs to address a cultural perspective. Rose became a victim of a respected elderly uncle. Betsy and Angela’s fathers were their abusers. For Rena it was her stepfather, grandfather, and cousins; how does one send all those significant people to jail? In addition, remain a ‘part’ of family and community. The Métis are raised to be very proud and loyal to family and community. We do not heal alone.

This work is about honouring individual strength and gifts in order to heal. It speaks to healing that is not in isolation from identity as a Métis or in isolation from one’s community. This thesis is about acknowledging the strengths of Métis women by giving voice to their stories, their dreams, and their lives.

Read the entire thesis here.

Henry Louis Rey, Spiritualism, and Creoles of Color in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

University of New Orleans
2009-12-20
72 pages

Melissa Daggett

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History

This thesis is a biography of Henry Louis Rey (1831-1894), a member of one of New Orleans’ most prominent Creole of Color families. During the Civil War, Rey was a captain in both the Confederate and Union Native Guards. In postbellum years, he served as a member of the Louisiana House of Representative and in appointed city offices. Rey became heavily involved with spiritualism in the 1850s and established séance circles in New Orleans during the early 1870s. The voluminous transcripts of these séance circles have survived into the twenty-first century; however, scholarly use of these sources has been limited because most of the transcripts and all marginal annotations later written by René Grandjean are in French. The author’s translations of the spirit communications through their entire run reveal insight into the spiritual and material realms negotiated by New Orleans Black Creoles as they weathered declining political and economic fortunes.

Read the entire thesis here.

Thrall, Poems

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2012-08-28
96 pages
6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN-13/ EAN:9780547571607; ISBN-10:0547571607
E-Book ISBN-13/ EAN:9780547840420; ISBN-10:054784042X

Natasha Trethewey, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing
Emory University

By unflinchingly charting the intersections of public and personal history, Thrall explores the historical, cultural, and social forces—across time and space—that determine the roles consigned to a mixed-race daughter and her white father. In a vivid series of poems about interracial marriage depicted in the Casta Paintings of Colonial Mexico, Trethewey investigates the philosophical assumptions that underpin Enlightenment notions of taxonomy and classification, exposing the way they encode ideas of race within our collective imagination. While tropes about captivity, bondage, inheritance, and enthrallment permeate the collection, Trethewey, by reflecting on a series of small estrangements from her poet father, comes to an understanding of how, as father and daughter, they are part of the ongoing history of race in America.

Thrall not only confirms that Natasha Trethewey is one of our most gifted and necessary poets but that she is also one of our most brilliant and fearless.

Native Guard: Poems

Mariner Books an Imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2007-04-03
64 pages
Trim Size: 5.50 x 8.25
Paperback ISBN-13/EAN: 9780618872657; ISBN-10: 0618872655

Natasha Trethewey, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing
Emory University

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Through elegiac verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South—where one of the first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. Trethewey’s resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history.

Excerpt:

Miscegenation

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong – mis in Mississippi.

A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same
as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.

Faulkner’s Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name
for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi.

My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name.
I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi.

When I turned 33 my father said, It’s your Jesus year – you’re the same
age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.

I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name –
though I’m not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.

The Aborigines Act, 1911 [Australia]
1911-12-07
Number 1048
Source: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

An Act to make provision for the better Protection and Control of the Aboriginal and Half-caste Inhabitants of the State of South Australia.

1. This Act may be cited as ‘‘ The Aborigines Act, 1911.”
2. The Ordinance No. 12 of 1844, being an Ordinance to provide for the protection, maintenance, and up-bringing of orphans and other destitute children of the aborigines, is hereby repealed : Provided that such repeal shall not alter the effect of the doing or omission of any thing before the passing of this Act, and shall not affect any right granted, obligation imposed, liability incurred, or any offence committed by, under, or against the said Ordinance, or any proceedings commenced before or after the passing of this Act with respect to any of such matters or things…

• …10. (1) The Chief Protector shall be the legal guardian of every aboriginal and every half-caste child, notwithstanding that any such child has a parent or other relative living, until such child attains the age of twenty-one years, except whilst such child is a State child within the meaning of ‘‘ The State Children Act, 1895,” or any Act amending or substituted for that Act. (2) Every Protector shall, within his district, be the local guardian of every such child within his district. (3) Such local guardian shall have and exercise the powers and duties prescribed…

Read the entire act here.

The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture

University of Pennsylvania Press
2000
384 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8122-3541-8
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8122-1722-3
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8122-0014-0

Roxann Wheeler, Associate Professor of English
Ohio State University

In the 1723 Journal of a Voyage up the Gambia, an English narrator describes the native translators vital to the expedition’s success as being “Black as Coal.” Such a description of dark skin color was not unusual for eighteenth-century Britons—but neither was the statement that followed: “here, thro’ Custom, (being Christians) they account themselves White Men.” The Complexion of Race asks how such categories would have been possible, when and how such statements came to seem illogical, and how our understanding of the eighteenth century has been distorted by the imposition of nineteenth and twentieth century notions of race on an earlier period.

Wheeler traces the emergence of skin color as a predominant marker of identity in British thought and juxtaposes the Enlightenment’s scientific speculation on the biology of race with accounts in travel literature, fiction, and other documents that remain grounded in different models of human variety. As a consequence of a burgeoning empire in the second half of the eighteenth century, English writers were increasingly preoccupied with differentiating the British nation from its imperial outposts by naming traits that set off the rulers from the ruled; although race was one of these traits, it was by no means the distinguishing one. In the fiction of the time, non-European characters could still be “redeemed” by baptism or conversion and the British nation could embrace its mixed-race progeny. In Wheeler’s eighteenth century we see the coexistence of two systems of racialization and to detect a moment when an older order, based on the division between Christian and heathen, gives way to a new one based on the assertion of difference between black and white.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction. The Empire of Climate: Categories of Race in Eighteenth-Century Britain
• 1. Christians, Savages, and Slaves: From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic
• 2. Racializing Civility: Violence and Trade in Africa
• 3. Romanticizing Racial Difference: Benevolent Subordination and the Midcentury Novel
• 4. Consuming Englishness: On the Margins of Civil Society
• 5. The Politicization of Race: The Specter of the Colonies in Britain
• Epilogue. Theorizing Race and Racism in the Eighteenth Century
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments

Households and Neighborhoods Among Free People of Color in New Orleans: A View from the Census, 1850-1860

University of New Orleans
2010-05-14
58 pages

Frank Joseph Lovato

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History

Historians have debated to what extent the free people of color in New Orleans were members of a wealthy privileged elite or part of a middle or working class in the South’s largest antebellum city. This study steps outside the debate to suggest that analysis of the censuses of 1850 and 1860 shows correlations between neighborhoods, household structures, and occupations that reveal a heterogeneous population that eludes simple definitions. In particular this study focuses on mixed-race households to shed light on this segment of the free colored population that is mostly unstudied and generally misrepresented. This study also finds that immediately prior to the Civil War, mixed-race families, for no easily understood reason, tended to cluster in certain neighborhoods. Mostly this study points out that by the Civil War, the free people of color in New Orleans had evolved into a diverse mostly working class population.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Maps
• List of Census Form
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Origins of the Free People of Color in New Orleans
• Historiography of the Free People of Color in New Orleans
• Methodology Used for Data Gathering
• Economic Role of the Free People of Color in Ante-Bellum New Orleans
• Community Organizations
• Neighborhoods and the Free People of Color
• Free People of Color and the Prelude to the Civil War
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Tables
• Maps
• Census Forms
• Vita

List of Figures

• Figure 1 – 4th Ward Mixed-Race Couple Distribution
• Figure 2 – 5th Ward Mixed-Race Couple Distribution
• Figure 3 – New Orleans Population in 1850 & 1860
• Figure 4 – New Orleans Colored Population in 1850 & 1860
• Figure 5 –Population Density of Colored Males in 1850 & 1860

List of Tables

• Table 1 – 1850 New Orleans Census
• Table 2 – 1860 New Orleans Census
• Table 3 – Population Density for Colored, Mulatto and Blacks in the 1850 New Orleans Census
• Table 4 – Population Density for Colored, Mulatto and Blacks in the 1860 New Orleans Census
• Table 5 – Property Values of the Free People of Color in 1850 New Orleans
• Table 6 – Property Values of the Free People of Color in 1860 New Orleans

List of Maps

• MUNICIPALITIES and WARDS 1847
• WARDS 1852
• Neighborhoods in New Orleans

List of Census Forms

• Title Page 1st and 4th Wards (1st Municipality)
• 1st Ward, 1st Municipality – 1850
• 9th Wards -1860

Read the entire thesis here.

People Can Claim One or More Races On Federal Forms

The New York Times
1997-10-30

Steven A. Holmes

The Clinton Administration today adopted new rules for listing racial and ethnic makeup on Federal forms, allowing people for the first time to identify themselves as members of more than one race.

The change, which could affect Government policies like affirmative action and the drawing of legislative districts, is the first revision in the Government’s definition of racial and ethnic groupings since 1977. It means that on Federal forms people can identify themselves in a single racial category or a combination.

The Administration rejected a ”multiracial” classification that would have covered all people of mixed racial heritage…

…But the Administration has yet to say how people who select this option will be counted in studies like the census. The Administration has not decided how to count someone who lists a racial makeup of black and white. More complicated is what to do with people listing themselves as black, white and Asian. Should such a person be counted as black, white or Asian or some combination?

The counting issue is important because Federal policy under measures like the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and aid for bilingual education is based on the percentage of certain racial groups in a given location. For example, legislative districts must be drawn in such a manner to insure that black residents are adequately represented, and block-by-block census counts are essential to the process…

…Officials at the Office of Management and Budget said they would meet with officials from other Federal agencies, interest groups, demographers, planners and social scientists to work out a policy for counting people who list themselves as members of more than one race. The officials said they hoped to put out recommendations on the issue by the fall of 1998.

The fight over how to count people will be arduous. The Association of Multiethnic Americans will argue that mixed-race residents be counted separately, Mr. Fernandez said.

Such a view is bound to raise concerns among some minority critics who have contended all along that the drive for a changing the racial categories was a way to attack affirmative action and other race-based government programs.

”I believe the same people who are against affirmative action are the same people who are pushing this,” said Robert Hill, the director of the Institute of Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore…

Read the entire article here.

Born a Half-Caste

Aboriginal Studies Press
1990 (revised edition)
78 pages
210 x1 50mm, b/w illus
Paperback ISBN: 9780855751609

Margaret (Marnie) Kennedy (1919–1985)

Marnie Kennedy was born in 1919 ‘on the bank of Coppermine Creek’. Her story takes us from her birthplace in Western Queensland, to Palm Island where she grew up ‘under the Act’, and back to western Queensland where she spent all of her hard-working life on cattle stations. It is a story of quiet courage and determination, dedicated ‘to my mother, my children and grandchildren, and my people’.