Mixed Race Studies

Britain’s first black community in Elizabethan London

BBC News Magazine
2012-07-19

Michael Wood

The black trumpeter John Blanke played regularly at the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII

The reign of Elizabeth I saw the beginning of Britain’s first black community. It’s a fascinating story for modern Britons, writes historian Michael Wood.

Walk out of Aldgate Tube and stroll around Whitechapel Road in east London today, and you’ll experience the heady sights, smells and sounds of the temples, mosques and curry houses of Brick Lane—so typical of modern multicultural Britain.

Most of us tend to think that black people came to Britain after the war—Caribbeans on the Empire Windrush in 1948, Bangladeshis after the 1971 war and Ugandan Asians after Idi Amin’s expulsion in 1972.

But, back in Shakespeare’s day, you could have met people from west Africa and even Bengal in the same London streets.

Of course, there were fewer, and they drew antipathy as well as fascination from the Tudor inhabitants, who had never seen black people before. But we know they lived, worked and intermarried, so it is fair to say that Britain’s first black community starts here.

There had been black people in Britain in Roman times, and they are found as musicians in the early Tudor period in England and Scotland.

But the real change came in Elizabeth I’s reign, when, through the records, we can pick up ordinary, working, black people, especially in London…

Read the entire article here.

The Sexualization of Difference: A Comparison of Mixed-Race and Same-Gender Marriage

Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review
Volume 37, Number 2, Summer 2002
pages 255-288

Josephine Ross, Associate Professor of Law; Supervisor, Criminal Justice Clinic
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

I. Introduction: Mixed-Race Love as a Sexual Orientation

The past prohibition of mixed-race marriages in many U.S. states is often cited by those who support civil recognition of same-sex marriages. Advocates and scholars reason that just as it is no longer legal to deny marriage licenses on the basis of race, it should be illegal to deny marriage licenses on the basis of sex. Unfortunately, the comparison usually stops there. No effort has been made by the legal community to examine the actual lives of these two groups of outsider couples to see if the comparison holds together descriptively as well as formalistically. Nor have contemporary attitudes towards same-sex couples been compared to historical data detailing attitudes towards mixed-race sexuality during the time that mixed-race relationships were illicit. This Article will compare heterosexual mixed-race and same-sex unions (both mixed-race and monorace) in the context of history, both legal and cultural. The historical treatment of mixed-race marriages in this country supplies important information regarding the way society marginalizes certain relationships, and the connection between deprivation of marriage rights and the sexualization of relationships.

To say that a relationship is “sexualized,” means it is viewed as essentially sexual, and is not seen to be about commitment, communication or love. To understand what I mean by the word “sexualized,” consider certain reactions to an elementary school teacher who came out to his class in Newton, Massachusetts. When asked if he was married, the teacher responded that he was not, but that if he were to live with someone, he would live with a man that he would “love the way your mom and dad love each other.” This response gave rise to a parent’s complaint that the teacher had talked inappropriately about “sex;’ That story nicely encapsulates what I mean by the sexualization of same-sex love. If the teacher had answered that he would like to marry a woman whom he would “love the way your mom and dad love each other,” no one would have sexualized his response.

My argument is that the sexualization of gay relationships is similar to the way interracial relationships were sexualized in the past. For both, sexualization is a cause as well as a symptom of disempowerment. In the 1970s, social scientists began to describe the continued sexualization of black-white relationships in the United States from the time of slavery through the decade following the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia. They noted that narrative discourse around mixed-race couples was sexualized, and that mixed-race love was viewed as something pornographic and essentially different from mono-race love. Social scientists uncovered attitudes towards mixed-race couples by family members and society at large that I believe mirror attitudes towards same-sex couples.

Part II of this Article provides clues to the link between the sexualization of relationships that trespass on societal norms, and the deprivation of power and rights. Section A explores how mixed-race relationships were sexualized in the past, while Section B examines how the law has been used to restrict both mixed-race and gay couples. Section B also explores the cases that predate Loving and the reasons for denying recognition to mixed-race marriages. Those reasons are compared to arguments made by marriage opponents in same-sex marriage cases today.

Part III considers similarities in the lives of gay couples and mixed-race couples in order to demonstrate that analogizing the issue of marriage as it relates to each group is not merely a trick of logic. Section A examines the analogy between Loving v. Virginia and same-sex marriage cases. Section B reviews recent social science data that illustrates many parallel experiences of outsider couples, including the reactions of family members and society, the ways non-traditional couples cope with those negative reactions, and the reasons couples commit to one another despite adversity. By comparing mixed-race and same-sex couples, one can learn a good deal about the way society grants status and safety to certain relationships while marginalizing others.

Part IV asks whether the term “sexual orientation” should be expanded to include those in mixed-race, heterosexual relationships. How one answers this question will shed light on whether the phrase “sexual orientation” is a useful or accurate term when applied to those in gay relationships.

In the Conclusion to this Article, I urge scholars to desist from sexualizing gay relationships. Like mixed-race couples, same-sex partners are not necessarily any more sexual than their heterosexual counterparts. Gay couples, like mixed-race couples, are different not because of what they do or do not do in the bedroom, but because of the meaning ascribed to these couples in supermarkets, in dance halls, and in PTA meetings. Advocates and scholars should learn from past sexualization of mixed-race love and consider more accurate and less sexualized means to characterize same-sex love and relationships…

…The ban on mixed-race marriage did not eliminate sexual activity, but affected the nature of the sexuality, making it secret, closeted and sinful. In the case of white men and black women, the taboo distorted their relationships, suppressing affection or the appearance of affection, rendering them sexual liaisons only. As sociologist [Calvin C.] Hernton wrote, a white man “can sleep with [a black lover] discreetly, give her mulatto babies, but in all of this he must never act as if he loves her.”

Although the apartheid system in this country was intended to prevent access to white women by black men, the system was not completely successful. Hernton documented in his personal life and in his work a great deal of sexual activity between white women and black men in this era. In his opinion, women were often the aggressors because they were the ones with power during segregation. Jim Crow laws could even be said to aid the women’s conquest because although there were dreadful consequences for black men who consented and were discovered, men were sometimes more afraid to resist for fear they would be framed as rapists and face mob violence. As with white men’s liaisons with black women, the interracial sex taboo served to make liaisons between white women and black men purely sexual and clandestine…

Read the entire article here.

Special Issue: Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Volume 3 (2012): Special Issue: Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature

Table of Contents

• Introduction to Volume III—Wei Ming Dariotis
• The AALDP Interview
  • Smoke and Flowers: An Interview with Olivia Boler—Wei Ming Dariotis
• Articles
  • American Orientalism and Cosmopolitan Mixed Race: Early Asian American Mixed Race in the American Literary Imagination—Melissa Eriko Poulsen
  • The Making of a Eurasian: Writing, Miscegenation, and Redemption in Sui Sin Far—Juanita C. But
  • Betwixt and Between Past and Present: Cultural and Generic Hybridity in the Fiction of Mary Yukari Waters—Rania Samir Youssef
  • Revisiting Local History and Ghostly Memory in Shawna Yang Ryan’s Locke 1928—Chia-rong Wu
  • Realizing blacknpinay: Negotiating Notions of Authenticity in Janet Stickmon’s Crushing Soft Rubies—Teresa Hodges
  • The Abjection of James Dean: Mixed Media/Mixed Race Performances in Ai’s Poem, “James Dean”—Cathy Irwin
  • Multiracial Male Masculinity: A Critical Mixed Race Analysis of Brian Ascalon Roley’s “American Son”—Kevin Escudero
  • Teaching Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft: Exploring the Limits of Race and Ethnicity—Jaime Cleland
  • Disturbing Stereotypes: Fu Man/Chan and Dragon Lady Blossoms—Audrey Wu Clark
  • Excursus on “Hapa;” or the Fate of Identity—Nicole Myoshi Rabin
  • A Hapa Family in Chekhov’s Three Sisters—Elizabeth Liang
• Reviews
  • Review: This is All I Choose To Tell—Cathy J. Schlund-Vials

Read the entire issue here.

Organizing 101: A Mixed-Race Feminist in Movements for Social Justice

Chapter in:
Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism
Seal Press
April 2002
432 pages
ISBN-10: 1580050670
ISBN-13: 9781580050678

Edited by:

Daisy Hernandez
Bushara Rehman

Foreword by: Cherríe Moraga

Chapter Author:

Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz

pages 29-39

I have vivid memories of celebrating the holidays with my maternal grandparents. My Jido and Sito (“grandfather” and “grandmother,” respectively in Arabic), who were raised as Muslim Arabs, celebrated Christmas rather than Ramadan. Every year, my Sito set up her Christmas tree in front of a huge bay window in their living room. It was important to her that the neighbors could see the tree from the street. Yet on Christmas day Arabic was spoken in the house, Arabic music was played, Arabic food was served and a hot and heavy poker game was always the main activity. Early on, I learned that what is publicly communicated can be very different from what is privately experienced.

Because of the racism, harassment and ostracism that my Arab grandparents faced, they developed ways to assimilate (or appear to assimilate) into their predominantly white New Hampshire community. When my mother married my Jewish father and raised me with his religion, they hoped that by presenting me to the world as a white Jewish girl, I would escape the hate they had experienced. But it did not happen that way. Instead, it took me years to untangle and understand the public/private dichotomy that had been such a part of my childhood.

My parents’ mixed-class, mixed-race and mixed-religion relationship held its own set of complex contradictions and tensions. My father comes from a working-class, Ashkenazi Jewish family. My mother comes from an upper-middle-class Lebanese family, in which—similar to other Arab families of her generation—women were not encouraged and only sometimes permitted to get an education. My mother has a high-school degree and no “marketable” job skills. When my father married her, he considered it an opportunity to marry into a higher class status. Her background as a Muslim Arab was something he essentially ignored except when it came to deciding what religious traditions my sister and I were going to be raised with. From my father’s perspective, regardless of my mother’s religious and cultural background, my sister and I were Jews—and only Jews.

My mother, who to this day carries an intense mix of pride and shame about being Arab, was eager to “marry out” of her Arabness. She thought that by marrying a white Jew, particularly in a predominantly white New Hampshire town, that she would somehow be able to escape or minimize the ongoing racism her family faced. She converted to Judaism for this reason and also because she felt that “eliminating” Arabness and Islam from the equation would make my life and my sister’s life less complex. We could all say—her included—that we were Jews. Sexism and racism (and their internalized versions) played a significant part in shaping my parents’ relationship. My father was never made to feel uncomfortable or unwelcome because he had married a Muslim Arab woman. He used his white male privilege and his Zionistic point of view to solidify his legitimacy. He created the perception that he did my mother a favor by “marrying her out” of her Arabness and the strictness of her upbringing.

My mother, however, bore the brunt of other people’s prejudices. Her struggle for acceptance and refuge was especially evident in her relationship with my father’s family, who never fully accepted her. It did not matter that she converted to Judaism, was active in Hadassah or knew all of the rituals involved in preparing a Passover meal. She was frequently made to feel that she was never quite Jewish enough. My Jewish grandmother was particularly critical of my mother and communicated in subtle and not so subtle ways that she tolerated my mother’s presence because she loved her son. In turn, I felt as if there was something wrong with me and that the love that I received from my father’s family was conditional. Many years later this was proven to be true: when my parents divorced, every member of my father’s family cut off communication from my mother, my sister and me. Racism and Zionism played a significant (but not exclusive) role in their choice. My father’s family (with the exception of my Jewish grandfather, who died in the early seventies) had always been uncomfortable that my father had married an Arab woman. The divorce gave them a way out of examining their own racism and Zionism.

Today my mother realizes that her notions about marrying into whiteness and into a community that would somehow gain her greater acceptance was, to say the least, misguided. She romanticized her relationship with my father as a “symbol of peace” between Jews and Arabs, and she underestimated the impact of two very real issues: racism within the white Jewish community and the strength of anti-Semitism toward the Jewish community. At the time she did not understand that her own struggle against racism and anti-Arab sentiment was both linked to and different than anti-Semitism…

Read the entire chapter here or here.

A diverged family converges at Harvard Law

Havard Law School News
2012-10-10

Audrey Kunycky

A chance encounter, a discovery of kin on opposite sides of the world

It wasn’t inevitable that Harvard Law School graduate students Erum Khalid Sattar and Rebecca Zaman would meet so soon, or even at all. Sattar has been at the law school for three years, pursuing a doctorate in juridical science (S.J.D.); Zaman arrived in August to begin a year of study for a master’s in law (LL.M.). Sattar is from Pakistan, and studied law in London; Zaman grew up, earned her law degree and completed a judicial clerkship in Australia. Then again, they’re about the same height, with the same dark brown hair, and that might not be just a coincidence.

In August, a few days into LL.M. Orientation, the two women shook hands and said hello at a Graduate Program reception. “If we hadn’t been wearing nametags, what happened next might never have happened,” says Zaman. Sattar’s large, expressive eyes are glittering, but she wants Zaman to tell the story, because she tells it better.

My surname is Zaman, and it’s a very unusual surname for a white-appearing Australian to have,” explains Zaman. “So when they saw my nametag, a lot of the Indians, Pakistanis and Middle Easterners asked how I could have this name. When I met Erum, it was very similar.  So I said, ‘Oh! My father’s father is a Muslim Indian from Hyderabad.’ And Erum said, ‘Oh, what a coincidence. My family was from Hyderabad, before they moved to Karachi after the partition.’ And she laughed, and said, ‘Maybe we’re related.’ We both laughed, and I said, ‘Maybe. It’s a strange story.’”…

Read the entire article here.

Barbosa made Brazil’s first black Supreme Court leader

BBC News
2012-10-10

The judge overseeing a major corruption trial in Brazil has been appointed president of the Supreme Court, the first black person to hold the post.

Judge Joaquim Barbosa, who was born into a poor family, has been praised for his judicial independence.

He will take over the post once the “Mensalao” corruption trial ends.

Brazil has the largest black population after Nigeria, many of them descendants of African slaves, but black people rarely achieve high office.

Judge Barbosa, who is 58, has been appointed by other judges, following the Court’s tradition of nominating its most senior member…

…In 2003, he became a household name in Brazil when he was appointed by then President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to the Supreme Court.

Two mixed-race judges had previously been members of the court, but Mr Barbosa said he was the first one who could be “widely recognised as a black man”.

“This act has great significance, as it indicates to society the end of certain visible and invisible barriers,” he said at the time…

Read the entire article here.

Don’t Be Too Black, Mr. President: The Racial Effect of President Obama’s Performance in the 2012 Presidential Debates

Darron Smith
2012-10-05

Darron T. Smith, Assistant Professor, Physician Assistant
Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas

What does it mean to be Black in America? Many Americans caught a glimpse of it on national television during the first of three presidential debates. The President looked disinterested, annoyed, preoccupied, not on his “A” game as some analyst remarked. Other pundits suggested that POTUS appeared tired looking and too nice. Obama supporters and those tough independent voters wanted more.

Remember, it’s been four years since the man has had a debate-he’s rusty. But amidst the fight of his political career, few have considered the enormous psychological cost of being black that the President must feel each and every time he’s on the stage. President Obama is not just another president in the long history of white presidents we’ve had in this country. He’s the first black president, and with that comes additionally burdens that only blacks and other stigmatized minority groups can truly appreciate. His overall likeability ratings are indicative of his daily performance of hyper-politeness, which is what black folk must do when working in predominately white settings. It’s in black Americans’ best interest to keep white folks happy and content as to not upset the racial applecart…

Read the entire article here.

Join Mixed Roots Midwest at CMRS

Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference
DePaul University
Chicago, Illinois
2012-11-01 through 2012-11-03

What Mixed Roots Midwest brings selected short films, a panel of filmmakers, and a live show featuring local and national talent whose material explores the Mixed experience to Chicago as part of the 2012 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference.

• November 1: 5:45 PM-7:15 PM – Selected Shorts: Silences, Crayola Monologues, Mixed Mexican, and Nigel’s Fingerprint
• November 2: 5:15 PM-6:45 PM – Filmmakers Panel: Kip Fulbeck, Jeff Chiba Stearns, and Kim Kuhteubl
• November 3: 5:00 PM-6:30 PM – Mixed Roots Midwest LIVE: Featuring Chicago’s own 2nd Story and many more exciting pieces from artists who meld performance art with an exploration and critical analysis of what it means to be “Mixed.”

All events are free and open to the public and will be located at DePaul’s Student Center 2250 N. Sheffield #120 A/B, Chicago, Illinois 60614.
 
For more info contact co-coordinator, Mixed Roots Midwest, Laura Kina lkinaaro@depaul.edu or 773-325-4048. View the flyer here.

The Elizabeth Warren Situation Is More Complicated Than Many Think

Indian Country Today Media Network
2012-10-10

Laura Waterman Wittstock
Seneca Nation

A ton of ink has been spilled on the subject of the Elizabeth Warren run for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. Most of the writing on the Indian side of opinion is whether or not Warren has a legitimate claim to her Delaware and Cherokee ancestry. Strong language has emerged on the subject, rightly due to the fact that so many Americans claim Indian heritage without any idea of what being an Indian is all about.

But between the Indian and non-Indian sides of the coin are a million slices of what-ifs and others. Example one: I met a woman whose husband was enrolled in Coweta Creek and got support for his considerable higher education costs. Beyond that, he knew next to nothing about his tribe. He was born into an African American family, married an African American and had a couple of wonderful children. His wife’s question to me was how she could get the children enrolled after they had been informed the children lacked sufficient blood quantum. This mother was interested in her children’s education and wanted them to have all the benefits they might be due as a result of their father’s heritage. I did not have good news for them…

Read the entire article here.

Métis Families and Schools: The Decline and Reclamation of Métis Identities in Saskatchewan, 1885-1980

University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon
March 2009
270 pages

Jonathan Anuik, Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies
University of Alberta

A Dissertation Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History

In the late-nineteenth century, Métis families and communities resisted what they perceived to be the encroachment of non-Aboriginal newcomers into the West. Resistance gave way to open conflict at the Red River Settlement and later in north central Saskatchewan. Both attempts by the Métis to resist the imposition of the newcomer’s settlement agenda were not successful, and the next 100 years would bring challenges to Métis unity. The transmission of knowledge of a Métis past declined as parents and grandparents opted to encourage their children and youth to pass into the growing settler society in what would become Saskatchewan. As parents restricted the flow of Métis knowledge, missionaries who represented Christian churches collaborated to develop the first Northwest Territories Board of Education, the agent responsible for the first state-supported schools in what would become the province of Saskatchewan. These first schools included Métis students and helped to shift their loyalties away from their families and communities and toward the British state. However, many Métis children and youth remained on the margins of educational attainment. They were either unable to attend school, or their schools did not have the required infrastructure or relevant pedagogy and curriculum. In the years after World War II, the Government of Saskatchewan noticed the unequal access to and achievement of the Métis in its schools. The government attempted to bring Métis students in from the margins through infrastructural, pedagogical, and curricular adaptations to support their learning.

Scholars have unearthed voluminous evidence of missionary work in Canada and have researched and written about public schools. As well, several scholars have undertaken research projects on Status First Nations education in the twentieth century. However, less is known about Métis’ interactions with Christian missionaries and in the state-supported or publicly funded schools. In this dissertation, I examine the history of missions and public schools in what would become Saskatchewan, and I enumerate the foundations that the Métis considered important for their learning. I identify Métis children and youth’s reactions to Christian and public schools in Saskatchewan, but I argue that Métis families who knew of their heritages actively participated in Roman Catholic Church rituals and activities and preserved and protected their pasts. Although experiences with Christianity varied, those with strong family ties and ties to the land adjusted well to the expectations of Christian teachings and formal public education. Overall, I tell the story of Métis children and youth and their involvement in church and public schooling based on how they saw Christianity, education, and its role on their lands and in their families. And I explain how Métis learners negotiated Protestant and Roman Catholic teachings and influences with the pedagogy and curriculum of public schools.

Oral history forms a substantial portion of the sources for this history of Métis children and youth and church and public education. I approached the interviews as means to generate new data – in collaboration with the people I interviewed. Consequently, I went into the interviews with a list of questions, but I strove to make these interviews conversational and allow for a two-way flow of knowledge. I started with contextual questions (i.e. date of birth, school attended, where family was from) and proceeded to probe further based on the responses I received from the person being interviewed and from previous interviews. As well, I drew from two oral history projects with tapes and transcripts available in the archives: the Saskatchewan Archives Board’s “Towards a New Past Oral History Project ‘The Métis’” and the Provincial Archives of Manitoba’s Manitoba Métis Oral History Project. See appendices A and B for discussion of my oral history methodology and the utility of the aforementioned oral history projects for my own research…

Read the entire dissertation here.