Mixed Race Studies

Runaway

Western Carolinian
Salisbury, North Carolina
1832-09-17
page 3, column 6
Source: The North Carolina Newspaper Digitization Project

On the 10th of September last, from my plantation in Jones county, two negroes, one named WASHINGTON, about 27 years of age, a very bright mulatto, on one of his hands there is a scar occasioned by a gin; he will change his name and endeavor to pass for a free man. The other named JOHN, a common mulatto, about 30 years  of age, Very intelligent; he will probably pass as the servant of Washington, and change his name. A reward of 25 dollars will be given for the delivery of either in any jail so that I can get them.

James Lamar
October 16th

The Georgian, Sahavanah; the Telescope, Columbia, S.C.; and Richmand Enquirer, are requested to publish the above weekly until forbid, and then forward their accounts to J. Lamar.

Identity for mixed-race kids? ‘Eurasian’ already exists

The Straits Times
Singapore
Forum Letters
2013-03-30

Michael Ang York Poon

I am baffled by Mr Peter Wadeley’s letter (“S’porean identity must include mixed-race kids“; March 16).

What he is calling for already exists – that is, Eurasians, who are one of Singapore’s four main racial groups.

In the first four decades of Singapore’s independence, immigration was not as common as it is now, and the number of migrants relatively insignificant. Hence, it would have been absurd to even wonder if Eurasian youngsters were non-native…

Read the entire letter here.

S’porean identity must include mixed-race kids

The Straits Times
Singapore
Forum Letters
2013-03-16

Peter Wadeley

MRS MARIETTA Koh Ai-meng (“Citizens have every right to expect privileges”; last Saturday) claims that rising consciousness of what it means to be Singaporean should not be decried as chauvinistic or jingoistic.

Last year, former president S R Nathan said that a clear Singaporean identity has yet to develop (“Building a S’porean culture takes time, says ex-president”; March 18, 2012).

Whenever such an identity is formed, it must be broad enough to include all Singaporeans, without distinction of race.

My children are Singaporean, have lived here their whole lives, and speak Singlish and Chinese. Most importantly, they identify themselves as Singaporean.

But as they are “only” half Chinese and look different from other children, they are, regrettably, treated accordingly…

Read the entire letter here.

Cross-Cultural Affinities between Native American and White Women in “The Alaska Widow” by Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far)

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Volume 38, Number 1 (Spring 2013)
pages 155-163
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mls002

Mary Chapman, Associate Professor of English
University of British Columbia

When her work was recovered in the 1980s, Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far) was credited with founding the canon of Asian-North American literature. The earliest Eaton scholarship focused on her resistance to yellow-peril discourse through her sympathetic portrayals of diasporic Chinese and Eurasians. This scholarship contrasted Edith Eaton’s “authentic” self-presentation as the half-Chinese “Sui Sin Far” with her sister Winnifred’s posturing as Japanese noblewoman author “Onoto Watanna.” Although fascinating in many ways, this scholarship was circumscribed by both an exclusive focus on the politics of race as it intersected with gender—and the lack of access to Eaton’s complete and more internally self-contradictory oeuvre. Scholars relying on the same handful of anthologized works—“The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese” (1910), “Her Chinese Husband” (1910), “In the Land of the Free” (1909), “The Wisdom of the New” (1912), “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” (1910), and “The Inferior Woman” (1910)—explored only a few of Eaton’s themes, most notably Eurasian marriage, tricksterism, and American anti-Asian racism. By focusing on Eaton’s depictions of North American Chinatowns, scholars have rarely recognized the broader transnational political contexts in which Eaton wrote or the cross-racial collaborations depicted in many of her works. Most have understated the significance of Eaton’s British, Canadian, Jamaican, and Chinese cultural referents and ignored significant interactions with the native communities—French Canadian, Caribbean, and even Native North American—that she depicts in much of her work. Nor have scholars adequately appreciated the carefully framed politics of what Sean McCann dismisses as Eaton’s “ordinary, mundane and domestic” settings (76).

In the past ten years, scholars have located numerous unknown essays, works of fiction, and journalism by Eaton that expand her known oeuvre and challenge the Asian American dualism for which she is known. In 2002, Dominika Ferens uncovered a daily column Eaton wrote…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West

W. W. Norton & Company
October 2013
352 pages
6.1 × 9.3 in
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-87140-445-9

Andrew R. Graybill, Associate Professor of History
Southern Methodist University

One of the American West’s bloodiest—and least-known—massacres is searingly re-created in this generation-spanning history of native-white intermarriage.

National Book Award–winning histories such as The Hemingses of Monticello and Slaves in the Family have raised our awareness about America’s intimately mixed black and white past. Award-winning western historian Andrew R. Graybill now sheds light on the overlooked interracial Native-white relationships critical in the development of the trans-Mississippi West in this multigenerational saga. Beginning in 1844 with the marriage of Montana fur trader Malcolm Clarke and his Piegan Blackfeet bride, Coth-co-co-na, Graybill traces the family from the mid-nineteenth century, when such mixed marriages proliferated, to the first half of the twentieth, when Clarke ’s children and grandchildren often encountered virulent prejudice. At the center of Graybill’s history is the virtually unexamined 1870 Marias Massacre, on a par with the more infamous slaughters at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, an episode set in motion by the murder of Malcolm Clarke and in which Clarke ’s two sons rode with the Second U.S. Cavalry to kill their own blood relatives.

Won’t Somebody Think of the Children

Slate
2013-03-27

Brian Palmer, Slate’s Chief Explainer

Do opponents of marriage equality always claim that they’re merely worried about the kids?

During yesterday’s oral arguments over the constitutionality of California’s ban on gay marriage, Justice Antonin Scalia claimed that there is “considerable disagreement among sociologists” as to whether being raised by a same-sex couple is “harmful to the child.” The lawyers arguing the case repeatedly brought up the landmark 1967 decision Loving v. Virginia, which struck down interracial marriage bans. Did supporters of the ban argue that interracial marriage was harmful to children in that case, too?

Absolutely. The state of Virginia presented two arguments in support of its interracial marriage ban in 1967. The first was that the authors of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution explicitly stated that they did not intend to strike down anti-miscegenation laws, which were common in the 19th century. The second argument was that interracial marriages were uniquely prone to divorce and placed undue psychological stress on children…

Read the entire article here.