Mixed Race Studies

On Being Brown in America

The New York Times
2013-04-25

Amitava Kumar, Writer and Professor of English
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

The recent bombings in Boston threw up many questions. One of the most pressing, in my somewhat narrow view, is the meaning of being brown in America.

On April 17, two days after the bombs went off during the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring almost 200 others, CNN’s John King went on air to say that the suspect was a “dark-skinned male.” In the CNN video, which shows that the time of the broadcast was 1.15 p.m. on Wednesday, we see King pointing to a photograph from the front-page of The New York Times. A positive identification had been made based on a surveillance video from a Lord & Taylor store just outside the frame of the picture in the Times, King said. A little later that afternoon, King would go on to assure viewers that a subsequent arrest had been made.

No one had been arrested that day, of course, and, alas, there was no dark-skinned male. What is remarkable is that even while first reporting his piece of “exclusive” news, CNN’s King felt it necessary to qualify what he was saying. The qualifications he offered were not about the haste with which he was sharing a piece of misinformation, or the bewildering lack of specificity in his description, or even the absence of adequate verification. Instead, his remarks appeared to suggest to his viewers that he couldn’t be more open with them because of politically correct sentiments that complicated open disclosures of “game changers” that the police had uncovered:

“I was told they have a breakthrough in the identification of the suspect, and I’m told — and I want to be very careful about this because people get very sensitive when you say these things — I was told by one of these sources who’s a law enforcement official that this was a dark-skinned male… The official used some other words. I’m not going to repeat them until we get more information because of the sensitivities. There are some people who will take offense even in saying that.”

Some people! Who are they?…

…You’ve heard the words of the old blues song: “They say if you’s white, should be all right, / If you’s brown, stick around, / But if you’s black, mmm mmm, brother, get back, get back, get back.” That old racial imaginary is changing. Brown is staining the edges of the racial divide. Richard Rodriguez has written, “Brown bleeds through the straight line, unstaunchable — the line separating black from white, for example.” If we are going to be optimistic, we can even say that brown is the color of the future.

A new book by a Boston-based academic and filmmaker, Vivek Bald, describes the formation of what he calls Bengali Harlem in the early decades of the last century. Starting with the migration of Bengali peddlers to the United States in 1880s, and a later group of seamen, mostly Muslims, in the 1930s and 1940s, those who came to this country didn’t establish separate ethnic enclaves like later immigrants. Instead, they formed “networks that were embedded in working-class Creole, African-American, and Puerto Rican neighborhoods and entwined with the lives of their residents.” This radical mixing and assimilation, Bald argues, is an unnoticed aspect of the history of U.S. immigration.

The invisible assimilation of working-class immigrants in that early phase has given way to an entirely different order of mixing in contemporary America. The attacks of Sept. 11 might have drawn a line in the sand, but the reality of sand is that it keeps shifting…

Read the entire article here.

Tries to Marry Quadroon

Los Angeles Herald
Volume 35, Number 31 (1907-11-02)
page 2, column 6
Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

By Associated Press

YUMA, Ariz,, Nov. 1-M. G. Graff, aged 21 years, white, of Riverside, Cal., and Addle Burkhart, aged 20, were refused the office of marriage by Probate Judge Godfrey here today and the license issued them was destroyed on the girl’s confession that she is a quadroon.

Zumbi dos Palmares College encourages Afro-Brazilians to study

Infosurhoy.com
2012-04-27

InfoSurHoy.com is a one-stop source of news and information about, and for, Latin America and the Caribbean. It is sponsored by the United States Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM).

Thiago Borges

Opened in 2004 in São Paulo, the institution reserves 50% of its enrollment for people of African descent, who account for only 13% of college students in Brazil.

SÃO PAULO, Brazil – As the country’s classrooms become gradually more diverse, the debate over racial quotas at public universities has once again reached the Brazilian Supreme Court.

The 10 judges representing the country’s highest court voted unanimously on April 26 that affirmative action based on race is legal.

Though quotas remain a controversial issue in Brazil, the path to a college education is becoming increasingly accessible for Brazilians of African descent.

In 2000, only 2% of university students in Brazil were black, according to the NGO African Brazilian Society for Social Cultural Development (Afrobras), which is working to increase the inclusion of Afro-Brazilians in higher education.

That rate has risen to 13%, according to the Ministry of Education (MEC).

The federal government’s University for All Program (ProUni) provides scholarships in private universities to students with disabilities, as well as indigenous, mixed-race and black students. The number of scholarships awarded is based on percentages of each group within the overall population, using figures from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).

“The situation is somewhat different because of ProUni, which made it possible for a lot of people from low-income communities to study at private universities (by granting them scholarships),” says Francisca Rodrigues, the director of communication for the Afrobras. “But the proportion is still very low when you take into account the fact that 51% of the population is black or mixed-race.”

Of the 919,551 scholarships awarded throughout Brazil by ProUni from 2005 to 2011, 35.34% went to students who declared themselves to be mixed race and 12.51% went to students who declared themselves to be black…

Read the entire article here.

Brown Man and Fiancee Can Not Get Knot Tied

San Francisco Call
Volume 107, Number 106 (1910-03-16)
page 3, column 5
Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

Unfeeling Goldfield Sheriff Suggests a Hurried Departure

GOLDFIELD, Nev., March 15.—George Masaki, a Japanese gardener, and Juliette S. Schwann, both of Los Angeles, were unable to get a judge to make them man and wife here today. Masaki took out marriage license during the afternoon, but as soon as the sheriff found it out he hunted the couple up and escorted them to the railroad station, where he ordered them not to appear in Goldfield again. This action of the authorities was taken because of unpleasant publicity resulting from a recent case of miscegenation.

The couple took a train to Tonopah. The authorities in Tonopah have been warned.

“I Thought He was White You Know a Regular American”: The Boston Marathon Bombing Shows Us How White Privilege Hurts White People… Again

We Are Respectable Negroes
2013-04-19

Chauncey DeVega

Race is a social construction. There is only one race, the human race. But, race has historically been something negotiated by the courts, has legal standing, and has impacted people’s life chances across the color line.

As Cheryl Harris and Ian Haney Lopez have detailed, to be “white” is to have a type of property in America. Because “Whiteness” is property it can be inherited, passed down from one person to another as an inheritance, and has value–both symbolic and monetary–under the law, and in the broader society.

European immigrants understood (and continue to understand in the present) the value of Whiteness. In the most stark example, they knew to distance themselves from black folks as a way of become fully “white” and a “real American.”

In addition, the United States government helped to create race and reinforce the value of Whiteness when it passed immigration laws that privileged “desirable” races from Europe over those “less desirable” from Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world.

And of course, the racist implementation of the G.I. Bill and FHA Housing Programs after World War 2 helped to create Whiteness again by creating a segregated place called “suburbia,” and creating a stark divide in the racial wealth and income gap that is still with us today.

Race works through a type of “common sense” that is based on individual experiences, cultural norms, (misunderstandings of) history, the law, politics, as well as psychological motivations and decision-making that operate on both a conscious and subconscious level. In total, the race business is a type of magic and pseudo-science. This makes it no less real or important.

Whiteness is synonymous with “American” for those who have socialized into what sociologists such as Joe Feagin have termed “the white racial frame.” Here, common sense dictates that “those people” look “American” and those “other people” do not…

Read the entire article here.

Yokohama Yankee: My Family’s Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan

Chin Music Press
March 2013
320 pages
Trade Paper ISBN: 978-0-9844576-6-3

Leslie Helm, Author, also Editor
Seattle Business Magazine

Leslie Helm’s decision to adopt Japanese children launches him on a personal journey through his family’s 140 years in Japan, beginning with his German great grandfather, who worked as a military adviser in 1870 and defied custom to marry his Japanese mistress. The family’s poignant experiences of love and war help Helm learn to embrace his Japanese and American heritage.

Yokohama Yankee is the first book to look at Japan across five generations with perspective that is both from the inside and through foreign eyes. Helm draws on his great grandfather’s unpublished memoir and a wealth of primary source material to bring his family history to life.

The general inferiority of the mixed stock has passed into a proverb even in Africa, where it is said: “A god created the whites; I know not who created the blacks; certainly a devil created the mongrels.” So reports Livingstone (quoted by Lombroso), and adds that he had seen but one Portuguese Mestizo of robust health. In Brazil it is held that the mingling of Indian with Latin blood has not produced evil results, but everywhere else such remote crossings have been more or less disastrous. Strikingly is this the case with the Zambos—the mixture of Indian and Negro; they are mainly degenerates and degraded. Thus E. G. Squier, writing of Honduras in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. XII., says: “A small part of the coast, above Cape Gracias, is occupied by the Sambos, a mixed race of Indians and Negroes, which, however, is fast disappearing.” In Mexico, Central and South America, the half-breeds are everywhere stationary or declining. In India the Eurasians (20,000 in Calcutta) “touch a level of degradation which is far lower than any reached by the pure heathen about them. They inherit defects more conspicuously than virtues from both races from which they spring” (Pop. Sci. Mon., Nov., 1892). In Japan the inferior Ainos are passing away before the superior Japanese. The hybrids are never healthy or vigorous, and vanish with the third or fourth generation. Here, in the United States, the testimony is all against the Mulatto. In a report of the Provost-Marshal General, the opinions of physicians stand eleven to one against the Mulatto as “scrofulous and consumptive,” “degenerated physically,” and the one favourable judgement reposes on only two instances. The anthropometry of the Mulatto is decidedly against him. His average lung capacity, the most significant of measurements, was found by Gould to be only 158.9 cubic inches against 163.5 for the pure Black, and 184.7 for the White. His respiration rate was equally unfavourable, being 19 per minute against 17.7 for the pure Black, and 16.4 for the White. We refer, also, to the testimony of Dr. Shaler (p. 52), that he had never known a Mulatto to pass threescore. The writer remembers the first use he ever heard of the word “cachectic;” his father spoke of it as a term generally applicable to Mulattoes.

From the convergence of all such testimony, which may be multiplied indefinitely, there seems no escape whatever. We must concede, with Lombroso: “It is impossible to contemplate these facts without admitting that marriages between some human races are much less fertile and happy than between others;” and especially unfortunate are those between such extremes as Whites and Negroes. When such anthropologists as Waitz, Serres, Deschamps, Bodichon, anticipate a millennium from universal miscegenation, it is only sentimentalism or else forgetfulness of the distinction drawn so properly by Topinard (Éléments d’Anthropologie générale, 1885) between the intermingling of nearly related and of distantly related races. In the first case the result is, in general, certainly good; in the latter, it is quite as certainly bad.

But let us now, merely for the moment and for the sake of argument, admit that both our premises are in doubt; that, perhaps, after all the Negro is not inferior organically—mentally, morally, or physically—to the Caucasian, and that interfertility might, perhaps, work no deterioration; would the case be essentially altered? Assuredly not. For even then the most extreme negrophilist must still admit that there is, at least, a reasonable doubt; even if the Negro be not proved inferior, yet he is certainly not proved equal, and there is a large body of at least apparent evidence against him; even if it be not certain that miscegenation would work deterioration, it is at least very possible and seemingly probable. Who, then, would have the foolhardihood to make this experiment of race amalgamation—an experiment which, once made, is made forever; whose consequences could never be undone—when there is at least and at the very lowest an undeniable possibility, not to say certainty, that those consequences would be disastrous in the extreme? Can we imagine a more wanton folly? Would such an experiment beseem any other place so well as the madhouse?

William Benjamin Smith, The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn, (New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1905). 67-70.