Mixed Race Studies

Half-Caste as Seen Through the Eyes of James Southard

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-06-05, 16:00Z (12:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

James Southard has always been drawn to the creation of authentic stories that are visually and emotionally compelling. His love of music and photography eventually led him to the video business as an Associate Producer working for Quincy Jones’ cable network (NUE-TV) in 2000. Since then, Mr. Southard has worked with clients such as Discovery Channel, HGTV, TV- Guide Channel, as well as several universities and non-profit organizations.

While James is proud of the time he spent as a youth working for his father in a grocery store and as a white-water rafting guide in his early 20s where spent three years working with emotionally challenged youth, James made a mark in his high school when he and his friend, Darrel Satcher started the first black students club.

On Today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio, we will discuss James’ love of Hip Hop and some of the experiences that have shaped him and his ideas of race as a social, rather than a biological, construct since he became a Hip Hop DJ in 1992. James will talk with us about some of his interesting experiences dealing with racism as a man who self-identifies as mixed and how he navigates the concept of race with his family and a community that sometimes feels he…

For more information, click here.

Louisiana Repeals Black Blood Law

The New York Times
1983-07-06

Frances Frank Marcus, Special to the New York Times

NEW ORLEANS, July 5—  Gov. David C. Treen today signed legislation repealing a Louisiana statute that established a mathematical formula to determine if a person was black.

The law establishing the formula, passed by state legislators in 1970, said that anyone having one thirty-second or less of “Negro blood” should not be designated as black by Louisiana state officials.

The legislator who wrote the law repealing the formula, Lee Frazier, a 34-year-old Democrat representing a racially mixed district in New Orleans, said recently that he had done so because of national attention focused on the law by a highly publicized court case here.

The case involves the vigorous but thus far unsuccessful efforts of Susie Guillory Phipps, the wife of a well-to-do white businessman in Sulphur, La., to change the racial description on her birth certificate from “col.,” an abbreviation for “colored,” to “white.”…

…Mr. Frazier said that in the future it would be possible for a person to change birth records by sworn statements from family members, doctors and others.

He said his research showed that the designation of race on official documents in this area from the late 1700’s and that its purpose was “to keep control over land ownership, to keep the landowner from having to share his land with his illegitimate children who were family members.”…

Read the entire article here.

What Makes you Black?

Ebony Magazine
Volume 38, Number 3 (January 1983)
pages 115-118

Vague definition of race is the basis for court battles

Imagine going to get a passport so you and your spouse can take a vacation in South America. Its all a formality, you reason; people just want to make sure you’re who and what you say you are. You fill out the form and, to your bewilderment, a clerk tells you she can’t give you the passport because you’re of a different race than what you claim to be.

It happened to 48-year-old Susie Guillory Phipps, who lives in Sulphur, La. She had been thinking all along that she was White, but her birth certificate indicated she was “Colored.”

“I was sick,” she later told reporters. “I couldn’t believe it.” She said she went home crying and told her husband she didn’t want to take the trip. It was the beginning of a 5-year court battle to get the State of Louisiana to change her birth certificate and the certificates of her six brothers and sisters. She also wants the states racial classification law declared unconstitutional. The law, approved by the Louisiana legislature in 1970, states that a person is Black if he or she has “1/32 Negro blood.” Louisiana is the only state with a race classification law.

So far, Mrs. Phipps has spent some $20,000 to change her racial status to White. A genealogist hired by the state has concluded she is 3/32 Black.

Mrs. Phipps’ case (Susie Smith vs. the State of Louisiana), which might be decided very soon, is the latest of a number of similar cases that have occurred over the years. A celebrated case developed during the 1920s when Leonard Kip Rhinelander failed to get an annulment of his marriage to Alice Jones, who admitted to having “some Negro blood.” Rhinelander, the son of millionaire society leader Philip Rhinelander, contended his wife deceived him about her race before their marriage. In a later case, Ralph Dupas, a prizefighter who fought and lost to Sugar Ray Robinson in 1963, was barred from fighting Whites in Louisiana in the late 1950s when word surfaced that he was Black. (Louisiana at that time didn’t allow interracial athletics). He failed in his bid to prove he was White. Earlier, another Louisiana prizefighter, Bernard Docusen, wasn’t allowed to fight Whites in Louisiana because of reports that his mother was Black. He was later recognized as White when it was discovered his mother was White.

Just what does make a person Black? The fundamental problem here, according to experts interviewed for and cited in this article, is that there is no generally accepted scientific definition of race. Another related problem is the inconsistency in the classification of people in the three traditional racial groupings — Negroid, Caucasoid and Mongoloid. In current practice, Black genes define and dominate White genes. One Black ancestor, for example, makes an Anglo-Saxon or a Chinese person “Black.” But, for some strange reason, the rule doesn’t work the other way, and one Chinese or Anglo-Saxon ancestor doesn’t make a Black person Chinese or Anglo-Saxon. And it is interesting to note that if the “one-Black” rule were applied to the other races, the racial composition of the United States would change markedly. Dr. Munro Edmonson, a professor of anthropology at Tulane University, says the average American White person has five percent traceable Black genes and the average American Black person has 25 percent traceable White genes…

Read the entire article here.

Antidiscrimination Law and the Multiracial Experience: A Reply to Nancy Leong

Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal
Volume 10, Summer 2013
pages 191-218

Tina F. Botts, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Pre-law Advisor
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Nancy Leong’s thesis, in “Judicial Erasure of Mixed-Race Discrimination,” is that antidiscrimination law should make a switch from defining race “categorically” to defining it in terms of the perception of the would-be discriminator so as to better accommodate claims of multiracial discrimination and so as to better achieve what Leong sees as the goals of antidiscrimination law, i.e., the promotion of racial understanding, and the elimination of racism and racial discrimination. But, while Leong’s goals are admirable, the method she proposes for achieving these goals will not succeed. Antidiscrimination law cannot operate to promote racial understanding, or to eliminate racism and racial discrimination, because it was not designed to achieve these goals. Moreover, a switch in focus on the part of antidiscrimination courts from “categorical” race to “perceived” race will not render antidiscrimination law more accommodating to claims of multiracial discrimination. Such a shift would instead operate to further exclude multiracial plaintiffs from protection against discrimination. A more effective way of modifying antidiscrimination law so as to render it better able to accommodate claims of multiracial discrimination is to call courts (1) to remember that discrimination is something that happens to social groups and not to individuals, and (2) to include multiracial persons among the groups of persons specially protected from discrimination.

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Breeds Are Not Negroes and May Mingle With Whites

The Weekly Messenger
St. Martinville, Louisiana
1910-04-30
page 3, column 2
Source: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers

The Daily Picayune

The Supreme Court of Louisiana by a vote of three to two, Justices Nicholls and Land dissenting, has decided that the state law prohibiting concubinage between the races in Louisiana affects only pure-blooded whites and pure-blooded blacks. Where either party is of mixed blood there is no prohibition under the law. It follows under this decision that were persons are charged with concubinage, and either pleads in defense that he or she is of mixed blood, which would bar prosecution, it will be incumbent on the state to prove the purity of the race, a problem vast more difficult than the proving of race mixture.

Justice Land, in his dissenting opinion, declares that under the decision of the court, the Gay-Shattuck law, which forbid whites and negroes to be served with liquors at the same bar, can apply to whites and blacks, and the prohibition does not extend to mulattoes to griffes, who are the offspring of negroes and mulattoes, and they have a right to be served at the same bars and tables with whites. Obviously between whites and griffes is entirely lawful under the decision of the court. Justice Land takes occasion to express bit gratification that the Legislators of Louisiana will be in session in the course of a few days and indulges the hope that the limitations imposed in these laws, which seek to distinguish between the races, will so define and establish the distinguishing terms as that nothing will be left to interference or conjecture.

It is inevitable that confusion must occur when the law forbidding the inter marriage of the races makes use of the terms “white” and “colored” while the statute prohibiting concubinage employs the distinctions “white” and “negro.” There seems to be no agreement by the lexicographers in the matter of distinctions. Webster, edition of 1910, use “negro” and “colored” indifferently, and the Century, while defining the negro race according to specific physical characteristics, uses the word “colored” with apparent indifference, as does also the Standard Dictionary. There are more negroes in the Southern part of the United States than in any other country on the globe which has a propendorating white population, and here, in all political and social distinctions, the negros and the mixed blood have always been reckoned together, and if these conditions are to be changed there should be fixed and definite terms by which these new conditions are to be established, and not left to the inferences and conjectures of a judicial tribunal, do matter how able and learned in the law its members.

Ethnic minorities: defining ethnicity and race

The Scottish Public Health Observatory
Ethnic Minorities
Last Updated: 2012-03-06

Ethnicity

Ethnicity has been defined as:

“the social group a person belongs to, and either identifies with or is identified with by others, as a result of a mix of cultural and other factors including language, diet, religion, ancestry and physical features traditionally associated with race”. (1)

Ethnicity is essentially self-defined and may change over time. Classification of ethnicity is essentially pragmatic, based on categories that include common self-descriptions, are acceptable to respondents and that identify variations that are important for research or policy. There is increasing recognition that people may want to identify themselves with more than one ethnic group, and the “mixed” category introduced in the UK 2001 Census attempts to do this. The standard classification of ethnic group in the UK is that used in the 2011 Census (which was slightly different in each of the four countries of the UK). Ethnicity is different from country of origin, since many countries include more than one ethnic group.

Race

The concept of race is controversial. It is difficult to define a rationale for racial categories and there is no consistent agreement about an objective set of categories. Classifying individuals by their physical appearance and skin colour is unreliable and of questionable validity. Genetic studies have found some evidence of broad “continental” groups which are genetically similar.(2,3) However, there is little evidence that these correspond to commonly perceived racial categories.(4) There is wider genetic variation between individuals within one “racial” group (such as “white”) than there is between such “racial” groups (5)—indeed 93% to 95% of genetic variation is within population groups. Despite these difficulties, the term race is still widely used in legal and policy contexts…

Read the entire article here.