Mixed Race Studies

St Martin de Porres

Victoria and Albert Museum: The world’s greatest museum of art and design
London, United Kingdom
2014-11-03

William Newton, Assistant Curator

Today on Sanctus Ignotum we have a case study in race relations, and our first South American saint. Born in Lima, Peru in 1579, the illegitimate son of a Spanish knight and a liberated black slave, Martin was initially apprenticed to a barber-surgeon. He initially joined the Dominican Order as a lay-helper, though his dedication to the poor and hallowed nature meant that he was soon invited to join the order as a full-time lay-brother.

He frequently experienced bouts of religious ecstasy, having spent nights in prayer. He kept himself very busy as monastic gardener and barber (two related skills), and as a counselor (some barbers may also believe this is a native skill), as well as attending to the sick and the poor. It was said that most of his cures came from a simple glass of water (presumably not part his barber’s training). Being of mixed race parentage himself, he was not as discerning as some of his colleagues in offering spiritual and physical comfort. The other Brothers did, however, dub him the ‘Father of Charity’ although he, being humble and saintly, preferred to call himself ‘Mulatto Dog’. Martin’s commitment to everyone’s wellbeing, no matter their colour or creed, does not appear to have been complemented by a reforming attitude to social conditions. Once, when his monastery encountered financial difficulties, he suggested that they sell him into slavery in order to make ends meet. Happily, they declined to do so…

Read the entire article here.

A Letter and the Legacy of “Not White” in the USA

Nursing Clio: Because the Personal is Historical
2014-11-04

Adam Turner, Co-founder and Technical Editor

With the events of the past months, and as Austin McCoy discussed here on Nursing Clio last week, it should be clear that white privilege is still alive and well in the United States. Despite the optimism following President Obama’s election six years ago, and the Republican Party’s tweets, we do not yet live in a society where the color of your skin doesn’t matter. To make matters worse, while the discussion should be about how best to fix the problems of racial injustice and economic oppression in the United States, substantial numbers of people refuse to even accept that it’s a problem. They prefer to believe that those who suffer from systemic poverty, police violence, and a biased justice system get only what they’ve earned by being lazy, or breaking the law, or acting badly.

This message comes most clearly from pundits like Bill O’Reilly, who continue to argue that white privilege died with the end of legal segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. More than that, they assert that white Americans are the new victims of discrimination. Going after O’Reilly feels like a cliché at this point, but unfortunately his arguments aren’t nearly as fringe as they should be. People who argue that white privilege doesn’t exist often do a few things:

1. They point out that state-sanctioned slavery and segregation are over.
2. They use anecdotes to try to prove systemic change, such as that “the most powerful man in the world is a black American, and the most powerful woman in the world — Oprah Winfrey — is black!” (that’s O’Reilly again).
3. They suggest that people of color who are not African American benefit from policies designed to address the legacy of slavery that also discriminate against white Americans.

All of these arguments assume that more than 300 years of discrimination and racism can be wiped out by one generation’s worth of civil rights protections (and very little effort to address economic equality). The Supreme Court certainly seemed to believe this when they started dismantling the Voting Rights Act. Based on this assumption, they conclude that white privilege no longer exists, and therefore policies designed to break cycles of inequality discriminate against white Americans. For many white-identified Americans, these conclusions make a lot of sense, especially in light of the economic recession.

This assumption, and the denial of white privilege, misunderstand both the depth and the breadth of racial injustice in the United States.

To get a sense of what I mean, let’s step back 90 years to 1924 to glimpse the long and personal echoes of racism in America. In the spring of that year, a new mother in Virginia received a letter from the head of the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics. It read:

This is to give you warning that this is a mulatto child and you cannot pass it off as white. A new law passed by the last legislature says that if a child has one drop of negro blood in it, it cannot be counted as white. You will have to do something about this matter and see that the child is not allowed to mix with white children, it cannot go to white schools and can never marry a white person in Virginia. It is an awful thing…

The head of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics, and the man who sent this heartbreakingly cruel letter, was Walter Ashby Plecker. Plecker, along with two other men, led Virginia’s most powerful white supremacist organization, the Anglo-Saxon Club. Together they played a key role in the passage of Virginia’s 1924 Act to Preserve Racial Integrity (the “new law” to which he refers in this letter). The 1924 law, one in a series of laws passed in Virginia during the 1920s based on racism, nativism, and eugenics ideology of the time, explicitly divided people into just two racial categories, “white” and “colored,” and forbade marriage (and thus implicitly sex) between the two. Virginia wasn’t the only state with such a law, but it became famous as the origin of the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case that overturned these laws…

Read the entire article here.

Cincy in 2060: 1 in 7 of us will be biracial

The Cincinnati Enquirer
2014-10-21

Mark Curnutte, Social Justice/Minority Affairs Reporter

Photos and video by:

Cara Owsley, Staff Photojournalist

A new index suggests many of our communities will look less like they do today and more like Austin or Washington, D.C.

EAST PRICE HILL –  Lydia Perez is 2 years old, with the curly black hair and dark eyes of her father’s Guatemalan heritage. Her complexion is fairer than his, more like that of her white mother, a woman of Appalachian descent who grew up in Lower Price Hill.

Lydia is 1 of 50 people now counted as bi-racial in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. But by the time she’s in her late 40s, in 2060, 1 in 7 people in our region will claim two or more races.

This is your grandchild’s Cincinnati: A place where a quarter of the people speak Spanish; where thousands more Latin Americans, East Africans, Asians and others live and work; and where increasing diversity is having profound influence on our families, schools, workplaces and politics.

The changes are part of dramatic shifts projected across America’s heartland in the next 50 years. A new diversity index by USA Today suggests that many of our communities will look less like the Cincinnati we know today and more like multi-ethnic Austin, Texas, or suburban Washington, D.C.

In many of our neighborhoods, chances will be 50/50 that the next person your child or grandchild meets in 2060 will be of a different race or ethnic background. In our eight closest-in counties, about one-third of us will be non-white, compared to 18 percent in 2010…

Read the entire article here.