Mixed Race Studies

‘Passing’ Across The Color Line In The Jazz Age

National Public Radio
All Things Considered: You Must Read This
2010-04-07

Heidi W. Durrow

Heidi W. Durrow is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Yale Law School. Her debut novel is “The Girl Who Fell From The Sky.”

There are novels that are enjoyable to read and others that say something about the world.  And sometimes there are novels that are both.  Passing by Nella Larsen is one of those books…

Read the entire essay here.
Listen to the essay here.

One of the Family: Metis Culture in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Saskatchewan

University of British Columbia Press
2010-02-22
360 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-7748-1729-5

Brenda Macdougall, Chair in Métis Studies
University of Ottawa

In recent years there has been growing interest in the social and cultural attributes that define the Metis as both Aboriginal and a distinct people. The study of Metis identity formation has also become one of the most innovative ways to explore cultural encounters and change in North American history and anthropology.

In One of the Family, Brenda Macdougall draws on diverse written and oral sources and employs the concept of wahkootowin—the Cree term for a worldview that privileges family and values relatedness between all beings—to trace the emergence of a distinct Metis community at Île à la Crosse in northern Saskatchewan. Wahkootowin describes how relationships in the nineteenth century were supposed to work and helps to explain how the Metis negotiated with local economic and religious institutions while creating and nurturing—through marriage choices and living arrangements, adoption and the selection of godparents, economic decisions and employment—a society that emphasized family obligation and responsibility.

This path-breaking study showcases how one Metis community created a distinct identity rooted in Aboriginal values about family and shaped by the fur trade and the Roman Catholic Church. It also offers a model for future research and discussion that will appeal to anyone interested in the history of the fur trade or Metis culture and identity.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Methodology and Sources
• Note on Writing Conventions
• Introduction
• Chapter One: “They are strongly attached to the country of rivers, lakes, and forests”: The Social Landscapes of the Northwest
• Chapter Two: “The bond that connected one human being to another”: Social Construction of the Metis Family
• Chapter Three: “To live in the land of my mother”: Residency and Patronymic Connections Across the Northwest
• Chapter Four: “After a man has tasted of the comforts of married life this living alone comes pretty tough”: Family, Acculturation, and Roman Catholicism
• Chapter Five: “The only men obtainable who know the country and Indians are all married”: Family, Labour, and the HBC
• Chapter Six: “The HalfBreeds of this place always did and always will dance”: Competition, Freemen, and Contested Spaces
• Chapter Seven: “I Thought it advisable to furnish him”: Freemen to Free Traders in the Northwest Fur Trade
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects

The half-caste and the dream of secularism and freedom: Insights from East African Asian writing

Scrutiny2
Volume 13, Issue 2 (September 2008)
pages 16 – 35
DOI: 10.1080/18125440802485987

Dan Ojwang, Senior Lecturer of African Literature
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Focusing on the work of Bahadur Tejani, Peter Nazareth and Moyez Vassanji, this article attempts to account for the popularity of tropes of miscegenation in the literature produced by East African writers of South Asian descent. The appearance of the figure of the half-caste in this body of writing is especially striking given the fact that miscegenation was much derided in colonial discourse and viewed in fear by traditionalists within the diaspora who saw in it a violation of the integrity of communal boundaries. This article argues that the invocation of miscegenation, and related ideas, was an attempt on the part of this group of writers to reconsider the meanings of citizenship and belonging along the broad lines of secular humanism. In some important sense, the halfcaste symbolized a quest for freedom from the authority of tradition and the naturalization of cultural difference during colonialism. 

Read or purchase the article here.

Racially Mixed People, DDC Table 5 Ethnic and National Groups, and MARC 21 Bibliographic Format Field 083 

Cataloging & Classification Quarterly
Volume 47, Issue 7 (October 2009)
pages 657 – 670
DOI: 10.1080/01639370903112005

Julianne Beall
Library of Congress, Washington, DC

This article explores ways that notation in Table 5 Ethnic and National Groups of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system can be used to extend subject access to works about racially mixed people beyond that provided by the rules for constructing standard DDC numbers. The proposed approach makes use of the new 083 field (Additional Dewey Decimal Classification Number) in the MARC Bibliographic Format and techniques developed for DeweyBrowser beta v2.0 by OCLC Research, especially tag clouds.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Flemish Bastard and the Former Indians: Métis and Identity in Seventeenth-Century New York

The American Indian Quarterly
Volume 34, Number 1 (Winter 2010)
pages 83-108
E-ISSN: 1534-1828 Print ISSN: 0095-182X
DOI: 10.1353/aiq.0.0087

Tom Arne Midtrød, Professor of History
University of Iowa

In 1709 the English Board of Trade recommended the settlement of three thousand Palatine migrants on the Hudson and Mohawk rivers in New York. The officials expressed confidence that these colonists would not only produce naval stores for the fleet but also intermarry with the Indians “as the French do” and lay the foundation for an expanding fur trade. They knew well that French Canadians had long mingled with Indians and produced children of mixed ancestry, or métis. What they perhaps did not know was that New York had long had métis of its own.

Compared to Canada, New York never had a large métis population, and some historians have commented upon the social distance between Dutch and Indians. Nevertheless, intimacy resulting in métis children does not seem to have been uncommon in this colony. Dutch observers charged Indians with lack of sexual restraint, and liaisons between Dutch men and Native women sometimes worried the authorities. In 1638 the Dutch council prohibited adultery with blacks and Indians and at least occasionally took legal action. Manor lord and patroon Kiliaen van Rensselaer warned his nephew Arent van Curler and forbade his tenants from sleeping with Indian females. Sexual promiscuity with Indian women was among the charges levied against provincial secretary Cornelis van Tiehnoven by his political enemies in the 1640s. Prosecutions of colonists impregnating Indian women are known from the early English period.

Native people probably thought these relations should involve a degree of reciprocity and mutual obligation. Historians have stressed that many Native peoples saw marriage and other intimate relations as means of incorporating outsiders, and an early Dutch observer alluded to the existence of this practice among Native traders in New Netherland…

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Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture

University of Massachusetts Press
November 2008
224 pages
paper ISBN 978-1-55849-675-0; cloth ISBN 978-1-55849-674-3

Baz Dreisinger, Associate Professor of English
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

A provocative look at the shifting contours of racial identity in America

In the United States, the notion of racial “passing” is usually associated with blacks and other minorities who seek to present themselves as part of the white majority. Yet as Baz Dreisinger demonstrates in this fascinating study, another form of this phenomenon also occurs, if less frequently, in American culture: cases in which legally white individuals are imagined, by themselves or by others, as passing for black.

In Near Black, Dreisinger explores the oft-ignored history of what she calls “reverse racial passing” by looking at a broad spectrum of short stories, novels, films, autobiographies, and pop-culture discourse that depict whites passing for black. The protagonists of these narratives, she shows, span centuries and cross contexts, from slavery to civil rights, jazz to rock to hip-hop. Tracing their role from the 1830s to the present day, Dreisinger argues that central to the enterprise of reverse passing are ideas about proximity. Because “blackness,” so to speak, is imagined as transmittable, proximity to blackness is invested with the power to turn whites black: those who are literally “near black” become metaphorically “near black.” While this concept first arose during Reconstruction in the context of white anxieties about miscegenation, it was revised by later white passers for whom proximity to blackness became an authenticating badge.

As Dreisinger shows, some white-to-black passers pass via self-identification. Jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow, for example, claimed that living among blacks and playing jazz had literally darkened his skin. Others are taken for black by a given community for a period of time. This was the experience of Jewish critic Waldo Frank during his travels with Jean Toomer, as well as that of disc jockey Hoss Allen, master of R&B slang at Nashville’s famed WLAC radio. For journalists John Howard Griffin and Grace Halsell, passing was a deliberate and fleeting experiment, while for Mark Twain’s fictional white slave in Pudd’nhead Wilson, it is a near-permanent and accidental occurrence.

Whether understood as a function of proximity or behavior, skin color or cultural heritage, self-definition or the perception of others, what all these variants of “reverse passing” demonstrate, according to Dreisinger, is that the lines defining racial identity in American culture are not only blurred but subject to change.

Questions for Benjamin Todd Jealous: Race Matters

The New York Times
2009-07-30

Deborah Solomon

As the new head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, can you tell us how your organization plans to respond to the case of Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor who was recently arrested for disorderly conduct at his own home — charges that have since been dropped — after he reportedly chewed out a cop who suspected him of burglary?
Our local volunteers are already engaged with the Cambridge Police Department, as we are with police departments across this country. The next step is passing the End Racial Profiling Act in Congress. Racial profiling is a constant drumbeat in this country. It’s a form of humiliation that strikes like lightning on a daily basis, and that is part of what Professor Gates was responding to. It’s hard to be in your house, told you’re a burglary suspect and then when you are no longer a suspect, told you are the problem…

…As the son of a white father and a black mother, do you refer to yourself as black?
Yes, without qualification…

Read the entire article here.

Obama Census Choice: African-American

The Huffington Post
2010-04-02

Mark S. Smith

WASHINGTON — He may be the world’s foremost mixed-race leader, but when it came to the official government head count, President Barack Obama gave only one answer to the question about his ethnic background: African-American.

The White House confirmed on Friday that Obama did not check multiple boxes on his U.S. Census form, or choose the option that allows him to elaborate on his racial heritage. He ticked the box that says “Black, African Am., or Negro.”…

…Obama the community activist and then politician always self-identified as African-American, and he now wears the mantle of America’s first black president with pride…

Read the entire article here.

Who are the ‘Mixed’ ethnic group?

Office for National Statistics [United Kingdom]
May 2006

Ben Bradford

Introduction

The last fifty years have seen the emergence of some new, predominantly British-born, ethnic minorities. These are the children of inter-ethnic partnerships, primarily partnerships between people from the White British group and people from ethnic minority groups. They include the children of White and Black Caribbean parents, White and Asian parents and White and Black African parents, as well as a multitude of other Mixed identities.

The majority of people who have a Mixed ethnic identity have a White parent and were born in Britain. One of the key issues of interest about the Mixed ethnic groups concerns the extent to which they are more similar to the White group, or to the ethnic minority groups, from which they are drawn. For example, whether young people from the Mixed White and Black Caribbean group experience the relatively low unemployment of their White peers, or the much higher unemployment of their Black Caribbean peers.

This article profiles the four Mixed ethnic groups identified in the 2001 Census. These groups are necessarily abstractions from the multitude of actual Mixed ethnicities which exist in Britain today. The three specific groups identified in the Census—Mixed White and Black Caribbean, Mixed White and Black African and Mixed White and Asian—were designed to allow the greatest number of people possible to easily identify themselves. Those who did not identify with one of these Mixed ethnicities could use a write-in space to provide their own description of their ethnicity.

We look at the size of the groups, their demographic and socio-economic characteristics and we consider how they compare with other ethnic groups. This article is intended to complement similar analysis of the ‘Other’ ethnic groups already published by ONS. Together this work provides an overview of the characteristics of these less well known ethnicities.

Table of contents

Introduction
Executive Summary
1. The introduction of Mixed ethnic group categories on the Census
2. Who are the Mixed ethnic groups?
3. The size of the Mixed ethnic populations in England and Wales
4. Age profile of the Mixed ethnic groups
5. Country of Birth
6. Religion
7. Region of residence
8. Socio-economic occupational class
9. Economic Activity
10. Unemployment
11. Educational Attainment
References

Read the entire article here.

Measurement Uncertainty in Racial and Ethnic Identification Among Adolescents of Mixed Ancestry: A Latent Variable Approach

Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal
Volume 17, Issue 1 (January 2010)
pages 110 – 133
DOI: 10.1080/10705510903439094

Allison J. Tracy
Wellesley Centers for Women

Sumru Erkut
Wellesley Centers for Women

Michelle V. Porche
Wellesley Centers for Women

Jo Kim
Wellesley Centers for Women

Linda Charmaraman
Wellesley Centers for Women

Jennifer M. Grossman
Wellesley Centers for Women

Ineke Ceder
Wellesley Centers for Women

Heidie Vázquez Garca
Wellesley Centers for Women

In this article, we operationalize identification of mixed racial and ethnic ancestry among adolescents as a latent variable to (a) account for measurement uncertainty, and (b) compare alternative wording formats for racial and ethnic self-categorization in surveys. Two latent variable models were fit to multiple mixed-ancestry indicator data from 1,738 adolescents in New England. The first, a mixture factor model, accounts for the zero-inflated mixture distribution underlying mixed-ancestry identification. Alternatively, a latent class model allows classification distinction between relatively ambiguous versus unambiguous mixed-ancestry responses. Comparison of individual indicators reveals that the Census 2000 survey version estimates higher prevalence of mixed ancestry but is less sensitive to relative certainty of identification than are alternate survey versions (i.e., offering a “mixed” check box option, allowing a written response). Ease of coding and missing data are also considered in discussing the relative merit of individual mixed-ancestry indicators among adolescents.

Read or purchase the article here.