Mixed Race Studies

Bradley Lincoln of  Multiple Heritage Project (mix-d™) Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed.  Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival)
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #138 – Bradley Lincoln
When: Wednesday, 2010-01-27 00:00Z

Bradley Lincoln, Founder
Multiple Heritage Project (now mix-d™)
Manchester, United Kingdom

Bradley Lincoln is the founder of the Multiple Heritage Project.  The Multiple Heritage Project exists for a number of reasons.

• Firstly, a growing population of young people are being marginalised, expected to choose one racial identity at the exclusion of another and rarely given a voice on the subject.
• Secondly, many professionals lack confidence in dealing with issues of appropriate terminology and thus are unable to empower these individuals.
• Thirdly, lone parents/carers of mix-d children can feel isolated without a full understanding of their child’s racial heritage or access to communities where they could get more information.

The Slave South

The racial character of American slavery and the commitment to white supremacy fostered a widespread antipathy toward race mixture in southern society.  Whites feared that sexual relations between blacks and whites, if not controlled, could undermine the institution of slavery and the racial order.  Children of mixed European and African ancestry, in particular, blurred the sharply demarcated boundaries between the races essential to slavery in the South.

The restrictive policy toward intermixture that emerged before the Civil War, however, was not all-encompassing.  Miscegenation laws sought not so much to eliminate interracial sexual contacts as to channel them.  Those in power employed these laws, as well as laws against fornication and adultery, mainly to keep white women and black men apart.  The legal process exhibited a degree of toleration for white males who had sexual relations with black females, as long as the liaison was kept casual and discreet.  This sort of illicit intercourse—between men of the higher-status racial group and women of the lower—reinforced rather than challenged the existing system of group stratification in the South…

…Maryland’s miscegenation law, in short, was directed primarily at white women, black men and, their mulatto offspring.  Recognizing that only the reproduction of “pure white” children of white women could maintain the fiction of a biracial society, the legal system was particularly determined to keep white women from interracial sexual unions.  This preoccupation, combined with the custom of lumping mulattoes and blacks into the same category, provides a crucial insight into the social and legal construction of reproduction.  Under the social rules that operated in the South, a white woman could give birth to a black child—thus the need for strict legal regulation of her sexual behavior.  But under the same rules, a black woman could not give birth to a white child.  Such a construction of reproduction clearly served the interest of white men in the South, allowing them to roam sexually among women of any color without threatening the color line.

A similar thrust characterized miscegenation legislation in Virginia.  The colony’s assembly decided in 1662 that interracial fornication demanded special penalties; the fine it imposed for this crime was twice that stipulated for illicit intercourse between persons of the same race.  Legislators moved at the same time to clarify the status of mulatto offspring of interracial unions.  Declaring that the child of a black woman by a white man would be “bound or free only according to the condition of the mother,” the assembly broke with English common law, which stated that the status of a child followed that of the father.  Virginia lawmakers thus ensured that the transgressions of white men would lead to an increase in the population of the slave labor force, providing a powerful economic incentive to engage in interracial sex even as criminal sanctions were imposed for such behavior.  To say the least, this new legislation delivered a mixed message to white males…

…The fact that mulatto children derived their status from their mother also helps explain why southern lawmakers struggled to prevent sexual relations between white women and black men.  Although mulatto children of black female slaves were subject to enslavement, mulatto offspring of white females could no be placed in slavery.  The free mulattoes threatened the racial caste system ideologically, if not practically, because their presence could lead to the blurring of the distinction between slave and black, on the one hand, and free and white on the other…

Bardaglio, Peter. “‘Shamefull Matches’ Regulation of Interracial Sex and Marriage in the South before 1900”, In Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, edited by Martha Hodes, 113, 115-116.  New York, New York: New York University Press, 1999.

Mummy’s Black, Daddy’s Yellow and I’m Orange: talking with young children about racial identity

National Children’s Bureau
Wednesday, 2010-02-24 from 09:30Z to 16:15Z
Islington, Islington

Overall aim

This newly developed course aims to give practitioners confidence and the tools for talking with young children about racial identity.

Intended learning outcomes

By the end of this course participants will:

• Understand how prejudice and racism impact on young children within and beyond settings
• Improve practitioners’ confidence in discussing racial identity, skin colour and racism with children, parents and carers and each other
• Consider specific issues for multi-ethnic and multi-heritage families

Trainer: Rachel Gillett

The programme will be led by Rachel Gillett, who has been a freelance trainer and consultant since 1994. Rachel works with a large range of charities, including National Children’s Bureau, Adoption UK, National Day Nurseries Association, Citizens Advice, LASA (London Advice Services Alliance) and Advice UK as well as many other smaller community organisations. She is based in Yorkshire, but works throughout the country. As well as delivering training courses, Rachel also writes training sessions and materials and offers supervision to trainers; she is a member for the Institute of Learning.

Rachel is a single parent with two children of mixed heritage.

For more information, click here.

Reloaded: Representing Asian Women Beyond Hollywood

Thursday, 2010-01-28, 16:00-17:30 PST (Local Time)
University of California, Berkeley
Center for Race & Gender
691 Barrows Hall

Elaine H. Kim, Professor of Asian American Studies
University of California, Berkeley

Join Prof. Elaine Kim for a screening and discussion of the new 30 minute documentary film, Reloaded: Representing Asian Women Beyond Hollywood (working title), a sequel to the 1988 documentary, Slaying the Dragon: Asian Women in U.S. Television and Film.

Over the past two decades, the world has changed dramatically as global capitalism moves production, people, technologies, and ideas over borders around the globe. New formations and new communities have emerged everywhere. Now there are many more Asians from diverse backgrounds living all over the world, including in the U.S. American people are becoming more racially mixed than ever, and old notions of race, gender, and identity have been called into question. How does today’s Hollywood reflect these changes? What is new and what’s been recycled? What interventions are being made in Asian American independent films and new media?

View the PDF flyer here.

What are you? For multiracial students, declaring an identity can be complicated

Princeton Alumni Weekly
Princeton University
2010-01-13 Issue

Maya Rock (Class of 2002)

In my first few weeks at Princeton, I became accustomed to fielding questions: What’s your background? Where are your parents from? And the strikingly ­existential: What are you?  

What the questioners really meant was, what race was I? The question said a lot to me about how important race was in America, even if direct discussion of the topic seemed reserved for special holidays or ­incendiary news stories. My answer was, “I’m half black and half white” — a response that made me an anomaly. People were used to divvying one another up into five neat racial categories. After giving my response, I knew, white students would censor what they said about race in front of me, and black students would expect a certain solidarity. I often wished I did not respond at all; I didn’t want to be a spokeswoman for an experience many considered fascinating but which was, for me, ­completely normal…

Read the entire article here.

Review Essay: Racial Relations and Racism in Brazil

Culture & Psychology
Volume 13, Number 4 (December 2007)
pages 461-473
DOI: 10.1177/1354067X07082805

Marcus Eugênio Oliveira Lima
Universidade Federal de Sergipe, Brazil

Telles, Edward Eric, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. 324 pp. ISBN 978–0–691–12792–7 (pbk)

Edward Telles‘ book Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (2006) has contributed to the understanding of racial and skin color relations in Brazil. The main aspects of the past and present of racism in Brazil are discussed, such as whitening, mestizaje, and the ideology of racial democracy, and some additional data are presented. This work reflects on and brings to light the reflections of Telles and of other researchers of racism about a future of more equalitarian racial and social relations in Brazil.

Read or purchase the review here.

Challenging Mestizaje: A Gender Perspective on Indigenous and Afrodescendant Movements in Latin America

Critique of Anthropology
Vol. 25, No. 3
pages 307-330
(2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0308275X05055217

Helen I. Safa, Professor Emerita of Anthropology/Latin American Studies
University of Florida

This article compares the contemporary movements for cultural autonomy and social legitimation organized by the indigenous and Afrodescendant populations of Latin America. These movements are challenging the concept of blanqueamiento or whitening embedded in the process of mestizaje in Latin America. Whitening proclaimed the superiority of white European culture over indigenous and black culture, a concept these movements are challenging by proclaiming their own cultural autonomy. In particular, the article will examine the increasing role of women in both these movements, and how women are reconciling the tension between ethnic/racial and gender consciousness.

 Read or purchase the article here.

Patrolling Borders: Hybrids, Hierarchies and the Challenge of Mestizaje

Political Research Quarterly
Vol. 57, No. 4
pages 597-607
(2004)
DOI: 10.1177/106591290405700408

Cristina Beltran, Associate Professor of Political Science
Haverford College

“Hybridity” has become a popular concept among scholars of critical race theory and identity, particularly those studying Chicano identity. Some scholars claim that hybridity—premised on multiplicity and fluidity—represents a new approach to subjectivity, challenging the idea of a stable and unified subject. In “Patrolling Borders,” I argue that scholars are mistaken in their belief that “hybrid” or “bordered” identities are inherently transgressive or antiessentialist. By constructing a genealogy of Chicano hybridity (i.e., mestizaje) I show how Chicano nationalists produced a politicized subjectivity during the Chicano Movement that emerged as the basis for recent notions of hybridity put forward by writers like Gloria Anzaldúa. By tracing the historical construction of mestizaje, I show how hybridity continues to be a discursive practice capable of comfortably coexisting with dreams of privileged knowledge, order, and wholeness.

Read or purchase the article here.

Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South

University of North Carolina Press
March 1998
382 pages
6.125 x 9.25
8 tables, notes, bibl., index
Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-4712-1

Peter W. Bardaglio, Associate Professor of History
Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland

Winner of the 1996 James A. Rawley Prize, Organization of American Historians

In Reconstructing the Household, Peter Bardaglio examines the connections between race, gender, sexuality, and the law in the nineteenth-century South. He focuses on miscegenation, rape, incest, child custody, and adoption laws to show how southerners struggled with the conflicts and stresses that surfaced within their own households and in the larger society during the Civil War era. Based on literary as well as legal sources, Bardaglio’s analysis reveals how legal contests involving African Americans, women, children, and the poor led to a rethinking of families, sexuality, and the social order. Before the Civil War, a distinctive variation of republicanism, based primarily on hierarchy and dependence, characterized southern domestic relations. This organic ideal of the household and its power structure differed significantly from domestic law in the North, which tended to emphasize individual rights and contractual obligations. The defeat of the Confederacy, emancipation, and economic change transformed family law and the governance of sexuality in the South and allowed an unprecedented intrusion of the state into private life. But Bardaglio argues that despite these profound social changes, a preoccupation with traditional notions of gender and race continued to shape southern legal attitudes.

Read the preface here.

The Impure Imagination: Toward a Critical Hybridity in Latin American Writing

University of Minnesota Press
2006
288 pages
5 7⁄8 x 9
Paper ISBN: 0-8166-4786-0; ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4786-6
Cloth ISBN: 0-8166-4785-2; ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4785-9

Joshua Lund, Associate Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literature
University of Pittsburgh

Challenges conventional thinking about the widely accepted concept of cultural hybridity.

“Hybridity” is a term that has been applied to Latin American politics, literature, and intellectual life for more than a century. During the past two decades, it has figured in—and been transfigured by—the work of prominent postcolonialist writers and thinkers throughout the Americas.

In this pathbreaking work, Joshua Lund offers a thoughtful critique of hybridity by reading contemporary theories of cultural mixing against their historical precursors. The Impure Imagination is the first book to systematically analyze today’s dominant theories in relation to earlier, narrative manifestations of hybridity in Latin American writing, with a particular focus on Mexico and Brazil.

Generally understood as the impurification of standard or canonized forms, hybridity has historically been embraced as a basic marker of Latin American regional identity and as a strategy of resistance to cultural imperialism. Lund contends that Latin American theories and narratives of hybridity have been, and continue to be, underwritten by a structure of colonial power. Here he provides an informed critique and cogent investigation of this connection, its cultural effects, and its political implications. Using the emergence of hybridity as an analytical frame for thinking about culture in the Americas, Lund examines the contributions of influential thinkers, including Néstor García Canclini, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jorge Luis Borges, Antonio Candido, and many others.

Distinguished by its philosophical grounding and underpinned with case studies, The Impure Imagination employs postcolonial theory and theories of race as it explores Latin American history and culture. The result is an original and interrogative study of hybridity that exposes surprising—and unsettling—similarities with nationalistic discourses.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Stakes of Hybridity
• Part I: Theorizing Hybridity Today
  • 1. Genres Are Not to Be Mixed
  • 2. Erasing Race and the Persistence of Teleology
  • 3. The Ambivalence of Theorizing Hybridity: Coloniality and Anthropology
• Part II: Mexico
  • 4. New Cultural History and the Rise of Mediation
  • 5. Back Toward a Positive Mestizaje
  • 6. They Were Not a Barbarous Tribe
  • 7. Mestizaje and Post-Revolutionary Malaise: Vasconcelos and Azuela
• Part III: Brazil
  • 8. The Brazilian Family
  • 9. On the Myth of Racial Democracy
  • 10. The Iracema-effect in Casa-grande e Senzala
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index