Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The number of children born out of the widespread practice of sexual intimacy forced the colonial administration and the Belgian Parliament to debate what they termed the problème des métis, “the mulatto problem.” The issue was the treatment of the mulatto offspring of these unions: whether they should endure the same status as the rest of the Congolese population or whether they should be considered an intermediate group above the latter but beneath the Europeans. Attempts at resolving the dilemma produced a series of contradictory policies, resulting in considerable ambiguity. This ambiguity came to characterize the lives of the growing population of métis throughout the entire colonial period (Jeurissen 1999; Stoler 2002). Usually, the status of the metis depended upon the degree of recognition and acknowledgment of parenthood by their fathers. Those who were not recognized were often abandoned by their mothers because of the ostracism that they faced when returning to their native villages. The abandoned children usually ended up living in Catholic and Protestant missionary boarding schools, which were created for this purpose.

Jean Muteba Rahier, “Métis/Mulâtre, Mulato, Mulatto, Negro, Moreno, Mundele Kaki, Black,… The Wanderings and Meanderings of Identities” in Problematizing Blackness: Self Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States, eds. Jean Muteba Rahier and Percey C. Hintzen, (London: Routledge, 2003): 86.

Kamala Harris’s record and character matter — not the race of her father and husband

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2019-02-23 21:38Z by Steven

Kamala Harris’s record and character matter — not the race of her father and husband

The Washington Post
2019-02-22

Colbert I. King

Sen. Kamala D. Harris arrives at a Harlem restaurant in New York for lunch with the Rev. Al Sharpton on Thursday. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

California Democratic Sen. Kamala D. Harris hardly had time to finish basking in the glow of her presidential bid’s five-star rollout before 20,000 adoring Oakland hometown fans, when two black-media-inspired questions hit her in the face: Why did she marry a white man? And: Is she black enough?

Harris has answers to both questions. They will appear in this column. But let’s take a look at why these questions turn up in a presidential contest.

Questions about race, sex and interracial coupling aren’t new. Warring over them is older than the Republic…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Colbert I. King, Kamala D. Harris, Kamala Devi Harris, Kamala Harris, The Washington Post, Washington Post

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Mixed Race Studies

Kamala Harris’s record and character matter — not the race of her father and husband

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