Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

People of mixed racial heritage, or “mulattoes,” symbolized the dependence of white men on black labor, both in the field and in the bed. Marked by their very skin color and other features as products of the white-black encounter in the South, mulatto women were obviously white and not-white, like “our white Caroline.” They were products of the long encounter between white exploiters of labor and black sources of labor, productive and reproductive. Their commodification reminded all that, in the South, every child of an enslaved mother was some form of slave laborer, an arrangement that enabled plantation slavery to function. Every enslaved man, woman, and child was a repository of reproductive capital and a source of production. The white political economy of the South would have collapsed without the legal and cultural fictions that assigned the “mulatto” and other children of African women to the created categories “black” and “enslaved.” Women like the “fair maid Martha,” and “the Yellow Girl Charlott” also, in their phenotypes, illustrated the long past of white sexual assault. “Mulatto” women thus embodied white dependency and white power, and offered men the chance to recapitulate and reexamine the past that had produced both white power and mixed-race individuals. Unwillingly, such women introduced a pornographic history, one obscene yet for that very reason more lusted-after, into the parlors, bedrooms, and above all, the markets of the elite white man’s world. They made flesh the years of white men desiring and depending on women (and men) who were supposedly less than civilized, Christian, or even human.

Edward E. Baptist, ““Cuffy,” “Fancy Maids,” and “One-Eyed Men”: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States, 1876,” The American Historical Review, (December, 2001).

Rheinland

Posted in Europe, History, Media Archive, Videos on 2013-10-09 15:03Z by Steven

Rheinland

2013
Mokoari Street Productions
Berlin, Germany
Written and directed by Lemohang J. Mosese
Produced by Hannah Stockmann, Julius B. Franklin & Christian Wagner

During the first World War the French government forced African men—many coming from Senegal or Cameroon —from their colonies to fight for the French army in the Rheinland. In 1919, there were between 25,000 and 40,000 African soldiers from the colonies based in the Rhineland. After Germany’s defeat, some of the soldiers stayed and founded families.

Their lives, which were already scarred by discrimination and racism were threatened existentially when Hitler and the Nazi-Party seized power. In 1937 the so called Commission Number 3 was instated which had the secret order to sterilise all so called “Rheinlandbastards“, a derogatory term used for the offsprings of white German women and African men. Local officials reported the “Rheinlandbastards” living under their jurisdiction and with their help a vast number of children was forcefully sterilised or disappeared forever. In “Mein Kampf” Hitler referred to them as contaminators of the white race “by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe.”

Rheinland tells the story of the so called “Rheinlandbastards” through the eyes of 12-year-old Joachim, the son of the Senegalese Awa and the German Annemarie. Joachim is forced to deal with his identity when the village his family lives in becomes more and more hostile.

For more information, click here.

Tags: Afro-Germans, Christian Wagner, Germany, Hannah Stockmann, Julius B. Franklin, Lemohang J. Mosese, Mokoari Street Productions

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Mixed Race Studies

Rheinland

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