Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

As this chapter will argue, soon after Anglo Texas’ separation from Mexico in the 1835-1836 revolution, white elites created a society rooted in the absolute legal separation of the white and black worlds. In order to prevent the development of a mulatto population that might inherit the political and economic wealth of the racial ruling class, white leaders promulgated harsh legal penalties in the 1840s and 1850s attached to blackness. Blacks faced slavery, the death penalty for many crimes punished less severely for whites, and laws defining the offspring of mixed-race parents as enslaved bastards ineligible for inheritance. Whiteness was defined simply as the absence of blackness, Indian blood, or other racial “pollution,” although many who were socially accepted as white had been polluted in this manner. Elites hoped that the social superiority all whites ostensibly enjoyed over blacks ameliorated disparities of power and wealth within the white community.

To the dismay of elites, however, frequently severe weather and a cash-strapped economy made life insecure for the non-slaveholding majority. In Dallas, divisions developed along economic and regional lines, leading to outbursts of violence that disturbed elite confidence and security. When a fire destroyed downtown Dallas in 1860, elite suspicions settled on white abolitionists born outside the South. The violence of 1860 created the terrain on which postwar racial ideology developed. Elites labeled those opposed to their notions of race and class hierarchy as uncivilized and therefore not fully white. After Reconstruction, the city leadership embraced a more fluid concept of race in which white status could be gained or lost based on acceptance of elite social norms. This more flexible definition of whiteness, which held dissent in check, shaped Dallas politics for more than 130 years afterward.

Michael Phillips, White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 1. The Music of Cracking Necks: Dallas Civilization and Its Discontents.

Last Child

Posted in Books, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Novels, United States, Women on 2011-11-07 01:24Z by Steven

Last Child

Henry Holt and Company (an imprint of Macmillan)
October 2005
240 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 240 pages,
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8050-7739-1, ISBN10: 0-8050-7739-1
E-Book ISBN: 978-1-4299-3709-2, ISBN10: 1-4299-3709-2

Michael Spooner, Director
Utah State University Press

A mixed-race girl must grow up quickly when danger threatens her world

Rosalie’s biggest problem used to be her own divided feelings. The constant tug-of-war between her white half and her Native American half is hard. She even has two names: Rosalie when she’s at the fort with her father and Last Child when she’s in the village with her mother.

But now a steamboat has carried smallpox into Rosalie’s world—and the Mandans have no resistance to the disease. Suddenly the name Last Child is all too real.

Set during the smallpox epidemic of 1837, this is the powerful story of a mixed-race girl fighting her way into adulthood against all odds.

Tags: Henry Holt and Company, MacMillan, Mandans, Michael Spooner

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What Are You? Voices of Mixed-Race Young People

Posted in Books, Family/Parenting, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2010-10-05 00:17Z by Steven

What Are You? Voices of Mixed-Race Young People

Henry Holt and Company and imprint of MacMillan
June 1999
288 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8050-5968-7, ISBN10: 0-8050-5968-7

Pearl Fuyo Gaskins

Awards: American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults; IRA Notable Books for a Global Society; Books for the Teen Age, New York Public Library; NCSS-CBC Notable Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies; Booklist Editors’ Choice

In the past three decades, the number of interracial marriages in the United States has increased by more than 800 percent. Now over four million children and teenagers do not identify themselves as being just one race or another.

Here is a book that allows these young people to speak in their own voices about their own lives.

What Are You? is based on the interviews the author has made over the past two years with mixed-race young people around the country. These fresh voices explore issues and topics such as dating, families, and the double prejudice and double insight that come from being mixed, but not mixed-up.

Tags: Henry Holt and Company, Pearl Fuyo Gaskins

Mixed Race Studies

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What Are You? Voices of Mixed-Race Young People

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