Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

A problem that consistently confronts racist law makers in the question of defining who is “Negro” and who is “white.” In general, two schools of “thought” prevail is the United States on this issue. In about nine states a Negro is anyone who had a grandparent who was a Negro. The laws generally define such a person as “having one-eighth or more Negro blood” or as an “octoroon.” The other definition of Negro is used in at least six states: a Negro is any person who has “any trace of Negro blood.” The circularity of these statements does not seem to trouble the opponents of miscegenation.

Virginia provides an interesting example of racist legal gymnastics. Whites in that state can marry neither Negroes nor American Indians. In Virginia, a Negro is a person who has any Negro ancestor, and an American Indian is a person who had at least one Indian grandparent. If someone has one-sixteenth or less “Indian blood” then he is a white. But Virginia still hasn’t decided what you are if you have one-eighth Indian heritage, i.e. one of your great-grandparents was an Indian. Furthermore, if a man is an inhabitant of an Indian tribal reservation and has at least one Indian grandparent and less than one-sixteenth “Negro blood,” then despite the state’s definition of a Negro he may be regarded as an Indian on the reservation. Once he leaves the reservation, however, he undergoes a legal metamorphosis and becomes a Negro. Of course he can then move to Mississippi, where the “octoroon” requirement prevails, and thus become a Caucasian.

Oklahoma courts have decided that American Indians are “white” and therefore may not marry “any person of African descent.” In Alabama, however, Indians are mulattoes, according to the courts, and therefore cannot marry whites. Filipinos in Louisiana must be able to prove that they are “not basically negroid” before they can marry whites. Indiana courts have revealed that “all Mexicans are not white persons and some of them are negroes,” and therefore non-Negro Mexicans can marry either Negroes or whites.

Peter Cumminos, “Race, Marriage, and Law,” The Harvard Crimson, December 17, 1963. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1963/12/17/race-marriage-and-law-pamerican-racism/

Brown: The Last Discovery of America

Posted in Autobiography, Books, Latino Studies, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2015-11-19 02:28Z by Steven

Brown: The Last Discovery of America

Penguin Books
2012
256 Pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780142000793
eBook ISBN: 9781101161500

Richard Rodriguez

In his dazzling new memoir, Richard Rodriguez reflects on the color brown and the meaning of Hispanics to the life of America today. Rodriguez argues that America has been brown since its inception-since the moment the African and the European met within the Indian eye. But more than simply a book about race, Brown is about America in the broadest sense—a look at what our country is, full of surprising observations by a writer who is a marvelous stylist as well as a trenchant observer and thinker.

Table of Contents

Brown – Richard Rodriguez Preface
One: The Triad of Alexis de Tocqueville
Two: In the Brown Study
Three: The Prince and I
Four: Poor Richard
Five: Hispanic
Six: The Third Man
Seven: Dreams of a Temperate People
Eight: Gone West
Nine: Peter’s Avocado
Acknowledgments

Tags: Penguin Books, Richard Rodriguez

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Black Like Me

Posted in Autobiography, Books, Media Archive, Monographs, Passing, United States on 2015-02-23 21:30Z by Steven

Black Like Me

Penguin Books
2003-05-06 (originally published in 1961)
208 pages
Paperback ISBN 9780451208644

John Howard Griffin (1920-1980)

In the Deep South of the 1950s, journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross the color line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man. His audacious, still chillingly relevant eyewitness history is a work about race and humanity-that in this new millennium still has something important to say to every American.

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Losing My Cool: Love, Literature, and a Black Man’s Escape from the Crowd

Posted in Autobiography, Books, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2015-01-02 20:05Z by Steven

Losing My Cool: Love, Literature, and a Black Man’s Escape from the Crowd

Penguin Books
April 2010
240 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780143119623
ePub ISBN: 9781101404348

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Growing up, Thomas Chatterton Williams knew he loved three things in life: his parents, literature, and the intoxicating hip-hop culture that surrounded him. For years, he managed to juggle two disparate lifestyles, “keeping it real” in his friends’ eyes and studying for the SATs under his father’s strict tutelage-until it all threatened to spin out of control. Written with remarkable candor and emotional depth, Losing My Cool portrays the allure and danger of hip-hop culture with the authority of a true fan who’s lived through it all, while demonstrating the saving grace of literature and the power of the bond between father and son.

Tags: Penguin Books, Thomas Chatterton Williams

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Mixed Race Studies

Brown: The Last Discovery of America

Black Like Me

Losing My Cool: Love, Literature, and a Black Man’s Escape from the Crowd

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