Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

“The debate about the slave trade, and of slavery itself, formed a critical background to everything that happens in the book. In fact, I would contend that the rhetoric around abolitionism was one of the most important factors in how the Anglo-Atlantic World thought about race at the end of the eighteenth century. For mixed-race migrants, there were three specific discussions that were relevant to them. First, activists working to abolish the slave trade started arguing in 1788 that once enslaved people were treated better and encouraged to marry one another, then they would increase naturally as a population, making the slave trade obsolete. That argument produced an ancillary claim that reformers should prevent interracial sex in the colonies because it undercut the natural growth of enslaved populations. In other words, the interracial relationships that produced mixed-race offspring suddenly became political, not just moral, problems for reformers. Second, when the Haitian Revolution broke out in 1791, French and English observers blamed abolitionists for stirring up trouble. But they also pointed to an event in the colony of Saint Domingue (that becomes Haiti) a few months before the Revolution. Vincent Ogé, a mixed-race Dominguan educated in France, led a militia of color demanding equal rights. They were quickly put down, but whites across the Caribbean assumed that his metropolitan education had radicalized him, and helped to inspire the later enslaved uprising. Jamaicans of color living in Britain, who had the same kind of biography as Ogé, were now even more threatening. Third, once the slave trade was abolished in 1807, observers immediately grew concerned that whites would flee the West Indies in droves, as the islands would no longer be economically productive. Someone still had to oversee these colonies, though, and mixed-race migrants who had been educated in Britain came to be seen as the best replacements for that white population that would inevitably leave the Caribbean.” —Daniel Livesay

Christopher Jones, “Q&A with Daniel Livesay, author of Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833,” The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History, April 20, 2018. https://earlyamericanists.com/2018/04/20/qa-with-daniel-livesay-author-of-children-of-uncertain-fortune-mixed-race-jamaicans-in-britain-and-the-atlantic-family-1733-1833/.

Rachel Dolezal 1 year later: ‘I don’t have any regrets about how I identify’

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, Passing, United States, Videos on 2016-04-13 00:12Z by Steven

Rachel Dolezal 1 year later: ‘I don’t have any regrets about how I identify’

The Today Show
2016-04-12

Eun Kyung Kim

Rachel Dolezal said she remains puzzled about why people have questioned her racial identity but is “ready to move on” from the controversy that made her a household name last spring.

“I don’t have any regrets about how I identify. I’m still me and nothing about that has changed,” the former NAACP chapter president told TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie on Tuesday.

Dolezal, who was born to white parents, created a national debate about racial identity after she told the world in a TODAY interview last June, “I identify as black.”…

Read the story and watch the interview here.

Tags: Rachel A. Dolezal, Rachel Dolezal, Savannah Clark Guthrie, Savannah Guthrie, The Today Show, TODAY, Today Show

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Mixed Race Studies

Rachel Dolezal 1 year later: ‘I don’t have any regrets about how I identify’

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