Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Political considerations forced [John Leslie] Powell and [Walter Ashby] Plecker to amend their iron-clad, white-supremacy law [The Racial Integrity Act of 1924] that defined as white only a person with no trace of non-white blood. Some of the leading families of Virginia, who took pride in claiming descent from John Rolfe and Pocahontas, took umbrage at being classified as inferior non-whites. This concern led to the creation of the “Pocahontas clause” which classified as white those individuals with no other non-caucasic blood than one-sixteenth or less the blood of the American Indian. Following this amendment, the bill sailed through the legislature. Thus, once all “historically-white”, upper-class Virginians were protected, the law gained tremendous support. Racism, science, and social control interacted to mediate the law’s provisions. The law would remain in effect, unchanged, for 43 years. Throughout that time it would be enforced by vigilant county court clerks and local vital statistics registrars. As late as 1945, Plecker lobbied a lawyer to push for a conviction under the miscegenation statute: “We attach great importance to this case, and we hope that you will fight it to a finish in the effort to secure an annulment for miscegenation, not for desertion or any other cause.” Plecker sought validation of the law through strict racial classification and a mass of successful precedent-setting prosecutions.

Gregory Michael Dorr, “Principled Expediency: Eugenics, Naim v. Naim, and the Supreme Court,” The American Journal of Legal History (Volume 42, Number 2, April, 1998), 127-128.

I speak, therefore I am: Meus idiomas

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2017-05-05 15:38Z by Steven

I speak, therefore I am: Meus idiomas

Varsity
Cambridge, England
2017-02-10

Eduardo Baptista

“But who am I to patronise them? I seem to have developed a tendency to shout mata (literally ‘kill’ in Portuguese) whenever I or my teammates execute a play under high pressure.”
Bianca Bueno

Eduardo Baptista talks about identity at the crossroads of swearing in Portuguese, struggling with Korean fluency, and sounding like a History student in English

It’s no news that we use language everyday to convey knowledge, ideas, and emotions of the most diverse kind. But it’s more intriguing how language directs us as much as we direct language, kind of like a stubborn GPS that doesn’t adjust to the driver’s every whim. It is often difficult to be self-aware of just how much language affects our personality and how we express it.

In my case, this self-awareness came about naturally, a consequence of being a mixed-race international student in Cambridge, spending holidays in Portugal, skipping Korean school as a kid, and experiencing some other fantastic cultures along the way…

Read the entire article here.