Mixed Race Studies

And if We Weren’t Genetically Mixed Race?

Cubanow
Havana, Cuba
2013-12-23

Luis Toledo Sande (Translated by Dayamí Interián)

To effectively fight racism, it’s necessary to know everything about it and expose its tricks. Otherwise, we run the risk of getting trapped by them, since they are powerful, able to “innocently” camouflage themselves in the interstices of language, which isn’t a simple code of signs but the natural medium – the easiest and most regular, together with behavior – for expressing the conscience. The mentioned tricks have an effect even when opting for “the equality of the human races,” because these terms imply accepting the existence of races within the species, and this is central to the heart of the deception. The name of the evil, racism, reinforces prejudices, even when it’s used to fight the reality it designates, because it originated from the erroneous imposition of racial divisions on the human race and carries it implicitly.

Cuba has a special and honorable responsibility in cultivating an enlightening legacy – there have been some – the one that José Martí bequeathed to this country and to the world as part of his thinking, more than a hundred years before science proved, with discoveries related to the human genome, that humanity is one only, regardless of external differences among its members. In Nuestra América (Our America), an essay published in January 1891, Martí categorically and with good reason denied the existence of races among humans. This opinion has been cited countless times, but the persistence in the world and the country of the fallacies he repudiated confirms the urgency of reiterating it more often, as the revolutionary concept it is:

“There is no racial hatred, because there are no races. Puny, arm-chair minds string together and reheat the library-shelf races that the honest traveler and the cordial observer seek in vain in the justice of Nature, where the universal identity of man leaps forth in victorious love and turbulent appetite. The soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies that are diverse in form and color. Anyone who promotes and disseminates opposition or hatred among races is committing a sin against Humanity.”…

Read the entire article here.

Race has a hold on history, but it no longer has a place in science. The sheer instability and potential for misinterpretation render race useless as a scientific concept. Inventing new vocabularies of human diversity and inequity won’t be easy, but is necessary.

Nina Jablonski, “2014 : What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?,” Edge, January 16, 2014. http://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirement.

Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960

Cambridge University Press
September 2013
379 pages
18 b/w illus.
235 x 158 x 22 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781107041363

Robbie Aitken, Senior Lecturer in Imperial History
Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom

Eve Rosenhaft, Professor of German Historical Studies
University of Liverpool, United Kingdom

This groundbreaking history traces the development of Germany’s black community, from its origins in colonial Africa to its decimation by the Nazis during World War II. Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft follow the careers of Africans arriving from the colonies, examining why and where they settled, their working lives and their political activities, and giving unprecedented attention to gender, sexuality and the challenges of ‘mixed marriage’. Addressing the networks through which individuals constituted community, Aitken and Rosenhaft explore the ways in which these relationships spread beyond ties of kinship and birthplace to constitute communities as ‘black’. The study also follows a number of its protagonists to France and back to Africa, providing new insights into the roots of Francophone black consciousness and postcolonial memory. Including an in-depth account of the impact of Nazism and its aftermath, this book offers a fresh critical perspective on narratives of ‘race’ in German history.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. The first generation: from presence to community
• 2. Should I stay and can I go? Status and mobility in the institutional net
• 3. Settling down: marriage and family
• 4. Surviving in Germany: work, welfare and community
• 5. Problem men and exemplary women? Gender, class and ‘race’
• 6. Practising diaspora – politics 1918–33
• 7. Under the shadow of national socialism
• 8. Refuge France?
• Epilogue

The Propaganda War in the Rhineland: Weimar Germany, Race and Occupation after World War I

I. B. Tauris
2013-02-28
352 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9781780763460
216 x 134mm

Peter Collar

Piecing together a fractured European continent after World War I, the Versailles Peace Treaty stipulated the long term occupation of the Rhineland by Allied troops. This occupation, perceived as a humiliation by the political right, caused anger and dismay in Germany and an aggressive propaganda war broke out – heightened by an explosion of vicious racist propaganda against the use of non-European colonial troops by France in the border area. These troops, the so-called Schwarze Schmach or “Black humiliation” raised questions of race and the Other in a Germany which was to be torn apart by racial anger in the decades to come. Here, in the first English-language book on the subject, Peter Collar uses the propaganda posters, letters and speeches to reconstruct the nature and organization of a propaganda campaign conducted against a background of fractured international relations and turbulent internal politics in the early years of the Weimar Republic. This will be essential reading for students and scholars of Weimar Germany and those interested in Race and Politics in the early 20th Century.

Introduction

Under the terms of the Armistice Agreement that ended World War I, those regions of Germany that lay to the west of the Rhine were immediately occupied by Allied troops. At the subsequent Peace Treaty negotiations presupposition of German responsibility tor the war led to the imposition of extensive penalties on the nation. Included in these was the continuing occupation of the Rhineland for a number of years in order to guarantee German fulfilment of the Peace Treaty clauses relating to reparations and disarmament.

Within Germany the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty were widely regarded as being unduly harsh and were greeted by the majority with anger and dismay. However, the use of force to overturn the situation was out of the question: the only way forward was to use persuasion. Following the reluctant signing of the Treaty, Therefore, strenuous efforts were made using propaganda to influence international opinion against the allegation of German war guilt and against the Treaty provisions. It was hoped that the Allies would agree to revision of the Treaty. The Rhineland occupation was one of the main targets of the stream of propaganda of all kinds that came out of post-war Germany and it is with this aspect that this book is concerned.

However, German propaganda against the occupation was aimed not only at an international readership. At home, there was the necessity of maintaining morale in the occupied regions, which at first were virtually isolated from the remainder of Germany. It was equally important to keep the public in unoccupied Germany well informed and to maintain its interest in, and support for, the occupied regions. Propaganda came from a wide range of sources. Some were official or semi-official bodies, though at the rime efforts were made by the governments of the Reich and those of the constituent states to conceal this fact. Private individuals and organisations, some set up specifically for the purpose, also took part.

The Allied armies occupied individual zones in the Rhineland territory of four German states: Prussia, Bavaria, Hessen and Oldenburg. Much German propaganda embraced the Rhineland as a whole, making no particular distinction between the territory of individual states. This was generally the case where private organisations and individuals were involved. Naturally, the Reich government had a national perspective. But propaganda was also organised at the level at the individual states, though even then the themes often included national issues. The picture overall was thus a very complex one. The roles of the different agencies actively engaged in this propaganda, often with conflicting interests and motivation, have so far nor been comprehensively addressed by historians.

I have concentrated on one particular region, the Bavarian Palatinate, or Pfalz. There are several reasons for this. By virtue of its position and the nature of its terrain the Pfalz in the southern Rhineland held a unique strategic and military importance for both France and Germany. For France, deeply concerned about her future security, the future of the region at the end of World War I presented both opportunity and frustration. Ideally, the Rhine, which formed the eastern border of the Pfalz, would also have made a natural eastern frontier for France, for it provided a natural line of defence against arrack from the east. Direct annexation of the Pfalz, however, was out of the question in the face of hostility from other Allies. Instead, the policy adopted by the French government was to encourage the local German population to form a Rhineland state, independent of the German Reich and friendly to France, which could act as a buffer zone…

…Of all the many propaganda themes of the early Weimar years none aroused as much passion and caused as much uproar as the campaign against the use of non-European colonial troops in the French army of occupation, the propaganda against the so-called Schwafze Schmach (the Black Humiliation). It was  intended to bring events in the Rhineland to the attention of the outside world, to influence foreign public opinion and so bring pressure to bear on foreign governments, especially that of the USA, where race had long been an issue. The underlying aim was to pressure the Allies into revising the terms of the Peace Treaty. At the same time the campaign was intended to mobilise support in unoccupied Germany. The origin, organisation, main themes and national and international impact of this campaign are therefore a subsidiary focus of this study.

Schwarze Schmach propaganda has already received considerable attention from other historians. Among the early studies, that by Keith Nelson drew mainly, though not exclusively, on archives in Washington to assess the international impact of the campaign and particularly its effect on the North American public. Gisela Lebzelter analysed the character and symbolism of the campaign in terms of the national mood prevailing in Germany following defeat in 1918, bringing in attitudes concerning racial superiority and drawing parallels with the development of anti-Semitism. The official sources cited by Lebzelter are almost exclusively drawn from the files of the Auswartiges Amt (Reich Foreign Minisrry) in Berlin, to which organisation she attributed major influence on the campaign.

The work by Reiner Pommerin had as its main theme the fate suffered by the few hundred children of mixed race who were born as a result o relationships between colonial troops and local German women. Such children offended against National Socialist concepts of racial purity and in 1937 a programme of enforced mass sterilization was carried our on them. Pommerin outlined the development of the Schwarze Schmach campaign, and noted the main organisations taking part, before exploring concerns about racial purity – evidently already beginning to surface in the Weimar period – through to the National Socialist era. The role of neither the Pfalzzenrale nor rhe Rheinische Frauenliga (Rhineland Women’s League), organisations that feature prominently in this study, received much mention. This may have resulted from a reliance mainly on the records of the Foreign Ministry, for relatively little reference was made to the extensive records that are available in the Bavarian State Archives in Munich. In passing it may also be noted that at the time these two studies were made records held in the Potsdam archives of the former DDR were nor available…

Detecting Winnifred Eaton

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Published online: 2014-01-16
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlt078

Jinny Huh, Assistant Professor of English
University of Vermont

In her recent introduction to Winnifred Eaton’s Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model (1916), Karen E. H. Skinazi explores the relationship between racial ambiguity—that of both the anonymous author and the heroines in Marion and its predecessor, Me: A Book of Remembrance (1915)—and the audience’s ability to detect racial coding. “Me’s success,” Skinazi states, “has been predicated on a mystery that allowed each reader the chance to become a literary Sherlock Holmes, cracking the codes of its vault of shocking secrets” (xvii). Later, Skinazi writes that a New York Times reviewer, playing detective, solves Eaton’s racial passing utilizing the science of detection à la Edgar Allan Poe (xxi-xxii). Skinazi’s allusions to the art of detection, although brief, are astute, leading to this essay’s rereading of Eaton’s legacy through the lens of detection and the anxieties produced by its failures, especially the threat of racial passing. It is no coincidence that Eaton published her fiction at a time when both classic detective fiction and African American passing tales were at the peak of their popularity.

Few critics have examined Eaton’s role in the detective genre. This essay responds to this oversight by arguing that Eaton’s reliance on a trope of racial and ethnic passing, both in her choice of pseudonym and in her Japanese romances, cannot be fully appreciated without situating her within the context of the panic about detecting passing that swept America during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The unique lens of detective fiction allows us further to conceptualize Eaton’s role as a founding figure of Asian American fiction. This essay also highlights Eaton’s familiarity with rules of genre, particularly detective fiction and African American passing narratives, and her participation in the construction of racial epistemologies that were then being codified by…

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Brazil Endorses International Decade for People of African Descent

Americas Quarterly: The Policy Journal for Our Hemisphere
Blog
2014-01-16

Shari Wejsa

On Monday, December 23, 2013, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing the International Decade for People of African Descent, which will run from January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2024. The aim will be to raise social consciousness in the fight against prejudice, intolerance, xenophobia, and racism.

The resolution follows a series of related efforts, including the General Assembly’s December 12, 1997 resolution, which convened the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, and the December 16, 2005 resolution, which guided the implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action.

Assembly representatives emphasized its importance. Verene Shepherd, chair of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, stated that the “indigestible fishbone of slavery” continued to stick in the throat due to the persistence of its legacies.  She added that the impact of slavery and colonialism were most obvious in the Americas and on the African content itself.

Responses from Brazilian representatives reinforced this perspective.  Bruno Santos de Oliveira noted that the 2010 national census data indicated that “more than 100 million Brazilians, more than half the population, had declared themselves African descendants,” and that the country has the largest number of people of African descent outside of Africa. The Brazilian Delegation recalled that the country continues to face racism and intolerance inherited from its colonial past.

This legacy is evident in high poverty levels, which vary significantly by region within Brazil. More than half of all poor Brazilians live in the Northeast, which is home to the highest concentration of African descendants. In the Northeast, the head of the household is often illiterate, despite attending school, and works in agriculture. Poor households are generally quite large, having nearly twice as many children when compared to families in higher socioeconomic levels, with limited resources and access to utilities. In Salvador, the capital of the northeastern state of Bahia, approximately 80 percent of the population is said to be of African ancestry.  Some critics claim that “the majority of Brazilians of African descent in Salvador are an example of continuing discrimination, living in the poorest areas, their lives often blighted by violence and largely excluded from political power.” Although recent studies indicate that the income gap between black and mixed race Brazilians and that of white Brazilians has been falling, a notable difference remains. From access to a high quality education to health and housing, Brazilians of African descent are usually worse off than their white counterparts…

Read the entire article here.

Editorial January 2014: On Reading Two Recent Memoirs by Afro-Germans

The Collegium for African American Research (CAAR)
January 2014

Gundolf Graml, Associate Professor of German and Director of German Studies
Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia

Two recent memoirs by German authors with an African connection emphasize that German history cannot be written without including the histories and perspectives of black Germans (as well as that of many other non-white people).

In Deutsch sein und Schwarz dazu [Being German and also Being Black], published in 2013 with Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, author Theodor Michael takes a long and probing look back at his experiences as a black German. Born in 1925 to a white German mother from the Eastern Prussian provinces and a black Cameroonian father, Michael’s childhood and youth coincided with the decline of the democratic German Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism.

In a low key style Michael recollects his participation in the infamous Völkerschauen [colonial peoples exhibits] organized by circusses and zoos. He describes his attempts to get by as hotel page and as extra in some of the Third Reich’s anti-British colonial films. And he details the toll that life under the Nuremberg race laws took on his body and mind. While his siblings managed to get out of Germany, Theodor Michael stayed behind, spending the last years of the regime as a forced laborer in a factory outside of Berlin, where he survived the war. After liberation, he managed to get into the Western zone, where he then tried to rebuild his life…

…Jennifer Teege’s memoir, Amon: Mein Großvater hätte mich erschossen [Amon: My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me], published in 2013 with Rowohlt Verlag, addresses the topic from the perspective of the second postwar generation of Germans. Teege, born in 1970 to a white German mother and a Nigerian father, grew up in an orphanage and later was adopted by a white middle-class German family. Decades later she finds out that her mother’s father, her grandfather, was Amon Göth, the concentration commander of Plaszow near Krakow, whose brutality and inhumanity are depicted in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. For Teege, who has lived in Israel for several years and worked with Holocaust survivors, the sudden discovery of a biological connection to one of the most infamous Nazi perpetrators was surpassed only by the shock that the grandmother to whom she has been attached so closely was Göth’s girlfriend and one of his most ardent defenders…

Read the entire review of the books here.

Amon: Mein Großvater hätte mich erschossen [Amon: My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me]

Rowohlt Verlag
2013-09-20
272 pages
Hardcover ISBN 978-3-498-06493-8

Jennifer Teege with Nikola Sellmair

Es ist ein Schock, der ihr ganzes Selbstverständnis erschüttert: Mit 38 Jahren erfährt Jennifer Teege durch einen Zufall, wer sie ist. In einer Bibliothek findet sie ein Buch über ihre Mutter und ihren Großvater Amon Göth. Millionen Menschen kennen Göths Geschichte. In Steven Spielbergs Film «Schindlers Liste» ist der brutale KZ-Kommandant der Saufkumpan und Gegenspieler des Judenretters Oskar Schindler. Göth war verantwortlich für den Tod tausender Menschen und wurde 1946 gehängt. Seine Lebensgefährtin Ruth Irene, Jennifer Teeges geliebte Großmutter, begeht 1983 Selbstmord.

Jennifer Teege ist die Tochter einer Deutschen und eines Nigerianers. Sie wurde bei Adoptiveltern groß und hat danach in Israel studiert. Jetzt ist sie mit einem Familiengeheimnis konfrontiert, das sie nicht mehr ruhen lässt. Wie kann sie ihren jüdischen Freunden noch unter die Augen treten? Und was soll sie ihren eigenen Kindern erzählen? Jennifer Teege beschäftigt sich intensiv mit der Vergangenheit. Sie trifft ihre Mutter wieder, die sie viele Jahre nicht gesehen hat.

Gemeinsam mit der Journalistin Nikola Sellmair recherchiert sie ihre Familiengeschichte, sucht die Orte der Vergangenheit noch einmal auf, reist nach Israel und nach Polen. Schritt für Schritt wird aus dem Schock über die Abgründe der eigenen Familie die Geschichte einer Befreiung.

Deutsch sein und schwarz dazu: Erinnerungen eines Afro-Deutschen [Being German and also Being Black: Memoirs of an Afro-German]

Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag
November 2013
200 pages
Hardback ISBN: ISBN 978-3-423-26005-3
ePub ISBN: 978-3-423-42033-4
eBook ISBN: 978-3-423-42034-1

Theodor Michael

Theodor Michaels Autobiografie ist so aberwitzig, dass sie erfunden sein könnte, wenn sie nicht allzu wahr wäre. Er entfaltet in ›Deutsch sein und schwarz dazu‹ eine Welt, die man so nicht gekannt hat, beschrieben von einem Mann, den man für seine Kraft, das alles zu bewältigen, nur bewundern kann, und dafür, dass es ihm gelungen ist, die Menschlichkeit zu bewahren. Theodor Michael erzählt ganz nüchtern, aber die Ereignisse sprechen für sich.

Der Lebensrückblick des schwarzen deutschen Zeitzeugen Theodor Michael

Theodor Michael wurde 1925 in Berlin als Sohn einer Deutschen und eines Kameruners geboren wurde. Als sein Vater nach Deutschland kam, war Kamerun noch deutsches Schutzgebiet, sprich Kolonie. Afrikaner wurden in Deutschland ganz freundlich aufgenommen. Nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg waren die Kolonien verloren und das Klima wurde deutlich unfreundlicher. Man fand, die Schwarzen sollten den Deutschen keine Arbeitsplätze wegnehmen. Aber in den sehr beliebten Völkerschauen kamen sie noch unter, die “Artfremden” mit dem “negroiden Einschlag”. Sogar in der Nazi-Zeit, als Statisten in den äußerst beliebten Kolonialfilmen. Doch dann landeten sie im KZ oder in Zwangsarbeiterlagern. So erging es auch Theodor Michael: Nachdem seine Eltern starben, schlug er sich als Page, Portier und Komparse durch, bis er 1943, mit 18 Jahren, in einem Zwangsarbeiterlager interniert wurde.

Deutsch sein und schwarz dazu‹ hat Theodor Michael in der Vergangenheit viele Probleme bereitet

Theodor Michael hat das alles überstanden, um dann nach Kriegsende feststellen zu müssen, dass er der Kollaboration verdächtigt wurde, weil er überlebt hatte. Damals hätte er es sich nicht träumen lassen, dass er einmal als Regierungsdirektor beim BND in den Ruhestand gehen würde.

Seit seiner Pensionierung engagiert er sich für die afro-deutsche Gemeinde und ist ein gefragter Ansprechpartner für die Presse.

Growing Up Half Asian American: Curse or Gift?

Asian Fortune: your source for all things asian american
2014-01-15

Tamara Treichel

In this era of globalization and liberalization, being – and identifying as – biracial is becoming increasingly common. Yet only a few decades ago, unions between the races which may lead to biracial offspring were punishable by law in different countries. Think about Nazi-era Germany and eugenics, where Rassenschaender (“defilers of race”) were paraded through the streets for marrying or having intimate relationships with “non-Aryans,” Apartheid-era South Africa, where interracial relationships were also punishable by law, and yes, even the proverbial melting pot, the United States….

…In fact, interracial marriages were prohibited in the United States as early as colonial times, and were only permitted in the United States some three centuries later, in 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia finally legalized marriage across racial lines.

Asian Fortune talked to several HAPAs both at home and as far abroad as Tokyo about the challenges and opportunities facing this unique demographic group. (A note on terminology: HAPA is used here in the sense of Half Asian Pacific American; meanwhile, there is a Hawaiian Pidgin term hapa, which means “part” or “mixed,” and Hawaiians use it to refer to persons of any kind of mixed ethnic heritage). Many of them talked about the difficulties they have in identifying with any particular race…

…Kip Fulbeck, a well-known artist, slam poet and filmmaker said he identified with HAPA more than any specific race. Fulbeck is the author of several books including Part Asian, 100% HAPA as well as the director of a dozen films such as Banana Split and Lilo & Me. His “HAPA Project” is a stunning collection of portraits and handwritten words of HAPA individuals…

Read the entire article here.