Mixed Race Studies

They Wouldn’t Allow Us to Use Daddy’s Last Name: A Family Historian’s Curiosity Leads to Revolutionary Results

Bayou Talk Newspaper
Volume 25, Number 7 (July 2013)
pages 1-8

Anita R. Paul

Most family history researchers know that surnames are an important key to finding ancestors. They also know that names can often lead to dead ends due to misspellings and other misinformation. For Michael N. Henderson, a retired Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy, the spelling of a family surname sparked his curiosity and eventually led to a nearly 30-year journey to uncover a hidden truth about his Louisiana roots.

“It all began when I was a kid,” recalls Henderson, a native of Algiers—a neighborhood in New Orleans, Louisiana—who now lives near Atlanta, Georgia. “I asked my mom why her mother’s maiden name was spelled Mathieu instead of Matthew.” She credited it to the family being Louisiana Creole and simply chose to spell the surname that way. Fortunately for Henderson, that answer did not satisfy him, so he sought a more suitable explanation. In the midst of his searching, which became a hobby and eventually an obsession during much of his naval career, he uncovered one fact after another about his family’s history and soon became the family historian, a role that did not always meet with genuine excitement from his relatives.

“When you start digging into the past, some family members get nervous. They’re afraid you might uncover some deep, dark secret that’s been buried for generations,” Henderson explains. Others, mostly those of the younger generation, simply shrugged off Henderson’s many attempts to share his findings. “My nieces and nephews have never been keen on listening to my ancestral stories, except, of course, when the time came for a school project.”

As his genealogy research continued, a conversation with a distant cousin opened a genealogical can of worms that caused Henderson to delve deeply into the unique three-tiered social structure of French and Spanish colonial Louisiana. He studied the Code Noir (Black Code) that regulated relationships between Europeans, Native American and African enslaved people, and the distinct class of free people of color…

…Uncovering this relationship revealed the answer to a haunting statement that had been in Henderson’s family for generations: “They wouldn’t allow us to use Daddy’s last name.” As Henderson discovered, Agnes assumed the first name of her French consort, Mathieu, as her own surname and passed it on to their mixed-race children and the generations following. This answered the question about the spelling of Henderson’s maternal grandmother’s surname and consequently exposed the answer to the generations-long lament about not being able to use “Daddy’s last name.”…

Read the entire article here.

An Interview with Lise Funderburg

Hot Metal Bridge: published by Writing MFA students at the University of Pittsburgh
Spring 2009 (All The Way Down)

Interview by Liberty Hultberg

Lise Funderburg is the author of Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity (1994) and the memoir Pig Candy (2008), which has been described as part memoir, part travelogue, and part social history, about race, mortality, filial duty…and barbecue. She has written numerous articles for publications including O Magazine, Self Magazine. She is a creative writing instructor at the University of Pennsylvania and resides in Philadelphia.

HMB: What prompted you to write Pig Candy? At what point did you know this needed to be a book?

LF: My dad got sick and almost died. I was in my late thirties, and I realized, suddenly, that he wasn’t going to be around forever. He recovered fully from that incident, but I realized there were things about my father that I just didn’t know because he’d been a very close-to-the-vest kind of person growing up. I wanted to figure out who he was; he was a curious combination of disparate elements. He was hardworking and reliable and charming and funny and unpredictable and cantankerous and mean and abusive. He was a very strict father, but in some ways he didn’t care about formalities at all. So who was this man and what made him tick?

I thought: Here’s this guy who’s so different from me demographically. He’s a man born in the twenties right before the Great Depression into the Jim Crow South in Monticello, a rural Georgia town. He grew up Black, and I grew up a mixed race girl in the integrated North in an urban environment during Civil Rights. There’s so much about what shaped his life that I don’t know anything about and how will I find this out? So I started to interview him. I was already a journalist, so I had this idea that maybe it was a book, but I didn’t really know what form the book was going to take. I interviewed him on safe subjects, which were his jobs; he was such a hardworking person that I thought this was something he’ll talk to me about, and it wouldn’t have the goopy, unpleasant (to him) qualities of emotion…

Read the entire interview here.

Moving forward on race – by understanding our own prism

Embrace Diverse Schools: Beyond celebrating: Debunking myth-perceptions to build strong diverse schools and communities
Welcome to Eileen Kugler’s Blog
2013-07-26

Eileen Kugler

“I don’t get it. Why do we need to be talking about race?” a commenter wrote on a LinkedIn group on diversity and inclusion. In her high school, “everyone got along great and we actually looked down on those who were prejudiced against one race over another.” So she can’t figure what the big issue is right now.

Her authentic comment is just the reason we need to keep discussing – and dealing with race. We each see issues through our own personal prism. That prism is formed by our life’s experiences that include our race, ethnicity, and religion, but also factors such as our family structure and where we grew up, right down to the neighborhood we called home.

President Obama did a courageous job of helping white people to understand what it feels like to be a Black man in this country, even as we are making strides every day…

Read the entire article here.

One of the most fruitful sources of genetic variation in man is race mixture. Although the term is something of a misnomer, its usage is firmly established. Actually anything from the latest international marriage of an American heiress with a British peer to the miscegenation of Australian aborigines with Europeans is called race mixture. In no case does race mixture in man represent the crossing of pure-line races such as might be possible in the laboratory, for pure-line human races do not exist. The very fact that pure human races are not to be found in nature—a situation which, paradoxically, “race mixture” has done much to bring about—makes it impossible to draw a hard and fast line between miscegenation of related peoples and the crossing of genetically distinct populations. The process of mixture, however, whether or not between closely related or widely diverse stocks is one that tends to create new gene combinations and therefore increased variation. The gene distributions which are known, the geographic continuities of physical variation and the prehistoric as well as the historic records are abundant evidence for the belief that mixture has always been a significant factor in man’s past. That it will involve a larger proportion of the world’s population in the future is not unlikely in view of the increasing contacts between the peoples of the earth. In the New World great areas are even now inhabited by populations of mixed blood. In the colonial empires of European nations, half-caste groups quickly become established. The migrations and resettlements of the past which brought millions of diverse Europeans to the United States, the dislocations of the present war, the opening up of Asiatic Russia, also provide fertile opportunities for reshuffling the genes of mankind. Up to the present only a handful of students have concerned themselves with the biological consequences of race mixture. Propagandists and Nordophiles like Madison Grant, echoing the racist literature of Germany, see nothing but evil in the process. At least, the evil was inevitable as far as the Nordics were concerned, for in the view of the racists the manifest supremacy of the Nordics could only suffer deterioration by miscegenation since they had no peer with which to mingle in equality. Although this extreme view was characteristic mainly of certain popular writers distinguished by their zeal rather than their scientific attainments, several geneticists have suggested that in crossing divergent races serious disharmonies were likely to develop. Castle among others has effectively disproved these claims, but there still lingers a common belief that the mulatto, for example, is inferior, at least physically, to either Negro or white. The high rate of tuberculosis among mulattoes is sometimes cited as evidence of this. Careful studies of the environment, however, usually reveals that in this condition other factors than race are determinants.

Contrary to belief that race mixture leads to deterioration, an actual superiority in some instances may characterize the half-caste population. Fischer’s study of the Rehobother Bastards, a cross between South African Boers and Hottentots (certainly as divergent a pair of stocks as might be expected to mate) disclosed evidence of a hybrid vigor which in fertility surpassed the performances of either Boers or Hottentots. In a study of the Polynesian-English descendants of the Mutineers of the Bounty, I found in the early generations a marked superiority over the parental stocks not only in physical size but also in the birth rate. Boas’s investigations on half-breed Indians indicated something of the same order. Such a phenomenon as hybrid vigor or heterosis is well known in biology and is now commercially applied in the propagation of hybrid corn, whose increased yields over pure-line strains has led to its wide adoption in agriculture. Experimental animals display the same results in certain crosses. There is then every reason to suppose that the increase of size, vigor, and fertility which is sometimes found in human hybrids is part of the same general biological principle. While it would be erroneous to assume that race mixture in every case leads to an enhanced biological status, it is worth considering as one of the possible explanations of the recurrent epochs of outstanding intellectual activity that mark European history. The intermingling of various strains that preceded the classic development of Greece and the miscegenation that accompanied the “Volkerwanderung” of the millennium before the Renaissance suggest that an unusually active reshuffling of genes produces a heightened vitality that finds expression in high peaks of civilization. This is not a novel construction of European history, but it does receive added credence from recent observations on race mixture.

H. L. Shapiro, “Society and Biological Man,” The Science of Man in the World Crisis, Ralph Linton, ed., (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945).

Medical Experimentation and Race in the Eighteenth-century Atlantic World

Social History of Medicine
Volume 26, Issue 3 (August 2013)
pages 364-382
DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkt011

Londa Schiebinger, The John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science
Stanford University

This article examines medical experimentation with humans in the Atlantic world. Physicians in this period tended to use bodies interchangeably in medical trials; subjects were scarce and, for the most part, used with extreme care. Experimentalists in this period, however, faced a paradox. In the second half of the eighteenth century naturalists across Europe began focusing attention on what they perceived to be racial differences. At the same time medical experimentalists required that human bodies be fully interchangeable if results were to hold universally. The dilemma, then, was this: on the one hand, physicians tended to emphasize racial difference with respect to the science of race; on the other hand, they assumed uniformity across humans with respect to developing drug therapies. It was in this context that important questions arose about whether experiments done among Caribbean slave populations were valid for Europeans.

Read or purchase the article here.

imagining hybrid cities

The State
2013-07-25

Tiana Reid

I started this series on crossing and mixing by considering temporality and its hold on how we imagine hybridity. The recent discourse centered on the unshakable ‘browning’ or ‘beiging’ of mostly urban populations in the decades to come offers itself up through the prevailing ‘hybrid futures’ narrative. In The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory, NYU professor Tavia Nyong’o made it clear that his 2009 book was not “yet another attempt to claim mixed-race America as a utopian future that ‘will’ just happen ‘in time,’ as Theodore Tilton held.” And last month, still, a claim against this mixed futurism persisted in my writing for The State as I drew on Lee Edelman to consider the “figural Child” as the ultimate citizen.

What is in the background of this, all of this, but also undergirding it, is the hybrid city. The urban and the cosmopolitan. While ‘hybrid cities’ isn’t necessarily an accepted or used concept at large, a quick Google and Google image search shows a technology-based, almost people-free imaginary. We know, too, that hybrid cities come synonymously with hybrid cars, that is, ‘pure’ innovation and more recently perhaps, the ‘White entrepreneurial guy.’ And, what’s more, they’re Jetsons-esque, a projection in which jokes are made to signify that the future is White.

Here, I’d like to think again about hybrid futures. And, broadly speaking, how race codes the city without falling into what, say, the contested terrain of afrofuturism at large attempts to counter, i.e. that blackness and technology (/future) do not make sense together. The city, more so than the country, is emblematic of everything new. The hybrid future, then, is a decidedly urban one…

Read the entire article here.

Obama’s “Double Consciousness” On Race

The New Yorker
2013-07-26

Jonathan Alter, Author, Reporter, Columnist, TV Analyst, Lecturer

More than a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote of the “double consciousness” of the black man: “One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” President Barack Obama’s extemporaneous remarks in the press room last week about the Trayvon Martin case and the plight of young black men were pitch-perfect in part because they let no one off the hook, not even well-intentioned people who want him to lead what he predicted would be a “stilted” national conversation on race.

But the surprise appearance will have lasting importance if it keeps the President on the hook, too—if it helps reconcile a double consciousness that had left the Obama White House facing some of the most important issues of the day as if under a veil (another of Du Bois’s concepts).

Those who know the President well attest that, for the most part, there aren’t “two Obamas” the way that there were famously “two Clintons” (the policy wonk and the man of appetites). The gap between the public and the private Obama is much smaller than it is for most politicians—except when the subject is race.

In public, he has, until now, tread gingerly; in private, after hours and especially with friends and family, race is often an overt part of the conversation—or else it inhabits a place close to its surface.

The President’s Trayvon talk, and its generally positive response, represents the narrowing of the gap between the public and private Obama. The caution that grew out of his status as the first black President, which one close aide described to me as “the President’s inability to swing at certain pitches” before being reelected, made it harder to confront social issues that have engaged him deeply since he was a young man…

Read the entire article here.

White-Race Problems: White Hispanic, White Black, Geraldo Rivera

Living Anthropologically: Anthropology – Understanding – Possibility
2013-07-25

Jason Antrosio, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York

A strange meme circulates, apparently fueled by Geraldo Rivera’s White Hispanic, Yellow Journalism. It goes like this: George Zimmerman is not really white, he’s Hispanic, and so the [liberal, race-baiting] Main Stream Media [MSM] invented “White Hispanic.” And if Zimmerman’s White Hispanic, does that make President Obama a White Black? Hahaha. #LiberalLogic Gotcha!

Rivera’s account is not completely inaccurate, it’s just a bit twisted and incorrect. First, the claim that “White Hispanic” is a completely made-up term for the Zimmerman trial should be news to the more than 26 million people who in 2010 marked in as White Hispanic on the US Census form–the categories for Hispanic yes/no and race are both separate and both mandatory, as they have been since at least the 1980 Census. Second, as of 2000, people like Obama could indeed check in as White Black on the US Census–however, understanding this issue means knowing about the traditional US framework of hypodescent. Finally, Rivera’s claim that the Hispanic immigrant experience is different from the Irish and Italian one–that Latinos will transform the US racial landscape–is intriguing but unsupported. If anything, the move seems to be toward a Hispanic White/Black bifurcation…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial Families in 18th-Century Mexico

The Root
2013-07-23

Unknown artist working in New Spain (Mexico), De español y negra mulata, oil on canvas, 36 by 48 cm (Museo de America, Madrid)

Image of the Week: A painting captures the multiethnic population in New Spain, now Mexico.

One of the most typical, revealing products of colonial Spanish culture was the casta painting. This Iberian term means “lineage,” or “race,” and in art refers to the comprehensive representation of mixed-race couples and their offspring. Produced in a series usually consisting of 16 family groups, casta paintings categorize the uniquely complex degree of racial variation that arose within the multiethnic population of the viceroyalty of New Spain, now Mexico. These works were produced almost exclusively in the major artistic and governmental centers of Mexico City and Puebla during the 18th century. About 100 sets of casta paintings survive today from what must once have been a considerably larger number.

Casta sets were commissioned primarily by members of the ruling elite of New Spain. Their audience consisted of a fairly limited but discerning group of officials, clergy and scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. In some cases the sets were directly presented to the king in Madrid as a visual record of the diversity of his overseas realm. The miscegenation recorded in these series is also reflected in the origins of the artists themselves. With only one known exception, all identified casta painters were born in Mexico, not Spain, and many were themselves of mixed race.

In all casta series, the couples consist of men and women from the three main ethnicities living in New Spain: white, Indian and black. Those represented are types, not specific individuals. All known series begin with the union between a white man, described as a Spaniard (español), and an Indian, producing a mestizo. The sequence then continues with a new category produced by the pairing of a mestizo with another Spaniard, producing a castizo. In the next case a white man is the father as well, and so the complexion becomes lighter, and therefore of greater advantage in the racially ordered hierarchy of colonial life. The child is, in fact, described as español, the same as his or her father…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Child Resource Book: Living Complex Realities

MAVIN Foundation
2003
288 pages
8 x 7.9 x 0.7 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0972963909

Edited by:

Maria P. P. Root

Matt Kelley

As America experiences a multiracial baby boom, parents, teachers and child welfare professionals must be equipped with resources to help raise happy and healthy mixed heritage youth. Published in 2003, this groundbreaking, 288-page volume edited by Maria P. P. Root, Ph.D. and Matt Kelley, offers 35 chapters to assist the people who work with children to serve multiracial youth with compassion and competence. Providing both a developmental and mixed heritage-specific approach, the Multiracial Child Resource Book provides a layered portrait of the mixed race experience from birth to adulthood, each chapter written by the nation’s experts and accompanied by first-person testimonials from mixed heritage young adults themselves.