Mixed Race Studies

The Social Experience of Mixed Race [Book Review]

Jill Olumide. Raiding the Gene Pool: The Social Construction of Mixed Race. London: Pluto Press, 2002. xii + 212 pp., ISBN 978-0-7453-1764-9; ISBN 978-0-7453-1765-6.

H-Net Online
December 2002

Mohamed Adhikari, Lecturer of Historical Studies
University of Cape Town, South Africa

The author, a medical sociologist at the University of London, defines the “mixed race condition” as encompassing the “patterns and commonality of experience among those who obstruct whatever purpose race is being put to at a particular time” and describes mixed race as “the ideological enemy of pure race as a means of social stratification” (p. 2). The concept as used in this study includes not only people of mixed racial origin but also those who are perceived as mixing race as, for example, in the case of couples involved in inter-racial relationships or people adopting children of a different race.

This book explores the social experience of people who have been designated mixed race. It examines the operation of racialized boundaries and how they are promoted, sustained and constructed through changing ideologies of race and ideas of mixed race. It asserts that the mixed race condition has resulted in similar social experiences across time, place and social class and endeavors to explain why this is the case. As its definition of mixed race above illustrates, this is a strongly anti-racist tract and takes every opportunity of challenging the racial bases of social differentiation, especially the preferential treatment of people whether by officialdom or in the private domain. Olumide expresses dissatisfaction with the current state of mixed race studies and sets out to create “fresh knowledge” on the subject (p. 3). She complains that the term anti-racism “has become a very moth-eaten construct” and insists that for it to regain validity it “must endeavour to be anti-race. Nothing less will do” (emphasis in the original, p. 5). As this example indicates, the writing sometimes verges on the polemical in its anti-racial posture…

 Read the entire review here.

What Does “White” Mean? Interpreting the Choice of “Race” by Mixed Race Young People in Britain

Sociological Perspectives
Volume 53, Number 2 (Summer 2010)
Pages 287–292
DOI: 10.1525/sop.2010.53.2.287

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

Ferhana Hashem, Research Fellow
Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent

Despite the often cited idea that racial identities are socially constructed, and potentially fluid, much public policy is still based on surveys that elicit only one measure of racial identity. A number of U.S. studies have employed “best single race” questions on racial identification, in which multiracial respondents are asked to choose only one race to describe themselves. We extend some American studies by examining responses to a “best single race” survey question posed to a small sample of multiracial young people in Britain. In-depth interviews with British multiracial respondents are employed to investigate the extent to which a “best single race” (BSR) question captures someone’s sense of attachment and belonging to a particular ethnic or racial group. In particular, we focus on how we should interpret East Asian/white respondents’ choice of “white” as their BSR.

Read or purchase the article here.

At last! It’s cool to be mixed race (which is handy because I’m African, American, Jewish, Geordie, Irish, Scottish and Hungarian)

The Daily Mail (United Kingdom)
2010-04-25

Oona King, Head of Diversity
Channel 4

White supremacy is so last century. These days it’s on-trend to be a mixed-race supremacist. Unlike the British National Party, mixed-race people can now point to scientifically credible research that highlights the various biological advantages of their ethnicity.

And that’s not to mention the anecdotal evidence pointing to sports stars and celebrities such as Lewis Hamilton, Theo Walcott and Leona Lewis as representing the new ideal of physical beauty.

But is this just a media fad, sparked by the election of the world’s most famous mixed-race person as President of the United States? And now that mixed-race people are our fastest growing ethnic group, what does it mean for Britain’s uneasy relationship with race?..

…And now it seems that mixed race genes are being hailed as the latest Darwinian ‘must-have’ accessory. If you spent your childhood being called a ‘mongrel’ in the playground, the recent research by Cardiff University, which seems to show that mixed-race people are more attractive and more successful, may bring a wry smile to your face.

Dr. Michael Lewis, who conducted the research said: ‘Darwin suggested that diversity of genes led to greater genetic fitness and this in turn seems to be linked to attractiveness.’

Far from being an abomination of the natural order, mixed-race children are apparently biologically preferable. The logic is that the wider the gene pool (the further apart genetically two parents are) the greater protection from illness or genetic abnormality their children enjoy…

Read the entire article here.

G. Reginald Daniel. More Than Black: Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order [Book Review: Harrison]

Journal of African American Men
Volume 6, Number 4 (June, 2002)
pages 96-97

Lisa Harrison
California State University, Sacramento

Many people in the United States have worked tirelessly to develop a truly egalitarian society that embraces all people, regardless of individual differences. Although there is an abundance of evidence to demonstrate that the United States has yet to achieve that goal, social change advocates have contended that one way to encourage social egalitarianism is to develop a national consciousness that fully accepts and embraces multiculturalism. Attempts at this endeavor have been  plagued with conflict, but some progress has been made. For example, there is growing recognition of the importance of adding a multicultural component to the core curriculums of our learning institutions. Thus, there is an increasing emphasis on understanding how ethnic and racial identity influences individual human behavior and larger social groups. However, most of this emphasis has been on understanding the experiences of singlerace groups. Therefore, little empirical or theoretical work has emerged on the experiences of multiracial individuals or the complexity of their position within the larger culture. Dr. [G.] Reginald Daniel’s timely examination of multiracial identity within the United States, aptly titled More Than Black, strives to correct this troublesome gap in the literature by exploring the historical legacy of multiracial identity within the United States and the contemporary impediments facing mixed-race persons…

Read the entire review here.

Coloring History and Mixing Race in Levina Urbino’s ‘Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage’ and Louise Heaven’s ‘In Bonds’

Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers
Volume 24, Number 2 (2007)
E-ISSN: 1534-0643, Print ISSN: 0748-4321
DOI: 10.1353/leg.2007.0018

Eric Gardner, Professor of English
Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan

While the figure of the “tragic mulatta” is writ large in American literature and literary criticism, this essay shares a recognition most recently advanced by William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun: “What is remarkable though not always acknowledged . . . is the fact that the majority of beautiful mulattas in American novels before 1865 . . . do not end up unfulfilled” (xliii). Andrews and Kachun note that Metta Victoria Victor’s Maum Guinea, H. L. [Hezekiah Lord] Hosmer’s Adela [The Octooon], John T. Trowbridge’s Neighbor Jackwood, [Thomas] Mayne Reid’s The Quadroon, and E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Retribution feature mixed-race female characters who, though they “must endure a stint in slavery and withstand intimidation by lascivious slave owners and brutal overseers,” “more often than not . . . eventually encounter a northerner or a European on whose love they can rely” (lxv, n. 45; xliii). While it is still too early to make judgments about “the majority”-especially given that Andrews and Kachun’s own work illustrates that we need to be hesitant about assuming any “complete sets”-this essay shares the sense that mixed-race characters who are not “tragic mulattas” have been absent from our discussions for too long.

This absence is complicated by the disproportionately larger presence in our scholarship of archetypal examples of the tragic mulatta type in works such as Lydia Maria Child’s “The Quadroons,” William Wells Brown’s Clotel, and Elizabeth Livermore’s Zoë, even though these works were neither more popular nor exceedingly better than some of the novels noted by Andrews and Kachun. The reasons for this imbalance are complex and beyond the scope of this essay; it may come in part from Child’s early imprint on a vast amount of antislavery literature (including Brown’s story) and in part from the limited senses of racial definition that have dominated much contemporary scholarship. Regardless, the dominance of the figure of the tragic mulatta in our scholarship has limited our consideration of race and racial identity. This imbalance seems to me, for example, to be partially to blame for Lauren Berlant’s dismissal of the full range of types of political efficacy available to mixed-race characters-a formation scholars such as P. Gabrielle Foreman have challenged when applied to Black women’s texts. It has also, among other gaps, led many of us to locate the first real resistance to the figure of the tragic mulatta in works such as Child’s Reconstruction-era Romance of the Republic and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy.

This essay thus begins by acknowledging that there were several early examples of a discourse of mixed-race heroines running counter to the figure of the tragic mulatta-one in which the mixed-race heroine not only avoids a tragic end but actually embraces her genealogy, uses her visual racial indeterminacy to aid nation-building and self-empowerment, and finds fulfillment in a multi-racial family housed within the larger Black community. Specifically, I examine two previously unknown mixed-race heroines who are ultimately far from tragic-indeed, who seem almost consciously constructed as revisions to the tragic mulatta type. This essay argues that, in different ways, the protagonists of both Levina B. Urbino’s Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage (1854) and Louise Palmer Heaven’s In Bonds (published in 1867 under the pseudonym Laura Preston) explode many of the expectations of the tragic mulatta type. Through this work, I hope to begin to re-imagine the contours of our sense of the mixed-race female character (tragic mulatta and otherwise) in American literature.

I focus on a pair of now unknown novels by now relatively unknown authors for a set of reasons. Both were popular in their day: Sunshine went through four editions (under different titles) in six years, and In Bonds, published in both San Francisco and New York, seems to have launched a successful if spotty career. Both have publication circumstances of interest to students of race: the publisher of Sunshine’s fourth edition (which carried the entirely new title The Home Angel) was Thayer and Eldridge, who also contracted to publish Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl before bankruptcy forestalled their doing so; the publisher of In Bonds founded the Overland Monthly and was a colleague of Mark Twain (who would, of course, write works key to considerations of race in American literature). Indeed, both books demonstrate a rich awareness of the literary discourses of race and race-mixing swirling around them. Though evidence about their composition is lacking, Sunshine repeatedly invokes and rewrites the language of the tragic mulatta figure, while In Bonds actually makes specific reference to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as part of the driving force in the novel’s plot (128-29). Though both novels and both authors are absent from contemporary critical work, Sunshine and In Bonds offer fascinating counterpoints to the dominant sense of the figure of the tragic mulatta and presage works that critics have treated as more revolutionary, such as Child’s Romance of the Republic and Harper’s Iola Leroy. Indeed, both Sunshine and (albeit a bit less so) In Bonds suggest that a mixed-race heroine who overcomes potential tragedy is central to America’s future…

Becoming Modern Racialized Subjects: Detours through our pasts to produce ourselves anew

Cultural Studies
Volume 23, Number 4 (July 2009)
pages 624-657
DOI: 10.1080/09502380902950948

Hazel V. Carby, Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies
Yale University

This essay is a close engagement with the work of Stuart Hall which has been central to the project of unraveling the complexities of difference, divisions in history, consciousness and humanity, embedded in the geo-political oppositions of colonial center and colonized margin, home and abroad, and metropole and periphery. Hall has exposed the temporal enigma that haunts the relation between colonial and post-colonial subject formation. In response, the essay focuses on the geo-politics rather than the linear temporality of encounters in an examination of the sources of tension, contention and anxiety that arise as racialized subjects are brought into being through narration in examples drawn from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano and post-colonial Caribbean novelists. The essay concludes by positing an alternative narrative for the emergence of the modern racialized state in Britain, one that has its origins in official responses to the presence of black American troops and West Indian civilian and Royal Air Force (RAF) personnel on British soil during World War II, rather than to the Caribbean migrants who arrived on the Empire Windrush in 1948.

…It was not only black subjects that were policed and disciplined. Black servicemen were dialogically constituted in their blackness in and through their potential and actual encounters with white women who were also to be ‘managed’. Reynolds records the ‘intensive efforts [that] were made to guide the conduct of British women’. For women who were in the armed service ‘military discipline was invoked’ to discourage them from fraternizing with black soldiers and by January 1944 these policies hardened when ‘the Women’s Territorial Auxillary issued an order ‘‘forbidding its members to speak to colored American soldiers except in the presence of a white [person]’’’. These systems of surveillance were not only instituted and regulated by the military they were also enabled and maintained by members of local constabularies who ‘routinely reported women soldiers found in the company of black GIs to their superiors.’ Even civilian women were prosecuted by their local police who evoked ‘a variety of laws’ to take them into custody when they were found ‘in company of black soldiers’ (Reynolds 1996, p. 229).

White women were counseled by families, friends and authorities alike, against marriage with black men; black American soldiers who wished to marry British women were refused permission to do so by their Commanding Officers and quickly transferred. Black journalist Ormus Davenport, ‘himself a wartime GI, claimed that there had been a ‘‘gentleman’s agreement’’ to prevent mixed marriages’. But ‘in the 8th Air Force Service Command where most of the American Air Force blacks were concentrated, a total ban on such marriages was quite explicit’ (Reynolds 1996, p. 231). The result was disastrous for their offspring…

Read the entire article here.

Our obsession with classification: What are the implications to mixed race studies?

2009-02-11
3 pages

Marcia Yumi Lise

Whether it is by gender, sex, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, age, or nationality, in contemporary society, we are immensely preoccupied by classifying people into categories. Social scientists collect and produce data to utilise it for analysis. We hold passports or identity cards (of some sort), which specify one’s nationality, gender, name, date of birth, place of birth etc. When taking up employment we are asked to fill in an ethnic monitoring form. What’s interesting is that in England for example the Domesday Survey is said to have started nearly 1,000 years ago (The National Archives). Objectification manifests everywhere in our world now.

…What does all this mean to the study of mixed race people and identities? When we speak of mixed race people, we are constantly drawing lines between different ethnicities, races, nationalities, heritages, or cultures to allow us to define “mixed race”. Academics have often stated that ‘mixed race’ people challenge existing classifications based on the aforementioned criterias. For instance, a Japanese and British individual instantly confronts conventional racial/national/ethnic/cultural classification. However we adjust to work in line with and make do with existing classification system. Recall how the concept of ‘race’ is ungrounded however. In this light the objectification of people using the criteria of ‘race’ is misleading…

Read the entire essay here.

Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics

Ashgate
March 2009
188 pages
234 x 156 mm
188 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7546-7145-9
eBook ISBN: ISBN 978-0-7546-9140-2

Shirley Anne Tate, Professor of Sociology
Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, United Kingdom

Previous work discussing Black beauty has tended to concentrate on Black women’s search for white beauty as a consequence of racialization. Without denying either the continuation of such aesthetics or their enduring power, this book uncovers the cracks in this hegemonic Black beauty.

Drawing on detailed ethnographic research amongst British women of Caribbean heritage, this volume pursues a broad discussion of beauty within the Black diaspora contexts of the Caribbean, the UK, the United States and Latin America through different historical periods to the present day. With a unique exploration of beauty, race and identity politics, the author reveals how Black women themselves speak about, negotiate, inhabit, work on and perform Black beauty. As such, it will appeal not only to sociologists, but anyone working in the fields of race, ethnicity and post-colonial thought, feminism and the sociology of the body.

Table of Contents

Introduction
‘Beauty comes from within’: or does it?
Anti-racist aesthetics in the 21st century: the matter of hair
‘Race’, beauty and melancholia: shade
The shame of beauty is its transformative potential
The ‘browning’, straighteners, and fake tan
Hybrid black beauty?
Conclusion: is it all stylization and is there a need for black beauty citizenship?
Appendix
Bibliography
Index

Read the introduction here.

What is beauty?
Writing a book on Black beauty has made me face many challenges. One of these has been unease about knowing just where to start when looking at beauty itself. Should I start with Rastafarianism as a Jamaican or should I start with Ivan Van Sertima’s (1989) Black Women in Antiquity or should I start with the words of Black British women who participated in my research? As you would expect, I suppose, knowing that I am an ethnographer, women’s words are my first port of call. When I asked Ray, a twenty-three-year-old Black ‘mixed race’ British student what Black beauty meant to her she replied:

Black beauty to me is – it’s a tricky question. But I think a really beautiful Black woman or a ‘mixed race’ woman out of them all is the one that has the potential to be stunning. My ideas of Black and beautiful I would say that they originate from my mother’s side of the family also the media probably influenced it. Being at home in Jamaica, what I call home in Jamaica and also even here which has a high Black population and even just within myself as well. Accepting myself as being beautiful I believe was a big step in knowing more about and having ideas on what Black and beautiful are especially from childhood experiences as an example because I grew up in a predominantly white neighbourhood. When I was eleven or twelve I met my best friend and I started to chill with her etc. and go over to Hud and I discovered that my hair, my nose, my lips, my skin colour, everything was actually beautiful and normal if anything above normal standards, normal or better than the norms that I was used to. That is, white straight hair, thin lips you know all that kind of thing, even the colour of the eyes, blue eyes.

With these words Ray orients us to the difficulty of defining once and for all what Black beauty is or could be claimed to be. Instead she points out its complexities when she first says that beauty is about having the potential to be stunning as she makes it clear that beauty is about an appeal to the senses and a judgement is made based on that appeal. For her such judgements have a context in her home in Jamaica, her mother’s family, Black community acknowledgement and acceptance of your beauty, your own acceptance of yourself as beautiful and a continuing uneasy interconnectedness with ideals of white beauty. Black beauty then is lodged in diasporic sociality, sensibilities and processes of transculturation. It is also about racialized aesthetics, the link between the psyche and the social mediated by the surface of the skin and a process of self discovery throughout one’s life…

Jackie Kay – Red Dust Road Launch Night

Glasgow Women’s Library
81 Parnie Street, Glasgow, Scotland
Wednesday 2010-06-23, 19:00 BST

Red Dust Road Exclusive Launch

Jackie Kay is known and loved for her fiction – a novel, and short stories -, for her poetry and her plays. In this revelatory and redemptive book, with characteristic generosity and humour, she tells the most inspirational of stories: her own…

For more information, click here.

Borders Book Festival: Where Words Come Alive—Jackie Kay

Harmony Marquee
Melrose, Scotland
2010-06-20, 20:30 BST (Local Time)

Published only days before the festival, Red Dust Road is Jackie Kay’s autobiographical journey.  Adopted by warm-spirited Scottish communists, Jackie has never thought of anyone else as her ‘real’ parents, but meeting her birth father and mother was nevertheless revelatory. This is a wonderfully written, emotional book about biology and destiny, strangers and family, belonging and belief.

For more information, click here.