Mixed Race Studies

The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind

Clarendon Press
1903
53 pages

James Bryce

From page 18:

Nothing really arrests intermarriage except physical repulsion, and physical repulsion exists only where there is a marked difference in physical aspect, and especially in colour. Roughly speaking (and subject to certain exceptions to be hereafter noted), we may say that while all the races of the same, or a similar, colour intermarry freely, those of one colour intermarry very little with those of another.

This is most marked as between the white and the black races. The various white races are, however, by no means equally averse to such unions. Among Arabs and Turks the sense of repulsion from negroes is weakest, partly no doubt owing to the influence of Islam, on which a word must be said hereafter. The South European races, though disinclined to such unions, do not wholly eschew them. In the ancient world we hear little of any repugnance in the Roman Empire to the dark-skinned Africans, for the contemptuous references to Egyptians seem to spring from dislike rather to the character and religion than to the colour of that singular people.   In modern times the Spanish settlers in the Antilles and South America, and the Portuguese in Brazil, as well as on the East and West coasts of Africa, have formed many unions with negro women, as the Spaniards have done with the Malayan Tagals in the Philippines, and the Portuguese with the Hindus in Malabar…

…Where two races stand in contact, and neither the barrier of Colour nor that of Religion keeps them apart, the natural tendency to union has its way, and there is formed by intermarriage a third race in which the component elements are undistinguishably blent and lost. Is this third race a new race? If one of the elements is greatly larger than the other, the resultant progeny will be only the more numerous race slightly altered. But even if the elements are numerically equal, the resultant product may not be an evidently new race, unlike either progenitor. There is a distinction to be drawn between the physical and the intellectual characteristics of the issue. The resultant race, being drawn in equal proportions from each blood, may as respects physical structure and aspect stand midway between the two sources whence it springs; as the average mulatto presents in colour, hair and feature some of the characteristics of each parent. But its mental type (including under that term notions and modes of thinking) may be, and often is, nearer to the type of the more advanced than it is to that of the more backward race. This may possibly be partly due to the fact that it is usually to the higher race that the male parent belongs. More white men have married coloured or Indian women than vice versa. But it is also ascribable to the fact that the higher race has more to give, and that the lower race wishes to receive. The ideas and habits of the white man tell upon and permeate the ofFspring of mixed marriages with all the greater force because that offspring seeks to resemble its higher rather than its inferior progenitor.   I must not, however, attempt to pursue this line of inquiry, significant as it is for the future of mixed races; nor can I stop to illustrate the power of a strong intellectual type to stamp itself upon other races from the two salient instances of the Hellenization of Asia after Alexander the Great, and the assimilation of new elements by the Anglo-American race in the United States during the last seventy years. But it is worth remarking that the present mixed population of Mexico, though doubtless drawn far more largely from native than from Spanish sources, conforms more to the Spanish than to the Indian type, even if it be less industrious and less trifty than the people of Old Spain…

…Now and then a man of brilliant gifts appears in one of these mixed races. Alexandre Dumas, of whom one may say that if his imagination was not of the highest quality it was of almost unsurpassed fertility, was a mulatto or at least a quadroon. At this moment there is living in the United States the son of a white father and negro mother, himself born in slavery, who is one of the most remarkable personalities and perhaps the most moving and persuasive orator in that nation of eighty millions. Mexico has been ruled for a quarter of a century with equal vigour and wisdom by a man of mixed Indian and Spanish blood who ranks among the five or six foremost figures of our time…

Read the entire book here.

Race Relations in Virginia & Miscegenation in the South, 1776-1860

University of Massachusetts Press
1970
362 pages
ISBN-10: 0870230506; ISBN-13: 978-0870230509

James Hugo Johnston (1891-1974), Professor of History
University of Virginia

Contents

• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• PART I. THE RELATION OF THE NEGRO TO THE WHITE MAN IN VIRGINIA
  • 1. Friendly Relations
  • 2. Violent Relations
  • 3. Free Negro Relations
• PART II. THE RELATION OF THE WHITE MAN TO THE NEGRO IN VIRGINIA
  • 4. The Humanitarians
  • 5. The Growth of Antislavery
  • 6. The Convention of 1829 and Nat Turner’s Insurrection
• PART III. MISCEGENATION
  • 7. The Intermixture of Races in the Colonial Period
  • 8. The Problem of Racial Identity
  • 9. The White Man and His Negro Relations
  • 10. The Status of the White Woman in the Slave States
  • 11. Indian Relations
  • 12. Mulatto Life in the Slave Period
• APPENDIX
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX

Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist

Penn State University Press
2012-05-19
336 pages
6 x 9, 1 illustration
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-05246-5

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) was Brazil’s foremost novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a mulatto, Machado experienced the ambiguity of racial identity throughout his life. Literary critics first interpreted Machado as an embittered misanthrope uninterested in the plight of his fellow African Brazilians. By midcentury, however, a new generation of critics asserted that Machado’s writings did reveal his interest in slavery, race, and other contemporary social issues, but their interpretations went too far in the other direction. Reginald Daniel, whose expertise on Brazilian race relations gives him special insights, takes a fresh look at how Machado’s life—especially his experience of his own racial identity—was inflected in his writings. The result is a new interpretation that sees Machado as endeavoring to transcend his racial origins by universalizing the experience of racial ambiguity and duality into a fundamental mode of human existence.

Yes We Can? White Racial Framing and the Obama Presidency, 2nd Edition

Routledge
292 pages
2012-12-17
Pages: 296
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-64536-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-64538-6

Adia Harvey Wingfield, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Georgia State University

Joe Feagin, Ella C. McFadden Professor of Sociology
Texas A & M University

The first edition of this book offered one of the first social science analyses of Barack Obama’s historic electoral campaigns and early presidency. In this second edition the authors extend that analysis to Obama’s service in the presidency and to his second campaign to hold that presidency. Elaborating on the concept of the white racial frame, Harvey Wingfield and Feagin assess in detail the ways white racial framing was deployed by the principal characters in the electoral campaigns and during Obama’s presidency. With much relevant data, this book counters many commonsense assumptions about U.S. racial matters, politics, and institutions, particularly the notion that Obama’s presidency ushered in a major post-racial era. Readers will find this fully revised and updated book distinctively valuable because it relies on sound social science analysis to assess numerous events and aspects of this historic campaign.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1. White Racial Framing and Barack Obama’s First Campaign
• Chapter 2. “Too Black?” Or “Not Black Enough?”
• Chapter 3. From Susan B. Anthony to Hillary Clinton
• Chapter 4. The Cool Black Man vs. The Fist-Bumping Socialist
• Chapter 5. The Dr. Jeremiah Wright Controversy
• Chapter 6. The 2008 Primaries and Voters of Color
• Chapter 7. November 4, 2008 : A Dramatic Day in U.S. History
• Chapter 8. “Post-Racial” America?
• Chapter 9. President Obama’s 2009-2013 Term and the 2011-2012 Primaries
• Chapter 10. The 2012 National Election
• Endnotes
• Index

War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art

University of Washington Press
January 2013
304 pages
63 illustrations, 44 in color, maps
7 x 10 in.
ISBN: 978-0-295-99225-9

Edited by

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

Wei Ming Dariotis, Associate Professor Asian American Studies
San Francisco State University

Cover art by Mequitta Ahuja

War Baby/Love Child examines hybrid Asian American identity through a collection of essays, artworks, and interviews at the intersection of critical mixed race studies and contemporary art. The book pairs artwork and interviews with nineteen emerging, mid-career, and established mixed race/mixed heritage Asian American artists, including Li-lan and Kip Fulbeck, with scholarly essays exploring such topics as Vietnamese Amerasians, Korean transracial adoptions, and multiethnic Hawai’i. As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age in an era of “optional identity,” this collection brings together first-person perspectives and a wider scholarly context to shed light on changing Asian American cultures.

Visit the website here.

Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire

Knopf
2013-01-22
384 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-307-27283-6
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-96115-0

Andrea Stuart

In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Americas.

 As it grew, the sugar trade enriched Europe as never before, financing the Industrial Revolution and fuelling the Enlightenment. And, as well, it became the basis of many economies in South America, played an important part in the evolution of the United States as a world power and transformed the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely profitable trade—“white gold,” as it was known—had profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the islands and, ultimately, throughout the American continents. Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with her family’s experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces shaped her own family—its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin—she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal and global history, Stuart gives us a deepened understanding of the connections between continents, between black and white, between men and women, between the free and the enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and unparalleled immediacy, a story of fundamental importance to the making of our world.

Paint the White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America

Stanford University Press
2013
224 pages
2 tables
Cloth ISBN: 9780804780957
Paper ISBN: 9780804780964
E-book ISBN: 9780804785570

Michael P. Jeffries, Sidney R. Knafel Assistant Professor of American Studies
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Barack Obama’s election as the first black president in American history forced a reconsideration of racial reality and possibility. It also incited an outpouring of discussion and analysis of Obama’s personal and political exploits. Paint the White House Black fills a significant void in Obama-themed debate, shifting the emphasis from the details of Obama’s political career to an understanding of how race works in America. In this groundbreaking book, race, rather than Obama, is the central focus.

Michael P. Jeffries approaches Obama’s election and administration as common cultural ground for thinking about race. He uncovers contemporary stereotypes and anxieties by examining historically rooted conceptions of race and nationhood, discourses of “biracialism” and Obama’s mixed heritage, the purported emergence of a “post-racial society,” and popular symbols of Michelle Obama as a modern black woman. In so doing, Jeffries casts new light on how we think about race and enables us to see how race, in turn, operates within our daily lives.

Race is a difficult concept to grasp, with outbursts and silences that disguise its relationships with a host of other phenomena. Using Barack Obama as its point of departure, Paint the White House Black boldly aims to understand race by tracing the web of interactions that bind it to other social and historical forces.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1: THROUGH THE FOG
• CHAPTER 2: MY (FOUNDING) FATHER’S SON: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Inheritance
• CHAPTER 3: “MUTTS LIKE Me”: Barack Obama, Tragic Mulattos, and Cool Mixed-Race Millennial
• CHAPTER 4: POSTRACIALISM RECONSIDERED: Class, the Black Counterpublic, and the End of Black Politics
• CHAPTER 5: THE PERILS OF BEING SUPERWOMAN: Michelle Obama’s Public Image
• CHAPTER 6: A PLACE CALLED “OBAMA”
• Appendix I. A Discussion of Racial Inequality
• Appendix II. Interviewing Multiracial Students
• Notes
• Index

Mixed Asian Americans and Health: Navigating Uncharted Waters

Chapter in: Handbook of Asian American Health

Springer
2013
pages 129-134
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-2226-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4614-2227-3
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-2227-3

Edited by:

Grace J. Yoo
San Francisco State University
 
Mai-Nhung Le
San Francisco State University

Alan Y. Oda
Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, California

Chapter Author:

Cathy J. Tashiro, PhD, RN, Associate Professor of Nursing
University of Washington, Tacoma

Over 2.6 million people who self-identified with more than one race in the 2010 U.S. Census claimed Asian ancestry, about 15% of the total population of Asians, making these individuals a significant part of Asian America. Mixed Asian Americans come from a variety of backgrounds, making it difficult to generalize about their health, though some common characteristics have emerged. While research on physical health outcomes of mixed Asian Americans is still limited, there is a growing body of research that may indicate increased risk for behavioral problems among some subgroups. The chapter reviews the existing research and discusses social and genetic factors relevant to the health and wellbeing of mixed Asian Americans.

Introduction

What are the health implications of being a mixed Asian American? Very little is known about this diverse and rapidly expanding population. The little we do know is complicated by the collision between biological concepts of “race” and the social process of racial categorization. Asian America includes such diverse populations that it’s difficult to make biological generalizations about them. Yet there are some well-established differences between certain Asian groups and the majority population that have important health implications. Two examples will be discussed in this chapter. For people of mixed Asian ancestry who may also have ancestral roots in Europe, Africa, and/or the Americas, the complexities of possible combinations and their implications are daunting. But there is an urgent need to tease apart the social and biological meanings of being a mixed Asian American. Researchers whose studies are discussed in this chapter are beginning to do this important work. Hopefully, in the near future, a mixed Asian American confronted with health risks by race who asks “But what does this mean for me?” will find real answers…

The Other Half of My Heart

Random House
June 2010
304 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-385-73440-0
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-440-24006-8

Sundee T. Frazier

The close relationship of a pair of biracial twins is tested when their grandmother enters them in a pageant for African American girls in this new story from Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Award winner Sundee T. Frazier.
 
When Minerva and Keira King were born, they made headlines: Keira is black like Mama, but Minni is white like Daddy. Together the family might look like part of a chessboard row, but they are first and foremost the close-knit Kings. Then Grandmother Johnson calls, to invite the twins down South to compete for the title of Miss Black Pearl Preteen of America.
 
Minni dreads the spotlight, but Keira assures her that together they’ll get through their stay with Grandmother Johnson. But when grandmother’s bias against Keira reveals itself, Keira pulls away from her twin. Minni has always believed that no matter how different she and Keira are, they share a deep bond of the heart. Now she’ll find out the truth.

Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora

Grove/Atlantic
January 2013
320 pages
6×9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8021-2003-8
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9379-7

Emily Raboteau

A decade in the making, Emily Raboteau’s Searching for Zion takes readers around the world on an unexpected adventure of faith. Both one woman’s quest for a place to call “home” and an investigation into a people’s search for the Promised Land, this landmark work of creative nonfiction is a trenchant inquiry into contemporary and historical ethnic displacement.

At twenty-three, Emily Raboteau traveled to Israel to visit her childhood best friend. While her friend appeared to have found a place to belong, Raboteau couldn’t say the same for herself. As a biracial woman from a country still divided along racial lines, she’d never felt at home in America. But as a reggae fan and the daughter of a historian of African-American religion, Raboteau knew of Zion as a place black people yearned to be. She’d heard about it on Bob Marley’s Exodus and in the speeches of Martin Luther King. She understood it as a metaphor for freedom, a spiritual realm rather than a geographical one. In Israel, the Jewish Zion, she was surprised to discover black Jews. Inspired by their exodus, Raboteau sought out other black communities that had left home in search of a Promised Land. Her question for them is the same she asks herself: have you found the home you’re looking for?

On her journey back in time and across the globe, through the Bush years and into the age of Obama, Raboteau visits Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana, and the American South to explore the complex and contradictory perspectives of Black Zionists. She talks to Rastafarians and African Hebrew Israelites, Evangelicals and Ethiopian Jews, and Katrina transplants from her own family—people who have risked everything in search of territory that is hard to define and harder to inhabit.

With Searching for Zion, Raboteau overturns our ideas of place and patriotism, displacement and dispossession, citizenship and country in a disarmingly honest and refreshingly brave take on the pull of the story of Exodus.