Mixed Race Studies

Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society

Indiana University Press
2012-08-16
336 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-253-00629-5

john a. powell, Professor of Law; Director Haas Diversity Research Center
University of California, Berkeley

Foreword by:

David R. Roediger, Kendrick Babcock Professor of History and African American Studies
University of Illinois

Renowned social justice advocate john a. powell persuasively argues that we have not achieved a post-racial society and that there is much work to do to redeem the American promise of inclusive democracy. Culled from a decade of writing about social justice and spirituality, these meditations on race, identity, and social policy provide an outline for laying claim to our shared humanity and a way toward healing ourselves and securing our future. Racing to Justice challenges us to replace attitudes and institutions that promote and perpetuate social suffering with those that foster relationships and a way of being that transcends disconnection and separation.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Moving Beyond the Isolated Self
• I. Race and Racialization
  • 1. Post-Racialism or Targeted Universalism?
  • 2. The Colorblind Multiracial Dilemma: Racial Categories Reconsidered
  • 3. The Racing of American Society: Race Functioning as a Verb Before Signifying as a Noun
• II. White Privilege
  • 4. Whites Will Be Whites: The Failure to Interrogate Racial Privilege
  • 5. White Innocence and the Courts: Jurisprudential Devices that Obscure Privilege
• III. The Racialized Self
  • 6. Dreaming of a Self Beyond Whiteness and Isolation
  • 7. The Multiple Self: Implications for Law and Social Justice
• IV. Engagement
  • 8. Lessons from Suffering: How Social Justice Informs Spirituality
• Afterword
• References
• Index

Imoinda’s Shade: Marriage and the African Woman in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, 1759–1808

Ohio State University Press
May 2012
289 paes
6×9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8142-1185-4
CD-ROM ISBN: 978-0-8142-9286-0

Lyndon J. Dominique, Assistant Professor of English
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

As the eighteenth century is entirely bereft of narratives written by African women, one might assume that these women had little to no impact on British literature and the national psyche of the period. Yet these kinds of assumptions are belied by the influence of one prominent African woman featured in the period’s literary texts.

Imoinda’s Shade examines the ways in which British writers utilize the most popular African female figure in eighteenth-century fiction and drama to foreground the African woman’s concerns and interests as well as those of a British nation grappling with the problems of slavery and abolition. Imoinda, the fictional phenomenon initially conceived by Aphra Behn and subsequently popularized by Thomas Southerne, has an influence that extends well beyond the Oroonoko novella and drama that established her as a formidable presence during the late Restoration period. This influence is palpably discerned in the characterizations of African women drawn up in novels and dramas written by late-eighteenth-century British writers. Through its examinations of the textual instances from 1759–1808 when Imoinda and her involvement in the Oroonoko marriage plot are being transformed and embellished for politicized ends, Imoinda’s Shade demonstrates how this period’s fictional African women were deliberately constructed by progressive eighteenth-century writers to popularize issues of rape, gynecological rebellion, and miscegenation. Moreover, it shows how these specific African female concerns influence British antislavery, abolitionist, and post-slavery discourse in heretofore unheralded, unusual, and sometimes radical ways.

Contents

• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Indroduction: Imoinda, Marriage, Slavery
• Part One. Imoinda’s Original Shades: African Women in British Antislavery Literature
  • Chapter 1. Altering Oroonoko and Imoinda in Mid-Eighteenth-Century British Drama
  • Chapter 2. Amelioration, African Women, and The Soft, Strategic Voice of Paternal Tyranny in The Grateful Negro
  • Chapter 3. “Between the saints and the rebels”: Imoinda and the Resurrection of the Black African Heroine
• Part Two. Imoinda’s Shade Extends: Abolition and Interracial Marriage in England
  • Chapter 4. Creoles, Closure, and Cubba’s Comedy of Pain: Abolition and the Politics of Homecoming in Eighteenth-Century British Farce
  • Chapter 5. “‘What!’ cried the delighted mulatto, ‘are we going to prosecu massa?’”: Adeline Mowbray’s Distinguished Complexion of Abolition
  • Chapter 6. “An unportioned girl of my complexion can . . . be a dangerous object.” Abolition and the Mulatto Heiress in England
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index

Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil 1888–1988

University of Wisconsin Press
November 1991
376 pages
6 x 9; 1 map
Paper ISBN: 978-0-299-13104-3

George Reid Andrews, Distinguished Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh

Winner of the 1993 Arthur P. Whitaker Prize

For much of the twentieth century Brazil enjoyed an international reputation as a “racial democracy,” but that image has been largely undermined in recent decades by research suggesting the existence of widespread racial inequality. George Reid Andrews provides the first thoroughly documented history of Brazilian racial inequality from the abolition of slavery in 1888 up to the late 1980s, showing how economic, social, and political changes in Brazil during the last one hundred years have shaped race relations.

No laws of segregation or apartheid exist in Brazil, but by looking carefully at government policies, data on employment, mainstream and Afro-Brazilian newspapers, and a variety of other sources, Andrews traces pervasive discrimination against Afro-Brazilians over time. He draws his evidence from the country’s largest and most economically important state, São Paulo, showing how race relations were affected by its transformation from a plantation-based economy to South America’s most urban, industrialized society.

The book focuses first on Afro-Brazilians’ entry into the agricultural and urban working class after the abolition of slavery. This transition, Andrews argues, was seriously hampered by state policies giving the many European immigrants of the period preference over black workers. As immigration declined and these policies were overturned in the late 1920s, black laborers began to be employed in agriculture and industry on nearly equal terms with whites. Andrews then surveys efforts of blacks to move into the middle class during the 1900s. He finds that informal racial solidarity among middle-class whites has tended to exclude Afro-Brazilians from the professions and other white-collar jobs.

Andrews traces how discrimination throughout the century led Afro-Brazilians to mobilize, first through the antislavery movement of the 1880s, then through such social and political organizations of the 1920s and 1930s as the Brazilian Black Front, and finally through the anti-racism movements of the 1970s and 1980s. These recent movements have provoked much debate among Brazilians over their national image as a racial democracy. It remains to be seen, Andrews concludes, whether that debate will result in increased opportunities for black Brazilians.

Contents

• Lists of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Part 1. Workers
  • Chapter 2. Slavery and Emancipation, 1800-1890
  • Chapter 3. Immigration, 1890-1930
  • Chapter 4. Working, 1920-1960
• Part 2. The Middle Class
  • Chapter 5. Living in a Racial Democracy, 1900-1940
  • Chapter 6. Blacks Ascending, 1940-1988
  • Chapter 7. Organizing, 1945-1988
• Part 3. Past, Present, Future
  • Chapter 8. One Hundred Years of Freedom: May 13, 1988
  • Chapter 9. Looking Back, Looking Forward
• Appendix A. Population of Sao Paulo State, 1800-1980
• Appendix B. Brazilian Racial Terminology
• Appendix C. Personnel Records at the Jafet and São Paulo Tramway, Light, and Power Companies
• Glossary
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

Race

Poem via Poetry Foundation from:

Antebellum Dream Book
Graywolf Press
2001
72 pages
Paperback ISBN: 1-55597-354-X

Elizabeth Alexander

Sometimes I think about Great-Uncle Paul who left Tuskegee,
Alabama to become a forester in Oregon and in so doing
became fundamentally white for the rest of his life, except
when he traveled without his white wife to visit his siblings—
now in New York, now in Harlem, USA—just as pale-skinned,
as straight-haired, as blue-eyed as Paul, and black. Paul never told anyone
he was white, he just didn’t say that he was black, and who could imagine,
an Oregon forester in 1930 as anything other than white?…

Read the entire poem here.

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

The New Press
Spring 2011
512 pages
6.125  x 9.25 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-59558-495-3

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

A powerful new argument from a leading intellectual that explores how today’s cutting-edge genetic science helps perpetuate inequality in a “post-racial” America

While embracing a racial ideology rooted in genetics, Americans are accepting a genetic ideology rooted in race that makes everyone responsible for managing their own lives at the genetic level instead of eliminating the social inequalities that damage our entire society.
—From Fatal Invention

A decade after the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, the emerging fields of personalized medicine, reproductive technologies, genetic genealogy, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category written in our genes.

In this provocative analysis, leading legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts argues that America is once again at the brink of a virulent outbreak of classifying population by race. By searching for differences at the molecular level, a new race-based science is obscuring racism in our society and legitimizing state brutality against communities of color at a time when America claims to be post-racial.

Moving from an account of the evolution of race—proving that it has always been a mutable and socially defined political division supported by mainstream science—Roberts delves deep into the current debates, interrogating the newest science and biotechnology, interviewing its researchers, and exposing the political consequences obscured by the focus on genetic difference. Fatal Invention is a provocative call for us to affirm our common humanity.

Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India: Changing Concepts of Hybridity Across Empires

Routledge
2012-02-29
208 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-50429-4

Adrian Carton
Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney, Australia

This book traces changing concepts of mixed-race identity in early colonial India by contrasting Portuguese, British and French colonial spaces. Starting in the sixteenth century, the author shows how the emergence of race was always shaped by affiliations based on religion, class, national identity, gender and citizenship across empires. In the context of increasing British power, the central core of the book looks at the Anglo-French tensions of the eighteenth century to consider the relationship between modernity and race-making. Arguing that different forms of modernity produced divergent categories of hybridity, the book considers the impact of changing political structures on mixed-race communities. With its emphasis on specificity, it situates current and past debates on the mixed-race experience and the politics of whiteness in broader historical and global contexts.

The book contributes to the understanding of race-making as an aspect of colonial governance, and it illuminates some margins of colonial India that are often lost in the shadows of the British regime. It is of interest to academics interested in world/global history, postcolonial studies, South Asian imperial history and critical mixed-race studies.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Portuguese Legacies
3. Race and Reform
4. Contested Colonialisms
5. French Complexions
6. Race and Fraternity
7. Conclusion

The Meeting Place: Māori and Pākehā Encounters, 1642–1840

Aukland University Press
May/June 2012
320 pages
228 x 148 mm
Paperback ISBN: 978 1 86940 594 6

Vincent O’Malley, Research Director
HistoryWorks Ltd., Wellington, New Zealand

How did Māori and Pākehā negotiate a meeting place? Would Māori observe the Sabbath? Should Pākehā fear the power of tapu? Whose view of land ownership and control would prevail? How would Māori rangatira and Pākehā leaders establish the rules of political engagement? Around such considerations about how the world would work, Māori and Pākehā in early New Zealand defined a way of being together. This is a book about that meeting time and place, about a process of mutual discovery, contact and encounter — meeting, greeting and seeing — between Māori and Pākehā from 1642 to about 1840.

After introducing the brief encounters and misunderstandings between European visitors and Māori before 1814, O’Malley focuses his study on the period between 1814 and 1840 when he argues that both peoples inhabited a ‘middle ground’ meeting place in which neither could dictate the political, economic or cultural rules of engagement.  By looking at economic, religious, political and sexual encounters, O’Malley offers a strikingly different picture to traditional accounts of imperial Pākehā power over a static, resistant Māori society.

In this meeting place, O’Malley shows, Māori and Europeans re-evaluated cultural priorities, adapted the customs of the other people that they found useful and sometimes ‘went native’ as they fell over into the other culture. O’Malley concludes with an analysis of how the middle ground gave way around 1840 to a world in which Pākehā had enough power largely to dictate terms.

Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, AD 1933-1940

Random House
1999 (Originally Published: 1931)
208 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-375-75380-0

George S. Schuyler (1895-1977)

Introduction by Ishmael Reed

What would happen to the race problem in America if black people turned white? Would everybody be happy? These questions and more are answered hilariously in Black No More, George S. Schuyler’s satiric romp. Black No More is the story of Max Disher, a dapper black rogue of an insurance man who, through a scientific transformation process, becomes Matthew Fisher, a white man. Matt dreams up a scam that allows him to become the leader of the Knights of Nordica, a white supremacist group, as well as to marry the white woman who rejected him when he was black. Black No More is a hysterical exploration of race and all its self-serving definitions. If you can’t beat them, turn into them.

Ishmael Reed, one of today’s top black satirists and the author of Mumbo Jumbo and Japanese by Spring, provides a spirited Introduction.

The fertile artistic period now known as the Harlem Renaissance (1920-1930) gave birth to many of the world-renowned masters of black literature and is the model for today’s renaissance of black writers.

Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimke Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders

Penguin Press
December 2002
432 pages
Paperback ISBN 9780142001035

Mark Perry

A story of race consciousness and the fight for equality told through the lives of one extraordinary American family

In the late 1820s Sarah and Angelina Grimké traded their elite position as daughters of a prominent white slaveholding family in Charleston, South Carolina, for a life dedicated to abolitionism and advocacy of women’s rights in the North. After the Civil War, discovering that their late brother had had children with one of his slaves, the Grimké sisters helped to educate their nephews and gave them the means to start a new life in postbellum America. The nephews, Archibald and Francis, went on to become well-known African American activists in the burgeoning civil rights movement and the founding of the NAACP. Spanning 150 eventful years, this is an inspiring tale of a remarkable family that transformed itself and America.

The Free Negro Family: A Study of Family Origins Before the Civil War

Fisk University Press
1932
72 pages
E185.86 .F84
Source: University of Michigan via The Hathi Trust Digital Library

E. Franklin Frazier (1894-1962), Professor of Sociology
Fisk University

CONTENTS

1. Origin, Growth, and Distribution of the Free Negroes
2. Character of the Free Negro Communities
3. The Free Negro Family
   • Selected Bibliography

TABLES

1. Growth of the Slave and Free Negro Population in the United States: 1790-1860
2. Distribution of the Free Negro Population According to States in 1830 and 1860
3. Number of Slaves and Free Negroes in the Total Population of Four Leading Cities in 1790
4. School Attendance and Adult Illiteracy Among the Free Negro Population in 16 Cities: 1850

MAPS

1. Percentage of the Negro Population Free in the Counties of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia: 1860
2. Distribution of Free Negro Families: 1830

CHAPTER I: ORIGIN, GROWTH, AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE FREE NEGROES

A class of free Negroes existed in America almost from the time that they were first introduced into the Virginia colony in 1619. Contrary to popular belief, the free class may even be said to be prior in origin to the slave class, since the first Negroes brought to America, did not have the status of slaves, but of indentured servants. Contracts of indentured Negro servants indicate that the status of the first Negroes was the same as that of the white servants. Moreover, court records show that Negroes were released originally upon the completion of a term of servitude. The slave status, for which the white colonists had no model in England, “developed in customary law, and was legally sanctioned at first by court decisions.” Although it was not until 1662 that the first act of the Virginia slave code was passed, slavery by this time had apparently become established in practice. As early as 1651 we find a Negro, Anthony Johnson, who was probably enumerated among the indentured servants in the census of 1624, having assigned to him in fee simple a land patent for two hundred and fifty acres of land. Two years later this same man was the defendant in a suit brought against him by another Negro for his freedom from servitude, after having served “seaven or eight years of Indenture.” According to Russell, “The upper limit of the period in which it was possible for negroes to come to Virginia as servants and to acquire freedom after a limited period is the year 1682” Nevertheless, the free class continued to grow until the Civil War.

The free Negro population was increased through five sources: (1) children born of free colored persons; (2) mulatto children born of free colored mothers; (3) mulatto children born of white servants or free women; (4) children of free Negro and Indian parentage; (5) manumitted slaves. The increase in the free Negro population through the offspring of free colored parents, though difficult to estimate, contributed to the growth of this class until Emancipation. Likewise, the numerous cases of offsprings from white fathers and free colored mothers would indicate that from this source the free Negro population was constantly enlarged. Mulattoes born of white servant women and free white women were also a significant factor, for it was soon the cause for special legislative action. Virginia, in 1691, passed a law prescribing that “any white woman marrying a negro or mulatto, bond or free,” should be banished. Maryland, in 1681, provided in an act that children born of white servant women and Negroes were free. Eleven years later any white woman who married or became the mother of a child by either a slave or free Negro became a servant for seven years. Pennsylvania found it necessary to restrict the intermarriage of Negroes and whites through legislative action in 1725-1726, after having punished a woman for “abetting a clandestine marriage between a white woman and a negro” in 1722. This restriction was swept away, as well as the other restrictions upon the Negro, in 1780. Seemingly, mixed marriages became common, for Thomas Branagan complained:

There are many, very many blacks who . . . begin to feel themselves consequential . . . will not be satisfied unless they get white women for wives, and are likewise exceedingly impertinent to white people in low circumstances … I solemnly swear, I have seen more white women married to, and deluded through the arts of seduction by Negroes in one year in Philadelphia, than for eight years I was visiting (West Indies and the Southern States). I know a black man who seducted a young white girl. . . who soon after married him, and died with a broken heart. On her death he said that he would not disgrace himself to have a Negro wife and acted accordingly, for he soon after married a white woman . . . There are perhaps hundreds of white women thus fascinated by black men in this city, and there are thousands of black children by them at present.

It is difficult to determine to what extent the intermixture of free Negroes and Indians contributed to the growth of the free colored population. There was always considerable association between the Indian and Negro, both in areas given up to Indians and outside of these areas…

Read the entire book here.