Mixed Race Studies

Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (review)

Journal of Social History
Volume 33, Number 3, Spring 2000
pages 753-755
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2000.0037

Joshua D. Rothman, Associate Professor of History
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History. Edited by Martha Hodes (New York and London: New York University Press, 1999. xvi plus 542 pp.).

In his 1995 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, reprinted as the opening essay of this important collection, Gary Nash called the attention of his audience to the “hidden history of mestizo America.” Lost amidst America’s long and frequently tragic experience with racial and ethnic classification and separation is a past significantly shaped by sexual intermixture, cultural boundary crossing, and lives lived and identities forged in tension with dominant ideologies. Looking backward with a sensitivity to this “hybridity,” Nash proposed, might hold a key for moving beyond racialism in our future, and for finding a politics that transcends biological determinism without sacrificing the value of difference.

The twenty-three other essays assembled here by Martha Hodes (eight of which have been previously published in whole or in part) collectively explore the possibilities such a reconceptualization of the past holds. The subtitle of the volume is a bit misleading, since nearly all of the pieces deal principally with the European colonial territories that now comprise the continental United States rather than with Mexico or Canada. Still, the breadth of human experience and historical subfields traversed by the authors is astonishing. Working from discussions of the intersection of race and sex, the essays yield insight to historical issues of gender, sexuality, marriage and the family, class, religion, slavery, violence, national and personal identity, politics and political activism, diplomacy, culture, economics and commercial exchange, law, and crime, just to name those themes most prominent and recurring.

The collection is divided into five parts and arranged chronologically. Generally, the essays within each part are logically juxtaposed. Moreover, the separate parts are connected smartly to one another, producing a discernible, if subtle and fractured, narrative that describes important ebbs and flows in the history of sex across racial and ethnic lines in America since the 1690s. The essays in part one examine various regions of colonial North America, and cumulatively investigate European, Native American, and African American societies and cultures encountering each other, sexually and otherwise, for the first time. The authors here describe an era characterized by domination and distrust, but also by uncertainty, intercultural negotiation, and mutual accommodation. The early emergence of racial antipathy and the construction of racial hierarchy-both inseparable  from sex and sexuality-are never far from the surface in the stories told by Jennifer Spear about French Louisiana, Graham Hodges about German Lutherans in New York, Daniel Mandell about New England, and Richard Godbeer about the eighteenth-century Southern backcountry.

Part two moves on to the early national and antebellum periods. Here, slavery takes center stage. Most of the essays in this section focus on interracial sexual activity between whites and blacks-particularly in the South-which was commonplace despite being legally and culturally taboo. In the words of Sharon Block, who compares and contrasts the sexual vulnerability of white servant and black enslaved women, sex across the color line under slavery frequently yielded coercive situations where “economic mastery created sexual mastery.” As Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., and Josephine Boyd Bradley and Kent Anderson Leslie demonstrate in fascinating case studies, however, familial connections between whites and blacks under slavery also enabled some people of African descent to carve out personal identities and establish economic positions that transcended both their color and their ancestry.

In her essay on antebellum New York City, Leslie Harris demonstrates how fears of “amalgamation” were central to political discourse about abolitionism, urban poverty, and immigration. As a number of essays in part three make evident, interracial sex had even more volatile political implications in the Reconstruction-era South. In his…

The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity [review]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 3, 2013
Special Issue: Racialization and Religion: Race, culture and difference in the study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia
pages 517-518
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.737929

Robin Cohen, Emeritus Professor of Development Studies
University of Oxford

Michael J. Monahan, The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity. New York: Fordham University Press. 2011, ix + 247 pp. (paper).

This book is written by a philosopher who reworks the well-trodden ground of how we to understand race and racism. It is perhaps not too grand a claim to say that for many years US discussion about race and racism was directly or indirectly derived from Gunnar Myrdal’s formative study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). It is an indication of how far scholarship in this field has moved on that Myrdal does not even make an appearance in Monahan’s list of references. Instead he draws on three newer wellsprings of arguments—cultural studies, whiteness studies and creolization.

One of the great luminaries of cultural studies was Raymond Williams at Cambridge, became so weary of being hailed as one of the progenitors of the field that he complained, ‘I don’t know how many times I’ve wished that I’d never heard the damned word (culture)’. This is because the idea of culture is often so vague and so tantalizingly out of reach. For Monahan. cultural studies is accessed not so much through reactions and interpretations of literature (the British tradition), but through phenomenology. Phenomenology, Monahan avers, is characterized ‘first and foremost by a commitment to placing human consciousness at the forefront of philosophical investigations’ (p. 106). This gives him ‘the subject’ in the principal title of his book.

Trained in a more prosaic sociological tradition. I would have supposed that accessing the subject’ might be easier if the dramatis personae in the research were alive and able to be surveyed or at least interviewed. Monahan does not make it easy for himself by choosing, as the central characters in his research, seventeenth-century Irish servants who were indentured to masters in Barbados. The so-called ‘Redlegs’ of the Caribbean (they went also to St Vincent and the Grenadines) have rightly attracted considerable scholarly attention by fascinated historians. There were a few who were stricto sensu slaves (though Monahan denies this); most were semi-free workers who could not be sold or endowed and had to be freed after their indentures expired. They were often impoverished to the point that their…

Read or purchase the article here.

“Multiracial” Discourse: Racial Classifications in an Era of Color-blind Jurisprudence

Maryland Law Review
Volume 57, Issue 1 (1998)
pages 97-173

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Professor of Law
Fordham University

• INTRODUCTION
• I. THE BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION OF THE MULTIRACIAL CATEGORY MOVEMENT
• II. THE ADVERSE CONSEQUENCES OF MULTIRACIAL DISCOURSE
  • A. The Reaffirmation of the Value of Whiteness in Racial Hierarchy
  • B. The Dissociation of a Racially Subordinated Buffer Class from Equality Efforts
  • C. The Continuation of the Color-Blind Jurisprudence Trajectory
    • 1. The Historical Meaning of Race Expelled from Analysis of Racial Discrimination
    • 2. Societal Discrimination Expelled from Analysis of Racial Discrimination
    • 3. The Judicial View of Race-Conscious Equality Measures as Harmful Stereotyping
    • 4. The Judicial Excision of Race from Racial Discrimination Discourse
  • D. Measurement of Racial Progress Hindered
• III. A RACE-CONSCIOUS RACIAL CLASSIFICATION PROPOSAL
• CONCLUSION

Introduction

The debate, in short, is really not so much about a multiracial box as it is about what race means-and what it will come to mean as the society approaches the millennium.
—Ellis Close

For the past several years, there has been a Multiracial Category Movement (MCM) promoted by some biracial persons’ and their parents for the addition of a “multiracial” race category on the decennial census. The stated aim of such a new category is to obtain a more specific count of the number of mixed-race persons in the United States and to have that tallying of mixed-race persons act as a barometer and promoter of racial harmony. As proposed, a respondent could choose the “multiracial” box in lieu of the presently listed racial classifications of American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black, White, or Other. The census schedule also includes a separate Hispanic Origin ethnicity question. On October 29, 1997, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) adopted a federal Interagency Committee recommendation to reject the multiracial category in favor of allowing individuals to check more than one racial category. Some MCM proponents are not satisfied with the OMB’s decision, because multiple box checking does not directly promote a distinct multiracial identity.  These MCM proponents are committed to continue lobbying for a multiracial category on the 2010 census. Further, an OMB official has indicated that the issue of a multiracial category might be reconsidered with an increase in mixed-race persons. Yet, the significance of the MCM extends beyond the actual decision of whether and how mixed-race persons should be counted.

The discourse surrounding the advocacy for a census count of mixed-race persons has social and legal ramifications apart from the limited context of revising a census form. The principle underlying this Article is that the law should be understood in terms of its social consequences. From a legal-realist perspective, it is important to scrutinize the neutral discourse characteristic among those proposing a legally mandated mixed-race census count. Such analysis exposes its moral and political significance and ramifications. “[L]anguage… can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive ‘othering’ of people.” The power of discourse arises from its ability to construct a public narrative and
then obstruct counter-explanations for social reality.

Multiracial discourse contends that a mixed-race census count is necessary because race has become too fluid to monitor. The theory posits that the inability to identify psychologically with just one racial category is inherent to mixed-race persons alone and that the growing number of mixed-race persons demonstrates the futility of racial categorization as a practice. For instance, MCM proponents often refer to the growing numbers of persons who choose the “Other Race” category to support the premise that the racial categories are inadequate for mixed-race persons. The multiracial narrative of modern race being more fluid than in the past corresponds with and reinforces the color-blind jurisprudence presentation of race as devoid of meaning. Thus, “multiracial discourse” has an immediate meaning as the rhetoric deployed in the campaign for a specific count of mixed-race persons, and a more expansive meaning as the approach to race that views the increasing diversity of society as deconstructing and transcending race. Multiracial discourse misconstrues the meaning of race used in the group measurement of racial disparity, with an individual focused assessment of fluid cultural identity. Such a view of race negates its sociopolitical meaning26 and thereby undermines effective legal mechanisms to ameliorate racial discrimination. In fact, the MCM can be viewed as a metonym for the more general colorblind approach to race evident in recent Supreme Court cases.

Both the immediate and expansive meanings of “multiracial discourse” are interrelated and involve a highly politicized discourse. Accordingly, this Article shall question the assumptions that underlie both levels of meaning in order to assess the continuing significance of the racial classifications that multiracial discourse challenges. This analysis reveals that although multiracial discourse may seem benign and appealing on a humanitarian level, its implementation will produce counter-egalitarian results in the struggle for racial equality. The MCM’s campaign for color-blind treatment of racial hierarchy cloaks the racial significance of ostensibly race-neutral laws, as the Supreme Court’s recent movement toward color-blind anti-discrimination jurisprudence has done.

Because of the manner in which the census context highlights the dangers of multiracial discourse to racial justice efforts, this Article will focus upon the census as a well-known paradigm for the way racial classifications function. In particular, to demonstrate the folly of color-blind approaches to race issues, the author enlists the debate centered on the demand for a census count of mixed-race persons. Because the census is the cornerstone of the federal statistical system, the battle over the reform of the census racial classifications is significant and far-reaching.The census reflects in large measure the nation’s struggle over how human beings will be known politically in a racially stratified society.  The debate over a multiracial category reveals an intriguing aspect about how we conceptualize race. An examination of multiracial discourse reveals that multiracial-category proponents misperceive the meaning of race relevant to the census inquiry by conflating a cultural approach to race with a sociopolitical approach to race. Therefore, this Article analyzes the widespread legal ramifications of the MCM and assesses whether the MCM’s proposal effectively advances its stated goal of promoting racial equality. After analyzing the legal import of multiracial discourse, the Article determines that the MCM misperception of race and its fluidity inadvertently furthers the progression of color-blind jurisprudence in direct contravention of the MCM goal of promoting racial equality. Part I provides background and identifies the motivating forces behind the MCM as a color-blind movement. Part II critiques the MCM for its adverse effects upon racial justice efforts in furthering the manner in which color-blind jurisprudence disregards actual experiences of racial discrimination in the promotion of White supremacy. Part III proposes a race-conscious classification system, which reflects the sociopolitical nature of race, to monitor racial discrimination more effectively and to dislodge the force of multiracial discourse…

Read the entire article here.

‘We have a race problem in England’

The Voice
London, England
2013-03-06

Hazelann Williams

Arinze Kene says he does not do politics. But for anyone who has seen one of Kene’s plays, it may sound like an unusual statement because the prolific playwright has written many plays about the state of society, ranging from life on a housing estate to African perceptions on Christianity. Yet, Kene says his plays are not political, they are humanistic.

“I’m not a political person, my plays always cover issues that people may say are political, but I’m tackling issues from the human perspective, from where it affects people personally. I can’t shun politics because I live on planet Earth but when I can I try to avoid it, because I don’t understand it. It gets me worked up and gets me stressed out and stress is the enemy,” confessed the 25-year-old.

In his latest play, God’s Property, Kene takes the audience back in time to the restless streets of Deptford, south London in the early 1980s, as estranged mixed race brothers Chima (Kinsley Ben-Adir) and Onochie (Ash Hunter) are unexpectedly reunited.

Not only covering the spiraling youth unemployment, inner city riots and economic downturn of the Eighties, the writer also is exploring the very divisive issue of race and where mixed race people stand in society. And although the Little Baby Jesus author tried to stay away from the political aspect of race he had to admit that, like 30 years ago, the UK still has a racial problem…

…“I know that some mixed raced people feel black, some feel mixed race and I thought I would explore that. It is still relevant, I don’t think discussing race is overdone, if you looked at the amount of time Great Expectations has been done and re-done, I don’t get bored of a good story and I don’t think this issue has been explored anywhere near enough as most. I think I am tapping into something that has not been explored enough,” said Kene…

Read the entire article here.

Canada Is Still Racist: And No Think Piece Can Change That

Vice Canada: The Definitive Guide to Enlightening Information
2013-03-05

Anupa Mistry

When I was younger and more naïve and shielded by my parents, Canadian multiculturalism felt real and true. I grew up in Brampton, Ont., a restlessly expanding suburb of Toronto that teems with immigrants. In 1992, the city – or, at least, my grade two classroom – was a case study in the celebratory, preservation-minded policy of Trudeau’s multiculturalism: My pale blonde friend Zeyn was from Turkey and Afia and all her cousins were Pakistani. Ebony and Roxanne had parents from Jamaica, Seth The Pervert was a Newfie, and Natasha, whose surprise birthday party I ruined because I cannot keep those kinds of secrets, constantly had relatives visiting from Guyana.

There was never a need to question where I fit in, and that same school year when some sniveling, store brand whiteboy called me a ‘Paki’ I went home and told my parents and cried because I knew from TV that that was what I was supposed to do. In reality, while I still remember exactly how the light filled the air in that bustling elementary school hallway, I was left largely unfazed by first contact with overt racism. Even my eight-year-old mind could grasp that dude was either scared, stupid or, at the very least, outnumbered. In that multiethnic microcosm his bad attitude was undesirable, and I was the normal one. He had nothing to take. There might not be a better place to grow up brown or black than Brampton.

Then, I enrolled in a performing arts high school north of the city only to transfer after two years because it was too white. Race as it actually functions, as a tool of human insidiousness and despotism, became real beyond my imagined utopia. As a millennial citizen of the Western world I move with an according sense of privilege: whatever you got, I’ma have that too. It’s my birthright, regardless of the colour of my skin or where my grandparents are from. Until it’s not. In hindsight my problem with that school was an inability to articulate feeling exposed and significantly different and, for the first time in my life, outnumbered. I’d taken diversity for granted; my normal was not so much…

…Two recent high profile pieces by Canadian writers are willfully naïve about the psychic reality of this country’s demographics…

…Fear is kind of the subtext for “Mixie Me,” a personal essay about being mixed race by Nick Hune-Brown in Toronto Life, with the attendant claim that the city is set to be the world’s first post-racial metropolis. Mixed race people are a more common sight on the streets of Toronto now, more than ever, and there’s comfort to be taken in that kind of visibility, he writes. Anxieties about interracial unions have given way to curiosity. Sexy, ethnically ambiguous mixies are what makes Toronto desirable next to taco restaurants and condos and a trap music party every night of the week. The beige and the beautiful will blur the lines that constitute xenophobia, or at least confuse us into submission.

Glib eugenics aside, there is a lot of merit to visibility. It’s why I was able to easily dismiss that second grade bully. But I’m skeptical that birthing a Yoruba-Guinea-Indian child, though a political act, will dissolve the structures that preserve xenophobia unless, maybe, that hot multiracial baby grows up to marry a Weston…

Read the entire article here.

Laylah Ali: The Greenheads Series

Weisman Art Museum
University of Minnesota
333 East River Road
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455
(612) 625-9494
2013-02-16 through 2013-05-12

Laylah Ali, Associate Professor of Art
Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Join us for a talk with Laylah Ali on March 7, 2013.

WAM is pleased to present Laylah Ali: The Greenheads Series. This is the first time the Greenheads series, created between 1996 and 2005, is being shown as a comprehensive body of work. Forty-three of the exquisitely rendered gouache paintings—from a total of more than eighty—have been gathered from collections here and abroad to chronicle the series’ development.

The figures inhabiting Ali’s works—the Greenheads—are enigmatic, round-headed beings of indeterminate sex and race who inhabit a regimented, dystopian world where odd and menacing, though sometimes strangely humorous, encounters prevail.

This exhibition will allow viewers to examine the evolution of Ali’s series. While the early paintings frequently focus on physically aggressive exchanges between groups of figures, these interactions are later replaced by individuals—alone or in small groups—who witness the prelude to, or aftermath of, a charged encounter. As the series continues, more and more of the figures’ anatomy is pruned away, as if the artist is examining how much can be taken out—such as arms, feet, skin color—while still communicating thought, emotion, and social status.

This exhibition was organized by the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts. It is co-sponsored by the University of Minnesota Department of Art…

For more information, click here.

60 Ways of Looking at a Black Woman

The New York Times
2005-01-23

Edward Lewine

Ellen Gallagher dabbed a swirl of gray watercolor onto the delicate pencil drawing she had just sketched of a furry hamster. Late December sunlight radiated through the windows at Two Palms Press, the SoHo printmaking studio where she has spent the last 18 months preparing a work comprising 60 collage prints. Titled “DeLuxe,” it is the subject of its own show at the Whitney Museum, opening this week.

Weeks remained until “DeLuxe” had to be delivered, and the mood in the lower Broadway loft was intense. One artist glued toy eyeballs onto a collage; another placed wig shapes made of plasticine clay onto a different collage; while a master printer was in a darkroom reproducing pages from black magazines like Ebony, Sepia and Our World that dated from the 1930’s through the 1970’s.

Reserved in manner, with a sonorous voice and a girlish laugh, Ms. Gallagher seemed relaxed despite her looming deadline and pleased to see the first copy of “DeLuxe” nearing completion. (The set of 60 collages will be printed 20 times in a numbered edition.)

“I love this moment,” she said. “It is sort of delicious. You have come through the agonizing part, when you are trying to articulate what you want to say but can’t. You have made your ideas visible.”

Until recently, Ms. Gallagher, 39, had charted a quiet if successful course as an artist, mostly as a painter whose work plays with ideas about race. In the past year, however, her career has gained momentum. Major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art have bought paintings; and the technical virtuosity of “DeLuxe,” the subject of her first solo show in a New York museum, is generating buzz…

…Many curators praise Ms. Gallagher for her ability to discuss race without being pompous and for the way she balances ideas with technique. “She’s masterful at creating tension between form and content,” said Elizabeth Smith, the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which bought a Gallagher painting last year.

Not all agree. Ms. Gallagher has been faulted for what some critics see as a certain facile quality. Writing in The New York Times about Ms. Gallagher’s winter 2004 show at the Gagosian Gallery, Ken Johnson called her paintings and collages “visually catchy” but “too obvious.”

Ms. Gallagher said she draws such criticism because her material makes people uncomfortable. “Somehow in America black artists aren’t allowed to use banal images of blackness,” she said. “On the other hand, the idea of something black and inscrutable is also very disturbing.”…

…Ms. Gallagher was raised in Providence, R.I. Her mother was white, her father black. Her father, a professional boxer, was rarely around, she said, and died in 1998.

Growing up, Ms. Gallagher said, she learned to navigate the worlds of her mother’s blue-collar, Irish family, her father’s family of recent immigrants from the Cape Verde Islands and the homes of her friends, many of them African Americans…

Read the entire article here.

MFA Thesis Choreographies

Davis Life Magazine
Davis, California
2013-02-28

UC Davis Department of Theatre and Dance is proud to present MFA Thesis Choreographies: “Ligilo” by Jarrell Iu-Hui Chua, in collaboration with Bobby August Jr., travels through the worlds of memories, dreams and present realities to investigate touch and its effects on relationships; “Transmutation” by Christine Germain, in collaboration with Andrea del Moral and Deirdre Morris, examines questions of personal identity and shifts in identity. MFA Thesis Choreographies opens at Mondavi Center’s Vanderhoef Studio Theatre on Thursday, Feb. 21 and runs through Sunday, March 3.

The title of Jarrell Iu-Hui Chua’s work “Ligilo” means “link” in Esperanto, a language that represents the choreographer’s ethnic sensitivities. She and collaborator Bobby August Jr. are both “hapa,” a term that Chua lovingly uses to describe their half-Asian heritage. Their hapa experiences of prejudice growing up in America are a core element in the choreography as is personal trauma from which Chua is recovering.

Emanating from these painful themes, “Ligilo” portrays anger and violence as two performers, Chua and August Jr., physically connect and disconnect. Most emphatically, the piece explores the positive dimensions of human touch in erotic love, humor, tenderness and other aspects of humanity and healing. The spiritual touch of bathing a loved one conveys hope and tranquility. This is both the heart of “Ligilo” and the basis of its foreign title as Esperanto (literally meaning “one who hopes”) was intended to foster peace among peoples of differing cultures…

Read the entire article here.

MMXLII Viewpoint: What Are You?

MMXLII: the power of diversity
2013-03-01

Joel Wacks

Our guest correspondent Joel Wacks is back with another intriguing article as he takes time to reflect on his personal life. As a person of mixed race there is a common question he seems to always be asked, and for one reason or another…it doesn’t sit too well. Hit the jump and take a look at his opinion and see what many other people of mixed race have to deal with constantly. Take a walk in their shoes so you can think about how that question may come across for some people. And if you are of mixed race, this is probably a story you can relate to.

A week or two ago I spent a weekend in New York, where I happened to chat, briefly, with a girl from Maryland. Or at least a girl who went to school in Maryland- it might be that she was from somewhere else originally. There were several minutes of generic pleasantries, and then she asked me, just as pleasantly as she’d asked my name and about my flight, what I was. Those were her exact words. “What are you?”

It was a question I found jarring and unpleasant. Which is unfair- it wasn’t unpleasantly, I’m sure, and I certainly had no excuse for being jarred. It’s a question I’ve been asked many times, by many people, for as long as I can remember. The truth is, though, that the more times I’m asked what I am, the more bothersome I find it. On the flight back to California, I had some time to think about why.

As an English major, I’ll start the discussion with a close reading, an analysis of the diction used in this three-word query. I’ll go ahead and say right now that it could usually be phrased more sensitively. I’ve heard stabs at this, actually- “What ethnicity are you?” “What nationality are you?” “Where are you from?” invariably followed by the clarifying but not necessarily enlightening “No, I mean originally?” For whatever reason though the most common formulation remains the simplest- “What are you?” (Of course the evidence for this is purely anecdotal, as much as I wish I had I haven’t actually kept track.)

It’s the “what” I think, that’s the sticking point. There’s some ugly implication, not entirely accidental I suspect, that you don’t fit into acceptable categories or genres, that you’re something completely different, unrecognizable, freakish. It’s telling that the snarky response most often suggested by my friends and family is “Human.” After all, who else is asked what they are besides the racially ambiguous? It’s what you ask the Terminator when his flesh scrapes away to reveal the robot beneath. It’s what you ask the newest Batman villain, right before he does you in. It’s what you ask Frankenstein’s monster, when you notice all those stitches. “What” is for monsters. When you’re talking to people, you usually say “who.” But of course, if you ask someone “Who are you?” they’d just tell you about themselves, and might forget to mention race at all.

Which brings me to the second issue I have with “What are you?” I never know how to answer. When I was younger, I would tell people that I was half Chinese and a quarter Jewish, falling prey to the racism of marked terms and assuming that the final fraction of unadulterated WASP DNA needed no explaination. At some point I figured out that the fractions didn’t add up, and switched to “Half Chinese and half white.” That formula lasted for years, before I began to worry that it sounded too much like a formula. “Half and half.” It made me feel like a cocktail, or a dairy product…

Read the entire article here

Bengali Harlem: Author documents a lost history of immigration in America

In America: You define America. What defines you?
Cable News Network (CNN)
2013-02-15

Editor’s note: CNN’s Moni Basu, a Bengali immigrant, was born in Kolkata, India.

Moni Basu

(CNN) – In the next few weeks, Fatima Shaik, an African-American, Christian woman, will travel “home” from New York to Kolkata, India.

It will be a journey steeped in a history that has remained unknown until the publication last month of a revelatory book by Vivek Bald. And it will be a journey of contemplation as Shaik, 60, meets for the first time ancestors with whom she has little in common.

“I want to go back because I want to find some sort of closure for my family, said Shaik, an author and scholar of the Afro-Creole experience.

That Americans like Shaik, who identify as black, are linked by blood to a people on the Indian subcontinent seems, at first, improbable.

South Asian immigration boomed in this country after the passage of landmark immigration legislation in 1965. But long before that, there were smaller waves of new Americans who hailed from India under the British Empire.

The first group, to which Shaik’s grandfather, Shaik Mohamed Musa, belonged, consisted of peddlers who came to these shores in the 1890s, according to Bald. They sold embroidered silks and cottons and other “exotic” wares from the East on the boardwalks of Asbury Park and Atlantic City, New Jersey. They eventually made their way south to cities like New Orleans and Atlanta and even farther to Central America.

The second wave came in the 1920s and ‘30s. They were seamen, some merchant marines.

Most were Muslim men from what was then the Indian province of Bengal and in many ways, they were the opposite of the stereotype of today’s well-heeled, highly educated South Asians.

South Asian immigration was illegal then – the 1917 Immigration Act barred all idiots, imbeciles, criminals and people from the “Asiatic Barred Zone.”

The Bengalis got off ships with little to their name.

They were mostly illiterate and worked as cooks, dishwashers, merchants, subway laborers. In New York, they gradually formed a small community of sorts in Spanish Harlem. They occupied apartments and tenement housing on streets in the 100s. They worked hard.

And they did all they could do to become American in a nation of segregation and prejudice.

A huge part of that meant marrying Latino and African-American women—there were no Bengali women around—and letting go of the world they left behind.

Unlike other immigrants of the time, they didn’t settle in their own enclaves. Rather, they began life anew in established neighborhoods of color: Harlem, West Baltimore and in New Orleans, Tremé.

By doing so, they also became a part of black and Latino heritage in America…

Read the entire article and view the photograph of “Bengalis and their Puerto Rican and African-American wives at a 1952 banquet at New York’s Pakistan League of America” here.