Mixed Race Studies

Romancing the Raj: Interracial Relations in Anglo-Indian Romance Novels

History of Intellectual Culture
Volume 4, Number 1 (2004)
ISSN 1492-7810

Hsu-Ming Teo, Senior Lecturer and Head of Modern History
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

This article examines Anglo-Indian romance novels written by British women during the period of the Raj. It argues that these love stories were symptomatic of British fantasies of colonial India and served as a forum to explore interracial relations as well as experimenting with the modern femininity of the New Woman. With the achievement of Indian independence in 1947, British interest in India as a locus for romance rapidly declined, thus demonstrating that these novels were never concerned with India but with British lives and British colonialism.

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Q&A: Professor examines those ‘outside the color lines’ in new book

University of Wisconsin-Madison
News
2012-10-20

Jenney Price

The history of segregation in the United States is often seen in black and white. Leslie Bow, professor of English and Asian American studies, is interested in the experiences of communities that fell outside those color lines. In her new book, Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South, Bow examines what segregation demanded of people who did not fall into the category of black or white — including Asians, American Indians and people of mixed race.

Wisconsin Week: What did segregation mean for people who — as you described it — stood outside the color lines? You posed the question, “Where did the Asian sit on the segregated bus?’

Leslie Bow: I think what’s most interesting to me about a project like this is that we often conflate race with African-Americans or see race as a black-white issue. When we say “multiculturalism” … we don’t think conceptually or theoretically about the challenge that poses to the way we think about racial history in the United States…

…WW: You mentioned your parents, who are Chinese-American. They attended white schools in Arkansas but didn’t socialize with and weren’t invited to the homes of their white classmates and I wondered how much their experience impacted your research interests?

LB: Definitely, because it was something that they themselves did not talk about. What I found was that they mediated that experience by creating a third level of segregation where there was limited social engagement with either whites or blacks. Their social context was wholly Chinese-American at the time. So, to me that was just the jumping off point for really an exploration of ambiguity, which is very much the bread and butter of literary studies: How you come to this process of interpreting multiple meanings within any given text…

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“What About the Children?” The Psychological and Social Well-Being of Multiracial Adolescents

The Sociological Quarterly
Volume 47, Issue 1 (February 2006)
pages 147–173
DOI: 10.1111/j.1533-8525.2006.00041.x

Mary E. Campbell, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Iowa

Jennifer Eggerling-Boeck
University of Wisconsin–Madison

We used the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the social and psychological well-being of multiracial adolescents. Using two different measures of multiracial identity, we investigated the ways in which these adolescents compare to their monoracial counterparts on five outcomes: depression, seriously considering suicide, feeling socially accepted, feeling close to others at school, and participating in extracurricular activities. We found that multiracial adolescents as a group experience some negative outcomes compared to white adolescents, but that this finding is driven by negative outcomes for those with American Indian and white heritage. We found no consistent evidence, however, that multiracial adolescents as a group face more difficulty in adolescence than members of other racial and ethnic minority groups. The results were similar, whether the multiracial population is defined by self-identification or by their parents’ racial identifications.

Read or purchase the article here.

Brazil Enacts Affirmative Action Law for Universities

The New York Times
2012-08-30

Simon Romero, Brazil Bureau Chief

RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil’s government has enacted one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping affirmative action laws, requiring public universities to reserve half of their admission spots for the largely poor students in the nation’s public schools and vastly increase the number of university students of African descent across the country.

The law, signed Wednesday by President Dilma Rousseff, seeks to reverse the racial and income inequality that has long characterized Brazil, a country with more people of African heritage than any nation outside of Africa. Despite strides over the last decade in lifting millions out of poverty, Brazil remains one of the world’s most unequal societies.

“Brazil owes a historical debt to a huge part of its own population,” said Jorge Werthein, who directs the Brazilian Center for Latin American Studies. “The democratization of higher education, which has always been a dream for the most neglected students in public schools, is one way of paying this debt.”…

…But while affirmative action has come under threat in the United States, it is taking deeper root in Brazil, Latin America’s largest country. Though the new legislation, called the Law of Social Quotas, is expected to face legal challenges, it drew broad support among lawmakers.

Of Brazil’s 81 senators, only one voted against the law this month. Other spheres of government here have also supported affirmative action measures. In a closely watched decision in April, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the racial quotas enacted in 2004 by the University of Brasília, which reserved 20 percent of its spots for black and mixed-race students…

…Brazil’s 2010 census showed that a slight majority of this nation’s 196 million people defined themselves as black or mixed-race, a shift from previous decades during which most Brazilians called themselves white…

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A quantitative method of morphological assessment of hybridization in the U. S. Negro-White male crania

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 41, Issue 2 (September 1974)
pages 269–278
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330410209

Sudha S. Saksena
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Muskingum College [Muskingum University], New Concord, Ohio

Portions of this paper are based on a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Indiana, Bloomington, Indiana, in 1967. Part of this paper appeared in abstract form in American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Vol. 29, No. 1, 1968, pp. 124–125.

The study develops a morphological method of assessing the amount of parental components in a U.S. Negro-White Hybrid sample and tests to what extent a multivariate discriminant analysis actually reflects the morphological pattern of hybridization.

To formulate norms of description for the parental and hybrid populations, a seventeenth century London Farringdon Street series of 94 crania was selected to represent the British White ancestral component and the data on the cadaverand-skeletal series in the T. W. Todd collection of Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, were used in the selection of 115 Unmixed Negro and 115 Negro-White Hybrid male crania.

The conclusions are: (1) the morphological scores of the Negro-White Hybrid series shows a biological overlap with the two parental series in the proportion of 1:3 (i.e., 25% White to 75% Negro). This overlap reflects the probable porportion of ancestral mixture in the ratio of one-fourth White to three-fourths Negro in the Negro-White Hybrid sample; and (2) the morphological approach to the assessment of the parental components with multivariate discriminant analysis as a tool, proves to be highly reliable in providing a biologically meaningful index of relationship.

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Cole Porter Scores An Interracial Couple’s Highs And Lows

National Public Radio
All Things Considered
Music: Mom and Dad’s Record Collection
2012-08-30

NPR Staff

As summer winds down, All Things Considered is winding down its series “Music: Mom and Dad’s Record Collection.”

For the past few months, the show has asked listeners to tell their stories about a particular piece of music they associate with their parents. Listener Melanie Cowart of San Antonio, Texas, wrote in to explain how Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” — a song that’s been interpreted by Artie Shaw, Ella Fitzgerald and many others — became a running soundtrack for her parents’ relationship.

“My father was African-American; my mother was white,” Cowart tells NPR’s Melissa Block. “They met in 1929, at a time when that type of a relationship was not something that was acceptable in society. In fact, in many states, including in Missouri where they met, it was against the law. But they fell in love and formed a very strong bond.”…

Read the entire transcript here. Download the audio here (00:05:42).

The Species Problem: Nineteenth-Century Concepts of Racial Inferiority in the Origin of Man Controversy

American Anthropologist
Volume 72, Issue 6 (December 1970)
pages 1319–1329
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1970.72.6.02a00060

John S. Haller, Jr., Emeritus Professor of History
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

The species problem and its implications in the origin of man controversy had grown in importance in prewar America owing largely to the question of slavery. Implicit in the problem was the position of the so-called inferior races in society. The monogenists, despite their emphasis on environmentalism, were no more favorable to the Negro, except in their remote theoretical stance. The Civil War—not Darwin—brought the controversy to an end in America, but it continued to rage in Europe. The apparent synthesis of the schools during the 1870s did not disturb the stereotyped ideas of racial inferiority. The “inferior races” remained the basis of evolutionary discussion, leaving them as remote outcasts of the evolutionary struggle.

Though most nineteenth-century anthropologists were busily engaged in the technical aspects of somatometry, a good number of them were also concerned with the more problematic question of man’s origin. Like somatometry, the speculation into origin grew out of the awareness of differences in the broad spectrum of genus Homo. The taxonomic system of Linnaeus not only precipitated an intensive study of comparative structures, but led also to the question of whether the various “races” of man originated in one primitive stock. Were the Negroes, Hottentots, Eskimos, and Australians really men in the full sense of the term, sharing in the intellectual endowments of the European, or were they half-brutes, not belonging to what the French scientist Bory de Saint-Vincent called the “race adamique”? Defined in other terms, the problem concerned whether humanity descended from a monogenetic type, or whether humanity had distinct polygenetic ancestors. If it were true that these peoples were really subspecies, or subraces, then, some argued, they should become subject to the superior races. The subsequent controversy between the monogenists and polygenists became the longest of the internecine battles among the physical scientists of man. Though ostensibly concerned only with origin, the controversy highlighted a major confrontation between science and religion. It also illuminated the peculiar role played by the “inferior races” to the higher categories of man, a role that was fundamentally the same in both schools and remained unchanged during the decades before and after Darwin. The apparent synthesis of the two opposing schools during the 1870s seemed not to disturb the continuity of race stereotypes and the ideas of racial inferiority…

…The early polygenists favored the term “species” in their belief in the diversity of man. In the context of their definition, species were “fixed” and did not naturally cross with other species, except under artificial conditions. Although there was occasional fertility between the separate species, the product of the union was sterile or tending toward sterility, proving the “unnaturalness” of the original union. The concept of species was important to those nineteenth-century scientists who drew their schematization of the universe from the logical and spatial arrangement of the chain of being. For if one hybrid were capable of increase, the divine arrangement of the creator would have been distorted and a destructive imbalance set into the order of the world. All living things formed one chain of universal being from the lowest to the highest. None of the species originally formed were extinct. Nature proceeded according to divine plan and admitted of no improvement. The continuation of this belief into the nineteenth century precipitated an enormous amount of speculation as to whether the mulatto was more or less fertile than either of the two original stocks. The general consensus was that the mulatto was less fertile, and hence, an artificial hybrid tending toward extinction.As the nineteenth-century polygenists turned to the term “race” rather than “species” to define human types, so they borrowed the word “mongrel” in exchange for “hybrid” to identify the offspring of mixing (Vogt 1864: 441; Huxley 1876:412). In doing so, however, they created a confusion in terminology because the monogenist’s criteria for “species,” “race,” “mongrel,” and “hybrid” remained unchanged…

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Racial classifications in the US census: 1890–1990

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 16, Issue 1 (1993)
pages 75-94
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.1993.9993773

Sharon M. Lee, Adjunct Professor of Sociology
University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

This article examines racial classifications on United States population census schedules between 1890 and 1990 to provide insights on the changing meanings of race in US society. The analysis uses a sociology of knowledge perspective which assumes that race is an ideological concept that can be interpreted most productively by relating its definition and measurement to the larger social and political context. Four themes are identified and discussed: (i) the historical and continuing importance of skin colour, usually dichotomized into white and non‐white, in defining race and counting racial groups; (ii) a belief in ‘pure’ races that is reflected in a preoccupation with categorizing people into a single or ‘pure’ race; (iii) the role of census categories in creating pan‐ethnic racial groups; and, (iv) the confusing of race and ethnicity in census racial classifications. Each theme demonstrates the potential or actual role of official statistics, exemplified by census racial data, in reflecting and guiding changes to the meaning and social perceptions of race. A detailed examination of racial classifications from the 1980 and 1990 Censuses shows that the influence of political interests on racial statistics is particularly important. The article concludes with a discussion of whether official statistical recorders such as population censuses should categorize and measure race, given the political motivations and non‐scientific character of the classifications used.

Read or purchase the article here.

Hidden Hapa

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
2012-04-06

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

“Hey, what are you doing over there with the Hapa?”

Kathy and I looked over and there were three of our Japanese American friends at another table smiling at us, one with a mischievous grin. Sandy had jokingly pointed out that I was a mixed blood amidst a group of full bloods. Kathy and I smiled back at them and returned to our conversation.
 
But Kathy suddenly surprised me by saying, “Actually, I’m kind of mixed too; my mother is from Okinawa; like an interracial marriage to Japanese.” I looked over at my friends and remembered that one of them had told me his father was Chinese. Hey, that makes three of us and only two of them!
 
I recalled this incident when I read yesterday in the New York Times that while Asian Americans still have one of the highest interracial marriage rates in the country, Asian Americans are marrying other Asian Americans more often than in recent years. The article reported that many of these couples are of different ethnicities, such as Chinese-Indian and Filipino-Vietnamese. This means that mixed Asian Americans will continue to increase, and that many of them will not be apparently ethnically mixed. Of course, these individuals exist now and the diversity among any ethnically defined subgroup of Asian Americans is far greater than assumed. Little is know about their experience, and I think they are generally not regarded as Hapa and may not consider themselves to be Hapa. But as for others, such as black Asians, who now feel excluded from Hapa circles, a space to express mixed ancestries may be appreciated. Developing these welcome spaces is a challenge facing Asian American communities…

Read the entire essay here.

More male and mixed-race health visitors wanted

Nursing Times
Harborough, Leicestershire, United Kingdom
2012-08-16

Steve Ford, Deputy News Editor

The Department of Health says it is seeking to attract more men and people from mixed ethnic backgrounds into health visiting, as part of the national recruitment drive.

The overwhelming majority of health visitors are white, female and approaching retirement, according to a DH equality analysis of the health visiting workforce in England. 

The research, published this week, is intended to inform the government’s ongoing Health Visitor Implementation Plan. The national strategy was published in February 2011 and set the aim of boosting the health visitor workforce by an extra 4,200 by 2015.

As of September 2010, there were 9,995 female health visitors and only 101 males, meaning “approximately 99% of health visitors” were women, the DH analysis said…

…“We are working with marketing colleagues to encourage nurses from mixed ethnic backgrounds to join the health visitor workforce,” the report said…

Read the entire article here.