Mixed Race Studies

Ethnogenesis and Ethnohistory of the Seminole Maroons

Journal of World History
Volume 4, Number 2 (Fall 1993)
pages 287-305

Kevin Mulroy, Associate University Librarian
University of California, Los Angeles

At what historic moment and by what means does a ‘people’ spring into being?” ask Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer Brown in their introduction to the 1985 ground-breaking study, The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America. It is an intriguing question, and one that ethnohistorians are beginning to ask with regard to a wide range of groups living on many different frontiers. The editors of The New Peoples take strong issue with Frederick Jackson Turner’s belief that American national identity emerged on the frontier as transplanted immigrants were “fused into a mixed race.” Rather, they argue, the story is one of “genesis of composite ‘mestizo’ populations and the creation of bold and startlingly original ethnic and national identities throughout the two continents” of North and South America. “The rise of the ‘new peoples,’ ” Peterson and Brown believe, “is the most significant historical consequence of the wrenching collision and entanglement of the Old World with the New.” As Rebecca Bateman has pointed out recently, “the very processes responsible for the decimation of many cultural groups of the Americas led to ethnogenesis, the birth of new ones.” This paper will argue in favor of Peterson and Brown’s conclusions by examining the beginnings of one of these new and distinct peoples, the Seminole maroons, whose ethnogenesis took place on the southeastern frontier in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, largely as a result of such entanglements between the Old World and the New.

The Seminole maroons’ ethnogenesis and cultural development place them within the frame of reference of neoteric or cenogenic societies, explanations of which tend to stress the multiple heritages of groups formed as a result of frontier expansion. Nancie L. Solien Gonzalez has defined a neoteric group as “a type of society which, springing from the ashes of warfare, forced migration or other calamity, survived by patching together bits and pieces from its cultural heritage while at the same time borrowing and inventing freely and rapidly in order to cope with new, completely different circumstances.” Such groups tended to welcome and even encourage rapid change in order to survive and prosper. Indeed, one might say that they were created by the circumstances to which they adapted.

Coining another term, Kenneth M. Bilby has described cenogenic societies as those

born of conditions associated with the major transformations wrought by the worldwide expansion of capitalism—the large scale uprooting of peoples through wars, conquest and colonization, slavery, migration, and the forced removal of people from their ancestral lands. Most of them emerged from frontier setlings. The resulting sociocultural “fusions” were truly new creations, owing much to the past, but without precedent at the same time. Indeed, the fact that those who evolved these new societies and identities were forced to call upon several cultural pasts, not just one or two, guaranteed original outcomes.

There is considerable overlap between the Gonzalez and Bilby models, but Bilby restricts his argument to small-scale societies. He also takes issue with Gonzalez’s notion that such newly formed societies are essentially “without roots,” arguing instead that “the special kind of abrupt ethnogenesis involved in the creation of these societies does not preclude the transmission of a great deal of cultural knowledge from the past.” Bilby’s central defining characteristic lor cenogenic societies, in fact, is the importance of history and historical consciousness in the development of their self-definition and identity, a notion crucial to an understanding of Seminole maroon ethnohistory…

Read the entire article here.

“IndiVisible” Discusses African–Native American Lives

Newsdsesk: Newsroom of the Smithsonian Institution
2012-01-06

“IndiVisible: African–Native American Lives in the Americas,” a 20-panel display that outlines the seldom-viewed history and complex lives of people of dual African American and Native American ancestry, will open at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York, the George Gustav Heye Center, Thursday, Feb. 9. The exhibit will be on view through Friday, Aug. 31, in the museum’s photo corridor gallery.

“Indivisible” addresses the racially motivated laws that have been forced on Native, African American and mixed-heritage peoples. Since pre-colonial times, Native and African American peoples have built strong communities through intermarriage, unified efforts to preserve their land and taking part in creative resistance. Over time, these communities developed constructive survival strategies, and several have regained economic sustainability through gaming in the 1980s. The daily cultural practices that define the African–Native American experience through food, language, writing, music, dance and the visual arts, will also be highlighted in the exhibition…

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The New Racial Dialogue: Arriving at Whiteness in the Age of Obama

Journal of African American Studies
Volume 13, Number 2 (June 2009) (“Joy Unspeakable: The First African American President”)
pages 184-186
DOI: 10.1007/s12111-008-9077-y

David H. Roane

My essay issues a challenge for whites to see the blackness of President-Elect Obama as a reflection of the similar complexity lying within themselves. By acknowledging the otherness within their whiteness, white Americans may finally grant themselves their race in a way that compels their much-needed participation in the national dialogue about race.

With the election of the nation’s first black president, there still remains the following question: how docs the “end” of public or institutional racism translate into an end of the negative biases that exist in private? To put it another way, what will the effect of having elected the nation’s first black president really have on the way people design their schools and neighborhoods, construct their families, and conceive their self-identities? What occurs in the ordinary business of people’s day-to-day life only marks true change.

For any national dialogue about race to move forward in a way that is real and significant—i.e. in a way that is personal—it will need new participants. The Age of Obama should be an age when white people can finally talk about their whiteness, not so much as a social identity (they already know how to do this and know how to leverage this quite well), but instead will come to learn what whiteness means as a culture linked to an ethnicity (something they understand much less). With that said, the problem of the 21st century is still the problem of the color line, only this time its frontier has a new set of pioneers.

So, what exactly is whiteness? Can it carry meaning beyond the typical hegemonic associations it has with the oppression of non-white groups? Can we…

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Marriages between African and Native Americans produced many children

Louisiana Weekly
2012-01-02

(Healthy Living News) —Native Americans with African ancestry produced more children than ‘full bloods’ in the early 1900s, despite the odds being against them, a new study demonstrates. Research by Michael Logan, Ph.D., of the University of Tennessee shows that increased fertility occurred at a time when things were not going particularly well for both African and Native Americans either — in social, economic and health terms. The work is published in Human Ecology…

…Dr. Logan examined the reproductive histories of 295 women of mixed Indian-Black and Indian-Black-white heritage. He found that Indian-Black marriages proved to be advantageous in terms of fertility, the average number of births, and offspring survival…

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American Indians with African Ancestry: Differential Fertility and the Complexities of Social Identity

Human Ecology
Volume 39, Number 6 (December 2011)
page 727-742
DOI: 10.1007/s10745-011-9439-2

Michael H. Logan, Professor of Anthropology
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Interethnic marriage represents a major trend in the demographic history of American Indians. While the majority of these unions involved Indian women and Caucasian men, a sizeable number occurred between Indians and African Americans. The children of these bicultural marriages were “mixed bloods” who in turn typically married non-Indians or other mixed bloods. Using data from the 1910 Census on American Indians in the United States and Alaska, this article explores why American Indians with African ancestry enjoyed high fertility. Differential rates of fertility among American Indians in the past were due to a number of underlying genetic, cultural, and environmental factors. By identifying these factors, the paradox of why Indian women with African heritage did so well in terms of fertility largely disappears. African admixture, however, greatly complicates Indian social identity.

Introduction

The demographic history of American Indians is characterized by a number of major trends, the most dramatic being the immense loss of life resulting from the introduction of several Old World diseases, including smallpox, measles, influenza, cholera, and malaria. While the exact size of indigenous populations in the Americas on the eve of European contact will never be known with certainty, scholars agree that up to 90% of the aboriginal population perished as a direct result of these introduced diseases (Thornton 1987, 1997; Ubelaker 1988; Ramenofsky 1987; Dobyns 1983). By 1900, the population of American Indians in the United States reached its nadir of 237,196 individuals (Thornton 1987:160). Although Ubelaker’s estimate (1988:291) for 1900 is more than twice as high (536,562). it does not alter the fact that millions of Indians died from these and other infectious disorders, as well as from other causes including famine, exposure, alcohol-related trauma, and armed combat with whites and other Indians (sec also Larsen and Milncr 1994; Bianchinc and Russo 1992).

Another highly significant demographic trend explored in this article is an increasing number of intercthnic marriages between American Indian women and non-Indian men. Although a limited number of white women married Indian men, this practice was certainly not common nor widely approved (Fllinghaus 2006; Jacobs 2002). The children of such marital unions were “mixed bloods,” who in turn typically married non-Indians or other mixed bloods (e.g.. Perdue 1998. 2003). Such “assortative” mating leads to an expansion of the gene pool, which, according to Quiggins (1990), may explain why highly admixed Cherokee are at lower risk of developing type-2 diabetes than full blood individuals. A similar finding has also been reported tor the Pima of Arizona (Williams et al. 2000). Using data from the 1980 U.S. census, Sanderur and McKinnell observe “intermarriage of Indians and whites is much more prevalent than that of blacks and whites, and … the extent of Indian white intermarriage has increased dramatically in recent decades” (1986:348). The scholarly literature on Indian-white marriages for the nineteenth and early twentieth century is quite extensive (Logan and Ousley 2001; Sturm 1998; Moore…

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Perspective on Mixed-Blood Natives: The Silence of Indian Country

Native News Network
Native Condition: Analysis and Opinion
2011-09-22

Mike Raccoon Eyes
Eastern Band of the Cherokee
Quallah, North Carolina

SAN FRANCISCO—Cherokee culture was steeped deeply into the great Meso-American pyramid temple cities as early as 800 AD. When the Olmecs, Toltecs, Mayans and Aztecs were moving from north to south deep into Mexico and Central America. They quickly absorbed and embraced building their own great pyramid temple spiritual cities they had observed and seen in the great Cherokee cities of the Southeast.

Cherokee intermarriage to both the Mexican and Central Americans would become the norm for the next 300 years. The mixed-blood Cherokees would hold a high place of honor within the Meso-American world of Mexico and Central America. For the mixed-blood Cherokee of the time were the priests, prophets, engineers and administrators, who were the elite of running the new spiritual pyramid temple cities of both Mexico and Central America. Without the mixed-blood Cherokees, the great pyramid temple cities in Mexico and Central America would cease to run, much less function.

The Cherokee started having intergenerational marriage with the Europeans in the early 1700s. Many Cherokee bands and families were quick to see the economic benefits of having trade, land and business dealings with Europeans. In a sense this could be viewed as a classic Cherokee version of the ‘hang around the fort Indians’. However this story was not true for the majority of mixed-blood Cherokee people of that time.

The preference of mixed-blood Cherokee men of the time was to marry European or other mixed-blood Cherokee women. Their children and grandchildren would follow suit. The new generation of light-skinned mixed-blood bourgeoisie Cherokee would wash their hands of and renounce the traditional ways of Cherokee culture and Spirituality.

However, there was another side to the mixed-blood Cherokee people that has been neglected and treated with silence. The story is that of the traditional mixed-blood Cherokee that retained their cultural and Spiritual identities…

Read the entire essay here.

Glimpse of a Visionary: Jeffrey Campbell ’33

St. Lawrence University Magazine
Winter 2006

Steve Peraza ’06

Jeffrey Campbell ’33 is generally thought of as St. Lawrence’s first African-American graduate. In a University Fellowship paper, Steve Peraza ’06, a history and sociology double major from New York City, contends that Campbell deserves to be recognized on different and broader grounds. “Much of the attention brought to Jeffrey Campbell’s name at St. Lawrence University has centered on Campbell’s social status as the first African American student to graduate,” Peraza writes, “not his accomplishments as an exemplary American citizen committed to his ‘faith and works’. Campbell may never have accepted that legacy; he might have more readily identified with a legacy that posits him as a progressive-minded and intellectually motivated Unitarian Universalist minister.”

The son of a blue-eyed, blond-haired white woman and a Black Boston attorney, Campbell admits in a brief autobiographical sketch that he bore the psychological and social “burden” of mixed racial lineage from his birth on March 1, 1910 (he died September 16, 1984). Perhaps those moments in which the Campbell family had to guard their safety because of racial discrimination led Campbell to ignore his “racial condition” and “establish [his] individuality” as a human being and not a Black human being…

Read the entire article here.

Interview with Kym Ragusa: (Passing)

Reel New York: Season 2
thirteen: WNET New York
From Week Four (May 1997)

Kathy High, Series Curator

Series curator Kathy High conducted this telephone interview with Kym Ragusa in May, 1997.

Q: The first question I’d like to ask you, Kym, is what prompted you to make the piece? It’s really a beautiful and incredibly moving piece.

Kym Ragusa: Oh, thank you.

Q: I wondered if this had been a story you’d heard before, as a child, and that you asked your grandmother to tell. How did it come about?

KR: Actually, my grandmother had told me the story a bunch of times. But I noticed that every time she told me, it was a little different. It would be more or less detailed, or the year would change. There’d always be something that was different. And I thought it would be a good idea just to try to record the stories as she told me. Part of it was to see how she remembered the story because it was something really traumatic for her. And also really pivotal in her life. And I wanted to see at different times, how and why she remembered certain things and not others. And why, at certain times, she would not tell me certain things. She wouldn’t be explicit about certain things — like her relationship with the man she traveled with. Actually, I did it over a period of three years. Another reason was that she has cancer and she’s not well now, and so I felt like I wanted to do something for her, and to preserve this part of her life that’s really her own thing that she did.
 
Read the entire interview here.

Documenting Race and Gender: Kym Ragusa Discusses “Passing” and “Fuori/Outside”

Women’s Studies Quarterly
Volume 30, Numbers 1/2, Looking Across the Lens: Women’s Studies and Film (Spring – Summer, 2002)
pages 213-220

Livia Tenzer, Managing Editor
Social Text

In her two award-winning short documentaries Passing (1996) and Fuori/Outside (1997), New York-based filmmaker Kym Ragusa explores the limits of the documentary genre in order to portray the centrality of race and ethnicity in U.S. women’s experience. Employing the narrative techniques of storytelling and the imagery of personal memory, Ragusa’s films relate a past that is broadly historical, yet anchored in the intimate relationships between a granddaughter and her grandmothers. Each film emerges from Ragusa’s research into the life of one of her grandmothers and reveals the social pressures and prejudices the older woman confronted. As her grandmothers’ lives connect to the present through the filmmaker, their stories provide crucial insight into how race and ethnicity continue to shape identity both inside and outside the family.

Passing records a story told to Ragusa by her African American grandmother about an incident that occurred in 1959 during a trip she took from New York City to Florida. Using still images, archival footage, and a soundtrack that mixes blues and gospel, Ragusa evokes the racial tensions of the time and creates a multilayered narrative around gender, class, and color. Traveling with an African American male friend (her then lover), the grandmother encounters the segregated and racially hostile South for the first time when her companion sends her into a diner in North Carolina to purchase food for a picnic. Inside, two white male customers repeatedly confront her with the question “What side of the tracks are you from?” When she realizes that they are asking her race, Ragusa’s light-skinned grandmother also realizes that her companion has presumed that she will be able to “pass.” Her courageous response to the people in the diner carries with it an aftermath of fear—will the two white men pursue them?—and unsettling questions about the supposed community among people categorized as racial outsiders by white social norms.

In Fuori/Outside Ragusa depicts the life of her Italian American grandmother, the person in her family who most resisted accepting…

Conference Keynote: White Privilege and the Biopolitics of Race

Understanding and Dismantling Privilege
Volume 1, Number 1 (2010)
16 pages
Online ISSN: 2152-1875

10th Annual White Privilege Conference Keynote Address
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Memphis, Tennessee

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

Genomics has resurrected scientific interest in biological concepts of race by attempting to identify race at the molecular level. In that last decade, there has been an explosion of biotechnologies that use race as a biological category, such as race-specific pharmaceuticals, commercial genetic testing for determining racial identity and genealogy, egg donation and embryo selection involving race, and racial profiling with DNA forensics. These technological innovations are part of a new biopolitics of race that helps to maintain white privilege in the 21st century, post-civil rights era. We must contest both the persistent myth that race is natural and persistent injustices based on race.

…My question is: How is white privilege preserved yet made invisible in the twenty-first century? That’s the tricky thing about white privilege, right? It’s been imbedded in U.S. institutions for centuries and yet many people don’t see it. I think we always have to ask, how is it that white privilege persists today? What is the mechanism that obscures white privilege in our current day and age? What are the forces, the institutions, the ways of thinking that we have to contest? The White Privilege Conference quotes on its flier a brilliant observation by Martin Luther King Jr.: “The best way to solve any problem is to remove its cause.” But, of course, we can’t remove the cause of the problem if we misdiagnose it. One of the ways that white privilege is perpetuated in this country is by convincing people that it’s natural for white people to have a privileged position in society. That’s just the way it’s supposed to be.

Why do many people still believe that white privilege is natural? Why do they think it’s natural that our prisons are filled with black and brown people, that most of the children in foster care are black and brown, and that black and brown people die early deaths? How can all this inequality be natural? One way people are persuaded that inequality is natural is through a misunderstanding of genetics. On June 26, 2000, President Bill Clinton unveiled a working draft of the map of the human genome and famously announced, “I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that, in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.” We differ only in a very tiny percentage of our genes. This confirmed the American Anthropological Association statement that race is a social and cultural construction. I would say, race is a political construction. The human species cannot be divided into genetically distinct races. So many scientists and scholars believed that the misunderstanding of race as a biological category had ended. Everyone would realize that all human beings are fundamentally the same. White privilege would disappear because scientists had discovered that these divisions don’t exist at the genetic level. Well, what happened?…

…So what is the origin of race? Is it genetics or is it power? One way to think about it is to ask, is there a genetic test for whiteness? Many genetic researchers focus on people of color and what’s wrong with them. Why do they die at faster rates from so many diseases? Millions of dollars goes into this kind of research seeking the genetic cause for why different groups of people of color are so diseased. But there is not very much attention to this question: What’s the genetic test for white people? If the origin of race is in genetics, we should be able to tell this racial category by the genes.

Well, if there’s a genetic test for whiteness, then tell me who in Barack Obama’s family is white. A family photo from his childhood shows his mother, who is of Irish decent; the Indonesian man she married after she separated from Barack Obama’s father, who’s Kenyan; Barack Obama’s sister, whose parents are Barack Obama’s mother and his stepfather. Who in this picture is definitely white? Apparently, just his mother. But could you tell that from a genetic test? If you test them, Barack Obama and his little sister are the genetic children of a white mother. The only way you can determine that he is black or that she is Asian and not white is to use a political test; there is no genetic test that can decide it. More generally, the only way you can tell who is white is a political test because it is a political category: White means people who are entitled to white privilege. This is a contest that’s gone on in the United States for centuries—who will be included in this category? The answer has nothing to do with genetics. At one point Jewish people were not included in this category. Irish people were not included in this category (Painter, 2010)…

Read the entire keynote here.