Mixed Race Studies

Experiences and Processes Affecting Racial Identity Development: Preliminary Results From the Biracial Sibling Project

Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology (formerly Cultural Diversity and Mental Health)
Volume 4, Issue 3, August 1998
Pages 237-247
DOI: 10.1037/1099-9809.4.3.237

Maria P. P. Root, Ph.D.

Examined what drives the process of racial identity development in general for persons of mixed racial heritage and what experiences account for some differential choices within the same family. 20 sibling pairs of mixed racial heritage (aged 18–40 yrs) completed packets including an extensive background questionnaire, a body image inventory, a racial resemblance inventory, a sibling racial resemblance inventory, a brief mental health inventory, a racial experiences inventory, and an identity questionnaire. Ss also participated in two 2-hr interviews. Four types of experiences surfaced that appear to influence the identity process: hazing, family dysfunction, other salient identities, and the impact of integration. These experiences were explored within the framework of the ecological model of racial identity development.

For centuries the United States has followed rules of hypodescent, or more colloquially, the “one-drop” rule for racial classification. This rule, implicitly embedded in racial identity theories, is challenged by changes in the contemporary population in which visible cohorts of persons of mixed heritage exist who do not strictly adhere to the one-drop rule.

Anecdotally, in the models of racial identity that have guided psychological understanding of racial awareness for two decades, persons assigned to the same racial grouping, whether they be siblings or strangers, use labels signifying their location within a single racial group. In contrast, anecdotal information on siblings of racially mixed heritage suggest they often racially or ethnically identify themselves differently from one another. At conferences dedicated to the theme of multiraciality, this difference is often the topic of discussion, with some individuals saying that each of three or four siblings identifies differently. Is this due to stage of racial identity development? Can gender explain these differences? Does phenotype explain the difference? Does birth order explain differences?

These questions offer a range of explanations and hypotheses about these differences, suggesting that this phenomenon of different racial identities among siblings in the same family would likely be complex. Studies of persons of mixed-race heritage already suggest some counterintuitive findings, and misunderstood findings. For example, phenotype does not determine how people identify themselves (Hall, 1980), though it may certainly predict some experiences one is more likely to have. Hall also found that gender alignment between a child and parent (i.e., mothers and daughters or fathers and sons) did not predict the identity label used by young Black Japanese adults in her study. Other researchers have found that identity can change over the lifetime in a way that does not necessarily reflect a stage process (Root, 1990). Racial identity can be very situational, not necessarily reflecting an ambivalence (Stephan, 1992). And the contemporary cohort of racially mixed young adults, more than at any other point in history, is asserting a racially mixed identity. This assertion, however, is generally misunderstood to reflect a racial hatred of self, a desire to be White, or a personality that is opportunistic. Rather than these explanations being derived from conventional lore, many of these individuals are subverting monoracial paradigms (Daniel, 1992), refusing to adhere to the irrational racial rules of this country (Spickard, 1992), or contextualizing racial identity. An identity choice is possible amid a growing number of mixed-race people in the post-civil rights era. Without most people’s ability to experience the insider perspective on being of mixed parentage, a monoracial framework is usually the guide for interpretation of behavior and process…

Read the entire article here.

Lone mothers of mixed racial and ethnic children in Britain: Comparing experiences of social attitudes and support in the 1960s and 2000s

Women’s Studies International Forum
Volume 34, Issue 6, November-December 2011
Pages 530-538
DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2011.06.007

Rosalind Edwards, Professor of Sociology
University of Southampton

Chamion Cabellero, Senior Research Fellow
Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

This article places side-by-side the views from lone mothers bringing up children from mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds in mid-1960s and early 2000s Britain, to consider whether the sorts of social attitudes and support these mothers experienced have changed or persisted over the past half century. The analysis compares and contrasts the general social and official attitudes that lone mothers of mixed children feel that they encounter, the support they receive from the fathers of their children, and their relationships with their own and the father’s wider family, the neighbourhood and friendship networks they draw on, and the formal supports available to them across time. The article concludes by considering some indicative trajectories of change and constancy that looking at these social attitudes and supports reveals, around negative assessments and their social expression, expectations of fathers, the availability of wider family, and the importance of informal daily support from other mothers in the same situation.

Read or purchase the article here.

Miscegenation in South Africa

Cahiers d’études africaines
Volume 1, Number 4 (1960)
pages 68-84
DOI: 10.3406/cea.1960.3680

Pierre L. Van Den Berghe
University of Natal

A number of related factors make the Union of South Africa an ideal object of investigation in the field of miscegenation. The exceptionally virulent brand of racism that has developed in South Africa since the beginning of the 2oth century was accompanied by an increasingly morbid fear of miscegenation unparalleled in intensity anywhere else in the world. As consequence of this miscegenophobia South Africa went further than any other country in recent times in prohibiting by law all sexual relations whether marital or non-marital between whites and non-whites. Finally the South African government in its concern over bastardization provides the social scientist with the best data on inter-racial marriage and concubinage of any country known to the author.

The history of miscegenation in South Africa is as old as the first permanent Dutch settlement at the Cape in 1652. In the first few decades, some instances of marriage between Dutchmen and christianized Hottentot women took place as well as extensive non-marital relations between masters and female slaves. In the 1670’s, an estimated 3/4 of all children of female slaves had white fathers. With the rise of colour prejudice in the latter decades of the 17th century, legal unions of whites and non-whites became rare. A 1685 law prohibited marriage between white men and slave women; some legal unions of white men with free women of colour continued to take place, but with decreasing frequency. Miscegenation however, continued to flourish in the form common to most slave societies namely institutionalized concubinage between white men and non-white women.

The salient fact in the early history of miscegenation in South Africa is that while intermarriage became rapidly condemned, extra marital relations between white men and women of colour were not only tolerated, but even looked upon with amusement The slave lodge of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape was wide-open brothel of which Mentzel gives an interesting account:

“Female slaves are always ready to offer their bodies for trifle; and towards evening one can see string of soldiers and sailors entering the lodge where they misspend their time until the clock strikes 9… The Company does nothing to prevent this promiscuous intercourse since, for one thing it tends to multiply the slave population and does away with the necessity of importing fresh slaves. Three or four generations of this admixture for the daughters follow their footsteps have produced a half-caste population—a mestizo class—but a slight shade darker than some Europeans.”

Among the European bourgeoisie, interracial concubinage was also common:

“Boys who, through, force of circumstances have to remain at home during these impressionable years between 16 and 21 more often than not commit some folly, and get entangled with handsome slave-girl belonging to the household. These affairs are not regarded as very serious… the offence is venial in the public estimation. It does not hurt the prospects; his escapade is source of amusement, and he is dubbed young fellow who has shown the stuff he is made of.”

British visitor to the Cape in the beginning of the 19th century tells that slave girls were routinely assigned to the bedroom of white guests to enliven the latters’ nights. Slave girls were “loaned out” to Europeans by their masters:

“Female slaves sometimes live with Europeans as husband and wife with the permission of their masters who benefit in two ways: the cost of upkeep of the slave is reduced through the presents she receives from the man, and her children are the property of her master since children of female slaves are themselves slaves… In this manner the slave population is always increasing.”

Similarly, the whites interbred extensively with the nominally free Hottentots. Vaillant estimates the number of Bastards (for such was the contemporary designation of white-Hottentot half-breeds) in 1780’s as 1/6 of the inhabitants of the whole Cape Colony. In the first half of the 19th century, entire communities of Bastards settled along the Orange River where they established autonomous “states”. The offspring of these white-slave and white-Hottentot unions, as well as interbreeding between slaves and Hottentots gave rise to the people known today as the “Cape Coloureds”.

In this early period then, miscegenation was not only common but sanctioned so long as it took the form of concubinage between higher-status men and lower-status women. There was no trace of feeling of horror against miscegenation per se. The main concern of the dominant white group was the preservation of its superior status, and the latter was left unthreatened by master-slave concubinage. Intermarriage on the other hand, entailed measure of social equality and was consequently opposed…

Read the entire article here.

Beyond poverty: the Negro and the Mulatto in Brazil

Journal de la Société des Américanistes
Volume 58 (1969)
pages 121-137
DOI: 10.3406/jsa.1969.2100

Florestan Fernandes

This paper was first presented, in a condensed version, at the seminars on “Minorities in Latin America and the United States”, (The College of the Finger Lakes, Corning, New York, December 5, 1969).

1. Introduction :

The most impressive aspect of the racial situation in Brazil appears under the trenchant denial of the existence of any “color” or “racial” problem. Racial prejudice and discrimination, as racial segregation, are seen as a sort of sin and as dishonorable behavior. Thus, we have two different levels of reality perception and of action connected with “color” and “race”: first, overt, in which racial equality and racial democracy are supposed and proclaimed; second, covert, in which collateral functions perform through, below and beyond the social stratification.

This overlay is not exclusive to race relations. It appears in other levels of social life. In the case of race relations it emerges as a clear product from the prevailing racial ideology and racial Utopia, both built during slavery by the white-dominant stratum—the rural and urban masters. Slavery was not in conflict with the Portuguese law and cultural tradition. The Roman law offered to the crown ordinances the elements with which it would be possible to classify the “Indians” or the “Africans” as things, as moveable property, and establish the social transmission of social position through the mother (according to the principle partus sequitur ventrem), deny to the slave any human condition (servus personam non habet, etc.) On the other hand, slavery was practiced on a small scale in Lisbon, and was attempted in Acores, Madeira, Cabo Verde and Sâo Tome, pioneering the modern plantation system. But slavery was in conflict with religion and the mores created by the Catholic conception of the world. This conflict, of a moral nature, did not give to the slave, in general, a better condition and more human treatment, as Frank Tannebaum believed. It only brought about a tendency to disguise things, separating the permissive from the real being.

Nevertheless, Brazil has a good intellectual tradition of penetrating, realistic, and unmasking objective knowledge of the racial situation. First of all, the conservative pride had given rise to very clear distinctions (as usually happened with the masters and some aristocratic white families arrogantly self-affirmative on matters of racial inequality and race differences). Second, some outstanding figures, leaders of the ideals of national emancipation or of abolitionism, as Jose Bonifacio de Andrade e Silva, Luiz Gama, Perdigao Malheiros, Joaquim Nabuco, Antonio Bento, etc., tried to point out the nature of the white behavior and value-orientations, connected with the Negroes and the Mulattos. Third, the “negro movements” after the First World War (especially in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro during the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s), as well as intellectual Negro conferences on race relations, have contributed to a new realistic perception and explanation of the complex Brazilian racial situation.

The findings of modern sociological, anthropological, or psychological investigations (Samuel Lowrie; Roger Bastide and Florestan Fernandes; L. A. Costa Pinto; Oracy Megueira; A. Guerreiro Ramos; Octavio Ianni, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Renato Jardim Moreira; Thaïes de Azevedo; Charles Wagley, Marvin Harris, Henry W. Hutchinson and Ben Zimmerman; René Ribeiro; Joao Baptista Borges Pereira; Virginia Leone Bicudo; Aniela Ginsberg; Carolina Martuscelli Bori; Dante Moreira Leite; etc.), have confirmed and deepened the evidence discovered by earlier writers. In the present discussion, I will limit myself to three special topics: the roots of competitive social order in Brazil; some objective evidences of racial ine quality and its sociological meaning; the Brazilian pattern of racial prejudice and discrimination…

Read the entire article here.

The Racially-Mixed People of the Ramapos: Undoing the Jackson White Legends

American Anthropologist
Volume 74, Number 5 (October 1972)
pages 1276-1285
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1972.74.5.02a00190

Daniel Collins
North Carolina State University

A review of the literature fails to validate the Jackson White legends which traditionally have accounted for the presence of a racially mixed collectivity in the Ramapo Mountain area. Extant oral traditions supporting the least documented and most pejorative aspects of the legends serve to maintain isolation and threaten the continuation of the Ramapo Mountain community of racially mixed people.

AMONG LOCAL PEOPLE of the Ramapo Valley, which crosses the New York–New Jersey border at Suffern, New York, the term “Jackson White” denotes a group of mixed breed persons who are held to have descended from the amalgamated issue of renegades, outlaws, and whores of various colors who at various times throughout the eighteenth century sought the sanctuary of the Ramapo Mountains. The name “Jackson White” connotes a racial anomaly spawned by inbreeding and intermarriage, born into ignorance and degeneracy, and condemned to poverty, feeblemindedness, and suspicion.

The difficulty of distinguishing between legend and history has hampered the establishment of a settled account of the racially mixed people of the Ramapo Mountains. They have been defined by one state agency as “a race of people of mixed Negro, Indian, and White blood inhabiting the Ramapo Mountains in the Northern part of New Jersey and extending over the border into the adjoining section of New York State” (Vineland Training School 1911:1). That a people known as “Jackson Whites” inhabit the rugged Appalachian foothills called the Ramapo Mountains is true; whether or not they constitute a “race of people” and what the historical components of that people are until most recently have been open questions.

There have been three clusters of people referred to as “Jackson Whites” in the valley. In the northern portion “Jackson Whites” have been located around Sloatsburg, Ladentown, and Haverstraw, New York. The other two clusters are centered in the southern portion at Ringwood and Stag Hill (Mahwah) New Jersey.

The physical characteristics of the racially-mixed people are varied as would be expected. Hair textures are both kinky and straight. Skin pigmentations range from brown through red-brown, tan (called “coffee” locally), white, and albino. Some have facial characteristics which appear to be distinctly Indian, and others seem more Caucasian or Negro in their conformation…

Read the entire article here.

The Biggest Lie About Race? That It’s Real

The Root
2011-07-26

Jenée Desmond-Harris, Contributing Editor

Dorothy Roberts says race is a social and political construct, and she won’t rest until we know it.

There’s a reason we’ll never come to a consensus on the most accurate racial classifications for Barack Obama or Tiger Woods. There’s a reason questions about ethnicity on the census and college applications feel impossible to an increasing number of Americans. There’s a reason you can be black in the United States, colored in South Africa and something else entirely in Brazil.

According to Dorothy Roberts, author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century, it’s because, despite centuries of efforts to treat race as if it’s a biological category, it is no more than social construction—created to oppress people—that changes with place, time and perspective.

The Root talked to Roberts about the profit that’s behind the re-emergence of myths about race, the impact for African Americans and health, and how we can continue to talk about it, minus the long-standing lies.

The Root: Fatal Invention is an attempt to correct major misunderstandings and myths about race. Explain what race is and what it isn’t.

Dorothy Roberts: I can say very definitively that race is an invented political system; it is not a natural biological condition of human beings. The human species is a single race. It is not biologically divided up into distinguishable races…

Read the entire article here.

Blood Quantum Land Laws and the Race versus Political Identity Dilemma

California Law Review
Volume 96 (2008)
pages 801-838

Rose Cuison Villazor, Associate Professor of Law
Hofstra University

Modern equal protection doctrine treats laws that make distinctions on the basis of indigeneity defined on blood quantum terms along a racial versus political paradigm. This dichotomy may be traced to Morton v. Mancari and, more recently, to Rice v. Cayetano. In Mancari, the Supreme Court held that laws that privilege members of American Indian tribes do not constitute racial discrimination because the preferences have a political purpose – to further the right of self-government of federally recognized American Indian tribes. Rice crystallized the juxtaposition of the racial from the political nature of indigeneity by invalidating a law that privileged Native Hawaiians. That law, according to the Court, used an ancestral blood requirement to construct a racial category and a racial purpose as opposed to the legally permissible political purpose of promoting the right of self-government of American Indian tribes.

Close analysis of the dichotomy between the constitutive notion of indigenous blood as either racial or political has largely escaped scholarship. An analysis deconstructing their juxtaposition is sorely needed. As recent challenges to blood quantum laws show, there remain unanswered questions about the extent to which the racialized (and thus invalid) Native Hawaiian-only voting law impact other blood quantum laws. Among the laws implicated by the dichotomy between the racial and political meaning of indigeneity are land ownership laws that privilege indigenous peoples who are not federally recognized tribes. Specifically, in some jurisdictions in the United States, including Hawaii, Alaska, and the U.S. territories, only indigenous peoples may purchase or possess property. Perhaps more problematically, these property laws define indigeneity on the basis of blood quantum. Under the contemporary race versus political meaning of blood quantum, these laws arguably violate equal protection principles because they do not fit the current framing of what constitutes political indigeneity.

Using these laws, what I collectively refer to as blood quantum land laws, as frames of reference, this Essay interrogates and criticizes the juxtaposition of the racial and political meaning of indigeneity. Specifically, the Essay examines the legal construction of political indigeneity and demonstrates how its narrowed construction would undermine these blood quantum land laws that were enacted to reverse the effects of colonialism. Consequently, this Essay calls for the liberalization of the binary racial and political paradigm by expanding equal protection law’s interpretation of the meaning of political indigeneity. Toward this end, this Essay provides an initial analysis of how to broaden the political notion of indigeneity, focusing in particular on the relationships among property, indigeneity, and the right to self-determination.

Read the entire article here.

Tribal Rights vs. Racial Justice: Was the Cherokee Nation’s expulsion of black Freedmen an act of tribal sovereignty or of racial discrimination?

The New York Times
Room for Debate
2011-09-15

Kevin Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Matthew L. M. Fletcher, Professor of Law
Michigan State University

Cara Cowan-Watts, Acting Speaker
Cherokee Nation Tribal Council

Rose Cuison Villazor, Associate Professor of Law
Hofstra University

Heather Williams, Cherokee citizen and Freedman Descendent
Cherokee Nation Entertainment Cultural Tourism Department

Carla D. Pratt, Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs
Pennsylvania State University, Dickinson School of Law

Tiya Miles, Professor of History and Chair of the Department of Afro-American and African Studies
University of Michigan

Joanne Barker (Lenape), Associate Professor of American Indian studies
San Francisco State University

Introduction

When the Cherokee were relocated from the South to present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, their black slaves were moved with them. Though an 1866 treaty gave the descendants of the slaves full rights as tribal citizens, regardless of ancestry, the Cherokee Nation has tried to expel them because they lack “Indian blood.”

The battle has been long fought. A recent ruling by the Cherokee Supreme Court upheld the tribe’s right to oust 2,800 Freedmen, as they are known, and cut off their health care, food stipends and other aid in the process.

But federal officials told the tribe that they would not recognize the results of a tribal election later this month if the citizenship of the black members was not restored. Faced with a cutoff of federal aid, a tribal commission this week offered the Freedmen provisional ballots, a half-step denounced by the black members.

Is the effort to expel of people of African descent from Indian tribes an exercise of tribal sovereignty, as tribal leaders claim, or a reversion to Jim Crow, as the Freedmen argue? Kevin Noble Maillard, a professor of law at Syracuse University and a member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, organized this discussion of the issue.

Read the entire debate here.

Record-High 86% Approve of Black-White Marriages

Gallup
2011-09-12

Jeffrey M. Jones

Ninety-six percent of blacks, 84% of whites approve

PRINCETON, NJ—Americans are approaching unanimity in their views of marriages between blacks and whites, with 86% now approving of such unions. Americans’ views on interracial marriage have undergone a major transformation in the past five decades. When Gallup first asked about black-white marriages in 1958, 4% approved. More Americans disapproved than approved until 1983, and approval did not exceed the majority level until 1997….

…The latest results are based on an Aug. 4-7 USA Today/Gallup poll, which included an oversample of blacks…

Read the entire article here. View methodology, full question results, and trend data here.

Elizabeth Fenwick Adams – Did she or didn’t she? A family history mystery.

Historic Places in South Jersey
2011-03-07

J. Wright

Twice this past week on gloriously sunny days that smelled of spring, friends and I headed down the highway on the trail of the mystery of Elizabeth Fenwick Adams and her alleged connection with the family that founded Gouldtown, a unique and remarkable tri-racial community in South Jersey.

Elizabeth Fenwick Adams and Gouldtown were not my only reasons for heading as far south as Greenwich, however. This year is the sesqui-centennial of the Civil War and I was also still on the hunt for the Underground Railroad and South Jersey’s fascinating AfroAmerican history including the Ambury Hill Cemetery.

The first of the two days, a friend and I researched Othello and Springtown. Once we’d arrived at Greenwich, the only town in New Jersey that I could actually imagine myself moving to, we stopped in at the Cumberland County Historical Society Library. The people there are kind, generous and friendly. Armed with their directions, maps, and knowledge, we drove to the “head of Greenwich” on Ye Greate Street, and up on a lonesome bluff, we found Ambury Hill, home of some veterans of the Civil War and the “Colored” Regiment from Cumberland County…

…Well, for Elizabeth’s story, we have to go back much further, to the arrival of the Fenwick family on the ship Griffin. This story stirs up a lot of debate over oral history and documentary history. The document that exists and gives the oral history some credibility is the will of John Fenwick, the original proprietor of the area. Written just before his death, in 1683. Variations on the quotation of the paragraph in the will exist in different web sites and books, but the gist of it as written in Rizzo’s book is:

“Item: I do except against Elizabeth Adams of having any ye least part of my estate, unless the Lord open her eyes to see her abominable transgression against him, me and her good father, by giving her true repentance, and forsaking yt Black yt hath been ye ruin of her, and becoming penitent for her sins; upon yt condition only I do will and require my executors to settle five hundred acres of land upon her”

Genealogical accounts have Elizabeth Fenwick Adams marrying an other colonist, Anthony Windsor, several days after grandfather’s will. Oral tradition of the Gouldtown residents has it that she and the original Gould had five children. No information remains on what happened to the three daughters, and one son died, which left Benjamin Gould, who married a Finnish woman and founded Gouldtown. It is said that their graves, Benjamin and his Finnish wife, are in the cemetery at Gouldtown. Information on the succeeding generations plus a really fine large group photo of the Goulds is available on-line in The Southern Workman, Vol 37, by the Hampton Institute via a google search…

Read the entire article here.