Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Messages: Barack Obama and Post-Racial Politics

Spectator (Journal of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematics Arts)
Volume 30, Number 2 (Fall 2010)
pages 9-17

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

The election of President Barack Hussein Obama marks an important milestone in United States racial politics. Many cultural critics and opinion leaders argue that Obama’s popularity and position represent post-racial accomplishments for the nation.

In this article I argue that post-racial politics, the ideology that race and/or racism is dead, ignores the salient fact that we continue to live in a society deeply influenced by race, with material consequences that affect life chances. I support this argument through an examination of Obama’s racial rhetoric in the address of March 18, 2008 “A More Perfect Union.” Through Obama’s uses of mixed race identity, the speech acknowledges the actual history of racial injustice and the ideal future of racial reconciliation through frank deliberation and political intervention, and thus serves as a prologue to racial dialogue rather than a post-racial epilogue or monologue.

The 21st century has ushered in a set of paradigm shifts that are responding to changes in technology, economics, politics, cultural flows, and narratives of identification. From the advent of social media, to the Great Recession, to health care reform, to the revised racial categories on the U.S. Census, American lives are faced with increasing tensions and ambiguities. No single icon reflects these tensions and ambiguities, and the paradigm shifts they are inspiring, more cohesively than President Barack Obama.

Some critics argue that Obamas election to the Presidency and status as global “supercelebrity” are signs that we have entered a post-racial moment in which everyone and everything is mixed. “Watching Obama campaign with his African American wife, his Indonesian-Caucasian half-sister, his Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law…all of their children,” not to mention the memories of his Kenyan father and white American mother and grandparents from Kansas, is evidence of this mixed, and ultimately post-, racial moment. Census statistics support this view, revealing that the population of multiracial children in the United States has soared from approximately 500,000 in 1970 to more than 6.8 million in 2000, and that they are happier than their mono-racial counterparts.

As a result of this mixing, many now question the existence of racial prejudice and discrimination writ large. In a recent interview with CNNs John King, President Obama was asked about the role he thinks race and racism play in his political reception. The President suggested that while racism exists, it lives more so in our imaginations than our intentions. If post-racial proponents are interpreting Obamas words and images correctly, then we may be on the verge of entering an era in which discriminatory racial barriers, partisan emotions and divisiveness have been dismantled. Put bluntly, in post-racial America, racism will be dead. If post-racial proponents are incorrect, then our dream of a post-racial America is a myth that both constrains and contains an ongoing drama concerning multiracialism, identity, and Obamas ability to change national public policy. In either case Obama is, as Peggy Orenstein claims, our emblematic “mixed messenger.” In the pages that follow I will engage post-racial politics by asking and answering three questions: What does post-race mean? How does Obamas racial rhetoric address a post-race perspective? And, what are the implications of Obama’s iconic racial status for U.S. racial politics?…

…In this article I argue that post-racial politics, the ideology that race and/or racism is dead, ignores the salient fact that we continue to live in a society deeply influenced by race, with material consequences that affect life chances. I support this argument through an examination of Barack Obamas racial rhetoric in his address of March 18, 2008—”A More Perfect Union”—perhaps the most climactic moment of his first Presidential campaign…

…In addition, those of African ancestry were the subjects of pseudo-scientific racist studies concluding they were soulless beasts, a threat to civilization itself, a drain on the economy, and a generally cursed people. These sinister images became the basis for a biological theory known as “hybrid degeneracy,” which claimed that mixed race people were emotionally unstable, irrational, recalcitrant, and sterile. According to Robyn Wiegman, this theory became a biological fact in Western discourse based on pseudo-scientific observation and comparative anatomy, especially of the brain, skull, and reproductive organs. As a result of these sociological and pseudo-scientific findings, white/European Americans were instructed to dissociate from African Americans in social life in order to maintain their purity. It is therefore unsurprising that blacks and whites who dared to cross the color line in any way, whether to attend school, vote, or mix with one another romantically, were the subjects of torture and abuse. Such physical and juridical policing of the color line is why the study of mixed race identification remains important to any discussion of racial and post-racial politics. Moreover, those of mixed race who passed as either white or black demonstrated that the color line promoted suffering on both sides and in the spaces in-between, making it at the same time all too real and extremely unstable…

Read the entire article here.

The historical politics of the New Zealand half-caste

MAI Review
Issue 3 (2008)
Article 7
ISSN 1177-5904
11 pages

Gina M. Colvin-McCluskey

The archives of settler journalism provides us with a rich resource for engaging with some of the ‘raced’ discourses in circulation at the commencement of Britain’s colonial project in Āotearoa/New Zealand. From these early literary resources we find chronicled in the settler press evidence of a complex, contradictory and largely imagined relationship with the ‘Natives’. As the colonist confronted the ‘Native’ and authored the encounter in the settler media, he was at the same time working through social hierarchies, resource entitlements, political institutions and the face of a burgeoning indigenous contest.

The Euronesians is a single newspaper article which appeared in 1843 in an Auckland newspaper, The Daily Southern Cross, established in the same year. This article has been analysed using a critical discourse methodology in order to understand the way in which seemingly munificent articles, that appear superficially, at least, to demonstrate a generous disposition toward the ‘Native’, are at the same time wedded to Britain’s colonising project, and work to justify, excuse, and accommodate a hegemonic white presence. At the core of critical discourse methodologies therefore is a desire to understand how language works to normalise social, economic and political domination. The discourse analyst’s methodological tool kit is therefore a set of key questions that are asked of the text. What is the background to the text? What does it say at its surface? What patterns of meaning do we find and what political work is the text doing? What is silenced? Are the patterns of meaning consistent over time? This paper addresses these questions.

An analysis of the text demonstrates that the apparent display of generosity toward those children of mixed racial parentage (Pākehā and Māori) is in fact demonstrative of a complex relationship between the seemingly contradictory discourses of cultural benevolence and appropriation. As will be demonstrated, the appearance of goodwill and concern for the ‘half-caste’, in this article, retreats into a rationale for demonstrating the untenable nature of certain obligations, protection and rights afforded to the Treaty of Waitangi signatories, which effectively precluded the colonist from the purchase of Native lands. The article ‘The Euronesians” is partially reproduced along with the punctuation and editing used in the original publication. The use of ‘native’ using the lower case was standard form of the day.

THE EURONESIANS, Or the Children of European and Native Parents.
Daily Southern Cross
Volume I, Issue 23, (23 September 1843)
Page 2

We have advocated the rights of the European and Native, frequently and fully. We have treated of the effects of British Government, as far as the present and prospective circumstances of both are concerned, but there is another, and a very important portion of our community whose interests we have always had in view, although we have not had an opportunity until now of bringing their case prominently before the public. A class of persons, who appear to have been entirely subjects of treaties and of laws; the privileges of the former have been attempted to be limited and prescribed, and the rights of the latter have been usurped and violated, but there is a class of persons who cannot be affected in their rights, either by the treaty of Waitangi, or the Land Claims Bill. We allude to the descendants of European fathers, and Maorie mothers, commonly called “half casts.” These persons are in many instances, the children of misfortune, and as such, are too often neglected and despised; but they are still our, fellow-creatures, and entitled, under the laws and dispensations of the God of nature, to an equal interest, and an equal participation in the soil on which he has planted them…

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Love with a Proper Stranger: What Anti-Miscegenation Laws Can Tell Us About the Meaning of Race, Sex, and Marriage

Hofstra Law Review
Volume 32, Issue 4 (2004)
pages 1663-1679

Rachel F. Moran, Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life’s highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn’t populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

–Wislawa Szymborska

If true love is for the lucky few, then for the rest of us there is the far more mundane institution of marriage. Traditionally, love has sat in an uneasy relationship to marriage, and only in the last century has romantic love emerged as the primary, if not exclusive, justification for a wedding in the United States. In part, the triumph of love reflects a society increasingly committed to an ethic of individualism, including individualism of the romantic variety, so that marriage is no longer presumptively a tool for the State to advance the general welfare. In the quest for individual liberation, women have gained access to education and employment that increasingly emancipates them from dependency on a husband to achieve economic security.

Because marriage has grown to be a matter of personal choice, the number of restrictions on permissible partners has steadily declined. Even so, some official regulation persists, and we can learn as much about the meaning of matrimony by looking at who is excluded as by looking at who is eligible. To that end, I want to explore the lessons of anti-miscegenation laws, state statutes that once prohibited interracial marriage. At one time, these statutes were widespread, but they were not identical in their coverage. The laws universally targeted relationships between Blacks and Whites, and a number of the provisions, particularly those in Western states, banned unions between Asians and Whites. A few restricted intermarriage with Native Americans, but none mentioned Latinos. The laws had a remarkable longevity. Even though individuals enjoyed increasing freedom to choose a mate free of state and community interference, these statutes remained valid until 1967 when the United States Supreme Court struck them down as unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia.

Although anti-miscegenation laws generally have been analyzed as racial legislation, they also can tell us a great deal about intimacy. These provisions have certainly been used to define and entrench racial difference, but they are also a means to set the boundaries of sexual decency and marital propriety. Here, I will use the comparative experience of Blacks, Asians, Native Americans, and Latinos to illustrate some of the laws’ implications for race and identity. I will then place the statutes in the context of larger developments regarding the regulation of sex and marriage to show how they reflected anxieties about wayward lust and forbidden desire.

I. THE ROLE OF ANTI-MISCEGENATION LAWS IN RACIAL SEPARATION AND STRATIFICATION

In the American mythology of racial segregation, there is an assumption that racial groups have always lived separately and that there is an almost natural inevitability about this arrangement. In fact, in the earliest years of settling the American colonies, Black slaves often worked side by side with White indentured servants. In these close, cooperative arrangements, interracial attraction was by no means a rarity. Relationships across the color line complicated social boundaries between Black and White, slave and free. Whites who, at least as a formal matter, had freely chosen a temporary contract of hard labor did not seem so very different from Blacks who had been sold into prevented race-mixing that undermined both the sanctity of free White labor and the legitimacy of Blacks’ status as property.

As the institution of slavery was consolidated, anti-miscegenation laws assumed another valuable purpose. They defined a racial hierarchy in which Whites were free and Blacks were not. Although many statutes banned both interracial marriage and fornication, White male slaveholders regularly flouted the laws. They could demand sex from their Black female slaves and inflict terrible punishment, including rape and sale on the auction block, if the women resisted. A former Virginia slave remembers the fate of another slave woman named Sukie:

“Ole Marsa was always tryin’ to make Sukie his gal.” One day when she was making lye soap and he approached her, “she gave him a shove an’ push his hindparts down in de hot pot o’ Soap. Soap was near to bilin’, an’ it burn him near to death. . . Marsa never did bother slave gals no mo’.” But a few days later Sukie was sent to the auction block.

In fact, interracial sex was so common that a new dilemma arose: How should the mixed-race offspring be identified? Traditionally, a child’s status was based on the father’s heritage, but a patrilineal rule would mean that most children of Black and White origin would be White and free. Such a result would once again complicate the line between Black and White, slave and free, as masters who enjoyed their license with female slaves produced emancipated mulattoes, not subject to the control of White owners and potentially loyal to Black mothers still in bondage. The solution was to change the rule of descendible privilege. Instead of determining a child’s status based on the father’s identity, a matrilineal principle of identity would be applied. Moreover, a one-drop rule evolved to ensure that even remote African ancestry identified a child as Black, not White. The children of sex across the color line would be Black and nearly always slaves. They could be emancipated only if their White father and master chose to do so, and they could never escape their Blackness…

…While anti-miscegenation laws were used to define racial difference and create racial hierarchy between Blacks and Whites in colonial America and later the antebellum South, the statutes served a distinct function when applied to Asian immigrants who arrived on the West Coast, particularly California, in the mid- to late 1800s. The Chinese were the first to arrive in substantial numbers in the middle of the nineteenth century when gold was discovered. Under the immigration laws, the Chinese were treated as sojourners, laborers who came temporarily to work and then returned to their home country. This migrant labor force was overwhelmingly male. In 1852, only seven of 11,794 Chinese were female. By 1870, Chinese men outnumbered Chinese women by a margin of 14 to 1.8 Because the men were here to sweat but not to stay, the United States government made clear that as unassimilable, non-White foreigners, they were ineligible for citizenship. Federal officials discouraged immigration of Chinese women because they did not want the sojourners to put down roots, form families, and produce children who would be Americans by birth….

…In contrast to Blacks and Asians, anti-miscegenation laws were seldom applied to Native Americans and never mentioned Latinos. The reasons for the lenient treatment of Latinos and Native Americans are quite similar. In both cases, these groups first came into contact with Whites when frontiers were being settled. At the outset, Whites had much to gain by forming friendly alliances with Indian tribes or Mexican natives. On occasion, these alliances could be cemented through intermarriage. Consider, for example, the Anglo settlers who arrived in northern Mexico to make their fortunes in the early to mid-1800s. Mexico, newly freed from Spanish rule, hoped to capitalize on the sparsely populated furthermost reaches of its territory by attracting foreign investors. However, Mexican officials did not want Anglos simply to come to their country, exploit the land, and leave with their fortunes. Instead, the government wanted to encourage permanent settlement, and an excellent way to do this was to reward those who put down roots there. As a result, Mexico offered naturalization opportunities and corresponding trade advantages to Anglos who married Mexican women. Indeed, the expectation was that Anglo settlers would be loyal to Mexican wives, not manipulate or abandon them after using them to personal advantage. In a diary of his Western travels, Matt Field, a journalist for the New Orleans Picayune, made these expectations clear to his readers when he described the sad tale of Maria Romero, who fell in love with a charming but dissolute Anglo adventurer who deserted her and her child by him. As Field wrote, “when subsequently she heard that [her lover] had designedly abandoned her, and had gone forever back to the United States, her reason failed, and poor Maria, the beauty of Taos, became a lunatic.” Maria had clearly expected marriage, not betrayal. In keeping with the commitment to permanent settlement in Mexico, the children of mixed marriages often spoke Spanish, observed Mexican cultural traditions, and Hispanicized their non-Spanish surnames…

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School Hygiene and Eugenics: The Role of Physical Education in Regeneration “The Brazilian Race”

Revista HISTEDBR On-Line
Number 35 (September 2009)
pages 19-28
ISSN: 1676-2584

Karl M. Lorenz, Associate Professor, Director Teacher Certification Programs
Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Connecticut

From 1870 to 1930, physicians, writers, anthropologists and educators discussed the relationship between education and the less-privileged segments of the Brazilian population. Among ideas circulating in the late nineteenth century were precepts of School Hygiene, such as physical exercise could promote personal health and, in a broader sense, the total development of the child. In discussions of eugenic themes in the early decades of the twentieth century, Physical Education was further promoted as a corrective measure for the negative effects of miscegenation; that is, the physical, intellectual and moral debilities of the poor and non-white segments of the Brazilian population. This paper examines the nature and effects of the school discipline Physical Education on the less-favored children of Brazil by first introducing its role in School Hygiene and then by focusing on its extended role from the eugenic perspective. In this latter discussion, the racial ideas of Fernando de Azevedo regarding the regenerating effect of Physical Education on the “Brazilian Race” are explored.

During the period known as the First Republic (1889-1930), different segments of Brazilian society sought to define the “Brazilian race.” Their efforts originated from a larger concern about the most efficacious ways to politically and socially modernize the country and create a new model of society. Increasing urbanization, industrialization, abolition, and an expanding school-going populace were important factors that shaped discussions on economic and social issues in the waning years of the Empire (1822-1889) and the first years of the Republic.

The question that perplexed those struggling with these issues was how could a country endowed with vast national resources like Brazil experience such a slow pace of economic and social development? As expected of such a broad question, numerous explanations were offered. Among these, and one that was prominent in influential intellectual circles, was the racial constitution of the Brazilian people. Race, it was argued, was the key determinant of social progress and national development (VECHIA & LORENZ, 2009, p. 58).

The identification of race as a factor in social progress and national development is not surprising given that since the mid 1800s the Brazilians were familiar with racial theories circulating in Europe. The theories first gained prominence with the studies of the British scientist Francis Galton (1822-1911) and the publication of his 1865 article Hereditary Talent and Character and his 1869 book Hereditary Genius. Galton meticulously recorded the physical characteristics of humans and concluded that a large number of physical, mental and moral traits were inherited and that progress could be achieved by the conscious selection and transmission of a population’s hereditary endowments to future generations. Galton coined the word “eugenics” in 1883 in his Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development to denote the science of the biological improvement of humankind. The eugenics doctrine encouraged the reproduction of superior individuals and races while discouraging the reproduction of those that were inferior…

…Eugenic Discourse in Brazil

In the second half of the nineteenth century racial ideas circulated in Brazil and fixed the notion for many Brazilian intellectuals that the great challenge of nationhood resided in its people. Count Gobineau’s influential text promoting the racial theory of the superiority of the “Aryan race,” Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1854), was one of the first works known to the Brazilian elite. His ideas supported the thesis that the Brazilian race was primarily comprised of the poor and non-white segments of the population and that these were responsible for the social misery of the country and the slow pace of national progress. Other social and scientific texts by Buckle, Kidd, le Bon, Lapouge, and social Darwinists held up Brazil as a prime example of the “degenerative” effects produced by “promiscuous racial miscegenation.” Brazilians found themselves receptive to these writings, especially those that espoused the apparent inequality of races in terms of a hierarchy constituted of “evolved” and “primitive” typologies. Theories of Negro inferiority, mulatto degeneration, tropical decay and their effects at inhibiting progress were accepted by many of the political and social elite (STEPAN, 1990, p. 114).

Questions about the origin and nature of the Brazilian Race were explored in the national literature, often in publications that voiced eugenic themes and employed eugenic terminology. Sílvio Romero, in his 1888 masterpiece Historia da literatura brasileira, discussed the mixing of the white, Indian and Negro peoples in Brazil, estimated a timeframe for the general whitening of the Brazilian people, and even advocated European immigration to hasten the “whitenening” and “homogenizing” process (ROMERO, 1906, p.123). Euclides da Cunha, in his novel Os Sertões, tells of the 1896 rebellion in Canudos, in the backlands of the northeastern tropical state of Bahia. He reflects on its causes and identifies the prejudicial effects of racial mixing on the behavior of the rebellious mestiço sertenejos (mestizos of the backlands) as one of a constellation of causes. The Bahian physician and ethnographer Nina Rodrigues, in Mestiçagem, Degenerescência e Crime (1899), defended the idea of the inferiority of the mestizo and the Negro and suggested they be subjected to their own penal codes. Towards the end of nineteenth century the historian Joaquim Maria de Lacerda decried the “black race” as “much less civilized and intelligent than other races”, and prior to 1930, the novelist Afrânio Peixoto asserted that mestizos were the problematic offspring of the mixing of superior and inferior races.

Most revealing was the racial view of the Brazilian writer Monteiro Lobato (1882-1948) who describes his disagreement with four inhabitants of the sertão (backlands of Brazil) in a letter to his friend Godofredo Rangel. The letter, which was published in the Journal of São Paulo in 1914, collectively referred to these “four lice” as a fictional and symbolic figure named Jeca Tatu—or “Jeca the backwoods hog” (the armadillo)—thus creating one of the best known literary characters of Brazilian culture. Jeca represents the typical country hick—a poor, ignorant, unpleasant and disease-ridden caboclo (an individual of mixed European and native Indian blood). Monteiro writes of his indignation with the apathy and indolence of the sertenejos, who because of miscegenation were a “veritable plague on the earth.” Even though later Lobato revised his thinking and attributed the decadence of the hybrid Jeca Tatu to his poor economic conditions, the image of the degenerate mestizo became deeply etched in the minds of Brazilians (VECHIA; LORENZ, 2009, p. 61-62)…

Read the entire article here.

“My Daughter Married a Negro”: Interracial Relationships in the United States as Portrayed in Popular Media, 1950-1975

Journal of Undergraduate Research
University of Wisconsin, La Crosse
Volume VIII (2005)
13 pages

Melissa Magnuson-Cannady

Between 1948 and 1967, thirty states either repealed their anti-miscegenation laws or the states’ laws themselves were struck down as unconstitutional by the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision. Although these laws were slowly being annulled, interracial relationships, especially Black-White relationships, were still considered taboo in much of the country. This research project critically examines how mainstream America thought about interracial relationships during and after those years as portrayed in popular culture media outlets such as popular magazines and periodicals, newspapers, and one major film. The articles and productions reveal both continuity and change over time and that many of those articles and productions were reactions to national events and court cases. After examining various articles it becomes clear that as more states repealed laws banning interracial relationships, more people accepted interracial relationships as long as interracial couples did not move into their neighborhoods, or involve their children. Currently, while there is an ever-increasing population of people involved in interracial relationships, this fact is not widely depicted in advertisements, on television, or in movies, revealing vestiges of an out-dated taboo.

INTRODUCTION

The author of “My Daughter Married a Negro” chose not to reveal his identity when he wrote this story detailing his family’s ordeal with their daughter marrying across the color line.1 But his story reveals that he and the rest of his family and their friends and neighbors did indeed have issues with the marriage. In fact, with the many references to the Second World War and to war in general, it seems as though he feels that he is fighting a war against the interracial union. This article was one of many articles published between 1950 and 1975 that portrayed both a reluctance to allow such relationships and a slow eventual acceptance of interracial relationships. Even the fact that he chose to remain anonymous and hide the fact that his daughter was marrying a black man from his co-workers speaks volumes about the general thoughts and notions about interracial marriages during the early 1950s. In fact, at the time this article was published and for years after, antimiscegenation laws were still widely practiced and enforced in the majority of the states in the South and the West of the United States. These laws were used to prohibit racial mixing, or amalgamation so to ensure the superiority and purity of the white race, to maintain the hierarchy of slave or free during the centuries of slavery, and to regulate property transmission. Such antimiscegenation laws predated the United States of America and continued to regulate relationships, race, and property transmission for a long time—less than forty years ago many states still had laws that banned the marriage of a white person to a person of any other race. Many of these laws were in place for decades, or even centuries, while other states had more recently passed their laws during the twentieth century…

Racial equality leading to mixed marriages and then to children of mixed racial descent was one of the driving forces behind preventing school integration. The September 19, 1958 issue of U.S. News & World Report published as its cover story “What South Really Fears about Mixed Schools: Leading Sociologists Discuss Sex Fears and Integration.” This article, along with the “Mixed Schools and Mixed Blood” article blatantly reveal the South’s real fear about integration. The sociologists’ views varied greatly. One stated, “…about the last person in the world that the average white kid would really seriously get interested in would be a Negro.” Another stated that although school integration may not directly lead to intermarriage, it will definitely lower the barriers to such relationships.51 Another leading sociologist argued that interracial relationships and sex are used to oppose integration, but that it “may not be the real reason but merely one that is easily understood and useful for the opposition. He then argued that the real reasons may have to do with social and political mobility of Negroes—that better educated Negroes would rock the world of politics in the South and that would eventually lead to whites loosing status and privilege in society. Still another sociologist, when answering the question, “Do you think that white parents are afraid their daughters may become interested in Negro boys, or their sons might become involved with Negro girls?” responded with,

Their sons have clandestinely been involved with Negro girls and women for over 200 years, and the evidence can be seen in the form of light mulattoes in almost every Southern and Northern City.

Public opinion accepts this fact, however, as not endangering the purity of the white race so long as the mixing does not involve the incorporation of the mixed-blood children in the father’s group. Of course, legal marriage with colored women would violate this principle, and this is why it is forbidden by law in every Southern State and in many non-Southern States.

With the daughters of white parents, it is a very different matter. Motherhood is concealed only with great difficulty. An old saying of the frontier has it that motherhood is a matter of fact but fatherhood is a matter of opinion. Hence it is through the woman that the white group lays down its rules of race membership.

This statement, very similar in many ways to Peggy Pascoe’s explanation of interracial relationships, shows why interracial marriage, but not interracial sex, is banned by law in many states, and how race and sex compound to further subjugate black women of the South. This statement reveals the sick truth that while white male slave owners had supreme control over his slaves, and later sharecroppers, and women in general in the South, black men had almost no power—not even to protect their female family and friends from the possible horrors of the white man. And, while not all of the relationships resulting in mixed children were based on this imbalance of power that resulted in rape, many surely were purely by the definition of rape itself. This statement reveals the ugly, horrible truth about one aspect of race relations in the South…

Read the entire article here.

Intermarriage and racial amalgamation in the United States

Biodemography and Social Biology
Volume 14, Issue 2 (1967)
pages 112-120
DOI: 10.1080/19485565.1967.9987710

David M. Heer, Professor Emeritus of Sociology
University of Southern California

Within the last few years tremendous popular interest has been aroused in the subject of Negro-white intermarriage. Fifteen years ago Negro protest leaders claimed they were interested only in jobs and votes and consequently downplayed talk of intermarriage. Moreover, conservative whites were comforted by Gunnar Myrdal’s report that although the ban on intermarriage was for them the most important aspect of the caste system, Negroes considered it the least important of the various discriminations they were forced to suffer. Very recently, however, the attitude on the part of many Negro leaders toward intermarriage has changed. Increasingly, such leaders, particularly the younger ones, are saying, “Why not?”

Earlier, most Negro thinking tended to isolate political and economic discriminations from the social discriminations symbolized, par excellence, by white attitudes toward racial intermarriage. However, in the writer’s opinion, such thinking represented faulty sociological analysis. A more thorough view of the situation reveals that restrictions on racial intermarriage may well be closely linked to the economic discrimination that Negroes in our society must endure. Davis (1949) has listed the main social functions of the family as the reproduction, maintenance, placement, and socialization of the young. Let us focus our attention on the placement function of the family in the contemporary United Stales, i.e. on the consequences which birth into a given family has for the youngsters future social position. Let us first remember that the transfer of wealth in our society is largely accomplished by bequeathal from one family member to another. The possession of wealth in our society not only entitles one to receive regular monetary interest; it is also a source of power, credit, and prestige. Secondly, it must be recognized that although universalism is the predominant criterion for the matching of job applicants to job vacancies in our society, particularism is quite important for many segments of it. In particular, in the building trades, jobs cannot be obtained without admittance to the union’s apprenticeship program and in many instances it is almost impossible to obtain entree into the apprenticeship program unless one is a son or other close relative of a union member. Third, social science research has established that entree to elite positions in our society is most easily obtained by those who grow up from birth in a family having relatively high status.  Birth in a high status family, of course, provides the financial means for obtaining advanced education. In addition, however, it is invaluable for giving one a sense of familiarity with the activities and functioning of high status society. This familiarity not only reduces the fear of interpersonal contacts in such a society but also increases the motivation to become a full participant…

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Craniometric Study of the Cape Coloured Population

Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa
Volume 33, Issue 1 (1951)
pages 29-51
DOI: 10.1080/00359195109519876

J. A. Keena
Department of Anatomy
University of Cape Town

(With Plate XI and three Text-figures.)
(Read November 16, 1949.)

The Cape Coloured people inhabit Cape Town, the Cape Peninsula and the western corner of the Cape Province. Their emergence aa a distinct ethnic group is a matter of history, covering a time-period of three centuries. The basis of the Cape Coloured group is the original Hottentot population, and an early admixture occurred between the incoming European settlers and the Hottentots. The Hottentot people at that time were already a somewhat mixed racial group, having absorbed a good deal of Bushman blood (Maingard, 1932). The Bushman element in the genetic make-up of the Cape Coloured will be seen to be an important factor.

A further admixture occurred when the Dutch East India Company introduced slaves into the colony. Some of the slaves came from population groups in the far East, such as Java, or the nearer East, such as Ceylon and India, and they brought into the Cape Coloured group elements of the south-eastern races of Asia. Other slaves came from the east coast of Africa along the trade route of the Dutch East India Company, and these brought a negro clement into the racial make-up of the Cape Coloured. It should be noted, however, that this is not the same as the West African negro element which has entered into the formation of the mixed racial groups of the American continent. The East African negro populations contain a considerable admixture of Hamitic stock which differentiates them from the West African negro communities.

In the main, therefore, the Cape Coloured people contain a mixture of Hottentot, Bushman, European, Asiatic and Negro racial elements, the crossings between these major subdivisions of mankind being well established and having occurred within a comparatively short time-period. To such…

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Marvel’s Mixed Race “Ultimate Spider-Man”

The Huffington Post
2011-08-03

Marcia Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

As a kid from Queens, NY it’s not hard to understand why Spider-Man has always been my favorite superhero. Aside from a shared geographical location Spider-Man reflected many of the qualities of urban youth. He came from a working class background. He lived with extended family. He was open-minded. Sometimes unsure of himself, he struggled to make sense of the bustling world around him and his place in it.

And now there’s a new chapter to the story. Today we meet Miles Morales, a younger multiracial and multiethnic Spidey. Morales, of mixed black and Latino descent, is described by TIME Magazine as a gangly teen “that fights crime and hurls spiderwebs, just like Peter Parker used to do.” The similarities between Morales and Parker don’t stop there. They share alliterative names and Miles was bitten by a powerful spider too. I guess that makes them both multiracial spider-men…

Read the entire article here.

The Arabs of Africa

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 6, Issue 1 (1972)
pages 1-9
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.1972.9969036

Ali Mazruia, Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities
State University of New York, Binghamton

The combination of acculturation and inter-mating between races might be called a process of biocultural assimilation Some degree of integration between groups is achieved by the process of mixing blood and fusing cultural patterns. There are two concepts here which need to be further refined. One is the concept of symmetrical acculturation and the other is the concept of symmetrical miscegenation. Symmetrical acculturation arises when a dominant group not only passes on its culture to the groups it dominates but is also significantly receptive to the cultural influence of its subjects or captives.

There have been occasions in history when acculturation has been asymmetrical, and yet the receiving group has been the politically dominant. The classical example is that of Greek influence on the Roman conquerors. A more common example is the kind of asymmetry in which the politically dominant culture transmits itself to its subjects and captives and receives little in return. The British cultural influence in much of Africa has been of the second category. We might call this descending asymmetry, and call the Greek-Roman example a model of ascending asymmetry.

As for symmetrical miscegenation, this would arise in a situation where two racial communities inter-marry and produce a comparable number of both men and women who crossed the racial boundary to seek partners from another community. In very isolated circumstances, and even there with some qualifications, such symmetry is conceivable, where one race or ethnic group is patrilineal and the other is matrilineal. The matrilineal group might not mind its women crossing the border and marrying men from the other country. The patrilineal group, in like manner, might permit the men to be exogamous. By the matrilineal race the child is regarded as sharing the race of its mother; while the patrilineal wing recognises the child’s racial affinity to its father. Tensions in such situations are conceivable, precisely in the duality of citizenship and the pulls of potentially conflicting loyalties. A much more prevalent phenomenon is that of asymmetrical miscegenation. In the great majority of cases where black people have inter-married with non-black people, a lack of symmetry has been a continuing characteristic. In this paper, we shall pay special attention to racial mixture as between the Arabs and black Africans. We are going to do this in a broad comparative perspective, relating the Afro-Arab experience to the different histories of racial mixture in the United States, in Latin America and in South Africa. These three, when combined with the Afro-Arab model, provide four distinct patterns of the relationship between miscegenation and social structure.

All four models of miscegenation are asymmetrical but In significantly different ways. In each case the dominant ethnic group has produced many more husbands in the racial mixture than wives. Over 70% of the so-called black population of the United States has white blood. But overwhelmingly the white blood has come through white males rather than white females…

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‘Queer magic’: Performing mixed-race on the Australian stage

Contemporary Theatre Review
Volume 16, Issue 2, 2006
pages 171-188
DOI: 10.1080/10486800600587138

Jacqueline Lo, Professor and Director of the ANU Centre for European Studies
Austrailian National University

Half-caste-woman, living a life apart.
What did your story begin?
Half-caste-woman, have you a secret heart
Waiting for someone to win?

Were you born of some queer magic
In your shimmering gown?
Is there something strange and tragic
Deep, deep down?…

(Noël Coward, Half-caste Woman, 1931)

Used variously to denote fusion, border crossing, miscegenation, transculturation, diaspora, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, hybridity as a term runs the risk of being so stretched that it ceases to have any critical purchase for meaningful analysis. It is my contention that despite the extensive range of analysis of hybridity in contemporary postcolonial studies, the body and processes of embodiment have been largely under explored. The focus of attention tends to be on cultural negotiations and performances of identity, Even when race and racism is invoked, the analysis tends to centre on the power mechanisms that produce specific subjectivities and types of bodies. There is very little attention given to how subjected bodies themselves respond somatically to this will to power, nor of how hybridity itself is embodied and performed The invisibility of the body in hybridity-talk is all the more surprising given the genealogy of the term and its association with miscegenation. In order to explain this lack, it is necessary to briefly trace the history of hybridity.

Robert Young points out in his seminal text, Colonial Desire that the English word ‘hybrid’ stems from the latin term hybrida meaning…

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