Mixed Race Studies

Where Do We Come From?

Discover
2003-05-01

Kathleen McGowan

Photography by Katy Grannan

A new generation of DNA genealogists stand ready to unearth our ancestors. We may not like what they find.

Brent Kennedy’s 19th-century ancestors stare out from his photo albums with dark eyes, high cheekbones, olive skin, and thick black hair—a genetic riddle waiting to be solved. It comes as no surprise that Elvis Presley, Ava Gardner, and Abraham Lincoln may be among their kin, yet the members of this tribe have never fitted properly into American racial categories. Depending on the census taker or tax man, they were classified as white, “free persons of color,” or mulatto, often drifting across the color line as they moved from county to county.

Kennedy calls himself a Melungeon, but no one knows exactly what that means. There are perhaps as many as 200,000 Melungeons in the United States today, all descended from a mysterious colony of olive-skinned people who lived for centuries in the foothills of the Appalachians. Some say the Melungeons can be traced back to Portuguese sailors, shipwrecked in the 16th century, or to colonial-era Turkish silk workers. Others point to Gypsies, to Sir Francis Drake’s lost colony of Roanoke, or to the ancient Phoenicians. It’s not even clear where the word Melungeon comes from: It might be derived from the French mélange or even a corruption of an Arabic or Turkish term for “cursed souls.”…

…In the United States, where the proverbial drop of blood was once enough to distinguish a freeman from a slave, telling such stories is far more than a pastime. Less than a century ago, for instance, the Melungeons’ hazy racial status was enough to win them a long list of enemies. Virginia townspeople once hauled them into court for attempting to vote and hung them for marrying white women. One crusading Virginia state registrar launched a campaign in the 1930s and 1940s to hunt down all Melungeons and reclassify them as “colored.”

The term Melungeon was a slur until recent decades. “The Melungeons were always some other family who lived over on the other ridge,” says Jack Goins, a retired glass cutter and television technician who has spent decades researching his ancestors. Darlene Wilson, a 50-year-old administrator and history teacher at Southeast Community College in Kentucky, says that when she was a teenager in the 1960s, working at a lunch counter in Norton, Virginia, her boss made her scrub the booth after the Melungeons had finished eating.

Growing up in Wise, Virginia, Brent Kennedy had no clue that he was related to those shy-looking people who kept to themselves up in the Appalachian hills. He didn’t look particularly Gaelic, with his cornflower blue eyes and bronze skin, but Melungeon roots were something polite people didn’t talk about. After he began his genealogical research in the late 1980s, one great-aunt torched a collection of family photos and letters, and other relatives stopped speaking to him.

When Kennedy approached scholars with his questions, they couldn’t be bothered. Anthropologists and historians like Virginia DeMarce of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., had already settled the Melungeon question, they said. Kennedy’s people were an insular group like the Louisiana Red Bones and the South Carolina Brass Ankles. They were a “triracial isolate” with white, American Indian, and African-American blood—a footnote in history.

So Kennedy did his own research instead. His book, The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People, is part memoir, part manifesto. It draws on his family story and genealogy to show how the Melungeons, like African-Americans and American Indians, have been victims of vicious racism—and how they have struggled to protect themselves through assimilation. Kennedy’s thesis became a rallying cry for many Melungeons, but historians scoffed at his less-than-rigorous approach. Kennedy “essentially invented a ‘new race,'” DeMarce wrote in the National Genealogical Quarterly in 1996, a “historically nonexistent oppressed minority that belies his own ancestry.”…

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Book explores racial identification

The Post and Courier
Charleston, South Carolina
2011-04-24

Karen Spain, legal writer based in Nashville

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey From Black to White. By Daniel J. Sharfstein. Penguin. 416 pages.

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, “The Invisible Line” is a fascinating history of how three mixed-race families migrated across the color line and changed their racial identification from black to white.

The Gibsons, wealthy mulatto landowners in Colonial South Carolina, were white Southern aristocrats by the time of the Civil War.

The Walls, slave children freed by their white father, became respected members of the black middle class before giving up their prominence to “become” white.

The Spencers, hardworking Appalachian farmers in eastern Kentucky, spent almost a century straddling the color line.

The three intricately woven genealogies reveal an America where race has never been as simple as black or white. In rugged environments where survival meant relying on neighbors for security, commerce and marriage, it was easier to assume everyone was the same than to draw impenetrable distinctions between the races…

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Biohistorical approaches to “race” in the United States: Biological distances among African Americans, European Americans, and their ancestors†

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Special Issue: Race Reconciled: How Biological Anthropologists View Human Variation
Volume 139, Issue 1 (May 2009)
pages 58-67
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.20961

Heather J.H. Edgar, Research Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Curator of Human Osteology, Maxwell Museum of Anthropology
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

†Author’s: Note: This study explores the effects of cultural concepts of race on changes in subpopulations in the United States. While some aspects of biology may correlate with cultural constructions of race, use of the term “race” here does not imply its biological validity under any definition. When not otherwise indicated, the words “race” or “racial” are used in this article to describe social categories.

Folk taxonomies of race are the categorizations used by people in their everyday judgments concerning the persons around them. As cultural traditions, folk taxonomies may shape gene flow so that it is unequal among groups sharing geography. The history of the United States is one of disparate people being brought together from around the globe, and provides a natural experiment for exploring the relationship between culture and gene flow. The biohistories of African Americans and European Americans were compared to examine whether population histories are shaped by culture when geography and language are shared. Dental morphological data were used to indicate phenotypic similarity, allowing diachronic change through United States history to be considered. Samples represented contemporary and historic African Americans and European Americans and their West African and European ancestral populations (N = 1445). Modified Mahalanobis’ D² and Mean Measure of Divergence statistics examined how biological distances change through time among the samples. Results suggest the social acceptance for mating between descendents of Western Europeans and Eastern and Southern European migrants to the United States produced relatively rapid gene flow between the groups. Although African Americans have been in the United States much longer than most Eastern and Southern Europeans, social barriers have been historically stronger between them and European Americans. These results indicate that gene flow is in part shaped by cultural factors such as folk taxonomies of race, and have implications for understanding contemporary human variation, relationships among prehistoric populations, and forensic anthropology.

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How race becomes biology: Embodiment of social inequality

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Special Issue: Race Reconciled: How Biological Anthropologists View Human Variation
Volume 139, Issue 1 (May 2009)
pages 47–57
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.20983

Clarence C. Gravlee, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Florida, Gainesville

The current debate over racial inequalities in health is arguably the most important venue for advancing both scientific and public understanding of race, racism, and human biological variation. In the United States and elsewhere, there are well-defined inequalities between racially defined groups for a range of biological outcomes—cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke, certain cancers, low birth weight, preterm delivery, and others. Among biomedical researchers, these patterns are often taken as evidence of fundamental genetic differences between alleged races. However, a growing body of evidence establishes the primacy of social inequalities in the origin and persistence of racial health disparities. Here, I summarize this evidence and argue that the debate over racial inequalities in health presents an opportunity to refine the critique of race in three ways: 1) to reiterate why the race concept is inconsistent with patterns of global human genetic diversity; 2) to refocus attention on the complex, environmental influences on human biology at multiple levels of analysis and across the lifecourse; and 3) to revise the claim that race is a cultural construct and expand research on the sociocultural reality of race and racism. Drawing on recent developments in neighboring disciplines, I present a model for explaining how racial inequality becomes embodied—literally—in the biological well-being of racialized groups and individuals. This model requires a shift in the way we articulate the critique of race as bad biology.

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More Iowans identifying as mixed race

The Daily Iowan
The Independent Daily Newspaper for the University of Iowa Since 1868
2011-04-19

Alison Sullivan

Photo: Christy Aumer/The Daily IowanSophomore Tevin Robbins poses in the window of the second floor at the Afro-American Cultural Center on April 5. Robbins is currently majoring in psychology but has switched his major from engineering to better accompany other areas of his life.

University of Iowa student Tevin Robbins sat lounging on the couch at the UI’s Latino Native American Cultural Center with friend, Michael Harbravison, on a Friday evening.

Robbins’ light coffee-crème complexion is juxtaposed by his hair — a thick, rusty-red mass sitting on top of his head.

“I don’t even know what type of skin color I am,” Robbins said. The 19-year-old, part Cherokee, African American, and white, makes the statement not out of confusion but merely the inability to choose.

Robbins is one among an increasing number of Iowans who identify as more than one ethnicity, according to data from the 2010 U.S. Census released in March. The number is still small—fewer than 2 percent of Iowans identified themselves as more than one race—but it is a 68 percent jump from 2000.

Growing up for Robbins was difficult because of his complexion. Too light, he said, to pass as African American, but dark enough to not pass as white. He never felt accepted in any one “group.”

“Why do I have to choose to identify as something?” he said. “I’m not one ethnicity.”

The 2010 census was the first time researchers were able to use the comparable data. In Johnson County, there has been a 77 percent increase. And at the University of Iowa, 223 students identified as two or more ethnicities in the fall of 2010—an increase from the 133 students in 2009, when the UI first began collecting such data.

Overall, the census shows a 60 percent increase in minorities in Iowa.

“This is a group whose choices have changed,” said Mary Campbell, a UI associate professor of sociology.

Campbell said roughly 40 years ago, people who had more than one ethnicity faced the pressures to identify with a single one, but now, social change has eased such constraints…

Read the entire article here.  View the slideshow here.

“A Being of a New World:” The Ambiguity of Mixed Blood in Pauline Johnson’s “My Mother”

MELUS
Volume 27, Number 3, Native American Literature (Autumn, 2002)
pages 43-56

Margo Lukens, Associate Professor of English
University of Maine

Studying mixed-blood/Métis history reveals that an overwhelming number of unions between Europeans and Native people happened between a European man and a Native woman. Sylvia Van Kirk has illustrated this demographic pattern in her work on the importance of Native women to the development of the fur trade in Canada; others, such as Jennifer Brown, corroborate the story of the creation of the Métis people by men from France or the British Isles and women from “the country,” members of Native groups who were instrumental in helping white men survive and establish their link to North American land. A specific mythology describing the men and women of these cross-cultural unions, and their children as well, grew in the imaginations of the Europeans intent upon describing their own occupation of the land and what they came to conceive of as their Manifest Destiny to spread the civilization they knew over the face of the continent. The mythology typified the Native women of these unions as drudges and as sexual temptresses, ready to cleave to their white spouses or melt inconspicuously back into their tribes once their husbands left them behind to care for their unacknowledged and genetically compromised children. The European men could, in this mythology, choose to return to French or English wives without penalty for their foray “into the country;” only those who chose to thrust their mixed-blood children upon society’s notice or “squaw-men” who remained with Native wives for life risked social disapproval and marginaliation.

What, then, of the handful of people experiencing unions with the genders reversed? Perhaps because of the Europeans’ inability to imagine these unions, they are largely undescribed by the mythology; perhaps because historical circumstance brought European men to America in large numbers without European women as companions, there was little necessity for a descriptive mythology to arise, except perhaps as a prohibitive tool; perhaps the fear of exposing their women to the attentions of men from outside shaped the European colonial project to be a male journey into an unknown and feminine landscape. Whatever the reasons, no comparable mythology existed for the union of a Native man and European woman. (2) In the work of Pauline Johnson, daughter of a Mohawk man and an English woman, we can see the tension generated by an attempt to create such a mythology of self-identity.

Pauline Johnson was born in 1861 on the Six Nations Reserve in the Grand River valley near Brantford, Ontario, the daughter of George Henry Martin Johnson, a Mohawk chief who was one-quarter Dutch, and Emily Susanna Howells, whose family had emigrated from England when she was eight years old. Because Canadian law identified as Indians women whose fathers or husbands were Indians, her status was Indian even though five of her eight great-grandparents were Europeans. She grew up in an English-style household on the Reserve, where she was educated partly by an English governess at home and partly at the Reserve school, idealizing the Indianness of her father and learning to claim the Mohawk part of her heritage with pride; as her biographer Betty Keller says, Pauline Johnson “credited everything in which she excelled to her Indian blood” (54)…

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Note on the Skin-Colour of the Crosses Between Negro and White

Biometrika
Volume 6, Number 4 (March 1909)
pages 348-353
DOI: 10.1093/biomet/6.4.348

Karl Pearson (1857-1936), F.R.S.

Those who feel compelled at present to hold their final judgment with regard to Mendelism in suspense, who do not think the statistical proof of its generality by any means yet complete, and who still question on logical grounds many of the statements made with regard to it, have nevertheless been ready to emphasise the paramount service of Mendel in drawing attention to the great factor of segregation in many inheritance problems. This admission can be made without overlooking the facts—too often disregarded—that segregation is not a universal principle, that it is, where it does occur, often incomplete, and that even where it occurs and is more or less complete it does not necessarily follow the simple Mendelian ratios. The theory of the “pure gamete,” the “unit character” and the  “allelomorph” may have aided, suggested and controlled much experimental work on inheritance, but this theory has undoubtedly been pushed—chiefly by young and enthusiastic disciples of Mendelism, who thought that at last a formula of heredity requiring no mathematical knowledge had been discovered—far beyond the limits of actual experimental work, or in some cases beyond the inferences allowable from the data actually observed. The public has been dosed by the general Mendelian practitioner with:

(DR) x (DR) = (DD) + 2(DR) + (RR)

and told that it solved all difficulties. But the higher consultants know that at the very best many complications arise, that even in segregation transitional forms occur occasionally or even frequently, and that “unit characters” are not independent but often highly correlated. They are also fully conscious that much straining of the theory of probability often is needed to make the ratios fit a simple Mendelian formula. The reason for these prefatory remarks lies in the fact that some time ago it was asserted by an ardent Mendelian that skin colour in crosses between dark and light skinned races would probably be found to obey Mendelian principles.   It had been hitherto almost universally accepted that skin colour did…

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“Quadroon” Balls in the Spanish Period

Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association
Volume 14, Number 3 (Summer, 1973)
pages 310-315

Translated and Edited by

Ronald R. Morazan, Assistant Professor of History
Southern University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

With the influx of free blacks into Spanish Louisiana from the island of Santo Domingo, the Spanish authorities provided them with special privileges to hold public dances which eventually became known as “quadroon balls.” Soon after the public dance hall for whites was established in 1792, Governor Carondelct granted Santiago Bernardo Coquet the privilege of giving weekly a public dance for the blacks. Preferring black women, as they were “less demanding,” the white men began patronaing the dance hall for blacks. To correct this situation, Gabriel Fonvergne, the Attorney General (Sindico Procurador General) of the Cabildo, asked the City Council to petition Governor Carondelet to prohibit slaves from entering the dance hall. The governor, because of numerous complaints and objections from slave owners, refused the request of the Cabildo and the attorney general but decided instead to prohibit white people from going into the dances for blacks. Permission to continue the dances was given by the following administration, which was that of Don Manuel Gayoso de Lcmos, but after his death, the new Attorney General of the Cabildo, Don Pedro Dulcido Barran, asked the City Council to petition Acting Civil Governor Don Nicolas Maria Vidal to abolish the dances once and for all; however, Governor Vidal refused…

PBS series explores black culture in Latin America

2011-04-18

Jennifer Kay
Associated Press

MIAMI—On a street in a seaside city in Brazil, four men describe themselves to Henry Louis Gates Jr. as black. Flabbergasted, the Harvard scholar insists they compare their skin tones with his.

In a jumble, their forearms form a mocha spectrum. Oh, the men say: We’re all black, but we’re all different colors.

Others in the marketplace describe Gates, who is black and renowned for his African American studies, with a variety of terms for someone of mixed race—more of an indication of his social status as a U.S. college professor than of his skin color.

“Here, my color is in the eye of the beholder,” Gates says, narrating over a scene filmed last year for his new series for PBS, “Black in Latin America.” The first of four episodes filmed in six Caribbean and Latin American countries begins airing Tuesday. A book expanding on Gates’ research for the series is set for publication in July.

Throughout the series, Gates finds himself in conversations about race that don’t really happen in the U.S., where the slavery-era “one-drop” concept—that anyone with even just one drop of black blood was black—is still widely accepted.

The idea for the series stems from a surprising number: Of the roughly 11 million Africans who survived the trans-Atlantic slave trade, only about 450,000 came to the U.S. By contrast, about 5 million slaves went to Brazil alone, and roughly 700,000 went to Mexico and Peru. And they all brought their music and religion with them…

…New U.S. census figures are revealing how complicated and surprising conversations about race can be. For example, the number of Puerto Ricans identifying themselves solely as black or American Indian jumped about 50 percent in the last 10 years, suggesting a shift in how residents of the racially mixed U.S. territory see themselves…

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Exploring the Popularization of the Mixed Race American

The Human Experience: Inside the Humanities at Stanford University
2011-04-22

Stanford Scholar Investigates the “Mulatto Millennium” through Literature, Theatre, Art, & Pop Culture

The United States has its first mixed race president, a man with a black African father and white American mother. Actress Halle Barry, golfer Tiger Woods, rocker Lenny Kravitz and singer Alicia Keyes—all people acknowledging a blended racial heritage—are household names. Since the 2000 U.S Census granted the MOOM (mark one or more) racial option, mixed race advocacy groups have gained political visibility and influence. Are there proportionally more mixed race Americans today then say twenty years ago? Or has something changed about how Americans see mixed race, thereby contributing to the increased prominence of the mixed race American in our country’s landscape?

In considering those questions, Stanford University English professor Michele Elam analyzed why and with what effect those identified (and identifying) as mixed race in the U.S. have gained such tremendous cultural cachet in the last decade.

Looking beyond the usual explanations for the increased visibility of mixed race people, such as immigration trends and the 1967 Supreme Court Loving Decision lifting bans on interracial marriage, Elam is interested in how contemporary literature, theatre, art and popular culture are re-shaping the way we perceive and understand mixed race in the new millennium. The creative works she examines in The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium, released by Stanford University Press in March, include comic strips, novels, art exhibitions, websites, theater, and even Comedy Central late night TV…

…“I started noticing more the popularization of certain kinds of images of mixed race people in media,” a popularity that extended into education curricula, from children’s books on how to raise a mixed race kindergartener through to college courses in “mixed race studies” Elam explained when discussing what inspired her to research mixed race in America. “I also noticed there wasn’t a lot of conversation about what impact these cultural works are having on our society, I would like to see more attention to literature, performance and art that is using the debates about mixed race to think more carefully about race’s saliency in the new millennium.”…

…Artists and Writers Help to Define what it means to be Biracial

To get a sense of Elam’s wide-ranging scholarship, start by looking at the cartoon displayed on the outside of her office door. It’s a copy of one of The Boondocks cartoons created by social satirist Aaron McGruder containing a pointed message about the issues biracial people encounter. In the comic, mixed race pre-teen Jazmine sits alone in a grassy field, lamenting that she feels so different from everyone else, even though her parents assure her that her blended background makes her special. Then the strip’s realist, Huey, appears and bluntly declares: “You’re black. Get over it.”

Elam said the strip sparked anger among some mixed race advocacy group members who were upset because the Huey character so flatly dismissed Jazmine’s desire to be biracial.  “That’s why I put it out there, somewhat as a provocation and also kind of as an illustration of the pop cultural engagements with mixed race that I think are interesting,” Elam said.

Her examination extends to other artwork, including Baby Halfie, the unique doll sitting on her office desk that she says no child would ever love.

The toy’s look is arresting, a mahogany-hued baby head atop a pudgy, nude, white-skinned infant body.  The plaything was part of an exhibition by African-American assemblage artist Lezley Saar that is now visible on Saar’s web site mulattonation.com.

“Baby Halfie’s arms are raised high as if asking to be lifted up for parental comfort and affirmation, but I suspect no parents will embrace it, let alone purchase it for their tots in hopes of inspiring proud mixed race identification or development empowerment—and that is no doubt precisely the point,” Elam writes in The Souls of Mixed Folks. “The doll is not an effort to capture how a person of mixed black and white descent might actually appear in the flesh. Its creative affront provides a vivid example of the alternative progressive directions for mixed race art and activism in the post-civil rights era that are at the center of this book.”…

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