Mixed Race Studies

Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas [Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 92, Issue 3 (2005)
pages 974-975
DOI: 10.2307/3660015

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas. Ed. by David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. xii, 329 pp. Cloth, isbn 0-252-02939-9. Paper, isbn 0-252-07194-8.)

Noting that free people of color never fully escaped the degrading effects of race-based slavery, David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine offer fourteen essays that explore women’s experiences of race, gender, and class in the slaveholding societies of the United States, the Caribbean, and South America. The book is divided into two sections, both of which contain rich information about enslaved as well as free women of color. The first section is organized around the conditions under which women achieved freedom; the second, around women’s economic and social adjustment to freedom. Key themes such as quality of freedom, economic status, and racial mixing are addressed in both sections…

…Virtually all the authors cite light skin and similar economic occupations as characteristic of free women of color. Félix V. Matos Rodréguez, for example, describes various food-selling establishments operated by free women of color, who made up the majority of street vendors in mid-nineteenth-century San Juan, Puerto Rico. In the United States as well, Loren Schweninger and Wilma King cite free women who earned their living as “laundresses, maids, seamstresses, cooks, midwives, venders, and servants” (p. 107) and a few who managed to own substantial property or small businesses.

Another common experience that connected the lives of free nonwhite women across national borders was the exploitive sexual system that permeated slave societies. Negative racial and gender stereotypes encouraged the rape and sexual degradation of relatively powerless enslaved and free women of color. There was another side to sexual exploitation, however. Many women of color manipulated the practice of concubinage (which often began with rape) to their advantage. Trevor Burnard tells the story of Phibbah, a Jamaican slave who gained social authority among slaves, profitable employment, property ownership, and ultimately freedom as a result of becoming the concubine of her powerful overseer. Virginia Meacham Gould similarly traces the freedom and prosperity of Henriette Delille of New Orleans, a proper Catholic Creole of color, to maternal African ancestors who escaped slavery on account of their descent from one of Louisiana’s wealthiest white colonists…

Read the entire review here.

Determining the (In)Determinable: Race in Brazil and the United States

Michigan Journal of Race & Law
Volume 14, Issue 2 (Spring 2009)
pages 143-195

D. Wendy Greene, Assistant Professor of Law
Cumberland School of Law, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama

Recently, the Brazilian states of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Mato Grasso du Sol have implemented race-conscious affirmative action programs in higher education. These states have established admissions quotas in public universities for Afro-Brazilians or afrodescendentes. As a result, determining “who is Black” has become a complex yet important undertaking in Brazil. Contrary to many scholars’ advancements race in Brazil is skin color or physical appearance, whereas in the United States race is based on ancestry, this Article advances the notion that in both American countries one’s physical appearance is the primary determinant of Blackness. Furthermore, when U.S. courts have been charged with determining Blackness, racial constructs based on physical appearance—not the rule of hypodescent—have steered their legal pronouncement of race. This Article first offers a necessary survey of African slavery in Brazil and the United States. This Article demonstrates that despite the contrasts in demography, slave law, and ensuing racial ideology—“racial democracy” in Brazil and “racial purity” in the United States—the enslavement and subordination of Africans and their descendants spawned a common racial hierarchy and assembly of phenotypes designating Blackness and whiteness. Moreover, this Article surveys historical and contemporary racial determination cases which demonstrate the salience of physical appearance in determining race in the United States and debunks the notion that the hypodescent rule is applied to determine “Blackness”. These cases additionally illuminate the paradoxical nature of race—specifically Blackness and whiteness—in the Americas; race is contextual, subjective, and malleable yet simultaneously fixed, as physical constructs of Blackness and whiteness have transcended geography, time, ideology, and demography. Ultimately, this exploration of racial determination cases imparts insight and guidance to Brazilian arbiters currently determining who is Afro-Brazilian for affirmative action purposes.

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION
• I. Slavery, Race, and Racial Ideology in Brazil and the United States Settlement, Slavery, and Demography
  • A. Race, Racial Ideology, and Racial Hierarchy
  • B. Brazil: A “Racial Democracy”
  • C. The United States: A “Racially Pure” Nation
  • D. Brazil and the United States: A Transnational Concept of Race and Racial Hierarchy
• II. Constructing Race: The Role of U.S. Courts
  • A. Race as Physical Appearance and Beyond in the Nineteenth Century: Hudgins v. Wright and White v. Tax Collector
  • B. Racial Determination in the Early Twentieth Century: In Re Cruz
  • C. Moving Toward a New Millennium Yet Mired in the Past: The Malone and Perkins Cases
• III. The Application of U.S. Racial Determination Methods to the Brazilian Case
• CONCLUSION

On January 20, 2009 Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States. Throughout President Obama’s candidacy and after his victory, one of the primary queries raised by the media revolved around his race: is America “ready” for a Black president? Even though it is publicly known that Obama’s mother is a white American from the Midwest and his father is a native of Kenya, the press as well as most Americans would describe Senator Obama as the first Black president of the United States, rather than the first mixed-race president. The general depiction and acceptance of Senator Obama as Black rather than multiracial generates important questions related to America’s common understanding of race. In the United States, is Obama deemed Black because he has self-identified as Black? Is Obama defined as Black due to his known African ancestry? Or is Obama generally regarded as Black in the United States, despite his known white parentage, because of his physical appearance—one which conforms to a socially constructed image of Blackness?

Since the era of Jim Crow, the rule of hypodescent—the presence of one ancestor of African descent makes an individual’s race Black—has been articulated as the guiding principle for determining one’s “Blackness” and “whiteness” in the United States. Accordingly, ancestry allegedly determines Blackness in the United States dissimilarly to Brazil, where one’s physical appearance is determinative. In Brazil it is widely acknowledged that most Brazilians are descendants of Africans in light of the pervasive miscegenation that occurred during and after the Portuguese and Brazilian enslavement of Africans. Therefore, one’s physical appearance—hair texture, skin color, nose size, eye shape, etc.—determines one’s race in Brazil. Contrary to scholarly opinion “[u]nlike in the United States, race in Brazil refers mostly to skin color or physical appearance rather than to ancestry” and public adherence to this idea, one’s physical appearance is the primary determinant of Blackness in both American countries. Indeed, an individual’s ancestry is necessarily implicated in determining race based on his or her physical appearance, as this method of classifying race is grounded in socially mediated presumptions concerning how an individual’s physical appearance denotes his or her genetic makeup…

…This Article examines the alleged complexity of determining who is Black or Afro-Brazilian for affirmative action purposes in higher education while surveying United States racial determination jurisprudence. This Article is not intended to serve as a dissertation on the legality of race-conscious affirmative action or the efficacy of these programs in the United States and Brazil. Since the United States is considered a global forerunner in the implementation of race-conscious affirmative action in higher education and employment, numerous scholars have debated the validity, constitutionality, and utility of race-conscious affirmative action in Brazil through a U.S./Brazil comparative lens. However, there is a paucity of literature exploring fundamental issues in facilitating race-conscious programs: specifically, who is the proper beneficiary; how should this determination be made; and can Brazilian arbiters adopt U.S. judicial modes of determining race to effectuate their raceconscious affirmative action programs? The objective of this Article is to mitigate this void in comparative scholarship by demonstrating the universality of race and the law’s role in constructing race, racial ideology, and racial hierarchy.

First, this Article discusses African slavery in Brazil and the United States, which is crucial to the understanding of race, racial ideology, and racial hierarchy in the two nations. Part I explores the differences and similarities between the conception of race in Brazil and the United States, specifically focusing on the construction of Black, white, and multi-racial classifications. Part I also considers the influence of slavery and settlement patterns on the contrasting racial ideologies in both American nations—“racial democracy” in Brazil and “racial purity” in the United States. Additionally, this section illustrates that a mutual racial hierarchy constructed around physical appearance developed and endures despite the divergent racial ideologies, settlement patterns and slavery law in Brazil and the United States.

Next, Part II examines a series of racial determination cases decided by American courts historically and contemporarily and the various methods these courts appropriated to determine an individual’s race. This survey of racial determination cases illuminates the salience of physical appearance in determining race as well as the paradoxical nature of race—specifically Blackness and whiteness—in the Americas; race is contextual, subjective, and malleable yet simultaneously fixed, as physical constructs of Blackness and whiteness have transcended geography, time, ideology, and demography. Part III concludes with a consideration of Brazilian arbiters adopting American judicial modes of determining race and the potential consequences of doing so…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia

Georgetown Law Review
Volume 77, Number 6 (August 1989)
pages 1967-2029

A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Judge (1928-1998)
United States Court of Appeals (3rd Circuit)

Barbara K. Kopytoff, Professor of Law (1938-1999)
University of Pennsylvania

I. Introduction

There is probably no better place than Virginia to examine the origins of the American doctrine of racial purity and the related prohibitions on interracial sex and interracial marriage. Many people applaud Virginia as the “mother of Presidents” (four of the first five Presidents were Virginians) and the “mother of revolutionaries,” such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Patrick Henry. Yet few stress that colonial Virginia was also the “mother” of American slavery and a leader in the gradual debasement of blacks through its institution of slavery. Virginia was also one of the first colonies to formulate a legal definition of race and to enact prohibitions against interracial marriage and interracial sex. For more than three centuries, the Virginia courts and legislatures advocated and endorsed concepts of racial purity that we would call racist.

While Virginia was a pioneer in these areas of law both before and after the Civil War, the pre-Civil War law was significantly different from that of the early twentieth century. The law of racial purity in the eighteenth century defined “white” as a less exclusive term than did the law of the twentieth century: people some of whose ancestors were known to be African could be legally white. The laws banning interracial sex and marriage were less harsh on blacks before the Civil War than they were afterwards: they did not punish blacks at all for marriage or for voluntary sexual relations with whites…

Read or purchase the article here.

All Things Being Equal: The Promise of Affirmative Efforts to Eradicate Color-Coded Inequality in the United States and Brazil

National Black Law Journal
Volume 21, Number 3 (2009)
41 pages

Tanya M. Washington, Associate Professor of Law
Georgia State University

The contrasted contexts of the United States and Brazil provide an intellectually fascinating framework for the consideration of race conscious remedies to racial inequality. “Any comparative examination of race relations hinges on the question of racial inequality: in what ways are blacks disadvantaged in relation to whites in each society . . . ?” A casual observer may compare the United State’s insistence on racial assignment and history of de jure and de facto racial discrimination with Brazilian historical aversion to racial classification and history of de facto discrimination and conclude that race and color enjoy more conceptual and legal relevance in the former context than in the latter.

Introduction

The contrasted contexts of the United States and Brazil provide an intellectually fascinating framework for the consideration of race conscious remedies to racial inequality. “Any comparative examination of race relations hinges on the question of racial inequality: in what ways are blacks disadvantaged in relation to whites in each society… ?”1 A casual observer may compare the United State’s insistence on racial assignment and history of de jure and de facto racial discrimination with Brazilian historical aversion to racial classification and history of de facto discrimination and conclude that race and color enjoy more conceptual and legal relevance in the former context than in the latter.  This conclusion, in turn, would inform a judgment as to the relative necessity and efficacy of the administration of affirmative action in both nations. Instead of using the apparent differences between legal definitions of race and color in the two countries as a reference point for comparing the utility of affirmative action as a means of eradicating color-coded inequality, this article uses as its point of departure, the similar ways that racial and color-based inequality have been manufactured in the United States and Brazil.4 “Because they share the same battle against insidious systems of racial hierarchy, it is sensible for both Americas to… focus upon the commonality of the historical legacy of slavery and its outgrowth in the continuing societal efforts to maintain privilege…” “North and South America… share a societal use of segregation for the promotion of supremacy. The segregation of education has been a key to this agenda of privilege.” Within the context of education, this piece treats affirmative action as a crucible, revealing racialized narratives, polarities, hierarchies and constructs, which have created and maintained the color-coded inequality that characterizes both American and Brazilian social, political, and economic realities…

…A substantively different construction of affirmative action, called by the same name, is being implemented in Brazil. Brazil has historically been described as a Racial Democracy, a national ideology that shares with colorblindness a resistance to the legal relevance of race. As this ideology yields to a national narrative that recognizes color-coded realities,16 the Brazilian government is utilizing the most aggressive form of affirmative action, quotas, to both remedy significant racialized social, economic and political disparities and to achieve substantive economic, social and political equality for its citizens. Brazilians opposed to affirmative action practices and policies, echoing objections raised by affirmative action detractors in the United States, charge that racial assignment and classification for the purpose of including some and excluding others (i.e., the legalization of racial classifications) is divisive,17 destabilizing, and impossible in a nation that has existed without categorical racial identities. This article considers whether a diversity focused affirmative action policy would provide a more politically palatable framework for race-conscious governmental action, and offer a justification that is more concentric with the Brazilian orientation towards difference, than a remediation focused policy.

The growing awareness of racial disparities as a catalyst to and justification for efforts to achieve substantive equality in Brazil and the growing reticence in the United States to the use of race conscious means of facilitating substantive equality, provide a unique opportunity for a comparative analysis of the ways in which racism and colorism construct social, economic and political inequality for Afro- Brazilians and Black Americans and the extent to which affirmative action can provide an effective vehicle for reform in both nations. Part I of this article begins with an examination of the history and evolution of the significance and uses of race and color that have informed the current climate of raceblindness in the face of racial inequality in both nations. This section explores the ways in which the legend of Racial Democracy continues to pervade perceptions of race and challenge efforts to remedy racial inequities in Brazil and the ways in which the ideology of colorblindness has provided a jurisprudential framework inherently hostile to race-conscious efforts to achieve substantive equality in America.

Part II of this article highlights racial disparities in both nations and identifies racial polarity, which expresses fixed and diametrically opposed valuations of whiteness and blackness, reflected in white-to-black color hierarchies that operate in both the United States and Brazil, as their chief article contrasts colorblindness in the United States and Racial Democracy in Brazil architect. In keeping with this theme, race and color are considered throughout this piece within a binary (black/white) framework, which underscores the central thesis that black-white racial polarities, in concert with normative whiteness, create substantive social, economic, and political inequality in both countries.

Part III of this article contrasts colorblindness in the United States and Racial Democracy in Brazil and addresses how racial and color-based inequality are both masked and manufactured at the intersection of racial polarity and resistance to an acknowledgement of the legal relevance of race in both nations. This section of the article then focuses on the prospects of a Brazilian affirmative action project based on educational diversity and its transformative possibilities for creating substantive equality. It highlights how Brazil’s Constitution and its affirmative action legislation accommodate and instigate responses to racial inequality that challenge normative whiteness. This article ends on an optimistic note, concluding that an educational diversity focused affirmative action project may be a more effective tool with which to disrupt racial polarity in Brazil and dismantle the consequent color hierarchy that creates and perpetuates substantive inequality.

…The prospect of freedom for the slaves inspired insecurity among white Brazilians, and created the need for structures and policies that would maintain their status as the ruling elite. Responding to this exigency, the Brazilian government engaged in large scale immigration of European whites and encouraged miscegenation in order to improve the racial balance between blacks and whites. The “whitening” of the Brazilian population, through miscegenation, was believed to have a civilizing effect on the Brazilian population of observable African ancestry and reinforced normative whiteness (i.e., whiteness as the value standard). A popular slogan of the day, “Marry White to Improve the Race,” captured the pervasive sentiment.

Gilberto Freyre, credited with popularizing the idea of Racial Democracy in the 1930s and 1940s, studied at Baylor University in Texas in the early 1900s and reacted with horror to the Jim Crow institutions and practices he witnessed during his visit, including a lynching.

The shock of Freyre’s encounter with the racial hostility and segregation of the United States led him to construct a vision of Brazil’s past (and, by extension, its present and future) that proved deeply appealing to many Brazilians. Scientific racism and its Brazilian variant, the whitening thesis, had viewed Brazil’s history of slavery and miscegenation, and the racially mixed population which was its legacy, as shameful obstacles that had to be overcome if Brazil were to enter the community of civilized nations. Freyre… rehabilitated that past, recasting it as the basis of a new national identity independent, for the first time in Brazilian history, of European norms and models…. Freyre’s writings thus became the basis of a new, semi-official ideology propagated in public proclamations, schools, universities, and the national media…

Read the entire article here.

Counting by Race Can Throw Off Some Numbers

The New York Times
2009-02-11

Susan Saulny, National Correspondent

Race Remixed: The Pigeonhole Problem. Articles in this series explore the growing number of mixed-race Americans.

The federal Department of Education would categorize Michelle López-Mullins—a university student who is of Peruvian, Chinese, Irish, Shawnee and Cherokee descent—as “Hispanic.” But the National Center for Health Statistics, the government agency that tracks data on births and deaths, would pronounce her “Asian.” And what does Ms. López-Mullins’s birth certificate from the State of Maryland say? It doesn’t mention her race.

Ms. López-Mullins, 20, usually marks “other” on surveys these days, but when she filled out a census form last year, she chose Asian, Hispanic, Native American and white.

The chameleon-like quality of Ms. López-Mullins’s racial and ethnic identification might seem trivial except that statistics on ethnicity and race are used for many important purposes. These include assessing disparities in health, education, employment and housing, enforcing civil rights protections, and deciding who might qualify for special consideration as members of underrepresented minority groups.

But when it comes to keeping racial statistics, the nation is in transition, moving, often without uniformity, from the old “mark one box” limit to allowing citizens to check as many boxes as their backgrounds demand. Changes in how Americans are counted by race and ethnicity are meant to improve the precision with which the nation’s growing diversity is gauged: the number of mixed-race Americans, for example, is rising rapidly, largely because of increases in immigration and intermarriage in the past two decades. (One in seven new marriages is now interracial or interethnic.)…

…Under Department of Education requirements that take effect this year, for instance, any student like Ms. López-Mullins who acknowledges even partial Hispanic ethnicity will, regardless of race, be reported to federal officials only as Hispanic. And students of non-Hispanic mixed parentage who choose more than one race will be placed in a “two or more races” category, a catchall that detractors describe as inadequately detailed. A child of black and American Indian parents, for example, would be in the same category as, say, a child of white and Asian parents.

The new standards for kindergarten through 12th grades and higher education will probably increase the nationwide student population of Hispanics, and could erase some “black” students who will now be counted as Hispanic or as multiracial (in the “two or more races category”). And reclassifying large numbers of white Hispanic students as simply Hispanic has the potential to mask the difference between minority and white students’ test scores, grades and graduation rates—the so-called achievement gap, a target of federal reform efforts that has plagued schools for decades.

“They’re all lumped together—blacks, Asians and Latinos—and they all look the same from the data perspective,” said Daniel J. Losen, a policy expert for the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, referring to the Department of Education aggregation. “But the reality is much different. There are different kinds of discrimination experienced by these subgroups.”

“It’s a big problem for researchers,” Mr. Losen continued, “because it throws a monkey wrench in our efforts at accountability, student tracking and the study of trends.”…

…The Census Bureau’s solution may have added layers of complexity for demographers—creating 63 categories of possible racial combinations—but it laid to rest fears from civil rights advocates that adding a multiracial category would diminish the number of blacks, Asians or American Indians in official government counts, since multiracial people are counted in the ranks of all of the races they check. (This does not distort the total population of the United States because that number is based on how many people answer the census questionnaire, not on adding the totals from each racial column.)

Even the Census Bureau acknowledges that accurately counting the multiracial population is a challenge and says it continues to explore ways to do it better, said Nicholas A. Jones, chief of the racial statistics branch. Some people of mixed race were fickle about their racial identifications in early tests of the new, more expansive methods, changing their answers from interview to interview.

Moreover, because the census in 2000 began allowing respondents to mark as many races as they wanted, today’s numbers are not directly comparable with those before 2000…

Read the entire article here.

Halle Berry and Nahla: Not So Mixed, Not So Happy

The Huffington Post
2011-02-09

Marcia Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

As we await the results of the 2010 Census it’s tempting to think that our growing comfort with categorizing people as multiracial has erased racism and the fear of interracial relations. But in a recent interview with Ebony Magazine, Halle Berry says that we’re neither as mixed nor as happy as we’d like to think.

In the interview Berry addressed her ugly custody battle with Gabriel Aubry over their 2-year-old daughter, Nahla. Allegations are circulating about the couple’s different racial philosophies, including the use of racial slurs, and their anxiety over Nahla’s racial categorization in the press. Berry told Ebony that “I feel like [Nahla is] black” because of the one drop rule. In other words, Berry sees herself and her daughter as black because they are of partial African American ancestry. Other sources say that Aubry sees Nahla as white and that he thinks Berry should demand a retraction whenever Nahla is identified otherwise…

…Note the word “naturally.” If we take a step back in time we will find that many, including the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson, used the word “naturally” to justify and promote racial segregation and inequality. Now, many are using this same terminology to suggest that mixed race people are, by nature, non-racist and capable of promoting large-scaled racial healing. Some even suggest that multiracial families can promote the end of race and racism because of their biological backgrounds. The beauty of thinking this way is that it allows culture to masquerade as human nature without any justification.

This popular-but-flawed way of thinking equates racial progress with racial mixing and ignores the fact that interracial romantic relationships still experience higher rates of failure and different kinds of challenges than same-race relationships. That’s why we can have multiracial families selling car insurance, pasta, and video games on one hand and, on the other, have Halle Berry and Gabriel Aubry’s rancorous custody battle…

Read the entire article here.

Where the interracials may take us

Los Angeles Times
2010-09-21

Eli Steele

Of all Americans, they represent the best opportunity to end identity politics and point America back to its tradition of individualism.

We may be in the midst of an interracial baby boom. A recent Pew Research Center study reported that interracial marriages rose from 6.7% in 1980 to a record 14.6% in 2008. If these marriages produce children at the national average, one out of seven Americans could claim two or more races. In Western states where interracial marriage is more common, the ratio rises to nearly one out of four.

The day will arrive when this interracial generation reaches political consciousness and finds itself at odds with America’s divisive identity politics. Of all Americans, they represent the best opportunity to end these politics and point America back to its tradition of individualism…

…Will such identity politics survive the interracial baby boom? Will new categories arise for the African German American or Chinese Latino American? Will a critical mass of interracials become an eclectic race in their own right? Or will they bypass the labels and embrace individualism?…

Read the entire article here.

This is who I am: Defining mixed-race identity

The Seattle Times
2008-09-28

Lornet Turnbull, Seattle Times staff

The story of race in the U.S. is changing, and so is the way many of us identify ourselves. That’s especially true in the Seattle area, which has a higher concentration of mixed-race people than any other metro area in the country.

Rachel Clad’s parents are a black woman from Detroit and a white man from California who met in the Peace Corps in Africa.

Clad, 26, was born in New Zealand and spent her early years in far-flung parts of the world before her family settled into a middle-class lifestyle in Washington, D.C.

She’ll tell you she’s multiracial.

“People look at me and see African American,” she said. “In my mind, that’s not who I am. I’m both and I’d like to be seen as both.”.

Aaron Hazard’s mother was a French-Canadian white woman who met his African-American father at a dance in Boston in the 1930s, at a time when such unions were forbidden.

When he signed up for service during the Vietnam era, the Army listed him as white, although Hazard has never referred to himself as anything other than black.

“It’s what my father was and that’s what I am,” the 62-year-old South Seattle resident said. “Back then there were too many white people to remind me of it.”

Barack Obama’s rise to prominence has broadened the dialogue around race in a country that has always done a poor job talking about it. And this new attention is prompting some people of mixed race to more closely examine how they define themselves.

That’s especially so in Greater Seattle, which has a higher concentration of mixed-race people — nearly 4 percent of the area’s population — than any other large metropolitan area in the country.

“One of the biggest mistakes people make in this discussion is assuming there’s only one correct way to be biracial,” said author Elliott Lewis, who grew up in Eastern Washington and has written about the biracial experience…

…”There were historical rules … that if you were mixed and had a parent who wasn’t white, then you checked the census box of the parent who wasn’t white,” said Maria P. P. Root, a Seattle clinical psychologist who has written extensively on mixed race in America.

“There was this gate-keeping around whiteness. The public still hasn’t gotten around to the fact that you can be blended.”…

Read the entire article here.

US, MSU see increase in multiracial students

The State News
East Lansing, Michigan
2011-02-02

Emily Wilkins

They call her “blackbean” – half black, half Mexican.

It’s a nickname embraced by Lynette Davidson, a political theory and constitutional democracy and communication sophomore and one of the 710 students at MSU who identifies with two or more races. Davidson’s mother is Mexican, her father is black.

Davidson is part of a growing number of college students who identify as biracial or multiracial.

MSU [Michigan State University] did not offer two or more races as a choice for students on university documents until fall 2010, so it is unknown how this number has changed during the past several years. However, the number of people in the U.S. who identify with two or more races is growing. Data from the U.S. Census shows between 2004-09, 838,000 babies were born with two or more races, an increase of more than 100,000 from the number born between 2000-04, which also increased from the five-year period prior.

Davidson said she does not fully feel like she belongs in black or Mexican student organizations.

“I never really identify with either of them,” Davidson said. “I grew up in a predominately white area.”

Students such as Davidson are not alone, but they do not represent the feeling of all multiracial students…

…Kristen Renn is an associate professor of higher, adult and lifelong education who has written a book about multiracial college students. Renn said not all racial groups are open to multiracial members, and a person’s acceptance and comfort level within a group is based on multiple things.

“Sometimes it has to do (with) a way a student looks,” Renn said. “(For example) it looks to the outside world that they are Asian, but they might have grown up in a household that didn’t celebrate a lot of Asian holidays or have a lot of Asian food. (They) come to campus and find themselves outside (Asian) student culture.”…

Read the entire article here.

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community [Review]

H-Net Reviews
May 2007

Sean H. Jacobs
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Mohamed Adhikari. Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community. Africa Series. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. xvii + 252 pp. Paper ISBN 978-0-89680-244-5.

Coloured Categories

What are “Coloureds“? For most South Africans and others familiar with South Africa the answer will be “people of mixed race.” This invocation of “mixing” inevitably links to a racial binary that relies on two opposing and ossified (primordial) identities of black and white. Linked to this view is of course the persistence of the stereotype of “tragic mulattoes“—long a trope in South African writing—in which the “products of miscegenation” can never be “true” South Africans. These were the views of apartheid’s planners and retain their resonance for most South Africans today, including many whom self-identify as Coloured.

Mohamed Adhikari’s work attempts a corrective to this kind of de-contextualized portrayal and assessment of Coloured politics and identity. In Not White Enough, Not Black Enough—a slim volume of 187 pages—Adhikari attempts to place Colouredness as a product, not of any biological process such as “mixture,” but rather as one of the politics of the last century or so. For him, Coloured identity is, in fact, both a product of apartheid category-making and of vigorous identity-building on the part of Coloured political actors themselves. That is, Adhikari also targets attempts to “do away” with Coloured identity, as by proclaiming it a species of false consciousness. The book’s main focus is on attempts by Coloureds themselves to construct identity and history. While much of the material he covers is useful and interesting, it is not clear that Adhikari has quite managed to get out from under the weight of inherited categories and analytic frames in quite the way he sets out to do.

Coloureds make up 4.1 million of South Africa’s 46.9 million people. Mostly working class and concentrated in (but not restricted to) the Western Cape Province (where they comprise 53.9 percent of the total population) and the more rural Northern Cape, they, along with Africans—despite some changes at the apex of the class pyramid—account for most of South Africa’s urban and rural poor…

Read the entire review here.