Mixed Race Studies

Destabilizing Racial Classifications Based on Insights Gleaned from Trademark Law

California Law Review
Volume 84, Number 4 (July, 1996)
pages 887-952

Alex M. Johnson, Jr., Perre Bowen Professor of Law; Thomas F. Bergin Teaching Professor of Law and Director, Center for the Study of Race and Law
University of Virginia

Analogy to trademark law offers solutions to the problematic binary system of race classification in the US by exposing and deconstructing the notion of whiteness as a property right. Maintaining the racial dichotomy between blacks and whites preserves whiteness as the position of privilege and blackness as the marginalized other. Promotion of multi-racial categories would make racial identification generic and would destroy the value of marking as a way of protecting the property right of being white. Ethnic identities could be retained because of the benefits of voluntary identification.

“What Are You?”: Exploring Racial Categorization in “Nowhere Else on Earth”

The Southern Literary Journal
Volume 39, Number 1 (Fall, 2006)
pages 33-53

Erica Abrams Locklear, Assistant Professor of Literature & Language
University of North Carolina, Asheville

In his introduction to the 1985 collection of essays entitled “Race,” Writing, and Difference, Henry Louis Gates rightfully asserts: “Race, as a meaningful criterion within the biological sciences, has long been recognized to be a fiction” (4), Even so, contemporary disputes centered on race remain one of American most glaring problems. Although laws supporting atrocities such as the Jim Crow South rest in the past, the systems of classification that inspired them still operate on many different levels of present-day American society, ranging from the way people describe themselves, to the labels people place on difference, to the way the American government decides what fraction of “blood” constitutes race. Fiction writer Josephine Humphreys explores the complexities, falsifications, and implications of racial classification for the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina in her historically based novel Nowhere Else on Earth. First published in 2000, the work’s 2001 Penguin edition includes a readers guide following the text in which Humphreys explains her impetus for writing about the Lumbee people. She admits that when she first encountered a Lumbee aboard a train, upon discovering ihat the woman was not white, Humphreys asked, “What are you?”, She goes on to remember that the young woman explained the story of the Lumbee people, as well as the infamous tale…

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The Coe Ridge Colony: A Racial Island Disappears

American Anthropologist
Volume 74, Issue 3 (June 1972)
pages 710–719
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1972.74.3.02a00350

Lynwood Montell
Western Kentucky University

The ninety year history of a racial isolate in the Kentucky–Tennessee border is examined. Peopled by a mixed population of Whites, Blacks, and, occasionally, Indians, the community received notoriety as an enclave for fugitives from the law of neighboring jurisdictions. Its demise came in 1958 as a result of changing land use and increasing tensions between the residents and those of the environing White society.

It has been said that the American Negro has in his veins not the blood of one race alone, or of two, but of three (Porter 1932: 287); the reference, of course, being to the Indian and White races. Such was certainly the case with the Coe Ridge racial island, comprising a people in southern Cumberland County, Kentucky, who called themselves Negro but who freely and proudly admitted to an early blood intermixture with the Cherokees of western North Carolina and a later infusion of White blood on multiple occasions on the Kentucky frontier. This racial group was concealed from the glare of the outside world in the raw yet beautiful hillcountry of southern Kentucky near the point where the Cumberland River disappears into Clay County, Tennessee, after meandering from Wolf Creek Dam across Russell, Cumberland, and Monroe Counties in Kentucky. It was here that the now legendary Black Coe bastion flourished, withered, and then perished before the relentless assault of the White man’s world.

Placed on Coe Ridge as a result of slave emancipation following the Civil War, the Coe racial island withstood for ninety years the attempts of resentful White neighbors to remove this single blot within an otherwise homogeneous White Society. The Black Coe people fought so fiercely in defense of their lives and property that, by the time the settlement finally succumbed to economic and legal pressures in the late 1950s, it was notorious in folk legend across the upper South as a place of refuge for White women shunned by their own families and communities and as a breeding ground for a race of rather handsome mulattoes, as a stronghold of moonshining and bootleggers, and as a battle ground for feuds that produced a harrowing list of ambushes, street murders, stabbings, and shootings. After years of raids, arrests, and skirmishes with federal agents and local lawmen, the Negroes’ resistance was broken, and they departed the hill country enclave for the industrial centers north of the Ohio River…

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The Physical Anthropology and Genetics of Marginal People of the Southeastern United States

American Anthropologist
Volume 74, Issue 3 (June 1972)
pages 719–734
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1972.74.3.02a00360

William S. Pollitzer
University of North Carolina

Admixture of White, Negro, and Indian peoples of the Southeastern United States from colonial days on has led to some unique populations isolated by social status. In time they formed distinctive gene pools. On the basis of physical traits and serological factors, it has been possible to reconstruct the approximate genetic contribution of parental populations to the hybrid ones. Some inherited diseases have also been concentrated in these isolates. Both differential fertility and changing social factors may affect the future of these populations.

Over vast spans of time populations of mankind have evolved many physical differences. In accordance with well established genetic principles, they arose because mutations in the genes controlling such traits occurred at random but conferred upon the individuals selective advantages. Thus, heavy pigmentation of the skin may have been an advantage to those living in the extreme sunlight of the tropics. Some anthropologists believe that body form and facial features may similarly represent adaptations to extremes of temperature and humidity. Geographical barriers such as oceans and deserts serve to isolate populations and emphasize their distinctive characteristics, although gradients exist between the physical traits of related people. Man’s increasing capacity for food production, most notably in the neolithic era when the cultivation of crops and domestication of animals greatly increased his food resources, contributed to the growth of populations. Particular groups of people of similar appearance expanded in numbers and later in territory, giving the impression that the earth was populated with a few “races.” An earlier generation of anthropologists, searching for distinct types, classified all people on the basis of a few physical traits such as skin color, hair form, head shape or nose width. More modern students of mankind have recognized that there are indeed only clines or gradients in all of these traits and that mixture is a universal phenomenon.

Can we then speak of “races” of man at all? While the concept of fixed types remains in the popular thinking, many scientists have gone to the opposite extreme and denied the reality of race at all. My own position is an intermediate one in which I liken human populations to the surface of the earth. Here is a small elevation and, there, a larger one; here is a single contour and, there, a doubled one. Shallow valleys separate some high ground; deep valleys separate others. Who can say, then, what is to be labeled a hill and what is to be called a mountain? Shall we use one name or two names for closely related projections? Where we draw the line-what labels we attach-these are arbitrary decisions; but the rises and the falls in the earth’s surface are facts of nature. So it is with human populations. How finely we wish to divide them, how broadly we lump them or the designations we give to them will inevitably vary; but large populations with distinctive features are still recognizable. It is, of course, mating preferences for physical characteristics which govern the collection of genes in so-called gene pools; and it is our culture which determines these choices. In that sense, those physically recognized groupings which we may popularly refer to as “races” are dependent upon our culture both for their formation and for their definition…

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University of Kent research reveals diversity of multiracial identification and experience in Britain today

University of Kent
Press Office
2010-11-04

Research from the University has revealed that while there is evidence of a growing consciousness and interest in mixed race identities among 18-25 year olds in Britain today, Britain cannot yet speak of a coherent or unified mixed group or experience.

The research, which was conducted by Peter Aspinall, Dr. Miri Song and Dr. Ferhana Hashem from the University’s School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research (SSPSSR), set out to explore the ways in which mixed race young adults thought about and understood their ethnic and racial identifications.

Key Findings Include:…

• …In a ‘forced choice’ question (where respondents were forced to choose the group, or ‘race’, which was most important to them), many were not able (or unwilling) to prioritise only one group. This suggests the growing prominence of ‘mixed’, hybrid identification. Furthermore, some respondents who refused to choose claimed to transcend racial identification and categorization completely.
• In general, the identity options perceived and experienced by Black/White mixed young people were more constrained than those of other mixes involving ‘White’, such as ‘Chinese and White’ , ‘South Asian and White’, and ‘Arab and White’. Many, though not all, part-Black respondents reported that they were seen as monoracially Black. This finding is interesting, since Britain has never had a codified ‘one-drop rule’ (in which anyone with a known Black ancestor was known as Black) as in the USA. The differences were statistically significant…

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Race Mixture among Northeastern Brazilian Populations

American Anthropologist
Volume 64, Issue 4 (August 1962)
pages 751–759
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1962.64.4.02a00050

P. H. Saldanha
Laboratória de Genética Humana
Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil

Northeastern Brazilian populations are extremely interesting for racial studies. These populations are derived from the intermixture of Negroes, Whites (Portuguese), and Indians and seem to be very stable ethnic groups of which representatives are promptly recognizable because of their unique physical appearances. The “Nordestino” populations inhabit a very hostile region, arid almost throughout the year. Because of the poor conditions there, they often emigrate to southern regions of the country. The emigration flow of “Nordestino” is fairly organized, and migrants stay some days at the State Hostelry in São Paulo before they are directed to job centers.

About one year ago an investigation of blood groups, simple genetical traits, physical measurements, and other anthropological characteristics of “Nordestino” immigrants was initiated by two laboratories in the State of São Paulo. A preliminary report of these investigations will be published elsewhere. The present paper is concerned with some general problems of race admixture.

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The American Isolates

American Anthropologist
Volume 74, Issue 3 (June 1972)
pages 693–694
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1972.74.3.02a00320

B. Eugene Griessman
Auburn University

More than 200 American isolates have been identified historically in at least eighteen of the eastern states of the United States. Their total population has been estimated at 75,000. Those who populate these communities commonly bear unflattering local names-Red Bones, Brass Ankles, Issues-although they themselves usually want to be known as Indians or as Whites.

They are an obscure people in American life and many of them would prefer to remain unnoticed because they are keepers of secrets. Some of them, or their children, or distant relatives, have crossed racial boundaries so that it would not do for them to receive much attention. Scholars for the most part have granted them their wish. “As a sizeable native minority,” William Harlan Gilbert, Jr., wrote twenty-six years ago, “they deserve more attention than the meager investigations which sociologists and anthropologists have hitherto made of their problems” (1946:438-447).

This state of affairs has been remedied partially by a few scholars who have studied these populations over a period of years. Some of their findings were presented for the first time at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society in 1970. And now with this issue of the American Anthropologist several articles will provide the basis for a wider knowledge of the enclaves…

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On Mixed-Racial Isolates

American Anthropologist
Volume 76, Issue 2 (June 1974)
pages 343–344
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1974.76.2.02a00190

G. Harry Stopp, Jr.
Louisiana State University

In recent articles on American isolates (American Anthropologist 74: 693-7 34) Beale, and Dane and Griessman predicted change for “mixed-racial” communities in the United States stemming from the recent civil rights legislation. They alluded to “Red Power” movements or associations and coalitions of some kind as mechanisms for such possible divergence from past models of behavior.

These gentlemen have presented an excellent outline of the problems many “mixed-racial” isolates have had to face. Dane and Griessman’s North Carolina example could serve as a model of almost every isolate group in the United States. Beale’s chronology of group identity assumption gives us insight into the time-depth most isolate groups will exhibit. Both articles, however, lean too heavily on the “Indian” identity as both the isolate groups’ own solution to its controversial background and as the ultimate role of all isolates.

If we assume American isolates to be “tri-racial,” I believe we will see that their reactions to racial problems have been, and continue to be, three-fold. The Lumbee have chosen to be Red; the community around them has accepted this; so, we could consider the Lumbee as Indians. With the advent of recent civil rights legislation, I expect that the Lumbee, and any other isolate group that has assumed a Red identity, will remain a cohesive group, possibly under a banner of Red Power. The Creoles of Mobile have, on the other hand, often accepted the mantle of the Black man. Bond (1931:556) reported this, and I have seen evidence of this also in my brief acquaintance with the Mobile Creoles. I can only assume that, with the advent of civil rights legislation, this group will begin to identify with the Black Power movement (though not necessarily on a radical basis). I would expect any isolate group that has accepted a Black identity to maintain cohesiveness as a Black group…

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An Overview of the Phenomenon of Mixed Racial Isolates in the United States

American Anthropologist
Volume 74, Issue 3 (June 1972)
pages 704–710
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1972.74.3.02a00340

Calvin L. Beale
Economic Research Service
U.S. Department of Agriculture

The subject of the paper is population groups of real or alleged tri-racial origin—Indian, White, and Negro. There is a review of the emergence of such groups in American history, their conflicts with public authorities, and their recognition by researchers. The past importance of separate schools as a boundary maintenance mechanism is discussed, with emphasis on the declining persistence of such schools today. The role of the church as the typical remaining group institution is noted. Mention is made of the decreasing proportion of endogamous marriages in recent times. The essentially rural nature of these racial isolates is pointed out, and the general societal trend of rural depopulation is stated to be affecting their size and continued existence. A suggested list of research needs is offered.

In About 1890, a young Tennessee woman asked a state legislator, “Please tell me what is a Malungeon?” “A Malungeon” said he, “isn’t a nigger, and he isn’t an Indian, and he isn’t a White man. God only knows what he is. I should call him a Democrat, only he always votes the Republican ticket” (Drumgoole 1891:473).

The young woman, Will Allen Drumgoole, soon sought out the Melungeons in remote Hancock County and lived with them for awhile to determine for herself what they were. Afterward, in the space of a ten page article, she described them as “shiftless,” “idle,” “illiterate,” “thieving,” “defiant,” “distillers of brandy,” “lawless,” “close,” “rogues,” “suspicious,” “inhospitable,” “untruthful,” “cowardly,” “sneaky,” “exceedingly immoral,” and “unforgiving.” She also spoke of their “cupidity and cruelty,” and ended her work by concluding, “The most than can be said of one of them is, ‘He is a Malungeon,’ a synonym for all that is doubtful and mysterious-and unclean” (Drumgoole 1891:479). Miss Drumgoole was essentially a sympathetic observer.

The existence of mixed racial populations that constitute a distinctive segment of society is not unique to the United States needless to say. But this nation must rank near the top in the number of such communities and in their general public obscurity. I refer in particular to groups of real or alleged White-Indian-Negro mixtures (such as the Melungeons) who are not tribally affiliated or traceable with historical continuity to a particular tribe. It is also logical to include a few groups of White-Negro origin that lack the Indian component. The South in particular is rich in such population strains, with all states except Arkansas and Oklahoma having such groups at present or within the twentieth century. (And I would not be surprised to be contradicted on my exception of those two states.)…

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Vikings Possibly Carried Native American to Europe

Discovery News
2010-11-17

Medieval texts suggest the Vikings arrived in the New World more than 1,000 years ago.

THE GIST

• DNA analysis reveals that four families in Iceland possess genes typically found in Native Americans or East Asians.
• Genealogical evidence revealed that these families shared a distant ancestor from the same region.
• The Vikings may have brought back a Native American woman with them after they arrived in the New World.

The first Native American to arrive in Europe may have been a woman brought to Iceland by the Vikings more than 1,000 years ago, a study by Spanish and Icelandic researchers suggests.

The findings boost widely-accepted theories, based on Icelandic medieval texts and a reputed Viking settlement in Newfoundland in Canada, that the Vikings reached the American continent several centuries before Christopher Columbus traveled to the “New World.”

Spain’s CSIC scientific research institute said genetic analysis of around 80 people from a total of four families in Iceland showed they possess a type of DNA normally only found in Native Americans or East Asians…

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