Mixed Race Studies

The New Multiracial Student: Where Do We Start?

The Vermont Connection
Volume 31 (2010)
pages 128-135

Jackie Hyman
University of Vermont

Jackie Hyman earned her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2008, and is anticipating her graduation from HESA in 2010. Having gone through periods of doubt and confusion throughout her graduate career in identifying as Biracial, she is now more confident than ever in her racial identity. Because of her experiences at University of Maryland and University of Vermont, she has committed herself to creating a Multiracial student group at UVM, as well as creating potential spaces for Multiracial students at her next institution, wherever that may be. Without a doubt, a passion has been ignited that will guide her research and involvement on college campuses for years to come.

In 2004, one in 40 persons in the United States self-identified as Multiracial. By the year 2050, it is projected that as many as one in five Americans will claim a Multiracial background, and in turn, a Multiracial or Biracial identity (Lee & Bean, 2004). With racial lines becoming more blurred, it is increasingly important for practitioners in higher education to address the issues surrounding identity development in Multiracial college students. By looking at a personal narrative of a Biracial woman, recent studies of Multiracial identity development, and the daily challenges that Multiracial and Biracial students face concerning their identity, student affairs practitioners can begin to create more inclusive spaces for this growing population of students.

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The Chinese Mestizos and the Formation of the Filipino Nationality

Archipel
Volume 32, 1986
pages 141-162
DOI: 10.3406/arch.1986.2316

Antonio S. Tan

The recorded history of the Philippines would be incomplete as a basis for understanding contemporary society unless it takes into account the Chinese mestizos’ contributions to our development as a nation.  The Chinese mestizos were an important element of Philippine society in the 19th century.  They played a significant role in the formation of the middle class, in the agitation for reforms, in the 1898 revolution and the formation of what is now known as the Filipino nationality.  In contemporary times their role in nation-building continues.

Read the entire article here.

UCLA needs more than just one multiethnic club

Daily Bruin
University of California, Los Angeles
2010-10-11

Salim Zymet

Only one student group promoting multiracialism is not enough for a campus as diverse as ours

Where are you from?

Answering that question can be difficult for some multiracial students. Perhaps you’re inclined to believe that despite your ethnic background, you’re simply an American, born and raised. Maybe you introduce yourself with all of your ethnic background included. Uncertainty may still plague your ethnic and cultural identity.

Enter the Hapa Club at UCLA. Hapa is a Hawaiian word traditionally meaning someone of mixed Asian or Pacific Islander descent – but the club aims to be a place where all multiracial students can come together. As the only club which represents all mixed ethnic backgrounds, it has large shoes to fill, even more so when you take into account that there are over 70 clubs, fraternities and sororities on campus devoted to various Asian ethnicities. I don’t take issue with the existence of these clubs, merely the staggering volume of them…

…If we are to be part of a truly diverse campus, more multiracial groups are going to have to be part of the solution…

…As an American of Indian, Syrian and Polish descent, I hope that next year’s incoming mixed students can be greeted by a more diverse group of ethnic clubs. As it stands now, if they want to join a club they are forced to either “choose” one of their backgrounds to identify as or join Hapa Club…

Read the entire article here.

New multiracial category has effects nationally, few at Smith

The Smith College Sophian
Northampton, Massachusetts
2010-09-30

Gina Charusombat

While Smith students speculate about the lack of diversity across disciplines of study, colleges and universities across the U.S. continue to track diversity on their campuses. On Sept. 19, the Chronicle of Higher Education revealed that the U.S. Department of Education now requires colleges to report students who check the “two or more races” category. Previously, reports listed “race unknown” for students who marked more than one category.

Students who mark several race categories in addition to “two or more races” are only counted in the multiracial category. However, there is one exception: if a student marks “two or more races” and marks Hispanic/Latino/Latina, the student is counted within that one category.

“[The multiracial category] is set against the politics of how we define or don’t define race,” said Dean of Enrollment Audrey Smith…

Read the entire article here.

The Chinese Mestizo in Philippine History

The Journal of Southeast Asian History
Volume 5, Number 1 (March 1964)
pages 62-100
DOI: 10.1017/S0217781100002222

Edgar Wickberg (1927-2008), Professor Emeritus of History
University of British Columbia

Our knowledge is still insufficient to allow us to assess the overall significance of the mestizo in Philippine history. But on the basis of what we now know we can make some generalizations and some hypotheses for future study. It is clear, in the first place, that the activities I have described are those of Chinese mestizos – not Spanish mestizos. While the Chinese mestizo population in the Philippines exceeded 200,000 by the late nineteenth century, the Spanish mestizo population was probably never more than 35,000. Furthermore, those who commented at all on the Spanish mestizo noted that he was interested in military matters or the “practical arts” – never in commerce. The aptitudes and attitudes of the Chinese mestizo were in sharp contrast to this.

Secondly, the Chinese mestizo rose to prominence between 1741 and 1898, primarily as a landholder and a middleman wholesaler of local produce and foreign imports, although there were also mestizos in the professions. The rise of the mestizos implies the existence of social change during the Spanish period, a condition that has been ignored or implicitly denied by many who have written about the Philippines. It needs to be emphasized that the mestizo impact was greatest in Central Luzon, Cebu, and Iloilo. We cannot as yet generalize about other areas.

Third, the renewal of Chinese immigration to the Philippines resulted in diversion of mestizo energies away from commerce, so that the mestizos lost their change to become a native middle class, a position then taken over by the Chinese.

Fourth, the Chinese mestizos in the Philippines possessed a unique combination of cultural characteristics. Lovers of ostentation, ardent devotees of Spanish Catholicism – they seemed almost more Spanish than the Spanish, more Catholic than the Catholics. Yet with those characteristics they combined a financial acumen that seemed out of place. Rejecters of their Chinese heritage, they were not completely at home with their indio heritage. The nearest approximation to them was the urbanized, heavily-hispanized indio. Only when hispanization had reached a high level in the nineteenth century urban areas could the mestizo find a basis of rapport with the indio. Thus, during the late nineteenth century, because of cultural, economic, and social changes, the mestizos increasingly identified themselves with the indios. in a new kind of “Filipino” cultural and national consensus.

Those are my conclusions. Here are some hypotheses, which I hope will stimulate further study:

1. That today’s Filipino elite is made up mostly of the descendants of indios and mestizos who rose to prominence on the basis of commercial agriculture in the lattetf part of the Spanish period. That in some respects the latter part of the Spanish period was a time of greater social change, in terms of the formation of contemporary Philippine society, than the period since 1898 has been.
2. That in the process of social change late in the Spanish period it was the mestizo, as a marginal element, not closely tied to a village or town, who acted as a kind of catalytic agent. In this would be included the penetration of money economy into parts of the Philippines. There were areas where the only persons with money were the provincial governors and the mestizos.
3. That the Chinese mestizo was an active agent of hispanization and the leading force in creating a Filipino culture characteristic now of Manila and the larger towns.
4. That much of the background explanation of the Philippine Revolution may be found by investigating the relationships between landowning religious orders, mestizo inquilinos, and indio kasamahan laborers.

It is my hope that these hypotheses may stimulate investigation into this important topic which can tell us so much about economic, social, and cultural change during- the Spanish period of Philippine history.

Read the entire article here.

“Race” and the Construction of Human Identity

American Anthropologist
Volume 100, Issue 3 (September 1998)
pages 690-702
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1998.100.3.690

Audrey Smedley, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and African American Studies
Virginia Commonwealth University

Race as a mechanism of social stratification and as a form of human identity is a recent concept in human history. Historical records show that neither the idea nor ideologies associated with race existed before the seventeenth century. In the United States, race became the main form of human identity, and it has had a tragic effect on low-status “racial” minorities and on those people who perceive themselves as of “mixed race.” We need to research and understand the consequences of race as the premier source of human identity. This paper briefly explores how race became a part of our culture and consciousness and argues that we must disconnect cultural features of identity from biological traits and study how “race” eroded and superseded older forms of human identity. It suggests that “race” ideology is already beginning to disintegrate as a result of twentieth-century changes.

…The Non-Problem of “Mixed-Race” People

One of the more tragic aspects of the racial worldview has been the seeming dilemma of people whose parents are identifiably of different “races.” Historically, “race” was grounded in the myth of biologically separate, exclusive, and distinct populations. No social ingredient in our race ideology allowed for an identity of “mixed-races.” Indeed over the past century and a half, the American public was conditioned to the belief that “mixed-race” people (especially of black and white ancestry) were abnormal products of the unnatural mating of two species, besides being socially unacceptable in the normal scheme of things. The tragedy for “mixed” people is that powerful social lie, the assumption at the heart of “race,” that a presumed biological essence is the basis of one’s true identity. Identity is biology, racial ideology tells us, and it is permanent and immutable. The emphasis on and significance given to “race” precludes any possibility for establishing our premier identities on the basis of other characteristics. In this sense it may be argued that the myth of ”race” has been a barrier to true human identities.

The unfortunate consequence of race ideology is that many of the people with this “mixed-race” background have also been conditioned to the belief in the biological salience of “race.” Their efforts to establish a “Mixed-Race” category in the American census forms show a total misunderstandinogf what “race” is all about, and this is, of course, a major part of the tragedy. Their arguments imply a feeling of having no identity at all because they do not exist formally (that is, socially) as a “biological” category.

The fact is that from the standpoint of biology, there have been “mixed” people in North America ever since Europeans first encountered indigenous Americans and the first Africans were brought to the English colonies in the 1620s. The average African American has about one quarter of his or her genes from non-African (nonblack ancestors, although most estimates are likely to be conservative (cf. Marks 1995; Reed 1969). There is a greater range of skin colors, hair textures, body sizes, nose shapes, and other physical features among black Americans than almost any other people identified as a distinct population. Virtually all of them could identify as of “mixed-race.” But the physical markers of race status are always open to interpretation by others. “Race” as social status is in the eye of the beholder. “Mixed” people will still be treated as black if their phenotypes cause them to be so perceived by others. Insistence on being in a separate classification willbnot change that perception or the reaction of people to them…

Read the entire article here.

“Girl, You Are Not Morena. We Are Negras!”: Questioning the Concept of “Race” in Southern Bahia, Brazil

Ethos
Volume 35, Issue 3 (September 2007)
pages 383-409
DOI: 10.1525/eth.2007.35.3.383

Michael D. Baran, Preceptor in Expository Writing
Harvard University

In 2003, teachers at the municipal high school in Belmonte, Brazil, began presenting students with a radically different ideology about racial categorization: an essentialized ideology that defines anyone not “purely” branco (white) as negro (black). This system of categorization conflicts with popular belief in a mixed-race moreno identity based not only on ancestry but also on observable physical features. Through a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods, I examine this apparent clash of ideologies in Belmonte with respect to academic theories on the cognition of race and ethnicity. I show how children and adults integrate certain aspects of essentialism but not others in their constructions of identity and in the way they reason about hypothetical scenarios. These nuanced solutions to the challenges posed by explicit conflicts over supposedly natural categories lead to my own questioning of race in anthropological theory.

During a March afternoon in 2003, in an eighth-grade science class in Belmonte, Brazil, racial ideologies collided. The lesson of the day dealt with human biology and basic genetics. One student in the class asked the teacher about the biology of race mixing. The teacher then tried to clarify the supposedly natural facts about racial classification for the class. She explained that there were only two races—blonde and blue-eyed brancos (whites) and everyone else, considered negros (blacks). Although a few heads nodded in approval, most of the class looked confused or upset. The teacher was presenting a particularly extreme form of the racial classification system that black movements have urged Brazilians to adopt, one in which those with any traceable African ancestry would self-identify as “negro” as a sign of positive self-image and political solidarity. While this conception of “negro” has been animating black movements for at least 25 years in Brazil’s urban centers, it has only now reached more rural areas like Belmonte. And it is not always well received.

“I’m morena, not negra!”2 cried 14-year old Paula. This claim of mixed-race “brown” identity echoes the more common ideology in Belmonte, academically labeled “racial democracy.” The roots of this ideology extend back to Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre’s influential 1933 book, The Masters and the Slaves (1946). Freyre found strength in the biological and cultural mixing of Portuguese colonizers, native Brazilians, and slaves of African descent, whereas race scientists before him saw only physical and mental weakness (Freyre 1946; Nina Rodrigues 1938; Ramos 1939). Freyre’s foundational story, still framing Brazilian history in school texts, holds that historical mixing has created an ethnically unified population without stark racial divisions or resulting discriminations making Brazil a supposed “racial paradise.” Consistent with this ideology, most residents of Belmonte prefer to self-identify with the inclusive term morena, which can be used in various linguistic contexts to refer to almost any combination of physical features. To call someone a “negra” within this racial democracy ideology is to separate them out from the mixed Brazilian mainstream and denigrate them as a separate category of “pure” black, associated with slavery and Africa. That is just what caused a stir when Ana Maria yelled out to Paula, “Girl, you are not morena. We are negras!”

In the title of this article, the phrase “Questioning the Concept of Race” has two levels of significance. First, it refers to the questions of some students as teachers impose new identity categories that clash with previously held “common sense” beliefs about race. Second, the title of this article refers to my own questions regarding academic conceptions of race. In the literature on racial categorization in Brazil, I found two different arguments that parallel the debate in the class between Ana Maria and Paula. On the one hand, a more conventional wisdom holds that racial categories in Brazil are multiple (up to hundreds in some cases), they can change from day to day or person to person, and they are based on physical features rather than rules of descent (Harris 1970; Harris and Kottak 1963; Kottak 1983).5 On the other hand, recent critics, both anthropological and psychological, argue that racial categories in Brazil are essentialized: they are dichotomous, rigid, and defined by descent (Gil-White 2001b; Sheriff 2001). Observing the coexistence of both ideologies in Belmonte and the active construction of supposedly natural categories by local actors led me to question both sides of this scholarly debate and to question the academic concept of race more generally…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Melungeon Identity Movement and the Construction of Appalachian Whiteness

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
Volume 11, Issue 1 (June 2001)
pages 131-146
DOI: 10.1525/jlin.2001.11.1.131

Anita Puckett, Associate Professor of Appalachian Studies
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

How this binary system is discursively constituted depends upon the ways in which elements of a repertoire interconnect to distribute or consolidate power and privilege across discursive contexts. Circulation of the revitalized lexeme Melungeon as a valued “object” within Appalachian discourse reveals linguistic processes by which white racial privilege is constructed and expanded, mixed-race classification excluded, and nonwhite disenfranchisement reproduced.

Read the entire article here.

Redeeming the “Character of the Creoles”: Whiteness, Gender and Creolization in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue

Journal of Historical Sociology
Volume 23, Issue 1 (March 2010)
pages 40–72
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6443.2009.01359.x

Yvonne Fabella, Lecturer of History
University of Pennsylvania

This article examines the political significance of white creolization in pre-revolutionary French Saint Domingue. Eighteenth-century Europeans tended to view white creoles as having physically, morally, and culturally degenerated due to the tropical climate, the monotony of plantation life, and their interaction with enslaved and free people of color. Yet elite white colonists in Saint Domingue claimed that white creoles possessed certain positive traits due to their new world birth, traits that rendered them physically stronger and potentially more virtuous than the French. Focusing on little-known publications authored by the white creole Moreau de Saint-Méry, this article highlights the deployment of gendered notions of virtue and noble savagery in debates over white creolization. Moreau’s claims, when placed in the context of a conflict between local colonial magistrates and the French Colonial Ministry, challenge interpretations of white creolization as an undesirable, subversive side-effect of colonial slavery. Rather, white colonial men claimed that white colonists knew best how to ensure the obedience of the enslaved precisely because of their creolization.

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Artist Ellen Gallagher humbled by new honor

The Providence Journal
2010-02-21

Bill Van Siclen, Journal Arts Writer

The first time her work appeared in a Whitney Biennial, the every-other-year exhibit that aims to take the pulse of contemporary art, Ellen Gallagher was just one of many up-and-coming artists vying for attention.

That was back in 1995, when Gallagher, a Providence-born painter and printmaker whose interests range from carpentry and scrimshaw to African-American history and culture, was barely out of art school.

Fifteen years later, Gallagher is Biennial-bound once again.

This time, however, she’s returning as a certified art star — someone whose work is avidly collected by major museums, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Tate Museum, and whose name is regularly mentioned alongside the likes of Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman and Matthew Barney. Even the Whitney Museum, which organizes the Whitney Biennial (and where the show’s 2010 edition opens Thursday), has several of her works in its permanent collection…

…WHILE MANY ARTISTS draw inspiration from a variety of sources, Gallagher’s reference points — everything from slavery to sea creatures to Sun Ra — seem particularly wide ranging. Then again, so is her background.

Born in 1965, Gallagher grew up in a biracial household headed by her father, an American-born Cape Verdean who traced his roots back to 19th-century whalers and who did odd jobs to support the family, including occasional stints as a professional boxer.

When he left suddenly, the burden of raising Gallagher fell on her mother, a white Irish Catholic who eventually saved enough money to buy a house in Providence’s Washington Park neighborhood…

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