Mixed Race Studies

Africans in China: Sweet and Sour in Guangzhou

The Africa Report
2010-02-01

Namvula Rennie

Deterred by immigration controls in the West, African families and traders are moving to major Chinese cities, adding a new dimension to China-Africa relations.

It’s raining again in Guangzhou. The downpours are sudden and violent, but do little to cool the city or relieve the cloying humidity. It is an ugly place and the uniformity of its sprawl is disorienting. Under the grey skies, the traffic flows relentlessly through webs of flyovers and underpasses, around towering apartment blocks and multi-storey shopping complexes. Here you can buy anything: leather, shoes, wigs, handbags, jeans, luggage, electronics, jewellery, plumbing, picture frames, reflective strips, motorbikes and even African crafts; original or copy, you can find it or get it made.

Africans are flocking here—the wealthy, the hopeful, the ambitious and the desperate. In the heartland of the southern Chinese economy, where commerce and industry are king, Guangzhou is both a city and a dream for sale. Many find what they seek, but for others, imagination is painfully disappointed as myth 
collides with reality…

…It was at an RVC service that Pastor Augustine met his Chinese wife, Bessie. As they walk to the store, sometimes arm-in-arm, passers-by stare openly at the rare sight of a mixed-race couple. Their four-year-old daughter—with Chinese features and an afro hairstyle—attracts even more attention, as she chirps away merrily in Mandarin. Pastor Augustine and Bessie are used to others’ curiosity, but worry about how it will affect their daughter and her baby brother.
 
What seems certain is that, as they grow up, these children will face more complex challenges than their parents did. The talk of brotherhood and mutual benefits is at odds with the daily experience of Africans in Guangzhou, yet Pastor Augustine clings to optimism. His hope is that this new generation of mixed-race children will become “the ones the Chinese cannot refuse”, softening mutual distrust and paving the way to a more peaceful society…

Read the entire article here.

100% Multiracial

UrbanFaith.com
2010-06-11

Kyle Waalen

The latest Census estimates show that multiracial people are the fastest growing demographic group in the United States. Yet many still struggle with the question of how many boxes to check. Two Christian women share about the tension and joy of being young and multiracial in America.

Kristy McDonald and Alicia Edison have a lot in common. They are both 27, both Christian women, and they are both children of an African American father and Caucasian mother. If we’re living in a multiracial world, as current demographic trends reveal, then Kristy and Alicia reflect the new face of American society. But is America ready?

The 2010 U.S. Census has reignited the debate about how society pressures multiracial people to choose one race over the other. In fact, President Obama made headlines when he selected “Black” on his census form rather than checking multiple boxes. The boxes we choose indicate more than just the color of our skin. For many reasons, racial identity still matters in America.

UrbanFaith’s Kyle Waalen asked Kristy, a caregiver at a group home for adults with disabilities in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Alicia, a Ph.D. student in sociology at the University of North Texas, to offer their personal perspectives on the challenges of being a mixed-race person in a multiracial society that hasn’t yet figured out how to be multiracial…

…Do ever feel that, as a multiracial person, you fall between the cracks when it comes to racial labels?

KRISTY: First of all, I am multiracial, but my skin tone is very light. When I was younger, I was part of a club at my local YMCA. It was designed to help African American girls make good choices about going to college and doing well in school. When guest speakers came to talk to us, they didn’t know what to think about my skin color. All the other girls at the club where dark-skinned, but I was not.

ALICIA: A multiracial person may fall through the cracks if they choose not to define themselves within the categories that society assigns. On most forms, we are given an alternative of choosing “other.” “Other” is not okay. It is not sufficient. “Other” means that we will continue to be marginalized and that we don’t count. We should be given the option to name ourselves when and how we choose…

Read the entire article here.

Gender, Work and Fears of a ‘Hybrid Race’ in 1920s New Zealand

Gender & History
Volume 19, Issue 3 (November 2007)
pages 501–518
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2007.00495.x

Barbara Brookes, Professor of History
Otago University, New Zealand

The 1929 New Zealand Committee of Inquiry into the Employment of Māori on Market Gardens affords insight into the ways in which masculine fears of racial degradation through miscegenation—of a ‘hybrid’ Chinese/Māori race—operated within a hierarchy of race, gender and Iwi (tribal) interests. The participation of Māori men in national politics contributed to a new articulation of ‘National Manhood’, in which Māori men and white men combined to express fears about women’s work and sexuality and young women’s potential to undermine a fragile and contested hierarchy of racial purity. Māori women, silenced in the cacophony of voices lamenting their plight, were at the centre of debates between Māori men, Pakeha (white New Zealander) employers, Chinese market gardeners, Anglican and Methodist interests and Pakeha women’s groups. I argue that the Inquiry was about commerce, both in a business and a sexual sense. As a historical episode, it also serves to complicate the picture of New Zealand as a historically bicultural society, made up only of Māori and Pakeha, by signalling the importance of the Chinese in debates about national belonging.

Read or purchase the article here.

What’s in a Name? Mixed-Race Families and Resistance to Racial Codification in Eighteenth-Century France

French Historical Studies
Volume 33, Number 3 (2010)
Pages 357-385
DOI: 10.1215/00161071-2010-002

Jennifer L. Palmer, Collegiate Assistant Professor of History
University of Chicago

The Saint-Domingue planter Aimé-Benjamin Fleuriau did not simply leave colonialism behind when he returned to his hometown La Rochelle: he literally brought some of its complications with him. Five of his mixed-race children by his former slave Jeanne arrived with or soon after their white father. The very existence of this family complicated an increasingly easy equation between blackness and slavery, and for both the planter and his children, family ties shaped their experience of race and status. In the midst of growing racial paranoia in France and legislation that regulated all people of color, Fleuriau and his daughter Marie-Jeanne privileged family over race as a means of carving out a position of autonomy for themselves in French society, albeit in very different ways and for very different reasons. In doing so, they shaped what the category “family” meant in France.

Aimé-Benjamin Fleuriau, ex–résident blanc de Saint-Domingue, au lieu d’abandonner le colonialisme après son retour à La Rochelle, a rapporté avec lui certaines des complications coloniales. Cinq des enfants métisses qu’il a eus avec son ancienne esclave Jeanne sont arrivés avec lui, ou peu après. L’existence même de cette famille a compliqué le lien évident entre la négritude et l’esclavage. Pour le planteur et ses enfants les liens familiaux ont informé leur manière d’assumer leur race et leur position sociale. Au milieu de la paranoïa raciale croissante en France au dixhuitième siècle et la législation qui réglementait tous gens de couleur, Fleuriau et sa fille Marie-Jeanne ont privilégié les liens familiaux plutôt que raciaux afin de créer une position d’autonomie dans la société française, bien que par des moyens et pour des raisons très différents. Ils ont ainsi façonné la catégorie « famille » en France.

Read or purchase the article here.

It’s a wonderful, mixed-up world

The Daily Telegraph
2009-11-01

Aarathi Prasad

There are now more mixed-race children than ever before—and that is something for us all to celebate, says the scientist Aarathi Prasad

Just two weeks ago in Louisiana, an American Justice of the Peace made international news for refusing to issue marriage licences to couples who were not of the same race. He said he had taken the decision because he believed that mixed-race children would not be accepted by their parents’ communities. Whether this was genuine concern for a real social problem or was born of a more atavistic notion that there is something inherently, biologically wrong with mixing races, we can only speculate. Either way, his position was quite illegal, and his conduct is being challenged.

The sentiment, however, is one that is also shared much closer to home. Nick Griffin, the chairman of the BNP and a member of the European Parliament, has made his party’s stance on mixed-race children clear. Miscegenation, he says, is “essentially unnatural and destructive”, and mixed-race children “are the most tragic victims of enforced multi-racism”. The BNP says that it does not, nor will it ever, “accept miscegenation as moral or normal.”

As a person from the Indian ethnic minority in this country, I am sorry to say that I am familiar with this attitude. The most recent census in England and Wales found that people from my South Asian background were the least likely of the minorities to be married to someone from a different ethnic group.

Our relatively low inter-marriage rate might be explained by our cultural as well as racial differences, and our predilection for holding tightly to our caste systems and religions. When someone like me chooses a partner of another race, some family member is guaranteed to ask the same question as that Louisiana Justice of the Peace: “But what will the children be?”

I can answer that question now. The answer is that my daughter, and approximately 400,000 other children like her in Britain today, is mixed race. Families like mine are on the rise – nearly one in 10 British children now lives in a mixed-race family, a figure that is six times higher than it was when I was a child. In fact, mixed race people are the fastest-growing minority in this country, a trend that is set to continue. Even in my community, traditionally inward-looking when it comes to choosing partners, the proportion of mixed marriages has increased from 3 per cent to 11 per cent in the space of just 14 years…

…But the combination of inbreeding being bad and diversity being good has flung open the doors for another claim about what it means to be mixed-race. The idea sounds simple enough. If inbreeding is bad, then the opposite – outbreeding – should be good. It makes sense, some suggest, that people might be genetically better off if they were mixed race. The anecdotal evidence is writ large in the over-representation of Britain’s tiny mixed-race population in the arts, music, modelling and sport. Mixed-race people account for 30 per cent of the current England football team in a country where they make up only 2 per cent of the general population…

Read the entire article here.

Variability and Racial Mixture

The American Naturalist
Volume 61, Number 672 (Jan. – Feb., 1927)
paages 68-81

Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963), Professor of Anthropology and African Studies
Northwestern University

[Read a biographical memoir by Joseph C. Greenberg here.]

[From Northwestern University: In 1948, Herskovits founded the Program of African Studies (PAS) at Northwestern, the first and foremost center of its kind at a major research university in the United States with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.]

The biometric method has come to lay great stress on the variability of populations of their development and in the discovery of the applicability of the findings of the geneticist to human populations.  One of the hypotheses which has gone hand in hand with the use of the concept of variability is what where there is a greater variation in one of two populations, that which has the larger represent the greater amount of mixture.  And when “mixture” is spoken of, the connotation is that of “racial mixture.”  The logical conclusion is that the “pure race” is that which show the lowest variability, and that when large variation is found in a population, this means it is the result of a great amount of race-crossing.

We see that this assumption is a real one in the minds of biologists and biometricians when we consider some of the  statements which have been recently made regarding this matter. Thus, in a paper published a short time ago, Castle remarks that “… as heterosis disappears, the population of later generations will be intermediate in character, and probably more variable that either uncrossed  race.”  Wissler, in a consideration of the subject of variability, remarks that “what he have… in a population unit is a number of types or pure lines, thrown together, each with its own range of variability, and these variabilities have a way of combining so as to increase the variability of the whole… As often said, the range of stature will be grater among mixed races.  This is, in fact, a recognized law of biology.”…

Read or purchase the article here.

Soul Search

The Post
Cork, Ireland
2010-09-05

Nadine O’Regan

When poet and novelist Jackie Kay started the search for her birth parents, she didn’t realise how traumatic a journey it would be, though she doesn’t regret doing it.

Jackie Kay met her birth father for the first time in a hotel room in Abuja, Nigeria, in 2003. Then in her early 40s,Kay was expectant, excited and nervous. She had brought him a present, an expensive watch.

However, before they could talk, her father, a born-again Christian, said there was something he had to do. For more than an hour, he prayed, frantically whirling, wild-eyed, like a dervish around the room, asking the Lord to cleanse the sin before him.

In her new memoir, Red Dust Road, which paints a vivid portrait of her search for her birth parents, Kay, an atheist, describes how her tears began to flood down her face as she understood that the sin being referred to was herself. ‘‘I realise with a fresh horror that Jonathan is seeing me as the sin, me as impure, me the bastard, illegitimate.”…

…Assembled in a kind of jigsaw manner – with events nipping back and forth across the years – Red Dust Road combines a compelling search story with a vivid portrait of struggling to deal with issues of race and roots. Long-term fans of Kay’s work will spy occasional references to her break-up with her lover of 15 years, British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, and get a sense of her current life: living in a terraced house in Chorlton, Manchester, teaching part time at the University of Newcastle and bringing up a university-age son…

…Born in 1961 to a Scottish nurse and a Nigerian student, Kay was adopted at the age of five months, and grew up as the daughter of two colourful, outspoken, lifelong socialists: her adoptive father was a member of the Communist Party and her mother was the Scottish secretary of CND…

…Absorbing the fact of her adoption wasn’t the only issue Kay had to face during her childhood. She was also mixed race in 1970s Glasgow – ‘‘Being black in a white country makes you a stranger to yourself’’ – and gay at a time when nobody was allowed to be.

‘‘We live in a society where people have civil partnerships and people understand what the word ‘homophobia’ means and gay people have children openly,” she says. ‘‘But when I told my mum, that was really unusual, and she was really quite shocked.”

Kay began writing poetry at the age of 12, as a response to the racist names she was called and the beatings she received. ‘‘I found writing to be a sanctuary. I’d write a little poem as revenge.”…

Read the entire article here.

Mentality of Racial Hybrids

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 36, Number 4 (January 1931)
pages 534-551
DOI: 10.1086/215474

Robert E. Park (1864-1944), Professor of Sociology
University of Chicago

Racial hybrids are one of the natural and inevitable results of migration and the consequent mingling of divergent racial stocks.  The motives bringing peoples of divergent races and cultures together are, in the first instance, economic.  In the long run, economic intercourse enforces more intimate personal and cultural relations, and eventually amalgamation takes place.  When the peoples involved are widely different in culture and in racial characteristics, and particularly when they are distinguished by physical marks, assimilation and amalgamation take place very slowly.  When the resulting hybrid peoples exhibit physical traits that mark them off and distinguish them from both parent-stocks, the mixed bloods are likely to constitute a distinct caste or class occupying a position and status midway between the two races of which they are composed.  The mixed bloods tend everywhere to be, as compared with the full bloods with whom they are identified, an intellectual and professional class.  The most obvious and generally accepted explanation of the superiority of the mixed bloods is that the former are products of two races, one of which is biologically inferior and the other biologically superior.  In the case of the Negro-white hybrids in the United States, other and less obvious explanations have been offered.  It has been pointed out, for example, that the mulatto is the result of a social selection which began during the period of slavery, when the dominant whites selected for their concubines the most comely, and presumably the superior, women among the Negroes.  There is, however, the fact to be considered that in a society where racial distinctions are rigidly maintained, the mixed blood tends to be be keenly conscious of his position.  He feels, as he frequently says, the conflict of warring ancestry in his veins.  The conflict of color is embodied, so to speak, in his person.  His mind is the melting pot in which the lower and higher cultures meet and fuse…

Read or purchase the article here.

Race and Marriage

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 15, Number 4 (January 1910)
pages 433-453
DOI: 10.1086/211800

Ulysses G. Weatherly (1865-1940), Associate Professor of History, Economics and Sociology
Indiana University

The aversion exhibited by most animals to pairing with individuals of another species has been attributed by Westermarck to the selective power of hereditary instinct.  those which prefer pairing with their own kind transmit their characteristics to their offspring and become the progenitors of numerous individuals marked by this particular trait.  Hybrid kinds on the other hand have a smaller chance of survival, both because the are either sterile or relatively infertile, and because departure from type is not conductive to the favor of their fellows.  Among plants, where conscious choice is impossible, hybrid individuals are more numerous.  So clearly developed is this instinctive aversion among the higher vertebrates that certain varieties refuse to interbreed with closely related varieties of the same species.  Examples of this occur among some kinds of deer, sheep, and horses.  It is impossible to determine at what point in evolution the non-paring instinct merges into a definite consciousness of kind, or when physical inability to cross is transformed into actual aversion to crossing, but it is certain that species aversion exists far down the scale of animal intelligence.

With the lowest orders of humans there enters another factor based on a highly developed self-sense which is found in animals only in a rudimentary form.  Aversion to cross-breeding may spring from a sense of strangeness due to geographical isolation and non-contact with other human varieties.  Some remote peoples have conceived of themselves as the only ones of their kind, and this idea has been reflected in the group name.  Experience requires only that the name distinguish members of the group from animal kinds with which its member come in contact, and they call themselves merely “men” or “human beings.”  Strangers, especially those of a markedly different physique, are looked upon as beings of another order with whom it is dangerous or wicked to interbreed.  Hybrids resulting from the earliest crossing with strangers are regarded as monstrosities…

…But, as Ripley points out, intermarriage does not really bring about acclimatization at all.  It results in the formation of an entirely new type.  Undoubtedly crossing with the dark races furnishes, for some regions, the sole means by which the European peoples can survive in the tropics in any form.  Furthermore, when aggressive races undertake to govern backward people of alien stock it may be theoretically advantageous to have a mixed class to break the shock between the two types.  Mr. Sydney Olivier is convinced that this is the case in the British West Indies:

I consider that this class of mixed race is a valuable and indispensable part of any West Indian community, and that a colony of blacks, colored and whites has far more organic efficiency and far more promise in it than a colony of black and white alone.  A community of white and black alone will remain, so-far as official classes are concerned, a community of employers and serfs, concessionaires and tributaries, with, at best, at bureaucracy to keep the peace between them and attend to the nice adjustment of this burden.  The graded mixed class in Jamaica helps to make an organic whole and saves it from this distinctive cleavage.

But conditions in Jamaica are peculiar because in that island the hybrids are not, as is usually true, in antagonism with either of the parent stocks, and because there are almost none of the class of “poor whites” who constitute so large an element of the problem in the southern states of America.  The position of the half-caste is usually an unfortunate one.  The consciousness of his superiority to the more primitive stock raises a barrier against sympathetic co-operation on that side, while on the side of the dominant race he finds no willingness to grant social equality.  If he is not more depraved in morals that either of the parent races he at least has acquired the reputation of being so.  Unless the two extremes continue to cross, the mixed breeds tends to disappear, either by marrying back into the darker race or by approaching the whites through conscious sexual selection, lighter mates always being preferred in successive generations.  Hoffman’s investigations show that in Jamaica itself mixed marriages are on the decline and that there is a well-marked tendency among the population to revert to the African type.  In some districts in the southern states likewise the growing race antipathy of whites manifests itself in a decrease of intercourse with negroes.  Bruce believes that this is already resulting not only in a rapid decline in the number of mulattoes, but in a perceptible return of the colored population to the original African type. “As his skin darkens,” continued Bruce, “in its return to the tint which distinguishes that of his remote ancestors, the prospect of the whites and blacks lawfully mixing their blood fades into the thinnest shadow of probability.”…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Problem of the Marginal Man

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 41, Number 1 (July 1935)
Pages 1-12
DOI: 10.1086/217001

Everett V. Stonequist (1901-1979), Professor of Sociology
Skidmore College

The marginal man arises in a bi-cultural or multi-cultural situation.  The natural desire of the mixed-blood is to advance toward the group occupying the higher status.  He may be forced to accept the status of the lower group, possibly becoming their leader.  He may be rejected by both groups.  Where accommodation, rather than conflict, prevails, the mixed blood may constitute a middle class.  With intermarriage the mixed-blood approximates more nearly the status of the dominate race.  The marginal individual experiences what [W. E. B.] Du Bois has analyzed as “double consciousness.”  It is as if he regarded himself through two looking-glasses presenting clashing images.  The marginal individual passes through a life-cycle:  introduction to the two cultures, crisis, and adjustment.  The natural history involves an initial phase with a small group of marginal individuals who are ahead of the minority.  This group increases, and a movement develops having as a goal some kind of equality and independence.  The final outcome may be a new social framework; if assimilation is facilitated, the minority may be incorporated into the dominant group, or become the dominant group, and the cycle ends…

Read or purchase the article here.