Mixed Race Studies

International Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Mixedness and Mixing

Routledge
2012-05-25
224 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-59804-0

Edited by

Suki Ali, Senior Lecturer of Sociology
London School of Economics and Political Science

Chamion Cabellero, Senior Research Fellow
Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

Rosalind Edwards, Professor of Sociology
University of Southampton

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

People from a ‘mixed’ racial and ethnic background, and people partnering and parenting across different racial and ethnic backgrounds, are increasingly visible internationally and often construed in diametrically opposed ways. On the one hand, images of racial and ethnic diversity are posed in opposition to unity and solidarity, creating a crisis of cohesive social trust. On the other hand, there are assertions that the portrayals of segregation and conflict ignore the reality of ongoing interactions between a mix of minority and majority racial, ethnic and religious cultures, where multiculture is an ordinary, unremarkable, feature of everyday social life.

This interdisciplinary volume brings internationally well-respected researchers together to explore the different contexts and concepts underpinning discussions about mixedness and mixing. Moving beyond pathologically focused research about confused identities and a dualistic black-white conception of mixedness, the book includes chapters on:

• Multiraciality and race classification
• Mixed race couples
• Mixedness in everyday life
• Mixed race politics

International Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Mixedness and Mixing develops theoretical perspectives and presents intellectually shaped empirical evidence that can deal with complexity and normalcy in order to move the debate onto more fruitful grounds. It is an important book for students and scholars of race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction / Suki Ali, Chamion Caballero, Rosalind Edwards and Miri Song
2. Multiraciality and census classification in global perspective / Ann Morning
3. Mixed race across time and place: an international perspective / Ilan Katz
4. Scaling diversity: mixed-race couples, segregation and urban America / Steven Holloway
5. The geography of mixedness in England and Wales / Charlie Owen
6. From ‘Draughtboard Alley’ to ‘Brown Britain’: the ordinariness of mixedness in British life / Chamion Caballero
7. How mixedness is understood and experienced in everyday life / Peter Aspinall and Miri Song
8. Finding value on a council estate in Nottingham: voices of white working class women / Lisa McKenzie
9. How to find mixed people in quantitative datasets / Anne Unterreiner
10. When ethnicity became an important family issue in Slovenia / Mateja Sedmak
11. Same difference? Developing a critical methodological stance in critical mixed race studies / Minelle Mahtani
12. Mixed race politics / Suki Ali

TV Review: Mixed Race Britain – Mixed Britannia

BioNews
Number 630 (2011-10-24)

Anoushka Shepherd

Mixed Race Britain: Mixed Britannia, BBC2, 6-20 October 2011, Presented by George Alagiah

I am mixed race, and thereby a member the fastest growing ethnic minority in the UK. My British dad met my Sri Lankan mum while travelling in the 1970s. They married and settled in Manchester where I grew up. And although I was definitely alive to the fact that their marriage was a joining of two very different cultures, I had no idea of the deep and contentious history of mixed relationships in this country.

In this three-part documentary, George Alagiah recounts the largely untold story of mixed race Britain and the many love stories that overcame extreme social hardship to create it…

…In summary, all three programmes are packed with interviews and are rich in photographs and footage from the archives. This is a very real and intimate recollection of the history of this country told in the refreshingly honest words of those who were there. All the stories told are different, interesting and moving in their own ways…

Read the entire review here.

Racial Hegemony in America: The Struggle for identity Among the Black Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southern United States

2004/2005 Portland State University McNair Scholars Online Journal
Volume 1, Transformative Possibilities: Transcending Interlocking Boundaries
pages 150-164

Natasha Hartsfield
Faculty Mentors: Pedro Ferbel-Azcarate

The notion of race was introduced to the Americas at the time of colonization. For the Black Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes, racism has led to the rejection of their tribal heritage from both tribal and United States governments. The Black Indians are of both African and Native American ancestry with a history born in America and rich with resistance against colonial power. Blood quantum, the governmental requisite for tribal membership, is but one of the many laws put in place to govern Native American tribes. This introduces the question: Why, in a Nation that claims “freedom for all,” does there continue to be groups of people whose identities are not recognized? Why are descendants of both Native American and African ancestors ineligible for education scholarships, land allotments, gaming and fishing rights and other tribal allowances? In 1965 African-Americans were marching on Washington to demand their rights as American citizens. Today, Black Indians are marching on Washington from Indian Territory in Oklahoma to demand their rights. As a people who represent the continuing struggle for American freedom, the case of the Black Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes demonstrates how hegemony introduced the hypodescent rule or “one drop of blood” rule by the United States, laid the foundation for systemic effects of the racial hierarchy within the tribes. As this is an issue that may be further explored, future research might include a comparative study of other unrecognized groups that have been affected by colonialism, incorporating archival research, research of material culture and oral histories.

Introduction

There are many tribal groups within the United States who remain unrecognized by governmental and societal institutions due to issues of race. The Black Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes represent a community of individuals who are the descendants of both Native American and African ancestors from the Southeastern region of the United States.

At the birth of the American colonial experiment, race served as a distinguishing factor in roles of domination and subordination among individuals. Later, race became codified into law through legislation such as the Dawes Act, which was, and continues to be defined by blood quantum. Today, the concept of race continues to be woven deeply into the fabric of American society. For the Black Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes, racism has led to the rejection of their tribal heritage from both the tribal and the United States governments. Members of the Black Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes are a self-ascribed people, who have for many years, endured the struggle of gaining both federal and tribal recognition as an existing people with a rich history in the United States. The significance of self-defined identities is to be emphasized here. How is membership defined as per the individual and the tribe, contrary to the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the United States? Biology or blood quantum is but one example of governmental provisions imposed on Native tribes. When such constraints for group inclusion are made, they serve to disregard the Native customs and imply the colonial ideology, creating subsequent damage to the social fabric within the tribes. Why in a Nation that claims “freedom for all”, there continue to be groups of people whose communities are not recognized? Why are the descendants of both Native American and African ancestors ineligible for education scholarships, land allotments, gaming and fishing rights and other tribal allowances? Is the reason for such an unequal distribution of rights the result of socio-economic structure founded on the basis of racial inequality? The story of the Black Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes demonstrates how the introduction of hypodescent, or “one drop of blood” rule, by the United States, laid the foundation for the systemic effects of the racial hierarchy within the tribes. It remains to be seen whether the civil rights of multi-racial people will become acknowledged in law. As one member of the Black Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes, Angela Molette exclaims: “The descendants of African ancestored tribes of the United States are not extinct.” (2004). It is beyond time that United States accepts its obligation to its people to provide cultural and ethnic recognition as per the terms of each community…

Read the entire article here.

Honor Bound: Race and Shame in America

Rutgers University Press
2012-03-27
288 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-5270-5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-5269-9

David Leverenz, Professor Emeritus of English
University of Florida

As Bill Clinton said in his second inaugural address, “The divide of race has been America’s constant curse.” In Honor Bound, David Leverenz explores the past to the present of that divide. He argues that in the United States, the rise and decline of white people’s racial shaming reflect the rise and decline of white honor. “White skin” and “black skin” are fictions of honor and shame. Americans have lived those fictions for over four hundred years.

To make his argument, Leverenz casts an unusually wide net, from ancient and modern cultures of honor to social, political, and military history to American literature and popular culture.

He highlights the convergence of whiteness and honor in the United States from the antebellum period to the present. The Civil War, the civil rights movement, and the election of Barack Obama represent racial progress; the Tea Party movement represents the latest recoil.

From exploring African American narratives to examining a 2009 episode of Hardball—in which two white commentators restore their honor by mocking U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder after he called Americans “cowards” for not talking more about race—Leverenz illustrates how white honor has prompted racial shaming and humiliation. The United States became a nation-state in which light-skinned people declared themselves white. The fear masked by white honor surfaces in such classics of American literature as The Scarlet Letter and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and in the U.S. wars against the Barbary pirates from 1783 to 1815 and the Iraqi insurgents from 2003 to the present. John McCain’s Faith of My Fathers is used to frame the 2008 presidential campaign as white honor’s last national stand.

Honor Bound concludes by probing the endless attempts in 2009 and 2010 to preserve white honor through racial shaming, from the “birthers” and Tea Party protests to Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” in Congress and the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. at the front door of his own home. Leverenz is optimistic that, in the twenty-first century, racial shaming is itself becoming shameful.

The Racial Paradox of Tribal Citizenship

American Studies
Volume 46, Numbers 3 & 4 (Fall-Winter 2005)
pages 163-185
Indigenous Studies Today
Volume 1 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006)

Steve Russell, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice
Indiana University

As I begin to write this my tribal election season is at hand. As usual, all the candidates claim to be “traditional.” This is a claim easy to make and hard to disprove. What is traditional? We are now over half Christian, and more of us speak English than speak Cherokee. Many of the accoutrements of contemporary identity have roots in recent times: frybread, ribbon shirts, jingle dresses, powwows. On the other hand, some items of earlier provenance, such as blowguns and turbans, surprise some modern Cherokees. We date our first written laws from 1808. We have lived under a series of written constitutions, the longest lasting those of 1839 and 1975. Is written law traditional? More to the point of this article, is the current Cherokee law of citizenship, a race-based law like that of most American Indian tribes, traditional?

I hope to show that the idea of “race” is, in Partha Chatterjee’s phrase describing nationalism, “a derivative discourse.” It is not only derived from European colonial discourse, but it has done and continues to do harm to Indian nations on a scale similar to that of smallpox and measles. Pathogens are typically ranked by body count, and so my task here will be to demonstrate that race theory is an Old World pathogen that diminishes the numbers of American Indians on a scale that invites comparison to “guns, germs, and steel.” It is perhaps instructive to read Chatterjee’s words and substitute “race” for “nationalism”:

Nationalism as an ideology is irrational, narrow, hateful and destructive. It is not an authentic product of any of the non-European civilizations which, in each particular case, it claims as its classical heritage. It is wholly a European export to the rest of the world. It is also one of Europe’s most pernicious exports, for it is not a child of reason or liberty, but of their opposite: of fervent romanticism, of political messianism whose inevitable consequence is the annihilation of  freedom.

Can “race” properly be considered, like nationalism, an ideology? According to the American Anthropological Association:

. . . physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them. Today scholars in many fields argue that “race” as it is understood in the United States of America was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: the English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian peoples, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor. . . . As they were constructing U.S. society, leaders among European-Americans fabricated the cultural/behavioral characteristics associated with each “race,” linking superior traits with Europeans and negative and inferior ones to blacks and Indians…. Ultimately, “race” as an ideology about human differences was subsequently spread to other areas of the world. It became a strategy for dividing, ranking, and controlling colonized people used by colonial powers everywhere.

The AAA Statement refers in a part not quoted above to the “Great Chain of Being” theory as the philosophical basis for ranking people by race, a religious theory that looked to early anthropology for scientific support. Cultural anthropology was in turn supported in its endorsement of racial hierarchy by disciplines thought to be more empirical in content: archaeology and physical anthropology. Outside of Indian law, the primary postbellum legal expression of the “Great Chain of Being” was anti-miscegenation law, representing a legal endorsement of racist ideology that was not declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court until 1967…

Read the entire article here.

Bearing the burden of whiteness: the implications of racial self-identification for multiracial adolescents’ school belonging and academic achievement

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 5 (May 2013)
pages 747-773
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.628998

Ruth Burke
Department of Sociology
University of Pennsylvania

Grace Kao, Professor of Sociology, Education, and Asian American Studies
University of Pennsylvania

Previous literature on racial self-identification among multiracials demonstrates that self-identification differs by context. Moreover, among multiracial adolescents, identity, usually measured in school, is correlated with achievement. In addition, a few studies have indicated that for half-white, half-minority adolescents, school achievement falls in between the achievements of their monoracial counterparts. Using the in-school and in-home components of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we examine the relationship between racial self-identification and school belonging and achievement. We find that among black/white and Asian/white adolescents, adolescents who self-identify as white are particularly disadvantaged in school, reporting lower grade point averages (GPA) than their multiracial counterparts. Our conclusions suggest that multiple contextual measures of self-identification better capture the relationship between racial identification and academic achievement among multiracial adolescents.

Read or purchase the article here.

Show me your CDIB: Blood Quantum and Indian Identity among Indian People of Oklahoma

American Behavioral Scientist
Volume 47, Number 3 (November 2003)
pages 267-282
DOI: 10.1177/0002764203256187

James F. Hamill, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

Discourse concerning the legitimacy of claims of Indian identity characterize much of the debate in Indian country today. Any legitimate claim to an Indian identity rests, in part, on tribal membership, which requires certification by the U.S. government in the form of a Certified Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB) and a tribal membership identification. Once a person establishes biological heritage with the CDIB, the blood quantum—full, 1/2, 1/256, and so forth—often is taken as a rough measure of “Indianness.” This emphasis on blood quantum has been an important feature of both Indian and Tribal identity in Oklahoma throughout the 20th century. Using data from interviews with Oklahoma Indian people taken in the 1930s, 1960s, and gathered in the field from 1994 on, this report will look at the meaning and importance of blood quantum in Indian identity and how that has been expressed by Indian women and men throughout the past 100 years.

Read or purchase the article here.

Sewing Ourselves Together: Clothing, Decorative Arts and the Expression of Métis and Half Breed Identity

University of Manitoba
2004
450 pages

Sherry Farrell Racette, Professor of Native Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies
University of Manitoba

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

When I was a university student, I worked at a summer education program in The Pas in northern Manitoba. There I met three women from the Manitoba Métis Federation who had obtained a grant to teach people who worked with their children. Tired of requests to come into classrooms to teach children beadwork, they had decided that the best use of their time and skills was to “teach the teachers” with the expectation that beadwork would be incorporated into the curriculum. The women seemed to take special care that I learned what they had to teach. Maybe it was because I was the only aboriginal woman in the workshop; maybe it was because I was interested. Kathleen Delaronde, a traditional artist of the highest caliber, was one of those women. I got to know her and her family and during another northern summer, I stayed at their home and learned at her kitchen table. Nobody in my family did beadwork but I felt an immediate connection with beads and leather.

Although beadwork and traditional arts were new to me, sewing clothes and making decorative objects for the home were not. Both my parents had been poor as children and took tremendous pleasure in dressing well. My grandmother always dressed up to go to town, and tortured my uncles by dressing them in little matching suits and hats. One summer while we were visiting my grandmother in Quebec, she sat me down at her treadle sewing machine and helped me sew a dress for my doll. At home I started sewing by helping my mother who was always making something. My job was to rip her mistakes while she forged ahead and to do hand sewing which she still loathes. In addition to what she had learned from my grandmother, my mother had taken a tailoring course that was offered by the Singer sewing machine company, and she sent me off to take a similar course when I was a teenager. Now she helps me when I embark on projects that involve sewing. For an art exhibit, Dolls for Big Girls, I merged what I knew about Métis and First Nations history and traditional arts and clothing. While I made little moccasins, my mother dressed the old woman for a piece entitled Flight based on her memories of clothing worn by my great-grandmother, Annie Poison King.

When I began my journey into traditional arts, my mother brought me a birch bark basket that belonged to my grandmother, Helen King Hanbury. Disappointed that, in a fit of creativity, my grandmother had painted it with green boat paint, I put the basket aside. I didn’t open it until shortly after my grandmother died. One day I found myself sitting on the edge of my bed with the basket in my lap. When I took off the lid, I found moccasin patterns, a piece of embroidery, assorted odds and ends, and a handmade needle case with a simple flower embroidered on the cover. I realized that I had unknowingly picked up a needle to an aesthetic tradition that my grandmother had put down. Since that time I have taken opportunities to learn from elder artists, such as the late Margaret McAuley of Cumberland House, and struggled on by myself. I have also thought a great deal about what it means when we wrap ourselves up and present ourselves to the world in a certain way and what it means when we stop. This study is an extension of the journey that began when Kathleen Delaronde helped me pick up the needle. It has been done with the greatest respect for the women who have taught me and the artists from long ago, who I am sure have been standing beside me guiding my research.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• PREFACE: Picking Up the Needle
  • Acknowledgements
  • Glossary
  • Abbreviations
• CHAPTER ONE: Métis and Half Breed Clothing and Decorative Arts
• CHAPTER TWO: Métis, Half Breed and Mixed Blood: Identifying Self and Group
• CHAPTER THREE: The Métis Space of New Possibilities: Elements of Hybrid Style
• CHAPTER FOUR: “After the Half Breed Fashion”: Reconstructing 19th Century Métis and Half Breed Dress
• CHAPTER FIVE: Tent Pegs: Material Evidence
• CHAPTER SIX: Spirit and Function: Symbolic Aspects of Occupational Dress
• CHAPTER SEVEN: Clothing in Action: the Expressive Properties Of Dress
• CHAPTER EIGHT: Sewing for a Living: the Commodification of Women’s Artistic Production
• CHAPTER NINE: Artists, Making and Meaning
• CHAPTER TEN: Half Breed, but not Métis: Lakota and Dakota Mixed Bloods
• CHAPTER ELEVEN: Final Thoughts and Conclusions
  • Sewing Ourselves Together
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• PLATE GALLERY

Read the entire dissertation here.

Black Mexico: Race and Society from Colonial to Modern Times

University of New Mexico Press
2009
296 pages
6 x 9 in, 21 halftones, 4 maps
paperback ISBN: 978-0-8263-4701-5

Edited by:

Ben Vinson III, Professor of history and Director of the Center for Africana Studies
Johns Hopkins University

Matthew Restall, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies
Pennsylvania State University

The essays in this collection build upon a series of conversations and papers that resulted from “New Directions in North American Scholarship on Afro-Mexico,” a symposium conducted at Pennsylvania State University in 2004. The issues addressed include contested historiography, social and economic contributions of Afro-Mexicans, social construction of race and ethnic identity, forms of agency and resistance, and contemporary inquiry into ethnographic work on Afro-Mexican communities. Comprised of a core set of chapters that examine the colonial period and a shorter epilogue addressing the modern era, this volume allows the reader to explore ideas of racial representation from the sixteenth century into the twenty-first.

Contributors:

Joan Bristol, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
Patrick Carroll, Texas A & M University, Corpus Christi
Andrew B. Fisher, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota
Nicole von Germeten, Oregon State University, Corvallis
Laura A. Lewis, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia
Jean-Philibert Mobwa Mobwa N’djoli, Congolese native living in Mexico City
Frank “Trey” Proctor III, Denison University, Granville, Ohio
Alva Moore Stevenson, University of California, Los Angeles
Bobby Vaughn, Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont, California

Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America

Duke University Press
2009
320 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4401-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4420-9

Edited by:

Matthew D. O’Hara, Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Santa Cruz

Andrew Fisher, Associate Professor of History
Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota

In colonial Latin America, social identity did not correlate neatly with fixed categories of race and ethnicity. As Imperial Subjects demonstrates, from the early years of Spanish and Portuguese rule, understandings of race and ethnicity were fluid. In this collection, historians offer nuanced interpretations of identity as they investigate how Iberian settlers, African slaves, Native Americans, and their multi-ethnic progeny understood who they were as individuals, as members of various communities, and as imperial subjects. The contributors’ explorations of the relationship between colonial ideologies of difference and the identities historical actors presented span the entire colonial period and beyond: from early contact to the legacy of colonial identities in the new republics of the nineteenth century. The volume includes essays on the major colonial centers of Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, as well as the Caribbean basin and the imperial borderlands.

Whether analyzing cases in which the Inquisition found that the individuals before it were “legally” Indians and thus exempt from prosecution, or considering late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century petitions for declarations of whiteness that entitled the mixed-race recipients to the legal and social benefits enjoyed by whites, the book’s contributors approach the question of identity by examining interactions between imperial subjects and colonial institutions. Colonial mandates, rulings, and legislation worked in conjunction with the exercise and negotiation of power between individual officials and an array of social actors engaged in countless brief interactions. Identities emerged out of the interplay between internalized understandings of self and group association and externalized social norms and categories.

Table of Contents

• Foreword / Irene Silverblatt
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Racial Identities and Their Interpreters in Colonial Latin America / Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara
• 1. Aristocracy on the Auction Block: Race, Lords, and the Perpetuity Controversy of Sixteenth-Century Peru / Jeremy Mumford
• 2. A Market of Identities: Women, Trade, and Ethnic Labels in Colonial Potosí­ / Jane E. Mangan
• 3. Legally Indian: Inquisitorial Readings of Indigenous Identity in New Spain / David Tavárez
• 4. The Many Faces of Colonialism in Two Iberoamerican Borderlands: Northern New Spain and the Eastern Lowlands of Charcas / Cynthia Radding
• 5. Humble Slaves and Loyal Vassals: Free Africans and Their Descendents in Eighteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil / Mariana L. R. Dantas
• 6. Purchasing Whiteness: Conversations of the Essence of Parso-ness and Mulatto-ness at the End of Empire / Ann Twinam
• 7. Patricians and Plebians in Late Colonial Charcas: Identity, Representation, and Colonialism / Sergio Serulnikov
• 8. Conjuring Identities: Race, Nativeness, Local Citizenship, and Royal Slavery on an Imperial Frontier (Revisiting El Cobre, Cuba) / María Elena Díaz
• 9. Indigenous Citizenship: Liberalism, Political Participation, and Ethic Identity in Post-Independence Oaxaca and Yucatán / Karen D. Caplan
• Conclusion / R. Douglas Cope
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index