Mixed Race Studies

“A blood mixture which experience has shown furnishes the very highest grade of citizen-material”: Selective Assimilation in a Polynesian Case of Naturalization to U.S. Citzenship

American Studies (ISSN: ISSN 0026-3079)
Volume 45, Number 3 (Fall 2004)
pages 33-48

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Associate Professor of American Studies and Anthropology
Wesleyan University

On the 11th of July, 1928, the front page of the Honolulu Pacific Advertiser read: “75 per cent white blood satisfies U.S.” The article reported what seems to be the landmark decision of U.S. District Court Judge William Lymer to allow a racially mixed Pacific Islander—Alfred Milner Stephen—to naturalize to U.S. citizenship. While the discussion focused on naturalization and citizenship, in Stephen’s case, blood racialization also played a key role. By blood quantum logic, Stephen was identified as three-quarters English and one-quarter Polynesian, the latter inherited from his mother, who was referred to as “half English and half Polynesian.” Judge Lymer argued that Stephen’s “predominance” of “white blood” qualified him for citizenship.

In 1790, when Congress passed a law to establish a uniform standard for naturalization—the Nationality Act—it was limited to “all free white persons.” Although Congress amended the Nationality Act in 1870, it did so only to conform to the intent of the Reconstruction amendments by expanding eligibility for naturalization only to “aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent” (Ancheta 1998, 23). Judge Lymer, who made clear that he was determining whether Stephen was a “white person” within the meaning of the 1870 nationality law, made him, in the words of Ian Haney Lopez, “white by law” (1996)…

…However, the justifications for racial prerequisites changed. For over thirty years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries courts assumed that scientific evidence and common knowledge were consistent in defining who was “white.” But, as contradictions between scientific evidence and common knowledge became more pronounced (e.g. as when anthropologists classified some dark-skinned people as Caucasians), courts increasingly came to rely on common knowledge justifications alone (Lopez 1996, 7).

The Stephen case revealed the confusion surrounding the “scientific” and “common knowledge” definitions of whiteness. In petitioning for naturalization, Stephen was challenging longstanding legal precedent based on “scientific evidence” and “common knowledge,” but, as courts increasingly relied on the latter, it became apparent that the two definitions could no longer be reconciled. Judge Lymer reflected this problem when he remarked that the Stephen case was the first time a federal court had considered status of a person with “more than half white blood” and “less than one half Polynesian, Malay, or Oriental blood.” The Stephen case reveals the complicated intersections of race and nation in early twentieth-century American culture.

This essay discusses the rationales that guided the judge’s decision. It was the “predominance” of whiteness mixed with Stephen’s “Polynesian blood” that made the difference in the court’s decision. But that factor alone did not motivate Judge Lymer’s decision. Pervasive notions about the potential for Hawaiians to assimilate and to fulfill the requirements of American citizenship were also crucial in this ruling. Although the court recognized Stephen as Polynesian, it deemed him white enough to become American. Stephen could be de-racialized as a legal subject in the courtroom because of racial logic that assumed the easy assimilation of Polynesians based on the historical treatment of racially mixed Hawaiians. Hawaiians and some other Pacific Islanders—in this case Stephen was identified as a Polynesian who came from “Neuru Island”—were inconsistently incorporated into whiteness through a process of selective assimilation. That is, they were selectively incorporated as whites when racially mixed (depending on degree), where white “blood”—in relation to indigenous “blood”—has been figured as a solvent…

Read the entire article here.

Dangerous Liaisons: Sex and Love in the Segregated South

The University of Arkansas Press
2003
160 pages
6″x9″
Paper: 1-55728–833-X (978-1-55728-833-2)
Cloth: 1-55728-755-4 (978-1-55728-755-7)

Charles F. Robinson II, Associate Professor of History, Vice Provost for Diversity, and Director of African American Studies program
University of Arkansas

In the tumultuous decades after the Civil War, as the southern white elite reclaimed power, “racial mixing” was the central concern of segregationists who strove to maintain “racial purity.” Segregation—and race itself—was based on the idea that interracial sex posed a biological threat to the white race. In this groundbreaking study, Charles Robinson examines how white southerners enforced anti-miscegenation laws. His findings challenge conventional wisdom, documenting a pattern of selective prosecution under which interracial domestic relationships were punished even more harshly than transient sexual encounters. Robinson shows that the real crime was to suggest that black and white individuals might be equals, a notion which undermined the legitimacy of the economic, political, and social structure of white male supremacy.

Robinson examines legal cases from across the South, considering both criminal prosecutions brought by states and civil disputes over marital and family assets. He also looks at U.S. Supreme Court decisions, debates in state legislatures, comments in the U.S. Congressional Record, and newspaper editorials. He not only shows the hardening of racial categories but assesses the attitudes of African Americans about anti-miscegenation laws and intermarriage.

Dangerous Liaisons vividly documents the regulation of intimacy and its fundamental role in the construction of race.

Les Enfants de la colonie: Les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté [Book Review]

H-France Review (Society for French Historical Studies)
Volume 8, Number 162 (November 2008)
pages 654-657

Marie-Paule Ha
The University of Hong Kong

Emmanuelle Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie: Les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté. Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 2007. 335 pp. Notes and bibliography. 24€. ISBN 978-2-7071-3982-5.

While the question of métissage has in the last two decades generated a significant volume of scholarly works from a diverse range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, Emmanuelle Saada’s monograph, which grew out of her 2001 doctoral dissertation at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, is quite unique in that it provides the first systematic and in-depth investigation of the judicial aspects of what was referred to as “la question métisse.”[1] Drawing on a wide array of materials ranging from archival and juridical sources to works from legal studies, history, anthropology and sociology, the author reconstructs the highly complex and tortuous trajectory that transformed the legal status of the empire’s métis from that of native subjects to being French citizens during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Given the book’s focus, the term “métis” in Les Enfants de la colonie is used to refer not to mixed-race children in general, but to the métis non reconnus, that is, those born out of wedlock that had not been legally recognized by their European fathers and were abandoned by them. As a result, this group of métis was given by default the status of native subjects. It was the plight of this particular category of illegitimate and racially mixed progeny of European men that became the object of the interventions of administrators, philanthropists and legal professionals in the colonies.

The starting point of Saada’s investigation of “the métis problem” is the 8 November 1928 decree which made it possible for the métis non reconnus born in Indochina to be granted French citizenship if one of their parents, legally unknown, could be presumed to be of “French race.” According to the decree, this presumption could be established “par tous les moyens,” which include “le nom que porte l’enfant, le fait qu’il a reçu une formation, une éducation et une culture françaises, sa situation dans la société” (p.13). The momentous interest of this legal text was twofold. On the one hand, it constituted the first occurrence of the word “race” in French legislation. On the other hand, the term was deployed not for an exclusive purpose, but rather to justify the integration of certain subjects of the empire in French citizenry…

Read the entire review here.

Miscegenation and Race: A Roundtable on Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally [A Tribute]

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 31, Number 3, 2010
pages 1-5
E-ISSN: 1536-0334, Print ISSN: 0160-9009

Estelle B. Freedman, Edgar E. Robinson Professor of History
Stanford University

The following papers pay tribute to Peggy Pascoe’s [1954-2010] extraordinary book What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, published in 2009 by Oxford University Press. They originated at a session held at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) in January 2010 to explore the implications of Pascoe’s work for current histories of race and gender. Sitting in the audience, I enjoyed not only the roundtable but also the deep pleasure evident on Pascoe’s face as she listened to the presentations and to the discussion of the influence of her book on our scholarship and our teaching. Peggy Pascoe always makes us think harder, in her gentle and affirming ways. This session gave her a taste of the rewards sown by her latest scholarly achievement. I could sense that day that I shared with others in attendance a sense of pride and vicarious gratification that so treasured a colleague should be recognized in this way.

Both sweeping and detailed, What Comes Naturally constructs the dual histories of the criminalization of interracial marriage and the resistance to that process by individuals and social movements, spanning the century between the 1860s and the 1960s. Since its publication in 2009 the book has been widely honored. It has received both the Hawley Prize and the Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians, both the Dunning and the Kelly Prizes from the American Historical Association, and the Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association. The range of subjects covered by these awards is telling: economy, politics, or institutions; cultural history; women’s history or feminist theory; American history; sociolegal history. In short, this is a book that has already had a profound effect on the profession across its many specializations…

Articles

Legal Fictions Exposed
pages 6-14

Eileen Boris, Eileen Boris Hull Professor and Chair of Feminist Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara

What Comes Naturally: A Racially Inclusive Look at Miscegenation Law
pages 15-21

Jacki Thompson Rand, Associate Professor of History; American Indian and Native Studies
University of Iowa

“The Relics of Slavery”: Interracial Sex and Manumission in the American South
pages 22-30

Jessica Millward, Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Irvine

Nikki Sawada Bridges Flynn and “What Comes Naturally”
pages 31-40

Valerie J. Matsumoto, Professor of History
University of California, Los Angeles

Therapeutic Culture and Marriage Equality: What Comes Naturally and Contemporary Dialogues about Marriage
pages 41-48

Kristin Celello, Assistant Professor of History
City University of New York, Queens College

Social Movements, the Rise of Colorblind Conservativism, and “What Comes Naturally”
pages 49-59

Matt Garcia, Associate Professor of American Civilization, Ethnic Studies and History
Brown University

The Re-Emergence of Race as a Biological Category: The Societal Implications—Reaffirmation of Race

The Iowa Law Review
Volume 94, Number 5 (July 2009)
pages 1547-1587

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

Table of Contents

• I. INTRODUCTION
• II. PLACING RACE IN CONTEXT: DEFINING THE ISSUE
  • A. AN HISTORICAL ANALYSIS
  • B. REALISTS AND ANTIREALISTS—COMPETING CONSTRUCTIONS OF RACE IN THE LEGAL COMMUNITY
• III. THE SOCIETAL COSTS OF USING RACE IN BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH
• IV. ETHNICITY VERSUS RACE: DEVELOPING A NEW, SOFTER PARADIGM
• V. CONCLUSION

As the Dean of the University of Minnesota Law School in 2005, I was privileged to host and attend a conference at the Law School entitled, “Proposals for the Responsible Use of Racial and Ethnic Categories in Biomedical Research: Where Do We Go from Here?”1 To say the least, it was a fascinating conference replete with interesting speakers engaged with topical and controversial issues. The papers presented and discussed were proof of the success of the conference and the relevance of issues addressed.2 Professor Susan Wolf prepared a concise summary of those articles for Nature Genetics, and the reader is encouraged to review that summary before continuing with this Article.

Although the conference quite appropriately focused on the topic at hand—the use of racial categories in biomedical research—my thoughts kept drifting to a related, and perhaps more important, issue: the re-emergence of race as a biological category rather than as a social construct. I also pondered the implications of that development in a society in which race continues to be the most prominent social issue, even though an African-American was recently sworn in as President of the United States.6 I kept returning to this thought because of the topics addressed during the conference, topics which were not new to me.

As a scholar who has written several articles about “race” and its place in in legal scholarship, have given a lot of thought as to how “race” impacts every significant facet of American society and how this society’s history is inextricably tied to its legacy of slavery and the vestiges (for example, “separate but equal” comes to mind) of that awful chapter in American history. I have gone so far as to advocate, in two separate articles, the destabilization of racial categories as a vehicle to eliminate “race” and, ultimately, the effects of race (i.e., racism and racialism) in American society.

As a result, during the twenty-plus years I have been researching, writing, and thinking about race and race-related issues, I have always been puzzled by an event that happens regularly: the release of medical reports and studies that report differential results, findings, or outcomes based on the race of the test subjects. It is fairly common for some reporter to quote a statistic indicating that African-Americans have a higher rate of, say, hypertension than whites…

Read the entire article here.

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.

Race Categorization and the Regulation of Business and Science

Law & Society Review
Volume 44, Issue 3-4 (September/December 2010)
pages 617–650
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5893.2010.00418.x

Catherine Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research
Rutgers University

John D. Skrentny, Director, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies and Professor of Sociology
University of California, San Diego

Despite the lack of consensus regarding the meaning or significance of race or ethnicity amongst scientists and the lay public, there are legal requirements and guidelines that dictate the collection of racial and ethnic data across a range of institutions. Legal regulations are typically created through a political process and then face varying kinds of resistance when the state tries to implement them. We explore the nature of this opposition by comparing responses from businesses, scientists, and science-oriented businesses (pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies) to U.S. state regulations that used politically derived racial categorizations, originally created to pursue civil rights goals. We argue that insights from cultural sociology regarding institutional and cultural boundaries can aid understanding of the nature of resistance to regulation. The Food and Drug Administration’s guidelines for research by pharmaceutical companies imposed race categories on science-based businesses, leading to objections that emphasized the autonomy and validity of science. In contrast, similar race categories regulating first business by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and later scientific research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) encountered little challenge. We argue that pharmaceutical companies had the motive (profit) that NIH-supported scientists lacked and a legitimate discourse (boundary work of science) that businesses regulated by the EEOC did not have. The study suggests the utility of a comparative cultural sociology of the politics of legal regulation, particularly when understanding race-related regulation and the importance of examining legal regulations for exploring how the meaning of race or ethnicity are contested and constructed in law.

…Drug companies and their industry association representatives argued that other conflicts could arise in using these categories outside the United States. Test subjects outside the United States would be unwilling, they claimed, to answer questions that many Americans might not find objectionable. A number of the pharmaceutical companies commented that in clinical studies conducted outside the United States, the Latino or Hispanic ethnicity question would render meaningless information from places such as Spain, where all subjects could be classified as Hispanic but whose cultural experiences and history may be more in alignment with France than with those of American Hispanics. Equally troubling as the Hispanic question was the lack of group specificity for the Asian category and uncertainty related to how multiracial subjects should be counted. In raising these concerns about how to identify and count Australian Aborigines, Spaniards, or Asians, these companies and organizations challenged the scientific integrity, applicability, and generalizability of the OMB categories. The lack of external validity violated a central tenet of the scientific method…

Read the entire article here.

In Memoriam: Peggy Pascoe (1954-2010)

Perspectives on History
November 2010

Estelle Freedman, Edgar E. Robinson Professor of History
Stanford University

Scholar of gender, race, and the U.S. West; 2009 winner of AHA’s William H. Dunning Prize and Joan Kelly Prize

Peggy Pascoe, the Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History and professor of ethnic studies at the University of Oregon, died at home in Eugene, Oregon, on July 23, 2010. She leaves behind an exceptional professional legacy, not only in her prize-winning scholarship on women and multicultural relations in the West, but also through the careers of the students and colleagues she mentored over the decades…

Pascoe was part way through the manuscript for her book on miscegenation law when she learned in 2005 that she had ovarian cancer. Initially she did not think that she would be able to complete the study. In 2007, at a panel held in her honor at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, several colleagues commented on her draft chapters, which helped inspire her to go back to work on the book even as she endured multiple rounds of chemotherapy. The scholarly result was stunning. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford, 2009) provides a sweeping and detailed account of the criminalization of interracial marriage and resistance to that process from the 1860s through the 1960s. It is also a superb history of the shifting meaning of “race” in American culture and the ways that gender and race are always mutually constructed. One of the most acclaimed books in U.S. social, cultural, and legal history, it received the Ellis W. Hawley and the Lawrence W. Levine Prizes from the Organization of American Historians; the John H. Dunning Prize and the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association; and the J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association…

Read the entire article here.

The Pocahontas Exception: The Exemption of American Indian Ancestry from Racial Purity Law

bepress Legal Series
Working Paper 1572
2006-08-18
47 pages

Kevin N. Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

“The Pocahontas Exception” confronts the legal existence and cultural fascination with the eponymous “Indian Grandmother.” Laws existed in many states that prohibited marriage between whites and nonwhites to prevent the “quagmire of mongrelization.” Yet, this racial protectionism, as ingrained in law, blatantly exempted Indian blood from the threat to white racial purity. In Virginia, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 made exceptions for whites of mixed descent who proudly claimed Native American ancestry from Pocahontas. This paper questions the juridical exceptions made for Native American ancestry in antimiscegenation statues, and analyzes the concomitant exemptions in contemporary social practice. With increasing numbers of Americans freely and lately claiming Native ancestry, this openness escapes the triumvirate of resistance, shame, and secrecy that regularly accompanies findings of partial African ancestry. I contend that antimiscegenation laws such as the Racial Integrity Act relegate Indians to existence only in a distant past, creating a temporal disjuncture to free Indians from a contemporary discourse of racial politics. I argue that such exemptions assess Indians as abstractions rather than practicalities, which facilitates the miscegenistic exceptionalism as demonstrated in Virginia’s antimiscegenation statute.

Table of Contents

• I. INTRODUCTION
• II. ADVOCATING INDIAN-WHITE INTERMIXTURE
  • A. Support from the Founding Fathers
  • B. Assimilation Schemes and the Dawes Allotment Act
• III. EUGENICS AND THE RACIAL INTEGRITY ACT OF 1924
  • A. The Growth of the Eugenics Movement
  • B. Fear Ingrained in Law: The Racial Integrity Act
  • C. Accommodating the Elite: Redefining the Parameters of Whiteness
• IV. THE LEGEND OF POCAHONTAS
• V. THE VANISHING INDIAN
  • A. The Indian Grandmother Complex: A Different Kind of Birth for the Nation
  • B. To the Margins of Society: The Non-Threat of Indian Blood
  • VI. CONCLUSION

Read the entire article here.

Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present

Routledge: Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures
2010-10-21
204 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-39808-4

Sarah Salih, Professor of English
University of Toronto

This study considers cultural representations of “brown” people in Jamaica and England alongside the determinations of race by statute from the Abolition era onwards. Through close readings of contemporary fictions and “histories,” Salih probes the extent to which colonial ideologies may have been underpinned by what might be called subject-constituting statutes, along with the potential for force and violence which necessarily undergird the law. The author explores the role legal and non-legal discourse plays in disciplining the brown body in pre- and post-Abolition colonial contexts, as well as how are other bodies and identities – e.g. black, white are discursively disciplined. Salih examines whether or not it’s possible to say that non-legal texts such as prose fictions are engaged in this kind of discursive disciplining, and more broadly, looks at what contemporary formulations of “mixed” identity owe to these legal or non-legal discursive formations. This study demonstrates the striking connections between historical and contemporary discourses of race and brownness and argues for a shift in the ways we think about, represent and discuss “mixed race” people.

Table of Contents

• 1: Introduction: The Mulatto in Law and Literature
• 2: Pre-Emancipation Stories of Race: Marly and The Woman of Colour
• 3: Legitimacy, Illegitimacy and Citizenship in the Nineteenth Century: Dinah Craik’s Olive [1850] and Richard Hill’s Lights and Shadows
• 4: Mulattos in the Contact Zone: Mary Seacole and Ozias Midwinter Coda: Modern Mulattos: Mona Lisa and The Crying Game
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index