Mixed Race Studies

Race (Part 1)

The Chronicle of Higher Education
Blog: Brainstorm—Ideas and culture.
2012-04-09

David Barash, Professor of Psychology
University of Washington, Seattle

Here’s a delicate subject, especially given the nationwide anguish over what appears to have been the cold-blooded, racially lubricated if not racially motivated murder of Trayvon Martin: race itself. More specifically and more delicately: whether race is a “socio-cultural construct.” My response, and one that may well disappoint and annoy many readers, regardless of their ideology (but perhaps especially my fellow travelers on the left): It is and it isn’t, but mostly isn’t. That is to say, an objective, science-based look at the subject and at its use in other contexts requires us to conclude that race is both socially constructed and biologically “real,” but probably more the latter than the former.

Of course, in the old days of racist pseudoscience, it was universally assumed that the human races were genuine biological entities, and moreover, that they were linearly arrayed with whites on top, then Asians, then blacks at the bottom. From that bizarre and altogether unscientific misuse of biology, there was, not surprisingly, a backlash that went overboard in the other direction, maintaining as a matter of faith that there is simply no such thing as human races, that they are purely an arbitrary figment of our sociocultural proclivities. Sad to say, this is arrant nonsense … just as was the earlier insistence that the human races could be evaluated in terms of “modernity,” “distance from the apes,” or simply, “degree of advancement” or “intelligence.”

If we’re going to talk about the alleged reality or unreality of human races, we need first to discuss the meaning of “race” itself. When biologists talk about races in other species, they are essentially concerned with a convenient grouping of individuals that comprise phenotypically distinguishable populations characterized by some consistent genetic differences between themselves and other, comparable populations, and that typically inhabit different geographic regions, and are therefore normally prevented from interbreeding (which was essential to the initial distinctiveness of each race in the first place). Of course, human races are all capable of interbreeding; hence, we know for certain that they are all members of one species, Homo sapiens. Moreover, we are not restricted to separate, non-overlapping (“allopatric”) populations. Nonetheless, there is no question that what are generally identified as different human races have historically been allopatric, with much of the geographic and genetic mixing being a comparatively recent phenomenon…

…When Barack Obama identifies himself similarly, only an idiot would deny him the right to make such a self-designation. Clearly the President had a choice, and thus his identification as “black” is also to some degree a socio-cultural decision: his. But equally clearly, it was made possible by the fact that his biological father was black (which is why, incidentally, the president noted that if he had a son, he would “probably look like” Trayvon). On the other hand, if Obama’s mother had reproduced with someone as Caucasian as she was, their offspring would most certainly have been Caucasian, not black. Moreover, when Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton our “first black president,” it was obvious to everyone that she was speaking allegorically: Bill Clinton is no more African-American than Trayvon Martin was Caucasian…

Read the entire article here.  Read “Playing With Fire: Race (Part 2)” here.

American Indian Identity and Blood Quantum in the 21st Century: A Critical Review

Journal of Anthropology
Volume 2011 (2011)
Article ID 549521
9 pages
DOI: 10.1155/2011/549521

Ryan W. Schmidt
Department of Anthropology
University of Montana

Identity in American Indian communities has continually been a subject of contentious debate among legal scholars, federal policy-makers, anthropologists, historians, and even within Native American society itself. As American Indians have a unique relationship with the United States, their identity has continually been redefined and reconstructed over the last century and a half. This has placed a substantial burden on definitions for legal purposes and tribal affiliation and on American Indians trying to self-identify within multiple cultural contexts. Is there an appropriate means to recognize and define just who is an American Indian? One approach has been to define identity through the use of blood quantum, a metaphorical construction for tracing individual and group ancestry. This paper will review the utility of blood quantum by examining the cultural, social, biological, and legal implications inherent in using such group membership and, further, how American Indian identity is being affected.

1. Introduction

Identity in American Indian communities and the ability to define tribal membership has continually been a subject of contentious debate. To obtain federal recognition and protection, American Indians, unlike any other American ethnic group, must constantly prove their identity, which in turn, forces them to adopt whatever Indian histories or identities are needed to convince themselves and others of their Indian identity, and thus their unique cultural heritage. Is there an appropriate means to recognize and define just what and who is an Indian? Should it be necessary for federal officials and tribes to continually reconstruct definitions to suit the present sociopolitical climate for American Indian identity? These questions need to be answered in light of American Indian identity politics, including how race serves as a basis for the exclusion or inclusion of “mixed bloods” within tribal communities and the United States society as a whole. In this context, identity has become one of the great issues of contestation in an increasingly multicultural and “multiracial” society.

One approach to answer these complex questions since initial contact between Native American tribes and European Americans has been to define identity through the use of blood quantum, a metaphorical, and increasingly physiological construction for tracing individual and group ancestry. Initially used by the federal government to classify “Indianness” during the late 1800s in the United States, many American Indian tribes have adopted the use of blood quantum to define membership in the group. This paper will explore the utility of blood quantum by examining the cultural, biological, political, and legal implications inherent through such a restricted use of group membership. In addition, blood quantum (and other genetic methods) as a way of tracing descent will be critiqued in favor of adopting a cultural-specific approach that allows inclusive membership and criteria not based upon one’s genetic and biophysical makeup. By reducing the reliance on blood quantum to define membership, American Indians can start moving away from an imposed racial past which was artificially created in the first place…

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

The Indians and the Metis: genealogical sources on Minnesota’s earliest settlers

Minnesota History Magazine
Volume 46, Number 7 (Fall 1979)
pages 286-296

Virginia Rogers

Editors Preface

GENEALOGISTS have long hesitated to do research on Minnesota’s Indian and métis or mixed-blood population. The fact that Indian and related métis peoples participated in a largely ond culture may have convinced them that few sources were available. Even historians, although aware of the existing sources, have shunned a study which appeared to them to have little value for the writing of general history. In spite of such common prejudices, institutions like the Minnesota Historical Society for a long time have been accumulating resources of real value in genealogical studies of Indians and métis.

What written records are available on people who left few written records of their own? What are the specific problems involved in doing genealogical research on Indian and métis families? How can research on individual members of the Indian and métis communities aid in understanding the culture to which they belonged? We hope that in examining the pages that follow, readers of Minnesota History, whatever their ethnic, cutural, or professional background, will be stimulated to take an increasing interest in an area of genealogical research that has been ignored too long. In the process, perhaps they will become aware of the special value of genealogical research for all students of history.

THE STUDY of ordinary individuals of the past is a fairly new interest in the United States. Generalizations about how the individual farmer or farmwife or worker lived centuries ago may have long interested people, but the facts of the individual’s life and the specifics of his familyy relationships, except in the case of the great or famous, was until recent years the province of the genealogist and the local historian…

Read the entire article here.

Real Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood [Review by Steve George]

Ethnicities
Volume 27, Number 2 (2005)
Pages 272–274

Steve George
Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland

Real Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood. By Bonita Lawrence. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. Pp. 303, bibliography, index, ISBN 0-7748-1103 -X)

The title of Lawrence’s book is as direct as it is provocative. The book’s title states the book’s purpose to examine the central and perhaps most volatile question in Aboriginal communities today: “Who is an Indian?” In 2003, Lawrence edited Strong Women Stories: Native Vision and Community Survival (Sumach Press) with Kim Anderson and in many respects this new work is a continuation of the voices heard in that book. Lawrence is a Mi’kmaq scholar whose research at Queen’s University, and more recently at York University, has concerned how “Indian/nativeness” is defined in Euro-Canadian and Native contexts, from within historical and legal paradigms as well as within native communities across Canada.

Bonita Lawrence’s work is a continuation of powerful works like Howard Adams’ Prison of Grass (1975) and Maria Campbell’s Half-Breed (1973) and more recent works by Joseph Bruchac, Bowman’s Store (Lee & Low Books, 2001) and Warren Carriou’s, Lake of the Prairies (Anchor, 2003). It has the depth of these works because we read mixed-blood peoples’ voices directly from the page. The importance of these voices lies in how each of these persons tells their stories, relates their experiences, and shares their family and community histories. Lawrence’s style of writing is easy to read while her research approach is organic in its having informants speak for themselves.

As a mixed-blood Mi’kmaw, I read this book from both a very personal level of experience as well as from an academic one, as a Masters graduate student in Folklore. In Canada the subject of mixed-blood Native people remains a controversial one from within native communities and from without, in the large urban centres across the country. Lawrence has interviewed several mixed-blood informants to tell stories that show the different kinds of experiences mixed-bloods have had in the city of Toronto and across North America. Some of these narratives involve pain, abuse, neglect, and lack of self worth, while others involve stories of empowerment, community involvement, and survival. Each one of the informants speaks from life experiences that involve a mix of acceptance and non-acceptance of their “Indian/nativeness,” both from within themselves, from their families as well as from different native communities. The responses interviewees give Lawrence are direct and bear fruit to the underreported and underwritten subject of mixed-blood Native peoples…

Read the entire review here.

“Mixed-Blood” Indians in Southern New England

TalkingFeather Radio
Blogtalk Radio
2009-07-15

The historical connections of Native Americans and African people is not a topic that is often discussed in classrooms, nor is it found in elementary, middle and high school history books. The trading that went on with Africans who sailed to this continent and Indigenous people of Mexico, the islands and parts of Central America before Columbus is often overlooked. Relationships were forged by trade and by blood for hundreds of years and yet many people do not know about this rich story. Our guest on the Talking Feather is Julieanne Jennings, who is Cheroenhaka Nottaway Native American, will talk about this history as it relates to the New England Indigenous people. For more than 15 years, she has been teaching children and adults about the history and culture of the Native people in southern New England. She currently teaches a first year program liberal arts colloquium entitled “Mixed-Blood Indians in Southern New England at Eastern Connecticut State University. Jennings is the author of several books and journal articles, and has co-authored Understanding Algonquian Indian Words and A Cultural History of the Native People of Southern New England. In 2009, she received Congressional Recognition from the United States Senate from Rhode Island’s Women of the Year Award event for cultural enrichment. Join us in this dialogue as we dispel the myths and get to the truth.

Download the episode here.

Rocky Point’s African American Past:  A Forgotten History Remembered through Historical Archaeology at the Betsey Prince Site

Long Island History Journal
Volume 22, Issue 1 (Winter 2011)
60 paragraphs

Allison Manfra McGovern
Department of Anthropology
The Graduate Center, City University of New York

North Country Road in the wilderness of Rocky Point, that was occupied during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As many as eight free people of color lived in the house at one point, and other free black households were established nearby. In this article, multiple lines of evidence are used to reconstruct the history and composition of the African American settlement at Rocky Point and the lifeways expressed at the Betsey Prince site. This analysis, which depends on an understanding of the socio-historical context of the site, emphasizes social interactions, labor, domestic activities, identity construction, and the fate of the community.

Archaeologists from the New York State Museum uncovered the foundation remains of a small house along North Country Road in Rocky Point, New York, in 1991. The house was occupied during parts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then left abandoned in the wilderness for roughly 150 years. The site was rediscovered during a cultural resources survey, performed by archaeologists for the New York State Department of Transportation, in advance of proposed highway improvements to New York State Route 25A. The small archaeological site, which consisted of a house foundation measuring 11 x 13 feet and associated archaeological deposits, was identified as the home of Betsey Prince through census data and deeds for adjacent properties.

Betsey Prince was listed as the head of a household in the 1820 Federal census. Her household was one of four comprised entirely of free people of color and located on North Country Road in Rocky Point in the early nineteenth century. The household was documented as early as 1790 (and was likely inhabited even earlier), but the occupants were variously identified as Prince, Prince Jessup, Rice Jessup, Betty Jessup, Betty or Betsey Prince, and Elizabeth Jessup in Federal census data, deeds, a tax document, and a probate inventory. In addition to the variety of names, the inhabitants and neighbors of the Betsey Prince site were racially identified with variance, as “colored,” “negro,” “black,” “mulatto,” and “mustey.” For the sake of consistency, they will be referred to here as free black people.

The archaeological site was determined eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places because it could provide information about people who lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that we know little about – free black people. The site was excavated by archaeologists because impending plans to widen New York State Route 25A would destroy it. The artifacts (stored at the New York State Museum) provide evidence of the everyday lives of the people who lived at the Betsey Prince site. Archival research aided in connecting names and identities with the site. Together, these resources provide the basis for a narrative of lifeways for a group that was marginal to history, but integral to the functioning of a rural, early American economy.

A prolonged abolition of slavery was facilitated throughout New York State by the Gradual Emancipation Act of 1799. Although the promise of freedom was made, many people of color remained legally enslaved in New York until 1827. During this time, many small and large white households held enslaved Africans, and some such households were listed near the free black settlement at Rocky Point. The presence of the free black settlement would have been conspicuous among the predominantly white communities of rural Long Island. However, they were part of a diverse non-white population, which included captive Africans and Indians, and people of color who were both recently freed and born free (on Long Island, or elsewhere and relocated to Long Island from various places, including New York City, New Jersey, Connecticut, and the Caribbean).

How black people negotiated their identities at this time is certainly difficult to understand. The variety of racial categories mentioned above suggests a lack of consistency in how people were both perceived and classified. The inconsistencies in names may point to the biases of census takers, tax assessors, and government clerks, or may be indicative of individual representation. Perhaps different names were given under different circumstances. It is therefore important to consider the role people of color played in constructing their own identities in early America, as it was not uncommon for black people to change their names more than once.

This socio-historical context is essential for interpreting the data from the Betsey Prince archaeological site. Working within a framework that recognizes racism, segregation, the complexities of identity formation, and the struggle for civil liberties will produce insight into the active lives of the site’s occupants. As such, the documents and archaeological evidence from the Betsey Prince site offer a unique opportunity to investigate identity construction through social interactions, labor, domestic activities, and gender…

Read the entire article here in HTML or PDF format.

Race, Religion, and Caste: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives

Comparative Sociology
Volume 1, Issue 2 (2002)
pages 115-126
DOI: 10.1163/156913302100418457

T. K. Oommen, Professsor Emeritus
Jawaharlal Nehru University

Although race as a biological concept has no validity, racism persists. In spite of the fact that caste is a social construct caste discrimination continues. To understand the reason for this one must trace the career of these concepts. The biological category of race subsequently came to have linguistic/philological, ethnological/cultural and political/national connotations giving birth to Nazism and fascism. Similarly, caste carried a racial connotation in that its social construction can be traced to the Hindu Doctrine of Creation as Varna implied colour. Further, both orientalist scholars and Hindu nationalists used caste and race, race and nation and even religion and race interchangeably. The divide between the fair-skinned upper caste Aryan Hindus and the dark-skinned lower caste Dravidian Hindus also implied racial differences. Therefore, the mechanical insistence on semantic purity of race and caste would adversely affect one’s comprehension of the nature of empirical reality in South Asia. While the tendency to equate caste and race in a neat and tidy vein is not sustainable, it is more difficult to eradicate caste discrimination as compared with racism not only because the two share several common characteristics, but also because caste discrimination is sanctioned by religion. Finally, it is important to remember that perceptions people hold about social reality are equally important as social fact, in successfully tackling social problems.

Afro-Mexican: A Short Study on Identity

University of Kansas
April 2009
63 pages

Ariane Rose Tulloch

Submitted to the graduate degree program in Anthropology and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master’s of Arts.

Up until the early 19th century, blacks outnumbered white Spaniards in most major Mexican cities (Vaughn 2008). Nowadays, the black population has been localized to two areas: Veracruz and the Costa Chica. This study looks at whether Afro-Mexicans in the Costa Chica region had developed a racial consciousness, and if so, to what extent. Data gathered about Afro-Mexicans was analyzed using the Minority Identity Development Model (Atkinson et al 1983) which captured the complexities of minority-majority relations in a multi-ethnic society. Not all Afro-Mexicans had developed a strong sense of Afro-Mexican identity, but instead accepted their classification into the dominant mestizo group. Others see themselves as Afro-Mexicans in their own right, possibly due to having been influenced by activist group in the U.S. and elsewhere. The latter group sees itself and others in a positive yet autonomous light, corresponding to the final stages of the Minority Identity Development Model.

Read the entire thesis here.

“Our Ancestors came from many Bloods”. Gendered Narrations of a Hybrid Nation

Lusotopie
Volume 12, Issue 1 (2005)
pages 217-232
DOI: 10.1163/176830805774719728

Isabel P.B. Fêo Rodrigues, Professor of Anthropology
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

Narratives of mixed ancestry in Cape Verde use gender as common denominator in the weaving of a Creole nation. These narratives may hide tensions, conflicts, and adversities, but they also contain elements of fusion and national cohesion. They are and have been gendered narratives, partial and selective of the elements of fusion substantiating and sustaining a Cape Verdean identity vis-à-vis the multiple symbolic and material challenges faced by this young post-colonial nation-state. In them, Cape Verde is portrayed as an exceptional African case with boundaries carved by the ocean, free from ethnic conflict, and without a pre-colonial past through which to filter present realities.

A Heritage Celebration: Event recognizes both Hispanic and Native American roots with symposium and several performances

San Marcos Daily Record
San Marcos, Texas

2011-08-12

San Marcos — San Marcos will experience a unique, two-in-one heritage celebration in a combination of two nationally recognized heritage months — Hispanic and Native American — on Saturday, Oct. 1 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos, 211 Lee Street.

A Sunday Matinee will also take place at 3 p.m. the next day at the Texas Music Theater.

“We’re bringing attention to the fact that most Hispanics in Texas have Native American ancestors and can celebrate two national heritage months,” says Dr. Mario Garza, chair of the Indigenous Cultures Institute that is producing this event. “Most Hispanics can legitimately embrace a Native American identity because they still retain much of their indigenous culture like customs, foods and even their Native language.”…

…“Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez will be one of the speakers in our Indigenous-Hispanics Symposium,” said Dr. Lydia French, managing editor of Nakum, the Institute’s online journal. “Dr. Rodriguez is one of the major figures in the historic struggle against the Arizona legislature’s anti immigrant law SB 1070 and ban on ethnic studies programs.”…

…Dr. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández and Margaret E. Cantú-Sánchez will be joining Dr. Rodriguez as presenters on the “Education: The Indigenity Challenge” panel.  Dr. Guidotti- Hernández teaches Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona and her published articles include “Reading Violence, Making Chicana Subjectivities” and “Dora the Explorer, Constructing ‘Latinidades’ and the Politics of Global Citizenship.”

Cantú-Sánchez is pursuing her doctorate degree in English at the University of Texas at San Antonio and is developing her “mestizaje” theory, which proposes that a balance of cultural and institutional philosophies of human knowledge ensures a better grasp of one’s identity…

Read the entire article here.