Mixed Race Studies

Creole Is, Creole Ain’t: Diachronic and Synchronic Attitudes toward Creole Identity in Southern Louisiana

Language in Society
Volume 29, Number 2 (June, 2000)
pages 237-258

Sylvie Dubois, Gabriel Muir Professor of French Studies
Louisiana State University

Megan Melançon, Associate Professor of English
Georgia College

Creole identity in Louisiana acquired diverse meanings for several ethnic groups during the French and Spanish regimes, before and after the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, and through the last part of the 20th century. In spite of a strong shift toward “Black” identity by many African Americans in the state, those who are fluent Creole French speakers now seem to be the repository of Louisiana Creole identity. This article presents a diachronic study of the different meanings applied to Creole identity which resulted from dramatic social, political, and economic changes. It also delimits and defines the actual attributes of Creole identity within two representative African American communities. Because of the historical and political conditions underlying Creole identity, African Americans who still identify as Creoles insist on linguistic attributes, rather than on the criterion of race, as essential characteristics of their ethnic identity.

European colonization during the 17th and 18th centuries gave rise to numerous Creole societies all over the world. In the 1869 edition of the Larousse dictionary, the French term créole referred to those born in, or native to, the local populace; but the 1929 edition depicted Creole as correctly designating only a Caucasian population—further noting that, “by way of analogy, it could be used to refer to non-Caucasian peoples of current or former colonies” (Dominguez 1986:15). A recent English dictionary (American Heritage 1992) gives five definitions of the word créole which pertain to identity: (a) A person of European descent born in the West Indies or Spanish America; (b) a person descended from or culturally related to the original French settlers of the southern US, especially Louisiana; (c) a person descended from or culturally related to the Spanish and Portuguese settlers of the Gulf States; (d) a person of mixed Black and European ancestry who speaks a creolized language; and (e) a Black slave born in the Americas, as opposed to one brought from Africa. In Louisiana, “the term came early to include any native, of French or Spanish descent by either parent, whose non-alliance with the slave race entitled him to social rank. Later, the term was adopted…

Islands and autochthons: Coloureds, space and belonging in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe (Part 1)

Journal of Social Archaeology
Volume 4, Number 3 (October 2004)
pages 405-426
DOI: 10.1177/1469605304046423

Julia Katherine Seirlis
Department of Anthropology
University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

This article, the first in a two-part series, examines the ramifications of the complex relationships between race and space for definitions of the nation and national identity in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe. Most generally, the workings of race and space helped polarize Rhodesia and Zimbabwe between what was set up as ‘white’ and ‘black’, and limit the struggle for power and claims on belonging to those two poles. Racial identity was inscribed into spatial sensibilities and organization so that white space (the city) functioned as a series of islands and black space (the countryside) activated organic assertions of autochthony. More specifically, race and space informed the creation of an intermediate racial category, ‘Coloured’, with no substantive claim to a ‘real’ or ‘full’ identity and with no authoritative claim to the physical soil of the country.

Read or purchase the article here.

Power, Perception, and Interracial Sex: Former Slaves Recall a Multiracial South

The Journal of Southern History
Volume 71, Number 3 (August, 2005)
pages 559-588

Fay A. Yarbrough, Associate Professor of History
University of Oklahoma

My father’s name wuz Robert Stewart. He wuz a white man. My mother wuz named Ann. She wuz part Indian. Her father wuz a Choctaw Indian and her mother a black woman—a slave.” This is how Charley Stewart, a former slave, described his lineage. Stewart was not alone in claiming parents and grandparents of mixed racial heritage; there are many references to mixed-race ancestry in the interviews of ex-slaves collected by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s. The interviews also contain candid observations about interracial unions in general and about how people of African descent understood relationships that crossed social. legal, and racial boundaries. The former slaves described various combinations of racial unions and their ramifications for the participants, families, fellow slaves, and offspring. This article will consider the words of ex-slaves, using the WPA collection and a selection of biographies and autobiographies of slaves, and will re-create descriptions of and attitudes toward interracial sex during the nineteenth century. These accounts…

A Pedigree Study of Amerindian Crosses in Canada

The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
Volume 58, (July – December, 1928)
pages 511-532

R. Ruggles Gates
Department of Anthropology
Harvard University

This paper is an attempt to apply genetical methods to the study of inter-racial crossing. In the anthropological studies which have hitherto been made of racial crosses, masses of anthropometric measurements have frequently been taken, which are capable, when analysed, of furnishing valuable evidence on many points. Rut it is seldom possible to extract from them the kind of evidence the geneticist wishes to have concerning the inheritance of individual character-differences. Anthropological measurements are quantitative and require statistical treatment. The inheritance of sizes and especially of shapes is the most difficult field in genetics, and much has still to be learned from experiments with animals and plants before it can be clearly applied to man. Such features as the colour of skin, eyes, and hair, or shape of the hair in cross-section, while often presenting qualitative racial differences, also require measurements for a complete analysis of their inheritance, since intermediate grades usually occur in the hybrids. But they have the advantage that the extreme conditions at least are easily recognizable as qualitatively distinct, while this may not be evident with a mean difference in, for instance, stature or cephalic index.

The difficulties of applying the genetical pedigree method to haphazard human matings are very great. Nevertheless, it is so important that this method should be taken up by anthropologists, in addition to the traditional biometric methods of studying racial differences, that I venture to put forward these necessarily very incomplete results. In the biometrical method, the individual is measured as one of a population, but no sufficient account is taken of his relation to others. The purpose of the genetical method is to trace individual pedigrees, and so follow the inheritance of racial differences through successive generations. We shall never have an adequate knowledge of human racial inheritance until this has been done on a large scale with crosses between different races in various parts of the world.

This paper contains an account of observations on inter-racial crosses between whites and Indians in Canada. A single pedigree with various interlacing branches has been followed, and the evidence concerning the inheritance especially of skin colour and eye colour has been made as complete as the circumstances would permit…

Negro Genius—Reviewed work(s):

The Journal of American Folklore
Volume 18, Number 71 (October-December, 1905)
pages 319-322

NEGRO GENIUS. As a dispatch from Washington, D. C., the “Evening Transcript” (Boston, Mass.) of February 18, 1905, published the following concerning the investigations of Mr. Daniel Murray: –

“Daniel Murray, for many years an assistant in the Library of Congress, is preparing a historical review of the contributions of the colored race to the literature of the world, with a complete bibliography relating to that subject. Public attention was sharply called to this question of the intellectual capacity of the Negro six years ago by Booker T. Washington and other colored men of prominence, when the United States government was preparing an exhibit for the Exposition at Paris, 1900. Mr. Washington urged that advantage be taken of the opportunity to show what the colored race had contributed to the world’s literature. The authorities consenting, Mr. Putnam, librarian of Congress, detailed Mr. Murray to make a list of all books and pamphlets written and published by authors identified with the colored race. As only four months intervened from the detail to the opening, the list was far from complete and very deficient in full historical information which has now been supplied.

“Mr. Murray’s work was practically begun about twenty-five years ago, when he commenced to gather material for such a work after reading Grégoire’s ‘Inquiry concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties and Literature of Negroes and Mulattoes, Quadroons, etc.,’ 1810. Grégoire formed in 1790, in Paris, a society called ‘Friends of the Blacks,’ designed to secure their emancipation in the French colonies. Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were members. ‘One of the aims of this society,’ said Mr. Murray, ‘was to gather evidence of capacity on the part of Negroes and mulattoes, the same being designed to reinforce the argument the society intended to present to the French convention, to induce it to grant full equality to the mulattoes, etc., in the colonies. Benjamin Banneker, a mulatto, born in Maryland, to whom credit is due for saving to the American people L’Enfant’s original plan of the city of Washington when L’Enfant broke with the commissioners and took away his plans, which he later sold to Governor Woodward for laying out the city of Detroit, was an intimate friend of Jefferson’s and was often held up as evidence that no mulatto should be a slave. Banneker exhibited mathematical knowledge, and compiled in 1792 an almanac which Jefferson sent to the Anti-Slavery Society in Paris to support his view that the mulatto was the equal of the white man. Jefferson had high regard for Banneker and formally invited him to be his guest at Monticello, and in other ways treated him as an equal.

“‘In the same spirit animating Grégoire, and for the same purpose, to show to the world that the colored race, under which head I include all not white or who have a strain of African blood, is entitled to greater credit than is now accorded it by the American people, I have prosecuted my researches. I claim for the colored race whatever credit of an intellectual character a Negro, mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon has won in the world of letters, and believe a fair examination of the evidence will remove no little prejudice against African blood. It has generally been accepted by scholars that ” Phillis Wheatley’s Poems,” 1773, was the first book by a Negro to display unusual intelligence and win recognition from the Caucasian. But this is not so. Beginning with Alexander the Great and his black general, Clitus, I have patiently gathered the facts from authentic sources of every highly creditable act by a Negro, mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon in the forum of letters or the polite arts…

Read the entire article here.

Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History

Rutgers University Press
2012-03-15
368 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-5255-2
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-5254-5

Keith Wailoo, Townsend Martin Professor of History and Public Affairs
Princeton University

Alondra Nelson, Associate Professor of Sociology
Columbia University

Catherine Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology; Faculty Associate
Institute for Health
Rutgers University

Our genetic markers have come to be regarded as portals to the past. Analysis of these markers is increasingly used to tell the story of human migration; to investigate and judge issues of social membership and kinship; to rewrite history and collective memory; to right past wrongs and to arbitrate legal claims and human rights controversies; and to open new thinking about health and well-being. At the same time, in many societies genetic evidence is being called upon to repair the racial past and to transform scholarly and popular opinion about the “nature” of identity in the present.

Genetics and the Unsettled Past considers the alignment of genetic science with commercial genealogy, with legal and forensic developments, and with pharmaceutical innovation to examine how these trends lend renewed authority to biological understandings of race and history.

This unique collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to explore the emerging and often contested connections among race, DNA, and history. Written for a general audience, the book’s essays touch upon a variety of topics, including the rise and implications of DNA in genealogy, law, and other fields; the cultural and political uses and misuses of genetic information; the way in which DNA testing is reshaping understandings of group identity for French Canadians, Native Americans, South Africans, and many others within and across cultural and national boundaries; and the sweeping implications of genetics for society today.

In this interview for Dalton Conley’s book, You May Ask Yourself, Alondra Nelson describes her research on genetic testing and how it is changing the way people think about race.

To Die in this Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965

Duke University Press
1998
336 pages
11 b&w photographs, 2 maps
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-2098-2
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-2084-5

Jeffrey L. Gould, Rudy Professor of History
Indiana University, Bloomington

Challenging the widely held belief that Nicaragua has been ethnically homogeneous since the nineteenth century, To Die in This Way reveals the continued existence and importance of an officially “forgotten” indigenous culture. Jeffrey L. Gould argues that mestizaje—a cultural homogeneity that has been hailed as a cornerstone of Nicaraguan national identity—involved a decades-long process of myth building.

Through interviews with indigenous peoples and records of the elite discourse that suppressed the expression of cultural differences and rationalized the destruction of Indian communities, Gould tells a story of cultural loss. Land expropriation and coerced labor led to cultural alienation that shamed the indigenous population into shedding their language, religion, and dress. Beginning with the 1870s, Gould historicizes the forces that prompted a collective movement away from a strong identification with indigenous cultural heritage to an “acceptance” of a national mixed-race identity.

By recovering a significant part of Nicaraguan history that has been excised from the national memory, To Die in This Way critiques the enterprise of third world nation-building and thus marks an important step in the study of Latin American culture and history that will also interest anthropologists and students of social and cultural historians.

Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil

Rutgers University Press
1997-10-01
192 pages
20 b & w photos
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-2364-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8135-2365-1

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

This groundbreaking ethnographic study analyzes everyday practices that leave intact the myth that Brazil is a racial democracy.

In Racism in a Racial Democracy, France Winddance Twine asks why Brazilians, particularly Afro-Brazilians, continue to have faith in Brazil’s “racial democracy” in the face of pervasive racism in all spheres of Brazilian life. Through a detailed ethnography, Twine provides a cultural analysis of the everyday discursive and material practices that sustain and naturalize white supremacy.

This is the first ethnographic study of racism in southeastern Brazil to place the practices of upwardly mobile Afro-Brazilians at the center of analysis. Based on extensive field research and more than fifty life histories with Afro- and Euro-Brazilians, this book analyzes how Brazilians conceptualize and respond to racial disparities. Twine illuminates the obstacles Brazilian activists face when attempting to generate grassroots support for an antiracist movement among the majority of working class Brazilians. Anyone interested in racism and antiracism in Latin America will find this book compelling.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Vasalia: The Research Site
• 3. Mapping the Ideological Terrain of Racism: The Social, Sexual, Socioeconomic, and Semiotic Contours
• 4. Discourses in Defense of the Racial Democracy
• 5. Embranquecimento: Aesthetic Ideals and Resistance to Mestiçagem
• 6. Memory: White Inflation and Willful Forgetting
• 7. Strategic Responses to Racism: Preserving White Supremacy
• Appendix A: Interview Schedule
• Appendix B: Biographical Data on Interviewees
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index

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.

Not black, not white: just the opposite. Culture, race and national identity in Brazil

Centre for Brazilian Studies
University of Oxford
Working Paper Number CBS-47-03
2003
52 pages

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo, Brazil

The search to define Brazil and Brazilians by colour, more specifically by a miscegenation so extreme that it appears exceptional, is longstanding. Mid-nineteenth century naturalists that visited the country from Europe were astounded by the lush vegetation, the wide variety of fauna, and another phenomena – a type of unprecedented laboratory of humans and their various races. Local intellectuals also focused on the racial theme, but more as explanation for their perceptions of national degeneration than racial mixture. It is from these origins that debate reappears as an official model in the 1930s and persists until today in notions about what makes Brazil unique. After an introduction of this historical context, and rejecting the myth of racial democracy, this paper reflects on the impasses of race anew and from a different perspective attuned to contemporary problems. The central question that remains is whether race is a social and economic variable or whether Brazilian identities are dispersed across a wide rainbow of color. The goal of this paper is to use recent census and 1996 PNAD data that reveal 136 categories for Brazilians to identify several specific characteristics of this debate. This analysis implies a more political discussion of the limits of citizenship in a country where the color line is always viewed subjectively and contextually. The maxim of the sixteenth century Jesuit, Antonil, that “Brazil is hell for negros, purgatory for whites, and paradise for mulattos” still appears to resonate.

Read the entire paper here.