Mixed Race Studies

Craniometric Study of the Cape Coloured Population

Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa
Volume 33, Issue 1 (1951)
pages 29-51
DOI: 10.1080/00359195109519876

J. A. Keena
Department of Anatomy
University of Cape Town

(With Plate XI and three Text-figures.)
(Read November 16, 1949.)

The Cape Coloured people inhabit Cape Town, the Cape Peninsula and the western corner of the Cape Province. Their emergence aa a distinct ethnic group is a matter of history, covering a time-period of three centuries. The basis of the Cape Coloured group is the original Hottentot population, and an early admixture occurred between the incoming European settlers and the Hottentots. The Hottentot people at that time were already a somewhat mixed racial group, having absorbed a good deal of Bushman blood (Maingard, 1932). The Bushman element in the genetic make-up of the Cape Coloured will be seen to be an important factor.

A further admixture occurred when the Dutch East India Company introduced slaves into the colony. Some of the slaves came from population groups in the far East, such as Java, or the nearer East, such as Ceylon and India, and they brought into the Cape Coloured group elements of the south-eastern races of Asia. Other slaves came from the east coast of Africa along the trade route of the Dutch East India Company, and these brought a negro clement into the racial make-up of the Cape Coloured. It should be noted, however, that this is not the same as the West African negro element which has entered into the formation of the mixed racial groups of the American continent. The East African negro populations contain a considerable admixture of Hamitic stock which differentiates them from the West African negro communities.

In the main, therefore, the Cape Coloured people contain a mixture of Hottentot, Bushman, European, Asiatic and Negro racial elements, the crossings between these major subdivisions of mankind being well established and having occurred within a comparatively short time-period. To such…

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Talking About Brazil with Lilia Schwarcz

The New York Review of Books
2010-08-17

Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor of History
Harvard University

On a recent trip to Brazil, I struck up a conversation with Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, one of Brazil’s finest historians and anthropologists. The talk turned to the two subjects she has studied most—racism and national identity.
 
I first visited Brazil in 1989, when hyperinflation had nearly paralyzed the economy, favelas erupted in shoot-outs, and Lula, a hero of the union movement but still unsure of himself as a politician, was undertaking his first campaign for the presidency. I found it all fascinating and frightening. On my second trip, a few years later, I met Lilia and her husband, Luiz Schwarcz, who was beginning to build the company he had founded, Companhia das Letras, into one of the finest publishing houses in Latin America. They treated me to a day so packed with Braziliana that I remember it as one of the happiest experiences of my life: in the morning a stroll with their children through São Paulo’s main park, where families of all shades of color were picnicking and playing in dazzling sunlight; lunch, a tour of Brazilian specialties undreamt of in my culinary philosophy (but no pig’s ears or tails, it not being feijoada day); an international soccer match (Brazil beat Venezuela, and the stands exploded with joy); then countless caipirinhas and a cabaret-concert by Caetano Veloso at his most lyrical and politically provocative…

Since then I have never stopped marveling at the energy and originality of Brazilian culture. But I don’t pretend to understand it, all the more so as it is constantly changing, and I can’t speak Portuguese. I can only ask questions in English and strain to grasp the answers. Has the myth of Brazil as a “sleeping giant” turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy? “He has awoken,” people say today. The economy is booming, health services expanding, literacy improving. There are also prophecies of doom, because Brazil’s economic history looks like cycles of boom and bust imposed on centuries of slavery and pauperization. Still, Lula is completing a second and final term as president. Whatever Brazilians may think of his newly assertive foreign policy, which includes cultivating friendly relations with Iran (most of them don’t seem to be interested in it), they generally agree that he has managed the economy well and has done a great deal to improve the lot of the poor. Lula’s term will end in October, and he has thrown his support behind Dilma Rousseff, his former chief of staff, whose chances of winning are much bolstered by Lula’s own popularity. The first debate of the new presidential campaign, which took place on August 5, was a dignified affair—an indication, I was told, that democracy is healthy and the days of military coups are over. Now foreigners are asking new questions about the character of this new great power. I directed some of the FAQs at Lilia…

…RD: Yes, like many New Yorkers, I have moments of fear when I get off the subway at the wrong station or wander too far from 125th Street. But when I visit Brazil, I like to think I am in a country that is coping successfully with its history of racism. Could Brazil evolve into a multi-nuanced mestizo society like the one imagined by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre?
 
LMS: Let me first ask you Bob, do you think of Obama as a “black President”? I am asking this question, because in Brazil the definition of color depends on the context, the moment and the temperament of the person who asks the question and responds to it.
 
RD: Ask any American, ask Obama himself, the answer will certainly be that he is black. In the US, despite the many varieties of skin color, we do not have a multi-nuanced notion of race. You are black or you are white or you are something not closely linked to color such as Chinese, Hispanic.
 
LMS: In Brazil, you are what you describe yourself to be. Officially we have five different colors—black, white, yellow, indigenous, and pardo (meaning “brown,” “brownish,” or “gray-brown”), but in reality, as research has demonstrated, we have more than 130 colors. Brazilians like to describe their spectrum of colors as a rainbow and we also think that color is a flexible way of categorizing people. For several years, I have been studying a soccer game called “Pretos X Brancos” (Blacks against whites), which takes place in a favela of São Paulo, called Heliópolis. In theory, it pits eleven white players against eleven black players. But, every year they change colors like they change socks or shirts—one year a player will choose to play for one team, the next year for the other, with the explanation that, “I feel more black,” or “I feel more white.” Also, in Brazil, if a person gets rich, he gets whiter. I recently talked with a dentist in Minas Gerais. As he is becoming old, his hair has turned white, and he is very well recognized in his little town. He started smoking cigars, joined the local Rotary Club, and said to me: “When I was black my life was really difficult.” So one can see how being white even nowadays is a powerful symbol. Here we have two sides of the same picture: on the one hand, identity is flexible; on the other hand, whiteness is ultimately what some people aspire to. But one aspect is common, the idea that you can manipulate your color and race…

Read the entire interview here.

The Spectacle of the Races: Scientists, Institutions, and the Race Question in Brazil, 1870-1930

Hill and Wang (an imprint of MacMillan)
September 1999
224 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
ISBN: 978-0-8090-8789-1, ISBN10: 0-8090-8789-8

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

Translated by Leland Guyer, Professor of Hispanic Studies
Macalester University, St. Paul, Minnesota

A provocative analysis of racial identity and nationhood.

“We are a half-breed country . . . We are half-breeds, if not in our blood, then at least in our souls.” With these words, the literary critic Silvio Romero summed up the impression of Brazil a century ago as a “festival of colors.” The spectacle of a mixed-race society in a world that prized racial purity was horrifying to European travelers as well as to Brazil’s intellectuals, who were soon crying out for “one hope, one solution: the whitening of the population within one century.”

But however attractive European notions of racial superiority might have been to Brazil’s elite, they were not easily adapted into the Brazilian context. In The Spectacle of the Races, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, a leading cultural anthropologist and historian, shows how Brazil’s philosophers, politicians, and scientists gratefully accepted social Darwinist ideas about innate differences among the races yet could not condemn the miscegenation that had so long been an essential feature of Brazilian society-and was at the very heart of a new state-building project as the country modernized. Schwarcz shows how the work of these “men of science” became crucial to the development and survival of Brazil’s basic national structures, affecting the country’s destiny in ways that still apply today, when race remains the basis of Brazil’s self-image.

The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference

University of California Press
June 2011
328 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520270312
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520270305
Adobe PDF E-Book ISBN: 9780520950146
ePUB Format ISBN: 9780520950146

Ann Morning, Associate Professor of Sociology
New York University

What do Americans think “race” means? What determines one’s race—appearance, ancestry, genes, or culture? How do education, government, and business influence our views on race? To unravel these complex questions, Ann Morning takes a close look at how scientists are influencing ideas about race through teaching and textbooks. Drawing from in-depth interviews with biologists, anthropologists, and undergraduates, Morning explores different conceptions of race—finding for example, that while many sociologists now assume that race is a social invention or “construct,” anthropologists and biologists are far from such a consensus. She discusses powerful new genetic accounts of race, and considers how corporations and the government use scientific research—for example, in designing DNA ancestry tests or census questionnaires—in ways that often reinforce the idea that race is biologically determined. Widening the debate about race beyond the pages of scholarly journals, The Nature of Race dissects competing definitions in straightforward language to reveal the logic and assumptions underpinning today’s claims about human difference.

Manufacturing citizenship: Metapragmatic framings of language competencies in media images of mixed race men in South Korea

Discourse & Society
Volume 22, Number 4 (July 2011)
pagesw 440-457
DOI: 10.1177/0957926510395834

Adrienne Lo, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Jenna Kim
Department of Educational Psychology
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

This article examines how discourses of linguistic (in)competency regiment productions of citizenship in the South Korean popular media. Through an analysis of newspaper articles and television programs, we investigate how depictions of language competency become key resources for locating individuals within genealogies of kinship and chronotopic figures of personhood. In some cases, the speech of these celebrities associates them with imaginings of their backwards, low-class Korean kin, the Japanese colonial period, and American military presence, while in other cases, their language is associated with the 21st-century ideal of the modern, elite, globetrotting neoliberal subject. This analysis demonstrates how competence is read in relation to changing notions of citizenship in the new ‘multicultural’ Korea as these men are differentially positioned between multiple raced, classed, and gendered imaginings of Whiteness and Koreanness. More generally, we argue that understandings of linguistic competence are social productions, rather than reflections of language ability.

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The Jackson Whites

The New Yorker
1938-09-17
page 29

George Weller

REPORTER AT LARGE about the Jackson Whites; history and origin of a primitive race living in the Ramapo Mountains. They are a mixture of three races, the white, the Negro, & the American Indians. Next to being an Indian, the greatest point of distinction for the Jackson White is to be an albino. The Ramapos have several entire families of albinos. The queen of the albinos was Nellie Mann, who in the late 1890’s travelled with the Barnum & Bailey sideshow, billed as a wild girl captured in the Australian bush. Mentions the van Dunks an albino family; the de Frees family which has branches all over the Ramapos, and Uncle Willie de Frees, a patriarch of the Jackson Whites and the only surving doctor

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Oreo, Topdeck and Eminem: Hybrid identities and global media flows

International Journal of Cultural Studies
Volume 14, Nubmer 2 (March 2011)
pages 153-172
DOI: 10.1177/1367877910387971

Jane Stadler, Senior Lecturer in Film and Media Studies
University of Queensland, Australia

The slang terms Oreo (someone who looks black but acts white) and Topdeck (someone who looks white but acts black) draw on the language of popular culture to signify racial hybridity, superseding slurs such as ‘black honkie’ and ‘wigger’. Using the terms Oreo and Topdeck to frame the analysis, this article investigates how identity politics finds expression in language, youth media and popular culture. It questions how global media flows affect conceptions of black masculinity by contrasting cinematic representations of African-Americans and black Africans in Shaft and the South African film Hijack Stories, and by examining class, ethnicity and rap culture in 8 Mile. I argue that, as South African media culture reflexively reworks messages about black identities, it produces terminology and texts that neither simply reinforce nor resist racial stereotypes, but legitimate the diversification of blackness by making cultural transition and difference visible.

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Negotiating Honor: Women and Slavery in Caracas, 1750-1854

University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
May 2011
214 pages

Sue E. Taylor

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History

This study examines three interrelated groups—female slaves, female slave owners, and free women of African heritage—living in the city and state of Caracas, Venezuela from the middle of the eighteenth through the middle of the nineteenth centuries in order to improve our historical understanding of gender and slavery. Venezuela represented the largest and longest lasting slave-owning regime in Spanish South America. Slavery, as a system of labor, was an integral part of colonial Venezuelan society and affected all segments of the populace. Understanding gender relations within slavery is crucial to understanding the dynamics of gender, power, race, and sexuality in the society as a whole. Women of Spanish, African, and mixed descent were involved in and affected by slavery.

Each group of women had a concept of what honor meant for them and each sought to preserve honor by demanding fair and humane treatment, to be treated with respect and dignity, and to protect their reputations. They also expected those people who had control over them to behave with honor. Sometimes honor, as seen in the cases and as demanded by slave and free black women, corresponded to traditional concepts of honor as birthright as defined by elite members of society and other times not. In other examples, women of color used honor along the lines of Stewart’s concept of honor as the entitlement of treatment as a worthwhile person. By looking beyond honor as birthright, the women in my study also invoked honor in their expectation that they be treated with dignity and respect and be able to preserve their reputations in society and with their peers. Slave owners, on the other hand, were sensitive to accusations of being overly harsh in their treatment of their human possessions. Their good reputation required both paternalism and firm control. Slave litigants tested the boundaries of appropriate coercion and restraint in their suits against abusive or unreasonable slave owners. They also showed a sophisticated understanding of legal codes and institutions.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables
• Introduction
  • Honor, women, and slavery
  • Historiography
  • Literature on gender and slave women
  • Literature on Honor
  • Honor in Latin America
  • Methodology and Sources
  • Organization of Chapters
• Part I: Redefining Honor
  • Chapter 2: Mistreatment as an indicator of dishonor
    • Protecting honor through the court
    • Conclusion
  • Chapter 3: Redefining Sexual Honor: Broken Promises and Respectable Work
    • Broken Promises
    • Respectable Work and Honor
    • Conclusion
• Part II: The slave family
  • Chapter 4: Slave and free black families as seen through Church documentation
    • The Parish of San Pablo
    • Marriage
    • Baptisms
    • Matriculas
  • Chapter 5: Preserving the Family
    • Children and Childhood
    • Enslaved Children: Achieving Freedom
    • The death of an owner
    • Marriage and Honor
    • Families and use of the law
• Part III: Slavery, freedom, and emancipation in the post-independence Liberal State
  • Chapter 6: Slavery and Independence
    • Venezuela moves toward revolution
    • The Junta de Secuestros
    • Revolution, slaves, and free blacks
    • Slavery in the republic of Venezuela
    • Freedom in the post-independence state
    • Conclusion
  • Chapter 7: Conclusion
• Bibliography

List of Tables

• Table 1: Slave and Free Black Marriages, San Pablo Parish
• Table 2: Slave Marriages
• Table 3: Free Black and slave/manumiso baptisms by year
• Table 4: Slave and Manumiso Baptisms
• Table 5: Slave and manumiso baptisms 1752-1852 by gender and status
• Table 6: Godparents
• Table 7: Heads of Household by race & marital status
• Table 8: Single heads of household
• Table 9: Slave Ownership
• Table 10: Slave Distribution
• Table 11: Slave Statistics
• Table 12: Overview of San Pablo Parish

Chapter 1: Introduction

Venezuela represented the largest and longest lasting slave-owning regime in Spanish South America. Slavery, as a system of labor, was an integral part of colonial Venezuelan society and affected all segments of the populace. Understanding gender relations within slavery is crucial to understanding the dynamics of gender, power, race, and sexuality in the society as a whole. Women of Spanish, African, and mixed descent were involved in and affected by slavery.

My study examines three interrelated groups—female slaves, female slave owners, and free women of African heritage—living in the city and state of Caracas, Venezuela from the middle of the eighteenth through the middle of the nineteenth centuries in order to improve our historical understanding of gender and slavery. This study aids in our understanding of gender and power relations within late colonial Venezuela and beyond, and will contribute to our knowledge of slavery in Latin America more broadly. The intersection of power, gender, race, and sexuality is especially important to this study. By power, I mean the socially sanctioned coercion of one category of person over another that permitted domination of masters over slaves, men over women, etc. Gender refers to socially constructed assumptions regarding behaviors, values, and societal roles assigned to men and women; it serves as a lens through which we can study the experiences and actions of historical actors. How power was mediated between masters and slaves and men and women, including female slave owners is a central concern of this study…

…Winthrop Wright’s monograph on race and class in Venezuela studies the changes in racial attitudes from the colonial period through the first half of the twentieth-century. Wright argues that the cash crop economy and resultant labor arrangements determined the nature of Venezuela’s colonial two-tiered society. The nature of colonial society in Venezuela—relatively under-populated, rural, at the fringe of the empire, with a majority of the population of African descent – mandated racial mixing, according to Wright. However, because miscegenation did not break down the barriers between the elite and the lower classes, race became a “systemic factor in the division of colonial society into distinct castes.” This colonial order persisted until black and mixed race troops were included in the independence movement.

A useful gender study that transcends race and class boundaries is Verena Stolcke’s (Martinez-Alier) 1974 monograph, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba. She uses marriage, specifically deviations from the norm, as a lens to assess nineteenth-century Cuban society. Stolcke examines cases of parents opposed to their child’s marriage, cases of elopement, and instances of interracial marriage, arguing that these deviations not only highlight conflicts within the system, but more importantly, make the norms even more apparent. This book deals specifically with interracial marriage within a slave-owning society. The fact that a large portion of the Cuban population were slaves, ex-slaves, or descendants of slaves is crucial to her argument. Her work raises important issues to colonial Cuban society and gender that are applicable to my case.

Finally, my study examines free African and mixed-race women living during the era of slavery to discover how their lives, occupations, opportunities, religious practices, and family relationships may have differed from those of their enslaved counterparts. Because slavery continued to expand in Venezuela through the end of the eighteenth century, the free population of color was sizeable, numbering nearly 200,000 free people of color, or forty-six percent of the population, by the end of the century…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Cambridge University Press (available in the United States at University of Michigan Press here.)
August 1974
224 pages
216 x 140 mm
Paperback ISBN: 9780521098465

Verena Martinez-Alier (a.k.a. Verena Stolcke), Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology
Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona

An analysis of marriage patterns in nineteenth-century Cuba, a society with a large black population the majority of which was held in slavery but which also included considerable numbers of freedmen. Dr Martinez-Alier uses as her main source of evidence the records in Havana of administrative and judicial proceedings of cases in which parents opposed a marriage, of cases involving elopement, and of cases of interracial marriage. Dr Martinez-Alier develops a model of the relation between sexual values and social inequality. She considers the importance of the value of virginity in supporting the hierarchy of Cuban society, based on ascription rather than achievement. As a consequence of the high evaluation of virginity, elopement was often a successful means of overcoming parental dissent to an unequal marriage. However, in cases of interracial elopement, the seduced coloured woman had little chance of redress through marriage. In this battle of the sexes and the races, the free coloured women and men played roles and acquired values which explain why matrifocality became characteristic of black free families.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Part I. Interracial Marriage:
  • 1. Intermarriage and family honour
  • 2. Intermarriage and politics
  • 3. Intermarriage and Catholic doctrine
  • 4. The white man’s view
  • 5. Colour as a symbol of social status
  • 6. Intraracial marriage
• Part II. Honour and Class:
  • 7. Elopement and seduction
  • 8. Conclusion: Some analytical comparisons.

Read the introduction here.

…Nineteenth-century Cuba cannot be treated as a historical and geographical isolate. Political factors outside Cuba were significant in shaping interracial marriage policy. The cultural tradition of Spain which during three centuries had espoused ‘purity of blood’ as the essential requisite of Spanishness must also be taken into consideration. Racism antedates slavery in the Americas and, as W. Jordan has proposed, the question would be to explain why African negroes (and not for instance the American Indians) were enslaved in the first place. To establish, therefore, a direct causal link between slavery as a highly exploitative system of production and racism would be too simple…

The New Face of America: How the Emerging Multiracial, Multiethnic Majority is Changing the United States

Praeger Publishers
May 2013
195 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-313-38569-8
eBook ISBN: 978-0-313-38570-4

Eric J. Bailey, Professor of Anthropology and Public Health
East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina

This unique and important book investigates what it means to be multiracial and/or multiethnic in the United States, examining the issues involved from personal, societal, and cultural perspectives.

The number of Americans who identify themselves as belonging to more than one race has gone up 33 percent since 2000. But what does it mean to identify oneself as multiracial? How does it impact such basics as race relations, health care, and politics? Equally important, what does this burgeoning population mean for U.S. businesses and institutions?

More and more, the idea of America as a melting pot is becoming a reality. Written from the perspective of multiracial citizens, The New Face of America: How the Emerging Multiracial, Multiethnic Majority is Changing the United States brings to light the values, beliefs, opinions, and patterns among these populations. It assesses group identity and social recognition by others, and it communicates how multiracial individuals experience America’s reaction to their increasing numbers.

Comprehensive and far-reaching, this thoughtful compendium covers the cultural history of multiracials in America. It looks at multiracial families today, at rural and urban multiracial populations, and at multiracial physical features, health disparities, bone and marrow transplant issues, adoption matters, as well as multiracial issues in other countries. Multiracial entertainers, athletes, and politicians are considered, as well. Among the book’s most important topics is multiracial health and health care disparity. Finally, the book makes clear how America’s current majority institutions, organizations, and corporations must change their relationship with multiracial and multiethnic populations if they wish to remain viable and competitive.