Mixed Race Studies

Mediating Blackness: Afro Puerto Rican Women and Popular Culture

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
2011-06-14
145 pages

Maritza Quiñones-Rivera

A Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communications in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In my dissertation I discuss how blackness, femaleness and Puerto Ricanness (national identity) is presented in commercial media in Puerto Rico. National identity, no matter how differently defined, is often constructed through claims to heritage, “roots,” tradition, and descent. In the western world, these claims, almost inevitably allude to questions of “race.” In Puerto Rico, it is the mixture of the Spanish, the Taíno Indian, and the African, which come to epitomize the racial/traditional stock out of which “the nation” is constructed, defended, and naturalized. This mixture is often represented by images, statues, murals across the island that display the three racialized representatives, as the predecessors of the modern, racially mixed Puerto Rican people. In their portrayals of black women, figures as Mama Inés (the mammy) and fritoleras (women who cook and sell codfish fritters), Caribbean Negras (Black Caribbean women) contemporary media draw upon familiar representations to make black women bodies intelligible to Puerto Rican audiences. In this dissertation I argue that black women are challenging these images as sites for mediating blackness, femaleness, and Puerto Ricanness where hegemony and resistance are dialectical. I integrate a text-based analysis of media images with an audience ethnographic study to fully explore these processes of racial and gender representation. Ultimately, my project is to detail the ways in which Black women respond to folklorized representations and mediate their Blackness by adopting the cultural identity of Trigueñidad in order to establish a respectful place for themselves within the Puerto Rican national identity. The contributions from the participants of my audience ethnography, as well as my own experiences as a Trigueña woman, demonstrate how Black women are contesting local representations and practices that have folklorized their bodies. The women who form part of this study also responded to the pressures of a nation whose official stance is that race and racism do not exist. In addition, I present global and local forces—and in particular commercial media—as means for creating contemporary Black identities that speak to a global economy. By placing media images in dialogue with the lived experiences of Black-Puerto Rican women, my research addresses the multiple ways in which Black identities are (re)constituted vis-à-vis these forces.

CHAPTER 1 “MISSING IN ACTION” RACE, GENDER AND PUERTO RICAN COMMERCIALIZ MEDIA RESEARCH LANDSCAPE

Media and popular culture are powerful venues in which women assert and communicate national and social identities.1 In this light, I contend that Black Puerto Rican women mediate their Blackness by challenging folklorized representations of themselves that are perpetuated in local commercial media and advertising. In the face of a society whose media presents “race” as part of the nation’s past, a fokloric identity, many women adopt a new language of Trigueñidad in order to find a place for themselves within the national landscape. Before I begin this line of research, it is vital to first review representations of race and gender in commercial television and other media in the island…

…Theoretical Framework

Overall, the process of mediating blackness in Puerto Rico is one caught in the dual tensions between the local media‘s inscriptions of black women as folklorized on the one hand, and the influences of U.S. popular culture and additional transnational media on the other. What is crucial here is the understanding that media messages and their representations do not work in a vacuum but form part of a broader social and cultural network, and that media itself is not a monolithic body that operates as a single, unified, controlling entity. Instead, media compose a complex set of production and consumption practices. In the case of Puerto Rico from 2003 to 2006, for instance, the influence of localized media began to dwindle following their purchase by American media conglomerates. A vast majority of television programming now comes from off-shore corporations (for example, telenovelas produced in Latin America) and U.S.-based, Spanish language commercial media. In spite of this narrowing of diversity, it is important to compare Black women‘s representation in one media to racial and gender representations in another. Approaching media from this standpoint allows me to critically combine elements of existing theories in order to gain a better understanding of the relationship between various media, Puerto Rican cultural identity, and black identity at the collective and individual levels. More specifically, my work is centrally interested in advertising and the way black women are represented in the Citibank advertisement mentioned above. It will be crucial not to examine advertising in insolation, however, but to also explore the representations of black women in different mass media forms, such as newspapers, television, radio, and Internet. The images of advertisements operate in a system of sign that can never work in isolation from other signs or cultural factors.

Mediating blackness is also a process that necessarily interacts with the commonly-held beliefs and daily practices of racially mixed populations in Puerto Rico and other Latin American and Caribbean countries. My dissertation thus explores the production, representation, and consumption of media by populations, and incorporates academic arguments on the shifting roles and boundaries of media in daily life. My central discussion of media accordingly draws upon several fields of academic inquiry, among them media studies, black feminism, body politics, and the study of racial blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, though it is ultimately grounded in cultural studies approaches to media studies.

Among these common conceptions that must be addressed is the dominant notion of Puerto Rico as a culturally unified nation that has produced a racially mixed, democratic society. Representations of this unified Puerto Rican culture are presented in such institutions as museums, the government, the education system and other “official” cultural sites. In response to this collective Puerto Rican cultural identity, forming a racial identity is often a struggle for some non-white Puerto Ricans (See: my autoethnography in Chapter 3), especially when Puerto Rican blackness is represented as folklorized, and when racism is a tacit component of official culture (Warren-Colón, 2003, p.664). Scholars have given only minimal attention to this phenomenon, and to the dismissive or stereotypical treatment of black women‘s bodies through their folklorized representations in popular culture and other media…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree: The Search for My Melungeon Ancestors

Arcade Publishing
April 2007
264 pages
Hardback ISBN-10: 1559708328; ISBN-13: 9781559708326
Paperback ISBN-10: 1-55970-876-X; ISBN-13: 978-1-55970-876-0

Lisa Alther

Best-selling author Lisa Alther chronicles her search for missing branches of her family tree in this dazzling, hilarious memoir.

Most of us grow up knowing who we are and where we come from. Lisa Alther’s mother hailed from New York, her father from Virginia, and every day they reenacted the Civil War at home. Then a babysitter with bad teeth told Lisa about the Melungeons: six-fingered child-snatchers who hid in caves. Forgetting about these creepy kidnappers until she had a daughter of her own, Lisa learned they were actually an isolated group of dark-skinned people—often with extra thumbs—living in East Tennessee. But who were they? Descendants of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony, or of shipwrecked Portuguese or Turkish sailors? Or the children of frontiersman, African slaves, and Native Americans? Lisa set out to discover who these mysterious Melungeons really were—and why her grandmother wouldn’t let her visit their Virginia relatives.

Part sidesplitting travelogue, part how (and how not) to climb your family tree, Kinfolks shimmers with wicked humor, showing just how wacky and wonderful our human family really is.

INTRODUCTION

Many People are born believing they know who they are. They’re Irish or Jewish or African-American or whatever. But some of us with culturally or ethnically mixed backgrounds don’t share that enviable luxury.

My mother was a New Yorker and my father a Virginian, and the Civil War was reenacted daily in our house and in my head. My Tennessee playmates used to insist that Yankees were rude, and my New York cousins insisted that southerners were stupid. I knew I was neither, but I had no idea what I might be instead. Hybrids have no communal templates to guide them in defining themselves.

In my life since, I’ve often lain awake at night trying to figure out how to fool the members of some clique into believing that I’m one of them. For a long time I lived with one foot in the PTA and the other in Provincetown. I also moved to several different cities, hoping to find a homeland. But each time I discovered that joining one group required denying my allegiances to other groups. In Boston, New York, and Vermont, I pretended not to hear the slurs against the South. And in London and Paris, I remained silent during anti-American rants.

But I have gradually become grateful for this chronic identity crisis because it has fostered my career. Everything I’ve ever written has been an attempt to work out who I am, not only culturally but also sexually, politically, and spiritually.

I rationalized my penchant for protective coloration by reviewing what I knew about my hapless ancestors, who were usually in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were Huguenots in France after Catholics declared open season on heretics; English in Ireland when the republicans began torching Anglo-Irish houses; Dutch in the Netherlands during the Spanish invasion; Scots in the Highlands during the Clearances; Native Americans in the path of Manifest Destiny; Union supporters in Confederate Virginia. I concluded that I’d inherited genes that condemned me to a lifetime of being a stranger in some very strange lands.

Then I met a cousin named Brent Kennedy, who maintained that some of our shared ancestors in the southern Appalachians were Melungeons. The earliest Melungeons were supposedly found living in what would become East Tennessee when the first European settlers arrived. They were olive-skinned and claimed to be Portuguese.

Conflicting origin stories for the Melungeons abound. They’re said to be descended from Indians who mated with early Spanish explorers, or from the survivors of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony on Roanoke Island, or from Portuguese sailors shipwrecked on the Carolina coast, or from African slaves who escaped into the mountains. Brent himself believed them to have Turkish ancestry. Before the Civil War, some were labeled “free people of color” and were prohibited from voting, attending white schools, marrying white people, or testifying against whites in court. After that war, some were subjected to Jim Crow laws. A friend who worked as a waitress told me she was ordered to wash down the booths with disinfectant after Melungeon customers departed. She also said that her mother warned her as a child never to look at Melungeons because they had the evil eye.

Growing up, I’d heard that Melungeons lived in caves and trees on cliffs outside our town and had six fingers on each hand. Brent’s showing me the scars from the removal of his extra thumbs launched me on a journey to discover who the historical Melungeons really were and whether my father’s family had, in fact, been closet Melungeons.

For nearly a decade I read history, visited sites, and interviewed people related to this quest. In school I’d learned that what is now the southeastern United States was an empty wilderness before the establishment of Jamestown in 1607. But my research taught me that it was instead filled with millions of Native Americans. It was also crawling with Spaniards, Portuguese, Frenchmen, Africans, Jews, Moors, Turks, Croatians, and British, among others—all roaming the Southeast for a variety of reasons.

In their wanderings these (mostly) men sired children with willing or unwilling Native Americans. Although an estimated 80 to 90 percent of Native Americans eventually succumbed to European diseases, some of their ethnically mixed children survived because of immunities inherited from their European and African fathers. They, in turn, had descendants, some of whom found ways to coexist with the encroaching European settlers.

I assembled plenty of clues about Melungeon origins, but DNA testing finally gave me some answers—and also explained why a sense of belonging has always eluded me. After a series of tests, I learned that I’d been walking around for six decades in a body constructed by DNA originating in Central Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. This in addition to the contributions from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Holland, Germany, and Native America, which I already knew about through conventional genealogical methods.

For weeks after receiving these results, I wandered around in a daze, humming “We Are the World.” A lifelong suspicion that I fit nowhere turned out not to be just idle paranoia. But once the reality of my panglobal identity sank in, I realized that I’d finally found my long-sought group. It consists of mongrels like myself who know that we belong nowhere—and everywhere. This book chronicles my six-decade evolution from bemused Appalachian misfit to equally bemused citizen of the world…

Puerto Rico: Afro-Caribbean and Taíno Identity

Repeating Islands: News and commentary on Caribbean culture, literature, and the arts
2011-06-26

Ivette Romero-Cesareo, Professor of Spanish and Director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Note from Steven F. Riley:  [The number of 2010 census repondents from Puerto Rico identifiying as two or more races (TOMR) decreased by 22.82% over the last decade. New York was the only other commonwealth/state with a TOMR decrease; which was 0.73%.]

The number of Puerto Ricans that identify only as black or Native American has increased by about 50 percent in the last decade, according to the latest census figures, which have surprised experts. “The increase suggests a growing sense of racial identity among the various ethnic groups that for a long time have been considered a heterogeneous mosaic in this Commonwealth of United States” writes AOL Noticias.

However, experts consider that it is too early to explain the reason for the change. “This really breaks with a historical pattern,” says Jorge Duany, professor of anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico. With the growth in those who consider themselves black or Native American, there was a decrease in the percentage of the population of Puerto Ricans who only identify as white. This group dropped almost 8 percentage points, to about 76% of the 3.7 million inhabitants of the island. More than 461,000 islanders identified solely as black, an increase of 52%, while close to 20,000 said that they were Native Americans, an increase of almost 49%.

According to experts, several factors could have influenced the increase in the number of people who identify as black. Duany explains that the choice of Barack Obama as President of United States could have influenced some who see themselves as black, because the leader dissipated negative stereotypes about race. The increase in the number of blacks also coincided with a push to highlight the black population of Puerto Rico, as the Department of Education included for the first time a high school textbook dealing exclusively with its history. Moreover, there was a base effort aimed at dark-skinned Puerto Ricans through social networks such as Facebook to urge them to identify as “afro-puertorriqueños” [Afro-Puerto Ricans] in the 2010 census…

Read the entire post here.

Where Is the Carnivalesque in Rio’s Carnaval? Samba, Mulatas and Modernity

Visual Anthropology
Volume 21, Issue 2 (2008)
pages 95-111
DOI: 10.1080/08949460701688775

Natasha Pravaz, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

This article chronicles the historical normalization of carnaval parades and samba performances in Rio de Janeiro, by looking at the progressive standardization of audiovisual imagery fueled by a nationalistic project based on cultural appropriation. Afro-Brazilian performance traditions have come to stand for Brazilian national identity since at least the 1930s, and practices of visual consumption such as shows de mulata (spectacles where Afro-Brazilian women dance the samba) have elevated “mixed-race” women to be icons of Brazilianness. While these practices have de-emphasized grotesque excess in order to fit scopophilic drives, they have failed to secure a firm grip over performers’ experiences.

Read or purchase the article here.

Hybridity Brazilian Style: Samba, Carnaval, and the Myth of “Racial Democracy” in Rio de Janeiro

Identities
Volume 15, Issue 1 (2008)
pages 80-102
DOI: 10.1080/10702890701801841

Natasha Pravaz, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Through ethnographic and historical inquiry, this article inspects the usefulness of the concept of hybridity for an analysis of Rio’s samba and carnaval. If differentiated from mestiçagem, the concept of hybridity can productively be put to use. The discourse on mestiçagem is the basis for dominant narratives of national identity and celebrates samba and other Afro-Brazilian cultural forms as symbols of Brazilianness and racial democracy. Such political use of culture was initiated by President Vargas’s appropriation of subaltern performance genres in his populist project of modernity. At the same time, as expressions of Afro-Brazilian culture, samba and carnaval are contested performances; many celebrate the “racially democratic” character of samba spaces as a core domain of Afro-Brazilian sociability. This article traces the roots of samba and carnaval in Rio de Janeiro and examines their current import for a politics of identity by drawing from interviews and fieldwork at escola de samba Unidos da Cereja. The article stresses the methodological importance of addressing multiple practices and voices emerging in the context of samba performances. The concept of hybridity can thus describe Afro-Brazilians’ use of culture in the negotiation of power imbalances and alternative values.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Blackfoot Tribe of the Midsouth

American Society of Ethnohistory Conference
“Blackfoot, Redbones, Brass Ankles and Pied Noir: Colorful Identities, Creative Strategies American Society of Ethnohistory conference”
Santa Fe, New Mexico
2005-11-18 through 2005-11-20
2005-11-19

Carol A. Morrow, Professor of Anthropology
Southeast Missouri State University

Over the years, I have had a number of African-American students identify themselves as having Native American heritage.  Occasionally they claim descent from the ‘Blackfoot tribe’, but they always have a southern heritage.  Most students don’t know much more than just the term, Blackfoot, but one student explained that Blackfoot meant a blend of African and Cherokee heritage.  Given our location on the Trail of Tears, Cherokee heritage is common; the Blackfoot tribe is something else entirely.  This paper reviews the use of the Blackfoot term throughout the Midsouth.

Over the years, I have had a number of students in my North American Indians classes who have self-identified as Blackfoot, or Cherokee and Blackfoot, or in one case, Choctaw and Blackfoot.  I would always ask them if they had ties or relatives in Montana, and with one exception, they all said NO. The one exception is the blond blue-eyed young man, who in fact, did have relatives in Montana.

I teach at Southeast Missouri State, which is in Cape Girardeau and the Cherokee Trail of tears passed through our community in 1838-1839.  Additionally, there was a large community of Cherokee Indians that lived to the sound of our area in Arkansas territory, and many pushed north into Missouri when they were moved in 1828 West into Indian territory (these were the Old Settlers).  So we have always had a number of people in the area of Cherokee ancestry.  But Blackfoot Indian is another story entirely.  Finally, I realized that the Blackfoot students were African-American.  My African-American students almost always had Indian blood, but it took me a while to figure out that they were the only ones that claimed Blackfoot blood…

Read the entire paper here.

Public Ceremonies and Mulatto Identity in Viceregal Lima: A Colonial Reenactment of the Fall of Troy (1631)

Colonial Latin American Review
Volume 16, Issue 2 (2007)
pages 179-201
DOI: 10.1080/10609160701644490

José R. Jouve-Martín, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies
McGill University, Montreal, Québec, Canada

Colonial Spanish America was a highly ritualized society. From single events to cyclical celebrations, the numerous civic and religious ceremonies that took place throughout the year helped legitimize European authority over religious and administrative matters of fundamental importance for the conservation of the colonial order. While these ceremonies fostered social cohesion by promoting collective participation, the various groups present in colonial society also saw them as an opportunity to affirm their trade, race or social position (Diez Borque 1985; Acosta 1997). However, not all saw their actions equally immortalized in the pages of history. When describing these events, historical sources lend to locus particularly on the ruling classes and to minimize or disregard the participation of other groups. This can be explained in two ways: Firstly, the amount of money that the privileged classes were able to spend on the organization of their festivities greatly surpassed that of other, less fortunate sectors of society, which lacked the resources to match these more extravagant displays. Secondly, the historians and chroniclers in charge of narrating these events often belonged to the European elite, and their texts were usually commissioned or read by those in the upper echelons of society, most of whom showed very little interest in the cultural and social life of the lower castes. Only in cities and towns with a sizable indigenous population such as Cuzco or Quito did chroniclers describe the participation of mestizos and indios in public ceremonies on a regular basis, as illustrated by the studies of Fspinosa (1990) and Dean {1999), among others. Other castas, particularly those of African origin, are almost never mentioned in the so-called relaciones de fiestas, or chronicles of festivities, and, if they are, it is usually only in passing. Nevertheless, it is in part due to such brief references that we know that blacks and mulattos attended public civic and religious ceremonies in Spanish colonial America not only as silent spectators, but also as active participants.

Read or purchase the article here.

Cultural Representation in Native America

AltaMira Press
August 2006
192 pages
Cloth 0-7591-0984-2 / 978-0-7591-0984-1
Paper 0-7591-0985-0 / 978-0-7591-0985-8

Edited by:

Andrew J. Jolivétte, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies
San Francisco State University

Today as in the past there are many cultural and commercial representations of American Indians that, thoughtlessly or otherwise, negatively shape the images of indigenous people. Jolivétte and his co-authors challenge and contest these images, demonstrating how Native representation and identity are at the heart of Native politics and Native activism. In portrayals of a Native Barbie Doll or a racist mascot, disrespect of Native women, misconceptions of mixed race identities, or the commodification of all things “Indian”, the authors reveal how the very existence of Native people continues to be challenged, with harmful repercussions in social and legal policy, not just in popular culture. The authors re-articulate Native history, religion, identity, and oral and literary traditions in ways that allow the true identity and persona of the Native person to be recognized and respected. It is a project that is fundamental to ethnic revitalization and the recognition of indigenous rights in North America. This book is a provocative and essential introduction for students and Native and non-Native people who wish to understand the images and realities of American Indian lifeways in American society.

Table of Contents

• PART I: Contestation and Representation, Chapter 1: Mapping Contests in Unknown Locations
  Paula Gunn Allen

• Say Hau to Native American Barbie
  Kim Shuck

• Liquor Moccasins
  Philip Klasky

• (Dis)Locating Spiritual Knowledge: Embodied Ideologies, Social Landscapes, and the Power of the Neoshamanic Other
  Sara Sutler-Cohen

• Mascots in the New Millennium
  Winona LaDuke

• PART II: Contestation and Politics, Chapter 6: Native American Resistance and Revitalization in the Era of Self-Determination
  Troy Johnson

• Identity, Oral Tradition, and Inter-generational Healing in the Southern Paiute Salt Songs
  Melissa Nelson

• In the Spirit of Crazy Horse
  Winona LaDuke

• Part III: Contestation and Mixed Race Identity; Chapter 9: In the Tracks of ‘the’ Native Woman
  Norma Alarcon

• Chapped with Weather and Age: Mixed-Blood Identity and the Shape of History
  Sara Stuler-Cohen

• Dunn Playing Indian
  Carolyn Dunn

• Examining the Regional and Multi-Generational Context of Creole and American Indian Identity
  Andrew Jolivette

Hybridity Theory and Kinship Thinking

Cultural Studies
Volume 19, Issue 5 (2005)
pages 602-621
DOI: 10.1080/09502380500365507

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

A parallel is posited between the ways hybridity and kinship are thought about in Western contexts, challenging the idea that kinship and biology tend to lead to narrow, roots-oriented, essentialized definitions of identity. Rather than being the opposite of rhizomic, diasporic hybridity, kinship and biology partake of the tension between roots and routes that is characteristic of all hybridity. Anthropological evidence on the character of Western kinship thinking is examined to elucidate some features of its flexibility. Theories of hybridity are seen as being themselves a type of kinship thinking.

Introduction

Concepts of hybridity—and related ones of mestizaje, syncretism, creolization, mélange , métissage , mixture—have been widely deployed in cultural theory, especially in relation to fields in which racial and ethnic identifications are made (Anzalduá 1987, Bhabha 1994, Garcıá Canclini 1995, Gilroy 2000, Hale 1996, 1999, Ifekwunigwe 1999, Kapchan & Strong 1999, Nelson 1999, Smith 1997, Werbner & Modood 1997, Young 1995). The concept of diaspora, although not at first sight nor necessarily associated with processes of mixing, may be deployed to the same kind of effect, evoking a context or dynamic which creates mixing (Brah 1996, Hall 1996, Gilroy 2000).

In much of this work, there is a current that sees hybridity as potentially subversive of dominant ideologies and practices and leading to the dislocation and destabilization of entrenched essentialisms, often with a focus on racial and ethnic categories and boundaries, and frequently in colonial and post-colonial contexts. On the other hand, there is also an awareness that hybridity carries with it some other possibilities and meanings, which are seen in a less positive light. These possibilities revolve around ideas of roots, genealogical kinship links, biology and essentialism. As Kapchan and Strong (1999, p. 242) put it, ‘There is hybridity that may refer to and reify history and genealogy, for example, and hybridity that seems to make a mockery of it’. In a similar vein, Young (1995, pp. 24
/5) distinguishes between ‘organic’ and ‘intentional’ modes of hybridity (see below). We are faced with a dualism in hybridity theory between potentially positive hybridity, which is dynamic, progressive, diasporic, rhizomic, subversive, anti-essentialist, routes-oriented and based on collage, montage and cut-and-mix; and a potentially negative hybridity, which is biological, genealogical, kinship-based, essentialist, roots-oriented and based on simple ideas of combining two wholes to make a third whole.

I argue that this dualism involves a narrow and stereotyped understanding of biology and kinship. Both of these domains are in fact characterized by dynamic processes of cultural practice which display their own tensions between roots and routes, between essentialisms and non-essentialisms, between being and becoming. Recognizing this does not dissolve the basic dualism outlined above—it makes biology and kinship straddle the divide, as hybridity itself is said to do—but it re-situates kinship and biology in important ways. It carries the theoretically and politically important implication that identities which invoke either kinship and/or biology (e.g. blood, genes) as tropes of belonging and identification should not necessarily or automatically be seen as essentialist (or needing justification in terms of their ‘strategic essentialism’), exclusivist, politically conservative, absolutist or fundamentalist…

…An illustration of the kinship assumptions that underlie thinking about processes of mixture is furnished by the recent literature on mixed-race identities in the USA. Root argues that mixed-race people ‘expose the irrationality by which the [racial] categories have been derived and enforced’ (Root 1996a, p. xxv). This idea that the US system of racial reckoning is irrational is supported by Spickard who describes the ‘illogic’ of American racial categories. Part of his argument is that all racial categorizations are illogical because they do not accord with the facts of biology—which, as he recognizes, only makes the categories illogical if they pretend to be based on biology. But ‘what is most illogical is that [in the USA] we imagine these racial categories to be exclusive’ (Spickard 1992, p. 20). For example, one could only—until 1997—check one census box for racial identity and this census practice broadly reflected social usage. To take the most common example, it is illogical to have to be either black or white, when so many people are black-white mixes. The US ‘one-drop rule’ that classifies anyone with ‘one drop of black blood’ as black is the mainstay of the either/or system—a system arguably now losing its dualist rigidity (Root 1996b, Azoulay 1997). This rule determines that ‘a white woman can give birth to a Black child, but a Black woman can never give birth to a white child’ (Nash 1995, p. 950, citing Barbara J. Fields). In one brutal sense, this system is highly logical: it defines a clear rule and follows it to a logical conclusion. In what sense, then, is it illogical, except insofar as any racial categorization is illogical? The intuition that the US system is illogical comes, I believe, from a sense of the ‘logic’ of a Western cognatic kinship model that assumes that a child gets equal amounts of its constitution from both parents. This does not necessarily mean people think a child born to a ‘black’ parent and a ‘white’ parent is literally physically half black and half white—although this mode of thought may, indeed, be widespread, in view of the fact that people routinely talk of having, say, black or white ‘blood’ in their veins, or of being, say, a quarter West Indian or half Scottish. Whether or not the kinship logic is understood in physical terms, it can also simply supply a way of thinking about the allegiances and ties that such a child would have ‘logically’ (i.e. ‘naturally’ by the precepts of Western kinship reckoning). It is against the background of this assumption that the US system appears illogical…

Read the entire aritcle here.

A Health Survey of the Seminole Indians

Yale Journal Biology and Medicine
Volume 6, Number 2 (December 1933)
pages 155–177

H. Hamlin

Among the numerous tribes of Indians living in Oklahoma the Seminoles offer some interesting phenomena for study which may contribute information on the subject of race mixture and its relationship to environment and health. The early history of the tribe in its original habitat of the Florida Everglades is not without romantic color, embodying as it does the Spanish occupation of the Southeastern United States and the stormy times before and after the War of 1812 that culminated in the Florida purchase. Many other tribes besides the Seminoles were occupying rich lands that European settlers coveted for plantations so that agitation for removal of the Indians by coercion gained increasing favor. Slavery augmented the conflict since negro deserters were continually seeking refuge among the Indians, especially in parts that now constitute Georgia and Florida.

It is recorded that as early as 1785 bands of Cherokees, Choctaws, Delawares and Shawnees began migrating west to settle because of pressure from whites along the borders of their old domain and the scarcity of game. The transfer of Indians comprising the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole tribes from their indigenous habitat to lands in what is now the state of Oklahoma was carried on with continuous difficulty until after 1840. The government was forced to conduct two expensive military campaigns against the Seminoles, and over a thousand recalcitrants refused to be caught and expatriated. These survivors remained in Florida. By 1906 around 100,000 individuals, of whom only about 26.4 per cent were full-bloods, had been officially enrolled as the Five Civilized Tribes and had been given individual land grants.

From the foregoing historical outline the possibilities of comparative study on the present-day Seminoles in both Oklahoma and Florida can be understood. Such a project was sponsored by the Laboratory of Anthropology at Santa Fe, New Mexico, during the summer of 1932 and placed under the direction of Dr. W. M. Krogman of the Anatomy Department of Western Reserve University. The greater part of the work resolved itself into the compilation of detailed anthropometric measurements of selected individuals. The tribal rolls, upon which the government based the land allotments, made feasible the deduction of rather accurate genealogical tables for four or five generations. The statements of every subject concerning his or her family were checked and protracted further by comparison with Campbell’s Abstract of Seminole Indian Census Cards, which proved an invaluable source of information. It is hoped that opportunity may avail to correlate the findings on physical measurements and other criteria of the Oklahoma Seminoles with the results of a similar procedure among the Seminoles still living in Florida, the latter serving as a control group…

…After the Creek war of 1813-14 a great many Creeks from the upper Creek country moved into Florida. They increased the population considerably and began mixing with the predominant Hitchiti (Oconee) racial element. This new strain was definitely Creek and later came to be identified with the Seminole. Such an interpretation is substantiated further by Wissler’, who classifies the languages of the Upper Creeks, Lower Creeks, and Seminoles together under the northern division of Muskogee proper. It seems clear that the Florida Seminoles were originally derived from the non-Muskogean Hitchiti of Georgia admixed with the earlier Floridian Yamasee and Yuchi, and this combination later admixed with Muskogee, mostly Creek. Before his departure for the west therefore, the Florida Seminole undoubtedly had a high percentage of Creek blood; and the two by impact of association had become linked enough in language and culture to obscure their separate origin.

Before the advent of Seminole stock in the west there was unquestionably an appreciable amount of negro blood present. This was a result of slavery, which reached its greatest development as a social practice in the Southeast during the latter part of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. Large numbers of slaves apparently succeeded in escaping from their masters to gain sanctuary among the Florida Indians. It would seem that negroes were usually anxious to make their way into Florida where they were often able to acquire a kind of group independence among the Indians. A large number of negroes accompanied the Five Tribes on their westward migration, including slaves of the Indians as well as those who had intermarried and their offspring. To the Creek fraction represented in Florida Seminole blood, therefore, must be added an unknown but quite definite component representing negro admixture acquired prior to removal. There probably had been some infusion of white blood with the Seminoles through Spanish intermixture before they took up residence in the west. Nash”, Giddings and Bartram’ predicate its occurrence in their writings, but the emphasis on the negro element is much greater. According to Nash”, the amount of white blood in the modern Florida Seminoles has increased to some extent, and this view is confirmed by others, notably Hrdlikcka. On the other hand negro intermixture among the present-day descendants of the original Florida Seminoles has declined. The population has been reported to be around 500 for a number of decades so that investigators have been able to tabulate race crossing with some certainty’0. White half-castes are granted full status by the Indians and an increase in their number is predicted for the future. Presumably, the propagation of white blood in the Florida Indians since the Seminole wars may be attributed to the offspring of unsanctioned Indian-White matings…

Pure Seminole—Age 44.

Seminole-Negro—Age 25.

Seminole-White—Age 34.

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