Mixed Race Studies

SOCI 329-Multiracial America

Rice University
2013-2014

Multiracial America examines the phenomenon of race mixing (e.g. interracial interaction, multiracial identity) from a sociological perspective. The course covers the legal, political, and cultural contexts of interracial interaction and how these impact current understanding of what it means to be “mixed race.” Recommended Prerequisite(s): SOCI 101.

RRS 625: Mixed Race Studies: A Comparative Focus

San Francisco State University
Spring 2013

Introduction to the field of mixed race studies from a comparative and ethnic studies perspective. Exploration of various multiracial issues for ethnic studies from the viewpoint of scholars and cultural expressionists who are themselves of mixed-racial heritage. [Formerly ETHS 625]

Philosophy of Race (3050)

Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina
Fall 2013

Kim Hall, Professor of Philosophy

What is race?  What is the relationship between the category of race and racism?  What is the relationship between race and personal identity?  How do multiracial identities raise questions about the meaning of race and its relationship to identity?  What is the relationship between racialization and society?  What can philosophy help us to understand about race?  What are the relationships between race, gender, class, and sexuality?  How has the idea of race influenced the discipline and practice of philosophy?  This course will examine the metaphysical, epistemological, social, political, and ethical dimensions of race.  Class readings will include both historical and contemporary philosophical approaches to race and racism.

American Multicultural Studies (AMCS) 374: The Multiracial Experience

Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California
2012-2013

Elenita Fe (Leny) M Strobel, Associate Professor and Chair of American Multicultural Studies Department

A general survey of the historical and contemporary experience of people claiming more than one racial or ethnic background. Emphasis will be given to inter-racial relations, the impact of political and social factors, and the cultural expressions of the multiracial experience.

Letter documenting the struggle of two children’s attempt to attend school

Special Collections
University of Southern Mississippi Libraries
Item of the Month
March 2010

Jennifer Brannock, Special Collections Librarian

The Mississippi Department of Archives and History: Sovereignty Commission Online

[Note from Steven F. Riley: For more on Newton Knight, Rachel Knight, and the “Free State of Jones,” please read Victoria E. Bynum’s excellent monograph, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War.]

In 1964, 9-year-old Edgar and 8-year-old Randy Williamson had never attended a day of school. The debate over their admittance stems from the fact that they are 1/16 or 1/32 African American. They are the great, great grandchildren of Newt Knight and a slave woman, Rachel. Newt Knight is a well-known historical figure who was the man behind the “Free State of Jones.” Rachel was a slave owned by Knight’s uncle. Even though Knight was married, it is believed that he left his wife and lived with Rachel until her death.

Edgar and Randy Williamson’s great, great grandmother was African American which meant that they were 1/16 African American. According to Mississippi law at the time, a person had to be less than 1/8 African American to be considered white. In the case of the Edgar and Randy, their mother, a direct descendant of Newt and Rachel, was listed as black on her birth certificate (she was 1/8 African American) with Edgar and Randy as white (their father was white). The people in Stringer, a community in Jasper County, considered the children to be African American since their mother was. Due to these beliefs, school officials at the white school in Stringer anticipated strong objections and possible violence if the children were admitted…

Read the entire article here.

The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (Scarborough review)

Civil War History
Volume 49, Number 1, March 2003
pages 72-74
DOI: 10.1353/cwh.2003.0026

William Kauffman Scarborough, Professor Emeritus of History
University of Southern Mississippi

The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War. By Victoria E. Bynum. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. 316. Cloth.)

For generations the so-called legend of the “Free State of Jones” has circulated throughout Mississippi and, to a lesser extent, beyond the borders of the state. Anti-Confederate elements within this piney-woods county in south Mississippi, so the story goes, actually seceded from the Confederacy and established a small independent republic. As previous historians have discovered, the story is entirely apocryphal. In actuality a band of Confederate deserters led by Newton Knight formed a company in the fall of 1863 that subsequently gained control over much of this predominately non-slaveholding county and engaged in a number of skirmishes with Confederate cavalry units over a period of more than a year. The Knight Company was pretty well decimated during what the author term’s an “infamous” Confederate raid into the county in April 1864 led by Col. Robert Lowery, later a two-term governor of Mississippi (115). By the time the skirmishing ended, ten of the Jones County deserters had  been hanged, and most of the remainder had either fled to the swamps, returned to the Confederate army, or joined the Union army in New Orleans.

Those expecting to read a detailed account of the Civil War activities of Newt Knight and his intrepid band of dissident warriors will be disappointed with this book. Only two of the eight chapters (thirty-four pages in all) are devoted to the war. Instead, the author concentrates primarily on the background of the families that settled in this rural piney-woods county and on the interracial liaisons that resulted in the so-called community of “white Negroes” after the war. Indeed, as the dust jacket proclaims, this is actually an account of the “origins and legacy” of the legendary Jones County rebels from the American Revolution to the twentieth-century civil rights movement. With a heavy emphasis upon the currently fashionable theme of race, class, and gender, Bynum traces the movement of such families as the Knights, Collinses, Welborns, Bynums (the author’s father was a native of Jones County), Sumralls, Welches, and Valentines from their antecedents in the Carolinas, where they were allegedly influenced by the Great Awakening and the Regulator Movement, to their settlement in south Mississippi during the first third of the nineteenth century. It was these independent-minded nonslaveholding yeomen who opposed secession in 1861 and ultimately took up arms against the Confederacy, aided in no small measure by the female members of their families.

One of those women was Rachel Knight, a mulatto slave who had supported the Knight Company during the war and who later had a long-term intimate relationship with Knight, apparently bearing him at least two sons. Whatever the true relationship between Newt and Rachel, it is clear that the older children of the two intermarried beginning about 1878, thereby giving rise to a mixed-race community in Jones County that endures to this day. The ambiguous racial identities in the county were illuminated in 1948 when Davis Knight, a great-grandson of Rachel Knight, was convicted of violating the anti-miscegenation laws then on the books in Mississippi because he had married a white woman two years before. Although his conviction was overturned by the state supreme court, the case illustrates the complexity of the family relationships that resulted from the interracial unions inaugurated by Knight and his black paramour.

Bynum, who clearly sympathizes with Knight and his company of anti-Confederates, contends that the Civil War dissident has been stigmatized unfairly by his postwar defiance of racial customs. If he was not quite the Robin Hood figure depicted by his son, Thomas J. Knight, in a 1935 biography, he was certainly not the villainous traitor described by his segregationist grandniece, Ethel Knight, in what…

Nathan Crowell on Racial Identity: Gloucester County, Virginia, revisited

Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners
2013-01-14

Victoria E. Bynum, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Some time ago, in response to my 10 November 2011 post, “Free People of Color in Old Virginia: The Morris Family of Gloucester County,”  (which I encourage you to read or reread) I received a long email message from Nathan Crowell, who traces his own mixed-heritage ancestry back to Gloucester County. Nathan shared not only his family research with me, but also certain insights that he gained over the years from listening to his ancestors—particularly his grandmother: insights into what it meant to be a “free person of color” in a slaveholding society, what it meant to be defined as “black” when one’s skin was fair. His remarks remind us that life in the Old South was far more complex than most of us realize, and that “race” was an imposed category of human existence that had no rational biological basis, but had very real legal, social, and psychological consequences that shaped the experiences and consciousness of all members of society.

With Nathan’s permission, I have created the following post from his remarks…

Read the entire article here.

The Myth of Post-Racialism: Hegemonic and Counterhegemonic Stories About Race and Racism in the United States

Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association
Volume 7, Issue 1 (2011) (Special Issue: Post-Racial States)
pages 2-25

Babacar M’Baye, Associate Professor of Pan-African Literature and Culture
Kent State University

In the United States, hegemonic narratives reproduce post-racial ideals by developing popular myths that either minimise the prevalence of racial inequalities or blame their persistence on African Americans, who are represented as dysfunctional and resistant to mainstream American culture. Hegemonic narratives are not only racist and prejudiced but also deceptive because they move race away from the unequal policies that produce structural-level inequities for lower and working class African Americans, putting the latter at a greater disadvantage in relationships to middle and upper class white Americans and African Americans. Hegemonic stories are misleading since they claim that racial equality is possible even when the majority of white Americans have a claim to socioeconomic and political privilege and have a vested interest in maintaining that advantage at the expense of others. Using both past and recent critical race theories, this article critically analyses the major differences between hegemonic stories which accept the myth of post-racialism in the United States and counterhegemonic stories which contest this myth. By analysing these stories, the essay reveals the racially disadvantageous conditions the majority of blacks in the United States continue to face despite the 2008 election of a black president. The essay identifies persistent structural racism that the myth of post-racialism seeks to efface. It also suggests that American social and economic institutions work to entrap African Americans and other non-white minorities into a racist prison industrial complex, limited education and health facilities and rampant poverty which drastically reduce their opportunities in the United States.

Read the entire article here.

Black German Heritage and Research Association Annual Convention 2013

Black German Heritage and Research Association
2013-01-29

The third annual convention of the Black German Heritage and Research Association (formerly the Black German Cultural Society NJ) will be held on August 8-11, 2013, at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. This year’s convention will focus on Black Germans in Diaspora. The conference will feature a keynote address by Maisha Eggers, Professor of Childhood and Diversity Studies at the University of Magdeburg, a screening of the 1952 film “Toxi” at the Amherst Cinema, with an introduction and Q & A by Professor Angelica Fenner of the University of Toronto, author of “Race Under Reconstruction in German Cinema” (2011), and presentations by guest artists Sharon Dodua Otoo and Sandrine Micossé-Aikins, editors of “The Little Book of Big Visions: How To Be an Artist and Revolutionize the World,” published by the Berlin publishers Edition Assemblage in October 2012.

The BGHRA Review Committee invites proposals for papers that engage the multiplicity and diversity of the experiences of Blacks of German heritage and on Blackness in Germany. We welcome submissions for twenty-minute presentations on three academic panels and two sessions devoted to life writing, oral history, and memoir…

…SUBMISSION DEADLINE: March 15, 2013

For more information, click here.

Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority [Andrews Review]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 5 (May 2013)
pages 918-919
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.758864

Matthew T. M. Andrews
Department of Sociology
University of Michigan

Andrew J. Jolivétte (ed), Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority, Bristol: Policy Press. 2012. v+237 pp. (paper)

In Obama and the Biracial Factor, Andrew Jolivétte edits a collection of essays that critically explore the role of U.S. President Barack Obama’s biracial background not only in his 2008 election and first term in office but also in the context of an increasingly multiracial USA. This volume is part of a multidisciplinary body of scholarship on ‘mixed race’ or multiracialily that has grown exponentially in the USA and the UK over the past two decades. However, it also departs from this scholarship’s tendency to focus exclusively on the topics of identity formation and racial classification on government forms. Instead, utilizing the timely case of President Obama ‘the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas’ the book examines what Jolivétte terms ‘mixed race hegemony’, the assertion that ‘biracial and multiracial individuals and families will lead to the end of a race-conscious and racially-discriminatory society in the United States’ (p. 4). Through various disciplinary lenses, the volume’s authors more or less expound on this concept to imagine a ‘post-racist’ rather than ‘post-racial’ USA.

The book’s first section. ‘The Biracial factor in America’, explores how narratives of ‘mixed race’ have shaped the past and present US race relations. In his chapter. G. Reginald Daniel situates Obama’s 2008 election within Daniel’s body of influential work on multiracial identity and considers the egalitarian possibilities of a ‘critical multiraciality’, which emphasizes cross-racial, coalition building and shared ancestral and cultural connections. Next, in ‘A Patchwork Heritage’, Justin Ponder offers an insightful close reading of Obama’s autobiography Dreams from My Father and argues that its rhetorical appeal lies less in Obama’s “accurate* portrayal of himself as African American than in his indeterminate citation of others, especially his white mother, complicating easy representations of his racial identity. Finally. Darryl Barthé,  Jr. charts the historical origins of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ in the USA to challenge the ‘racial revisionism’ in debates surrounding President Obama’s black identity.

The volume’s second section. “Beyond Black and While Identity Polities’, considers the gendered, global and cultural implications of President Obama’s biraciality beyond black white racial politics. Wei Ming Dairiotis and Grace Yoo draw on a nation-wide survey of ‘Obama Mamas’ or mothers who supported Obama’s 2008 campaign and show how many perceived him as a potential ‘bridge builder’ that could provide a more peaceful future for their children. In her perceptive chapter. ‘Is “No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama?”‘, Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain contends that Ireland’s embrace of Obama’s Irish heritage illustrates an unprecedented decoupling of ancestry and phenotype in contemporary racial thinking. This section also includes an additional essay by Dariotis. in which she extends her notion of ‘mixed race kin aesthetic’ to explain Obama’s global appeal, and a chapter by Zebulon Vance Miletsky. who uses Obama’s ‘mutt like me’ comment as an entry point into a historically informed analysis of questions around his ‘racial authenticity’.

The book’s final section, ‘The Battle for the New American Majority’, addresses existing challenges for President Obama and Americans more generally in realizing a truly diverse American majority. In his essay, Robert Keith Collins employs person-centred ethnography to critique monolithic conceptions of ‘blackness’ that undergird debates around Obama’s…

Read or purchase the article here.