Mixed Race Studies

Pike County, Ohio – As Black as We Wish to Be

Public Radio Exchange
State of the Re:Union
2012-09-28
Length: 00:53:53

Al Letson, Producer/Host

Lu Olkowski, Reporter

In this episode Al Letson and guest producer Lu Olkowski visit a tiny town [East Jackson/Waverly] in the Appalachian foothills of Ohio where, for a century, residents have shared the common bond of identifying as African-American despite the fact that they look white. Racial lines have been blurred to invisibility, and people inside the same family can vehemently disagree about whether they are black or white. It can be tense and confusing. As a result, everyone’s choosing: Am I black? Am I mixed race? Or, am I white? Adding to the confusion, there’s a movement afoot to recognize their Native-American heritage.

Family portraits on the mantle in Judy Tanner’s living room. Photo Credit: Lu Olkowski

Listen to the episode here. For more information, click here. View photographs from Pike County, Ohio here.

Life Stories, Local Places, and the Networks of Free Women of Color in Early North America

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 72
Friday, 2013-01-04: 08:30-10:00 CST (Local Time)
Preservation Hall, Studio 7 (New Orleans Marriott)

Chair: Daina Ramey Berry, University of Texas, Austin

Papers:

• “Life Stories, Local Knowledge, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century North America” / Terri L. Snyder, California State University, Fullerton
• “‘Refugee from St. Domingue Living in This City’: The Geography of Social Networks in Testaments of Refugee Free Women of Color in New Orleans” / Elizabeth Neidenbach, College of William and Mary
• “The Power of Priscilla’s Upper Room: Gender and the African American Public Sphere in the 1830s” / Sharon E. Wood, University of Nebraska, Omaha

Comment: Anthony S. Parent, Wake Forest University

The three papers included in this panel share several themes significant to new directions in the history of women of color in North America and the Caribbean.

First, all three papers are concerned with the importance of networks, and the relationship between networks and localities.  In these papers, networks sustain women’s claims to freedom, and networks are closely associated with places.  Terri Snyder finds, for example, that Jane Webb and her daughter Elisha strengthened their positions in 18th century courtrooms–rarely hospitable to women of color–by drawing on local knowledge to support their claims to justice.  For Elisha, her mother’s networks in Virginia eventually intervened to secure her freedom in New Hampshire.  Elizabeth Neidenbach’s research in the wills of refugees from St. Domingue uncovers women’s networks expressed in the streets and neighborhoods of New Orleans–networks that reach back to the island home left behind.  Not only did these networks help refugee women survive, they played a significant role in shaping the culture of the city.  Finally, Sharon Wood’s research underscores the importance of African American-controlled space to the emergence of a black public sphere.  Property in Illinois owned by Priscilla, a former slave, became the meeting place when leading white men of St. Louis sought to suppress African American organizing by shutting off their access to space.  

Finally, all three papers are concerned with methodologies of doing history and biography at the intersections of race and gender in early North America. Focusing on relatively ordinary women of color, each paper aims to recover the lives of particular women and integrate them into history. Until very recently, it has been a truism that the life stories of unlettered, enslaved, and free women of color of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries must remain unwritten because the sources to uncover their lives did not exist. Yet each of these papers, by imaginative use of primary sources and diligent linking of records across national, colonial, and state borders, challenges that claim, giving voice and flesh to women whose lives would otherwise remain fragmented among scattered documents.

This session addresses audiences interested in the histories of women, slavery and freedom, and geographical and biographical approaches to history.

Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States

Duke University Press
2009
408 pages
19 photographs
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4440-7
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4426-1

Micol Seigel, Associate Professor of African-American and African Diaspora Studies
Indiana University

In Uneven Encounters, Micol Seigel chronicles the exchange of popular culture between Brazil and the United States in the years between the World Wars, and demonstrates how that exchange affected ideas of race and nation in both countries. From Americans interpreting advertisements for Brazilian coffee or dancing the Brazilian maxixe, to Rio musicians embracing the “foreign” qualities of jazz, Seigel traces a lively, cultural back and forth. Along the way, she shows how race and nation for both elites and non-elites are constructed together, and driven by global cultural and intellectual currents as well as local, regional, and national ones.

Seigel explores the circulation of images of Brazilian coffee and of maxixe in the United States during the period just after the imperial expansions of the early twentieth century. Exoticist interpretations structured North Americans’ paradoxical sense of themselves as productive “consumer citizens.” Some people, however, could not simply assume the privileges of citizenship. In their struggles against racism, Afro-descended citizens living in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, New York, and Chicago encountered images and notions of each other, and found them useful. Seigel introduces readers to cosmopolitan Afro-Brazilians and African Americans who rarely traveled far from home but who nonetheless absorbed ideas from abroad. She suggests that studies comparing U.S. and Brazilian racial identities as two distinct constructions are misconceived. Racial formation transcends national borders; attempts to understand it must do the same.

Table of Contents

• Illustrations
• Preface
• Note on Language
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Producing Consumption: Coffee and Consumer Citizenship
• 2. Maxixe’s Travels: Cultural Exchange and Erasure
• 3. Playing Politics: Making the Meanings of Jazz in Rio de Janeiro
• 4. Nation Drag: Uses of the Exotic
• 5. Another “Global Vision”: (Trans)Nationalism in the Sao Paulo Black Press
• 6. Black Mothers, Citizen Sons
• Conclusion
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Discography
• Bibliography
• Index

American Voters Are Getting All Mixed Up

Dog Park: Media Unleased
2012-11-20

Leighton Woodhouse, Founding Partner

As anybody with a TV, radio or newspaper subscription can affirm, the big story coming out of the 2012 election is the long feared/eagerly awaited arrival of the Latino Vote as a national political force capable of deciding a presidential contest. Latinos accounted for a record ten percent of the electorate this year, and something north of 70 percent of them cast their ballots for Obama. Meanwhile, fewer Latinos than ever before voted for the Republican candidate. With the Latino segment of the electorate poised to continue expanding for many election cycles to come, leaders of both parties are tripping over each other to position themselves on immigration reform, and even in blood red states like Texas, GOP strategists are warning of imminent doom for their party if Republicans fail to break their cycle of addiction to racism, xenophobia and pandering to border-guarding lunatics.
 
The story is both accurate to a point and incomplete, as conventional wisdom is wont to be. Tavis Smiley, for instance, has highlighted the grating irony of black voters being left out of the punditocracy’s post-election anointing of the “new governing coalition,” following the second presidential election in a row in which African-Americans broke records turning out to support Barack Obama. And when it comes to speculating about long-term electoral prospects, there’s another demographic category of Americans that’s getting glossed over in this mechanical extrapolation of the present into the future. Interestingly, it’s the one that Obama himself belongs to: multiracial Americans.
 
That’s not to say that mixed-race voters were a big electoral force in this election or any other national election in history. Nor is “mixed race” really much of a coherent ethnic identity in the first place (then again, neither arguably is “Latino” or “Asian”). As a demographic category, however, it’s going to be a significant factor for both parties to grapple with in future elections. It’s simply inevitable: About fifteen percent of new marriages nationally in 2010 were interracial, according to a Pew study published earlier this year. That’s more than double the proportion of the 1980s. Those couples are having kids, and those kids are growing up to become voters. Moreover, according to the study, quaint taboos against interracial coupling are pretty close to completely breaking down, with nearly two-thirds of Americans fine with the idea, so we can expect the phenomenon to continue and accelerate going forward: more interracial couples, more mixed race kids. And in politics, as they say, demography is destiny…

Read the entire article here.

Nation Drag: Uses of the Exotic

The Journal of Transnational American Studies
ISSN 1940-0764
Volume 1, Issue 1 (2009)

Micol Seigel, Associate Professor of African-American and African Diaspora Studies
Indiana University

In Uneven Encounters, the forthcoming book from which this article is excerpted, Micol Seigel chronicles the exchange of popular culture between Brazil and the United States in the years between the World Wars, and she demonstrates how that exchange affected ideas of race and nation in both countries. From Americans interpreting advertisements for Brazilian coffee or dancing the Brazilian maxixe, to Rio musicians embracing the “foreign” qualities of jazz, Seigel traces a lively, cultural back-and-forth. Along the way, she shows how race and nation are constructed together, by both non-elites and elites, and gleaned from global cultural and intellectual currents as well as local, regional, and national ones. Seigel explores the circulation of images of Brazilian coffee and of maxixe in the United States during the period just after the imperial expansions of the early twentieth century. Exoticist interpretations structured North Americans’ paradoxical sense of self as productive “consumer citizens.” Some people, however, could not simply assume the privileges of citizenship. In their struggles against racism, Afro-descended citizens living in the cities of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, New York, and Chicago encountered images and notions of each other, and found them useful. Seigel introduces readers to cosmopolitan Afro-Brazilians and African Americans who rarely traveled far but who absorbed ideas from abroad nonetheless. African American vaudeville artists saw the utility of pretending to “be” Brazilian to cross the color line on stage. Putting on “nation drag,” they passed not from one race to another but out of familiar racial categories entirely. Afro-Brazilian journalists reported intensively on foreign, particularly North American, news and eventually entered into conversation with the U.S. black press in a collaborative but still conflictual dialogue. Seigel suggests that projects comparing U.S. and Brazilian racial identities as two distinct constructions are misconceived. Racial formations transcend national borders; attempts to understand them must do the same.

Read the entire article here.

Negotiating Racial and Ethnic Lines in the Borderlands: Mixed Peoples in Transitional North America

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 108
Friday, 2013-01-04, 10:30-12:00 CST (Local Time)
Cornet Room (Sheraton New Orleans)

Chair: Stephen Aron, University of California, Los Angeles

Papers:

• “‘I Do Not Know at Times What To Do, Everything Turns Out Wrong’: Mixed Children Negotiating Anglo and Californio Worlds in Post-Conquest California” / Erika Perez, Loyola Marymount University
• “Major E. C. Watkins’ Frustrating Adventure: Defining Family in the Post-Civil War North American West” / Anne Hyde, Colorado College
• “The Man Who Talks Not: John L. Clarke and the Politics of Mixed-Race Identity in Montana, 1900–50” / Andrew R. Graybill, Southern Methodist University

Comments: Margaret Jacobs, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The 2000 U.S. census revealed that an increasing number of Americans identified themselves as multi-racial and the recent 2010 census indicates the same trend. President Barak Obama’s 2008 election also called into question debates about multi-racial identities and the validity of racial categories given the long history of intimate mixing in the United States. This panel attempts to historically situate processes of identity-formation by people of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds in North America, focusing particularly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that some mixed-race and multi-ethnic individuals and families struggled against mainstream racial discourses that discouraged any acceptance of complex identities. Some mixed individuals faced pressures to select and perform one racial identity in public and even within their communities and families. However, the research of this panel demonstrates that individual identities remained contested, negotiated, and in some cases fluid, especially in the American west where racial paradigms extended beyond black and white to include Native Americans and Mexicans in the evolution of racial categories and ideologies.

The first paper by Erika Perez evaluates how the offspring of Spanish-Mexican and European ancestry struggled to find their niche in the aftermath of the U.S. conquest of California in the wake of the Gold Rush. Mixed offspring soon discovered that their options for social mobility were shaped largely by gender, class, education and racial identity, and despite the presence of a European or Anglo-American father, this did not necessarily guarantee mixed offspring success in a changing social climate in American California. While mixed girls experienced increasing social and marriage options in California society, their brothers expressed fear and frustration that they would never attain the success of the previous generation. Anne Hyde’s paper demonstrates how U.S. bureaucrats and policy-makers of Indian affairs attempted to impose their own concepts of gender and the nuclear family upon Native American communities towards the latter part of the nineteenth century. However, Hyde shows that these bureaucratic efforts were contested by indigenous-influenced meanings of family and kinship, thereby contributing to confusion about racial categories, legal identities, and legitimacy in Indian country. Finally, Andrew Graybill’s paper tells the story of one man, John L. Clarke, a Montana artist, who held fast and firm to an Indian identity throughout his life and in his art despite the potential for him to lay claim to some white privilege because of his marriage and mixed heritage. Although other members of Clarke’s family claimed an “in-between” identity, affirming both their Indian and European roots, he remained determined to express himself as an Indian. As this abstract makes clear, all of these papers touch upon identity-formation and developing ideas of race in the North American borderlands and how this process was not always geared towards assimilation but entailed great complexity and negotiation among mixed individuals and even members of the same family. Members interested in racial identities, borderland studies, and the American West will find this panel useful.

The Process of Forming a Multiracial Identity for Persons of Three or More Races

Alliant International University, San Diego, California
2012
197 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3524119
ISBN: 9781267582935

Maria Reyna Fowlks

A PsyD Clinical Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant International University San Diego In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree Doctor of Psychology

The number of multiracial individuals (MRIs) in the United States continues to grow. As this number continues to grow, it is likely there will be an increase in MRIs of three or more races. However, the literature has not specifically looked at the experiences and process of forming a racial identity development of individuals of three or more races. This qualitative study based on grounded theory aimed to do this. Twelve MRIs were interviewed using a semi-structured interview guide. Ten themes and 34 subthemes emerged from the data and were deemed significant to the participants’ experiences and development. Themes included: parental influences on racial identity; varied extended family messages, dynamics, and relations; cultural and geographic influences on racial identity; development of racial awareness; wanting to fit in; getting teased and discriminated against; dealing with other people’s questions and assumptions; discovery and development of one’s racial identity; being mixed has had a positive impact on life; and ways to address race and being multiracial with children. Results indicated the process of developing a multiracial identity is complex with many factors interacting and influencing one’s racial identity. A proposed model is presented integrating the findings from this study to describe the experiences and multiracial identity development process for MRIs of three or more races. Finally, clinical implications, limitations of the study, and recommendations for future research are discussed.

Purchase the dissertation here.

Perspectives and Research on the Concept of Race within the Framework of Multiracial Identity

Interpersona: An International Journal on Personal Relationships
Volume 5, Issue 2 (December 2011)
pages 168-203

Katherine Aumer, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Hawai’i Pacific University

Elaine Hatfield, Professor of Psychology
University of Hawai‘i, Manoa

William Swann, Professor of Social and Personality Psychology
University of Texas, Austin

Rosemary Frey
University of Technology, Jamaica

In recent years, according to U. S. Census reports, the number of people who classify themselves as “mixed race” is rapidly increasing. As a consequence, scholars have become increasingly interested in the nature of racial identity. Currently, scholars and laypersons tend to view the concept of race from a biological perspective, from a social-constructivist perspective, or from a mixture of the two. In this paper, we address several questions: How do political, religious, and legal experts classify various people (racially)? How do men and women (especially those of mixed ancestry) decide to what race they belong? Does one’s own identity, be it monoracial or multiracial, influence one’s perception of race as socially constructed or biologically determined? In order to understand how the concept of race is viewed in the U. S.—especially as the American landscape becomes increasingly complex—we reviewed 40 studies, conducted from 1986-2006, that explored the nature of racial and ethnic identity.2 This comprehensive review suggested that: 1. Americans often find it difficult to classify people of mixed ancestry. 2. Men and women (of mixed race) generally possess a complex view of race. They generally agree that race is, at least in part, a social construct. Nonethess, they are well aware that (at least in society’s eyes) ancestry, appearance, “blood,” and genetic make-up also play a part in one’s racial classification. 3. Multiracials appear to be more flexible in “choosing” a racial identity than are their peers. How they choose to present themselves depends on their physical appearance, how accepting their family and friends are of their claims, and how profitable they think it will be to identify with various aspects of their racial heritage.

Read the entire article here.

Children of Empire: The Fate of Mixed-Race Individuals in British India, the Caribbean, and the Early American Republic

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 105: North American Conference on British Studies
Friday, 2013-01-04, 10:30-12:00 CST (Local Time)
Chamber Ballroom III (Roosevelt New Orleans)

Chair: Kathleen Wilson, Stony Brook University

Papers

• “‘We Are an Indian People’: Mixed-Race Peoples on Virginia’s Eastern Shore” / Royce Gildersleeve, George Mason University
• “Global Citizens: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in the Caribbean, Britain, and India” / Daniel Livesay, Drury University
• “George Washington’s Anglo-Indian Relatives” / Rosemarie Zagarri, George Mason University

Comment: Kathleen Wilson, Stony Brook University

This session will examine the fate of mixed-race individuals in selected places in the English-speaking world from approximately 1775 through 1820. Royce Gildersleeve’s paper focuses on the Virginia government’s efforts to dispossess a group of Gingaskin Indians from their traditional lands on the Eastern Shore. Over time, intermarriage between free black people and the native population had altered the appearance of tribal members. By 1812, the Virginia government maintained that the community was no longer inhabited by Indians but by African Americans who did not deserve title to the land. Daniel Livesay investigates the stories of mixed-race individuals from Jamaica who moved first to Britain and then to British India in an effort to improve their social and economic status. Focusing on the story of three families of color, Livesay explores how British imperialism allowed mixed-race individuals to forge new identities in a new place, but also shows how the hardening of racial ideologies ultimately foreclosed some of the most promising avenues of advancement. Rosemarie Zagarri explores the effects of a migration that proceeded in the opposite direction. Thomas Law, a high-ranking British East India Company official, brought his three illegitimate children, born of an Indian concubine, first to England and then to the young United States. Law hoped that this move would allow his Eurasian children to escape India’s increasingly hostile environment for mixed-race children and secure his sons’ future in what he believed to be a land of unbounded opportunity. Kathleen Wilson, an eminent scholar of the “new” imperial history of Britain, is an ideal commentator for the session.

By focusing on a small group of individuals from a wide geographic expanse, scholars on this panel will directly address the 2013 convention theme, “Lives, Places, Stories.” By concentrating on mixed-race peoples, the panel will complicate our understanding of racial regimes that have been seen in terms of binary oppositions, such black and white, native American and white, Anglo and Indian. The panel will also provide an opportunity for the study of comparative imperialisms. Despite their common British origins, British India, the Caribbean, and the early American republic are seldom examined with reference to one another. Given the relatively flexible character of racial ideology in the mid-eighteenth century, mixed-race individuals from these places could often exploit the ambiguities of their descent to their own advantage. Yet in both British India and the early American republic, the rise of scientific forms of racial ideology in the early nineteenth century diminished their room to maneuver. White Europeans and Americans came to define “race” less in terms of a society’s degree of civilization and economic affluence and more in terms of its members’ skin color and physical characteristics. Nonetheless, the application of these ideas was highly contextual and differed from place to place. By juxtaposing the fate of individuals of mixed-race origins in a variety of English-speaking contexts, this panel will provide new insights into the development of racial identity and the ways in which different imperial regimes imposed shared racial ideologies.

For more information, click here.

In My Skin: Shaping the Multiracial Identity in Indiana

Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana
April 2012
18 pages

Earl L. Harris

A CREATIVE PROJECT SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE MASTER OF ARTS

This project takes viewers inside the lives of multiracial individuals in Indiana through a 60-minute documentary. The state was broken into three parts, broken into Northern, Central, and Southern parts, with each having a person chosen to profile. This is done to educate, inform, and eliminate myths in place about multiracial individuals. Shown is how each deals with day-to-day life not always being understood or fitting in. Life is explored and documented as it happens, including interviews with individuals as part of the production in order to hear “in their own words” about experiences. Other key people, family, friends, co-workers, share thoughts on the multiracial individuals also. The goal is to capture life without affecting what happens.

Read the entire thesis here.