Mixed Race Studies

Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America

Princeton University Press
March 2012
282 pages
6 x 9; 17 halftones. 14 line illus. 10 tables
Cloth ISBN: 9780691152998
eBook ISBN: 9781400841943

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Vesla M. Weaver, Assistant Professor
The Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
University of Virginia

Traci R. Burch, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Northwestern University

The American racial order—the beliefs, institutions, and practices that organize relationships among the nation’s races and ethnicities—is undergoing its greatest transformation since the 1960s. Creating a New Racial Order takes a groundbreaking look at the reasons behind this dramatic change, and considers how different groups of Americans are being affected. Through revealing narrative and striking research, the authors show that the personal and political choices of Americans will be critical to how, and how much, racial hierarchy is redefined in decades to come.

The authors outline the components that make up a racial order and examine the specific mechanisms influencing group dynamics in the United States: immigration, multiracialism, genomic science, and generational change. Cumulatively, these mechanisms increase heterogeneity within each racial or ethnic group, and decrease the distance separating groups from each other. The authors show that individuals are moving across group boundaries, that genomic science is challenging the whole concept of race, and that economic variation within groups is increasing. Above all, young adults understand and practice race differently from their elders: their formative memories are 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Obama’s election—not civil rights marches, riots, or the early stages of immigration. Blockages could stymie or distort these changes, however, so the authors point to essential policy and political choices.

Portraying a vision, not of a postracial America, but of a different racial America, Creating a New Racial Order examines how the structures of race and ethnicity are altering a nation.

Contents

• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction
• PART I: THE ARGUMENT
  • 1. Destabilizing the American Racial Order
• PART II: CREATING A NEW ORDER
  • 2. Immigration
  • 3. Multiracialism
  • 4. Genomics
  • 5. Cohort Change
  • 6. Blockages to Racial Transformation
• PART III: POSSIBILITIES
  • 7. The Future of the American Racial Order
• Notes
• References
• Index

Introduction

A racial order—the set of beliefs, assumptions, rules, and practices that shape the way in which groups in a given society are connected with one another—may seem fixed. Racial orders do change, however. The change may be gradual, as when America evolved over two centuries from being a society with slaves to a slave society, or cataclysmic as when slavery or serfdom is abolished or apartheid instituted. A racial order can change for some groups but not others; the Immigration Act of 1924 denied all Asians and most Kuropcans and Africans, but not Latin Americans, the right of entry to the United States. Change in a racial order is most visible when it results from severe struggle, but it may also occur unintentionally through thousands of cumulative small acts and thoughts. And a racial order can change in some but not all dimensions; American Indians gained U.S. citizenship in 1924 but few have reacquired the land lost through centuries of conquest and appropriation.

Variation in pace, direction, activity, and object makes it difficult to see major change while it is occurring. Nevertheless, we argue that the racial order of the late twentieth century that emerged from the 1960’s civil rights movement, opening of immigration, and Great Society is undergoing a cumulative, wide-ranging, partly unintentional and partly deliberate transformation. The transformation is occurring in locations and laws, beliefs and practices. Its starting point was the abolition of institutional supports and public commitments of the pre-1960s racial order, such as intermarriage bans, legally mandated segregation, unembarrassed racism, and racial or ethnic discrimination. Once those props were removed, the changes broadly signaled by “the 1960s” could develop over the next forty years. They included a rise in immigration, Blacks’ assertion of pride and dignity, Whites’ rejection of racial supremacy (at least in public), a slow opening of schools, jobs, and suburbs to people previously excluded, and a shift in government policy from promoting segregation and hierarchy and restricting interracial unions to promoting (at least officially) integration and equality and allowing interracial unions.

As a consequence, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, new institutions and practices have been moving into place: official records permit people to identify with more than one race, anti-discrimination policies are well established in schools and workplaces, and some non-Whites hold influential political positions. At the same time, the late twentieth century’s understanding of the very meaning of race—a few exhaustive and mutually exclusive groups—is becoming less and less tenable as a consequence of new multiracial identities, immigrants’ rejection of conventional American categories, and genomic science. Social relations, particularly among young Americans, are less driven by stereotypes, more fluid and fragmented, and more susceptible to creation rather than acquiescence. Even deeply seated hierarchies of income, educational attainment and achievement, prestige, and political power are easing for some groups and in some dimensions of life. Race or ethnicity, though still important, is less likely to predict a young person’s life chances than at any previous point in American history; today’s young adults will move through adulthood with the knowledge that one need not be White in order to become the most powerful person in the world…

…Thus the late twentieth-century racial order captures less and less of the way in which race and ethnicity are practiced in the United States today and may be practiced in the foreseeable future. If transformative forces persist and prevail, the United States can finally move toward becoming the society that James Madison envisioned in Federalist #10, one in which no majority faction, not even native-born European Americans, dominates the political, economic, or social arena.

The Madisonian vision must not blind us to two concerns. If it persists, creation of a new racial order will not have only beneficial results. Some Americans are likely to be harmed by these changes and will thereby suffer relative or even absolute losses. Continuing the venerable American pattern, they will be disproportionately African American or Native American, supplemented by undocumented immigrants. All Americans are likely to lose some of the joys and advantages of a strong sense of group identity and rootedness. The greater concern, however, is that the newly created racial order will not persist and prevail. Black poverty and alienation may be too deep; White supremacy may be too tenacious; institutional change may be too shallow; undocumented immigrants may not attain a path to belonging; genomic research may usher in a new era of eugenic discrimination. In short, Americans may in the end lack the political will to finish what demographic change, scientific research, young adults’ worldviews, and the momentum of the past decade have
started…

…Our exploration of transformative forces and their blockages is spread over three parts and seven chapters. Part 1, “The Argument,” has one chapter. Chapter 1 explicates the five components of a societal racial order and suggests what is at stake in the ongoing reinvention of the American racial order. Examples show how immigration, multiracialism, genomics, and cohort change are transforming each component of the late twentieth-century racial order. Chapter 1 also points to elements of American society that could distort or block transformation of the racial order. Perhaps most important, it provides analytic justification for our expectation that creative forces will outweigh blockages, so long as Americans take steps to incorporate those now in danger of exclusion and to improve the life chances of those at the bottom.

Part 2, “Creating a New Order,” consists of five chapters. Chapters 2 through 5 respectively analyze immigration, multiracialism, genomics, and cohort change, in each case using the five components of a racial order to organize the discussion. Despite variation in the content and process of change, a consistent pattern emerges: each transformative force independently (and all of them interactively) is changing how Americans understand what a race is, how individuals are classified, how groups are relatively positioned, how state actions affect people’s freedom of choice, and how people relate to one another in the society. Chapter 6 looks at the opposite side of the creative dynamic—that is, features of the American racial order that reinforce the late twentieth-century order of clear racial and ethnic boundaries, relatively fixed group positions, intermittently prohibitive state actions, and hostile social relations. Chapter 6 focuses on four issues that directly challenge the transformative forces—the costs of a loss in group identity, wealth disparities, unprecedented levels of Black and Latino incarceration, and the possibility that illegal immigrants or Muslims might become the new pariah group. It warns that effective creation of a new racial order can itself deepen the disadvantage of the worst off even while moving toward a more racially inclusive polity.

Finally, part 3, “Possibilities,” consists of one chapter. Chapter 7 concludes by considering the likelihood that the current American racial order will look very different by the time our children reach old age. It also sketches some political and policy directions necessary to promote transformation, expand its benefits, and reduce the proportion of Americans who arc left out or harmed…

The History of the Idea of Race… And Why it Matters

Conference: Race, Human Variation and Disease: Consensus and Frontiers
American Anthropological Association (AAA)
Warrenton, Virginia
2007-03-14 through 2007-03-17
9 pages

Audrey Smedley, Professor Emerita of Anthropology and African American Studies
Virginia Commonwealth University

The position taken by many anthropologists, both biological and social, and increasingly many other scholars in the social sciences is that “race is a cultural construct.” It should be clear that this is not a definition or even a characterization of “race,” but an assertion about the scholarly or existential domain in which we can best examine and explain the phenomenon of race. Race should be analyzed as a social/cultural reality that exists in a realm independent of biological or genetic variations. No amount of research into the biophysical or genetic features of individuals or groups will explain the social phenomenon of race. When five white policemen shot a young unarmed African immigrant 41 times in the doorway of his New York apartment, this can’t be explained by examining their genes or biology. Nor can we explain employer preferences for white job applicants or discrimination in housing or any other of the social realities of racism by references to human biological differences.

This does not mean that we deny that there is a biological basis for some human behaviors at the individual level which is a perfectly legitimate perspective for those who are engaged in this kind of research. Nor does it mean that the existence of race as a cultural phenomenon has no impact on the biology of human beings. On the contrary we know a lot about the sometimes devastating effects of race and racism on the biology and behavior of individuals and groups. Because of several hundred years of racism, during which both physical and psychological oppression have characterized the lives and environments of those people seen as members of low status races, differences in health status and life styles among them have appeared and continue to impact all of us.

The significance of History

In the middle of the 20th century, a new generation of historians began to take another look at the beginnings of the American experience. They spent decades exploring all of the original documents relating to the establishment of colonies in America. What these scholars discovered was to transform the writing of American history forever. Their research revealed that our 19th and 20th century ideas and beliefs about races did not in fact exist in the 17th century. Race originated as a folk idea and ideology about human differences; it was a social invention, not a product of science. Historians have documented when, and to a great extent, how race as an ideology came into our culture and our consciousness. This is the story that I will briefly tell here. (One of the first of the publications and perhaps the one with the greatest impact was a book by Edmund Morgan entitled, American Slavery, American Freedom [1975]. It is the detailed story of Virginia, the first successful colony. On its publication it was hailed as a classic that has inspired numerous other historians.)…

…Edmund Morgan wrote, “There is more than a little evidence that Virginians during these years were ready to think of Negroes as members or potential members of the community on the same terms as other men and to demand of them the same standards of behavior. Black men and white serving the same master worked, ate, and slept together, and together shared in escapades, escapes, and punishments” (1975, 327). “It was common for servants and slaves to run away together, steal hogs together, get drunk together. It was not uncommon for them to make love together” (1975, 327).

No stigma was associated with what we today call intermarriages. Black men servants often married white women servants. Records from one county reveal that one fourth of the children born to European servant girls were mulatto (Breen and Ennis 1980). Historian Anthony Parent (2003) notes that five out of ten black men on the Eastern Shore were married to white women. One servant girl declared to her master that she would rather marry a Negro slave on a neighboring plantation than him with all of his property, and she did (P. Morgan 1998). Given the demographics, servant girls had their choice of men. One white widow of a black farmer had no problem with remarrying, this time to a white man. She later sued this second husband, accusing him of squandering the property she had accumulated with her first husband (E. Morgan 1975, 334). In another case, a black women servant sued successfully for her freedom and then married the white lawyer who represented her in court (P. Morgan, 1998)…

Read the entire paper here.

Mixed Race Studies with Steve Riley

BlogtalkRadio: Is That Your Child?
2012-01-20, 19:30 EST/16:30 PST; [2012-01-21, 00:30Z]

Michelle McCrary, Host

ITYC welcomes creator, founder and editor of the site Mixed Race Studies.org Steve Riley to the podcast this week. In his words, Riley began Mixed Race Studies in April of 2009 “in recognition of our family members and friends who are ‘mixed-race’ and/or raising ‘mixed-race’ children, in response the growing number self-identifying ‘mixed-race’ living here in the Washington, DC area, and finally in celebration of my interracial marriage to my loving wife of 16 years.”

 We’ll talk to him about the site, what he’s learned about issues of mixed identity over the last few years, and if his work  has revealed anything about his own interracial relationship.

HLA class I variation controlled for genetic admixture in the Gila River Indian Community of Arizona: A model for the Paleo-Indians

Human Immunology
Volume 33, Issue 1 (January 1992)
Pages 39–46
DOI: 10.1016/0198-8859(92)90050-W

Robert C. Williams
Histocompatibility Laboratory, Blood Systems, Inc., Scottsdale, Arizona
Department of Anthropology, Arizona State University

Joan E. McAuley
Histocompatibility Laboratory, Blood Systems, Inc., Scottsdale, Arizona

The genetic distribution of the HLA class I loci is presented for 619 “full blooded” Pima and Tohono O’odham Native Americans (Pimans) in the Gila River Indian Community. Variation in the Pimans is highly restricted. There are only three polymorphic alleles at the HLA-A locus, ^∗A2, ^∗A24, and ^∗A31, and only 10 alleles with a frequency greater than 0.01 at HLA-B where ^∗Bw48 (0.187), ^∗B35 (0.173), and the new epitope ^∗BN21 (0.143) have the highest frequencies. Two and three locus disequilibria values and haplotype frequencies are presented. Ten three-locus haplotypes account for more than 50% of the class I variation, with ^∗A24 ^∗BN21 ^∗Cw3 (0.085) having the highest frequency. Gm allotypes demonstrate that little admixture from non-Indian populations has entered the Community since the 17th century when Europeans first came to this area. As a consequence many alleles commonly found in Europeans and European Americans are efficient markers for Caucasian admixture, while the “private” Indian alleles, ^∗BN21 and ^∗Bw48, can be used to measure Native American admixture in Caucasian populations. It is suggested that this distribution in “full blooded” Pimans approximates that of the Paleo-Indian migrants who first entered the Americas between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago.

Purchase the article here.

Anthropology at the Washington Meeting for 1911

Science Magazine
Volume 35, Number 904 (1912-04-26)
pages 665-676
DOI: 10.1126/science.35.904.665

George Grant MacCurdy (1863-1947), Assistant Professor of Archæology
Yale University

The annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association was held in the United States National Museum, Washington, D. C., December 27-30, 1911, in affiliation with Section H of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Folk-Lore Society. The attendance was good and the program exceptionally long and interesting. The most important features were the two symposia: (1) “The Problems of the Unity or Plurality and the Probable Place of Origin of the American Aborigines, ” discussed by J. W. Fewkes, A. Hrdlieka, W. H. Dall, J. W. Gidley, A. H. Clark, W. H. Holmes, Alice C. Fletcher, Walter Hough, Stansbury Hagar, A. F. Chamberlain and R. B. Dixon; and (2) “Culture and Environment,” discussed by J. W. Fewkes, Clark Wissler, Edward Sapir and Robert H. Lowie. The first of these two discussions is printed in full in the January-March issue of the Anthropologist, and the second will appear in the April-June issue. Dr. J. Walter Fewkes presided at the six sessions in charge of the American Anthropological Association; also at the single session of the American Folk-Lore Society, in the absence of Professor Henry M. Belden, president of that society. Professor George T. Ladd, vice president of Section H, was chairman of the single session in charge of the section. The social functions to which members of the affiliated societies were invited included: a reception by Dr. and Mrs. Robert S. Woodward at the Carnegie Institution, a reception at the New National Museum, and the opening of the Corcoran Gallery of Art…

…Some Aspects of the Negro Problem: ALBERT ERNEST JENKS, University of Minnesota.

Immigration.—Since we have a serious negro problem is it reasonable that this problem be made more difficult by admission into the United States each year of an increasing number of un-Americanized immigrant alien negroes.

There are no United States laws against such immigration. Just short of 40,000 such persons have come to this country in the last ten years; in 1911 we received 6,721. They come from near at hand-three fourths coming from the West Indies. The West Indies have nearly 6,000,000 negroes, any of whom may come to the United States. America debars oriental peoples, not because they are inferior, but because they and their culture are so different from American people and culture. For the same reason we should exclude the “African black.” He should also be excluded because his admission is unfair to the white and also to the negro American-since he makes even more difficult one of America’s most perplexing problems.

Miscegenation.—There are two forms of negro-white miscegenation: (1) Legal marriage, permitted permitted in twenty-three states where the unions are largely between negro men and white women; (2) illegal, more or less temporary unions, usually between white men and negro women. Investigation in a certain area shows that 65 per cent. of the white wives of negro men are foreign born girls—usually of Teutonic peoples. Over two per cent. of children are born to these marriages. The result of both these forms of miscegenation is an increasing number of mulattoes cemented by color and prejudice to the negro race, while by inheritance they are endowed to a considerable degree with Anglo-Saxon initiative, will, ideals and desire for a square-deal—which, because of their color, they can seldom get. These mulattoes are the migrants in the north and west of the United States; they are more migrant than the restless, foot-free white American. The mulatto is the chief factor in the negro problem; the problem is bound to increase, then, in geographic area, in number of discontented negroes, and in its intensity, hand in hand with the increased flow of Anglo-Saxon blood into the veins of this new American man. All forms of miscegenation between the two races should be made a felony, punishable for one offence; and the father of children born to one white and one negro parent should be held to support and educate such children.

Who is a Negro?—The negro should be defined uniformly, so that there would be no question of the legal and racial status of any given person, no matter in what commonwealth he may be. To-day there is no such uniformity of laws.

Murderous Race Riots.—The white man ‘s passion against the offending, or suspected, negro is often nothing short of blood vengeance against the negro race. This is seen in the fact that assault against the virtue of a white woman is only one of some three dozen offences for which negroes are annually lynched. In many of these lynchings and burnings murder is not committed in the frenzy of the moment; the mob starts out to lynch or burn-the crime is premeditated. If America is to train her annual armies of immigrant recruits into law-respecting and law-abiding citizens, she must punish to the limit necessary all participants in murderous race riots.

Education.—Each negro child should have, so far as public and private schools are concerned, an equal opportunity with the white child to make of himself all that he is capable of being.

Investigation.—A commission should be selected to study every aspect of the negro problem. This commission might well be financed by private funds so as to keep it from the almost certain bias of politics and sectionalism…

Read the entire article here.

Johnny Otis, ‘Godfather of Rhythm and Blues,’ Dies at 90

New York Times
2012-01-19

Ihsan Taylor

Johnny Otis, the musician, bandleader, songwriter, impresario, disc jockey and talent scout often called “the godfather of rhythm and blues,” died on Tuesday at his home in Altadena, Calif. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his manager, Terry Gould.

Leading a band in the late 1940s that combined the high musical standards of big-band jazz with the raw urgency of gospel music and the blues, Mr. Otis played a key role in creating a new sound for a new audience of young urban blacks, a sound that within a few years would form the foundation of rock ’n’ roll.

With his uncanny ear for talent, he helped steer a long list of performers to stardom, among them Etta James, Jackie Wilson, Esther Phillips and Big Mama Thornton — whose hit recording of “Hound Dog,” made in 1952, four years before Elvis Presley’s, was produced by Mr. Otis and featured him on drums.

…Despite being a mover and shaker in the world of black music, Mr. Otis was not black, a fact that as far as he was concerned was simply an accident of birth. He was immersed in African-American culture from an early age and considered himself, he said, “black by persuasion.”

“Genetically, I’m pure Greek,” he told The San Jose Mercury News in 1994. “Psychologically, environmentally, culturally, by choice, I’m a member of the black community.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

Science in the Service of the Far Right: Henry E. Garrett, the IAAEE, and the Liberty Lobby

Journal of Social Issues
Volume 54, Issue 1 (Spring 1998)
pages 179–210
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4560.1998.tb01212.x

Andrew S. Winston, Professor of Psychology
University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada

Henry E. Garrett (1894–1973) was the President of the American Psychological Association in 1946 and Chair of Psychology at Columbia University from 1941 to 1955. In the 1950s Garrett helped organize an international group of scholars dedicated to preventing race mixing, preserving segregation, and promoting the principles of early 20th century eugenics and “race hygiene.” Garrett became a leader in the fight against integration and collaborated with those who sought to revitalize the ideology of National Socialism. I discuss the intertwined history the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE), the journal Mankind Quarterly, the neofascist Northern League, and the ultra-right-wing political group, the Liberty Lobby. The use of psychological research and expertise in the promotion of neofascism is examined.

Read or purchase the article here.

Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy

Global Dialogue
Volume 12, Number 2 (Summer/Autumn 2010)—Race and Racisms
ISSN 1986-2601

Andrea Smith, Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies
University of California, Riverside

Many scholars in Native studies have argued that the field has been co-opted by broader discourses, such as ethnic studies or post-colonial studies. Their contention is that ethnic studies elide Native claims to sovereignty by rendering Native peoples as ethnic groups suffering racial discrimination rather than as nations who are undergoing colonisation. These scholars and activists rightly point to the neglect within ethnic studies and within broader racial-justice struggles of the unique legal position Native peoples have in the United States. At the same time, because of this intellectual and political divide, there is insufficient exchange that would help us understand how white supremacy and settler colonialism intersect, particularly within the United States. In this paper, I will examine how the lack of attention to settler colonialism hinders the analysis of race and white supremacy developed by scholars who focus on race and racial formation. I will then examine how the lack of attention to race and white supremacy within Native studies and Native struggles hinders the development of a decolonial framework.

The Logics of White Supremacy

Before I begin this examination, however, it is important to challenge the manner in which ethnic studies have formulated the study of race relations as well as how people of colour organising within the United States have formulated models for racial solidarity. As I have argued elsewhere, the general premiss behind organising by “people of colour” as well as “ethnic studies” is that communities of colour share overlapping experiences of oppression around which they can compare and organise.The result of this model is that scholars or activists, sensing that this melting-pot approach to understanding racism is eliding critical differences between groups, focus on the uniqueness of their particular history of oppression. However, they do not necessarily challenge the model as a whole—often assuming that it works for all groups except theirs. Instead, as I have also argued, we may wish to rearticulate our understanding of white supremacy by not assuming that it is enacted in a single fashion; rather, white supremacy is constituted by separate and distinct, but still interrelated, logics. I would argue that the three primary logics of white supremacy in the US context include: (1) slaveability/anti-black racism, which anchors capitalism; (2) genocide, which anchors colonialism; and (3) orientalism, which anchors war.

One pillar of white supremacy is the logic of slavery. This logic renders black people as inherently enslaveable—as nothing more than property. That is, in this logic of white supremacy, blackness becomes equated with slaveability. The forms of slavery may change, be it explicit slavery, sharecropping, or systems that regard black peoples as permanent property of the state, such as the current prison–industrial complex (whether or not blacks are formally working within prisons).  But the logic itself has remained consistent. This logic is the anchor of capitalism. That is, the capitalist system ultimately commodifies all workers: one’s own person becomes a commodity that one must sell in the labour market while the profits of one’s work are taken by somebody else. To keep this capitalist system in place—which ultimately commodifies most people—the logic of slavery applies a racial hierarchy to this system. This racial hierarchy tells people that as long as you are not black, you have the opportunity to escape the commodification of capitalism. Anti-blackness enables people who are not black to accept their lot in life because they can feel that at least they are not at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy—at least they are not property, at least they are not slaveable.

A second pillar of white supremacy is the logic of genocide. This logic holds that indigenous peoples must disappear. In fact, they must always be disappearing, in order to enable non-indigenous peoples’ rightful claim to land. Through this logic of genocide, non-Native peoples then become the rightful inheritors of all that was indigenous—land, resources, indigenous spirituality, and culture. Genocide serves as the anchor of colonialism: it is what allows non-Native peoples to feel they can rightfully own indigenous peoples’ land. It is acceptable exclusively to possess land that is the home of indigenous peoples because indigenous peoples have disappeared.

A third pillar of white supremacy is the logic of orientalism. “Orientalism” was Edward Said’s term for the process of the West’s defining itself as a superior civilisation by constructing itself in opposition to an “exotic” but inferior “Orient”. (Here, I am using the term “orientalism” more broadly than to signify solely what has been historically named as the “orient” or “Asia”.) The logic of orientalism marks certain peoples or nations as inferior and deems them to be a constant threat to the wellbeing of empire. These peoples are still seen as “civilisations”—they are not property or the “disappeared”. However, they are imagined as permanent foreign threats to empire. This logic is evident in the anti-immigration movements in the United States that target immigrants of colour. It does not matter how long immigrants of colour reside in the United States, they generally become targeted as foreign threats, particularly during war-time. Consequently, orientalism serves as the anchor of war, because it allows the United States to justify being in a constant state of war to protect itself from its enemies. Orientalism allows the United States to defend the logics of slavery and genocide as these practices enable it to stay “strong enough” to fight these constant wars. What becomes clear, then, is what Sora Han declares: the United States is not at war; the United States is war. For the system of white supremacy to stay in place, the United States must always be at war…

…Jared Sexton, in his otherwise brilliant analysis in Amalgamation Schemes, also presumes the continuance of settler colonialism. He describes Native peoples as a “racial group” to be collapsed into all non-black peoples of colour. Sexton goes so far as to argue for a black/non-black paradigm that is parallel to a “black/immigrant” paradigm, rhetorically collapsing indigenous peoples into the category of immigrants, in effect erasing their relationship to this land and hence reifying the settler colonial project. Similarly, Angela Harris argues for a “black exceptionalism” that defines race relations in which Native peoples play a “subsidiary” role. To make this claim, she lumps Native peoples into the category of racial minority and even “immigrant” by contending that “contempt for blacks is part of the ritual through which immigrant groups become ‘American’ ”.

Of course, what is not raised in this analysis is that “America” itself can exist only through the disappearance of indigenous peoples. Feagin, Sexton and Harris fail to consider that markers of “racial progress” for Native peoples are also markers of genocide. For instance, Sexton contends that the high rate of interracial marriages for Native peoples indicates racial progress rather than being part of the legacy of US policies of cultural genocide, including boarding schools, relocation, removal and termination. Interestingly, a central intervention made by Sexton is that the politics of multiculturalism depends on anti-black racism. That is, multiculturalism exists to distance itself from blackness (since difference from whiteness, defined as racial purity, is already a given). However, with an expanded notion of the logics of settler colonialism, his analysis could resonate with indigenous critiques of mestizaje, whereby the primitive indigenous subject always disappears into the more complex, evolved mestizo subject. These signs of “racial progress” could then be rearticulated as markers of indigenous disappearance and what Denise Ferreira da Silva terms as racial engulfment into the white self-determining subject. Thus, besides presuming the genocide of Native peoples and the givenness of settler society, these analyses also misread the logics of anti-indigenous racism (as well as other forms of racism)…

Read the entire article here.

A Stronger Kinship: One Town’s Extraordinary Story of Hope and Faith

University of Nebraska Press
2007
296 pages
20 photos, 9 tables, appendix
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-6018-4

Anna-Lisa Cox

In the heartland of the United States 150 years ago, where racism and hatred were common, a community decided there could be a different America. Here schools and churches were completely integrated, blacks and whites intermarried, and power and wealth were shared by both races. But for this to happen, the town’s citizens had to keep secrets, break the laws of the world outside, and sweep aside fear and embrace hope.

In a historical-detective feat, Anna-Lisa Cox uncovers the heartening story of this community that took the road untaken. Beginning in the 1860s, the people of Covert, Michigan, attempted to do what then seemed impossible: love one’s neighbor—regardless of skin color—as oneself. Drawing on diaries, oral histories, and contemporary records, Cox gives us intimate glimpses of Covert’s people, from William Conner, the Civil War veteran who went on to become Michigan’s first black justice of the peace, to Elizabeth Gillard, who, shipwrecked and washed onto Covert’s shores, ultimately came to love the unusual community she would call home. In bringing these and other stories of this small town to light, Cox presents a vision of what our nation might have been, and could be.

Table of Contents

• Cast of Characters
• Deerfield map
• Colored population map
• Introduction
• 1: The Bleeding Heartland
• 2: The Journey: 1860–1866
• 3: Rights: 1866–1869
• 4: Citizenship: 1870–1875
• 5: Equality: 1875–1880
• 6: Independence: 1880–1884
• 7: Friendship: 1885–1889
• 8: Justice: 1890–1896
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

The Man Who Talks Not: John L. Clarke and the Politics of Mixed-Race Identity in Montana, 1900-1950

United States History Colloquium 2011-2012
University of California, Los Angeles
History Conference Room, 6275 Bunche Hall
2012-01-19, 16:00-18:00 PST (Local Time)

Andrew Graybill, Associate Professor of History
Southern Methodist University

A Pre-circulated Paper and Discussion with Professor Andrew Graybill of Southern Methodist University.

This talk is sponsored by the UCLA Department of History and the Center for the Study of the American West, Autry National Center.