Mixed Race Studies

The Negro as a Health Problem

The Journal of the American Medical Association
Volume 55, Number 15 (1910-10-08)
pages 1246-1247
DOI: 10.1001/jama.1910.04330150006002

H. M. Folkes, M.D.
Biloxi, Mississippi

In the South, regardless of hair-splitting dictionary or legal definitions, it is customary to regard as negro any person who is known to have any negro blood in his veins; this despite the fact that the Supreme Court of Louisiana has lately handed down a decision restricting the term “negro” to those having a greater proportion of negro blood than would occur in an octoroon. This decision, however much it may be law, has not been the custom.

It may not be commonly known in the North that prior to the war it was the custom in the South among the better class of slave owners to give the very best care and attention to the slaves—to the house-servants as well as every other class of laborer generally. Of course, while due credit must be given to the humane motive at the bottom of this, it must be acknowledged that the economic consideration was also largely influential, as each negro, old, or young, possessed considerable cash value. Hence it was decidedly to the interest of the property owner to take care of his investment.

The natural result of this was a higher standard of physical health among negro children than has ever been attained since the emancipation, for among other unfortunate sequelæ folloing this perfectly righteous step was the handing over of the lives and care of negro progeny to their more or less fatalistic parens, who, removed from the control of intelligent direction, soon lapsed into their African condition of irresponsibility. The unfortunate creatures (as the negro race has done in all history) then reverted, in a  large measure, to aboriginal conditions.

The negro, due to his heredity and environment, is essentially a fatalist, and when moved at all it is by his emotions, and not by judgement….

…Mulattoes, octoroons and quadroons are much more susceptible to the ravages of syphilis and gonorrhea than are their more deeply tinted brethren.  Negroes of all shades are extremely susceptible to tuberculosis, and also to measles.  In my experience extending over a period of nearly twenty years, I do not recall having seen a case of scarlet fever, diphtheria, mumps or tonsillitis in black negroes, and since beginning this paper I have made inquiries of all the physicians with whom I have come in contact and have received practically the same answer as to the immunity of the pure-blooded negro from these diseases.

Mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons are decidedly more susceptible to scarlet fever, diphtheria, mumps and tonsillitis, but with rather large experience among the different shades of negro people, I can recall at this moment but very few instances of these diseases among them.

It might not be out of place at this point to call attention to the fact that mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons, as they are at present in the South, are mostly descendedants of their own type of people, and not the result of crossing of white and black bloods; in other words, mulatto man and woman have progeny mulattoes; quadroons present the same as themselves, as also do octoroons.  There is, however, a marked tendency toward a decrease in the number of children born to these light-colored negroes and the nearer they approach to pure white blood the fewer children they have, as a rule…

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THE CONGRESS: Black’s White

TIME Magazine
1938-01-24

To Negro Lee Jones, a 31-year-old mill-hand of Greensboro, Ala., last week’s doings in the U. S. Senate were good news. Negro Jones had been arrested, charged with jumping on the running board of a car to kidnap Mrs. Robert Knox Greene, wife of a white planter. When Mrs. Greene’s friends began to gather he did not need to be told what familiar, ugly thought they had in mind. At the crucial moment when Sheriff Calvin Hollis was trying to calm the crowd, up stepped Planter Robert Knox Greene himself. How Planter Greene, a cousin of Alabama’s Representative Sam Hobbs, persuaded the mob to disperse he was soon explaining to the Associated Press. “I told them I was the aggrieved person,” said he, with some self-satisfaction, “and I ought to have the final say. I also reminded them our Southern Senators were fighting an anti-lynching bill in Washington and violence might hamper them…

…But Jimmy Byrnes dropped the first real bomb. Pointing straight at a small man seated quietly in the gallery, his voice tense with passion, the wiry South Carolinian cried: “The South may just as well know , . . that it has been deserted by the Democrats of the North. . . . One Negro . . . has ordered this bill to pass and if a majority can pass it, it will pass. . . . If Walter White,” and Jimmy Byrnes was fairly shouting his angry tribute, “should consent to have this bill laid aside, its advocates would desert it as quickly as football players unscramble when the whistle of the referee is heard.”

Paleface-The Negro who did not acknowledge this extraordinary attention was Secretary Walter Francis White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Not the least reason for Southern hatred of antilynching bills is that for the past decade they have been inextricably associated with Walter White, and that the gradual growth of the anti-lynching movement had by last week made spunky, dapper, 44-year-old Negro White the most potent leader of his race in the U. S.

Son of a fair-skinned Georgia postman and his fair-skinned wife, Walter White is blond and palefaced. He himself does not know how much Negro blood runs in his veins; Harvard’s far-ranging Anthropologist Earnest Alfred Hooton computes it at 1/64. But despite a skin that last week fooled fellow guests at Washington’s Hay-Adams House, Walter White has always regarded himself as a Negro. He remembers that his father’s house was almost burned down during an Atlanta race riot in his childhood. He recalls too that his father died in agony when the surgeons of the white ward of an Atlanta hospital, to which he had been mistakenly taken for an emergency operation, balked upon learning his race and insisted on shipping him in the rain to the Negro ward across the street…

…In 1935, Walter White was able to get the ear of Franklin Roosevelt. Secretary Marvin Mclntyre refused him an appointment with the President, but the President’s Negro Valet Irvin H. McDuffie who sometimes leaves notes on his employer’s pillow and tactfully gets unofficial callers in through the White House kitchen, was able to arrange a private meeting. What effect Walter White’s address to the President may have had Washington last week was not sure…

Read the entire article here.

PLAIN PEOPLE: Is There Anywhere?…

Time Magazine
1946-03-11

Prewar Britain’s Negro problem was as minuscule as prewar Britain’s Negro population. But the 70,000 U.S. Negro troops who served in Britain during the war left behind hundreds of illegitimate mulatto babies. Last fortnight London’s League of Colored Peoples reported that already 544 children of U.S. Negro soldiers and British women were in social or economic straits.

So long as the Negro fathers were in the U.S. Army and acknowledged paternity, the mothers received support allowances. In the British provinces $85 a month was comparative riches. But when Negro soldiers were demobilized in the U.S., allowances ceased; some Negro fathers neglected to make any other provision. Then the social pressure of British provincial respectability became unbearable. Said one British mother of a Negro’s child: “I am shunned by the whole village. . . . The inspector for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has told my friend to keep her children away from my house… as didn’t she know that I had two illegitimate colored children? Is there anywhere I can go where my children will not get… pushed around?”…

Read the entire article here.

Science: Savants

TIME Magazine
1924-08-18

Women’s barber shops call themselves beauty parlors. Drug stores call themselves ice cream parlors. Clerks call themselves salesmen. Politicians call themselves statesmen. Flappers call themselves young ladies. But scientists call themselves scientists, and only newspapers call them savants.

But the word “savants” has been spread in the headlines of newspapers for the greater part of the week. What this signified was that some 2,000 hardworking men of science were assembled at Toronto at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The Association, which makes a practice of meeting everywhere save in London—in order to stimulate interest elsewhere—gathered to its meeting more than 500 British scientists, about the same number each of Canadians and Americans, and a scattering number from the rest of the world. The presence of Americans was, indeed, due to the fact that the British Association very thoughtfully gave the members of the American Association of the same name membership in the British Association for the purpose of the meeting.

¶ The meeting was opened at Toronto University by Major-General Sir David Bruce, President of the Association…

…¶ John W. Gregory, President of the Geographical Section of the Association, spoke on the “Color” problem of the earth, in which the white race, composed of some 520,000,000 out of a total population of about 1,700,000,000, controls eight-ninths of the habitable earth. He suggested that there were four possible solutions of the color problem: 1) amalgamation by miscegenation; 2) coresidence without fusion; 3) ‘disfranchisement of the colored population; 4) segregation into separate communities. He inclined to the belief that the last will be the solution, and foresaw that in 100 years or so, by natural processes, a sort of free state of Negroes would develop in the Southern U. S…

Read the entire article here.

But Don’t Call Me White: Mixed Race Women Exposing Nuances of Privilege and Oppression Politics

Sense Publishers
September 2011
258 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-94-6091-692-2
Paperback ISBN 978-94-6091-691-5

Silvia Cristina Bettez, Assistant Professor of Cultural Foundations
School of Education
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Highlighting the words and experiences of 16 mixed race women (who have one white parent and one parent who is a person of color), Silvia Bettez exposes hidden nuances of privilege and oppression related to multiple positionalites associated with race, class, gender and sexuality. These women are “secret agent insiders” to cultural Whiteness who provide unique insights and perspectives that emerge through their mixed race lenses.  Much of what the participants share is never revealed in mixed—White/of color—company.  Although critical of racial power politics and hierarchies, these women were invested in cross-cultural connections and revealed key insights that can aid all in understanding how to better communicate across lines of cultural difference.

This book is an invaluable resource for a wide range of activists, scholars and general readers, including sociologists, sociologists of education, feminists, anti-oppression/social justice scholars, critical multicultural educators, and qualitative researchers who are interested in mixed race issues, cross cultural communication, social justice work, or who simply wish to minimize racial conflict and other forms of oppression.

Mixed-race numbers double since 2000

The Tuscaloosa News
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
2011-10-04

Dana Beyerle, Montgomery Bureau Chief

More than twice as many people in Alabama say they are of two races than 10 years earlier

MONTGOMERY | Alabama’s black population increased slightly between 2000 and 2010, but the number of people claiming mixed-race status more than doubled, according to researchers at the University of Alabama.

More than twice as many people in Alabama indicated they were of mixed race in 2010 as they did on the 2000 Census, the first time the option was available.

In 2000, 13,068 Alabamians reported they were of two races, one of which was black. For the 2010 Census, 29,807 Alabamians indicated that they were of mixed-race status.

Carolyn Trent, socio-economic analyst at the Center for Business and Economic Research’s state data center, said Monday the mixed-race increase probably reflects a growing willingness to identify a person’s dual heritage…

Read the entire article here.

Visualizing a Critical Mixed-Race Theory

Stance: An International Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
Volume 2 (Spring 2009)
pages 18-25
Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana
ISSN: 1943-1880

Desiree Valentine, Departments of Philosophy and Communication Studies
Marquette University

In this paper, questions regarding the cultural understanding of mixed race are explored, which have the ability to complicate the accepted portrayal of race in society as a black/white binary system. Thus, the acknowledgement of something other than this binary system offers new ways of theorizing about race, particularly concerning the sociopolitical implications of mixed-race designation. This paper argues that the visually mixed-race person has a certain direct ability to challenge the binary and its racist logic. Furthermore, this paper goes on to offer a unique interpretation of where power for working against a racially oppressive system lies within critical mixed-race theory.

I was in kindergarten when I had a clear understanding of the racialized world in which we live, when I had to check a box on my school registration papers recognizing myself as either black or white. This simple action can be quite complicated when one is a daughter of a black father and white mother. I was finally offered the choice of “mixed” by the time I reached Jr. High. But what is this concept of “mixed” and what does it offer a nation still infused with racism years after the time period known as the “Civil Rights Era” has ended?

Questions of mixed race bring with them complications to the established black/white binary system and thus offer new ways of theorizing race as well as the sociopolitical implications of mixed race designation. As Lewis Gordon states, “In spite of contemporary resistance to ‘binary’ analyses, a critical discussion of mixed-race categories calls for an understanding of how binary logic functions in discourses on race and racism. Without binaries, no racism will exist.” Can a breakdown of the current binary logic, which places social and political advantages on white individuals, occur with the inception of a critical mixed race theory? And could this lead to a society free of racism?

This essay will focus on the views of theorists Lewis Gordon and Naomi Zack and their conceptions of the racial binary system and mixed race. I will begin by looking at both theorists’ views on the racial binary system, posing the question, “How do we understand the spectrum of race?” From there, I will explore the approaches each theorist offers for deconstructing the binary, followed by a comparison and critique of both theorizations, with the end goal of offering my own interpretation of where power for working against a racially oppressive system lies within a critical mixed race theory. It is my view that what often gets overlooked in these theorizations is the effect of visual incoherency to the black/white binary that can be provided by the mixed race individual. The concept of the “visibly mixed race person” will be used in this essay to explore the transformative areas for a society still enmeshed in the ugly history of racism…

Read the entire article here.

Who Will You Let Me Be?

Race, Ethnicity, and Me: Autobiographical Reflections by Trinity University Students
Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas
Fall 2008

Claire Murphy-Cook

Race, Ethnicity, and Me is a collection of autobiographical essays written by Trinity University students as an assignment for a course taught by Professor David Spener in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. In their essays, students use research findings and scholarly concepts to analyze their own experiences involving racial and ethnic identities in the United States. The collection is intended for use by students and educators as a tool for promoting dialogue about diversity issues as they affect their academic institutions and communities. The essays it contains were written by students in the fall 2008 semester.

Claire Murphy-Cook comes from what, in her words, “can only be described as an alternative family.” She has two lesbian mothers who have been in a relationship for nearly thirty years. Both her mothers are non-Hispanic whites. Her father is a mixed-race, gay man from Brazil who was asked by her mothers to be their sperm donor. He has, nonetheless, been an active presence in Claire’s life. In her essay, she describes how traveling to Brazil with him as a teenager gave her a new sense of her own identity in racial and ethnic terms.

To be mixed race means not having a place in any defined racial categories. It means being defined by standards that do not recognize who you are or where you came from, checking too many bubbles on Scantrons, and puzzling over census categorizations. What is it exactly that places us in these arbitrary categories? How does a person come to terms with the gaps in society’s perceptions about you and the way you see yourself?…

…Though I am aware that American society perceives me as white, I view myself as half Irish (white) and half Brazilian (Latina), someone multiracial. Growing up, there was always an emphasis of both of these identities; I can remember numerous times when my parents told me that I was “not just white.” They also told me that because of societal perceptions of my race that I was treated better than if than if my skin were darker. They were not so overt as to tell me that I had white privilege, but we always talked about how my dad used to be stopped and searched in the airport all the time. Then my moms would bring up how we never got stopped or searched at the airport, and tell my sister and I that it was because we were two white ladies traveling with young daughters. Although never explicitly mentioned as such, I have always been both aware and wary of my white privilege…

Read the entire essay here.

The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics

MIT Press
January 2009
368 pages
7 x 9, 35 illus.
Paper ISBN-10: 0-262-58275-9; ISBN-13: 978-0-262-58275-9

Evelynn M. Hammonds, Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies (and Dean of Harvard College)
Harvard University

Rebecca M. Herzig, Professor of Women and Gender Studies
Bates College, Lewiston, Maine

The Nature of Difference documents how distinctions between people have been generated in and by the life sciences. Through a wide-ranging selection of primary documents and insightful commentaries by the editors, it charts the shifting boundaries of science and race through more than two centuries of American history. The documents, primarily writings by authoritative, eminent scientists intended for their professional peers, show how various sciences of race have changed their object of study over time: from racial groups to types to populations to genomes and beyond. The book’s thematic and synthetic approach reveals the profoundly diverse array of practices—countless acts of observation, quantification, and experimentation—that enabled the consequential categorizations we inherit.
 
The documents—most reproduced in their entirety—range from definitions of race in dictionaries published between 1886 and 2005 to an exchange of letters between Benjamin Baneker and Thomas Jefferson; from Samuel Cartwright’s 1851 “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race” to a 1950 UNESCO declaration that race is a social myth; from a 1928 paper detailing the importance of the glands in shaping human nature to a 2005 report of the discovery of a genetic basis for skin color. Such documents, given context by the editors’ introductions to each thematic chapter, provide scholars, journalists, and general readers with the rich historical background necessary for understanding contemporary developments in racial science.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. DICTIONARY DEFINITIONS OF “RACE”
• 2. ANATOMICAL OBSERVATIONS
• 3. IMMUNITY AND CONTAGION
• 4. EVOLUTION AND DEGENERATION
• 5. TECHNIQUES OF MEASUREMENT
• 6. GLANDULAR DIFFERENCES
• 7. HYBRIDITY AND ADMIXTURE
• 8. TOWARD GENETICS
• 9. THE END OF RACE?
• Index

Glenn Robinson to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #227? – Glenn Robinson
When: Wednesday, 2011-10-05, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Glenn Robinson, Lover of Human Rights, Social Justice, Dignity & Respect

Glenn is the creator of the blogs Community Village and Mixed American Life and is an Irish, German, Dutch, English & Austrian American married to a Spanish & Aztec Mexican-American. They have two children and encourage them to identify however they want. Glenn is interested in progressive immigration reform, universal health care and desegregation within schools and communities. He is a life long learner with interests in sociology, anthropology, psychology, history and politics.