Mixed Race Studies

Critical Mixed Race Conference 2012: Call for Papers

Critical Mixed Race Conference 2012
“What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?”
2012-11-01 throuth 2012-11-04
DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Click here for this announcement in PDF format.

Conference Description: What is Critical Mixed Race Studies? will be hosted at DePaul University in Chicago, November 1-4, 2012. The CMRS conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines nationwide. Recognizing that the diverse disciplines that have nurtured Mixed Race Studies have fostered different approaches to the field, the 2012 CMRS conference is devoted to the general theme “What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?”

Proposals:We invite panels, roundtables, and papers that address the conference theme, although participants are also welcome to submit proposals that speak to their own specialized research, pedagogical, or community-based interests. The primary criterion for selection will be the quality of the proposal, not its connection to the conference theme. Proposals might consider the ways different disciplines approach or provide methodologies for critical analyses of mixed race issues. Proposals might also consider the following areas as related to Critical Mixed Race Studies:

To submit a proposal or for more information, please visit: http://las.depaul.edu/cmrs

Deadline for all proposals: December 15th, 2011.
Selections will be finalized by March 1, 2012.

All queries should be directed to cmrs@depaul.edu.

Group provides space for ‘racial Hybrids’

The University News
A Student Voice of Saint Louis University Since 1921
2011-04-14

Sean Worley

Black Student Alliance, Filipino Student Association, Indian Student Association and the list of groups oriented around race goes on. Although these student groups have a noticeable presence on campus, for some students, they just are not enough.
 
“I constantly feel different,” freshman Rebecca Glasgow said. “I relate to things but I always feel different.”
 
Glasgow identifies as an Arab-American with her father being from the United States and her mother from Syria, she often wonders where her chartered student organization is on campus.
 
Hybrid Identities is such a student organization for students who identify with no one particular race. In other words they are mixed race, or hybrid.
 
This CSO is currently in its probationary status but is already starting to gain interest and support…

Read the entire article here.

Man with a Cross: Hawkeye Was a “Half-Breed”

Cooper Panel
American Literature Association Conference
San Diego, California
May 1998

James Fenimore Cooper Society

Barbara Mann, Lecturer of English
University of Toledo

Originally published in James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers No. 10, August 1998

Natty Bumppo—Hawkeye of James Fenimore Cooper’s five Leather-Stocking Tales—is indelibly inscribed in the critical mind as the “man without a cross,” that prototypical “white Indian” of American literature. So accustomed are they to Natty’s “man-without-a-cross” mantra that critics take it at face value, never asking the obvious question: Was Natty really a man without a racial cross? I say, “Not a chance.” Seen against the backdrop of Native history, of which Cooper was intimately aware, Natty could only have been a mixed blood.

Now for a little primer: Modem critics tend to assume that the one-drop rule of racial identity was always in force in America, legally disallowing any wiggle room to people of racially mixed ancestry. Not so. There were in actuality three rules of racial identity, each competing with the others between 1750 and 1850: generational passing; the rule of recognition; and the rule of descent. Generational passing, the British rule under colonialism, allowed third generation cross-bloods to pass as “white,” regardless of how Native or African they might look. By 1825, racist theory was gaining ground in America, positing two new, conflicting “rules” of race, those of recognition and descent. The rule of recognition was the eye-test of identity: whoever could pass, might; while the rule of descent—the infamous “one-drop” rule—forbade passing at all times, regardless of generation or appearance. After 1825, only the rules of recognition and descent remained to vie for social control and, from 1850 on, the one-drop rule alone applied. Note that, in Natty’s lifetime, the generational rule and the rule of recognition were in force. Under either, Natty was legally “white,” even though in modem, more racist America, he would not be so categorized…

Read the entire paper here.

From the “half-breed” to the “tragic mulatto”: The race integration film in the fifties and the struggle for social equality

New York University
May 2007
435 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3269779
ISBN: 9780549099536

Ryan Daniel DeRosa, Assistant Professor of Film Studies
Ohio University

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Cinema Studies New York University

This dissertation connects Hollywood “integration films” of the 1950s to the modern civil rights movement and to “liberal” racial ideologies. We use the historiography of Foucault to exhume correspondences between political and popular representations of racial-national identity and of integration, following changes in the formation of ideas empowering racial liberalism. We place film interactively alongside Supreme Court rulings and Congressional debates around race integration, contemporaneously published works of history and sociology, and the “memory” of slavery and Reconstruction as displayed in the wider culture.

In films centering a protagonist who is racially or culturally “mixed,” we examine a change in discourse surrounding racial integration. In the early fifties—from the social problem film such as No Way Out (1950) to the pro-Indian western such as Broken Arrow (1950) and Broken Lance (1954)—motion pictures employ a framework of the melting pot, or cultural assimilation, to represent integration. This signifies national support for racial progress yet also, by using terms of “culture” to repress terms of “class,” suggests widespread resistance to imagining and ensuring needed change in the racial-social structure of society. In the later fifties, a different logic–based on cultural pluralism—represents integration, often in films making miscegenation or racial mixing problematic. Movies such as The Searchers (1956) and Imitation of Life (1959) construct an imagined “right” to protect white status as a “culture,” or “racial cultural” boundaries that would oppose our political knowledge of race and class struggle.

Further, we connect seminal liberal representations of race in the fifties to ideological positions today that efface the persistence of segregation—or that would represent poverty but do not advance a social remedy for it. This dissertation would challenge liberalism to speak not just for passive racial “progress,” for “rationalism” and for the individual, but moreover for the rights of the poor and working class to equal social resources, rights that interact with and would advance racial equality.

Table of Contents

• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABSTRACT
• INTRODUCTION The Fifties Integration Film and the Limits of Racial Liberalism
  • 1. The Integration Film and the Melting Pot
  • 2. The Fifties Western and Historiography
  • 3. Gunnar Myrdal and Racial Liberalism
• CHAPTER I “I Thought You Were Worried about Being an Indian”: Broken Lance, Brown v. Board of Ed, and Integration Discourse
  • 1. Discourses of Psychology, Integration, and Culture
  • 2. Integration Discourse
  • 1. Discourses of Psychology, Integration, and Culture
  • 2. Integration Discourse
  • 3. Oscar Handlin and the Melting Pot
  • 4. Broken Lance, Integration, and the Status of White Patriarchy
  • 5. Conclusion: Brown’s Lost Justification
• CHAPTER II From Social Problems to Cultural Relations: No Way Out, Broken Arrow, and “Melting Pot” Liberalism
  • 1. The Melting Pot and the Pro-Indian Western
  • 2. To Discover and Unite America: The Sociology of the Melting Pot
  • 3. Reading Culture in Broken Arrow
  • 4. Segregation with Assimilation: Pinky
  • 5. No Way Out and the Return of Class Conflict
  • 6. The Radical Sociology of Oliver C. Cox
  • 7. Conclusion: Ideological Opportunities for Integration
• CHAPTER III The Searchers, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and the Ideology of Cultural Rights
  • 1. Cultural Rights and Debbie’s Choice
  • 2. The Searchers, Ambiguity and Historical Investigation
  • 3. Relations in the Film
  • 4. American Judaism and Integration Fears
  • 5. The Searchers and the Civil Rights Act of 1957
  • 6. Conclusion: Cultural Rights and History
• CHAPTER IV “You Weren’t Being Colored”: Imitation of Life, Cultural Pluralism, and the Struggle for Social Equality
  • 1. Introduction: “Radical Ambiguity” and Imitation of Life
  • 2. Melodrama and Changing Gender Relations
  • 3. Melodrama, Realism, and Race
  • 4 Imitation in the 1930s: “Mammy” and the New Deal
  • 5. Imitation and Slavery
  • 6. “Mammy” and Melodrama
  • 7. Elkins and a New Pluralism
  • 8. Imitation’s Dual/Dueling Aesthetics
  • 9. Conclusion: “The Other Nation”
• CONCLUSION The Representation of Poverty and the Veil over Culture
  • 1. Looking Forward
  • 2. The “Tragic Mulatto” in the Western, 1960
  • 3. Affirmative Action and Struggle over Diversity
  • 4. The Representation of Poverty
  • 5. Culture as Social Struggle
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Order the dissertation here.

Between Race and Nation: The Plains Metis and the Canada-United States Border

University of Wisconsin, Madison
May 2009
419 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3384469
ISBN: 9781109476347

Michel Hogue, Assistant Professor of History
Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation examines how the Plains Métis both experienced and shaped their incorporation into two nation-states: the U.S. and Canada. It explores how, as the northern Plains were pulled into the economic, political, and social orbits of distinct metropolitan centers, the social category of race emerged as a key measure of the boundaries of citizenship within new nation-states. The study encompasses a critical time period when ideas about race and the differences it marked were in flux. Set in a place that straddled national borders, where national territorial claims were weak, and where national borders marked different legal regimes, it explores the question of how and why mixed racial groups in North America formed or failed to form. This study asks, What effect did the new political boundaries and racial hierarchies emerging within these new states have on the potential for the creation of the Métis as a distinct people?

The study shows that, as this borderland world became more closely tied to national economies and polities through the nineteenth century, the socio-legal categories of nationality and race became key faultlines that circumscribed Métis claims to belonging in both countries. Incorporative projects, whether commercial or national, initially allowed Plains Métis communities to flourish. But, as settler-based societies supplanted fur trade societies, social relations changed dramatically. Even in Canada, where distinct legal and conceptual categories existed for people of mixed Indigenous and white ancestry and where fur trade interactions had given rise to separate Métis communities in other parts of the country, recurring questions about nationality and race undercut Plains Métis attempts to secure a more permanent place in the borderlands. The precise meanings of the categories of race and nation—or who could be included within them—remained the subject of intense negotiation among officials, the Métis, and their Indigenous neighbors. Ultimately, the absence of appropriate legal frameworks for the recognition of mixed-race groups and state willingness to guarantee the corporate rights of those groups created significant barriers for the continuation of separate, identifiable Plains Métis borderland communities.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Note on Terminology
• INTRODUCTION: Remapping Plains Metis History from the Borderlands
• CHAPTER ONE: Creating a Metis Borderland, 1800-1840
• CHAPTER TWO: Fur Trade, Free Trade, and the Franchise: The Politics and Economics of Metis Borderland Settlements, 1840-1870
• CHAPTER THREE: Crossing Boundaries: The Plains Metis in Montana, 1869-1878
• CHAPTER FOUR: White, Indian, Metis: Race and Incorporation on the Canadian Prairies, 1869-1879
• CHAPTER FIVE: Dismantling Plains Metis Borderland Settlements, 1879-1885
• CHAPTER SIX: Scrip & Enrollment Commissions and the Shifting Boundaries of Belonging, 1885-1920
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

List of Figures

1. “Heart of a Continent”
2. Northern Plains in the 1860s
3. Metis Wintering Sites, 1840s-1870s
4. Metis Migrations
5. Northern Plains in the 1870s
6. Reduction of Montana Indian Reservations, 1885-95

Purchase the dissertation here.

Negroes: Miscegenation

Time Magazine
1923-07-23

Protests of Negro organizations from many parts of the country, descending about the ears of a Senator, caused him to change his mind. Senator [Arthur] Capper of Kansas is leader of the farm bloc and of the “marriage bloc”—if such a thing there is. In the last Congress he brought forward a Constitutional Amendment and a supplementary bill to make marriage and divorce laws uniform throughout the country. One of the provisions of the bill prohibited ” marriage between members of the white and black races or of the white and yellow races.” Letters of protest—from Negroes have since poured in upon Senator Capper, threatening, not least of all, political revenge.

Accordingly, Senator Capper decided to amend his bill by striking out the passage which is “unnecessarily offending to the Negro population.” Many states have laws against miscegenation, and the Senator regards the provision as an unnecessary troublemaker. The withdrawal of this section by the Senator is made easier because he himself did not write the bill. It was drawn by the attorney of the American Federation of Women’s Clubs…

Read the entire article here.

Birthers’ shameful racist roots

The Boston Globe
2011-05-02

James Carroll

It was not up to President Obama to label the birther movement as racist in his extraordinary address on the subject last week, but plenty of commentary has done it for him. There can be no doubt that the lurid contempt shown to the president by antagonists who question his constitutional right to hold office is rooted in white-supremacist hysteria. The issue has never been the authenticity of documentation related to Barack Obama’s date and place of birth, which is why the production of birth certificates—first short, then long—has not stilled the controversy.

The issue has been his character as—well, as the issue of a Caucasian mother and an African father. An inch below the surface of this discussion is the perceived offense not just of blackness, but of miscegenation, that peculiarly demonic legacy of a slave system which took for granted the white owners’ sexual exploitation of slaves, while outlawing interracial sex. The biological fact of Obama’s existence, not the bureaucratic fact of government records, is what generates the lunatic rage…

Read the entire editorial here.

Breaking the Black-White Binary

Fathom: the source for online learning
Columbia University
2002

Gary Okihiro, Professor of International and Public Affairs
Columbia University

Where do Asians fall in the American construct of race? According to Gary Okihiro, the director of Columbia University’s Center for Race and Ethnicity, the position of Asians has had to be invented and reinvented over the past two centuries to fit into a binary, black-white national racial definition

Gary Okihiro: In the US, the racial formation is a binary of black and white. In fact, there is actually mainly black. White is frequently not seen as a racial category; it is simply the normative. Blackness is race. And when today we deploy the term “minority,” for example, we mean basically African-Americans. I think binaries are simpleminded ways of categorizing not just people but also things, objects other than oneself. Binaries provide a kind of coherence. They allow for a simple and straightforward explanation of who one is and who one is not. And so this binary of who one is, which is whiteness, and who one is not, which is blackness, in this case affords a kind of self-definition and also a privilege that authorizes one to define the other.

Now, Asians and Latinos and other racialized minorities who do not fit into that black-white binary pose a problem for that kind of racialized thinking. The binary itself, by the way, is very functional. Obviously it is an invention, first of all. Who is white, for example, is an invention, and the category “white” is an elastic one. It includes different peoples at different times; for example, at some point Irish people were not included within the category “white” within the United States. Similarly, the category “black” is an invented category and is also an elastic one…

Read the entire interview here.

Five Myths About Multiracial People in the U.S.

About.com: Race Relations
2011-04-09

Nadra Kareem Nittle

When Barack Obama set his sights on the presidency, newspapers suddenly began devoting a lot more ink to the multiracial identity. Media outlets from Time Magazine and the New York Times to the British-based Guardian and BBC News pondered the significance of Obama’s mixed heritage. His mother was a white Kansan and his father, a black Kenyan. Three years later it remains to be seen just what impact Obama’s biracial makeup has had on race relations, but mixed-race people continue to make news headlines, thanks to the U.S. Census Bureau’s finding that the country’s multiracial population is exploding. But just because mixed-race people are in the spotlight doesn’t mean that the myths about them have vanished. What are the most common misconceptions about multiracial identity? This list both names and dispels them.

Multiracial People Are Novelties

What’s the fastest-growing group of young people? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the answer is multiracial youths. Today, the United States includes more than 4.2 million children identified as multiracial. That’s a jump of nearly 50 percent since the 2000 census. And among the total U.S. population, the amount of people identifying as multiracial spiked by 32 percent, or 9 million. In the face of such groundbreaking statistics, it’s easy to conclude that multiracial people are a new phenomenon now rapidly growing in rank. The truth is, however, that multiracial people have been a part of the country’s fabric for centuries. Consider anthropologist Audrey Smedley’s finding that the first child of mixed Afro-European ancestry was born in the U.S. eons ago—way back in 1620. There’s also the fact that historical figures from Crispus Attucks to Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable to Frederick Douglass were all mixed-race.

A major reason why it appears that the multiracial population has soared is because for years and years, Americans weren’t allowed to identify as more than one race on federal documents such as the census. Specifically, any American with a fraction of African ancestry was deemed black due to the “one-drop rule.” This rule proved particularly beneficial to slave owners, who routinely fathered children with slave women. Their mixed-race offspring would be considered black, not white, which served to increase the highly profitable slave population.

The year 2000 marked the first time in ages that multiracial individuals could identify as such on the census. By that point in time, though, much of the multiracial population had grown accustomed to identifying as just one race. So, it’s uncertain if the number of multiracials is actually soaring or if ten years after they were first permitted to identify as mixed-race, Americans are finally acknowledging their diverse ancestry…

Read the entire article here.

Responsible Mixed Race Politics

How do identities matter?
Stanford University
2005-01-13

Presentation by:

Ronald Sundstrom, Associate Professor of African American Studies
University of San Francisco

The harshest critics of mixed-race have claimed that the identity is self-indulgent and irresponsible, because it evades or, worse, is complicit in racism. Such strident condemnations of mixed-race identity are dogmatic and uncharitable. In “Being & Being Mixed Race,” I argued that mixed-race is a real social identity and that it need not be morally illegitimate. In this essay I return to the topic of the relationship between mixed-race identity and politics and the dynamics of racism. There are disturbing trends in mixed-race literature and organizations that precisely are irresponsible in the way critics of the mixed-race movement have asserted. I criticize these developments, and counter that mixed-race individuals and groups have a special obligation to resist racism and to refuse the “wages of whiteness” that accrue from their mixed-race status. Although all persons have a moral obligation to reject and resist racism, mixed-race individuals and groups have special obligations that are based on their own experience of race and racism, and their place in the history and experience of race and racism in America. Just as mixed-race persons argue that they are morally obligated to remember and affirm their complex family histories-to not forget their mothers-they have an equal obligation to remember the significance of their personal history in the history of race in America: we have an equal obligation to the memories of our grandmothers.