Mixed Race Studies

What Miscegenation is! And What We are to Expect Now That Mr. Lincoln is Re-elected

Waller & Willets, Publishers, New York
c. 1865
8 pages
Source: Harvard University via The Hathi Trust Digital Library

L. Seaman, LL. D.

“What, is Miscegenation?” is an oft repeated inquiry. A word not recognized by Webster, Johnson, or Worcester, and yet in general use. The following definition is according to the popular acceptation of the term:

Miscegenation, noun—The act of mixing or state of being mixed; a mass or compound of different ingredients; in logic, thought of in relation to an actual existence; opposed to abstract.

Miscegenate, verb transitive—Literally, to unite and blend as one common brotherhood different races; to blend promiscuously; to coalesce.

It is unnecessary for us to enter into a lengthy definition of the word as the artist who engraved our frontispiece portrays that which our pen fails to accomplish. Our illustration represents an “intelligent gentleman of color” affectionately saluting a pretty white girl of sixteen, with auburn hair and light complexion; the different shades of complexion of the two contrasting beautifully and lending  enchantment to the scene. The thick tufts of wool of the one lends beauty to the long, waving auburn hair of the other, and the sweet, delicate little Roman nose of the one does not detract from the beauty of the broad, flat nose, with expanded nostrils of the other—while the intellectual, bold and majestic forehead of the one forms an unique, though beautiful contrast to the round, flat head, resembling a huge gutter mop, of the other. Contrast is the order of the day: a desire for sameness was an hallucination of the ancients, but we of the Nineteenth Century are going to bring about a new order of things…

…Actual Miscegenationists were first discovered in the South, but the atrocious crime was not popular although it was committed to a considerable extent, and men have been known to sell their own children into slavery, simply because of the supposed attaintment of the offspring from its mother. But such beasts are only to be found in the South. Here in the North, we have a finer sense of the beautiful. Dark blood, in the estimation ot the Northmen, instead of attainting, purifies. A man whose veins are coursed by a certain amount of dark blood, and whose skin is correspondingly dark, is believed to be a superior being.

Many of our best orators have been advocating this mixture for some time. Wendel Phillips can’t see why a negro is not the equal of a white man, and, in many instances, why he has not proved himself superior. When coalescesion takes place he believes that the excellent properties of Sambo’s component parts are intensified and the sluggish material of the white man purified and renovated…

Read the entire pamphlet here.

Will new age of mixed-race identities loosen the hold of race or tie it up in tighter knots?

Newhouse News Service
2000-04-20

Jonathan Tilove

Ward Connerly, who describes himself as a roughly equal mix of French Canadian, Choctaw, African and Irish ancestry and who is married to a white woman, spent much of the last decade campaigning to end race-based affirmative action. Susan Graham, a white woman married to a black man, has spent that same decade working tirelessly as the founder of Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally) so that her two children and others like them could be counted in official statistics as “multiracial.”

For the first time in American history, respondents to the decennial census are able to identify themselves by as many races as they see fit. The tabulated results will yield 63 different categories and combinations—or 126 considering that each of those 63 could also be either Hispanic or non-Hispanic. And that does not take into account the limitless possibilities for writing in some race of one’s own devising.

But when the 2000 census is completed, all the folks at both the Connerly and Graham households will be assigned the race of their nearest neighbors. Why? Because both Connerly and Graham, for their own very different reasons, refused to check any of the boxes on the race question.

As America embarks on a new, more complicated era of racial counting, a look at how some of those close to the issue chose to answer the census race question presents a puzzle: Is this dawning age of mixed-race identities likely to loosen the hold of race on the American mind, or merely tie it up in tighter knots?

“It is progress,” said G. Reginald Daniel, a sociologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “Whether people understand it or not, we’re undoing 300 years of racial formation. We have yet to see the after-effect, but it will be radical.”

Daniel, who grew up black in Kentucky, said he has been thinking about his racial identity since Dec. 2, 1955, when his first-grade teacher reported that Rosa Parks had been arrested for refusing to let a white passenger have her seat on the bus. “It’s time we colored people stood up for our rights,” the teacher told her students.

Daniel was puzzled. He raised his hand and asked the teacher who “colored” people were. “Everyone in this school,” the teacher, startled, replied. But, Daniel persisted, what color are they? “We’re brown! We’re Negroes!” the teacher replied…

But Daniel’s skin was tan, a blend of white and brown, and when he asked his mother about it she explained that while they were a mix of African, Irish, English, French, American Indian, Asian Indian and maybe even German-Jewish, they were still members of the “Negro race.”

Over time, Daniel came to identify himself as multiracial. He became a leading intellectual adviser, at one point to Project RACE and on a continuing basis to the Association for MultiEthnic Americans (AMEA)—the largest of the organizations that pressed for a multiracial category on the census. The federal Office of Management and Budget rejected that possibility but in 1997, after four years of deliberation, announced that on the 2000 census respondents would be able to check as many races as apply…

…But to Susan Graham, the form felt like one step forward and two steps back. Graham had wanted a separate multiracial category so that children like hers would not have to choose between their parents’ racial identities, or end up some unclassifiable “other.”…

…“I’m not about to have my children check more than one box only to be relegated back to the black category,” said Graham, who now lives in Tallahassee, Fla. She left the race question blank.

But the census cannot permit blanks, so, by a statistical method known as “hot deck imputation,” Graham’s family will be assigned races that blend best with their closest neighbors—the assumption being that most people live in neighborhoods that match them racially. And, in Graham’s case that is true, with immediate neighbors black, white and interracial.

Rainier Spencer, a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, has studied the multiracial movement in his book, “Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States.” He faults Graham’s logic.

In Spencer’s view, Graham and others in the multiracial movement deploy their distaste with the one-drop rule selectively. If they truly want its repeal, they must recognize that virtually all African-Americans are multiracial.

To him, the whole notion of a multiracial identity depends on an assumption that racial identity is real. And as Spencer told some 100 students at the Pan-Collegiate Conference on the Mixed-Race Experience, held recently at Harvard University and Wellesley College, “All racial identity is bogus, no matter whether the prefix is mono, multi or bi.”

The “insurgent idea” of multiraciality can undermine the racial order by “demonstrating the absurdity of fixed and exclusive racial categories,” he writes in his book. But the moment multiracial becomes an official category—a box to be checked—it no longer undermines the existing racial paradigm, but expands it.

Moreover, Spencer said, while race may not truly exist, racism does, and OMB acted quite appropriately in ordering the racial data collapsed back into traditional categories for civil rights purposes…

Read the entire article here.

New Americans: Rise of the Multiracials: A Documentary

A Work-In-Progress Documentary

Eli Steele, Producer

With more Americans marrying across the color line today than before, it is inevitable that the racial makeup of America’s face will forever change. Of the nine million individuals that identified themselves as multiracial on the 2010 census, more than 50 percent were under 18 years of age, including filmmaker Eli Steele’s two children, Jack and June. By 2050, they and their multiracial peers are expected to account for 25% of the total population.
 
This fate was long predicted by early Americans such as James Madison and Frederick Douglass who knew the color line could not keep the races apart for eternity. And now that this fate is upon us, what does it mean for a country that has shed so much blood in the name of race?

With this question on his mind, Filmmaker Eli Steele, who is multiracial himself, has embarked on a journey through America to explore various aspects of the American landscape for clues to what the future holds. So far, he has encountered individuals ranging from a U.S. Army soldier who refuses to self identify his race to a radio host who identifies as Black American despite a white mother and black father. Aside from interviews, Steele plans to explore the role of multiracial individuals in key moments in American history, the ongoing demographic shifts that are rapidly redefining once firm racial boundaries, and pockets of resistance to the multiracial baby boom.
 
Steele also plans to journey into the history of his family for to be multiracial is a fate that is at once deeply personal and political. Why did the ancestors of his children make the decisions to cross the color line, especially at times where there were no societal advantages in doing so? By learning more about the world they came from and the decisions they made, Steele hopes to provide his children with a better understanding of the world and people they come from. 
 ​
To date, Steele has discovered there are two Americas at odds with one another. There is the private America of individuals has advanced race relations to the point that 85 percent of 18 to 29 year olds and 73 percent of 30 to 49 year olds would consider marriage to another race. On the other side, there is the public America of government institutions and corporations that continue their race policies despite an obvious absurdity: if an individual is more than one race, then what is race? Will America reconcile its race policies with the irreversible trends of private America or will there always be a disconnect?

The outcome of this new front on the culture war around race will determine whether America continues its legacy of racial strife or finally looks past skin color to the person’s content of character. At the end of his journey, Steele hopes to return to his two children, Jack and June, with a better and realistic understanding of how to prepare them for the America they will live in 2050.

Interview subjects include Clay Cane, Jennifer Ceci, Jen Chau, Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Eric ‘Charles’ Jaskolski, Angela Mckee, Farzana Nayani, Jared Sexton, and Ken Tanabe.

For more information, click here.

Brazil’s New Racial Politics

Lynne Rienner Publishers
2009
251 pages
ISBN: 978-1-58826-666-8

Edited by:

Bernd Reiter, Associate Professor of Political Science
University of South Florida

Gladys L. Mitchell (Gladys Mitchell-Walthour), Assistant Professor of Political Science
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

As the popular myth of racial equality in Brazil crumbles beneath the weight of current grassroots politics, how will the country redefine itself as a multiethnic nation? Brazil’s New Racial Politics captures the myriad questions and problems unleashed by a growing awareness of the ways racism structures Brazilian society.

 The authors bridge the gap between scholarship and activism as they tackle issues ranging from white privilege to black power, from government policy to popular advocacy, and from historical injustices to recent victories. The result is a rich exploration of the conflicting social realities characterizing Brazil today, as well as their far-reaching political implications.

Contents

• Foreword—Michael Mitchell.
• 1. The New Politics of Race in Brazil—Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell.
• BLACK EMPOWERMENT AND WHITE PRIVILEGE.
  • 2. Whiteness as Capital: Constructing Inclusion and Defending Privilege—Bernd  Reiter.
  • 3. Politicizing Blackness: Afro-Brazilian Color Identification and Candidate Preference—Gladys L. Mitchell
  • 4. Out of Place: The Experience of the Black Middle Class—Angela Figueiredo.
  • 5. The Political Shock of the Year: The Press and the Election of a Black Mayor in São Paulo—Cloves Luiz Pereira Oliveira.
• AFFIRMATIVE ACTION CONTESTED.
  • 6. Affirmative Action and Identity—Seth Racusen.
  • 7. Opportunities and Challenges for the Afro-Brazilian Movement—Mónica Treviño González.
• THE NEW POLITICS OF BLACK POWER.
  • 8. Racialized History and Urban Politics: Black Women’s Wisdom in Grassroots Struggles—Keisha-Khan Y. Perry.
  • 9. Black NGOs and “Conscious” Rap: New Agents of the Antiracism Struggle in Brazil—Sales Augusto dos Santos.
  • 10. Power and Black Organizing in Brazil—Fernando Conceição.
  • 11. New Social Activism: University Entry Courses for Black and Poor Students—Renato Emerson dos Santos.
• CONCLUSION.
  • After the Racial Democracy—Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell.

A Mulatto Area Gets Own School

The New York Times
1962-09-16
page 73

Hedrick Smith, Special to the New York Times

Desegregation Moves Roi Louisiana Caste System

BURAS, La., Sept. 13—Freda’s Hi-Lo Bar sits just off State Highway 23 as the road chases the Mississippi River on its last 100 miles from the suburbs of New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico.

It is a white-frame building only slightly larger than the small cottages that surround it on the west bank of the river.

For the last week, workmen have been refurbishing it and improving its lighting and plumbing. For the second time since World War II It is being transformed into a school for mulattoes, or, as they are sometimes called here, Hi-Lo’s.

The bar, long patronized exclusively by mulattoes, is a symbol of one of the most extensive caste systems of the South.

In the life, of Plaquemines Parish (County), and particularly of the town of Buras, there are not just two, but three, racial groupings. At the top of what one writer has called a “layer cake of color” are the whites. At the bottom are the dark Negroes. In between are lighter-skinned Negroes, or mulattoes, whose ancestry is racially mixed.

500 Families in Parish

The mulattoes are sprinkled throughout the parish. Local officials estimate there are about 500 families. The largest group of them lives just north of Buras, in the houses surrounding the Hi-Lo Bar and a Roman Catholic school for mulattoes.

Their faces have a Latin appearance. Many have straight hair, sharp noses, thin lips and freckles. Within families, their color can range from a rich mahogany to a tawny yellow.

Who determines whether they are mulattoes or Negroes?

“They determine it themselves.” say the whites.

Some Negroes assent with bitterness.

“They try to be something: they are not.” said Mrs. Joseph Powell, a Negro woman who tried last year to send her daughter to the Catholic mulatto school but was turned down.

The mulattoes’ presence in this marshy delta territory antedates slave times. Old parish records note a number of slave owners who were “freemen of color.” Some of these are believed to have come here from Santo Domingo…

…Archdiocese Desegregates

The move toward a public school for mulattoes followed the decision of the Archdiocese of New Orleans to desegregate its parochial schools this fall.

Five Negro children went to the white parochial school here on Aug. 29. A white boycott followed, and the parish priest, the Rev. Christopher Schneider, closed down the school briefly because of “threats of physical Violence and economic reprisals.”

Some white students have since returned, but the five Negroes have never been back. Two of them, however, began attending the school for mulattoes.

Luke Petrovich, Commissioner of Public Safety, said that because of this the county was converting the bar into a public school for mulattoes. “Some of the mulatto parents contacted us concerning public school facilities for them” he said.

Others think, however, that the new public school may be an attempt to lure mulattoes away from the parochial school where some racial distinctions are being erased. They think that whites want to keep mulattoes as a buffer between them and the darker Negroes.

But there are indications that the bitterness and” jealousy between the dark Negroes and the mulattoes may be dissolving. Some mulatto parents say they will refuse to take their children out of the Catholic school just because Negroes are there.

Read or purchase the entire article here.

Black Like Obama: What the Junior Illinois Senator’s Appearance on the National Scene Reveals About Race in America, and Where We Should Go from Here

Thurgood Marshall Law Review
Volume 31 (2005)
pages 79-100

Amos N. Jones, Professor of Law
Campbell University, Raleigh, North Carolina

Given Americans’ warm bipartisan response to Senator Barack Obama’s keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the realist is constrained to applaud with them. The fact that voters of all ethnicities enthusiastically back a man apparently black who, at first glance, is fairly critical of the status quo indicates that the country is more open-minded than it used to be. Once the applause has subsided, however, the realist is further constrained to take a hard look at the facts as opposed to the rhetoric accompanying Obama’s stardom. His globetrotting memoir and media appearances, while uplifting and entertaining, have proved unsatisfactory in delivering the obviously critical thinker’s original answer to the big question that has remained unaddressed since the euphoria of 2004, when numerous journalists proclaimed Obama the new black political hope: When, how, and why did Barack Obama become black?

This essay contextualizes Obama’s popular personal story within the messy legal and social framework created by centuries of slavery and Jim Crow segregation in America. It opens with a summary of Obama’s identity as presented in his autobiography republished in 2004 and proceeds through a specific review of racial classifications in American legal history, raising the question whether Obama should even be counted as a black man. After explaining the history of the “one-drop rule” given legal force by a rarely considered holding of Plessy v. Ferguson that remains good law even today, the essay criticizes the thoughtless imposition of the black label upon Obama, suggesting possible reasons for his allowing Americans to minimize or ignore his substantially more dominant white heritage. Without suggesting specific regimes for categorization, the essay concludes by arguing that the time has come for public and private law to recognize different degrees of blackness, especially now that the country’s census allows Americans to categorize themselves in more than one racial group…

Read the entire article here.

Obama and Race: History, Culture, Politics

Routledge
2011-11-10
200 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-68678-5

Edited by

Richard H. King, Professor Emeritus of American and Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham

In this collection, academics from both sides of the Atlantic analyze the confluence of a politician, a process, and a problem—Barack Obama, the 2008 US presidential election, and the ‘problem’ of race in contemporary America. The special focus falls upon Barack Obama himself, who appears in many guises: as an individual from biracial and transnational backgrounds; a skilled, urban African-American organizer and then politician; and as intellectual and author of a bestselling autobiographical exploration.

There is a certain representative quality about Obama that makes him a convenient way into the labyrinth of American race relations, national and regional politics (including the South and Hawaii), and past history (particularly from the 1960s to the present). Contributors also explore the role Michelle Obama has played in this process, both separately from and together with her husband, while one theme running through many chapters concerns the myriad ways that the American left, right and centre differ on the nature and future of race in a country that daily becomes more mixed in ethnic and racial terms. Race is everywhere; race is nowhere. The essays are grouped by their approach to the topic of Obama and race: via historical analysis, cultural studies, political science and sociology, as well as pedagogy. The result is an exciting mix of perspectives on one of the most fascinating phenomena of our time.
 
This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Patterns of Prejudice.

Contents

1. Obama and race: culture, history, politics Richard H. King, University of Nottingham, UK
2. The riddle of race Emily Bernard, University of Vermont, USA
3. ‘A curious relationship’: Barack Obama, the 1960s and the election of 2008 Brian Ward, University of Manchester, UK
4. Barack Hussein Obama: the use of history in the creation of an ‘American’ president George Lewis, University of Leicester, UK
5. Becoming black, becoming president Richard H. King, University of Nottingham, UK
6. Two great days in Harlem Carmel King, freelance photographer, UK
7. How to read Michelle Obama Maria Lauret, Sussex University, UK
8. Barack Obama and the American island of the colour blind Peter Kuryla, Belmont University, USA
9. Barack Obama as the post-racial candidate for a post-racial America: perspectives from Asian America and Hawaii Jonathan Y. Okamura, University of Hawaii, USA
10. Barack Obama and the South: demography as electoral opportunity Donald W. Beachler, Ithaca College, USA
11. Teaching Obama: history, critical race theory and social work education Damon Freeman, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Becoming black, becoming president

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 45, Issue 1-2, 2011
pages 62-85
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2011.563145

Richard H. King, Professor Emeritus of American and Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham

Speculation about the relationship between Barack Obama’s election to the presidency and race in the United States was rife prior to, during and after his successful campaign. King looks at three aspects of this issue. First, as a kind of outsider, Obama had to prove himself black enough for African Americans of the traditional sort and not too dangerous for Whites. How did he achieve this? Second, Obama’s election was made possible by changes in the voting behaviour of white Americans, particularly in the North, and the way that African Americans like Obama gained a foothold in, and at times control of, urban political machines, such as, in his case, Chicago. How have American historians treated this shift in white voting behaviour? Finally, the central question of how race still impinges on President Obama’s performance as president. King concludes with a look at issues such as colour blindness and whiteness, the nature of black political identity and solidarity, and the variety of political roles from which a black leader such Obama can choose.

Read or purchase the article here.

Destiny’s Child: Obama and Election ’08

boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture
Volume 39, Number 2 (Summer 2012)
pages 3-32
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-1597871

Hortense Spillers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English
Vanderbilt University

“Destiny’s Child: Obama and Election ’08” interrogates the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States as a historically ordained event. This essay not only addresses the question of whether we might plausibly read it as the fulfillment of telos but also examines the implications of our having already done so.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Miracle and the Defects [Chapter]

Chapter in:

The Constantinos Kararnanlis Institute for Democracy Yearbook 2009
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-00621-0

pages 73-77
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-00621-0_11

Edited by:

Constantine Arvanitopoulos, Professor of European and International Studies
Panteion University, Athens, Greece

Konstantina E. Botsiou, Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Peloponnisos, Korinthos, Greece

Chapter Author:

George Th. Mavrogordatos, Professor of Political Science
University of Athens

In most of the world, the election of the 44th President of the United States was justly celebrated as an event of historic significance. It proved the irrepressible vitality of the American Dream, precisely at a time when American capitalism appeared to be crumbling. It also confirmed the unique adaptability of an admirable political system, which never ceases to evolve, even though it is based on the oldest written Constitution.

Fear of repetition or banality must not hinder the exploration and evaluation of the manifold significance that the Obama victory has on several different levels, beyond race as such. He is indeed the first African-American president, and his election was regarded as finally laying to rest a painful legacy of slavery, civil war, and discrimination. But he is also a person of mixed blood, who belongs more to the present and the future than to the past, thanks to his multiracial and multicultural background. He had to persuade not only whites, but also many blacks who understandably did not recognise him immediately as one of their own.

Moreover, he is an intellectual educated at the most elite institutions, yet capable of rousing and mobilising the poor and uneducated, without concessions at the expense of his cultured rhetorical style or his cool rationalism. Change is just as impressive in this respect, after many years of Republican disdain of the intellect and intellectuals.

How did such an unusual person, in such a short time, become President of the United States? The easy answer would be to classify him immediately as a ‘charismatic leader’ in the Weberian (not the journalistic) sense. Although it is a scientific term that should be used sparingly, many Obama supporters clearly do believe (as required by Max Weber’s definition) that he is endowed with ‘specifically exceptional powers or qualities, not accessible to the ordinary person’ or, more precisely, the ordinary politician. There were even references to ‘magic’ and to a ‘miracle.’…