Mixed Race Studies

Who are the Blacks? The Question of Racial Classification in Brazilian Affirmative Action Policies in Higher Education

Cahiers de la Recherche sur l’Éducation et les Savoirs
Number 7 (October 2008)
18 pages

Luisa Farah Schwartzman, Assistant Professor in Sociology
University of Toronto

Debates about racial classification and its agreement with the uses of “race” and “color” in everyday life have been central to the discussion about affirmative action in Brazil. Using quantitative and qualitative data regarding the relationship between socio-economic status and racial identification in Brazilian universities, this paper investigates how particular kinds of policies may have different impact in terms of which particular “kinds” of individuals are benefited. I argue that both the labels that are used and the socio-economic limits that are imposed may have significant and not always intuitive consequences for which individuals are admitted, and for how contestable their eligibility will become. The label negro, when used as the sole criterion for admissions, may be too restrictive and exclude “deserving” non-whites from these policies. On the other hand, because potential non-whites from higher socio-economic classes are more likely to come from “multi-racial” families, the absence of a socio-economic criterion may lead to a substantial number of candidates who may feel that they can lay claims to a wide range of racial labels, not all of which may be acceptable to policy designers and scrutinizers concerned with restricting eligibility for quotas to “deserving” candidates.

Read the entire article here.

Politics: President Obama, of All People, Should Know That Some Rights Can’t be Left to the States

The New Gay
2011-07-18

Tony Phillips

In 1961, when Barack Hussein Obama II was born in the brand new State of Hawaii, laws on the books in 22 of the other 49 United States forbade the marriage of his White American mother to his Black Kenyan father. Arizona’s anti-miscegenation law prohibiting marriage between whites and any persons of color was repealed in 1962. Similar laws in Utah and Nebraska were overturned the following year. Indiana’s law prohibiting interracial marriage held out until 1965, Maryland’s until 1967, the same year that such laws were finally overturned in Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Loving v. Virginia that ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States…

…Yes, we all know about America’s racially conflicted past, so what’s the point?
 
The point is that it’s incomprehensible to me that Barack Obama, a man whose legitimacy as an American has been publicly questioned by hate-rousing provocateurs, a man whose early life confounds the prevailing norms of his generation, a man whose ascendency in the 21st Century was made possible only by the bravery of justice-seekers in the 20th, that he, of all people, would be behind the times on marriage equality. How is it possible that his stance on gay marriage is still evolving?…

Read the entire article here.

How medicine is advancing beyond race

CNN.com
2011-07-08

Elizabeth Landau, CNN.com Health Writer/Producer

(CNN)—No matter what race you consider yourself to be, you have a unique genetic makeup.

That’s why, as technology improves and researchers explore new implications of the human genome, medicine is going to become more individually tailored in a model called personalized medicine.

Although we’ve been hearing for years that people of particular races are at higher risk for certain illnesses, personalized medicine will (in theory) make better predictions based on actual genetic makeup. And even now, race is less relevant to your own health care than you might think.
 
But doctors say a patient’s culture—the collection of norms, goals, attitudes, values and beliefs—will always be important to health care, no matter how sophisticated genetic technology gets.

Biologically, what is race?

When it comes down to it there’s, no clear-cut way of saying that one person “belongs” to one race or another—in fact, a person who has the skin color and hair type typical of one race may self-identify in a completely different way.

And if you think that race comes from location-based populations, many Americans don’t have a “pure” genetic heritage from only one world region. In fact, 9 million Americans identified as multiracial on the most recent census, so it’s hard to make these distinctions.

You probably have genes that came from several groups of ancestral communities. Based on archaeological evidence, everyone’s earliest ancestors came from Africa more than 2 million years ago, so we’re all descended from the same “race” anyway.

“There are genetic ancestries—markers that you can see—but those don’t necessarily perfectly correlate with what people consider their own race to be, because that’s sort of an artificial construct,” said Dr. Wendy Chung, assistant professor of pediatrics at Columbia University Medical Center…

…Sometimes race obscures underlying mechanisms for genetic traits.
 
For decades, doctors thought that sickle cell disease was exclusively African, but some people of Mediterranean and Indian origin also have the genetic trait. We now know that the genetic trait for sickle cell disease protects against malaria, and that it is found among people with ancestry in places where malaria is, or used to be found, biologists Marcus Feldman and Richard Lewontin point out in their essay “Race, Ancestry, and Medicine.”

Race can also hide underlying social issues—namely, poverty.
 
African-American life expectancy at birth is on average, about five fewer years than white Americans, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But Dr. Vicente Navarro at Johns Hopkins University has shown in his research that social class is a bigger driver of U.S. life expectancy than race or gender. He points out in a 1990 Lancet study that the United States is the only Western developed nation that does not report health statistics according to class…

Read the entire article here.

The New Face of America: How the Emerging Multiracial, Multiethnic Majority is Changing the United States

Praeger Publishers
May 2013
195 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-313-38569-8
eBook ISBN: 978-0-313-38570-4

Eric J. Bailey, Professor of Anthropology and Public Health
East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina

This unique and important book investigates what it means to be multiracial and/or multiethnic in the United States, examining the issues involved from personal, societal, and cultural perspectives.

The number of Americans who identify themselves as belonging to more than one race has gone up 33 percent since 2000. But what does it mean to identify oneself as multiracial? How does it impact such basics as race relations, health care, and politics? Equally important, what does this burgeoning population mean for U.S. businesses and institutions?

More and more, the idea of America as a melting pot is becoming a reality. Written from the perspective of multiracial citizens, The New Face of America: How the Emerging Multiracial, Multiethnic Majority is Changing the United States brings to light the values, beliefs, opinions, and patterns among these populations. It assesses group identity and social recognition by others, and it communicates how multiracial individuals experience America’s reaction to their increasing numbers.

Comprehensive and far-reaching, this thoughtful compendium covers the cultural history of multiracials in America. It looks at multiracial families today, at rural and urban multiracial populations, and at multiracial physical features, health disparities, bone and marrow transplant issues, adoption matters, as well as multiracial issues in other countries. Multiracial entertainers, athletes, and politicians are considered, as well. Among the book’s most important topics is multiracial health and health care disparity. Finally, the book makes clear how America’s current majority institutions, organizations, and corporations must change their relationship with multiracial and multiethnic populations if they wish to remain viable and competitive.

John Powell: His Racial and Cultural Ideologies

Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online
Volume 5, Issue 1 (2006)
14 pages

David Z. Kushner, Professor Emeritus of Musicology/Music History
University of Florida

The opening of the first movement of the Symphony in A Major “Virginia Symphony” (Allegro non troppo ma con brio). QuickTime-format, WindowsMedia-format

Following John Powell’s death on August 15, 1963, Virginius Dabney closed his editorial comments in the Richmond Times-Dispatch with the following encomium: “Mr. Powell’s passing at 80 removes one of the genuinely great Virginians of modern times. In personality and character he was truly exceptional, and as a pianist and composer he was unique in the annals of the Old Dominion.” Only a dozen years earlier, on November 5, 1951, the then Governor of Virginia, John S. Battle, proclaimed a “John Powell Day,” on which the National Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Howard Mitchell performed the composer’s Symphony in A major. The Governor went on to state that the state-wide tribute to Powell was only fitting owing to “his many contributions to the cultural life of America….” The irregularity of such an extravagant gesture toward a musician in this country had the effect of rejuvenating interest in the artist both within the borders of Virginia and beyond. The world of academia, for example, contributed three master’s theses and a doctoral dissertation between 1968 and 1973, and Radford College, now Radford University, named its new music building Powell Hall at dedication ceremonies held on May 13, 1968.

By the 1950s and 1960s, Powell’s earlier involvement in contentious issues such as race relations in general, and the incorporation of racial and ethnic elements in the formation of an identifiably American music was conveniently forgotten or, at the least, placed on a back burner…

…Fame and, to some extent, fortune permitted Powell to devote more of his energy toward what became the leit motifs of his life—a preoccupation with racial purity and a conviction that Anglo-Saxon folksong serve as the primary basis for an identifiably American music. During the 1920s, Powell developed a friendship with Daniel Gregory Mason, a relationship that is treated in the latter’s book, Music in My Time.  Both composers held an aversion to the avant-garde music of their day and both supported the idea that an Anglo-Saxon-based musical aesthetic was the best way to establish an identifiably American music. But Powell’s persona is well-illustrated by the following remarks by Mason:

Considering how insatiably social John is, it is strange how hard it is to extract a letter from him. In all our long friendship I have accumulated only about half a dozen. He will gladly sit up all night with you, if you will let him, discussing music, or just gossiping—for he has an unappeasable appetite for personalia, especially when spiced with a little friendly malice—or declaiming on some of his pet fanaticisms such as the horrible dangers of intermarriage between Negroes and whites, or the supreme virtues of Anglo-Saxon folk-songs…

…Where Mason’s biases were slanted toward Jews, Powell’s were directed primarily, but not exclusively, to blacks. And these prejudices were, like Mason’s, intertwined with his views on the state of American music. In September 1922, Powell and several prominent Virginians of like thinking, was a founder of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, the purpose of which was to foster “the preservation and maintenance of Anglo-Saxon ideals and civilization in America. This purpose is to be accomplished in three ways: first, by the strengthening of Anglo-Saxon instincts, traditions, and principles among representatives of our original American stock; second, by intelligent selection and exclusion of immigrants; and third, by fundamental and final solutions of our racial problems in general, most especially of the negro (sic) problem.” The pamphlet further enact legislation that will ensure the preservation of the white race:

1. There shall be instituted immediately a system of registration and birth certificates showing the racial composition (white, black, brown, yellow, red) of every resident of this State.
2. No marriage license shall be granted save upon presentation and attestation under oath by both parties of said registration or birth certificates.
3. White persons may marry only whites.
4. For the purposes of this legislation, the term “white persons” shall apply only to individuals who have no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.

Aligning himself with leaders of the burgeoning eugenics movement, Powell was instrumental in gaining political support for passage of the Racial Integrity Act, which was signed into law on March 20, 1924 by the Governor of Virginia, Elbert Lee Trinkle. This bill also forbade the marriage of Orientals and other non-whites to whites, although the compulsory registration provision was defeated…

…Powell makes clear the direction in which he is heading, by decrying the likelihood of miscegenation and by citing specifically “the negro (sic) problem”:

If the present ratio were to remain permanent, the inevitable product of the melting pot would be approximately an octoroon. It should not be necessary to stress the significance of this point. We know that under Mendelian law the African strain is hereditarily predominant. In other words, one drop of negro (sic) blood makes the negro (sic). We also know that no higher race has ever been able to preserve its culture, to prevent decay and eventual degeneracy when tainted, even slightly, with negro (sic) blood. Sixty centuries of history establish this rule. Since the first page of recorded fact, history can show no exception. Were the American people to become an octoroon race, it would mean their sinking to the level of Haiti and Santo Domingo…

Read the entire article here.

Too White to be Regarded as Aborigines: An historical analysis of policies for the protection of Aborigines and the assimilation of Aborigines of mixed descent, and the role of Chief Protectors of Aborigines in the formulation and implementation of those policies, in Western Australia from 1898 to 1940.

University of Notre Dame, Australia
March 2008
328 pages

Derrick Tomlinson

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame Australia

For much of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, public policies for Western Australia’s Indigenous peoples were guided by beliefs that they were remnants of a race in terminal decline and that a public duty existed to protect and preserve them. If their extinction was unavoidable, the public duty was to ease their passing. The Aborigines Act 1905 vested the Chief Protector of Aborigines (after 1936 the Commissioner for Native Affairs), with lawful responsibility for the pursuit of that duty. All Aborigines caught by the terms of the Act, in particular Aboriginal children under the age of 16, and after 1936 girls and women under the age of 21, were wards of the Chief Protector and the Act entrusted him with extensive powers for managing their lives. The historical progression of public policies for the protection of Aborigines is analysed in this thesis. Particular attention is paid to developments guided by A.O. Neville, the third Chief Protector of Aborigines and first Commissioner for Native Affairs from 1915 to 1940. In that time, inadequacies in the law and its false assumptions about the destiny of the Aboriginal race were exposed. Those who framed the Aborigines Act 1905 failed to address the possibility that the race might not be extinguished, but might be transformed by interaction with the dominant white community. They did not anticipate a need to manage an emergent, fertile, and anomic half-caste populace, too black for the mainstream white community to accept as equals, but too white to be regarded as Aborigines. In the face of these and other challenges, public policy shifted under Neville’s guidance from protecting the racial integrity of Aborigines by segregating them from contaminating influences of the white community, towards the absorption of Aborigines, in the first instance those of mixed racial descent, by the white population. Critics of the latter policy have condemned it as being directed towards sinister objectives of ‘biological absorption’, ‘constructive miscegenation’, or, at the extreme, ‘genocide’. It is argued in this thesis that public policy in Western Australia was directed towards none of those objectives. Breeding out the colour was never the intention. Public policy progressively after 1915 was guided by an aspiration that Aborigines might be elevated in public estimation to a level where they might be accepted by the white community. A.O. Neville believed that in the longer term inter-racial marriage might even become acceptable and that ultimately ‘coloureds’ might breed out, but not that public programs should be directed towards that purpose.

Read the entire thesis here.

Constructing and Contesting Color Lines: Tidewater Native Peoples and Indianness in Jim Crow Virginia

George Washington University
2009-01-31
392 pages

Laura Janet Feller

A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements  for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Indian peoples in the United States have faced many challenges to their group and individual identities as Native Americans over centuries of cultural exchange, demographic change, violence, and dispossession. For Native Americans in the South those challenges have arisen in the context of the idea of “race” as a two-part black-white social, cultural, and political system. This dissertation explores how groups and individuals in tidewater Virginia created, re-created, claimed, re-claimed, retained and maintained identities as Indians after the Civil War and into the 1950s, weathering decades of the ever-stranger career of Jim Crow. They did this in the face of varied pressures from white Virginians who devoted enormous political and social effort to the construction of race as a simple binary division between black and white people.

In the era after the Civil War, tidewater Indians coped by creating new tribal organizations, churches, and schools, presenting theatrical productions that used pan-Indian symbols, and maintaining separations from their African American neighbors. To some extent, they acquiesced in whites’ notions about the “inferior” racialized status of African Americans. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tidewater Virginia, while contending with, and sometimes adapting, popular ideas about “race” and “blood purity,” organized tidewater Virginia Indians also drew from a sense of their shared histories as descendants of the Algonquian Powhatan groups, and from pan-Indian imagery. This project explores how popular ideas about “race” shaped their world and their efforts to position themselves as red rather than black or white, while whites worked to construct “race” along a black-white “color line.”

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Abstract of Dissertation
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Not Black and Not White: Contexts for Constructing Native Identities in the South from Slavery to the 1920s
• Chapter Two: Making the 1924 “Racial Integrity” Law: Defining Whiteness, Blackness, and Redness in a Modernizing, Bureaucratizing State
• Chapter Three: Constructing Native Identities in Tidewater Virginia between 1865 and 1930: Reservations, Organizations, and Public Ceremonies
• Chapter Four: “Conjuring:” Ethnologists and “Salvage” Ethnography among Tidewater Native American Peoples
• Chapter Five: In the Aftermath of the “Racial Integrity” Law
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Introduction

The challenge is not only to recognize the fluidity of race, but to find ways of narrating events, social movement, and the trajectory of individual lives in all their integrity along the convoluted path of an ever-shifting racial reality.

Matthew Frye Jacobson

One narrative that illuminates the “ever-shifting racial reality” in America is the story of how individuals and communities in tidewater Virginia created, recreated, and publicly claimed and re-claimed Native American identities after the Civil War and into the 1950s, weathering decades of the ever-stranger career of Jim Crow. They did this in the face of varied pressures from white Virginians who devoted enormous political and social effort to the construction of race in Virginia as a black-white binary system. A 1924 Virginia “miscegenation” law, an “Act to Preserve Racial Integrity,” exemplifies those efforts. That law demonstrated how racialized justifications for segregation could be joined to national eugenic debates of the 1920s. It also punctuated decades of efforts by white individuals to deny that anyone in Virginia was “really” Indian, based upon the notion that all Virginians who said they were Indian were at best racially “mixed” and had some white or African “blood.”

Thus, in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Virginia, the popular “one drop” idea of what makes one an African American came together with ideas about “blood quantum” and “purity” of racialized “blood,” at a time when tidewater Native people were constructing, re-constructing, and maintaining identities as Indians in the aftermath of emancipation and in the era of Jim Crow. While sometimes contending with, and sometimes adapting for their own purposes, popular ideas about “blood” purity and racialized identities, organized tidewater Virginia Indians also drew from a sense of their shared, localized histories as descendants of the Algonquian Powhatan groups, and from pan-Indian symbols. This project explores how popular ideas about “race” pervaded their efforts, even as they worked to position themselves as “red” rather than black or white, while whites worked to construct of “race” along a black-white “color line.”

The organized tidewater Indian groups persisted in their fight for acceptance oftheir Indian identities despite their lack of distinctive languages and the fact that for more than a century they had been perceived by outsiders as having lost most of the material culture that many whites regarded as markers of “real” Indians. Organized tidewater Natives’ campaigns, institutions, and representations of Indian identity illuminate a part of the story of the construction of “race” in America, but also some of the complications raised by questions about how “ethnic” groups form and persist in the United States. How can we best talk about the histories of “race” and ethnicity in America? How can a shared sense of a common history contribute to construction of ethnic or racialized boundaries, compared to other factors such as a shared land base, parentage, or language? How is it that for Native Americans, whites so often have assumed and even imposed the notion that the only valid Native tradition is one that, if not totally static, has a documentable track stretching “unbroken” back through many generations?

For American Indians nationally, part of this dynamic has been that they have dealt with whites in whose eyes Indians were often both racialized and ethnicized. For tidewater organized Native groups in the period of this study, it seems that their foes wanted them categorized primarily as “racial” groups, and that Virginia Indians fought back on grounds and with weapons that to a large extent reflected the racialized, segregated world in which they lived.

The 1924 law on “racial integrity” was part of a long history of racial legislation in Virginia and throughout the United States designed to create racialized lines in a world where such lines had been blurred since the age of European colonization began. “Miscegenation” law, for example, was solidly entrenched in the English colonies then in the United States, until the Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia. The first ban on “interracial” marriage in the English North American colonies was Maryland’s in 1664. Virginia’s first “miscegenation” law dated from 1691, and it explicitly included Native Americans among those forbidden to marry white individuals. Before 1924, Virginia laws specified what made someone black rather than defining whiteness. To define “blackness” as a legal matter, Virginia law before 1924 typically expressed and codified racialized identities in terms of numbers of ancestors, or fractions of ancestry. Virginia’s 1924 “racial integrity” law, though, defined legal “whiteness” rather than “blackness.” In doing so, this statute in effect made a matter of explicit law, for the first time in Virginia, the concept of a “one drop rule” for what makes someone legally African American. The sole exception to the whiteness definition in the 1924 law was that a Virginian could be legally white if he or she had no more than “one-sixteenth” Indian “blood” and his or her ancestors were otherwise “white.”

This 1924 statute stands at several intersections in the history of racialist thinking and racism in America. In it, Jim Crow meets “scientific racism” and eugenic thought. As a “miscegenation” law, the statute also illustrates some of the ways in which racialized identities are entwined with conflicts about sexuality. It evidences how constructions of social and cultural identities could connect with, or be contested by, state powers and legal discourses, within the context of the modernizing tendencies of post-World War I governmental policies and programs…

…Starting with 1924 as a focal point, this project looks at Native and “mixed” Native identities as claimed and recorded before and after passage of Virginia’s “Racial Integrity” law. Moving backward into the post-Civil War era and then forward from 1924 into the 1950s, this study explores the impact of Virginia’s 1924 “miscegenation” law on individuals and communities who claimed Native American identities. The 1924 law was a climax of sorts in decades of official and social efforts by whites to classify Virginia Indians variously as “persons of color,” “mulattoes,” or African Americans. Native peoples’ reservation lands in Virginia disappeared, except for two that survive to this day. The Mattaponi and Pamunkey people of those two reservations had some advantages in that they had and have a land base, and along with that land they also have community structures recognized by whites. Even the reservation peoples, though, faced white reluctance to concede the continuing existence of red, rather than black or white, identities in Virginia. Non-reservation tidewater Native people had even trickier choices to make about when and how they would identify themselves publicly, in official situations and documents, as Indians…

Read the entire dissertation here.

This lame and utterly boring series has yet to even reach the already low, low bar set in the mid-1990s regarding this topic by Time and Newsweek. Beyond the drippingly bathetic nature of the reporting throughout the series, there is never more than a sentence or two given over to the fact that there is a huge ideological debate occurring within critical mixed-race studies circles about just what mixed race is and is not, about whether or not supporting it requires belief in the fallacy of biological race, about how much it does or does not advance the cause of white supremacy (whether overtly and knowingly or not), and about the propriety of the disproportionate influence of white mothers of black/white children within the multiracial movement.

The only boundary being pushed by the “Race Remixed” series is the continued fencing off of any significant input (beyond that sentence or two acknowledged above) by scholars who are critical of multiracial identity. If this thoroughly unbalanced series wanted to actually provide real news, it would dare to investigate how multiraciality poses a danger to civil rights compliance monitoring, how multiraciality is assisting certain persons of Hispanic and Asian descent in their transition to “honorary whiteness” while persons of African descent remain barred from doing the same, and how the multiracial movement remains absolutely exclusionary in terms of setting itself apart from the nearly 40 million Afro-Americans of mixed descent in this country. If that thoroughly mixed population is not mixed race, then no one is.

Rainier Spencer (Professor and author of Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix, 2011), Reader’s Comments (#49) for article “Pushing Boundaries, Mixed-Race Artists Gain Notice,” The New York Times, July 5, 2011. http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/arts/mixed-race-writers-and-artists-raise-their-profiles.html?permid=49#comment49

Virginia’s Attempt to Adjust the Color Problem

The American Journal of Public Health
Volume 15, Number 2 (1925)
pages 111-115

W. A. Plecker, M.D., Fellow A.P.H.A.
State Registrar of Vital Statistics, Richmond, Virginia

Read at the joint session of the Public Health Administration and Vital Statistics Sections of the American Public Health Association at the Fifty-third Annual Meeting at Detroit, Michigan, October 23, 1924.

The settlers of North America came not as did the Spanish and Portuguese adventurers of the southern continent, without their women, bent only on conquest and the gaining of wealth and power; but bringing their families, the Bible, and high ideals of religious and civic freedom.

They came to make homes, to create a nation, and to found a civilization of the highest type; not to mix their blood with the savages of the land; not to originate a mongrel population combining the worst traits of both conquerors and conquered.

All was well until that fateful day in 1619 when a Dutch trader landed twenty negroes and sold them to the settlers, who hoped by means of slave labor to clear the land and develop the colony more quickly.

Few paused to consider the enormity of the mistake until it was too late. From this small beginning developed the great slave traffic which continued until 1808, when the importation of slaves into America was stopped. But there were already enough negroes in the land to constitute them the great American problem. Two races as materially divergent as the white and the negro, in morals, mental powers, and cultural fitness, cannot live in close contact without injury to the higher, amounting in many cases to absolute ruin. The lower never has been and never car be raised to the level of the higher.

This statement is not an opinion based on sentiment or prejudice, but is an unquestionable scientific fact. Recently published ethnological studies of history lead to this conclusion, as do the psychologic tests of negro and negroid groups, especially the tests made by the United States Army for selective service in the World War. It is evident that in the hybrid mixture the traits of the more primitive will dominate those of the more specialized or civilized race. It is equally obvious that these culturally destructive characteristics are hereditary, carried in the germ plasm, and hence they cannot be influenced by environmental factors such as improved economic, social and educational opportunities. On the contrary, such opportunities often accelerate the inevitable decadence. Dr. A. H. Estabrook in a recent study, made for the Carnegie Foundation, of a mixed group in Virginia many of whom are so slightly negroid as to be able to pass for white, says, ” School studies and observations of some adults indicate the group as a whole to be of poor mentality, much below the average, probably D or D- on the basis of the army intelligence tests. There is an early adolescence with low moral code, high incidence of licentiousness and 21 per cent of illegitimacy in the group.”

When two races live together there is but one possible outcome, and that is the amalgamation of the races. The result of this will be the elimination of the higher type, the one on which progress depends. In the mixture the lower race loses its native good qualities which may be utilized and developed in the presence of a dominant race…

…Let us return now to our own country, and, as we are considering Virginia, to that state in particular. There are about twelve million negroes of various degrees of admixture in the Union today. Of the population of Virginia, nearly one-third is classed as negro, but many of these people are negroid, some being near-wnite, some having actually succeeded in getting across into the white class.

The mixed negroes are nearly all the result of illegitimate intercourse. The well known moral laxity resulting from close contact of a civilized with a primitive race makes illegitimate intermixture an easy matter. This is illustrated by the fact that the illegitimate birth-rate of Virginia negroes is thirty-two times that of Rhode Island, while the District of Columbia rate is thirty-seven times, and that of Maryland forty-six times.

In the days when slavery was still a blight upon our state, it was quite a common occurrence for white men to father children born to the negro servants. The history, as related to me, of at least one colony of people known as “Issue” or ” Free Issue,” now spread over several counties, is that they originated in part in that manner.

It was considered undesirable to retain these mulattoes on the place, bearing the family name, and a number from one county were given their freedom and colonized in a distant county. These intermarried amongst themselves and with some people of Indian-negro-white descent, and received an additional infusion of white blood, either illegitimately or by actual marriage with low-grade whites…

…In the lifetime of some now living we may expect the present twelve million colored population to increase to twenty or possibly thirty millions, and that perhaps to one hundred millions during the next century, to say nothing of the prolific Mongolians who are already firmly established upon our western coast. With the competition of this large number of people of low ideals and low standards of living, and the great effort to secure the means of maintaining a family up to the desired standard, the white population will to that extent be crowded out.

Virginia has made the first serious attempt to stay or postpone the evil day when this is no longer a white man’s country. Her recently enacted law “for the preservation of racial integrity” is, in the words of Major E. S. Cox, “the most perfect expression of the white ideal, and the most important eugenical effort that has been made during the past 4,000 years.” Of course this law will not prevent the illegitimate mixture of the races, although a law requiring the father to share with the mother the responsibility of the birth would have a deterring effect. When more than one man is involved, all should be held equally responsible in sharing the cost, as I am informed is the case in Norway.

But it is possible to stop the legal intermixture, and that Virginia has attempted to do in the above mentioned law, which defines a white person as one with “no trace whatsoever of blood other than Caucasian,” and makes it a felony punishable by confinement for one year in the penitentiary to make a willfully false statement as to color.

Clerks are not permitted to grant licenses for white persons to marry those with any trace of colored blood. It is needless to call attention to the sad plight of a white person who is thus imposed upon or of a white woman who under such circumstances would give birth to a child of marked negro characteristics, as will occur from time to time under Mendel’s law.

The new law places upon the office of the Bureau of Vital Statistics much additional work, but we believe it will be a strong factor in preventing the inter’marriage of the races and in preventing persons of negro descent from passing themselves off as white…

Read the entire article here.

Living as Others in Japan

Japanese Studies Association of Australia 2011 Biennial Conference
Internationalising Japan: Sport, Culture and Education
University of Melbourne, Melbourne Law School
185 Pelham Street
Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia
2011-07-04 through 2011-07-07

Wednesday, 2011-07-06, 11:00-12:30 AEDT (Local Time)
Room 102

This panel will present two historical papers about individuals whose lives were affected by the Pacific War, and a third paper which examines issues involving intercultural communication between Japanese and non-Japanese people. The two historical stories focus on how their respective individuals navigated their life course as “Others” in Japan. Hamilton will shed light on children born to Japanese mothers and Australian fathers during the Allied Occupation in Kure. Tamura’s paper is on a businessman of mixed heritage, English and Japanese, born in Kobe, who was interned in Japan. Parry’s paper provides a look into intercultural communication between Australian students in a homestay among ten Japanese host parents.

Kure Kids
Walter Hamilton

Walter Hamilton has recently completed a book on the mixed-race children of the Occupation, under the working title of Lest We Beget: The Mixed-Race Legacy of Occupied Japan. (www.lestwebeget.com).

Nearly sixty years have passed since the post-war occupation of Japan. It might be assumed historians will have exhausted all there is to say about its political, economic and social effects. But one unexplored aspect remains vividly alive: the hidden ancestral links that bind Australians, Americans, Britons and others to Japanese blood-relations never known, never met: the unclaimed, mixed-race offspring left in Japan when the troops departed. Their fathers would not or could not acknowledge them: an estimated 10,000 children, including several hundred fathered by Australians.

So familiar is the idea of military conquest leading to the birth of “unwanted” children outside marriage – across racial, class and cultural divides – they tend to be dismissed as a natural corollary of war. Their appearance in occupied Japan came as no surprise. The “Madame Butterfly” tradition provided a high-toned model of Western men exploiting Japanese women. As if their biological inevitability made them what they were, the children attracted scant attention from Western writers, who acquiesced in facile assumptions about their fate. Surely they were disowned by their fathers, lamented by their mothers and thrust to the lower depths of society. The eminent American historian John Dower has called them “one of the sad, unspoken stories” of the occupation. Japanese historical and fictional treatments of the issue also suffer from a determination to link the children exclusively to prostitution, moral collapse and national humiliation.

Australia joined the occupation not expecting to convert the former enemy but to punish and ostracise him. With immigration restrictions, in some respects, even tighter than they were in 1941, permission was denied for troops in Japan to marry across the race divide. Anyone defying the ban risked being forcibly removed from his de facto wife and children. Although these measures were relaxed in 1952 to admit the first Japanese war brides, no such right was extended to the unacknowledged or orphaned children of Australian servicemen. In addition, the federal government maintained an elaborate deception to stop the children being adopted by Australian families. Bogus welfare arguments were used to cover a purely political determination. The moment the strategy showed signs of faltering, it was reinforced through public monies being deployed to keep the children in Japan. There were almost no exceptions, even for the sons and daughters of brave men who had fought and died in the Korean War. In the words of a leading churchman of the day, the Reverend Alan Walker: “There have been few more disgraceful incidents in the whole miserable history of Australia’s racial immigration policy.”

This paper will introduce several individuals born in or near the city of Kure, in Hiroshima prefecture, where the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) was based from 1946 until the withdrawn of the last Korean War contingent in 1956. The Kure Kids encountered discrimination because of their physical appearance, dysfunctional family life, low socioeconomic status and social isolation. But the lives of these Japanese “others” represented much more—in quality, variety and achievement—than is suggested by the conventional portrayal of “sad, unspoken stories.”

Between Father Land and Mother Land: a British-Japanese Dual National and his Pacific War
Keiko Tamua

In war, individuals are categorized either as friend or foe, and enemy nationals are seen and treated with suspicion and fear. In December 1941, when the Pacific War started, about 700 out of 2134 civilians of the Allied nations who were residing in Japan were arrested or interned as enemy aliens. Most of them had lived in Japan for a number of years and had become part of the community. Some civilians were repatriated to their home countries on exchange boats in 1942 and 43, but others decided to remain in Japan even though they knew they were going to be interned or kept under police surveillance. Most of them had mixed heritage through their parents and/or having Japanese spouse; they thought their home was Japan rather than Britain or the USA, and they felt they could not leave without their family members.

F. M. Jonas was one of these expatriates who were caught in the war. He was born in Osaka in 1878, having a British father and a Japanese mother. He had established himself as a respectable British businessman in pre-war Kobe, running a stevedore business at the port. He was highly regarded both in the expatriate and Japanese communities, having been vicechairman of the Kobe Foreign Chamber of Commerce, and president of the Kobe Regatta and Athletic Club – the premier expatriate social club in Kobe. When the war started Jonas was arrested by the Japanese authorities, and later interned as an enemy alien. However, he managed to secure release from internment through British-Japanese dual citizenship, and he changed his name to Morii Kamejirō. When the war ended, he tried to re-establish his formal status as a British national. He died in 1950 before final resolution was officially made. Did he claim citizenship of convenience to suit the circumstances, to avoid internment, and consequently did he betray his father land? Or did he have legitimate reasons to do so? What were the consequences of his action for himself and his family? Japanese nationality laws upheld the principle of paternal succession until 1985, and dual citizenship has never been recognized. How did Jonas convince the authorities of his dual nationality? In this paper, I will discuss the life course of F. M. Jonas, who lived between father land and mother land in the middle of the Pacific War. Through Jonas’ story, I will explore, from a historical point of view, how the nationality of mixed decent people has been interpreted and handled in Japan and Britain.

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