Mixed Race Studies

Early America was far more ethnically and racially complex than we have been taught. Some whites were not northern European, some blacks were not sub-Saharan African, and some Indians and some mulattos were not Indians and mulattos… We Melungeons and, indeed, other mixed groups have irrefutable ties not only to northern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and early America, but also to the eastern Mediterranean, southern Europe, northern African, and central Asia.

N. Brent Kennedy, “Introduction,” in North From the Mountains: A Folk History of the Carmel Melungeon Settlement, Highland County, Ohio, authors John S. Kessler and Donald B. Ball.  (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2001),  pp. ix-x.

Racially, I’m an African-Native American.  Culturally, I’m an aspiring Seminole Maroon descendant. But to the people of America who see me on the street, I’m just another flavor of Black.

Phil Wilkes Fixico, “Episode 225 – Phil Wilkes Fixico,” Mixed Chicks Chat, September 14, 2011. (00:09:12-00:09:28). http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-34257/TS-504952.mp3.

The peoples of Europe are of such mongrel origin that any attempt at classification according to only two characteristics (colour of eyes and hair) would exclude two-thirds of the population in any region studied; the addition of a third characteristic (cranial formation) would leave us with a still smaller fraction of the population presenting the required combination of all three characteristics; and with the inclusion of stature and nasal index, the proportion of «pure» types would become infinitesimal.

We may take it then that there are no pure human races; at the very most it would be possible to define a pure race in terms of the incidence of one selected somatic characteristic, but never in terms of all or even of the majority of hereditary traits. Nevertheless there is a widespread belief that there was a time in antiquity when racial types were pure, that miscegenation is of relatively recent date, and that it threatens humanity with a general degeneration and retrogression. This belief lacks the slightest support from science. The mixing of races has been going on since the very beginning of human life on earth, though obviously the improvement of communications and the general increase in population has stimulated it in the last two centuries. Migration is as old as the human race, and automatically implies cross-breeding between groups.

Juan Comas, Racial Myths (Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 1951), 12-13.

Race is a true lie and a social construction. The meaning of race, and how different people are located within its shifting boundaries and categories, is a function of the politics of the moment, and the type of “social work” that race does in a given society.

Chauncey DeVega, “He Really Just Wants to be the ‘Brown Paper Bag Test Referee’ for Black Folks: Ironically, Tim Graham is More Right Than Wrong in His Insight About Karen Finney and the One-Drop Rule,” We Are Respectable Negroes: Happy Non-Threatening Coloured Folks, Even in the Age of Obama. (April 3, 2013). http://wearerespectablenegroes.blogspot.com/2013/04/he-really-wants-to-be-brown-bag-test.html

When do I use “we”? In a room full of people I do not know, I always search out the ones who fall in the middle, like me, out of some irrational ideal that we belong together.  I worry that this is the wrong thing for the child of a mixed marriage to feel.  My parents conquered difference, and we would all like to think that sort of accomplishment is something that could be passed down from generation to generation.  That’s why we’re all, in theory, so excited by the idea of miscegenation—because if we mix the races, presumably, we create a new generation of people for whom existing racial categories do not exist.  I don’t think it’s that easy, though.  If you mix black and white, you don’t obliterate those categories; you merely create a third category, a category that demands, for its very existence, an even greater commitment to nuances of racial taxonomy.

Malcolm Gladwell, “Lost in the Middle,” in Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural, ed. Claudine Chiawei O’Hearn. (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 112.

Unfortunately, so long as ideas of racial categories continue to fragment our ability to imagine humanity, many minorities have few choices but to cash in on their ‘exotic’ appeal. For Eurasian women, this means accepting all the baggage of deviancy, prostitution and foreignness that is implicit in it. It also means a lifetime of answering the “what are you?” question and being told that they are not their parents’ children.

Lyn Dickens. “Being a Eurasian Australian,” Yemaya: Sydney University Law Society’s annual interdisciplinary Women’s journal, 2010 (2011): 34-36. http://www.suls.org.au/s/yemaya_2010.pdf.

Not only physical but also mental and temperamental incompatibilities may be a consequence of hybridization. For example, one often sees in mulattoes an ambition and push combined with intellectual inadequacy which makes the unhappy hybrid dissatisfied with his lot and a nuisance to others.

To sum up, then, miscegenation commonly spells disharmony—disharmony of physical, mental and temperamental qualities and this means also disharmony with environment. A hybridized people are a badly put together people and a dissatisfied, restless, ineffective people. One wonders how much of the exceptionally high death rate in middle life in this country is due to such bodily maladjustments; and how much of our crime and insanity is due to mental and temperamental friction.

This country is in for hybridization on the greatest scale that the world has ever seen.

Charles B. Davenport, “The Effects of Race Intermingling,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Volume 56, Number 4 (1917): 364-368.

Intermarriage bans arose in the late 1600s, when tobacco planters in Virginia needed to shore up their new institution of slavery. In previous decades, before slavery took hold, interracial sex was more prevalent than at any other time in American history. White and black laborers lived and worked side by side and naturally became intimate. Even interracial marriage, though uncommon, was allowed. But as race slavery replaced servitude as the South’s labor force, interracial sex threatened to blur the distinctions between white and black—and thus between free and slave.

David Greenberg, “White Weddings: The incredible staying power of the laws against interracial marriage,” Slate, June 15, 1999. http://www.slate.com/id/30352/.

If we accept the definition of Black which we have been given—a definition which historically defined anyone with “one drop of Black blood” as Black—we ignore the existence of multiracial people. We ignore people whose experiences may be different from those experiences which have been defined as constituting the Black experience—that is, the “essentialized” Black experience. By so essentializing, we assume that the taxonomy of race proposed by nineteenth-century white supremacists—that human beings can be classified into four races and everyone fits neatly into one slot—is a valid one. On the other hand, if we do classify multiracial people as Black, the potential for group solidarity is much greater. “We are all Black,” we say. “You cannot divide us.”

Trina Grillo, “Anti-Essentialism and Intersectionality: Tools to Dismantle the Master’s House,” Berkeley Women’s Law Journal (Volume 10, 1995).

My favorite trivia question in baseball is, “Which Italian American player for the Brooklyn Dodgers once hit 40 home runs in a season?” Nobody ever gets it right, because the answer is Roy Campanella, who was as Italian as he was black. He had an Italian father and a black mother, but he’s always classified as black. You see, American racial classification is totally cultural, and it’s based on the unfortunate and sad legacy of racial distinction based on this ridiculous metaphor, the purity of blood.

You’re identifiable as having black ancestry because we can see it. I mean, who’s Tiger Wood, who’s Colin Powell? Colin Powell is as Irish as he is African, but we don’t classify him as that.

No, we have a really screwed up classification. To think it’s biological is just plain wrong. It’s based, flat-out, on the legacy of racism and the metaphor of the purity of the blood. It’s a very troubling issue.

“RACE—The Power of an Illusion: Background Readings: Interview with Stephen Jay Gould,” Public Broadcasting Service (2003). http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-01-09.htm.