Mixed Race Studies

The Mulatto (hybrid) is in thirty states of this union, an illegitimate product. And, to the honest student of ethnology, this restriction is a wise one, for it is in accordance with a great law of nature, which cannot be violated with impunity. The tendency of this hybrid is to run out unless crossed with the parent stock on either side, and there is high authority for a belief that “inter se” the mulattos are not fertile beyond the third generation. At best their children are less able to resist disease than those of either pure type. Thus, indeed, are the sins of the parent visited upon the children unto the third generation.

Jos. A. Roberts, The Race Conflict in Southern States: An Ethnological Study of the Original Types and the Effects of Hybridity (Savannah: 1899), 2. (Source: OpenLibrary)

President Obama was not the first African American to seriously pursue the presidency. In fact, more than forty black men and women candidates paved the way for a black president; Obama stands on the shoulders of those other black leaders and politicians.

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, “Introduction: The African American Quest for the Presidency,” in African Americans and the Presidency: The Road to the White House (New York, London: Routledge, 2009), 2.

As this chapter will argue, soon after Anglo Texas’ separation from Mexico in the 1835-1836 revolution, white elites created a society rooted in the absolute legal separation of the white and black worlds. In order to prevent the development of a mulatto population that might inherit the political and economic wealth of the racial ruling class, white leaders promulgated harsh legal penalties in the 1840s and 1850s attached to blackness. Blacks faced slavery, the death penalty for many crimes punished less severely for whites, and laws defining the offspring of mixed-race parents as enslaved bastards ineligible for inheritance. Whiteness was defined simply as the absence of blackness, Indian blood, or other racial “pollution,” although many who were socially accepted as white had been polluted in this manner. Elites hoped that the social superiority all whites ostensibly enjoyed over blacks ameliorated disparities of power and wealth within the white community.

To the dismay of elites, however, frequently severe weather and a cash-strapped economy made life insecure for the non-slaveholding majority. In Dallas, divisions developed along economic and regional lines, leading to outbursts of violence that disturbed elite confidence and security. When a fire destroyed downtown Dallas in 1860, elite suspicions settled on white abolitionists born outside the South. The violence of 1860 created the terrain on which postwar racial ideology developed. Elites labeled those opposed to their notions of race and class hierarchy as uncivilized and therefore not fully white. After Reconstruction, the city leadership embraced a more fluid concept of race in which white status could be gained or lost based on acceptance of elite social norms. This more flexible definition of whiteness, which held dissent in check, shaped Dallas politics for more than 130 years afterward.

Michael Phillips, White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 1. The Music of Cracking Necks: Dallas Civilization and Its Discontents.

Well, I would say I consider myself more black than white, but more biracial than anything else…

…My identity is biracial. But I say that I’m more black than white because for a lot of biracial people I think this sort of an attempt to balance both parts of their heritage with equal weight.  In my life they’re not equal. The black side attempts to dominate. And I say that because for me, being a biracial person is to be a person of color in America. And so I tend to identify more with my non-white side than with my white side. But I say that I’m more biracial than anything else because my identity and my orientation as a biracial person seem to trump it all…

..I think it goes back to the point I was making earlier, about that for me, to be biracial is being a person of color, you know, in society. If you think about… going back to the days of segregation, there was no “biracial” water fountain in this country. You had “white” water fountains and you had “colored” water fountains and if you were biracial, you drank from the “colored” water fountain. You didn’t have the option of saying, “Oh, I’m half-and-half so I can drink from both.” That’s just not how it worked. So that for me, to be biracial is to be a person of color.

—Elliot Lewis, author of Fade: My Journeys in Multiracial America

Fanshen Cox and Heidi Durrow, “Episode 62 – Mixed Chicks Chat with ‘Fade’ author Elliott Lewis”, Mixed Chicks Chat, (August 8, 2008). http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-34257/TS-128390.mp3 or http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/audioPop.jsp?episodeId=128390&cmd=apop.

I was taken aback by her verbal slap and had a visceral reaction to it. I punctured the sudden pregnant pause in the room with an assertive, visibly annoyed and equally voluminous, “Yeah, that’s right.” I shot a glance at Gilbert’s brown-skinned daughter across the room, who was smiling an uncomfortable smile of embarrassment. I replied to her smile with a classic rolling of my eyes, which she appeared to enjoy and gestured to me that it was the appropriate response to the offensive remark. Though it was difficult, out of respect for my host, I succeeded in controlling my anger. But I was seething as I exited the room with the racial insult still stuck in my craw. Passing by the food table, I picked up a massive beef rib and moments later found myself absent-mindedly gnawing on it—sitting at a table under the canopy, chatting with my host, who was unaware that anything awkward had just occurred. After making customary small talk, I excused myself, wished Gilbert a happy birthday, and headed for the cultural comfort of my Brazilian friends, in whose multiracial culture of origin, or so they tell me, this incident would probably never have occurred—because most people in Brazil consider themselves mixed-race. As I crossed the street, still seeing only the ignorant woman’s face in my crosshairs, I muttered quietly to myself: “It never ends. It just never f— ends!”

This incident was just the most recent in a lifetime of similar disquieting experiences—actually, many lifetimes of such experiences—in the history of my family, always posing the same question: “Why? Why do they say these things to us?” This deeply personal and perennial question has in large part prompted my interest in the construction of ethnoracial identity within situational contexts. Why have so many of our African American neighbors routinely treated us with such disdain? This vexing question once inspired me to write the following poem entitled, Who Am I? during my early teenage years—circa 1963.

Samuel M. Lemon, “The construction of ethnoracial identity within situational contexts: A study of triracial family histories” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2007, ProQuest AAT 3270863): 3-4. http://search.proquest.com/docview/304838296.

The validity of the antimiscegenation law itself could also be questioned under the fourteenth amendment by requiring the showing of a reasonable legislative purpose for its enactment. There is serious doubt that any valid reason could be shown for this type of statute. In fact, the three basic arguments which are often advanced to support these statutes; namely, that the children of these marriages would be inferior, that social tensions and domestic problems are lessened, and that psychological hardships to the offspring are avoided, have been discredited. Therefore the application of a reasonable legislative purpose test would most likely lead to a finding of unconstitutionality under the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment, especially since the usual presumption of a valid legislative purpose is not applied to cases dealing with racial classifications.

However, a better approach might be to recognize that the right of the individual to marry is a fundamental right, protected under the clear and present danger test. Surely it is a right which can be considered as important to the individual as is his right to own property or his freedom of speech. The United States Supreme Court has acknowledged that marriage and procreation are fundamental to the very existence and survival of the race.

C. Michael Conter, “Recent Decisions: Constitutional Law: Miscegenation Laws,” Marquette Law Review, Volume 48, Issue 4 (Spring 1965): pages 616-620.

These half-breed negroes in the United States, or, in fact, all that class of people having any negro blood in them at all, are extremely objectionable factors to add to our nation or risk in the building up of our civilization. They often, indeed in a large proportion of instances, are worse than the typical negroes themselves, and certainly a large number of them are no better. They are dangerous from whatever point man may elect to view them, as they may possess all of the vicious and sensual traits of the negro, without the color of the latter’s skin as a warning flag to the unwary. In any question at issue they will invariably choose sides with the colored race every time, and from their keener wits and higher intelligence are capable of giving a greater amount of trouble. Mulattoes, too, have better opportunities to contract white alliances in marriage, and thus insidiously pass the savage Ethiopian blood into the veins of the Anglo-Saxon or American. This is most deplorable, for, as I have frequently remarked, the negro has absolutely nothing in his organization that can be added to our own with the slightest value, while on the other hand, nearly everything about him, mentally, morally and physically, is undesirable in the highest degree. As has been shown, he is, as a rule, deeply imbued with criminal tendencies, and his hybrids are equally so. Mulattoes have no higher sense of our civilization than the black stock from which they are derived. They are, however, in speech, manners, dress and actions better mimics of the whites than most of the true negroes. Personally, I have found them equally superstitious, treacherous, mendacious, and unreliable. It is the better class of hybrids, however, that command such place and position in this country that demand more than usual ability to fill. Many regard them as the colored doctors, the colored lawyers, colored clergymen, colored poets and authors, and so on, whereas, as a matter of fact, they are nothing of the kind. They are hybrids, nothing more nor less, and often with a very minute tincture of the African negro in them. Some of them are so like Caucasians in face and figure, that were they to go abroad, to Europe, for example, the average European would never for an instant suspect the negro blood in them, and it would only be that person well versed in the negro character and with a knowledge gained by long contact with the race, that could make the correct ethnical diagnosis. I refer distinctly to such specimens as Henry Ossawa Tanner (artist), Daniel H. Williams (surgeon), Charles Waddell Chesnutt (novelist), Francis James Grimké (clergyman), and likewise (W. E. Burghardt) Du Bois (sociologist). When the type is more pronounced, there is no mistaking them, as the negro then crops out with greater certainty. This is the case with such examples as Paul Lawrence Dunbar (poet), Kelly Miller (mathematician), Granville T. Woods (electrician), Edward H. Morris (lawyer), Booker T. Washington (teacher), and several others. Negroes claim one and all of these as representatives of their race in America, and a man like Du Bois is continually howling about them one and all in the press as the Advance Guard of the Negro Race in America.

R. W. Shufeldt, The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization, (Boston: The Gorham Press, 1907), 91-93.

The mixture of the races began to take place almost as soon as the first Negroes and white men came into contact in America. This was the experience of the Spanish and the French as well as the English colonists. When colonization brings two dissimilar races into contact, the fusion of the races is as a rule more often the result of the union of the men of the stronger race with the women of the weaker. This was true in America where the scarcity of white women possibly operated to cause interracial alliances. No doubt, Shufeldt is correct when he claims: “The crossing of the two races commenced at the very out-start of the vile slave trade that brought them thither; indeed, in those days many a negress was landed upon our shores already impregnated by someone of the demoniac crew that brought her over.” Captain Daniel Elfrye, said by some to be responsible for the introduction of the first Negroes into Virginia, received a letter from the London Company, May 10, 1632, “condemning him for too freely entertaining a mulatto.”

James Hugo Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia & Miscegenation in the South, 1776-1860, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 165-166.

I think it’s important for everyone to know that neither racism nor race are stable or natural. Racism metastasizes and changes over time, changing the ways that race is thought about and implemented in the US. For the last few decades, the Census has been one way to try to observe and track the symptoms of racial inequalities. For example, we can use the data to determine whether a racial group is disproportionately imprisoned or denied access to equitable bank loans. Without such data, it’s difficult to demonstrate racist trends.

—Eric Hamako

Steven F. Riley, “A Conversation with Eric Hamako,” MixedRaceStudies.org, (January 23, 2013). http://www.mixedracestudies.org/wordpress/?p=27794.

Perhaps you are all familiar with the “one drop” philosophy, adopted by American slave owners. Essentially, as long as an individual had even one drop of African blood, that individual was considered Black, regardless of what could sometimes be a very mixed lineage. Well, the “one drop” concept is, in some ways, alive and well today and is the unspoken subtext that spurs someone to ask “What are you,” when I am clearly and visibly something other than white. So possibly the question could more precisely be phrased as “What part of you is black?” Not, “Where are you from?” After all, when I truthfully answer with Guelph, Ontario, no one is never satisfied!

Araba Ocran-Caesar, “1.1 But Where are You Really From? Part IV: Oh, really? You were born in Guelph?,” Schema Magazine, (August 3, 2009). http://www.schemamag.ca/indepth/2009/08/feature-ocran-caesar.php.