Mixed Race Studies

…but I’m honestly moving away from biracial & even mixed—I am so disillusioned by the whole notion of ‘race’ at all.

Fanshen Cox, “One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for her Father’s Racial Approval,” #swirlchat, July 27, 2012. http://storify.com/swirlinc/one-drop-of-love-a-daughter-s-search-for-her-fathe

The truth is that the hybrid finds himself alive and human, with all that this signifies in terms of capacity for soul development. The pure-bred has no better initial equipment. In the matter of human fundamentals they come to differ only as a different nurture plays upon a very similar human nature. There surely are no real data for the support of Le Bon’s notion that contrary heredities sap the vitality of hybrids and leave them barren of soul.

Harvey Ernest Jordan, “The Biological Status and Social Worth of the Mulatto,” The Popular Science Monthly, (June 1913): 573-582.

The claim that persons identifying as multiracial suffer health risks due to the lack of a federal multiracial category is without foundation. On March 1 and 2, 1993, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry conducted their Workshop on the Use of Race and Ethnicity in Public Health Surveillance. One of the general principles agreed upon by workshop participants was that “the concept of race as assessed in pub­lic health surveillance is a social measure. Biological or genetic reference, or both, should be made with extreme caution.” Clearly, the call for instituting a mul­tiracial category for purposes of disease screening is medically insupportable. According to epidemiologists and workshop participants Robert Hahn and Donna Stroup, medical screening by biological race is not desired since “what is mea­sured as ‘race’ in public health surveillance is not a biological characteristic, but rather a self-perception for which phenotypic characteristics may be one among many criteria… Even were distinctive biological markers of race determined, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to assess such markers in common surveil­lance processes and in the census.”

Rainier Spencer, Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, (Boulder: Westview Press,1999), 158.

Race is an elusive category and provides an even more elusive way to forge a sense of collective belonging. Nobody is more aware of this elusiveness than Brazilian black-power activists. For most of the history of blacks in Brazil, Africans and their descendents had a strong sense of being different from their white slaveholders. This difference was forced onto them and used to hold them at the bottom of Brazil’s social hierarchies, and it left no doubt that Brazilian whites had no intention whatsoever to accept the moral and legal equality of blacks, which held true well into the twentieth century. The sense of black identity was indeed so strong during most of the colonial period and slavery, which lasted until 1888, that African and Brazilian blacks of different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds and of different degrees of biological mixture repeatedly united to contest white supremacy and attempted to overthrow the system that held them at the bottom. On several occasions, Brazil barely escaped its “Haitian moment.” As late as 1931, the radical Frente Negra Brasileira, the Brazilian Black Front, had a membership of about 200,000, mostly concentrated in the industrialized south (Davis 1999: 187). In 1936, however, the authoritarian government of Vargas outlawed the Black Front, together with all other oppositional political parties. The Vargas government sought to discourage any association that had the potential to endanger his project of national unity. The risk of factionalism and even secession was so great during the 1930s that the Vargas government undertook extraordinary measures to forge a sense of nationality, national pride, and even a sense of what it meant to be Brazilian.

Among the most successful in this cause was sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1986). Freyre’s writings on the Brazilian national character provided the ideological foundation upon which a unified nation could be constructed, and the Vargas regime left no means untouched to disseminate this ideology. Brazil would be a racial paradise, inhabited by one race, the Brazilian version of “cosmic race”—a tropical mulatto republic. Anybody daring to say differently was transformed into a naysayer and a reactionary. The concept of a racial paradise promised a solution to finally catch up to the developed world, even if—and especially because—Brazil had such a large mixed population.

To the black-power movement, this move proved devastating. Up until the 1930s, Brazilian blacks were forcefully united by the perverse power of racism and social Darwinism; after the 1930s, asserting one’s blackness was transformed into an act of civic upheaval and antipatriotism and little by little, as the Vargas regime made sure that its version of the truth was accepted, asserting ethnic difference became an act of political incorrectness not only aimed against the state, but against mainstream society. Under Vargas, race was removed from textbooks, censuses, and from the official discourse about Brazil. The state thus produced the main and only official way to represent the country, and any Brazilian—black or white, mixed or indigenous—had no other choice but to accept that reality and to find ways of social mobility that explicitly took it into account. The core of the doctrine disseminated under Vargas was that no matter what their ethnic background, Brazilians are all mixed and hence one. Nevertheless, this was not an “imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson (1991) suggests. Rather, it was a designed community, designed by the state and forced onto its people. The only one imagining, dreaming, and sometimes hallucinating such a community was the father of the idea, Gilberto Freyre.

The Vargas years severely delegitimized any attempt to forge a sense of racial solidarity among excluded blacks. Just as black-power movements regrouped during the 1950s and early 1960s, the state stepped in again, this time to avoid a potentially explosive bonding between labor and racialized groups. During the military regime, black-power activism became subversive and was subject to prosecution in the best-case scenario, but also to state-sponsored persecution, imprisonment, torture, and even death. The military regime also ensured that the category race would disappear again from the census, and it thus sought to curtail even the prospects for an emerging racial solidarity that would embrace and represent all those affected by the forces of racism and racialized exclusion. Categories, after all, are the building blocks of group consciousness (Brubaker 2004). Without numbers, mobilization is greatly complicated, as there can be no sense of a shared destiny if it is not known with whom, and with how many, this destiny is shared. Political activism is all but rendered impossible if there are no data and no existing categories other than being Brazilian.

Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell (Gladys Mitchell-Walthour), “The New Politics of Race in Brazil” in Brazil’s New Racial Politics, edited by Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell, (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2012): 3-5.

The talk of Obama as a presidential contender centers on this power to unite. But if Obama’s capacity for racial unification is to be credibly assessed, then the white heritage with which he is intimately familiar must be acknowledged as prominently as his black identity is. His black identity has been imposed without incident and paraded in public with fanfare. Yet, while Obama is known as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, he in fact is more probably the periodical’s first biracial president. He is celebrated as only the fifth African-American ever elected to the United States Senate, although he is more accurately among a tiny group of Americans of equal black and white heritage who have been elected to the United States Senate. It is as if the well researched and now-officially-recognized racial category for mixed Americans does not exist-or, if it does, never should be taken seriously as a category of its own, lest history be subject to significant revision informed by an enlightened embrace of ethnic distinctions that matter to every American’s identity.

Amos N. Jones, “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): 84-85.

A problem that consistently confronts racist law makers in the question of defining who is “Negro” and who is “white.” In general, two schools of “thought” prevail is the United States on this issue. In about nine states a Negro is anyone who had a grandparent who was a Negro. The laws generally define such a person as “having one-eighth or more Negro blood” or as an “octoroon.” The other definition of Negro is used in at least six states: a Negro is any person who has “any trace of Negro blood.” The circularity of these statements does not seem to trouble the opponents of miscegenation.

Virginia provides an interesting example of racist legal gymnastics. Whites in that state can marry neither Negroes nor American Indians. In Virginia, a Negro is a person who has any Negro ancestor, and an American Indian is a person who had at least one Indian grandparent. If someone has one-sixteenth or less “Indian blood” then he is a white. But Virginia still hasn’t decided what you are if you have one-eighth Indian heritage, i.e. one of your great-grandparents was an Indian. Furthermore, if a man is an inhabitant of an Indian tribal reservation and has at least one Indian grandparent and less than one-sixteenth “Negro blood,” then despite the state’s definition of a Negro he may be regarded as an Indian on the reservation. Once he leaves the reservation, however, he undergoes a legal metamorphosis and becomes a Negro. Of course he can then move to Mississippi, where the “octoroon” requirement prevails, and thus become a Caucasian.

Oklahoma courts have decided that American Indians are “white” and therefore may not marry “any person of African descent.” In Alabama, however, Indians are mulattoes, according to the courts, and therefore cannot marry whites. Filipinos in Louisiana must be able to prove that they are “not basically negroid” before they can marry whites. Indiana courts have revealed that “all Mexicans are not white persons and some of them are negroes,” and therefore non-Negro Mexicans can marry either Negroes or whites.

Peter Cumminos, “Race, Marriage, and Law,” The Harvard Crimson, December 17, 1963. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1963/12/17/race-marriage-and-law-pamerican-racism/

Race mixture or miscegenation excited considerable scholarly interest and public indignation in the continental United States during the early twentieth century. According to the 1910 census, the number of self-identifying “mulattoes” in the U.S. population had risen to two million, more than 20% of African Americans. This development prompted concern among some white social theorists. In 1918, Madison Grant (1918) predicted the passing of the great white race: “mongrelization” across the globe was leading to dilution and degeneration. A few years later, Lothrop Stoddard (1921) echoed Grant’s predictions. Through the 1920s and 1930s, marriage between African Americans and European Americans remained illegal in more than 40 states but not in the insular territories (Hollinger 2003; Kennedy 2003; Moran 2001; Pascoe 1996; Sollors 2000; Spickard 1989; Williamson 1980). In 1924, Virginia promulgated the “one-drop” rule to define more rigidly the boundaries of white identity. The following year, Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander scandalized New York when he sued Alice Jones for passing as white and deceptively luring him into marriage. Black men accused of lustful behavior toward white women were still being lynched in the South. In 1935, the African American intellectual W. E. B. DuBois observed that fear of race mixing was “the crux of the so-called Negro problem in the United States” (DuBois 1980 [1935]:99). Nonetheless, in places such as Harlem, New York, a self-conscious and assertive “mulatto” culture emerged during this period (Huggins 1973; Watson 1995).

Warwick Anderson, “Racial Hybridity, Physical Anthropology, and Human Biology in the Colonial Laboratories of the United States,” Current Anthropology, Volume 53, Number S5 (April 2012): S95-S107. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/662330.

Governor Northen says that miscegenation by law will never, take place in the south. But miscegenation in the south has already taken place. It has been on the road over 200 years. Not miscegenation by law, but by brute force, which is the very worst form of law. Who started it? Not the negroes, I am sure, nor was it the poor white trash. It was the blue vein aristocracy of the south that broke over the fence, defied all law, and the result is we have black negroes and white negroes, some of them as white as Governor Northen.

Joseph W. Henderson, “An Answer to Northen: The Son of a Slave Mother on Southern Miscegenation,” The Daily Star (via: Valley of the Shadow: Civil War Era Newspapers, University of Virginia Library), June 19, 1899, page 1 (column 1). http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=H9AwAAAAIBAJ&sjid=WooDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5707%2C959988

Speaking of morals, you asked me what effect the female population of mixed blood was going to have on society here [in Charleston, South Carolina]. I have looked somewhat into the matter since my return, from what I can learn, I believe there is hardly a young man here of Southern birth, who can afford the expense, who does not protect one of these girls, and few married men who have not two families. Miscegenation is practiced here. I know of nearly a dozen cases where the parties are married. These girls are many of them beautiful, many almost pure white, with blue eyes and light hair, of fine figures and lady-like appearance. Many of them are much whiter than the majority of pure whites, who seem to belong to the order of women known as scraggy, and are the color of a liver colored pointer, having tan colored paws and faces. But few children are born where these girls are protected by single men, while some of the old men have larger colored families. Nothing can be done to rectify this evil, as these girls will not on any account marry a man with a drop of “nigger blood” in his veins.

“Life in the South,” Franklin Repository (via: Valley of the Shadow: Civil War Era Newspapers, University of Virginia Library), January 23, 1867, 2 (column 3). http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/news/fr1867/pa.fr.fr.1867.01.23.xml#02

Race is a polysemic concept with a long and contested history. The term ‘race’ is dynamic and adaptable because it is not the core concept of racialised knowledge and thinking, that is to say ‘race’ has no causal properties. The concept and associated taxonomic devices, including categorisations of race, have no dynamic or processual power. The focus on ‘race’ misses both the production of knowledge about racialised things (entities, dynamics) and the locus of power in racial debates and theories. It is the active process of racism and racialisation that produce racist circumstances, situations, knowledge and beliefs. Racial categories are rather, abstract nouns that act as part of the linguistic architecture of racist knowledge by creating a set of artificial boundaries for knowledge and beliefs that are both fluid and contentious. The ‘new’ discourses of population ‘mixing’ are a reflection of these false population categories and their presumed borders, since both consensual and non-consensual assimilation/integration are a permanent feature of human history.

Hamish L. Robertson and Joanne F. Travaglia, “Racial ideology and the production of knowledge about health,” Darkmatter, Volume 9, Issue 1 (Post-Racial Imaginaries), (July 2, 2012). http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2012/07/02/racial-ideology-and-the-production-of-knowledge-about-health/