Mixed Race Studies

Racial and ethnic self-identification have economic consequences because the choice of self-identity is likely to be entwined with the acceptance of and acculturation into dominant social norms. If race or ethnicity is endogenous in certain circumstances, a self-identity may or may not be selected to distance oneself from a subordinate group or to improve one’s standing with or acceptance into the dominant group. In a study of people of Mexican descent, Mason (2001) tests a model in which acculturation is a dominant strategy, and finds that light-complected people of Mexican descent may acculturate more easily. Murguia and Telles (1996) report different educational opportunities for Mexicans of light and dark complexion and argue that these may result from conscious choices. Phenotypic differences, they argue, influence individual strategies. Light-skinned people of Mexican descent learn early in life that by assimilating or acculturating they can defuse negative stereotypes and attain more than their dark-complected counterparts. Later in life, light-skinned Mexicans are able to increase their incomes by adopting a non-Hispanic white identity (Mason 2001). Yet there may also be situations in which members of the subordinate group decide to maintain identities separate from the dominant group.

Howard Bodenhorn and Christopher S. Ruebeck, “The Economics of Identity and the Endogeneity of Race,” National Bureau of Economic Research: Working Paper 9962 (September 2003): 3-4.

In 1850 the mulattoes and others of mixed blood formed about eighty percent of Louisiana’s total free Negro population.” Some of them came from stable families which had been free for generations,” But almost all had their origins in some extramarital union (by this time perhaps quite far removed) between a white man and a black woman. The beginnings of this long-established practice dated back to the early eighteenth century when Louisiana was first being settled by the French. The small group of early settlers consisted mostly of those “in the pay of … the King” and especially garrison soldiers. Among the hardships faced by these men in their pioneering work of founding a colony was a scarcity of women. They solved the problem, according to the French Governor Bienville, by running “in the woods after Indian girls.”

Laura Foner, “The Free People of Color In Louisiana and St. Domingue: A Comparative Portrait of Two Three-Caste Slave Societies,” Journal of Social History, Volume 3, Number 3 (1970): 408.

In many ways, Obama’s story provides a possible model for black­ descended multiracial people in that racial acceptance and success depends on an identity that is closely tied to blackness. In the larger sense, Obama reconciles the tensions between what G. Reginald Daniel has called “multigenerational multiracials,” that is to say, the category that most African Americans fall into as a racially mixed people, and “first-generation” multiracial people who have one parent that identifies as monoracially white and another that identifies as monoracially black. The question is: does this require an African American identification or can it simply be a multiracial identity that affirms one’s connection to the African Diaspora and the black experience? Had Obama identified more with the white side of his parental lineage, or even more strongly as a mixed race person, many Americans might not today know the name Barack Obama. The important point to take away from this memoir is that in the end, the protagonist, the hero, does not choose a mixed race identity but, rather, an African American one. To do otherwise would surely have antagonized and alienated African American support and acceptance. Anything less than full and absolute acceptance of an African American identity would have cost Obama severely.

Zebulon Vance Miletsky, “Mutt like me: Barack Obama and the Mixed Race Experience in Historical Perspective,” in Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority, edited by Andrew J. Jolivétte (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2012), 149-150.

The first Africans to arrive in North America did not arrive as slaves and almost certainly did not conceive of themselves as “negros.” The word, appropriated from the Latin word for “black” was a descriptive device divorced from any cultural or historical context for these people. Over time, that descriptive device would become a social designation constructed in opposition to and structurally inferior to “whiteness.” The first Africans to arrive in Virginia may not have arrived as slaves, but legislation would ensure that black freedom would exist only as a misshapen simulacrum of white freedom. Where whiteness signified privilege, blackness had to signify subordination, a dynamic which was eventually codified in racial slavery. For those without claim to “whiteness,” there was no recourse to white domination and so within this racialized caste system, “half-blackness” or “half-whiteness” were as problematic concepts as “partial-oppression” or “half-supremacy.”

Darryl G. Barthé, Jr., “Racial Revisionism, Caste Revisited: Whiteness, Blackness, and Barack Obama,” in Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority, edited by Andrew J. Jolivétte (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2012), 82.

Mixed race hegemony, I argue, is the assertion by neoliberals, ethnocentric nationalists, and by some mixed race people themselves that biracial and multiracial individuals and families will lead to the end of a race-conscious and racially-discriminatory society in the United States.  In other words ethnic nationalists believe that multiracial people dilute the resources of people of color and strides that have been made as a result of civil rights while neoliberals articulate an ideology of multiraciality as the next logical stage in a “colorblind” or “post-racial” society. On both sides hegemonic ideologies are used to control the way that people of color and whites understand and respond to the growing population that identifies with being of multiple ethnic backgrounds.

Andrew J. Jolivétte, “Obama and the Biracial Factor: an Introduction,” in Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority, edited by Andrew J. Jolivétte (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2012), 4.

One thing that I learned while doing all my research was that there was a lot that I hadn’t learned in school.  For instance, I learned the Southeast was just a empty wilderness when the settlers arrived at Jamestown. But in my research I discovered that it was crawling with people. Hundreds of thousands of natives. If you look at the maps of their villages they’re all over the place. There were also a lot of European and Africans who were there for various reasons and they were mostly young men, so they were mixing and melding with the native women. So the earliest years of our country, the population was quite mixed. I mean the whole melting pot idea didn’t come in with the nineteenth century; it was here all along. So, these earliest people, as Britain won out over Spain and Portugal, everyone wanted to be English, so everybody denied the rest of their heritage.

Lisa Alther, “Author Explores Racial Mixing In New Historical Novel,” VPR News, Vermont Public Radio, (March, 14, 2012): 00:01:45-00:02:45. http://www.vpr.net/news_detail/93768/author-explores-racial-mixing-in-new-historical-no/.

In 1932, under the supervision of Harvard physical anthropologist Earnest Hooton, [Caroline Bond] Day published her Radcliffe master’s thesis, A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States. It showed that the mixture of African Americans and Whites simply yielded children with some characteristics of each race, who were entirely normal. In fact, Day observed, these offspring were often middle-class and lived lives that were very like those of middle-class White people, although in U.S. culture they were regarded as African American. As an outsider within her field, Day adapted the methods of anthropology to her own uses.

Anastasia C. Curwood, “Caroline Bond Day (1889–1948): A Black Woman Outsider Within Physical Anthropology,” Transforming Anthropology, Volume 20, Issue 1, (April 2012): 79.

To discuss the perspective of race in contemporary German literature, it is worthwhile to focus on those writers associated with the programmatic efforts of the Afro-Germans, a heterogeneous, biracial group of individuals usually of German and African or African American heritage and born since 1945. In 1984 the late feminist author and scholar Audre Lorde presented a lecture and workshop in Berlin that apparently struck a resonant chord among the biracial women present. Lorde’s topic was African American and feminist literature. Allegedly the confrontation with African American literature and history led those present to call themselves “Afro-German” and to record “their-story.” The result has been organizational and publishing initiatives as well as a series of texts that include such disparate genres as lyric, film, essay, and rap. Perhaps the most interesting aspect in the evolution of Afro-German literature is the reception of the African American experience.

Leroy T. Hopkins, “Speak, So I Might See You! Afro-German Literature,” World Literature Today,Volume 69, Number 3, Multiculturalism in Contemporary German Literature (Summer, 1995): 533-538.

A focus on Sui Sin Far’s depiction of Eurasian characters and on the subject of interracial marriage illustrates her multifaceted understanding of the crisis in US race relations. Through the treatment of these subjects, she enacts a revolutionary revisioning of race differences. The stories found in Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, including “Pat and Pan,” “Its Wavering Image,” along with excerpts from “The Story of One White Woman who Married a Chinese,” “Her Loving Husband,” and Sui Sin Far’s autobiographical essay, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” exemplify the artistic and psychological complexity of Sui Sin Far’s treatment of the biracial character and of interracial marriage. In particular, by addressing these themes, Sui Sin Far deconstructs Orientalism by dramatizing the destructive ways in which North American culture defines the Chinese as inhuman “Other” in order to prevent interracial understanding and maintain profitable power structures. Sui Sin Far’s fiction and essays illustrate the lengths to which members of the dominant culture will go to preserve a notion of racial purity based on hatred and ignorance, and she explores the terrible effects that racism has on its victims.

Vanessa Holford Diana, “Biracial/Bicultural Identity in the Writings of Sui Sin Far,” MELUS, Volume 26, Number 2 (Summer 2001): 160-161.

The revisionist celebration of a mixed-race identity negates and eclipses a long history of white men crossing the color line to engage in sex with Black women, usually without their consent.  It has rendered invisible violations of Black women while critiquing the strategic efficacy of privileging Black political identities. Although questions of appearance, performance and class require a separate analysis of diverse and divisive perceptions and conceptions of Blackness, the campaign for a multiracial category obscures the fact that Black/African-Americans is already a multiracial category. Legal scholar Patricia Williams skillfully encapsulates this sentiment when she writes, “what troubles me is the degree to which few people in the world, and most particularly in the United States, are anything but multiracial, to say nothing of biracial.  The use of the term seems to privilege to offspring of mixed marriages as those ‘between’ races without doing much to enhance to social status of all of us mixed-up products of illegitimacies of the not so distance past.”

Katya Gibel Azoulay [Katya Gibel Mevorach], “Jewish After Mount Sinai: Jews, Blacks and the (Multi) racial Category,” Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, Volume 9, Number 1 (Summer 2001): 31-45.