Mixed Race Studies

The “myth of racial democracy”, like the good myth it is, contains distortions in its much vaunted absolute equality, but does contain partial truths in indicating a singularity in the relationship between the races, mainly between races and culture. Indeed, several studies prove there to have been one distinguishing feature in Portuguese colonization: the incentive towards miscegenation, which was considered a strategic point of the settlement policy. This feature stands out even more when contrasted with other approaches to colonization—such as the American model—in which restrictive policies with regard to legalizing mixed marriages were adopted, or when one perceives similarities with former Portuguese colonies in Africa. But, one cannot forget, that was not just a question of character but a contextual question, connected with the lack of women involved in the Portuguese colonization. In my point of view that is not a question of defining the differences—cultural differences—or transforming it in fossilized parameters. It is not even a question of judging the models positively or negatively, but rather of reflecting on individual modes of discrimination, a Brazilian way of discriminating.

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, “Not black, not white: just the opposite. Culture, race and national identity in Brazil,” Centre for Brazilian Studies, Working Paper Number CBS-47-03, (2003): 5.

There are numberless examples in history, showing with terrible clarity how each time Aryan blood has become mixed with that of inferior peoples the result has been an end to the culture-sustaining race. North America, the population of which consists for the most part of Germanic elements, which mixed very little with inferior coloured nations, displays humanity and culture very different from that of Central and South America, in which the settlers, mainly Latin in origin, mingled their blood very freely with that of the aborigines. Taking the above as an example, we clearly recognize the effects of racial intermixture. The man of Germanic race on the continent of America having kept himself pure and unmixed, has risen to be its master; and he will remain master as long as he does not fall into the shame of mixing the blood.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, E.T.S. Dugdale, ed. & trans. (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1933), 121.

Going back to the Census figures quoted in The New York Times, it’s one thing to claim that the multiracial population may increase 50 percent, but when the original figure is only 2.4 percent of Americans, a 50 percent increase simply means that the 2010 multiracial population could end up around 3.6 percent of the population. The number 50 surely sounds more impressive than the smaller 3.6 figure. Manipulating these numbers can create misleading impressions, sometimes done with intention.

Peter M. Nardi, “Skeptic’s Café: Understanding Popular Uses of Percentages,” Pacific Standard, April 30, 2011. https://psmag.com/understanding-popular-uses-of-percentages-2cba925821e8.

The White supremacist underpinnings of the racial mixture [in Brazil] as racial utopia concept are made even more evident when one considers the intersectional gender and race specificity regarding the discourse of racial mixture. White elite women are completely precluded from the idealization of racial mixture. Their racial purity and class status are not implicated in the mestiçagem/cult of racial mixture; they are meant to continue the production of an elite white class. Instead, it is the intimacy of black women with white men that is the focus of national racial mixture and its presumed ability to decrease the Black presence within the nation. Further, while interracial intimacy is viewed as the prerogative of all white men, only working-class men are viewed as the appropriate marriage partners of black women. The gendered racism of the trope of racial mixture is also prevalent across Latin America.

Tanya Katerí Hernández, “The Value of Intersectional Comparative Analysis to the “Post-Racial” Future of Critical Race Theory: A Brazil-U.S. Comparative Case Study,” Connecticut Law Review, Volume 43, Number 5 (2011): 1407-1437.

Multiracialism cuts its teeth on the denial of this fundamental social truth: not simply that antiblackness is longstanding and ongoing but also that it is unlike other forms of racial oppression in qualitative ways—differences of kind, rather than degree, a structural singularity rather than an empirical anomaly.

Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 245.

That no black or mulatto person or persons shall hereafter be permitted to be sworn or give evidence in any court of record, or elsewhere, in this state, in any cause depending, or matter of controversy, where either party to the same is a white person.

—5 Laws of Ohio 53, approved January 25, 1807

We argue that evidence of America’s biracial heritage exists in discursive clues that always almost remind Americans that race was never as pure a distinction as the lexicographers and teachers of official language and histories once inculcated. Though recent scholarship has recovered some of this heritage, we argue that this knowledge has haunted Americans, who have always almost known about their biracial past. Double meanings, oral histories, “fictions,” fantasies, and epithets perpetuated an almost awareness of this heritage even as successive discursive formations obscured its memory.

Greg Goodale and Jeremy Engles, “Black and White: Vestiges of Biracialism in American Discourse,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Volume 7, Issue 1 (March 2010): 70-89.

By obscuring the historic dimensions of American multiraciality—emphasizing its newness but not its oldness—we may run the risk of ignoring lessons that past racial stratification offers for understanding today’s outcomes. For one thing, older social norms still make themselves felt in contemporary discussion of mixed-race identity (Davis, 1991; Waters, 1991; Wilson, 1992). In addition, history reminds us that these attitudes toward multiraciality were embedded in complex webs of social, political, economic, and cultural premises and objectives, thereby suggesting that the same holds true today. Finally, turning to the past highlights how malleable racial concepts have proved to be over time despite the permanence and universality we often ascribe to them. Given the United States’ history, the extent to which public attitudes toward mixed-race unions and ancestry have changed is remarkable. Perhaps the real new people today are not just those of multiracial heritage but also Americans in general who now conceptualize, tolerate, or embrace multiple-race identities in ways that were unacceptable in the past.

Ann Morning, “New Faces, Old Faces: Counting the Multiracial Population Past and Present,” in New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century, edited by Loretta I. Winters, Herman L. DeBose, Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications USA, 2002.

The two studies reported here show that mixed-race individuals in the United States who identify as biracial or multiracial can encounter difficulty in asserting their identities, and that such constraints can lead to negative psychological consequences. In Study 1 we found that when discussing instances in which their biracial or multiracial identity caused them to feel tension, mixed-race individuals spontaneously mentioned demographic questionnaires that forced them to select only one racial group. Using this real-world experience as a model, Study 2 found that compared with those who were able to choose multiple racial groups, those who were constrained to only one racial group showed lower performance self esteem and motivation. Additionally, this constraint, even after it was removed, influenced participants’ subsequent report of their racial identities. Those who had been forced to choose only one racial group were more likely to report a discrepancy between their chosen identity and their social experience.

Sarah S. M. Townsend, Hazel R. Markus, Hilary B. Bergsieker, “My Choice, Your Categories: The Denial of Multiracial Identities,” Journal of Social Issues, Volume 65, Number 1 (2009): 185-204.

The whole being of a mulâtresse is given over to sensual pleasure and the flame of this goddess burns in her heart so as only to be snuffed out with life itself… Even the most inflamed imagination can conceive of nothing that she has not fathomed, concocted, experienced. Her sole vocation is to bewitch the senses, deliver them to the most delicious ecstasies, enrapture them with the most seductive temptations; nature, pleasure’s accomplice, has given her charms, endowments, inclinations, and what is indeed more dangerous, the ability to enjoy such sensations even more keenly than her partners, including some unknown to Sappho.

Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie Française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, (1797): 104.