Mixed Race Studies

…These emerging beliefs provided the legal community with a framework within which to justify increasingly rigid separation between blacks and whites and increasingly stringent definitions of blackness. One clear example may be found in Judge Thomas M. Norwood‘s remarks in 1907, entitled “Address on the Negro,” in which he reflected upon his experiences dealing with black defendants over the years. After detailing the inferiority of the black race, Norwood explained to his audience that miscegenation was a horrible threat to the nation. Even though the law forbade interracial sex, having legal prohibitions on the books was not sufficient to curb the evil: “illicit miscegenation thrives and the proof stalks abroad in breeches and petticoats along our streets and highways.” This proof was the mixed-race issue of such unions.

Norwood’s beliefs about black inferiority did not permit him to blame “pure” blacks for the increases in racial mixing. He placed the blame squarely on white men, who made and enforced the laws against miscegenation and prevented black men from crossing the color line, while simultaneously “wallow[ing] with dusky Diana with impunity.” This practice by white men, in Norwood’s view, was particularly damaging to white women. Women married to men who engaged in interracial sex would bear the shame of knowing that their children had black half siblings. Their white daughters would flinch at having to acknowledge a black child’s salute of them as sisters.

While Norwood saw “full-blooded Negroes” as childlike, easily led, humble, and nonthreatening, he believed that mulattoes, due to the admixture of whiteness, were a genuine threat both in their prominence and in their attitudes. He argued that all prominent black persons in the United States had white or Native American ancestry to thank for their abilities and that all were hostile to whites. His solution to this problem, which would have been unconstitutional even under the prevailing racist standards, was to “Draw a dead line between the races. Tell the Negro, when he crosses it the penalty is death. Tell the white man, when he crosses it the penitentiary is there.” …

Julie Novkov, “Racial Constructions: The Legal Regulation of Miscegenation in Alabama, 1890–1934,” Law and History Review Summer 2002.

The Loving opinion treated race as a monolithic and meaningful category, even though the realities of the case itself subverted this account. The litigation arose in Caroline County, Virginia, a place called the “passing capital of America” because so many light-skinned blacks were mistaken for whites. In addition, the Jeters made clear that “Richard [wasn’t] the first white person in our family,” suggesting that Mildred’s own racial background was complex.

Rachel F. Moran, “Loving and the Legacy of Unintended Consequences,” (Wisconsin Law Review, Issue 2, 2007), 241-281. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265218010_Loving_and_the_Legacy_of_Unintended_Consequences.

…Finally, Rhinelander teaches us about the limited spaces that are available in society for recognizing families that are multiracial. Like many multiracial families, Alice’s family, the Joneses, existed within an American landscape that had no recognized place for them and their lives. Just like the one-drop rule was applied to individuals, it was applied to the Jones family during and after the Rhinelander saga. In other words, Elizabeth Jones’s legal and social classification as a white individual became “implicated by [the] brownness” of her family members, and the reality of her family’s existence as one that lived between two worlds, one white and one black, was erased. It had no place in 1920s New York society, and it placed them nowhere within the spectrum of American families. Today, this sense of family as defined by race persists. The lesson is so clear that even young children understand it. Just ask my husband, who is white and who is often asked as he drops off or picks up our children, who are racially mixed, black and white children, “why he does not match.” Or ask my daughter, who even at the age four, understood that there was no place for her family, often declaring that she wanted to paint her daddy “brown like Davey’s dad.” As Heidi Durrow has explained about the continuing “spaceless-ness” of interracial families in our society, “[w]hen race acts as the primary kinship identifier, the reality of [the multiracial] family dissolves.” It is important that we continue to explore and study cases like Rhinelander case, which serve as stark reminder of this dissolving multiracial family, and our need to create spaces for it…

Angela Onwuachi-Willig,  “A Beautiful Lie: Exploring Rhinelander v. Rhinelander as a Formative Lesson on Race, Identity, Marriage, and Family,” California Law Review, Volume 95, 2007, University of Iowa Legal Studies Research Paper No. 07-27.

I now see fluid identity as a strength. I like being able to move in and out of different communities, being able to express the cultural characteristics of my surroundings without much thought. Perhaps the best example of this came a few years ago while I was in line at Disneyland with a few friends. The women ahead of us were exchange students from Japan. We talked for the forty-five minutes or so it took to get on the roller coaster, and when we got off the ride, my friends commented on how I “became Japanese” as I talked with the students. “Your sentence structure changed. You bowed your head a lot. It was like you became a different person. Do you always do that around Japanese people?” Their questions truly caught me off guard, not because I felt insecure in who they perceived me to be, but because I really hadn’t noticed I did that. Fluid identity is just as it sounds: the ability to identify in a way that takes into account the cultural currents and adjust accordingly. The issues it raises permeate all aspects of who I am.

Amiko Matsumoto, “Fluid…: Identity In the Making,” The Vermont Connection Journal, (July 29, 2002).

The dismissal of the “mulatto” through his emasculation is historically grounded: “so frequently did nineteenth century writers depict octoroons as delicate beauties that the word itself began to conjure up images of passive femininity. Although by definition an octoroon was either a male or a female with one-eighth Black blood, Black men in novels were rarely described as such.” There is, of course, an immense bibliography of work (primary and secondary) concerning the “tragic mulatto” as a typically female protagonist, who is unable to find her place in society because of her biracial heritage. This displacement has sexual implications, explains Cynthia Nakashima: “[b]ecause of the structure of power and domination in the American gender system… weakness and vulnerability can be very exciting and attractive when applied to females.” Although the mulatta narratives are intended to evoke sympathy, they often culled readerly desire instead.

Dunning, Stefanie. “Demystifying the Tragic Mulatta: The Biracial Woman as Spectacle.” Stanford Black Arts Quarterly 2.3 (Summer/Spring 1997). 12-14.

The slaves imported from Africa by no means represented “pure Negro races.”  Of the original tribal stocks, many had admixture of Caucasoid genes from crosses with Mediterranean peoples.   During the slave trade more white genes were added.  The Portuguese who settled on the Guinea Coast had relations with the natives.  The slave traders themselves were known frequently to have had promiscuous intercourse with their female merchandise.

Spencer, Rainier. “New Racial Identities, Old Arguments: Continuing Biological Reification”, In Mixed Messages: Multiracial Identities in the “Color-Blind” Era, edited by David L. Brunsma, 89.  Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006.  Originally published in Myrdal G., R. Sterner, and A. M. Rose.  1944.  An American Dilema.  New York: Harper and Row, 123.

…Marriage between blacks, whites and Indians was legal in Virginia for most of the 17th century. Genealogist Paul Heinegg found that 99% of all mixed children in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and the Carolinas before 1810 came from intermarriages of free blacks with whites. Cases of white masters having children by black slaves were virtually non-existence, making up only one percent of the mixed mulatto population…

Tim Hashaw,  “MALUNGU: The African Origin of the American Melungeons,” Electica (July/August 2001). http://www.eclectica.org/v5n3/hashaw.html.

…From the 1620s, in southern British colonies like Virginia, white northern Europeans intermarried with Indians.  They also intermarried with Africans who began entering the American colonies as early as 1619.  Melungeons originate from these red, white and black peoples in this period of American history.  They began forming identifiable separate mixed communities when the first anti-African laws started restricting some of their freedoms by 1660…

Tim Hashaw,  “MALUNGU: The African Origin of the American Melungeons,” Electica  (July/August 2001), http://www.eclectica.org/v5n3/hashaw.html.

We are, in fact, at a crucial moment in research on multiraciality.  The idea that race is socially, rather than biologically, constructed is well-accepted in academy and is gaining purchase in the larger society. Most recent research related to multiracial identity begins from the standpoint that racial categories are socially constructed and racial identity is constructed on an individual level through social interactions and cognitive development.  Acceptance of these tenets begs the question: if we believe that race is socially constructed, to what extent are we re-inscribing fixed racial categories by studying multiraciality?  If there are no “races” how can there be “mixed races”? Before proceeding as a research community, we need to address these questions and explore potential solutions.

Renn, Kristen A., “Tilting at Windmills: The Paradox of Researching Mixed-Race,”  Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting in April 2000, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED441889.

..It was always a longstanding, almost obsessive concern with me to attempt to build an existence outside of the world of racism, animosity, and rejection that I felt, separated from other Chinese people.  I was told I was not Chinese by both relatives and unrelated people alike and believed that I wasn’t because of it.  Never did I question the validity of these statements that cut me off from my mother, from Chineseness, nor did I feel much at home in my blackness alone.  And so I lived with this sense of tension inside me, a tension built on popular belief that blackness as a race, as a color was capable of canceling out anything lighter than itself, erasing all other parts of culture, enveloping a person in darkness.  But I refused to see the eclipse, to believe my experience, my identity inherited maternally through blood and culture was false…

Wendy Marie Thompson, “Black Chinese: Hybridity, History and Home,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives. (January 2007).