Mixed Race Studies

‘Obama’s My Dad’: Mixed Race Suspects, Political Anxiety and the New Imperialism

thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory & culture
Volume 10, Number 1 (2011)

Rachel Gorman, Lecturer
Women and Gender Studies Institute
University of Toronto

In this article I will argue that the ideology of white supremacy is currently being reproduced as an ideology of political supremacy. I explore narratives of Obama and my father, and bring a transnational feminist framework to an examination of ontological and cultural ideologies of mixed race identity.

All my life I have encountered suspicion about my race. As a child in a working class neighbourhood of Toronto, Canada in the 1970s, my mixed race identity seemed to be an ontological threat to my European immigrant and white settler neighbours, and my ‘Mediterranean’ appearance rendered me unintelligible in relation to Blackness As a pre-teen transplanted to Muscat, Oman in the 1980s, I was intelligible as Arab, which, given Oman’s historical and geographical proximity to Eastern Africa, did not preclude African ancestry. While I was unremarkable at the national school, I was questioned by British ‘expats’ when I circulated in the international neighbourhood, despite (or perhaps because of) the presence of several mixed families. Back in Toronto during the aggressive intensification of war and occupation in the Middle East in the 2000s, my racial ambiguity has become suspicious in new ways. I am dating this shift from September 2000, the beginning of the second Intifada, not September 2001, when the New American Century went prime time. Much happened between the two Septembers–mass protests at the summit on the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas at Québec City in April 2001; the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa in August 2001. In the weeks following Durban, the global struggle to maintain white supremacy was recast as the will to reestablish American political supremacy. It was also during this time that, as an antiwar and anti-occupation organizer, my racial ambiguity was reconstituted through suspicions over whether I harbour dangerous worldviews…

…A phenomenology of race is useful to continue to dispel the illusions of white supremacists who argue that Obama’s presidency means we are living in a post-racist world. Indeed, there are many questions to be asked about how mixed race people are emerging as tropes of the triumph of a liberal brand of diversity—as Kimberley DaCosta argues, the identity ‘multiracial’ emerged in the US context in part through a struggle over racial categories on government forms, and in part through niche market recognition. In order to resist the tendency to analytically collapse antiracism into advocacy for market inclusion, we need a phenomenology of race that allows us to grasp both ontology and culture in relation to political consciousness…

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Though Many Have White Skin, their Veins Flow of Black Blood: Afro-Argentine Culture and History during the Twentieth Century in Buenos Aires, Argentina

McNair Scholars Journal
Volume 7, Issue 1 (2003)
Article 8
11 pages

Erika D. Edwards, Grand Valley State University

Although the Afro-Argentine population continued to decline during the twentieth century, the people played an integral role in shaping Argentina’s culture through their contributions in the field of dance, literature, and religion. Unfortunately, their vibrant culture and history are often ignored and overlooked because of Argentina’s subtle efforts to whiten its population. The purpose of this project is three-fold. First, it aims to recognize the survival of the Afro-Argentine community during the twentieth century. Second, it recaptures the means used to preserve African traditions. Finally, it reveals efforts of Afro-Argentine groups such as La Fundación Africa Vive that have dedicated themselves to reconstructing the Afro- Argentine role in Argentina’s culture and history.

Introduction

One of the first things I noticed while studying in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was that there were few, if any, blacks among the city’s inhabitants. I lived there for six months and people always assumed that I was Brazilian because of their popular belief that Afro-Argentines no longer exist. However, this is a lie: Afro-Argentines do indeed exist. Africans began arriving in Argentina as slaves in 1534, two years after the foundation of Buenos Aires, and since then they have shaped and transformed Argentina. This paper seeks to draw attention to the contributions of Afro-Argentines to the country’s culture and history. To this end, I will recognize their existence despite the country’s denial of its black population. Then, I will address the ways in which Afro-Argentines recapture their African past through dance, music, religion, and literature. Finally, I will discuss what Afro-Argentines are doing to reconstruct their history and, in the process, correct lies, misconceptions, and myths about them. In denying Afro-Argentine culture and history, many Argentines may not learn about their families’ and country’s past. Though many have white skin, their veins flow of black blood.

Recognizing the Existence of Afro-Argentines

Statisticians often claim, “the numbers never lie.” Yet in the case of census information for Argentina over the course of the twentieth century, the existence of the country’s black population is often denied or its size is underestimated. The noted Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges remembered that in 1910 or 1912 there was a tenement of blacks on the corner of Uriburu and Vicente López streets and another on Sarmiento Street in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 1946, Nicolás Besio Moreno calculated that there were “one and a half million people with black blood [in Argentina]” and further stated that they could be classified as blacks based upon the United States guidelines, which suggest that people who have a lighter complexion and often might pass for whites would still be classified as blacks. The following year, in 1947, a national census identified the presence of 15,000 blacks, (5,000 blacks and 10,000 mulattos).  By 1963, Afro-Argentines were estimated to number 17,000. Their population declined over the next four years to 3,000 in 1967 but increased to 4,500 in 1968 for reasons which remain unclear. However, some people have estimated that there were as many as 10,000 blacks “not counting those mixed with dark skinned people in the provinces.” The journalist Narciso Binayan Carmona stated in 1973 that “if all Argentines with black blood were accounted there would be 2-3 million.” Based upon this information, one can see there are discrepancies involving the size of Argentina’s black population; their true number probably lies somewhere between what the census counted and people’s perceptions.

Present-day statistics tend to agree with what people saw during the twentieth century. This could be due to El Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos (INDEC) which forgot to include a box for citizens to identify their descent (descendencia) during the last national census in 2001. INDEC later denied that it had forgotten to include the box. It is interesting to note that when the last national census was undertaken, INDEC included a category for the first time to check if one was of indigenous descent, a change from the last national census conducted in 1991. Their failure to inquire about people of African descent further perpetuates the myth that Afro-Argentines no longer exist. In stark contrast, La Fundación Africa Vive, an Afro-Argentine group dedicated to promoting black culture and history, believes that there are currently two million Afro-Argentines (descended from slaves) in the country. Thus, regardless of how a person may appear (dark- or light-skinned) and whether or not they are aware, many Argentines have black blood.

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, miscegenation served to lighten the complexion of the country’s black population. Argentina’s black male population was already in decline as a result of wars for independence and territorial expansion as well as diseases. Then, from 1880 to 1930, a mass of European immigrants arrived in the country. Most European immigrants were male, thus their arrival led to a surplus of white males and a shortage of white females. Given the pre-existing scarcity of black males, prospective black brides often married white grooms, many of whom were European immigrants. Interracial marriages became common. The children of such unions often had lighter skin giving them access to better education and employment opportunities thereby facilitating their ability to pass themselves off as white.

However, not all blacks who wished to marry selected white spouses. There were black couples, such as the Monteros. The couple had three daughters but due to miscegenation in their family’s past, each of the girls was a different shade of brown: the eldest looked black, the middle child resembled a mulatto, and the youngest appeared to be entirely white. “So great were the physical differences… people refused to believe they were family.” However, the Monteros considered themselves black and “had a shelf of books on race and a stack of Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack, and Ike and Tina records to prove it.” At the time they were interviewed in 1973, the girls were dating white boys. Were they to have married and had children, they too would have contributed to the whitening of the country’s black population. As the black population becomes lighter through miscegenation, it will become harder to identify its existence…

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Between Black and White: An Exploratory Investigation of Biracialism in the United States and South Africa

McNair Scholars Journal
Volume 11, Issue 1 (2007)
Article 7

Whitney Laster
Grand Valley State University

The United States and South Africa both endured periods of intense racism produced from rigid social hierarchies. While European populations controlled these institutions, black populations remained marginalized. Critical race theory proposes that race is socially constructed as opposed to inherently biological. Although social construction of the white and black ethnicities formed similarly, the development of the mixing of white and black into biracial peoples developed uniquely in each country. This study will apply concepts from critical race theory to analyze similarities and differences within the constructions, highlighting the elements of colonization, slavery, and de facto segregation and investigating the effects on the social identity.

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Creolization, colonial citizenship(s) and degeneracy: A critique of selected histories of Sierra Leone and South Africa

Current Sociology
Volume 59, Number 5 (September 2011)
pages 635-654
DOI: 10.1177/0011392111408678

Zimitri Erasmus, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
University of Cape Town

This work examines the nexus between creolization, colonial citizenship(s) and discourses of degeneration. It focuses on two sites: (1) 19th- and 20th-century Freetown, Sierra Leone, and (2) the early Cape and 20th-century South Africa. The author engages three key thinkers: Édouard Glissant, Jean-Loup Amselle and Mahmood Mamdani to illustrate how these colonial administrations deployed creolization to construct partial citizenships derived from ideas of ‘mixed race’ and ‘corrupted’ or ‘lacking’ culture. The author argues that ‘Creole’ and ‘creole’ signified, in the colonial imagination, a ‘degenerate type’ behind its legal category, ‘non-native’, and shows how uses of the concepts ‘creolization’ and ‘creole’, in selected histories of the Cape and Freetown, surrender to their colonial meanings, obscure their biopolitical significance and so, collude with discourses of degeneration. The article concludes first, that Edouard Glissant’s conception of creolization as method counters ethnological reasoning and second, that his concept ‘Relation’ enables citizenship(s) that contest social inequality and live with difference.

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Blacks, the white elite, and the politics of nation building: Inter and intraracial relationships in “Cecilia Valdes” and “O Mulato”

Tulane University
May 2006
274 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3275113
ISBN: 9780549253327

Geoffrey Scott Mitchell

A Dissertation Submitted on the Twenty-Sixth day of May 2006 to the Department of Spanish and Portugues in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirments of the Graduate School of Tulate University for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This project is an examination of the novels O Mulato (Aluísio Azevedo, 1889) and Cecilia Valdés (Cirilo Villaverde, 1882) and their call for social reform and a re-examination of the place of blacks in the emerging republics of Brazil and Cuba. Both novels question and criticize social constructs of race while pressing for an improved treatment of both free and enslaved blacks.

This project provides an intellectual history of eighteenth and nineteenth century rac(ial)ist theories that exerted a pronounced influence on Azevedo and Villaverde. Specifically, this section examines physiognomy, phrenology, and craniometry in addition to sociological and anthropological approaches to racial hybridism, the evolutionary theories of Darwin and Spencer, and the geographical determinism of Buckle. Finally, the chapter provides a close reading of Comte’s positivism and its reception by the intelligentsia in Cuba and Brazil.

Azevedo’s O Mulato purports to discredit racial discrimination by white society and the destructive influence of the Catholic clergy in Brazil’s northern province of Maranhão during the 1870s by deploying the metaphor of an unsuccessful, interracial relationship involving a wealthy and educated mulatto and his white, aristocratic cousin. Although Azevedo endeavored to illustrate the problematic nature of racial discrimination and the social compartmentalization of blacks in Brazil—both relics of Portuguese colonialism—he nevertheless succumbed to the racialist ideologies of the nineteenth century and imbued his protagonist with stereotypical characteristics. Although blacks were rising socially via education and the military, Azevedo nevertheless envisioned a future, positivistic republic necessarily led by a white elite.

In Cecilia Valdés, Villaverde deploys an unsuccessful, interracial relationship involving a poor but beautiful, nearly-white mulatta and her aristocratic, half-brother as agents of the policy of whitening. As in O Mulato, the metaphor of an unsuccessful, interracial relationship reveals the difficulty in crossing racial and social castes and thus uniting different socio-economic sectors of the imagined community. Only one intraracial romance involving whites proves to be successful in the novel. This relationship serves as a metaphor indicating that only enlightened whites are capable of leading Cuba out of colonialism and into independence.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1. INTRODUCTION: SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL
• 2. RACISM’S ROOTS: AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF SELECT RACIALIST THEORIES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
• 3. BLACK MEN, WHITE WOMEN, AND THE FORMATION OF THE POSITIVIST STATE: ALUISIO AZEVEDO AND O MULATO
• 4. FAILED RELATIONSHIPS, FRAGMENTED SOCIETIES: RACE, SEX, AND METAPHOR IN CECILIA VALDES
• 5. CONCLUSION: BLACKS, THE WHITE ELITE, AND PROJECTS FOR NATIONAL IDENTITY
• ENDNOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Mismatched racial identities, colourism, and health in Toronto and Vancouver

Social Science & Medicine
Volume 73, Issue 8, October 2011
pages 1152–1162
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.07.030

Gerry Veenstra, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of British Columbia

Using original telephone survey data collected from adult residents of Toronto (n=685) and Vancouver (n=814) in 2009, I investigate associations between mental and physical health and variously conceived racial identities. An ‘expressed racial identity’ is a self-identification with a racial grouping that a person will readily express to others when asked to fit into official racial classifications presented by Census forms, survey researchers, insurance forms, and the like. Distinguishing between Asian, Black, South Asian, and White expressed racial identities, I find that survey respondents expressing Black identity are the most likely to report high blood pressure or hypertension, a risk that is slightly attenuated by socioeconomic status, and that respondents expressing Asian identity are the most likely to report poorer self-rated mental health and self-rated overall health, risks that are not explained by socioeconomic status. I also find that darker-skinned Black respondents are more likely than lighter-skinned Black respondents to report poor health outcomes, indicating that colourism, processes of discrimination which privilege lighter-skinned people of colour over their darker-skinned counterparts, exists and has implications for well-being in Canada as it does in the United States. Finally, ‘reflected racial identity’ refers to the racial identity that a person believes that others tend to perceive him or her to be. I find that expressed and reflected racial identities differ from one another for large proportions of self-expressed Black and South Asian respondents and relatively few self-expressed White and Asian respondents. I also find that mismatched racial identities correspond with relatively high risks of various poor health outcomes, especially for respondents who consider themselves White but believe that others tend to think they are something else. I conclude by presenting a framework for conceptualizing multifaceted suites of racial identities and relating their various components and inconsistencies between them to health outcomes.

Loudoun Square: A Community Survey-I (An Aspect of Race Relations in English Society)

The Sociological Review
Volume a34, Issue 1-2 (January 1942)
pages 12–33
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.1942.tb02744.x

K. L. Little

Recent research in North America has brought more clearly to light certain facets of urban and contemporary social life, more particularly in the shape of the urban community, which have been ascribed and limited hitherto to the much smaller and less complicated social configuration, such as the village, or even the so-called primitive folk society. The Coloured community of Cardiff, of whose anthropology this paper offers a preliminary description, certainly brings to the quarter of the town which it inhabits something of that distinctive quality which Park finds in different areas of the modern city.But the interest the anthropologist has in this community lies not only in its uniqueness in terms of racial hybridity, and its manifold diversity of language, religion, and even of culture, but in the curious reflection it throws on “normal” English society, and on the wider cultural values which appertain to the latter.

The account of these anthropological investigations in the dockland of Cardiff durring August and September 1941 has been styled a “community-survey.” By convention the social survey, or survey of a community, is concerned exclusively with modern civilized and usually urban society. Ideally, it may be defined as a study of the sociology, i.e. of the social institutions and activities, of people living in a particular locality. On the other hand, as Ginsberg has pointed out, the study of contemporary social conditions in this country, at any rate, has been inspired by direct interest in practical reform, and has not in general been guided by…

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The American Negro and Race Blending

The Sociological Review
Volume a2, Issue 4 (October 1909)
pages 349–360
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.1909.tb01972.x

Frances Hoggan

The problem of the colour population of America is many-sided. Perhaps the most vital question to be considered is that of the amalgamation of the races: how far it has reached or may reach, and what good or bad results it has produced or may be expected to produce.

It may be affirmed unhesitatingly, that no two races of men can live side by side in the same country without more or less race blending. The question therefore narrows itself to one of amount and incidence. In the Southern United States, practically all mixed unions during the period of slavery were irregular unions between white men and Negro women, using the term Negro in its legal sense to include all degrees of intermixture down to one-sixteenth only of coloured blood. Comparatively few mixed marriages took place, although a few of the higher class Mulattoes belonging to Northern families are the offspring of married parents and bear no stigma of bastardy. In the Southern States marriage was hardly ever thought of, and even had it been the enactments against it, passed in different years in the various States, were so uncompromising and drastic as effectually to prevent its occurrence. The race blending of slavery was therefore one-sided, the fathers only being white, and it was outside of legal marriage. When the resulting offspring is studied the inferiority of the mother socially and culturally cannot fail to reveal itself in the child, and in addition to the maternal inferiority, the upbringing and general conditions of slave life were such as to render it next to impossible to emerge from servile habits and modes of thought. When, as was often the case, the master and the father were one and the same man, his paternity was ignored to an extent unparalleled in other countries where slave mothers were common. In contrast with the more humane Mahommedan law and customs, the American slave child was seldom freed, and he could be sold away from the mother, in which case he became a mere waif, with no trace of natural relationships, without recognised kindred, and without even the semblance of a home.  It would be difficult to find elsewhere such loose family ties as prevailed among the slave population of the United States, or a more unnatural conception of the role of the white father. When he was not at the same time the…

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The Social Adjustment of Chinese Immigrants in Liverpool

The Sociological Review
Volume 3, Issue 1 (July 1955)
pages 65-75
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.1955.tb01045.x

Maurice Broody

Some of the most urgent social problems of a cosmopolitan seaport city like Liverpool are problems of adjustment between ethnic minorities and the indigenous society into which they have migrated. This adjustment is often very difficult, and many immigrant communities suffer acutely as a result of prejudice and discrimination. Their problems have been the concern of both administrators and sociologists, and the research which has hitherto been undertaken in Liverpool into problems of race-relations has been related to the Negro communities, since it is they which are most adversely affected by racial discrimination.

The Chinese community, on the other hand, it interesting precisely because its adjustment is not regarded as a problem. In a report, which was published in 1930, Miss M.[uriel] Fletcher came to the conclusion that the Chinese, unlike the West African community, did not present a serious social problem. That judgment was confirmed four years later by Caradog Jones, whose comment on the Negro and Chinese communities still appears to be substantially true: Each community comprises about 500 adult males. In both cases, there has been widespread inter-marriage and cohabitation with white women. Here the resemblance between the two groups ceases. The Chinese appear to make excellent husbands and there is little evidence of any of their families falling into poverty, but the same cannot be said of the negroes and their families. The half-Chinese children on growing up find little difficulty in obtaining work or in entering into marriage with the surrounding white population. The girls in particular are attractive and good-looking. On the other hand, the Anglo-negroid children when grown up do not easily get work or mix with the ordinary population.

The comparatively untroubled adjustment of the Chinese may be explained partly by the fact, that local residents do not discriminate…

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The curious case of Barack Obama: A postracial black man in a racialized world

University of Houston, Clear Lake
July 2009
180 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1471005
ISBN: 9781109355192

Joel G. Carter

THESIS Presented to the Faculty of The University of Houston Clear Lake In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS THE UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON-CLEAR LAKE

This thesis discusses the debate over Barack Obama’s race and the role it played in the 2008 presidential election, and analyzes how they expose the mechanisms that operate in a racialized society that still struggles to categorize people into clearly defined and mutually exclusive racial “boxes” and view the categorization as a meaningful basis for social and behavioral analysis, such that after someone has been racially categorized, everything they do can be better understood through a racial lens. This discussion is organized around three racialized storylines: that Obama is (1) not black (enough), (2) black, but not too black, and (3) too black. Obama’s attempts to reshape racial discourse, which were rebuffed by the purveyors of the existing narrative, reveal that he is a postracial black man who exposes the entrenched beliefs about race that belie the notion that the U.S. is close to becoming a postracial nation.

CONTENTS

• INTRODUCTION
• ONE: ON THE THEORY OF POSTETHNICITY
  • Postethnic Dreams from My Father
  • Terminology Disclaimers
  • Pre-emptive Pushback
• TWO: HE’S NOT BLACK (ENOUGH)
  • On Growing up White and Deciding to be Black
  • Genetic Authenticity
  • Cultural Authenticity
  • On Shelby Steele, Bound Men, and Unfortunate Subtitles
• THREE: HE’S BLACK (BUT NOT TOO BLACK)
  • Articulate, Bright, and Clean (Oh My)
  • Obama captivates White People, Wins Iowa
  • Those Amazing, Race-Transcending “Iconic Negroes”
  • The Huxtable Effect: Obama as The Cosby Show’s Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable
• FOUR: HE’S TOO BLACK
  • America’s Black Friend Has a Blacker Friend: Jeremiah Wright
  • The Big Speech on Race, or Obama Throws His Grandmother Under the Bus
  • He’s So Well-Spoken: Obama as the Master of Veiled Racial Rhetoric
  • The Bradley Effect and Hard-Working White Americans
• FIVE: THE ELECTION AND THE AFTERMATH
  • The Bradley Effect is a No-Show
  • On the Alleged Declining Significance of Race
  • A Generational Sea-Change?
• CONCLUSION: DEEPER BLACK IS THE NEW BLACK
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story,… and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.

—Barack Obama

In the middle of a divisive presidential race, and in front of throngs of supporters in Boston and millions of political voyeurs across the country and around the world, a tall, skinny man with light brown skin and a conspicuously deliberate syntax spoke into the microphone at the 2004 Democratic Party National Convention and declared, “There’s not a Black America and a White America and a Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of  America.” Moments after the speech concluded, the political pundits were pontificating; the blogs were buzzing. Who was he? What was he? Three months later, he became the Junior Senator from Illinois. Two years later, he became a candidate for president, and 16 months after that, he became his party’s nominee. And that fall, in an electoral landslide victory on November 4, 2008, this man—Barack Obama—became the 44th President of the United States of America. The debate over what he is, and what that answer means for the country he was elected to lead, rages on.

The discourse surrounding Obama’s racial identity, deeply rooted in the complicated history of slavery, anti-miscegenation laws, segregation, and black/white relations in this country, exposes how the United States, collectively, still struggles to categorize people into clearly defined and mutually exclusive racial “boxes” and, after this categorization is made, attempts to view it as a meaningful basis for social and behavioral analysis, such that after a person has been racially categorized, everything he does or doesn’t do can be better (or best) understood through a racial lens. This is organized around what I call “the three memes.” …

…In this thesis, I make no attempt to engage in the sort of analysis that debates dueling definitions of blackness and racial authenticity in an attempt to declare that Obama is or isn’t black. My goal here is not to uncover the “actual” truth about Obama’s racial identity and castigate those who have not been able to do so or those who have tried but reached a conclusion different from my own. I am not looking at the inkblot and attempting to describe its “true nature,” instead, I am looking at the people who are. I dissect some of the statements made by the people who insist, suggest, or imply that a person’s race can be determined by an objective framework—say, the same type of framework that would apply to a determination of a person’s height, weight, or age. By analyzing how people respond to Obama’s racial identity, what I intend to show is that people sometimes speak as if Obama is mistaken when he describes his own racial identity—or, as Walter Benn Michaels might say, they speak as if “there is some fact of the matter independent of the perception.” Instead, I attempt to upend the argument that the U.S. is moving beyond race or is already postracial by showing just how large a force racialized thinking was during the campaign, and still is. The existing assumptions and prevailing conventional wisdom about race drown out what Obama actually says about his own identity and the role race plays in his life. A closer look at his statements—particularly Dreams from My Father, but also throughout his political career—reveals that Obama is more than the ultimate racial Rorschach test: he is a postracial black man, rendered invisible by a thoroughly
racialized society…

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