Mixed Race Studies

An Unexpected Blackness

Transition: An International Review
Feb 2009
No. 100
Pages 112-132

Naomi Pabst, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and American Studies
Yale University

What does it mean to be of African descent while residing in Canada, where the hypodescent rule does not hold sway?  Naomi Pabst reflects upon the complexity of life for people of color regarded as neither, nor.

Black Europe and the African Diaspora

University of Illinois Press
2009
368 pages
6 x 9 in. 
15 black & white photographs, 1 map
Cloth: ISBN 978-0-252-03467-1
Paper: ISBN 978-0-252-07657-2

Edited by

Darlene Clark Hine, Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies
Northwestern University

Trica Danielle Keaton, Associate Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies
the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Stephen Small, Associate Professor of African American Studies
University of California, Berkeley

Multifaceted analyses of the African diaspora in Europe

The presence of Blacks in a number of European societies has drawn increasing interest from scholars, policymakers, and the general public. This interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary collection penetrates the multifaceted Black presence in Europe, and, in so doing, complicates the notions of race, belonging, desire, and identities assumed and presumed in revealing portraits of Black experiences in a European context. In focusing on contemporary intellectual currents and themes, the contributors theorize and re-imagine a range of historical and contemporary issues related to the broader questions of blackness, diaspora, hegemony, transnationalism, and “Black Europe” itself as lived and perceived realities.

Contributors are Allison Blakely, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Tina Campt, Fred Constant, Alessandra Di Maio, Philomena Essed, Terri Francis, Barnor Hesse, Darlene Clark Hine, Dienke Hondius, Eileen Julien, Trica Danielle Keaton, Kwame Nimako, Tiffany Ruby Patterson, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Stephen Small, Tyler Stovall, Alexander G. Weheliye, Gloria Wekker, and Michelle M. Wright.

On Being Amorphous: Autoethnography, Genealogy, and a Multiracial Identity

Qualitative Inquiry
Volume 9, Number 1 (2003)
pages 20-48
DOI: 10.1177/1077800402239338

Sarah N. Gatson, Associate Professor of Sociology
Texas A&M University

The article is a sociologically informed approach to understanding the author’s own place and identity. Questions of personal identity serve to highlight larger insights about a crucial reality in the United States. The author engages a standpoint at the crux of America’s racial dilemma, combined with a specialization in research on race and ethnicity. First, the interactive and overlapping set of methodologies within which her own narrative of identity fits is discussed. These data are systematically collected and analyzed field notes, historical documents, and the embedded interactions from within a larger culture of literature, scholarship, and popular understandings. The body of the article consists of three examples that she characterizes as confronting her Blackness, confronting her multiracialness, and confronting her Whiteness.

Read or purchase the article here.

A New Multicultural Population: Creating Effective Partnerships With Multiracial Families

Intervention in School and Clinic
Published: 2009-11-01
Vol. 45, No. 2,
pp. 124-131
DOI: 10.1177/1053451209340217

Monica R. Brown, Assistant Professor (mobrown@nmsu.edu)
Department of Special Education/Communication Disorders
New Mexico State University

Multiracial families make up the fastest growing demographic in the United States.  Approximately 9% of the U.S. population is multiracial, and it is estimated that the numbers will climb to 21% by 2050. With this increasing population, educators have a new responsibility to meet the needs of these families. Education must begin to form partnerships with families to increase the social and academic achievement of children from multiracial backgrounds. The purpose of this article is to (a) identify the uniqueness of multiracial students and families, (b) provide recommendations regarding improving multiracial family partnerships, and (c) offer best practices and strategies for working effectively with multiracial children and youth in schools.

New Perspectives on Racial Identity Development: A Theoretical and Practical Anthology

New York University Press
Paperback
2001
296 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780814793435

Edited by

Charmaine Wijeyesinghe

Bailey W. Jackson, Associate Professor of Education
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Decades have passed since our original theories of racial identity development were formed, bringing with them changes in our society and in our understandings of race and racism.

New Perspectives on Racial Identity Development seeks to update these foundational models. The volume brings together leaders in the field to deepen, broaden, and reassess our understandings of racial identity development among Blacks, Latino/as, Asian Americans, American Indians, Whites, and multiracial people.

Contributors include the authors of some of the earliest theories in the field. Bailey W. Jackson, Jean Kim, and Rita Hardiman here take stock of their original theories and offer updated versions of their models. Other theorists, such as Perry G. Horse, Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe, Bernardo M. Ferdman, and Placida Gallegos present new paradigms and consider future issues which may come to challenge existing theories. Later chapters present examples of the ways in which these models may be applied within such contexts as conflict resolution and clinical counseling and supervisory relationships, and address their utility in understanding the experiences of other racial and ethnic groups. In addition, William E. Cross and Peony Fhagen-Smith present a revised and expanded version of nigrescence theory.

Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America

University of Texas Press
2004
6 x 9 in.
216 pp., 3 b&w illus.
ISBN: 978-0-292-70596-8

Marilyn Grace Miller, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
Tulane University, New Orleans

Latin America is characterized by a uniquely rich history of cultural and racial mixtures known collectively as mestizaje. These mixtures reflect the influences of indigenous peoples from Latin America, Europeans, and Africans, and spawn a fascinating and often volatile blend of cultural practices and products. Yet no scholarly study to date has provided an articulate context for fully appreciating and exploring the profound effects of distinct local invocations of syncretism and hybridity. Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race fills this void by charting the history of Latin America’s experience of mestizaje through the prisms of literature, the visual and performing arts, social commentary, and music.

In accessible, jargon-free prose, Marilyn Grace Miller brings to life the varied perspectives of a vast region in a tour that stretches from Mexico and the Caribbean to Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina. She explores the repercussions of mestizo identity in the United States and reveals the key moments in the story of Latin America’s cult of synthesis. Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race examines the inextricable links between aesthetics and politics, and unravels the threads of colonialism woven throughout national narratives in which mestizos serve as primary protagonists.

Illuminating the ways in which regional engagements with mestizaje represent contentious sites of nation building and racial politics, Miller uncovers a rich and multivalent self-portrait of Latin America’s diverse populations.

Genealogy as Social Memory: Making the Public Personal

The 7th Annual Committee on Historical Studies, Sociology Department and International Labor Working Class History Journal Joint Conference
History Matters: Spaces of Violences, Spaces of Memory
New School for Social Research
2004-04-23 through 2004-04-24

Karla Hackstaff, Associate Professor of Sociology
Northern Arizona University

“Race, like nature and sex, is replete with all the rituals of guilt and innocence in the stories of nation, family, and species. Race, like nature, is about roots, pollution, and origins. An inherently dubious notion, race, like sex, is about the purity of lineage; the legitimacy of passage; and the drama of inheritance of bodies, property, and stories”
(Haraway 1995, p. 213).

In May 2002, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation which runs Monticello and is comprised of the descendants of Thomas and Martha Jefferson voted to deny membership and associated burial rights to the descendants of Sally Hemings—a slave who appears to have had children by Thomas Jefferson (San Francisco Chronicle, May 12, 2002, p. D4).  This decision was somewhat surprising because in 1998 genetic tests appeared to confirm what Hemings’ relatives had claimed through oral history for years—that at least one, if not all, of Sally Hemings’ children had descended from Thomas Jefferson. Still, the white descendants concluded that the historical and scientific evidence was “insufficient.”…

…First, within sociology there is a large and growing literature on the formation of racial/ethnic identities, relations, and the accompanying constructions of inequalities (e.g. Azoulay 1997; Brah and Coombes 2000; Collins 2000; DaCosta 2000; Haraway 1995; Nagel 1994; Omi and Winant 1994; Pedraza and Rumbaut 1996; Song 2001; Waters 1990; Worchel 1999). Given that race, ethnicity, and nationality organize many genealogical associations, clearly, race and ethnicity are constructed in the process of doing genealogy. Although ‘race’ as a biological construction has been widely rejected, it is no less real for being a social construction. As many scholars have shown, racialethnic constructions must be sustained, and are neither invariant nor universal.  Ethnoracial identities are sustained through various practices, policies, and institutions—including families.  Because interracial relations have been taboo, we still assume and to a large degree produce families that appear monoracial (DaCosta 2000). Intermarriage has grown substantially in recent decades—there were ten times as many couples categorized as interracial in 1990 as had been the case in 1960; still, in 1990 interracial marriages were just three percent of all marriages in the United Stated (DaCosta 2000, p. 9-10). By 2000, six percent of marriage households were interracial (Simmons and O’Connell 2003).  The practices of adoption agencies and sperm banks often, if not always, produce monoracial families as well. In short, ethnoracial identities continue to be crucial to family constructions…

Read the entire paper here.

Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean

University of Minnesota Press
2003
336 pages, 27 halftones
5 7/8 x 9
Paper ISBN: 0-8166-3574-9
Paper ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3574-0
Cloth ISBN: 0-8166-3573-0
Cloth ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3573-3

José F. Buscaglia-Salgado, Professor and Chair of Cultures, Societies and Global Studies
Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

A revelatory account that places mulatto experience at the center of Caribbean history.

This ambitious book brings to light the story of what José F. Buscaglia-Salgado terms mulataje-the ways Caribbean aesthetics offer the possibility of the ultimate erasure of racial difference. Undoing Empire gives a broad panorama stretching from the complex politics of medieval Iberian societies to the beginning of direct U.S. hegemony in the Caribbean at the end of the nineteenth century.

Buscaglia-Salgado begins with an examination of Washington Irving‘s “American Columbiad” as an act of historical and territorial plundering. He then traces the roots of mulatto society to the pre-1492 Iberian world, not only finding a connection between the Moors of “Old Spain” and the morenos-the blacks and mulattos of the New World-but also offering a profound critique of creole and imperial discourses. Buscaglia-Salgado reads the pursuit and contestation of what he terms the European Ideal in colonial texts, architecture, and paintings; then identifies the mulatto movement of “undoing” the Ideal in the wars that shook the nineteenth-century Caribbean from Haiti to Cuba, arguing that certain projects of national liberation have moved contrary to the historical claims to freedom in the mulatto world.

Multiracial America: A Resource Guide on the History and Literature of Interracial Issues

The Scarecrow Press, Inc.
March 2005
264 pages
Paper ISBN: 0-8108-5199-7; ISBN-13: 978-0-8108-5199-3

Edited by

Karen Downing, Foundation and Grants Librarian
Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan

Darlene Nichols, Psychology Librarian and Coordinator of Instruction
Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan

Kelly Webster, Associate Librarian
Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan

Multiracial America addresses a growing interest in interracial people and relationships in America. Over the past decade, there have been numerous books and articles written on interracial issues. Despite the rampant growth in publishing, locating these often-scattered and inaccessible materials remains a challenge. This resource guide provides easy access to the available literature. Topical chapters on the most often researched themes are included, such as core historical literature, books for children and young adults, hot-button issues (passing, identification, appearance, fitting in, and blood quantification), interracial dating and marriage, families, adoption, and issues pertaining to race and queer sexuality. Each chapter includes a brief discussion of the literature on the topic, including historical context and comments on the breadth and depth of the available literature, and followed by annotations of books, popular and scholarly journals, magazines, and newspaper articles, videos/films, and websites. Other useful sections include a chapter on the depiction of interracial relationships in film, teaching an interracial issues course, and how to search for materials given changing terminology and classification issues. Indexes by race and non-print media are included.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction

1. Accessing the Literature by Karen Downing
2. Teaching an Interracial Issues Course by David Schoem
3. Hot Button Issues by Karen Downing and Kelly Webster
4. Core Historical Literature by Chuck Ransom
5. The Politics of Being Interracial by Karen Downing
6. Interracial Dating and Marriage by Alysse Jordan
7. Interracial Families by Renoir Gaither
8. Transracial Adoption by Darlene Nichols
9. Books for Children and Young Adults by Darlene Nichols
10. Multiracial Identity Development by Kelly Webster
11. The Intersection of Race and Queer Sexuality by Joseph Diaz
12. Representations of Interracial Relationships and Multiracial Identity on the American Screen by Helen Look and Martin Knott

• Appendix I. Subject Heading/Descriptor Vocabularly to Assist in Searching by Karen Downing
• Appendix II. Definitions of Terms Used in Interracial Literature by Karen Downing
• Appendix III. Sociology 412 — Ethnic Identity and Intergroup Relations Syllabus by David Schoem
• Appendix IV. OMB Directive 15
• Appendix V. Resources by Race
• Index
• About the Contributors

Reading the Dougla Body: Mixed-race, Post-race, and Other Narratives of What it Means to be Mixed in Trinidad

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Volume 3, Issue 1 (March 2008)
pages 1-31
DOI: 10.1080/17442220701865820

Sarah England, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Soka University of America, Aliso Viejo, California

In recent years there has been a great deal of scholarship addressing the ‘mixed-race’ question in the Americas. Much of this literature is concerned with documenting the experiences of mixed-race peoples and exploring how their existence alters racial ideologies and racial formations in their respective societies. This essay contributes to that literature through an analysis of the experience of mixed-race peoples in Trinidad and Tobago. Through interviews with people of Indo-Trinidadian and Afro-Trinidadian parentage (douglas) I show how the dougla experience both challenges traditional ways that race is understood ontologically, and is shaped by those same ideologies. I further examine the place that douglas see themselves as occupying in a society where racial mixing is both heralded as the essence of the national character and seen as threatening to the traditional division between Indo-Trinidadians and Afro-Trinidadians.

Read or purchase the article here.