Mixed Race Studies

Mixed and Multiracial in Trinidad and Honduras: Rethinking Mixed-race Identities in Latin America and the Caribbean

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 33, Issue 2 (2010)
pages 195-213
DOI: 10.1080/01419870903040169

Sarah England, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences
Soka University of America, Aliso Viejo, California

The purpose of this paper is to explore what it means to be mixed in Latin America and the Caribbean and to ask if mixing in the ‘South’ can always be understood within the so-called racial continuum as opposed to the racial binary of the ‘North’. I do this through a comparison of two potentially mixed-race identities, the afro-indigenous Garifuna of Honduras and peoples of East Indian and African mixture (douglas) in Trinidad. Through this comparison I show that in both Honduras and Trinidad classification of mixed-race peoples can follow the logic of the racial binary or of the racial continuum depending on the historical context and the particular mix. I also discuss the way that mixed-race identities can sometimes be radical critiques of state racial projects of pluralism and at other times they can be the basis of state racial projects meant to obfuscate racial pluralism.

In his 1967 book, The Two Variants in Caribbean Race Relations, Harry Hoetnik argued thai the main gauge of racism within a society is not so much the degree to which different racial groups are integrated on the level of work and social interaction, but rather the degree to which inter-racial mixing (sexual, reproductive) is accepted and gradations between racial categories are recognized. Based on this premise he set out to characterize the racial systems of the Caribbean, within which he included the United Stales South and Brazil. He argued thai (here are basically three different systems: 1) the North American variant, characterized by a high degree of segmentation between black and white based on strict definitions of whiteness and rules of hypodescent that relegate any mixed people into the non-white…

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An Examination of Social Science Literature Pertaining to Multiracial Identity: A Historical Perspective

Journal of Multicultural Social Work
Volume 6, Issue 1 & 2
August 1997
pages 117 – 138
DOI: 10.1300/J285v06n01_08

Jack S. Kahn, Professor of Psychology
Curry College

Jacqueline Denmon
Department of Anthropology
College of William and Mary

This article traces the history of the construct, multiracial identity, within social science literature. This research evolves from an emphasis on demonstrating the inferiority of multiracial individuals to understanding their phenomenological experiences. Over time, the emphasis seems to shift from categorizing by race to a focus on ethnicity. The method of inquiring about racial identity appears to have shifted from behavioral observation to self-report. Empirical research examining this phenomenon also seems to become more methodologically rigorous over time. Historically, the struggle to understand multiracial individuals as either marginal or healthy may have been more the result of ethnocentric beliefs on the part of the researchers rather than the identification process of multiracial individuals. It is additionally urged that further research continue to explore this often overlooked and misrepresented subgroup.

Using the extended case method to explore identity in a multiracial context

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 32, Number 9
November 2009
pp. 1599-1618
DOI: 10.1080/01419870902749117

Gina Miranda Samuels, Assistant Professor
School of Social Service Administration
University of Chicago

Increasingly, multiracial research calls upon scholars to reconcile and clarify their stances on race as a biological versus a social construct and to situate their theorizing of racialized identities historically, sociopolitically and as experienced subjectively. While multiracial scholarship offers both critiques against and support for a so-called ‘multiracial’ identity, few have outlined the methodological implications of pursuing inquiry responsive to this diverse body of work. This paper highlights the methodological challenges posed by empirical inquiry pursuing nonessentialist but structurally and subjectively grounded analyses of multiracial identity. The extended case method (Burawoy 1998) is introduced as one approach that epistemologically reflects these conceptual challenges in the field. Three elements of its application within a study of black-white multiracial adoptees are offered: 1) use of fluid concepts of race and identity; 2) conducting multi-systemic analyses; and 3) using interpretative findings to extend existing theory.

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Eurasian Persuasions: Mixed Race, Performativity and Cosmopolitanism

Journal of Intercultural Studies
Volume 28, Issue 1 (February 2007)
pages 41-54
DOI: 10.1080/07256860601082921

Julie Matthews, Associate Professor
School of Education
University of Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Eurasians are ‘in’. We are the poster children of globalisation. In Asia, and increasingly in the West, mixed-race Eurasian models charm us with their cosmopolitan chic. Terms previously used to demarcate impure outsiders such as Eurasian mixed-race, hybridity, mestiza, hapa, haafu, Euro-Asian and Anglo-Asian have recently been given an affirmative spin. This essay argues that the appeal, allure and persuasions of Eurasian/mixed-race are as much an effect of its commodified production as a cosmopolitan figure with automatic racial, cultural and national border crossing attributes, as its capacity and potential to claim for itself a location and space of visibility. Framed as a performative, the visual aesthetics and cosmopolitan attributes of Eurasian/mixed-race are explored in relation to postcolonial practices of racialisation and sexualisation under globalisation. Factors evoked in the constitution of Eurasian/mixed race delimit rather than preclude its promise of an expansive transnational/transcultural cosmopolitan future.

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Aisha Khan Lecture – New York University Professor Aisha Khan Speaks on Multiculturalism

St. Augustine News – STAN
University of the West Indies
July-September 2006
Page 24

Alake Pilgrim

[Article copied in full for readability.  To read in original print layout version (with photographs), click here.]

On the surface of things, Professor Aisha Khan, lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at New York University, might seem like a poster-child for multiculturalism. Born in Bangladesh and raised in California, her research originally took her among the Garifuna people of Honduras.  Her first visit to Trinidad was in 1984, and from 1987 to 1989 she conducted research among Trinidadians of East Indian descent in agricultural communities in the southern part of the island to which she has returned several times over the years.

However, Professor Khan, whose research is concerned with religious identity, race relations, social stratification and migration histories, took a very critical perspective on multiculturalism in her lecture. She questioned the extent to which this “slippery term”, which calls for the equal recognition of different “cultures” and “races”, can meaningfully foster greater harmony and equality in society.

Understanding the multiple meanings of multiculturalism requires an analysis of the changing definitions of culture, nationality, religion, race and colour in different contexts. As part of this process, Profesor Khan examined three models of multiculturalism – in the United States (US), Brazil and Trinidad.

In the US, she argued, the multicultural alternative to the “one-drop rule” of non-white inferiority and the assimilationist melting-pot narrative, proposes celebrating the multiple cultures (often referred to as “races”) that make up US society.  This trend is evident in articles featuring photos of “mixed race” celebrities like Jessica Alba and Vin Diesel as the new faces of beauty. But does this concept of multiculturalism really unseat the reigning Euro-American, middle-class ideal? To paraphrase Professor Khan, does making difference “cool” actually address structural inequality in societies, such as unequal access to resources like income, housing and education?

She took that question to Brazil, where the idea that miscegenation (a “mixed race” population) and non-racialism (deemphasizing the role of race in the society) had brought about a unified Brazilian nationalism, is currently being critiqued as myth. Contentious issues of affirmative action and a political quota system are now being debated in the public sphere. Paradoxically, Professor Khan stated, the affirmative action approach to multiculturalism both undermines and reinforces the foundations of social inequality, in that it pushes toward more fixed definitions of racial categories supporting faulty race-based assumptions. In addition, such an initiative continues to make race – a biological fallacy and social variable – one of the most central aspects of human identification.

On the other hand, she opined, trying to simply eliminate race as a category of identification doesn’t work either, because the historical, legal, social and economic systems of power built on concepts of race, persist throughout the world today.

She then turned to Trinidad, which she described as being structured under colonialism according to the hierarchy of plantation society, in which black people of African descent occupied the lowest tier of the social pyramid. Independence society, she stated, was built on Afro-Euro foundations, with the attempt by some to have a multi-cultural, multi-racial “rainbow” society that was quintessentially Trinbagonian. At the same time, the society faced the conundrum of a perceived deep-seated duality and supposed hostility between people of African and East Indian descent, which was encouraged by the colonial masters and entrenched by post-independence partisan politics. This conflict centres around competition for equal resources, as well as the question of what really constitutes equal representation.

While very real divisions exist, Professor Khan expressed the view that this version of irresolvable conflict between people of African and East Indian descent, denied the reality that people in Trinidad have been living, loving, working and struggling together practically from the moment they set foot on the island.

So, in light of these case studies, what was Professor Khan’s conclusion regarding multiculturalism’s potential to bring about greater equality? Not an overly favourable one… She suggested an alternative treatment of “race” and “culture” that addressed their social significance, without freezing people into fixed racial and cultural categories. And spoke firmly against using multiculturalism and other celebrations of diversity, as a way of denying ongoing discrimination, or de-emphasizing the importance of providing equal access to resources for the underprivileged and excluded members of society. Professor Khan’s most recent book is Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad.

‘But most of all mi love me browning’: The Emergence in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Jamaica of the Mulatto Woman as the Desired

Feminist Review(on-Line)
Volume 65, Issue 1
June 2000
pages 22 – 48
DOI: 10.1080/014177800406921

Patricia Mohammed, Head and Lecturer
Centre for Gender and Development Studies, Mona Unit
University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica

One of the most common threads in the Caribbean tapestry races which have populated the region over the last five centuries largely through forced or voluntary migration, is that there have emerged mixtures of the different racial groups. A large proportion of Caribbean women and men are referred to euphemistically as ‘mixed race’. The terms used to describe people of mixed race vary by territory and have been incrementally added to or changed over time. The original nomenclatures such as sambo, musteephino, mulatto, creole, etc. have been replaced at present to include terms like brown skin, mulatto, clear skin, light skin, red-nigger, dougla and browning. The title of the article comes from a contemporary dancehall song in Jamaica in which the black singer, Buju Banton, unwittingly echoes an unspoken yet shared notion of female desirability in the Caribbean: a preference for ‘brown’ as opposed to black women or unmixed women. In the ongoing constructions of femininity in the region, class and skin colour have intersected with race to produce hierarchies and stereotypes of femininity based on racial mixing. Drawing on some of the historical data available, particularly that of the pioneering research in this area produced by Lucille Mathurin [1924-2009] in 1974, this article interrogates some aspects of miscegenation in the Jamaican past, to configure these with gender, race and class relations in the present. The article does not attempt to arrive at conclusive findings but to contribute to the ongoing process in the region, and elsewhere, of differentiating the category ‘woman’ in historiography and sociology.

Politicking the personal: examining academic literature and British National Party beliefs and wishes about intimate interracial relationships and mixed heritage

Information & Communications Technology Law
Volume 18, Issue 2
June 2009
pages 83 – 98
DOI: 10.1080/13600830902814992

Mike Sutton
School of Social Sciences
Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Barbara Perry
Faculty of Criminology Justice and Policy Studies
University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Ontario, Canada

Drawing heavily on our earlier work in this area (Perry and Sutton 2006; forthcoming), this article discusses the issue of intimate interracial relationships (IIRs) within the context of the UK Government’s current concerns with social cohesion and provides an overview of the literature on hate and prejudice against those in IIRs in the UK and USA. Following an examination of the official statistics and the numbers of mixed race people in England and Wales, we move on to provide a brief but disturbing glimpse of what it would mean if the BNP‘s long-term dream of winning a national election were actually to happen in light of their official website published proposed policies against IRRs and mixed heritage people.

I Define My Own Identity: Pacific Articulations of ‘Race’ and ‘Culture’on the Internet

Ethnicities
Vol. 3, No. 4
pp. 465-490
(2003)
DOI: 10.1177/1468796803003004002

Marianne I. Franklin
University of Amsterdam

Most of the participants in the internet discussion forums, the Kava Bowl and the Kamehameha Roundtable, herald from the South Pacific islands of Tonga and Samoa. These forums are part of a cluster of popular online meeting places for the ‘Polynesian Diaspora’ and other people from the Pacific Islands who live in the USA, Australia and New Zealand for the most part. They have been going strong since the mid-1990s, nearly as long as the worldwide web. One of the most recurring topics in the discussions is the nature of Tongan and/or Samoan ‘identity’ and how this relates to ‘living overseas’. In these discussions, participants – many of whom are of ‘mixed race’ – exchange personal experiences, political opinions, emotional and intellectual expectations about the outer and inner limits of race/ethnicity, and/or culture in their everyday lives. This article reconstructs several of the more substantial debates on the meaning and implications of ‘identity’ that show how these generations of the postcolonial South Pacific Islands are (re)defining what it means to be Tongan, Samoan – Polynesian – in a diasporic context. Discussions revolve around several axes; the personal and political issues of race (ethnicity) as everyday embodiments; Tongan/Samoan and Pacific Island cultures as negotiable rather than fixed practices; ways of turning colonialist categories for Pacific Island societies, such as ‘Polynesian’, into futurist tropes for communities who are often socioeconomically disadvantaged and discriminated against both ‘at home’ and ‘overseas’. As they argue, write, read, send emails and interact with one another on and offline, the creators of thousands of interwoven online texts over the years have been articulating ‘race’ and ‘culture’ on their own terms. They have been doing so in the public cyberspaces of the worldwide web, tracing, as they come and go, a nascent postcolonial politics of representation.

Crossing racial lines: geographies of mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the United States

Progress in Human Geography
Vol. 27, No. 4
pp. 457-474
(2003)
DOI: 10.1191/0309132503ph444oa

Richard Wright
Department of Geography
Dartmouth College

Serin Houston
Department of Geography
Dartmouth College

Mark Ellis
Department of Geography and Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology
University of Washington

Steven Holloway
Department of Geography
University of Georgia

Margaret Hudson
Department of Geography
University of Georgia

This review highlights geographical perspectives on mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the United States, explicitly calling for increased analysis at the scale of the mixed-race household. We begin with a discussion of mixed-race rhetoric and then sketch contemporary trends in mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the US. We also weave in considerations of the public and the private and the genealogical and social constructions of race. Our challenges to current thought add to the landscape of scholarship concerned with race and space. By presenting mixed race in fresh ways, we offer new sites for intervention in this evolving literature.

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Philosophical aspects of the ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’

Anthropological Theory
Volume 1, Number 4 (December 2001)
pages 445-465
DOI: 10.1177/14634990122228836

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

I apply philosophical analysis to the ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’ (American Anthropological Association, 1998) and the commentary on its earlier draft published in the Anthropology Newsletter (1997). Racial essentialism is the theory that there are distinct and general human biological traits that determine racial membership and cause the presence of specific racial traits. This theory is false, as is the belief that a taxonomy of human races, or race, exists. But the 1998 ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’ fails to repudiate racial essentialism explicitly. Instead, the Statement denies that race determines culture or psychology and thereby misses the broad logical point that race cannot determine anything, because it does not exist. In the Anthropology Newsletter discussion of Kennewick Man, which appeared to be a debate about racial essentialism, contributors spoke past one another in confusing population-based measures of human diversity with race. The same confusion clouds contemporary concerns about the relevance of common-sense racial categories to medical diagnosis and treatment. Education is the solution to the public’s ignorance about the scientific foundation for its ideas about race. It is an empirical question whether such education will remedy racism or unjust treatment based on the false racial taxonomy. Although mixed-race categories are no more real than ‘pure’ ones, their acceptance may help unsettle the prevailing false taxonomy of race.

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