Mixed Race Studies

When Jim Crow Met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War II Britain

I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd.
1987
300 pages
220 x 140cm
Hardback ISBN: 9781850430391

Graham Smith

An important chapter in the history of World War II is here explored for the first-time—how the arrival of the black troops strained war-time Anglo-American relations, upset elements of the British political and military establishments and brought Britons face to face with social and sexual issues they had never faced before. This book, drawing on previously unpublished new material, covers an important but neglected dimension of diplomatic relations in World War II. As well as providing critical insights into the thinking of many leading political and military figures of the period, it paints an original and invaluable portrait of wartime Britain and its confrontation with the issue of race. It is a tale rich in human dignity—and in instances of tragicomic hypocrisy.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. Prologue: The Great War – Black Americans in Europe
• 2. The Early War Years: First Encounters
• 3. Attitudes and Anxieties: Jim Crow and the British Government
• 4. Jim Crow in Britain: The US Army and Racial Segregation
• 5. Novelty to Familiarity: The Home Front
• 6. Dixie Invades Britain: The Racial Violence
• 7. The Watchdogs: Jim Crow Under Close Scrutiny
• 8. ‘No Mother, No Father, No Uncle Sam’: Sex and Brown Babies
• 9. The Black GI in Britain: Reflections and Results
• Notes
• A Select Bibliography
• Index

About Biracials Learning About African-American Culture or B.L.A.A.C.

Biracials Learning About African-American Culture or B.L.A.A.C.
2013-06-18

Zebulon Miletsky, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Stony Brook University, State University of New York

The idea for this blog came from several discussions with students and young people who come from mixed-race backgrounds, especially so-called “white and black” biracials who, for whatever reason, grew up without learning very much about African-American life, history or culture. Whether they be trans-racially adopted, grew up in a home without the biological black parent or were perhaps raised in an area without many black people, the probability for people of mixed race descent to grow up without a solid, positive grounding in the black experience is much higher for reasons that will become fairly obvious. Not so obvious at times, however, is the more complicated truth of racism in America, a past deeply rooted in the ugly practice of white supremacy and centuries of stigmatization of African-American culture, heritage and contributions. This phenomenon, known to some scholars as “Anti-blackness”, has done more to confuse and ultimately divide than perhaps any other factor…

Read the entire article here.

Empathetic eye

Agência FAPESP: News Agency of the Sao Paulo Research Foundation
2011-06-08

Fábio de Castro

Agência FAPESP – In 1865, an expedition led by Swiss natural scientist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) of Harvard University travelled around Brazil for 15 months to study the country. Among the voluntary collectors that participated in the expedition was a 23 year old medical student, William James (1842-1910), who would later become one of the most influential American thinkers, known mainly as one of the creators of pragmatic philosophy. 

Organized by professor Maria Helena Toledo Machado of the History Department of Universidade de São Paulo’s (USP) Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences School (FFLCH), the book Brazil through the eyes of William James covers  the large volume of writing and drawings produced by the young James during the expedition. Unlike the travel logs typical of the period, the material left by James reveals a sensitive and empathetic traveler with unique perspectives on the nature and society of Brazil.

The book was launched on April 7 at the USP’s Maria Antônia University Center, during the opening of the exhibition Rastros e raças de Louis Agassiz: fotografia, corpo e ciência (Traces of Louis Agassiz: photography, body and science), a collection of a series of photographs obtained during the expedition on Brazilian racial types…

…James’ perspective also significantly contrasts with the bias expressed by the expedition. Agassiz, founder of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, intended to collect fish specimen and data on their geographic distribution in Brazil, with a view to contesting Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which he opposed.

During the trip – known as the Thayer Expedition because it was financed by magnate Nathaniel Thayer-, Agassiz became interested in studying the population, taking the initiative to document Brazilian racial types through photography with a view evaluating the results of miscegenation. The work is one of the main photographic registers of Brazil in the 19th century.

“Agassiz was a creationist and the scientific and racial focus of the expedition is a bit backwards. But this did not affect James’ perspective. Highly sensitive, he developed what I would characterize as empathy, which would be manifested throughout his work. He shows a great capacity to understand the world from the other’s perspective. Instead of the paternalistic and pious approach common among other travelers of the time, he got involved with people and managed to understand the profound differences of this unfamiliar society,” affirms Machado.

Miscegenation

According to the historian, the position James exhibited in his expedition diaries are reflected throughout the life of the thinker. Later, he would fight against imperialism, defend Darwinism, become a follower of relativism – which garnered much criticism – and would develop the notion of stream of consciousness.

“All these ideas are coherent to his manner of approaching reality, manifested during his time in Brazil. In his writings, he deconstructs the exotic perspective, the incomprehensible other, the foreigner alienated from the codes of local social life,” says Machado…

Read the entire article here.

Japanese migration to Brazil was part of a peaceful expansionist policy

Agência FAPESP: News Agency of the Sao Paulo Research Foundation
2012-07-25

Elton Alisson

USP historian Shozo Motoyama makes the above assertion in a study on the first stage of Japanese immigration to Brazil, which covers the process of cultural integration

Agência FAPESP – Japanese immigration to Brazil beginning in 1908 represented a peaceful means for Japan to continue developing without the military excursions it was using to become a global power at the time.

However, the arrival of Japanese in Brazil under the auspices of the coffee barons during the Old Republic (1889-1930) split opinion and sparked an intense debate between those in Brazilian society who were in favor of and against this immigration.

The less than cordial integration of the two cultures through immigration is described in the book Under the sign of the Rising Sun: A Story of Japanese Immigration in Brazil – volume 1 (1908-1941) (Sob o signo do sol levante: Uma história da imigração japonesa no Brasil – volume I (1908-1941), penned by historian Shozo Motoyama, who is also a professor at Universidade de São Paulo’s School of Philosophy, Letters and Humanities (FFLCH) and president of the Nippo-Brazilian Studies Center.

Released at the end of April, the book describes the first stage of immigration to Brazil – begun in 1908 and ending in 1941 when Japan entered World War II – as part of a peaceful expansion orchestrated by the Japanese government…

…Supported by certain representatives of the Brazilian elite of that day, the theory known as “whitening” stated that Brazil’s lack of development was due to the country having been peopled by “inferior races” (blacks and Indians) and that the country would only develop as its population turned “whiter.”

As the cycle of immigration of Negros to Brazil ended, the focus shifted to the Japanese, who had begun to arrive in the country.

Defending the Japanese, the São Paulo farmers accepted an absurd theory touted by a Brazilian farmer and congress member that these immigrants were whiter than the Portuguese, who had undergone an intense process of miscegenation in the country…

Read the entire article here.

Masculinity and whiteness in the construction of the Brazilian Republic

Agência FAPESP: News Agency of the São Paulo Research Foundation
2013-06-12

José Tadeu Arantes

Sexual discipline and whitening of the population were the guidelines of the conservative modernization promoted by the elite, affirms study

Agência FAPESP – Masculinity and whiteness were the ideals of the Brazilian elite at the end of the 19th century — ideals that represented rejection of Brazil’s colonial and monarchical past and the mixed-race heritage of its people and defining a model of sexual discipline and whitening on which to build the Brazil of the future.

From the perspective of this elite, which was at once conservative and modern, the past and the people were associated with nature, instincts and backwardness. The model that inspired the elite was the idealized portrait of more developed countries in Europe and the United States. That idea is the main thread of the book “The Desire of a Nation” by Richard Miskolci, professor in the Department of Sociology at the Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar) and coordinator of the study group “Bodies, Identities and Subjectivations,” which brings together several Brazilian universities.

The book, which was the result of post-doctoral studies at the University of Michigan in 2008 and a FAPESP Research Grant, also received funding from FAPESP for publication. The book explores how the desires and fears of this elite promoted the transition from a monarchy to a republic and the conservative modernization of the country.

“It investigated the national ideas running against the grain through analysis of the specters that haunted our elite: from fear of Negros, which after abolition became a fear of common people, to sexual anxieties and gender, which threatened the project of building a nation based on the idealized image of Europe,” commented Miskolci, who is currently a visiting professor at the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz…

Read the entire article here.

Frizzly Studies: Negotiating the Invisible Lines of Race

Common Knowledge
Volume 19, Number 3 (Fall 2013)
pages 518-529
DOI: 10.1215/0961754X-2281810

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

Beginning with the assumption that race is a conceptual blur, this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies” argues that race conflates what is plain to see with something that is invisible. Race roots today’s policy decisions in a remote and often imagined past. It blurs agency and overwhelming structural inequality. It is a set of categories that people define for themselves and that, at the same time, others — strangers, neighbors, government officials — relentlessly impose upon them. For four hundred years, the meaning of racial categories in North America has remained unstable. A central question underlying the history of race in the United States is how people could acknowledge the incoherence of racial categories while still structuring their lives, communities, politics, and culture around the idea of race. At a fundamental level, race has functioned as a set of rules and rights—and legal entitlements and disabilities are a primary source of meaning for racial categories. The law provides a starting point for understanding how there could be so much consensus regarding such a blur. Legal decision making is itself a process that blurs what is objective and subjective, scientific and social, precise and penumbral. Taken together, the pervasive fuzziness of race and law ensured the resilience of clear and definable regimes of discrimination and hierarchy.

Read or purchase the article here.

Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story

Regina Griffin Films, Inc.
2011
102 minutes
color
United States

Regina Griffin, Director

Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story reveals the tragic lives of biracial, bicultural children, unwanted, ignored and forgotten by enemy nations. Imagine being born in a place and time where racism and hatred run rampant, and your mother is white and German and your father is a black American serviceman. Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story tells the painful and personal story of a forgotten piece of world history through eyes of the people who suffered most.

• ŸBest Documentary, American Black Film Festival 2011
• Best Film, Audience Award, African-American Women in Cinema 2011
• HBO Finalist, Martha’s Vineyard Black Film Festival, 2011
• Best Documentary Nominee, Black Reel Awards, 2012

A Tale of Two Seminole Counties

Indian Voices
August 2013
page 7

Phil Fixico

Some coincidences can’t be ignored, like February the 26th, in both Florida’s and Oklahoma’s Seminole Counties. What does this date and these counties have in common. Trayvon Martin was killed on February 26th, 2012, in Seminole County, Florida. He was born on Feb. 5th, 1995, not in Seminole County, but that, is where his young life would tragically be ended.

My grandfather Pompey Bruner Fixico, on Feb. 14th, 1894, a hundred and one years before Trayvon’s birth, was born in Seminole County, Oklahoma. Eighty-seven years before Trayvon Martin’s death at the hands of an armed killer, who felt entitled to take Trayvon’s life, a similar scenario would end Pompey Bruner Fixico’s life on Feb. 26th, 1925, by someone else, who also didn’t hesitate. Pompey was a good deal older than Trayvon, he was 31 yrs. old and a WW1 Vet who had served his country in France during the War. He left a wife and four children, all younger than Trayvon’s 17 years, who by many, would be considered a child in a young man’s body. Pompey’s death took place, not far from the site of the “worst racial violence in American History”, “The Tulsa Race Riot”. The Riot had occurred 4 years earlier in 1921. Pompey Bruner’s (his father was Caesar Bruner) Draft Registration Card lists, his place of employment, in 1917, as the Brady Hotel, in Tulsa, Ok. It was owned by Mr. Tate Brady, the Grand Wizard of Oklahoma’s Ku Klux Klan, in that area. Grand Wizard Brady was reported to have had a hand in the, “Tulsa Race Riot”…

Read the entire article here.

Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich

University of Michigan Press
2004
296 pages
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-472-03138-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-472-02160-4

Tina M. Campt, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program
Barnard College

It’s hard to imagine an issue or image more riveting than Black Germans during the Third Reich. Yet accounts of their lives are virtually nonexistent, despite the fact that they lived through a regime dedicated to racial purity.

Tina M. Campt’s Other Germans tells the story of this largely forgotten group of individuals, with important distinctions from other accounts. Most strikingly, Campt centers her arguments on race, rather than anti-Semitism. She also provides an oral history as background for her study, interviewing two Black German subjects for her book.

In the end the author comes face to face with an inevitable question: Is there a relationship between the history of Black Germans and those of other black communities?

The answers to Campt’s questions make Other Germans essential reading in the emerging study of what it means to be black and German in the context of a society that looked at anyone with non-German blood as racially impure at best.

Contents

• Front Matter
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Race, Memory, and Historical Representation: Contextualizing Black German Narratives of the Third Reich
• Part I: Echoes of Imagined Danger – Specters of Racial Mixture
  • Chapter 1: “Resonant Echoes”: The Rhineland Campaign and Converging Specters of Racial Mixture
  • Chapter 2: Confronting Racial Danger, Neutralizing Racial Pollution: Afro-Germans and the National Socialist Sterilization Program
• Part II: Memory Narratives/Memory Technologies: Race, Gendering, and the Politics of Memory Work
  • Chapter 3: Conversations with the “Other Within”: Memories of a Black German Coming of Age in the Third Reich
  • Chapter 4: Identifying as the “Other Within”: National Socialist Racial Politics and an Afro-German Childhood in the Third Reich
  • Chapter 5: Diaspora Space, Ethnographic Space – Writing History Between the Lines: A Postscript
• Appendix: Original German Interview Excerpts
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe

University of Michigan Press
2009
272 pages
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-472-03344-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-472-02578-7

Rita Chin, Associate Professor of History
University of Michigan

Heide Fehrenbach, Presidential Research Professor
Northern Illinois University

Geoff Eley, Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History
University of Michigan

Atina Grossmann, Professor of History
Cooper Union, New York

An investigation of the concept of “race” in post-Nazi Germany

What happened to “race,” race thinking, and racial distinctions in Germany, and Europe more broadly, after the demise of the Nazi racial state? This book investigates the afterlife of “race” since 1945 and challenges the long-dominant assumption among historians that it disappeared from public discourse and policy-making with the defeat of the Third Reich and its genocidal European empire. Drawing on case studies of Afro-Germans, Jews, and Turks—arguably the three most important minority communities in postwar Germany—the authors detail continuities and change across the 1945 divide and offer the beginnings of a history of race and racialization after Hitler. A final chapter moves beyond the German context to consider the postwar engagement with “race” in France, Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands, where waves of postwar, postcolonial, and labor migration troubled nativist notions of national and European identity.

After the Nazi Racial State poses interpretative questions for the historical understanding of postwar societies and democratic transformation, both in Germany and throughout Europe. It elucidates key analytical categories, historicizes current discourse, and demonstrates how contemporary debates about immigration and integration—and about just how much “difference” a democracy can accommodate—are implicated in a longer history of “race.” This book explores why the concept of “race” became taboo as a tool for understanding German society after 1945. Most crucially, it suggests the social and epistemic consequences of this determined retreat from “race” for Germany and Europe as a whole.

Contents

• Preface
• Introduction: What’s Race Got to Do With It? Postwar German History in Context / Rita Chin and Heide Fehrenhach
• CHAPTER 1: Black Occupation Children and the Devolution of the Nazi Racial State / Heide Fehrenhach
• CHAPTER 2: From Victims to “Homeless Foreigners”: Jewish Survivors in Postwar Germany / Atina Grossmann
• CHAPTER 3: Guest Worker Migration and the Unexpected Return of Race / Rita Chin
• CHAPTER 4: German Democracy and the Question of Difference, 1945 1995 / Rita Chin and Heide Fehrenhach
• CHAPTER 5: The Trouble with “Race”: Migrancy, Cultural Difference, and the Remaking of Europe / Geoff Eley
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index