Mixed Race Studies

Canada’s Métis win 142-year-old land ruling

BBC News
2013-03-08

Canada’s Supreme Court has ruled the government failed to hand out land grants properly to the Métis indigenous group 142 years ago.

In a 6-2 ruling, the top court said the failure was “not a matter of occasional negligence, but of repeated mistakes and inaction”.

The Métis are descendants of indigenous people and European immigrants.

The land was promised in a 1870 law, to settle a rebellion of existing Métis amid a wave of settlement in Manitoba.

After delays, it was eventually distributed via a lottery that largely benefited European settlers.

The Manitoba Métis Federation (MMF), which brought the suit, celebrated the end of three decades of legal challenges over the land-grant provision…

Read the entire article here.

Historicising Whiteness: From the Case of Late Colonial India

Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association
Volume 2, Number 1 (2006) Whiteness and the Horizons of Race

Satoshi Mizutani

It has been a while since critical race and whiteness studies have disseminated the now-familiar notion that whiteness is not a given but a social construct. The idea, however, is yet to be fully explored, with many untouched areas and methodologies of potential importance. This paper is a humble attempt to make a contribution to the field from the perspective of colonial history. Drawing on a historical case study on British Indian society from the late nineteenth century onwards, it firstly focuses on the oft-neglected social world of white colonials of ‘respectable’ standing, enquiring what defined their whiteness and under what material conditions it was to be acquired. This is to be followed by an examination of how these whites differentiated themselves from, and in turn controlled the lives of, the so-called ‘domiciled’ population, members of which were of white descent, permanently based in India, often impoverished and frequently (if not always) racially mixed. Such a two-level approach to the people of white descent is to reveal that the colonial invention of whiteness depended both on the securing of a ‘bourgeois’ social milieu for middle-class whites and on the vigilant control of the impoverished domiciled. The paper shows the complex ways in which the insidiously unsound nature of such a construction of whiteness repeatedly posed a political challenge to the colonial racial order. The case of colonial India may be taken as a vivid example of how whiteness may come charged with inevitable self contradictions and ambiguities, and with those counter-measures that seek to contain the socio-political unrest resulting there from.

Read the entire article here.

Nathan Crowell on Racial Identity: Gloucester County, Virginia, revisited

Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners
2013-01-14

Victoria E. Bynum, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Some time ago, in response to my 10 November 2011 post, “Free People of Color in Old Virginia: The Morris Family of Gloucester County,”  (which I encourage you to read or reread) I received a long email message from Nathan Crowell, who traces his own mixed-heritage ancestry back to Gloucester County. Nathan shared not only his family research with me, but also certain insights that he gained over the years from listening to his ancestors—particularly his grandmother: insights into what it meant to be a “free person of color” in a slaveholding society, what it meant to be defined as “black” when one’s skin was fair. His remarks remind us that life in the Old South was far more complex than most of us realize, and that “race” was an imposed category of human existence that had no rational biological basis, but had very real legal, social, and psychological consequences that shaped the experiences and consciousness of all members of society.

With Nathan’s permission, I have created the following post from his remarks…

Read the entire article here.

Examining ‘Latinidad’ in Latin America: Race, ‘Latinidad’ and the Decolonial Option

Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association
Volume 8, Number 2, (2012) Directions and Intersections
11 pages

Eugenia Demuro, Visiting Fellow
School of Language Studies, College of Arts and Social Sciences
Australian National University

This article provides a critical account of the idea of race, conceived of and derived from European colonisers in the New World. The paper argues that race became a crucial category to the colonising projects of the New World, and in particular in the distribution of power during colonialism. The paper further examines how the notion of Latinidad (Latinity), entrenched in the term Latin America, continued to enact a discourse of racial superiority/inferiority even after the battles for Independence had taken place. Employing the critical vocabulary and framework of Decolonial theory, the paper introduces key arguments against Western European universality, and calls for a re-reading of the processes that structure privilege across racial and ethnic lines.

Introduction

Following the conquest and colonisation of the Americas, the concept of race, as a category, became instrumental to social organisation and, significantly, continues to be a powerful stratagem today. This is clearly evident in the idea of Latinidad (Latinity) that underscores the nomenclature ‘Latin America’, which continues to elevate European heritage to the detriment of all other racial or ethnic groups. We can see this, for example, in the fact that whilst an Aymaran Amerindian from Bolivia may not share much with an Afro-Cuban from Santiago, or with a porteño from Buenos Aires, or a Mexican from Tijuana, each is deemed to be Latin American. Given the cultural heterogeneity of the region, it seems imprecise to speak of Latin America as though there were no marked differences between the nations, regions, cultures and peoples of the huge landmass that extends from the south of Río Grande to Tierra del Fuego. It is difficult to employ the term Latin America with any validity for a number of reasons: to reiterate, it is the referent of an incredibly vast and heterogeneous region; additionally, the term emerged as the result of conflicts between imperial nations and was hence applied to the region from outside (see Mignolo 2005); and, most importantly, the very idea of Latinidad functions to define Latin American identity in relation to the European heritages, and erases and marginalises the racial and cultural diversity of people residing in Latin America. For these reasons, the term Latin America and its continued usage must be seen as part of a larger program of coloniality that began with the inception of the Americas as the New World in the 15th century, and that continues today through global, Western capitalism and its accompanying epistemology. In Latin America, the colonial project that began with the arrival of Europeans did not end with the cessation of Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule. In fact, coloniality persists today and is evident in the distribution of wealth and resources across the region and the globe…

…The Emergence of Race

For Europe, the so-called discovery of America opened vast territories to be appropriated, riches to be extracted, and inhabitants to be indoctrinated into European culture and Catholicism. For the indigenous peoples of the New World, the conquest and colonisation meant complete domination, and went hand-in-hand with slavery, serfdom, genocide and the overall destruction of previously existing social formations. It goes without saying that the destruction of culture also meant the destruction of knowledge/s and worldviews that differed from that of the Europeans. The legitimizing discourse of this enterprise, based on the supposed superiority of the European colonisers and the supposed inferiority of the dominated, rested on a newly emergent notion of race.

The classification Indio to refer to the vast numbers of societies and civilisations not only obscured the differences between the groups which inhabited the region, it served as the construction of an identity whose main purpose was to differentiate the indigenous from the colonisers. The term summarised a category that was entirely negative and inferior. The same process was repeated when it came to the people transported as slaves from Africa, although they came from different regions and belonged to different groups—Ashantis, Yorubas, Congos, etc.—in the colonial period they became Negros (Quijano 2000: 551-2). Both Indios and Negros were conceived as inferior identities to their European counterparts, and this inferiority was defined specifically in terms of their race. These identities became configured in asymmetrical relations of power within the new colonial system; they had a corresponding place within the colonial hierarchies, the organisation of labour, and corresponding social roles. Both Indios and Negros existed outside the domain of civilised society, as a repository of labour to be exploited for the advantage of Europeans. Interestingly, race became associated with colour, perhaps as one of the most salient differences of phenotype, and social organisation and privilege can be traced to a gradient of colour: the darker the subject the lesser freedom they exercised and possessed. In this way, the concept of race was instrumental to conquest and colonisation: there is a direct link between the idea of race that emerged at the onset of the conquest of the Americas—and that was later spread around the world—and the division and organisation of labour. From the beginning, the distribution of wealth, power, domination and resources was established in terms of the newly invented categories of identity that the concept of race facilitated—Indio, Negro, Mestizo, Spanish, Portuguese, European. It is difficult to overstate the significance of this emergence of race as a new mode of power, efficiently employed as a means to codify the relationship between the conquerors and the conquered, and to justify the atrocities, and the violence, that the conquest and colonial enterprise entailed…

Read the entire article here.

The Evolution and Genetics of Latin American Populations

Cambridge University Press
December 2001
528 pages
12 b/w illus. 128 tables
228 x 152 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9780521652759
Paperback ISBN: ISBN:9780521022392
eBook ISBN: 9780511837128

Francisco M. Salzano
Departamento de Genética, Instituto de Biociências
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Maria C. Bortolini
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

The human genetic make-up of Latin America is a reflection of successive waves of colonization and immigration. There have been few works dealing with the biology of human populations at a continental scale, and while much data is available on the genetics of Latin American populations, most information remains scattered throughout the literature. This volume examines Latin American human populations in relation to their origins, environment, history, demography and genetics, drawing on aspects of nutrition, physiology, and morphology for an integrated and multidisciplinary approach. The result is a fascinating account of a people characterized by a turbulent history, marked heterogeneity, and unique genetic traits.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. Origins
• 2. Environment and history
• 3. Socioeconomic indices, demography, and population structure
• 4. Ecology, nutrition, and physiological adaptation
• 5. Morphology
• 6. Health and disease
• 7. Haemoglobin types and haemoglobinopathies
• 8. Normal genetic variation at the protein, glycoconjugate, and DNA levels
• 9. Gene dynamics
• 10. Synthesis.

Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique (Review)

French History
Volume 27, Issue 1 (2013)
pages 135-137
DOI: 10.1093/fh/crs158

Emily Musil Church, Assistant Professor of History
Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania

Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique. By Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2009. 312 pp. ISBN: 978 0 8122 4172 3.

Rebecca Hartkopf Scholss’ investigation of the end of slavery in the French Caribbean island of Martinique is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on the history of the Francophone Black Atlantic world. Schloss’ book builds on existing works by exploring the complex dynamics that existed amidst and between the various racial and economic groups in Martinique, as well as between the metropole and colony. The author’s writing style makes a long, complicated colonial history with a complex cast of characters both engaging and accessible. She uses a wide variety of sources—ranging from court proceedings to diaries to demographic statistics—to reconstruct how Martinique, and the French empire more broadly, defined and redefined racial categories and their meanings. Although she uses class and racial categories to describe the social framework, Schloss is careful to reinforce that the categories she describes—such elite Creoles, poor whites, free mixed-race persons, enslaved Africans, and so on—were fluid designations and not united, cohesive groups. The…

Read or purchase the article here.

Walking a Tightrope: Towards a Social History of the Coloured Community of Zimbabwe [Review]

H-net Reviews
H-SAfrica
April 2007

Elizabeth Schmidt, Professor of History
Loyola University Maryland

James Muzondidya. Walking a Tightrope: Towards a Social History of the Coloured Community of Zimbabwe. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2005. xviii + 323 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-1-59221-246-0.

Based on a wide range of archival sources and more than two dozen interviews, James Muzondidya’s book provides a major historical reassessment of Zimbabwe’s colored community from the early twentieth century to 1980. This small community has largely been ignored in Southern African historiography. The few works focusing on the colored population generally have perpetuated a distorted view, arguing that the mixed-race community had no authentic identity. Rather, they posit that “colored” was a state-imposed category without roots in popular experience or consciousness. According to this view, coloreds were merely a product of the colonial state’s divide-and-rule tactics. While Africans viewed them as dupes, collaborators, and beneficiaries of the colonial system, Europeans dismissed them as a marginal population that was more African than European and, as such, unworthy of European rights and privileges.

In this important contribution to the historical literature, Muzondidya reassesses the construction of colored identity, rejecting the proposition that colored social and political identities were solely state-imposed. He argues instead that these complex and contested identities were the product of colored historical agency and the political, economic, and social structures in which the actors operated. He disaggregates the mixed-race category, too often viewed as homogeneous, in terms of gender, generation, class, culture, and historical background. In a particularly fascinating section, he explores the deep divisions between South African-born Cape Coloreds (or Cape Afrikanders) and the indigenous “EurAfrican” population. Cape Colored immigrants to colonial Zimbabwe were predominantly Muslim, Afrikaans-speaking descendants of African and Asian slaves, the Cape’s original Khoikhoi inhabitants, and Afrikaner settlers. Generations removed from their exclusively African or European past, they belonged to the Western-educated middle and professional classes…

Read the entire review here.

Ben-Ur awarded study grant by Hadassah-Brandeis Institute

In the Loop: News for Staff and Faculty
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
2012-12-13

Associate professor Aviva Ben-Ur of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies has been awarded a Senior Grant in History from the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute for her book project “Eurafrican Identity in a Jewish Society: Suriname, 1660-1863.”
 
Ben-Ur’s book project focuses on slave society in the former Dutch colony of Suriname in South America, where Jews of Iberian origin were among the earliest colonists. She examines the ever-shifting boundaries and bridges of Jewish communal belonging in Suriname and focuses on the special role enslaved and free Eurafrican women played in expanding the definition of Jewishness and collapsing the social hierarchies that distinguished whites from non-whites. Ben-Ur argues that from the start of Jewish settlement in the colony in the 1650s, females of African descent were key to both Jewish community building and the transformative adaptation of Jewish culture to a multi-ethnic slave society…

Read the entire article here.

Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity: Indian-Black Intermarriage in Southern New England, 1760-1880

The Journal of American History
Volume 85, Number 2 (September, 1998)
pages 466-501

Daniel R. Mandell, Professor of History
Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri

In the century following the American Revolution, Indians in southern New England struggled to survive as communities, families, and individuals, in the face of prejudice and the region’s rapidly shifting social and economic landscape. Their struggle was shaped by intermarriage with “foreigners & strangers,” mostly African American men. The persistence, adaptation, and acculturation of particular ethnic groups, and the assimilation of members of those groups, are not unusual topics of study for historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. But the story of New England Indians in the early republic is unusual because it took place on the side of America’s racial line where few studies of ethnicity have gone. Examining relations between Indians and blacks in southern New England illuminates the fundamental flaws of a bichromatic view of racial relations in American history, and it offers new insight into the complexity and uncertainty of ethnic identity and assimilation…

Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (review)

Journal of Social History
Volume 33, Number 3, Spring 2000
pages 753-755
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2000.0037

Joshua D. Rothman, Associate Professor of History
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History. Edited by Martha Hodes (New York and London: New York University Press, 1999. xvi plus 542 pp.).

In his 1995 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, reprinted as the opening essay of this important collection, Gary Nash called the attention of his audience to the “hidden history of mestizo America.” Lost amidst America’s long and frequently tragic experience with racial and ethnic classification and separation is a past significantly shaped by sexual intermixture, cultural boundary crossing, and lives lived and identities forged in tension with dominant ideologies. Looking backward with a sensitivity to this “hybridity,” Nash proposed, might hold a key for moving beyond racialism in our future, and for finding a politics that transcends biological determinism without sacrificing the value of difference.

The twenty-three other essays assembled here by Martha Hodes (eight of which have been previously published in whole or in part) collectively explore the possibilities such a reconceptualization of the past holds. The subtitle of the volume is a bit misleading, since nearly all of the pieces deal principally with the European colonial territories that now comprise the continental United States rather than with Mexico or Canada. Still, the breadth of human experience and historical subfields traversed by the authors is astonishing. Working from discussions of the intersection of race and sex, the essays yield insight to historical issues of gender, sexuality, marriage and the family, class, religion, slavery, violence, national and personal identity, politics and political activism, diplomacy, culture, economics and commercial exchange, law, and crime, just to name those themes most prominent and recurring.

The collection is divided into five parts and arranged chronologically. Generally, the essays within each part are logically juxtaposed. Moreover, the separate parts are connected smartly to one another, producing a discernible, if subtle and fractured, narrative that describes important ebbs and flows in the history of sex across racial and ethnic lines in America since the 1690s. The essays in part one examine various regions of colonial North America, and cumulatively investigate European, Native American, and African American societies and cultures encountering each other, sexually and otherwise, for the first time. The authors here describe an era characterized by domination and distrust, but also by uncertainty, intercultural negotiation, and mutual accommodation. The early emergence of racial antipathy and the construction of racial hierarchy-both inseparable  from sex and sexuality-are never far from the surface in the stories told by Jennifer Spear about French Louisiana, Graham Hodges about German Lutherans in New York, Daniel Mandell about New England, and Richard Godbeer about the eighteenth-century Southern backcountry.

Part two moves on to the early national and antebellum periods. Here, slavery takes center stage. Most of the essays in this section focus on interracial sexual activity between whites and blacks-particularly in the South-which was commonplace despite being legally and culturally taboo. In the words of Sharon Block, who compares and contrasts the sexual vulnerability of white servant and black enslaved women, sex across the color line under slavery frequently yielded coercive situations where “economic mastery created sexual mastery.” As Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., and Josephine Boyd Bradley and Kent Anderson Leslie demonstrate in fascinating case studies, however, familial connections between whites and blacks under slavery also enabled some people of African descent to carve out personal identities and establish economic positions that transcended both their color and their ancestry.

In her essay on antebellum New York City, Leslie Harris demonstrates how fears of “amalgamation” were central to political discourse about abolitionism, urban poverty, and immigration. As a number of essays in part three make evident, interracial sex had even more volatile political implications in the Reconstruction-era South. In his…