Mixed Race Studies

Mestizaje nacional: una historia “negra” por contar / National miscegenation: a “negro” history yet to be told

Memoria y Sociedad
Volume 14, Number 29 (2010)
pages 91-105

Diana Catalina Zapata-Cortés
Historiadora de la Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia

This work analyzes the “negro” representation in the projects of folklore diffusion that spread in the decade 1950-1960 as a product of a socio-political context characterized for its need to redefine national Latin-American identities. In Colombia, this process started in 1930 through the Liberal Republic educational policy, and was designed from the idea of a “mixed race country”. The following document carefully explores the work and cultural management exerted by Delia and Manuel Zapata Olivella, two important milestones in the intellectual and cultural fields of the country. They became known for their contribution to the understanding of folklore and the inclusion of “negros” within national memory.

Read the entire article (in Spanish) here.

Children of Empire: The Fate of Mixed-Race Individuals in British India, the Caribbean, and the Early American Republic

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 105: North American Conference on British Studies
Friday, 2013-01-04, 10:30-12:00 CST (Local Time)
Chamber Ballroom III (Roosevelt New Orleans)

Chair: Kathleen Wilson, Stony Brook University

Papers

• “‘We Are an Indian People’: Mixed-Race Peoples on Virginia’s Eastern Shore” / Royce Gildersleeve, George Mason University
• “Global Citizens: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in the Caribbean, Britain, and India” / Daniel Livesay, Drury University
• “George Washington’s Anglo-Indian Relatives” / Rosemarie Zagarri, George Mason University

Comment: Kathleen Wilson, Stony Brook University

This session will examine the fate of mixed-race individuals in selected places in the English-speaking world from approximately 1775 through 1820. Royce Gildersleeve’s paper focuses on the Virginia government’s efforts to dispossess a group of Gingaskin Indians from their traditional lands on the Eastern Shore. Over time, intermarriage between free black people and the native population had altered the appearance of tribal members. By 1812, the Virginia government maintained that the community was no longer inhabited by Indians but by African Americans who did not deserve title to the land. Daniel Livesay investigates the stories of mixed-race individuals from Jamaica who moved first to Britain and then to British India in an effort to improve their social and economic status. Focusing on the story of three families of color, Livesay explores how British imperialism allowed mixed-race individuals to forge new identities in a new place, but also shows how the hardening of racial ideologies ultimately foreclosed some of the most promising avenues of advancement. Rosemarie Zagarri explores the effects of a migration that proceeded in the opposite direction. Thomas Law, a high-ranking British East India Company official, brought his three illegitimate children, born of an Indian concubine, first to England and then to the young United States. Law hoped that this move would allow his Eurasian children to escape India’s increasingly hostile environment for mixed-race children and secure his sons’ future in what he believed to be a land of unbounded opportunity. Kathleen Wilson, an eminent scholar of the “new” imperial history of Britain, is an ideal commentator for the session.

By focusing on a small group of individuals from a wide geographic expanse, scholars on this panel will directly address the 2013 convention theme, “Lives, Places, Stories.” By concentrating on mixed-race peoples, the panel will complicate our understanding of racial regimes that have been seen in terms of binary oppositions, such black and white, native American and white, Anglo and Indian. The panel will also provide an opportunity for the study of comparative imperialisms. Despite their common British origins, British India, the Caribbean, and the early American republic are seldom examined with reference to one another. Given the relatively flexible character of racial ideology in the mid-eighteenth century, mixed-race individuals from these places could often exploit the ambiguities of their descent to their own advantage. Yet in both British India and the early American republic, the rise of scientific forms of racial ideology in the early nineteenth century diminished their room to maneuver. White Europeans and Americans came to define “race” less in terms of a society’s degree of civilization and economic affluence and more in terms of its members’ skin color and physical characteristics. Nonetheless, the application of these ideas was highly contextual and differed from place to place. By juxtaposing the fate of individuals of mixed-race origins in a variety of English-speaking contexts, this panel will provide new insights into the development of racial identity and the ways in which different imperial regimes imposed shared racial ideologies.

For more information, click here.

Dr. Marcia Dawkins Discusses Her Book, Clearly Invisible

Mixed Race Radio
2012-09-21, 17:00Z (12:00 EST, 09:00 PST)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Marcia Dawkins, Clinical Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Southern California, Annenberg

Marcia is an award-winning writer, speaker, educator and visiting scholar at Brown University. She is the author of Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity (Baylor UP, 2012) and Eminem: The Real Slim Shady (Praeger, 2013).

Marcia writes about racial passing, mixed race identities, media, religion, pop culture and politics for a variety of high-profile publications. Her expert opinion has been sought out by NPR, WABC-TV Boston, The New York Times and TIME Magazine. She earned her PhD in communication from USC Annenberg, her master’s degrees in humanities from USC and NYU and her bachelor’s degrees in communication arts and honors from Villanova.

Clearly Invisible (Baylor University Press, 2012), is the first to connect racial passing and classical rhetoric to issues of disability, gender-neutral parenting, human trafficking, hacktivism, identity theft, racial privacy, media typecasting and violent extremism.

By applying fresh eyes to landmark historical cases and benchmark popular culture moments in the history of passing Dawkins also rethinks the representational character and civic purpose of multiracial identities. In the process she provides powerful insights called “passwords” that help readers tackle the tough questions of who we are and how we can relate to one another and the world.

Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (review)

Journal of World History
Volume 23, Number 3, September 2012
pages 676-680
DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2012.0064

Magnus Fiskesjö, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Cornell University

Michael Keevak has given us a wonderful, even riveting, deep-historical account of how people in Asia (particularly East Asia) came to be seen as yellow. It surveys how Asians were described as white in most European accounts prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and only later determined to be yellow—in the new color-differentiated theories of human “races” dreamt up from the eighteenth century onward, which established white, black, red, and yellow as key identifiers.

Becoming Yellow investigates this long process in considerable detail. Keevak shows how the race-color classification evolved in the works of seminal European scholars, such as Linneaus, Linnean disciples dispatched to Asia, plus Buffon, Blumenbach, Kant, and others, who all contributed toward developing a scientific racism with color as a defining feature. He also discusses how colors retained the key role as classificatory headings even as other characteristics (eye shape, skull morphology, etc.) became important in nineteenth- and twentieth-century science. Blumenbach (who actually was not history’s worst racist!) is identified as largely responsible for naming the “Mongolian” race—a long-lived label, to which others labored to firmly attach its designated color, yellow. Keevak catalogs (chap. 3) these efforts, including such strange devices as the Color Top, originally a children’s toy, in all seriousness spun near native limbs by anthropologists and other scientists, to ascertain that East Asian skin really was yellow.

But why yellow, and why the effort? Keevak says there is no definite answer, and not even a clear beginning point for the use of yellow instead of white or other terms that were used before (some writers acknowledged seeing lighter-skinned people in the north, and brown-or dark-skinned Southerners). The choice of yellow was the result of a complex, fitful process. Keevak hints at the larger global-historical context in which the new European world-classification was produced, including the importance of transatlantic slavery (which, of course, concentrated on enslaving “black” Africans only after ambiguous seventeenth-century beginnings in which “white” Europeans were also enslaved), but he does not explore this much further. He discusses the ambiguities of India, which like East Asia also presented trouble, as a difficult anomaly. He examines and rejects (for lack of evidence) the hypothesis that European observers were inspired to use yellow for the Chinese, at least, by the apparent high status of the Chinese-language term for yellow (huang)—as, purportedly, in the mythical Yellow Emperor’s name, and in the official color of the last imperial dynasty. Instead, it was a coincidence—and later a part of the foundation for today’s Chinese acceptance of Western race theory, and for its peculiar fusion with recycled elements of the historical Chinese use of huang (chap. 5 on the reception of yellow in China, and in Japan, which was less receptive).

Most interestingly, Keevak describes (chaps. 1–2) how the original European description of the Chinese, Japanese, and others as white was abandoned in the course of a slow-in-coming realization that even though these people were both light-skinned and civilized, they would not easily give themselves up to Christianity. If they had done so, it would have confirmed what the Europeans hoped was a certain kinship: the Asian’s lightness contrasted with the darkness of the purportedly noncivilized within “Asia” as a whole in a way that closely paralleled how Europe contrasted with the darkness of its own non-Christian others, notably Africans. The scientific insight that all humans were originally dark-skinned and that lightness of skin is in part an evolutionary response to latitude, had not yet been reached; instead, the observation that many civilized Orientals had light skin, similar to Europeans, was interpreted in theological terms, where light represented good and dark was evil, as in the dark enemies of Christianity.

Here is a point of connection with anthropology’s insights about colors and cultures, not engaged by Keevak. To explain briefly: the natural color spectrum is…

Covering Multiracial America Requires Historical Perspective

Maynard Media Center on Structural Inequity
Maynard Institute
2012-11-14

Nadra Kareem Nittle

Although people of mixed races have lived in the United States for centuries, authorities on multiracial identity say mainstream media continue to report on these people as if they are a new phenomenon.

In 1619, the first slaves were brought to Britain’s North American colonies. The following year, says Audrey Smedley, professor emerita of anthropology and African American studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, the first “mulatto” child was born. Thus, mixed-race people have a long history in this country, disproving the notion often mentioned today that miscegenation will somehow magically cure racism.

Most major stereotypes about multiracial people in America historically involved individuals whose heritage was black and white or Native American and white. Such people were largely thought to yearn for the same advantages as whites but found them off-limits because of the “one-drop rule,” which originated in the South and mandated that just a drop of black blood meant they were of color.

In the 21st century, newer stereotypes about multiracial people have gained popularity. Rainier Spencer, founder and director of the Afro-American Studies Program and senior adviser to the president at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, says contemporary media coverage of mixed-race people isn’t filled with tragic mulattoes but with docile symbols of a colorblind America yet to reach fruition.

“Multiracial people are infantilized,” Spencer says. “They [the media] don’t treat them as fully capable agents. Mixed-race people are quiet and happy, and they don’t complain. They’re our postracial future.”

Spencer, author of “Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix,” cautions that these notions are dangerous. The stereotype that multiracial people represent a bridge between races that will soon eradicate bigotry ignores the fact that such people were in North America more than a century before U.S. independence and that racism remains a reality.

This idea also lets the establishment off the hook, he says. “If mixed-race people are going to take us to a postracial destiny, then the power structure doesn’t have to worry about it. It’s very convenient.”…

…In 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau permitted declaring more than one race on census forms. In the subsequent decade, several published articles reported that the mixed-race population was increasing, especially among young people.

But Heidi W. Durrow, who grew up as the only daughter of an African-American father and a Danish mother, would like to see news stories about multiracial people that don’t revolve around census figures…

…Laura Kina, a founding member of the Critical Mixed Race Studies biennial conference and associate professor of Art, Media and Design at DePaul University, has similar concerns. She considers the idea that mixed-race people are new to be a stereotype. “They go back a very long ways,” she says.

Kina is the daughter of an Okinawan father from Hawaii and a Spanish-Basque/Anglo mother, according to her website…

…Dominique DiPrima, host of Los Angeles radio show “The Front Page,” takes issue with the concept of multiracialism because she disputes the concept of race. “I think the media should differentiate between culture, ethnicity and race,” says DiPrima, daughter of Italian-American poet Diane di Prima and African-American writer Amiri Baraka…

Read the entire article here.

‘The Black Count:’ the epic true story behind ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’

The Seattle Times
2012-11-16

Tyrone Beason

Tom Reiss’ swashbuckling new book, “The Black Count,” tells the true story of Alex Dumas, son of a French nobleman and an African slave, the father of author Alexandre Dumas and the inspiration for the younger Dumas’ classic novel “The Count of Monte Cristo.”

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss Crown, 414 pp.

There are no statues in monument-laden France commemorating the legendary 18th century swordsman and general Alex Dumas, whose son Alexandre based literary classics like “The Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo” on scenes from the elder’s epic life story.

It’s a sad civic oversight, but nothing compared to the tragic decline suffered by the novelist’s heroic father as laid out in Tom Reiss’ fascinating, and dare to say, swashbuckling new biography, “The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo.”

It turns out that the heroes in those classics are modeled on a black man who was born in 1762 in the French colony of Haiti. Alex Dumas was the son of a wayward French nobleman and an African slave, and it is his biracial identity that adds such rich complexity to his rise through the ranks of the French military to become one of the most beloved generals of his time, arguably even more admired than Napoleon, a fact that probably didn’t sit well with the megalomaniacal future ruler.

It was Napoleon who tapped Dumas to command the cavalry that invaded Egypt, an enormous, and as it turns out, fateful honor.

“The Black Count” meticulously evokes the spirit of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, but it also explains the exasperating paradox of a nation that was simultaneously a huge slaveholding empire and the pioneering exponent of the concept of “liberté, egalité, fraternité.”

Let’s not forget the context. By the 1750s, black slaves taken to France were able to sue their masters for freedom. After the French Revolution in 1793, special schools were set up in France to educate the children of “revolutionaries of color” from the colonies. Black and mixed-race politicians were allowed to serve in the national government…

Read the entire review here.

Political Racism in the Age of Obama

The New York Times
2012-11-10

Steven Hahn, Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History
University of Pennsylvania

The white students at Ole Miss who greeted President Obama’s decisive re-election with racial slurs and nasty disruptions on Tuesday night show that the long shadows of race still hang eerily over us. Four years ago, when Mr. Obama became our first African-American president by putting together an impressive coalition of white, black and Latino voters, it might have appeared otherwise. Some observers even insisted that we had entered a “post-racial” era.

But while that cross-racial and ethnic coalition figured significantly in Mr. Obama’s re-election last week, it has frayed over time — and may in fact have been weaker than we imagined to begin with. For close to the surface lies a political racism that harks back 150 years to the time of Reconstruction, when African-Americans won citizenship rights. Black men also won the right to vote and contested for power where they had previously been enslaved…

…By the early 20th century the message was clear: black people did not belong in American political society and had no business wielding power over white people. This attitude has died hard. It is not, in fact, dead. Despite the achievements of the civil rights movement, African-Americans have seldom been elected to office from white-majority districts; only three, including Mr. Obama, have been elected to the United States Senate since Reconstruction, and they have been from either Illinois or Massachusetts.

The truth is that in the post-Civil War South few whites ever voted for black officeseekers, and the legacy of their refusal remains with us in a variety of forms. The depiction of Mr. Obama as a Kenyan, an Indonesian, an African tribal chief, a foreign Muslim — in other words, as a man fundamentally ineligible to be our president — is perhaps the most searing. Tellingly, it is a charge never brought against any of his predecessors…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Strange Fruit: Dr. Yaba Blay’s (1)ne Drop Project; Director Kenny Leon

WFPL 89.3 FM
Louisville, Kentucky
2012-11-03

Laura Ellis, Producer

Who is black? That’s the question the (1)ne Drop Project seeks to answer. The project, created by Dr. Yaba Blay, features photographs of people who identify as black, African-American, biracial, and other identities—but whose physical appearances may provoke curiosity, or even disbelief, in strangers. Dr. Blay will appear on CNN’s Black in America 5 to talk about what it means to be black. But this week she made some time to talk to us about her work…

Listen to the interview here (00:38.42). (The interview with Dr. Blay begins at 00:14:54 and ends at 00:26:01).

From Kongo to Othello to Tango to Museum Shows

ARTnews
2012-10-25

Robin Cembalest

Jacopo da Pontormo (Jacopo Carucci), Portrait of Maria Salviati de’ Medici and Giulia de’ Medici, ca. 1539, oil on panel. THE WALTERS ART MUSEUM, BALTIMORE, ACQUIRED BY HENRY WALTERS WITH THE MASSARENTI COLLECTION, 1902 (37.596).

Artists and scholars are taking increasingly nuanced approaches to tracking the image—and influence—of Africans in Western art

In 1902 the Walters Art Museum acquired a Pontormo painting of an Italian noblewoman, Maria Salviati, dated ca. 1539. Back then it was considered a portrait of a woman whose hands were “in funny places,” as Gary Vikan, the museum’s director, puts it. Then in 1937, restorers removed some over-painting—and discovered a child was there. That child was assumed to be a portrait of Maria’s son, Cosimo de’ Medici.

And Then He Was a She
 
Now curators say the boy was a girl–Giulia de’ Medici. The daughter of Duke Alessandro de’ Medici, who was believed to be the son of a black female servant, Giulia is thought to have been the most prominent European woman of African descent at that time.

Darkness Visible
 
This discovery helped inspire “Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe,” an inventive show at the Walters that enlists familiar faces of art history to spotlight lesser-known ones in social history. Focusing on the period between 1480 to 1610, an era of increased contact as trade routes expanded, diplomats traveled more widely, and Africans were imported to Europe en masse to serve as slaves, the show includes works by Dürer, Rubens, Pontormo, and Veronese, among many others, depicting Africans living in or visiting Europe. The museum describes the show as an effort to restore an identity to individuals who have been invisible–in various senses of the word.
 
The show uses representations of slaves in Europe to find out who they were, how they lived, and what their depictions say about Renaissance society. A Caracci portrait of a slave woman is a fragment of a double portrait of her owner, of whom a bit of veil remains. She is holding a clock, meant to announce her mistress’s Christian concern for the quick passage of time…

Read the entire article here.

Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871–1921 (review) [Allan Cho]

University of Toronto Quarterly
Volume 81, Number 3, Summer 2012
pages 690-691
DOI: 10.1353/utq.2012.0090

Allan Cho, Program Services Librarian
University of British Columbia

As part of a new collective at the University of British Columbia re-envisaging the landscape and boundaries of early Canada, Renisa Mawani’s Colonial Proximities exemplifies a new wave of scholarship on ‘Pacific Canada.’ Focusing on how migrants from Asia, Europe, and other parts of the Americas interacted with each other and with First Nations peoples historically, the important work of these scholars examines the parallels beyond the histories of French-English Canada and to larger histories in North America.

Situated in this intellectual context, Mawani argues that these early interracial encounters between aboriginal peoples, Chinese migrants, and other “racial enemies” provoked such deep concerns among colonial authorities that a production of a number of ‘juridical racial truths’ were needed to pave the way for modes of governance that eventually pervaded for the remaining century. As a contact zone saturated by interraciality, the colonial administrators sought a delicate balance of moral assimilation for its aboriginal populace and physical segregation of its Chinese settlers. Not only did fear of racial encounters promulgate accusations of either coerced or deliberate prostitution ever threatening to colonial morals, heterosexuality ultimately became a contested field among the colonial authorities that sought to regulate the social mores of its inhabitants.

Unfurling a bio-political conundrum, this settler colonialism produced a paradoxical blend of assimilation and segregation intersecting at one of the colony’s main economic engines, the salmon cannery industry. Could the economic fortunes that required an abundant supply of cheap labour from Chinese and aboriginal workers in the canneries justify the possibilities of this ‘contagion’ that would result from intimate contact between these races? Could the desire for racial purity within a racially mixed labour force even be possible?

Whereas aboriginal women were seen as an internal danger to the colony, Chinese women were racial enemies who threatened the racial balance of its white populace. Liquor provisions further worked to augment racial divisions and fortify existing power structures dominated by European colonialists. The illegal liquor trade served to underpin the hostility that exacerbated the accusation of Chinese selling liquor to aboriginals, which required an ‘interracial prevention.’ Matters became complicated, however, when mixed peoples, the ‘half breeds,’ challenged and defied colonial taxonomies, as colonial authorities could no longer easily pinpoint those that it needed to control.

Not surprisingly, these interracial exchanges among aboriginal peoples, European colonists, Chinese migrants, and mixed-race populations engendered racial anxieties that sustained colonial institutions run by the Indian agents, missionaries, and legal authorities who sought manifold ways to monitor these encounters through friendships, alliances, and even sexual relations. This legislation of race emerged as a common voice among the largely white administration. Lively debates and discussions eventually led to the creation of royal commissions, further solidifying colonial procedures and legislation that would systematically demarcate racial lines.

Colonial Proximities is an evolution of Mawani’s doctoral dissertation, showing a maturation of ideas. This fresh and more fluid understanding of early Canada is one that seeks to examine the role of trans-Pacific migration in multiple directions throughout the Pacific region, highlighting the history of racism and exploitation of migrants and displacement of First Nations people…