Mixed Race Studies

The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia

Melbourne University Publishing
March 2002
364 pages
235 x 154 mm, 25 b/w illustrations & 4 maps
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-522-84989-9

Warwick Anderson, Research Professor of History
University of Sydney

Winner of the Australian Historical Association W.K. Hancock Prize 2004

In this lucid and original book, Warwick Anderson offers the first comprehensive history of Australian medical and scientific ideas about race and place.

In nineteenth-century Australia, the main commentators on race and biological differences were doctors. The medical profession entertained serious anxieties about ‘racial degeneration’ of the white population in the new land. They feared non-white races as reservoirs of disease, and they held firm beliefs on the baneful influence of the tropics on the health of Europeans.

Gradually these matters became the province of public health and biological science. In the 1930s anthropologists claimed ‘race’ as their special interest, until eventually the edifice of racial classification collapsed under its own proliferating contradictions.

The Cultivation of Whiteness examines the notion of ‘whiteness’ as a flexible category in scientific and public debates. This is the first time such an analytic framework has been used anywhere in the history of medicine or of science. Anderson also provides the first full account of experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s on Aboriginal people in the central deserts.

This very readable book draws on European and American work on the development of racial thought and on the history of representations of the body. As the first extensive (and entertaining) historical survey of ideas about the peopling of Australia, it will help to reshape debate on race, ethnicity, citizenship and environment.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The Temperate South
  • 1. Antipodean Britons
  • 2. A Cultivated Society
• The Northern Tropics
  • 3. No Place for a White Man
  • 4. The Making of the Tropical White Man
  • 5. White Triumph in the Tropics?
  • 6. Whitening the Nation
• Aboriginal Australia
  • 7. From Deserts the Prophets Come
  • 8. The Reproductive Frontier
• Conclusion: Biology and Nation
• Notes
• Bibliography of Works Cited
• Index

American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South

Liverpool University Press
May 2012
256 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781846317538

Edited by:

Celia Britton, Professor of French and Francophone Studies
University College London

Martin Munro, Professor of French and Francophone Studies
Florida State University

The Francophone Caribbean and the American South are sites born of the plantation, the common matrix for the diverse nations and territories of the circum-Caribbean. This book takes as its premise that the basic configuration of the plantation, in terms of its physical layout and the social relations it created, was largely the same in the Caribbean and the American South. Essays written by leading authorities in the field examine the cultural, social, and historical affinities between the Francophone Caribbean and the American South, including Louisiana, which among the Southern states has had a quite particular attachment to France and the Francophone world. The essays focus on issues of history, language, politics and culture in various forms, notably literature, music and theatre. Considering figures as diverse as Barack Obama, Frantz Fanon, Miles Davis, James Brown, Édouard Glissant, William Faulkner, Maryse Condé and Lafcadio Hearn, the essays explore in innovative ways the notions of creole culture and creolization, terms rooted in and indicative of contact between European and African people and cultures in the Americas, and which are promoted here as some of the most productive ways for conceiving of the circum-Caribbean as a cultural and historical entity.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – Martin Munro and Celia Britton
• Creolizations
  • Lafcadio Hearn’s American Writings and the Creole Continuum – Mary Gallagher
  • Auguste Lussan’s La Famille creole: How Saint-Domingue Emigres Bcame Louisiana Creoles – Typhaine Leservot
  • Caribbean and Creole in New Orleans – Angle Adams Parham
  • Creolizing Barack Obama – Valerie Loichot
  • Richard Price or the Canadian from Petite-Anse: The Potential and the Limitations of a Hybrid Anthropology – Christina Kullberg
• Music
  • ‘Fightin’ the Future’: Rhythm and Creolization in the Circum-Caribbean – Martin Munro
  • Leaving the South: Frantz Fanon, Modern Jazz, and the Rejection of Negritude – Jeremy F. Lane
  • The Sorcerer and the Quimboiseur: Poetic Intention in the Works of Miles Davis and Edourard Glissant – Jean-Luc Tamby
  • Creolizing Jazz, Jazzing the Tout-monde: Jazz, Gwoka and the Poetics of Relation – Jerome Camal
• Intertextualities: Faulkner, Glissant, Conde
  • Go Slow Now: Saying the Unsayable in Edouard Glissant’s Reading of Faulkner – Michael Wiedorn
  • Edouard Glissant and the Test of Faulkner’s Modernism – Hugh Azerad
  • The Theme of the Ancestral Crime in the Novels of Faulkner, Glissant, and Conde – Celia Britton
  • An American Story – Yanick Lahen
• Notes on Contributors
• Index

The Arab and the Brit: The Last of the Welcome Immigrants

Syracuse University Press
2012
248 pages
6 x 9; 12 black-and-white illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8156-0974-2

Bill Rezak, Former President
Alfred State College, Alfred, New York

Born of a Palestinian father and a British mother, Rezak has always been intrigued by the different worlds from which his parents came. His father’s ancestors were highwaymen on the Arabian Peninsula in the eighteenth century. They sparred unsuccessfully with ruling Ottoman Turks and escaped with their families to America. His mother’s parents were sent separately from Great Britain into indentured servitude in Canada, alone at the ages of ten and sixteen. They worked off their servitude, met, married, and moved to New York State. In The Arab and the Brit, a memoir that spans multiple generations and countries, Rezak traces the remarkable lives of his ancestors. Narrating their experiences against the backdrop of two world wars and an emerging modern Middle East, the author gives readers a textured and vivid immigrant story.

Rezak recalls his paternal grandmother apprehending would-be Russian saboteurs during World War I, his grandfather’s time at Dr. Bernardo’s home, a shelter for destitute children, and his father’s work with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association following World War II. Told with humor and captivating detail, The Arab and the Brit chronicles the trials and triumphs of one family’s struggle to succeed in the New World.

Black GIs, English women, and ‘brown babies’ (1944-1950)

Mix-d: Museum: Timeline
Mix-d:
2012-07-10

During the period 1942-45 around one million US servicemen were based in England as part of the preparations for the invasion of Europe in June 1944 and around 130,000 (13%) of these were Black (African American) GIs. This caused endless worry for British officials who were reluctant to support American segregation practices formally, but were nevertheless highly concerned about the possible growth of interracial relationships and ‘half-caste babies’ in Britain. British authorities tried to discourage relationships between white British women and black – and other minority ethnic – troops in a number of ways: social segregation at dance halls, pubs and cinemas, restrictions put on female military staff, police surveillance and ‘whispering campaigns’.  These actions did little, however, to stop these interracial relationships. The black troops tended to be popular with Britons, who tended to oppose the American idea of segregation, and they were particularly popular with white British women, much to the angry bewilderment of white American GIs…

Read the entire timeline section and view the video clip here.

Michelle’s Great-Great-Great-Granddaddy—and Yours

The Root
2009-10-08

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research
Harvard University

First Lady Michelle Obama’s maternal third-great-grandfather was a white man who fathered Melvinia Shields’ (her maternal third great-grandmother) son, Dolphus T. Shields, both slaves. This discovery, like all recoveries of the identities of ancestors we thought had been obliterated in the crucible of slavery, is first and foremost a welcome gift for the first family, especially for Michelle’s mother, Marian Shields Robinson, and the Shields family line. And for anyone still naïve enough to believe in the myth of racial purity, it is one more corroboration that the social categories of “white” and “black” are and always have been more porous than can be imagined, especially in that nether world called slavery.

As I have learned since embarking upon my African American Lives series (for PBS), never before are more African Americans determined to ferret out the names of their slave ancestors, and never before have more resources, especially online, been available to facilitate these searches. But, be prepared. To paraphrase the Bible: seek; but fasten your seat belt as to what ye may find…

…African Americans, just like our first lady, are a racially mixed or mulatto people—deeply and overwhelmingly so. Fact: Fully 58 percent of African-American people, according to geneticist Mark Shriver at Morehouse College, possess at least 12.5 percent European ancestry (again, the equivalent of that one great-grandparent). As a matter of fact, if I analyzed the y-DNA (which a man inherits exactly from his father, and he from his father, etc.) of all the black players in the NBA, fully one-third (somewhere between 30 percent and 35 percent) would, incredibly, discover that they were descended from a white male who impregnated a black female, most likely a female slave, just as a white man did Michelle Obama’s third-great-grandmother. In the ‘60s, we were fond of saying that we are an “African people.” Well, our DNA proclaims loudly that we are a European people, a multicultural people, a people black as well as white. You might think of us as an Afro-Mulatto people, our genes recombined in that test tube called slavery…

Read the entire article here.

God’s governor: George Grey and racial amalgamation in New Zealand 1845-1853

University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
August 2005
346 pages

Susannah Grant

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

The legend of Governor Grey is a major feature of nineteenth century New Zealand historiography. This thesis seeks to understand Grey as a real person. Acknowledging the past as a strange and foreign place, it argues that Grey (and previous interpretations of him) can only be understood in context. The intellectual milieu of liberal Anglicanism and Victorian structures of imperial authority are crucial to understanding Grey’s policies of racial amalgamation.

Focusing on Grey’s first governorship of New Zealand, 1845 – 1853, this thesis begins by exploring the imperial networks within which he operated. The members of Grey’s web gathered and shared information to further a range of different agendas – scientific, humanitarian, and political. Grey’s main focus was native civilisation. His ideas about race were informed by liberal Anglican theology, scientific investigation and personal experience. Grey believed in the unity and improvability of all mankind. His mission as governor was to elevate natives to a state of true equality with Europeans so that all could progress together still further up the scale of civilisation. This model formed the basis of Grey’s 1840 plan for civilising native peoples, in which he proposed a range of measures to promote racial amalgamation in Australia.

Between 1845 and 1853 Grey implemented those measures in New Zealand. He used military force and British law to establish peace and enforce Crown authority. He used economic policies to encourage Māori integration in the colonial economy. He built schools and hospitals and enacted legislation to encourage the best features of British culture and limit the effects of its worst. He also augmented his power and encouraged amalgamation through personal relationships, official reports and the structures of colonial authority.

Grey was driven by complex, sometimes contradictory motives including personal gain, economic imperatives and political pressures. His policies have had ongoing, often devastating effects, on Māori and on race relations in New Zealand. This thesis brings to light the ideas and attitudes which formed them. Grey understood himself as a Christian governor ordained to civilise Māori and join them with British settlers in accordance with God’s divine plan for improving humankind.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Beyond Black and White
• 1. Information and Improvement: an Imperial Web
• 2. Civilising Schemes: Ethnography and Empire
• 3. Law and War: the Politics of Humanitarian Control
• 4. Economic Integration: Land, Labour and Loans
• 5. Social Elevation: Education, Health and Culture
• 6. Personal Rule: Performing Authority
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor and the Case of Black Washington, D.C.

University of Tennessee Press
2006-07-15
136 pages
9.2 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
Cloth ISBN: 1-57233-462-2
Cloth ISBN-13: 978-1572334625

Audrey Elisa Kerr, Professor of English and Women Studies
Southern Connecticut State University

The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor in the Case of Black Washington, D.C. considers the function of oral history in shaping community dynamics among African American residents of the nation’s capitol. The only attempt to document rumor and legends relating to complexion in black communities, The Paper Bag Principle looks at the divide that has existed between the black elite and the black “folk.”

While a few studies have dealt with complexion consciousness in black communities, there has, to date, been no study that has catalogued how the belief systems of members of a black community have influenced the shaping of its institutions, organizations, and neighborhoods. Audrey Kerr examines how these folk beliefs—exemplified by the infamous “paper bag tests”—inform color discrimination intraracially.

Kerr argues that proximity to whiteness (in hue) and wealth have helped create two black Washingtons and that the black community, at various times in history, replicated “Jim Crowism” internally to create some standard of exceptionalism in education and social organization. Kerr further contends that within the nomenclature of African Americans, folklore represents a complex negotiation of racism written in ritual, legend, myth, folk poetry, and folk song that captures “boundary building” within African American communities.

The Paper Bag Principle focuses on three objectives: to record lore related to the “paper bag principle” (the set of attitudes that granted blacks with light skin higher status in black communities); to investigate the impact that this “principle” has had on the development of black community consciousness; and to link this material to power that results from proximity to whiteness. The Paper Bag Principle is sure to appeal to scholars and historians interested in African American studies, cultural studies, oral history, folklore, and ethnic and urban studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Traditions and Complexion Lore
• 2. A National Perspective on Complextion Lore
• 3. Washington Society
• 4. Social Organization in Washington
• 5. School Lore: Beliefe and Practice in the Education of Black Washington
• 6. Complexion and Worship
• 7. One Drop of Black Blood, a Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

An Answer to Northen: The Son of a Slave Mother on Southern Miscegenation.

The Daily Star
Fredericksburg, Virginia
Volume 6, Number 2097
1899-06-19
page 1, column 1

THE ARITOCRACY RESPONSIBLE.

The Founder of the American Protective League Says the Poor Whites Are Not to Blame For Racial Amalgamation.

Boston, June 19.—Joseph W. Henderson, of Providence, founder of the American Protective League, an organization of colored people for the securing of their rights, delivered an address in the Spark Street church yesterday In which he replied to the recent speech of ex-Governor Northen, of Georgia, with reference to the southern outrages upon colored people. Said Mr. Henderson:

“It is not necessary at this time for me to make any reply to Governor Northen’s dramatic defense of human slavery. But had I been an owner of human beings and man-killing dogs, as he has been, and since written my name among the followers of Christ, I would have felt more like coming up to the altar of repentance at this stage of reform than to have come to one of the greatest cities In the world with a typewritten defense of the most cruel institutions of human debauchery ever known to civilized or savage man. Were it not that it was in Georgia that my poor mother was born; there that she tremblingly obeyed the slave master’s whip and felt the slave hound’s bite; there that she was sold and deported for life from her blood and kin, I would not stoop to dignify Governor Northen’s pro-slavery utterances even with a sneer.”

“Governor Northen says that miscegenation by law will never, take place in the south. But miscegenation in the south has already taken place. It has been on the road over 200 years. Not miscegenation by law, but by brute force, which is the very worst form of law. Who started it? Not the negroes, I am sure, nor was it the poor white trash. It was the blue vein aristocracy of the south that broke over the fence, defied all law, and the result is we have black negroes and white negroes, some of them as white as Governor Northen.”

“One seldom hears of the wholesale assaults that southern white men are making upon colored women, but they are as constant as the rising and setting of the sun. Go south and count the penitentiary-born children whose mothers are colored and fathers white. That tells the story.”

“Aside from force, there Is a regular organized society of white men and colored women, for which the colored women are as much to blame as the white men.  These particular colored women have long since concluded that they would rather wear diamonds and ride in carriages of their own than to chop cotton or wash dishes for somebody else, and be it said to the discredit of this class of colored women and their white gentlemen associates that they are living in clover.”

“The poor whites of the south are not to blame for this racial amalgamation, for they and the blacks do not associate. They mutually hate and scorn each other. It is the blue vein aristocracy of the south that in creating havoc with the morals and social affections in negro homes and mixing the races most alarmingly.”

“I have been unable to ascertain what led Governor Northen to tell his northern audience that the negro has the same chance In southern courts that the white man has. Southern law is the white man’s cloak and the black man’s enemy. It Is often used to protect the lawless and punish the lawful, provided the lawless are white and the lawful black.”

Race, Marriage, and Law

The Harvard Crimson
1963-12-17

Peter Cumminos

American racism, though it rests most strongly upon social practice, is strongly bulwarked by many state and local laws. The segregated schools and transportation facilities of the South are explicitly decreed by state legislatures. Virginia courts maintain, for example, that “the preservation of racial integrity is the unquestioned policy of this State, and that it is sound and wholesome, cannot be gainsaid.”

The laws which most directly protect “racial integrity,” whatever that may be, are those which make miscegenation (intermarriage of races) a crime. The first anti-miscegenation law was enacted in the colony of Maryland in 1661. It declared that “divers free-born English women, forgetful of their free conditions, and to the disgrace of our nation do intermarry with Negro slaves,” and to deter these “shameful matches” the law provided that women who so marry, and their off-spring, should themselves become slaves. Massachusetts became the third colony to prohibit marriage between Negroes and Caucasians in 1705.

Today it is illegal for Negroes and whites to marry in 21 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, [Indiana, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana], Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Six of these states prohibit Negro white marriages in their constitutions. Eighteen states, most of them in the last ten years, have repealed anti-miscegenation statutes: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Washington…

…Who’s Who

A problem that consistently confronts racist law makers in the question of defining who is “Negro” and who is “white.” In general, two schools of “thought” prevail is the United States on this issue. In about nine states a Negro is anyone who had a grandparent who was a Negro. The laws generally define such a person as “having one-eighth or more Negro blood” or as an “octoroon.” The other definition of Negro is used in at least six states: a Negro is any person who has “any trace of Negro blood.” The circularity of these statements does not seem to trouble the opponents of miscegenation.

Virginia provides an interesting example of racist legal gymnastics. Whites in that state can marry neither Negroes nor American Indians. In Virginia, a Negro is a person who has any Negro ancestor, and an American Indian is a person who had at least one Indian grandparent. If someone has one-sixteenth or less “Indian blood” then he is a white. But Virginia still hasn’t decided what you are if you have one-eighth Indian heritage, i.e. one of your great-grandparents was an Indian. Furthermore, if a man is an inhabitant of an Indian tribal reservation and has at least one Indian grandparent and less than one-sixteenth “Negro blood,” then despite the state’s definition of a Negro he may be regarded as an Indian on the reservation. Once he leaves the reservation, however, he undergoes a legal metamorphosis and becomes a Negro. Of course he can then move to Mississippi, where the “octoroon” requirement prevails, and thus become a Caucasian.

Oklahoma courts have decided that American Indians are “white” and therefore may not marry “any person of African descent.” In Alabama, however, Indians are mulattoes, according to the courts, and therefore cannot marry whites. Filipinos in Louisiana must be able to prove that they are “not basically negroid” before they can marry whites. Indiana courts have revealed that “all Mexicans are not white persons and some of them are negroes,” and therefore non-Negro Mexicans can marry either Negroes or whites.

Once a miscegenation case reaches the courts, legal definitions of race give way to more practical methods. Missouri courts, unable to test a man’s blood for his Negroness, have held that “the jury trying such a case may determine the proportion of negro blood in any party to such marriage from the appearance of such person.” In Alabama you are a Negro if witnesses testify that you attended a Negro school, go to Negro church, have Negro acquaintances, or are “otherwise voluntarily living on terms of social equality with them.” But in many states miscegenation suits have been lost because the white jurors simply could not decide whether the defendant was white or Negro…

Read the entire article here.

Parading Respectability: An Ethnography of the Christmas Bands movement in the Western Cape, South Africa

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
May 2012
238 pages

Sylvia R. Bruinders

The Christmas Bands march through Adderley Street late at night during the “festive season” in Cape Town, 2001.
Picture by Henry Trotter. The author releases it to the public domain.

A Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology

In this dissertation I investigate the Christmas Bands Movement of the Western Cape of South Africa. I document this centuries-old expressive practice of ushering in the joy of Christmas through music by way of a social history of the colored communities. The term colored is a local racialized designation for people of mixed descent–often perceived as of mixed-race by the segregationist and apartheid ideologues. In the complexity of race relations in South Africa these communities have emerged largely within the black/white interstices and remained marginal to the socio-cultural and political landscape. Their ancestral area is the Western Cape where most still live and where several of their expressive practices can be witnessed over the festive season in the summer months from December through March. The Christmas Bands Movement is one of three parading practices that are active during this period.

Drawing on Foucault’s notion of “embodied subjectivity” and Butler’s work on gender and performativity, I explore three main themes, two of which are overlapping, throughout this dissertation. First, I investigate how the bands constitute themselves as respectable members of society through disciplinary routines, uniform dress, and military gestures. Second, I show how the band members constitute their subjectivity both individually as a member and collectively as a band; each has a mutual impact on the other. Even though the notion of subjectivity is more concerned with the inner thoughts and experiences and their concern with respectability is an outward manifestation of a social ideal, these two themes overlap as both relate to how the members constitute themselves. Third, I explore how the emergent gender politics, given renewed emphasis in the new South African constitution (1995) has played out in local expressive practices through the women’s insistence on being an integral part of the performance activities of the Christmas Bands Movement. Their acceptance into the Christmas Bands has transformed the historically gendered perception of the bands as male-only expressive forms. Furthermore, I will illustrate how this cultural practice has gained in popularity during the last seventeen years of democratic rule in South Africa, which may suggest that the historical marginality of the communities is still very present.

Read the entire dissertation here.