Mixed Race Studies

SO 3300: ‘Race’and ‘Mixed Race’

Forham University
Spring 2010

The origins of ‘race,’its historic role and social construction are examined. Ancient and modern-day ideas are explored. Contrasts between the United States and Latin American concepts of ‘race’ and ‘mixed race’ are analyzed. Future implications are discussed.

The Origin of the Van Guilders

History’s Faces
2012-05-25

Debra Winchell

Recently the Associated Press published an article by Travis Loller saying that DNA study seeks the origin of Appalachia’s Melungeons. In a excerpt Mr. Loller wrote:

In recent years, it has become a catchall term for people of mixed-race ancestry and has been applied to about 200 communities in the eastern U.S. — from New York to Louisiana.

Among them were the Montauks, the Mantinecocks, Van Guilders, the Clappers, the Shinnecocks and others in New York. Pennsylvania had the Pools; North Carolina the Lumbees, Waccamaws and Haliwas and South Carolina the Redbones, Buckheads, Yellowhammers, Creels and others. In Louisiana, which somewhat resembled a Latin American nation with its racial mixing, there were Creoles of the Cane River region and the Redbones of western Louisiana, among others.

As a result of researching the Van Guilders for over fifteen years, I know that the Van Gilders/Van Guilders from western Massachusetts, upstate New York and Vermont are not Melungeon.   The founder of the family was Jan Van Gelder, a Mohican–Wappinger man who married the German Palatine woman Anna Maria Koerner in Kingston, New York, in 1719.  They lived in what is now present day Berkshire County on the west bank of the Green River, southwest of Great Barrington…

Read the entire article here.

HIST 465: Mestizos, Métis, and Mulattos: Mixed-Race People in the Atlantic World, 1400-1850

Lawrence University, Appleton Wisconsin
Fall 2012

This course examines how race worked in the Atlantic World (Africa, Europe, and the Americas) between 1400 and 1850 through the perspectives of mixed-race individuals and communities. We will use a comparative framework to understand how people created, resisted, and used their cross-racial identities to navigate their lives. (Also listed as Ethnic Studies 465)

ASTD 393-03 – Mixed Race America

Saint Louis University
Fall 2012

Heidi Ardizzone, Assistant Professor of American Studies 

Despite popular images of American as a “melting” both of races and ethnicities, our institutions, values, and practices have often tried to create or maintain spatial and social distance between groups defined as racially different. This course will explore that ways in which Americans have transgressed those boundaries or found other ways of interacting across cultural lines, primarily in the 19th and 20th centuries. We will examine popular cultural perceptions of people of mixed ancestry, their social experiences, the development of various mixed-ancestry communities, and historical attempts to limit interracial socializing, relationships, and marriage. These issues were and are deeply embedded in debates over the meaning of race, gender expectations and ideas about sex and sexuality. We will also pay close attention to how minority communities have understood people of mixed ancestry in the United States, and how mixed-race identities intersect with African American, Native American, Asian, White, and Latino identities.

View the Syllabus here.

“Out of an obscure place”: Japanese War Brides and Cultural Pluralism in the 1950s

differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
Volume 10, Number 3 (1998)
pages 47-81

Caroline Chung Simpson, Associate Professor of English
University of Washington

In the spring of 1954, the American philosopher Horace Kallen was invited to deliver a series of lectures at the University of Pennsylvania reviewing the state of cultural pluralism in American postwar society. The concept of cultural pluralism was Kallen’s own invention, an idea of American society first expressed in his 1915 essay, “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot,” in which he defended America’s growing racial and ethnic diversity-“the federation or commonwealth of nationalities” that seemed to emerge in the wake of early-twentieth-century immigration-as the strength rather than the curse of the nation. Although by 1954 the supposed menace of immigration had long since been checked, most notably by the 1924 Immigration Act that imposed severe restrictions on immigration from Europe and Asia, the diversity Kallen had defended earlier in the century was once more poised to overwhelm the national imagination. As Kallen delivered his lectures that spring, the Supreme Court was hearing the Brown case, the culmination of a stream of compelling legal arguments that contested the notion of “separate but equal” established in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. Given the anxiety that racial desegregation provoked in many whites, Kallen and the liberal intellectuals attending his lectures understood the need to reassess and restate the case for cultural pluralism.

In the face of tense public and legal debate over desegregation, Kallen reasserted the promise of pluralism in stirring strains that seemed at times to evoke an almost radiant vision of what Americans might yet achieve. His vision depended on the willingness of white Americans in particular to embrace change. As he put it, “the dogma that we cannot change the past is not an understanding of the process of change but a prejudice of our resistance to it and a static illusion symbolizing our fear of it” (“Meanings” 24). The chief effect of his lectures and the published responses to them was to affirm that the coming changes in race relations anticipated by the Brown deliberations would be generative rather than enervating:

It is the variety and range of his participations, which does in fact distinguish a civilized man from an uncivilized man, a man of faith and reason from an unreasoning fanatic, a democrat from a totalitarian, a man of culture from a barbarian. Such a man obviously orchestrates a growing pluralism of associations into the wholeness of his individuality.

In descriptions like this one, Kallen recasts the threat of integration as a deft “orchestration” of differences that would leave the nation “whole” rather than fractured. But while most Americans might have assumed this orchestration would soon occur through increased interactions between blacks and whites, as indeed it did, there were other, less visible avenues by which public voices sought to orchestrate or imagine the successful transition to racial integration in the mid-1950s…

….Such is the case of Japanese Americans in the postwar period, a group often neglected in considerations of American pluralism and postwar integration despite the fact that the meaning and shape of Japanese American identity was caught in a tremendous crisis. The relocation and internment experience was, of course, the most startling evidence of that crisis. But the postwar dilemma of Japanese Americans as citizen-subjects, while often limited to discussions of the internment experience of the West Coast population, in fact incorporates a range of national experiences and histories, including the resettlement program after the war and the impact of the immigration of Japanese war brides on the meaning of Japanese American citizenship.

Japanese war brides were perhaps the most visible representatives of Japanese American life in the postwar period, although they did not always self-identify as Japanese Americans. Still they were often presented as emergent members of a new kind of Japanese American community, which was primarily attractive because the war brides were seen solely as compliant wives and mothers unfettered by the disturbing public history of internment. Settling into domestic life in the 1950s, with little fanfare, as unfamiliar national subjects who had formerly been citizens of an enemy nation, Japanese war brides soon became meaningful figures in the discourse on racial integration and cultural pluralism. As white Americans tried to negotiate the threat of black integration, and government programs tried in vain to resettle interned Japanese Americans, Japanese war brides provided at least one “unofficial or obscure place” out of which the redemption of cultural pluralism, as an ideal that stabilized relations rather than disrupted them, would reemerge as a distinct possibility. In significant ways, the postwar popular media’s changing view of Japanese war brides projects them as an early form of the Asian American model minority. The 1950s transformation of the Japanese war bride from an opportunistic and ignorant alien seeking to penetrate the suburban affluence of white America to the gracious and hard-working middle-class housewife was an early exemplar for achieving the integrated future in America, a halcyon story of domestic bliss and economic mobility difficult to extract from the stories of long-time racialized citizen-subjects…

…But even more troubling for the concept of national identity was the issue of “the Eurasian children of these marriages.” In tow with their mothers, they promised to increase “the Japanese-race population back home” (25). However, the underlying concern of the Post authors is less that the Japanese American race would be replenished by these immigrant women than that their mixed race marriages and their “Eurasian children” would eventually erode the distinctions between the white and Japanese races. “The effect of these mixed marriages on American life at home is still to come,” conclude the authors, who imagine in mythic terms “the arrival of thousands of dark-skinned, dark-eyed brides in Mississippi cotton hamlets and New Jersey factory cities, on Oregon ranches or in Kansas country towns” where “their bright-eyed children soon will be knocking on school doors in most of the forty-eight states” (25). The probability of mixed race families living openly in formerly white or non-Asian areas of the nation not only renders these regions unfamiliar; it also disturbs miscegenation anxieties that are the bedrock of white resistance to racial integration. The interracial marriages of Japanese war brides, then, established the limits of white-Japanese relations, limits that had been checked in the case of resettled Nisei by the idiom of patronage that defined their contacts with whites. Although, as the passage of time revealed, these limits did not necessarily contain the ambivalent feelings often expressed by most of the fifteen Nisei respondents to the 1943 study…

Read the entire article here.

AFAM 349a/AMST 326a/WGSS 388a: Interraciality and Hybridity

Yale University
Fall 2011

Naomi Pabst, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and American Studies
Yale University

Examination of mixed-race matters in both literary and critical writings, primarily within the black/white schema.  Historical and current questions of black and interracial identity; the contemporary “mixed race movement” and the emerging rubric of “critical mixed race studies”; historical genealogy and interraciality and hybridity.  Analysis of longstanding debates on race mixing in the realms of legal classification, transracial adoption, census taking, grassroots movements, the discursive, the ideological, and the popular.

Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture

Columbia University Press
September 2011
304 pages
1 illus; 4 tables
Paper ISBN: 978-0-231-15697-4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-15696-7

Edited by:

Sheldon Krimsky, Professor of Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning; Adjunct Professor of Public Health and Family Medicine
Tufts School of Medicine
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Kathleen Sloan

Do advances in genomic biology create a scientific rationale for long-discredited racial categories? Leading scholars in law, medicine, biology, sociology, history, anthropology, and psychology examine the impact of modern genetics on the concept of race. Contributors trace the interplay between genetics and race in forensic DNA databanks, the biology of intelligence, DNA ancestry markers, and racialized medicine. Each essay explores commonly held and unexamined assumptions and misperceptions about race in science and popular culture.

This collection begins with the historical origins and current uses of the concept of “race” in science. It follows with an analysis of the role of race in DNA databanks and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Essays then consider the rise of recreational genetics in the form of for-profit testing of genetic ancestry and the introduction of racialized medicine, specifically through an FDA-approved heart drug called BiDil, marketed to African American men. Concluding sections discuss the contradictions between our scientific and cultural understandings of race and the continuing significance of race in educational and criminal justice policy.

Table of Contents

• A short history of the race concept / Michael Yudell
• Natural selection, the human genome, and the idea of race / Robert Pollack
• Racial disparities in databanking of DNA profiles / Michael T. Risher
• Prejudice, stigma, and DNA databases / Helen Wallace
• Ancestry testing and DNA : uses, limits, and caveat emptor / Troy Duster
• Can DNA witness race? Forensic uses of an imperfect ancestry testing technology / Duana Fullwiley
• BiDil and racialized medicine / Jonathan Kahn
• Evolutionary versus racial medicine : why it matters? / Joseph L. Graves Jr.
• Myth and mystification : the science of race and IQ / Pilar N. Ossorio
• Intelligence, race, and genetics / Robert J. Sternberg … [et al.]
• The elusive variability of race / Patricia J. Williams
• Race, genetics, and the regulatory need for race impact assessments / Osagie K. Obasogie.

Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory

Left Coast Press
March 2007
276 pages
6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-59874-278-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59874-279-4
eBook ISBN: 978-1-61132-467-9
eBook Rental (180 Days) ISBN: 978-1-61132-467-9

Edited by

Charles Stewart
Department of Anthropology
University College London

Social scientists have used the term “Creolization” to evoke cultural fusion and the emergence of new cultures across the globe. However, the term has been under-theorized and tends to be used as a simple synonym for “mixture” or “hybridity.” In this volume, by contrast, renowned scholars give the term historical and theoretical specificity by examining the very different domains and circumstances in which the process takes place. Elucidating the concept in this way not only uncovers a remarkable history, it also re-opens the term for new theoretical use. It illuminates an ill-understood idea, explores how the term has operated and signified in different disciplines, times, and places, and indicates new areas of study for a dynamic and fascinating process.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, Charles Stewart
• 1. Creole Discourse in Colonial Spanish America, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
• 2. Creoles in British America: From Denial to Acceptance, Joyce Chaplin
• 3. The ‘C-Word’, Again: From Colonial to Postcolonial Semantics, Stephan Palmié
• 4.Creole Linguistics from its Beginnings, Through Schuchardt, To the Present Day, Philip Baker and Peter Mühlhäusler
• 5. From Miscegenation to Creole Identity: Portuguese Colonialism, Brazil, Cape Verde, Miguel Vale de Almeida
• 6. Indian-Oceanic Creolizations:Processes and Practices of Creolization on Réunion Island, Françoise Vergès
• 7. Creolization in Anthropological Theory and in Mauritius, Thomas Hylland Eriksen
• 8. Is There a Model in the Muddle? ‘Creolization’ in African Americanist History and Anthropology, Stephan Palmié
• 9. Adapting to Inequality: Negotiating Japanese Identity in Contexts of Return, Joshua Roth
• 10. The Créolité Movement: Paradoxes of a French Caribbean Orthodoxy, Mary Gallagher
• 11. Creolization Moments, Aisha Khan

Examining the Legacy of European Names in the Elmina-Cape Coast Area of Ghana

Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies
Volume 1, Number 3 (2007)
22 pages

Amma Kyerewaa Akrofi
Texas Tech University

Lawrence Owusu-Ansah
Texas Tech University

The prevalence of European family and place names in Fante areas of Ghana is one of the best known vestiges of the interaction between African and European cultures, but there has been little systematic study of it. The aim of this research was to investigate the European and Europeanized names commonly found in the Cape Coast–Elmina area. Using data obtained from interviews and a variety of written sources, the names were collected, classified, and their linguistic characteristics analyzed. The results of the study show that 1) there is a pervasiveness of such names still used by the citizens of the area under study, 2) the names are classifiable according to origin, and 3) there is a tendency toward hybridization.

1. Ancient Cities Marked by History

The interaction between Europe and modern day Ghana dates back to the fifteenth century. Francis K. Buah (1980) recounts that the Portuguese were the first European power to arrive on Ghana’s shores in January 1471, lured by the rich trade in gold. They operated from Elmina where, in 1492, they built the Sao Jorge da Mina castle and settled for about a century and a half being engaged in trade. Later, the Dutch came and conquered the Portuguese and, after staying there for about half a century, they also left, selling their holdings to the English. Buah further informs us that about a century and a half after the advent of the Portuguese, the English settled in Cape Coast and in 1664 built the Cape Coast Castle. From there they traded in merchandise and slaves and later ruled the colony until the capital was moved to Accra in 1876. Joseph Brookman-Amissah (1972) supports Buah’s account and provides further evidence of other Europeans frequenting the coastal towns of Cape Coast and Elmina. Notable among them were the French, the Danes, the Swedes and even the German Bradenbergers, the latter two staying for only a short time. Therefore, Mylène Rémy and Jean-Claude Klotchkoff’s (1992, 109) description of Elmina and Cape Coast as ancient cities marked by history is appropriate. Rémy and Klotchkoff elaborate this portrayal (1992, 109) with an assertion that the past seems more present than the present itself in both towns. However, in making this statement, Rémy and Klotchkoff’s thoughts seem to dwell more on historical monuments like the castles and forts and colonial architecture than on anything else, as evidenced by the following description of central Elmina as an aggregate of:

old creole-style houses, a totally unexpected Italian palace, and the equally startling statue of a doughty Queen Victoria in the middle of one of the town squares (Rémy and Klotchkoff 1992, 109).

But it is not only the antiquated European architecture that gives the two towns their nostalgic charm. They get their charm also from a unique characteristic –the prevalence of European and Europeanized family names. Buah (1980, 75) referred to this phenomenon as another lasting result of European activities in the country.

It is most intriguing that after 50 years of independence, the people of Cape Coast and Elmina still maintain the pre-colonial and colonial practice of giving European and Europeanised family names to their offspring. However, apart from brief and scattered comments such as the one by Buah quoted above, no systematic study has been made of those names, although they constitute some of the most obvious vestiges of the interaction between Europe and Ghana. This study attempted to establish that the names are an important record not only of that interaction but also of the different European powers who visited that part of the world. We asked the following research questions: 1) what kinds of European and Europeanized names are currently used in the area, 2) why are they used, and 3) what are the future trends? The cordial relationship between the Europeans and the Africans as evidenced by those names is a living testimony of the oneness of humanity, a fact that is often ignored in a world struggling to come to terms with ethnic conflicts and racial intolerance…

…6. Reasons for Adopting European and Europeanized Names

The informants who were interviewed gave five main reasons for adopting European or Europeanized names: European ancestry, conversion to Christianity, acquisition of formal education, to obtain colonial jobs, and miscellaneous reasons. We discuss these below.

6.1. European ancestry

Several of the European names, especially those of Portuguese and Dutch origin, were given directly by European fathers to their children with African women and these have been passed down to the present generation. A very good example of this is the name Bartels, which is common in Elmina. Originally German, it came to Elmina when Governor Bartels, whose family had migrated to Holland earlier, married a Fante woman.2 The Bartels family in Elmina today is descended from the children of this marriage, including Johann Carl Bartels who was a very rich merchant in his day. In addition to this, many families whose histories are not well documented claim direct descent from European forebears, e.g. the LeJeune and Guichard families of Elmina and Cape Coast, respectively. In both cases, as in many others, bi-racial characteristics support the claim…

Read the entire article here.

Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race

Princeton University Press
2010
178 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Cloth ISBN: 9780691137308
eBook ISBN: 9781400834198

Thomas J. Sugrue, David Boies Professor of History and Professor of Sociology
University of Pennsylvania

Finalist, The 2010 Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change National Book Award, The University of Memphis

Barack Obama, in his acclaimed campaign speech discussing the troubling complexities of race in America today, quoted William Faulkner’s famous remark “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” In Not Even Past, award-winning historian Thomas Sugrue examines the paradox of race in Obama’s America and how President Obama intends to deal with it.

Obama’s journey to the White House undoubtedly marks a watershed in the history of race in America. Yet even in what is being hailed as the post-civil rights era, racial divisions–particularly between blacks and whites—remain deeply entrenched in American life. Sugrue traces Obama’s evolving understanding of race and racial inequality throughout his career, from his early days as a community organizer in Chicago, to his time as an attorney and scholar, to his spectacular rise to power as a charismatic and savvy politician, to his dramatic presidential campaign. Sugrue looks at Obama’s place in the contested history of the civil rights struggle; his views about the root causes of black poverty in America; and the incredible challenges confronting his historic presidency.

Does Obama’s presidency signal the end of race in American life? In Not Even Past, a leading historian of civil rights, race, and urban America offers a revealing and unflinchingly honest assessment of the culture and politics of race in the age of Obama, and of our prospects for a postracial America.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• CHAPTER I: “This Is My Story”: Obama, Civil Rights, and Memory
• CHAPTER II: Obama and the Truly Disadvantaged: The Politics of Race and Class
• CHAPTER III: “A More Perfect Union”? The Burden of Race in Obama’s America
• Acknowledgments
• Notes

Introduction

It is now a commonplace that the election of Barack Obama marks the opening of a new period in America’s long racial history. The unlikely rise of a black man to the nation’s highest office—someone who was a mostly unknown state senator only five years before he was inaugurated president—confirms the view of many, especially whites, that the United States is a postracial society. At last, the shackles of discrimination have been broken and individual merit is rewarded, regardless of skin color. In this view, blackness—once the clearest marker of difference in American society—has lost some or all of its stigma. Barack Obama, in the most common formulation, transcends race; his ancestry fuses African and European into a new hybrid; his political vision of unity discredits those who cling bitterly to notions of racial superiority and, at the same time, rebukes those who harbor a divisive identity politics fueled by an exaggerated sense of racial grievance.

As with all interpretations of the relationship between the past and the present, the notion that Obama’s election marks an epochal change in racial dynamics is not without its critics. Obama himself offers a tempered view, suggesting that even if America has advanced considerably over the last forty years, some racial prejudices remain in place and some racial discrimination still exists. In his view, we have realized much, but not all, of the dream of racial equality. Other commentators, like Berkeley historian David Hollinger, suggest that Obama heralds the emergence of a new, multihued racial order, a majority-minority society where static notions of race are losing their purchase, and where race-specific remedies like affirmative action have outlived their usefulness. Many scholars and pundits further to the left, by contrast, are skeptical that much has changed at all. They point to the angry denunciations of Obama during his campaign and since his inauguration (Obama as Muslim, Obama as black man in whiteface, Obama as witch doctor, Obama as noncitizen) as evidence of a deep-seated racism that is inflamed by the discomfiting presence of a brown-hued man in the White House.

In the most dystopian vision, offered by Duke sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, the symbolism of an African-descended president obscures a deeper, more troubling reality: the “Latin Americanization” of the United States, namely, the emergence of a society where a tripartite system of color gradation will supplant the “one-drop rule” of racial classification, but where the darkest-skinned racial minorities remain concentrated at the bottom…

…To understand Obama’s life and times requires an examination of race and racial politics. It is safe to say that few domestic issues have been more controversial in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America. And few issues have generated more passion among scholars and journalists. Debates about civil rights, black power, race consciousness, and inequality are often couched in predictable and analytically problematic formulations that reflect the moral dualism that still shapes our understandings of race. The first binary—“race versus class”—inflects much scholarship and liberal journalism about race. Either race matters as a dominant force or it is a screen—or a form of false consciousness—that masks far deeper inequalities of class. This is a simplistic formulation that downplays the ways that racial and economic disadvantages are fundamentally intertwined, and fails to address how the American economy generates inequalities that affect people regardless of their background but are still disproportionatelyborne by people of color. A second binary—with special hold in public discourse—is “racism versus color blindness.” This contrasts a pathology and a principle, a flawed reality and an ideal. But it, too, does not stand up to close scrutiny. As legal scholar Richard Thompson Ford has argued, to hurl the invective “racist” loosely is to put too much weight on individual beliefs or values. And conversely, to proclaim color blindness is to overlook the ways that racial inequalities persist and sometimes harden regardless of the good intentions or the benign disposition of any single actor. There are stone-cold racists in America, and there are people who believe that they are wholly free of prejudice. Ultimately, the most enduring racial inequalities in the United States today are not the consequence of conspiracy or intention, or even the unconscious prejudice that neuropsychologists argue exists in the amygdala; rather they stem from the long-term institutional legacies of economic and public policies that have systematically disadvantaged African Americans and, when left unaltered, continue to do so in key realms of American life today. The third binary is “pessimism versus optimism.” Either America is still a profoundly racist society, or we have mostly overcome past racial injustices. Any clear-eyed examination of race in modern America must recognize the changes that have transformed the life chances of African Americans in the United States since the mid-twentieth century, and that enabled Barack Obama’s remarkable ascent through some of America’s most prestigious institutions and ultimately to the White House—most of them the result of grassroots activism, litigation, and public policy innovation. And it must also account for what even a cursory review of census data, opinion surveys, and health, educational, and housing statistics reveals: namely, that racial gaps are deep and persistent in American life. Those statistics, the way that Obama understands and interprets them, and the ways that Americans in general make sense of them, are at the heart of this book…

Read the entire Introduction here.