Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Britannia – marrying an alien

BBC Two
2011-10-02

George Alagiah, Host

Nearly 100 years ago, Chinese seaman Stanley Ah Foo arrived in Liverpool to start a new life. He soon fell in love—but laws at the time meant that his English bride, Emily, was only able to marry if she gave up her British nationality and became a so-called alien herself.

In Mixed Britannia—a new three-part series for BBC 2—George Alagiah explores the often untold stories of Britain’s mixed-race communities. He met Stanley and Emily Ah Foo’s daughters, Doreen and Lynne, who told the remarkable story of how their parents met, and the restrictions placed upon them.

The first episode of Mixed Britannia will be broadcast on BBC 2 at 20:00Z (21:00 BST) on Thursday, 2011-10-06.

View the video clip here (00:02:11).

The Rulers and the Ruled: the Singapore Eurasian Community Under the British and the Japanese

National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University
1999
DS610.25.E87 Con

John Gregory Conceicao

Mixed-race populations provide a challenging and fascinating subject for historical enquiry as they blend multiple cultures and, in the process, give rise to unique social and political forces. This thesis focuses on the Eurasians of Singapore, a distinct and disparate social group which arose from Singapore’s strategic location as an entreport that attracted Europeans from diverse backgrounds. As an ethnic group, the Eurasians were perhaps one of the earliest among the domiciled communities to look upon Singapore as their home and to develop a stake in the Colony, which had essentially been a place for travellers, transients and sojourners. This study focuses on the Eurasians and the complex relationships they forged with their two colonial overlords, the British and the Japanese, in the period prior to 1946.

Under the British the Eurasians played a ‘middleman’ role vis-a-vis other Asiatic communities and, by doing so, obtained unique privileges. However, in the 1870s a point was reached when owing to changing circumstances and attitudes, the British began to adopt a less than favourable stance towards the Eurasians. While the British needed their support for political and economic reasons in order to run the administration of the Colony, they adopted a policy that vacillated between patronage and prejudice. This left the Eurasians in a difficult position as they were staunchly pro-British yet, confused at the disinterest displayed by their patrons. Without much success, the Eurasians tried to redefine privilege to mean rights, and to have a voice in running the affairs of a place they regarded as their home.

The onset of the Japanese Occupation during the Second World War deepened the Eurasian predicament. They were singled out by the Japanese authorities for political indoctrination and subjected to measures which combined chastisement and encouragement. The Japanese forced the Eurasians to re-examine and re-orientate their ethnic identity. Without doubt, they were now encouraged to see themselves as ‘Asiatics’.

In retrospect, the Eurasians were subjected by their British and Japanese overlords to inconsistent policies which often left them confused and helpless. As a consequence, their self-definitions of identity underwent marked changes over time. Post-war developments in Singapore brought about a torrent of political changes that particularly affected the Eurasians. They emerged as a people who sometimes felt displaced and marginalised. The strengths and unique traits which the community once possessed—domicility, education and social privilege—were no longer their preserve in a nation that aimed to make egalitarianism and merit the cornerstones of its polity. This thesis argues that circumstantialism has been a dominant force in powerfully shaping the Eurasian identity. This identity was not given in a primordialist sense but was constructed from historical configurations and social circumstances, in which the relationship between the ‘Rulers’ and the ‘Ruled’ played an extraordinarily potent part.

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Regulating Race: Interracial Relationships, Community, and Law in Jim Crow Alabama

University of Georgia
2008
96 pages

L. Kathryn Tucker

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS

This thesis, based largely on legal cases concerning miscegenation in Alabama, argues that legal efforts to impose social control by prohibiting interracial marriages and relationships proved ineffective due to the efforts of defendants to find legal loopholes, the racial ambiguity of a tri-racial society, and the reluctance of many communities to prosecute offenders. Nationwide interest in matters of race fueled the passage of one-drop laws in the 1920s, but also provided defendants with ways to claim racial backgrounds that fell outside the scope of the laws. Concurrently, local communities proved disinclined to prosecute interracial relationships unless individuals felt personally involved through desires for revenge or monetary gain. This often long-term toleration of interracial relationships, along with interracial couples’ own efforts to escape prosecution, proves that southern race relations were often more flexible and accommodating than harsh laws and the attitudes behind them would suggest.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER
  • 1. Miscegenation and the Law
  • 2. Patterns of Defense
  • 3. Defining Race
  • 4. Community Toleration
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDICES
  • A. Map of Alabama Counties
  • B. Alabama Miscegenation Cases, 1883-1938
  • C. Alabama Appellate Miscegenation Cases 1865-1970
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

…Much of the difficulties that the courts faced in determining race, even by physical means, stemmed from the defendants’ own attempts at muddling the issues. By the 1920s, most blacks came from families that at some point had experienced racial mixture—whether by choice or by force—and many white families, contrary to their fervent beliefs, also had racially mixed forebears. Savvy defendants in miscegenation cases used this fact to their benefit, claiming ancestors who variously possessed Spanish, Indian, or the ambiguous “Creole” or “Cajun” blood in order to explain dark skin tones. This defense proved particularly valuable in states such as Alabama, where the legislatures never outlawed marriage between Indians and whites. Closely linked to attempts to define race based on physical characteristics of both defendants and families, attempts to explain away ambiguous features based on Indian heritage often proved successful….

Read the entire thesis here.

Brown Bag: Mixed-race tension in early America

The Daily Campus: The Independent Voice of Southern Methodist University Since 1915
Dallas, Texas
2011-09-21

Logan May

The struggle of mixed race families in Southwest America was a daunting issue in the early 19th century.

As part of the Brown Bag Lecture Series of the Southwest, SMU Director of Southwest Studies Andrew Graybill shared a detailed account of a mixed White-Native American family from Montana who faced an exponential amount of racial discrimination.

In the Texana Room of DeGolyer Library Wednesday afternoon, listeners gathered and silently snacked on their lunches as Graybill spoke of the Clarke family.

“To walk in two worlds was impossible,” Graybill said, “whites looked at mixed blood with repulsion.”

His book, entitled A Mixture of So Many Bloods, recalled the life of Helen Clarke and the backlash she received for being the daughter of a white man and a Native American woman. At this time in the early 1800s, marriage within the two races was common, and children served as brokers between the two groups. Helen’s father had a prominent role as a fur trader; therefore, the family was often the talk of the town…

Read the entire article here.

Training for assimilation: Cecil cook and the ‘half‐caste’ apprentice regulations

Melbourne Studies in Education (Currently known as Critical Studies in Education)
Volume 29, Issue 1 (1987)
pages 128-141
DOI: 10.1080/17508488709556226

Tony Austin
Darwin Institute of Technology

One of the most significant consequences of the colonisation of Aboriginal Australia was a fast growing population of people of mixed Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal descent, known as ‘Half-castes’. As the increase in numbers became pronounced. Half-castes were vilified more vehemently even than other Aborigines. However, popular contempt was tinged with shame that children, fathered by Europeans and so with a mix of White blood, were left to be brought up as ‘savages’ in the bush or on the fringes of settlement. Hence legislation for the protection and control of Aborigines included special provision for Half-castes: they were to be given an improved chance to assimilate to White Australia.

This paper describes one attempt in the Northern Territory during the 1930s to prepare young people for assimilation—an apprenticeship scheme for Half-caste pastoral workers. The scheme is viewed in the context of Commonwealth Government policy for Half-castes and prevailing views about the intellectual capacity of Aborigines and Half-castes.

Social Darwinism and Aboriginal Intelligence

From the earliest days of Commonwealth control of the Northern Territory progressive officials with anthropological interests, like Chief Protectors Herbert Basedow and Baldwin Spencer had included in their policy proposals education and training for Aborigines and especially for Half-castes who were considered to be intellectually superior to other Aborigines. But these proposals were barely acted upon. In addition to general Commonwealth neglect of Aborigines and intermittent military and financial crises, the reason is to be found in Australian views about Aborigines’ intelligence.

Basedow and Spencer, in ascribing intellectual prowess (however limited) to Aborigines, were out of step with anthropological opinion. Late nineteenth century British, American and Australian anthropologists disseminated the belief that the Scale of Nature had become rigid, making progress for certain peoples impossible and so consigning them to a permanent place of inferiority in the struggle for survival. Such theories of evolutionary arrest, coupled with A.R. Wallace’s contention that moral and mental evolution had largely replaced physical evolution made the link between ‘savages’ and the apes, or at best with Neanderthal and Engis humans, conventional anthropological wisdom.

In Australia, ethnocentric Europeans reasoned that cessation of cultural evolution was demonstrated by Aborigines’ lack of recognisable institutions, rulers, morality, religion, parental pride, sense of humour or responsible treatment of the ‘fair sex’. Cultural discontinuity, it was argued, was a clear indication of intellectual inferiority. As [Charles] C. Staniland Wake put it, Aborigines ‘represent the childhood of humanity itself, revealing to us the condition of mankind, if not in primeval times, yet when the original potentialities of man’s being had been slightly developed by the struggle for existence’ Scientific substance for this view was provided by craniologists who alleged that Aboriginal brains were primitive and incapable of matching the power of those of the ‘higher races’. Features of Aboriginal brains were said to show an ‘infantile character… a type of anomaly which is referable to persistence of an immature (even a foetal) condition’.

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The colour line and the colour scale in the twentieth century

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 35, Issue 7, 2012
pages 1109-1131
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.605902

Michael Banton, Emeritus Professor of Sociology
University of Bristol

Some more recent evidence supports Du Bois’ prediction that the twentieth century would prove the century of the colour line. It indicates that men have always and everywhere shown a preference for fair complexioned women as sexual partners, whereas males seeking a mate are rarely disadvantaged by a dark complexion. In the employment market in the USA, a dark complexion is a significant disadvantage for both males and females. Though there is no properly comparable evidence from other countries, there appears to be a widespread tendency for any negative valuation of darker skin colour to be incorporated into a scale of socio-economic status. In some situations a colour scale is replacing the colour line.

Du Bois’ reference to differences of colour has been largely superseded in English-speaking countries by references to differences of race. From a policy standpoint, the switch from colour to race has had both positive and negative consequences. From a sociological standpoint, it has made it more difficult to disaggregate the dimensions of social difference and to dispel the confusions engendered by ideas of racial difference.

Introduction

In the first year of the century, and then again three years later, W. E. B. Du Bois (2005:x, 10) wrote that ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line
the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and in the islands of the sea’. His prediction was only partially borne out, for the main problems of the twentieth century were the militarism that stimulated the slaughter of World War I, the dictatorships that led to World War II, the armaments race of the Cold War, the decolonization process, and the problems that the international political system could not grasp, particularly those of population growth and climate change. Colour-consciousness contributed to the fourth of these.

The expression, ‘a colour line’, was a metaphor drawing on Du Bois’ experiences in North America that was very effective for the designation of a political problem. Yet if a name chosen to designate a political problem conveys a thesis about the source, or cause, of the thing in question, it also poses an intellectual problem. In this case the expression ‘colour line’ grasped only one facet of the relations between humans of different colour…

…In the early years of the century there appeared to be a scientific justification for racial classification, even if there was no agreement upon quite which classification to employ, or for what purpose. That is no longer the case, and the educated public is now aware that there is no close correspondence between the social categories identified as races and the classes that assemble genetic similarities and dissimilarities. For example, it has been known for a long time that the social classification of persons in the USA as black or white is biologically misleading. A statistical analysis using historical census data and historical data on immigration and birth rates concluded in 1958 that twenty-one per cent of the white population had black ancestors, and that the majority of the persons with some African ancestry were classified as white (Stuckert 1958). In the aftermath of World War II, and in the international revulsion from the use made of racial doctrines by Nazi Germany, the idiom of race was used, in both international and national laws, to prohibit discrimination on grounds of race, colour, descent, and national or ethnic origin. Racial classifications have since been used in population censuses, in programmes for the promotion of  equality, and, at times, but in a different way, in medical research. The use of the word race in the law will continue, as it may in other parts of the everyday world of practical affairs…

…Though variations in skin colour can be measured objectively by use of a photospectrometer, these measures provide only approximate indications of a person’s genotype. Better indications can be taken from work in molecular anthropology. Such research has found that six genetic loci are involved in the determination of a person’s skin colour, so it is possible for a person to have a fifteen
-twenty per cent African component in his or her genotype without possessing any of the alleles that code for dark skin (Sweet 2004). This makes it easier, in a country like the USA, for a person with African ancestry to ‘pass for white’. For the same genetic reasons, African admixture amongst white Americans can increase without any significant change in skin tone. Conversely, amongst African-Americans, an amount of African admixture is directly correlated with darker skin since no selective pressure is applied; as a result, African-Americans may have a very wide range of African admixture (
>0-
100%), whereas European-Americans have a lower range (2
-20%). As there is a small overlap, it is possible that a man who identifies himself as white may have more African admixture than a man who identifies himself as black…

…This essay reviews the political problems of the twentieth century, at the same time calling attention to the intellectual problem posed by the multidimensionality of difference. Why is it that, in given circumstances, certain dimensions acquire a particular significance? This is the explanandum that has to be approached step by step. Starting from Du Bois’ prediction, it is argued here, firstly, that use of the word colour concentrates attention upon what serves as a visible sign of a social difference; secondly, that sociologists have to account for how it comes to be used as such a sign; and thirdly, that when sociologists use race as if it were a synonym for colour (as English-speaking sociologists often do) they make it more difficult to identify what has to be explained. As the essay’s title suggests, it also contends that the notion of a colour scale helps consideration of the function of colour as a social sign…

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Germany’s ‘Brown Babies’: The Difficult Identities of Post-War Black Children of GIs

Speigel Online International
2009-10-13

Stephanie Siek

Rosemarie Pena’s identity document after her adoption. “Many of us never knew we were adopted, and many of us thought we were the only one,” Pena said. Her adoptive parents changed her name to Wanda Lynn Haymon. After discovering she was adopted, she reclaimed her birth name.

For many of the now-adult children of white German women and African-American GIs, adopted by families in the United States after World War II, the search for the truth has been difficult. Online communities are helping.

Rudi Richardson knew something about what it meant to be a black man in the United States. But after being deported to Germany, the country where he was born, shortly before his 47th birthday, he had to start figuring out what it meant to be black and German—in a land he barely remembered and whose language he didn’t speak.

He started life as Udo Ackermann, born in a Bavarian women’s prison in 1955. His mother, a Jewish woman named Liesolette, was serving a prison term for prostitution. His father, whom he never met, was an African-American serviceman named George. Rudi was given up for adoption.

Like thousands of other postwar children with black GI fathers and white German mothers, Richardson was raised by an African-American military family in the US. He has spent his life trying to find where he fits in.

Born in an era when Germany was still grappling with its responsibility for the Holocaust and when the US Army had a policy of not acknowledging paternity claims brought against its soldiers stationed abroad, some of these children were put up for adoption in the United States. At the time, Germany judged itself incapable of absorbing these “brown babies”—as they have come to call themselves. In the late 1940s and 1950s, efforts were made to match them with African-American military families, many of whom were stationed around Germany at the time…

…But Cardwell, who is writing a book about his experiences, has learned that his own story is not that simple. Brought to the United States as a four-year-old and adopted by an African-American couple in Washington D.C., he was raised believing that he was a very light-skinned black man. It was not until he began trying to find his biological parents as an adult that he discovered his mother was a half-German refugee from Poland, and his father was native Hawaiian who was classified as “colored” by the military because of his skin color.

“I’ve been run out of white people’s houses: ‘Who’s this black person you’re bringing in here?’ I’ve been run out of black people’s houses: ‘Who’s this white person you’re bringing in here?'” Cardwell said of his adolescence and early adulthood. “There is no belonging, which is what brown babies sought most.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Cosmic Race in Texas: Racial Fusion, White Supremacy, and Civil Rights Politics

The Journal of American History
Volume 98, Issue 2 (September 2011)
pages 404-419
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jar338

Benjamin H. Johnson, Associate Professor of Global Studies and History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

In the early twentieth century, a number of Latin American intellectuals embraced racial fusion and predicted that it would one day undo the white supremacy represented by the United States. These ideas influenced Mexican American civil rights advocates in Texas in the 1930s and 1940s, who found the embrace of hybridity to be a realistic description of their own racial backgrounds and an effective rejoinder to Jim Crow’s emphasis on racial purity. Attacking the consensus that an aspiration for whiteness drove these civil rights claims, Benjamin H. Johnson finds deep ties between Mexican American and Mexican political cultures and concludes that borderlands histories can take a transnational approach without obscuring the influence of nation-states or denying the emancipatory potential of claims to national belonging.

“The days of the pure whites, the victors of today,” proclaimed José Vasconcelos in 1925, “are as numbered as were the days of their predecessors. Having fulfilled their destiny of mechanizing the world, they themselves have set, without knowing it, the basis for a new period: the period of the fusion and mixing of all peoples.” Vasconcelos wrote these words in Mexico as his four-year tenure as the secretary of the nation’s public education system came to a close and as his quest for an elected position (first the governorship of the state of Oaxaca and then the presidency) began. They appeared in La raza cósmica, an enormously influential work that circulated across the hemisphere. Whereas the U.S. intellectual and civil rights crusader W. E. B. Du Bois had prophesied that the color line would be the problem of the twentieth century, Vasconcelos confidently predicted its erasure. The struggles of a country such as Mexico, which had just emerged from a decade of revolution and civil war, were for Vasconcelos at the center of global dynamics, as they heralded the rise of the cosmic race of his title, first in Latin America and then across the globe.

Although Vasconcelos was not well known in the United States, where his predictions would have surely struck both the architects and victims of a particularly brutal phase of white supremacy as ludicrous, he did have a profound influence there. His ideas, and the postrevolutionary political and social order of which they were a part, provided Mexican American civil rights leaders in Texas in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly those involved with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a reflection of their own racial self-conception and a set of arguments with which to critique white supremacy.

This article examines the connections…

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Mixed Indians, Caboclos and Curibocas: Historical Analysis of a Process of Miscegenation; Rio Negro (Brazil), 18th and 19th Centuries

Chapter in: Amazon Peasant Societies in a Changing Environment (2009)
Springer
Part I
pages 55-68
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9283-1_4

Décio de Alencar Guzmán

The author analyses the process of mixing (mestiçagem) in the Rio Negro region during the 18th and 19th Centuries. After presenting the main features of this mestiçagem’s components (the Amerindian, the European and the African), the author concentrates on the inter-racial marriage policies prescribed by the Portuguese Crown, as part of a group of projects geared towards the exploitation of human resources in Portuguese America. Guzmán believes that one of the main hindrances to the advance of the studies about the Amazonian caboclo societies is the belief that they are independent and self-regulated social systems. Such a conception has prevented a more accurate understanding of such societies as a product of historical transformations.

Read or purchase the chapter here.

Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Fourth Edition)

Westview Press
July 2011
400 pages
Trade paperback ISBN: 9780813345543

Audrey Smedley, Professor Emerita of Anthropology and African American Studies
Virginia Commonwealth University

Brian D. Smedley, Vice President and Director
Health Policy Institute
Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies

In a sweeping work that traces the idea of race for more than three centuries, Audrey Smedley shows that “race” is a cultural invention that has been used variously and opportunistically since the eighteenth century. Race, in its origin, was not a product of science but of a folk ideology reflecting a new form of social stratification and a rationalization for inequality among the peoples of North America.

New coauthor Brian Smedley joins Audrey Smedley in updating this renowned and groundbreaking text. The fourth edition includes a compelling new chapter on the health impacts of the racial worldview, as well as a thoroughly rewritten chapter that explores the election of Barack Obama and the evolving role of race in American political history. This edition also incorporates recent findings on the human genome and the implications of genomics. Drawing on new understandings of DNA expression, the authors scrutinize the positions of contemporary race scientists who maintain that race is a valid biological concept.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Some Theoretical Considerations
• 2. Etymology of the Term “Race”
• 3. Antecedents of the Racial Worldview
• 4. The Growth of the English Ideology about Human Differences in America
• 5. The Arrival of Africans and Descent into Slavery
• 6. Comparing Slave Systems: The Significance of “Racial” Servitude
• 7. Eighteenth-Century Thought and Crystallization of the Ideology of Race
• 8. Antislavery and the Entrenchment of a Racial Worldview
• 9. The Rise of Science and Scientific Racism
• 10. Growth of The Racial Worldview in 19th Century Science
• 11. Science and the Expansion of Race Ideology Beyond the US
• 12. Twentieth-Century Developments in Race Ideology
• 13. Changing Perspectives on Human Variation in Science
• 14. Dismantling the Folk Idea of Race: The Election of Barack Obama and the Transformations of an Ideology
• 15. The Health Consequences of the Racial Worldview
• References
• Index