Mixed Race Studies

Into the Arms of America: The Korean Roots of International Adoption

The University of Chicago
August 2008
248 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3322621
ISBN: 9780549742289

Arissa Hyun Jung Oh

A Dissertation submitted to the faculty of the division of Social Sciences in candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of History

This dissertation locates the origins of the phenomenon of international adoption in Korea in the 1950s, when Americans began adopting mixed-race ‘GI babies’ produced through liasions between Korean women and foreign military personnel during the Korean War. Seeing no other solution to the existence of these children than their mass emigration abroad, the Korean government cooperated with allies in Korea and in the United States to establish an intercountry adoption system.

Americans had adopted children from Europe and Japan prior to the Korean War, but there are a number of reasons why intercountry took off from Korea. First, the supply of unwanted mixed-race GI babies in South Korea converged with a demand for them in the United States. The newly established Republic of South Korea sought to to redefine itself through a nationalism centered in large part on its sense of itself as an racially homogeneous nation and was therefore eager to send its mixed-race children overseas. At the same time, Americans expressed interest in adopting Korean GI babies for a number of reasons: humanitarianism, a shortage of adoptable children in the U.S., or because they wished to avoid the doctrinal investigations of social workers required under state adoption laws.

Second, a ‘culture religion’ or ‘civic religion’ that I call Christian Americanism emerged in the 1950s to power the early movement to adopt Korean GI babies. Christian Americanism combined patriotism with vaguely Christian principles to form a powerful ideology that promoted U.S. responsibility in the new world of the Cold War. The adoption of Korean GI babies became a Christian Americanist missionary project, and although not all adoptive parents of children from Korea were Christian Americanists, the language of Christian Americanism became the language of the Korean adoption movement. Christian Americanist adopters saw adopting a Korean GI baby as a way to participate in their country’s new Cold War project of proving its racial liberalism and winning the hearts and minds of newly independent countries around the world. Third, Harry Holt, a farmer from Oregon, emerged as a leader of the Christian Americanist Korean adoption movement. Holt founded the Holt Adoption Program in 1956, made Korean adoption available to the masses, and was a crucial catalyst in the establishment and development of international adoption.

In the early 1960s, the composition of the Korean homeless-child population changed such that mixed-race children no longer represented the majority of the Korean children being adopted internationally. The institutions, procedures and laws that had been erected to facilitate the removal of mixed-race children became a convenient system through which to send full-blooded children abroad.

Korean adoption has been a dynamic and ever-changing phenomenon reflecting some of the major trends in Cold War politics as well as shifting ideas about race, family and nation in both Korea and the United States. What began as a race-based evacuation evolved into a Cold War missionary project, and has now become an increasingly common way for Americans to build their families.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• VOLUME ONE
  • LIST OF TABLES
  • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  • ABSTRACT
  • INTRODUCTION
  • CHAPTER 1. Soldiers, Missionaries and the Kids of Korea
  • CHAPTER 2. Creating Intercountry Adoption
  • CHAPTER 3. A New Kind of Missionary Work: Christian Americanism and the Adoption of Korean GI Babies
• VOLUME TWO
  • CHAPTER 4. Making Orphans, Making Families
  • CHAPTER 5. Harry Holt Versus ‘The Welfare’: The Fight Over Proxy Adoption
  • CHAPTER 6. The Turn In the Road
  • APPENDIX U. S. Immigration Laws Pertaining to Korean Adoption
  • BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIST OF TABLES

Purchase the dissertation here.

Kept In, Kept out : The Formation of Racial Identity in Brazil, 1930-1937

Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
November 1996
95 pages

Veronica Armstrong

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Latin American Studies Program

This thesis examines the roles of historian Gilberto Freyre and the Sao Paulo black press in the formation of racial identity in Brazil. In Casa Grande e Senzala, published in 1933, Freyre presented a hypothesis of Brazilian national identity based on positive interpretations of slavery and miscegenation. His emphasis on racial harmony met with the approval of Getúlio Vargas, a president intent on the unification of Brazilian society. With Vargas’ backing, racial democracy became Brazilian national identity. Supporters included the black press which welcomed an idea that brought blacks into definitions of Brazilianness. Yet, blacks were embracing an interpretation of Brazilian identity that would replace a growing black racial awareness. Reasons for the undermining of black racial consciousness and the enshrining of racial democracy as Brazilian national identity emerge in an overview of shifts occurring during the first decades of the twentieth century. The forces of mass immigration, negative evaluations of Brazil by scientific racism, and the nation-building politics of Vargas affected the elite minority and the poverty-stricken majority of Brazilians, but in differing ways. For while economic stability and national pride were the goals of the former, research suggests that survival was the paramount aim of the latter. Addressing the needs of both groups, the adoption of racial democracy as national ideology in the late 1930s maintained elite privilege, defused the potential of racial unrest, and promised social mobility to the masses.

Benefits to the largely-black masses, however, had strings attached. Social mobility depended on their acting “white” and becoming “white” through miscegenation. In the face of desperate poverty, blacks had few options and assimilation seemed a way to move beyond their low socio-economic status. Furthermore, contrasts with American segregation convinced black writers that battling discrimination had to be secondary to the economic survival of their community. The thesis concludes by seeking to explain the paradox of a society characterised by many foreigners and most Brazilians as a racial paradise from the 1930s to the 1970s even though Brazilian reality evinces gross inequality between the small Europeanised elite and the large black and mixed-race underclass.

Table of Contents

• Approval
• Abstract.
• Acknowledgments.
• Preface.
• Introduction kept in, kept out:the question of brazilianness and black solidarity 1930-1937
  • The March for national identity
  • Brazilianness vs. Blackness
• Chapter 1. Ideology and Identity
  • The dawning of a new era of national thought
  • A historic moment
  • Whitening
  • A New Era
• Chapter 2. Race
  • Miscegenation and Racial Terminology
  • Racial Democracy: Theory and Revision
• Chapter 3. The Making of a Cultural Hero
  • Freyre: the child and the man
  • Freyre s “Old Social Order”
  • Ciasa Grande e Senzala
  • Freyre, the Intellectual
  • Freyre, Father of National Identity.
• Chapter 4. The Politics of Identity
  • The Black Press in Brazil
  • The Meaning of Language
  • From the mulato to the black press
  • The Black Press: an alternative path
  • Assimilation vs. segregation
  • A Frente Negra
• Chapter 5. Only we, the negros of Brazil, know what it is to feel colour prejudice
  • A Voz da Raza
  • Conclusion: We are Brazilian
  • Intellectuals and Ideology
  • Searching for identity
• Epilogue
• Bibliography

List of Figures

• figure 1: Roquete Pinto’s prediction of the racial make up of Brazilian populations based on official statistics 1872-1890
• figure 2: System of values within the miscegenation process

Read the entire dissertation here.

“The Last Stand”: The Fight for Racial Integrity in Virginia in the 1920s

Richard B. Sherman, Chancellor Professor of History
College of William and Mary

The Journal of Southern History
Volume 54, Number 1 (February, 1988)
pages 69-92

By the 1920s many southern whites had come to believe that the race question was settled. White supremacy had been assured and the subordinate position of blacks effectively guaranteed by ostensibly constitutional methods of disfranchisement, Jim Crow laws, and other forms of racial discrimination. In Virginia, however, a small but determined group of racial zealots insisted that such steps were not enough. The race problem, they argued, was no longer political; it was biological. Believing that extreme measures had to be taken to prevent the contamination of white blood, they initiated and led an emotional campaign for stringent new laws to preserve racial integrity. Without these, they warned, amalgamation was inevitable. These racial purists were convinced that their fight was a “Last Stand” to keep America white and to save civilization itself from downfall. The campaign for racial integrity in Virginia was not the product of a great popular ground swell. Rather, it was primarily the work of this dedicated coterie of extremists who played effectively on the fears and prejudices of many whites. Ultimately they were able to achieve some, although not all, of their legislative goals. Their activities, nonetheless, were significant and had an impact on Virginia that was felt long after the 1920s.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century a number of steps had been taken in Virginia to “settle” the race question and to guarantee white supremacy. One of the most important measures had been the adoption of a new constitution in 1902 with provisions that severely contracted the franchise. As a result Virginia came to be controlled by a remarkably small political and social elite, while blacks were largely eliminated as a political force capable of providing…

Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home

Wiley-Blackwell
August 2005
304 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4051-0054-0
Papeback ISBN: 978-1-4051-0055-7
E-book ISBN: 978-1-4051-4130-7

Alison Blunt, Professor of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London

Domicile and Diaspora investigates geographies of home and identity for Anglo-Indian women in the 50 years before and after Indian independence in 1947.

• The first book to study the Anglo-Indian community past and present, in India, Britain and Australia.
• The first book by a geographer to focus on a community of mixed descent.
• Investigates geographies of home and identity for Anglo-Indian women in the 50 years before and after Indian independence in 1947.
• Draws on interviews and focus groups with over 150 Anglo-Indians, as well as archival research.
• Makes a distinctive contribution to debates about home, identity, hybridity, migration and diaspora.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures.
• Series Editors’ Preface.
• Acknowledgements.
• 1. Domicile and Diaspora: An Introduction.
• 2. At Home in British India: Imperial Domesticity and National Identity.
• 3. Home, Community and Nation: Domesticating Identity and Embodying Modernity.
• 4. Colonization and Settlement: Anglo-Indian Homelands.
• 5. Independence and Decolonization: Anglo-Indian Resettlement in Britain.
• 6. Mixed Descent, Migration and Multiculturalism: Anglo-Indians in Australia since 1947.
• 7. At Home in Independent India: Post-Imperial Domesticity and National Identity.
• 8. Domicile and Diaspora: Conclusions.
• Bibliography.
• Appendix 1 Archival Sources.
• Appendix 2 Interviews and Focus Groups.
• Index

Read chapter one here.

Robeson County Native Writes Book on Lumbee Indians

The Pilot
Southern Pines, North Carolina
2010-06-16

Kay Grismer

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

The Native Americans who have lived along the Lumber River in Robeson County for generations may have been given names to identify their “tribe”— “Croatan,” “Cherokee,” “Siouan” and “Lumbee” — but their collective identity as a “People” does not come from the “outside.”

“The word ‘People’ acknowledges that Indians have a history and a sense of self that goes back to before the colonial relationships that labeled us as Indian, Native American or Indigenous,” says Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, assistant professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and a Lumbee Indian. “Growing up, I knew first and foremost that I was part of a People, that I had a family and that my family connected to other families; and that all of these families lived in a place, what for us was a sacred homeland: the land along the Lumber River in Robeson County. Kinship and place are the foundational layer of Indian identity in Robeson County.”

This identity as a People has been tested repeatedly over time.

“Indian people are burdened with defending their identity more often and more extensively than any other ethnic group in America,” says historian Alexandra Harmon.

This is especially true for the 50,000 Lumbees, the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi River, who have had to struggle for recognition and acceptance.

During the years between 1885 and 1956, Robeson County Indians adopted different names, “not because they didn’t know who they were or what constituted their identity,” Lowery says, “but because federal and state officials kept changing their criteria for authenticity.”

Lowery will discuss the evolution of the Lumbee Indians Thursday, June 17, at 4 p.m. at The Country Bookshop in downtown Southern Pines, when she presents her book, “Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity and the Making of a Nation.”…

…In a segregated society where white supremacists had the power to reclassify Indians as “colored,” Indians began to distance themselves from both blacks and whites. White supremacy demanded that Indians avoid blacks both politically and socially and deny inclusion to community members who might possess African ancestry.

“Excluding blacks from their community may have preserved some autonomy, but it sometimes required Indian leaders to forswear their own kin ties and the value they placed on family,” Lowery adds. “This process of adopting segregation to affirm their distinctiveness results in an additional layer of identity for Indians who had previously thought of themselves as a People. They began to express their intentions as a race and as a tribe.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Jackson Whites

The New Yorker
1938-09-17
page 29

George Weller

REPORTER AT LARGE about the Jackson Whites; history and origin of a primitive race living in the Ramapo Mountains. They are a mixture of three races, the white, the Negro, & the American Indians. Next to being an Indian, the greatest point of distinction for the Jackson White is to be an albino. The Ramapos have several entire families of albinos. The queen of the albinos was Nellie Mann, who in the late 1890’s travelled with the Barnum & Bailey sideshow, billed as a wild girl captured in the Australian bush. Mentions the van Dunks an albino family; the de Frees family which has branches all over the Ramapos, and Uncle Willie de Frees, a patriarch of the Jackson Whites and the only surving doctor

Read or purchase the article here.

Ramapough Mountain People: “The Jackson Whites”: A Pathfinder and Annotated Bibliography

1995

Randy D. Ralph

Introduction:

My parents moved the family way, way out in the country, after my baby brother was born, to a little tract house in the middle of the Preakness Valley in Passaic County, New Jersey. The valley was open and green and filled with Dutch dairy farms and Italian truck gardens. It lay snuggled between the Ramapo and Watchung ridges. Our family was one of the first to move into the new neighborhood between Old Man van der Veen’s dairy cows and Mrs. Capodimaggi’s vegetable garden. One day in mid-summer, not long after we’d moved in, a new kid showed up at the baseball diamond the us kids had carved out of one of the still-vacant lots. His name was Willie G. Mann, Jr., or, just “Junior.” He became one of my best friends for reasons I didn’t understand until many years later.

I was a fat kid. I was usually the last to be picked when the kids chose up sides for baseball. I could hit OK, but I couldn’t catch worth a damn and I couldn’t run fast either. More often than not, I’d wind up in the middle of a fight over whose team I’d made lose the last time—until Junior showed up.

The kids on the block thought Junior was “weird-looking” and said so. His complexion was almost bronze. He had sparkling Blue Plate Special blue eyes and jet black, curly hair. He looked for all the world like an Indian to me. To the kids on the block it was clear he wasn’t “one of us.” He was lanky and athletic, though. It almost seemed he could hit a home run with one hand tied behind his back, catch a pop fly blind-folded or round the bases in a blur and slide into home without a drop of sweat on his brow. He was a natural, and that was all that mattered to them…

“The Jackson Whites”:

The Ramapough Mountain People, also known locally, and in the pejorative as “The Jackson Whites,” are an extended clan of closely interrelated families living in the Ramapo Mountains and their more remote valleys principally in Bergen County, New Jersey, but also in immediately adjacent Passaic County, New Jersey, and Rockland County, New York. Their largely Dutch surnames, de Groot, de Fries, van der Donck, and Mann, in all their variant spellings, are among the oldest in the countryside and predate the Revolutionary War. They live only thirty miles or so from downtown Manhattan which lies just across the Hudson River (see map). They are shy, gentle, proud, and reclusive people who, until relatively recently, seldom ventured far from their mountain homes.

They are clearly racially mixed. There are elements from native Indian, Negro, Dutch, and possibly German (Hessian) and Italian blood lines…

Readd the entire article here.

Race and Sociological Reason in the Republic: Inquiries on the Métis in the French Empire (1908-37)

International Sociology
Volume 17, Number 3 (September 2002)
361-391
DOI: 10.1177/0268580902017003002

Emmanuelle Saada, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies
Columbia University

This article compares two collective surveys on the métis conducted in 1908 and 1937 in the French colonies. Métis was a category used mostly to describe children born out of wedlock to indigenous mothers and European fathers. The first inquiry was sponsored by anthropologists of the Société d’anthropologie de Paris; the second was an administrative survey that brought together social scientists, administrators and a variety of other experts. The comparison sheds light on the specific trajectory of the ‘métis problem’ in the French Empire, and on the process of construction of a social category. More broadly, it invites a reappraisal of the signification and role of race in both the construction of French citizenship and the history of French social thought in the first half of the 20th century.

Read or purchase the article here.

Negotiating Honor: Women and Slavery in Caracas, 1750-1854

University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
May 2011
214 pages

Sue E. Taylor

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History

This study examines three interrelated groups—female slaves, female slave owners, and free women of African heritage—living in the city and state of Caracas, Venezuela from the middle of the eighteenth through the middle of the nineteenth centuries in order to improve our historical understanding of gender and slavery. Venezuela represented the largest and longest lasting slave-owning regime in Spanish South America. Slavery, as a system of labor, was an integral part of colonial Venezuelan society and affected all segments of the populace. Understanding gender relations within slavery is crucial to understanding the dynamics of gender, power, race, and sexuality in the society as a whole. Women of Spanish, African, and mixed descent were involved in and affected by slavery.

Each group of women had a concept of what honor meant for them and each sought to preserve honor by demanding fair and humane treatment, to be treated with respect and dignity, and to protect their reputations. They also expected those people who had control over them to behave with honor. Sometimes honor, as seen in the cases and as demanded by slave and free black women, corresponded to traditional concepts of honor as birthright as defined by elite members of society and other times not. In other examples, women of color used honor along the lines of Stewart’s concept of honor as the entitlement of treatment as a worthwhile person. By looking beyond honor as birthright, the women in my study also invoked honor in their expectation that they be treated with dignity and respect and be able to preserve their reputations in society and with their peers. Slave owners, on the other hand, were sensitive to accusations of being overly harsh in their treatment of their human possessions. Their good reputation required both paternalism and firm control. Slave litigants tested the boundaries of appropriate coercion and restraint in their suits against abusive or unreasonable slave owners. They also showed a sophisticated understanding of legal codes and institutions.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables
• Introduction
  • Honor, women, and slavery
  • Historiography
  • Literature on gender and slave women
  • Literature on Honor
  • Honor in Latin America
  • Methodology and Sources
  • Organization of Chapters
• Part I: Redefining Honor
  • Chapter 2: Mistreatment as an indicator of dishonor
    • Protecting honor through the court
    • Conclusion
  • Chapter 3: Redefining Sexual Honor: Broken Promises and Respectable Work
    • Broken Promises
    • Respectable Work and Honor
    • Conclusion
• Part II: The slave family
  • Chapter 4: Slave and free black families as seen through Church documentation
    • The Parish of San Pablo
    • Marriage
    • Baptisms
    • Matriculas
  • Chapter 5: Preserving the Family
    • Children and Childhood
    • Enslaved Children: Achieving Freedom
    • The death of an owner
    • Marriage and Honor
    • Families and use of the law
• Part III: Slavery, freedom, and emancipation in the post-independence Liberal State
  • Chapter 6: Slavery and Independence
    • Venezuela moves toward revolution
    • The Junta de Secuestros
    • Revolution, slaves, and free blacks
    • Slavery in the republic of Venezuela
    • Freedom in the post-independence state
    • Conclusion
  • Chapter 7: Conclusion
• Bibliography

List of Tables

• Table 1: Slave and Free Black Marriages, San Pablo Parish
• Table 2: Slave Marriages
• Table 3: Free Black and slave/manumiso baptisms by year
• Table 4: Slave and Manumiso Baptisms
• Table 5: Slave and manumiso baptisms 1752-1852 by gender and status
• Table 6: Godparents
• Table 7: Heads of Household by race & marital status
• Table 8: Single heads of household
• Table 9: Slave Ownership
• Table 10: Slave Distribution
• Table 11: Slave Statistics
• Table 12: Overview of San Pablo Parish

Chapter 1: Introduction

Venezuela represented the largest and longest lasting slave-owning regime in Spanish South America. Slavery, as a system of labor, was an integral part of colonial Venezuelan society and affected all segments of the populace. Understanding gender relations within slavery is crucial to understanding the dynamics of gender, power, race, and sexuality in the society as a whole. Women of Spanish, African, and mixed descent were involved in and affected by slavery.

My study examines three interrelated groups—female slaves, female slave owners, and free women of African heritage—living in the city and state of Caracas, Venezuela from the middle of the eighteenth through the middle of the nineteenth centuries in order to improve our historical understanding of gender and slavery. This study aids in our understanding of gender and power relations within late colonial Venezuela and beyond, and will contribute to our knowledge of slavery in Latin America more broadly. The intersection of power, gender, race, and sexuality is especially important to this study. By power, I mean the socially sanctioned coercion of one category of person over another that permitted domination of masters over slaves, men over women, etc. Gender refers to socially constructed assumptions regarding behaviors, values, and societal roles assigned to men and women; it serves as a lens through which we can study the experiences and actions of historical actors. How power was mediated between masters and slaves and men and women, including female slave owners is a central concern of this study…

…Winthrop Wright’s monograph on race and class in Venezuela studies the changes in racial attitudes from the colonial period through the first half of the twentieth-century. Wright argues that the cash crop economy and resultant labor arrangements determined the nature of Venezuela’s colonial two-tiered society. The nature of colonial society in Venezuela—relatively under-populated, rural, at the fringe of the empire, with a majority of the population of African descent – mandated racial mixing, according to Wright. However, because miscegenation did not break down the barriers between the elite and the lower classes, race became a “systemic factor in the division of colonial society into distinct castes.” This colonial order persisted until black and mixed race troops were included in the independence movement.

A useful gender study that transcends race and class boundaries is Verena Stolcke’s (Martinez-Alier) 1974 monograph, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba. She uses marriage, specifically deviations from the norm, as a lens to assess nineteenth-century Cuban society. Stolcke examines cases of parents opposed to their child’s marriage, cases of elopement, and instances of interracial marriage, arguing that these deviations not only highlight conflicts within the system, but more importantly, make the norms even more apparent. This book deals specifically with interracial marriage within a slave-owning society. The fact that a large portion of the Cuban population were slaves, ex-slaves, or descendants of slaves is crucial to her argument. Her work raises important issues to colonial Cuban society and gender that are applicable to my case.

Finally, my study examines free African and mixed-race women living during the era of slavery to discover how their lives, occupations, opportunities, religious practices, and family relationships may have differed from those of their enslaved counterparts. Because slavery continued to expand in Venezuela through the end of the eighteenth century, the free population of color was sizeable, numbering nearly 200,000 free people of color, or forty-six percent of the population, by the end of the century…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Cambridge University Press (available in the United States at University of Michigan Press here.)
August 1974
224 pages
216 x 140 mm
Paperback ISBN: 9780521098465

Verena Martinez-Alier (a.k.a. Verena Stolcke), Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology
Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona

An analysis of marriage patterns in nineteenth-century Cuba, a society with a large black population the majority of which was held in slavery but which also included considerable numbers of freedmen. Dr Martinez-Alier uses as her main source of evidence the records in Havana of administrative and judicial proceedings of cases in which parents opposed a marriage, of cases involving elopement, and of cases of interracial marriage. Dr Martinez-Alier develops a model of the relation between sexual values and social inequality. She considers the importance of the value of virginity in supporting the hierarchy of Cuban society, based on ascription rather than achievement. As a consequence of the high evaluation of virginity, elopement was often a successful means of overcoming parental dissent to an unequal marriage. However, in cases of interracial elopement, the seduced coloured woman had little chance of redress through marriage. In this battle of the sexes and the races, the free coloured women and men played roles and acquired values which explain why matrifocality became characteristic of black free families.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Part I. Interracial Marriage:
  • 1. Intermarriage and family honour
  • 2. Intermarriage and politics
  • 3. Intermarriage and Catholic doctrine
  • 4. The white man’s view
  • 5. Colour as a symbol of social status
  • 6. Intraracial marriage
• Part II. Honour and Class:
  • 7. Elopement and seduction
  • 8. Conclusion: Some analytical comparisons.

Read the introduction here.

…Nineteenth-century Cuba cannot be treated as a historical and geographical isolate. Political factors outside Cuba were significant in shaping interracial marriage policy. The cultural tradition of Spain which during three centuries had espoused ‘purity of blood’ as the essential requisite of Spanishness must also be taken into consideration. Racism antedates slavery in the Americas and, as W. Jordan has proposed, the question would be to explain why African negroes (and not for instance the American Indians) were enslaved in the first place. To establish, therefore, a direct causal link between slavery as a highly exploitative system of production and racism would be too simple…