Mixed Race Studies

“Tell the Court I Love My [Indian] Wife” Interrogating Race and Self-Identity in Loving v. Virginia

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
Volume 8, Issue 1 (April 2006)
pages 67-80
DOI: 10.1080/10999940500516983

Arica L. Coleman, Assistant Professor of Black American Studies
Unverisity of Delaware

The article reexamines the Loving V. Virginia case by focusing on their tri-racial community of Central Point, Virginia and Mildred Loving‘s self identity as an Indian woman. Loving’s self identity was informed by the twentieth-century politics of racial purity, which resulted in a community-wide denial of African ancestry. I argue that Mildred Loving’s marriage to a white man was not an affirmation of Black/white intermarriage, but rather adhered to the code of racial purity as defined by the state of Virginia, a legacy which continues in the post-Civil Rights era.

The 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, has garnered far less scholarly attention than its 1954 predecessor. Brown v. the Board of Education, which overturned legalized segregation. What little appeared in the way of scholarship has focused on analysis the history the history of anti-miscegenation legislation, the events which led up to the case presentation before the nine justices, the legal precedents regarding the arguments presented before the court, and the unanimous decision delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Until recently with the exception of an article which appeared in Ebony magazine several months after the Supreme Court decision, writers have given little attention to the personal lives of the actual plaintiffs now enshrined in American history, as “the couple that rocked the courts.”…

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Understanding Race: The Evolution of the Meaning of Race in American Law and the Impact of DNA Technology on its Meaning in the Future

Albany Law Review
Volume 72, Issue 4 (2009)
Pages 1113-1143

William Q. Lowe
Albany Law School

Race has played a decisive role in nearly all aspects of American society, yet its meaning in various contexts remains unclear.  Throughout history, individuals have struggled to define “race” as it pertains to science, society, and the law in particular. Although race became a part of the English language in the mid-sixteenth century, it did not take on its modern definition until the early nineteenth century. Scientific, social, and political interpretations of race have gone through an evolutionary process as well. After over two-hundred years of trying to understand its meaning, “[t]he word ‘race’ defies precise definition in American law.” Countless competing theories exist as to the definition and meaning of race, and the inability for one to earn universal support poses a significant problem to the American legal system. Despite the fact that numerous statutes have been enacted to prohibit racial discrimination throughout all aspects of American society, “the law has provided no consistent definition of race and no logical way to distinguish members of different races from one another.”

It has been argued that “race” was first used as a tool to classify individuals during the age of colonial exploration; however, this use was maintained for centuries. Today, classifications based on race are still present in America, and have been found to be permissible in some instances, such as when used to remedy instances of past discrimination. With the predominant role race continues to play in American society, to ensure that all are treated fairly under the law, it is imperative that a single definition of race is applied universally to all Americans. It is foreseeable that advances in science, particularly in DNA testing, will allow for a uniform method of determining one’s race.

This note will discuss the current lack of a settled definition of race in American Law, and the potential role DNA technology can play in remedying the problems associated with it. Part II of this Note will explore the concept of race by examining various definitions of race and how they have evolved into the modern definition. This section will additionally look at the historical understanding of the meaning of race, and the recent divergence from traditional thought. Part III of this Note will analyze the role of race throughout American legal history. This portion of the Note will address historical notions of race in America, the origin of the need to define race, and the treatment of race by the legislature and the courts. Part IV of this Note will discuss current DNA technology and the potential impact it may have of on modern concepts of race, particularly with regard to the law. It is foreseeable that advances in DNA technology will allow scientists to identify and classify individuals through an analysis of their genetic information.

The first legislative attempt at defining race took place in Virginia, nearly one-hundred years before America gained its independence from England, and it was enacted in response to the “uncertain status” of children born with parents of mixed race. The statute was concerned only with the status of mulatto children who were born to a black woman, and stated that the race of the mother would be used to determine the race of the child. This policy reflected the biological definition of race, as the skin color of the individual in question was determinative. This statute was in contrast to that of English law, where inheritance followed the paternal line. Ultimately, under the Virginia statute, children born of a free white man and his slave could potentially be considered to be slaves themselves.

The presence of many free blacks residing in Virginia quickly made this statute unworkable, because it was not easy to determine if a child’s black ancestry came from his or her mother’s side or his or her father’s side. The possibility that a white woman could have a child with a black man, whether he was a slave or a free man, resulted in mulatto children being exiled from Virginia, and ultimately led to the creation of “one-drop rules.” Such rules held that an individual would be classified as black, despite the fact that his or her genetic makeup was primarily white…

Subsequently, Virginia, as well as other states, passed similar laws aimed at the prevention of interracial marriages. Pursuant to such laws, any white person who married a non-white would be exiled from Virginia. The language used in the statute is striking, as interracial marriage is referred to as “that abominable mixture and spurious issue which hereafter may encrease in this dominion.” This serves as yet another example of the hierarchical system of classification based on race at this time in American history.

Later statutes based on the “one-drop rule” departed from the 1662 Virginia statute in the sense that they did not take a “physical appearance approach.” Such “[f]ormula-based definitions of race” became increasingly popular in the South, and Booker T. Washington provided an accurate description of what they entailed: “[I]f a person is known to have one percent of African blood in his veins, he ceases to be a white man. The ninety-nine percent of Caucasian blood does not weigh by the side of the one-percent of African blood. . . . The person is a Negro every time.” In practice, most states with race-based statutes formed under the “one-drop rule” held that individuals who had at least one black grandparent were legally black. It should be noted, however, that “as the likelihood that more biracial people could be classified as white… the laws became more restrictive… finally culminating in the one-drop rule…

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One of the Family: Metis Culture in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Saskatchewan

University of British Columbia Press
2010-02-22
360 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-7748-1729-5

Brenda Macdougall, Chair in Métis Studies
University of Ottawa

In recent years there has been growing interest in the social and cultural attributes that define the Metis as both Aboriginal and a distinct people. The study of Metis identity formation has also become one of the most innovative ways to explore cultural encounters and change in North American history and anthropology.

In One of the Family, Brenda Macdougall draws on diverse written and oral sources and employs the concept of wahkootowin—the Cree term for a worldview that privileges family and values relatedness between all beings—to trace the emergence of a distinct Metis community at Île à la Crosse in northern Saskatchewan. Wahkootowin describes how relationships in the nineteenth century were supposed to work and helps to explain how the Metis negotiated with local economic and religious institutions while creating and nurturing—through marriage choices and living arrangements, adoption and the selection of godparents, economic decisions and employment—a society that emphasized family obligation and responsibility.

This path-breaking study showcases how one Metis community created a distinct identity rooted in Aboriginal values about family and shaped by the fur trade and the Roman Catholic Church. It also offers a model for future research and discussion that will appeal to anyone interested in the history of the fur trade or Metis culture and identity.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Methodology and Sources
• Note on Writing Conventions
• Introduction
• Chapter One: “They are strongly attached to the country of rivers, lakes, and forests”: The Social Landscapes of the Northwest
• Chapter Two: “The bond that connected one human being to another”: Social Construction of the Metis Family
• Chapter Three: “To live in the land of my mother”: Residency and Patronymic Connections Across the Northwest
• Chapter Four: “After a man has tasted of the comforts of married life this living alone comes pretty tough”: Family, Acculturation, and Roman Catholicism
• Chapter Five: “The only men obtainable who know the country and Indians are all married”: Family, Labour, and the HBC
• Chapter Six: “The HalfBreeds of this place always did and always will dance”: Competition, Freemen, and Contested Spaces
• Chapter Seven: “I Thought it advisable to furnish him”: Freemen to Free Traders in the Northwest Fur Trade
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects

The Flemish Bastard and the Former Indians: Métis and Identity in Seventeenth-Century New York

The American Indian Quarterly
Volume 34, Number 1 (Winter 2010)
pages 83-108
E-ISSN: 1534-1828 Print ISSN: 0095-182X
DOI: 10.1353/aiq.0.0087

Tom Arne Midtrød, Professor of History
University of Iowa

In 1709 the English Board of Trade recommended the settlement of three thousand Palatine migrants on the Hudson and Mohawk rivers in New York. The officials expressed confidence that these colonists would not only produce naval stores for the fleet but also intermarry with the Indians “as the French do” and lay the foundation for an expanding fur trade. They knew well that French Canadians had long mingled with Indians and produced children of mixed ancestry, or métis. What they perhaps did not know was that New York had long had métis of its own.

Compared to Canada, New York never had a large métis population, and some historians have commented upon the social distance between Dutch and Indians. Nevertheless, intimacy resulting in métis children does not seem to have been uncommon in this colony. Dutch observers charged Indians with lack of sexual restraint, and liaisons between Dutch men and Native women sometimes worried the authorities. In 1638 the Dutch council prohibited adultery with blacks and Indians and at least occasionally took legal action. Manor lord and patroon Kiliaen van Rensselaer warned his nephew Arent van Curler and forbade his tenants from sleeping with Indian females. Sexual promiscuity with Indian women was among the charges levied against provincial secretary Cornelis van Tiehnoven by his political enemies in the 1640s. Prosecutions of colonists impregnating Indian women are known from the early English period.

Native people probably thought these relations should involve a degree of reciprocity and mutual obligation. Historians have stressed that many Native peoples saw marriage and other intimate relations as means of incorporating outsiders, and an early Dutch observer alluded to the existence of this practice among Native traders in New Netherland…

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Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture

University of Massachusetts Press
November 2008
224 pages
paper ISBN 978-1-55849-675-0; cloth ISBN 978-1-55849-674-3

Baz Dreisinger, Associate Professor of English
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

A provocative look at the shifting contours of racial identity in America

In the United States, the notion of racial “passing” is usually associated with blacks and other minorities who seek to present themselves as part of the white majority. Yet as Baz Dreisinger demonstrates in this fascinating study, another form of this phenomenon also occurs, if less frequently, in American culture: cases in which legally white individuals are imagined, by themselves or by others, as passing for black.

In Near Black, Dreisinger explores the oft-ignored history of what she calls “reverse racial passing” by looking at a broad spectrum of short stories, novels, films, autobiographies, and pop-culture discourse that depict whites passing for black. The protagonists of these narratives, she shows, span centuries and cross contexts, from slavery to civil rights, jazz to rock to hip-hop. Tracing their role from the 1830s to the present day, Dreisinger argues that central to the enterprise of reverse passing are ideas about proximity. Because “blackness,” so to speak, is imagined as transmittable, proximity to blackness is invested with the power to turn whites black: those who are literally “near black” become metaphorically “near black.” While this concept first arose during Reconstruction in the context of white anxieties about miscegenation, it was revised by later white passers for whom proximity to blackness became an authenticating badge.

As Dreisinger shows, some white-to-black passers pass via self-identification. Jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow, for example, claimed that living among blacks and playing jazz had literally darkened his skin. Others are taken for black by a given community for a period of time. This was the experience of Jewish critic Waldo Frank during his travels with Jean Toomer, as well as that of disc jockey Hoss Allen, master of R&B slang at Nashville’s famed WLAC radio. For journalists John Howard Griffin and Grace Halsell, passing was a deliberate and fleeting experiment, while for Mark Twain’s fictional white slave in Pudd’nhead Wilson, it is a near-permanent and accidental occurrence.

Whether understood as a function of proximity or behavior, skin color or cultural heritage, self-definition or the perception of others, what all these variants of “reverse passing” demonstrate, according to Dreisinger, is that the lines defining racial identity in American culture are not only blurred but subject to change.

Policies of Racial Classification and the Politics of Racial Inequality

In Suzanne Mettler, Joe Soss, and Jacob Hacker (eds.). Remaking America: Democracy and Public Policy in an Age of Inequality
Russell Sage Foundation
November 2007
41 pages

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Vesla Mae Weaver, Assistant Professor
The Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
University of Virginia

Introduction: Policy, Politics, Inequality, and Race

In 1890, the United States census bureau reported that the nation contained 6,337,980 negroes, 956,989 “mulattoes,” 105,135 “quadroons,” and 69,936 “octoroons.” In the early twentieth century it also reported the number of whites of “mixed parentage,” the number of Indians with one-quarter, half, or three-quarters black or white “blood,” and the number of part-Hawaiians and part-Malays. The boundaries between racial and ethnic groups, and even the definition of race and ethnicity, were blurred and contested. By 1930, however, this ambiguity largely disappeared from the census. Anyone with any “Negro blood” was counted as a Negro; whites no longer had mixed parentage; Indians were mainly identified by tribe rather than ancestry; and a consistent treatment of Asians was slowly developing. In other work we examine how and why these classifications rose and fell; here we examine the consequences for contemporary American politics and policy.

Official governmental classification systems can create as well as reflect social, economic, and political inequality, just as policies of taxation, welfare, or social services can and do. Official classification defines groups, determines boundaries between them, and assigns individuals to groups; in “ranked ethnic systems” (Horowitz 2000), this process enshrines structurally the dominant group’s belief about who belongs where, which groups deserve what, and ultimately who gets what. Official racial categories have determined whether a person may enter the United States, attain citizenship, own a laundry, marry a loved one, become a firefighter, enter a medical school, attend an elementary school near home, avoid an internment camp, vote, run for office, annul a marriage, receive appropriate medical treatment for syphilis, join a tribe, sell handicrafts, or open a casino. Private racial categories have affected whether an employer offers a person a job, whether a criminal defendant gets lynched, whether a university admits an applicant, and whether a heart attack victim receives the proper therapy. In these and many more ways, racial classification helps to create and maintain poverty and political, social, and economic inequality. Thus systems of racial categorization are appropriate subjects for analysis through a policy-centered perspective because they are “strategies for achieving political goals, structures shaping political interchange, and symbolic objects conveying status and identity” (p. 2 of Intro). Race is also, not coincidentally, the pivot around which political contests about equality have been waged for most of this country’s history.

The same classification system that promotes inequality may also undermine it. Once categorization generates groups with sharply defined boundaries, the members of that group can draw on their shared identity within the boundary to mobilize against their subordinate position—what one set of authors call strategic essentialism (Omi and Winant 1994). Thus classification laws are recursive, containing the elements for both generating and challenging group-based inequality. For this reason—and also because demographic patterns and other social relations on which classification rests can change—categorizations are unstable and impermanent.

We explore these abstract claims by examining the past century of racial classification in the United States. That period encompassed significant change in systems of classification and their attendant hierarchies; thus we can see how classification and inequality are related, as well as tracing the political dynamics that reinforce or challenge inequality-sustaining policies. From the Civil War era through the 1920s, the Black population was partly deconstructed through official attention to mulattos (and sometimes quadroons and octoroons), then reconstructed through court decisions and state-level “one drop of blood” laws. As of 1930, a clear and simple racial hierarchy was inscribed in the American polity — with all the attendant horrors of Jim Crow segregation. However, the one-drop policy that reinforced racial inequality also undermined it. From the 1930s through the 1970s, that is, the Black population solidified though a growing sense of racial consciousness and shared fate, and developed the political capacity to contest their poverty and unequal status…

Read the entire chapter here.

Crises of Whiteness and Empire in Colonial Indochina: The Removal of Abandoned Eurasian Children From the Vietnamese Milieu, 1890–1956

Journal of Social History
Volume 43, Number 3 (Spring 2010)
pages 587-613
E-ISSN: 1527-1897 Print ISSN: 0022-4529
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.0.0304

Christina Firpo, Assistant Professor of History
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

From 1890–1956, non-governmental welfare agencies worked with the French colonial government in Indochina to remove Eurasian children, who had been abandoned by their French fathers, from their Vietnamese mothers and the Vietnamese cultural environment. In an era marked by historical exigencies, perceived threats to white prestige, and inherent challenges to the colonial patriarchy, such children were believed to be a threat to colonial security and white prestige. The racial formations of abandoned Eurasian children in colonial Indochina changed repeatedly in response to these threats. Drawing from the rhetoric of racial sciences and led by anxieties over changes colonial security, French civilians increasingly and colonial government administrators increasingly made the case that these children where white and must be removed from their Vietnamese mothers’ care, using force if necessary.

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The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries

Palgrave Macmillan
January 2005
176 pages
Size 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Paperback ISBN: 1-4039-6708-3
Hardcover ISBN: 1-4039-6563-3

Edited by:

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Assistant Professor of Luso-Brazilian Literature
University of California, San Diego

The Masters and the Slaves theorizes the interface of plantation relations with nationalist projects throughout the Americas. In readings that cover a wide range of genres–from essays and scientific writing to poetry, memoirs and the visual arts–this work investigates the post-slavery discourses of Brazil, the United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti and Martinique. Indebted to Orlando Patterson‘s Slavery and Social Death (1982) and Paul Gilroy‘s The Black Atlantic (1993), these essays fill a void in studies of plantation power relations for their comparative, interdisciplinary approach and their investment in reading slavery through the gaze of contemporary theory, with particularly strong ties to psychoanalytic and gender studies interrogations of desire and performativity.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• The Sugar Daddy: Gilberto Freyre and the White Man’s Love for Blacks—César Braga-Pinto
• Writing Brazilian Culture—Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond
• Authority’s Double Shadow: Thomas Jefferson and the Architecture of Illegitimacy—Helena Holgersson
• Fixing History: Race, Nation, and the Symbolics of Servitude in Haitian Noirisme —Valerie Kaussen
• Fanon as ‘Metrocolonial’ Flaneur in the Caribbean Post-Plantation/Algerian Colonial City—Nalini Natarajan
• From the Tropics: Cultural Subjectivity and Politics in Gilberto Freyre—Jossiana Arroyo
• Hybridity and Mestizaje: Syncretism or Subversive Complicity—Ramón Grosfoguel
• Giants of Three Colors: A Writer and an Artist Imagine Racial Mixture in 1940s Brazil—Luiza Franco Moreira
• Messianic Melancholic Imagination: Imagine Community with the Dead—Shreerekha Subramanian

White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity

Palgrave Macmillan
December 2007
208 pages
Size 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 1-4039-7595-7

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Associate Professor of Luso-Brazilian Literature
University of California, San Diego

White Negritude analyzes the discourse of mestiçagem (mestizaje, métissage, or “mixing”) in Brazil. Focused on Gilberto Freyre‘s sociology of plantation relations, it interrogates the relation of power to writing and canon formation, and the emergence of an exclusionary, ethnographic discourse that situates itself as the gatekeeper of African “survivals” in decline. Taking Freyre’s master/slave paradigm as a point of departure for theorizing a particular form of racial and authorial impostery, this book analyzes the construction of race and raced writing in Brazil in relation to U.S. identity politics and Caribbean “mestizo projects.”

Table of Contents

• Vanishing Primitives: An Introduction
• Poetry and the Plantation: Jorge de Lima‘s White Authorship in a Caribbean Perspective
• White Man in the Tropics: Authorship and Atmospheric Blackness in Gilberto Freyre
• Joaquim Nabuco: Abolitionism and Erasure in the Americas
• From the Plantation Manor to the Sociologist’s Study: Democracy, Lusotropicalism, and the Scene of Writing

Indians and Mestizos: Identity and Urban Popular Culture in Andean Peru

Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume 26, Issue 2 (June 2000)
pages 239 – 253
DOI: 10.1080/03057070050010093

Fiona Wilson

The article begins with a discussion of the chronology of conquest and liberation in Peru and reflects on the changing meanings given to the racial categories of Indian and mestizo (half-caste) in colonial and post-colonial periods. Using popular culture as a lens, the transformations taking place in images of race and urban social identities are analysed, using as a case study a provincial town in the Andean highlands in the course of the twentieth century. Through changing forms of street theatre urban groups worked out new identities by weaving together, juxtaposing and contesting different cultural forms. The article explores in detail two manifestations of street theatre that predominated. These are the Dance of the Inca in the 1900s that addressed Indian/white relations, and carnaval where relations between mestizo and white were played out for much of the twentieth century.

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