Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Race Literature

Stanford University Press
2002
256 pages
8 illustrations
Cloth Edition: ISBN-10: 0804736391; ISBN-13: 9780804736398
Paperback Edition ISBN-10: 0804736405; ISBN-13: 9780804736404

Edited by

Jonathan Brennan, Professor of English
Mission College, Santa Clara, California

This collection presents the first scholarly attempt to map the rapidly emerging field of mixed-race literature, defined as texts written by authors who represent multiple cultural and literary traditions—African-European, Native-European, Eurasian, African-Asian, and Native-African American. It not only allows scholars to engage a wide variety of mixed race literatures and critical approaches, but also to situate these literatures in relation to contemporary fields of literary inquiry.

The editor’s introduction provides a historical context for the development of mixed-race identity and literature, summarizing existing scholarship on the subject, interrogating the social construction of race and mixed race, and arguing for a literary (rather than literal) inquiry into mixed-race texts.

The essays examine such subjects as mythmaking and interpreting; the illustration of mixed-race texts; the mixed-race drama of Velina Hasu Houston; race, gender, and transnational spaces; the meaning and negotiation of identity; the theory of kin-aesthetic in Asian-Native American literatures; and Maori-Pakeha mixed-race writing in New Zealand.

The editor’s conclusion argues that rather than following the tragic employment assigned to mulattos, octoroons, and half-bloods, the evolution of mixed-race texts has been from tragedy to trickster. The role of the tragic trickster facilitates a shift in which new and distinct literary strategies and forms emerge. These models represent critical sites from which to theorize the overall formation of American literature and to complicate its formation in ways that unfold our usual notions of race, gender, and culture.

Mixed Race America and the Law: A Reader

New York Univeristy Press
2003-02-01
512 pages
ISBN: 9780814742570

Edited by:

Kevin R. Johnson, Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicano/a Studies
University of California Davis

For the first time in United States history, the Year 2000 census allowed people to check more than one box to identify their race. This new way of gathering data and characterizing race and ethnicity reflects important changes in how racial identity is understood in America. Besides acknowledging the presence of mixed race citizens, this new understanding promises to have major implications for American law and policy.

With this anthology, Kevin R. Johnson brings together ground-breaking scholarship on the mixed race experience in America to examine the impact of law on these citizens. The foundational essays that comprise the collection present the historical, social, and political contexts surrounding the body of law that addresses race while analyzing the implications of multiracialism. Divided into 12 sections, the reader includes an introduction by Johnson and essential essays by contributors such as Garrett Epps, Judith Resnick, Richard Delgado, Ian Haney López, Randall Kennedy, and Patricia Hill Collins. Selections address miscegenation, racial classification, interracial adoption, the 2000 census, “passing,” and other topics; each section includes questions to promote further discussion. This book is an invaluable resource for examining the complexities of racial categories in modern America.

Read the entire introduction here.

Race in another America: the significance of skin color in Brazil

Princeton University Press
2004
336 pages
27 line illus. 5 halftones
6 x 9 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 9780691127927
Ebook ISBN: 9781400837434

Edward E. Telles, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

• Winner of the 2006 Oliver Cromwell Cox Award, Section on Race and Ethnic Minorities, American Sociological Association
• Winner of the 2006 Distinguished Book Award, American Sociological Association
• Winner of the 2005 Otis Dudley Duncan Award, Section on Sociology of Population, American Sociological Association
• Winner of the 2005 Hubert Herring Award, Pacific Coast Council of Latin American Studies
• Winner of the 2005 Best Book on Brazil in English, Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association

This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date book on the increasingly important and controversial subject of race relations in Brazil. North American scholars of race relations frequently turn to Brazil for comparisons, since its history has many key similarities to that of the United States. Brazilians have commonly compared themselves with North Americans, and have traditionally argued that race relations in Brazil are far more harmonious because the country encourages race mixture rather than formal or informal segregation.

More recently, however, scholars have challenged this national myth, seeking to show that race relations are characterized by exclusion, not inclusion, and that fair-skinned Brazilians continue to be privileged and hold a disproportionate share of wealth and power.

In this sociological and demographic study, Edward Telles seeks to understand the reality of race in Brazil and how well it squares with these traditional and revisionist views of race relations. He shows that both schools have it partly right–that there is far more miscegenation in Brazil than in the United States–but that exclusion remains a serious problem. He blends his demographic analysis with ethnographic fieldwork, history, and political theory to try to “understand” the enigma of Brazilian race relations–how inclusiveness can coexist with exclusiveness.

The book also seeks to understand some of the political pathologies of buying too readily into unexamined ideas about race relations. In the end, Telles contends, the traditional myth that Brazil had harmonious race relations compared with the United States encouraged the government to do almost nothing to address its shortcomings.

Read the entire first chapter in HTML or PDF format.

Read a book review here.

From Jamestown 1607 to 2007, the American Mosaic: A Multicultural Society

National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS)
People of Color Conference 2006

Christine Madsen
Rocky Mount Academy (North Carolina)

Some of the original settlers in colonial Virginia formed self-sustaining mixed race communities. The history of these communities will be used as an entrance point to discuss the invention of racial identities as social constructs.

View the Powerpoint presentation here.

The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South

HarperCollins
Imprint: Smithsonian
2009-05-19
224 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780061375736; ISBN10: 006137573X
On Sale: 2009-05-19

W. Ralph Eubanks, Bernard Schwartz Fellow
New America Foundation

In 1914, in defiance of his middle-class landowning family, a young white man named James Morgan Richardson married a light-skinned black woman named Edna Howell. Over more than twenty years of marriage, they formed a strong family and built a house at the end of a winding sandy road in South Alabama, a place where their safety from the hostile world around them was assured, and where they developed a unique racial and cultural identity. Jim and Edna Richardson were Ralph Eubanks’s grandparents.

Part personal journey, part cultural biography, The House at the End of the Road examines a little-known piece of this country’s past: interracial families that survived and prevailed despite Jim Crow laws, including those prohibiting mixed-race marriage. As he did in his acclaimed 2003 memoir, Ever Is a Long Time, Eubanks uses interviews, oral history, and archival research to tell a story about race in American life that few readers have experienced. Using the Richardson family as a microcosm of American views on race and identity, The House at the End of the Road examines why ideas about racial identity rooted in the eighteenth century persist today. In lyrical, evocative prose, this extraordinary book pierces the heart of issues of race and racial identity, leaving us ultimately hopeful about the world as our children might see it.

Browse the contents of the book here.

The Historical Problematization of ‘Mixed Race’ in Psychological and Human-Scientific Discourses

Defining difference: Race and Racism in the History of Psychology
2004
Edited by Andrew Winston
pages pp. 79-108
American Psychological Association

Thomas Teo, Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
York University

This paper reconstructs techniques of problematization regarding “mixed race” from Enlightenment inspired anthropological discourses to the North-American psychological discourses of the present time. Two central techniques of problematization are discussed. The conceptual technique of problematization, used in bio-psychological discourse at the beginning of the 20th century, transformed a lack of evidence into invoking metaphysical concepts such as disharmony. Sociological and social-psychological discourses changed problems of society with hybridity into problems of individuals. The empirical technique of problematization refers to the repeated testing of the inferiority of hybrid groups, for example of the “mulatto hypothesis.” Finally, it is shown how multiracial academics in the contemporary discourse shifted the discourse by focusing on problems that biracial people experience within society. It is suggested that the reconstruction of hybridity illustrates the epistemological and ethical shortcomings of a paradigm that considers humans as objects and not as subjects of research.

Read the entire chapter here.

The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City

Princeton University Press
November 2004
320 pages
6 x 9; 23 halftones. 4 maps.
Paperback ISBN: 9780691130484

Mary Ting Yi Lui, Assistant Professor of American Studies and History
Yale University

2005 AAAS Book Award, History category

In the summer of 1909, the gruesome murder of nineteen-year-old Elsie Sigel sent shock waves through New York City and the nation at large. The young woman’s strangled corpse was discovered inside a trunk in the midtown Manhattan apartment of her reputed former Sunday school student and lover, a Chinese man named Leon Ling.

Through the lens of this unsolved murder, Mary Ting Yi Lui offers a fascinating snapshot of social and sexual relations between Chinese and non-Chinese populations in turn-of-the-century New York City. Sigel’s murder was more than a notorious crime, Lui contends. It was a clear signal that attempts to maintain geographical and social boundaries between the city’s Chinese male and white female populations had failed.

When police discovered Sigel and Leon Ling’s love letters, giving rise to the theory that Leon Ling killed his lover in a fit of jealous rage, this idea became even more embedded in the public consciousness. New Yorkers condemned the work of Chinese missions and eagerly participated in the massive national and international manhunt to locate the vanished Leon Ling.

Lui explores how the narratives of racial and sexual danger that arose from the Sigel murder revealed widespread concerns about interracial social and sexual mixing during the era. She also examines how they provoked far-reaching skepticism about regulatory efforts to limit the social and physical mobility of Chinese immigrants and white working-class and middle-class women.

Through her thorough re-examination of this notorious murder, Lui reveals in unprecedented detail how contemporary politics of race, gender, and sexuality shaped public responses to the presence of Chinese immigrants during the Chinese exclusion era.

Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition

Penn State Press
2001 (Originally published in 1992)
232 pages
6 x 9
ISBN 978-0-271-02172-0

F. James Davis, Professor Emeritus of Sociology
Illinois State University

Winner of the 1992 Outstanding Book on the Subject of Human Rights from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in the United States.

Tenth Anniversary Edition

Reprinted many times since its first publication in 1991, Who Is Black? has become a staple in college classrooms throughout the United States, helping students understand this nation’s history of miscegenation and the role that the “one-drop rule” has played in it. In this special anniversary edition, the author brings the story up to date in an epilogue. There he highlights some revealing responses to Who Is Black? and examines recent challenges to the one-drop rule, including the multiracial identity movement and a significant change in the census classification of racial and ethnic groups.

Table of Contents

• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE: THE NATION’S RULE
  • The One-Drop Rule Defined
  • Black Leaders, But Predominantly White
  • Plessy, Phipps, and Other Challenges in Courts
  • Census Enumeration of Blacks
  • Uniqueness of the One-Drop Rule
• CHAPTER TWO: MISCEGENATION AND BELIEFS
  • Racial Classification and Miscegenation
  • Racist Beliefs About Miscegenation
  • The Judge Brady Paradox
  • Miscegenation in Africa and Europe
  • Race vs. Beliefs About Race
• CHAPTER THREE: CONFLICTING RULES
  • Early Miscegenation in the Upper South: The Rule Emerges
  • South Carolina and Louisiana: A Different Rule
  • Miscegenation on Black Belt Plantations
  • Reconstruction and the One-Drop Rule
  • The Status of Free Mulattoes, North and South
  • The Emergence and Spread of the One-Drop Rule
• CHAPTER FOUR: THE RULE BECOMES FIRM
  • Creation of the Jim Crow System
  • The One-Drop Rule Under Jim Crow
  • Effects of the Black Renaissance of the 1920s
  • The Rule and Myrdal’s Rank Order of Discriminations
  • Sexual Norms and the Rule: Jim Crow vs. Apartheid
  • Effects of The Fall of Jim Crow
  • De Facto Segregation and Miscegenation
  • Miscegenation Since the 1960s
  • Development of the One-Drop Rule in the Twentieth Century
• CHAPTER FIVE: OTHER PLACES, OTHER DEFINITIONS
  • Racial Hybrid Status Lower Than Both Parents Groups
  • Status Higher Than Either Parent Group
  • In-Between Status: South Africa and Others
  • Highly Variable Class Status: Latin America
  • Two Variants in the Caribbean
  • Equality for the Racially Mixed in Hawaii
  • Same Status as the Subordinate Group: The One-Drop Rule
  • Status of an Assimilating Minority
  • Contrasting Socially Constructed Rules
• CHAPTER SIX: BLACK ACCEPTANCE OF THE RULE
  • Alex Haley, Lillian Smith, and Others
  • Transracial Adoptions and the One-Drop Rule
  • Rejecton of the Rule: Garvey, American Indians, and Others
  • Black Acceptance: Reasons and Implications
• CHAPTER SEVEN: AMBIGUITIES, STRAINS, CONFLICTS, AND TRAUMAS
  • The Death of Walter White’s Father and Other Traumas
  • Collective Anxieties About Racial Identity: Some Cases
  • Personal Identity: Seven Modes of Adjustment
  • Lena Home’s Struggles with Her Racial Identity
  • Problems of Administering the One-Drop Rule
  • Misperceptions of the Racial Identity of South Asians, Arabs, and Others
  • Sampling Errors in Studying American Blacks
  • Blockage of Full Assimilation of Blacks
  • Costs of the One-Drop Rule
• CHAPTER EIGHT: ISSUES AND PROSPECTS
  • A Massive Distortion? A Monstrous Myth?
  • Clues for Change in Deviations from the Rule
  • Clues for Change in Costs of the Rule
  • Possible Direction: Which Alternative?
  • Prospects for the Future
• EPILOGUE TO THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY
• EDITION
• WORKS CITED
• INDEX

Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s Mulattos: From Barefoot Madonna to Maggie the Ripper

Journal of American Studies
Volume 41, Issue 1 (April 2007)
pages 83-114
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875806002763

Jo-Ann Morgan, Associate Professor of Art History and African American Studies
Western Illinois University

With emancipation a fait accompli by 1865, one might ask why Kentucky-born Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835–1907), former Confederate soldier, son of a border state slaveholder, began painting slaves then. Noble had known the “peculiar institution” at first hand, albeit from a privileged position within the master class. As a result, his choice to embark upon a career as a painter using historical incidents from slavery makes for an interesting study. Were the paintings a way of atoning for his Confederate culpability, a rebel pounding his sword into a paintbrush to appease the conquering North? Or was he capitalizing on his unique geographic perspective as a scion of slave-trafficking Frankfort, Kentucky, soon to head a prestigious art school in Cincinnati, the city where so many runaways first tasted freedom? Between 1865 and 1869 Noble exhibited in northern cities a total of eight paintings with African American subjects. Two of these, The Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis (1865, repainted ca. 1870) and Margaret Garner (1867), featured mixed-race women, or mulattos, as they had come to be called. From a young female up for auction, to the famous fugitive Margaret Garner, his portrayals show a transformation taking place within perceptions of biracial women in post-emancipation America. Opinions about mulattos surfaced in a range of theoretical discussions, from the scientific to the political, as strategists North and South envisioned evolving social policy.

Margaret Garner or The Modern Medea (1867)

Raising Eurasia: Race, Class, and Age in French and British Colonies

Comparative Studies in Society and History
Volume 51, Issue 2 (April 2009)
pages 314-343
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417509000140

David M. Pomfret, Associate Professor
The University of Hong Kong

Sexual relationships between European men and indigenous women produced racially mixed offspring in all of Europe’s empires. Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has shown how these persons of mixed race, seen as transgressing the interior frontiers of supposedly fixed categories of racial and juridical difference upon which colonizers’ prestige and authority rested, posed a challenge to the elaborate but fragile sets of subjective criteria by which “whiteness” was defined.  Scholars critiquing the traditional historiography of empire for its tendency to present colonial elites as homogeneous communities pursuing common interests have emphasized the repertoire of exclusionary tactics, constructed along lines of race, class, and gender, devised within European colonial communities in response to the presence of “mixed bloods.” This article aims to show that the presence of people of biracial heritage inspired collaborative as well as exclusionary responses in outposts of European empire during the late imperial era. It also illustrates how, with white prestige and authority at stake, age, age-related subcategories, and in particular childhood and adolescence, powerfully underpinned responses to the threat this group posed to the cultural reproduction of racialized identity.

Footnotes
Acknowledgments: Research for this article was generously supported by the Hong Kong Government Research Grants Council Competitive Earmarked Research Grant (HKU7455/05H).