Mixed Race Studies

“Race Crossing in Man: The Analysis of Metrical Characters” [Review by L. C. Dunn]

Race Crossing in Man: The Analysis of Metrical Characters. J. C. Trevor (“Eugenics Laboratory Memoirs,” XXXVI.) London: Cambridge University Press, 1953. 45 pp., 1 plate.

American Anthropologist
Volume 56, Issue 5 (October 1954)
pages 923-924
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1954.56.5.02a00490

L. C. Dunn
Columbia University

This is a review and analysis of nine selected sets of data published before 1938. Those cases were chosen in which anthropological measurements of living “hybrid” subjects were available, together with measurements of known or assumed parent racial groups. All involved marriage between European and non-European parents. Trevor’s chief interest was to test by existing data two opinions frequently held by anthropologists: first, that the average values of physical characters of hybrid groups are intermediate between those of the parent races; and second, that populations derived from crosses of distinct races are highly variable and often show bimodal or multimodal frequency distributions. By use of adequate biometrical methods the first opinion is sustained; the second clearly is not. The absence of the anticipated high variability of hybrids was a surprise to the author, who asks whether variability might have been reduced by the tendency of hybrid groups to be inbred. He considers this possible. The reviewer would suggest that inbreeding has two effects relevant to this question: first, reduction of heterozygosity within each related group; second, a tendency toward divergence between different family or clan groups leading toward increased variance of the total population which is so divided. Much would depend on whether the hybrid population was dispersed as in the case of American Negroes, or concentrated and localized as in the case of the Norfolk Islanders. It is doubtful whether any data now exist by which such questions can be adequately tested for human groups. The variability of mensurable traits in all human populations may be such as to render imperceptible the differences due to differing degrees of “hybridity” within and between races. Trevor’s paper is a contribution to the methodology of analysis of such difficult questions as those mentioned, and a challenge to anthropologists to produce more and better data to which the methods can be applied.

Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiah [Amaye Review]

New Black Arts Alliance
2011-02-18

Muli Amaye, Part 1 Tutor, Creative Writing
Lancaster University

Daniel R. McNeil. Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic: Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs. London: Routledge, 2009, 186 pp. Hardback ISBN 978-0-415-87226-3, Paperback ISBN 978-0-415-89391-6, eBook ISBN 978-0-203-85736-6.

As a part of the Routledge Studies on African and Black Diaspora this book is a necessary and useful addition. The fact that it brings a lot of research and theory together makes it a good starting point for information on an important part of the Diaspora that is often overlooked, other than with curiosity or somewhat derogatory terms.

Overall the book is informative and provides the reader with extensive notes at the end broken down by chapters and a thorough bibliography. McNeil has linked theories and philosophies to literature and contemporary TV/film in a way that provides the reader with understandable examples and brings the text to life. The writing is accessible and readable using language in a way that opens the book up from pure academia and puts it into the public sphere.

The book is split into 6 main chapters plus a preface and a conclusion. The headings for the chapters do not give a lot on information for the reader looking for specific information, however, the short preface deals with this. Each chapter draws on what has been written previously i.e. Schulyer, Rank and Du Bois are used comparatively throughout, which gives the book coherence.

Overall this book is a comprehensive look at the mixed race population bringing the debate right up to date and offering a fresh look at theories and philosophies by introducing creative expression into the forum. By challenging what has been written and debated before McNeil encourages the reader to think beyond what has always been on offer by leading theorists and to question whether it is time for a fresh look.

The following is a very brief overview of each chapter.

Preface

The preface introduces the book immediately by offering opening literary credits followed by a personal anecdote. This promises a fresh look at theory and literature offering grounded in reality. It gives a brief outline of each chapter, which is a useful for research purposes, although the length and accessibility of the text makes reading the whole book easy.

McNeil begins his acknowledgement outlining his reasons for writing this book, which once more added a personal touch for the reader particularly when he explains that the text was born from anger. The reading belies this emotion because it is offered as a scholarly text and fits well within that remit.

Chapter 1 – New People?

Starting with a quote from Rudyard Kipling, The White Man’s Burden (1899) ending with the line ‘Half devil and half child’ McNeill sets up the tone of the chapter and alerts the reader to his critique of what has gone before. The title indicates that McNeill is not making a judgment with what is to come but is questioning and enquiring through the literature that has gone before.

This chapter, as expected, is a literature review and offers the reader an in depth insight into the literature that has gone before and gives a historical account of the ‘half-caste’ and ‘mulatto’ from colonization onwards. This is very informative and gives the reader the opportunity to research further from Du Bois, Schulyer and Rogers to the novel Quicksand by Nella Larsen. McNeill refers to philosophers such as Rank and Freud, Fanon and introduces lesser-known theorists as well as making reference to modern day mixed race celebrities.

This chapter is American-centric although there are a few references to the UK. What stands out immediately is the reference to female writers and actors, which makes a welcome change.

Chapter 2 – An Individualistic Age?

This chapter begins with a quote from Otto Rank making reference to Freud and opens with a reference to both Marx and Freud dreaming about ‘grotesque racial hybrids’. This sets the tone for the chapter, which then goes on to give a brief history of Otto Rank and his ‘psychoanalytic study of the artist’. McNeil covers Du Bois and Fanon in separate headed sections that are informative and turns up some little known information that questions the male orientated view of these well-known philosophers, particularly around light skinned females.

What is interesting is the references McNeil makes throughout to females rather than males, which is a refreshing change.

Chapter 3 – Je suis metisse

This chapter begins with two quotes, one from The Diary of Anais Nin 1934-1939 and one from Nancy Cunard’s Negro (1970) both of which make reference to Harlem.

The chapter focuses on the female and American culture. It gives an insight into the life of concert pianist and composer, Philippa Schuyler and her denial of her racial background in the 1950s.

McNeil explores this fully with referencing and quotes that shows his extensive research. He offers a fully complex character who does not conform to what is expected either of a female or a person of colour and it is this thorough investigation and reference to the philosophies that have gone before that make it interesting and thought provoking.

Chapter 4 – “I. Am. A Light Grey Canadian.”

This chapter begins with quotes by Marx and Rank. As the title suggests it is an exploration of the mixed race Canadian and introduces the work of Lawrence Hill who is also a novelist and is described by McNeil as ‘probably the most famous name in Canadian Studies of mixed race.’

The chapter quickly moves on to Dr Daniel Hill’s studies and after thorough and comparative investigation concludes that the writer does not necessarily agree with other scholars who claim his work updates Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, but as his final sentence in this chapter states it is about adding ‘context and understanding…in the study of mixed-race identities.’

Chapter 5 “I’m Black. Not Mixed. Not Canadian. Not African. Just Black.”

This chapter begins with quotes from Fanon and Rosa Emilia Warder.

The focus is once more on Canada and the ‘Altantic thinkers’ but is informative and explores Fanon and James then moves onto Merseyside, which brings the text to the UK and McNeil’s personal interest. This is once more well researched and is thorough in its approach looking at both male and female perspectives as it moves from Nova Scotia to Merseyside and incorporates Hollywood stars and TV personalities.

Chapter 6 “Yes, We’re All Individuals!” “I’m Not.”

This chapter begins with a long quote from Maria P. Root, “Multiracial Bill of Rights” and a further quote from Siobhan Somerville.

The whole chapter is dedicated to mixed race celebrities and explores and examines through film and books and reference to philosophies and theories. This chapter incorporates sexuality, which the quote from Somerville suggests. McNeil uses contemporary films such as “Walking Tall” (2004) which stars ‘The Rock’ to illustrate his points. He ends the chapter in discussion of footballs Stan Collymore and referring to Rank and bringing the discussion back to Liverpool and the UK.

Conclusion

The short conclusion starts with a quote by SuAndi and a short paragraph outlines her stance with regard to Gilroy’s Black Atlantic.

McNeil does not offer the usual summing up within his conclusion but offers an in-depth look into the British comedy, The Office and makes reference to Star Trek. This does not detract from the book as an excellent source of information but reiterates the fresh eye with which he has surveyed the literature and film that has gone before and offered it to the reader with a new and clear perspective.

Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas [Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 92, Issue 3 (2005)
pages 974-975
DOI: 10.2307/3660015

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas. Ed. by David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. xii, 329 pp. Cloth, isbn 0-252-02939-9. Paper, isbn 0-252-07194-8.)

Noting that free people of color never fully escaped the degrading effects of race-based slavery, David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine offer fourteen essays that explore women’s experiences of race, gender, and class in the slaveholding societies of the United States, the Caribbean, and South America. The book is divided into two sections, both of which contain rich information about enslaved as well as free women of color. The first section is organized around the conditions under which women achieved freedom; the second, around women’s economic and social adjustment to freedom. Key themes such as quality of freedom, economic status, and racial mixing are addressed in both sections…

…Virtually all the authors cite light skin and similar economic occupations as characteristic of free women of color. Félix V. Matos Rodréguez, for example, describes various food-selling establishments operated by free women of color, who made up the majority of street vendors in mid-nineteenth-century San Juan, Puerto Rico. In the United States as well, Loren Schweninger and Wilma King cite free women who earned their living as “laundresses, maids, seamstresses, cooks, midwives, venders, and servants” (p. 107) and a few who managed to own substantial property or small businesses.

Another common experience that connected the lives of free nonwhite women across national borders was the exploitive sexual system that permeated slave societies. Negative racial and gender stereotypes encouraged the rape and sexual degradation of relatively powerless enslaved and free women of color. There was another side to sexual exploitation, however. Many women of color manipulated the practice of concubinage (which often began with rape) to their advantage. Trevor Burnard tells the story of Phibbah, a Jamaican slave who gained social authority among slaves, profitable employment, property ownership, and ultimately freedom as a result of becoming the concubine of her powerful overseer. Virginia Meacham Gould similarly traces the freedom and prosperity of Henriette Delille of New Orleans, a proper Catholic Creole of color, to maternal African ancestors who escaped slavery on account of their descent from one of Louisiana’s wealthiest white colonists…

Read the entire review here.

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community [Review]

H-Net Reviews
May 2007

Sean H. Jacobs
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Mohamed Adhikari. Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community. Africa Series. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. xvii + 252 pp. Paper ISBN 978-0-89680-244-5.

Coloured Categories

What are “Coloureds“? For most South Africans and others familiar with South Africa the answer will be “people of mixed race.” This invocation of “mixing” inevitably links to a racial binary that relies on two opposing and ossified (primordial) identities of black and white. Linked to this view is of course the persistence of the stereotype of “tragic mulattoes“—long a trope in South African writing—in which the “products of miscegenation” can never be “true” South Africans. These were the views of apartheid’s planners and retain their resonance for most South Africans today, including many whom self-identify as Coloured.

Mohamed Adhikari’s work attempts a corrective to this kind of de-contextualized portrayal and assessment of Coloured politics and identity. In Not White Enough, Not Black Enough—a slim volume of 187 pages—Adhikari attempts to place Colouredness as a product, not of any biological process such as “mixture,” but rather as one of the politics of the last century or so. For him, Coloured identity is, in fact, both a product of apartheid category-making and of vigorous identity-building on the part of Coloured political actors themselves. That is, Adhikari also targets attempts to “do away” with Coloured identity, as by proclaiming it a species of false consciousness. The book’s main focus is on attempts by Coloureds themselves to construct identity and history. While much of the material he covers is useful and interesting, it is not clear that Adhikari has quite managed to get out from under the weight of inherited categories and analytic frames in quite the way he sets out to do.

Coloureds make up 4.1 million of South Africa’s 46.9 million people. Mostly working class and concentrated in (but not restricted to) the Western Cape Province (where they comprise 53.9 percent of the total population) and the more rural Northern Cape, they, along with Africans—despite some changes at the apex of the class pyramid—account for most of South Africa’s urban and rural poor…

Read the entire review here.

White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity [Review]

H-Net Reviews
February 2010

Lorenzo Veracini

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond. White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Cloth ISBN 978-1-4039-7595-9.

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond has published a persuasive outline and contextualization of Brazilian “Race Democracy” advocate Gilberto Freyre. In a forthcoming book, I argue that settler projects use a variety of “transfers” in order to manage indigenous and exogenous alterity in their respective population economies, and that “transfer” does not apply only to people pushed across borders. This review of White Negritude contends that Freyre was indeed a master (discursive) transferist.

Casa Grande e Senzala (1933) proposed a reading of Brazilian race relations that in many ways remains paradigmatic. The specific conditions afforded by a tropical environment and the encounter between Portuguese colonizers and African slaves had produced a uniquely Brazilian synthesis. The master/slave dialectic had been upturned; the inherent antagonism and violence that should have accompanied that relation had been defused. This synthesis, Freyre argued, demonstrated among other things Brazil’s superiority to the United States. While this stance contributed to Casa Grande e Senzala’s reception and career, Isfahani-Hammond suggests that it may also have prevented scrutiny—Brazilian race relations are still routinely construed—both in Brazil and in the US—as primarily an “antithesis” of something else. Freyre, the generally accepted reading goes, made the Afro-Brazilian a central character of the national narrative, recognized that the slaves were the true colonizers, framed senzala and Casa Grande in the same interpretative frame, and proposed a consistently non-eugenicist reading of Brazilian society and culture. Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond successfully problematises this interpretation.

The main point in Freyre’s argument is that Brazilian slave masters identify with their slaves and, having assimilated their cultural traits, can therefore genuinely and authentically represent them. This identification is acquired, for example, via sexual (non reproductive and noncoercive) intercourse with black women. Afro-Brazilian “atmospheric” influences are thus transferred to the white masters in the unique context of the northeastern Brazilian plantation complex (a self-contained social microcosm that is presented as the epicentre of the Brazilian cultural experience). Isfahani-Hammond insists on Freyre’s strategic disavowal of genetic hybridisation. Branquemento (“whitening”) was one available possibility, an approach that advocated the progressive elimination of black genes through miscegenation and immigration policies that favoured Europeans. Freyre, on the other hand, developed more effective discursive strategies. This is where Isfahani-Hammond’s argument is most convincing, and Freyre’s “celebration” of Afro-Brazilian cultural traits is shown as ultimately seeking to “replace sociohistorical blackness with a discourse about blackness” (p. 7). In this way, a potentially destabilising oppositional agency is expropriated and circumvented. Despite its ostensibly non-racial determinants, Freyre’s reasoning is shown to actually culminate in the “exclusionary resolution of Brazilian heterogeneity” (p. 14)…

Read the entire review here

Being Black and White

The American Prospect
2001-09-09
 
E. J. Graff, Associate Director and Senior Researcher
The Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts

• Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black By Gregory Howard Williams. Plume (1996), 285 pages, paperback
• The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother By James McBride. Riverhead Books (1996), 297 pages, paperback
• Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self By Rebecca Walker. Riverhead Books (2001), 323 pages, hardcover
• Divided to the Vein: A Journey into Race and Family By Scott Minerbrook. Harcourt Brace and Company (1996), 261 pages, hardcover

When I was 18, I learned, quite belatedly, that my father’s brother had married a black woman. The wedding took place in 1958—the year I was born, the year after my parents married. Instantly I knew that racism had kept me from knowing my uncle (by then dead of a heart attack), my aunt, my cousins. Instantly I knew I would have to find them. But it was one thing to discover that the deepest, most volatile division in the country ran right through my family; actually crossing that divide to claim kinship was, for a long time, too daunting for someone whose only experience with “diversity” was being the sole Jewish kid among her semirural Ohio high school’s 2,300 students.

And so it wasn’t until my thirties that I finally met my aunt and cousins. To my surprise, they treated me not just as a cousin but as a living symbol of racial reconciliation. Once we’d met, told stories, and compared features—we share a long jaw and sharp chin—I started to notice how arbitrarily I’d sorted the world around me into “black” or “white.” All around were black people who looked related to me. White friends had color in their families of blood or choice: a stepfather, a spouse, a sister-in-law, a dearest friend. I started to feel that every American whose family has been here more than a few decades is from a mixed-race family, that somewhere out there—however near or far—we all have relatives of the “other” color. African Americans know this, of course, often down to the name of at least one plantation owner in the family tree. But for a white girl in a color-bound world, this was news.

As it happened, the insight that was striking me so personally—that the color line is drawn in shifting sand—would soon strike the culture. In the past few years, the headlines have been full of such things as the 2000 census’s mix-and-match option; genetic evidence that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (his dead wife’s half-sister and slave) left a widening delta of descendants; and the ascending god Tiger Woods’s refusal to reject his plural ethnicity. And since 1995, a number of mixed-race memoirs have hit our shelves, opening discussion of a new identity: biracial writers who have a black parent and a white one. These authors grapple with the sense that they don’t quite belong anywhere, that they aren’t fully claimed by either race. But their wide range of experiences reveals how deeply racial identity, like any identity, is affected not just by society but also by family, character, time, and place…

Read the entire article here.

A Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Journal of American Folklore
Volume 124, Number 491 (Winter 2011)
pages 120-121
E-ISSN: 1535-1882 Print ISSN: 0021-8715

Sharon Downey Varner
Department of English
University of South Alabama

Hodes, Martha. A Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2007.

This meticulously researched historical narrative is reconstructed from letters written by the subject and her family members. In A Sea Captain’s Wife, historian Martha Hodes brings to life the story of an obscure New England woman who marries a black man after the Civil War and takes up residence in the Cayman Islands. Hodes is a professor of history at New York University and the author of White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth Century South.

Eunice Richardson, the subject of this book, was born a white, working-class woman in New England in 1831. She was first married to William Stone, a fellow New Englander, with whom she moved to Mobile, Alabama, for a period of time. Hodes speculates that it was in Mobile that Eunice first became acquainted with Smiley Connolly, an African American who would become her second husband.

Hodes leaves no stone unturned and no document undogged. Her storyteller’s bent, her understanding of the complex racial climate of the late 1800s, and her extensive historical knowledge combine to produce an engaging historical document that reads like a novel…

Read or purchase the article here.

We Know Who We Are: Métis Identity in a Montana Community [Book Review]

Drumlummon Views: the Online Journal of Montana Arts & Culture
Volume 1, Numbers 1-2, (Spring/Summer 2006)
pages 237-240

Nicholas C. P. Vrooman

Martha Harroun Foster, We Know Who We Are: Métis Identity in a Montana Community, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2006. Maps, tables, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 306 pages.

Given the dearth of existing titles on the Métis in the United States, it is a real pleasure to read Martha Harroun Foster’s new book. Her work has untangled and explained pieces of a little-understood yet central story to Montana history. When Anglo society took hold of this state in the late 19th and early 20th century, it committed a huge error—the aggressively unjust treatment and tragic denial of our Métis population. This book is a story of one group of Métis families who became sedentary in a specific place upon the demise of the buffalo; the town which grew around them is now known as Lewistown. Foster does a superb job of recounting those families’ struggle to maintain their distinct identity amidst a most often uncaring society.

Yet I have serious concerns. Foster names her group the Spring Creek band, saying they belong to the state’s “longest continuously occupied Métis settlement” (p. 4). Determining “continuous occupation” is a highly charged notion used against Aboriginal peoples (Montana Métis specifically, to this day) throughout the colonial and national period as a judicial determinate to divest land and ignore prior rights of habitation. Historically, native communities shifted in co-relation to ever-changing environmental conditions. Is this how we want to speak of Indigenous community status of land tenure in this era? It also projects, from an external source, the “We’re #1” syndrome of individual supremacy onto one native community. Even applying the insatiable American and Western craving for exceptionalism, Lewistown still is not the “longest continuously occupied Métis settlement in Montana.” Suffice it to say, Métis have been living “continuously” throughout Montana since at least the 1830s and probably before.

I love Lewistown. It exists because it fits within the intrinsic unifying flow of river valleys and ancient roadways through permeable pulsating ecosystems to and fro’ areas of seasonal sustenance and power on an east/west and north/south axis across the Northern Plains. Throughout these environments Aboriginal communities, including the Métis, have long lived and continue to circulate. It is all related. It still exists. It is there to be known. The Medicine Line remains mysterious…

Read the entire review here.

A shameful history: Nowhere People: How International Race Thinking Shaped Australia’s Identity [Book Review]

The Lancet
Volume 366, Issue 9495 (October 2005)
page 1428
DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67586

Caroline de Costa, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology; Director of the Clinical School
James Cook University School of Medicine, Cairns Campus, North Queensland, Australia

Nowhere People: How International Race Thinking Shaped Australia’s Identity
Henry Reynolds
Viking, 2005
Pp 204. ISBN-0-670-04118-1

A few years ago my daughter, a poised young woman, found herself in a large rural Australian town she did not know well. She sought directions from an older white woman who, glancing briefly at her appearance, gave the required information, but in the slow and careful tones one might use for the mentally impaired. This incident annoyed but did not surprise my daughter; my husband is of Sri Lankan origin, and all of our six children, of varying hues and facial features, have at times been taken to be of mixed Aboriginal descent in rural Australia, and know something of the experience that can go with this.

So it was with great personal interest that I opened Henry Reynolds’ impressive study of the history of people of “mixed-race” in the 19th and 20th centuries in all those countries where colonists confronted people of different colour and physiognomy. As a 21st-century medical practitioner well aware that we are all one species, I was dismayed to find how much medical practitioners and scientists had contributed to repressive legislation and social engineering, both in Australia and elsewhere…

Read the entire article here.

A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America, edited by Frank Shuffelton (Oxford University Press, 1993) [Review]

African American Review
Volume 29, Number 1 (Spring 1995)
pages 149-152

Raymond F. Dolle, Associate Professor of English
Indiana State University

A Mixed Race extends the recent work of ethnographic critics, such as James Clifford (The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art [1988]), and such literary critics as Werner Sollors (Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture [1986]) and William Boelhower (Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature [1987]). These critics have argued that ethnicity is not located solely in an essential cultural identity, continuity, or tradition, and that texts should not be understood as mimetic descriptions of an essential, unchanging ethnic difference (even though that is often the pretense of these texts). Rather, the center of ethnicity should be seen as a dynamic relation between cultural groups, and their texts as orchestrations of multivocal exchanges among these groups as they transform themselves (the hegemonic group included) in the process of confronting others. Thus, ethnicity is performance, a group’s continually changing self-understanding in relation to a changing larger world, a struggle for control over narratives, values, and the self. Furthermore, this process of ethnicity is carried on by means of signs and codes that are generated by the groups to negotiate relationships with other hostile or accommodating groups. So, to understand more fully the ethnic foundation of our culture, we must recognize ethnic semiosis in colonial texts. Such clarifying views have enabled the scholars in this volume to consider the circumstances, rhetorical negotiations, and representation of ethnic formation in early America…

Read the entire article here.