Mixed Race Studies

Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, & American Law (Anderson review)

The Catholic Historical Review
Volume 97, Number 1 (January 2011)
pages 179-180
E-ISSN: 1534-0708, Print ISSN: 0008-8080

R. Bentley Anderson, S. J. Associate Professor of African and African-American Studies
Fordham University

In Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, & American Law, Fay Botham, adjunct professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Iowa, focuses on a rarely examined issue in American race matters: the intersection of religion, law, and interracial marriage. To what extent did Protestant or Catholic understanding of marriage influence secular law regarding this institution? In particular, how did the Catholic understanding of marriage as a sacrament and the Protestant notion that marriage was sacred but a state matter influence judicial decision making? Furthermore, what are the proper roles of the church and state in establishing marriage laws in this country?

Divided into six chapters, Almighty God begins with an examination of the 1948 California-based case Perez v. Lippold, which outlawed religious discrimination in marriage. The deciding vote in the state of California’s Supreme Court decision was cast by a Christian Science jurist who agreed with the…

Read or purchase the review here.

The Chinese in the Caribbean [Book Reveiw]

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Volume 3, Issue 1 (Spring 2005)
8 paragraphs
ISSN 1547-7150

Kathryn Morris

Andrew R. Wilson, Editor. The Chinese in the Caribbean. Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2004, xxiii+230 pp.

The Hakka are a migratory people. We move outwards on the tides of history. Most of us have relatives in Surinam, Panama, the British West Indies, as well as Singapore, Malaysia and other parts of South-east Asia. After several more generations in Canada, will it still be significant that we sojourned for a few generations in Jamaica? For now and as far we can see, that is how we identify ourselves and that is also how we are perceived by the wider Canadian community . . . In this generation we became part of a North American community, with significant concentration in Miami, New York, Toronto and other U.S. and Canadian cities and even London, England, as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan.

—Patrick A. Lee, Canadian Jamaican Chinese 2000.

Culturally, the signifier “Chinese” in the Caribbean context has evolved into a broad term that encompasses the latest group of emigrants to the region; the hyphenated (Trinidadian, Jamaican, etc.), third- or fourth-generation, mixed-ancestry Chinese; and the countless members of the Chinese Caribbean Diaspora who are still “on the move.” Toronto, home to a large population of people who define themselves as Chinese—insert Caribbean country here—Canadian, has become a major center for Chinese Caribbean diasporan activity aimed at maintaining connections to the Caribbean and to China. For example, Patrick Lee’s work, excerpted above, presents pictorial and narrative histories of Jamaican Chinese families spanning five generations; Lee’s work pays tributes to his father, Lee Tom Yin’s earlier work, Chinese in Jamaica (1957), which commemorated the 100-year anniversary of the Chinese arrival in Jamaica. Reaching further out into the world, the celebrity of Jamaican reggae artist Sean Paul, who claims Chinese among his ancestors, has put the Chinese-Caribbean connection in the international spotlight. This substantial community is now a dragon with a foot on every continent and is growing in size and visibility. Andrew R. Wilson’s The Chinese in the Caribbean, which begins with the statement, “The macro-historical significance of Chinese emigration [since the 1830s] is undeniable,” is the latest publication to bring critical attention to this Caribbean and global phenomenon (vii).
 
The Chinese in the Caribbean is a collection of eight essays that together provide a fairly detailed overview about the Chinese presence in the Caribbean. Divided into three parts—The British West Indies, Cuba, and Re-Migration and Re-Imagining Identity—this book manages to be accessible to those seeking introductory information on the topic, and yet detailed enough for scholars to engage in topical research.
 
Read the entire reveiw here.

Review of Spencer, Jon Michael, The New Colored People: The Mixed-Race Movement in America

H-Net Reviews
January 1998

Richard L. Hughes

The Census, Race, and…

Amid a racial climate which includes a presidential advisory board on race and a discussion of slavery within the popular media, there lies an increasingly prominent dialogue on race in American culture. As the United States nears its next federal census in the year 2000, many Americans have expressed dissatisfaction with the accuracy of the current four categories of white, black, Asian and Pacific Islander, and American Indian or Alaskan Native. Some observers have supported the addition of a “multiracial” category where others, such as historian Orlando Patterson, have criticized the continued existence of racial categories on the census as a “scientifically meaningless” and “politically dangerous” “Race Trap.”[1]

One of the reasons why this debate resonates with so many Americans is that the discussion of race and public policy includes both the persistent belief that race is a fixed biological factor and the emerging notion of many scholars and policymakers that race is a fluid historical and sociopolitical construct. Acknowledging both perspectives, Jon Michael Spencer’s The New Colored People: The Mixed-Race Movement in America is the latest scholarly contribution to this ongoing debate concerning the census and the possible use of the category “multiracial.” Borrowing both the title and analytical framework from Joel Williamson’s New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (1980), which focused on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Spencer offers a cautionary tale about a “multiracial” category in the contemporary United States.[2] He contends that without a “frank assessment of race” and the end of racism, such a category would be “politically naive” and even “suicidal” to black Americans (pp. 148,155).

While Spencer shares Williamson’s astute perspective that the status of “mulattoes” or, to use Spencer’s term, “multiracial” Americans, is an instructive index for race relations, his argument about the dangers of a new government-sanctioned racial category centers on a “cross-cultural analysis” of multiracial Americans and the coloured people of South Africa (p. 11). Building on the comparative work of historian George Fredrickson, the writings of coloured intellectuals such as Richard Van der Ross and Allan Boesak, and interviews with other “coloured nationalists,” Spencer concludes that the creation of a coloured “middle status” under apartheid served to divide and oppress nonwhites by creating a buffer zone between white elites and the black masses (pp. xiii, 91).[3] The result was the continued oppression of South African blacks and a marginal status for coloured South Africans. Cognizant of the centrality of issues of personal identity in the current American debate, Spencer adds that the middle status robbed coloureds of the identity, esteem, and culture only possible through a unified black consciousness movement in more recent South Africa. Spencer’s valuable contribution lies in his comparative analysis in which the tragedy of South African apartheid underscores the possible dangers in careless additions to America’s racial landscape…

Read the entire review here.

The Great Unraveling [Book Review of “Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America”]

The New York Times
2010-12-29

Raymond Arsenault, Visiting Scholar, Florida State University Study Center in London
and John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History, University of South Florida

Eugene Robinson, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America (New York: Doubleday, 2010).

When Henry Louis Gates Jr. told Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge police, “You don’t know who you’re messing with,” he was speaking truth to power, albeit in a manner more akin to arrogance than erudition. The big shock here, according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson, is not that a Harvard professor misused the subjective case (“who” for “whom”) and inelegantly ended a sentence with a preposition; it is, rather, that Gates belongs to an elite enclave beyond the sergeant’s experience or imagination. Gates’s life as an academic superstar places him among a select group of black Americans aptly labeled “Transcendent” by Robinson. Think of Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé, Kobe Bryant, Vernon Jordan and Richard Parsons, the retired chief executive of Time Warner…

…These Transcendent men and women, Robinson tells us at the outset, live and work in a privileged world of wealth and power. Despite the color of their skin, they do not belong to the black community.

Fair enough, but Robinson does not stop there. Over the next 200 pages, he demonstrates rather convincingly that no one belongs to the black community anymore…

…During the past four decades, Robinson persuasively argues, black America has splintered into four subgroups: the Transcendent elite; the Mainstream middle class, which now accounts for a majority of black Americans; an Emergent community made up of mixed-race families and black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean; and the Abandoned, a large and growing underclass concentrated in the inner cities and depressed pockets of the rural South…

Read the entire article here.

Scholars Say Chronicler of Black Life Passed for White

New York Times
2010-12-26

Felicia R. Lee

Renown came to Jean Toomer with his 1923 book “Cane,” which mingled fiction, drama and poetry in a formally audacious effort to portray the complexity of black lives. But the racially mixed Toomer’s confounding efforts to defy being stuck in conventional racial categories and his disaffiliation with black culture made him perhaps the most enigmatic writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

Now Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard scholar, and Rudolph P. Byrd, a professor at Emory University, say their research for a new edition of “Cane” documents that Toomer was “a Negro who decided to pass for white.”…

…Toomer’s racial complexity has long been intriguing to critics and scholars, but Mr. Gates and Mr. Byrd’s assertion about his identity is certain to spark debate. Richard Eldridge, a Toomer biographer, said recently that he had not read the new edition — and will stand corrected if its case is persuasive — but that Toomer never “passed” in the classic sense of pretending to be white. Rather, he said, Toomer (whose appearance was racially indeterminate) sought to transcend standard definitions of race.

“I think he never claimed that he was a white man,” Mr. Eldridge said. “He always claimed that he was a representative of a new, emergent race that was a combination of various races. He averred this virtually throughout his life.” Mr. Eldridge and Cynthia Earl Kerman are the authors of “The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness” published in 1987 by Louisiana State University Press…

…Yet this new edition of “Cane” documents that over the course of his life Toomer variously denied ever living as a black person; called himself racially mixed; and said he was a new kind of American, transcending old racial terms. Toomer did not want to be featured as a Negro in the marketing of “Cane” and later did not want his work included in black anthologies…

Read the entire article here.

Making Multiracials: State, Family, And Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line [Book Review]

The Black Scholar
2010-03-22

Alexes Harris, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Washington

Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line, by Kimberly McClain DaCosta (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007; $30.95, paper, 280 pp; ISBN 10 0-80475546-9).

THIS THOUGHT-PROVOKING book addresses several interesting and important questions about the relatively recent emergence of a multiracial movement in the United States. In Making Multiracials, DaCosta explores a unique racial and ethnic project in the making and asks how and why has a group of people who have been largely invisible to and isolated from one another mobilized for a new census classification? Using a purposively drawn sample of 62 individuals including those who have mixed-race ancestry and those who are in mixed-race relationships, and ethnographic observations of group activities and events around multiracial identity, DaCosta finds that mixed-race individuals become members of multiracial organizations for a sense of belonging, a safe space, and to reflect on their shared experiences…

Read the entire review here.

Les Enfants de la colonie: Les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté [Book Review]

H-France Review (Society for French Historical Studies)
Volume 8, Number 162 (November 2008)
pages 654-657

Marie-Paule Ha
The University of Hong Kong

Emmanuelle Saada, Les Enfants de la colonie: Les métis de l’Empire français entre sujétion et citoyenneté. Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 2007. 335 pp. Notes and bibliography. 24€. ISBN 978-2-7071-3982-5.

While the question of métissage has in the last two decades generated a significant volume of scholarly works from a diverse range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, Emmanuelle Saada’s monograph, which grew out of her 2001 doctoral dissertation at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, is quite unique in that it provides the first systematic and in-depth investigation of the judicial aspects of what was referred to as “la question métisse.”[1] Drawing on a wide array of materials ranging from archival and juridical sources to works from legal studies, history, anthropology and sociology, the author reconstructs the highly complex and tortuous trajectory that transformed the legal status of the empire’s métis from that of native subjects to being French citizens during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Given the book’s focus, the term “métis” in Les Enfants de la colonie is used to refer not to mixed-race children in general, but to the métis non reconnus, that is, those born out of wedlock that had not been legally recognized by their European fathers and were abandoned by them. As a result, this group of métis was given by default the status of native subjects. It was the plight of this particular category of illegitimate and racially mixed progeny of European men that became the object of the interventions of administrators, philanthropists and legal professionals in the colonies.

The starting point of Saada’s investigation of “the métis problem” is the 8 November 1928 decree which made it possible for the métis non reconnus born in Indochina to be granted French citizenship if one of their parents, legally unknown, could be presumed to be of “French race.” According to the decree, this presumption could be established “par tous les moyens,” which include “le nom que porte l’enfant, le fait qu’il a reçu une formation, une éducation et une culture françaises, sa situation dans la société” (p.13). The momentous interest of this legal text was twofold. On the one hand, it constituted the first occurrence of the word “race” in French legislation. On the other hand, the term was deployed not for an exclusive purpose, but rather to justify the integration of certain subjects of the empire in French citizenry…

Read the entire review here.

Race-Mixing, Radicalism, and Reimaginating the Nation

Journal of Women’s History
Volume 22, Number 4, Winter 2010
pages 253-256
E-ISSN: 1527-2036, Print ISSN: 1042-7961

Hilary Jones, Assistant Professor of African History
University of Maryland

The title of Kumari Jayawardena’s monograph, Erasure of the Euro-Asian, reveals the degree to which people of mixed racial ancestry have been silenced in histories of nationalism and national identity in South Asia. The same holds true for the story of mixed race groups in Africa under colonial rule. An obsession with racial purity and the pervasive image of the “tragic mulatto” has dominated popular and academic discourse to the point that we fail to recognize the complex ways that people who lived “betwixt and between” colonial powers created their own sense of group identity and negotiated the politics of race, class, and gender to assert their own interests and even develop a radical critique of colonial rule. Overemphasis on the idea that people of mixed racial ancestry were destined to live lives of marginalization or that they acted simply as the unwitting agents of colonial powers has, thus, erased the critical contributions that Euro-Asian women and men made as leaders, public intellectuals, and reformers in the land of their birth and in the colonial societies of which they were a part.  Erasure of the Euro-Asian uncovers these hidden histories and in doing so complicates our assumptions about collaboration and resistance and disrupts the notion that assimilation or mimicry constituted the only possible response for people of mixed racial ancestry within modern colonial societies.

Jayawardena’s study of Euro-Asians over several generations, from first encounters in the sixteenth century to the emergence of modern nationalism in South Asia in the 1920s and 1930s, confirms my own research on métis identity and French colonialism in Senegal, West Africa. In Senegal, the history of Euro-Africans begins in the period of the Atlantic slave trade. African and Afro-European women known as signares married…

Read or purchase the article here.

Being Eurasian: Memories across Racial Divides by Vicky Lee [Book Review]

The Asian Review of Books
2004-12-29

John Walsh, Assistant Professor of Marketing and Communications
School of Management, Shinawatra International University, Bangkok

The creation of Empires inevitably entails contact between coloniser and colonised at many different levels. Owing to the prominence of men in empire creation, it is inevitable that at least some of those connections involve establishing one or more relationships with local women, in the absence of women from the home country. A reasonable amount of attention has been placed on these relationships. Rather less attention has been focused on the results of those unions. The children that resulted from the relationships between British and Chinese in Hong Kong are one subset of the whole range of intercultural births and they share some distinctive characteristics. Unlike the Portuguese, who tended enthusiastically to children into the fold as a means of expanding their overseas holdings, the British of course have always rather looked down on those who cavort with the locals and, since we rather dislike even our own children, certainly have little truck with any others who have a reason to be looked down upon.

Being Eurasian: Memories across Racial Divides by Vicky Lee explores some of the experiences and feelings of a small section of the British-Chinese Hong Kong people, especially during the first part of the 20th century. Her book, which has been developed from a PhD thesis, is in the main clearly and appropriately written, although it does suffer a little from the problems of the multidisciplinary approach, which tends to lack the rigor imposed by any single discipline. However, the one or two false notes may be forgiven for the sake of the histories told, which are of great interest…

Read the entire review here.

Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century [Book Review]

H-Africa
H-Net Reviews
March 2004

Eric S. Ross, Coordinator, School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Al Akhawayn University, Ifrane, Morocco

George Brooks’s Eurafricans in Western Africa is the sequel to his Landlords and Strangers (1993). This book covers Western African coastal trading networks from the Senegal River to Cape Palmas (including the Cape Verde Islands) from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Brooks uses the term “Eurafrican” to designate Luso-Africans, Franco-Africans, and Anglo-Africans, the offspring of the union of transient European male traders and African women, often of elite social status. The term is meant to emphasize the greater African heritage of the mothers, as opposed to the Portuguese, French, or English heritage of the fathers.

As the subtitle indicates, the book deals extensively with social status, religion, and gender-related issues among Eurafricans. According to Brooks, African laws regarding inheritance and property rights largely determined the social status of Eurafricans, and these laws differed considerably depending on whether a society was acephalous or politically stratified. Religious observances and gender roles, in turn, depended on social status. Brooks makes good use of primary sources, particularly the accounts of Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English travelers and traders, nearly all of them men. In the preface, the author recognizes that his assessment of Eurafricans is limited by these informants and observers, who were “misinformed, self-serving, and imbued with racial prejudice” (p. xi). Also, only the most “successful” Eurafricans, of elite status, have survived in the historical record; porters, mariners, servants, and slaves, as all too often, re main anonymous seen but not heard…

Read the entire review here.