Mixed Race Studies

Biological and Social Consequences of Race-Crossing

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 9, Issue 2 (April/June 1926)
pages 145–156
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330090212

W. E. Castle (1867-1962)
Bussey Institution, Harvard University

What constitute the essential differences between human races seems to be a question difficult for anthropologists to agree upon but from a biologist’s point of view those appear to be on safe ground who base racial distinctions on easily recognizable and measurable differences perpetuated by heredity irrespective of the environment.  See Hooton, 1926.  It is still a moot question how races originate, not merely in man, but also among lower animals and plants.  At one time natural selection was thought to be an all-sufficient explanation of the matter, but the more carefully the question is studied and the more exact and experimental in character the data which enter into its solution, the more fully we become convinced that forms of life are rarely static, that organic is the rule rather than the exception. Change is inevitable and is not limited to useful or adaptive variations.  Natural selection undoubtedly determines the survival of decidedly useful variations, which arise for any reason, and also the extinction of those which are positively harmful, but a host of there variations fall in neither of these categories and survive among the descendants as a matter of course, quite unaffected by natural selection.

The experimental study of evolution indicates that genetic (hereditary) variations are all the time arising, and with especial frequency in such organism are bisexual and cross-fertilized.

In a state of nature no species can long be separated by geographical barriers into  non-interbreeding groups, without the origins of specific or racial differences between such groups…

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…The Korean word for a bi or multiracial person, despite the composition of their mixture, is honhyeol (in), which literally translates into impure blood. There has been a “pride” instilled in Koreans for their “ethnic homogeneity” which has resulted in “fear and distrust of outsiders” (The Economist, 2006). The connotation for Korea, which bases its national identity upon the notion of Koreans descending from one common ancestor and speaking one language, is that these offspring of interracial relationships are not Korean, because they have more than Korean blood coursing through their veins. It makes sense then that the oppositional identity of these “pure blooded” Koreans came about as a sort of resistance to the first Chinese invasion, then Japanese imperialism, and then finally Western imperialism in the form of American occupation after the Korean War. Korean nationalism was wrapped up in the idea of “consanguinity” to link “ethnic homogeneity” to a “profound sense of cultural distinctiveness and superiority.” (Kim, 2007) As these countries made their presence known, Korea began to rely on internal colonialism, which economically exploited and political excluded groups different from the dominant group, becoming a reminder there can be “colonial subjects – on the national soil.” (Gordon, 2006; Blauner 1972, p. 52) For many then, international marriages were “associated with the invasion of Korea by other countries” and were subsequently seen as “betrayals of nationalism” where the children resulting from those unions became physical reminders of that betrayal (Lee). Kim Sok-soo believes that the coupling of nationalism with ethnic homogeneity ultimately has became a “useful tool for the South Korean government when the country was embroiled in ideological turmoil. It was used as an effective tool to make its people obedient and easy to govern” (Park, 2006). The way the bodies of these bi and multiracial Koreans are, in both social and political realms, recognized, regulated, and ultimately utilized through relationships maintained by various institutions of the state is essential to a particular form of governmentality…

Washington, Myra. “More than a Metaphor: Blood as Boundary for Korean Biracial Identity” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the NCA 95th Annual Convention, Chicago Hilton & Towers, Chicago, IL, Nov 11, 2009 Online <PDF>. 2010-08-09 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p368501_index.html>

Institutions, Inculcation, and Black Racial Identity: Pigmentocracy vs. the Rule of Hypodescent

Social Identities
Volume 14, Issue 5 (September 2008)
pages 567-585
DOI: 10.1080/13504630802343390

Richard T. Middleton IV, Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Missouri, St. Louis

This research paper investigates the effect political institutions have on black racial identity. In particular, I study individual inculcation in contexts where political institutions institutionalize either of two forms of racial social structures—a pigmentocracy (the Dominican Republic), or the rule of hypodescent (the US South), and the effect such inculcation has on black racial identity. I sampled 101 respondents from the Dominican Republic and 102 from the state of Mississippi, USA. Consistent with the basic assumptions of my hypotheses, respondents in the Dominican Republic study sites showed a weaker degree of identification with blackness vis—vis something ‘whiter’. Nevertheless, respondents in the Dominican Republic sites demonstrated a stronger identification with blackness than what most conventional observers would have anticipated. Respondents in the Mississippi study sites showed a stronger sense of identification with blackness. Surprisingly, however, Mississippi respondents demonstrated a larger degree of neutrality than expected in their belief of being of a mixed racial heritage rather than just a black African heritage.

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Dreaming with the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women in Texas and Mexico

University of Oklahoma Press
December 2010
400 pages
30 B&W Illus., 2 Maps
6.125″ x 9.25″
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806140537

Shirley Boteler Mock, Research Fellow
Mesoamerican Archaeological Research Laboratory, University of Texas, Austin

Explores a unique and eclectic culture rooted in African traditions

Indian freedmen and their descendants have garnered much public and scholarly attention, but women’s roles have largely been absent from that discussion. Now a scholar who gained an insider’s perspective into the Black Seminole community in Texas and Mexico offers a rare and vivid picture of these women and their contributions. In Dreaming with the Ancestors, Shirley Boteler Mock explores the role that Black Seminole women have played in shaping and perpetuating a culture born of African roots and shaped by southeastern Native American and Mexican influences.

Mock reveals a unique maroon culture, forged from an eclectic mixture of religious beliefs and social practices. At its core is an amalgam of African-derived traditions kept alive by women. The author interweaves documentary research with extensive interviews she conducted with leading Black Seminole women to uncover their remarkable history. She tells how these women nourished their families and held fast to their Afro-Seminole language—even as they fled slavery, endured relocation, and eventually sought new lives in new lands. Of key importance were the “warrior women”—keepers of dreams and visions that bring to life age-old African customs.

Featuring more than thirty illustrations and maps, including historic photographs never before published, Dreaming with the Ancestors combines scholarly analysis with human interest to open a new window on both African American and American Indian history and culture.

Cinderella Story: A Scholarly Sketchbook about Race, Identity, Barack Obama, the Human Spirit, and Other Stuff that Matter

AltaMira Press
February 2010
228 pages
Cloth ISBN: 0-7591-1176-6 / 978-0-7591-1176-9  

James Haywood Rolling, Jr., Associate Professor of Art Education
Syracuse University

Cinderella Story is an experimental autoethnography that explores critical racial issues in America through the media of language and images. Rolling asks, How do words and images-involving stories and paradigms, past and future, perceptions of beauty and ugliness-become flesh? How are they done and undone? In this supple and complex narrative, the author peers deeply into his own life and attitudes, and into the racial images and ideas made explicit by American history as a whole, to sort out fact from fiction in new and ingenious ways.

Table of Contents

Prologue: An Old Story
Episode One: Borderlines
Episode Two: Homelessness
Episode Three: Origins
Episode Four: Breech Births and Cinderella Endings
Episode Five: Monsters Deconstructed
Episode Six: Figuring Myself Out
Episode Seven: Messing around with Identity Constructs
Episode Eight: Disruptions
Episode Nine: Secular Blasphemy
Episode Ten: Propaganda
Episode Eleven: Invisibility and In/di/visuality
Episode Twelve: The Meeting
Episode Thirteen: Self-Portrait, with Stern Resistance
Episode Fourteen: (Re)Appearances
Episode Fifteen: Self Portrait, with Backlighting
Episode Sixteen: The One-Drop Rule
Episode Seventeen: Self-Portrait, with Possibilities
Episode Eighteen: Epilogue, with New Story Values

Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500–1900

Duke University Press
2010
296 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4745-3
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4764-4

Vanita Seth, Associate Professor of Politics
University of California, Santa Cruz

Europe’s Indians forces a rethinking of key assumptions regarding difference—particularly racial difference—and its centrality to contemporary social and political theory. Tracing shifts in European representations of two different colonial spaces, the New World and India, from the late fifteenth century through the late nineteenth, Vanita Seth demonstrates that the classification of humans into racial categories or binaries of self-other is a product of modernity. Part historical, part philosophical, and part a history of science, her account exposes the epistemic conditions that enabled the thinking of difference at distinct historical junctures. Seth’s examination of Renaissance, Classical Age, and nineteenth-century representations of difference reveals radically diverging forms of knowing, reasoning, organizing thought, and authorizing truth. It encompasses stories of monsters, new worlds, and ancient lands; the theories of individual agency expounded by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; and the physiological sciences of the nineteenth century. European knowledge, she argues, does not reflect a singular history of Reason, but rather multiple traditions of reasoning, of historically bounded and contingent forms of knowledge. Europe’s Indians shows that a history of colonialism and racism must also be an investigation into the historical production of subjectivity, agency, epistemology, and the body.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Self and Similitude: Renaissance Representations of the New World
2. “Constructing” Individuals and “Creating” History: Subjectivity in Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau
3. Traditions of History: Mapping India’s Past
4. Of Monsters and Man: The Peculiar History of Race
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

The Risks of Multiracial Identification

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2006-11-10

Naomi Schaefer Riley

The comment period has closed on proposed new guidelines from the U.S. Department of Education on how colleges should ask students about race. No longer, the guidelines say, should applicants simply be given the choice of black, white, Asian, American Indian (or Alaska Native), or native Hawaiian (or other Pacific Islander). Now they should be allowed to check off more than one box, as well as note whether they identify as Hispanic. Eugene L. Anderson, an associate director of the American Council on Education, told Diverse, a higher-education magazine, that he expected colleges would be pleased with the new guidelines: “They make sense; they respect peoples’ individual notion of racial identity, which is important.”

No doubt colleges also appreciate the department’s instructions for practical reasons. The proliferation of multiracial options on a variety of forms, including college applications, reflects the new demographic reality in America. On the 2000 census, nearly seven million Americans checked off two or more racial boxes. And a study last year by researchers at Cornell University found that the number of interracial marriages involving white people, black people, or Hispanics each year in the United States has jumped tenfold since the 1960s.

In a sense, these developments represent the realization of the dream of a melting pot. In 1963 Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, penned a controversial essay called “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” expressing despair about the chances for real racial integration in this country. That could not occur, he wrote, “unless color does in fact disappear: and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation.”…

…But even those mixed-race groups cannot satisfy some students. One told the Crimson that her acquaintances at Harvard’s Hapa group focused too much on East Asian identities, instead of South Asian ones. They went out, she complained, for dim sum, “which I enjoy, but don’t identify with culturally.” But she didn’t feel welcome in the regular South Asian group, either, because in a theatrical performance the group’s leaders cast her in the role of a white person.

The level of specificity that seems to be required for many young men and women to feel comfortable today is bordering on the absurd. Ultimately it’s sad. Advocates of diversity on college campuses insist that they are not just assembling faces of different colors for aesthetic purposes; they are trying to offer students a model of how to live in a multiracial, multiethnic society. But students do not seem to be learning to be more tolerant of people unlike them. They are demanding that they be surrounded and sheltered by people who are exactly like them.

Colleges have long experienced what sociologists refer to as the “lunch-table problem.” That tendency toward racial self-segregation may find its origins in students’ upbringings, but it is surely furthered by campus multiculturalists. Over the years, I have had many students I’ve interviewed tell me that they were never encouraged to identify themselves by their race so much as when they set foot on a college campus. Both administrators and student-run organizations often pressured them to engage in activities that put them in a particular racial box. So it’s not surprising that students now want activities that conform to every contour of their ancestry…

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Interracial families in South Africa: an exploratory study

Rand Afrikaans University
June 1994
310 pages
(In English and Afrikaans)

Lesley Morrall

A dissertation presented in partial fulfillment of the requirement of the degree Doctor of Literature and Philosophy in Psychology in the Faculty of Arts at Rand Afrikaans University.

Interracial marriage can be viewed as a barometer of social change. South Africa has historically been a country of racial tension with legislation seeking to keep the races apart. However, during April 1994 the country’s first democratic elections took place, thus ending the reign of white minority rule. It is against this backdrop that the present study took place. The aim of the study is to seek a deeper understanding of the experiences of mixed: race families living in South Africa. Certain questions are raised, inter alia; the causes for interracial relationships and marriage, the reactions of the families of origin, the patterns of adjustment, the raising of the children with specific reference to identity development and, the reactions of the community. Theories on prejudice, discrimination and interpersonal attraction were studied as a basis for a possible understanding of the phenomenon of mixed marriage. A brief exposition of the history of South Africa detailing relevant legislation places the study in context. Statistics on the incidence of interracial marriage and divorce were tabulated. Research pertaining to mixed marriage and interracial children was reviewed emphasizing the issues as outlined in the questions posed. However, very few studies could be found which related to South Africa. As such, media coverage of interracial relationships as reported in South Africa between 1993 to 1994 was also covered.

Table of Contents

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• SUMMARY (ENGLISH)
• SUMMARY (AFRIKAANS)

1. OVERVIEW
   1. Introduction
   2. Marriage
   3. Family
   4. The Concept of Race
   5. The Concept of Mixed-Race
   6. The Present Study
      • Aims of the study
2. THEORIES : PREJUDICE, DISCRIMINATION AND INTERPERSONAL ATTRACTION
   1. Introduction
   2. Prejudice and Discrimination Defined
   3. The Origin of Prejudice
   4. Theories of Prejudice
   5. Combatting Prejudice
   6. Interpersonal Attraction Defined
   7. Proximity
   8. Emotional State
   9. Need for Affiliation
   10. Physical Attractiveness
   11. Similarity
   12. Conclusion
3. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF SOUTH AFRICA AND THE LAW
   1. Introduction
   2. Historical Overview
   3. Legislation
      • The Population Registration Act, Act 30 of 1950
      • The Group Areas Act, Act 41 of 1950
      • History of the Immorality Act and the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act
        • Media coverage
        • Repeal of the Acts
   4. Conclusion
4. LITERATURE REVIEW: MIXED-RACE MARRIAGE
   1. Introduction
   2. Trends and Pattems of Mixed-Race Marriage
   3. Spouse Selection
   4. Adjustment
   5. Divorce
   6. Public Attitudes towards Mixed Marriage
   7. Attitude of Family towards Mixed-Race Couples
   8. Research Critique
   9. Conclusions from the literature Review
5. LITERATURE REVIEW: MIXED-RACE CHILDREN
   1. Introduction
   2. Theories: Biracial Children and their Identity
   3. Studies of Biracial Children
      • Intellectual development: Birth to four years
      • Racial awareness: Early childhood
      • Self-concept: Scholars
      • Racial identity: Adolescents
      • Mixed-race heritage: Adults
   4. Raising Biracial Children
   5. Conclusions from the Literature Review
6. INCIDENCE OF MIXED-RACE MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE
   1. Introduction
   2. Incidence in the United States of America
   3. Incidence of Mixed-Race Marriage in South Africa
   4. Incidence of Mixed-Race Divorce in South Africa
7. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
   1. Introduction
   2. Questions
   3. Qualitative Research
   4. The Study
   5. Sample
   6. Data Analysis
8. CASE NUMBER 1 – MOHAMMED AND RONELLE: AN ASIAN/WHITE FAMILY
9. CASE NUMBER 2 – JACK AND TINA: A WHITE/BLACK RELATIONSHIP
10. CASE NUMBER 3 – CLIVE AND MINNIE: THREE GENERATIONS OF MIXED MARRIAGES
11. CASE NUMBER 4 – LEON AND ESTHER: A WHITE/BLACK INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE
12. CASE NUMBER 5 – ED AND ELLEN: FOUR GENERATIONS OF MIXED MARRIAGES
13. CASE NUMBER 6 – JOHAN AND BELINDA: WHITE/COLOURED MIXED MARRIAGE
14. CASE NUMBER 7 – THOMAS AND BELLA: A WHITE/BLACK INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE
15. RESULTS OF THE RESEARCH
    1. Introduction
    2. General Results
    3. Specific Results
    4. Conclusion
16. DISCUSSION OF RESULTS AND CONCLUSION
    1. Introduction
    2. Theories: Prejudice and Discrimination
    3. Theories: Interpersonal Attraction
    4. Previous Research: Mixed-Race Marriage
       • Who marries out?
       • Spouse selection
       • Adjustment
       • Societal attitude towards mixed marriage
       • Attitude of extended family
    5. Identity Development: Mixed-Race Children
    6. Divorce
    7. Conclusions
       • Causes of interracial relationships
       • Adjustment patterns
       • Child raising practices
       • Racial identity
       • The extended family
       • Legislation and the political environment
    8. Limitations of the Study
    9. Directions for Future Research

• REFERENCES
• APPENDIX A: MEDIA COVERAGE OF INTERRACIAL RELATIONSHIPS: 1993-1994
  1. Introduction
  2. Articles
  3. Conclusion
• APPENDIX B: NEWSPAPER CARTOONS
• APPENDIX C: QUESTIONNAIRE
• APPENDIX D: LETTER TO THANDI MAGAZINE
• APPENDIX E: ADVERTISEMENT IN THANDI MAGAZINE

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Familial Ethnic Socialization Among Adolescents of Latino and European Descent: Do Latina Mothers Exert the Most Influence?

Journal of Family Issues
Volume 27, Number 2 (February 2006)
Pages 184-207
DOI: 10.1177/0192513X05279987

Andrea G. González
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Adriana J. Umaña-Taylor, Associate Professor, School of Social and Family Dynamics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Arizona State University

Mayra Y. Bámaca-Colbert, Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies
Pennsylvania State University

This article examines gender and family composition differences in 98 biethnic adolescents’ reports of familial ethnic socialization and ethnic identity. Using analysis of variance, four groups (i.e., adolescent males with Latina mothers and European American fathers, adolescent females with Latina mothers and European American fathers, adolescent males with European American mothers and Latino fathers, and adolescent females with European American mothers and Latino fathers) are compared on the above measures. Results indicate that sons of Latina mothers reported the highest levels of familial ethnic socialization. No significant differences emerge between groups on a measure of ethnic identity.

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Empire’s progeny: The representation of mixed race characters in twentieth century South African and Caribbean literature

2006-01-01
355 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3249543

Kathleen A. Koljian
University of Connecticut

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, 2006.

This dissertation is an examination of the portrayal of mixed race characters in South African and Caribbean literature. Through a close reading of the works of representative Caribbean [Derek Walcott, Michelle Cliff, and Jamaica Kincaid] and South African authors, [Bessie Head, Zoe Wicomb, and Zakes Mda] my dissertation will construct a more valid paradigm for the understanding of mixed-race characters and the ways in which authors from the Caribbean and South Africa typically deploy racially mixed characters to challenge the social order imposed during colonial domination. These authors emphasize the nuanced and hierarchical conceptualizations of racialized identity in South Africa and the Caribbean. Their narratives stand in marked contrast to contemporary models of ‘hybridity’ promulgated by prominent post-colonial critics such as Homi Bhabha and his adherents. In this dissertation, I hope to provide a more historically and culturally situated paradigm for understanding narrative portrayals of mixed race characters as an alternative to contemporary theories of ‘hybridity’. Current paradigms within post-colonial theory are compromised by their lack of historical and cultural specificity. In failing to take into account specific and long-standing attitudes toward racial identity prevalent in particular colonized cultures, these critics founder in attempts to define the significance of the racially mixed character in postcolonial literature. Bhabha, for example, fails to recognize that the formation of racialized identity within the Caribbean and South Africa is not imagined in simple binary terms but within a distinctly articulated racial hierarchy. Furthermore, Bhabha does not acknowledge the evolution of attitudes and ideas that have shaped the construction and understanding of mixed-race identity. After a brief survey of the scientific discourse of race in the colonial era, and a representative sampling of key thematic elements and tropes in early colonial literature to demonstrate the intersection of race theory and literature, close readings of individual narratives will demonstrate the limitations of current models of ‘hybridity’ and illuminate the ways in which individual authors and texts are constructed within (and sometimes constrained by) long-standing and pervasive discourses of racialized identity.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Empire’s Progeny
• “A Small Corner of the Earth”: Bessie Head
• “Colouring the Truth”: Zoe Wicomb
• Birthing the Rainbow Nation: Zakes Mda’s Madonna of Excelsior
• The “Mulatto of Style”: Derek Walcott’s Carribean Aesthetics
• “Only Sadness Comes from Mixture”: Clare Savage’s Matrilineal Quest
• Xeula and Oya: Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

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