Mixed Race Studies

Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence

University of Notre Dame Press
2004
376 pages
Cloth ISBN 10: 0-268-04103-2
Cloth ISBN 13: 978-0-268-04103-8
Paper ISBN 10: 0-268-04104-0
Paper ISBN 13: 978-0-268-04104-5

Edited by:

Paul Spickard, Professor of 20th Century U.S. Social and Cultural History
University of California, Santa Barbara

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California at Santa Barbara

Racial Thinking in the United States is a comprehensive reassessment of the ideas that Americans have had about race. This useful book draws on the skills and perspectives of nine scholars from the fields of history, sociology, theology, American studies, and ethnic studies. In thirteen carefully crafted essays they tell the history of the American system of racial domination and of twentieth-century challenges to that racial hierarchy, from monoracial movements to the multiracial movement.

The collection begins with an introduction to how Americans have thought about race, ethnicity, and colonialism. The first section of the book describes the founding of racial thinking in the United States along the racial binary of Black and White, and compares that system to the quite different system that developed in Jamaica. Section two describes anomalies in the racial binary, such as the experiences of people of mixed race, and of states such as Texas, California, and Hawai`i, where large groups of non-Black and White racial groups co-exist. Part three analyzes five monoracial challenges to racial hierarchy: the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the Chicana/o movement, the Asian American movement, Afrocentricity, and the White studies movement. Part four explores the multiracial movement which developed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and assesses whether it constitutes a successful challenge to racial hierarchy and binary racial thinking.

Racial Thinking in the United States provides excellent summaries of historical events and cultural movements, as well as analysis and criticism. It will be a welcome text for undergraduate courses in ethnic studies and American history.

Contributors: Paul Spickard, G. Reginald Daniel, Stephen A. Small, Hanna Wallinger, Lori Anne Pierce, Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval, William Wei, Michael C. Thornton, and Zipporah G. Glass.

Raiding The Gene Pool: The Social Construction of Mixed Race

Pluto Press an imprint of MacMillan Publishing
February 2002
ISBN: 978-0-7453-1764-9
ISBN10: 0-7453-1764-2
5.5 x 8.25 inches
224 pages

Jill Olumide, Researcher
Swansea University, School of Health Science

High profile ‘mixed race’ stars like Tiger Woods have brought the politics of identity into the mainstream. Jill Olumide argues that we must examine the contradictions inherent in the term “mixed race” in order to reach a fuller understanding of the variety in human experience and identity. Olumide demonstrates that there are distinctive features of mixed race experience that span time and place. By comparing contemporary experiences of mixed race, collected through interviews and workshops, with those of past populations in different parts of the world, she explains how its meaning alters with national boundary, historical context, class, gender and ethnicity. Showing how different communities are linked by social ambiguity, dependency and the denial of social space, she reveals that the underlying ideology is transformed by social, economic and political change. As mixed race groups across the world call for the right of self-definition, this book reveals that it is through understanding the plurality of the category of mixed race that we are best able to transcend the idea of ‘race’ and challenge the racial axes of social division. The book includes an examination of the folklore around racism and anti-racism, and the agencies through which ideologies of race are propagated, including social welfare groups, religious groups, scientific texts, and the family.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. A Spell to Make Them Balance: Introduction
  • Dangerous Knowledge
  • Importance of Studying Mixed Race
  • Divisions
  • The Mixed race Condition
  • Group Identity
  • A Theory of Lived Experience
  • Social Construction: Passing and Being Passed
  • Passing As…
  • Structure of the book
• 2. The Hall of Mirrors: Structures of Power
  • The Babalawo and the Sociologist
  • Ideology and State
  • Ideology For What?
  • Race and its Provenance
  • Religion and Race
  • Ethnocentricism
  • European Roots of Race Thinking
  • Spain
  • Classification and Race
  • The Ground of Racialisation in the Capitalist Era
  • A Missing Link: Whiteness as a Racial Category
  • Ethnicity
  • Women and the Racial Order
  • Endpiece
• 3. Parallel Fictions: Writing About Mixed Race
  • ‘Natural’ Science.
  • Politics of Biology
  • Eugenics
  • UNESCO and Race
  • Stonequist and the Psychologising Tendency
  • Marginal Man Goes East
  • Mixed Race and the Question ofIdentity
  • Fostering Mixed Race
  • Proving that Mixed Race Works
  • The Mothers of Mixed Race Children
  • Counting Mixed Race
  • Multiracial People
  • Biographical and Autobiographical Writing
• 4. Changing Illusions: Some Excerpts From the History of Mixed race
  • Patterns in the Career of mixed Race
  • Heredity
  • Division and Exploitation:Slavocracy Style
  • White Women and Black Women
  • Losing Caste
  • Group Consciousness
  • Metissage
  • Divide and Rule
  • The Mixed Race Condition and Genocide
  • The Purposeful Concept of Mixed Race
• 5. Behind the Facade: Race Mixing
  • Background to the Research Population
  • Access and Understanding
  • Difference as Liberation
  • Bridging
  • No Positive Images
  • Parents Must Prepare
  • Knowledge is Power
  • The Wrong Parents
  • Set Up to Fail
  • Terminology
  • Not White/Black Enough
  • Siblings and step-Families
  • Conclusion
• 6. The Balancing Act: Race Separating
  • Sanctions
  • Rejection
  • ‘Looks’
  • Abuse
  • Reputation
  • Pigeonholing
  • Repatriation
  • Suspicion of Unsuitable Combinations
  • Strategies
  • Hold Hands and Stick Together
  • Challenge-Cure Ignorance
  • Hard Work and Rightful Expectations
  • The Goodness of Mixture
  • Pass Amongst
  • Imaginary Homelands
  • Keep Your Distance
  • Humour
• 7. The Very Foundation of Order: Social Origins of Mixed Race
  • Theorising Mixed race
  • Ethnic Leakage
  • The Slimy Category
  • Mixed race Undermines Black and White
  • Women and the Reproduction of Own-Kind
  • Family
  • Religion
  • Professionals
  • Welfare Professionals in Particular
  • Race Does Not Always Over-Determine Class
  • and Gender
  • The Need to Talk
• 8. Communities to Conjure With: Concluding Remarks
  • Five Features of Mixed Race Ideology
  • An Ambiguous Social Location
  • A Contested Site
  • A Measure of Induced Dependency is Inolved
  • It is a Conditional State
  • It is a Point of Articulation in the Ordering of Race Gender and Other Divisions
  • Emotional Subjects
  • Giving Voice to Mixed Race
• Notes
• Index

Mixed-Race, Post-Race: Gender, New Ethnicities and Cultural Practices

Berg Publisher
November 2003
212pp, 10 bw illus bibliog index
Paperback ISBN: 9781859737705
Hardback ISBN: 9781859737651
Ebook ISBN: 9781845205553

Suki Ali, Lecturer in Sociology
London School of Economics

Social scientists claim that we now live in a post-race society, where race has been replaced by ‘ethnicity’. Yet racism is endemic to British society and people often think in terms of black and white. With a marked rise in the number of children from mixed parentage, there is an urgent need to challenge simplistic understandings of ‘race’, nation and culture, and interrogate what it means to grow up in Britain and claim a ‘mixed’ identity.

Focusing on mixed-race and inter-ethnic families, this book not only explores current understandings of ‘race’, but it shows, using innovative research techniques with children, how we come to read race. What influence do photographs and television have on childrens ideas about ‘race’?  How do children use memories and stories to talk about racial differences within their own families?  How important is the home and domestic culture in achieving a sense of belonging? Ali also considers, through data gathered from teachers and parents, broader issues relating to the effectiveness of anti-racist and multicultural teaching in schools, and parental concerns over the social mobility and social acceptability of their children.

Rigorously researched, this book is the first to combine childrens accounts on ‘race’ and identity with contemporary cultural theory. Using fascinating case studies, it fills a major gap in this area and provides an original approach to writing on race.

Mixed Feelings: The Complex Lives of Mixed-Race Britons

The Women’s Press
2001
336 pages
9.1 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
Paperback ISBN-10: 0704347067; ISBN-13: 978-0704347069

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s new book offers the sharpest and most informed insight yet on mixed-race Britain. Opening with an historical perspective, she traces up to the twenty-first century the reactions – often rabid – to mixed-race relationships, and the influences of imperialism and large-scale immigration. With research drawn from coupls, parents and children, she offers unique insight into the stresses as well as the strengths of links across the racial divide. In a penetrating, constantly questioning text, she asks why social policy makers have been so slow to deal with the particular problems of this growing and significant group.

The influence of race on national identity is a crucial current debate and this book gives voice to the issue, addressing difficult dilemmas but also suggesting positive solutions to the often instinctive reactions aroused by the breaking down of old barriers. An essential report into the future of the nation.

Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture

Routledge
2000-08-24
320 pages
Trim Size: 234×156
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-19402-0
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-19403-7

Edited by

Avtar Brah, Professor in Sociology
Birbek University of London

Annie Coombes, Professor of Material and Visual Culture
Birkbeck University of London

Hybridity and its Discontents explores the history and experience of ‘hybridity’ – the mixing of peoples and cultures – in North and South America, Latin America, Britain and Ireland, South Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The contributors trace manifestations of hybridity in debates about miscengenation and racial purity, in scientific notions of genetics and ‘race’, in processes of cultural translation, and in ideas of nation, community and belonging.

The contributors begin by examining the persistence of anxieties about racial ‘contamination’, from nineteenth-century fears of miscegenation to more recent debates about mixed race relationships and parenting. Examining the lived experiences of children of ‘mixed parentage’, contributors ask why such fears still thrive in a supposedly tolerant culture?  The contributors go on to discuss how science, while apparently neutral, is part of cultural discourses, which affect its constructions and classifications of gender and ‘race’.

The contributors examine how new cultural forms emerge from borrowings, exchanges and intersections across ethnic and cultural boundaries, and conclude by investigating the contemporary experience of multiculturalism in an age of contested national borders and identities.

Contributors

Avtar Brah, Annie Coombes, Donna Haraway, Sandra Klopper, John Kraniauskas, Jo Labanyi, Charlie Owen, Anne Phoenix, S. Sayyid, Deborah Lynn Steinberg, Anne Stoler, Nicholas Thomas, Amal Treacher, Lola Young

Working with multiracial clients in therapy: Bridging theory, research, and practice

Professional Psychology: Research and Practice
Vol 39(2)
Apr 2008
pages 192-201

Jennifer Teramoto Pedrotti, Associate Professor
California Polytechnic State University

Lisa M. Edwards, Assistant Professor, Director of Child/Adolescent Community Program
Marquette University

Shane J. Lopez

The growing multiracial population has resulted in a need for professional psychologists to become knowledgeable about unique identity issues that may influence therapy with multiracial clients. The overarching goal of this article is to provide clinicians with current theory and research, as well as particular therapeutic strategies that will be useful in their work with multiracial clients. Specifically, this article (a) provides a brief review of some prevalent models of multiracial identity; (b) discusses several common themes derived from theory and research about multiracial identity, which should be taken into account when working with this population; and (c) offers some specific techniques and strategies that may be used in therapy to develop more accurate conceptualizations of multiracial clients.

Read the entire article here.

A content and methodological review of articles concerning multiracial issues in six major counseling journals

Journal of Counseling Psychology
Vol 55(3)
Jul 2008
pages 411-418

Lisa M. Edwards, Assistant Professor, Director of Child/Adolescent Community Program
Marquette University

Jennifer Teramoto Pedrotti, Associate Professor
California Polytechnic State University

This study describes a comprehensive content and methodological review of articles about multiracial issues in 6 journals related to counseling up to the year 2006. The authors summarize findings about the 18 articles that emerged from this review of the Journal of Counseling Psychology, Journal of Counseling & Development, The Counseling Psychologist, Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, and Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development. The authors specifically note trends in content and methodology as well as future directions for research.

Purchase the entire article here.

The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis (Book Review)

Journal of Southern History
Vol. 67
2001

Lloyd A. Hunter
Franklin College of Indiana

The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis. By Cyprian Clamorgan. Edited and with an introduction by Julie Winch. (Columbia, Mo., and London: University of Missouri Press, c. 1999. Pp. xiv, 122. $27.50, ISBN 0-8262-1236-0.)

When Cyprian Clamorgan wrote The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis in 1858, he described what it took to “make it” as an anomaly in that city. He recognized that, in St. Louis as in antebellum communities throughout the United States, to be free and of African descent meant that one did not fit into a society that assumed that black people were meant to be slaves and that only white people could know freedom. Yet Clamorgan observed that there existed in the Mound City “a certain circle; … a peculiar class–the elite of the colored race” who attained their high status through “wealth, education, or natural ability” (p. 46). And the greatest of these was wealth. This stress on wealth as the key component of St. Louis’s black aristocracy comes through clearly in Julie Winch’s reprint of Clamorgan’s brief work. Through her informative introductory chapters, meticulous editing, and extensive annotation, Winch enriches our perception of the African American community of pre-Civil War St. Louis.  She also makes a valuable contribution to the study of free blacks.

The Cyprian Clamorgan who emerges on these pages was a barber and a well-traveled steward on numerous Mississippi River boats. He was also a mulatto with an exceedingly complex ancestry. Winch adeptly unravels the snarled tale of Clamorgan’s family and of Cyprian’s descent from an apparently unsavory French voyageur, the ambitious slave trader Jacques Clamorgan (ca. 1734-1814), and one of Jacques’s parade of “Negro wives” (p. 23). Although Jacques amassed a considerable estate, he failed to gain entry to the white upper class of St. Louis. Later his equally opportunist grandson Cyprian sought to benefit financially both from the sale of Jacques’s land claims and the marketing of a literary challenge to the white “notion that black people were all alike because they were black” (p. 2). Hence his publication of The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis in 1858, a propitious time when the Dred Scott case, which also emanated from St. Louis, was commanding national attention.

Clamorgan’s little book is a virtual tour of the free black neighborhood of antebellum St. Louis. Through colorful vignettes and often humorous comments, the reader meets the African American elite while also receiving, in Winch’s view, “a serious message about race, class, and power” (p. 3). Here for example is Mrs. Pelagie Rutgers, a former slave who bought her freedom for three dollars but who is now “worth half a million dollars” (p. 48). Around the corner is Mrs. Pelagie Nash, who owns nearly the entire block on which she lives. Here also are the “inveterate gambler” but “strictly honest” Samuel Mordecai (p. 51) and the “nearly white” Antoine Labadie (p. 56). Interspersed with the visits are some of Clamorgan’s bold judgments. Although adamantly opposed to slavery, he believed that abolitionists suffered from “the same morbid and diseased brain” as that of Harriet Beecher Stowe (p. 45). Moreover, the colored aristocracy, while unable to vote, controlled elections because “wealth is power” (p. 47).

It is Winch, however, not Clamorgan, who tells the more balanced story of St. Louis’s black elite. Her voluminous annotations provide a wellspring of information based on a wide array of primary sources ranging from church records and court cases to deeds and census data. The annotations occasionally contain more facts than are necessary, and many of the archival materials could be more adequately dated, but Winch’s careful research and its insightful presentation offer a valuable window on black society, and on the roles of class and race, in a vital southern river city.

The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis

University of Missouri Press
1999 (originaly written in 1858)
ISBN 978-0-8262-1236-8
136 pages
6 x 9
Bibliography, Index, Illustrations

Cyprian Clamorgan

Edited with an Introduction by

Julie Winch, Professor of History
University of Massachusetts, Boston

In 1858, Cyprian Clamorgan wrote a brief but immensely readable book entitled The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis. The grandson of a white voyageur and a mulatto woman, he was himself a member of the “colored aristocracy.” In a setting where the vast majority of African Americans were slaves, and where those who were free generally lived in abject poverty, Clamorgan’s “aristocrats” were exceptional people. Wealthy, educated, and articulate, these men and women occupied a “middle ground.” Their material advantages removed them from the mass of African Americans, but their race barred them from membership in white society.

The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis is both a serious analysis of the social and legal disabilities under which African Americans of all classes labored and a settling of old scores. Somewhat malicious, Clamorgan enjoyed pointing out the foibles of his friends and enemies, but his book had a serious message as well. “He endeavored to convince white Americans that race was not an absolute, that the black community was not a monolith, that class, education, and especially wealth, should count for something.”

Despite its fascinating insights into antebellum St. Louis, Clamorgan’s book has been virtually ignored since its initial publication. Using deeds, church records, court cases, and other primary sources, Winch reacquaints readers with this important book and establishes its place in the context of African American history. This annotated edition of The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis includes an introductory essay on African Americans in St. Louis before the Civil War, as well as an account of the lives of the author and the members of his remarkable family—a family that was truly at the heart of the city’s “colored aristocracy” for four generations.

A witty and perceptive commentary on race and class, The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis is a remarkable story about a largely forgotten segment of nineteenth-century society. Scholars and general readers alike will appreciate Clamorgan’s insights into one of antebellum America’s most important communities.

Blind Boone: Missouri’s Ragtime Pioneer

University of Missouri Press
1998
136 pages
6 x 9.
Biblio. Index. 25 illus.
ISBN: 0-8262-1198-4

Jack A. Batterson

Often overlooked by ragtime historians, John William “Blind” Boone had a remarkably successful and influential music career that endured for almost fifty years. Blind Boone: Missouri’s Ragtime Pioneer provides the first full account of the Missouri-born musician’s amazing story of overcoming the odds.

Boone’s background and his approach to music contributed to his ability to bridge gaps–gaps between blacks and whites and gaps between popular and classical music. Boone’s thousands of performances from 1879 to 1927 brought blacks and whites into the same concert halls as he played a mixture of popular and classical tunes.  A pioneer of ragtime music, Boone was the first performer to give the musical style legitimacy by bringing it to the concert stage.

The mulatto child of a former slave and a Union soldier, Boone was born in Miami, Missouri, in 1864 amid the chaos of the Civil War.  At six months he was diagnosed with “brain fever.” Doctors, believing they were performing a lifesaving procedure, removed Boone’s eyes and sewed his eyelids shut.

Despite blindness and poverty, Boone was a fun-loving, cheerful child.  Growing up in Warrensburg, Missouri, he played freely with both black and white children, undaunted by racial differences or his own disabilities. He exhibited a keen ear and musical promise early in life; at only five years of age he recruited older boys and formed a band.

Recognizing Boone’s talent, the town’s prominent citizens sent him to the St. Louis School for the Blind. There he excelled at music and amazed his instructors. However, Boone became increasingly unhappy with the school’s treatment of him and he frequently ran away to the tenderloin district of the city, where he first experienced ragtime. As a result of his forays, he was expelled after only two and a half years.

After some harrowing experiences, Boone met John Lange Jr., a benevolent black contractor and philanthropist in Columbia, Missouri. Boone and Lange began a lifelong friendship, which developed from their partnership in the Blind Boone Concert Company.  Although the two experienced hardships and racism, fires and train wrecks, Lange’s guidance and Boone’s talent secured 8,650 concerts in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Blind Boone: Missouri’s Ragtime Pioneer offers an engaging and readable account of the personal and professional life of Blind Boone. This book will appeal to the general reader as well as anyone interested in African American studies or music history.