Mixed Race Studies

The Color Question Like Banquo’s Ghost

The Indianapolis Recorder: A Weekly Newspaper Devoted the to Best Interest of the Negroes
Saturday, 1910-05-07
page 1, column 3
Source: Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis: University Library: Program of Digital Scholarship

There Is Virtue In Being a Full Blood Negro—Louisiana Supreme Court Makes Important Ruling.

According to a decision handed down by the Louisiana supreme court on Monday, April 25, when the law says “Negroes” it designates people of full African descent and does not include “persons of color”—octoroons, quadroons or even mulattoes. In holding thus the court puts an end to several prosecutions of men accused of violating state laws, passed after a long educational campaign, for the purpose of preventing miscegenation and the consequent deterioration of the white race. The decision will therefore be regarded as of great importance as well as of great interest not only in Louisiana, but all through the south, in every part of which the disastrous results of racial mingling, in and out of marriage, have of late been the subject of much and serious attention.

The decision of the court is, of course, a practical repeal or making void of such legislation as has already been passed with a view to keeping the white and  black  races apart, and equally, of course. It is in direct contradiction of the long established theory that any recognizable fraction of Negro blood fixes the status of the person in whose veins it flows. This was the invariable rule in slavery days, and it has survived emancipation in the drawing of social lines no less in the north than in the south. It is indeed a little humiliating to Caucasian pride that an eighth, a quarter or a half of black blood should count for more than a half, three-quarters or seven-eighths of white blood.

Mixing Matters: Critical Intersectionalities: Call For Papers

Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies (CERS)
University of Leeds
2013-05-18

An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Symposium on Critical Mixed Race Studies

The Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies (CERS) at the University of Leeds invites postgraduate research students to participate in a one-day symposium which will be held on 18 May 2013. The aim of this symposium is to explore and consider what constitutes Critical Mixed Race Studies as an emerging field of intellectual enquiry.

Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) is a rapidly growing body of scholarship and through the continued challenging of essentialized conceptions of ‘race’ and ethnicity, CMRS becomes an emerging paradigm for examining the politics of ‘race’, racism and representation. CMRS can be defined as “the transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions of race. CMRS emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. CMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization” (Critical Mixed Race Studies Association). In this transnational, interdisciplinary symposium, we seek to explore these components through the lens of intersectionalities in individual experience, theorising and activism.

This symposium is open to postgraduate researchers across a range of disciplines whose work is pertinent to and reflected within the broad field of Critical Mixed Race Studies. We invite papers that address this theme and hope to welcome national and international postgraduate research students from a wide range of disciplines.

Deadline for proposals: 8th March 2013

To submit a proposal, send a title and abstract (200-250 words) to the organizing committee, cmrs.symposium@leeds.ac.uk

Attendance at this conference is free; all other queries should be directed to the above address.

For more information, click here.

John C. Minkins on Race Purity

The Indianapolis Recorder: A Weekly Newspaper Devoted the to Best Interest of the Negroes
Saturday, 1910-05-07
page 1, columns 4-5
Source: Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis: University Library: Program of Digital Scholarship

No Objection to Prohibitive Laws Against Miscegenation.

EDUCATION IS THE REMEDY.

Mixed Bloods Praised For Their Loyalty to tho Race—Eighty-one Percent of All the Mixed Blood Negroes In the Country Are In the South. Where There Is No Intermarriage.

A large and representative audience was present at the recent meeting of the Boston Literary and Historical association to hear an address by John C. Minkins, editor of the Providence (R. I.) Evening News, on miscegenation and the fight for race purity.  His address was enthusiastically received. William Monroe Trotter, the president, introduced the speaker. A piano solo was contributed by Miss Ester Francis, a contralto solo by Miss Mae Smith and a tenor solo by Mr. Robert M. Johnson, each being encored. A resultion was unanimously adopted against the report of the Brownsville board, thanking Senator Foraker, Attorney Dagget and N. B. Marshal for their good work in behalf of the discharged soldiers. The resolution calls for a bill in congress to reinstate the discharged soldiers.

Mr. Minkins discussed “Miscegenation and the fight for Race Purity,” treating the subject broadly and answering especially magazine articles that have appeared recently on the subject. He declared whtat the American Negro was the victim, not the enemy of the white man. He declared that the “Negro problem,” the problem of miscegenation, was the white man’s problem, the Negro being the clay and the nation the potter; that as the hybridization process began under slaver and continued for 240 years it was not difficult to place the blame for the original attacks upon racial purity, as in 1790 there were hardly any mulattoes, quadroons and octoroons, white in 1890, 100 years later, the black had increased but 400 per cent and the mixed Negroes so much so that is was impossible to approximate it mathematically. After pointing out that hardly two southern states prohibit white intermarriage with a person who has some Negro blood, he said: “Few indeed of the states flatly prohibit intermarriage of the races, as they would do were their legislators genuinely in earnest in their abhorrence of Negro blood. If they had the courage of their convictions they would bar one drop of Negro blood. They leave us instead to infer that they believe there is a point at which intermixture of Negro and white blood is beneficial or they have other, to them, good an sufficient reasons for compromising and deciding to lower the legal bar sinister, such, for instance, as South Carolina had when she desired to protect some of the leading white families who were known to be ‘tainted.'”

He said the Negro need have no objection to absolutely prohibitive laws against miscegenation, as they would give him a far wider range of matrimonial choice than any other race on earth, since he could have all the thirty-second degree Negroes and more than 1,100,000 others, ranging from half white to thirty-one thirty-seconds white, from which to choose, adding, “The range is wide enough and attractive enough to satisfy the most adventurous and exacting among us.” He was not disposed to be disturbed by legitimate miscegenation and its ultimate effects, as they would take care of themselves as they had done ever since the present European Caucasian races sprang from the Negro’s ancestors, the Euro-Africans.

He asserted emphatically that the mulatto had increased faster than either white or black from 1850 to 1890. the increase being 92 per cent, the black increase 65 per cent and the white Increase, excluding about 13,000,000 immigrants, only 52 per cent. He accounted for the larger proportionate number of mulattoes In the north by immigration of mulattoes from the south, by intermarriage and by the counting of many octoroons at the south as white and asserted that more than 81 per cent of all the mixed Negroes in the country are in the south, where there is no intermarriage, the proportion to the whites in South Carolina. Louisiana and Mississippi being larger than it bears to the Negro population of those states. He praised the bulk of the mixed bloods for showing unalterable loyalty to their race and emphatically denied that the Negro was responsible for the “great black plague,” asserting that it was and always had been “a concomitant of the white man’s civilization” while he charged the white man also with responsibility for the “white slave” traffic.

Referring more particularly to Louisiana, where the anti-miscegenation crusade is under way, he said the intelligent Negroes of that state heartily endorsed the movement and accounted for the prevalence of the practice by so much ignorance among both white and black, asserting that Louisiana Negroes and Louisiana whites were the most illiterate In the country, Louisiana having twenty-one out of the thirty counties in the country in which more than two-thirds of all the Negroes were illiterate. He added that education decreases the desire for amalgamation. He deplored the fact that white men, who make the laws, had erected every conceivable defense around the white woman, but up to the time of the Louisiana crusade had interposed no barrier at all around the black woman, simply stipulating that there should be no intermarriage. Thousands of Negroes had been lynched for crimes, attempted and alleged, against white women, but no white man had ever been lynched for a like crime against a Negro woman.

In conclusion he denied that the Negro woman was immoral and insisted that the concurrent testimony of unprejudiced investigators proved “the most marvelous advancement in history” had been made by the Negro “along every conceivable line.” He advocated better protection through education and the unwritten law by both Negroes and whites for the Negro woman and the Negro home as the most effective means of making the Negro safer and the white woman also, as “the well being of the white race in this country is inseparably bound up with that of its fellow citizens in black,” adding that “the sooner this is realized tbe better it will be for both races, even though they are destined to live, as some people believe, as united as the hand, as separate as the fingers.”

CNN Joins Forces with Soledad O’Brien’s New Production Company

Cable News Network (CNN)
2012-02-21

Starfish Media Group Will Produce Specials and Documentaries for CNN
 
CNN is entering into a production and distribution agreement with critically-acclaimed journalist Soledad O’Brien, whose new production company will produce long-form programming specials for the network it was announced today by Jeff Zucker, president CNN Worldwide. O’Brien’s company, which will launch in June, will produce three long-form programming specials for CNN in 2014. Those specials will include one of the network’s most successful franchises, Black in America. O’Brien’s new production company, Starfish Media Group, in conjunction with CNN, will act as the exclusive worldwide distributor of previous documentaries featuring O’Brien. She will also host the 2013 CNN Black in America documentary, which will air later this year.

“We greatly value Soledad’s experience, and her first-rate storytelling will continue to be an asset to CNN,” said Zucker. “Documentaries and long-form story telling are important to our brand and we’re anticipating more of what we’ve come to expect from her – riveting content.”…

Read the entire press release here.

The Stigma of Privilege: Racial Identity and Stigma Consciousness Among Biracial Individuals

Race and Social Problems
Volume 5, Issue 1 (March 2013)
pages 41-56
DOI: 10.1007/s12552-012-9083-5

Leigh S. Wilton
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Diana T. Sanchez, Associate Professor of Psychology
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Julie A. Garcia, Associate Professor of Psychology
California Polytechnic State University

Racial identification is a complex and dynamic process for multiracial individuals, who as members of multiple racial groups have been shown to self-identify or be identified by others differently, depending on the social context. For biracial individuals who have white and minority ancestry, such identity shifting (e.g., from minority to white, or vice versa) may be a way to cope with the threats to their racial identity that can be signaled by the presence or absence of whites and/or minorities in their social environment. We examine whether stigma consciousness (Pinel in J Pers Soc Psychol 76(1):114–128, 1999; i.e., the chronic awareness of the stereotyping and prejudice that minorities face) interacts with the sociocultural context to predict social identity threat, belonging, and racial identification. Using experience sampling methodology, minority/white biracial individuals (27 Asian/white, 22 black/white, and 26 Latino/white) reported the racial composition of their environment, social identity threat for their component racial identities, overall feelings of belonging, and racial identification over a 1-week period. Results suggest that stigma consciousness predicts the extent to which biracial people identify with their white background and experience belonging in different racial contexts. We discuss racial identity shifting in response to context-based threats as a protective strategy for biracial people, and identity where participants’ sociocultural contexts and experiences with racial identity and threat differ as a result of their minority racial group or ascribed race.

Read the pre-publication proof here.

Colorism and School-to-Work and School-to-College Transitions of African American Adolescents

Race and Social Problems
Volume 5, Issue 1 (March 2013)
pages 15-27
DOI: 10.1007/s12552-012-9081-7

Igor Ryabov, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg, Texas

Using multinomial logistic modeling, the current study estimated the impact of skin tone on school-to-work and school-to-college transitions of African American youths. The findings suggest that African American males with the lightest skin tone were more likely to find a job and to be in college than their co-racial peers with darker skin tones. The odds of finding a full-time job were also significantly higher for African American females with the lightest skin tone. Generally, the multivariate results reveal that among the effects examined in this study, the family background factors, marital status, prior achievement, and average school socioeconomic status matter the most.

Introduction

Colorism, the favoring of light complexion over dark complexion, has traditionally been important to our acceptance of racialized identities of Black folks in the United States. Complexion, along with other features of Eurocentric phenotypc—blue. gray, or green eyes; straight hair; thinlips: and a narrow nose—has always been considered valuable both within and outside the African American community. Eurocentric phenotype plays a central role in defining standards of beauty and governs both status and treatment. On the other hand, dark skin tone and Afrocentric features—broad nose, curly hair, and thick lips—have been devalued. The hierarchy of these phenotypic trails has implied that people of predominantly African ancestry with more European features are viewed as being more attractive and intelligent than those with few of none of these features.

An abundant literature has shown the many ways in which colorism affects the African American community (Bodenhorn 2006; Bodenhorn and Ruebeck 2007). One of the major streams of research has been the advantages of light skin complexion for upward social mobility. Much emphasis has been placed on the intergenerational mobility of light- versus darker-complected African Americans, while very little research has directly examined the intragenerational social mobility and. specifically, the influence of colorism on school-to-work and school-to-collegc transitions of African American adolescents. Although studies of adolescent transitions are abundant, one issue with these studies is that they usually treat African Americans as homogeneous group and do not account for the effects of colorism. This paper attempted to address this shortcoming in the literature and to explore the paths taken by black youths in the period immediately following their high school years. In addition to investigating cursory characteristics such as skin tone, the present study estimated the effect of a set of explanatory variables (school contextual factors, family effects, marital status, etc.) on the path that youths look in the period following their high school years. Of the three trajectories—college, work, and unemployment—the first two were considered as successful since both typically lead to the accumulation of skills either through formal study or learning on-the-job. Multinomial logistic regression was chosen as an appropriate statistical technique because the dependent variable was a set of more than two outcomes that could not he ordered in a meaningful way. With the purpose of investigating the aforementioned predictors of African American school-to-work and school-to-college transitions, we used the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (henceforth, the Add Health). The cogent rationale of using the Add Health was that it had collected information not only from adolescent respondents, but also from their parents or members of their peer network. Furthermore, this information was incorporated in the way to provide a complete account of all possible social interactions among adolescents and their parents. These data allowed the examination of the relative influences of school contextual factors and family influences on school-to-work transitions. Additionally, the Add Health is a longitudinal survey which implies that an insight can be gained about the causal order of the relationship between school-to-work transitions and school contextual factors.

Conceptual Framework

Complexion Advantage and Social Mobility

Historical accounts point to a consistent pattern of preference given by individuals, regardless of their race, and institutions to light-complected individuals (Bodenhorn 2003. 2006; Cole 2005; Edwards 1959; Frazier 1957; Myrdal et al. 1944; Keuter 1917). The advantages of a light complexion date back to slavery when blackness was defined as barbaric, savage, and ugly, whereas whiteness was associated with culture, virtue, and beauty. According to Reuter (1917) and Frazier (1957), a complexion advantage appeared early in the slavery era when the majority of slaveholders resented at sending light-complected slaves to field work, while letting them to participate in craft training and apprenticeship. Slaves of mixed ancestry were more likely to be granted domestic positions, better food and clothing, and manumission and educational opportunities (Cole 2005). Myrdal et al. (1944) wrote that slaves, more European in appearance, commanded higher prices in the slave market and were preferred as personal servants to white masters because they were considered to be more esthetically appealing and intellectually superior to slaves with pure African ancestry. Frazier (1957) claimed a fair complexion improved slaves’ chances of survival by significantly reducing their toil and chores, by improving their access to food and shelter, and by exposure to the culture of whites, including their manners, dress, and linguistic conventions. Moreover, visible white ancestry became the basis of differential access to privilege not only among slaves, but also among free persons of color. Light-complected, mixed-race free mulattos were also more likely to be literate, and their superiority over dark-complecled free blacks was widely accepted in the free black population as a whole as a result of the status advantages and similarities between whites and mulattos in physical appearance, speech, dress, and behavior (Edwards 1959).

Differences in socioeconomic characteristics by skin tone lingered long after slavery. In the antebellum South, free light-complected blacks became the social and economic elite of black communities. Although their jobs as small businessmen and service workers with white patrons were not prestigious in the modem sense, these were privileged positions compared with the opportunities available to their darker contemporaries. Socially, elite groups of light-complected blacks erected walls between themselves and the dark-complected masses by avoiding intermarriage with darker blacks, continuing their associations with whiles, and passing their advantages on to their children. This is how the original mulatto elite maintained its in-group privileged status until the beginning of the twentieth century. Even now for many people of African descent, black is not black: Lightness begets access to in-group privileges, rather than whiteness alone. Evidence from some analysts implies that skin tone effects on socioeconomic status are as potent now as in the past (Bowman et al. 2004; Goldsmith et al. 2006; Thompson and Keith 2001).

Colorism: How it Works

Although the exact mechanism is not known, understanding how this process works is largely limited to social psychology, Sumner (1906) was among the first to notice the general tendency of human beings to rank themselves according to group membership. He coined the distinction between in-group and out-group and suggested that preference for in-groups over out-groups is a universal characteristic of social existence. According to theories of implicit social cognition, we universally share positive feelings about the in-groups while simultaneously prefer to distance ourselves from out-group members in a diverse social environment (Banaji 2001; Banaji and Dasgupla 1998; Dovidio et al. 2002;  Greenwald et al. 2002; Uhlmann et al. 2002). It is important to stress, however, that privileges may be granted to those in the in-group by both members of the in-group and out-group. For example, teachers and potential employers make attributions regarding who is and who is not smart, competent, etc., based on the implicit biases learned from the environment and related to the ways society relates lighter skin with attractiveness, intelligence, competence, and likeability (Lovejoy 2001: Maddox and Gray 2002).

Several studies have found that dark-complected African Americans are more likely to report racial discrimination at work than light-complected African Americans (e.g.. Hill 2002; Keith and Herring 1991; Seltzer and Smith 1991)…

Race: A Philosophical Introduction, 2nd Edition

Polity Press
February 2013
240 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-7456-4965-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7456-4966-5

Paul C. Taylor, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Pennsylvania State University

In Race: A Philosophical Introduction, Second Edition, Paul C. Taylor provides an accessible guide to a well-travelled but still-mysterious area of the contemporary social landscape. As in the first edition, the book blends metaphysics and social philosophy, analytic philosophy and pragmatic philosophy of experience. In this thoroughly updated and revised volume, Taylor outlines the main features and implications of race-thinking, while engaging the ideas of such important figures as Linda Alcoff, K. Anthony Appiah, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, Sally Haslanger, and Howard Winant. The result is a comprehensive but accessible introduction to philosophical race theory and to a non-biological and situational notion of race.

The book unfolds in a sequence of five chapters, each devoted to one of the following questions: What is race-thinking? Don’t we know better than to talk about race now? Are there any races? What is it like to have a racial identity? And how important, ethically, is colorblindness? On the way to answering these questions, Race takes up topics like mixed-race identity, white supremacy, the relationship between the race concept and other social identity categories and the impact of race-thinking on our erotic and romantic lives. The second edition’s new concluding chapter explores the racially fraught issues of policing, immigration, and global justice, and interrogates the thought that Barack Obama has ushered in a post-racial age. This volume is suitable for the educated general reader as well as for students and scholars in ethnic studies, philosophy, sociology, and other related fields.

Features

• Fully updated and revised edition of this comprehensive but accessible introduction to philosophical race theory.
• Blends metaphysics and social philosophy, analytic philosophy and pragmatic philosophy of experience and engages the ideas of such important figures as Linda Alcoff, K. Anthony Appiah, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, Sally Haslanger, and Howard Winant.
• Taylor examines key topics such as mixed-race identity and white supremacy as well as timely examinations of racially fraught issues of policing, immigration, and global justice.
• This compelling volume will appeal to students and scholars in ethnic studies, philosophy, sociology, and other related fields.

Table of Contents

• Preface.
• Part I: Theory:.
  • 1. What Race-Thinking Is:.
    • The Language Of Race.
    • What We Mean By ‘Race’: What Do You Mean, ‘We’?.
    • Modern Racialism: Prehistory And Background.
    • Power, Racial Formation, And Method.
    • Conclusion.
  • 2. Three Challenges To Race-Thinking:.
    • Introduction.
    • The Anti-Racist Challenge, Take 1: Isn’t Race-Thinking Unethical?.
    • What Racism Is.
    • Classical Racialism: History And Background.
    • Early Modern Racialism.
    • High Modern, Or Classical, Racialism.
    • The Concept Of Classical Racialism.
    • The Challenge Of Human Variation: Isn’t Racial Biology False?.
    • What’s Wrong With Race.
    • The Challenge Of Social Differentiation: Isn’t The Race Concept Just In The Way?.
    • Ethnicity.
    • Nation.
    • Class.
    • Caste.
    • Intersecting Principles: Gender.
    • Conclusion.
  • 3. What Races Are:.
    • Introduction.
    • After Classical Racialism.
    • The U.S. Racial Terrain Today.
    • Varieties Of Racialism: Four Accounts And Ten Questions.
    • What Races Are – A Radical Constructionist’s Story.
    • Ten Questions.
    • Conclusion.
• Part II: Practice:.
  • 4. Existence, Experience, Elisions:.
    • Introduction.
    • Ethical Eliminativism, For And Against; Or, The Anti-Racist Challenge, Take 2.
    • The Slippery Slope And The Argument From Political Realism.
    • The Argument From Self-Realization.
    • Existence, Identity, And Despair.
    • The Basics.
    • Despair And Terror.
    • Double-Consciousness.
    • Micro-Diversity, Part I.
    • Microdiversity, Part II.
    • In-Between: Illusions Of Purity And Interstitial Peoples.
    • Experience, Invisibility, And Embodiment.
    • The Basics.
    • Invisibility And The Other Mind-Body Problem.
    • From The Ontic To The Ontological.
    • Conclusion.
  • 5. The Color Question:.
    • Introduction.
    • Color And ‘Courting’: The Ethics Of Miscegenation.
    • Colorblindness And Affirmative Action.
    • Conclusion.
• A Note On Further Reading.
• Endnotes

Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool

Princeton University Press
2005
312 pages
6 x 9
ISBN: 978-1-4008-2641-4

Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hunter College of the City University of New York

The port city of Liverpool, England, is home to one of the oldest Black communities in Britain. Its members proudly date their history back at least as far as the nineteenth century, with the global wanderings and eventual settlement of colonial African seamen. Jacqueline Nassy Brown analyzes how this worldly origin story supports an avowedly local Black politic and identity—a theme that becomes a window onto British politics of race, place, and nation, and Liverpool’s own contentious origin story as a gloriously cosmopolitan port of world-historical import that was nonetheless central to British slave trading and imperialism.

This ethnography also examines the rise and consequent dilemmas of Black identity. It captures the contradictions of diaspora in postcolonial Liverpool, where African and Afro-Caribbean heritages and transnational linkages with Black America both contribute to and compete with the local as a basis for authentic racial identity. Crisscrossing historical periods, rhetorical modes, and academic genres, the book focuses singularly on “place,” enabling its most radical move: its analysis of Black racial politics as enactments of English cultural premises. The insistent focus on English culture implies a further twist. Just as Blacks are racialized through appeals to their assumed Afro-Caribbean and African cultures, so too has Liverpool–an Irish, working-class city whose expansive port faces the world beyond Britain–long been beyond the pale of dominant notions of authentic Englishness. Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail studies “race” through clashing constructions of “Liverpool.”

Read the entire first chapter for free here in HTML or PDF format.  Excerpts are below.

“TO UNDERSTAND Black people, you’ve got to understand Liverpool.” So argued my friend Scott, a sixty-year-old Black man born and raised in that city…

…In the midst of describing the center’s aims he stopped short, interrupting himself to say, “To understand Black people, you’ve got to understand Liverpool.” He explained that Stanley House was established by charitable White people.  But their charter referred to the children of African seamen and the White women to whom they were often married as “half-castes,” a much despised term now…

Variations of that question were being posed in seaports all over Britain and in the overlapping arenas of social work, philanthropy, and academia, which would, in the mid to late nineteenth century, include physical anthropology and ethnology.  In contrast to eighteenth-century British ideas about human variation, which considered religion and clothing as key indices of civilization and posited climate as an explanation of different human potentials, the 1840s saw the emergence of a more biological argument (Wheeler 2000; Hamer 1996).  Physical types, which were correlated with areas of geographic origin, became the basis of racial distinctions and served to explain differential human capacities. Classificatory schema abounded. In this respect, Brontë’s mysterious, somewhat monstrous representation of the racially ambiguous Heathcliff is intriguing; it accords with the fearful image of the half-caste conjured up in Gothic literature and other discursive contexts.  As H. L. Malchow provocatively explains, “[O]ne may define [the Gothic] genre by characteristics that resonate strongly with racial prejudice, imperial exploration and sensational anthropology—themes and images that are meant to shock and terrify, that emphasize chaos and excess, sexual taboo and barbarism, and a style grounded in techniques of suspense and threat” (1996: 102).  Just as the unpredictable and brooding Heathcliff posed an ever-present danger, so too were the “hundreds of half-caste children” in 1920s Cardiff said to have “vicious tendencies.” These children also confused the categories of science, exhibiting, according to the press, a “disharmony of physical traits and mental characteristics” (Rich 1986: 131). In an era when science had attained unprecedented legitimacy (Lorimer 1996), the racially ambiguous or mixed person was a threat to the social order. Again, Malchow writes, “The terms ‘half-breed’ and ‘half-caste’ are double, hyphenated constructions resonating with other linguistic inadequacies and incompletes—with ‘half-wit’ or ‘half-dead’, with ‘half-naked’ or ‘half-truth’, and of course with ‘half-civilized’” (1996: 104). The person of mixed race was a pathology to be studied from both literary and “scientific” points of view. Their sexuality was of particular concern. It was one thing to be born of immoral unions in immoral circumstances; but as freaks of nature themselves, what moral predilections would they reproduce? Could they reproduce? (Malchow 1996; Young 1995)…

…Into a milieu defined, at the very least, by the above-described dynamics of colonialism, race, nationality, place, sexuality, class, and gender entered one Muriel Fletcher, infamous in present-day Liverpool for a study she conducted in 1928 under the auspices of the Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half- Caste Children. Fletcher was trained in social research at the Liverpool University School of Social Science, where her circle included eugenicist anthropologists (Rich 1986).  The subjects of Fletcher’s research were White women who were formerly involved with African men and their “half-caste” children. She published her conclusions in Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports. Ultimately, the Fletcher Report, as it is commonly called, concludes that “the colour problem” in that city owed not to the racist structuring of British society, the ideologies promulgated by the British state and its institutions, nor those circulating within Liverpool’s social welfare establishment, nor to the everyday racism of White Liverpudlians who routinely subjected colored seamen to violence. Rather, Fletcher attributed the colour problem in Liverpool to African seamen. It would be hard to state emphatically enough how thoroughly racial politics in Liverpool/Britain reflect the legacy of the Fletcher Report….

…The African man creates the White woman’s problems, while they both create the myriad crises said to befall their “half-caste” children. Fletcher uses the term half-caste in various ways. At times she distinguishes between “Anglo-Negroid” and “Anglo-Chinese” children; yet both of these groups belong to the half-caste category. Fletcher remarks at the outset, however, that “Anglo-Chinese” children are quite well-adjusted.  Since they pose no problem, we need not hear anything more about them.  As well, in the early pages, Fletcher uses the term Anglo-Negroid for children of African men and White women.  In detailing the minute phenotypical features of “half-caste” children, the Fletcher Report marks some of them “English,” as in “30 per cent. had English eyes… A little over 50 per cent. had hair negroid in type and colour. 25 per cent. had English, while the remaining 25 per cent. exhibited some curious mixtures… About 12 per cent. had lips like the average English child” (27).   She refers to these children’s social characteristics in similar terms. While she does not suggest that biological inheritance is at work, the children nevertheless manifest a troubling duality, exhibiting the worst trait of each parent.  Here speaking about “half-caste” girls, Fletcher argues, “From her mother the half-caste girl is liable to inherit a certain slackness, and from her father a happy-go-lucky attitude towards life” (34). The problems of half-caste children are not of their own making, then. They are victims. They attend earnestly to their schoolwork and seem amiable enough. But the immorality that characterizes their home life, given the low character of both parents, cannot help but be reproduced in these hapless children….

Read the entire first chapter for free here in HTML or PDF format.

From the Golden Gate to the Green Mountains: A Hapa Educational Autobiography and Meta-Critical Reflection

University of Vermont
October 2012
65 pages

Noelle Brassey

A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Graduate College of The University of Vermont In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts Specializing in English

As a former UC Berkeley undergraduate and a University of Vermont graduate student, this is an educational autobiography of a self-identified Hapa, or mixed-race Asian American, through the lens of race and identity. Exploring what it means to be “white” and “privileged,” and realizing that these concepts—like identity—are fluid, this thesis adopts a dual methodology that includes personal narrative, as well as a meta-critical reflection. This thesis focuses on three memoirs: Bone Black and Wounds of Passion by bell hooks, and Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez, each of which explore themes of reclaiming voice and reconstructing identity with regards to race, class, and culture.

Read the entire thesis here.

Identity Politics: the Mixed-race American Indian Experience

Journal of Critical Race Inquiry
Volume 2, Number 1 (2012)
25 pages

Michelle R. Montgomery
University of Washington

This paper builds a Critical Race Theory approach to consider how mixed-race American Indian college students conform to, or resist, dominant black/non-black ideology. Current research on multiracials in the U.S. lacks the perspectives of mixed-race American Indians on the heightened disputes of “Indianness,” tribal enrollment, and tribal self-determination. Also under-explored is how mixed-race American Indian persons perceive themselves in racial terms, how they wish to be perceived, and how economic and historical perspectives inform their choices about racial self-identification. This paper provides an overview of the identity politics of mixed-race American Indians at a tribal college and highlights the need for tribal colleges to embrace a growing mixed-race population through self-determination education policies.

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