Mixed Race Studies

Teaching Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far: Multiple Approaches

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Volume 1 (2010)
pages 70-78

Wei Ming Dariotis, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies
San Francisco State University

This essay compares pedagogical approaches to teaching the literature of Edith Eaton in two distinct contexts: a course on Asian American Literature and a course on Asian Americans of Mixed Heritage.  This is a comparison of the variant pedagogical approaches in these two different contexts.

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race Jamaicans in England

A Parcel of Ribbons: Eighteenth century Jamaica viewed throught family stories and documents
2012-01-28

Ann Powers

The status of  mixed race Jamaicans in eighteenth century Jamaica was always going to be less than than of white colonists, but it was possible for them to become established and successful in England. A case in point are two of the children of Scudamore Winde.

Ambrose Scudamore Winde (he seems to have dropped the Ambrose early on) was born about 1732 at Kentchurch in Herefordshire, son of John Winde and Mary Scudamore.  The beautiful Kentchurch Court is still in the hands of the Scudamore family as it has been for the last thousand years or so. In 1759, following the suicide of his father, he and his brother Robert went to Jamaica where Scudamore Winde became an extremely successful merchant.  He was also Assistant Judge of the Supreme Court of the Judicature and a member of the Assembly.

Like many white colonists of the island he had relationships with several women but did not marry.  When he died in late September 1775 he left generous legacies to his various children. His business had prospered and a large part of his assets were in the form of debts owed to him. According to Trevor Burnard[1] he had  personal assets of £94,273, of which £82,233 were in the form of debts. This would be equivalent to about £9.3 million relative to current retail prices or £135 million in relation to average wages today.

Scudamore Winde freed his negro slave Patty who was baptised as Patty Winde in 1778 at Kingston when her age was given as about 50.  Patty and her daughter Mary were left land that he had bought from Richard Ormonde in Saint Catherine’s with the buildings on it, and £100 Jamaican currency together with two slaves called Suki and little Polly.  It is not clear whether Mary was Scudamore Winde’s daughter for although her name is given as Mary Winde she is referred to as a negro rather than mulatto.

Scudamore Winde had a mulatto son called Robert, possibly the son of Patty, who was born about 1759, and three children with Sarah Cox herself a free negro or mulatto (records vary).  Her children were Penelope, John and Thomas born between 1768 and 1774.  John may have died young and Thomas elected to remain in Jamaica where he had a successful career as a merchant in Kingston.  Robert and Penelope travelled to England under the eye of Robert Cooper Lee who was trustee and executor of his close friend Scudamore Winde’s Will…

Read the entire article here.

Morgan Goode: On Board with the Future of the Movement

The Bilerico Project
2012-03-21

Amy Andre, Project Contributor

If you haven’t heard of her already, BiNet USA board member Morgan Goode is a name for you to remember. At this year’s Creating Change conference, she co-led a workshop about mixed race issues that brought a crowd that was literally spilling out of the doors. I was in that room, and I saw the current and future leadership of the bi movement—and of the LGBT movement as a whole—sitting in there with me. Specifically, I saw it at the front of the room.

Morgan is a writer and photographer living in Brooklyn. She is a profo-queer and is affiliated with many different LGBT organizations, but her opinions are her own. She tells me that one day she is going to make good on her threat to do a photo project on white tourists photographing homeless people of color. In the meantime, she is an editor-at-large at prettyqueer.com and is also organizing the 6th Annual Amazingly Queer Race for Economic Justice. Her favorite pastimes include subverting the gaze, making people uncomfortably aware of their privilege and petting kitties.

I recently caught up with Morgan to learn more about where she’s going, where the movement is going, and how we can all get on board. Here’s what she had to say.

Amy: What inspired your workshop at Creating Change for mixed race attendees? How did it go for you? Do you plan to do more in the future?

Morgan: Mixed race issues have been on my mind since I can remember but that workshop actually came out of meeting fellow activist Ryan Li Dahlstrom at the 2010 BECAUSE Conference. The conference and the panel obviously focused on bi/pan/fluid issues, but Ryan Li and I really connected around our shared identities as mixed race queers. It wasn’t long before we knew we had to do a workshop that would give mixed race queer and trans folks the opportunity to come together and support each other as activists and allies. I think mixed race queer and trans folks are really hungry for that space to share our experiences and be heard…

Read the entire article here.

Family Tree’s Startling Roots

The New York Times
2012-03-19

Felicia Lee

Thirty-nine lashes “well laid” on her bare back and an extension of her indentured servitude was Elizabeth Banks’s punishment for “fornication & Bastardy with a negroe slave,” according to a stark June 20, 1683, court document from York County, Va. Through the alchemy of celebrity and genealogy, that record and others led to the recent discovery that Banks, a free white woman despite her servitude, was the paternal ninth great-grandmother of Wanda Sykes, the ribald comedian and actress.

More than an intriguing boldface-name connection, it is a rare find even in a genealogy-crazed era in which Internet sites like ancestry.com, with more than 14 million users, and the popular NBC program “Who Do You Think You Are?” play on that fascination. Because slavery meant that their black ancestors were considered property and not people, most African-Americans are able to trace their roots in this country only back to the first quarter of the 19th century.

“This is an extraordinary case and the only such case that I know of in which it is possible to trace a black family rooted in freedom from the late 17th century to the present,” said the historian Ira Berlin, a professor at the University of Maryland known for his work on slavery and African-American history.

Mary Banks, the biracial child born to Elizabeth Banks around 1683, inherited her mother’s free status, although she too was indentured. Mary appeared to have four children. There are many other unanswered questions, but the family grew, often as free people of color married or paired off with other free people of color.

Ms. Sykes’s family history was professionally researched for a segment of “Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr.,” a new series that has its debut Sunday on PBS.

“The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched, ” said Mr. Gates, the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard. He was referring to the dozens of genealogies his researchers have unearthed for his television roots franchise, which began in 2006 with the PBS series “African-American Lives” and includes three other genealogy-inspired shows. Mr. Gates said he also checked Ms. Sykes’s family tree with historians, including Mr. Berlin…

…Johni Cerny, who is the chief genealogist for Mr. Gates’s television programs, noted that many African-Americans with white ancestry could trace their heritage beyond the 1600s to European ancestors. She said 85 percent of African-Americans have some European ancestry.

“The unique thing about Wanda is that she descends from 10 generations of free Virginia mulattos, which is more rare than descendants of mixed-race African-Americans who descend from English royalty,” Ms. Cerny wrote in an e-mail message.

More than 1,000 mixed-race children were born to white women in colonial Virginia and Maryland, but their existence has been erased from oral and written history, said Paul Heinegg, a respected lay genealogist and historian. Mr. Heinegg’s Web site, freeafricanamericans.com, features books and documents like tax lists that provide information about those families…

Read the entire article here.

Performativity and the Latina/o-white hybrid identity: performing the textual self

University of South Florida
2005
192 pages

Shane T. Moreman, Associate Professor of Communications
California State University, Fresno

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Communication College of Arts and Sciences

This study is an exploration of Latina/o-White hybrid identity for constructions and negotiations of hybridity as performed in the lives of individuals and as rearticulated in discourse. These discourses are drawn from interviews with nine individuals, stories of my own life, and three published memoirs. Despite these different forms, all the self identified Latina/o-White hybrid individuals speak to the difficulty of imagining and enacting a hybrid identity within todays discourse on race and ethnicity. This study articulates these difficulties as lived experience, theory, and performance come together to argue for and against hybridity as a model for contemporary identity. The project rests mainly on the theory of performativity and the theory of hybridity. In Chapter Two, I interview nine participants. While Whiteness was consistently re-centered in their self-perceptions, this re-centering disrupts naturalness to their racial identity.
 
Race is understood beyond the visual and into the performative.This disruption of naturalness allows room for a more imaginative approach to race. In Chapter Three, I utilize the Mexican pop singer, Paulina Rubio, as a backdrop to my own theoretical and material performative embodiments of hybridity. I deconstruct the perceived hybridity of Paulina Rubio, and I theorize the lived-experience of my own hybrid performativity. I demonstrate how hybrid performativity,while theoretically achievable, loses its material efficacy.In Chapter Four, I do a close-reading of three memoirs written about and by Latina/o-White hybrid individuals. The range of hybridity, being thrust upon and beinga strategy, is reproduced as a continuum across different hybridities of the Latina/o-White hybrid individual. The continuum moves across five hybrid strategies for languaging identity: imposter, mongrel, homeless, bridge, and twin. Chapter Five is a summary of the dissertation.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables
• Abstract
• Chapter One: Introduction
  • Rationale for the Study
  • Identity: Self, Other, and Racial Other
  • Performing an Identity
  • Multiplicity of Self and Other
  • Preview of the Chapters
• Chapter Two: Acting in Concert and Acting In Accord: Performativity of Latina/o-White Identity
  • The Terms of Latina/o Identity
  • The Ineffable White
  • Between the Many-Named and the Never-Need-to-be-Named
  • Constructing and Negotiating Identity through Material Practices
  • Constructing and Negotiating Identity through the Visual
  • Constructing and Negotiating Identity through Discourse
  • Constructing and Negotiating Identity through Performative Acts
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Three: Paulina Rubio Y Yo: Questioning Hybrid Perfomativity
  • Paulina Rubio: ?Eres la persona que te dices?
  • Moving as She Moves and Mouthing Her Words: Hybrid Performativity
  • Globalized Media as an Opportunity for Hybridity
  • A Hybrid Identity Foreclosed
• Chapter Four: Memoir as Equipment for Living: Hybrid Performative Identities
  • Textual Production of Hybrid Performativity
  • Performative Trappings: Language as Binary/Hierarchy Trap
  • Performative Trappings: Performing Whiteness
  • Performative Trappings: Words that Produce Their Subjects and Effects
  • When Performativity Meets Hybridity: Beyond the Trappings
  • A Continuum of Strategies of Hybrid Performativity: The Imposter
  • A Continuum of Strategies of Hybrid Performativity: The Mongrel
  • A Continuum of Strategies of Hybrid Performativity: The Homeless
  • A Continuum of Strategies of Hybrid Performativity: The Bridge
  • A Continuum of Strategies of Hybrid Performativity: The Twin
  • Hybridizing Art with Love
• Chapter Five: A Grammar of Hybridity in the Subjunctive Mood
  • Overview of Significant Findings within the Chapters
  • Performativity & the Latina/o-White Hybrid Identity: Performing the Textual Self
  • Implications for Future Research in Hybridity
• References
• Appendices
  • Appendix A: Informed Consent
  • Appendix B: Interview Schedule
  • Appendix C: Letter of Support
• About the Author

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Obama Effect: Understanding Emerging Meanings of “Obama” in Anti-Discrimination Law

Indiana Law Journal
Volume 87: Issue 1 (Spring 2012)
pages 328-348
Symposium: “Labor and Employment Under the Obama Administration: A Time for Hope and Change?”

Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Charles and Marion Kierscht Professor of Law
University of Iowa

Mario L. Barnes, Professor of Law
University of California, Irvine

Panel 6: Employment Law: Antidiscrimination Law Under a Black President in a “Post-Racial” America?

The election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency on November 4, 2008, prompted many declarations from journalists and commentators about the arrival of a post-racial society, a society in which race is no longer meaningful. For many, the fact that a self-identified black man had obtained the most prominent, powerful, and prestigious job in the United States symbolized the end of an era in which Blacks and other racial minorities could make legitimate claims about the harmful effects of racism. In fact, on the night of the election, conservative talk show host Bill Bennett proclaimed that Blacks would have no more excuses for any failures or unattained successes. Black actor Will Smith essentially agreed with Bennett, proclaiming the following: “I love that all of our excuses have been removed. African-American excuses have been removed. There’s no white man trying to keep you down, because if he were really trying to keep you down, he would have done everything he could to keep Obama down.”

Along the same lines, many conservatives pointed to Obama’s election as a symbol of a racism-free society when they initiated constitutional challenges to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite the fact that Obama had earned only one in four votes from Whites in areas covered by section 5 of the Act while earning nearly half of all votes from Whites nationally, Texas lawyer Gregory Coleman argued that the Voting Rights Act was basically irrelevant in today’s society; to him and other conservatives, Obama’s election as president demonstrated as much. Coleman declared, “The America that has elected Barack Obama as its first African American president is far different than when [the Voting Rights Act] was first enacted in 1965.”

Overall, many pondered whether Obama’s election signaled a new day for Blacks. The fact that Obama was biracial only made the symbolism stronger. The son of a black Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, Obama represented a break from our nation’s troubled past with race and racism, not just because of his ability to become president but also because of his individual racial background.

In this Article, we explore the proclamations that have been made about an emerging “post-racial” society within the context of workplace anti-discrimination law. Specifically, as the title of our panel for this symposium asks, we inquire: What is the significance of having a biracial, black-white president (or more specifically, the first self-identified black president) to the enforcement of anti-discrimination law? What impact, if any, has President Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency and election as president had on discrimination in the workplace?

Based in part on our review of discrimination cases in which President Obama’s name has been invoked—in most cases, either to demean minority workers or with an otherwise discriminatory purpose—we conclude that having a biracial, black-white (or self-identified black) president has had a surprising effect on the enforcement of anti-discrimination law. Indeed, we contend that Obama’s campaign and election have, to an extent, had an unusual effect in the work environment. Rather than revealing that racism is over or that racial discrimination is diminishing in the workplace, Obama’s presence and prominence have developed a specialized meaning that ironically has resulted in an increase in or at the very least a continuation of regular discrimination and harassment within the workplace. In fact, our review of a number of anti-discrimination law cases filed during the political ascendance and election of Obama suggests that, within certain contexts, individuals have made references to Obama in ways that demonstrate racial animus against Blacks and those associated with Blacks or as a means for explaining why offending conduct toward racial minorities does not involve discrimination. In other words, in these contexts, the term “Obama” itself has become a new tool for racial harassment and discrimination as well as a new tool for denying the reality of racism…

Read the entire article here.

The Impact of the Obama Presidency on Civil Rights Enforcement in the United States

Indiana Law Journal
Volume 87: Issue 1 (Spring 2012)
Symposium: “Labor and Employment Under the Obama Administration: A Time for Hope and Change?”

Joel Wm. Friedman, Jack M. Gordon Professor of Law
Tulane University Law School

Panel 6: Employment Law: Antidiscrimination Law Under a Black President in a “Post-Racial” America?

On Friday, August 4, 1961, police officers in Shreveport, Louisiana, arrested four African American freedom riders after the two men and two women refused to accede to the officers’ orders to exit the whites-only waiting room at the Continental Trailways bus terminal. Four thousand miles away, in the delivery room at Kapi’olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, Stanley Ann Dunham, a Kansas-born American anthropologist whose family had moved to the island state twenty years earlier, gave birth to the only child that she would have with her first husband, Barack Obama Sr., an ethnic Luo who had come to Hawaii from the Nyanza Province in southwest Kenya to pursue his education at the University of Hawaii. Just over forty-seven years later, on November 4, 2008, their son, Barak Obama II, a mixed-race man who identifies as black, was elected the 44th president of the United States.

The election of the nation’s first African American president was hailed as an event of historic importance. Many heralded Obama’s victory as signaling the dismantling of “the last racial barrier in American politics.” Analogies were quickly and frequently drawn to the historic moment when Jackie Robinson became the first African American player in Major League Baseball. This superficially obvious comparison, however, diminished the causal significance of Obama’s election. When Jackie Robinson left the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues on October 23, 1945, to sign a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and then made his debut on a major league diamond at Ebbets Field on April 15, 1947, he breached the unofficial, but rigidly enforced exclusionary “color line” in professional baseball. But this momentous event was the product of a courageous and visionary decision by one man—Branch Rick[e]y, the part-owner, president, and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Obama’s election triumph, on the other hand, was the result of millions of individual determinations to vote for an African American candidate for the nation’s highest office.

Beyond the unique historical aspect of Obama’s election triumph, the results of the 2008 presidential election were interpreted by many as marking the onset of a new era of American “postracialism.” For example, much was made of the fact  that in Virginia, home of the Confederacy’s capital city, Obama amassed more votes than his Caucasian opponent. Many analysts concluded that the voters’ comparative assessments of each candidate’s ability to deal with the nation’s economic woes, and not his racial classification, were a crucial determinant in their decisions in the voting booth. They pointed to the fact that Obama’s 8.5 million vote margin of victory was, in part, the result of his receipt of 40% of the votes cast by white men, a higher share than had been garnered by any of the five previous (white) Democratic presidential nominees…

Read the entire article here.

“White Latino” Leaders: A Foregone Conclusion or Mischaracterization of Latino Society

The Modern American
Volume 3, Issue 2 (Summer-Fall, 2007)
Article 11
pages 62-65

Eric M. Gutierrez

Am I white? My personal inquiry into race begins with a school picture of a six-year-old boy. My dark brown hair, parted to one side, falls impishly over half-cocked eyebrows. My eyes, more almond-shaped than oval, are a murky blue with green speckles. My nose, a thicker version of the traditional aquiline Roman contour, fades into a tiny bulbous tip. My smile, close-mouthed and askance. My skin, white, even with a faded summer tan.

If I am white, whether I have claimed it or not, has it afforded me the privileges of a racial hierarchy skewed towards the dominant white culture? Moreover, has my apparent skin color placed me in a leadership role in the Latino community based merely on society’s perception of what that race is? Will that perception imply that I will turn my back on the Latino community that raised me, opting instead for the spoils of an influential white power structure?

In this article I consider the arguments presented by Ian Haney López in his essay entitled “White Latinos” and analyze the validity of his statements on white Latino community leaders. I examine and challenge López’s assertions regarding the characterization of Latino leaders, generally; and his description of an emerging Latino culture identified as “Mexican Americans,” the “Brown Race,” and the “New Whites,” specifically.

The most crucial assertion by López is that white Latino leaders are the most prevalent and influential in Latino society and that by emphasizing their whiteness as a key component of their identity, they facilitate the mistreatment of Latinos and buttress social inequality. Although I agree with many of López’s assertions about white Latino leaders, I believe the aforementioned assertion is a mischaracterization of Latino leadership and neglects to consider the cultural values from which these leaders arise…

Read the entire article here.

White Latinos

Harvard Latino Law Review
Volume 6, Number 1 (Spring 2003)
8 pages

Ian Haney Lopez, John H. Boalt Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley

Who are the leaders in Latino communities? This question does not admit simple answers, for who counts as a leader and what Latino identity entails are both contentious issues. Having said that, I contend that often Latino leaders are white. I employ this hyperbole to emphasize my point that most of those who see themselves as leaders of Latino communities accept or assert whiteness as a key component of their identity. This assertion of whiteness, I argue here, facilitates the mistreatment of Latinos and buttresses social inequality. In this Essay I use the experience of Mexican Americans and the Chicano movement to illustrate this dynamic, and also comment on the aspiration to be white in the context of contemporary racial politics.

I. WHITE LATINO LEADERS

The majority of those who consider themselves leaders in Latino communities are white. I do not contend by this that race is fixed or easily ascertained. Nor do I mean that the Latino community is led by Anglos—that is, by persons from the group hstorically understood as white in this country. Rather, Latino leaders are often white in terms of how they see themselves and how they are regarded by others within and outside of their community. Race’s socially constructed nature ensures that racial identity is formed on multiple, sometimes contradictory levels. Self-identification, group perception, and external classification all constitute axes of racial construction. In turn, these axes encompass myriad criteria for determining racial identity. In this context, many Latino leaders believe they are—and are understood to be—white by virtue of class privilege, education, physical features, accent, acculturation, self-conception, and social consensus. True, these Latinos are rarely white in the sense that they are accorded the full range of racial privileges and presumptions Anglos reserve for themselves. But then, as with all racial categories, there are various shades of white, and many Latino leaders are arrayed along this continuum…

Read the entire essay here.

Spotlight on Jon Veilie: A Man on a Thirteen Year Mission

The Modern American
Volume 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2005)
Article 8
pages 22-23

Lydia Edwards

It all started one month after he passed the bar. Sylvia Davis, a black Seminole, came to Jon for help. She had been to many lawyers already. She told Jon Velie her story about how her 13 year old son was denied clothing benefits because he is black. “It hit me as obviously wrong. So I naively took the case on a contingency basis not knowing there would be no real payment. I naively thought I could inform the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the tribe they missed this.” What Jon really stepped into was something like the uphill civil rights battles of the 1960s. “It was straight up racism in conversations with the involved parties including the tribe and BIA; the ‘N word’ was thrown all around.” For his entire legal career, Jon Velie has sought to bring justice to Ms. Davis and other black Seminoles as well as black Cherokees.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Jon Velie graduated from University of Oklahoma Law School in 1993. As an undergraduate at U.C. Berkeley he was a Native American studies major. During law school he was a research assistant for Rennard Stickland, a renown Indian Law scholar who is now Dean of Oregon Law School. Before attending U.C. Berkeley, Jon had already developed an affinity for Native American issues. As a child he grew up in the Absentee Shawnee tribal community. Many of his friends were from the tribe and he was exposed to sacred activities otherwise unseen by outsiders. His father, Alan Velie, taught the first course in contemporary Indian studies.

Alan Velie was a Shakespearean professor at the Oklahoma University in the 1970s in the midst of the American Indian rights movement when he was approached by Native American students and agreed to teach a course on American Indian literature. At the time, all the courses taught about Native Americans were concentrated on the past and more in the anthropological sense. He now travels the world talking about Native American literature and has written seven books on the subject.

WHO ARE THE BLACK INDIANS?

Unbeknownst to most Americans, the Five Civilized Tribes (Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and Creek) have had long traditions of African membership and enslavement. The Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes had a form of African slavery that closely mirrored that of Southern white plantation owners. The Seminole tribe, however, has had a unique relationship with its African members. The Seminole tribe and its African members (commonly referred to as Freedmen Freedmen) have coexisted together since the 16th Century. Many slaves of white plantation owners ran away to live with the Seminole tribe. Both Seminole Wars were fought over the number of runaway slaves who lived with the tribe. African members could intermarry and take on positions of leadership. Many served as translators between the Spanish, the tribe, and southern white plantation owners.

During the Civil War, the Five Civilized Tribes fought with the Confederacy against the Union. After the war, all of the tribes signed treaties with the United States government in order to maintain their sovereignty and reinstitute an autonomous government. In all of their treaties, there were clauses ordering the tribes to free their slaves and treat them and their descendants equally. Over the years, Congress and the courts have enforced the treaties to assure equal rights for the black Indians. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Congress set up the Dawes Commission to record all the members of respective Indian Tribes. Their records are called the Dawes Rolls. The commission recorded black Indians on separate rolls for all of the tribes. Cherokees and Seminoles that were ¾ white were recorded on a “full blood” list while their black members were enrolled on the Freedmen list. The quantity of Indian blood of each black Indian was not recorded by the Dawes Commission…

Read the entire article here.