Mixed Race Studies

Virginia’s Caroline County, ‘Symbolic of Main Street USA’

The Washington Post
2012-02-10

Carol Morello

Bowling Green, Va. — Only a few easily overlooked markers note the importance of Mildred and Richard Loving in Caroline County, where five decades ago the sheriff rousted the white man and his black bride from their bed and carted them off to jail.

A small brass plaque in the county courthouse credits their landmark 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, with overturning laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Their names are engraved on a granite obelisk, at the end of a list of prominent local African Americans. The county Web site devotes a page to their case.

Yet their legacy is everywhere in the small Tidewater towns and family farms that make up Caroline County, where a soaring number of people identify themselves as multiracial.

In the 2010 Census, 3 percent of Caroline County’s 28,500 residents were counted as of two or more races. Most are younger than 20. The phenomenon is both old and new.

Historical records show multiracial children in the county going back to slave-holding Colonial times. Today, their increasing ranks are part of a national trend that is changing the way people think and talk about race.

…Even in 1958, Caroline County was an unlikely place for an interracial couple to be arrested. An area known as Central Point had so many multiracial residents of white, black and Native American heritage that during segregation, their children all attended the county’s all-black high school. A major feature of Central Point is Passing Road — a name attributed in local lore to the many residents who could “pass” as white. Elderly residents of Central Point say they recall other interracial couples who had married out of state and lived quietly in the area….

…It’s not known how Mildred Loving, with her black and Native American heritage, identified herself in the 2000 Census. She died in 2008, 33 years after her husband died in a car crash. But in the 2010 Census, their daughter decided to check only one box when faced, like so many millions of other Americans, with boiling down a complex ancestry on a bureaucratic form.

“Native American,” said Peggy Loving Fortune, who is 52. “Just Native American.”…

Read the entire article here.

Replacing History With Fiction in Arizona

The Nation
2012-02-08

Gary Younge

In 1997 black America gained a new hero when Tiger Woods putted himself into history at the US Masters. Within a few weeks, it had lost him in an unlikely fashion—to a bespoke racial identity articulated on Oprah’s couch.
  
Does it bother you being termed “African-American”? Oprah asked him.

It does,” said Woods, whose father was of African-American, Chinese and Native American descent and whose mother was of Thai, Chinese and Dutch descent. At school he would tick “African-American” and “Asian.” “Growing up, I came up with this name: I’m Cablinasian [CAucasian, BLack, INdian and ASIAN]. I’m just who I am…whoever you see in front of you.” According to an editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times, Woods could not have been more praiseworthy if he’d scored a hole in one wearing a blindfold. “He justly rejects attempts to pigeonhole him in the past,” claimed the editorial. “Tiger Woods is the embodiment of our melting pot and our cultural diversity ideals and deserves to be called what he in fact is—an American.”
 
It is a peculiar fact of modern Western rhetoric, as prevalent among liberals as conservatives, that nationality is understood as a liberating identity, whereas ethnicity, race and other markers are regarded as confining. There are far more black and Asian people in the world than there are Americans. Racial identity is no less diverse than national identity. But somehow to describe Woods as black or Asian traps him in a pigeonhole, while to define him by his nationality sets him free.
 
Such was the ostensible motivation of the Arizona officials who banned Mexican-American studies from the Tucson schools. Tom Horne, the state attorney general who surfed into office on a wave of anti-immigrant bigotry, wrote the legislation, which claims the curriculum “advocates ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” By the end of January officials were going into schools and boxing up Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, one of the books banned for “promoting ethnic resentment.”…

Read the entire article here.

Writing Africans Out of the Racial Hierarchy: Anti-African Sentiment in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

Cincinnati Romance Review
Volume 30 (2011): Afro-Hispanic Subjectivities
pages 172-183

Galadriel Mehera Gerardo, Assistant Professor of Latin American History
Youngstown State University

Over the past two decades scholars have examined Mexican racial ideology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They have paid particular attention to the positivist ideas propagated by Porfirio Díaz’s científicos in the late 19th century and the creation of the seemingly nationalist, antiimperialist concept of mestizaje most associated with post-revolutionary scholars in the early to mid 20th century (Castro, Hedrick, and Minna Stern). Most studies focus on the inaccurate, racist portrayal of indigenous people by the Mexican nationalist intellectuals of this era. They often note the influence of U.S. and European scientific racism, particularly Social Darwinism, on Mexicans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They rarely emphasize the absence of Africans in Mexican intellectuals’ discussions of race, however. The absence or near absence of Africans in early- to mid-20th century Mexican discussions of race indicates as much about the attitudes of Mexican scholars as their emphasis on the indigenous past. Likewise, excluding Africans from the Mexican racial narrative was as significant to the creation of Mexican national identity as Mexican scholars’ depictions of native peoples. Mexican intellectuals “whitened” the imagined Mexican, simultaneously writing Africans out of Mexico’s history while challenging North Atlantic ideas about race and racial supremacy by promoting the mixing of European and indigenous peoples, offering what they believed was a distinct, nationalist vision of the racial hierarchy.

This article concentrates on three Mexican scholars and their discussions of Africans (or, in some cases, lack thereof) in their most significant essays. The first two—José Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio—emerged among Mexico’s most important intellectuals of the revolutionary period. The third—Octavio Paz—became Mexico’s most influential literary figure a generation later. While he criticized many of the previous generation’s ideas, he embraced aspects of Gamio and Vasconcelos’s arguments. Moreover, in The Labyrinth of Solitude, widely considered the definitive work on Mexican character, Paz continued both the trend of integrating indigenous people as a means of ultimately eliminating them, and of “lightening” Mexico’s racial stock by avoiding acknowledging the presence of people of African descent in Mexico’s population and history.

This study consciously focuses on three individuals who at various times in their lives worked for branches of the Mexican government (usually educational) and in some cases even founded government institutions based on their ideas. Despite their antiimperialist, nationalist mentalities, all three spent periods of time living in the United States, often seeking refuge when their ideas fell out of favor with their own government. Both their experiences in the U.S. and the influence of North Atlantic ideas on their educations are significant for understanding each of these men’s assertions about race, and particularly their decision to render invisible Afro-Mexicans by writing them out of treatises on Mexico’s future. In contrast to the científicos who worked during the Porfiriato, these 20th century Mexican intellectuals considered themselves nationalists and intended their visions of the Mexican people’s future to counter the white supremacist ideology supported by Social Darwinism and embraced by U.S. intellectuals. Yet in ignoring the historical presence of Africans throughout Mexican history, Mexican intellectuals reified the North Atlantic vision of a racial hierarchy with Anglo-Europeans and Anglo-Americans at the top and Africans and indigenous Americans at the bottom. Many recent scholars have pointed out the racism inherent to the concept of mestizaje. However, these critiques have focused on Mexican intellectuals’ treatment of indigenous people. Emphasizing the exclusion of Africans  from the racial narratives underlines the nuances of Mexican racism in the first half of the 20th century. It also suggests how firmly entrenched North Atlantic ideas about race had become in Mexico by the 20th century.

Anti-African Sentiment

The history of Africans in Mexico spans as far back as the history of Europeans there. Africans took part in the conquest of Mexico and were present throughout the colonial period. Often they held significant intermediary roles as overseers, skilled craftsmen, and merchants. Both free and enslaved Africans could be found in colonial Mexico. As the colonial period progressed, Spaniards imported more African slaves to work as unskilled laborers in the semi-tropical sugar-producing regions around Veracruz, Acapulco, and parts of Guerrero and Oaxaca. Because more male than female slaves were imported, interracial unions regularly occurred in the colonial period, particularly between indigenous women and African men. As a result of the decline of slavery combined with racial mixing, by the time of independence only a small portion of Mexico’s population was considered “black,” although a significant portion of the mixed-race population likely had some African heritage (Meyer 164-6)…

Read the entire article here.

Rice Outside the Paddy: The Form and Function of Hybridity in a Thai Novel

Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies
Volume 11, Number 1 (1997)
pages 51-78

Jan R. Weisman

This paper examines some of the problematic issues of racial hybridity in contemporary Thailand through an analysis of the fictional portrayal of Thai hybrid individuals in the archetypical story, Khao Nok Na. I argue that the modern Thai treatment of hybridity—both fictional and real—privileges some forms over others as it 1) reflects Thai Buddhist concepts of the phenotypical expression of accumulated religious merit, 2) reflects and creates audience desire and anxiety as it reminds the nation of its actual, perceived, or feared loss of control over the course of its development and globalization, and 3) insists on Thai control of its various images as a means of  alleviating the anxieties so created.

Introduction

Thai popular conceptions of hybridity—in particular, the genetic hybridity expressed in individuals of mixed Thai-Western ancestry—have undergone significant changes in recent decades. Eurasians occupied a neutral social category for much of Thai history. Their numbers were small; their parents were of high socioeconomic status; and their Thai lineage was usually a paternal connection. This situation changed dramatically with the influx of American military personnel into Thailand during the Vietnam War. Though the Thai government does not maintain records on the subject, it is estimated that as many as 7,000 Amerasian children…

José Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race

Rutgers University Press
2011-05-07
142 pages
5.5 x 8.5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-5063-3
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-5064
Web PDF ISBN: 978-0-8135-5104-3

Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture
Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts

Mexican educator and thinker José Vasconcelos is to Latinos what W.E.B. Du Bois is to African Americans—a controversial scholar who fostered an alternative view of the future. In José Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race, his influential 1925 essay, “Mestizaje”—key to understanding the role he played in the shaping of multiethnic America—is for the first time showcased and properly analyzed. Freshly translated here by John H. R. Polt, “Mestizaje” suggested that the Brown Race from Latin America was called to dominate the world, a thesis embraced by activists and scholars north and south of the Rio Grande. Ilan Stavans insightfully and comprehensively examines the essay in biographical and historical context, and considers how many in the United States, especially Chicanos during the civil rights era, used it as a platform for their political agenda. The volume also includes Vasconcelos’s long-forgotten 1926 Harris Foundation Lecture at the University of Chicago, “The Race Problem in Latin America,” where he cautioned the United States that rejecting mestizaje in our own midst will ultimately bankrupt the nation.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Ilan Stavans
  • The Prophet of Race
• Jose Vasconcelos
  • Mestizaje
  • The Race Problem in Latin America
• Chronology
• Acknowledgments

“The Girl Isn’t White”: New Racial Dimensions in Octavia Butler’s Survivor

Extrapolation
Volume 47, Number 1 (2006)
pages 35-50
DOI: 10.3828/extr.2006.47.1.6
ISSN: 0014-5483 (Print); 2047-7708 (Online)

Crystal S. Anderson, Associate Professor of English Department
Elon University, Elon, North Carolina

Since the publication of her first novel, Octavia Butler’s popularity has increased, making her now a staple for individuals attracted to the fiction of Afro-futurism. Sandra Govan argues that Butler “forge[s] a black presence in science fiction,” a presence that consistently challenges assumptions regarding inter-group and intra-group relations (87). Butler’s Patternist series of novels focuses on the tensions between groups with psychic abilities and those without, and her Xenogenesis trilogy explores the ramifications of blending humans with an alien race. Much of Butler’s success among African Americans surely rests on the connections readers make between the themes of these novels and their experiences in a race-conscious society. Changes in American society, particularly the dynamic between ethnic groups, prompt a reexamination of Butler’s early fiction. Survivor (1978) anticipates the challenges contemporary blacks face in an increasingly diverse society. Butler uses Alanna, an Afro-Asian protagonist, to illuminate strategies of negotiation for African Americans who engage a variety of ethnic groups.

During the late 1970s, African Americans became increasingly aware of other ethnic groups, particularly Asians. This time period witnesses a mode of civil rights that acknowledges the parallel struggle of American blacks and Asian groups, especially in radical political circles. Bill Mullen reminds us that “beginning with the 1955 meeting of decolonizing African and Asian nations in Bandung, Indonesia, until at least the early 1970s, African American and Asian radicals imagined themselves as antipodal partners in cultural revolution, pen pals for world liberation” (76) Asian cultures so interpenetrated African American cultural movements in the 1970s, Robin Kelley declares, “although the Black Arts Movement was the primary vehicle for black cultural revolution in the United States United States,  it is hard to imagine what that revolution would have looked like without China” (107). Butler’s early foray  into fiction demonstrates its awareness of similar Afro-Asian dynamics by meditating on racial dynamics contrary to the traditional black-white racial paradigm.

…Butler’s use of an Afro-Asian protagonist disrupts conventional tendencies that read all biracial identities according to a black-white paradigm. The reader learns of Alanna’s heritage during a flashback: “There was a man, as lean and tall as Alanna was now. His coloring was dark brown, almost black, contrasting strangely with the very fair skin of the woman. Alanna stood between them, her eyes only slightly narrowed, her skin a smooth medium brown” (27). Initially, Butler does not identify the race of each parent, but uses phrases such as “dark brown” and “fair skin” to imply they are both non-white. As Alanna stands between them, her appearance operates as a visual median, taking the “medium brown” coloring from her father and her narrow eyes possibly from her mother. Butler intentionally delays racial identification, explaining, “if I had given the characters’ race away earlier … possibly the reader wouldn’t react, but, instead, maybe discard that information” (Butler, “Radio,” 52). Such a strategy suggests that Alanna’s background is not an insignificant detail. Butler’s narrative soon confirms Alanna’s unique mixed-race identity when Neila reveals that Alanna’s “Afro-Asian from what she says of her parents. Black father, Asian mother” (31).

As the product of two minority groups, Alanna’s racial identity produces a different set of issues than the traditional black-white racial identity. Butler is aware of such differences, for when she was a child, she discovered that a neighbor had a black father and a Japanese mother. That discovery informs her adult thoughts on minority mixed-race identity: “It didn’t change anything about the way I thought about her except that I was intensely curious about her life. How is her life different because she’s from this unusual situation?” (Butler, “Radio,” 52). Butler recognizes that minority mixed-race individuals may have a different perspective because they culturally partake from two similarly marginalized groups within society. Christine C. Iijima Hall and Trude I. Cooke Turner assert, “the minority-minority individual does not have to choose between being a member of a minority or a majority group. Because these individuals already belong to two minority groups, their social standing in American culture is usually minority” (82). Alanna’s bifurcated identity signals to the reader that she is uniquely suited to see situations from a point of view not associated with the dominant group. She has a perspective attuned to difference. According to Lucille Fultz, diverging from traditional characterizations of the racial backgrounds of characters encourages readers to “rethink received notions of difference based on race and class and question their own investment in the cultural constructions of such categories” (26). Alanna’s mixed-race identity will underscore her engagement with multiple groups…

Read the entire article here.

Charles Marsh recounts the formation and activities of The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission.

The Civil Rights Movement as Theological Drama
The Project on Lived Theology
University of Virginia

Charles Marsh

In 1956, a new organization appeared, predisposed to the same political concerns articulated by the Citizen’s Council, but now underwritten by the state legislature.  The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was formed to broaden the scope of protecting “the Southern Way of Life.”  The commission expressed purpose was “to do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi, and her sister states, from encroachment thereon by the Federal Government”; nevertheless, it operated as “something akin to NKVD among the cotton patches,” as journalist Wilson Minor put it.  With an extensive surveillance network solidly in place, the Sovereignty Commission vigilantly monitored civil rights activists and any Mississippi citizens suspected of heterodoxy–“persons whose utterances or actions indicate they should be watched with suspicion on future racial attitudes.”  The commission pursued its ordained work by dispatching investigators and spies to gather information on civil rights workers, white liberals, and anyone else suspected of racial indiscretion.  By 1967, the commission had amassed an archive of more than ten thousand reports on people who worked for or represented “subversive, militant, or revolutionary groups.”  (By 1974, the files would grow to 87,000 names.)
 
Although the Sovereignty Commission’s principal motivation was “to prevent encroachment upon the rights of this and other states by the Federal Government” (as the charter stated), its obsession with racial purity could not be entirely explained by state’s rights fervor.  The commission’s agents seemed to spend as much energy tracking down reports of mixed-race babies and children as it did investigating the activities of subversive, militant and revolutionary groups.  Sadly, a reading of the available Sovereignty Commission files regarding rumors of interracial sex show us (in Adam Nossiter’s words) “cool accounts of lives damaged, destroyed, or threatened because black men were suspected of consorting with white women.”

Then there are reports that are stranger than fiction.  In , the director of the commission himself, Erle Johnston, Jr., wrote an eight page, single spaced report in December of 1963 explorinthe case of the woman Louvenia K. and her two sons, Edgar and Randy Edg the racial composition of the boys and their mother…

Read the entire article here.

Nationalism, Racism and Propaganda in Early Weimar Germany: Contradictions in the Campaign against the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’

German History
Volume 30, Issue 1 (March, 2012)
pages 45-74
DOI: 10.1093/gerhis/ghr124

Julia Roos, Associate Professor of History
Indiana University, Bloomington

During the early 1920s, an average of 25,000 colonial soldiers from North Africa, Senegal and Madagascar formed part of the French army of occupation in the Rhineland. The campaign against these troops, which used the racist epithet ‘black horror on the Rhine’ (schwarze Schmach am Rhein), was one of the most important propaganda efforts of the Weimar period. In black horror propaganda, images of alleged sexual violence against Rhenish women and children by African French soldiers served as metaphors for Germany’s ‘victimization’ through the Versailles Treaty. Because the campaign initially gained broad popular and official support, historians have tended to consider the black horror a successful nationalist movement bridging political divides and strengthening the German nation state. In contrast, this essay points to some of the contradictions within the campaign, which often crystallized around conflicts over the nature of effective propaganda. Extreme racist claims about the Rhineland’s alleged ‘mulattoization’ (Mulattisierung) increasingly alienated Rhinelanders and threatened to exacerbate traditional tensions between the predominantly Catholic Rhineland and the central state at a time when Germany’s western borders seemed rather precarious in the light of recent territorial losses and separatist agitation. There was a growing concern that radical strands within the black horror movement were detrimental to the cohesion of the German nation state and to Germany’s positive image abroad, and this was a major reason behind the campaign’s decline after 1921/22. The conflicts within the campaign also point to some hitherto neglected affinities between the black horror and subsequent Nazi propaganda.

Read or purchase the article here.

Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860

McFarland
2012 [Originally Published by University of South Carolina press in 1985]
300 pages
6 x 9
Softcover ISBN: 978-0-7864-6931-4

Larry Koger, Historian

Most Americans, both black and white, believe that slavery was a system maintained by whites to exploit blacks, but this authoritative study reveals the extent to which African Americans played a significant role as slave masters. Examining South Carolina’s diverse population of African-American slaveowners, the book demonstrates that free African Americans widely embraced slavery as a viable economic system and that they—like their white counterparts—exploited the labor of slaves on their farms and in their businesses.

Drawing on the federal census, wills, mortgage bills of sale, tax returns, and newspaper advertisements, the author reveals the nature of African-American slaveholding, its complexity, and its rationales. He describes how some African-American slave masters had earned their freedom but how many others—primarily mulattoes born of free parents—were unfamiliar with slavery’s dehumanization.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Free Black Slaveholding and the Federal Census
• 2. The Numbers and Distribution of Black Slaveholding
• 3. From Slavery to Freedom to Slaveownership
• 4. “Buying My Chidrum from Ole Massa”
• 5. Neither a Slave Nor a Free Person
• 6. The Woodson Thesis: Fact or Fiction?
• 7. White Rice, White Cotton, Brown Planters, Black Slaves
• 8. Free Black Artisans: A Need for Labor
• 9. The Denmark Vesey Conspiracy: Brown Masters vs. Black Slaves
• 10. No More Black Massa
• Appendix A. Tables for Chapter One
• Appendix B. Table for Chapter Two
• Appendix C. Tables for Chapter Six
• Notes
• Index

Use of Blood Groups in Human Classification

Science Magazine
Volume 112, Number 2903 (1950-08-18)
pages 187-196
DOI: 10.1126/science.112.2903.187

William C. Boyd
Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts

—Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him!
Plato, The Republic

In recent years there has been an increasing feeling, on the part of both geneticists and physical anthropologists, that genetical methods ought to be applied to the problems of the classification of man, and a number of proposals to this effect have been made. Nevertheless, new books of anthropology, as they have been published, have been found to contain much the same old classifications based on morphological characteristics, skin color, etc., even though the authors may have started with the announced intention of making use of the newer methods. It is clear that many a worker, attempting to apply genetical methods of taxonomy to man, has been disappointed, and, in fact, one scientist, formerly quite active in the field of physical anthropology, has now given it up, and announced in a letter to me: “I tried to see what blood groups would tell me about ancient man, and found the results very disappointing.”

A careful analysis of the situation will show that such disappointment is based largely on two circumstances. First, there is the fact that the blood grouping genes affect invisible serological characteristics of the individual, and are thus never visible to the naked eye. It is to be feared that we are all too much inclined to be impressed by the visible as opposed to the invisible. Second, there is the fact that the layman’s concept of race (which is that the human species can be divided up by valid, scientific methods, into various groups that are pretty different from each other and which will look pretty different from each other) has been unconsciously retained by many scientific workers, and the hypothetical dissenting readers are unconsciously expecting that the new system we propose to introduce will also provide us with startling differences in the appearance and behavior of the different “races” we define, and will feel let down to discover that the new classification does not, when all is said about it, reveal any very dramatic results.

If the blood grouping genes had affected, not characteristics of the blood, but prominent morphological or physical characteristics such as the shape of the head, color of the skin, etc., there cannot be the slightest question that they would already have been made the chief basis of a racial classification and would have been considered entirely adequate for that purpose.

Equivalence of Genes

From our knowledge of genetics we may see that there is nothing fundamentally different between the blood grouping genes as genes, and the genes which do affect morphological features. It is simply a historical accident that fairly adequate information was obtained about the mode of transmission of blood grouping genes before any information at all equivalent in amount or value was obtained about the genes affecting physical appearance.

In view of these facts, and since there seems to be no reason to suppose that the location of a gene in a chromosome, or the nature of the particular chromosome in which the gene resides, determines in advance the main or even the subsidiary characteristics which are to be influenced by the gene, it might be instructive to let our imaginations roam a bit. The outwardly observable effects of the blood group genes are, so far as we know, zero. Therefore let us make some arbitrary assumptions as to the sort of effect which the blood grouping genes could have produced, supposing them to have affected some of the external and visible char-…

Read or purchase the article here.