Mixed Race Studies

Race, Forgetting, and the Law

The Atlantic
2010-07-30

Sara Mayeux

Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America is a tour-de-force of archival research, bringing to light countless criminal prosecutions, civil cases, and bureaucratic decisions through which miscegenation laws were enforced not just in the South but throughout the nation; and not just in the deep past, but well into my parents’ lifetimes; and not just between blacks and whites but between blacks and whites and Japanese and Filipinos and Mexicans….. the list could go on. The book spans the 1860s through the 1960s, with a focus on the less-well-known story of race-based marriage laws in the Western states, including California.

Throughout, Pascoe is attentive not just to ideologies of race but also to ideologies of gender, and the complex interactions between them. This history is not, she insists, simple, and “interracial couples should be relieved of the burden of having to stand as one-dimensional heroes and heroines.” Many, like the now-famous Lovings, wanted mostly to be left alone. “Mr. Cohen,” Richard Loving told his Supreme Court advocate, “tell the Court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.”

One of Pascoe’s themes is the role that forgetting plays in the law. In the years immediately following the Civil War, some state courts had upheld interracial marriages (typically in cases involving a white husband whose privileges and property rights the courts wanted to protect), and some states had repealed their antebellum anti-miscegenation laws. But this was all quickly forgotten. After legislators had reinstated the laws and judges had overturned or simply abandoned the earlier rulings, bans on interracial marriage came to seem, to almost everyone, “natural” and “traditional,” the way it had always been…

Read the entire review here.

Bertie County: An Eastern Carolina History

Arcadia Publishing
2002-10-21
160 pages
ISBN: 9780738523958

Arwin D. Smallwood, Associate Professor of History
The University of Memphis

The lives of the Native American, African, and European inhabitants of Bertie County over its 400 years of recorded history have not only shaped, but been shaped by its landscape. One of the oldest counties in North Carolina, Bertie County lies in the western coastal plains of northeastern North Carolina, bordered to the east by Albemarle Sound and the tidewater region and to the west by the Roanoke River in the piedmont. The county’s waterways and forests sustained the old Native American villages that were replaced in the eighteenth century by English plantations, cleared for the whites by African slaves. Bertie County’s inhabitants successfully developed and sustained a wide variety of crops including the “three sisters”—corn, beans, and squash—as well as the giants: tobacco, cotton, and peanuts. The county was a leading exporter of naval stores and mineral wealth and later, a breadbasket of the Confederacy. Bertie County: An Eastern Carolina History documents the long history of the region and tells how its people, at first limited by the landscape, radically altered it to support their needs. This is the story of the Native Americans, gone from the county for 200 years but for arrowheads and other artifacts. It is the story of the African slaves and their descendants and the chronicle of their struggles through slavery, the Jim Crow era, and the Civil Rights Movement. It is also the story of the Europeans and their rush to tame the wilderness in a new land. Their entwined history is clarified in dozens of new maps created especially for this book, along with vivid illustrations of forgotten faces and moments from the past.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: An Ecological History
• 1. Early History: Roanoke Island and the Chowan and Roanoke River Valleys, 1584-1711
• 2. Cultures in Conflict: The Tuscarora War and Forced Migration, 1711-1722
• 3. Life during the Colonial era, 1722-1774
• 4. The American Revolution and the Early Years of the New Republic, 1774-1803
• 5. Religion, Cotton. Tobacco, and Peanuts; The Antebellum Years, 1803-1861
• 6. A County Divided: From the Civil War to the Collapse of Reconstruction, 1861-1877
• 7. The Collapse of Reconstruction through the Jim Crow Era, 1877-1954
• 8. Life in the Rural “New South”: During and Since the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-2002
• Bibliography
• Index

Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes

University of Massachusetts Press
December, 2001
256 pages
6.125 x 9.25
ISBN (paper):  978-1-55849-310-0

Susan Sleeper-Smith, Professor of History
Michigan State University

An innovative study of cultural resilience and resistance in early America

A center of the lucrative fur trade throughout the colonial period, the Great Lakes region was an important site of cultural as well as economic exchange between native and European peoples. In this well-researched study, Susan Sleeper-Smith focuses on an often overlooked aspect of these interactions—the role played by Indian women who married French traders. Drawing on a broad range of primary and secondary sources, she shows how these women used a variety of means to negotiate a middle ground between two disparate cultures. Many were converts to Catholicism who constructed elaborate mixed-blood kinship networks that paralleled those of native society, thus facilitating the integration of Indian and French values. By the mid-eighteenth century, native women had extended these kin linkages to fur trade communities throughout the Great Lakes, not only enhancing access to the region’s highly prized pelts but also ensuring safe transport for other goods. Indian Women and French Men depicts the encounter of Old World and New as an extended process of indigenous adaptation and change rather than one of conflict and inevitable demise. By serving as brokers between those two worlds, Indian women who married French men helped connect the Great Lakes to a larger, expanding transatlantic economy while securing the survival of their own native culture. As such, Sleeper-Smith points out, their experiences illuminate those of other traditional cultures forced to adapt to market-motivated Europeans.

Contents

• Illustrations
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Fish to Furs: The Fur Trade in Illinois Country
• 2. Marie Rouensa and the Jesuits: Conversion, Gender, and Power
• 3. Marie Madeleine Réaume L’archêveque Chevalier and the St. Joseph River Potawatomi
• 4. British Governance in the Western Great Lakes
• 5. Agriculture, Warfare, and Neutrality
• 6. Being Indian and Becoming Catholic
• 7. Hiding in Plain View: Persistence on the Indiana Frontier
• 8. Emigrants and Indians: Michigan’s Mythical Frontier
• Notes
• Index

Plein Air: Mapping Mary Ann Armstrong

Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments
Number 24 (Fall/Winter 2009)

Deborah Fries, Editorial Board Member

The first time I saw her picture, I wanted to know everything about her. 

I wanted to know where she’d lived before she married my great, great grandfather in 1859.  I wanted to know what her parents, Mariah and William G. Armstrong, looked like; whether William G. had been a planter in Tyrrell County, North Carolina, or a yeoman farmer.  I wanted to know which of Mary Ann’s six children looked like her, rather than their eagle-featured father, Edward Parisher.  I wanted to know why she looked so very serious.

All of that wanting began in 2000, when distant relative and genealogical researcher Mark Bateman sent me a scanned photo of my great, great grandparents, along with a generous amount of his own Parisher family research.   And even though I’ve gathered a little more information, even had my mitochondrial DNA tested, most days I’m sure that I’ll never have enough facts to salvage historical certainty out of the shipwreck of fantasy.

Instead, I’ll have a breeches bucket of images: smoke rising from decaying peat in the Great Dismal Swamp; moss hanging from a pecan tree in a sandy yard; dogs sleeping in the shade of a magnolia; the ghosts of torn-down farmhouses and tobacco barns; rows of corn bending under hurricane winds; gold-rimmed English paste ware sitting on a sideboard.  A wide-cheek-boned woman in a lace collar frozen in her ante-bellum portrait, a man with a long goatee beside her.  I’ll be left with mysteries and wish-based assumptions, and an impressionistic synthesis of how my own family illustrates the rich history of the people who have lived on the south shore of the Albemarle Sound for more than 400 years..

Long after I opened the envelope from Mark that contained the photos of Mary Ann Armstrong and Edward Parisher, as well as scanned tintypes of two of their six children, I remained intrigued by the racial ambiguity of my great, great grandmother.  In 2008, I ordered a test kit from the research firm with the largest DNA database, sure that my matrilineal line would escort me back to Mary Ann’s genes and provide definitive conclusions. Was she biracial?  Triracial?  In all census records, she and her parents are listed as White, a mono-racial identity the picture seems to belie.  Mark had heard she was “part Indian.”  The molecular test results, I expected, would be oracular…

…Mary Ann’s appearance and information about her planter paternal line raised new questions.  Recently, I’ve been able to pose some of those questions to Dr. Arwin Smallwood, a University of Memphis history professor whose work in eastern North Carolina maps the entwined lives of Native, African, and European Americans from first contact to the present.

Smallwood, author of Bertie County, An Eastern Carolina History and The Atlas of African-American History and Politics: From the Slave Trade to Modern Times, as well as other scholarly works, grew up about 30 miles northwest of my maternal family’s farmstead.  Triracial himself, he is currently overseeing additional research projects in eastern North Carolina.   If anyone would understand the social permutations that were negotiated over hundreds of years in that region, and reflected in the picture of  my great, great grandmother, it would be Dr. Smallwood…

Read the entire article here.

Origin Traditions of American Racial Isolates: A Case of Something Borrowed

Appalachian Journal
Volume 11, Number 3 (Spring 1984)
pages 201-213

David Henige
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Beginnings have an irritating but essential fragility and one that should be taken to heart by all who occupy themselves with history.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

There are many groups of localized, isolated peoples scattered throughout the eastern United States. Generally they are varying mixtures of white, black, and Indian, and this composite quality has contributed both to their distinctiveness and to perceptions of their origins. Like many other oral cultures, such as those of Africa and Oceania, these groups perceived their distant past as being characterized by constant large-scale migrations, because most traditions denied autochthonous origins and spoke instead of the movement(s) of ancestors into their present locale.

In the past few years most (though not yet quite all) historians who use oral historical materials have become convinced that while ideas and products may have moved over long distances more or less freely, as a rule people did not. It may be useful, therefore, to examine the traditions of origin of four of the so-called racial isolates of the eastern United States, for these permit some direct comparisons between the earliest available documentary sources, later traditions, and learned speculation. At the same time they throw interesting light on the interplay between practical expediency and changing points of view in the matter of origins.

Today the so-called Guineas number about 7,000 people who reside primarily in Barbour and Taylor counties in West Virginia. The name (or rather epithet) Guinea seems not to be of their own devising but has been applied to them by neighbors as a convenient all-purpose pejorative. The Guineas themselves resent the implication of black blood. So it is both surprising and unaccountable that members of the Guinea community have developed theories of the group’s origins which seek to explain the hated…

The New Black

The National Post
Toronto, Canada
The Afterword: Postings from the literary world
2012-02-03

Donna Bailey Nurse

The day after the Giller Awards I had breakfast with a friend at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto. The ceremony had been held there the night before and as I savoured my bagel and lox we discussed Esi Edugyan’s thrilling win for Half-Blood Blues.
 
“She seemed genuinely surprised,” said my friend, who was describing the event, for she had attended the gala and I had not. “She looked gorgeous. Her dress was amazing. Oh look,” she broke off, “there she is!”
 
I turned in my chair to see Edugyan and her husband, Steven Price, being seated at the table behind me. What good luck. I had been hoping to catch up with her at some point to congratulate her in person. Happily, here she was…

…Half-Blood Blues, like Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, has become a bestseller. Some critics are surprised by the wide appeal of these two books, but it makes sense to me. Black stories are popular because they touch on two concerns close to every human heart: the desire for acceptance, to feel as though we belong; and the desire to be free to be who we are meant to be. Black Canadian stories feel quintessentially Canadian. The early novels of Austin Clarke, for example, started a vigorous discussion of hyphenated identities — the idea that we are either Irish-Canadian or Italian-Canadian or black-Canadian or Asian-Canadian, and that being Canadian means being two things (at least) at once.
 
As a literature of the diaspora, black Canadian novels are destined to make their mark: They articulate a language for black experience in an ostensibly post-racial world. Currently, African-American writers and black British writers — and black writers practically everywhere — are attempting to express what it means to be black in a world that claims race doesn’t matter. In this, black Canadian writers have been given a huge head start: Canada has always professed colour blindness…

…Bi-racial heritage is emerging as this literature’s dominant theme. Half-Blood Blues, Lawrence Hill’s Any Known Blood and Kameleon Man are all titles that allude to its significance. Even The Polished Hoe concerns a heroine that is black but looks white. Nearly every major character in Half-Blood Blues is mixed race; not only Afro-German Heiro, but also Sid, who is undoubtedly descended from a slave woman and her master. Chip, as it turns out, may possess Native-American blood.
 
Mixed heritage proves a wonderfully fruitful symbol. It is sometimes used to scrutinize the bi-racial dilemma of being caught between duelling cultures. Or it may address the anxiety fair-skinned blacks may feel about whether or not to pass for white. It can symbolize the struggle of black Canadians to reconcile the African and European aspects of their culture. A turbulent interracial romance may represent the overall challenges of race relations. Bi-racial anxiety and alienation lie at the heart of Half-Blood Blues. Altogether,  the title refers to a song the band records, the characters themselves, and a world where few accept that we are all at least two things at once…

Read the entire article here.

The Birth of Physical Anthropology in Late Imperial Portugal

Current Anthropology
Volume 53, Number S5, April 2012
13 pages

Gonçalo Santos, Senior Research Fellow
Max-Planck-Institut für Ethnologische Forschung

In this article I analyze the emergence of the field of physical anthropology in the metropolitan academic sphere of the Portuguese Empire during the late nineteenth century. I suggest that Portugal’s relatively peripheral position combined with a complex internal conjuncture of political instability and economic impotence gave early Portuguese physical anthropology a less explicitly “colonial” orientation than in other, more central Western European imperial powers. I describe the various national and international exchanges leading to the birth of this naturalist anthropological tradition at the University of Coimbra, drawing particular attention to the foundational role played by the technological assemblage of large osteological collections aimed at the study of the somatic characteristics of the metropolitan “white” population. I situate these technical developments in the context of wider sociocultural and politico-economic processes of both “nation building” and “empire building.” These processes had a strong effect on the kinds of questions asked and the kinds of answers that seemed compelling and acceptable to early physical anthropologists.

This article is about a long-standing tradition of scientific imagination concerned with “the systematic study of human unity-in-diversity” (Stocking 1983:5): the anthropological tradition. I focus on the emergence of a particular field of inquiry within this very broad scholarly tradition, but I analyze this process from the perspective of a peripheral arena of scientific production within the Western European core: the metropolitan academic sphere of the Portuguese Empire during the late nineteenth century. I suggest that this relatively peripheral condition combined with a complex historical conjuncture of internal political and economic crises gave early Portuguese physical anthropology a less explicitly “colonial” orientation than in other, more central Western European imperial powers. This started to change in the 1930s with the rise of a powerful dictatorial regime—Salazar’s Estado Novo—that supported the emergence of a “colonial anthropology” strongly oriented, at least until the 1950s, toward the field of physical anthropology.

The development of the discipline of physical anthropology started in Western Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and spread to other parts of the world during the second half of the nineteenth century. This process of discipline building produced a remarkable degree of international consistency, but it also engendered considerable variations, especially before the second half of the twentieth century (Blanckaert 2009; Dias 2005; Stocking 1988; Zimmerman 2001). As the editors of this supplemental issue of Current Anthropology note, these disciplinary variations remain poorly studied outside core Western European and North American areas, and this article joins recent calls to rethink the history of anthropology more inclusively (Handler 2000; Kuklick 2008) and to focus on diversity in world anthropological production (Cardoso de Oliveira 2000; Krotz 1997; L’Estoile, Neiburg, and Sigaud 2005; Ribeiro and Escobar 2006).

My contribution to this “world anthropologies” agenda is to bring to the surface a little-known Western European perspective on the origins of modern anthropology and the discipline of physical anthropology. In clear contrast to the American anthropological tradition and its four-field approach, the Portuguese anthropological tradition—as I show elsewhere (Santos 2005)—was built on two different but closely intertwined variants of anthropological research. One was more culturalist—focusing on “people,” “language,” and “customs”—and the other was more naturalist—focusing on “race,” “body,” and “fossils.” It was from within this naturalist camp that emerged in the late nineteenth century the first studies of “physical anthropology.” As in the French context (Jamin 1991; see also Blanckaert 1988, 1995, 2009), this early tradition of physical anthropology was so prominent that it was often labeled with the unmodified term “anthropology” (antropologia) and contrasted to its other half, “ethnology” (etnologia)—the ancestor of modern social-cultural anthropology and modern archaeology…

…Before plunging into an analysis of such disciplinary transformations in late nineteenth-century Portugal, I would like to give a brief account of what happened to the entire field of anthropological production from the early twentieth century onward so as to make more explicit the linkages between my “archaeological exploration” and the contemporary anthropological scene.

After a very short-lived First Republic (1910–1926), the dictatorial regime established in 1933 proved very stable and long-lasting but had a very negative effect in the academic sphere. This authoritarian regime repressed freedom of speech, rejected liberal economic reforms, and set out to build a Third Empire in Africa. Anthropologists did not oppose this enterprise and were called on to produce useful “colonial knowledge.” Physical anthropologists—most of whom still espoused a holistic conception of the discipline—played a salient role in this process. By and large, their work offered “scientific” support to the regime’s colonial rhetoric, which emphasized the civilizing mission of the Portuguese imperial expansion and opposed racial miscegenation (Pereira 2005; Santos 2005; Thomaz 2005).

This rhetoric started to change in the post–World War II period, and the major intellectual figure behind the new official ideology was the great Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre, whose work on the formation of Brazilian society praised the allegedly humanistic nature of the Portuguese colonial endeavor and civilizing engagement with miscegenation (Castelo 1999; Vale de Almeida 2002). This new official rhetoric again constrained the work of anthropologists, but it was more in tune with the liberal antiracialist and cultural relativist anthropology that became internationally dominant in the post–World War II period (Vale de Almeida 2002, 2008). Starting in the 1960s, there emerged increasing epistemological and institutional divides between physical-biological and social-cultural anthropologists, and the latter gained the upper hand in colonial affairs (Pereira 2005)…

Read the entire article here.

Answer Formats in British Census and Survey Ethnicity Questions: Does Open Response Better Capture ‘Superdiversity’?

Sociology
Volume 46, Number 2 (April 2012)
pages 354-364
DOI: 10.1177/0038038511419195

Peter J. Aspinall, Reader in Population Health at the Centre for Health Services Studies
University of Kent, UK

During a period of unprecedented ethnicity data collection in Britain, an almost universal characteristic of this practice has been the mandated use of the decennial census ethnicity classifications. In Canada and the USA a greater plurality of methods has included open response, now recommended for the 2020 US Census. As the ethnic diversity of Britain has increased, driven by immigration dynamics and population mixing leading to ‘superdiversity’, the census is no longer able to capture the new populations. The validity and utility of unprompted open response is examined in several ‘mixed race’ datasets. It is argued that open response can be a modus operandi for large-scale ethnicity data collection and that the lack of consistency in recording of such responses need not necessarily be viewed as a drawback. Open response offers substantial insights into the country’s superdiversity in a way that ethnicity categorization alone cannot.

Read or purchase the article here.

Racial Divides in a Multicultural America

The American Prospect
2011-01-31

Jamelle Bouie

In The New York Times, Susan Saulny writes about the apparent malleability of race in an increasingly multicultural America. To that end, she profiles a group of students in the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association at the University of Maryland:
 
Many young adults of mixed backgrounds are rejecting the color lines that have defined Americans for generations in favor of a much more fluid sense of identity. Ask Michelle López-Mullins, a 20-year-old junior and the president of the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association, how she marks her race on forms like the census, and she says, “It depends on the day, and it depends on the options.”

It’s interesting to see a group of kids who want to live in a colorblind—or at least, racially fluid—world. But I’m not sure how meaningful this is for future demographic trends. I’ve said this before, but it remains true that “black/non-black” is the main racial divide in American life. For proof, it’s useful to look at rates of interracial marriage:…

…The great majority of intermarriages take place between Hispanics, Asians, and whites. If there is a great population of multiracial people, it’s almost certain that they will be some combination of Hispanic and white, or Asian and white. Undoubtedly, some of these people will “become” white in our racial discourse. To paraphrase myself, by 2050 or so, we’ll have a large population of white people with Latino or Asian last names, and a cultural understanding similar to the descendants of ethnic European immigrants…

Read the entire article here.

Miscegenation Ball

The Atlantic
2011-02-01

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Senior Editor

Reporters should stop writing these beiging of America stories, and listen to Jamelle Boiue:

The great majority of intermarriages take place between Hispanics, Asians and whites. If there is a great population of multiracial people, it’s almost certain that they will be some combination of Hispanic and white, or Asian and white. Undoubtedly, some of these people will “become” white in our racial discourse. To paraphrase myself, by 2050 or so, we’ll have a large population of white people with Latino or Asian last names, and a cultural understanding similar to the descendants of ethnic European immigrants.

Of course, the American racial landscape goes beyond white/black/Latino/Asian. Which is why it’s important to understand the significance of a black/non-black divide. On nearly every measure—from income and education to housing and health—the distance between blacks and everyone else is large and enduring. Upwardly mobile immigrant groups have always counterpoised themselves against the descendants of slaves in an effort to attain the privileges of whiteness. This is a simplified analysis, but my guess is that the dynamic will remain, with a few alternations. Some ethnic immigrants may never “become” white, but since blackness retains this social stigma, it’s very likely we’ll understand them as non-black, which in practice, is the same.

This is a depressing perspective. But it’s not only the likely truth about our future, it’s the truth about our past. The first thing to understand is that race, as we know it, is an invention and a re-invention. You need not go back but a century to see people referring to the “Irish Race”  or the “Italian Race.”  or the “Hebrew Race.” Indeed, by the standards of the 19th century racialism, today’s “white people” are an unholy, mongrel mix.

And so it has long been with “blacks,” an ethnic group whose members range in appearance from Beyoncé and Charlie Rangel to Yaphet Kotto and India Arie. I love my family. But the photos from our Christmas Eve dinners immediately reveal that the notion that we’re all of the same “race” is not so much a statement of phenotype, but of culture and sociology. It should not be forgotten that both America’s president and First Lady have “white” ancestry.

Well-meaning neophytes often suggest that if people of different “races” screwed each other, we’d all look the same, and our problems would disappear. Unfortunately, such magical thinking underestimates the abiding complexity of human thought.In fact people of different “races,” have been screwing for over two millenia. Our response—over the past 500 years—has been to invent more races…

Read the entire article here.