Mixed Race Studies

Between black and miscegenated population groups: sickle cell anemia and sickle cell trait in Brazil in the 1930s and 1940s

História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos
Volume 18, Number 2 (April/June 2011)
29 pages
DOI: 10.1590/S0104-59702011000200007

Juliana Manzoni Cavalcanti, PhD candidate
Graduate Program on History of the Sciences and Health
Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Fundação Oswaldo Cruz

Marcos Chor Maio, Senior Researcher and Professor
Graduate Program on History of the Sciences and Health
Fiocruz – Casa de Oswaldo Cruz

Translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty

The article examines medical and scientific studies of sickle cell anemia published in Brazil in the 1930s and 1940s, when the vast majority of physicians and scientists believed that miscegenation played a significant role in the epidemiology of the disease in the country. Special focus is placed on hematologist Ernani Martins da Silva, of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute, who conducted blood analyses around the interior of Brazil with the purpose of classifying miscegenated and allegedly pure population groups based on the presence of sickle cells and the racial distribution of blood groups. The article explores the ambivalences stemming from associations between sickle cell anemia and the ‘black race’ during this period.

The term sickle cell disease (SCD) is applied to disorders caused by a specific change in the hemoglobin molecule, an oxygen-carrying molecule that is one of the most abundant within red blood cells. Genetic alteration causes one amino acid to be replaced with another in the protein chains that make up hemoglobin (with ß6 glutamic acid replaced by valine – Hb S), thereby altering the molecule’s structure. This change lowers the affinity between the oxygen molecule and hemoglobin, prompting the formation of long hemoglobin chains that clump into intracellular bundles concentrated at the ends of the red blood cell and thus distort the cell into the crescent shape from which it gains its name (Andreoli et al., 1997, p.371)…

Read the entire article here.

First Annual Convention Report: Black German Cultural Society NJ

Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey
German Historical Institute
Washington, D.C.
2011-08-19 through 2011-08-21
14 pages

By Priscilla Layne and S. Marina Jones

The First Annual Black German Cultural Society, NJ Convention was an important opportunity for scholars, students, and individuals personally affected by Afrogerman history and culture, from both sides of the Atlantic, to come together. Participants included numerous members of the Afrogerman community many of whom are themselves scholars, authors, filmmakers, and activists…

Read the entire report here.

The Stain of White: Liaisons, Memories, and White Men as Relatives

Men and Masculinities
Volume 9, Number 2 (October 2006)
pages 131-151
DOI: 10.1177/1097184X06287764

Janaki Abraham, Assistant Professor Women Studies
Jawaharlal Neru University

During British colonial rule some matrilineal Thiyya women in North Kerala, India, had liaisons with British men. While the response of the caste (here, a Backward caste) to these liaisons shifted over time, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century many women who had liaisons and their families were excommunicated. A “white connection” became a stain and kinship with the white man was denied or shrouded. This article looks at the ways in which both the liaisons and the denial of the white man as father or relative were located within practices of matrilineal kinship. Furthermore, this article seeks to understand how these liaisons are remembered today and how the presence of the white man as a relative is layered over by processes of forgetting and remembering.

Read or purchase the article here.

Review: Giller winner recounts struggles of mixed-race jazz musicians in prewar Europe

Ottowa Citizen
2011-11-09

Julian Gunn

Half-Blood Blues By Esi Edugyan, Thomas Allen, 2011.

I remember waiting for a bus and listening to a literary podcast when I heard that Victoria, B.C. author Esi Edugyan’s second novel, Half-Blood Blues, had made the Man Booker Prize long list. The book had already received strong support: Lawrence Hill, Austin Clarke and other literary figures wrote glowing responses.

The book was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker but lost out to Julian Barnes. It was also shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Writers’ Trust Award. And it won the Giller Prize this week.

Half-Blood Blues binds together disparate human behaviour — celebration, community and violence — in telling the story of a band of jazz musicians struggling to exist in Berlin on the cusp of the Second World War.

American and German, dark-and light-skinned, gentile and Jewish, the members map complex racial and national identities. The musicians aren’t targets only because of their skin colour or religious identity; they’re also playing “degenerate” music, according to the SS. That’s a double whammy…

…Hiero is Hieronymus Thomas Falk, a German citizen with a Rhinelander mother and an African father whose precise story shimmers elusively in the history of colonialism and war. “He was a Mischling,” Sid explains, “a half-breed.”

Sid himself is “straight-haired and green-eyed” and light-skinned enough to pass, but ambiguously: “a right little Spaniard,” he says wryly. Though he’s a foreigner, he’s often safer than his friend in Hiero’s own country. Hiero, Delilah and Sid move through a shifting triangular relationship where music plays as important a role as love….

Read the entire review here.

Half-Blood Blues

Picador (an imprint of Macmillan)
2011-09-03
304 pages
8.5 X 5.5 X 0.9 in
Cloth ISBN:9780887627415
Paperback ISBN: ISBN: 9781250012708

Esi Edugyan

• Winner of the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Paris, 1940.  A brilliant jazz musician, Hiero, is arrested by the Nazis and never heard from again.  He is twenty years old.  He is a German citizen.  And he is black.

Fifty years later, his friend and fellow musician, Sid, must relive that unforgettable time, revealing the friendships, love affairs and treacheries that sealed Hiero’s fate.  From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of  Paris—where the legendary Louis Armstrong makes an appearance—Sid, with his distinctive and rhythmic German-American slang, leads the reader through a fascinating world alive with passion, music and the spirit of resistance.

Half-Blood Blues, the second novel by an exceptionally talented young writer, is an entrancing, electric story about jazz, race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves, and demand of others, in the name of art.

African Diasporas: Afro-German Literature in the Context of the African American Experience

Lit Verlag
2006
144 pages
ISBN: 3-8258-9612-9

Aija Poikane-Daumke

This book investigates the development of Afro-German literature in the context of the African American experience and shows the decisive role of literature for the emergence of the Afro-German Movement. Various Afro-German literary and cultural initiatives, which began in the 1980s, arose as a response to the experience of being marginalized—to the point of invisibility—within a dominant Eurocentric culture that could not bring the notions of “Black” and “German” together in a meaningful way. The book is a significant contribution to the understanding of German literature as multi-ethnic and of the the transatlantic networks operating in the African Diasporas.

“Free People of Color” in Old Virginia: The Morris Family of Gloucester County, a Case Study

Renegade South: histories of unconventional southerners
2011-11-10

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Back in 1977, when I was a junior in college, history became a personal venture for me when an African American friend told me that his ancestors were from Virginia, but that he had always heard that they were not slaves. African Americans from Old Virginia who had never been slaves? That got my attention!

A brand new history major, I decided on the spot to research my friend’s family history. Soon I was delving into microfilmed and published records from colonial Middlesex and Gloucester Counties of Virginia, where I did indeed find the ancestors of my friend—and many more—living as “free people of color” in colonial and antebellum Virginia. The following is their story.

During the transformative years of 1680-1730, as slavery overtook servitude as the favored system of labor among planters in the English colonies of America, a small but significant population of free people of color emerged in Virginia’s Gloucester and Middlesex Counties. We know very little about their individual lives beyond their names, racial designations, and ages as recorded in church and court records. We know, for example, that Elizabeth Morris, a servant of Middlesex County, was of mixed ancestry because the vestry book of Christ Church Parish described her in 1706 as “A Mulatto Woman.” (Note 1)

That same vestry book identified Elizabeth’s white master and mistress as “gentleman” Francis Weeks and his wife, Elizabeth. The Weeks family owned a number of slaves, raising questions about why Elizabeth was not also enslaved. Perhaps her mother was also a servant, or perhaps Elizabeth was the child of an enslaved woman and a white slave master who subsequently freed her…

…But even in this deliberately bi-racial society, a third category of race and status intruded: that of free person of color, with ”color” often meaning light brown. Elizabeth Morris’s designation as a “Mulatto,” which technically meant half African, half European, should not be taken literally. Virginia officials used the term rather loosely; it might mean that an individual was born to a mixed-race couple, or simply that one or both parents were of mixed ancestry. Mainly, it meant that a person’s skin was lighter in tone than that of enslaved Africans being forced into the colony in ever greater numbers…

Read the entire article here.

Playwright discusses biracialism

The Dartmouth
2006-01-18

Ashley Zuzek, The Dartmouth Staff

William S. Yellow Robe, Jr., author of the play “Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers,” discussed the psychology of racial duality during a Tuesday night discussion at the Hopkins Center and emphasized the need for Americans of mixed blood to identify with a single race rather than getting lost between the two.

Having mixed blood, Yellow Robe said, “has created a psychology that no one has dealt with. People go into this panic of being too native or not being native enough.”

Yellow Robe, who is both Native American and African American, described the difficulty of being biracial during his discussion, “Claiming Our Relations.”

While Yellow Robe identifies more with his Native American ancestry than his African American ancestry, he is not ashamed of his mixed race.

“I honor it and I never deny it,” he said. However, he cautioned that people of mixed race should not “straddle both paths,” and that he has never regretted identifying with his Native American side…

Read the entire article here.

The Monacan Indian Nation of Virginia: The Drums of Life

University of Alabama Press
2008
248 pages
Quality Paper ISBN: 978-0-8173-5488-6
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8173-1615-0
E Book ISBN: 978-0-8173-8113-4 
 
Rosemary Clark Whitlock, Monacan Indian and Independent Scholar

The contemporary Monacan Nation had approximately 1,400 registered members in 2006, mostly living in and around Lynchburg, Virginia, in Amherst County, but some are scattered like any other large family. Records trace the Monacans of Virginia back to the late 1500s, with an estimated population of over 15,000 in the 1700s.
 
Like members of some other native tribes, the Monacans have a long history of struggles for equality in jobs, health care, and education and have suffered cultural, political, and social abuse at the hands of authority figures appointed to serve them. The critical difference for the Monacans was the actions of segregationist Dr. Walter A. Plecker, Director of the Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912 until he retired at age 85 in 1946. A strong proponent and enforcer of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Law of 1924 (struck down in 1967), which prohibited marriage between races, Plecker’s interpretation of that law convinced him that there were only two races–white and colored–and anyone not bearing physically white genetic characteristics was “colored” and that included Indians. He would not let Indians get married in Virginia unless they applied as white or colored, he forced the local teachers to falsify the students’ race on the official school rolls, and he threatened court clerks and census takers with prosecution if they used the term “Indian” on any official form. He personally changed government records when his directives were not followed and even coerced postpartum Indian mothers to list their newborns as white or colored or they could not take their infants home from the hospital. Eventually the federal government intervened, directing the Virginia state officials to begin the tedious process of correcting official records. Yet the legacy of Plecker’s attempted cultural genocide remains. Through interviews with 26 Monacans, one Episcopal minister appointed to serve them, one former clerk of the court for Amherst County, and her own story, Whitlock provides first person accounts of what happened to the Monacan families and how their very existence as Indians was threatened.

Race, Reproduction and Family Romance in Moreau de Saint-Mery’s Description. ..de la partie francaise de l’isle Saint Domingue

Eighteenth-Century Studies
Volume 38, Number 2, Winter 2005
pages 227-246
DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2005.0008

Doris Lorraine Garraway, Associate Professor of French
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

This paper analyzes the colonial jurist and historian Moreau de Saint-Méry’s racial classification system with an aim to disclose its ideology of family romance and reproduction. By examining the sexual allegory implicit in the tabular demonstration of métissage, I argue that Moreau’s racial science represents a sexual fantasy for white colonials whose libertine practices threatened the fragile demographic balance of colonial society. Moreau de Saint-Méry revises Enlightenment ideas about racial degeneration and infertility to arrive at an original hypothesis for the biological reproduction of colonial humanity, one that places the control of such procreation squarely in the hands of white men.

The publication in 1797 of the colonial jurist and historian Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue represented a milestone in Enlightenment racial theory. Within the first volume of the encyclopedic account of the colony on the eve of the Haitian Revolution, there appeared a systematic classification of human variety in the colonies, unprecedented in its scope and detail. Expanding on previous taxonomies of De Pauw and Hilliard d’Auberteuil, and borrowing from eighteenth-century innovations in algebra and statistics, Moreau devised an exhaustive tabular, arithmetic and narrative typology of “nuances of the skin” along a continuum between white and black. Comprising nearly twenty pages, this attempt to delineate and classify human color variation in the colony of Saint-Domingue represented much more than an experiment in Enlightenment rationality or the science of amalgamation. By meticulously theorizing the genealogical progression between black and white, Moreau de Saint-Méry fixated on the one difference that carried political consequences in Saint-Domingue—that between white and non-white, or “sang-mêlé” (mixed-blood).

In the decades leading up to the Haitian Revolution, whites faced increasing challenges to their economic and political supremacy from the growing class of free people of color. As established slaveholders, planters, entrepreneurs, skilled laborers, artisans, and military leaders, they had acquired considerable wealth and property in land and slaves. As such, they aspired to the same political recognition and elite titles and offices held by whites. While mulatto activists such as Julien Raymond traveled to Paris to petition the royal government on behalf of free people of color, those at home sought to improve their position by building social networks, sending their children to be educated in France, adhering to French moral codes regarding marriage and legitimacy, and, in some cases, marrying their daughters to white men. The social ambitions of free people of color did little to quell the long-standing controversy over the prevalence of interracial sexual relationships in Saint-Domingue. In addition to engaging in sexual relations with slave women, elite white men frequently sought free women of color to serve as ménagères, their live-in housekeepers and lovers. In the late eighteenth century, colonial writers sensationalized mulatto women as icons of sensual pleasure and sexual excess, figures both loved and blamed for the luxury, indebtedness and moral laxity of the colony. Yet this stereotype concealed the fact that free women of color were among the most entrepreneurial and financially independent women in the colony, owing to their connections to white benefactors and their prevalence in urban marketing and commerce. While interracial marriage was never officially outlawed in the colony, the colonial leadership made many attempts to suppress the practice and in the end settled for a series of punitive measures against “misallied” white men. More difficult to control, however, was the massive increase in the population of free people of color in the last decades of French rule. In the two decades prior to the revolution, their numbers increased at nearly twice the rate of whites in the same period, such that by 1789 each population amounted to approximately 30,000 persons.

Faced with the population increase, social ambition, wealth and political demands of free people of color, the white elite responded with an extraordinarily oppressive regime of racially exclusionary laws intended to halt their advancement. Free people of color were forbidden to wear luxurious clothing, take the name of a white person, carry arms, practice certain professions and hold public office. By 1785, Moreau de Saint-Méry had become a leading figure of colonial jurisprudence. Born in 1750 to the white Creole elite of Martinique, Moreau had risen through the ranks of the magistrature to become a counselor on the Superior Court in Cap-Français, Saint-Domingue, and premier historian of colonial law. He was also a prominent figure of the colonial Enlightenment, holding memberships in the colonial Chamber of Agriculture and the Cercle des Philadelphes, later named the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences. This organization made Cap-Français a center of scientific debate, comparable in its time to Philadelphia and Boston. Moreau’s rise in the colonies was concomitant with his growing notoriety on the French political and cultural scene. In the 1780s, he took a leading role in the pre-revolutionary assemblies in Paris as a spokesperson for the colonial elite, arguing polemically against mulatto rights and the proposals of the Société des Amis des noirs. His address of May 12, 1791 provoked Robespierre’s famous speech calling for the end of the colonies should they compromise revolutionary principles…