Mixed Race Studies

Mediating Racial Mixture

The Journal of Media Literacy
Volume 55, Numbers 1 & 2 (Cultural Diversity) (2008)

Carlos E. Cortés, Professor Emeritus of History
University of California, Riverside

Which one of the following names does not fit in the set? Barack Obama. Mariah Carey. Halle Berry. Tiger Woods. Ann Curry. Soledad O’Brien. Benjamin Jealous. Carlos Cortés.

Oh, that’s too easy. All of the others—a presidential candidate, a pop diva, an Oscar-winning actress, a professional golfer, two national television newspeople, and the newly-elected president of the NAACP—are visible figures of contemporary American popular culture.
 
But let’s try another question. What characteristic do they have in common? The answer: they are all the offspring of mixed heritages, part of a major U.S. population shift—the relentless growth of ethnically-mixed Americans.
 
This phenomenon has myriad implications. Not the least, it has challenged traditional U.S. categorical thinking about race and ethnicity. This includes news media conventions for racially and ethnically identifying individuals and groups (Cortés, 2000).
 
THE ROOTS OF MIXEDNESS

Two historical trends have converged to hypertrophy this challenge. First, the rise of interracial marriage, particularly since the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision that invalidated the sixteen remaining state-level intermarriage bans. (Mildred Jeter Loving, the African-American woman whose marriage to a white man helped precipitate that landmark decision, died in May of this year.)
 
Second, the continuous inflow of Latin Americans. Millions are of mixed heritage and come from nations with racial systems quite different than the one that has taken root in the United States. Furthermore, by the third generation, more than half of U.S. Latinos marry non-Latinos, so their children further undermine categorical purity.

The year 2000 census illustrated the impact of these two trends. Through a set of decisions that reflected changing realities, pragmatism, compromise, and external pressure, the Census Bureau addressed mixed heritage in two ways.
 
First, it repeated the 1990 practice of separating Hispanic heritage (question five on the short form) from race (question six). The result—48 percent of self-identified Hispanics checked white as their racial identity, while 42 percent checked “some other race” (meaning I don’t fit into any of your racial categories).

Second, and for the first time, the 2000 census permitted respondents to indicate more than one “race.” This ended, at least temporarily, the historical “check one” practice that had forced mixed-race respondents to reject either their father or their mother.
 
These demographic and census category changes have contributed to scholarly dissensus, including deep disagreements over the meaning and use of such terms as “race” and “ethnicity” (Gracia, 2007). They have also raised a challenge for the American news media (Squires, 2007). How should they categorize and label mixed-heritage people?…

Read the entire article here.

Op-Ed: President Obama and the Mixed Race Mix-up

Digital Journal
2009-03-22

Hargrove Jones

Today, a young woman in a California audience, stood up and told President Obama that she is mixed-race, and glad that the president is someone she can relate to. Does that mean she cannot relate to her father, or her mother?
 
As a matter of fact, if her parents shared her point of view, she would not exist.

Confused thinking, like a person with a black parent and a white parent, purporting to need a mixed race person, in order to relate; echos the chaotic ideas of Alice Walker’s bi-racial daughter, claiming her mother is jealous because she has a rich white father. As if she cannot conceive of the truth, which is, that it is her mother who is rich; and it is her mother who picked that white man, to be her father. This type of mis-perceiving can only occur, when you deny who you are…

…Mixed race, without white parent involvement, has been part and parcel of the Diasporan community for 400 years, which is why those who are a part of this new social experience, and who want to be identified as mixed race or bi-racial, have difficulty distinguishing themselves physically since, large numbers of Diasporans, who are pleased to own their African heritage, look more European than most bi-racial people.

People who are of African descent, but who want to excuse themselves from that designation, are plagued by social concepts like the one drop rule. According to the one drop rule, one drop of African blood makes one African. But it is more than a biological description, it speaks to the historic attitude toward Africans since, the concept is not reciprocal. One drop of European blood, does not a European make. Inferentially, the rule speaks to a racial measure that is qualitative, not quantitative…

…Most mixed race people, like all people of African descent, wear a symbol in their flesh, that has the same effect as the star of David appended to the Jews during the holocaust. It identifies us with slanderous misrepresentations, and as people who are available for abuse.

In my opinion, the mixed race claim is an effort at exception from a maligned group, and the aggressive inclusion of President Obama, is an attempt to dignify it. Only people of African descent are perpetually saying, that they are something, besides the obvious.

Acknowledgment of racial and ethnic heritage is fine and right, but it should be responsive to a question, or in a meaningful context, not an anxious announcement that begs to escape the many painful experiences that racism provides.

Mixed race claimants should be aware, that whatever you call yourself in America, if you look like you are of African descent, you will be treated like you are of African descent. But it’s everyone’s right to be called whatever suits them, and the woman in the audience, obviously wants to be called mixed race, but President Barack Obama is, a self-described African American. She should have given him, the same respect, that she wants for herself.

To read the opinion piece, click here.

Impurely Raced // Purely Erased: Toward a Rhetorical Theory of (Bi)Racial Passing

University of Southern California
May 2009
348 pages

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMMUNICATION)

This dissertation develops a theory about the interrelations between mixed race identification and passing as they pertain to the field of rhetoric and to United States slavery and segregation settings. I introduce the concept of (bi)racial passing to argue that passing is a form of rhetoric that identifies and represents passers intersectionally via synecdoche. In Chapter One I introduce the rhetorical, cultural, and conceptual significances of passing based on a review of the literature. I introduce the central argument of the project by proposing a theory of (bi)racial passing that considers the problems and possibilities of mixed race representation and mobility as a bridge between Platonic episteme and Sophistic doxa as well as between the material and symbolic components of biracial categorization. Chapter Two considers the historical narrative of Ellen Craft at the intersection of synecdoche and irony to highlight and transgress real and imagined borders that stretch beyond a simple consideration of race. Taking up the issue of appropriation through a detailed critique of the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, my third chapter considers passing as an antecedent form of identity theft and as a form of resistance. In contrast to the cases examined in these chapters, my fourth chapter explores Harper’s Iola Leroy, as a fictional account of passing that ties synecdoche to eloquence, articulating the tension between the threat of passing contained in the Plessy ruling and its relation to contemporary attempts at measuring discrimination at the intersection of race, class, and gender.

My fifth chapter takes a turn by exploring the literary and cinematic versions of The Human Stain, as contemporary narratives of passing based on tragedy and synecdoche in the context of minstrel performance and Jim and Jane Crow segregation. My last chapter fleshes out the theory introduced in the first, working toward a theory of (bi)racial passing that rethinks inadequate dichotomies of episteme vs. doxa as well as white vs. black. Then, blending the critical race theory of intersectionality with rhetorical personae I explain the significances of synecdoche, metonymy, irony, appropriation, eloquence, and tragedy in the various instances of passing explored. At a theoretical level, I rethink the inadequate dichotomies of episteme vs. doxa as well as white vs. black. I conclude with a rhetorical theory of passing based on the fourth persona and six original passwords that present opportunities for future research.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Epigraph
• Acknowledgments
• Abstract
• Chapter One: Running Along the Color Line: Racial Passing and the Problem of Mixed Race Identity
• Chapter One References
• Chapter Two: The “Craft” of Passing: Rhetorical Irony, Intersectionality and the Case of Ellen Craft
• Chapter Two References
• Chapter Three: “Membership Has Its Privileges:” Plessy’s Passing and the Threat of Identity Theft
• Chapter Three References
• Chapter Four: “She Was Above All Sincere:” (Bi)racial Passing and Rhetorical Eloquence in Iola Leroy
• Chapter Four References
• Chapter Five: “A Crow that Doesn’t Know How to Be a Crow:” Reading The Human Stain and Racial Passing from Text to Film
• Chapter Five References
• Chapter Six: Things Said in Passing: Toward a Rhetorical: Theory of (Bi)Racial Passing
• Chapter Six References
• Bibliography

LIST OF FIGURES

• Figure 1: Rev. Rafael Matos Sr
• Figure 2: “The New Eve”
• Figure 3: Dramatic Theater of Passing
• Figure 4: Ellen Craft in Plain Clothes
• Figure 5: Ellen Craft as Mr. Johnson
• Figure 6: D. F. Desdunes
• Figure 7: Homer A. Plessy
• Figure 8: Hopkins as Elder Silk
• Figure 9: Miller as Younger Silk
• Figure 10: Rhetorical Intersections of Passing
• Figure 11: Dramatic Theater of Passing as Rhetorical and Intersectional
• Figure 12: Layers of Meaning: The Dramatic and Tropological Roots of (Bi)racial Passing
• Figure 13: Neoclassical Elements of Passing
• Figure 14: The Truths of (Bi)racial Passing
• Figure 15: (Bi)racial Passing as Material and Symbolic

Read the entire dissertation here.

Black or White?

The New York Times
2011-05-14

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

Daniel J. Sharfstein is the author of “The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White.”

In February 1861, just weeks after Louisiana seceded from the Union, Randall Lee Gibson enlisted as a private in a state army regiment. The son of a wealthy sugar planter and valedictorian of Yale’s Class of 1853, Gibson had long supported secession. Conflict was inevitable, he believed, not because of states’ rights or the propriety or necessity of slavery. Rather, a war would be fought over the inexorable gulf between whites and blacks, or what he called “the most enlightened race” and “the most degraded of all the races of men.” Because Northern abolitionists were forcing the South to recognize “the political, civil, and social equality of all the races of men,” Gibson wrote, the South was compelled to enjoy “independence out of the Union.” (Read Randall Lee Gibson’s article, “Our Federal Union.”)

The notion that war turned on a question of black and white as opposed to slavery and freedom was hardly an intuitive position for Gibson or for the South. Although Southern society was premised on slavery, the line between black and white had always been permeable. Since the 17th century, people descended from African slaves had been assimilating into white communities. It was a great migration that was covered up even as it was happening, its reach extending into the most unlikely corners of the South: although Randall Gibson was committed to a hardline ideology of racial difference, this secret narrative of the American experience was his family’s story.

Gibson’s siblings proudly traced their ancestry to a prosperous farmer in the South Carolina backcountry named Gideon Gibson. What they didn’t know was that when he first arrived in the colony in the 1730s, he was a free man of color. At the time the legislature thought he had come there to plot a slave revolt. The governor demanded a personal audience with him and learned that he was a skilled tradesman, had a white wife and had owned land and slaves in Virginia and North Carolina. Declaring the Gibsons to be “not Negroes nor Slaves but Free people,” the governor granted them hundreds of acres of land. The Gibsons soon married into their Welsh and Scots-Irish community along the frontier separating South Carolina’s coastal plantations from Indian country. It did not matter if the Gibsons were black or white—they were planters…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Hawaii is older, more racially mixed, census shows

Honolulu Star Advertiser
2011-05-19

Michael Tsai

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest demographic profile of the state, Hawaii is looking a little older, a tad whiter, perhaps a bit lonelier.

The bureau is scheduled to release today detailed demographic information collected last year in Hawaii and 12 other states.

The findings are consistent with continuing trends for aging, immigration and racial composition, household composition and population distribution…

…Statewide, the number of people who identified themselves as being of mixed race increased to 23.6 percent from 21.4 percent.

Of those who identified themselves by one race, African-American, Japanese and Chinese residents all recorded lower population totals from 2000 to 2010. Native Hawaiians remained level at 80,337 total, 5.9 percent of the population.

Meanwhile, white residents increased to 24.7 percent from 24.3 percent of the total population, a gain of 42,497 people…

Read the entire article here.

Splitting the Difference: Exploring the Experiences of Identity and Community Among Biracial and Bisexual People in Nova Scotia

Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia
April 2011
82 pages

Samantha Loppie

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

The term ‘bicultural’ has been gaining acknowledgment in sociological and psycho-social research and literature. It refers to identity construction which internalizes of more than one cultural identity by an individual. This thesis uses qualitative methods and a grounded theory research design to explore how bicultural (biracial and bisexual) people navigate identity and community in Nova Scotia. While similar research has been conducted on racial and sexual identities elsewhere, this study looks to fill some of the gaps in bicultural research by specifically dealing with it in an Atlantic Canadian context. Living in a social environment steeped in historical discrimination and political struggle exerts significant influence on the identities and communities of bicultural people in Nova Scotia. The thesis research findings suggest that while social environment often creates divisions and dichotomy when interpreting bicultural identities, bicultural people manage to maintain an integrated sense of self within this environment.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: Literature Review
  • Biculturalism: A Foot in Both Doors
  • Creating Context: Nova Scotia
  • Bicultural Identity: Biracial and Bisexual
  • Black and Queer: Exploring Marginalized Community
  • Discrimination and Privilege
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Three: Methodology
  • Definition of Terms
  • Qualitative Method and Research Design
  • Participant Selection
  • Research Participants
  • Data Collection
  • Ethics
  • Data Management and Analysis
• Chapter Four: A Place to Belong
  • Identity and Social Context: Nova Scotia
  • How People Talk About Identity Labels
  • Conceptualizing Identity
  • Influence and Development of Identity
  • Expressions of Identity
  • Identity Interactions with Community
  • Divergent Communities
  • Discrimination and Advantage
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Five: Conclusion: Finding Middle Ground
  • Foundations of Dichotomy: Nova Scotia
  • Seeing the Self Through Other’ Eyes: Self and Social Identity
  • Rejected and Accepted: Community Interactions
  • More Than Half: Discrimination and Legitimacy for Bicultural People
  • Invisible Advantage: Role of Privilege in Bicultural Identity
  • Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendices
  • Appendix A – Interview Questions and Guide
  • Appendix B – Consent Form
  • Appendix C – Code List

Read the entire dissertation here.

Reconceptualizing the Measurement of Multiracial Status for Health Research in the United States

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
Volume 8, Issue 1 (2011) (Special Issue: Racial Inequality and Health)
pages 25-36
DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X11000038

Meghan Woo, Senior Analyst
Abt Associates Inc.

S. Bryn Austina, Director of Fellowship Research Training in the Division of Adolescent/Young Adult Medicine
Children’s Hospital, Boston

David R. Williams, Florence and Laura Norman Professor of Public Health; Professor of African and African American Studies and of Sociology
Harvard University

Gary G. Bennett, Associate Professor of Psychology and Global Health
Duke University

The assessment of multiracial status in U.S. health research is fraught with challenges that limit our ability to enumerate and study this population. This paper reconceptualizes the assessment of multiracial status through the development of a model with three dimensions: mixed ancestry multiracial status, self-identified multiracial status, and socially assigned multiracial status. We present challenges to studying multiracial populations and provide recommendations for improving the assessment of multiracial status in health research.

The campaign for racial purity and the erosion of paternalism in Virginia, 1922-1930: “nominally white, biologically mixed, and legally Negro”.

The Journal of Southern History
Volume 68, Number 1 (February 2002)
pages 65-106

J. Douglas Smith

In September 1922 John Powell, a Richmond native and world-renowned pianist and composer, and Earnest Sevier Cox, a self-proclaimed explorer and ethnographer, organized Post No. 1 of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America. By the following June the organization claimed four hundred members in Richmond alone and had added new groups throughout the state, all dedicated to “the preservation and maintenance of Anglo-Saxon ideals and civilization.” For the next ten years Powell and his supporters dominated racial discourse in the Old Dominion; successfully challenged the legislature to redefine blacks, whites, and Indians; used the power of a state agency to enforce the law with impunity fundamentally altered the lives of hundreds of mixed-race Virginians; and threatened the essence of the state’s devotion to paternalistic race relations.

The racial extremism and histrionics of the leaders of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs have attracted the attention of both legal scholars and southern historians, particularly those interested in the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, the major legislative achievement of the organization, and Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed three centuries of miscegenation statutes in the United States. Historian Richard B. Sherman, for instance, has focused on the organization’s leaders, “a small but determined group of racial zealots who rejected the contention of most southern whites in the 1920s that the “race question was settled.” Sherman, who has written the most detailed account of the legislative efforts of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs, has argued in the pages of the Journal of Southern History that the leaders of the organization constituted a “dedicated coterie of extremists who played effectively on the fears and prejudices of many whites.” Convinced that increasing numbers of persons with traces of black blood were passing as white, they made a “Last Stand” against racial amalgamation.

While Sherman is certainly correct that the Anglo-Saxon Clubs owed their success to the commitment of their leaders, their views and policies resonated with a much broader swath of the white population. The Anglo-Saxon Clubs did not merely manipulate the racial fears and prejudices of whites but also tapped into the same assumptions that undergirded the entire foundation of white supremacy and championed segregation as a system of racial hierarchy and control. The call for racial integrity appealed especially to elite whites in Virginia who were obsessed with genealogy and their pristine bloodlines. Lady Astor, for instance, reportedly informed her English friends that they lacked the purity of the white inhabitants of the Virginia Piedmont. “We are undiluted,” she proclaimed. Author Emily Clark satirized this prevailing view in Richmond when one of her characters remarked, “for here alone, in all America, flourished the Anglo-Saxon race, untainted, pure, and perfect.” White elites across Virginia gave their support to the Anglo-Saxon Clubs and allowed Powell’s message a hearing: state senators and delegates approved legislation; governors publicly advocated the aims of the organization; some of the most socially prominent women in Richmond joined the ladies auxiliary; and influential newspapers offered editorial support and provided a public platform for the dissemination of the organization’s extreme views…

…In addition to exposing a fundamental weakness in the system of managed race relations, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs unintentionally revealed the absurdity of the basic assumption that underlay their mission: it proved impossible to divide the state, or the nation for that matter, into readily identifiable races. The longer they waged their campaign, the more apparent it became that they could not divine the precise amount of nonwhite blood in a given individual. Furthermore, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs met a great deal of resistance from individuals and communities who rejected the clubs’ particular construction of racial identity. Communities across the state revealed a variability in race relations that confounded those most committed to a discrete, binary definition of race…

…Although Powell and Cox initially placed their efforts within the broader nativist context of the national debate over federal immigration policy, they soon ceased to mention immigration at all. (11) Instead, they focused their energies toward “achieving a final solution” to the “negro problem.” Their ultimate concern, as they suggested in lengthy articles in the Times-Dispatch, was to prevent “White America” from devolving into a “Negroid Nation.” Writing in July 1923, Powell argued that the passage of Jim Crow laws and the disfranchisement of blacks had “diverted the minds of our people from the most serious and fundamental peril, that is, the danger of racial amalgamation.” “It is not enough to segregate the Negro on railway trains and street cars, in schools and theaters,” the pianist declared; “it is not enough to restrict his exercise of the franchise, so long as the possibility remains of the absorption of Negro blood into our white population.” Powell acknowledged that Virginia’s laws already prevented the intermarriage of blacks and whites but warned that such laws did not necessarily “prevent intermixture.” He and his colleagues in the Anglo-Saxon Clubs also believed that a 1910 Virginia statute that defined a black person as having at least one-sixteenth black blood no longer protected the integrity of the white race. Pointing to census figures that showed a decrease in the number of mulattoes in Virginia from 222,910 in 1910 to 164,171 in 1920, they argued that an increasing number of people with some black blood must be passing as white. Consequently, a new, “absolute” color line offered the only “possibility, if not the probability, of achieving a final solution.”

Powell’s analysis of census data, however, points to the absurdity of his campaign to define race in absolute terms. While Powell interpreted the steep drop in mulattoes as proof of increased passing, historian Joel Williamson argues that by the early twentieth century the only significant “mixing” occurred between lighter-skinned blacks and darker-skinned blacks. Even census officials warned in 1920 that “considerable uncertainty necessarily attaches to the classification of Negroes as black and mulatto, since the accuracy of the distinction depends largely upon the judgment and care employed by the enumerators.” Mulattoes in Virginia did not become white between 1910 and 1920 but rather became black. In fact, the census bureau did away with mulatto as a category for the 1930 enumeration…

…Although Powell was the Anglo-Saxon Clubs’ leading spokesman, Walter Plecker, as director of the Bureau of Vital Statistics, was without a doubt the group’s primary enforcer. From 1924 until his retirement twenty-two years later, Plecker waged a campaign of threats and intimidation aimed at classifying all Virginians by race and identifying even the smallest traces of black blood in the state’s citizens. In short, the statistician operated on the belief that a person was guilty of being black until he or she could prove otherwise.

Plecker considered it his mission to encourage as many Virginians as possible to register with the state. Between ten and twenty thousand near-white Virginians, he noted, “possess an intermixture of colored blood, in some cases to a slight extent, it is true, but still enough to prevent them from being white.” Such people previously had been considered white, which had allowed them to demand “admittance of their children to white schools” and “in not a few cases” to marry whites. Although such people were “scarcely distinguished as colored,” they “are not white in reality.” Registration, he argued, would enable the Bureau of Vital Statistics to head off such trouble…

…Linking racial integrity and segregated schools assumed a level of critical importance as the General Assembly prepared to meet in January 1930. Revelations that a number of mixed-race children attended white schools in Essex County provided advocates of a stricter racial-definition law the means of persuasion that they had lacked in 1926 and 1928 when they were seen as unnecessarily harassing the state’s Indians. The situation in Essex County first developed in 1928 as local school officials took steps to remove from the white schools children considered mixed. One family resisted, hired a lawyer, and filed suit. In the Circuit Court of Essex County, school officials acknowledged that the children in question had less than one-sixteenth black blood. Consequently, Judge Joseph W. Chinn ruled that the children could not be kept out of white schools.

Chinn based his ruling on what racial integrity advocates had long understood as a loophole in the original legislation. The 1924 Racial Integrity Act defined a white person as an individual with “no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian,” making an exception only for certain Indians, and failed to define a black person. Furthermore, the act specifically prohibited the intermarriage of a white person with a nonwhite person, but it made no mention of the schools. Powell later testified that he had assumed that all persons not deemed white would be automatically classified black. But since the 1924 statute did not amend the 1910 act which termed blacks as persons with one-sixteenth or more black blood, an individual with less than one-sixteenth black blood could not be considered black, and therefore he or she could not be prevented from attending white schools.

A reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch concluded that under Chinn’s ruling “any child having less than one-sixteenth Negro blood, not only can attend a white school, but must attend it, and is by law prevented from attending a colored school.” The judge’s opinion, moreover, opened the door for persons with less than one-sixteenth black blood to attend any of Virginia’s colleges or universities. In the wake of Chinn’s decision, local officials understood that their only avenue of relief lay with the state legislature passing a stricter law; consequently, sponsors introduced a measure that defined as black “any person in whom there is ascertainable any Negro Blood”—the so-called one-drop rule…

Loving Indian Style: Maintaining Racial Caste and Tribal Sovereignty Through Sexual Assimilation

Wisconsin Law Review
Volume 2007, Number 2 (2007-01-12)
pages 410-461

Carla D. Pratt, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Educational Equity; Nancy J. LaMont Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law
Pennsylvania State University

I. Introduction

When the United States Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s miscegenation statute forty years ago, everyone understood that the Court was eroding the formal barrier between blacks and whites. Although there has been healthy disagreement about Loving v. Virginia, including whether it provides the precedent for legal endorsement of same-sex marriage, scholars generally agree that the Virginia statute which Loving struck down was not a law proscribing miscegenation generally, but merely prohibiting miscegenation with a white person. Commentators have generally recognized the Virginia legislators’ choice to structure the law in this way as being aimed at preserving white racial purity and ensuring that white women were reserved exclusively for white men. Ostensibly the law was insouciant regarding the intimate relations of people of color, but a closer look betrays its impact on interracial relations between people of color.

Further, state miscegenation laws that ultimately permitted whites to marry Indians aided the assimilation of Indians into mainstream white America by operating as a form of racial rehabilitation. Indian assimilation, however, required more than Indians intermarrying with whites; it required the total indoctrination of Indians into the system of white supremacy. This meant that Indians needed to adopt white sexual mores, including the aversion to race-mixing with blacks.

This Article calls this process—which operated as the pathway to Indian acceptance in American society and privileged Indians over blacks—“sexual assimilation.” While sexual assimilation was aimed at cultural genocide from the federal perspective, it paradoxically played a role in preventing Indian cultural extinction by helping to maintain tribal sovereignty.

Scholars have generally characterized Loving as a case about the line separating whites from blacks. Within the subtext of Loving, however, lies a narrative about the line separating Indians from blacks. Virginia’s miscegenation law employed a eugenics-based racial classification to legally construct Mildred Loving as “Negro,” but her true racial identity contained a Cherokee Indian component. Mildred was herself a product of race mixing. Furthermore, while Mildred’s mixed racial identity may lead one to believe that—as some scholars have suggested—Indians intermarried with blacks freely and frequently, the miscegenation laws of several tribes impart a counternarrative that portrays some Indian communities as viewing marriage to blacks as taboo.

Despite all of the discussion about miscegenation laws that Loving has generated, there has been little discussion about the American Indian Nations’s enactment of miscegenation laws. Perhaps this paucity of literature is due to the fact that Loving had no precedential effect in tribal miscegenation law since tribes are sovereigns that are, in many respects, independent of federal regulation. Nonetheless, an examination of Loving is incomplete without an examination of the role that state miscegenation laws played in Indian communities in the scheme to maintain the boundaries of racial categories and the struggle to maintain tribal sovereignty. An examination of tribal miscegenation law yields a better understanding of how state miscegenation laws affected nonblack people of color such as Native Americans, who were often political casualties of state and federal laws designed with a black-white paradigm in mind. In fact, Native Americans found themselves wedged in the middle of the black-white models of racial subordination and ultimately adjusted to the existing racial hierarchy through social and legal assimilation.

The fact that several Indian tribes adopted miscegenation laws similar to the law struck down in Loving raises important questions. Why did these particular tribes adopt miscegenation laws? What role did the adoption of miscegenation laws play in the tribe and its interaction with state and federal governments? What role did tribal miscegenation laws play in the acculturation of Indians, and what legacy have these laws left for the tribes’ contemporary understanding of self?

This Article examines tribal miscegenation laws in an effort to locate some potential answers to these questions. This Article is not proffered as a definitive answer to the questions posed, but as a contribution to the emerging dialogue aimed at developing a collective understanding of the social, historical, and political context in which such laws arose and operated. This Article deviates from the traditional binary paradigm of exploring how miscegenation laws affected blacks and whites and explores how miscegenation laws affected nonblack people of color and their relations with blacks. Thus, it reveals that the statute at issue in Loving and similar race-preserving laws indirectly regulated interracial relations between certain nonwhite groups.

Part II of this Article explores the substance of tribal miscegenation laws—and their legal and political context—in an effort to better understand why tribes adopted such racially isolating laws. Part III examines how state miscegenation laws affected Native Americans as well as the role of tribal miscegenation laws in maintaining individual and communal Indian identity and tribal sovereignty. Part IV questions whether tribal miscegenation laws, despite their repeal, help explain contemporary tribal conflicts between blacks and Indians. Part V concludes that extant legal disputes between the tribes and African Americans who claim membership in those tribes are derivatives of the project of sexual assimilation of Indian people. This suggests that both the tribes and African Americans who claim a Native American identity could benefit from a better understanding of the historical sociolegal context in which contemporary notions of Indian identity are rooted…

Read the entire article here.

The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity

Fordham University Press
May 2011
256 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780823234509; Hardback ISBN: 9780823234493

Michael J. Monahan, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Marquette University

How does our understanding of the reality (or lack thereof ) of race as a category of being affect our understanding of racism as a social phenomenon, and vice versa? How should we envision the aims and methods of our struggles against racism?

Traditionally, the Western political and philosophical tradition held that true social justice points toward a raceless future—that racial categories are themselves inherently racist, and a sincere advocacy for social justice requires a commitment to the elimination or abolition of race altogether. This book focuses on the underlying assumptions that inform this view of race and racism, arguing that it is ultimately bound up in a “politics of purity”—an understanding of human agency, and reality itself, as requiring all-or-nothing categories with clear and unambiguous boundaries. Racism, being organized around a conception of whiteness as the purest manifestation of the human, thus demands a constant policing of the boundaries among racial categories.

Drawing upon a close engagement with historical treatments of the development of racial categories and identities, the book argues that races should be understood not as clear and distinct categories of being but rather as ambiguous and indeterminate (yet importantly real) processes of social negotiation. As one of its central examples, it lays out the case of the Irish in seventeenth-century Barbados, who occasionally united with black slaves to fight white supremacy—and did so as white people, not as nonwhites who later became white when they capitulated to white supremacy.

Against the politics of purity, Monahan calls for the emergence of a “creolizing subjectivity” that would place such ambiguity at the center of our understanding of race. The Creolizing Subject takes seriously the way in which racial categories, in all of their variety and ambiguity, situate and condition our identity, while emphasizing our capacity, as agents, to engage in the ongoing contestation and negotiation of the meaning and significance of those very categories.

Table of Contents

• Acknowldegements
• Introduction
• Contingency, History, and Ontology: On Abolishing Whiteness
• Turbulent and Dangerous Spirits: Irish Servitude in Barbados
• Race and Biology: Scientific Reason and the Politics of Purity
• “Becoming” White: Race, Reality, and Agency
• The Politics of Purity: Colonialism, Reason, and Modernity
• Creolizing Subjects: Antiracism and the Future of Philosophy
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index