Mixed Race Studies

Racial inequalities and perinatal health in the southeast region of Brazil

Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research
Volume 40, Number 9 (September 2007)
pages 1187-1194
DOI: 10.1590/S0100-879X2006005000144
ISSN 1678-4510

L. M. Silva
Departamento de Saúde Pública
Universidade Federal do Maranhão, São Luís, MA, Brasil

R. A. Silva
Departamento de Saúde Pública
Universidade Federal do Maranhão, São Luís, MA, Brasil

A. A. M. Silva
Departamento de Saúde Pública
Universidade Federal do Maranhão, São Luís, MA, Brasil

H. Bettiol
Departamento de Puericultura e Pediatria, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brasil

M. A. Barbieri
Departamento de Puericultura e Pediatria, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brasil

Few studies are available about racial inequalities in perinatal health in Brazil and little is known about whether the existing inequality is due to socioeconomic factors or to racial discrimination per se. Data regarding the Ribeirão Preto birth cohort, Brazil, whose mothers were interviewed from June 1, 1978 to May 31, 1979 were used to answer these questions. The perinatal factors were obtained from the birth questionnaire and the ethnic data were obtained from 2063 participants asked about self-reported skin color at early adulthood (23-25 years of age) in 2002/2004. Mothers of mulatto and black children had higher rates of low schooling ( £ 4 years, 27.2 and 38.0%) and lower family income ( £ 1 minimum wage, 28.6 and 30.4%). Mothers aged less than 20 years old predominated among mulattos (17.0%) and blacks (14.0%). Higher rates of low birth weight and smoking during pregnancy were observed among mulatto individuals (9.6 and 28.8%). Preterm birth rate was higher among mulattos (9.5%) and blacks (9.7%) than whites (5.5%). White individuals had higher rates of cesarean delivery (34.9%). Skin color remained as an independent risk factor for low birth weight (P < 0.001), preterm birth (P = 0.01), small for gestational age (P = 0.01), and lack of prenatal care (P = 0.02) after adjustment for family income and maternal schooling, suggesting that the racial inequalities regarding these indicators are explained by the socioeconomic disadvantage experienced by mulattos and blacks but are also influenced by other factors, possibly by racial discrimination and/or genetics.

Introduction

Natives, mulattos, blacks, and whites occupy unequal places in the social networks, with differential aspects related to birth, growth, disease, and dying. Racial inequality is not limited to socioeconomic indicators related to quality of life, income and schooling but also occurs in health indicators. In the United States, which have a tradition of research on racial questions, the rates of preterm birth, low birth weight and infant mortality are higher among blacks than among whites (1,2).

Although Brazil is considered to be a country in which racial discrimination is not so significant and in which “racial democracy” prevails, significant socioeconomic inequalities related to diverse ethnic groups exist in this country (3,4). Even in cities in the south of the country, where there is better access to health services, black women have fewer opportunities to receive ideal prenatal care, with repercussions on perinatal health (5-7). In the town of Pelotas, black children have a higher prevalence of low birth weight, preterm birth and restricted intrauterine growth (8). In a study conducted in Rio de Janeiro, black mothers had lower schooling, a greater proportion of smokers and lower prenatal care attendance, cohabited less, and had a higher prevalence of pregnancy during adolescence (9). In Brazil in general, infant mortality is higher among blacks and native Indians (10).

The race/ethnic group category is not useful as a biological category, but is a social construct (11,12). In Brazil, the term race is normally used to refer to phenotype (physical appearance) rather than to ancestrality (origin), as is the case in the US. While US research is based on categories of “pure” races, in Brazil the “brown” or “mulatto” category is commonly used also to refer to cross-bred individuals (13). The determination of race in health studies is usually done by the interviewer, whereas the more recommended procedure is self-classification (11).

Few studies regarding ethnic inequalities and perinatal health have been conducted in Brazil, mainly due to low availability and/or quality of the data or to inadequate instruments for the measurement of race/ethnic origin. Questions related to the inequalities existing between individuals of mulatto and black skin colors have not been fully clarified, with these groups being usually analyzed as non-white in relation to whites. It has not been clarified whether the inequalities existing between ethnic groups regarding perinatal factors are due to socioeconomic factors or to other cultural or genetic factors. To clarify these questions, a study was conducted to analyze a cohort of individuals born in Ribeirão Preto, SP, in which skin color self-reported in adulthood in 2002/2004 was related to the social, economic, obstetrical, and perinatal characteristics of the subjects at birth in 1978/79.

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Recasting the Real: Reconstructivism: A Response to Hybridity in Contemporary Art Methodologies

The University of Alabama McNair Journal
The McNair Scholars Program
Volume 7 (Spring 2007)
pages 65-84

Suzanah Moorer

While many artists are taking an interdisciplinary approach to art making, currently there is not a critical consensus on the direction and significance of hybrid artwork in American culture. Responding to Nikos Papastergiadisʼs summary of this situation, “Scholars and writers have not proposed a new philosophical framework that can assist people to make sense of their experience [with hybrid artwork],” I have borrowed the philosophical framework “Reconstructivism” from cultural criticism in an effort to further the understanding of hybridity in art today. In this project, I have first explored the parameters of Reconstructivism as it relates to the practical methodology of a sample of contemporary artistsʼ practice. Second, using a Reconstructivist methodology, I have created a body of work that is hybrid in both form and content, which culminated in an installation which includes a work of short fiction, a cycle of prints, an assemblage of objects, sound, and video. The content of the work addresses the construction of identity for biracial persons of African-American and Caucasian descent as influenced by social forces in the American South. Finally, I offer a Reconstructivist analysis of the work to elucidate the ways in which Reconstructivism can function as a “philosophical framework” to help people better understand hybrid artwork.

…My Reconstructivist Body of Work

More than “who are you?” I have been asked the question “what are you?” As a child, questions like this confused me. My reaction prompted the curious to give me options: “black or white.” I first tried responding with “or”; it was the most logical option between the two, syntactically. The answer is not simple. Before the day of the “multi-racial” race box on census documents, miscegenated people disrupted the binary system of racial classification. Because of my experience as a miscegenated person in the South, hybridity is not simply a model of interpretation for me but rather a mode of existence. The reality and significance that I perceive from the hybrid perspective compel me to create artwork that addresses the social conflict that surrounds the hybrid entity. I seek to communicate the reality of this split situation to the viewer.

Using a Reconstructivist methodology, I have created a body of work called “Halve” that is hybrid in both form and content. This body of work culminated in an installation which includes a work of short fiction, a cycle of prints, an assemblage of objects, and looped video projection. The environment that I have sought to reconstruct through an art installation is that of racial tension in the American South. Specifically, the installation addresses the perception of identity in the biracial subject (of both African-American and Caucasian descent) as influenced by social forces. The foundation of this work has come from my own personal mythology which I have constructed in the form of a short fiction, “Ribbons for Magnolia.”…

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Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism [Review: Spickard]

American Studies
Volume 50, No. 1/2: Spring/Summer 2009
pages 125-127

Paul Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. Jared Sexton. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2008.

One of the major developments in ethnic studies over the past two decades has been the idea (and sometimes the advocacy) of multiraciality. From a theoretical perspective, this has stemmed from a post-structuralist attempt to deconstruct the categories created by the European Enlightenment and its colonial enterprise around the world. From a personal perspective, it has been driven by the life experiences in the last half-century of a growing number of people who have and acknowledge mixed parentage. The leading figures in this scholarly movement are probably Maria Root and G. Reginald Daniel, but the writers are many and include figures as eminent as Gary Nash and Randall Kennedy.

A small but dedicated group of writers has resisted this trend: chiefly Rainier Spencer, Jon Michael Spencer, and Lewis Gordon. They have raised no controversy, perhaps because their books are not well written, and perhaps because their arguments do not make a great deal of sense. It is not that there is nothing wrong with the literature and the people movement surrounding multiraciality. Some writers and social activists do tend to wax rhapsodic about the glories of intermarriage and multiracial identity as social panacea. A couple of not-very-thoughtful activists (Charles Byrd and Susan Graham) have been co-opted by the Gingrichian right (to be fair, one must point out that most multiracialists are on the left). And, most importantly, there is a tension between some Black intellectuals and the multiracial idea over the lingering fear that, for some people, adopting a multiracial identity is a dodge to avoid being Black. If so, that might tend to sap the strength of a monoracially-defined movement for Black community empowerment.

With Amalgamation Schemes, Jared Sexton is trying to stir up some controversy. He presents a facile, sophisticated, and theoretically informed intelligence, and he picks a fight from the start. His title suggests that the study of multiraciality is some kind of plot, or at the very least an illegitimate enterprise. His tone is angry and accusatory on every page. It is difficult to get to the grounds of his argument, because the cloud of invective is so thick, and because his writing is abstract, referential, and at key points vague…

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Speaking About Southern Unionists… and Mixed-Race People: A Report and an Announcement

Renegade South: histories of unconventional southerners
2011-05-07

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

I just returned from a wonderful visit to Leiden University in the Netherlands, where I spoke generally about Civil War Southern Unionists and specifically about The Free State of Jones as part of that university’s yearly American Studies Lecture Series. In commemoration of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, this year’s theme was “The American Civil War After 150 Years: An Unfinished War?”

I was impressed by the deep interest in the American Civil War displayed by Leiden students and faculty. I’m happy to report there were no arguments between True Believers in either the noble “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy, or the total benevolence of Northern motives and goals in thwarting the South’s secession from the Union. Rather, discussions centered on understanding that many Southerners–white as well as black–opposed secession and the creation of the Confederacy, and that many more turned against the Confederacy as the war dragged on. How common across the South was guerrilla warfare such as that of Jones County, Mississippi?, they wanted to know. Who was Newt Knight? This question led to a discussion about the deep need displayed by Civil War partisans to turn Newt into either a murderous traitor to ”The South,” or, conversely, into an abolitionist whose racial views anticipated the modern Civil Rights Movement…

…There was special interest among the Leiden audience in the mixed-race community that grew out of Newt Knight’s wartime collaboration with Rachel Knight, the former slave of his grandfather, Jackie Knight. Many of the questions centered on issues of racial identity and the historical importance–and limits–of the “one drop rule” in determining such identities. Members of the audience were fascinated by the variety of racial identities assumed by, as well as imposed upon, descendants of Newt Knight, his white wife Serena, and the two mixed-race women–Rachel Knight and her daughter George Ann–by whom he had children.  Historically, they understood, race is a social, political, and legal construction rather than a biologically rational system…

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New Guinea: Racial Identity and Inclusion in the Stockbridge and Brothertown Indian Communities of New York

New York History
Volume 90, Number 3 (Summer 2009)
23 paragraphs

Christopher Geherin

In 1818 the Stockbridge Indians initiated a series of land sales to the state of New York in order to finance the relocation of the tribe further west. By 1830, the Stockbridges had engaged in some thirteen land treaties, ceding more than 20,000 acres to the state. By the treaty of October 1, 1825, the tribe ceded another 1,436 acres of its land, including a distinct tract of 361.88 acres on the southern border of the community known by the name of New Guinea. An oft-cited history asserts that the Stockbridges had granted this tract to a colony of freed slaves who arrived circa 1800 from the Mohawk Valley. Here, New Guinea settlers are identified as including the Baldwin, Cook, Fiddler, Mitop, and Welch families. An earlier source corroborates the identification of John Baldwin as a settler on the New Guinea tract, adding also the name of Nathan Pendleton. Literature pertaining to the tract remains sparse, and the assumption that its inhabitants were former African slaves has persisted. That individuals of African descent were living at New Stockbridge is substantiated. As early as 1796, the Reverends Belknap and Morse noted the presence of free blacks in Stockbridge and Oneida villages. Similarly, Stockbridge missionary John Sergeant mentioned preaching to a small nearby settlement of mulattos. The 1825 Stockbridge treaty itself names no occupant of the four New Guinea lots, nor does the associated surveyor’s field book. Other evidence, however, identifies the inhabitants and reveals that the families of New Guinea possessed a more complex heritage than their characterization as freed slaves would suggest. Furthermore, the histories of the New Guinea settlers offer a valuable perspective on racial identity in the Stockbridge and Brothertown Indian communities—particularly in regard to intermarriage with African-Americans—and on racial integration in western New York in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

In recent years, historians have begun to render a fuller picture of a Native American identity as complex and fluid as any notion of an “American” identity itself, as diverse as eighteenth- and nineteenth- century perceptions of “Indian” were typically static and monolithic. Intermarriage with African-Americans represents an important facet of the evolving nature of that identity. At the same time that such intermarriage increased in native communities after the American Revolution—due to declining tribal populations as well as simple proximity—racial sensibilities were developing in American society; more and more preoccupied with racial distinctions, Americans began to categorize people according to heritable and fixed “racial” traits. This emerging ideology had implications for native communities. After the Revolution, “models of Indian citizenship were becoming more English,” and a number of New England tribes moved to restrict acceptance of Africans, largely because of diminishing land and a paucity of eligible men. Intermarriage with Africans became an even more divisive tribal issue in the nineteenth century, influenced in part by the growing insistence in larger society that to be “Indian” required an absence of racial intermixture. Any African descent came to be viewed as eclipsing Indian ancestry. Native Americans with discernible African heritage (and often without) were categorized as black, negro, mulatto, or colored, a practice demonstrated by white and tribal authorities. Both the Brothertown and Stockbridge tribes assimilated this standard, with the Stockbridges in particular manifesting the mutable character of racial consciousness. In 1824 the Stockbridge tribal council formally adopted William Gardner, identifying him as Narragansett. But in 1826 the legislature of New York defined Gardner as “coloured,” and by the 1870s the tribe sought to exclude the Gardners by characterizing the family as “negro.” (This was not the case for Stockbridge and Brothertown Indians of European ancestry.) Despite studies enriching our understanding of the diversity of Native American identity, examinations of the acculturated, multiracial, and multitribal communities of New Stockbridge and Brothertown remain lacking.

Formerly from Massachusetts, the Stockbridges—or Muhheakunnuck as they refer to themselves—are a Mohican tribe that resettled in New York in the mid-1780s. The Stockbridge Mohicans originated as an amalgamation of diverse Algonquian groups living between the Hudson and Housatonic River Valleys. The Stockbridge tribe itself came into existence in 1734 as a Protestant mission community resulting from negotiations between Housatonic-Mohican villages and the Massachusetts provincial authorities. In that year, missionary John Sergeant, Sr., began work in the town of Stockbridge at the invitation of the tribe. In a progressive measure for the era, the Stockbridges shared with their English neighbors the governance of their township. Stockbridge warriors fought with the British during with French and Indian War, but, along with the Oneidas, sided with the American colonists in the Revolution. Despite this history and acculturation, however, the Stockbridges continued to face increasing pressures from white settlers in their Massachusetts home.

In 1773 seven other tribes from New York and southern New England formulated a plan to move west together to land among the Six Nations of Iroquois. Though also Christianized and acculturated, the so-called New England tribes had not been integrated into surrounding white society, and found themselves struggling to survive culturally, economically, and literally after decades of poverty, depopulation (due to disease and participation in colonial wars), and dispossession of their lands. They had come to believe that their vision of a Christian Indian community practicing European habits of agriculture could only be realized apart from whites. They also embraced a calling to Christianize and civilize their Six Nations comrades, and had undertaken missionary work among the Oneidas in the 1760s. Implementing their plan to emigrate, representatives from the seven tribes lamented to the Six Nations that the situation in New England had become so dire as to preclude their remaining there. In 1774 the Oneidas responded by designating a tract southeast of Oneida Lake in Madison and Oneida Counties for use by these various tribes, later to be known collectively as the Brothertown Indians.

The current study concerns the integration of people of African descent in the transplanted, multitribal communities of New Stockbridge and Brothertown—in particular on a specific tract in New Stockbridge—and does not explore this issue among the Oneidas who welcomed them. Beyond the distinct history of tribal relocation and amalgamation, it is also worth noting significant cultural differences between the Stockbridge and Brothertown Indians and their Oneida benefactors. Unlike the Christian communities of New Stockbridge and Brothertown, potent and enduring factions within the Oneida tribe continued to resist the very acceptance of aspects of European culture, including agriculture and Christianity. Still, the Oneidas, too, constituted a multi-ethnic, multiracial community. (This despite disparaging the Brotherton Delawares who joined the Stockbridges in 1802 as “those newcomers from New Jersey, who consist of Indians, mulattoes and some white women connected with Indians.”) In 1796 Belknap and Morse reported that “among the Oneidas there is scarcely an individual who is not descended on one side from Indians of other nations, or from English, Scots, Irish, French, German, Dutch and some few, from Africans.” By welcoming the beleaguered New England tribes among them, the Oneidas sought to bolster their standing with their fellow Iroquois and deflect the State of New York’s acquisitive land efforts. It was also no coincidence that the land they offered stood on the eastern border of their territory, thus serving as a buffer against encroaching white settlement…

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Jamette Carnival and Afro-Caribbean Influences on the Work of Jean Rhys

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Volume 3, Issue 2 (Fall 2005)
22 paragraphs
ISSN 1547-7150

Cynthia Davis

Most art critics would agree that since the Universal Exhibition of 1900 in Paris, African aesthetics have profoundly influenced twentieth century sculpture and painting. Literary critics have paid less attention to ways in which West African culture and rhetorical patterns have shaped twentieth century writing. A case in point is the Dominican writer Jean Rhys (1890-1979) who has been located within the discursive spaces of formalism and feminism and, in the case of Wide Sargasso Sea, postcolonialism. Aside from Caribbeanists who, as Kamau Brathwaite points out in “A Post-Cautionary Tale,” bat Rhys back and forth as “The Helen of Our Wars,” critical response to Rhys’ work usually privileges its European modernism and concern with form over its Caribbean cultural context. Even though Ford Madox Ford trumpets her Antillean origin in the introduction to her first book, The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927), critics of Rhys’ first four novels rarely mention her West Indian identity. Such an oversight is puzzling, considering that every text, European setting notwithstanding, includes such identifiable Afrocentric elements as parody, satire, masquerade, hybridity, heteroglossia, and the rhetorical technique of call-and-response. Critics who do acknowledge the culture of the Black Atlantic in all of Rhys’ work include Kenneth Ramchand and Elaine Savory. Ramchand contextualizes her style, “essentially image and rhythm,” as part of the Negritude movement of the 1930’s (Ramchand 134), while Savory contends that Rhys’ texts “conduct important conversations between gender, national, racial and class positions” (198). Janette Martin further asserts that Afrocentric spirituality provides all of Rhys’ protagonists with an “alternative epistemology” (5), “to transcend or, more important, to transgress conventional modes of knowing and behaving” (4). It is surprising that even after the publication of her specifically West Indian novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), A. Alvarez hailed her as “the best living English novelist,” and Carole Angier, her British biographer, never visited Dominica as part of her research. Annette Gilson, however, maintains that Rhys’ Afrocentric identity is always present in her European texts, albeit coded and manifested as presence-as-absence (654).

Like Picasso and Modigliani, to whose art she alluded in her novels, Jean Rhys drew on African sources, mediated in her case through the culture of her Dominican homeland. Just as visual artists learned, from West African masks and sacred artifacts, to streamline and stylize form, so Rhys borrowed cultural and oral tropes from the Yoruba and other West African peoples. These cultural markers had crossed the Atlantic with the slave ships and evolved into the trickster tales, ghost stories, obeah spells, talismans, satirical calypso songs and carnival street performances of Dominica and the other Caribbean islands. In privileging Afro-Caribbean orality, heteroglossia, hybridity, and satire, Rhys stands as a foremother to Anglophone writers such as Olive Senior, Michelle Cliff, Rambai Espinet, Jamaica Kincaid, Pauline Melville, Velma Pollard, Erna Brodber, and Opal Palmer Adisa. Like the Martinican novelist Mayotte Capecia (Lucette Combette), Rhys writes against the racist travelogues of “local colorists” like Lafcadio Hearn and subverts the stereotype of the guiablesse (female demon) in both West Indian and European sites (Carter 446). Rhys’ protagonists, like Capecia’s, have been dismissed as apolitical and Eurocentric when in fact the reverse is true. Rhys’ interrogation of power relations across racial, sexual and economic lines is subversive, and she approaches her subject in the indirect, elliptical style of Afrocentric social criticism.

This paper contextualizes Rhys within Afro-Dominican culture and argues that the texts set in Paris and London are deeply informed by the culture, specifically by the rhetorical device of call-and-response and by the persona of the female carnival street performer, or jamette. Jamette is Trinidadian Creole, from the French diametre, the name given to the working class women who took part in carnival (Liverpool 3). The term is used in a broader sense here to include the transgressive, parodic style of the Dominican female street performers of Rhys’ childhood. I would argue that for Rhys, the jamette signifies an opposition to the legal and cultural “limitations … that seek to close women and to enclose [them] ‘safely’” (Fayad 451). Rhetorically, Rhys uses Afrocentric “forms of verbal artistry such as calypso that require economy and highly developed verbal play [and] permit a depth of signification without many words” (Savory 153). Rhys thus indirectly interrogates colonial and metropolitan power structures. In combining modernism and African aesthetics with the hybridity and heteroglossia of her own background, she shapes the satirical tone and parodic structure of her work.

…Rhys’ Afrocentric belief system may be grounded in her own ambiguous ethnicity. “Who’s white?” the Rhysian father expostulates whenever the question of people’s “colored blood” on Dominica comes up, “damn few!” (Rhys, “The Day They Burned the Books,” Short Stories 156). While Rhys’ father may have warned his family that the racial identity of all West Indians was suspect, he may also have encouraged his daughter to embrace her mixed heritage. Gilson writes that in the metropolis “she was subject to disparagement reserved by the English for West Indian colonials whose racial identity was suspect and whose social position was questionable at best” (636). In 1959, Francis Wyndham reported on the BBC that Rhys was “Welsh and Scottish.” She immediately wrote: “I am not a Scot at all. My father was Welsh … my mother’s family was Creole …As far as I know I am white but I have no country really…” (Rhys, Letters 172; my italics). Her great-grandfather Lockhart had married a “pretty Cuban countess … with dark curls and an intelligent face,” who never fully assimilated the language and mores of the British plantocracy. Lockhart was “jealous and suspicious not only of other men but of her possible attempts to get in touch with Catholicism again” (Rhys, Smile Please 26). In “Elsa” the narrator suspects that she is of mixed race: “my grandfather and his beautiful Spanish wife. Spanish. I wonder …” (Jean Rhys Collection [Series I, Box, 1, Folder 1a] McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa). While one must be careful of conflating excessively, as Angier does, Rhys’ fiction and her history, Aunt Hester’s insinuations to Anna in Voyage that her mother is racially mixed and that her father was pressured into the marriage may be grounded in Rees Williams’ family history. Rhys recalls that Aunt Clarice, the “real” Hester, made similar remarks. Clarice claimed that her brother was “continually brooding over his exile in a small Caribbean island … ‘Poor Willy,’ she would say meaningfully, ‘poor, poor Willy’” (Rhys, Smile Please 55).

Although Rhys was considered white in Dominica, English people, including her biographer, routinely questioned her race. Adrian Allinson, a painter for whom Rhys once modeled and on whom she in turn based Marston in “Till September, Petronella,” criticized her “drawling” West Indian voice and suggested that she was of mixed race (Dorothy Miller Richardson Collection [Series II, Box 1, Folder 11] McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa). Ford Madox Ford and his common-law wife Stella Bowen both claimed that Rhys was passing for white (Angier 656), and described her as such in their books. Bowen justified her complicity in “l’affaire Ford” by othering Rhys as “savage” and “cannibal,” while asserting her own “superior” Anglo-Saxon values (Thomas 4). The sinister Lola Porter (read “Ella Lenglet,” Rhys’ name at the time) in Ford’s turgid potboiler When the Wicked Man (1931)is modeled on Rhys. Lola is a Creole from the West Indies and, like Rhys, is tall and thin. Lola has a “soft, stealthy voice” and “gipsy blood” (Ford 157). She is “a seductive blackamoor”(249); her breath “pours in and out of her large nostrils”(Ford 183). Lola frequents Harlem nightclubs, is an expert on “Negro music,” and tells “fantastic and horrible details of obi and the voodoo practices of the coloured people of her childhood home” (Ford 175). The scenes in which Lola alternates between kissing the protagonist’s hands “continuously, as if she had been a slave” (162) and threatening him with death by obeah (259), are very similar to Rhys’ description of Marya’s behavior toward Heidler (Ford) in Quartet. A milder version of Rhys inspires another character in Ford’s novel. Henrietta Faulkner Felise is an American, of Spanish descent. Henrietta is from the “Deep South” (“Missouri or Tennessee” as Ford puts it) and has “a slightly dusky accent” (Ford 78). Like Rhys, Henrietta has an unusual intonation and the protagonist “experience(s) a singular revulsion … at her voice” (78). Henrietta is ostensibly white but Ford makes a Carib/cannibal association with her necklace of pink coral, her sharp little white teeth, her “very full and pouted lips,” high cheek bones, and “extremely large-pupilled eyes” (78). Like Rhys, both Lola and Henrietta are expert horsewomen and “spent their childhood on horseback”(Ford 183). Lola, dressed in riding clothes, inspires lurid dominatrix fantasies in the hapless protagonist. Although Rhys and Ford both said their novels, Quartet and When the Wicked Man, were not autobiographical, there are remarkable similarities in the racial othering of the Lola/Marya/Henrietta characters…

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The term “race,” the way it is defined in forms, does not exist; the term “racism” is a reality

University of Memphis
Colloge of Arts & Sciences Archive (from an article in La Prensa Latina)
2004-03-08

Marcela Mendoza, Adjunct Instructor & Courtesy Research Associate
Department of Anthropology
University of Oregon

The term “race” as defined in the administrative forms, in reality has no existence; however, the term “racism” as notion of “race” is powerful in society. Those of us, who were born in Latin America, find it very strange to have to indicate “race” on […] any form where one is required to show proof of identity. We find this strange because people in Latin American countries are not asked to classify themselves in a race; this is not an important issue and moreover, we all know that we are from a mixed heredity; (everyone has an indigenous, European, African or Asian ancestor). Nevertheless, for Hispanic Americans the “racial” issue is more natural because they were born and raised in the contradictions of this social system.

Racial classifications are a legacy of the colonial expansion. Colonial empires used them to differentiate the new nations they conquered. For example, Anglo Saxons classified the “Native Americans” (indigenous) in separate categories from the slaves they brought from Africa, and as a result they created the two categories of “Native American” and “Black”…

…The truth is that “race” as a concept has no biological foundation because people have been of mixed heredity since the existence of mankind. The only thing that racial classification shows is the genetic continuation among individuals born in the same geographic region. However, the social consequences (discrimination) of using racial classifications to divide the population of a nation are huge…

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Gouldtown: A Very Remarkable Settlement of Ancient Date

J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia (Digitized by Google)
1913
237 pages

William Steward, A.M.

Rev. Theophilus G. Stweard, D.D., Chaplain, U.S. Army, Retired

Studies of some sturdy examples of the simple live, toghether with sketches of early colonial history of Cumberland county and Southern New Jersey and some early genealogical records.

CHAPTER I: Gouldtown; its tradition; its people; its general History.

In Judge Lucius Q. C. Elmer’s history of Cumberland County, New Jersey, written in 1865, occurs this statement:

“Gouldtown—partly in the Northern part of Fairfield, and partly in Bridgeton Townships—although never more than a settlement of mulattoes, principally bearing the names of Gould and Pierce, scattered over a considerable territory, is of quite ancient date. The tradition is that they are descendants of Fenwick.”

Judge Elmer, a distinguished Supreme Court Jurist of New Jersey, was the son of General Ebenezer Elmer, of New Jersey, who was an officer in the Revolutionary Army, first as an ensign, and shortly after as lieutenant in a company, and later, being a physician, serving as a surgeon; he served, in all, during the war of the Revolution, a period of seven years and eight months. In 1814, he commanded a brigade of militia called out for the defence of Philadelphia against the British, and was ever after that known as General Elmer. Judge Elmer was born soon after the close of the Revolution in 1798, and had ample opportunity and ability for research in his native county. He died in 1888.

Much interest has always been taken in the community of Gouldtown by the neighboring communities, and this was always of a friendly character; in early times because of its traditional descent, and later because of the ethnological features recognizable.

General Elmer and his son were accustomed, on Sunday afternoons to meet in a schoolhouse and catechize the children of Gouldtown, in the neighborhood, in the years following the Revolution. These children and youth would not all be mulattoes (the term “mulattoes” is used in this book in its general significance, applying to the people of color of mixed blood) however, for in the community were pure white families—as for instance the Woodruff’s, the Luptons, the Fullers, the Seeleys, and the Whites, and others; traces of whom are to be found only in the farms they left, which were known by their names as the “Fuller Fields,” the “hite Fields,” the “Jay Fields “; the names remaining a century or more after their owners had vanished. Only one of these names has been perpetuated in a village, and that of recent date and several miles distant from the original location. This is Woodruffs, about three or four miles northward from Gouldtown. It is a wealthy farming settlement on the line of the Central Railroad, and has a Methodist Church and a schoolhouse and post-office.

Gouldtown is comprised in two sections—following the two family names of Gould and Pierce, which were always known by their separate names, Gouldtown and Piercetown, but both known comprehensively as Gouldtown. It is remarkable in that it has perpetuated its family name in its locality for nearly two hundred years; also because it is a community of mulattoes who, contrary to the pet theory of some astute ethnological scientists, have perpetuated themselves generation after generation for almost two centuries; remarkable, too, for the known longevity of its people, who do not begin to grow old, as is often said, until they come to three-score years, and a number of whom have reached the century mark, one of whom (Ebenezer Pierce Bishop) is still living, at this writing, who is one hundred and six years old, and one of whom (Mrs. Lydia Gould Sheppard) was buried in the year nineteen hundred and eleven, at the age of one hundred and two, in the Gouldtown Cemetery, and a number of others who are still living at ages between seventy and ninety-five years…

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Multiracial Identity Development: Understanding Choice of Racial Identity in Asian-White College Students

Journal of the Indiana University Student Personnel Association
2011
pages 38-45

Ashley Viager
Higher Education and Student Affairs Program
Indiana University

Asian-White individuals will have greater representation in higher education in coming years, and student affairs professionals must learn how these students make meaning of their racial identities in order to best serve the needs of this group. Analyzing Poston’s (1990) and Root’s (2003) theories of multiracial identity development, this paper examines the experiences unique to this population to demonstrate that Asian-White individuals have the ability to choose from multiple racial identity outcomes.

In 2000, the United States government conducted a census in which multiracial individuals could self-identify with more than one racial category. Multiracial individuals are those whose parents are of two or more different and distinct federally recognized racial groups (Chapman-Huls, 2009). Previously, multiracial individuals had not been formally recognized in the United States. Instead, multiracial individuals who had one White parent were primarily classified according to their parent of color (Zack, 2001). This system of racial classification, also known as “hypodescent,” originated in the eighteenth century as a way to “maintain White racial purity and to deny mixed race people access to privilege,” (Renn, 2004, p. 4) and reinforced rigid categories of race. The 2000 census formally challenged these previous notions of essentialist racial categories by recognizing those who blurred the boundaries.

One of the main purposes in the revision of the census was to reflect the growing prevalence of interracial marriage in American society (Perlmann & Waters, 2002). The multiracial population is one of the fastest growing minority groups in the United States (Shih & Sanchez, 2009), and by the year 2050, one in five Americans could self-identify as multiracial (Farley, 2001). Of any racial minority group in the United States, Asians, both native and U.S. born, register one of the highest rates of marriages outside their race, and marriages to Whites are the most prevalent (Lee & Bean, 2004; Qian, 1997). This growing trend means the population of young mixed race Asian Americans, specifically those who claim Asian and White descent, will increase (Min, 2006). As a result, Asian-White individuals will have significantly greater representation in higher education in the coming years. Because the Asian-White student population is growing, student affairs professionals must learn how these students make meaning of their racial identities. While few studies have explored the racial identity formation specific to Asian-White individuals (Khanna, 2004), current research on multiracial identity development can help student affairs professionals understand the Asian-White experience.

Acceptance or rejection from a racial group can significantly impact how a multiracial student chooses to identify. Multiracial identity theories rely on the notion that individuals “must make choices about their racial identification, navigate validation or invalidation around their choice, and resolve their in-between status while traveling pathways shaped by acceptance and/or denial” (Rockquemore & Laszloffy, 2005). Multiracial students often feel caught between their racial components, unable to fully identify with White students or with monoracial students of color (Renn, 1998). It is important to note, however, that multiracial students experience varying levels of dissonance based on factors that impact the way they identify, and current multiracial identity development models are too general to be applied to any one specific multiracial subpopulation. Asian-White individuals share similar experiences that make their process of racial identity development different from any other multiracial group, thus necessitating a theory that outlines the Asian-White racial identity developmental process. This paper will examine Poston’s (1990) and Root’s (2003) multiracial identity development theories to provide an overview of how various factors influence the racial identity outcomes of multiracial individuals. These theories will then be integrated with current literature regarding the experiences of Asian and Asian- White groups in American society to provide an understanding of the fluidity in racial identity choice for Asian-White individuals…

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Exploring the “Tragic Mulatto” Stereotype Through Film History

National Social Science Journal
National Social Science Associaton
Volume 28, Number 1 (2007)
pages 88-91

Robert W. Pineda-Volk, Professor of Sociology
Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania

Considerable attention has been given to the prevalence and persistence of black stereotypes in U. S. culture. Yet one of these identified stereotypes, the “tragic mulatto,” has received relatively cursory attention from scholars and social critics of film and popular culture. In a society historically bent in maintaining rigid social boundaries, this omission is highly problematic. This paper begins to address this shortcoming by examining the construction of this image in popular film and analyzing its political functions and sociological impact in terms of race, gender, and class.

Article Outline

• The Birth of a Nation and the Rise of the Cinematic Society
• The Social Construction of the Tragic Mulatto
• Making the “Tragic Mulatto” Mulatto
• Making the “Tragic Mulatto” Female
• Making the “Tragic Mulatto” Tragic
• Discussion
  • The Gaze, the Look, and the Other
  • Tragic Mulattoes and Contemporary Cinema
• Reference

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