Mixed Race Studies

Honoring Our Legacy: Past, Present and Future, RED/BLACK Connections

Indian Voices
October 2010
pages 8-9

Black Native American Association’s First Multi-Cultural National Pow Wow
California State University Eastbay-Hayward
September 18-19, 2010

On Friday, September 17, a workshop examined the Red/Black relationships and how to improve them. Noted participants on the panel included Black Seminole Lonnie Harrington, author of “Both Sides of the Water”, a teaching artist at the Arts Connections in New York and a Native American drummer. Others were Dr. Andrew Jolivette, Associate Professor and department chief of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University and author of two books: ”Louisiana Creoles” and “Cultural Recovery and Mixed Race Native American Identity;” Dr. Elnora Webb-Mitchell, President of Laney College; Pastor Steve Constantine, Arwak Tribe, Guyna, South America; and Jewelle Gomez, poet, author, political activist, playwright, Native American (Wampanoag and Iowasy) and Director of Cultural Equity Grants Program of San Francisco…

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Mothering Children of African Descent: Hopes, Fears and Strategies of White Birth Mothers

The Journal of Pan African Studies
Volume 2, Number 1 (November 2007)
pages 62-76

Annie Stopford, Ph.D., Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and Adjunct Research Fellow
University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Introduction

It is often acknowledged that African identities are “complex, contested and contingent,” and that these negotiations and contestations are conducted in many locations around the globe (Ahluwalia and Zegeye 113). However, there has been little discussion thus far about the role of non-African parents of mixed African-Western children in these processes. In many parts of the world where the African Diaspora has spread, there are increasing numbers of children being born to African and non-African parents, particularly (but not only) African fathers and non-African mothers of diverse ethnicities. Non-African parents may play a significant role in facilitating, supporting, or obstructing their children’s positive identifications and associations with Africa and “Africanness,” especially if and when the marriage or relationship breaks down and the child or children reside with the non-African parent.

In this article, I use extracts from interviews with white Australian birth mothers of African Australian children to explore how they negotiate some of the complexities, challenges, and rewards of mothering children of African descent. I argue that the contributions of non-African mothers of African-other children add an important dimension to discussions about the complexities of postcolonial and Africana hybrid identities. The article begins with a description of empirical data sources, some information about the field of research, and an exploration of the theoretical underpinnings of the discussion. This is followed by a discussion of some issues described by research participants, with an emphasis on narratives about lived experience and intersubjective dynamics. The article concludes with a brief reflection on the implications of these narratives.

…The Research Field

Despite the plethora of recent literature about interracial and postcolonial subjectivities, there has been little in-depth discussion thus far about mothering children of mixed cultural, ethnic, and racial descent. The focus of discussion in mixed race and hybridity studies tends to be on the children of couples of mixed cultures and races, rather than the parents themselves, and the damage done by racist and essentialist discourse to the children of those people who cross “the color line,” especially black/white relationships.

There have, however, been some studies of mixed race and culture families that focus on the parents and their responses to their children (Phoenix and Owens 158-177; Dalmage 1-32). There has also been some feminist and critical race research and discussion specifically about or by white mothers of African descent children in Western locations, and white mothers of African descent children living in Africa, with a particular emphasis on the way white mothers resist racism and try to foster positive identifications with blackness (Reddy 43-64; Lazarre 21-51; Twine 729-746, 878-907; Adomako Ampofo In My Mother’s House). Because fighting racism and fostering Africana identities are of course inextricably linked, I see this research as continuing the work of the aforementioned writers.

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Beyond The Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons

Duke University Press
1996
198 pages
Cloth: ISBN: 978-0-8223-1826-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-2044-9

Jane Lazarre

“I am Black,” Jane Lazarre’s son tells her. “I have a Jewish mother, but I am not ‘biracial.’ That term is meaningless to me.” She understands, she says—but he tells her, gently, that he doesn’t think so, that she can’t understand this completely because she is white. Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness is Jane Lazarre’s memoir of coming to terms with this painful truth, of learning to look into the nature of whiteness in a way that passionately informs the connections between herself and her family. A moving account of life in a biracial family, this book is a powerful meditation on motherhood and racism in America, the story of an education into the realities of African American culture.

Lazarre has spent over twenty-five years living in a Black American family, married to an African American man, birthing and raising two sons. A teacher of African American literature, she has been influenced by an autobiographical tradition that is characterized by a speaking out against racism and a grounding of that expression in one’s own experience—an overlapping of the stories of one’s own life and the world. Like the stories of that tradition, Lazarre’s is a recovery of memories that come together in this book with a new sense of meaning. From a crucial moment in which consciousness is transformed, to recalling and accepting the nature and realities of whiteness, each step describes an aspect of her internal and intellectual journey. Recalling events that opened her eyes to her sons’ and husband’s experience as Black Americans—an operation, turned into a horrific nightmare by a doctor’s unconscious racism or the jarring truths brought home by a visit to an exhibit on slavery at the Richmond Museum of the Confederacy—or her own revealing missteps, Lazarre describes a movement from silence to voice, to a commitment to action, and to an appreciation of the value of a fluid, even ambiguous, identity. It is a coming of age that permits a final retelling of family history and family reunion.

With her skill as a novelist and her experience as a teacher, Jane Lazarre has crafted a narrative as compelling as it is telling. It eloquently describes the author’s delight at being accepted into her husband’s family and attests to the power of motherhood. And as personal as this story is, it is a remarkably incisive account of how perceptions of racial difference lie at the heart of the history and culture of America.

Estelusti Marginality: A Qualitative Examination of the Black Seminole

The Journal of Pan African Studies
Volume 2, Number 4 (June 2008)
pages 60-80

Ray Von Robertson, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas

Approximately four years ago, I began collecting interview data with Black Seminoles/Estelusti in Oklahoma. My research focused on how the Black Seminoles negotiated their marginal status within the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and with nonfreedman Blacks. Using Weisberger’s (1992) marginality construct, I found that the Estelusti most often employed ‘poise’ to manage their state of ‘double ambivalence’. This study further explored the issue of Black Seminole marginality after their reintegration into the cultural group in 2003. My findings, while different in specifics, were generally consistent with those found a few years earlier. The Black Seminoles still appear to experience significant marginality and are not fully accepted by the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma.

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Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans (review)

Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Volume 41, Number 4, Spring 2011
pages 661-663
E-ISSN: 1530-9169, Print ISSN: 0022-1953

Mary Niall Mitchell, Associate Professor of History
New Orleans University

Shirley Elizabeth Thompson. Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009. 400 pages, Hardcover ISBN: 9780674023512.

The people who inhabit the pages of this book—New Orleans’s nineteenth-century Creoles of color—make difficult, yet fascinating, subjects of historical and cultural study. They are difficult for two reasons: (1) Their story, which is complicated and unfamiliar to most readers, requires Thompson to explain the precarious yet prosperous existence of a group of French-speaking free people of color, with ties to Europe and the Caribbean, in the midst of a U.S. slave society; (2) although most were well educated, and many of them were writers and intellectuals, few of their personal papers are stored in archives (most of those that have survived remain in private hands). Scholars, therefore, must look to a variety of sources to piece together the history of Creoles of color. In the book under review, this array of documentation includes legal and property records, Romantic poetry, newspaper editorials, and evidence of the built environment. To address such disparate sources, Thompson wields a number of methodological tools, from theories of urban space to literary criticism, historiography, and legal analysis.

The fundamental problem that frames this book, according to the…

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Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas

Ashgate Publishing
July 2007
218 pages
219 x 153 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7546-5189-5

Edited by

Nora E. Jaffary, Associate Professor of History
Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

When Europe introduced mechanisms to control New World territories, resources and populations, women-whether African, indigenous, mixed race, or European-responded and participated in multiple ways. By adopting a comprehensive view of female agency, the essays in this collection reveal the varied implications of women’s experiences in colonialism in North and South America.

Although the Spanish American context receives particular attention here, the volume contrasts the context of both colonial Mexico and Peru to every other major geographic region that became a focus of European imperialism in the early modern period: the Caribbean, Brazil, English America, and New France. The chapters provide a coherent perspective on the comparative history of European colonialism in the Americas through their united treatment of four central themes: the gendered implications of life on colonial frontiers; non-European women’s relationships to Christian institutions; the implications of race-mixing; and social networks established by women of various ethnicities in the colonial context.

This volume adds a new dimension to current scholarship in Atlantic history through its emphasis on culture, gender and race, and through its explicit effort to link religion to the broader imperial framework of economic extraction and political domination.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Contextualizing race, gender, and religion in the New World Nora E. Jaffary
• Part 1: Frontiers
  • 2. Women as go-betweens? Patterns in 16th-century Brazil Alida C. Metcalf
  • 3. Gender and violence: conquest, conversion, and culture on new Spain’s imperial frontier Bruce A. Erickson
  • 4. The very sinews of a new Colony: demographic determinism and the history of early Georgia women, 1732–52 Ben Marsh
• Part 2: Female Religious
  • 5. The convent as missionary in 17th-century France Susan Broomhall
  • 6. ‘Although I am black, I am beautiful’: Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, Black Carmelite of Puebla Joan C. Bristol
  • 7. Andean women in religion: Beatas, ‘decency’, and the defense of honour in colonial Cuzco Kathryn Burns
• Part 3: Race Mixing
  • 8. Incest, sexual virtue, and social mobility in late colonial Mexico Nora E. Jaffary
  • 9. ‘An empire founded on libertinage’: The mulâtresse and colonial anxiety in Saint Domingue
    Yvonne Fabella
  • 10. Mediating Mackinac: métis women’s cultural persistence in the Upper Great Lakes Bethany Fleming
• Part 4: Networks
  • 11. Circuits of knowledge among women in early-17th-century Lima Nancy E. van Deusen
  • 12. Waters of faith, currents of freedom: gender, religion, and ethnicity in inter-imperial trade between Curaçao and Tierra Firme Linda M. Rupert
• Afterword
  • Women in the Atlantic world
  • Patricia Seed
• Bibliography
• Index

Read the introduction here.

“The Face Is the Road Map”: Vietnamese Amerasians in U.S. Political and Popular Culture, 1980–1988

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 14, Number 1 (February 2011)
pages 33-68
E-ISSN: 1096-8598; Print ISSN: 1097-2129

Jana K. Lipman, Assistant Professor of History
Tulane University

During the 1980s, U.S. politicians and the media presented Vietnamese Amerasians as quintessential Americans who could be brought home rather than as foreigners or as immigrants. However, Amerasians were non-white immigrants and their rights to enter the United States intertwined with debates over immigration restriction and the ongoing search for American Prisoners of War. The popular emphasis on Amerasians’ American “look” resulted in a discourse which valued whiteness, and sometimes blackness, at the expense of Vietnamese mothers and Asian identities. This article argues how Amerasian immigration policies re-inscribed hierarchies of race and sexuality grounded in the history of Asian exclusion.

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2011 Southern Arizona Asian American & Pacific Islander Conference

“Reach, Inspire, Connect”
 
Pima Community College – West Campus
2202 West Anklam Road
Tucson, Arizona 85709
Saturday, 2011-03-19 from 08:00 to 14:00 MDT (Local Time)

Conference Program…

09:00-09:50 –  Session “A”

Workshop 4:  Mixed Race – A popular 2009 workshop returning this year.  The presenter will talk about how she and others grew up as mixed race children, how the experiences shaped her adult professional life, how to grow positively with the lessons learned, and how they integrate into society.

Presenter:  M. Craig, Japan-America Society of Tucson

For information, click here.

Miengun’s Children: Tales from a Mixed-Race Family

Mrs. Jessie W. Hilton of Albuquerque, N.M., who summers at her cottage Mi-en-gun Walszh (Wolf’s Den) in Northport, was hostess at 5:00 o’clock Wednesday at Schuler’s of this city honoring Mrs. C. Stuker of Oak Park, III., house guest of her sister, Mrs. Basil Milliken of Oklahoma City, Okla., summer resident at Northport.

Traverse City [Michigan] Record Eagle, July 7, 1954

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 29, Numbers 2/3, Intermarriage and North American Indians (2008)
pp. 146-185
DOI: 10.1353/fro.0.0016

Susan E. Gray, Associate Professor of History
Arizona State University

At the time of this gathering of summer society in a northern Michigan resort town, Jessie Milton was eighty-nine years old. For more than fifty years, she had been a summer resident of Northport, on the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula, north and west of Traverse City, leaving her home in Oklahoma City every June and returning from Michigan in October, events noted in the society pages of newspapers in both places. The only break in this pattern occurred in 1947, when she moved from Oklahoma City to her daughter’s house in Albuquerque, from which she continued to commute each summer to the Leelanau. Despite Jessie’s social standing, however, her annual pilgrimages differed from most sojourns of the genteel and well-heeled to northern Michigan. Twice divorced, she was long accustomed to supporting herself, and she ran a shop in Northport during the summer tourist season, selling Indian handicrafts and pies that she made from the cherries for which the Traverse region is famous. The silverwork for sale at the “Cherry Buttery” came from New Mexico, but the sweet grass and split ash baskets were the work of local Odawa and Ojibwe people, some of whom Hilton had known far longer than she had been summering on the Leelanau. Indeed, the annual arrival of Jessie Hilton, society matron and purveyor of Indian handicrafts, at the Wolf’s Den signaled the complexity and fluidity of a mixed-race identity that she, like her twelve brothers and sisters, had spent a lifetime negotiating.

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Hybrid Knowledge

History Workshop Journal
Published online 2011-02-25
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbq062

Anna Winterbottom, Tutorial Fellow in Early Modern History
Sussex University, Brighton, England

The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820, ed. Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, James Delbourgo; Science History Publications, Sagamore Beach MA, 2009; 552 pp.; 0-88135-374-4.

As the editors of this volume note, the terms ‘broker’ and ‘go-between’ tend to evoke back-room introductions and the shuffling of suspicious papers, rather than the traditionally triumphal images of Enlightenment knowledge. The people who embodied the global connections through which information flowed between cultures have only relatively recently become a focus of English-language scholarship. This is in part the legacy of dualistic conceptualizations of race, empire and science in Anglo-American colonial discourse. In an imagined world divided between black and white, ruler and ruled, modern and traditional, scientific and emotional, rational and spiritual, the people or ideas that crossed boundaries posed not only an administrative headache, but also a threat to the cosmic order. A rejection of the idea of mixing, physically or intellectually, also came from many of those who opposed colonialism. For example, Anglo-Indians were generally sidelined rather than celebrated in the Indian independence movement. Writing from a colonial gaol, Nehru argued that despite the efforts of a few more enlightened individuals, opportunities for cultural, social and scientific exchange were deliberately quashed and that European and Asian systems of knowledge remained more or less separate.  During the colonial period, therefore, people who crossed the borders of knowledge, like those who transgressed racial categories, were characterized on all sides as untrustworthy and potentially treacherous.

In Spanish, Portuguese and French, the words for the intermingling of cultures and those who are the agents of this process have a longer history of academic discussion and cultural politics. While fears concerning the dangers of cultural and racial…

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