Mixed Race Studies

Mulatto: Less than Human

Indian Country Today
2012-01-16

Julianne Jennings
Arizona State University

Race is not simply about the physical description of human variation. Since its origin in Western science in the eighteenth century, race has been used both to classify and rank human beings according to inferior and superior types. Although race as a concept developed in the West during the age of Enlightenment, prominent Enlightenment thinkers—Carolus Linnaeus, Johann Blumenbach, Lewis Henry Morgan and Samuel George Morton, among others—greatly influenced European ideas about economics, government and science as well as race. Concepts of race eventually spread to many parts of the non-Western world through international commerce, including the slave trade, and later colonial conquest and administration—which have used it as a tool of social division, even among “mixed-race” peoples.

For centuries, a great amount of blood-mixing has occurred, creating “Creole,” “Mestizo,” and other “colored” populations of the New World colonies and possessions of Europe. But what do these labels mean? Haitian anthropologist, Antenor Firmin observes “that human beings have always interbred whenever they came in contact with one another, so that the very notion of races is questionable. Indeed, if not for this fact of the essential unity of humanity, it would be difficult to explain the eugenic crossbreeding that have made the planet sparkle with more human colors than there are nuances in a rainbow”…

Read the entire article here.

Derek Jeter embodies MLK’s dream

ESPN New York
2012-01-16

Wallace Matthews

Biracial Yankees captain a symbol of the America Martin Luther King once envisioned

When the average person thinks of Derek Jeter, he or she is likely to think of the 3,000 hits, or the five World Series rings, or the highlight reel full of great plays he has made over the past 16 years for the New York Yankees.

They are likely to linger on the countless clutch hits he has delivered in key moments, or the 2000 World Series MVP, or the fact he has been captain of the Yankees for nearly a decade and the face of the franchise for considerably longer than that.

It is a safe bet that for most people, one of the last things they think about when they think about Derek Jeter is his race. Or, more correctly, his races.

To all the remarkable accomplishments Jeter has achieved in his Cooperstown-bound baseball career, add one that few of us ever bother to think about—that Jeter is the product of a mixed-race marriage, a happenstance that at one time would have caused him to suffer hardship, if not scorn, from many, but now is just another fact in the Derek Jeter biography.

As we celebrate Martin Luther King Day, it is important to understand that of all the things Derek Jeter is, one of the most significant is that he is a symbol of the kind of America Dr. King hoped one day to live in…

…Jeter, always wary of discussing topics outside of his comfort zone—the baseball diamond—declined a request to be interviewed for this story.

 But Dr. Harry Edwards, a sociologist and black activist of the 1960s who has spoken and written extensively on the subject of race and professional athletics, explained Jeter’s appeal as a combination both of his unique attributes as an athlete and individual, and as a sign that the United States, throughout its history often bitterly divided along racial, ethnic and territorial lines, is moving toward an era of diversity and inclusion.

“I think it’s absolutely appropriate in the 21st century that a Derek Jeter should be the face of the premier baseball team in this country,” Edwards said. “When you talk about leadership and production and consistency and durability over the years, what he has achieved and what he has accomplished, and more than that, the way that he has done it is just absolutely phenomenal. He is one of our real athletic heroes and role models to the point that his race or ethnicity does not matter.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Evolution of ‘Portuguese’ Identity: Luso-Africans on the Upper Guinea Coast from the Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century

The Journal of African History
Volume 40, Issue 2 (1999)
pages 173-191

Peter Mark, Professor of Art History
Wesleyan University, Connecticut

During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, Portugal established a trading presence along the Upper Guinea Coast from Senegal to Sierra Leone. Emigrants from Portugal known as lançados—some of them Jews seeking to escape religious persecution—settled along the coast, where many of them married women from local communities. By the early sixteenth century, Luso-Africans, or ‘Portuguese’ as they called themselves, were established at trading centers from the Petite Côte in Senegal, south to Sierra Leone. Descendants of Portuguese immigrants, of Cape Verde islanders, and of West Africans, the Luso-Africans developed a culture that was itself a synthesis of African and European elements. Rich historical documentation allows a case study of the changing ways Luso-Africans identified themselves over the course of three centuries.

The earliest lançados established themselves along the coast as commercial middlemen between African and European traders and as coastal traders between Sierra Leone and Senegambia. Their position was formally discouraged by the Portuguese Crown until the second decade of the sixteenth century, but they nevertheless played an important role in trade with Portugal and the Cape Verde islands. Lançado communities were permanently settled on the Petite Côte, while in Sierra Leone and Rio Nunez much early commerce was in the hands of lançados who sailed there regularly from S. Domingos, north of present day Bissau. The offspring of these lançados and African women were called filhos de terra and were generally considered to be ‘Portuguese’.

Throughout the sixteenth century, the descendants of the lançados maintained close commercial ties with the Cape Verde islands. Cape Verdeans were themselves the offspring of mixed Portuguese and West African marriages. Sharing elements of a common culture and united by marriage and economic ties, mainland Luso-Africans and Cape Verdeans represented a socially complex and geographically dispersed community. Cape Verdeans, like mainland Luso-Africans, resolutely maintained that they were ‘Portuguese’, and both sub-groups employed the same essentially cultural criteria of group identification.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed marriage: ‘I am coming to Senegal and I want to marry you’

Surprising Europe: Share Your Migration Experience
Netherlands
2010-03-26

This website is part of the international cross-media project Surprising Europe, initiated by Ssuuna Golooba, who left Uganda in the hope of a better life. Surprising Europe consists of a documentary and a nine part television series. Surprising Europe.com is a community of people who are interested in African-European migration issues.

Turid from the Netherlands fell in love with Moussé from Senegal when she was staying in Senegal. She went back, but realized that Moussé was the one: ‘I called him and said: ‘I am coming to Senegal next month and I want to marry you.’ He replied: ‘Can I call you back tomorrow?’

Turid didn’t know it at the time, but Moussé had to do something important before he could answer her question: ‘I first had to ask my parents, that’s tradition in Africa. But they thought is was great, asked me if I was in love and I said “yes!”, so we married,’ he smiles. Now they live in The Netherlands with their three children…

Read the article and watch the video here.

Multinational families, creolized practices and new identities: Euro-Senegalese cases

Oxford University
The Oxford Diasporas Programme
2011-01-01 through 2015-12-31

Hélène Neveu-Kringelbach, Oxford Diaspora Programme Research Fellow, African Studies Centre Junior Research Fellow
St Anne’s College, University of Oxford

The Oxford Diasporas Programme is a five-year research programme involving various centres at the University of Oxford and led by the International Migration Institute.
 
The research consists of 11 projects focusing on the impact of diasporas.
 
The programme is funded by the Leverhulme Trust from 1 January 2011 to 31 December 2015.

One of the effects of the global intensification of mobility is the formation of multicultural and transnational families involving spouses with different citizenships, as well as linguistic, religious and cultural backgrounds. In many parts of coastal West Africa, there is a long history of marriage with Europeans, dating back to the transatlantic slave trade. With a focus on bi-national families involving a Senegalese and a European partner as a case study, this project explores processes of family making in a diasporic context, from a gendered and cross-generational perspective. This project will contribute to our understanding of the relationship between the resilience of diasporas over time and their integration into ‘host societies’.

For more information, click here.

The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World

Cambridge University Press
March 2011
278 pages
8 b/w illus. 3 maps
228 x 152 mm
Hardback ISBN:9780521192866

Peter Mark, Professor of Art History
Wesleyan University, Connecticut

José da Silva Horta
Universidade de Lisboa

This book traces the history of early seventeenth-century Portuguese Sephardic traders who settled in two communities on Senegal’s Petite Côte. There, they lived as public Jews, under the spiritual guidance of a rabbi sent to them by the newly established Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. In Senegal, the Jews were protected from agents of the Inquisition by local Muslim rulers. The Petite Côte communities included several Jews of mixed Portuguese-African heritage as well as African wives, offspring, and servants. The blade weapons trade was an important part of their commercial activities. These merchants participated marginally in the slave trade but fully in the arms trade, illegally supplying West African markets with swords. This blade weapons trade depended on artisans and merchants based in Morocco, Lisbon, and northern Europe and affected warfare in the Sahel and along the Upper Guinea Coast. After members of these communities moved to the United Provinces around 1620, they had a profound influence on relations between black and white Jews in Amsterdam. The study not only discovers previously unknown Jewish communities but by doing so offers a reinterpretation of the dynamics and processes of identity construction throughout the Atlantic world.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Two Sephardic communities on Senegal’s Petite Côte
• 2. Jewish identity in Senegambia
• 3. Religious interaction: Catholics, Jews, and Muslims in early 17th-century Upper Guinea
• 4. The blade weapons trade in seventeenth-century West Africa
• 5. The Luso-African ivories as historical source for the weapons trade and for the Jewish presence in Guinea of Cape Verde
• 6. The later years: merchant mobility and the evolution of identity
• Conclusion
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Index

What’s Race Got to Do With It?

The New York Times
2012-01-14

Lee Seigel

Mitt Romney may not have officially clinched the Republican nomination, but his victory has never really been in doubt. Nor has his viability in November: the most fanatical Tea Partiers are not about to withhold their votes and risk allowing President Obama to be re-elected.

Pundits have already begun the endless debate over whether Mr. Romney’s wealth and religion are hindrances or assets. But there has yet to be any discussion over the one quality that has subtly fueled his candidacy thus far and could well put him over the top in the fall: his race. The simple, impolitely stated fact is that Mitt Romney is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory.

Of course, I’m not talking about a strict count of melanin density. I’m referring to the countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways he telegraphs to a certain type of voter that he is the cultural alternative to America’s first black president. It is a whiteness grounded in a retro vision of the country, one of white picket fences and stay-at-home moms and fathers unashamed of working hard for corporate America…

…In this way, whether he means to or not, Mr. Romney connects with a central evangelic fantasy: that the Barack Obama years, far from being the way forward, are in fact a historical aberration, a tear in the white space-time continuum. And let’s be clear: Mr. Obama’s election was not destiny, but a fluke.

Despite a general revulsion against George W. Bush and his policies, despite John McCain’s lack of ideas and his remoteness from contemporary American problems, the Republican ticket was ahead of Mr. Obama by several points in September 2008. Then came the fall: Lehman Brothers, the stock-market plunge and skyrocketing unemployment (not to mention Sarah Palin).

By the iron law of elections, the country threw the bums out and rejected anyone even remotely tied to them. The result? America’s first black president…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

A Critique of Pure Pluralism

Chapter in:
Reconstructing American Literary History
Harvard University Press
1986
386 pages
ISBN-10: 1583484167; ISBN-13: 978-1583484166

Edited by:

Sacvan Bercovitch, Powell M. Cabot Research Professor of American Literature
Harvard University

pages 250-279

Chapter Author:

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Afro American Studies; Director of the History of American Civilization Program
Harvard University

Men may change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies, to a greater or lesser extent: they cannot change their grandfathers.
Horace Kallen

Reviewing the new (fifth) edition of James D. Hart’s Oxford Companion to American Literature, Joe Weixlmann praises the editor’s effort to expand the coverage of black authors, yet finds the volume’s treatment of black, ethnic, female, and modern writers ultimately insufficient and wanting. Weixlmann concludes that “the old, venerable Oxford Companion to American Literature, despite its partial facelift, remains in its current incarnation, a product of such staid American and academic values as racism, sexism, traditionalism, and elitism.”

This identification of deplorable omissions with a scholar’s bias is quite common in the current debates. Frequently an opposition is constructed between closeminded narrowness (sexism, racism, elitism) and the alternative of inclusive openness associated with what is often called “cultural pluralism. In his essay “Minority Literature in the Service of Cultural Pluralism,” included in one of the several Modern Language Association readers on American ethnic literature which were published in the last decade, David Dorsey writes:

Only from the diverse literatures can youth feel the meaning of the past … At present diversity is everywhere tolerated in theory, punished in practice, and nowhere justified or justifiable beyond an appeal to solipsism. But America has no choice. Only a genuinely pluralistic society can henceforth prosper here. It must be nurtured in our diverse hearts. And for that we need literature, which is the language of the heart.

In this scholarly drama of diversity and pluralism versus traditionalism and prejudice there is emotion and prophecy just as there are heroes and villains. The editors of another MLA reader, Ethnic Perspectives in American Literature (1983), write:

Ethnic pluralism, once the anathema to those who espoused the melting-pot theory, has become a positive, stimulating force for many in our country . . . Transforming the national metaphors from “melting pot” to “mosaic” is not easy. Indeed, the pieces of that national mosaic have been cemented in place with much congealed blood and sweat. We must all continue to work at making the beauty of our multiethnicity shine through the dullness of racism that threatens to cloud it…

…The dominant assumption among serious scholars who study ethnic literary history seems to be that history can best be written by separating the groups that produced such literature in the United States. The published results of this “mosaic” procedure are the readers and compendiums made up of diverse essays on groups of ethnic writers who may have little in common except so-called ethnic roots while, at the same time, obvious and important literary and cultural connections are obfuscated. As James Dormon wrote in a recent review of such a mosaic collection of essays on ethnic theater, “there is little to tie the various essays together other than the shared theme ‘ethnic American theater history,’ as this topic might be construed by each individual author.” The contours of an ethnic literary history are beginning to emerge which views writers primarily as “members” of various ethnic and gender groups. James T. Farrell may thus be discussed as a pure Irish-American writer, without any hint that he got interested in writing ethnic literature after reading and meeting Abraham Cahan, and that his first stories were set in Polish-America—not to mention his interest in Russian and French writing or in Chicago sociology. Or, conversely, Carl Sandburg may be dismissed from the Scandinavian-American part of the mosaic for being “too American.”

Taken exclusively, what is often called “the ethnic perspective”—which often means, in literary history, the emphasis of a writer’s descent—all but annihilates polyethnic art movements, moments of individual and cultural interaction, and the pervasiveness of cultural syncretism in America. The widespread acceptance of the group-by-group approach has not only led to unhistorical accounts held together by static notions of rather abstractly and homogeneously conceived ethnic groups, but has also weakened the comparative and critical skills of increasingly timid interpreters who sometimes choose to speak with the authority of ethnic insiders rather than that of readers of texts. (Practicing cultural pluralism may easily manifest itself in ethnic relativism.)

Yet, if anything, ethnic literary history ought to increase our understanding of the cultural interplays and contacts among writers of different backgrounds, the ethnic innovations and cultural mergers that took place in America; and the results of the critical readings should not only leave room for, but actively invite, criticism and scrutiny by other readers (“outsiders” or “insiders”) of the texts discussed. This can only be accomplished if the categorization of writers—and literary critics—as “members” of ethnic groups is understood to be a very partial, temporal, and insufficient characterization at best. Could not an openly transethnic procedure that aims for conceptual generalizations and historicity be more daring, profitable, and conceptually illuminating than that of simply adding to the sections on “major writers” chapters on “the popular muse,” “Negro voices,” “the immigrant speaks,” “generations of women,” “mingling of tongues,” and the rest of it?

Is it possible now to rewrite Quinn’s chapter and include Douglass or do we need separate chapters for each ethnic group, to be written by “insiders”? Can we construct a chapter on intellectual life in the early twentieth century in which ideas entertained by Anglo-American, Irish-American, Jewish-American, and Afro-American figures can be discussed together, or do we have to separate men and women, immigrants and American-born authors? Is it possible to connect Alain Locke, who ended his introduction to The New Negro (1925) with the hope for “a spiritual Coming of Age” with his college classmate Van Wyck Brooks, or are two heterogeneous ethnic experiences at work in them? These questions apply not only to the synchronic analysis of a period, but also to the construction of diachronic “descent lines.” Do we have to believe in a filiation from Mark Twain to Ernest Hemingway, but not to Ralph Ellison (who is supposedly descended from James Weldon Johnson and Richard Wright)? Can Gertrude Stein be discussed with Richard Wright or only with white women expatriate German-Jewish writers? Is there a link from the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin to those of Frederick Douglass and Mary Antin, or must we see Douglass exclusively as a version of Olaudah Equiano and a precursor to Malcolm X? Is Zora Neale Hurston only Alice Walker’s foremother? In general, is the question of influence, of who came first, more interesting than the investigation of the constellation in which ideas, styles, themes, and  forms of travel.

In order to pursue such questions I have set myself a double task. I shall review significant criticisms of the shortcomings of the concept of cultural pluralism in the hope that the arguments made by intellectual historians of the past decade may affect thinking about American literature today; and I shall attempt to suggest the complexities of polyethnic interaction among some of the intellectuals who were involved in developing the term “cultural pluralism.” It is ironical that the story of the origins of cultural pluralism I shall tell could not have been told in the “pluralistic mosaic” format of group-by-group accounts of American cultural life: one protagonist would illustrate what the current fashion calls “the Jewish experience,” another “the Black experience,” a third “the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant experience.” But the fact is that it was not any monoethnic “experience” that led to the emergence of the concept of cultural pluralism. It was the protagonists’ troubled interaction with each other. Pluralism had a fairly monistic origin in a university philosophy department in the first decade of this century; yet it is a notion whose very mobility challenges the concept’s central tenet of the permanent power of ethnic boundaries…

Read the entire chapter here.

Louis Riel and the dispersion of the American Métis

Minnesota History Magazine
Volume 49, Issue 5 (1985)
Pages 179-190

Thomas Flanagan, Professor of Political Science
University of Calgary, Alberta

THE MÉTIS leader Louis Riel is perhaps best known to readers of Minnesota History in connection with the Red River insurrection of 1869-70. When Canada agreed to purchase Rupert’s Land, the immense fur trading preserve of the Hudson’s Bay Company, no one bothered to consult the mixed-blood inhabitants of the country. Riel led the métis who lived at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers in a movement of resistance, insisting that Canada meet certain metis demands before taking possession of Rupert’s Land. The métis were clamoring for local self-government, recognition of their French language and Catholic religion, and protection of their traditional land holdings and other customary rights, such as free trade with the United States.

In one sense the metis resistance was a success. It forced the Canadian government into negotiations in which many of the métis demands were conceded and legally entrenched in the Manitoba Act which gave birth to the province of that name. Howvever, the victory was tainted by the debacle of Thomas Scott’s execution. Scott, an Ulster Orangeman who had also lived in Ontario, belonged to the small Canadian faction in Red River Settlement that tried to overthrow Riel s government. The métis imprisoned Scott for “counter-revolutionary” activities and, when he proved difficult to control in captivity’, executed him by firing squad on March 4, 1870. Riel wanted to make his provisional government respected, but this gratuitous act of brutality was a terrible mistake. It so inflamed opinion in Canada against Riel that he was forced to flee Manitoba when Canadian troops arrived in the new province in August, 1870.

Riel took refuge in St. Joseph, Dakota Territory. In fact, he spent about half his adult life in the United States. He was south of the Canadian border episodically in 1866-68 and 1870-75 and lived continuously in the United States from January, 1878, to June, 1884,
becoming an American citizen on March 16, 1883…

Read the entire article here.

Call at Rio fashion show for more black models

Agence France-Presse
2012-01-14

Only a handful of black models sashayed down the catwalk at this week’s Rio fashion show, sparking fresh calls for quotas to ensure greater diversity in a country where more than half of the population is of African ancestry.

Some 24 labels displayed their latest designs at the Rio de Janeiro winter 2012 fashion week, that ran from Wednesday to Saturday, and as in previous years the models were overwhelmingly white.

Yet Brazil, home to 190 million people, has the world’s second largest black population after Nigeria.

Organizers refused to address this perennial lack of racial diversity, although in the past they claimed that “there is no racial discrimination” in an industry known for its preference for eurocentric standards of beauty.

For the first time in June 2009, the Sao Paulo Fashion Week (SPFW)—Latin America’s premier fashion event—imposed quotas requiring at least 10 percent of the models to be black or indigenous…

…Luana Genot, one of the eight black models out of more 200 employed by the main Rio modeling agency, 40° Models, gave details of the hurdles blacks face.

“They call us only when the the theme of the show is linked to black culture,” said the 23-year-old who is also an advertising student at Rio Catholic University (PUC).

“I am often told: What am I going to do with your hair? And for make-up, I am always the last so as not to dirty the brush with overly dark tones,” she added.

Last June, during Black Consciousness Week, Genot organized a debate on “ethnic diversity in fashion” at PUC.

“We are told that the winter collection is for whites in Europe or that black women’s butts are too big, their hips too wide. I am shocked to see that in Brazil, where more than half of the people are descendants of black slaves, there is so little space for us,” she added.

“Brazil’s population is very mixed and this must be reflected in fashion,” Genot said…

Read the entire article here.