Mixed Race Studies

Power, Perception, and Interracial Sex: Former Slaves Recall a Multiracial South

The Journal of Southern History
Volume 71, Number 3 (August, 2005)
pages 559-588

Fay A. Yarbrough, Associate Professor of History
University of Oklahoma

My father’s name wuz Robert Stewart. He wuz a white man. My mother wuz named Ann. She wuz part Indian. Her father wuz a Choctaw Indian and her mother a black woman—a slave.” This is how Charley Stewart, a former slave, described his lineage. Stewart was not alone in claiming parents and grandparents of mixed racial heritage; there are many references to mixed-race ancestry in the interviews of ex-slaves collected by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s. The interviews also contain candid observations about interracial unions in general and about how people of African descent understood relationships that crossed social. legal, and racial boundaries. The former slaves described various combinations of racial unions and their ramifications for the participants, families, fellow slaves, and offspring. This article will consider the words of ex-slaves, using the WPA collection and a selection of biographies and autobiographies of slaves, and will re-create descriptions of and attitudes toward interracial sex during the nineteenth century. These accounts…

The Hybrid and the Social Process

Phylon (1940-1956)
Volume 6, Number 4 (4th Quarter, 1945)
pages 327-336

Jitsuichi Masuoka

An intermixture of blood is an invariable outcome of human migration, contact, and association. To this statement there seems to be no historical exception. Races and peoples, however much they may be physically and culturally dissimilar, if they come together at all, associate to produce individuals of nondescript physical type. In its essence, the hybridization of peoples and races is a biological process, but as it has a wider social implication, it may be studied as a part and parcel of social processes.

A study of changes in genetic factors, as a consequence of racial intermixing, belongs properly to the science of human genetics. Race mixture in its wider ramification is a sociological problem for reasons generally recognized but not always fully understood. Man’s sex appetite, as of all other human impulses, is everywhere culturally channeled, and in this broad sense, one may well speak of race mixture as falling within the orbit of sociology. Moreover, as the intermixture of races runs counter to the existing sex mores of the societies in contact and, as it undermines, in the long run, the pre-existing social order, the problem of race mixture comes to have a sociological rather than biological import. In this way it comes about that the problems of “race mixture” and “race problem” are inseparable in the minds of many; thus, making an objective study of racial hybridization difficult. Race mixing is freighted with heightened emotions and sentiments and intellectual stupidities rampage in this area of discourse. It seems important, therefore, that this problem be examined as a phase of general social process. By viewing it within this wider frame of reference, one may attain a reasonable degree of objectivity toward race mixture.

Much has been written about racial miscegenation by students of biology, psychology, and social sciences. But, the hybrid as a personality type received its first clear definitive statement from Reuter and Park. “The hybrids,” Reuter writes, “tend to be distinct in social position, cultural status, and personality organization: sociologically as well as racially, they are hybrid.” Resulting chiefly from their accessibility to wider cultural opportunities, the mixed-blood individuals occupy the status superior to that of the natives but inferior to that of the whites. However, this superior social position of the hybrid is not to be taken as an evidence of innate intellectual superiority. It should, as Reuter points…

A Pedigree Study of Amerindian Crosses in Canada

The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
Volume 58, (July – December, 1928)
pages 511-532

R. Ruggles Gates
Department of Anthropology
Harvard University

This paper is an attempt to apply genetical methods to the study of inter-racial crossing. In the anthropological studies which have hitherto been made of racial crosses, masses of anthropometric measurements have frequently been taken, which are capable, when analysed, of furnishing valuable evidence on many points. Rut it is seldom possible to extract from them the kind of evidence the geneticist wishes to have concerning the inheritance of individual character-differences. Anthropological measurements are quantitative and require statistical treatment. The inheritance of sizes and especially of shapes is the most difficult field in genetics, and much has still to be learned from experiments with animals and plants before it can be clearly applied to man. Such features as the colour of skin, eyes, and hair, or shape of the hair in cross-section, while often presenting qualitative racial differences, also require measurements for a complete analysis of their inheritance, since intermediate grades usually occur in the hybrids. But they have the advantage that the extreme conditions at least are easily recognizable as qualitatively distinct, while this may not be evident with a mean difference in, for instance, stature or cephalic index.

The difficulties of applying the genetical pedigree method to haphazard human matings are very great. Nevertheless, it is so important that this method should be taken up by anthropologists, in addition to the traditional biometric methods of studying racial differences, that I venture to put forward these necessarily very incomplete results. In the biometrical method, the individual is measured as one of a population, but no sufficient account is taken of his relation to others. The purpose of the genetical method is to trace individual pedigrees, and so follow the inheritance of racial differences through successive generations. We shall never have an adequate knowledge of human racial inheritance until this has been done on a large scale with crosses between different races in various parts of the world.

This paper contains an account of observations on inter-racial crosses between whites and Indians in Canada. A single pedigree with various interlacing branches has been followed, and the evidence concerning the inheritance especially of skin colour and eye colour has been made as complete as the circumstances would permit…

When It Counts—More On Obama and the Census

InterfaithFamiliy.com
2010-05-03

Ruth Abrams

Elizabeth Chang wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post last week, “Why Obama should not have checked ‘black’ on his census form,”

Although I knew Obama self-identifies as African American, I was disappointed when I read that that’s what he checked on his census form. The federal government, finally heeding the desires of multiracial people to be able to accurately define themselves, had changed the rules in 2000, so he could have also checked white. Or he could have checked “some other race.” Instead, Obama went with black alone.

I understand why Chang wrote this, and even though I’m mostly on the same page with her about a lot of this, I think she’s wrong.

Chang identifies as the mother of biracial children in an interfaith family, and as someone raising biracial Jewish children. The whole Jewish community is behind her in wanting her children to be able identify as more than one thing. Jewish and Chinese and Hawaiian? Beautiful, we are so on board with that.

But on the other hand, I think there is something to Chang’s phrase, “when it counts, he is black.” When it counts, stand up for the people who need you. Based on his experiences, Obama judged this was the time to count as an African American. I read the piece in Newsweek last September on the work ahead of parents who want to raise anti-racist children. Parenting “colorblind”—pretending that racism doesn’t exist and that people aren’t different—doesn’t make racism go away or make your children accept difference. In fact it demonstrably does the opposite…

Read the entire article here.

To the whites, all Africans who were not of pure blood were gens de couleur [people of color]. Among themselves, however, there were jealous and fiercely-guarded distinctions: “griffes, briques, mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, each term meaning one degree’s further transfiguration toward the Caucasian standard of physical perfection.”¹

Alice Dunbar-Nelson, “People of Color in Lousiana: Part I,” The Journal of Negro History, Volume 1, Number 4 (October 1916): 361.

Intimacy and Inequality: Manumission and Miscegenation in Nineteenth-Century Bahia (1830-1888)

University of Nottingham
April 2010
428 pages

Jane-Marie Collins

Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Hispanic and Latin American Studies

This thesis proposes a new paradigm for understanding the historical roots of the myth of racial democracy in Brazil. In order to better comprehend the co-existence of race discrimination and racial democracy in Brazil it is argued that the myth itself needs to be subjected to an analysis which foregrounds the historically unequal relations of both race and gender. This study demonstrates how the enigma that is Brazilian race relations is the result of two major oversights in the scholarly work to date. First, the lack of critical attention to the historical processes and practices which gave rise to the so-called unique version of race relations in Brazil: manumission and miscegenation. Second, the sidelining of the role of gender and sex, as well as the specific and central place of black women’s labour, in theoretical formulations about Brazilian race relations.

The overarching intellectual aim of this thesis is to invert the way notions of familiarity and intimacy have been represented in the history of miscegenation and manumission in Brazilian slave society. The role of intimacy in the social history of race relations is instead shown to be firmly located within a hierarchy of race and gender inequalities predicated on the inferiority of blacks and women. In turn, this thesis explores how these race and gender inequalities intersected to inform and shape enslaved women’s versions of resistance and visions of freedom. In doing so this study unpicks some of the notions of advantage and privilege traditionally associated with women in general and light skin colour in particular in the processes of manumission and miscegenation; notions that are foundational to the myth of racial democracy.

Through an examination and analysis of primary sources pertaining to the lives of enslaved and freedwomen and their descendants in nineteenth-century Bahia, this study brings together different areas of their lived experiences of enslavement, manumission, miscegenation and freedom as these women came into contact with the authorities at pivotal moments in their lives. Collectively, these sources and the analysis thereof expose the limitations of advantage or privilege that have been associated with being female, parda or mulatta in the historiography of Brazilian slave society in general and the literature on manumission in particular. By foregrounding and highlighting the ways in which overlapping inequalities of race, gender and status determined experiences of enslavement and expectations of freedom during slavery, this study produces a new approach to interpreting race and gender history in Brazil, and a more comprehensive understanding of Brazilian slave labour relations.

CONTENTS

• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Section One: Introduction
  • Part 1: Introduction and overview
  • Part 2: ntimacy and Inequality: inverting the paradigm of racial democracy
• Section Two: Becoming Freed
  • 2.1 Introduction
  • 2.2 Manumission in comparative perspective
  • 2.3 Manumission in Africa
  • 2.4 Manumission in the Americas
  • 2.5 Manumission in Brazil
  • 2.6 Manumission, a gendered perspective: assessing advantage
  • 2.7 Childhood manumissions, Salvador 1830-1871
  • 2.8. Disputing and defending freed status
  • 2.9 Conclusion
• Section Three: Work, Wealth and Mobility
  • Part 1: The Demographics of Slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil
    • 3.1 Introduction
    • 3.2 The slave trades: trans-Atlantic and domestic
    • 3.3 Brazilian slave societies: provincial profiles
    • 3.4 Conclusion
    • 3.5 Occupational hierarchies, race and gender
    • 3.6 Conclusion
  • Part 2: Manumission and Mobility
    • 3.7 Introduction
    • 3.8 Manumission and creolisation
    • 3.9 Manumission and mobility
    • 3.10 Lourença on liberty
    • 3.11 Markets, labour and love
    • 3.12 Africanas and brasileiras, libertas and livres
    • 3.13 Motherhood and marriage
    • 3.14 Material wealth
    • 3.15 Markets and mobility
    • 3.16. Lourença’s last words
    • 3.17 Conclusion
• Section Four: The Enslaved Family: Unity, Stability and Viability
  • 4.1 Introduction
  • 4.2 The historiography of the Brazilian slave family: an overview
  • 4.3 Slave family 1: African/urban
  • 4.4 Slave family 2: mixed race/mixed status
  • 4.5 Slave family 3: married/rural
  • 4.6 Slave family 4: slave/free marriage
  • 4.7. Conclusion
• Section Five: Resistance
  • 5.1. Introduction
  • Part 1: Flight
    • 5.2 Paradigms
    • 5.3 Male flight
    • 5.4 Female flight: single women
    • 5.5 Female flight, family and protection
    • 5.6 Conclusion
  • Part 2: Murder
    • 5.7 Introduction
    • 5.8 Case studies
    • 5.9 Analysis
    • 5.10 Conclusion
  • Part 3: Infanticide
    • 5.11 Introduction
    • 5.12 Infanticide and slave resistance
    • 5.13 Infanticide and Illegitimacy: a question of honour?
    • 5.14 Conclusion
• Section Six: Conclusion
• Appendix
• Sources and Bibliography

Read the entire thesis here.

People of Color in Lousiana: Part I

The Journal of Negro History
Volume 1, Noumber 4 (October, 1916)
pages 361-376

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935)

PEOPLE OF COLOR IN LOUISIANA

PART I

The title of a possible discussion of the Negro in Louisiana presents difficulties, for there is no such word as Negro permissible in speaking of this State. The history of the State is filled with attempts to define, sometimes at the point of the sword, oftenest in civil or criminal courts, the meaning of the word Negro. By common consent, it came to mean in Louisiana, prior to 1865, slave, and after the war, those whose complexions were noticeably dark. As Grace King so delightfully puts it, “The pure-blooded African was never called colored, but always Negro.” The gens de couleur, colored people, were always a class apart, separated from and superior to the Negroes, ennobled were it only by one drop of white blood in their veins. The caste seems to have existed from the first introduction of slaves. To the whites, all Africans who were not of pure blood were gens de couleur. Among themselves, however, there were jealous and fiercely-guarded distinctions: “griffes, briques, mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, each term meaning one degree’s further transfiguration toward the Caucasian standard of physical perfection.”

Negro slavery in Louisiana seems to have been early influenced by the policy of the Spanish colonies. De las Casas, an apostle to the Indians, exclaimed against the slavery of the Indians and finding his efforts of no avail proposed to Charles V in 1517 the slavery of the Africans as a substitute.  The Spaniards refused at first to import slaves from Africa, but later agreed to the proposition and employed other nations to traffic in them. Louisiana learned from the Spanish colonies her lessons of this traffic, took over certain parts of the slave regulations and imported bondmen from the Spanish West Indies. Others brought thither were Congo, Banbara, Yaloff, and Mandingo slaves.

People of color were introduced into Louisiana early in the eighteenth century. In 1708, according to the historian, Gayarré, the little colony of Louisiana, at the point on the Gulf of Mexico now known as Biloxi, in the present State of Mississippi, had been in existence nine years. In 1708, the population of the colony did not exceed 279 persons. The land about this region is particularly sterile, and the colonists were little disposed to undertake the laborious task of tilling the soil. Indian slavery was attempted but found unprofitable and exceedingly precarious. So Bienville, lacking the sympathy of De las Casas for the Indians, wrote his government to obtain the authorization of exchanging Negroes for Indians with the French West Indian islands. “We shall give,” he said, “three Indians for two Negroes. The Indians, when in the islands, will not be able to run away, the country being unknown to them, and the Negroes will not dare to become fugitives in Louisiana, because the Indians would kill them.”…

Read the entire article here.

Tiffany Rae Reid pens first book as a guide for raising biracial children

phillyBurbs.com
2011-12-18

Naila Francis, Staff Writer

At first, there were the looks, brazenly curious, speculative, and in Briety McKeon’s eyes, even judgmental.

Who was the little girl beside her? The one with the warm, honeyed tint to her skin, the darker, curlier hair, the features that didn’t quite match the pretty white woman beside her and the young white girl who was more her mirror image? How did she fit in?

Those implied questions would crush her, though McKeon adored her daughters equally, though she herself yearned for them to be as empowered by their obvious differences as the many bonds they shared.

“Still, to this day, we will walk into a room and get the look,” says McKeon, a single mom to daughters Aurora, 5, whose dad is black, and Lydia, 10, whose father is white. “There is going to be a certain paranoia in your head. It’s not so much that people are going to come out and say something. It’s more the reaction on their face. It’s like, ‘Are both of them yours? Is Aurora adopted?’ Even friends will say, ‘Yeah, it took me a while to figure it out.’”

When Aurora was born, McKeon admits to an initial naïveté: “On the inside, you think, ‘We’re OK with it, so everyone else will be OK with it.’ ”

As she quickly learned otherwise, she struggled with how to handle the blatant stares, the questions, the perceived criticism she encountered whenever she was in public with her girls.

But it wasn’t until Aurora came to her this year asking why she looked different from everybody else in their large Irish-Italian family that McKeon began worrying more about what her daughter was internalizing than the reactions of the world around her.

That’s when she turned to Tiffany Rae Reid…

At 36, the biracial Reid is still coming to terms with who she is. For more than half her life, the Voorhees resident believed she was white. She was raised in rural Ashtabula, Ohio, the daughter of a Hungarian mother and absentee African-American father whom she met for the first time when she was 26. Until that point, Reid, whose sister is also white, had believed her mother’s stories about her permanently tanned complexion. Whenever she dared to ask why she looked so different, her mother would pull out the family albums, pointing to photos of Reid’s dark-skinned Hungarian uncle, whose light green eyes, curly hair and thick lips mimicked her own.

“I would ask my mom, ‘Am I adopted? Why don’t I look like you?’ ” recalls Reid. “She created this whole reality that I was a dark Hungarian.”…

Read the entire article here.

Narrative Miscegenation: “Absalom, Absalom!” as Naturalist Novel, Auto/Biography, and African-American Oral Story

Journal of Narrative Theory
Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer, 2001)
pages 155-179
DOI: 10.1353/jnt.2011.0080

Alex Vernon, Associate Professor of English
Hendrix College, Conway, Arkansas

Charles Darwin’s evolutionary ideas, especially as disseminated by Herbert Spencer, profoundly affected literary criticism at the end of the nineteenth century, with genres treated like biological species to the degree that at least one critic wrote about “a struggle for existence among genres” (Pizer 82). A century later, in “The Law of Genre,” Jacques Derrida repeatedly expresses this law—that “genres are not to be mixed” (51)—in naturalist terms. He remarks that genres have been treated in a system akin to “race, familial membership, [and] classificatory genealogy” whereby to mix genres is, by convention, to “risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity” (57, 53). It is to commit a kind of miscegenation. Yet his essay finally finds such intermixing inevitable, an inevitability he calls “the law of the law of genre” (55).

William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! also employs naturalistic language in its various accountings of the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen. While the story turns on the historical Southern taboo of racial intermixing, Faulkner artfully incorporates generic miscegenation into the novel’s structure. The narrative structure of Absalom, Absalom! can be viewed as a “cross-breed” of several literary forms, including (among others) the naturalist novel, biography, autobiography, and the oral tale largely associated…

Read or purchase article here.

Between Black and White: Attitudes Toward Southern Mulattoes, 1830-1861

The Journal of Southern History
Volume 45, Number 2 (May, 1979)
pages 185-200

Robert Brent Toplin, Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Wilmington

The documents of slavery—laws, narratives speeches, and political tracts—contain abundant references to “Negroes” and “mulattoes.” By the standards of antebellum America, the distinction was not accidental or minor. Contemporary attitudes about the difference between Negro and mulatto related to fundamental racial ideas. For many years Americans from both the North and South openly expressed a marked bias favoring the mulatto over the Negro. The variations in white attitudes toward mulattoes in the antebellum period need closer investigation than they have received, especially in connection with conflicting opinions about miscegenation, sexual oppression, and racial identification. In many respects disputes about the mulatto’s position in southern society related to fundamental points in the debates about slavery and abolition.

Historians of slavery recognize that antebellum Americans often showed special interest in mulattoes, but their estimates of the extent and importance of this interest vary greatly. In a careful study of white attitudes from 1550 to 1812 Winthrop D. Jordan…