Mixed Race Studies

Science: Savants

TIME Magazine
1924-08-18

Women’s barber shops call themselves beauty parlors. Drug stores call themselves ice cream parlors. Clerks call themselves salesmen. Politicians call themselves statesmen. Flappers call themselves young ladies. But scientists call themselves scientists, and only newspapers call them savants.

But the word “savants” has been spread in the headlines of newspapers for the greater part of the week. What this signified was that some 2,000 hardworking men of science were assembled at Toronto at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The Association, which makes a practice of meeting everywhere save in London—in order to stimulate interest elsewhere—gathered to its meeting more than 500 British scientists, about the same number each of Canadians and Americans, and a scattering number from the rest of the world. The presence of Americans was, indeed, due to the fact that the British Association very thoughtfully gave the members of the American Association of the same name membership in the British Association for the purpose of the meeting.

¶ The meeting was opened at Toronto University by Major-General Sir David Bruce, President of the Association…

…¶ John W. Gregory, President of the Geographical Section of the Association, spoke on the “Color” problem of the earth, in which the white race, composed of some 520,000,000 out of a total population of about 1,700,000,000, controls eight-ninths of the habitable earth. He suggested that there were four possible solutions of the color problem: 1) amalgamation by miscegenation; 2) coresidence without fusion; 3) ‘disfranchisement of the colored population; 4) segregation into separate communities. He inclined to the belief that the last will be the solution, and foresaw that in 100 years or so, by natural processes, a sort of free state of Negroes would develop in the Southern U. S…

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Mammy versus mulatta: A rhetorical analysis of the act of passing and the influence of controlling images in Fannie Hurst’s “Imitation of Life”

Arizona State University
May 2010
189 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3407107
ISBN: 9781109743265

Allison Parker

A Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel, Imitation of Life, and the two movies that followed in 1934 and 1959, address the issue of racial passing in a way that no text ever has before. The theme of Imitation of Life is imitation, and as a result, it lends itself to a discussion of race performativity. Imitation of Life is the first text to juxtapose the mammy character with the tragic mulatto character, and this makes it conducive to studying the category of race and how race performativity functions. In addition, instead of focusing exclusively on passing, this analysis focuses more specifically on the way that resistance to (or condemnation of) passing, mainly through the power of confession, produces a specific mode of performativity.

Each of the versions of Imitation of Life is analyzed separately in order to use the specific version of the text to examine not only how the mores of the time affect the outcome of the story to contextualize each story within its respective time period, but also to examine how each of the characters is constructed in order to evaluate the relationships between black and white women living in the same household. The focus is on the specific features of the mammy and the mulatto characters–their history, their attributes, and their significant features, in order to understand how they work in context and to understand their significance in terms of race performativity. Finally, an examination of the category of race in terms of performative reiteration is presented. Scenes from the book and the two films are scrutinized in an attempt to provide a vehicle to understand the means by which racial norms function. These sections work together to examine the condemnation of passing in Imitation of Life through the lens of race as a speech act. Imitation of Life is a passing narrative that is a crucial text for assisting theorists in understanding the complicated features of race performativity.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• PREFACE
• CHAPTER 1 REVIEW OF LITERATURE
  • Introduction and Scope
  • Theoretical Approach
  • Organization of Research
  • Concluding Remarks
• CHAPTER 2 THE 1933 NOVEL
  • Fannie Hurst: Racial Activist
  • Hurston and Hurst
  • The Conflicts in Imitation of Lite
  • A Warning for Ambitious Womem
  • Aunt Jemima: The Most Famous Mammy
  • The Influence of Zora Neale Hurston
  • Delilah—the Ultimate Mammy
  • Peola—the Tragic Mulatto
  • Peola’s Passing
  • Critical Reception and Debate
• CHAPTER 3 THE 1934 FILM
  • The Plot Thickens
  • The Embodiment of Miscegenation
  • From Page to Screen
  • The Subservient Mammy Stereotype Continues
  • An Updated Bea
  • An Updated Peola
  • Critical Reception
  • Hurston, Hughes, Morrison, and hooks Respond
• CHAPTER 4 THE 1959 FILM
  • Lana’s Imitation of Life
  • Colorblind Casting?
  • Imitation in Imitation of Life
  • Starring Sarah Jane
  • The Rhinelander Case
  • Controlling Images
• CHAPTER 5 RACE PERFORMATIVITY
  • Austin, Derrida, Butler, and Performativity
  • Foucault and Confession
  • Assumptions of Whiteness and the Contradictions of Race
  • Judith Butler and Imitation of Life
  • The Punishment for Passing
  • Mammy Versus Mulatto
  • Conclusion
• WORKS CITED

Purchase the dissertation here.

Métis/Mulâtre, Mulato, Mulatto, Negro, Moreno, Mundele Kaki, Black,… The Wanderings and Meanderings of Identities

Chapter in: Problematizing Blackness: Self Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States
Routledge
2003-09-30
240 pages

Edited by

Jean Muteba Rahier, Associate Professor of Anthropology and African & African Diaspora Studies
Florida International University

Percey C. Hintzen, Professor of African American Studies
University of California, Berkeley

Chapter 6
pages 85-112

Jean Muteba Rahier, Associate Professor of Anthropology and African & African Diaspora Studies
Florida International University

I have no race except that which is forced upon me. I have no country except that to which I’m obliged to belong. I have no traditions. I’m free. I have only the future.

Richard Wright

I was born in 1959, in what was then the Belgian Congo, of a Congolese colonized mother and a Belgian colonial father. I grew up in Belgium.

Belgian Explorations: My Father’s Congo

The Congo Free State (C.F.S.) was created as a private property of the Belgian King Leopold II in 1884–85 at the Berlin Conference and lasted until 1908. It was succeeded by the Belgian Congo, which lasted from 1908 until 1960, when the country gained its independence (see Vangroenweghe 1986; Ndaywel è Nziem 1998; Hochschild 1998). During the short history of colonial rule, the organization and implementation of the colonial enterprise were conducted almost exclusively by males. There was a contingent development of the institution of the ménagères, wherein African women and the male colonizers developed relationships of sexual intimacy. These relations occurred between female “housekeepers” (the ménagères) and the male colonizers whom they were serving. These relationships developed within the context of the absence of European women—an absence legitimized by their supposed biological unsuitability for the African tropical climate (Habig 1944, 10–11; Stoler 2002). The practice of sexual relations between the male colonizers and the colonized African women was universal and widespread, particularly outside the most important urban centers of Leopoldville, Elisabethville, and Stanleyville. Once in the Congo, many agents of the state and many employees of private colonial companies looked for the companionship of African women, who provided them with housekeeping, affection, and sexual favors. Usually, Belgian men kept their ménagères with them until the end of their tour of duty.

State employees and agents of private companies were contractually employed for a three-year term. They would normally leave at the end of the term, usually spending six months’ vacation in Belgium, after which they had the option of returning to the colony for another three-year tour of service. This could continue indefinitely.Upon their return to the colony, it was customary for them either to retain the same ménagères in their “employ” or to choose another from among the “available African women.” Sometimes, the ménagères would become pregnant. If she did, she was typically sent back to her village with a small “financial indemnity” and material compensation. Usually, the colonial agent would then choose a new, young African woman to replace her in his house and in his bed.

The number of children born out of the widespread practice of sexual intimacy forced the colonial administration and the Belgian Parliament to debate what they termed the problème des métis, “the mulatto problem.” The issue was the treatment of the mulatto offspring of these unions: whether they should endure the same status as the rest of the Congolese population or whether they should be considered an intermediate group above the latter but beneath the Europeans. Attempts at resolving the dilemma produced a series of contradictory policies, resulting in considerable ambiguity. This ambiguity came to characterize the lives of the growing population of métis throughout the entire colonial period (Jeurissen 1999; Stoler 2002). Usually, the status of the métis depended upon the degree of recognition and acknowledgment of parenthood by their fathers. Those who were not recognized were often abandoned by their mothers because of the ostracism that they faced when returning to their native villages. The abandoned children usually ended up living in Catholic and Protestant missionary boarding schools, which were created for this purpose.

Read the entire chapter here…

Natural Ambiguities: Racial Categorization of Multiracial Individuals

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Volume 48, Issue 1, January 2012
pages 152–164
DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.10.005

Jacqueline M. Chen
University of California, Santa Barbara

David L. Hamilton, Professor of Social Psychology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Understanding the perception of multiracial persons is increasingly important in today’s diverse society. The present research investigated the process of categorizing multiracial persons as “Multiracial.” We hypothesized that perceivers would make fewer Multiracial categorizations of multiracials and that these categorizations would take longer than monoracial categorizations. We found support for these hypotheses across six experiments. Experiment 1 demonstrated that perceivers did not categorize morphed Black-White faces as Multiracial with the same frequency with which they categorized Black and White faces as Black and White (respectively), and that categorizations of multiracials as Multiracial took longer than monoracial categorizations. Experiment 2 replicated and extended these effects to real Black-White faces. Experiment 3 showed that these findings generalized to Asian-White faces. We used pixel variance analysis to show that these effects were not due to increased variance among Multiracial faces. The image analysis showed that the Black-White morphs and real biracials were actually less varied than either the Black or White sets of faces. Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that cognitive load and time constraints detrimentally affected multiracial, but not monoracial, categorizations. Experiment 6 showed that imbuing monoracial categories were importance decreases use of the Multiracial category. Implications of these findings for understanding perceptions of multiracial persons are discussed.

Highlights

• We investigated the process of categorizing multiracial persons as “multiracial.
• Multiracial categorizations are not as spontaneous as monoracial ones.
• These results are not driven by properties of the multiracial stimuli.
• Perceiving racial dichotomies as meaningful inhibits multiracial categorization.

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What being mixed race has taught me

MsAfropolitan: the cosmopolitan African woman
2011-01-26

Minna Salami

It’s a shame that we black people are the ones that analyse and debate race and racism the most. If society was as post-racial as some try to claim, then I believe that it is white people that should be analysing and debating the effects racism has had on the world, whilst black people should be discussing how to heal from the effects racism has had on us…
 
…First of all let me say, in the simplest of summaries, that I think that race is a fallacy, a social and scientific construct, developed by mid-century europeans to justify a financial venture.
 
Nevertheless, racial profiling is now part of our culture so there’s no use denying it. Although I would argue that mixed race people who want to constitute another race are adding another layer to the madness. After all we may accept that racial divides exist, but we can’t build new truths from something that was untrue to start with. But as I’ve said before, we mixed race people have issues. Either way, racial constructions may now appear to be fact, but that’s because people of similar melanin count share similar social experiences.
 
And it is in this light, not in the ‘one-drop-rule’ light, that I am black. That is to say, people with my particular skin tone and genetic make up share the same ancestral history with those with two African or diaspora parents. We share the history of slavery, oppression and colonization. This history is a shared legacy of the black experience…

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Medieval black Briton found

The Times of London
2010-05-02

Gillian Passmore

A SKELETON uncovered in the ruins of a friary is the earliest physical evidence of a black person living in Britain in medieval times.
 
The remains of a man, found in the friary in Ipswich, Suffolk, which was destroyed by Henry VIII, have been dated to the 13th century.
 
It is the first solid indication that there were black people in Britain in the 1,000-year period between the departure of the Romans, who had African slaves, and the beginnings of the age of discovery in the 15th century…
  
…He predates by 150 years the three black people previously known to have lived in Britain. They were identified from tax records…

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But Don’t Call Me White: Mixed Race Women Exposing Nuances of Privilege and Oppression Politics

Sense Publishers
September 2011
258 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-94-6091-692-2
Paperback ISBN 978-94-6091-691-5

Silvia Cristina Bettez, Assistant Professor of Cultural Foundations
School of Education
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Highlighting the words and experiences of 16 mixed race women (who have one white parent and one parent who is a person of color), Silvia Bettez exposes hidden nuances of privilege and oppression related to multiple positionalites associated with race, class, gender and sexuality. These women are “secret agent insiders” to cultural Whiteness who provide unique insights and perspectives that emerge through their mixed race lenses.  Much of what the participants share is never revealed in mixed—White/of color—company.  Although critical of racial power politics and hierarchies, these women were invested in cross-cultural connections and revealed key insights that can aid all in understanding how to better communicate across lines of cultural difference.

This book is an invaluable resource for a wide range of activists, scholars and general readers, including sociologists, sociologists of education, feminists, anti-oppression/social justice scholars, critical multicultural educators, and qualitative researchers who are interested in mixed race issues, cross cultural communication, social justice work, or who simply wish to minimize racial conflict and other forms of oppression.

Mixed-race numbers double since 2000

The Tuscaloosa News
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
2011-10-04

Dana Beyerle, Montgomery Bureau Chief

More than twice as many people in Alabama say they are of two races than 10 years earlier

MONTGOMERY | Alabama’s black population increased slightly between 2000 and 2010, but the number of people claiming mixed-race status more than doubled, according to researchers at the University of Alabama.

More than twice as many people in Alabama indicated they were of mixed race in 2010 as they did on the 2000 Census, the first time the option was available.

In 2000, 13,068 Alabamians reported they were of two races, one of which was black. For the 2010 Census, 29,807 Alabamians indicated that they were of mixed-race status.

Carolyn Trent, socio-economic analyst at the Center for Business and Economic Research’s state data center, said Monday the mixed-race increase probably reflects a growing willingness to identify a person’s dual heritage…

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Visualizing a Critical Mixed-Race Theory

Stance: An International Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
Volume 2 (Spring 2009)
pages 18-25
Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana
ISSN: 1943-1880

Desiree Valentine, Departments of Philosophy and Communication Studies
Marquette University

In this paper, questions regarding the cultural understanding of mixed race are explored, which have the ability to complicate the accepted portrayal of race in society as a black/white binary system. Thus, the acknowledgement of something other than this binary system offers new ways of theorizing about race, particularly concerning the sociopolitical implications of mixed-race designation. This paper argues that the visually mixed-race person has a certain direct ability to challenge the binary and its racist logic. Furthermore, this paper goes on to offer a unique interpretation of where power for working against a racially oppressive system lies within critical mixed-race theory.

I was in kindergarten when I had a clear understanding of the racialized world in which we live, when I had to check a box on my school registration papers recognizing myself as either black or white. This simple action can be quite complicated when one is a daughter of a black father and white mother. I was finally offered the choice of “mixed” by the time I reached Jr. High. But what is this concept of “mixed” and what does it offer a nation still infused with racism years after the time period known as the “Civil Rights Era” has ended?

Questions of mixed race bring with them complications to the established black/white binary system and thus offer new ways of theorizing race as well as the sociopolitical implications of mixed race designation. As Lewis Gordon states, “In spite of contemporary resistance to ‘binary’ analyses, a critical discussion of mixed-race categories calls for an understanding of how binary logic functions in discourses on race and racism. Without binaries, no racism will exist.” Can a breakdown of the current binary logic, which places social and political advantages on white individuals, occur with the inception of a critical mixed race theory? And could this lead to a society free of racism?

This essay will focus on the views of theorists Lewis Gordon and Naomi Zack and their conceptions of the racial binary system and mixed race. I will begin by looking at both theorists’ views on the racial binary system, posing the question, “How do we understand the spectrum of race?” From there, I will explore the approaches each theorist offers for deconstructing the binary, followed by a comparison and critique of both theorizations, with the end goal of offering my own interpretation of where power for working against a racially oppressive system lies within a critical mixed race theory. It is my view that what often gets overlooked in these theorizations is the effect of visual incoherency to the black/white binary that can be provided by the mixed race individual. The concept of the “visibly mixed race person” will be used in this essay to explore the transformative areas for a society still enmeshed in the ugly history of racism…

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‘Going out of stock’: Mulattoes and Levantines in Italian literature and cinema of the Fascist period

University of Connecticut
2008
255 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3329116
ISBN: 9780549826118

Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut

My dissertation examines, within Fascist propagandist literature and cinema of the 1930s, the hybrid figures of mulattoes—the offspring of interracial unions between Italian men and native women of Italy’s African colonies—and Levantines—white Italian immigrant merchants and craftsmen living in Alexandria, Egypt, who culturally intermingled with other ethnic groups. The popular novels and feature films I examine reveal the mulattoes and Levantines as interchangeable characters invalidating Benito Mussolini’s efforts at establishing a national identity based on a common cultural background, racial attributes, and religious beliefs. As my title suggests, I take mulattoes and Levantines out of the cinematic and literary “stock” of propaganda, where they were depicted as outside the stirpe (stock) of the Italian people, to reveal the inconsistencies within Fascist ideals of racial and cultural purity. In historical and anthropological terms, I intend to bring to light how literary and cinematic devices used to stigmatize mulattoes and Levantines often undermine themselves, calling attention to what was supposed to be absent or different from what was in “stock,” in the works themselves, in the actual peoples depicted and even in the motives of Fascist colonial enterprises. My analysis is informed by the framework of studies on exoticism, hybridity and mimicry, passing and the tragic mulatto, masculinity and femininity, and cultural studies, all of which lead back to the question: Why did Italians resist the ethnic and cultural metissage during colonialism and still to this day insist on “whiteness” when they describe themselves and their culture?

Table of Contents

• Approval Page
• Acknowledgments
• Table of contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: ‘Speaking of Itself:’ Exoticism in ‘African Works’ of the Early Italian Colonialism
  • 1.1. Introduction
  • 1.2. Italian Colonialism from the Purchase of the Bay of Assab to the Ethiopian Campaign
  • 1.3. Exoticism and Colonialism
  • 1.4. Exploration and First Italian Colonization: Piaggia, Franzoj, Bianchi and Martini
  • 1.5. Italian Anthropology in the Second Half of the 19th Century and the Hamitic Theory
  • 1.6. Africa in the Literary Works of De Amicis, Salgari, D’Annunzio and Marinetti
• Chapter Two: ‘Art of Darkness:’ The Aestheticization of Black People in Fascist Colonial Novel
  • 2.1. Introduction
  • 2.2. Mixed Race Children in Italy’s African Colonies
  • 2.3. The Colonial Novel
  • 2.4. Disciplining the Native Population and the Italian Audience
  • 2.5. Rosolino Gabrielli’s II piccolo Brassa
  • 2.6. Arnaldo Cipolla’s Melograno d’Oro, regina d’Etiopia
• Chapter Three: Undermining Fascist Policies of Order and Risanamento. The Dissident Literature of Enrico Pea and Fausta Cialente
  • 3.1. Introduction
  • 3.2. Alexandria of Egypt: Historical Framework
  • 3.3. The Italian Emigrants of Alexandria
  • 3.4. Growing up in the Shadow of Alexandria
  • 3.5. Enrico Pea’s Egyptian Novels
  • 3.6. Fausta Cialente’s Levantine Characters
• Chapter Four: Fade to White:’ How Italian Cinema Affiliated with Fascism Framed the Native Population of Italy’s African Colonies
  • 4.1. Introduction
  • 4.2. Demographic Colonization of Ethiopia
  • 4.3. Italian Cinema before Fascism
  • 4.4. ‘African Films’ during the Fascist Period
  • 4.5. Augusto Genina’s Lo squadrone bianco
  • 4.6. Guido Brignone’s Sotto La Croce del Sud
• Bibliography

Purchase the dissertation here.