Mixed Race Studies

Race and Mixed Race (LS 355)

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Fall 2011

Explores the history of racial classification in the U.S. with special attention to the census and the role of the state more generally in defining race. Emphasis on how race-mixing has been understood in American culture, and on the current literature on “multiracials” and the future of “race” in the U.S. Readings are drawn from interdisciplinary sources, but examined from a sociological perspective. Same as AAS 355 and SOC 355.

The Invisible Line: American families’ journeys from black to white

Research news@Vanderbilt
Vanderbilt University
2011-02-17

Amy Wolf

The idea of someone transitioning from black to white, without science or surgery, seems hard to grasp on the surface. Yet Vanderbilt Law School professor Daniel J. Sharfstein finds that African Americans have continually crossed the color line and assimilated into white communities from 17th century America through today. This actual journey has little to do with one’s skin color and more to do with a society’s willingness to look beyond race.

“We talk about the great migration north of African Americans in the 20th century, but this mass migration across the color line impacted millions of people and was hundreds of years in the making,” said Sharfstein. “It’s very easy to forget this history. This process of migrating across the color line is something that falls outside of what we think of as African American history because it’s a history that people were trying to cover up and forget as it was happening.”…

…Self definition, not color, was key

Sharfstein spent almost a decade researching dozens of families that, for social, economic, safety and other reasons, chose to change their race and create new lives. Sharfstein found court and government records, personal letters and other archives that helped paint vivid pictures of these Americans.

While previous records of “passing” have focused on individuals’ struggles to redefine themselves, often by leaving their homes and fabricating new identities, Sharfstein found large numbers of people who managed to defy the legal definitions of race right within their own communities. Sharfstein found that what mattered most was not the color of their skin, but how they defined themselves and related to their neighbors.

“What this research tells us is that the categories of black and white have never been about blood. There were plenty of people throughout American history who were not just white, but quintessentially white, powerfully white, and had African American ancestors,” said Sharfstein. “Then we’re left thinking, ‘What is black and what is white then if it’s not about blood and biology?’ And what we wind up with is just the fact of separation and hierarchy.”

Three families’s stories

Sharfstein focused much of his research on three families whom he chronicled in a new book titled “The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White.”…

Read the entire article here.

BBC Two explores what it means to be mixed-race in Britain

British Broadcasting Corporaton
2010-03-10

Mixed-Race Britain is put under the spotlight this autumn on BBC Two in a collection of revealing and compelling new programmes.

Britain in 2011 has proportionately the largest mixed population in the Western world, but 100 years ago people of mixed race lived on the fringes of British society, an invisible community unacknowledged by the wider world.

With an exciting mix of drama and documentaries, the programmes provide a window into the varied and surprising lives of mixed-race people in the UK and help us understand what the increasing rise in mixed-race people means for the way we live now in Britain.

…Leading the programming is Shirley Bassey—A Very British Diva (working title), an intimate and revealing drama that tells the extraordinary life story of Dame Shirley Bassey—one of Britain’s national treasures and one of the world’s most enduring and successful divas. But her rise from poverty to international stardom is no ordinary rags-to-riches story…

In a three-part series, journalist and TV presenter George Alagiah leads viewers through the remarkable and untold story of how Britain’s mixed-race community has become part of everyone’s lives today. With previously unseen footage and unheard testimony, Mixed Britannia (working title) uncovers a tale of illicit love, marriage, children, tragedy and triumph.

Charting events from the turn of the 20th century to the present day, George explores the social factors that have influenced the shape of the mixed-race Britain we see today.

He’ll find out about the flourishing love between merchant seamen and liberated female workers during the First World War; how the British eugenics movement physically examined mixed-race children in the name of science; how pioneering white couples—including English aristocrats—adopted mixed-race babies; and how Britain’s mixed-race population exploded with the arrival of people from all over the globe—making them the fastest-growing ethnic group in the UK.

Mixed—Sex, Race And Empire is a one-off documentary exploring the social, sexual, economic and political issues that led to the race mixing of people across the world. From India to West Africa via South America and the USA, this programme reflects upon the stories and consequences of racial mixing across the world…

Read the entire press release here.

Notes from Steven F. Riley.

For some early 20th century background material on the topics covered in Mixed Britannia, see:

• Jacqueline Nassy Brown. Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, 312 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4008-2641-4).
• Mark Christian. “The Fletcher Report 1930: A Historical Case Study of Contested Black Mixed Heritage Britishness,” Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 21, Issue 2-3 (2008): 213-241.
• Lucy Bland. “White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War,” Gender & History, Volume 17, Issue 1 (2005): 29-61.
• Rachel M. Fleming.“Human hybrids in various parts of the world,” Eugenics Review, Volume 21, Number 4 (1930): 257-263.
• Carina E. Ray. “‘The White Wife Problem’: Sex, Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa,” Gender & History, Volume 21, Number 3 (2009): 628-646.
• Daniel R. McNeil. Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic: Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs. (London: Routledge, 2009, 204 pp., ISBN: 978-0-415-87226-3).
• Alison Blunt. “Geographies of diaspora and mixed descent: Anglo-Indians in India and Britain,” International Journal of Population Geography (Special Issue: Geographies of Diaspora) Volume 9, Issue 4 (2003): 281-294.
• Sydney F. Collins. “The Social Position of White and “Half-Caste” Women in Colored Groupings in Britain,” American Sociological Review, Volume 16, Number 6 (1951): 796-802.

The Invisible Line: Three American families and the secret journey from black to white [Live Interview with Daniel J. Sharfstein]

Minnesota Public Radio News
Midmorning Broadcast: 2011-03-15 15:06Z (10:06 CDT, 11:06 EDT, 08:06 PDT)

Kerri Miller, Host

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

For much of American history, racial identity has been defined in terms of black and white. But because of their heritage and physical appearance, some families walk the line between cultures.

A new book chronicles three mixed-race families whose identities were called into question at various periods in history – with surprising consequences.

Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah. By R. Warren Metcalf. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. xx, 305 pp., ISBN 0-8032-3201-2.)  [Review]

The Journal of American History
Volume 90, Number 3 (December 2003)
page 1107
DOI: 10.2307/3661030

David Rich Lewis, Professor of History
Utah State University, Logan

Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah. By R. Warren Metcalf. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. xx, 305 pp., ISBN 0-8032-3201-2.)

In the 1950s the federal government reversed its pluralistic policies for revitalizing tribal governments and began terminating its trust responsibility under the guise of “freeing” American Indians from federal control. Termination policies flowed out of the conservative, budget-cutting, consensus rhetoric of Cold War America. As R. Warren Metcalf points out, its implementation varied, informed by the ideology of its practitioners and the circumstances of its subjects—specifically the Mormon cultural background of Arthur V. Watkins, Republican senator from Utah and chief advocate of termination in Congress, and the numerically small, powerless, and divided Shoshone, Paiute, and Ute Indians of Utah. Metcalf details the process whereby federal officials, Mormon politicians and lawyers, and Utes themselves accomplished the termination of mixed-blood members of the Northern Ute tribe despite the letter of the law and the bonds of racial identity. It is the story of identity politics that left individuals as “discarded” Indians…

Read the entire review here.

Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah

University of Nebraska Press
2002
311 pages
Illus., maps
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-3201-3; Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-2251-9

R. Warren Metcalf, Associate Professor of United States History
University of Oklahoma

Termination’s Legacy describes how the federal policy of termination irrevocably affected the lives of a group of mixed-blood Ute Indians who made their home on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in Utah. Following World War II many Native American communities were strongly encouraged to terminate their status as wards of the federal government and develop greater economic and political power for themselves. During this era, the rights of many Native communities came under siege, and the tribal status of some was terminated. Most of the terminated communities eventually regained tribal status and federal recognition in subsequent decades. But not all did.

The mixed-blood Utes fell outside the formal categories of classification by the federal government, they did not meet the essentialist expectations of some officials of the Mormon Church, and their regaining of tribal status potentially would have threatened those Utes already classified as tribal members on the reservation. Skillfully weaving together interviews and extensive archival research, R. Warren Metcalf traces the steps that led to the termination of the mixed-blood Utes’ tribal status and shows how and why this particular group of Native Americans was never formally recognized as “Indian” again. Their repeated failure to regain their tribal status throws into relief the volatile key issue of identity then and today for full- and mixed-blood Native Americans, the federal government, and the powerful Mormon Church in Utah.

Some anthropological characteristics of hybrid populations

The Eugenics Review
Volume 30, Number 1 (April 1938)
pages 21-31

J. C. Trevor, Leonard Darwin Research Fellow

It should be explained that “hybrid” is used here in its restricted zoological sense, viz. as relating to intraspecific rather than to interspecific crosses. The adjective “mixed,” though convenient, can be misleading, since there is no acceptable definition of what constitutes a “pure” human race. For the purposes of the present discussion, “hybrid” will be taken to apply to crosses between races comprised within different major divisions of mankind such as the “varieties” of Blumenbach and the main “groups” of Haddon, Hooton and other anthropological systematists…

..The nine hybrid series concerned in this paper may be briefly described as follows:

(1) Norfolk Islanders, 113 adult male and female subjects, the descendants of six mutineers of H.M.S. Bounty and from ten to twelve Polynesian women from Tahiti and possibly two of its neighbouring islands, measured and described by Shapiro (1929). They are compared with 153 male and female Society Islanders, whose measurements were taken by Handy and reduced by Shapiro, and with 6,975 “English” and 381 Oxfordfshire villagers, whose measurements were taken by Galton and by Buxton and Blackood, respectively, and reduced by the writer. The genealogical records of the Norfolk Islanders have been carefully kept since about 1790, and any influx of fresh blood invarably been noted.

(2) Half-Blood Sioux, 77 adult male subjects including some described as a quarter and others as three-quarters Indian, whose meaurements were taken by Boas and eight assistants and reduced by Sullivan (1920). European ancestry is said to be French, Scotch, English and Irish. They are compared with 540 full-blood Sioux, measured by the same observers, and with 727 “Old American” Whites, measured and described Hrdlicka (1925). Herskovits (1930) has provided several constants of variation for the last series, and the writer a few others.

(3) Ojibwa-Whites, 8o adult male subjects, principally from Minnesota, representing various degrees of intermixture between women and French and Scotch which has been “continuous and cumulative” since 1660. They are described by Jenks (1916) and have been compared with 24 full-blood Ojibwa (all that could be obtained) and with 100 Minnesota French and 50 Minnesota Scotch, also measured by them. The constants of variation of these four studies have been computed by the writer.

(4) Yucatecans, 88o adult male subjects, a product of intermixture between Spanish immigrants into Mexico and Maya Indians during a period of some 350 years, measured and described by Williams (1931). They are compared with 77 presumably unmixed Mayas, measured and described by Steggerda (1932b), and with 416 Andalusians measured and described by Hulse (1933), for stature, and 79 subjects from all parts of Spain, whose measurements were taken by Barras and reduced by Williams, for cephalic and facial characters.

(5) Jamaican “Browns,” 165 male and female subjects of mixed White and Negro ancestry from Jamaica, measured by Steggerda and described by Davenport and himself (1929). They are compared with one series of 100 Whites of British and German descent and with another of 105 full-blood Negroes, also measured by Steggerda, both coming from the island of Jamaica and its dependencies. The Whites cannot be said to represent ideal comparative material, and as a large proportion of immature subjects is included in all three series, means based on their absolute measurements would appear to be unreliable. Consequently only indices, which are less likely to be affected by possible growth changes, have been used in the present comparison. It is unfortunate that the means and constants of variation provided by Davenport and Steggerda were determined by very crude statistical methods and that mistakes also occur in their computation.

(6) American Negroes of Mixed Blood, 254 adult male subjects of European and Negro ancestry, principally from various parts of the United States, measured and described by Herskovits (1930). Genealogies were obtained from each subject, who was then classified with regard to the proportions of White and Negro ancestry he possessed, three main divisions being recognized: (i) more Negro than White, (ii) approximately equal amounts of Negro and White, and (iii) more White than Negro. The number of individuals in each of these divisions makes them, in general, adequate for separate statistical treatment. They are compared with an unmixed American Negro series of 109 individuals, also measured by Herskovits, and with Hrdlicka’s “Old Americans.”

(7) Boer-Hottentot Crosses (the so-called “Bastaards” of Rehoboth), 74 adult male subjects of six or seven generations of mixed Boer and Hottentot descent from South-West Africa, measured and described by Fischer (1913). Fischer, like Herskovits, divides his material into genealogical classes representing different proportions of Boer and Hottentot ancestry. None of these, however, is really large enough for statistical purposes, and the measurements have been pooled to form a general Bastaard series, which is compared with 74 Hottentots, measured by Schultze Jena (1928), and, in default of local Boers, with 70 Dutch, whose forbears come from the northern provinces of the Netherlands, measured and described by Steggerda (4932a). The general Bastaard constants of variation and those of the Hottentots have been computed by the writer.

(8) Kisar Mestizos, 132 adult male and female subjects of mixed Dutch and Indonesian ancestry from Kisar, a small island in the Sunda archipelago, some thirty-five miles east of Timor. They were measured and described by Rodenwaldt (1927), who ascribes their origin to the seventeenth century. The mestizos are divided by him into genealogical classes, but these are too small for satisfactory statistical analysis, and the material has again to be treated as a whole. For comparative purposes, 64 Kisarese, also measured by Rodenwaldt, and Steggerda’s Dutch are used.

(9) Anglo-Indians, “new style,” 145 adult male subjects of mixed European and Indian ancestry from Calcutta, whose measurements were taken by Annandale, first reduced by Mahalanobis (1922-31) and later, with the exclusion of some immature individuals, by the writer. There is almost a complete absence of reliable information concerning their origin and it has been found impossible to select suitable material from Indian senes for a comparison of means, though in view of their very complex racial antecedents they can be retained for the study of variability…

Read the entire article here.

Mary Beltrán and Camilla Fojas (Eds.), Mixed Race Hollywood, New York University Press, 2008, 325 pp. [Review]

International Journal of Communication
Issue 4 (2010)
pages 139-141

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

In the wake of “Obama-mania,” conventional wisdom about racial identity is facing a set of new and unique challenges. It is therefore imperative for scholars and industry professionals to reflect on multiracial identification, representation, history and post-racial politics as they pertain to art and to life. This is exactly what Mixed Race Hollywood, four parts, the book examines representations of multiracial people as integral yet often silenced parts of our real and imagined communities. A truly interdisciplinary study, the essays explore a wide range of topics—from early mixed race film characters to Blaxploitation and “multiracial chic” to children’s television programming, same-sex romance and the “outing” of mixed race stars online. Both provocative and timely, the collection helps its readers better understand the evolving conceptions of what race actually is and can be—mixed. The threads running through each essay are these two questions: How are mixed race people deployed as subjects and/or objects in Hollywood? And, when it comes to issues of mixed race, does art imitate life or does life imitate art?…

Read the entire review here.

What is ‘post-racial’?

The Spectator
Seattle University
2011-02-16

Frances Dinger

Since Barack Obama became the first black president in 2008, the word “post-racial” has been liberally used by some media groups. We are, according to some, at a point in our country’s history when we can be past race but minorities are still incarcerated at a disproportionate rate to whites and are more often living below the poverty line, especially in urban areas (whites outnumber minorities in the case of poverty in rural areas, according to the U.S. Census Bureau). So, what does it mean to say we are a post-racial nation when the numbers suggest otherwise?

“We’re not post-racial,” said sociology professor Gary Perry. “We’re post-talking about race.”

With the rise of the multi-racial and multi-cultural movement, some ethnic groups are becoming less visible. And the issue is complicated further considering races are not measured uniformly across government agencies. A 20-year-old student named Michelle López-Mullins who is of Peruvian, Chinese, Irish, Shawnee and Cherokee descent is counted as “Hispanic” by the Board of Education but the National Center for Health statistics would count her both as “Asian” and “Hispanic,” according to a Feb. 9 New York Times article by Susan Saulny.

During the 2010 census, individuals had the option of checking a box marked “mixed race,” making counting all the more complicated.

While trivial to some, racial statistics help government agencies consider disparities in health, education, employment and housing, among other protections. So, where are we in the race discussion when even government agencies are sometimes unsure how to group individuals? Does a movement for “mixed race” mean we are moving toward greater equality or acceptance?

“Symbolically, there’s this idea that we’ve arrived at a place absent of race,” Perry said. “[…] It’s not that we’re post-racial, but the mixing we’re seeing indicates race doesn’t matter.”

Perry emphasized that what we see in the media from minority celebrities is not the reality faced by many Americans of color…

Read the entire article here.

So… What Are You, Anyway?

Harvard Half-Asian People’s Association
Harvard University
2011-03-25 through 2011-03-26

The Harvard Half-Asian People’s Association will host its third annual conference on mixed-race politics and identity issues, “So…What Are You, Anyway?” (SWAYA) on Friday, March 25 and Saturday, March 26, 2011 on the Harvard University campus. The event is open to the public and will feature an array of exciting guest lecturers who will speak on issues involving multiracial identity.

The conference will include lectures given by the Dean of Harvard College and other Harvard College professors, as well as student panels and discussion groups. Last year, the event drew over one hundred students and other guests from colleges and cities around the Boston area.

SWAYA will culminate in a special gala dinner* in honor of the 2010 recipient of the Cultural Pioneer Award, celebrity mixed-race artist Jeff Chiba Stearns, director of the award-winning documentary “One Big Hapa Family”. An international spokesperson on mixed-race identity, Stearns’ short films exploring multiethnic issues have been screened in hundreds of film festivals around the world and have garnered over 33 awards.

For more information, click here.