Mixed Race Studies

In Memoriam: Peggy Pascoe (1954-2010)

Perspectives on History
November 2010

Estelle Freedman, Edgar E. Robinson Professor of History
Stanford University

Scholar of gender, race, and the U.S. West; 2009 winner of AHA’s William H. Dunning Prize and Joan Kelly Prize

Peggy Pascoe, the Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History and professor of ethnic studies at the University of Oregon, died at home in Eugene, Oregon, on July 23, 2010. She leaves behind an exceptional professional legacy, not only in her prize-winning scholarship on women and multicultural relations in the West, but also through the careers of the students and colleagues she mentored over the decades…

Pascoe was part way through the manuscript for her book on miscegenation law when she learned in 2005 that she had ovarian cancer. Initially she did not think that she would be able to complete the study. In 2007, at a panel held in her honor at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, several colleagues commented on her draft chapters, which helped inspire her to go back to work on the book even as she endured multiple rounds of chemotherapy. The scholarly result was stunning. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford, 2009) provides a sweeping and detailed account of the criminalization of interracial marriage and resistance to that process from the 1860s through the 1960s. It is also a superb history of the shifting meaning of “race” in American culture and the ways that gender and race are always mutually constructed. One of the most acclaimed books in U.S. social, cultural, and legal history, it received the Ellis W. Hawley and the Lawrence W. Levine Prizes from the Organization of American Historians; the John H. Dunning Prize and the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association; and the J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association…

Read the entire article here.

“The devil made the mulatto”: Race, religion and respectability in a Black Atlantic, 1931-2005

University of Toronto
2007
312 pages
Publication Number: AAT NR39517
ISBN: 9780494395172

Daniel R. McNeil, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
Newcastle University, United Kingdom

According to The Historical Journal there has only been one scholarly study of mixed- race history. This text—New People: Mulattoes and Miscegenation in the United States—fails to address events after 1930 in any detail, and ends its historical analysis with a discussion of the mixed-race people who committed themselves to a “New Negro” group. In an attempt to cover this gap in the academic literature, my dissertation analyses the creative artistry of individuals who were born after 1930 and were told, by governmental agencies in the US, UK and Canada, that they had a Black father and a white mother. My first case study looks at Philippa Schuyler, the daughter of George Schuyler, the most prominent African American journalist of the early twentieth century. I acknowledge that George Schuyler’s journalistic peers marketed his daughter as a “Negro” child prodigy during the 1930s and 1940s, but I also document how she fashioned herself as a “mulatto” writer or a vaguely aristocratic “off-white” femme fatale during the 1950s and 1960s. My second case study looks at Lawrence Hill, a writer who grew up in the suburbs of Toronto during the 1950s and 1960s and has achieved a degree of prominence in Canada by casting himself as a middle-class Black “race man” like his African American father, the first director of the Ontario Human Rights Agency. Subsequent case studies investigate the legacy of the “Black is beautiful” movements of the 1960s on a wider variety of individuals—from working-class folks in Nova Scotia and Merseyside to American idols—and provide further evidence for my argument that a Black identity has been masculinized in opposition to the stigma attached to a “mulatto” identity associated with young “brown girls”. In doing so, I draw heavily on the work of Otto Rank, W.E.B Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. In particular, I link Rank’s ideas about creative artistry – that it was a masculine attempt to give birth to a new self, community or nation—to the theories of Du Bois and Fanon that defined “honest intellectuals” in a Black Atlantic against mixed-race women and children.

Purchase the dissertation here.

Sources of Self-Categorization as Minority for Mixed-Race Individuals: Implications for Affirmative Action Entitlement

Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology
Volume 16, Issue 4 (October 2010)
Pages 453-460
DOI: 10.1037/a0020128

Jessica J. Good, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina

George F. Chavez
Department of Psychology
Rutgers University

Diana T. Sanchez, Associate Professor of Psychology
Rutgers University

Multiracial individuals are in the unique position of being able to categorize themselves as members of multiple racial groups. Drawing on self-categorization theory, we suggest that similarity to the minority ingroup depends on self-perceptions of physical appearance and connectedness to the minority ingroup. Moreover, we argue that similarity to the ingroup determines self-categorization as minority, which predicts category-based entitlements such as perceived eligibility for minority resources (e.g., affirmative action). Using path analysis, we found support for this model on a convenience sample of 107 mixed-race minority–White participants. The results suggest that affective processes rather than observable characteristics such as prototypical physical appearance better predict self-categorization among mixed-race individuals.

Read or purchase the article here.

Students manage social lives amidst diversity

The Dartmouth
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
2010-11-11

Marina Villeneuve, The Dartmouth Staff

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment in a three-part series investigating race at the College. The experiences and opinions expressed are the views of individual students, and should not be considered representative of wider communities.

When Marian Gutierrez ’13 stepped onto Dartmouth’s campus as a freshman, she said found she herself a member of a student population strikingly different than the one that existed in her hometown of Los Angeles.

“It wasn’t as diverse as I thought it would be,” she said. “It was a bit of a culture shock.”

The College’s efforts to widen the diversity of the student body have resulted in an undergraduate population increasingly reflective of national demographics — as of this fall, the undergraduate population is 8 percent African-American, 14 percent Asian-American, 7 percent Latino, 4 percent Native American, 7 percent international and 53 percent white, according to the Office of Institutional Research…

…Students of mixed race said their backgrounds allowed them to mediate between different groups on campus.

“Being half black and half Mexican has made my life more interesting here — I feel two ways at same time,” Chris Norman ’13 said. “There’s more than one group I can go to and relate with. For me, it’s easier to branch out to the mainstream community being mixed race.”…

Read the entire article here.

Sociology Professor Chronicles Rising Latino Culture

Inside Fordham Online
Fordham University
In Focus: Faculty and Research
2010-11-15

Patrick Verel

Already the largest minority group in the United States, Latinos will be an even bigger presence in the years to come, according to demographic studies. Clara Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of sociology in Fordham College at Lincoln Center, is making sure their stories are told.

Through 10 books, dozens of papers and consulting projects with Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street, Rodriguez has developed a deep knowledge about a group that now accounts for 15 percent of the population.

Her analyses of United States census data have resulted in papers such as “Contestations Over Classifications: Latinos, the Census and Race in the United States” (Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 2009) and “Implications and Impact of Race on the Health of Latinos,” a chapter in Health Issues in Latino Males: A Social and Structural Approach (Rutgers University Press, 2010).

As part of her study of census data, Rodriguez cast a critical eye on racial classifications in the decennial censuses. Examining how respondents who identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino reported their race, she found that 40 percent chose “some other race,” and many of them wrote in what is known as a Latino identifier, such as Dominican, Panamanian or Chicano.

This happened in the last three decennial censuses, despite the fact that the census allowed them to choose more than one racial category in the last census…

…“People who could choose more than one race didn’t choose white and black; they still chose the category ‘some other race.’ This 40 percent has increased—I think this time it was 42 percent—even though the Census Bureau has really tried to discourage this response,” she said.

“This raises the question, ‘What is race?’ Science was raising that question. Children of mixed-race families were raising that question. So are people from all over the world who came here with very different identities and are now being folded into one of our five major groups.”…

Read the entire article here.

Trends in the Naming of Tri-Racial Mixed-Blood Groups in the Eastern United States

American Speech
Volume 22, Number 2 (April, 1947)
pages 81-87

A. R. Dunlap
University of Delaware

C. A. Weslager
University of Delaware

In the eastern part of the United States, particularly in the southern and middle-Atlantic portions, are a number of populations groups, so-called ‘ethnic-island,’ whose members combine, in varying degrees, the characteristics of Caucasoid, Negroid, and Indian racial stocks. To quote W. H. Gilbert, Jr., who has written extensively of mixed-blood groups, these racial islands

seem to develop especially where environmental circumstances such as forbidding swamps and inaccessible and barren mountain country favor their growth.  Many are located along the tidewater of the Atlantic coast where swamps or island and peninsulas have protected them… Others are farther inland in the Piedmont area and are found with their backs up against the wall of the Blue Ridge or Alleghenies.  A few… are to be found on the very top of the Blue Ridge and on the several ridges of the Appalachian Great Valley just beyond.

A sufficient number of these tri-racial groups has now been reported in various sociological and ethnological journals to make possible a study of the names employed to distinguish this type of mixed-bloods from mixed-bloods of bi-racial origin, such as mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, etc., or from ‘pure’ bloods of one of the three principal racial stocks, i.e., whites, Indians, and Negroes. From the alphabetical list which follows have been excluded names of ethnic groups which perpetuate Indian tribal names for example, the Nanticokes and Houmas mentioned in Gilbert’s ‘Memorandum’; or the surviving Powhatan tribes of Virginia, the Cherokee, and other Algonkian and Iroquoian descendants in the Eastern Woodlands area with tribal organizations.

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial representations: Nishime examines Battlestar Galactica

University of Washington
Department of Communications
2010-11-15

Amanda Weber

LeiLani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communication, is a self-proclaimed science fiction fan, so it seemed natural to her to set her research sights on the TV series Battlestar Galactica. Although science fiction is generally a genre about the future, it often reflects current social issues. Nishime is a scholar on multiracial and interracial studies, Asian American media representations, and Asian American subcultural production. In her study, “Aliens: Narrating U.S. Global Identity Through Transnational Adoption and Interracial Marriage in Battlestar Galactica,” she identifies visual and narrative representations of multiracial people…

Read the entire article and watch a short video clip here.

Constructing Whiteness: Regulating Aboriginal identity

University of Toronto
2009
93 pages
Publication Number: AAT MR59722
ISBN: 9780494597224

Rebecca Boock

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts Graduate Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

Curricula in classrooms facilitate a national amnesia of colonialism that renders inconceivable the possibility of Aboriginal heritage or mixed-blood presence in national subjects. This thesis examines my own family history alongside the Indian Act and discourses of multiculturalism. I provide a personal account for the ways in which Aboriginal identities are regulated in Canada. I examine how glorified white settler narratives—reproduced through both formal and informal schooling—work to displace Aboriginal peoples as the original inhabitants of the land. I argue that this facilitates ongoing Canadian colonialism that continues to circumvent the possibility of particular mixed-blood Aboriginal identities within the confines of national belonging. Citizenship education in the Toronto District School Board is situated as a mechanism of formal schooling that continues to negate the ongoing colonization of Aboriginal people so that mixed-race Aboriginal students may continue to assume themselves as white subjects within the nation.

Table of Contents

• Title Page
• Abstract
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Rendering Whiteness: Making National Belonging White
• Chapter Two: National Benevolence and the Erasure of Canadian Colonialism
• Chapter Three” Citizenship Education: Reinscribing Whiteness
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Read the entire thesis here.

Video from 2010 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference at DePaul now available on iTunes U

If you missed the Nov 5-6, 2010 “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies” conference or any of the keynote talks or the welcoming address, you can now download the videos via Apple’s iTunes U.

Here is a link to the following videos:

• November 5th (00:19:48): Welcoming Remarks by DePaul’s Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean Charles Suchar and conference organizers Camilla Fojas, Wei Ming Dariotis, and Laura Kina.
• November 5th (00:50:36): Keynote Address by Andrew Jolivette, “Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Directions in the Politics of Race and Representation”
• November 6th(01:00:04): Keynote Address by Mary Beltrán, “Everywhere and Nowhere: Mediated Mixed Race and Mixed Race Critical Studies”
• November 6th (00:57:08): Keynote Address by Louie Gong, “Halfs and Have Nots”

Please note that your computer must have Apple’s iTunes installed in order to view the video.  It can be download here.

Seeds of Rebellion in Plantation Fiction: Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto”

Southern Spaces
An interdisciplinary journal about regions, places, and cultures of the American South and their global connections
2007-08-28

Ed Piacentino, Professor of English
High Point University, High Point, North Carolina

This essay examines Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto” (1837), a short story acknowledged as the first fictional work by an African American. Through its representation of physical and psychological effects, Séjour’s story, a narrative of slavery in Saint-Domingue, also inaugurated the literary delineation of slavery’s submission-rebellion binary. The enslaved raconteur in “The Mulatto” voices protest and appeals to social consciousness and sympathy, anticipating the embedded narrators in works of later writers throughout the Plantation Americas.

Sections:

• Introduction
• Liberated Narrative Voice
• Restricted Space
• Clotel’s Rebellion
• Local Color
• Conclusion & Notes
• Recommended Resources
• “The Mulatto”

Introduction

A little-known story first translated into English in 1995 by Philip Barnard for The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, “Le Mulâtre” (“The Mulatto”) by Victor Séjour (1817-1874), a New Orleans free man of color, was initially published in the March 1837 issue of Cyrille Bisette’s Parisian abolitionist journal La Revue des Colonies. La Revue was a monthly periodical of “Colonial Politics, Administration, Justice, Education and Customs” owned and sponsored by a “society of men of color.” A recent immigrant to Paris, Séjour was in an amenable environment among kindred spirits who shared his sentiments about slavery.

…Although little known in its era, “The Mulatto” presents the binary of submission and rebellion that became a motif in U.S. based slave narratives and novelized autobiographies treating racialized sexual harassment and/or exploitation of mulattas such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl, antislavery novels such as William Wells Brown’s Clotel or; The President’s Daughter and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, and even late nineteenth-century southern local color stories with embedded former slave storytellers, such as Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s Uncle Julius. In exposing the brutality of the slave system, such as the impact of miscegenation on persons of mixed race; the sexual violation of enslaved persons; and the physical and psychological brutalities of slavery—particularly the devastating effects on family life of whites as well as on blacks—“The Mulatto” deploys strategies for antislavery protest writing that will appear in antebellum slave narratives and anti-slavery novels and in postbellum fiction about slavery…

Read the entire article here.