Mixed Race Studies

The Racially-Mixed People of the Ramapos: Undoing the Jackson White Legends

American Anthropologist
Volume 74, Number 5 (October 1972)
pages 1276-1285
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1972.74.5.02a00190

Daniel Collins
North Carolina State University

A review of the literature fails to validate the Jackson White legends which traditionally have accounted for the presence of a racially mixed collectivity in the Ramapo Mountain area. Extant oral traditions supporting the least documented and most pejorative aspects of the legends serve to maintain isolation and threaten the continuation of the Ramapo Mountain community of racially mixed people.

AMONG LOCAL PEOPLE of the Ramapo Valley, which crosses the New York–New Jersey border at Suffern, New York, the term “Jackson White” denotes a group of mixed breed persons who are held to have descended from the amalgamated issue of renegades, outlaws, and whores of various colors who at various times throughout the eighteenth century sought the sanctuary of the Ramapo Mountains. The name “Jackson White” connotes a racial anomaly spawned by inbreeding and intermarriage, born into ignorance and degeneracy, and condemned to poverty, feeblemindedness, and suspicion.

The difficulty of distinguishing between legend and history has hampered the establishment of a settled account of the racially mixed people of the Ramapo Mountains. They have been defined by one state agency as “a race of people of mixed Negro, Indian, and White blood inhabiting the Ramapo Mountains in the Northern part of New Jersey and extending over the border into the adjoining section of New York State” (Vineland Training School 1911:1). That a people known as “Jackson Whites” inhabit the rugged Appalachian foothills called the Ramapo Mountains is true; whether or not they constitute a “race of people” and what the historical components of that people are until most recently have been open questions.

There have been three clusters of people referred to as “Jackson Whites” in the valley. In the northern portion “Jackson Whites” have been located around Sloatsburg, Ladentown, and Haverstraw, New York. The other two clusters are centered in the southern portion at Ringwood and Stag Hill (Mahwah) New Jersey.

The physical characteristics of the racially-mixed people are varied as would be expected. Hair textures are both kinky and straight. Skin pigmentations range from brown through red-brown, tan (called “coffee” locally), white, and albino. Some have facial characteristics which appear to be distinctly Indian, and others seem more Caucasian or Negro in their conformation…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed messages: ‘mixed race’ representations in film

Concordia University
August 2004
124 pages

Naomi Angel

The growing interest in issues pertaining to mixed race identities and communities, as well as a surge in films with mixed race characters has prompted this examination of representations of mixed race characters in film from the 1950s to the present. The study consists of an analysis of selected films, including Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Jungle Fever, Dr. No, Showboat and Rabbit Proof Fence, and situates this analysis within a historical framework based on the particular context in which each film was set and/or made.

The value in studying ‘mixed race’ representations in film lies in the reflection it provides of significant moments in ‘mixed race’ histories, and in the portrayal of cultural imaginings of people of ‘mixed race.’ By examining these representations, this thesis traces the development of ‘mixed race’ terminology, interrogates the history of anti-miscegenation law in the United States, and explores the sociological and commonsense views of ‘mixed race’ maladjustment in the early 1900s.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Neither White Nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction

New York University Press
1978
280 pages
ISBN-10: 0814709966; ISBN-13: 978-0814709962
9 x 6 x 1 inches

This book is out of print.

Judith R. Berzon

The mulatto character has captured the imagination of American novelist in every period of our literature.  For American writers, the mulatto has long signified a “marginal man,” caught between two cultures and between the boundaries of the American caste system. As such, the mulatto’s biological and psychological responses to his status—attraction and repulsion to both the white an non-white castes—have frequently been fictionalized.

Neither White Nor Black is the first comprehensive study of the mulatto character in American fiction.  It is interdisciplinary in approach, drawing from literature, history, sociology, psychology and biology, and assessing the influence of racist ideology, social mythology and historical reality upon the portrayal of the mulatto character.  Dr. Berzon examines how the self-concepts of mixed-blood characters are affected by black-white mythology and explores the roles mulattoes have played in American culture.  Among the 19th an 20th-century black and white authors examined here are Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren and John A. Williams.

In Part I of the book, Dr. Berzon provides an introduction to the historical, sociological and scientific backgrounds of the fiction; an overview of the novels; and a discussion of the most prevalent sterotype—“the tragic mulatto.”  Part II defines and illustrates the forms of adjustment to marginality.  Each chapter is organized around a specific mode of adjustment—passing for white, becoming a member of the black bourgeosie, working as leader of his/her race, and failing to achieve identification with either the white or black group.  In the Postscript, Dr. Berzon examines three novels of the 1970s by important black authors—John A. Williams, Ernest J. Gaines, and John Oliver Killens.  Her study is enriched by the recently published but crucial historical scholarship such as Roll, Jordan Roll by Eguene Genovese, White Over Black by Winthrop Jordan, an The Black Image in the White Mind by George Fredrickson, as well as the earlier work by Addison Gayle Jr., The Black Aesthetic.

In Neither White Nor Black, Dr. Berzon reveals the recurring themes in the portrayal of the mulatto character throughout several periods of the 19th and 20th-century American history.  Central to the portrayal of the mulatto during all these periods is the quest for identity, and Dr. Berzon, through her illuminating analysis, provides her readers, whether students of Black studies, American studies, Southern history, literature, or intellectual history, with an essential understanding of that quest and of the role of the mulatto in American society.

Dorothy Roberts – Fatal Invention

The Tavis Smiley Show
PRI: Public Radio International
2011-07-08

Tavis Smiley, Host

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Professor and legal scholar Dorothy Roberts explores the effects of race-based science in her new book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. It’s the first text of its kind to document the development of racial science and biotechnology based on genetics and to map its implications for equality in America.

The Biggest Lie About Race? That It’s Real

The Root
2011-07-26

Jenée Desmond-Harris, Contributing Editor

Dorothy Roberts says race is a social and political construct, and she won’t rest until we know it.

There’s a reason we’ll never come to a consensus on the most accurate racial classifications for Barack Obama or Tiger Woods. There’s a reason questions about ethnicity on the census and college applications feel impossible to an increasing number of Americans. There’s a reason you can be black in the United States, colored in South Africa and something else entirely in Brazil.

According to Dorothy Roberts, author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century, it’s because, despite centuries of efforts to treat race as if it’s a biological category, it is no more than social construction—created to oppress people—that changes with place, time and perspective.

The Root talked to Roberts about the profit that’s behind the re-emergence of myths about race, the impact for African Americans and health, and how we can continue to talk about it, minus the long-standing lies.

The Root: Fatal Invention is an attempt to correct major misunderstandings and myths about race. Explain what race is and what it isn’t.

Dorothy Roberts: I can say very definitively that race is an invented political system; it is not a natural biological condition of human beings. The human species is a single race. It is not biologically divided up into distinguishable races…

Read the entire article here.

Mestizaje in Ibero-America

University of Arizona Press
1995
378 pages
6.0 x 9.0
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8165-1219-5

Claudio Esteva-Fabregat
El Colegio de Jalisco

Translated by John Wheat

One of the most remarkable results of the arrival of Europeans in the New World may often be taken for granted: the emergence of the mestizo component in Latin American societies. The racial mixing that occurred in the Hispanic New World is the subject of this important study, which draws on a wide variety of historical, ethnographic, demographic, and biological sources to analyze processes of intermarriage, assimilation, and acculturation that continue in Latin America to the present day. Mestizaje in Ibero-America sheds new light on miscegenation and acculturation: their different levels and proportions in particular periods and in rural and urban areas, and the role of Spanish, Indian, and African women in the historical process of biological fusion. Although racial and cultural mixing usually coincided, Esteva observes that mestizos were often assimilated into Indian or Spanish society during the early colonial period and that acculturation without miscegenation sometimes occurred. He also shows that, contrary to the belief that “pure” Spanish blood was diluted in the New World, racial mixing and acculturation already existed in Iberia, facilitating its occurrence in America.

Blood Quantum Land Laws and the Race versus Political Identity Dilemma

California Law Review
Volume 96 (2008)
pages 801-838

Rose Cuison Villazor, Associate Professor of Law
Hofstra University

Modern equal protection doctrine treats laws that make distinctions on the basis of indigeneity defined on blood quantum terms along a racial versus political paradigm. This dichotomy may be traced to Morton v. Mancari and, more recently, to Rice v. Cayetano. In Mancari, the Supreme Court held that laws that privilege members of American Indian tribes do not constitute racial discrimination because the preferences have a political purpose – to further the right of self-government of federally recognized American Indian tribes. Rice crystallized the juxtaposition of the racial from the political nature of indigeneity by invalidating a law that privileged Native Hawaiians. That law, according to the Court, used an ancestral blood requirement to construct a racial category and a racial purpose as opposed to the legally permissible political purpose of promoting the right of self-government of American Indian tribes.

Close analysis of the dichotomy between the constitutive notion of indigenous blood as either racial or political has largely escaped scholarship. An analysis deconstructing their juxtaposition is sorely needed. As recent challenges to blood quantum laws show, there remain unanswered questions about the extent to which the racialized (and thus invalid) Native Hawaiian-only voting law impact other blood quantum laws. Among the laws implicated by the dichotomy between the racial and political meaning of indigeneity are land ownership laws that privilege indigenous peoples who are not federally recognized tribes. Specifically, in some jurisdictions in the United States, including Hawaii, Alaska, and the U.S. territories, only indigenous peoples may purchase or possess property. Perhaps more problematically, these property laws define indigeneity on the basis of blood quantum. Under the contemporary race versus political meaning of blood quantum, these laws arguably violate equal protection principles because they do not fit the current framing of what constitutes political indigeneity.

Using these laws, what I collectively refer to as blood quantum land laws, as frames of reference, this Essay interrogates and criticizes the juxtaposition of the racial and political meaning of indigeneity. Specifically, the Essay examines the legal construction of political indigeneity and demonstrates how its narrowed construction would undermine these blood quantum land laws that were enacted to reverse the effects of colonialism. Consequently, this Essay calls for the liberalization of the binary racial and political paradigm by expanding equal protection law’s interpretation of the meaning of political indigeneity. Toward this end, this Essay provides an initial analysis of how to broaden the political notion of indigeneity, focusing in particular on the relationships among property, indigeneity, and the right to self-determination.

Read the entire article here.

Tribal Rights vs. Racial Justice: Was the Cherokee Nation’s expulsion of black Freedmen an act of tribal sovereignty or of racial discrimination?

The New York Times
Room for Debate
2011-09-15

Kevin Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Matthew L. M. Fletcher, Professor of Law
Michigan State University

Cara Cowan-Watts, Acting Speaker
Cherokee Nation Tribal Council

Rose Cuison Villazor, Associate Professor of Law
Hofstra University

Heather Williams, Cherokee citizen and Freedman Descendent
Cherokee Nation Entertainment Cultural Tourism Department

Carla D. Pratt, Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs
Pennsylvania State University, Dickinson School of Law

Tiya Miles, Professor of History and Chair of the Department of Afro-American and African Studies
University of Michigan

Joanne Barker (Lenape), Associate Professor of American Indian studies
San Francisco State University

Introduction

When the Cherokee were relocated from the South to present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, their black slaves were moved with them. Though an 1866 treaty gave the descendants of the slaves full rights as tribal citizens, regardless of ancestry, the Cherokee Nation has tried to expel them because they lack “Indian blood.”

The battle has been long fought. A recent ruling by the Cherokee Supreme Court upheld the tribe’s right to oust 2,800 Freedmen, as they are known, and cut off their health care, food stipends and other aid in the process.

But federal officials told the tribe that they would not recognize the results of a tribal election later this month if the citizenship of the black members was not restored. Faced with a cutoff of federal aid, a tribal commission this week offered the Freedmen provisional ballots, a half-step denounced by the black members.

Is the effort to expel of people of African descent from Indian tribes an exercise of tribal sovereignty, as tribal leaders claim, or a reversion to Jim Crow, as the Freedmen argue? Kevin Noble Maillard, a professor of law at Syracuse University and a member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, organized this discussion of the issue.

Read the entire debate here.

Record-High 86% Approve of Black-White Marriages

Gallup
2011-09-12

Jeffrey M. Jones

Ninety-six percent of blacks, 84% of whites approve

PRINCETON, NJ—Americans are approaching unanimity in their views of marriages between blacks and whites, with 86% now approving of such unions. Americans’ views on interracial marriage have undergone a major transformation in the past five decades. When Gallup first asked about black-white marriages in 1958, 4% approved. More Americans disapproved than approved until 1983, and approval did not exceed the majority level until 1997….

…The latest results are based on an Aug. 4-7 USA Today/Gallup poll, which included an oversample of blacks…

Read the entire article here. View methodology, full question results, and trend data here.

The Civil War afforded the community of free Negroes an opportunity to show their solidarity with their enslaved brothers in the South. Anti-Confederate feeling was so strong in Gouldtown [in New Jersey] that all the men offered to fight. The community officially informed President Lincoln that it could raise a regiment of colored men burning with a great zeal to help defeat the armies of the slaveholders. When that offer was rejected by the government, the entire community felt rebuffed. Scores of Gouldtown men quietly slipped away from their homes and joined the Union Army as white men.

“America’s Oldest Negro Community,” Ebony, February 1952: 42-46.