Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

recent posts

about

  • Too White to be Regarded as Aborigines: An historical analysis of policies for the protection of Aborigines and the assimilation of Aborigines of mixed descent, and the role of Chief Protectors of Aborigines in the formulation and implementation of those policies, in Western Australia from 1898 to 1940.

    Too White to be Regarded as Aborigines: An historical analysis of policies for the protection of Aborigines and the assimilation of Aborigines of mixed descent, and the role of Chief Protectors of Aborigines in the formulation and implementation of those policies, in Western Australia from 1898 to 1940.

    University of Notre Dame, Australia
    March 2008
    328 pages

    Derrick Tomlinson

    A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame Australia

    For much of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, public policies for Western Australia’s Indigenous peoples were guided by beliefs that they were remnants of a race in terminal decline and that a public duty existed to protect and preserve them. If their extinction was unavoidable, the public duty was to ease their passing. The Aborigines Act 1905 vested the Chief Protector of Aborigines (after 1936 the Commissioner for Native Affairs), with lawful responsibility for the pursuit of that duty. All Aborigines caught by the terms of the Act, in particular Aboriginal children under the age of 16, and after 1936 girls and women under the age of 21, were wards of the Chief Protector and the Act entrusted him with extensive powers for managing their lives. The historical progression of public policies for the protection of Aborigines is analysed in this thesis. Particular attention is paid to developments guided by A.O. Neville, the third Chief Protector of Aborigines and first Commissioner for Native Affairs from 1915 to 1940. In that time, inadequacies in the law and its false assumptions about the destiny of the Aboriginal race were exposed. Those who framed the Aborigines Act 1905 failed to address the possibility that the race might not be extinguished, but might be transformed by interaction with the dominant white community. They did not anticipate a need to manage an emergent, fertile, and anomic half-caste populace, too black for the mainstream white community to accept as equals, but too white to be regarded as Aborigines. In the face of these and other challenges, public policy shifted under Neville’s guidance from protecting the racial integrity of Aborigines by segregating them from contaminating influences of the white community, towards the absorption of Aborigines, in the first instance those of mixed racial descent, by the white population. Critics of the latter policy have condemned it as being directed towards sinister objectives of ‘biological absorption’, ‘constructive miscegenation’, or, at the extreme, ‘genocide’. It is argued in this thesis that public policy in Western Australia was directed towards none of those objectives. Breeding out the colour was never the intention. Public policy progressively after 1915 was guided by an aspiration that Aborigines might be elevated in public estimation to a level where they might be accepted by the white community. A.O. Neville believed that in the longer term inter-racial marriage might even become acceptable and that ultimately ‘coloureds’ might breed out, but not that public programs should be directed towards that purpose.

    Read the entire thesis here.

  • Multiracial Identity and White Supremacy

    Nonetheless, correctly and jointly, these articles recognize that we live in a society dominated and dictated by white supremacy. To understand multiracial Americans, we must place individuals with this identity within this context. Additionally, this collection does what no other has: It includes in this recognition the role that class can and does play when it comes to understanding a multiracial identity and construction.

    Beth Frankel Merenstein, “Book Review: Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity,” Teaching Sociology,Volume 39, Number 2 (2011): 214-216. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0092055X11403292.

  • Mental Conflicts of Eurasian Adolescents

    Mental Conflicts of Eurasian Adolescents

    The Journal of Social Psychology
    Volume 5, Issue 3 (August 1934)
    pages 402-408
    ISSN: 0022-4545 (Print), 1940-1183 (Online)
    DOI: 10.1080/00224545.1934.9921608

    Linden B. Jenkins

    The article presents information on mental conflicts of Eurasian adolescents. In the early colonizing days when only young unmarried men were sent out there seemed to be no expressed attitude toward mixed marriages or concubinage. Eurasians were looked upon as a “natural result” of the conditions under which “empire builders” were forced to live. Mixed marriages then began to be looked upon as contrary to tradition and Eurasians became an “ever-present reminder that taboos have been violated and caste integrity threatened.” These Eurasians are generally so marked physically as to set them off from both parents, and, being excluded from either full-blood group, they constitute a third distinct class. One of the great tragedies to the Eurasion personality is the fact that the struggle to adjust himself to his environment results in the capitulation of his “ego.” The “inferior ego” is a most significant problem for the Eurasian adolescent. Hygienic mental adjustment begins at the point where the adolescent is learning the hard lesson that other individuals be- sides himself exist and have rights similar to his own.

    In Malaysia there have been European contacts with the native peoples since the early exploration days of the Portuguese and, as a consequence, there is today a hybrid population of about fifteen thousand “Eurasians” in British Malaya alone. They are of a variety of mixtures—the more common type being Portuguese-Malay. Other mixtures are those of the Dutch, British, and Americans with the Malays, Indians, Javanese, and Chinese.

    In the early colonizing days when only young unmarried men were sent out there seemed to be no expressed attitude toward mixed marriages or concubinage. Eurasians were looked upon as a “natural result” of the conditions under which “empire builders” were forced to live.  At a much…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Notes on the state of Virginia: Africans, Indians and the paradox of racial integrity

    Notes on the state of Virginia: Africans, Indians and the paradox of racial integrity

    Union Institute and University
    June 2005
    277 pages
    AAT 3196614
    Publication Number: AAT 3196614
    ISBN: 9780542425899

    Arica L. Coleman, Assistant Professor of Black American Studies
    Unverisity of Delaware

    Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Arts and Sciences a Concentration in African American – Native American Relations at the Union Institute and University, Cincinnati, Ohio

    W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous statement, ‘The problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the color line,’ invokes images of the century’s racial antagonisms between Blacks and whites. However, racial antagonism in Virginia also occurred between African Americans and Amerindians, as the question regarding who was an Indian and who was a Negro became paramount to Amerindian survival. Central to this problem was the enforcement of a law the Virginia General Assembly passed on March 20, 1924, entitled ‘An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity.’ This legislation, the first such law to be passed in the United States, was the culmination of Virginia’s three hundred year campaign to insure the ‘purity’ of the white race. Racial purity, in early twentieth-century Virginia, was defined by the absence of African ancestry. Therefore, one could be of Indian-white admixture and remain racially pure. But an Indian-Black admixture, even one drop of black ‘blood,’ and one was transformed from pure to impure, and in jeopardy of being ethnically reclassified. By denying the historical relationship between African and Indian peoples in the Commonwealth, this paradox informed the state recognition process and helped many to successfully maintain their aboriginal status. However, the problem of the color line continues in the twenty-first century because racial integrity remains the dividing factor in African-Indian relations. The following discourse examines the changing state of African-Indian relations in Virginia from the Colonial period to the present. Chapter 1 provides a historical overview of the United States racial formation project in relation to Africans and Indians; chapter 2 examines Thomas Jefferson’s racial theories concerning African-Indian admixture, racial identity, and their influence on Virginia’s twentieth-century racial purity campaign; chapter 3 examines the historical relationship between African and Indians by tracing the Indian presence in the slave and free ‘colored’ populations of colonial and antebellum Virginia; chapter 4 examines the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, its impact on African-Indian relations, and the debate it provoked among such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey; chapter 5 provides a critical analysis of twentieth-century anthropological advocates Frank Speck and Helen Rountree, their activism on behalf of the Virginia Tribes, and the ways their advocacy contributed to the racial integrity cause; chapter 6 is a case study which examines Central Point, Virginia, the home of Richard and Mildred Loving (Loving v Virginia), to interrogate race and self identity, namely the self identity of Mildred Loving as an Indian woman; the Epilogue examines the contemporary activism of Virginia residents of mixed African-Indian heritage whose alternative historical consciousness defies racial politics and promotes decolonization, reclamation and empowerment.

    Table of Contents

    • Abstract
    • Dedication
    • Acknowledgments
    • Preface
    • Chapters
      • 1. Introduction
      • 2. Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia Revisited
      • 3. The Changing State of African and Indian Relations in Virginia
      • 4. Towards State [Un] Recognition: Native Identity and the One Drop
      • 5. The Present State of Virginia Indians: The Predicament of Of Race and Culture
      • 6. “Tell The Court I Love My [Indian] Wife:” Interrogating Race and Self Identity in Loving v. Virginia
    • Epilogue – Coming Together: Decolonization and Empowerment, Reclaiming Ourselves
    • Appendices
      • A. An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity
      • B. Loving Marriage license
      • C. Weyanoke Holiday Card
      • Works Cited

    Purchase the dissertation here.

  • Constructing and Contesting Color Lines: Tidewater Native Peoples and Indianness in Jim Crow Virginia

    Constructing and Contesting Color Lines: Tidewater Native Peoples and Indianness in Jim Crow Virginia

    George Washington University
    2009-01-31
    392 pages

    Laura Janet Feller

    A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements  for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

    Indian peoples in the United States have faced many challenges to their group and individual identities as Native Americans over centuries of cultural exchange, demographic change, violence, and dispossession. For Native Americans in the South those challenges have arisen in the context of the idea of “race” as a two-part black-white social, cultural, and political system. This dissertation explores how groups and individuals in tidewater Virginia created, re-created, claimed, re-claimed, retained and maintained identities as Indians after the Civil War and into the 1950s, weathering decades of the ever-stranger career of Jim Crow. They did this in the face of varied pressures from white Virginians who devoted enormous political and social effort to the construction of race as a simple binary division between black and white people.

    In the era after the Civil War, tidewater Indians coped by creating new tribal organizations, churches, and schools, presenting theatrical productions that used pan-Indian symbols, and maintaining separations from their African American neighbors. To some extent, they acquiesced in whites’ notions about the “inferior” racialized status of African Americans. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tidewater Virginia, while contending with, and sometimes adapting, popular ideas about “race” and “blood purity,” organized tidewater Virginia Indians also drew from a sense of their shared histories as descendants of the Algonquian Powhatan groups, and from pan-Indian imagery. This project explores how popular ideas about “race” shaped their world and their efforts to position themselves as red rather than black or white, while whites worked to construct “race” along a black-white “color line.”

    Table of Contents

    • Acknowledgements
    • Abstract of Dissertation
    • Table of Contents
    • List of Tables
    • Introduction
    • Chapter One: Not Black and Not White: Contexts for Constructing Native Identities in the South from Slavery to the 1920s
    • Chapter Two: Making the 1924 “Racial Integrity” Law: Defining Whiteness, Blackness, and Redness in a Modernizing, Bureaucratizing State
    • Chapter Three: Constructing Native Identities in Tidewater Virginia between 1865 and 1930: Reservations, Organizations, and Public Ceremonies
    • Chapter Four: “Conjuring:” Ethnologists and “Salvage” Ethnography among Tidewater Native American Peoples
    • Chapter Five: In the Aftermath of the “Racial Integrity” Law
    • Conclusion
    • Bibliography

    Introduction

    The challenge is not only to recognize the fluidity of race, but to find ways of narrating events, social movement, and the trajectory of individual lives in all their integrity along the convoluted path of an ever-shifting racial reality.

    Matthew Frye Jacobson

    One narrative that illuminates the “ever-shifting racial reality” in America is the story of how individuals and communities in tidewater Virginia created, recreated, and publicly claimed and re-claimed Native American identities after the Civil War and into the 1950s, weathering decades of the ever-stranger career of Jim Crow. They did this in the face of varied pressures from white Virginians who devoted enormous political and social effort to the construction of race in Virginia as a black-white binary system. A 1924 Virginia “miscegenation” law, an “Act to Preserve Racial Integrity,” exemplifies those efforts. That law demonstrated how racialized justifications for segregation could be joined to national eugenic debates of the 1920s. It also punctuated decades of efforts by white individuals to deny that anyone in Virginia was “really” Indian, based upon the notion that all Virginians who said they were Indian were at best racially “mixed” and had some white or African “blood.”

    Thus, in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Virginia, the popular “one drop” idea of what makes one an African American came together with ideas about “blood quantum” and “purity” of racialized “blood,” at a time when tidewater Native people were constructing, re-constructing, and maintaining identities as Indians in the aftermath of emancipation and in the era of Jim Crow. While sometimes contending with, and sometimes adapting for their own purposes, popular ideas about “blood” purity and racialized identities, organized tidewater Virginia Indians also drew from a sense of their shared, localized histories as descendants of the Algonquian Powhatan groups, and from pan-Indian symbols. This project explores how popular ideas about “race” pervaded their efforts, even as they worked to position themselves as “red” rather than black or white, while whites worked to construct of “race” along a black-white “color line.”

    The organized tidewater Indian groups persisted in their fight for acceptance oftheir Indian identities despite their lack of distinctive languages and the fact that for more than a century they had been perceived by outsiders as having lost most of the material culture that many whites regarded as markers of “real” Indians. Organized tidewater Natives’ campaigns, institutions, and representations of Indian identity illuminate a part of the story of the construction of “race” in America, but also some of the complications raised by questions about how “ethnic” groups form and persist in the United States. How can we best talk about the histories of “race” and ethnicity in America? How can a shared sense of a common history contribute to construction of ethnic or racialized boundaries, compared to other factors such as a shared land base, parentage, or language? How is it that for Native Americans, whites so often have assumed and even imposed the notion that the only valid Native tradition is one that, if not totally static, has a documentable track stretching “unbroken” back through many generations?

    For American Indians nationally, part of this dynamic has been that they have dealt with whites in whose eyes Indians were often both racialized and ethnicized. For tidewater organized Native groups in the period of this study, it seems that their foes wanted them categorized primarily as “racial” groups, and that Virginia Indians fought back on grounds and with weapons that to a large extent reflected the racialized, segregated world in which they lived.

    The 1924 law on “racial integrity” was part of a long history of racial legislation in Virginia and throughout the United States designed to create racialized lines in a world where such lines had been blurred since the age of European colonization began. “Miscegenation” law, for example, was solidly entrenched in the English colonies then in the United States, until the Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia. The first ban on “interracial” marriage in the English North American colonies was Maryland’s in 1664. Virginia’s first “miscegenation” law dated from 1691, and it explicitly included Native Americans among those forbidden to marry white individuals. Before 1924, Virginia laws specified what made someone black rather than defining whiteness. To define “blackness” as a legal matter, Virginia law before 1924 typically expressed and codified racialized identities in terms of numbers of ancestors, or fractions of ancestry. Virginia’s 1924 “racial integrity” law, though, defined legal “whiteness” rather than “blackness.” In doing so, this statute in effect made a matter of explicit law, for the first time in Virginia, the concept of a “one drop rule” for what makes someone legally African American. The sole exception to the whiteness definition in the 1924 law was that a Virginian could be legally white if he or she had no more than “one-sixteenth” Indian “blood” and his or her ancestors were otherwise “white.”

    This 1924 statute stands at several intersections in the history of racialist thinking and racism in America. In it, Jim Crow meets “scientific racism” and eugenic thought. As a “miscegenation” law, the statute also illustrates some of the ways in which racialized identities are entwined with conflicts about sexuality. It evidences how constructions of social and cultural identities could connect with, or be contested by, state powers and legal discourses, within the context of the modernizing tendencies of post-World War I governmental policies and programs…

    …Starting with 1924 as a focal point, this project looks at Native and “mixed” Native identities as claimed and recorded before and after passage of Virginia’s “Racial Integrity” law. Moving backward into the post-Civil War era and then forward from 1924 into the 1950s, this study explores the impact of Virginia’s 1924 “miscegenation” law on individuals and communities who claimed Native American identities. The 1924 law was a climax of sorts in decades of official and social efforts by whites to classify Virginia Indians variously as “persons of color,” “mulattoes,” or African Americans. Native peoples’ reservation lands in Virginia disappeared, except for two that survive to this day. The Mattaponi and Pamunkey people of those two reservations had some advantages in that they had and have a land base, and along with that land they also have community structures recognized by whites. Even the reservation peoples, though, faced white reluctance to concede the continuing existence of red, rather than black or white, identities in Virginia. Non-reservation tidewater Native people had even trickier choices to make about when and how they would identify themselves publicly, in official situations and documents, as Indians…

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • Crossing Over: Racial Passing and Racial Uplift in Nella Larsen’s Fiction

    Crossing Over: Racial Passing and Racial Uplift in Nella Larsen’s Fiction

    University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee
    2009
    34 pages

    Karly D. Beavers

    Senior Honors Thesis in American Studies

    Fundamental to the American myth is a juxtaposition of the “civilized” or “superior” majority with the “inferior” other. By classifying African Americans as inherently different from and inferior to whites, the white majority justified the enslavement and, later, the political and social oppression of black Americans. Our concept of race relies heavily on the visible differences between whites and African Americans. Interracial couples posed a threat to the socially constructed color line almost immediately, producing offspring who did not fit under the simple label of black or white. Although legally considered African American because of their “Negro blood,” some individuals found it possible to pass for white. Passing began long before emancipation, but it became a prevalent topic in African American fiction during the early twentieth century. Nella Larsen in particular explores the idea of passing in her two novels Quicksand and Passing. As her main female protagonists search for their true identity within a racist and patriarchal society, they struggle with DuBois’s idea of “double consciousness.” Within the African American community during the early twentieth century, middle class blacks sought to uplift the race through upholding and exemplifying white middle class values. Larsen’s characters are thus trapped in a complicated system that rails against social inequality while it espouses the oppressive structures of the dominant white culture. From various newspaper articles and book reviews, one sees a varied reaction to passing within the African American community. For men, racial passing rendered them more effeminate in the eyes of black Americans. Larsen focuses more on the experiences of black women, who found themselves forced into an oppressive domestic role in an effort to uplift the race and reaffirm the masculinity of black men.

    An attractive young woman sits on a train destined for New York. Leaving behind the remnants of her oppressive past, she begins to make plans for the future—a bright future bursting with opportunity and adventure. Pain, isolation, shame—all fade into the distance. Surely New York will be the answer. Surely the happiness that has eluded her for so long awaits her there. She. Helga Crane, will no longer be the illegitimate daughter of a Danish runaway and an African American gambler. She will simply become another young woman trying to make a life for herself in the city. A remark from her new employer interrupts Helga’s pleasant thoughts. “How is it that a nice girl like you can rush off on a wild goose chase like this at a moment’s notice. I should think your people’d object, or’d make inquiries, or something.’ In an instant. Helga’s excitement gives way to embarrassment. After the young woman admits to a less than ideal parentage, her employer replies coldly. “I wouldn’t mention that my people are white, if I were you. Colored people won’t understand it. and after all it’s your own business.”

    So begins Helga Crane’s journey to New York in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. Published in 1928. Larsen’s debut novel tells the story of a mixed race woman searching for a stable identity within a racist and unstable society. The daughter of a white woman and a black man. Helga constantly reminds herself and others of the threat lurking beneath America’s strict racial code. When her employer discovers Helga’s heritage, Larsen writes. “The woman felt that the story, dealing as it did with race intermingling and possibly adultery, was beyond definite discussion. For among black people, as among white people, it is tacitly understood that these things are not mentioned—and therefore they do not exist.” Helga is thus robbed of her true identity. Because she threatens the strict “color line” that guides all of American life, the mixed race Helga—the real Helga—cannot exist. According to Martha J. Cutter. “Helga Crane attempts to use ‘passing’ as a way of finding a unitary sense of identity—a sense of identity structured around one role, a role that somehow corresponds to her ‘essential self.’” Although Helga’s dark skin prevents her from passing for white, she in a sense passes for black by denying, or at least omitting, her white ancestry. Instead, she finds solace in a number of different identities. In Cutter’s words, she passes as “an exotic Other, a committed teacher, an art object, a devout Christian, a proponent of racial uplift, [and] a dutiful mother.”…

    Read the entire thesis here.

  • Race and Making America in Brazil: How Brazilian Return Migrants Negotiate Race in the US and Brazil

    Race and Making America in Brazil: How Brazilian Return Migrants Negotiate Race in the US and Brazil

    University of Michigan
    2011
    314 pages

    Tiffany Denise Joseph

    Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Sociology) in The University of Michigan

    This dissertation explores how US immigration influenced the racial conceptions of Brazilian returnees, individuals who immigrated to the US and subsequently returned to Brazil. Since Brazil was once regarded as a multi-racial utopia and represents a very distinct social environment when compared to the US, the dissertation objective was to learn how returnees adapted to the US racial system and if they “brought back” US racial ideals to Brazil upon returning. I conducted semi-structured retrospective interviews with 49 Brazilian returnees in Governador Valadares, Brazil, the country‘s largest immigrant-sending city to the US to explore how these individuals perceived and navigated racial classification and relations in Brazil and the US before, during, and after the US migration. To more effectively isolate the influence of immigration for returnees, I also interviewed a comparison group of 24 non-migrants.

    Findings suggest that returnees relied on a transnational racial optic to navigate the US racial system as immigrants and to readapt to the Brazilian racial system after returning to Brazil. I use the term “transnational racial optic” to demonstrate how migration transformed returnees‘ observations, interpretations, and understandings of race in Brazil and the US. Returnees felt the US racial system was characterized by more rigid racial classification, overt forms of racism, and pervasive interracial social and residential segregation compared to Brazil. The US migration also influenced returnees‘ perceptions of racial stratification in both societies, particularly with regard to the socio-economic positions and behaviors of US and Brazilian blacks.

    After the US migration, most returnees were not conscious of how their racial classifications or perceptions changed, although the results indicate shifts in their racial and skin tone classifications over the course of the migration. Furthermore, returnees felt that they did not remit US racial ideals to Brazil after returning. While both returnees and non-migrants thought racism existed in Brazil, returnees, after having lived in the US, were more cognizant of the structural manifestations of racism than non-migrants. This suggests that returnees‘ observations of race in the US influenced their perceptions of race in Brazil post-migration, which is indicative of the transnational racial optic.

    Table of Contents

    • Dedication
    • Acknowledgements
    • List of Figures
    • List of Tables
    • List of Appendices
    • Abstract
    • Chapter 1 Introduction
    • Chapter 2 Background and Theoretical Framework
    • Chapter 3 Methodology
    • Chapter 4 Examining Brazilian Return Migrants‘ Personal Conceptions about Race in the United States
    • Chapter 5 Examining Brazilian Return Migrants‘ Societal Conceptions about Race in the US
    • Chapter 6 The Return: Brazilian Return Migrants‘ Post-Migration Conceptions of Racial Classification in Brazil
    • Chapter 7 Contemporary Life in GV: Conceptions of Race among Return Migrants and Non-Migrants
    • Chapter 8 Conclusion
    • Appendices
    • Bibliography

    List of Figures

    • Figure 1: Returnees‘ Race in Brazil Pre-Migration (Brazil Census)
    • Figure 2: Returnees‘ Race in US (US Census)
    • Figure 3: Returnees‘ Average Skin Tone Classifications during Migration Process
    • Figure 4: Non-Migrants‘ Racial Classifications (Brazil Census)
    • Figure 5: Returnees’ Racial Classifications at Time of Interview
    • Figure 6: Coding Schema for Returnees’ and Non-Migrants’ Brazilian Racial Conceptions
    • Figure 7: Coding Schema of Returnees‘ US Racial Conceptions

    List of Tables

    • Table 1: Demographics of Return and Non-Migrants
    • Table 2: Immigration Demographics for Return Migrants
    • Table 3: Topics in Interview Protocols
    • Table 4: How Participants Racially Classified Interviewer
    • Table 5: Importance of Race before Immigrating
    • Table 6: Importance of Race in US
    • Table 7: Importance of Race before Immigrating vs US
    • Table 8: Brazilian Racial Classifications
    • Table 9: Open-Ended Racial Classifications in US
    • Table 10: Self-Ascribed vs. External Racial Classification in US
    • Table 11: Factors Influencing Open-Ended Racial Classification
    • Table 12: Experiences of Discrimination by Racial Classification
    • Table 13: Defining Race- Return Migrants vs Non-Migrants
    • Table 14: Factors Influencing Return Migrants and Non-Migrants
    • Table 15: Returnees’ Skin Tone Classifications at Each Retrospective Migration Stage
    • Table 16: Racial Classification in the US vs Racial Classification
    • Table 17: Pre-Migration Racial Classification vs Racial Classification
    • Table 18: Self-Ascribed Racial Classification-Return Migrants vs. Non-Migrants
    • Table 19: Importance of Classifications
    • Table 20: Return Migrants‘ Skin Tone Classifications across Racial Categories
    • Table 21: Returnees’ Perceptions of Racial Democracy
    • Table 22: Manifestations of Racism
    • Table 23: Return Migrants’ Demographic Info (Returnees 1-24)
    • Table 24: Return Migrants’ Demographic Info (Returnees 25-49)
    • Table 25: Non-Migrants‘ Demographic Info

    List of Appendices

    • Appendix 1 Demographic Information
    • Appendix 2 Coding Schema
    • Appendix 3 Interview Protocol for Return Migrants-English Version
    • Appendix 4 Interview Protocol for Non-Migrants-English Version
    • Appendix 5 Interview Protocol for Return Migrants-Portuguese Version
    • Appendix 6 Interview Protocol for Non-Migrants- Portuguese Version

    Chapter 1: Introduction

    I filled it out [Census form]. Yes, they asked [for my racial classification] and I put white because I wasn‘t Hispanic or Latino. [The form] had Hispanic, white, black, there wasn‘t an option for me specifically. Even though in Brazil, I considered myself white, there [in the US] for them [the Americans] I am not white because white there is blue eyes and blonde hair.

    –Renata, white woman, 46 years, New York

    Because when they [Americans] look at you, they know, they know that you‘re not American. (quirks) I don‘t know how they know, but…if you speak English [with a foreign-sounding accent] like in America, they know you are not American. I don‘t know why.

    -Amanda, white woman, 33 years, Massachusetts

    Increasing immigration to the United States in the last fifty years has had a significant impact on the population’s racial and ethnic diversity. Although the US historically has been predominantly white and black, the 2000 US Census revealed a population that has become increasingly racially nonwhite since the majority of recent immigrants have come from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean.2 While these immigrants bring with them hopes for a brighter future, they also come with conceptions of race from their countries of origin, which are not easily shed and may influence their perceptions of and incorporation into US society. In the US, race is a primary mode of social organization and the social construction of race has created widespread social inequality between whites and people of color since the nation’s inception (Feagin 2000; Omi and Winant 1994). Feagin (2000) argues that the black-white racial binary is the foundation of US race relations and is the ruler by which other racial and immigrant groups are measured. Therefore, immigrants who come to the US enter a racially polarized social context.

    The quotes at the beginning of this chapter provide recollections of how Brazilian return migrants, or Brazilians who immigrated to the US and subsequently returned to Brazil, negotiated race while living in the US as immigrants.3 The ideas captured in Renata and Amanda’s quotes suggest a reconfiguration in the US of self-ascribed racial classification that differed from their racial self-classifications in Brazil, as well as recognition of how “Americans” identify foreign others.

    While race is a strong structuring factor for US residents, race and racial classification in immigrants’ countries of origin may be very different from those in the US, which means immigrants must learn how to negotiate race in their new context. According to Landale and Oropesa (2002):

    “Not only must migrants adapt to change in their status from majority group member to minority group member; they also face pressure to redefine themselves in terms of the black-white dichotomy that delineates race relations in the U.S.” (pg. 234).

    Such a process of redefinition may be challenging for immigrants who never before have classified themselves using rigid racial terms, particularly for those who come from Latin America, which has a history of more socially-accepted racial mixing that has resulted in populations with a diverse range of physical racial markers, such as skin tone and hair texture (Landale and Oropesa 2002; Roth 2006; Duany 2002; Itzigsohn et. al 2005). Brazil, once considered a racial utopia compared to the US because of its perceived harmonic interracial relations, is such a country. Whereas one’s ancestry and physical features are generally the basis for classification into a single specific racial group in the US, such characteristics may signify different racial classifications in Brazil and other Latin American countries. Renata’s quote clearly demonstrates how her physical features are considered white in Brazil although she is considered nonwhite in the US. Thus, Renata and other Latin American immigrants come to the US with a different understanding of race and must adjust to existing racial classifications and race relations upon arrival. As Latinos are currently the largest ethno-racial minority in the US and do not easily fit into the historical black-white racial binary, it is important to explore how immigrants from Latin American countries, more specifically Brazil, adapt to race in the US.

    Brazil is the Latin American country of interest in this study for three reasons. First, there have been various comparative studies of race in the United States and Brazil that have explored the unique racial characteristics of these countries (Degler 1986; Marx 1998; Telles 2004; Bailey 2009). Brazil and the US are two of the largest countries in the Americas and share a history of European colonization, Indigenous conquest, and African enslavement. Yet, the social construction of race has unfolded very differently in each context, motivating studies that explored how the racist US differed from Brazil’s multi-racial paradise.4 Second, as the largest slave-holding societies in the Americas, Brazil and the US have large African-descended populations. The majority of African slaves imported to the Americas were sent to Brazil. Even after the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, African slaves were still illegally imported to Brazil, which was last country in the Americas to abolish slavery in 1888. Thus, Brazil’s African-descended population is significantly larger than its US counterpart (Telles 2004). In fact, it has been argued that Brazil has the world’s second largest-African descended population after Africa (Telles 2004; Martes 2007). Finally, this research is also motivated by the increase in Brazilian immigration to the US in the last thirty years. Brazil’s economic recession in the 1980s with its high unemployment and inflation rates encouraged significant emigration for employment purposes to the US, Canada, and Japan (Goza 1999; Margolis 1994; Takenaka 2000). Since that time, Brazilians have migrated to the US in large numbers, yet there had been very little research examining their experiences until the mid-1990s.

    Given the plethora of comparative race research on Brazil and the US and the growth of Brazilian immigrant communities in the US, a study exploring how Brazilian immigrants come to understand race in the US is warranted. The primary goal of this dissertation is to comparatively explore the social constructions of race in Brazil and the US through the observations, perceptions, and experiences of individuals who have lived in each country for an extended period of time. While other comparative studies have relied on survey and historical data to understand how race and racism “work” on a macro-level in each society, I examine how individuals make sense of and negotiate race in both countries at the personal level. Because Brazilian immigrants are one of the most recent immigrant groups to the US and extensive return migration has been documented among this group, Brazilian return migrants are the ideal group for such a study. As individuals who were racially socialized in Brazil, they entered the US with a different perception of race and encountered a racial system that relied on more rigidly defined racial categories and groups and appeared to be more overtly racist than Brazil.

    Furthermore, upon leaving the US, Brazilian return migrants go home with a different mindset that has been shaped by their experiences abroad. Migration between both countries facilitates comparisons between migrants’ quality of life in Brazil and the US that make it difficult to readapt to life in post-migration Brazil (Margolis 2001). Margolis (2001) argues that “some returnees become people in-between [who] are not entirely satisfied with life in either country” (pg. 243). Thus, if their mindsets are “changed” by living in the US, it is possible that US migration also facilitates a change in these individuals’ racial conceptions in Brazil after the US migration. I define racial conceptions as a set of ideas that help individuals understand how social actors, in this study Brazilian returnees, negotiate race in a particular context. In this study, I operationalize these conceptions in three ways using data from respondents’ experiences of: (1) racial classification, (2) observations, perceptions, and experiences of racism or racial discrimination, and (3) an understanding of how race functions on a societal level. For example, Brazilian return migrants in this study negotiated racial conceptions in the US through: (1) their personal, professional, and miscellaneous interactions with other Brazilians, other immigrants, and native born US citizens, and (2) their “consumption” of US culture through television, music, and newspapers.

    This dissertation examines how exposure to racial systems in the United States and Brazil influences the racial conceptions of Brazilian return migrants in three contexts: (1) in Brazil before the US migration; (2) in the US as immigrants; and (3) in Brazil after the US migration. To comparatively explore race in the US and Brazil via Brazilian return migrants’ racial conceptions, I address two major questions in this study:

    (1) How does immigration to the US change racial conceptions for Brazilian return migrants while they are living in the US and after returning to Brazil?

    (2) Do return migrants “bring back” racial ideals from the US and if so, what impact does extensive US migration have on racial relations in returnees’communities?

    To address these research questions, I rely on data obtained from semi-structured interviews with 49 Brazilian return migrants and 24 non-migrants (Brazilians who never migrated) in Governador Valadares, Brazil, a city of 250,000 residents in the South Central state of Minas Gerais. Governador Valadares (GV) has historically been Brazil’s largest immigrant-sending city to the US. Emigration to the US has so heavily influenced the local economy that the city has been famously nicknamed by Brazilians as “Governador Valadolares,” as in US dollars. About 15 percent of GV residents, also known as Valadarenses, are estimated to be living in the US and nearly 80 percent of Valadarenses have at least one relative residing in the US (CIAAT 2007; Margolis 1998). Additionally, return migration to GV after the US migration has been heavily documented (Marcus 2009; Assis and de Campos 2009; Martes 2008; Siqueira 2008; CIAAT 2007; Siqueira 2006). The prevalence of US migration has created a constant flow of people, money, and culture between GV and the US, so much so that GV and particular US cities with large numbers of migrants from GV are considered transnational social fields or:

    “… set[s] of multiple interlocking networks of social relationships through which ideas, practices, and resources are unequally exchanged, organized, and transformed… [that] connect actors through direct and indirect relations across borders” (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004, 1009).

    Because the majority of migrants from GV intend to return to their native city after the US migration, they maintain social and economic ties while living in the US. Valadarenses generally immigrate to the US to work for two to five years to earn and save as much money as possible for the purpose of purchasing a home and car or starting a business upon returning from the US. This process has been referred to as “Fazer à América,” which translates in English to “making America” (Martes 2008; CIAAT 2007; Siqueira 2006). These migrants hope the US migration will facilitate upward social mobility and access to what they perceive to be a better or more “American” quality of life in GV after migration…

    …Additionally, the exploration of racial conceptions for this subset of individuals who are on the move between the US and Brazil also helps me develop a more nuanced argument about race as a social construction that varies from place to place. This is particularly true for the comparison of the US and Brazil, two countries with very distinct racial histories that are now experiencing shifts in racial discourses due to changing ethnic demographics (US) and the introduction of affirmative action policies (Brazil). The increase in rates of interracial marriage, introduction of an option to classify in more than one racial category on the US census, the dismantling of race-based affirmative action policies in the US and the recent election of Barack Obama as the first black (biracial) president of the United States have spurred debates about whether the US has now become a postracial society. Furthermore, the growth of the Latino population into the country’s largest ethno-racial minority and increased immigration from Latin America have had a significant impact on US demographics.

    At the same time, to address racial inequality in Brazil, some universities and companies have begun to implement racial quotas to increase the representation of Afro-Brazilians in Brazil’s higher education system, which has been very controversial. Although nonwhites constitute nearly half of the Brazilian population, whites constitute about 73 percent of university students (Telles 2004; Stubrin 2005; Bailey 2009). Due to the prevalence of racial mixing in Brazil and many white Brazilians’ acknowledgment of having black racial ancestry, the implementation of affirmative action has made it necessary to racially classify individuals (blacks) in a socially meaningful way to determine who can benefit from race-specific policies. This policy has facilitated discussions about an importation of US racial classification standards (Telles 2004; Araujo 2001; Fry and Maggie 2004; Maio and Santos 2005; Bailey 2009). Because both Brazil and the US are experiencing shifts in racial discourse as they relate to discussions of racial demographics, racial classification, and inequality, some researchers have argued that the US will undergo either a (1) “Latin-Americanization” of race in which existing racial boundaries will become more ambiguous or (2) shift from the traditional black-white racial binary to a black-nonblack binary in which existing racial boundaries will be realigned (Bonilla-Silva 2004; Skidmore 2003; Lee and Bean 2004; Yancey 2003). Other researchers suggest that the US and Brazilian racial classification systems are on “converging paths,” as each country’s racial dynamics seem to be resembling its counterpart (Daniel 2006; Bailey 2009):

    It appears to be the case that racial dynamics in the United States and in Brazil are like two ships passing in the night, one showing signs of movement toward mixed-race framings and the other toward single-race identification (Bailey 2009, 8).

    Thus, it is possible that just as Brazilians are moving back and forth across US and Brazilian borders, that racial ideals in each country are also being exchanged, which highlights the significance of this study in another way. If race in the US is becoming “Latin-Americanized,” it is important to understand how Latin Americans (in this study Brazilians) conceive of race in their countries of origin and in the US if researchers are to understand how the social construction of race in the US may evolve in the future…

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • FBI investigating racist threat in Polk County

    FBI investigating racist threat in Polk County

    Chattanooga Times Free Press
    Chattanooga, Tennessee
    Sunday, 2011-06-26

    Beth Burger

    Ducktown, Tenn.—More than a week after part of a cinderblock was thrown through a trailer window with a threatening racist message attached, an interracial Polk County couple continue to have sleepless nights.

    “I just want to get out of there,” said Ellis Weatherspoon, 45, who lives in Turtletown with his common-law wife, Jennifer, and their 3-year-old son. Weatherspoon, who is black, and Jennifer, 28, who is white, have been together for seven years.

    While the Polk County Sheriff’s Office categorized the crime as a simple vandalism case with no apparent motive, the Chattanooga FBI office now is investigating the incident, according to Sheriff Bill Davis.

    And things have gotten worse for the couple. On Thursday, the couple found their 6-month-old pit bull/German shepherd mix, Gilbert, dead at the trailer, a rope tied around its neck several times and its body propped against its doghouse…

    …Ugly past

    Historically, there were consequences for having an interracial relationship in Tennessee.

    Dating back to the 1800s, Tennessee law forbade whites from cohabitating or marrying people who were more than one-eighth black, said Daniel Sharfstein, an associate law professor at Vanderbilt University.

    A violation was a felony and people could do time in prison, he said. But sometimes mobs took the law into their own hands and lynched the illicit lovers.

    Despite the law, interracial relationships were accepted in some rural mountain areas throughout the South, said Sharfstein, who is the author of “The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White.”

    “The struggles of everyday life were often more important than something as meaningless as race,” he said. “So when I read about the Weatherspoons, to go out of your way to attack an interracial couple — it’s not just disgraceful, it also goes against a most cherished tradition of life in the mountains where people lived the life they chose to live, free of outside meddling and interference.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Fifteenth Union: A Melungeon Gathering

    Fifteenth Union: A Melungeon Gathering

    Melungeon Heritage Association
    Carolina Connections: Roots and Branches of Mixed Ancestry Communities
    Warren Wilson College
    Swannanoa, North Carolina
    2011-07-14 through 2011-07-16

    MHA is delighted to announce that this year our annual Union will be celebrated at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC, July 14-16, 2011. This will be our first Union in the Carolinas, states of primary significance to the history of mixed ancestry communities across America. Melungeon roots in the Carolinas have been prominent topics of discussion in past Unions, and MHA welcomes the opportunity to celebrate and study our heritage on this historic and beautiful campus. Warren Wilson College is located a few miles from Asheville in a scenic area near the highest mountains in the East. It has historic connections to the Melungeon community of Vardy, which the Union will celebrate.

    We will have speakers on a wide variety of genealogical and historical topics. The program is still being developed, but two distinguished authors have agreed to discuss their new books at the Union. Each book breaks new ground in the literature of mixed ancestry in the United States.

    The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin, 2011) tells three stories that will be especially meaningful to MHA readers. Author Daniel J. Sharfstein is an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University. Within a month of publication, his new book was acclaimed in the New York Times as “astonishingly detailed rendering of the variety and complexity of racial experience in an evolving national culture moving from slavery to segregation to civil rights.” This study of the Gibson, Spencer, and Wall families has the potential to change the national conversation about race, and MHA is honored by Mr. Sharfstein’s participation in 15th Union.

    Lisa Alther is an acclaimed author of bestselling fiction whose most recent book was a nonfiction investigation of Melungeon ancestry entitled Kinfolks: Falling off the Family Tree. She returns to fiction with Washed in the Blood, forthcoming this fall from Mercer University Press. Alther’s new novel portrays the early history of the southern Appalachians. It tells the story of several generations of the Martin family, from the arrival of Diego Martin as a hog drover with a Spanish exploring party in the 16th century, describing his descendants’ struggles to survive and gain acceptance down through the early 20th century.  In this new novel, Alther connects Melungeon history to early settlement of the Southeastern US, and thus to the theme of 15th Union…

    For more information, click here.

  • Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree: The Search for My Melungeon Ancestors

    Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree: The Search for My Melungeon Ancestors

    Arcade Publishing
    April 2007
    264 pages
    Hardback ISBN-10: 1559708328; ISBN-13: 9781559708326
    Paperback ISBN-10: 1-55970-876-X; ISBN-13: 978-1-55970-876-0

    Lisa Alther

    Best-selling author Lisa Alther chronicles her search for missing branches of her family tree in this dazzling, hilarious memoir.

    Most of us grow up knowing who we are and where we come from. Lisa Alther’s mother hailed from New York, her father from Virginia, and every day they reenacted the Civil War at home. Then a babysitter with bad teeth told Lisa about the Melungeons: six-fingered child-snatchers who hid in caves. Forgetting about these creepy kidnappers until she had a daughter of her own, Lisa learned they were actually an isolated group of dark-skinned people—often with extra thumbs—living in East Tennessee. But who were they? Descendants of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony, or of shipwrecked Portuguese or Turkish sailors? Or the children of frontiersman, African slaves, and Native Americans? Lisa set out to discover who these mysterious Melungeons really were—and why her grandmother wouldn’t let her visit their Virginia relatives.

    Part sidesplitting travelogue, part how (and how not) to climb your family tree, Kinfolks shimmers with wicked humor, showing just how wacky and wonderful our human family really is.

    INTRODUCTION

    Many People are born believing they know who they are. They’re Irish or Jewish or African-American or whatever. But some of us with culturally or ethnically mixed backgrounds don’t share that enviable luxury.

    My mother was a New Yorker and my father a Virginian, and the Civil War was reenacted daily in our house and in my head. My Tennessee playmates used to insist that Yankees were rude, and my New York cousins insisted that southerners were stupid. I knew I was neither, but I had no idea what I might be instead. Hybrids have no communal templates to guide them in defining themselves.

    In my life since, I’ve often lain awake at night trying to figure out how to fool the members of some clique into believing that I’m one of them. For a long time I lived with one foot in the PTA and the other in Provincetown. I also moved to several different cities, hoping to find a homeland. But each time I discovered that joining one group required denying my allegiances to other groups. In Boston, New York, and Vermont, I pretended not to hear the slurs against the South. And in London and Paris, I remained silent during anti-American rants.

    But I have gradually become grateful for this chronic identity crisis because it has fostered my career. Everything I’ve ever written has been an attempt to work out who I am, not only culturally but also sexually, politically, and spiritually.

    I rationalized my penchant for protective coloration by reviewing what I knew about my hapless ancestors, who were usually in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were Huguenots in France after Catholics declared open season on heretics; English in Ireland when the republicans began torching Anglo-Irish houses; Dutch in the Netherlands during the Spanish invasion; Scots in the Highlands during the Clearances; Native Americans in the path of Manifest Destiny; Union supporters in Confederate Virginia. I concluded that I’d inherited genes that condemned me to a lifetime of being a stranger in some very strange lands.

    Then I met a cousin named Brent Kennedy, who maintained that some of our shared ancestors in the southern Appalachians were Melungeons. The earliest Melungeons were supposedly found living in what would become East Tennessee when the first European settlers arrived. They were olive-skinned and claimed to be Portuguese.

    Conflicting origin stories for the Melungeons abound. They’re said to be descended from Indians who mated with early Spanish explorers, or from the survivors of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony on Roanoke Island, or from Portuguese sailors shipwrecked on the Carolina coast, or from African slaves who escaped into the mountains. Brent himself believed them to have Turkish ancestry. Before the Civil War, some were labeled “free people of color” and were prohibited from voting, attending white schools, marrying white people, or testifying against whites in court. After that war, some were subjected to Jim Crow laws. A friend who worked as a waitress told me she was ordered to wash down the booths with disinfectant after Melungeon customers departed. She also said that her mother warned her as a child never to look at Melungeons because they had the evil eye.

    Growing up, I’d heard that Melungeons lived in caves and trees on cliffs outside our town and had six fingers on each hand. Brent’s showing me the scars from the removal of his extra thumbs launched me on a journey to discover who the historical Melungeons really were and whether my father’s family had, in fact, been closet Melungeons.

    For nearly a decade I read history, visited sites, and interviewed people related to this quest. In school I’d learned that what is now the southeastern United States was an empty wilderness before the establishment of Jamestown in 1607. But my research taught me that it was instead filled with millions of Native Americans. It was also crawling with Spaniards, Portuguese, Frenchmen, Africans, Jews, Moors, Turks, Croatians, and British, among others—all roaming the Southeast for a variety of reasons.

    In their wanderings these (mostly) men sired children with willing or unwilling Native Americans. Although an estimated 80 to 90 percent of Native Americans eventually succumbed to European diseases, some of their ethnically mixed children survived because of immunities inherited from their European and African fathers. They, in turn, had descendants, some of whom found ways to coexist with the encroaching European settlers.

    I assembled plenty of clues about Melungeon origins, but DNA testing finally gave me some answers—and also explained why a sense of belonging has always eluded me. After a series of tests, I learned that I’d been walking around for six decades in a body constructed by DNA originating in Central Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. This in addition to the contributions from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Holland, Germany, and Native America, which I already knew about through conventional genealogical methods.

    For weeks after receiving these results, I wandered around in a daze, humming “We Are the World.” A lifelong suspicion that I fit nowhere turned out not to be just idle paranoia. But once the reality of my panglobal identity sank in, I realized that I’d finally found my long-sought group. It consists of mongrels like myself who know that we belong nowhere—and everywhere. This book chronicles my six-decade evolution from bemused Appalachian misfit to equally bemused citizen of the world…