Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
I am a third-year doctoral student in counseling psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University and I am currently working on a study exploring the experiences of biracial and multiracial women. I am looking for women who are 18 years old or older and of mixed racial heritage to participate in a one hour confidential interview. Please contact me if you interested in participating in my study.
For more information, contact Susan Mao at susanemao@gmail.com.
Training for assimilation: Cecil cook and the ‘half‐caste’ apprentice regulations
Melbourne Studies in Education (Currently known as Critical Studies in Education)
Volume 29, Issue 1 (1987)
pages 128-141
DOI: 10.1080/17508488709556226
Tony Austin
Darwin Institute of Technology
One of the most significant consequences of the colonisation of Aboriginal Australia was a fast growing population of people of mixed Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal descent, known as ‘Half-castes’. As the increase in numbers became pronounced. Half-castes were vilified more vehemently even than other Aborigines. However, popular contempt was tinged with shame that children, fathered by Europeans and so with a mix of White blood, were left to be brought up as ‘savages’ in the bush or on the fringes of settlement. Hence legislation for the protection and control of Aborigines included special provision for Half-castes: they were to be given an improved chance to assimilate to White Australia.
This paper describes one attempt in the Northern Territory during the 1930s to prepare young people for assimilation—an apprenticeship scheme for Half-caste pastoral workers. The scheme is viewed in the context of Commonwealth Government policy for Half-castes and prevailing views about the intellectual capacity of Aborigines and Half-castes.
Social Darwinism and Aboriginal Intelligence
From the earliest days of Commonwealth control of the Northern Territory progressive officials with anthropological interests, like Chief Protectors Herbert Basedow and Baldwin Spencer had included in their policy proposals education and training for Aborigines and especially for Half-castes who were considered to be intellectually superior to other Aborigines. But these proposals were barely acted upon. In addition to general Commonwealth neglect of Aborigines and intermittent military and financial crises, the reason is to be found in Australian views about Aborigines’ intelligence.
Basedow and Spencer, in ascribing intellectual prowess (however limited) to Aborigines, were out of step with anthropological opinion. Late nineteenth century British, American and Australian anthropologists disseminated the belief that the Scale of Nature had become rigid, making progress for certain peoples impossible and so consigning them to a permanent place of inferiority in the struggle for survival. Such theories of evolutionary arrest, coupled with A.R. Wallace’s contention that moral and mental evolution had largely replaced physical evolution made the link between ‘savages’ and the apes, or at best with Neanderthal and Engis humans, conventional anthropological wisdom.
In Australia, ethnocentric Europeans reasoned that cessation of cultural evolution was demonstrated by Aborigines’ lack of recognisable institutions, rulers, morality, religion, parental pride, sense of humour or responsible treatment of the ‘fair sex’. Cultural discontinuity, it was argued, was a clear indication of intellectual inferiority. As [Charles] C. Staniland Wake put it, Aborigines ‘represent the childhood of humanity itself, revealing to us the condition of mankind, if not in primeval times, yet when the original potentialities of man’s being had been slightly developed by the struggle for existence’ Scientific substance for this view was provided by craniologists who alleged that Aboriginal brains were primitive and incapable of matching the power of those of the ‘higher races’. Features of Aboriginal brains were said to show an ‘infantile character… a type of anomaly which is referable to persistence of an immature (even a foetal) condition’.
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A Review of “Mixed Race Hollywood”
Quarterly Review of Film and Video
Volume 28, Issue 5 (2011)
pages 428-433
DOI: 10.1080/10509200902820589
Delia Konzett, Associate Professor of English
University of New Hampshire
Mixed Race Hollywood, edited by Mary Beltrán and Camilla Fojas. New York: New York University Press, 2008
The problem of the 20th century, W. E. B. Dubois would famously write in 1903, is that of the color line. Over 100 years later, we can unfortunately still say the problem of the 21st century is the color line, particularly our inability to move beyond entrenched binary conceptions of race (white/black or white/nonwhite) and acknowledge the new multiracial contexts that inform our present global, multicultural, and multimedia era. Mixed Race Hollywood is a timely and extremely valuable collection of essays that explores the various facets of the history of mixed race representation in mainstream American film and media.
Such representation has a long and complex tradition in Hollywood, ranging from the notorious depiction of the treacherous mulatto in Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915) and the non-threatening interracial pairing of Shirley Temple and Bojangles Robinson in The Little Colonel (David Butler, 1935) and The Littlest Rebel (David Butler, 1935) to the mixed race love affair in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer, 1967) that symbolically announced the arrival proper of civil rights. Since the mid 1990s, as the anthology’s editors Mary Beltrán and Camilla Fojas note, there has been a significant cultural shift in mixed race representation as seen in the “veritable explosion of multiracial imagery in…
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The Guardian
2011-09-23
James and Daniel are twins. What sets them apart is that one is white and one is black—and the differences don’t end there, as Joanna Moorhead discovers
The two teenage boys sitting on the sofa opposite are different in almost every way. On the left is James: he’s black, he’s gay, he’s gregarious, and he’s academic. He’s taking three A-levels next summer, and wants to go to university. Daniel, sitting beside him, is white. He’s straight, he’s shy, and he didn’t enjoy school at all. He left after taking GCSEs, and hopes that his next move will be an apprenticeship in engineering.
So, given that they are diametrically opposed, there is one truly surprising thing about James and Daniel. They are twins. They were born on 27 March 1993, the sons of Alyson and Errol Kelly, who live in south-east London. And from the start, it was obvious to everyone that they were the complete flipside of identical. “They were chalk and cheese, right from the word go,” says Alyson. “It was hard to believe they were even brothers, let alone twins.”…
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Germany’s ‘Brown Babies’: The Difficult Identities of Post-War Black Children of GIs
Speigel Online International
2009-10-13
 Rosemarie Pena’s identity document after her adoption. “Many of us never knew we were adopted, and many of us thought we were the only one,” Pena said. Her adoptive parents changed her name to Wanda Lynn Haymon. After discovering she was adopted, she reclaimed her birth name. |
For many of the now-adult children of white German women and African-American GIs, adopted by families in the United States after World War II, the search for the truth has been difficult. Online communities are helping.
Rudi Richardson knew something about what it meant to be a black man in the United States. But after being deported to Germany, the country where he was born, shortly before his 47th birthday, he had to start figuring out what it meant to be black and German—in a land he barely remembered and whose language he didn’t speak.
He started life as Udo Ackermann, born in a Bavarian women’s prison in 1955. His mother, a Jewish woman named Liesolette, was serving a prison term for prostitution. His father, whom he never met, was an African-American serviceman named George. Rudi was given up for adoption.
Like thousands of other postwar children with black GI fathers and white German mothers, Richardson was raised by an African-American military family in the US. He has spent his life trying to find where he fits in.
Born in an era when Germany was still grappling with its responsibility for the Holocaust and when the US Army had a policy of not acknowledging paternity claims brought against its soldiers stationed abroad, some of these children were put up for adoption in the United States. At the time, Germany judged itself incapable of absorbing these “brown babies”—as they have come to call themselves. In the late 1940s and 1950s, efforts were made to match them with African-American military families, many of whom were stationed around Germany at the time…
…But Cardwell, who is writing a book about his experiences, has learned that his own story is not that simple. Brought to the United States as a four-year-old and adopted by an African-American couple in Washington D.C., he was raised believing that he was a very light-skinned black man. It was not until he began trying to find his biological parents as an adult that he discovered his mother was a half-German refugee from Poland, and his father was native Hawaiian who was classified as “colored” by the military because of his skin color.
“I’ve been run out of white people’s houses: ‘Who’s this black person you’re bringing in here?’ I’ve been run out of black people’s houses: ‘Who’s this white person you’re bringing in here?’” Cardwell said of his adolescence and early adulthood. “There is no belonging, which is what brown babies sought most.”…
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