Mixed Race Studies

For the first time, blacks outnumber whites in Brazil

Miami Herald
2011-05-24

Taylor Barnes, Special to the Miami Herald

Brazilians are no longer reluctant to admit being black or ‘pardo,’ experts said.

RIO DE JANEIRO—In the past decade, famously mixed-race Brazilians either became prouder of their African roots, savvier with public policies benefiting people of color or are simply more often darker skinned , depending on how you read the much-debated new analysis of the census here.

A recently released 2010 survey showed that Brazil became for the first time a “majority minority” nation, meaning less than half the population now identifies as white.
 
Every minority racial group—officially, “black,” “pardo” (mixed), “yellow” and “indigenous”—grew in absolute numbers since 2000. “White” was the only group that shrank in both absolute numbers and percentage, becoming 48 percent of the population from 53 percent 10 years ago.

Experts say the shift reflects a growing comfort in not calling oneself white in order to prosper in Brazil and underscores the growing influence of popular culture. Paula Miranda-Ribeiro, a demographer at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, said another factor was the increase in bi-racial unions with mixed-race kids.

While Americans look at race as a question of origin, Brazilians largely go by appearance, so much so that the children of the same parents could mark different census categories, she said…

…Activists and artists here say they’ve seen a greater mobilization for mixed-race Brazilians to call themselves black or pardo in recent years.

“The phenomenon I perceive are people getting out of that pressure to whiten themselves, and assuming their blackness,” says visual artist Rosana Paulino, whose doctoral work at the University of São Paulo focused on the representation of blacks in the arts.
 
She sees a rising self-esteem on the part of mixed-race Brazilians who stop using middle-ground terms like “moreninho” (“a little tan”) or “marrom-bombom” (“brown chocolate”) and simply call themselves black…

Read the entire article here.

Retroactive phantasies: discourse, discipline, and the production of race

Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
Volume 14, Issue 3 (2008)
Pages 333-347
DOI: 10.1080/13504630802088219

Nadine Ehlers, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
Georgetown University

The present inquiry considers how the practice and notion of race can be figured as a type of discipline that functions to achieve the subjection of the individual—to form the individual as a racial subject. Focusing on the constructions of blackness and whiteness within US racial rhetoric, and engaging the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, I propose that racial identity is a retroactive phantasy that is always conditional on the subject enacting the very power that marks them: the formation and maintenance of subjectivity is premised on the individual being formed and forming themselves in relation to a normalized identity site and is, thus, always an action. Precisely due to this necessity to act, and to the incoherence of power, innovative acts of anti-discipline re-negotiate the ways in which racial subjectivity is lived and realized.

Read or purchase the article here.

Although the history of racial passing does not evoke the clearcut ethical responses that we have to slavery it is an important part of the larger story of racism and racial repression in this country. The frequency of passing is further evidence of the fraudulence of race as a meaningful construct for other than divisive exploitation. The experiences of the black Creole men and women that I have focused on are examples of the extreme risks African-Americans born at the turn-of-the-century often felt forced to take to circumvent a poverty that was socially engineered by white supremacists who wanted to preserve decent paying jobs for whites. Therefore, to read the history of “passing” as a tragic mulatto story of self-hatred, or as evidence of a “devil may care,” Caribbean-style multiracial identity in South Louisiana is to misread the history of American race relations…

Arthé A. Anthony, “‘Lost Boundaries’: Racial Passing and Poverty in Segregated New Orleans,” The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Volume 36, Number 3 (1995): 310.

“Lost Boundaries”: Racial Passing and Poverty in Segregated New Orleans

The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association
Volume 36, Number 3 (Summer, 1995)
pages 291-312

Arthé A. Anthony, Professor of American Studies, Emeritus
Occidental College, Los Angeles

On sunny summer Sunday afternoons in Harlem
when the air is one interminable ball game
and grandma cannot get her gospel hymns
from the Saints of God in Christ
on account of the Dodgers on the radio,
on sunny Sunday afternoons
when the kids look all new
and far too clean to stay that way,
and Harlem has its
washed-and-ironed-and-cleaned-best out,
the ones who’ve crossed the line
to live downtown
miss you,
Harlem of the bitter dream,
since their dream has
come true.

—Langston Hughes, 1951

Racial passing is a well-known theme in pre-World War II African-American literature. Adrian Piper’s recent essay, “Passing for White, Passing for Black,” is an example of continued interest in the topic. In addition, “passing” is used in cultural studies as a metaphor for masking the real-and most often marginalized-self. This article examines racial passing, with an emphasis on the lives of black Creole women, in relation to the economic impact of racial repression and segregation on black life in New Orleans. My conclusions are drawn, in large part, from an analysis of thirty extensive oral history interviews that I conducted with eighteen women and twelve men born between 1885 and 1905, and living in downtown New Orleans in 1977. Each of the men and women that I interviewed thought of themselves as “Creole,” and participated in the familial and social networks of the city’s black Creole community.

Their occupations and educations were representative of the choices then available in New Orleans. All of them worked, although the kind of work that they did changed over the life cycle; they were primarily cigar makers, seamstresses, skilled craftsmen in the building trades, postal carriers, printers, and school teachers. A few of them attended the city’s private high schools and normal schools, an accomplishment that has to be understood within the context of the limited availability of an education-private or public-for African-Americans at the turn of the century. Many others were forced to terminate their educations, in more than one instance as early as the third grade, to begin working, whereas others finished apprenticeships. Their personal lives were equally varied as reflected in the extended, nuclear and augmented households in which they lived, and their individual experiences with parenting, divorce and remarriage, as well as widowhood and desertion. Most, but not all of them, were Catholics. Despite their individual differences, as a group the Creoles of color that I interviewed shared first-hand experiences with hard work and racial discrimination. The women-a group that has been overlooked in New Orleans historiography-experienced both racial and sexual discrimination.

Each of the men and women I interviewed offered insightful interpretations of the worlds in which they lived. They were all very familiar with the myriad practices of racial passing; although they were not all light-skinned, they all knew of individuals-often a parent, spouse or friend-who had passed. More important than examples of the intricate mechanics of passing were their observations about the reasons individuals did so. Lillian Gelbart Simonet, for example, born in 1904, identified a relationship between passing for white and poverty when she remarked:

There are whole families of these people in New Orleans, (who are not necessarily Creoles), who have just been absorbed and gone to various parts of the country and they’re white. Sometimes you just can’t blame them because they have had a hard time. Creole people, with all of the airs, had a hard time to get along [because] they [the young women] would not be domestics. Some were fortunate enough to get work at El Trelles, a cigar factory . . . and Wallace Marine had a cigar factory . . . they weren’t prepared to do any kind of work that required any kind of education at all because half of them hadn’t finished high school.”

The observations of Mrs. Simonet, a retired public school teacher, call attention to the limited opportunities available to the majority of black Creoles who were poor and uneducated, unlike herself.

In the larger scheme of twentieth-century American race categorization, individuals were either black or white. Individual whites may have had preferences for light-skinned or dark-skinned African-Americans in their employ.  But overall the ethnic and cultural nuances and phenotypical differences that were critical to the intraracial dynamics of the black community were disregarded by whites in the segregated economy of New Orleans in the 1900s-1920s. Many Creoles of Color consequently were willing to accept the risks of passing for white rather than suffer the deteriorating material and social conditions endured by persons living and working as “colored.”…

…Although the history of racial passing does not evoke the clearcut ethical responses that we have to slavery it is an important part of the larger story of racism and racial repression in this country. The frequency of passing is further evidence of the fraudulence of race as a meaningful construct for other than divisive exploitation. The experiences of the black Creole men and women that I have focused on are examples of the extreme risks African-Americans born at the turn-of-the-century often felt forced to take to circumvent a poverty that was socially engineered by white supremacists who wanted to preserve decent paying jobs for whites. Therefore, to read the history of “passing” as a tragic mulatto story of self-hatred, or as evidence of a “devil may care,” Caribbean-style multiracial identity in South Louisiana is to misread the history of American race relations…

Read or purchase the article here.

Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany

HarperCollins
480 pages
2001
ISBN: 9780060959616

Hans J. Massaquoi (1926-2013)

This is a story of the unexpected. In Destined to Witness, Hans Massaquoi has crafted a beautifully rendered memoir—an astonishing true tale of how he came of age as a black child in Nazi Germany. The son of a prominent African and a German nurse, Hans remained behind with his mother when Hitler came to power, due to concerns about his fragile health, after his father returned to Liberia. Like other German boys, Hans went to school; like other German boys, he swiftly fell under the Fuhrer’s spell. So he was crushed to learn that, as a black child, he was ineligible for the Hitler Youth. His path to a secondary education and an eventual profession was blocked. He now lived in fear that, at any moment, he might hear the Gestapo banging on the door—or Allied bombs falling on his home. Ironic, moving, and deeply human, Massaquoi’s account of this lonely struggle for survival brims with courage and intelligence.

Prologue

To write of ones self, in such a manner as not to incur the imputation of weakness, vanity, and egotism, is a work within the ability of hut few; and I have little reason to believe that I belong to that fortunate few.
—Frederick Douglass

I could not agree more wich the above sentiments, expressed so eloquently over a century ago by the great abolitionist in the preface to his autobiography, My Bondage, My Freedom. If, like Mr. Douglass, I nonetheless decided to risk being thought of as weak, vain, and egocentric by making public the story of my life, it was mainly because of the persistent urging of persons whose literary judgment I felt was above reproach, such as my longtime friends Alex Haley, the author of Roots; Ralph Giordano, of Cologne, Germany, author of Die Bertinis; and my former employer and mentor. Ebony publisher John H. Johnson. Each convinced me that my experiences as a black youngster growing into manhood and surviving in Nazi Germany—an eyewitness to, and frequent victim of, both Nazi racial madness and Allied bombings—followed by my years in Africa were so unique that it was my duty as a journalist to share this rather different perspective on the Holocaust. Alex felt that because I was both an insider in Nazi Germany and, paradoxically, an endangered outsider, I had a rare perspective on some of the Third Reich’s major catastrophic events. He also urged me to record my equally unique experience of finding my own African roots.

Four fundamental aspects set the private hell I endured under the Nazis apart from both the pogroms suffered by my Jewish compatriots in Germany and from the racial persecution inflicted on my African-American brothers and sisters in the United States.

As a black person in white Nazi Germany, I was highly visible and thus could neither run nor hide, to paraphrase my childhood idol Joe Louis. Unlike African-Americans, I did not have the benefit of inherited survival techniques created and perfected by countless ancestors and passed down from generation to generation of oppressed people. Instead, I was forced to traverse a minefield of potential disasters and to develop my own instincts to tell me how best to survive physically and psychologically in a country consumed by racial arrogance and racial hatred and openly committed to the destruction of all “non-Aryans.”

Nazi racists, unlike their white American counterparts, did not commit their atrocities anonymously, disguised in white sheets and under the protection of night. Nor did they operate like some contemporary American politicians who advance their racist agendas by dividing black and white Americans with cleverly disguised code words about “unfair quotas,” “reverse discrimination,” and “states’ rights.” Racists in Nazi Germany did their dirty work openly and brazenly with the full protection, cooperation, and encouragement of the government, which had declared the pollution of Aryan blood with “inferior” non-Aryan blood the nation’s cardinal sin. For all practical purposes—except for the courageous and unflagging support I received from my German mother, who taught me to believe in myself by believing in me and my potential—I faced the constant threat that Nazi ethnic-cleansing policies posed to my safety alone. I faced this threat without the sense of security and reeling of belonging that humans derive from being members of a group, even an embattled one. Because of the absence of black females and the government-imposed taboo of race mixing, I had no legal social outlet when I reached puberty. Unlike the thousands of Africans and so-called “brown babies”—children of black GI fathers and German mothers—who reside in the Federal Republic of Germany today, there simply was no black population to speak of in Germany during the Hitler years, certainly none that I encountered. Not until long after the war did I learn that a small number of black Germans—the tragic so-called “Rhineland bastards” fathered by World War I French and Belgian colonial occupation troops—were exterminated in Hitler’s death camps.

Because Germans of my generation were expected to be fair skinned and of Aryan stock, it became my lot in life to explain ad nauseam why someone who had a brown complexion and black, kinky hair spoke accent-free German and claimed Germany as his place of birth. So let me state here once again, for the record, that I was born in 1926 in Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, because my grandfather, then consul general of Liberia to Hamburg, had brought with him his sizable family. His oldest son became my father after an intense courtship with my mother, a German nurse. Shortly before Hitler’s rise to power, my grandfather and father returned to Liberia, leaving my mother and me to fend for ourselves in an increasingly hostile racist environment…

British-Asian cinema: the sequel

The Guardian
2011-02-17

Sarfraz Manzoor

Aqib Khan in West Is West.

Twelve years on from the hugely acclaimed East Is East comes its sequel, West Is West. Sarfraz Manzoor examines the new directions British-Asian film-makers are taking

Twelve years on from the hugely acclaimed East Is East comes its sequel, West Is West. Sarfraz Manzoor examines the new directions British-Asian film-makers are taking

Ayub Khan-Din was in his first year at drama school in Salford when his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Khan-Din, the mixed-race son of a Pakistani Muslim father and a white Catholic mother, found that each time he came home, another slab of his mother’s memory had disappeared. The past, with all its stories, was slipping into the void, and Khan-Din became determined to try to preserve his parents’ history and his own experience of growing up.

Although he was studying to be an actor, Khan-Din started writing. At the time, Asians were rarely glimpsed on screen in the UK unless they were being beaten up by racist skinheads, running corner shops or fleeing arranged marriages. Khan-Din wanted to tell a different story—about growing up with a Pakistani father who had married an English woman, but who wanted his boys to marry Pakistani girls. The play Khan-Din wrote, East Is East, was performed on stage, then released to great acclaim as a film in 1999. Now, 12 years on, comes the release of West Is West, Khan-Din’s long-awaited sequel…

…Like Khan-Din and Monica Ali—whose novel Brick Lane would later be adapted for the screen—Kureishi grew up in a mixed-race family. The particular conflicts inherent in such a background, and the subsequent struggles for identity, were not shared by those such as Chadha and Syal, whose parents were both Asian. My Beautiful Laundrette was not only a personal work but also, Kureishi suggests, the product of an emerging curiosity of mainstream Britain about Asian society. “Around the mid-80s, people in film and publishing realised that Britain was changing,” he says. “I was lucky because I had this great opportunity to write about something that no one else had written about.” The freshness of this material to a wider audience meant many of the films that have come out of the British-Asian subgenre—including Prasad’s My Son the Fanatic, based on another Kureishi short story—operate not only as fictional works but also as quasi-documentaries, revealing a hitherto unknown world. The frisson of familiarity felt by Asian audiences on seeing families like theirs was coupled by the shock of the new that white audiences experienced…

Read the entire article here.

A “Mixed-Race” Nation Isn’t the Same as a Post-Race One

ColorLines
2011-02-04

Dom Apollon

The Web is still buzzing with chatter over a New York Times feature last weekend that explored how and why an increasing number of young people identify as “mixed-race.” The Census Bureau will release race-based data from its 2010 decennial count later this month, and everybody from sociologists to marketers are eagerly waiting to see what the next generation of Americans, dubbed the “Millennials,” looks like. If the Times story is correct, a whole lot more of them are people who aren’t invested in a racial identity—or, at least not a singular one.

But the story got me thinking about focus groups I’ve been conducting for the Applied Research Center, which publishes Colorlines.com, over the past few months. We’re talking in Los Angeles with separate groups of 18 to 25 year old African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and Whites. Our project is not yet complete, but already the conversations we’ve heard within our four groups, including with a handful of respondents from multiple racial/ethnic backgrounds, suggest a significant gap between the sort of individual identities that the Times explored and the broader reality in which those young, post-identity people live.

It’d be easy for the casual reader to conclude from the Times piece that this growing group of individuals who refuse to be pigeon-holed into distinct racial or ethnic classifications will inevitably transform our society into one without racial prejudice. As the Times’ reporter explained, optimistic observers “say the blending of the races is a step toward transcending race, to a place where America is free of bigotry, prejudice and programs like affirmative action.”

Well, that sounds so nice and inevitable, doesn’t it? The problem is, it’s an optimism born of our society’s collective, subconscious yearning for relief. Relief from what, you ask? Relief from the deep discomfort we continue to feel about race, and the continued racial disparities (in high school and college graduation, unemployment, wages and work standards, homeownership, etc.) that challenge America’s understanding of itself as a place defined by equal opportunity…

…But the fact that some young folks are ticking off multiple boxes on surveys to express their racial and ethnic identities doesn’t mean much if the opportunity gap between whites and people of color throughout society is not changing, too. When we see less disparity in outcomes in education, in health and health care, in housing and more, then we’ll know we’re approaching something close to a “post-racial” society…

Read the entire article here.

Sonic spaces: Inscribing “coloured” voices in the Karoo, South Africa

University of Pennsylvania
2006
228 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3246175

Marie R. Jorritsma

A Dissertation in Music Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

A common stereotype of those classified as “coloured” in apartheid South Africa was that, because of their mixed racial heritage, they had no authentic racial or cultural identity and history. This dissertation counters that lingering stereotype by examining how musical performance enabled “coloured” community members around the town of Graaff-Reinet to claim a place for themselves collectively under apartheid and in post-apartheid South Africa. Nurtured and sustained by a policy of racial purity, the apartheid regime held a deeply ambivalent position towards those it categorized as “coloured,” the racial group it defined as “not a white person or a native.” Oral and written sources typically convey “coloured” people’s ethnic identity, cultural history, and musical heritage as similarly lacking. Despite this, music has been and continues to be an integral part of the religious practices of this community though its performance has survived practically unnoticed by those outside.

By placing the voices of “coloured” people at the center of this study, I move beyond the myopic apartheid view that saw “coloured” people purely in terms of their ethnic origins and capacity for labor. Instead, I approach “coloured” music and history in terms of the sounds and spaces of their religious performance culture. My research provides a narrative of “coloured” social history in the Graaff-Reinet region that is drawn from regional archives and empirical research in the form of fieldwork, specifically participant observation. I concentrate on religious musical practice, namely, hymns, koortjies (little choruses), choir performance, and the singing at women’s society meetings. Studying song performance creates a complex nexus of music, race, religion, and politics, and constitutes a vital way of retrieving history and oral repertories. This music thereby provides one vehicle for groups and individuals in this community to articulate a more “legitimate” place for themselves in the contemporary landscape of South African history and culture.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abstract
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Chapter One – Introduction: Sonic Spaces, Inscribing “Coloured” Voices
• Chapter Two – Senzeni na: Music, Religion, and Politics in Three Kroonvale Congregations
• Chapter Three – Singing the “Queen’s English”: Church Choirs in Kroonvale
• Chapter Four V – Mothers of the Church: Women’s Society Music and South African Gender Issues
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Glossary
• Bibliography

List of Illustrations

1. View of Umasizakhe, Graaff-Reinet, and Kroonvale
2. View of Kroonvale, Santaville, Asherville, Koebergville, and Geluksdal
3. Map of Kroonvale
4. Old DRMC Building in Graaff-Reinet
5. Last Church Service Held at the DRMC Building, c. 1964
6. URC Building in Kroonvale
7. Old PSCC Building in Graaff-Reinet
8. PSCC Building in Kroonvale
9. Old Klein Londen Building in Graaff-Reinet
10. ESCC Building in Kroonvale
11. View of URC and PSCC from ESCC Grounds
12. Parsonage Street Congregational Church, 13 February 2005
13. East Street Congregational Church, 17 July 2005
14. Uniting Reformed Church, 15 August 2004
15. Combined Congregational Church Broederband service, 17 February 2005
16. Wat bring jy myn die domme?: Cape Malay Ghomma-liedjie notated by I.D. du Plessis
17. Juig aarde juig sung by Mrs J.S. Beukes, Mr W.S. Adonis and Mr J.W. Beukes, 16 April 1980
18. Hy’s hier om ons te seen (He’s here to bless us), Uniting Reformed Church, 5 December 2004
19. Jesus is so lief virmy (Jesus loves me very much), East Street Congregational Church, 26 June 2005
20. Dit was nie om te oordeel nie (It was not to judge), Parsonage Street Congregational Church, 6 March 2005
21. Worstel mens (Wrestle sinner), Combined Congregational Church Broederband service, 17 February 2005
22. Graaff-Reinet Mayor Daantjie Jaftha
23. Zion, City of God (G. Froflich)
24. Holy Holy Holy (Franz Schubert)
25. Program of Concert Tour and Performance in Kimberley, 3 September 1972
26. Restored Slave Cottages at Stretch’s Court, Drostdy Hotel
27. Wees stil en weet, Women’s World Day of Prayer Service, East Street Congregational Church, 3 March 2005
28. Wees stil en weet, “Official” Hymnbook Version

PREFACE

As a child, the Karoo always symbolised an escape for me. It was a refuge from the routine of school attendance, extra-mural activities, and the restlessly windy, unpredictable weather of the coastal city of Port Elizabeth. The family farm lay only three and a half hours1 drive away from the city, where huge breakfasts of porridge, toast, and tea fortified me for seemingly endless sunny and windless days spent walking in the surrounding veld, participating in (and most likely, hindering) the usual farming activities, and playing in the water furrows. A typical Karoo child displays an endless fascination with the precious commodity of water, and diverting the small rivulets in the furrow to flow smoothly over the muddy gravel guaranteed countless hours of captivation.

My grandmother used to tell me, as a child, to look for San tools such as grinding stones or arrowheads when walking in the Karoo veld. To this day, this collection remains displayed in the farmhouse. It never occurred to me then that the San people, the forebears of many present-day “coloured” people, suffered merciless persecution on the part of my ancestors, the colonial settlers.

When I returned to the Karoo for fieldwork on the music of “coloured” people, this memory of looking for San ”treasure” and proof of their existence in this area contrasted very strangely with the historical accounts I read about the violent treatment of the San people by the settlers. Immersed in my research, I seldom visited the veld, and instead explored my childhood memories in new contexts of colonial history and apartheid. As much as this project was originally driven by a deep appreciation of and interest in this music and then an ongoing desire that it not be ignored, my own background as the granddaughter of a Karoo farmer had to be revisited and recontextualised as the project continued.

I remember sitting in June Bosch’s home one day when for once my childhood memories did not clash with the historical and contemporary stories of “coloured” people’s oppression and marginalization. June Bosch and her cousin, Loretta Fortune, told me a story from their childhood days in Caroline Street, Graaff-Reinet. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, water from the Van Ryneveld’s Pass Dam outside the town would be led into the cement furrows lining the streets for the townspeople to use. As the neighborhood children spotted the water, they would shout up the street to announce its presence and run for any and every available container. June was under strict instructions from her grandmother to water the garden roses first, and then to spray the unpaved street in order to settle the dust. After fulfilling these duties, the children would play in the furrows until the water flow ceased. Recognizing the similarity in our childhood games and activities with their focus on water made it poignantly apparent to me that we were all once children of the Karoo.

This research project thus stems from my own connection to Graaff-Reinet and its surrounding area. Combined with a strong scholarly fascination with this music, my reasons for undertaking the project also included the opportunity to revisit and perhaps, in some small way, to recapture the past. No longer a childhood escape, it is the spaces and sounds of this Karoo community that have offered me a new perspective on my relationship to this place and its people…

Purchase the dissertation here.

Integration of a mixed race indigenous mind: A personal deconstruction of colonization

California Institute of Integral Studies
208
204 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3306675
ISBN: 9780549538394

Pamela E. Dos Ramos

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Integral Studies with a Concentration in Recovery of Indigenous Mind

This dissertation, in narrative form, documents a process of decolonization and self-integration through a transformative process, called Recovery of Indigenous Mind (RIM). At the California Institute of Integral Studies, this process was created to assist non-native people to reconnect with their own indigenous ancestral knowledge, rituals, and ways of being. The author was enrolled as a graduate student in the RIM Doctoral Program, which shook her to the core and initiated her journey towards wholeness. Through the uncovering of indigenous roots and ancestral histories, the process served as a healing mechanism to integrate all parts of the author’s being, some of which had previously been blocked out and denied unconsciously.

The question implicit in this work is: what makes mixed race women stumble and become immobilized in their quest to find their wholeness of being and solid identity? Written in the first person, this dissertation focuses on the author’s journey by focusing on her identity as a female of mixed race ancestry. In relation to her ancestral heritage, it provides a map, a process of integration that may be followed by other women of mixed race ancestry. However, it may be of particular relevance and importance to those women of ancestral heritages similar to the author’s, who are open to non-Western ways of connecting with, listening to, and learning from the guidance of their ancestors.

Table of Contents

• ABSTRACT
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Chapter 1: Introduction
  • Importance of This Journey
  • Rationale
  • Personal Background
    • Diverse Origins
    • The Face of Exclusion
    • Discovering History
    • Counselor Heal Thyself
• Chapter 2: Integration of History and process
  • Introduction
  • Uncovering Ancestors’ Stories
    • Colonization: First Peoples, Amerindian Ancestors
    • Colonization: Slavery—African Ancestors
    • Colonization: Indentured Labor—East Indian Ancestors
    • Colonization Legacies of Minds, Hearts and Spirits
  • A World Away: Historical Exclusion in Canada
  • Loss of Ancestral Identity
  • Indigenous Science, Indigenous Mind Worldviews
    • Indigenous Science, Indigenous Mind
    • Worldviews
  • Racial/Cultural Identity Development
  • Mixed Race Identity
• Chapter 3: Indigenous Science, Indigenous Mind
  • Intuitive Inquiry
  • Indigenous Science Inquiry
• Chapter 4: Walking the Path of Recovery
  • Decolonization of Heart and Mind
  • Ancestral Connections: Honoring Grandmothers
    • The Task: Radical Trust in Ancestral Guidance
    • Older Woman Power: The Crone
    • The Crone Today
    • Qualities and Responsibilities of the Crone
    • The Croning Ritual: Planning and Organizing
    • The Croning Ritual: Ceremony
    • Ancestors in Action
  • Further Invoking of My Indigenous Mind
  • Toward Wholeness
    • Going Home
    • Dakar, Senegal: A Foreign Past
    • Full Circle
• Chapter 5: The Home in my Heart
  • Out of the Curtain of Silence
  • Integrating Experiences and Recovery of Indigenous Mind
  • Threads Interwoven
  • Ancestral Gifts
  • The Tapestry Woven
  • A Pathway
  • Mists of Lost Time
  • Limitations
  • Further work
• References
• APPENDIX A: GLOSSARY—OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS
• APPENDIX B: THE SOCIALIZATION AND ISM PRISM
• APPENDIX C: BILL OF RIGHTS FOR PEOPLE OF MIXED HERITAGE
• APPENDIX D: MULTIRACIAL OATH OF SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Purchase the dissertation here.

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White [Discussion]

Lillian Goldman Law Library
Yale University
2011-03-07

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

Moderator: Claire Priest, Professor of Law
Yale University

The Lillian Goldman Law Library together with the Yale Law School Legal History Forum and the Yale Black Law Students Association invite you to a discussion featuring an important new book by Professor Daniel J. Sharfstein, with critical commentary by Professor Claire Priest.
 
The Invisible Line unravels the stories of three families who represent the complexity of race in America and force us to rethink our basic assumptions about who we are. For example, one of the families that started out black produced a Yale-educated Confederate general! This book has been called a “must read” by major scholars spanning the fields of legal history and African American Studies. It is written with the sensitivity of a novelist from the perspective of a legal scholar and provides a fascinating account of how laws and court decisions help shape racial attitudes.

Running Time: 01:17:37