Mixed Race Studies

Census Nonsense: Why Barack Obama isn’t black.

The New Republic
2010-04-07

John Judis, Senior Editor and Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

When asked about his race on the census form, Barack Obama, the child of a white Kansan and black African, did not take the option of checking both “white” and “black” or “some other race.” Instead, he checked “black, African American or Negro.” By doing that, Obama probably did what was expected of him, but he also confirmed an enduring legacy of American racism…

…The obvious question—perhaps not to an American, but certainly to a visitor from another planet—is why if someone’s ancestry is predominantly white, they are not identified as “white” rather than “black.” It’s not because of the way they look. Walter White was widely “mistaken” as a white person. As a student at Colgate, Adam Clayton Powell [, Jr.] was initially believed to be “white.” But once it became known that they had black ancestry, they became black. And American law backed up this conclusion. In the South, the idea that any black ancestry would qualify someone as black, negro, or colored was called the “one-drop rule.”…

…In its American incarnation, blackness emerged as a social category in the seventeenth century as part of Southern whites’ attempt to justify the economic and social subordination of Africans who had been brought to the country in bondage. The legal interpretation of blackness was accompanied by laws barring miscegenation between whites and blacks. The one-drop rule endured after the Civil War and after emancipation as a justification of racial segregation and of the tiered economy of the sharecroppers…

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“Des couleurs primitives”: Miscegenation and French Painting of Algeria

Visual Resources
Volume 24, Issue 3 (2008)
pages 273 – 298
DOI: 10.1080/01973760802284638

Peter Benson Miller, Art Historian
Rome Art Program

The Romantic concept of “local color” refers to a site of painterly experimentation, the application of pigment in the chromatic construction of a picture. The term also identifies a detail authenticating an exotic subject considered typical of a particular region. This article zeroes in on the convergence of these two aspects of local color, interrogating the dialogue between subject and technique in the representation of North Africans. In their paintings from the late 1840s depicting “primitive” racial types from the Maghrib, Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) and Théodore Chassériau (1819-1856) shifted to a color system that emphasized contrasts of distinct zones of color derived from an ethnological spectrum over smooth transitions and harmonies between hues. Unpacking the coordinates, including the trope of the mixed-blood, and the unstable classificatory schemas of physical anthropology suggests that these painters’ unconventional colorism and formal daring indexed the pervasive anxiety that miscegenation would lead to racial chaos. 

…Initially, though, the apparent prevalence of mixed races in Algeria did not inspire concern. In an influential text published in 1826, the American consul general in Algiers, William Shaler (1778–1833), while ambivalent about miscegenation, praised the hybrid ancestry of the ‘‘Moors’’: ‘‘an amalgamation of the ancient Mauritanians, various invaders, the emigrants from Spain, and the Turks,’’ which created a vigorous blend. Proof of the positive effect of such interbreeding, according to Shaler, was the fact ‘‘that there are few people who surpass them in beauty of configuration; their features are remarkably expressive, and their complexions are hardly darker than those of the inhabitants of the South of Spain.’’ While specialists would later question Shaler’s claims, and continue to debate the viability of mixed races, the impulse to discern origins, filiation and racial identity—whether mixed or pure—through skin color and physiognomy would remain a constant…

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The half-caste and the dream of secularism and freedom: Insights from East African Asian writing

Scrutiny2
Volume 13, Issue 2 (September 2008)
pages 16 – 35
DOI: 10.1080/18125440802485987

Dan Ojwang, Senior Lecturer of African Literature
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Focusing on the work of Bahadur Tejani, Peter Nazareth and Moyez Vassanji, this article attempts to account for the popularity of tropes of miscegenation in the literature produced by East African writers of South Asian descent. The appearance of the figure of the half-caste in this body of writing is especially striking given the fact that miscegenation was much derided in colonial discourse and viewed in fear by traditionalists within the diaspora who saw in it a violation of the integrity of communal boundaries. This article argues that the invocation of miscegenation, and related ideas, was an attempt on the part of this group of writers to reconsider the meanings of citizenship and belonging along the broad lines of secular humanism. In some important sense, the halfcaste symbolized a quest for freedom from the authority of tradition and the naturalization of cultural difference during colonialism. 

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From Narratives of Miscegenation to Post-Modernist Re-Imagining: Toward a Historiography of Coloured Identity in South Africa

African Historical Review
Volume 40, Issue 1 (June 2008)
pages 77 – 100
DOI: 10.1080/17532520802249472

Mohamed Adhikari, Associate Professor of History
University of Cape Town, South Africa

This article traces changing interpretations of the nature of Coloured identity and the history of the Coloured community in South Africa in both popular thinking as well as the academy. It explores some of the main contestations that have arisen between rival schools of thought, particularly their stance on the popular perception that Colouredness is an inherent racial condition derived from miscegenation. This essay identifies four distinct paradigms in historical writing on the Coloured people. Firstly, there is the essentialist school which regards Colouredness as a product of miscegenation and represents the conventional understanding of the identity. Secondly, instrumentalists view Coloured identity as an artificial creation of the white ruling class who used it as a ploy to divide and rule the black majority. This explanation, which first emerged in academic writing in the early 1980s, held sway in anti-apartheid circles. Opposing these interpretations are what may be termed the social constructionists who from the early 1990s stressed the complexities of identity formation and the agency of Coloured people in the making of their own identities. Most recently the rudiments of a fourth approach, of applying postmodern theory, especially the concept of creolisation, to Coloured identity have appeared.

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Deterritorialised Blackness: (Re)making coloured identities in South Africa

postamble
Volume 2, Number 1
2006

Janette Yarwood, Doctoral Candidate
Department of Anthropology
City University of New York

“When I was a kid in the early eighties, this music [hip-hop] was the first I’d heard that I could relate to. You know, ‘Fuck da Police’, and all that shit, that’s what I was feeling.”
Shamel X interview

“Black is not a question of pigmentation. The Black I’m talking about is a historical category, a political category, a cultural category…  Black was created as a political category in a certain historical moment.”2

During the summer of 2003 I took my first pre-dissertation trip to South Africa to develop my dissertation topic on coloured identities in post-apartheid South Africa. Although it is no secret that hip-hop as both a musical genre and a defined lifestyle has gained recognition and popularity around the globe, I was not quite prepared for what I experienced in South Africa. I encountered cars blasting Jay-Z, Sean Paul and P. Diddy among others; people wearing Sean John, Avirex or United States sports team jerseys; and cell phones ringing to the tunes of the latest 50 Cent or R. Kelly songs. I found that as a black person of Caribbean and American descent, I felt a common blackness with the coloured people I interacted with not because of a common African heritage but mainly because of black popular culture and hip-hop culture specifically. This led me to ask: What does it mean to be black in today’s world? Is there a transnational or globalised notion of blackness?…

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A new paradigm of race: Visit to Brazil prompts the question: Can mixing everyone up solve the race problem?

Bloomington Herald-Times
2004-08-29
Courtesy of: Black Film Center/Archive
Indiana University

Audrey T. McCluskey, Director Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center
Indiana University

If Tiger Woods lived in Brazil he would not have had to coin the word “Cablanasian” to describe the multiracial mixture of caucasian, black, and Asian that makes up his lineage nor face derision from those of us who thought he was trippin’ (being silly, unreal). As my husband and I saw on a recent trip, in Brazil race-mixing is the rule, not the exception, with the majority of its 170 million people being visible incarnates of the slogan that officials like to tout: “We’re a multiracial democracy. We’re not white, or black, or Indian, we’re all Brazilians.”

Skeptical, but being swept along by the stunning beauty of the country and its people, I did begin to wonder if (contrary to learned opinion) Brazil had solved its race problem by just mixing everyone up. British scholar Paul Gilroy recently said that Brazil and South Africa – a country that I also visited recently and will invoke later – present “a new paradigm of race” that is more subtle and flexible than the U.S.’s old “one drop” (of black blood makes you black) rule that equates whiteness with mythical purity…

Read the entire article here.

Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640

Indiana University Press
2005-02-02
288 pages
1 bibliog., 1 index, 6.125 x 9.25
Paper ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21775-2; ISBN: 0-253-21775-X

Herman L. Bennett, Professor of Latin American History
City Univerisity of New York

The African community in colonial Mexico under Spanish and Catholic rule.

In this study of the largest population of free and slave Africans in the New World, Herman L. Bennett has uncovered much new information about the lives of slave and free blacks, the ways that their lives were regulated by the government and the Church, the impact upon them of the Inquisition, their legal status in marriage, and their rights and obligations as Christian subjects.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Africans, Absolutism, and Archives
1. Soiled Gods and the Formation of a Slave Society
2. “The Grand Remedy”: Africans and Christian Conjugality
3. Policing Christians: Persons of African Descent before the Inquisition and Ecclesiastical Courts
4. Christian matrimony and the Boundaries of African Self-Fashioning
5. Between Property and Person: Jurisdictional Conflicts over Marriage
6. Creoles and Christian Narratives
Postscript
Glossary
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Africa in Mexico: A Repudiated Heritage/África en México: una herencia repudiada

Edwin Mellen Press
2007
140 pages
ISBN10: 0-7734-5216-8; ISBN13: 978-0-7734-5216-9

Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas, Asssociate Professor of Spanish
North Carolina Central University

This study explores the African presence in Mexico and the impact it has had on the development of Mexican national identity over the past centuries. By analyzing Mexican miscegenation from a perspective identified as mestizaje positivo (positive miscegenation) where an equality exists among all ethnic heritages are equal forming the glue that binds together the new ethnicity, it reveals that Mexico’s African heritage is alive and well. In the end, the author calls for further examinations into the damage caused to the majority of the Mexican population by a Eurocentric mentality that marks them as inferior.

The Africanization of Mexico from the Sixteenth Century to the Present

Edwin Mellen Press
2010
212 pages
ISBN10: 0-7734-3781-9; ISBN13: 978-0-7734-3781-4

Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas, Asssociate Professor of Spanish
North Carolina Central University

This work is an Afrocentric analysis that subscribes to the notion that there is one human race of multiple ethnicities. It acknowledges Mexico’s African, Amerindian (herein after called First Nations), Asian, and European ethnic heritages. Contrary to the African-disappearance-by-miscegenation-hypothesis-turned-ideology, it introduces the theory of the widespread Africanization of Mexico from the sixteenth century onward.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Foreword by Álvaro Ochoa Serrano
Introduction
1. African National Names as Denigrating, Obscene and Scatological Language in Mexican Spanish
2. The Colors of Mexican Racism
3. The Africans and Afrodescendants who Constructed Veracruz and the Jarocho Ethos 1521-1778
4. The African Sahelo-Sudanic Belt in the Birth of Mexican Vaqueros and Vaquero Culture in the Veracruz Lowlands
5. Tracing the Afro-Mexican Path: 1813-1910
6. Mexican Food is Soul Food: A Medicine for National Amnesia
7. The Africanness of Mexican Traditional Medicine
8. Memín Pinguín, Hermelinda Linda and Andanzas de Aniceto: The Dark Side of “Light-Reading”
Conclusions
Bibliography
Index

Winnefred and Agnes: The Story of Two Women

Independent Publishing Group
September 2002
288 pages, Cloth, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
6 B/W Photos, 1 Chart, 1 Map
ISBN: 9780795701139 (0795701136)

Agnes Lottering

This is a rare, possibly the first, first-person account of being part of the group of mixed-race families who came into existence at Ngome in the province of KwaZulu-Natal when, in the late 19th century, well-to-do British and Irish traders took Zulu wives and adopted Zulu cultural practices, including polygamy. The author recounts her life and that of her mother in this true account of a Zululand family whose lives were touched in equal measure by tribal belief and Christianity, healing herbs, magical birds, and the tokeloshe, a mischievous creature surrounded by myth and sexual innuendo. It is also a tale of betrayal, grand passion, bewitchment, abuse, and the triumph of love. Part love story and family saga, part social history, it is above all a uniquely South African tale.

Agnes Lottering was born in Ngome Forest in 1937. Due to financial and other constraints, she never completed her schooling. Yet she is a gifted storyteller, telling her tale with freshness and authenticity. She lives in Durban, South Africa.