Mixed Race Studies

“We Have Always Been:” Mixed Race Experiences in the USA and French Polynesian (Tahitian) Contexts: 2010 Exploration Seminar in Tahiti

University of Washington Exploration Seminars
Dates of Instruction: 2010-08-22 through 2010-09-10

Program Director: Steve Woodard and Alejandro Espania (Minority Affairs)

Ia Ora Na, friend!  Please know that this three (3) week seminar will take place in Tahiti, one of 130 main islands within the French Polynesian archipelago.   The dates for this seminar are August 22, 2010 through September 10, 2010. Participants should plan to participate in a pre-seminar, which will take place during the latter part of Spring Quarter 2010 at the University of Washington.

We invite you to join us as we traverse through, and push upon the boundaries of, the system of knowledge collectively referred to in the literature as multiracial theory.  Our expected resources include seminal and newly published texts about the mixed race experience, as well as the participants’ (and instructors’) own respective personal narratives.  Both ways of knowing will be routinely explored via purposeful dialogues, structured self-reflections, and organized large/small group and one-on-one community interactions…

For more information, click here.

Thinking about Race, Sexuality, and Marriage: A Roundtable on Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally

American Historical Association
124th Annual Meeting
Friday, 2010-01-10, 08:30-10:30 PST (Local Time)
Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego
Manchester Ballroom D (Hyatt)
San Diego, California

Thinking about Race, Sexuality, and Marriage: A Roundtable on Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally

Chair:
Eileen Boris, Professor of History, Chair and Professor of Feminist Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara

Commentator:
Vicki L. Ruiz, Chair and Professor of History
University of California, Irvine

Sponsored by the AHA Working Group for Historical Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage

Panel Discussion
Kristin Celello, Assistant Professor of History
Queens College, City University of New York

For the past several decades, historians have argued effectively that far from being stable and unchanging until the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, marriage–as a legal and social institution–has changed in significant ways over the course of American history.  Pascoe’s book reminds us that race must necessarily be integrated into this discourse, contending not only that who has had access to marriage has varied but also that the state has played a crucial role in the creation of marital “norms.”

Panel Discussion
Matt J. Garcia, Associate Professor of American Civilization, Ethnic Studies and History
Brown University

Panel Discussion
Valerie Matsumoto, Associate Professor of History
University of California, Los Angeles

Peggy Pascoe‘s landmark work raises questions regarding post-World War II changes not only in the dominant US society but also within East Asian American communities, which had their own strong preferences for endogamous marriage.  Her research also draws attention to the roles played by Asian Americans in confronting old racial structures, as embedded in law.  Challenges to miscegenation laws in the US West were mounted by Nisei such as Noriko Sawada Bridges and Harry Oyama during the critical period of Japanese American community reconfiguration and rebuilding after World War II. I will consider how the Japanese American community’s understandings of racialization shifted in this era; I will also examine perceptions of interracial marriage within the ethnic community.

Panel Discussion
Jessica Millward, Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Irvine

I suggest that the implications of Peggy Pascoe‘s work on miscegenation laws stretch beyond the geographical setting of the West, and the temporal setting of the Progressive era, and signal key points of inquiry among scholars of African American Women’s history writ large. In particular, I focus on laws of slavery and manumission in 18th and 19th centuries.  Laws governing manumission held particular ramifications for enslaved African American women as they used their consensual and non-consensual relationships with owners, and consensual relationships with free black men to access freedom for themselves and their children.  I suggest that laws governing manumission served as precursors to miscegenation laws in the 20th century. Likewise, I suggest that “marriage” and uplift constituted a range of definitions based on the particular angle of vision of African American women in both slavery and in freedom.

“El Destierro de los Chinos”: Popular Perspectives of Chinese-Mexican Interracial Marriage as Reflected in Poetry, Cartoon, Comedy, and Corridos

American Historical Association
124th Annual Meeting
Friday, 2010-01-10 11:20 PST (Local Time)
San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina
Torrey 3 (Marriott)
San Diego, California

Robert Chao Romero, Assistant Professor, Chicana and Chicano Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Drawing from poetry, cartoons, comedy, and musical recordings of the UCLA Frontera Collection, this paper examines the historical phenomenon of Chinese-Mexican intermarriage through the lense of Mexican popular culture of the early twentieth century. Popular Mexican culture portrayed Chinese cross-cultural marriages as relationships of abuse, slavery, and neglect, and rejected the offspring of such unions as sub-human, degenerative, and unworthy of full inclusion within the Mexican national community. Interracial marriage with prosperous Chinese merchants was scornfully depicted as a shameless short cut by which slothful Mexican women avoided the need to work and secured lives of material comfort. Such popular criticism of Chinese-Mexican interracial marriage, moreover, was often couched within larger discourses of revolutionary economic nationalism. Beyond presenting an historical examination of the phenomenon of Chinese-Mexican interracial marriage, as one important theoretical implication, this paper destabilizes prevalent notions of “mestizaje” within the disciplines of Latin American Studies and Latino Studies. It challenges the “white-brown” binary of traditional racial theory in Latino Studies and sounds a clarion call for further research and discussion related to the important contributions of Chinese, Japanese, African, Middle Eastern, and other overlooked ethnic immigrant groups to the Mexican and cultural melting pot.

Status, Race, and Marriage: French Continental Law versus French Colonial Law

American Historical Association
124th Annual Meeting
Friday, 2010-01-08 14:30 PST (Local Time)
Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego
Manchester Ballroom F (Hyatt)
San Diego, California

Valérie Gobert-Sega
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France

In its most traditional moral and legal conception, marriage had for consequence to erase the crime of cohabitation and dissoluteness. Independentently of geographic space and by virtue of the principle of the unity of French laws and customs, the institution of marriage could not be left supplant under colonial law and order. In 1685, the Edict administering the rights and the duties of slaves and emancipated slaves as well as their relationships with white people in the French colonies established legitimacy and religious rules. However, the rigidity of statutory tripartition of the population could not concretely integrate these justifiable, legally valid but socially prohibited unions. The first legal ban was introduced into the Code of Louisiana in 1724 and the second was imposed by the prescription of April, 1778 for continental France. Meanwhile, the Monarchy was never resolved to reform article 9 of the Code of 1685. In doing so, the administration strategically restricted the civil and professional rights of those who chose to go against the social misalliance. It isn’t until the promulgation of the Civil code of 1805 that the restriction based on race and status is finally unified. But once again even if the principle is acquired, its execution remains unpredictable: it extends to all people, of color or black, in colonies but only to black people in metropolitan France. However, for more than two centuries, the legislator, conscientiously maintained a flaw in the prohibition: whether it be in the colonies or in France, these marriages will never be punished by nullity. This absence of penalty will finally allow the Supreme Court and the Abolitionists to declare the legal ban on interracial marriages invalid and to overrule it.

Intimacy and the Atlantic World

American Historical Association
124th Annual Meeting
Friday, 2010-01-08 14:50 PST (Local Time)
Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego
Manchester Ballroom F (Hyatt)
San Diego, California

Jennifer L. Palmer, Collegiate Assistant Professor of History
University of Chicago

In 1755 the merchant Aimé-Benjamin Fleuriau returned to his native city of La Rochelle, a bustling port on France’s Atlantic coast, after twenty years in the colonies where he made his fortune in indigo and sugar produced by slaves who worked his plantation. But he did not return alone: he brought five of his mixed-race children with him, his sons and daughters by a woman named Jeanne, one of his former slaves. The children’s gender determined their varied paths: the boys returned to Saint-Domingue where they supervised their father’s plantation, while the girls remained close to their father in La Rochelle. With his support, his daughters Jeanne-Marie and Marie-Charlotte set up house just a few blocks from where Aimé-Benjamin lived in the most splendid house in town with his new, white French wife and children. In spite of the ocean between them, Jeanne-Marie and Marie-Charlotte remained in touch with their brothers in the colonies, and made every effort to reinforce these family ties that distance threatened to pull asunder. In doing so, they drew on family strategies long-established in Europe and deployed them to define their own trans-oceanic, multi-racial family unit. This paper argues that intimacy provides a critical lens through which to view the Atlantic world. It was in the context of the family that enduring relationships between white men and people of color were most common, and examining how such intimate family relationships were constructed and maintained provides insight into how Europeans, including black and mixed-race Europeans, participated in and shaped the Black Atlantic. The results of such a view are sometimes surprising: free women of color, who might at first glance seem among the least influential members of a society that valued rank, name, and status, found ways to shape family structures and strategies.

Patterns of Mixed-Race Migration to Britain in the Eighteenth-Century Black Atlantic

American Historical Association
124th Annual Meeting
Friday, 2010-01-08 15:10 PST (Local Time)
Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego
Manchester Ballroom F (Hyatt)
San Diego, California

Daniel Alan Livesay, Assistant Professor of History
Drury University, Springfield, Missouri

With tremendous gender and racial disparities, miscegenation and interracial cohabitation became the norm in eighteenth-century Jamaica.  A large number of mixed-race children came from these unions, and in many cases these individuals received financial and personal assistance from their white fathers.  Lacking schools, and with almost no professional prospects for free people of color on the island, many fathers sent their mixed-race children to Britain for a better chance at schooling and employment.  These individuals took their place in the upper ranks of metropolitan society, with large colonial fortunes behind them.  Their interactions with white relatives, and scholarly success in Britain, paved the way for continued achievement in the metropole, or for a more advanced position in Jamaican society, if they chose to return. This paper examines the wills of over 2200 Jamaican residents from 1770-1815 to provide a quantifiable look at mixed-race migration to Britain.  Gathered from the Island Record Office in Central Village, Jamaica, these wills shed light not only on the frequency and regularity of this practice over the period in question, but also on the gender and class dynamics that dictated life for mixed-race Jamaicans who traveled to the metropole.  Though primarily a male phenomenon, mixed-race migration to Britain also included a large number of women who, more often than their male counterparts, stayed in the metropolis permanently.  This paper will argue that such movement became an important component in the development of the Black Atlantic, and that the remigration of mixed-race Jamaicans from the metropole to the periphery constituted a vital force in the creolization of the West Indies.

 Mixed Race in the United States

Simpson Center for The Humanities at the University of Washington
Dates (Local Time: 19:30 PST): 2010-01-06, 2010-01-20, 2010-02-03, 2010-02-17, and 2010-03-03
Location: Kane Hall 220

Is it coincidence that the first nonwhite president of the United States comes from a multiracial background? Or was his election, in fact, partially due to his mixed-race background and the idea that it somehow resonated with all Americans, regardless of race? In the twenty-first century United States, mixed-race people, from the chief executive to the family next door, seem to be everywhere. In the past twenty-five years, the period since the decriminalization of interracial marriage, the births of monoracial babies have increased 15%, while multiracial births have increased a dramatic 260%.  But what do these numbers imply?  Has racialized inequality changed with the surging numbers of multiracial Americans?  This course will interrogate what it means to understand mixed-race identity in America, and what representations and histories of U.S. multiracialism can illustrate about changing notions of race, power, and privilege in the United States.

Ralina L. Joseph is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and an adjunct assistant professor in the departments of American Ethnic Studies and Women Studies at the University of Washington.  She recently completed a book manuscript, Beyond the Binaries?: Reading Mixed-Race Blackness in the New Millennium, and is currently at work on her second book project, Speaking Back: How Black Women Resist Post-Identity Culture. Joseph teaches about issues of race, gender, sexuality, and the media, and is a 2009 recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

The Wednesday University provides Puget Sound residents with an intellectually stimulating way to continue their education in the humanities.

Each year, the Wednesday University offers three courses taught by distinguished faculty at the University of Washington. These courses, which meet on Wednesday evenings, are open to anyone—from high school students to senior citizens. Please join us and become a part of one of Seattle’s liveliest intellectual and cultural communities.

The Wednesday University is a collaborative program sponsored by Seattle Arts & Lectures, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and the Henry Art Gallery. All classes are held at the Henry Art Gallery Auditorium at the University of Washington from 7:30-9 pm.

Course Fee: $80 each or $210 for all three courses. To register, please visit the Seattle Arts & Lectures website or call 206.621.2230 ext. 10.

All course locations are on the University of Washington campus.  The Fall and Winter courses will be in Kane Hall. The Spring course will be in Brechemin Hall in the Music Building.  All courses begin at 19:30 PST (Local Time).

To register for the lecture, click here.

More Than Black? Humanitis Series

University of California Television
February 2003
00:50:32

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Introduced by:

Paul R. Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

In the United States, anyone with even a trace of African American ancestry has been considered Black. Even as the twenty-first century opens, a racial hierarchy still prevents people of color, including individuals of mixed race, from enjoying the same privileges as Euro-Americans. In his book, G. Reginald Daniel argues that we are at a cross-roads, with members of a new multiracial movement pointing the way toward equality. Presented as part of the Humanitas Lecture Series at UC Santa Barbara. Series: “Humanitas” [2/2003] [Humanities] [Show ID: 7094]

G. Reginald Daniel discusses his book, More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order.

Author Dr. Bonnie M. Davis Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed.  Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival)
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #135 – Bonnie M. Davis, Ph.D.
When: Wednesday, 2010-01-06, 22:00Z

Bonnie M. Davis, Ph.D., Author and Educator
Educating For Change^®

Bonnie M. Davis is a veteran teacher of 37 years who is passionate about education. She has taught in middle schools, high schools, universities, homeless shelters, and a men’s prison. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including Teacher of the Year, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Anti-Defamation League’s World of Difference Community Service Award. Davis has presented at numerous national conferences and provides services to schools through her consulting firm, A4Achievement. Her publications include The Biracial and Multiracial Student Experience: A Journey to Racial Literacy (2009), How to Coach Teachers Who Don’t Look Like You (2007), How to Teach Students Who Don’t Look Like You (2006), African-American Academic Achievement: Building a Classroom of Excellence (2001) and numerous articles on literacy instruction. Dr. Davis will be the keynote and featured speaker at the National Association of African-American Studies (NAAAS) 2010 Teacher Summer Conference, June 27-30, 2010 in Orlando, Florida.  She received her BS in education, her MA in English, her MAI in communi­cations, and her PhD in English.

Mixed Race… Mixed Up?

Presentation at the Canadian Critical Race Conference 2003

Charito Gailling

Mee Lain Ling

Our workshop will explore “mixed race experience” by referring to our own experiences as mixed race women. We are particularly interested in fostering discussion that critically examines racial binaries of whiteness vs non-whiteness and how mixed race voices are negotiated and made invisible. Using exercises, discussion and group work, we will invite participants to consider how re-presentations of power and privilege are present in popular and academic discourses on this topic. We hope to challenge participants to become aware of their own specific “lenses” and think through intersections of identity, racialization, gender, etc. which can be highlighted through the experience of being a mixed race person.

View the presentation here.