Mixed Race Studies

Colour and Race in Brazil: from whitening to the search for Afrodescent

Paper presented at XVII ISA World Congress of Sociology
Gothenburg, Sweden
July 2010
21 pages

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo

Two paradigmatic cases of the building process of post-slavery societies in the Americas were, without a doubt, Brazil and the United States. While the United States had an exceptional and singular development, the Brazilian case can be generalised, with certain caveats, to other countries of Central and South America and the Caribbean in terms of the incorporation of Afro-descendent and Amerindian populations into the free work regime, the formation of a class society, as well as the development of racial and national ideologies. Whereas in Brazil racial democracy was cultivated, segregation still presents a problem in the United States; whilst the former perpetuates pre-capitalist forms of exploitation and precarious employment, the latter provided for the formation of a modern black society, albeit separate from the rest of the nation; if in Brazil we have turned colour into the basic unit of a complicated symbolic system of status attribution, in the U.S. race was built into a descent status group.

In this article I aim to clarify the way in which Brazil has, since abolition, been developing a system of colour classification with regard to Afro-descendents. Not only do I intend to show how this system has developed through time, but how it is also shaped by the mobilization of the black population around the notion of race—as a group of solidarity and common experiences of subordination and discrimination. My strategy is to trace the terms “colour” and “race” and their meanings through time, as used or systemised into classifications by the state, social movements and social scientists. Certainly, this is a preliminary and incomplete study, but I hope that it can serve as a guide to future and more systematic investigations about specific periods, places and social agents…

Read the entire paper here.

The Past and the Present Condition, and the Destiny, of the Colored Race

Henry Highland Garnet

Edited by Paul Royster
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Steam press of J. C. Kneeland and Co.
1848
31 pages

The text of this electronic edition is based on the original published at Troy, New York, in 1848. It was transcribed from a facsimile edition—issued on 1969 by Mnemosyne Publishing Inc., Miami, Florida—which was photo-offset from a copy in the Fisk University Library. Except as noted below, the spelling, punctuation, italics, and capitalization of the original have been preserved. Variant nineteenth-century spellings (such as “carcase” or “develope”) have been retained. Some typographical errors have been corrected and re listed below at the end of the text.

A discourse delivered at the fifteenth anniversary of the Female Benevolent Society of Troy, New York, February 14, 1848.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:

My theme is the Past and the Present condition, and the Destiny of the Colored race. The path of thought which you are invited to travel, has not as I am aware, been pursued heretofore to any considerable extent. The Present, is the midway between the Past and the Future. Let us ascend that sublime eminence, that we may view the vast empire of ruin that is scarcely discernable through the mists of former ages ; and if, while we are dwelling upon the desolations that meet our eyes, we shall mourn over them, I entreat you to look upward and behold the bright scenery of the future. There we have a clear sky, and from thence are refreshing breezes. The airy plains are radiant with prophetic brightness, and truth, love, and liberty are descending the heavens, bearing the charter of man’s destiny to a waiting world.

All the various forms of truth that are presented to the minds of men, are in perfect harmony with the government of God. Many things that appear to be discordant are not really so ; for when they are understood, and the mind becomes illuminated and informed, the imagined deformities disappear as spectres depart from the vision of one who had been a maniac, when his reason returns. “God is the rock, his work is perfect—a God of truth, and without iniquity. Justice and judgment are the habitations of his throne, and mercy and truth go before his face. His righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and his law is the truth.”…

…This western world is destined to be filled with a mixed race. Statesmen, distinguished for their forecast, have gravely said that the blacks must either be removed, or such as I have stated will be the result. It is a stubborn fact, that it is impossible to separate the pale man and the man of color, and therefore the result which to them is so fearful, is inevitable. All this the wiser portion of the Colonizationists see, and they labor to hinder it. It matters not whether we abhor or desire such a consummation, it is now too late to change the decree of nature and circumstances. As well might we attempt to shake the Alleghanies with our hands, or to burst the rock of Gibralter with our fists. If the colored people should all consent to leave this country, on the day of their departure there would be sore lamentations, the like of which the world has not heard since Rachel wept for her children, and would not be comforted, because they were not. We would insist upon taking all who have our generous and prolific blood in their veins. In such an event, the American church and state would be bereaved. The Reverend Francis L. Hawks, D. D., of the Protestant Episcopal Church, a man who is receiving the largest salary of any divine in the country, would be called upon to make the sacrifice of leaving a good living, and to share the fate of his brethren according to the flesh. The Reverend Dr. Murphy, of Herkimer, N. Y., a Presbyterian, would be compelled to leave his beloved flock ; and how could they endure the loss of a shepherd so eloquent, so faithful and so kind. We should be burdened with that renegade negro of the United States Senate, Mr. YULEE, of Florida. We should take one of the wives of Senator Samuel Houston. The consort,—the beautiful Cleopatra of his Excellency, R. M. Johnson, late Democratic Vice President of this great nation,—would be the foremost in the vast company of exiles. After we all should return to tread the golden sands of AFRICA, whether we would add to the morality of our kindred across the deep waters future generations would decide. One thing I am certain of, and that is, many of the slaveholders and lynchers of the South are not very moral now. Our cousins of the tribe of Shem are welcome to our deserters. If they are enriched by them they may be assured that we are not impoverished…

Read the entire paper here.

The Effects of Race Intermingling

Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
Volume 56, Number 4 (1917)
pages 364-368

Charles B. Davenport, Director
Department of Experimental Evolution
(Carnegie Institution of Washington)
Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York

Read on April 13, 1917

The problem of the effects of race intermingling may well interest us of America, when a single state, like New York, of 9,000,000 inhabitants contains 840,000 Russians and Finns, 720,000 Italians, 1,ooo,ooo Germans, 880,000 Irish, 470,000 Austro-Hungarians, 310,000 of Great Britain, 125,000 Canadians (largely French), and 9o,ooo Scandinavians. All figures include those born abroad or born of two foreign-born parents. Nearly two thirds of the population of New York State is foreign-born or of foreign or mixed parentage. Even in a state like Connecticut it is doubtful if 2 per cent of the population are of pure Anglo-Saxon stock for six generations of ancestors in all lines. Clearly a mixture of European races is going on in America on a colossal scale.

Before proceeding further let us inquire into the meaning of “race.” The modern geneticists’ definition differs from that of the systematist or old fashioned breeder. A race is a more or less pure bred “group” of individuals that differs from other groups by at least one character, or, strictly, a genetically connected group whose germ plasm is characterized by a difference, in one or more genes, from other groups. Thus a blue-eyed Scotchman belongs to a different race from some of the dark Scotch. Strictly, as the term is employed by geneticists they may be said to belong to different elementary species.

Defining race in this sense of elementary species we have to consider our problem: What are the results of race intermingling, or miscegenation? To this question no general answer can be given. A specific answer can, however, be given to questions involving specific characters. For example, if the question be framed: what are the results of hybridization between a blue-eyed race (say Swede) and a brown-eyed race (say South Italian)? The answer is that, since brown eye is dominant over blue eye, all the children will have brown eyes; and if two such children inter-marry brown and blue eyes will appear among their children in the ratio of 3 to 1. Again, if one parent be white and the other a full-blooded negro then the skin color of the children will be about half as dark as that of the darker parent; and the progeny of two such mulattoes will be white, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 and full black in the ratio of 1:4:6:4:1…

…Not only physical but also mental and temperamental incompatibilities may be a consequence of hybridization. For example, one often sees in mulattoes an ambition and push combined with intellectual inadequacy which makes the unhappy hybrid dissatisfied with his lot and a nuisance to others.

To sum up, then, miscegenation commonly spells disharmony—disharmony of physical, mental and temperamental qualities and this means also disharmony with environment. A hybridized people are a badly put together people and a dissatisfied, restless, ineffective people. One wonders how much of the exceptionally high death rate in middle life in this country is due to such bodily maladjustments; and how much of our crime and insanity is due to mental and temperamental friction.

This country is in for hybridization on the greatest scale that the world has ever seen…

Read the entire article here.

Race Mixing a Religious Fraud

circa 1930-1960s
8 pages
Source: Digital Collections of the University of Southern Mississippi Libraries
USM Identifier: mus-mcc033

D. B. Red, (Author of the pamphlet, A Corrupt Tree Bringeth Forth Evil Fruit)

From the McCain (William D.) Pamphlet Collection; D. B. Red states that God implemented segregation after the flood and enforced it all through the Old Testament. He quotes the Bible to support his belief that segregation of races was ordained by God and that race-mixing is an instrument of the Devil. He also quotes Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to support his view that racial integration is undesirable. Red also contends that religious leaders who support integration have been duped by an influx of Communist rhetoric that seeks to undermine the social structure of the United States.

Race Mixing A Religious Fraud

Race mixing not only disregards the age-long experience of man and constitutional guarantees, but as it is now taught, is a religious fraud. Many religious leaders have asked the Federal Government to reach over the heads of the states into homes to usurp the God-given right and duty of parents to give their children the benefit of the most wholesome surroundings in public schools. Approval is given to Block Busting integration which divides the value of residential property by two or three, and exposes people to all of the annoyance and dangers of slum and crime areas.

The indifference of church leaders to the fate of the victims of race mixing reminds this scribe of the hit and run drivers who never change their ways or look back at their victims. Some are worse than others but all of the larger denominations are pushing us down the Devil’s highway of racial integration and on toward national perdition.

Christ says: “YE MUST BE BORN AGAIN… BEHOLD I STAND AT THE DOOR AND KNOCK”, Church and State say: “YOU MUST BE INTEGRATED NOW; BEHOLD A BAYONET IS AT YOUR BACK.”

IS THIS SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE, OR IS SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND CHRIST ?

God Introduces Multiple Races and Segregation

While the virgin earth spread her beauty and bounty in all directions, great evils arose among men, who reveled in sin and so vexed the Creator that He almost destroyed mankind. As He again sent man forth with the hope of producing much more righteous conditions, He introduced the multiple race plan. Have age-long results justified the wisdom of God as displayed in this crisis? Or has time justified the wisdom of those who have long ignored this plan and spread a blanket of perpetual blight and mixed races over much of the earth?

Every faculty of man as he was originally created is capable of both good and evil. Frightful evils are entagled with the desire for a happy future existence. Evil also arises from a loyalty to your own kind and an aversion to other kinds. Should we denounce these things and reject the wisdom of the Creator? Or should we seek to better understand His wisdom?

The efforts of religious leaders to lead and force men to accept racial integration are surprising, and become even more so when the communist attitude is known. In 1913, a communist living in England suggested the agitation of the race problem in the United States of America as a trouble-maker. Comrade Lenin said, “We will find our most fertile field for the infiltration of Marxism within the field of religion, because religious people are the most gullible and will accept almost anything if it is couched in religious terminology.” Soon the viper of racial integration was brought forth in robes of righteousness, and religious leaders have abundantly justified this statement of Lenin as to their gullibility. They freely misuse or ignore scripture in efforts to fit scriptural robes on this ancient abomination. It seems safe to assume that if God did err by the introduction of the multiple race plan, He would surely have been able to see it and would have at least relaxed in His demands for the adherence to this plan. The division of the land and the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel both tended to maintain racial divisions. The call of Abraham produced a racial subdivision and rigid segregation was used to preserve it. We find that God has always had to depend on minorities to carry His message. Perhaps He was wisely preparing in advance for this.

God Deals With Mixed People

There were natural and special penalties for integration. The commandments of Moses and Joshua clearly forbade mixing with the descendants of Ham. In strong, figurative language Joshua foretold the frightful price of disobedience- Quote Joshua 23:13: “They shall be snares and traps unto you and scourges in your sides, and thorns in your eyes, until ye perish from off this good land which the Lord your God hath given you.” In Ezra, chapters 9 and 10, and Nehemiah, chapters 9 through 13, we find that on discovery of mixed marriages a systematic check was made and a considerable number were required to give up their strange wives with any children that they may have had. “Also they separated from Israel all of the mixed multitude.” This was a clear-cut case of a special penalty. Others seem to have suffered a combination of penalties. In Genesis 26: 34-35 we find that Esau first took two Hittite wives “which were a grief of mind to Isaac and Rebecca.” In Obadiah 18 we find, “There shall not be any remaining of the house of Esau.” This came to pass centuries ago. Concerning Israel, Hosea said in 7:8-9, “Ephraim, he hath mixed himself among the people . . . Strangers hath devoured his strength and he knoweth it not.”…

…Who Plays the Sucker

In the time of Christ gambling was hoary with age. National bondage and individual slavery were great evils. Neither of these are condemned in the Bible. They are generally conceded to be evil. Race-mixing is not only often and severely condemned in the Bible, but is an age-long and incurable curse of the first magnitude. Of all the millions and billions of people who have borne the curse of blended blood and jumbled humanity, the mixers will only speak of the situation in Hawaii where they are said to have an easy fluid mixture of the races. They fail to note that communist influence has long been strong in the islands and that this fluid situation is a much sought goal of communism, since it facilitates the easy formation of communist cells, and leaves no coherent group to oppose them. Are these mixers as ignorant as they seem, or are they only presuming on the ignorance of others?…

Read the entire pamphlet here.

Gender, Mixed Race Relations and Dougla Identities in Indo-Caribbean Women’s Fiction

6th International Conference of Caribbean Women’s Writing: Comparative Critical Conversations
Goldsmiths, University of London
Centre for Caribbean Studies
2011-06-24 through 2011-06-25

Christine Vogt-William
Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany

Once a pejorative term in Hindi meaning ‘bastard’, dougla is used nowadays to designate those of African and Indian parentage in the Caribbean. Relations between African and Indian communities in the Caribbean have been fraught, due to the divide-and-rule policies implemented by the colonial plantocracy, missionaries and state regimes, in order to discourage interracial solidarity and cooperation. Vijay Prashad observes: “the descendants of the coolies and the slaves have struggled against the legacy of both social fractures and of the mobility of some at the expense of others“ (Prashad, 2001: 95). Yet, despite this there were transcultural alliances between Afro-Caribbeans and Indo-Caribbeans. However the figure of the dougla was considered by many middle class Indians as a potential threat to Indian cultural coherence and by extension to a powerful political lobby under the demographic category of “East Indian” (Prashad, 2001: 83). Indo-Caribbean culture, history and literature cannot be examined without acknowledging the transcultural aspects of dougla heritages.

The focus of my paper will be on how gender and mixed race relations are addressed in novels by Indo-Trinidadian-Canadian writers Ramabai Espinet and Shani Mootoo. The genre of the novel could be read as an adequate site to address the interrogation of hybrid identities with a view to engendering a Caribbean feminist dougla poetics, since literature is “a medium that is not understood to be exclusively the cultural capital of Indo- or Afro-Trinidadians” (Puri, 2004: 206). Gender roles and expectations from both Indo-Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean communities inform and complicate racial relations—factors which are rendered even more complex due to the histories of slavery and indentured labour and how these served to shape Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean women’s self-perceptions. In view of these histories, I read The Swinging Bridge (Espinet) and He Drown She in the Sea (Mootoo) with the aim of charting spaces to articulate alternative perspectives normally disallowed by hegemonic racial representations (Afro-Creole and Indian “Mother Culture”), which also repress the gender and class inequalities within Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean communities. These spaces then might provide the dougla potential of disrupting dominant racial and gendered stereotypes, thus allowing for specifically transcultural feminist interventions in prevalent gender and race imagery.

For more information, click here.

Rebuilding the Tower of Babel

Pelican Publishing Company, New Orleans
1957
24 pages
Source: Digital Collections of the University of Southern Mississippi Libraries
USM Identifier: mus-mcc030

Stuart O. Landry

From the McCain (William D.) Pamphlet Collection; In this pamphlet, Landry asserts that integrationists are trying to reunite the races that God separated in the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel. He asserts that new anthropological and psychological theories of racial equality are pseudoscientific and backed by Communist interests. Landry cites some Old Testament quotations that he interprets as implying that segregation is ordered by God, and he asserts that race amalgamation will be lead to the downfall of Christianity. He also compares African Americans’ social condition to that of Jews, Italians, Germans, and Irish in order to support his argument that African Americans’ place at the bottom of the United States’ social structure is a result of their lack of effort.

FOREWORD

This is not an attack upon the Church nor a criticism of Christianity. It is not a message of hate or of intolerance. On the contrary, it is a plea for broad-mindness on the part of many Christian groups who are becoming narrow-minded with respect to the ideas and customs of brother Christians.

It is with reluctance that I emphasize the difference—physical, mental and cultural—between white people and colored people. It looks like I am acting the Pharisee, wearing his phylacteries with an air of “better than thou.” But such is not the case.

My enumeration of racial differences is no more invidious than making a comparison between men and women between whom there are many physical and mental differences. I am simply trying to show the disadvantage of race-mixing.

Above all, I am not trying to close the door of opportunity to anyone, or condemn any individual to failure by making him feel inferior. This he can easily disprove. My generalizations apply to large groups. If any man can rise above his environment, more power to him!

S. O. L.

And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech… And they said Let us build a city and a tower whose top may reach into heaven… And the Lord said Let us go down there and confound their language that they may not understand one another’s speech… Therefore is the name called Babel because the Lord did there confound the language of all the the earth; and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

—Genesis XI: 1-9.

The good church people of the United States want to rebuild the Tower of Babel. They wish to do away with races and the confusion of tongues. Can they climb to heaven on such a structure?

The building of a new tower reaching to high heaven, even if only figurative, transgresses the will of God, who thousands of years ago destroyed the actual attempt and scattered peoples all over the world, and contravenes the laws that govern human nature.

But most church members seem to have forgotten the story of Babel, and today are much concerned over the alleged discrimination against Negroes and other races.

The thought of the times is, let’s desegregate and integrate. Let’s bring together men of all colors, races and countries—we are all brothers under the skin. Let’s go back to Babel.

The movement to do away with all racial segregation in school, church and social life (which eventually means amalgamation of the races and the mongrelization of the white race) has now found favor with all the leading church groups of America…

…The Presbyterian Church is now taking the lead in the “desegregation revolution.” The 168th General Assembly (Presbyterian Church in the U. S.) in May 1956 called for all-out efforts to end segregation in the fields of education, housing and industry. On June 14th, 1956 the Presbyterian Session of New York unanimously approved a resolution commending the work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Only recently a Presbyterain minister told the General Assembly of the Church of Ireland that inter-marriage between black and white “on an immense scale” would solve the color problem.

In Connecticut last year a Presbyterian church with a predominantly white congregation called a Negro pastor. What has this great church come to, once the strict interpreter of the Bible, when it now thinks that the Ethiopian can change his skin!…

The “Scum” Origin Of Integration

The idea of racial equality and integration has come up from the lower orders of the social scale. The underworld knows no class. Prize fighting, not exactly the underworld, but not a very cultural institution, was the first sport to “integrate.” Now we find kindly old ladies all over the land watching Negro brutes fighting white brutes on television and glorying in knockouts.

Night clubs, “hot-spots,” and taverns went for racial equality rapidly. Negroes have preempted this form of enlightened entertainment. With sex, obscenity, jazz, rock-and-roll music, the night life of the country is far from being elevating, yet much of it slops over into radio and television to familiarize us all with the idea of non-segregation…

…There is no Commandment against segregation, no prohibition of it in the Bible nor in any of the great canons of moral law. Segregation was not a sin ten years ago, it was not a sin a hundred years ago, it was not a sin a thousand years ago and it is not a sin now. If right and wrong change with the years then the materialistic philosophy of William Graham Sumner is correct—that is, morals vary with the times and in accordance with the culture of peoples. This is the view of Karl Marx and modern communists. Such a view is against the principles of the Christian religion which believes in the Eternal God and absoluteness of truth. Right does not change with the years. It does not become wrong because of the preaching of false prophets, who, from mistaken or ulterior motives, make the welkin ring with their declamations against what they call injustice and immorality.

A Practical Solution

Segregation is a practical working method whereby large numbers of two race?, differing in customs, culture and intelligence, living in the same area, are in constant contact with each other without trouble or dissension. Under the systems employed in countries and states where the population is bi-racial, segregation has worked successfully. In the Southern states of the United States, in spite of the belief to the contrary, Negroes have had all the opportunity the land afforded…

…The Harm Of Racial Mixing

The question is asked that if the Bible is vague on the question of segregation, wouldn’t we resolve the problem more in keeping with Christian brotherhood if we declared it against the policy of the Church? What is the harm of mixing the races together in churches, schools and social affairs?

Well, the harm in the fraternizing and mixing of white and colored people comes in the breaking down of the social inhibition against the intermarriage between whites and Negroes. Race mixing that leads to racial intermarriage is a crime against the future of the white race. To mix the black and white races is bad science, bad eugenics and bad genetics. It is not a matter of Christianity, it is a matter of common sense, a practical matter that affects the future of all our people.

The Church, in advocating integration or the mixing of the races in schools and social affairs, knows that this will lead to eventual amalgamation and the absorption of the Negro race all to the disadvantage of the race that absorbs them.

On the same theory that all men are brothers we will then begin to mix in with the Chinese, East Indians and more Africans. Soon we will have one race of people. I do not understand why the good Christians of this country cannot see that in the event we absorb all the races of the world, or rather that we are absorbed by them since there are twice as many colored people as there are whites, religion as we know it today will disappear. We will have no more Christianity. We will have some kind of blended belief such as advocated by Arnold Toynbee. Back to Babel again.

Not White Supremacy But White Superiority

No plea is made here for the denial of any of the rights to which the citizens of this country are entitled. The right to liberty, life and the pursuit of happiness belongs to everyone. There is no suggestion of a limit on the exercise of political rights, the advocating of economical and educational restrictions, or belittling the dignity of the members of any minority group.

My plea is simply that we recognize in a common sense way that there is a difference between the white race and the Negro race, that sensible white people do not want to become too intimate socially with colored people as that only leads to intermarriage and a mongrelization of the Caucasian race…

…How To Have A Superior People

Up until recently eugenists—now graduated into geneticists and now soft-pedalling the theory of superior peoples or races—were pointing out to Americans as well as the world the necessity for more careful mating on the part of individuals, and the desirability of superior persons choosing their wives or husbands from outstanding families. Taking their cue from stock breeders and dog fanciers they believed that the way to bring about the evolution of a highly intelligent and moral people was to mate together people who possessed these qualities. But modern ethnologists, sociologists and even geneticists wish us to disregard the principles employed by practical breeders of cattle, dogs, birds, flowers and plants when it comes to race mixing.

Influenced by propaganda the doctors of these “sciences,” which are still vague and far from exact, are saying in effect that black is white and there are no racial differences that are consequential. They want us to develop into a hybrid or mongrel race…

Read the entire pamphlet here.

Do You See Your Family?: An Examination of Racially Mixed Characters & Families in Children’s Picture Books Available in School Media Centers

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
2002
37 pages

Susan S. Lovett

A Master’s paper submitted to the faculty of the School of Information and Library Science of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Library Science.

This study describes a survey of public elementary schools in Wake County, North Carolina determining what picture books that include mixed-race characters or mixed-race families are available and which are most commonly collected in public school media centers. Fifty-two of the seventy-nine elementary school media centers in the Wake County Public School System responded. Thirty-four titles that included a mixed-race character or a mixed-race family, where the family was not multiracial due to adoption, are identified. Nine titles prove to be highly collected, eleven titles are somewhat collected, and fourteen titles are rarely collected. Half of the highly collected titles are award winners, whereas the mid and rarely collected category books have not won any awards. The parental racial combinations vary, but the prevalent pairing is African American/Caucasian. Titles appear to be collected more because they are award-winning than because they represent a non-Caucasian population. The majority of elementary school media specialists have never been asked to find materials that include mixed-race characters or families. Overall, few of these books exist, and fewer still are collected in school media centers.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Table of Tables
• Introduction
• Literature Review
• Research Questions
• Methodology
  • Locating Mixed Race Materials
  • Instrument
  • Procedure
• Findings & Discussion
• Conclusions
• Future Research
• References
• Appendices
  • Appendix A – School Media Collection Survey Instrument
  • Appendix B – Survey Data Arranged by Quantity Owned
  • Appendix C – Annotated Picture Books

TABLE OF TABLES

• Table 1 – Identified Picture Books with Racially Mixed Characters or Families
• Table 2 – Highly Collected Titles
• Table 3 – Mid Collected Titles
• Table 4 – Rarely Collected Titles
• Table 5 – Total Racially Mixed Picture Book Collection per Media Center
• Table 6 – Titles Suggested by Surveyed Media Specialists
• Table 7 – Racial Pairings per Title

Read the entire paper here.

Living as Others in Japan

Japanese Studies Association of Australia 2011 Biennial Conference
Internationalising Japan: Sport, Culture and Education
University of Melbourne, Melbourne Law School
185 Pelham Street
Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia
2011-07-04 through 2011-07-07

Wednesday, 2011-07-06, 11:00-12:30 AEDT (Local Time)
Room 102

This panel will present two historical papers about individuals whose lives were affected by the Pacific War, and a third paper which examines issues involving intercultural communication between Japanese and non-Japanese people. The two historical stories focus on how their respective individuals navigated their life course as “Others” in Japan. Hamilton will shed light on children born to Japanese mothers and Australian fathers during the Allied Occupation in Kure. Tamura’s paper is on a businessman of mixed heritage, English and Japanese, born in Kobe, who was interned in Japan. Parry’s paper provides a look into intercultural communication between Australian students in a homestay among ten Japanese host parents.

Kure Kids
Walter Hamilton

Walter Hamilton has recently completed a book on the mixed-race children of the Occupation, under the working title of Lest We Beget: The Mixed-Race Legacy of Occupied Japan. (www.lestwebeget.com).

Nearly sixty years have passed since the post-war occupation of Japan. It might be assumed historians will have exhausted all there is to say about its political, economic and social effects. But one unexplored aspect remains vividly alive: the hidden ancestral links that bind Australians, Americans, Britons and others to Japanese blood-relations never known, never met: the unclaimed, mixed-race offspring left in Japan when the troops departed. Their fathers would not or could not acknowledge them: an estimated 10,000 children, including several hundred fathered by Australians.

So familiar is the idea of military conquest leading to the birth of “unwanted” children outside marriage – across racial, class and cultural divides – they tend to be dismissed as a natural corollary of war. Their appearance in occupied Japan came as no surprise. The “Madame Butterfly” tradition provided a high-toned model of Western men exploiting Japanese women. As if their biological inevitability made them what they were, the children attracted scant attention from Western writers, who acquiesced in facile assumptions about their fate. Surely they were disowned by their fathers, lamented by their mothers and thrust to the lower depths of society. The eminent American historian John Dower has called them “one of the sad, unspoken stories” of the occupation. Japanese historical and fictional treatments of the issue also suffer from a determination to link the children exclusively to prostitution, moral collapse and national humiliation.

Australia joined the occupation not expecting to convert the former enemy but to punish and ostracise him. With immigration restrictions, in some respects, even tighter than they were in 1941, permission was denied for troops in Japan to marry across the race divide. Anyone defying the ban risked being forcibly removed from his de facto wife and children. Although these measures were relaxed in 1952 to admit the first Japanese war brides, no such right was extended to the unacknowledged or orphaned children of Australian servicemen. In addition, the federal government maintained an elaborate deception to stop the children being adopted by Australian families. Bogus welfare arguments were used to cover a purely political determination. The moment the strategy showed signs of faltering, it was reinforced through public monies being deployed to keep the children in Japan. There were almost no exceptions, even for the sons and daughters of brave men who had fought and died in the Korean War. In the words of a leading churchman of the day, the Reverend Alan Walker: “There have been few more disgraceful incidents in the whole miserable history of Australia’s racial immigration policy.”

This paper will introduce several individuals born in or near the city of Kure, in Hiroshima prefecture, where the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) was based from 1946 until the withdrawn of the last Korean War contingent in 1956. The Kure Kids encountered discrimination because of their physical appearance, dysfunctional family life, low socioeconomic status and social isolation. But the lives of these Japanese “others” represented much more—in quality, variety and achievement—than is suggested by the conventional portrayal of “sad, unspoken stories.”

Between Father Land and Mother Land: a British-Japanese Dual National and his Pacific War
Keiko Tamua

In war, individuals are categorized either as friend or foe, and enemy nationals are seen and treated with suspicion and fear. In December 1941, when the Pacific War started, about 700 out of 2134 civilians of the Allied nations who were residing in Japan were arrested or interned as enemy aliens. Most of them had lived in Japan for a number of years and had become part of the community. Some civilians were repatriated to their home countries on exchange boats in 1942 and 43, but others decided to remain in Japan even though they knew they were going to be interned or kept under police surveillance. Most of them had mixed heritage through their parents and/or having Japanese spouse; they thought their home was Japan rather than Britain or the USA, and they felt they could not leave without their family members.

F. M. Jonas was one of these expatriates who were caught in the war. He was born in Osaka in 1878, having a British father and a Japanese mother. He had established himself as a respectable British businessman in pre-war Kobe, running a stevedore business at the port. He was highly regarded both in the expatriate and Japanese communities, having been vicechairman of the Kobe Foreign Chamber of Commerce, and president of the Kobe Regatta and Athletic Club – the premier expatriate social club in Kobe. When the war started Jonas was arrested by the Japanese authorities, and later interned as an enemy alien. However, he managed to secure release from internment through British-Japanese dual citizenship, and he changed his name to Morii Kamejirō. When the war ended, he tried to re-establish his formal status as a British national. He died in 1950 before final resolution was officially made. Did he claim citizenship of convenience to suit the circumstances, to avoid internment, and consequently did he betray his father land? Or did he have legitimate reasons to do so? What were the consequences of his action for himself and his family? Japanese nationality laws upheld the principle of paternal succession until 1985, and dual citizenship has never been recognized. How did Jonas convince the authorities of his dual nationality? In this paper, I will discuss the life course of F. M. Jonas, who lived between father land and mother land in the middle of the Pacific War. Through Jonas’ story, I will explore, from a historical point of view, how the nationality of mixed decent people has been interpreted and handled in Japan and Britain.

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InSide/OutSide Cultural Hybridity: Greenstone as Narrative Provocateur

Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE)
International Education Research Conference 2003
AARE – NZARE
2003-11-30 through 2003-12-03
Auckland, New Zealand

Tess Moeke-Maxwell, HRC Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Department of Psychology
University of Waikato

This paper is a revised chapter located in my PhD thesis ‘Bringing Home The Body: Bi/multi Racial Maori Women’s Hybridity in Aotearoa/New Zealand (2003). An earlier version of this paper is to be published as a chapter in Provocations: On Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Excitability in Education. Editors: Cathryn McConaghy (University of New England) and Judith P. Robertson (University of Ottawa).

Toward evening—we know it is evening—a canoe puts off from the bank of That Side and sets off over the river. In it are Huia and Memory and Sire paddling back from That Side to This, all chanting a paddle song the old one has recently taught them, keeping instinctive time with the paddles, which is one sure time they know—any instinctive rhythm. It is in Maori of course.

Behold my paddle!
See how it flies and flashes;
It quivers like a bird’s wing
This paddle of mine….

But as they reach This Side landing an unrest stirs in Huia. Her allegiance to her koro on That Side confronts her feeling for Puppa on This Side. In the crossing of the polished surface of the river is the crossing from the brown to the white, although she’s too young to know it, and the emotional racial transition is not polished like the face of the river holding the gray of the sky in her waters and the glamorous gold of the trees; it is something with smudges on it, something with jagged angles. The racial transition is a sunken branch cutting the mirror surface (Ashton-Warner, 1966, pp. 63-4).

Essentially, this paper is a summary of the ideas presented in my doctoral thesis whereby I examined bi/multi racial Maori women’s cultural hybridity in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In my concluding chapter, I utilised Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s (1966) novel Greenstone to highlight bi/multi racial women’s hybridity in her portrayal of Huia’s coming and going, from one side of the river where she lives with her Pakeha family to the Other, the ancestral home of her people and the place where her Maori grandfather still lives. Ashton-Warner’s novel is situated after the First World War. She demonstrates how children of mixed racial ancestries were multiply located across different landscapes and cultures. In Greenstone, Hybrid-Huia’s corporeal body regularly travels backwards and forwards across the river/boundary separating her two cultural worlds, This Side and That Side. The crisscrossing between This Pakeha Side and That Maori Side is portrayed as a journey/process of metaphoric images and competing landscapes that need to be traversed to make the (cultural) transition to the Other Side possible…

Read the entire paper here.

The Blackfoot Tribe of the Midsouth

American Society of Ethnohistory Conference
“Blackfoot, Redbones, Brass Ankles and Pied Noir: Colorful Identities, Creative Strategies American Society of Ethnohistory conference”
Santa Fe, New Mexico
2005-11-18 through 2005-11-20
2005-11-19

Carol A. Morrow, Professor of Anthropology
Southeast Missouri State University

Over the years, I have had a number of African-American students identify themselves as having Native American heritage.  Occasionally they claim descent from the ‘Blackfoot tribe’, but they always have a southern heritage.  Most students don’t know much more than just the term, Blackfoot, but one student explained that Blackfoot meant a blend of African and Cherokee heritage.  Given our location on the Trail of Tears, Cherokee heritage is common; the Blackfoot tribe is something else entirely.  This paper reviews the use of the Blackfoot term throughout the Midsouth.

Over the years, I have had a number of students in my North American Indians classes who have self-identified as Blackfoot, or Cherokee and Blackfoot, or in one case, Choctaw and Blackfoot.  I would always ask them if they had ties or relatives in Montana, and with one exception, they all said NO. The one exception is the blond blue-eyed young man, who in fact, did have relatives in Montana.

I teach at Southeast Missouri State, which is in Cape Girardeau and the Cherokee Trail of tears passed through our community in 1838-1839.  Additionally, there was a large community of Cherokee Indians that lived to the sound of our area in Arkansas territory, and many pushed north into Missouri when they were moved in 1828 West into Indian territory (these were the Old Settlers).  So we have always had a number of people in the area of Cherokee ancestry.  But Blackfoot Indian is another story entirely.  Finally, I realized that the Blackfoot students were African-American.  My African-American students almost always had Indian blood, but it took me a while to figure out that they were the only ones that claimed Blackfoot blood…

Read the entire paper here.