Mixed Race Studies

School of Cultural Inquiry Seminar Series – Narrating the Nowhere People: FB Vickers’ The Mirage and “Half-Caste” Aboriginals

Australian National University
A. D. Hope Conference Room (Building 14)
2011-06-06, 16:16-17:30 (Local TIme)

Rich Pascal, Visiting Fellow
School of Cultural Inquiry
Australian National University

By the turn of the Twentieth Century, and increasingly in the decades that followed, areas located literally on the fringes of many Australian towns were populated by people consigned figuratively to a conceptual limbo.  Australians who were mostly of mixed Aboriginal and European ancestry congregated in slumlike camps and reserves.  As the century wore on, the mainstream society’s widespread belief that the so-called “tribal” Aboriginals were passing into extinction had come to be shadowed by a perception that these so-called “half-castes” and “fringe dwellers” were now the dark Others whose endurance threatened the dream of an all-white Australia.  They were, to borrow Henry Reynolds’ apt phrase, Australia’s “nowhere people.” 
 
Mostly unsighted, they were in the literal sense commonly unremarked by mainstream Australians.  And the society’s chronic inclination to render the marginalised social group translucent was nowhere more apparent than in the sphere of literary and popular narratives.  In the novels, stories, and memoirs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries their near invisibility registers as an almost total absence.  It wasn’t until the two decades following the end of the Second World War that some memoirs, novels and stories that featured them prominently were presented to the reading public.  The first book length narrative to set itself the challenge of subjectively rendering the experience of Indigenous nowhereness was FB Vickers’ The Mirage (1955), a novel that has not been well remembered.  Although well received by reviewers of the time, it was not a popular success and it was rarely mentioned in later histories of Australian literature; it has never been studied in any depth or detail.  This discussion constitutes an effort to redress the latter omission, and advances as well an argument for the book’s sociocultural importance with regard to subsequent efforts, literary and otherwise, to include the nowhere people within the national identity.

Passing for Black: Sermon

Unitarian Church of Norfolk
Norfolk, Virginia
2010-08-29

Dr. Walter Skip Earl

OPENING WORDS

Forty-seven years ago yesterday, on August 28, 1963, before a huge crowd of African and other Americans gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said:

In a sense, we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice…

…READING:

Our reading this morning comes from the jacket (show) previews of Clarence E. Walker’s 2009 University of Virginia press, MONGREL NATION, The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. The term “mongrel” is usually used as a derogatory term for “Mixed Race” .

The first quote is from Annette Gordon-Reed, New York Law School and author of THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO: An American Family.

America has indeed been a mongrel nation, not just in terms of blood, but in terms of culture and politics, from the very beginning. Walker very rightly challenges the assumption that the Jefferson-Hemings liaison was either unusual or exceptional.

Secondly, from the author himself, Clarence E. Walker, Professor of History at the University of California, Davis and also the author of WE CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN: An Argument about Afrocentrism.

The debate over the affair between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings rarely rises above the question, “Did they or didn’t they?” But lost in the argument over the existence of such a relationship are equally urgent questions about a history that is more complex, both sexually and culturally, than most of us realize.

(T)he relationship between Jefferson and Hemings must be seen not in isolation but in the broader context of interracial affairs within the plantation complex. Viewed from this perspective, the relationship ..was fairly typical. For many, this is a disturbing realization because it forces us to abandon the idea of American exceptionalism and reexamine slavery in America as part of a long, global history of slaveholders frequently crossing the color line.

More than many other societies—and despite our obvious mixed-race population—our nation has displayed particular reluctance to acknowledge this dynamic….From Jefferson’s time to our own, the general public denied—or remained oblivious to—the possibility of the affair. Historians, too, dismissed the idea, even when confronted with compelling arguments by fellow scholars. It took the DNA finds of 1998 to persuade many (although to this day, doubters remain).

The president’s apologists, both before and after the DNA findings, have constructed an iconic Jefferson that tells us more about their own beliefs—than it does about the interaction between slave owners and slaves. Much more than a search for the facts about two individuals , the debate over Jefferson and Hemings is emblematic of tensions in our society between competing conceptions both of race and of our nation. (underlining is mine)

This sermon is not meant to be a history lesson. Nor is it meant to be a summary of the contents of MONGREL NATION.

Rather, it is my RESPONSE to having read the book. It is my attempt to react to the thesis of Clarence Walker’s latest book within the time frame of these next 15 to 20 minutes. And I appreciate your sharing this with me by listening…

Read the entire sermon here.

Profit, Power, & Privilege: The Racial Politics of Ancestry
 
American Anthropological Association Meetings
November 18, 2000
San Francisco, California

Lee D. Baker, Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies
Duke University

In March of this year each of you received your decennial census, and you were confronted, once again, by those ominous racial boxes. This time, however, you could go ahead and check more than one box. Your ability to check more than one box was a compromise worked out by the Commerce Department and two opposing efforts to lobby the Administration. One effort was launched by people that identify as bi-racial, or of mixed race descent, and who wanted their own box. The other effort was led by the NAACP and the National Council of La Razza who argued that the boxes should remain the same. Although virtually every Latino, Black, or Native American person should go ahead and check “all of the above,” the powerful bi-racial lobby did not want to force their constituents to “choose” between identifying with one ancestor or another. The NAACP and others argued that the census was about identification—not identity—and pressed the Administration to make an accurate count of people who are identified as racial minorities, to gain a better understanding of inter-city demographics, and to maintain the ability to demonstrate disparate impact. These organizations wanted to be able to account for all people identified as black, Hispanic, etc. In this case, the bi-racial lobby viewed race as a proxy for ancestry while the NAACP viewed race as a proxy for political status.

Several months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that indigenous Hawaiians could not vote in a state-wide election for the commissioners of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, an agency that allocates resources set aside when Hawaii became a state in 1959. Since these resources were for the explicit purpose of bettering ” the conditions of Native Hawaiians,” only indigenous Hawaiians could vote for commissioners. The Court deemed the election unconstitutional and invoked the rarely used 15th Amendment, which provides that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude.” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy explained in his majority opinion that “ancestry can be a proxy for race” and therefore ruled the elections unconstitutional. However, elections held by Indian tribes remained Constitutional, Kennedy argued, because of their “unique political status.”

A few years ago, the Lumbee Tribe of Pembroke, North Carolina petitioned the U.S. Congress for federally designated tribal status. At stake was over 70 million federal dollars targeted for health and education. Although members of the Lumbee Tribe have made treaties with the federal government, number 40,000, are recognized as a tribe by the state of North Carolina, and enjoy a very salient “political status,” the federal government in 1994 refused to recognize their tribal status because they did not meet the stringent requirements imposed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Part of the BIA requirements includes tracing descent from a “historic tribe.” The Lumbees, however, have a mixed ancestry that includes decedents from earlier Hatteras and Cheraw groups. Unlike Western tribes, the Lumbees have participated in the crosscurrents of culture since 1585 when Sir Walter Raleigh embarked upon his ill-fated colony. For centuries, the Lumbees have absorbed the culture and people from neighboring black, white, and Indian populations and today are hard-pressed to meet the requirements set by the BIA that simply ignore processes of culture change. In this case, the Lumbees viewed political status as a proxy for ancestry, but Congress did not.

Race and racism in the U.S. today is the historical end product of a gamy mix of social, political, and economic pressures grinding against each other. Like the tectonics of the earth’s plates, it’s usually slow and predictable, but one never knows when these forces will erupt or quake- forever changing the social landscape. (Here in California, tectonics of all kinds are particularly volatile). Although the outcomes of the cases I briefly described seemed more like a game of “rock-scissors-paper,” they fall within the slow and predictable racial tectonics. From the centuries old “one-drop” rule to the complex fractions used to claim tribal membership; race, culture, and heritage, have always been used inconsistently in a struggle to define social, political, and economic relationships. W.E.B. Du Bois once penned that the concept of race was “a group of contradictory forces, facts and tendencies” (Du Bois 1986b:651).

I have long thought that this was one of the best definitions of race, but it does not get us very far. Anthropologists are supposed to identify patterns in process, but it is often difficult when such salient modalities in American culture are used willy-nilly by even our most esteemed institutions. Although it appears in the above cases that race, ancestry, and political status are applied in a sort of catch-as-catch-can manner, there is a simple and usually predictable logic that shapes these “contradictory forces, facts, and tendencies”—Profit, Power, and Privilege. Like the investigative reporter who “follows the money,” a scholar is well served if he or she looks for the way people use race to acquire or protect any one of these three “Ps.”…

…Individuals who yoke their identity to categories of race often miss the fact that most people stitch together an ethnic identity from various cultural heritages, and that cultural identity has nothing to do with racial categories. This distinction between race and ethnicity is thrown into vivid relief when I used to walk out my back door and stroll down 125th Street—affectionately know as the “Heart of Harlem.” The everyday lives of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Haitian, Nigerians, and African Americans commingle and converge in this community in a way that has transposed historic segregation into a form of congregation that exhibits the rich tapestry of the African diaspora.

The question remains, why does the mixed-race lobby insist on using ancestry as a proxy for race? I think the answers lies in the one argument I have not seen made by members of this lobbying effort. People advocating for a mixed race category should also advocate that every racial minority check that box too. Barring recent immigrants, virtually no person today considered Black, Indian, or Hawaiian can trace an uninterrupted genealogy back to Africa, Hawaii, or ancestral tribe. Moreover, everyone with a mythical “Cherokee grandmother,” should be encouraged to check that box.

In lieu of this argument, it appears that these advocates are trying to institutionalize a mixed race category, which in other countries at least, turns on a claim to white privilege. We can learn from South Africa, Jamaica, Haiti, and even in Louisiana and South Carolina that efforts to institutionalize, not a hybrid heritage, but a mixed race category, actually advances racial injustice and allocates white privilege into the haves, have nots, and have some….

Read the entire paper here.

Man with a Cross: Hawkeye Was a “Half-Breed”

Cooper Panel
American Literature Association Conference
San Diego, California
May 1998

James Fenimore Cooper Society

Barbara Mann, Lecturer of English
University of Toledo

Originally published in James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers No. 10, August 1998

Natty Bumppo—Hawkeye of James Fenimore Cooper’s five Leather-Stocking Tales—is indelibly inscribed in the critical mind as the “man without a cross,” that prototypical “white Indian” of American literature. So accustomed are they to Natty’s “man-without-a-cross” mantra that critics take it at face value, never asking the obvious question: Was Natty really a man without a racial cross? I say, “Not a chance.” Seen against the backdrop of Native history, of which Cooper was intimately aware, Natty could only have been a mixed blood.

Now for a little primer: Modem critics tend to assume that the one-drop rule of racial identity was always in force in America, legally disallowing any wiggle room to people of racially mixed ancestry. Not so. There were in actuality three rules of racial identity, each competing with the others between 1750 and 1850: generational passing; the rule of recognition; and the rule of descent. Generational passing, the British rule under colonialism, allowed third generation cross-bloods to pass as “white,” regardless of how Native or African they might look. By 1825, racist theory was gaining ground in America, positing two new, conflicting “rules” of race, those of recognition and descent. The rule of recognition was the eye-test of identity: whoever could pass, might; while the rule of descent—the infamous “one-drop” rule—forbade passing at all times, regardless of generation or appearance. After 1825, only the rules of recognition and descent remained to vie for social control and, from 1850 on, the one-drop rule alone applied. Note that, in Natty’s lifetime, the generational rule and the rule of recognition were in force. Under either, Natty was legally “white,” even though in modem, more racist America, he would not be so categorized…

Read the entire paper here.

Responsible Mixed Race Politics

How do identities matter?
Stanford University
2005-01-13

Presentation by:

Ronald Sundstrom, Associate Professor of African American Studies
University of San Francisco

The harshest critics of mixed-race have claimed that the identity is self-indulgent and irresponsible, because it evades or, worse, is complicit in racism. Such strident condemnations of mixed-race identity are dogmatic and uncharitable. In “Being & Being Mixed Race,” I argued that mixed-race is a real social identity and that it need not be morally illegitimate. In this essay I return to the topic of the relationship between mixed-race identity and politics and the dynamics of racism. There are disturbing trends in mixed-race literature and organizations that precisely are irresponsible in the way critics of the mixed-race movement have asserted. I criticize these developments, and counter that mixed-race individuals and groups have a special obligation to resist racism and to refuse the “wages of whiteness” that accrue from their mixed-race status. Although all persons have a moral obligation to reject and resist racism, mixed-race individuals and groups have special obligations that are based on their own experience of race and racism, and their place in the history and experience of race and racism in America. Just as mixed-race persons argue that they are morally obligated to remember and affirm their complex family histories-to not forget their mothers-they have an equal obligation to remember the significance of their personal history in the history of race in America: we have an equal obligation to the memories of our grandmothers.

Biracial Identity and the College Social Environment: An Examination of the Effect of College Racial Composition on Black-White Biracial Students’ Racial Identity Construction and Maintenance

29th Annual SouthEastern Undergraduate Sociology Symposium 2011
Co-sponsored by Morehouse College and Emory University Departments of Sociology
Emory University, February 25-26, 2011

Kristen Clayton
Emory University

Winner of the first place prize at the 2011, 29th Annual SouthEastern Undergraduate Sociology Symposium (SEUSS).

The majority of the extant research on biracial identity focuses on documenting and describing the variety of ways in which individuals of mixed black and white ancestry identify, while paying substantially less attention to the social factors which affect biracial identity development. This study aims to address this gap in the literature by examining some of the ways social context affects biracial identity; this study specifically examines the effect of college racial composition on black-white biracial students’ racial identity construction and maintenance. In this paper I draw upon the transcripts of five taped interviews with biracial men attending an all male HBCU [Historically black colleges and universities] to show how the majority black institution affected their racial identities. Preliminary analysis of these interviews indicates that the racial composition of the men’s HBUC affected the students’ racial identities by affecting the individuals available for social comparisons, increasing students’ exposure to and familiarity with black people, and influencing the messages students received about race through both the peer and academic cultures of the institution. These social processes are the same ones described by researchers like Renn (2004), Khanna (2007), Rockquemore and Brunsma (2002*; 2002**) and Twine (1996). Taken together, these studies imply a connection between racial identity and social context that warrants further exploration.

Black, White, Light, and Bright: A Narrative of Creole Color

Past Narratives/Narratives Past Graduate Conference
Stanford University, Stanford, California
2001-02-16 through 2001-02-18
20 pages

Christopher N. Matthews, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hofstra University

Much of the world of life is made real through the symbolic application of color, shade, hue, and other features of visual meaning to the physical matter around us. This interplay of light and dark gives shape to form and place to space. This same mode also works discursively allowing forms and spaces to be recognized not only physically but culturally as representations of the social construction of reality. This paper explores this issue by seeing color both in fact and symbol in the development of the Creole cultures of New Orleans. A city steeped in multiple traditions, New Orleans is a spectrum of colors which act out the tensions of past and present. At the root is a conflict between that which is Creole and that which is not. The archaeology here is a story about this story.

Race cannot allow ambiguity, fluidity, or mixture, for it then ceases to refer to something pure, something distinct. The absolute strength of mestizaje is the power it has—by its even being able to be thought—of dissolving race and everything associated with it, ultimately dissolving even itself.

Rainier Spencer, Race and Mixed-Race: A Personal Tour

Introduction: race and color

The discussion of color is simultaneously at the heart of American historical archaeology and left out altogether. Without doubt archaeologies of race and racism, of cultures of alterity framed by these social issues, and the relatively new yet established sub-field of African-American Archaeology are a center of concern and productivity for the field. It goes without saying that these archaeologies are concerned with exploring the dimensions of social life driven by color and the implied social and cultural differences that existed among past people. It is also agreed that because color continues to elicit deep social significance in contemporary society that the search through archaeology for its constructions and expressions carries some extra special resonance for archaeology today.

I contend, however, that historical archaeologists have yet to reveal the depth of meaning behind color differences that their subjects, collaborators, colleagues, institutions, and living social formations represent, struggle with and against, and perhaps too quickly assume. The historical archaeology of race and racism in particular has yet to explicitly consider how race becomes identity, choosing instead to employ racial identities as givens and produce archaeologies of their expression rather than their construction. To work against this, we must not produce archaeologies about race which assume its existence, but archaeologies that explain the material of racing and the materialities of racism (see also Orser 1998, Mullins 1999, Epperson 1999, Matthews et al n.d.)…

…Culture to Race

During this era of Creolization, however, the undoing of Louisiana’s Creole culture was literally born. Issued from the union of natives, settlers, and slaves, “mixedrace” children were regularly born in New Orleans after 1730. Their numbers were not large and to be sure they were not always planned, chosen, nor welcome. Nevertheless, throughout the 18th century their population grew with each decade (Hanger 1997, Bell 1997). A growing population, however, was not their problem. Rather, new influences emerged in Louisiana towards the end of the century that challenged the Creole tradition by redefining Creole in the terms of race….

Read the entire paper here.

Griqua Identity: A Bibliography

2010
47 pages

Allegra Louw, Librarian
African Studies Library
University of Cape Town

Introduction

Most scholars acknowledge that the origins of the Griqua people are rooted in the complex relationships between autochthonous KhoeSan, slaves, Africans and European settlers. Coupled with the intricacies that underpin the issue of Griqua identity—and often as equally contested—is the matter of terminology.

Christopher Saunders and Nicholas Southey describe the Griquas as

Pastoralists of Khoikhoi and mixed descent, initially known as Bastards or Basters, who left the Cape in the late 18th century under their first leader, Adam Kok 1 (c.1710-c.1795).

They explain the name “bastards” as

[The] term used in the 18th century for the offspring of mixed unions of whites with people of colour, most commonly Khoikhoi but also, less frequently, slaves.”

Even in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, issues of identity and ethnicity continue to dominate the literature of the Griqua people. As the South African social anthropologist, Linda Waldman, writes:

The Griqua comprise an extremely diverse category of South Africans. They are defined neither by geographical boundaries nor by cultural practices.

Waldman goes on to illustrate the complexities surrounding attempts to categorise the Griqua people by explaining how the Griqua have been described by some as a sub-category of the Coloured people, by others as either constituting a separate ethnic group, by others as not constituting a separate ethnic group, and by still others as a nation…

Read the entire bibliography here.

Coloured Identity: South Africa, A Select bibliography

November 2010
74 pages

Allegra Louw, Librarian
African Studies Library
University of Cape Town

Introduction

According to Mohamed Adhikari, a leading scholar on Coloured Identity, the concept of “Colouredness” functioned as a social identity from the time of the formation of the South African state in 1910 to the present. He believes that Coloured identity did not undergo a process of continuous change during the era of white rule in South Africa, but remained essentially stable. This was because of

the Coloured people‘s assimilationism, which spurred hopes of future acceptance into the dominant society; their intermediate status in the racial hierarchy, which generated fears that they might lose their position of relative privilege and be relegated to the status of Africans; the negative connotations with which Coloured identity was imbued, especially the shame attached to their supposed racial hybridity; and finally, the marginality of the Coloured people, which caused them a great deal of frustration.

For the sociologist Zimitri Erasmus, “Coloured identities are not based on ‘race mixture’, but on cultural creativity, creolized formations shaped by South Africa‘s history of colonialism, slavery, segregation and apartheid.” She sees Coloured identities as cultural identities comprising detailed bodies of knowledge, specific cultural practices, memories, rituals and modes of being. Coloured identities were formed in the colonial encounter between colonists (Dutch and British), slaves from South and East India and from East Africa, and conquered indigenous peoples, the Khoi and San.

The South African Population Registration Act (Act 30 of 1950) defined a ‘Coloured person’ as a person who is not a white person or a Bantu. Section 5 (1) and (2) distinguished the following subgroups: Cape Coloureds, Malay, Griqua, Other Coloureds, Chinese, Indians and Other Asiatics.

There are those who deny the existence of a ‘Coloured’ identity. In the late 1990s, political activist and academic Neville Alexander wrote that coloured identity was white-imposed, reactionary and indicative of new forms of racism. Similarly, Zimitri Erasmus cites Norman Duncan, in an interview in the Cape Times, asserting that “…there‘s no such thing as a coloured culture, coloured identity. Someone has to show me what it is…”.

An interesting phenomenon is the proliferation of organisations which emerged after the April 1994 elections. Amongst these were the Kleurling Weerstandsbeweging vir die Vooruitgang van Bruinmense (Coloured Movement for the Progress of Brown People), the December First Movement and the Coloured Forum. A more recent development was the emergence of the Bruin Belange Inisiatief (Brown Interests Initiative) which was formed in July 2008. Most of these organisations were based in the Western Cape, and were formed not only for access to material resources, but also for political and social recognition.

This bibliography has been compiled to aid research on Coloured identity in South Africa, particularly in the Western Cape. It comprises all the divergent views on this phenomenon but is by no means complete. The bibliography is dynamic and will be updated from time to time.

Read the entire bibliography here.

Identifications and cultural practices of mixed-heritage youth

Paper presented in the eConference on “Mixedness and Mixing: New Perspectives on Mixed-Race Britons”
Commission for Racial Equality
2007-09-04 through 2007-09-06
4 pages

Martyn Barrett, Professor of Psychology
University of Surrey

David Garbin, Research Fellow
Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism
University of Surrey

John Eade, Professor of Sociology & Anthropology
Roehampton University

Marco Cinnirella, Senior Lecturer in Psychology
Royal Holloway University of London

This paper summarises findings from a research study which investigated how 11- to 17-year-old mixed-heritage adolescents living in London negotiate the demands of living with multiple cultures. The study also explored how these adolescents construe themselves in terms of race, ethnicity and nationality. It was found that these individuals had multiple identifications which were subjectively salient to them, and that they were very adept at managing their various identities in different situations. There was no evidence of a sense of marginality, or of being ‘caught between two cultures’, and there was no difference in the strength of British identification exhibited by these mixed-heritage adolescents and white English adolescents of the same age. However, the identities and cultural practices of the mixed-heritage adolescents were fluid and context-dependent, and they appreciated the advantages of being able to negotiate and interact with multiple ethnic worlds.

…Findings from the quantitative phase

The quantitative questionnaires revealed that, in the full mixed-heritage sample of 126 youth, British identification was weaker than both ethnic and religious identification; ethnic and religious identifications were of equal strength. It is noteworthy that there was no difference in the strength of British identification exhibited by the mixed-heritage and white English participants. When the black Caribbean-white mixed-heritage participants were analysed as separate group, it was found that they had the highest levels of identification with Britishness out of all the minority ethnic groups, and there were no significant differences in the strength of these participants’ ethnic, British and religious identifications. However, for the black African-white participants, ethnic identification was stronger than British identification, with religious identification being between the two. Analysed individually, neither of the two black-white mixed-heritage groups differed from white English children in their strength of British identification…

Read the entire paper here.