Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Race in the Age of Obama

University of Chicago
Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture (CSRPC)
International House, Home Room
1414 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL
2010-03-05, 09:00 to 18:00 CST (Local Time)

The Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of  Chicago presents a daylong conference, “Mixed-Race in the Age of Obama,” which seeks to intervene in the discursive, material, and ideological debates involving mixed-race people nationally and internationally, examining historical, sociological, literary, legal, and other (inter)disciplinary representations of the lived experience of mixed race people. Organized by Dr. Matthews Briones, Department of History at U of C. Co-sponsored by International House Global Voices Program. Free & open to the public.

For more information, click here.

Theatrical Medicine: Aboriginal performance, ritual and commemoration

The Medicine Project
2008-03-25

Michelle La Flamme

Dr. Michelle La Flamme is an Afro-NDN performer, activist and educator who completed a Ph.D. at UBC [University of British Columbia] in English literature (May 2006). In her other life, she is an avid performer and has worked in film and video production. She tries her best to bridge the world of academia and her creative life and she is often asked to speak or perform at Canadian conferences addressing representations of race in contemporary Canadian art and literature. She was born and raised here on the “best Coast” and has had the good fortune of taking her ideas abroad as a guest lecturer in Germany, Spain and The Netherlands. These days she is particularly interested in Native/Black issues as her bloodlines encompass both sides of the 49th and include Métis, Creek and African-American strains. Currently, she teaches Canadian literature, Academic Writing, Introduction to Fiction and Introduction to Poetry at UBC. She makes the time to write, perform and be involved in community activism when she has the energy.

There are many different definitions of Medicine. As a woman of mixed heritage (Métis, African-Canadian and Creek) I have been exposed to many Aboriginal teachings and ceremonies. My own definition of medicine is based on the teachings of traditional elders who have shared their cultural insight with me regarding the power and meaning of medicine. There are Medicine Wheel ceremonies that involve respect for the four directions and the balance between the physical, mental, spiritual and emotional aspects of an individual. Medicine can be understood in a psychological or philosophical way whereby individuals go through a form of catharsis when they are guided by the teachings. There is medicine involved in seeking advice from elders by way of offering them tobacco. There is participatory medicine involved in being a witness or participant in talking circles, and there is medicine that is physical in the form of tobacco, sweet grass, sage and cedar. There is medicine in ceremony whether these be sweat lodge ceremonies, moon lodge ceremonies, naming ceremonies or longhouse ceremonies. There is medicine in the practice of creating art whether that be carving, weaving or painting. Some traditional languages do not have a word for theatrical performance, so they use the closest word, which is ceremony. These cultural beliefs about medicine and practices which are referred to as medicinal reflect a belief in the power of performance and the possibility of the performance being medicinal for any and all of these cultural associations with medicine. The performances and plays that I examine in this essay can be understood as medicine in that they bring balance to the witnesses through honouring the deceased by way of naming rituals, they bring balance to communities by showing the humanity of Aboriginal women and they provide a cathartic ritual or ceremony for the release of trauma…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Messages [Theatrical Play]

Written by
Michelle La Flamme
University of British Columbia

with help from

Minelle Mahtani, Associate Professor of Geography and Planning
University of Toronto

Burcu Ozdemir

Mixed Messages is a satirical look at the exclusive rules for membership in academic spaces and a jab at racial identity politics in the “mixed race” movement. It was first  performed as part of the monthly Transculturalisms series at UBC, Fall 2002.

Read the script here.

Language and the Politics of Ethnicity in the Caribbean

Center for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean
York University, Toronto, Ontario
The Fourth Annual Jagan Lecture
Presented at York University on 2002-03-02

George Lamming, Visiting Professor
Brown University

The Jagan Lectures commemorate the life and vision of the late Dr. Cheddi Jagan, Caribbean thinker, politician, and political visionary. The series of annual lectures is founded upon the idea that the many and varied dimensions of Cheddi Jagan’s belief in the possibility of a New Global Human Order should be publicly ac-knowledged as part of his permanent legacy to the world.

This lecture was given by the renowned Caribbean writer and intellect George Lamming as part of the Jagan Lecture Series commemorating the late Dr. Cheddi Jagan. Lamming looks at the problem of ethnicity – and especially of relations between Africans and Indians in the territories where they form almost equal populations, namely Guyana and Trinidad – from multiple perspectives. He re-calls dramatizing strategies employed by the old colonial power in this region, strategies that are still used today by contemporary politicians. He proposes that race and ethnicity are socially constructed categories, and draws upon many Barbadian examples to illustrate the absurdity of racial prejudice in a Caribbean context where cultural miscegenation is so deep, and where habits of perception, accents, and tastes are so mixed, that wearing several categories of identity at once is common to all. His conclusion, however, is far from being a curse: the challenges of cultural, linguistic and ra-cial/ethnic diversity faced by the Caribbean constitute part of the wealth of the region, as amply demonstrated by its cultural workers, and its distinct traditions and peoples.

Read the entire paper here.

Legal Transplants: Slavery and the Civil Law in Louisiana

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series
Working Paper 32
May 2009
37 pages

Ariela J. Gross, Professor of Law and History
University of Southern California Law School

Can Louisiana tell us something about civil law vs. common law regimes of slavery? What can the Louisiana experience tell us about a civil law jurisdiction “transplanted” in a common-law country? Louisiana is unique among American states in having been governed first by France, then by Spain, before becoming a U.S. territory and state in the nineteenth century. Unlike other slave states, it operated under a civil code, first the Digest of 1808, and then the Code of 1825. With regard to the regulation of slaves, these codes also incorporated a “Black Code,” first adopted in 1806, which owed a great deal to both French and Spanish law. Comparisons of Louisiana with other slave states tend to emphasize the uniqueness of New Orleans’ three-tier caste system, with a significant population of gens de couleur libre (free people of color), and the ameliorative influence of Spanish law. This reflects more general assumptions about comparative race and slavery in the Americas, based on the work of Frank Tannenbaum and other historians of an earlier generation, who drew sharp contrasts between slavery in British and Spanish America. How does the comparison shift if we turn our attention away from slave codes, where Tannenbaum focused, to the “law in action”? At the local level, one can see the way slaves took advantage of the gap between rules and enforcement, and to fathom racial meanings at the level of day-to-day interactions rather than comparisions of formal rules. This essay surveys three areas of law involving slaves – manumission, racial identity, and “redhibition” (breach of warranty) – to compare Louisiana to other jurisdictions, and particularly to its common-law neighbors.

…The first major slave codes in the North American colonies date to 1680-82. They draw numerous distinctions on the basis of race rather than status, including laws against carrying arms and against leaving the owner’s plantations without a certificate. A penalty of thirty lashes met “any Negro” who “lift up his hand against any Christian.” In 1691, English women were fined for having a bastard child with a negro. In 1705, all mulatto children were made servants to the age of 31 in Virginia; Maryland and North Carolina adopted the same rule within the next several decades.

By the time the U.S. became a republic, only those of African descent were slaves, and all whites were free. Yet there were a significant number of individuals and entire communities of mixed ancestry with ambiguous racial identity along the Eastern seaboard. In the southeast, Indian tribes both absorbed runaway slaves and, in the late eighteenth century, adopted African slavery. In addition to the 12,000 people designated in the Census as “free people of color” in Virginia, there were 8000 in Maryland in 1790, 5000 in North Carolina, 1800 in South Carolina, and 400 in Georgia…

Read the entire paper here.

African Americans and National Identities in Central America

Rina Cáceres, Professor of Diaspora Studies Program at the Centro de Investigationes Historicas de America Central
Universidad de Costa Rica

Lowell Gudmundson, Professor of Latin American Studies and History
Mount Holyoke University

Mauricio Meléndez

An interdisciplinary, multinational research program to reconceptualize and document, both visually and textually, the history of people of African descent in Central America.

Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Program, Mount Holyoke College and The Center for Central American Historical Research at the Universidad de Costa Rica.

Our collaborative research project seeks to reassess the historical presence and contributions of peoples of African descent to the national histories and identities constructed in Central America over the past two centuries. In choosing a color for the cosmic race, modern nationalist thinkers in the region systematically emphasized the European and Indigenous origins of its peoples, in terms of both historical fact and group agency. Thus they radically discounted not only the importance, role, and presence of any African heritage but also as the centrality of racial or ethnic conflict within the historical experience of non-indigenous sectors of society…

Visit the project website here.

Racial Boundary Formation at the Dawn of Jim Crow: The Determinants and Effects of Black/Mulatto Occupational Differences in the United States, 1880 (Working Paper)

33 pages
Updated 2008-07-03

Aaron Gullickson, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Oregon

Much of the literature within sociology regarding mixed-race populations focuses on contemporary issues and dynamics, often overlooking a larger historical literature.  This article provides a historical perspective on these issues by exploiting regional variation in the United States in the degree of occupational differentiation between blacks and mulattoes in the 1880 Census, during a transitionary period from slavery to freedom.  The analysis reveals that the role of the mixed-race category as either a “buffer class” or a status threat depended upon the class composition of the white population.  Black/mulatto occupational differentiation was greatest in areas where whites had a high level of occupational prestige and thus little to fear from an elevated mulatto group. Furthermore, the effect of black/mulatto occupational differentiation on lynching varied by the occupational status of whites. In areas where whites were of relatively low status, black/mulatto differentiation increased the risk of lynching, while in areas where whites were of relatively high status, black/mulatto differentiation decreased the risk of lynching.

Read the entire paper here.

Bi-Ethnic Identity: Converging Conversations

Language Literacy & Culture Review
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
2009

Anissa Sorokin
Univerisity of Maryland

This paper examines ethnic identity, with a focus on bi-ethnic identity, from academic, creative non-fiction, and personal perspectives. Social psychological models of ethnic identity development, along with salient aspects of ethnic identity, are explored and interpreted through the writings of qualitative researchers, creative writers, and the author. The paper centers on two factors of ethnic identity development, heritage language and religion, and makes connections between academic literature and personal narratives. A brief discussion of perceived cultural and personal responsibility concludes the paper.

Read the entire paper here.

Impacts of Multiple Race Reporting on Rural Health Policy and Data Analysis

Working Paper No. 73
Working Paper Series
North Carolina Rural Health Research and Policy Analysis Center
Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

2002-05-01
39 pages

Randy Randolph, M.R.P.

Rebecca Slifkin, Ph.D.

Lynn Whitener, Dr.P.H.

Anna Wulfsberg, M.S.P.H.

This work was supported by Cooperative Agreement 1-U1C-RH-00027-01 with the federal Office of Rural Health Policy.

Introduction

In the 1990s the policy goal of improving the rural minority population’s health status and access to health care gained prominence.  The President’s Initiative on Race, announced in 1998, established goals for improvements in health indicators and declared 2010 as the target year for achieving these goals. In A National Agenda for Rural Minority Health, the National Rural Health Association outlined strategies to realize the President’s goals in rural America. The plan identified three priority areas associated with these goals: Information and Data, Health Policy and Practices, and Health Delivery Systems. All three of these areas require a consistent stream of data describing the racial composition of rural areas and rural residents’ health status. The information and data section recommends that “Data collection systems will incorporate core data sets and employ uniform definitions for relevant terms to facilitate information sharing and comparisons among and across minority populations and nonminority populations as well” (NRHA, 1999).

Recent changes in federal policy will complicate achieving NRHA’s stated goal and measuring the rural success of the Initiative on Race. On October 30, 1997, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced the first revised federal standards for collecting data on race and ethnicity since 1977. The revisions are to be adopted by all federal agencies working with race-based information.  The modifications to Statistical Policy Directive No. 15, Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting (the existing policy) contained changes in both content and naming of racial and ethnic categories requiring that respondents be allowed to choose one or more of five race categories: “American Indian or Alaska Native,” “Asian,” “Black or African American,” “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander,” and “White”; an optional “Other Race” is allowed, but not encouraged, under the rule. Two categories for data on ethnicity—“Hispanic or Latino” and “Not Hispanic or Latino” are offered in a separate question. The separate ethnicity choice is only a change in category naming with the addition of Latino to the category—the option of also including Spanish Origin is permitted. Some of the new race categories defined by the revision to Directive 15 were changes from the 1977 rule. The most obvious change was disaggregating the “Asian or Pacific Islander” category to distinct “Asian” and “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander” categories. The population covered by the “American Indian or Alaskan Native” category has been expanded from the 1977 classification—which included the indigenous peoples of the United States and Canada—to also include those indigenous to Central America and South America…

Read the entire paper here.

Becoming Mexican Across the Pacific: The Expulsion of Mexican Chinese Families from Mexico to China and Diasporic Imaginings of a Mexican Homeland, 1930s–60s

American Historical Association
124th Annual Meeting
Friday, 2010-01-10 11:40 PST (Local Time)
San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina
Torrey 3 (Marriott)
San Diego, California

Julia María Schiavone Camacho, Assistant Professor of History
University of Texa, El Paso

Chinese men arrived in Mexico after Chinese Exclusion in the United States. Chinese concentrated in the north due to its proximity to the United States and opportunities in the developing economy. Chinese men forged a variety of ties with Mexicans including romantic liaisons with Mexican women. Anti-Chinese campaigns emerged in the border state Sonora during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Spreading rapidly and gaining tremendous power, the movement reached its zenith during the Great Depression when the United States forcibly repatriated hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. Overlapping partially with Mexican “repatriation,” a mass expulsion of Chinese occurred in Sonora and its southern neighbor Sinaloa. Mexican women and Chinese Mexican children accompanied Chinese men for a variety of reasons. Some Chinese men and Mexican Chinese families departed Sonora and Sinaloa through Mexican ports. Others traversed the Mexican-U.S. borderlands, landing in the custody of U.S. Immigration Service agents who, in enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, jailed and deported them to China. Complicating international relations, the United States accused officials in Sonora of violating its immigration laws by forcing Chinese across its border. Mexican Chinese families faced great challenges in their new locations in Guangdong province. While some families remained unified, others broke apart. The Mexican Chinese families, congregated in Portuguese Macau. The colony’s Catholic and Iberian culture was similar to Mexico’s and the Mexican Chinese found niches. Over time, they created a coherent enclave whose web extended to British Hong Kong as well as Guangdong. The concept of the “Mexican homeland” gained increasing salience in the context of great flux in mid-twentieth-century China. The Mexican Chinese “became Mexican” over time and from abroad as they struggled to return to Mexico. Following these families across borders and oceans, this paper examines larger questions of nationalism and “diasporas.”