Mixed Race Studies

Toni Morrison and the Evolution of American Biracial Identity

Occidental College
Oxy Scholar: ECLS Student Scholarship
Submisions for 2009
2008-12-10
17 pages

Emily Isenberg

She enchanted the entire school. When teachers called on her, they smiled encouragingly. Black boys didn’t trip her in the halls; white boys didn’t stone her, white girls didn’t suck their teeth when she was assigned to be their work partners; black girls stepped aside when she wanted to use the sink in the girls’ toilet, and their eyes genuflected under sliding lids ( Morrison 62).

This passage from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is describing the biracial girl named Maureen Peal. In just these few sentences the suggestion that Maureen is a mediator between both races in her school is clear, and this premise is supported by the sociologist F. James Davis, whose 1991 book, Who is Black: One Nation’s Definition explains that biracial people may act “objectively with the black and the white communities both while not being fully a part of either, and often being a liaison person between the two” (Davis 150). Davis’ observation supports what we see reflected in this particular passage, but throughout the novel we see that this premise does not continue to hold true. Maureen in reality cannot be the mediator between the two races because she is not actually accepted by either group. My analysis of Maureen Peal will portray her as the female version of Everett Stonequist’s concept of the “Marginal Man.” This term comes from Everett Stonequist’s 1937 book, The Marginal Man. Stonequist, an American sociologist best known for his work in race relations, explains that the figure of the “Marginal Man” embodies the sense of inner conflict between the two races: “Having participated in each he is now able to look at himself from two viewpoints…the marginal Negro from that of the white man as well as the black man” (Stonequist 145). Maureen’s biracial identity gives her the position of the “Marginal Man” who, according to Stonequist, cannot belong to either race and has a “dual personality” which is forced onto him by his society. This “dual personality” prevents the “Marginal Man” from developing cohesion between the two parts of himself. It is because Maureen Peal senses a lack of cohesion in her inner self that she rejects her black would-be friends, Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola, not because she thinks of herself as superior to them…

Read the entire paper here.

Dismembering the Master Narrative: Michelle Cliff’s Attempt to Rewrite Jamaican History in Abeng

St. John Fisher College, Rochester, New York
English Senior Seminar Papers
2012-11-27
27 pages

Marissa Petta
St. John Fisher College

Abeng by Michelle Cliff is a coming-of-age novel set in colonial Jamaica. The heroine, Clare, struggles with defining herself across the lines of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Intertwined with Clare’s journey to find herself is a large discussion of Jamaica’s history as a colonial territory as well as the permanent effects of English colonization on the island. Cliff recognizes that the typical European history of Jamaica is told through the eyes of superior white male colonizers and it most commonly shows that all things native and/or black are perceived as bad. Cliff challenges the master narrative and tries to rewrite Jamaica’s colonial history with the untold stories of the island’s past. Through discussion of mixed race heritage, female leadership, and resistance, Cliff tries to rewrite Jamaica’s past to embrace the forgotten stories that are full of pride and strength, which gives the colonized subjects a voice in their own history. She uses Clare Savage as a metaphor for the island, her resistance as a representation of Jamaica’s new history. Cliff recognizes that the past cannot be erased, however, she believes that history can be retold to more fully explain the strength, resilience, and power within the Jamaican community. Her ultimate goal is to tell a powerful story of Jamaica’s history, a new history that has been untold and kept secret for many years. Clare’s resistance is the catalyst of change in Cliff’s retelling of Jamaica’s past, and she helps to create a sense of hope that the stories that have been hidden for so long will be unveiled and celebrated by the Jamaican people…

Read the entire article here.

Challenging the Racial Dichotomy in Nella Larsen’s Passing

St. John Fisher College, Rochester, New York
English Senior Seminar Papers
2012-12-11
22 pages

Samantha Davis
St. John Fisher College

Nella Larsen’s Passing introduces two African American women on a quest for an integrated identity. Irene and Clare are two pale-skinned, childhood friends who are light enough to pass for white. Passing is a work concerned with the representation and construction of race. Clare Kendry passes for white and she “whitens” her lifestyle by adjusting her clothes, behavior, gestures, and etiquette while resisting and denying any existence of her black culture. Irene on the other hand, lives as a black woman but remains a part of the black community only superficially. She occasionally masks her blackness and passes for white for her own convenience. Despite this racial divide, both women desire to achieve an integrated identity to live as both black and white. Irene attempts to achieve this integrated identity by accepting and practicing white standards while living as a black woman. Clare attempts to achieve an integrated identity by finding her way back to the black community. However, they ultimately fail at achieving this integrated identity as the novel reinforces the societal belief that a person can only have one race as either black or white, but not both…

Read the entire paper here.

The Racial Politics of Culture and Silent Racism in Peru

Paper prepared for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) Conference on Racism and Public Policy
Durban, South Africa
2001-09-03 through 2001-09-05
13 pages

Marisol de la Cadena, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of California, Davis

In this talk mestizaje is both the topic and a pretext. Treating it the topic of the paper, I want to explain why, in contrast with other Latin American countries such as Mexico, Bolivia, and Ecuador mestizaje—or the project of racial mixing—never became an official national ideology in Peru. But I also want to use mestizaje as a pretext to analyse the historical production of the Peruvian culturalist scientific definition of race, which is partially similar to what analysts of contemporary European forms of discrimination have called ‘racism without race’ or “new racism.” I call it silent racism, because in the case of Peru, as we shall see, culturalist forms of discrimination are neither new, nor without race. The debate about racial mixture (or mestizaje) that took place in Peru in the first half of the 20th century, is a good window to explore the reasons that Peruvian intellectuals might have had in developing this presumably peculiar definition of race which eventually allowed for the current denial of racist practices in Peru. Illustrative of these denials Jorge Basadre, one of Peru’s most eminent historians declared in the mid 1960s.

Historically, racism as it is understood in South Africa or in parts of the Southern United States has not existed in Peru. (…) This is not to say that there do not exist prejudices against Indians, cholos, and blacks, however these prejudices have not been sanctioned by the law and more than a profound racial feeling, they have an economic, social, and cultural character. Colour does not prevent an aborigine, mestizo, or Negroid from occupying high positions if they can accumulate wealth or achieve political success. (If there exists a distance between them and us) it is not racial, (…) rather it corresponds to what can be termed an historical state of things.

Basadre acknowledges the existance of prejudices, but acquits those prejudices of the charge of racism because they do not derive from biological race. This acquittal, which continues to characterize the Peruvian racial formation, is not a whimsical national peculairity. Rather, I argue that it is historically rooted in the scientific definition of race that Peruvian intellectuals coined at the turn of the century. Then they used it to contest European and North American racial determinisms which positioned intellectuals from my country (and Latin Americans in general) as hybrids and thus potentially–if not actually–degenerates. During this period Peruvian intellectuals delved into the scientific interconnection of “culture” and ‘race,” and produced a notion of “race” through which—borrowing Robert Young’’s words— “culture” was racially defined and thus historically enabled to mark differences. When, roughly in mid-century, the international community rejected race as biology, it did not question the discriminatory potential of culture, nor its power to naturalize differences. Then Peruvian intellectuals—like Basadre— dropped race from their vocabulary and criticized racism, while preserving culturalist interpretations of difference to reify social hierarchies, and to legitimate discrimination and exclusion…

Read the entire paper here.

What should Multiracial people learn? Learning goals for anti-(mono)racist education

Paper presented at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference
DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois
2012-11-01
6 pages

Eric Hamako
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Political education has played important roles in many social movements. Philosopher Ronald Sundstrom has argued that Multiracial activists and community organizers have a responsibility to set an expressly anti-racist agenda for Multiracial social movements. However, a coherent anti-racist agenda—and the political education curricula needed to support it—has yet to solidly materialize in Multiracial movements. So, I asked Multiracial activists who teach about racism, “What learning goals would you set for Multiracial participants in anti-racist education?” In this paper, based on my dissertation research, I present some of the key learning goals proposed by my participants. Then, I offer my thoughts about those learning goals and suggest new directions for teaching Multiracial people about racism and anti-racism.

Read the entire paper here.

Harry Potter and the mistaken myth of the Mixed-Race messiah

Paper presented at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference
DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois
2012-11-03
6 pages

Eric Hamako
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The Harry Potter franchise has worldwide popularity. Contained within Harry Potter are popular stories about Mixed-Race, both appealing and toxic. Harry Potter and other science fiction and fantasy narratives attempt to address popular anxieties about racism and racial power. But what are they saying? Will vigorous hybrid messiahs herald racial salvation? Will degenerate hybrid monsters cause a racial apocalypse? In this paper, I explore White Supremacist and Christian Supremacist ideas about Mixed-Race prevalent in current science fiction & fantasy movie franchises, such as Harry Potter, and why people shouldn’t believe the hybrid hype… or the hate.

Read the entire paper here.

Race, Skin Color, and Economic Outcomes in Early Twentieth-Century America

Stanford University Job Market Paper
2012-11-28
53 pages

Roy Mill
Department of Economics
Stanford University

Luke C.D. Stein
Department of Economics
Stanford University

We study the effect of race on economic outcomes using unique data from the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which skin color was explicitly coded in population censuses as “White,” “Black,” or “Mulatto.” We construct a panel of siblings by digitizing and matching records across the 1910 and 1940 censuses and identifying all 12,000 African-American families in which enumerators classified some children as light-skinned (“Mulatto”) and others as dark-skinned (“Black”). Siblings coded “Mulatto” when they were children (in 1910) earned similar wages as adults (in 1940) relative to their Black siblings. This within-family earnings difference is substantially lower than the Black-Mulatto earnings difference in the general population, suggesting that skin color in itself played only a small role in the racial earnings gap. To explore the role of the more social aspect that might be associated with being Black, we then focus on individuals who “passed for White,” an important social phenomenon at the time. To do so, we identify individuals coded “Mulatto” as children but “White” as adults. Passing for White meant that individuals changed their racial affiliation by changing their social ties, while skin color remained unchanged. Passing was associated with substantially higher earnings, suggesting that race in its social formcould have significant consequences for economic outcomes. We discuss how our findings shed light on the roles of discrimination and identity in driving economic outcomes.

Read the entire paper here.

Rosa Mahier’s Freedom: Identity and the Maintenance of Liberty in Antebellum Louisiana

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

Saturday, 2013-01-05: 14:50 CST (Local Time)
Chamber Ballroom I (Roosevelt New Orleans)
Paper in AHA Session 220: Manipulating Freedom: Liberty, Enslavement, and the Quest for Power in the Southwestern Borderlands (2013-01-05: 14:30-16:30 CST)

Johanna Lee Davis Smith
Tulane University

Rosa Mahier had lived her whole life in Mulatto Bend, a little community located a short distance from Baton Rouge.  Born a slave in 1813 and legally freed in 1827, Rosa was a familiar member of a network of free people of color which had lived and worked within and throughout the larger white population of the area since the 1780s.  Most of the inhabitants – black as well as white, Rosa included – were descended from local families of longue durée, and the free people of color in the community carefully cultivated their identity in order to perpetuate the security of their free status.  Rosa Mahier had been legally free for twenty years when Fergus Mahier, the white nephew of the man who once owned her, took legal action in an attempt to re-enslave her and her freeborn children.

Fergus Mahier did not ultimately prevail in his lawsuit, but his petition is as compelling for what he did not demand as for what he did.  Mahier did not attempt to re-enslave Rosa’s two brothers or her grandmother, all of whom had been manumitted at the same time and in the same way as Rosa, nor did he include Rosa’s mother Agnes, who also had been owned and freed by the Mahier family.  Therefore, the brief record of the case offers the opportunity to weigh the roles of identity, status, gender, wealth, and power as factors in the successful maintenance of liberty among free people of color in antebellum Louisiana.  Mahier’s motivation for the suit and the individual characteristics of the people involved present a trenchant illustration of the hair’s breadth that separated slavery and freedom, as well as the continuous efforts of aspiring slaveowners to breach that line.

Donas, Signares, and Free Women of Color: African and Eurafrican Women of the Atlantic World in an Age of Racial Slavery

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 153
Saturday, 2013-01-05: 09:00-11:00 CST (Local Time)
Chamber Ballroom II (Roosevelt New Orleans)

Chair: Hilary Jones, University of Maryland, College Park

Papers:

• “Reevaluating Saint Louis’ Infamous Signares, 1700–1850” / Lindsey Gish, Michigan State University
• “‘The Christened Mulatresses’: Interracial Marriage in a Slave Trading Town on the Gold Coast” / Pernille Ipsen, University of Wisconsin–Madison
• “Strategies of Power: Luso-African Donas of Nineteenth-Century Luanda” / Vanessa S. Oliveira, York University
• “Free African and Eurafrican Women and the Trading Companies of the French Atlantic” / Jessica Marie Johnson, Michigan State University

Comment: Lorelle D. Semley, College of the Holy Cross

In the age of the Atlantic Slave Trade, African and Eurafrican women emerged as intermediaries between foreign traders and local populations. Europeans’ lack of knowledge in African languages, trade networks, local culture, social structures and political institutions provided African and Eurafrican women a unique opportunity to become cultural and economic brokers.  Portuguese adventurers on the coast of West Africa first named these women “senhoras” in the 16th century. Although Portuguese men coined the term, they were not the only Europeans to name and have socio-economic relationships with African and Eurafrican women. Over time each European group made the original Portuguese term their own: in Crioulo it became “nhara”, in French “signare”, in English “senora”, and “dona” among the Portuguese of Central Africa.  These ‘middle-women” surfaced all along the coast of Africa from the Senegambia to Mozambique between the 15th and the 20th centuries, although the most famous of these women were found in the port cities of Bathurst, Benguela, Bissao, Cacheu, Goree, Joal, Luanda, Osu, Portudal, Rufisque and Saint Louis. These women formed a distinct group within African and Afro-Atlantic society during an age of racial slavery, but the duration and trajectory of their lives varied across time and place.

“Donas, Signares & Free Women of Color” gathers scholars working on female African and Eurafrican entrepreneurs, brokers, and partners who allied with Portuguese, Spanish, French and Danish men in one specific enclave of Africa or the Americas. Together these four papers will question what made these women unique, how different European powers perceived them, if and how partnering with one particular European power over another influenced these women, and how their actions were shaped by their local environments. Panelists’ papers will also explore the trans-regional and trans-Atlantic connections between women in each society, drawing on comparative frameworks to interrogate the similarities and differences between each group. By exploring the individual stories of African and Eurafrican “middle-women” across the Atlantic world, this panel will move the scholarship beyond exoticism and generalizations. The panel’s ultimate goal is to determine if these women can and should be discussed as a coherent collective group throughout the Atlantic World or if scholars should continue to examine each group separately.

Black Faces, White Deeds: The Miracles of Ancient Ethiopian Saints in the Early Modern Catholic Atlantic

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

Thursday, 2013-01-03: 16:10 CST (Local Time)
Preservation Hall, Studio 3 (New Orleans Marriott)

From Session AHA Session 31: Saintly Translations: Stories about Saints across Time and Space, 2013-01-03: 15:30-17:30 CST (Local Time)

Erin Kathleen Rowe, Assistant Professor of History
Johns Hopkins University

In the mid-seventeenth century, a woman stood before the Inquisitiorial tribunal in Mexico City, accused of Judaizing practices and speaking disrespectfully of the saints.  One witness claimed that the defendant had harsh words for one saint in particular, Benedict of Palermo: “How can a black man be a saint?” This striking question reveals the spiritual, cultural, and racial anxieties that could be provoked by black sanctity in the early modern Catholic world.  While the Catholic Church actively promoted the cults of several saints purportedly of sub-Saharan African origin or descent in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, their reception and veneration created a kind of spiritual ambiguity during a period of history when rapid globalization of Catholicism paralleled rapid intensification of racialization.  My paper looks at the circulation of black saints throughout the early modern Catholic Atlantic; focusing on two case studies, the Ethiopian saints Ifigenia and Elesban, I examine the movement of devotion, miracles, and images throughout the larger Catholic world.  Miracles attributed to these saints were very likely to be associated with a holy image, since there were no extant relics.  Thus, the visible representation of their blackness stood as an ever-present aspect of their cults.  Ifigenia and Elesban stood as patron saints of confraternities for black and mulatto populations throughout Latin America, while back in Europe their images appeared in Carmelite churches throughout Spain and Portugal for predominantly white audiences.  Through close study of miracle stories, we can arrive at a fuller understanding of devotion to the saints throughout the Catholic world and the significance of their ethnicity and sanctity as they shifted locations and audiences, context and meaning.