Mixed Race Studies

Carothers McCaslin’s Progeny Tracing the Theme of Redemption Chronologically Through the Multiracial McCaslins

Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects
1999
Paper 211
pages 38-50

Christine Reiss
Western Kentucky University

William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942) is a novel that depicts the complicated family history of the McCaslins. There are primarily three branches of the family: the white, male-descended McCaslins, the white, female-descended Edmondses, and the multiracial, male-descended Beauchamps. The multiracial line of the family, the Beauchamps, are the progeny of the original McCaslin patriarch, old Carothers McCaslin. His act of miscegenation with one of his slaves produces a daughter, on whom he then fathers a son. This act of miscegenation and incest sets in motion a family line that struggles with the weight of its father’s sin. The individuals seek to live the most liberated lives that they can, given the various social constraints with which they come into contact, and by the end of the novel, they accomplish a fair measure of freedom, perhaps even redemption, from their father’s sin.

Read the entire paper here.

Not black, not white: just the opposite. Culture, race and national identity in Brazil

Centre for Brazilian Studies
University of Oxford
Working Paper Number CBS-47-03
2003
52 pages

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo, Brazil

The search to define Brazil and Brazilians by colour, more specifically by a miscegenation so extreme that it appears exceptional, is longstanding. Mid-nineteenth century naturalists that visited the country from Europe were astounded by the lush vegetation, the wide variety of fauna, and another phenomena – a type of unprecedented laboratory of humans and their various races. Local intellectuals also focused on the racial theme, but more as explanation for their perceptions of national degeneration than racial mixture. It is from these origins that debate reappears as an official model in the 1930s and persists until today in notions about what makes Brazil unique. After an introduction of this historical context, and rejecting the myth of racial democracy, this paper reflects on the impasses of race anew and from a different perspective attuned to contemporary problems. The central question that remains is whether race is a social and economic variable or whether Brazilian identities are dispersed across a wide rainbow of color. The goal of this paper is to use recent census and 1996 PNAD data that reveal 136 categories for Brazilians to identify several specific characteristics of this debate. This analysis implies a more political discussion of the limits of citizenship in a country where the color line is always viewed subjectively and contextually. The maxim of the sixteenth century Jesuit, Antonil, that “Brazil is hell for negros, purgatory for whites, and paradise for mulattos” still appears to resonate.

Read the entire paper here.

Is the Future Mestizo and Mulatto? A Theological-Sociological Investigation into the Racial and Ethnic Future of the Human Person within the U.S.

Zygon Center for Religion and Science
Third Annual Student Symposium on Science and Spirituality
Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago, Illinois
2011-03-25
13 pages

Kevin Patrick Considine
Loyola University, Chicago

My study is a theological investigation into the racial and ethnic future of the human person within a changing racial context. I examine the concept of mestizaje/mulatez, which has its theological roots in the work of Virgilio Elizondo, and perform a mutually critical correlation between it and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s and George Yancey’s sociologies of the changing racial structure. Elizondo is pointing towards God’s creation of an eschatological people of cultural and biological hybridity who embody a new creation that transcends racial categorization and is made incarnate in the person of the Galilean Jesus. At the same time, mestizaje/mulatez contains ambiguity in that it possesses both liberating and oppressive possibilities for the future of humankind and its struggle against racialized suffering. Nevertheless, I contend that mestizaje/mulatez embodies a small sacrament of salvation, a cautious hope, for the redemption of the human community from racial suffering within an emerging multiracial context.

Read the entire paper here.

Multiracial Identity: New Models and Frameworks for Describing and Understanding the Experience of Race and Identity

National Conference on Race & Ethnicity (NCORE) 2012
New York, New York
2012-05-29 through 2012-06-02
Date & Time To Be Determined

Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe, Ed.D, Consultant in Organizational Development and Social Justice Education

For two decades, research on Multiracial people has challenged, advanced, and re-framed how we view race and identity in the United States.  The impact of foundational, as well as new models of Multiracial identity is evident in the content of emerging perspectives on social identity, including Intersectionality. This highly interactive session includes a brief review of ways Multiracial identity has been framed over the past 20 years, including key issues that both support and challenge traditional theories of racial identity development.  A new model of multiracial identity that incorporates aspects of intersectionality is presented and demonstrated as a learning and programming tool.  Interactive discussion allows participants to examine questions often raised by the topic of Multiracial identity on campus, such as: to what extent is racial identity chosen as opposed to assigned? Do racial groups embody aspects of culture, and if so, what is Multiracial culture? To what extent should institutional policies and practices change to accommodate Multiracial people? and What interventions and programs have been successful in meeting the needs of Multiracial students, and what can we learn from our mistakes?

For more information, click here.

Bridgetower – Black Musicians and British Culture, 1807-2007

Gresham College
2007-07-02

Mike Phillips, Professor of Music
Gresham College

George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, the son of an Abyssinian slave, was hailed as a musical prodigy in the eighteenth century. Taught by Haydn, his appearance at the court in Windsor to play in front of George III led to his subsequent ‘adoption’ by the Prince Regent. Friends with Beethoven—Bridgetower was the original dedicatee of the Kreutzer Sonata and they gave the first performance together—his life offers a powerful symbolism for the creation and establishment of a black British community which has its roots in the 18th century importation and migration of slaves and ex-slaves.

Professor Mike Phillips is the librettist for the newly-commissioned opera, Bridgetower – A Fable of 1807, to be given its premier as a part of the City of London Festival on the 5th of July. He will be discussing the role of black musicians in British culture in the two hundred years since the Abolition of the Slave Trade act.

I must begin by making it clear that I am not an academic researcher or an expert on slavery or an expert on the culture and customs of the Caribbean or Africa, and I have not spent many years in the British Library digging up obscure facts about this topic.  So I am not going to get into arcane disputes about the precise number of black musicians who lived in Southwark or how often they did their laundry!  But I have read a considerable amount about the topic.  I am a novelist and a curator and I have written an exhausting number of words about the history of black people in Britain.  This is not a talk about urban rioting or reggae or calypso or gospel music or jazz, although these forms dominate the experience of recent years.  I am telling you this partly because I am going to end at the end of the 19th Century, because I only have an hour, and if I got on to the 20th Century, I would be here all night!  But in fact, because of the subject of the new opera Bridgetower, a Fable of 1807, and because in general this part of the City of London Festival has focused on the 18th Century and the early 19th Century, I will be dealing roughly with those years.

The other point is that, in general, we tend to talk about black people in Britain, or about the multiracial nature of the population, as if it was an exclusively 20th Century phenomenon.  We talk about the respective cultures as if they existed behind barriers, and we talk as if the colour of people’s skins defines their cultural prospects and abilities, a tendency which is an exact match for the strictures of 18th Century racial science, with its appalling attempts to categorise human beings in line with a preordained network of characteristics.

Even now, in this country, young black musicians still face a series of nudges in the direction of what everyone will describe as ‘their culture’, meaning steel bands and rapping.  Young black musicians who lean towards classical forms will be more or less guaranteed a difficult time—it would be easier if they wanted to do percussion.  Historically, that has meant that, by and large, black musicians in Europe have been written out of the narrative of the very landscape that they helped to shape, and we find ourselves obliged to rediscover figures like the Chevalier de Saint-George or Samuel Coleridge-Taylor—people who were household names in their own time.

In that context, one of the most illuminating and reassuring aspects of looking at the lives of black cultural figures in Britain and Europe is that if you go back between the 16th Century and the 20th Century, you encounter black artists, poets, novelists and musicians who had no problems nor inhibitions in engaging in the cultural environment in which they found themselves.  In the process, they tended to affect the culture in which they lived in various specific ways.

I mentioned the 19th Century, but as far back as 1505 we have an African drummer working for James IV in Edinburgh, arranging a dance with dancers in black and white costumes for the Shrove Tuesday festivities.  Black musicians are repeatedly mentioned in pageants, fairs and at least one tournament from the 16th Century onwards.

If you come to the 18th Century, they’re relatively well-known—black musicians like Cato, who ended up as a head gamekeeper to the Prince of Wales around about 1740, and who was reputed to blow the best French horn and trumpet in his time.  In the 18th Century, Londoners were already dancing in what were called black hops, where 12 pence would get you admission…

…But I will go on to talk about George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower.  Bridgetower is an interesting person, not simply because he was born in the Esterhazy household; not simply because he was black; not because he was a child protégé, but all those things together, at the time when he arrived in Britain and during his career, had a particular kind of significance…

Read the lecture here.
Download the video (very large! 330 MB).
Download the audio (56.5 MB).

Advertising “Interraciality” and “Multiraciality” In ObamaLand—Representations and Images in Kohl’s, Macy’s, Sears, Wal-Mart, etc.

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the
34th Annual National Council for Black Studies
Sheraton New Orleans Hotel
New Orleans, Louisiana
2010-03-17

William Berry

This study examined the representation and contextualization of interraciality and multiraciality in newspaper advertising supplements . Since the election of Barack Obama, media reports have expressed that pre-2008 constructs/contexts of race and ethnicity have evolved into what scholars have theorized as the “post-racial” era. A literature review determined that the advertising industry was among the last sites of consumerism to bring African Americans into typical roles as users of general market products/services, except when they appeared in advertisements placed in Black newspapers/magazines. A content analysis was conducted to determine the extent to which representations of multiracial families, couples, and friends—from childhood through adulthood—have appeared in advertisements from national retail chains, including JC Penney, Sears, and Wal-Mart. The study found that while interraciality and multiraciality are presented prominently in advertising supplements, these representations rarely depict individuals engaging in interactions that suggest they are family members or involved in intimate relationships, or that these engagements can be expected to occur within the home or other private, personal spaces where individuals significantly are more likely to interact closely with others of the same race or ethnic descent. Implications of the findings are that intimate interracial relationships may continue to be taboo and forbidden, in effect continuing as the “third rail” of the consumer society, consistent with how such advertisements were not produced or presented during most of the twentieth century.

Lectures delivered by John Powell under the auspices of the lectureship in Music

The Rice Institute Pamphlet
Volume 10, Number 3 (July 1923)
pages 107-163

Lectures delivered by John Powell
Palace Theatre of Houston
1923-04-05 through 1923-04-06

John Powell

Table of Contents

• I. Music and the Individual (20 pages)
• II. Music and the Nation (38 pages)

From “Music and the Nation”

This is America, a large country. We are the hope of the world. We stand for and safeguard the liberty of the world. We are the greatest country that ever existed or ever will exist. People of every race and clime have come to our shores, The white, the yellow, the red, the black, and the brown are all here in this great melting-pot. They are all free and equal in the brotherhood of man. Eventually they will fuse into a homogeneous mass, and the outcome of this amalgamation will be the highest type of humanity ever known in history—because this is America.

Nobody has more respect for America nor more pride in her than I myself. But it seems to me that the folly of this idea surpasses anything that has ever come within my knowledge. It is idiocy to suppose that mere contact with American soil can change age-old hereditary characters; that, because this is America, the action of ineluctable, biological laws will be suspended. The melting-pot should rather be termed the “witches’ cauldron.” And we can be well assured that no miraculous alchemy will transmute these tainted strains into the perfect superman. Indeed, nothing more preposterous than this theory has ever been preached to a long-suffering people. Why, we would not think of subjecting even our domestic animals to such conditions as these! Everyone knows that if he wishes to breed thorough-bred horses he cannot admix inferior breeds into the stock. The same applies to flowers, to garden vegetables. How dare we sit still and let happen to our children-bone of our bone, blood of our blood-that which we would not allow to happen to the very beasts of the field. I wish here and now to enter my protest against this insidious, this hideous doctrine with every drop of blood in my veins and every ounce of vigor in my body.

If there were no other reason for rejecting this solution of general miscegenation, the negro problem would furnish good and sufficient grounds. If the present ratio were to remain permanent, the inevitable product of the melting-pot would be approximately an octoroon. It should not be necessary to stress the significance of this point. We know that under the Mendelian law the African strain is hereditarily predominant. In other words, one drop of negro blood makes the negro. We also know that no higher race has ever beqn able to preserve its culture, to prevent decay and eventual degeneracy when tainted, even slightly, with negro blood. Sixty centuries of history establish this rule. Since the first page of recorded fact, history can show no exception. Were the American people to become an octoroon race, it would mean their sinking to the level of Haiti and Santo Domingo.

With the constant interchange of population between Europe and America, Europe would likewise inevitably become tainted. This would mean the degeneration of the whole Caucasian race, the annihilation of white civilization. For not only are the physical characteristics of the negro predominant, but the universal experience of the past, as well as the study of our own hybrids and the other negroid peoples of the present time, proves conclusively that his psychology is also hereditarily predominant. This is the reason why every race which has mixed blood with him has decayed. If we, in America, allow this contamination to proceed unchecked, our civilization is inexorably doomed, For the transmission of these characters is effected through the germ plasm; and, whether we accept or discard the more extreme deductions of Weismann, we must still admit that the poison is too deeply embedded to be eradicable by education, or by material, social, or political advantages. Once let our germ plasm become tainted, and all is irrevocably lost. For, granting that natural selection and the course of evolution might eventually produce from this contaminated mass a race of high order, even then aæons would have to elapse before any appreciable results could show themselves, and Anglo-Saxon civilization would long since have vanished eternally from the face of the earth. But if we reject this melting-pot solution, what is left to us?…

Read both papers here and here.

Native, Aboriginal, Indigenous: Who Counts as Indian in Post Apartheid Virginia

Mid-Atlantic Conference on the Scholarship of Diversity, Conference Proceedings
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia
April 2004
17 pages

Jay Hansford C. Vest, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies
University of North Carolina, Pembroke

In 1948, sociologist William Gilbert wrote: “Indian blood still remains noticeable in our eastern States population in spite of the depletions arising from over 300 years of wars, invasions by disease and white men from Europe and black men from Africa.” Gilbert chronicled remnant Indian groups of the eastern states from Maine to Texas and Virginia to Illinois. In his findings, he reported that only Vermont and New Hampshire exhibit no residual Native tribal population while Georgia, Arkansas and Illinois manifest no surviving social groups. At the time, Gilbert estimated the survival of 75,000 to 100,000 mixed-blood Natives “Who may frequently be more white or Negro in appearance” than Indian. Having fallen into disuse, the original tribal names were largely lost in time and most often the distinguishing terms applied to these Native Americans has been nicknames given them by the dominant white people.

Noting that Virginia’s surviving Indian groups tended to retain traditions of their Native origin, Gilbert identified several mixed blood groups along the Blue Ridge and Piedmont zones of the state. Stating that these concentrations “beginning with Rappahannock County in the north and continuing southward along the Blue Ridge through Rockbridge and Amherst Counties and striking directly southward to Halifax County on the North Carolina border,” he gave definition to the geographical occupation of these interior Virginia tribal groups. Specifically he identified 500 to 600 mixed bloods in central and the extreme western end of Amherst County near Bear Mountain and Tobacco Row Mountain of the Blue Ridge. Known locally as “Issues,” he describes these people as having “a very rich brunette with straight black hair and Caucasian features.” Noting a second group northwest of Amherst County, he further identified a population of over 300 “Brown people” exhibiting “a mixture of white, Indian, and occasionally Negro blood.” A third group who claimed Indian descent was identified by Gilbert in “Halifax County on the North Carolina border. Locally both groups were considered to be “mulattoes” but acknowledged as “a group apart from both whites and Negroes.” While this brief summary exhausts the information supplied by Gilbert, it does not begin to manifest the social history and cultural significance of these and other surviving Virginia Piedmont and Blue Ridge Indian groups.

Considered in an ahistorical context, these sociological reports of “tri-racial isolates” have largely been taken as a means of undermining the aboriginal-indigenous character of surviving Native Americans in the eastern United States. Minding this conclusion, it is the intent of this paper to, first, supply to an historical background of Colonial Indian assimilation and explore the American institutional racism that has plagued these Natives, particularly in the south, and second, to consider factors of their Native-aboriginal-indigenous birthright…

Read the entire paper here.

Who Will You Let Me Be?

Race, Ethnicity, and Me: Autobiographical Reflections by Trinity University Students
Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas
Fall 2008

Claire Murphy-Cook

Race, Ethnicity, and Me is a collection of autobiographical essays written by Trinity University students as an assignment for a course taught by Professor David Spener in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. In their essays, students use research findings and scholarly concepts to analyze their own experiences involving racial and ethnic identities in the United States. The collection is intended for use by students and educators as a tool for promoting dialogue about diversity issues as they affect their academic institutions and communities. The essays it contains were written by students in the fall 2008 semester.

Claire Murphy-Cook comes from what, in her words, “can only be described as an alternative family.” She has two lesbian mothers who have been in a relationship for nearly thirty years. Both her mothers are non-Hispanic whites. Her father is a mixed-race, gay man from Brazil who was asked by her mothers to be their sperm donor. He has, nonetheless, been an active presence in Claire’s life. In her essay, she describes how traveling to Brazil with him as a teenager gave her a new sense of her own identity in racial and ethnic terms.

To be mixed race means not having a place in any defined racial categories. It means being defined by standards that do not recognize who you are or where you came from, checking too many bubbles on Scantrons, and puzzling over census categorizations. What is it exactly that places us in these arbitrary categories? How does a person come to terms with the gaps in society’s perceptions about you and the way you see yourself?…

…Though I am aware that American society perceives me as white, I view myself as half Irish (white) and half Brazilian (Latina), someone multiracial. Growing up, there was always an emphasis of both of these identities; I can remember numerous times when my parents told me that I was “not just white.” They also told me that because of societal perceptions of my race that I was treated better than if than if my skin were darker. They were not so overt as to tell me that I had white privilege, but we always talked about how my dad used to be stopped and searched in the airport all the time. Then my moms would bring up how we never got stopped or searched at the airport, and tell my sister and I that it was because we were two white ladies traveling with young daughters. Although never explicitly mentioned as such, I have always been both aware and wary of my white privilege…

Read the entire essay here.

The Economics of Identity and the Endogeneity of Race

National Bureau of Economic Research
Working Paper 9962
September 2003

Howard Bodenhorn, Professor of Economics
Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina

Christopher S. Ruebeck, Associate Professor of Economics
Lafayette University, Easton, Pennsylvania

Economic and social theorists have modeled race and ethnicity as a form of personal identity produced in recognition of the costliness of adopting and maintaining a specific identity. These models of racial and ethnic identity recognize that race and ethnicity is potentially endogenous because racial and ethnic identities are fluid. We look at the free African-American population in the mid-nineteenth century to investigate the costs and benefits of adopting alternative racial identities. We model the choice as an extensive-form game, where whites choose to accept or reject a separate mulatto identity and mixed race individuals then choose whether or not to adopt that mulatto identity. Adopting a mulatto identity generates pecuniary gains, but imposes psychic costs. Our empirical results imply that race is contextual and that there was a large pecuniary benefit to adopting a mixed-race identity.

1. Introduction

Economic and social theorists have modeled race and ethnicity as a form of personal identity adopted in response to the costliness of maintaining a specific identity (Hechter, Friedman, and Appelbaum 1982; Stewart 1997; Mason 2001; Akerlof and Kranton 2000; Darity, Mason, and Stewart 2002). These models of racial and ethnic identity recognize that race and ethnicity is contextual because racial and ethnic identities are fluid (McElreath, Boyd, and Richerson, undated). Harris and Sim (2001) report recent evidence of this fluidity among contemporary mixed black-white youth. Although 75 percent of today’s mixed black-white children self-identify as black, 17 percent self-identify as white, and the remaining 8 percent prefer not to select a single racial designation. About 10 percent of mixed-race youth adopt one racial designation at school and a different one at home. It is evident that among modern mixed race youth racial identification is contextual.

Racial and ethnic self-identification have economic consequences because the choice of self-identity is likely to be entwined with the acceptance of and acculturation into dominant social norms. If race or ethnicity is endogenous in certain circumstances, a self-identity may or may not be selected to distance oneself from a subordinate group or to improve one’s standing with or acceptance into the dominant group. In a study of people of Mexican descent, Mason (2001) tests a model in which acculturation is a dominant strategy, and finds that light-complected people of Mexican descent may acculturate more easily. Murguia and Telles (1996) report different educational opportunities for Mexicans of light and dark complexion and argue that these may result from conscious choices. Phenotypic differences, they argue, influence individual strategies. Light-skinned people of Mexican descent learn early in life that by assimilating or acculturating they can defuse negative stereotypes and attain more than their dark-complected counterparts. Later in life, light-skinned Mexicans are able to increase their incomes by adopting a non-Hispanic white identity (Mason 2001). Yet there may also be situations in which members of the subordinate group decide to maintain identities separate from the dominant group.

Our study considers the choices and life chances of black and mixed black-white individuals residing in the urban U.S. South prior to the Civil War. The experience of mixed black-white individuals in this period is particularly germane to the study of the social and economic consequences of racial identification because the so-called one-drop rule was not yet firmly established. Most Upper South states legally adopted a one-fourth rule separating black from white. But the line was not as sharply drawn because the dominant white culture accepted mixed-race people as a separate class. As Williamson (1984, p. 13) notes for Virginia, “there were some people who were significantly black, visibly black, and known to be black, but by the law of the land and the rulings of the courts had the privileges of whites.” Lower South states generally adopted no formal definition of “whiteness,” and were even more accepting of a separate mixed-race or mulatto class. “Known and visible mulattoes could by behavior and reputation be ‘white’” (Williamson 1984, p. 19). Acculturation was an option for at least some mixed-race people living in the antebellum South.

We first model a mixed-race individual’s choice of self-identity. Acculturation brought a degree of acceptance from the dominant white community, which opened the door to a wider set of economic opportunities, but acculturation carried an implicit cost, namely that by adopting the norms of the dominant white culture (dress, language, mannerisms, religious affiliation, group membership, etc.), the individual alienated himself or herself from the black community. To the extent that the recognition of an individual’s heritage generates utility, the rejection of black culture was costly.

We then test the model empirically. We find that African Americans were more likely to identify as mulatto when there were already a substantial number of other mulattos who had formed social networks and established a community. Yet, the probability of declaring a mulatto identity declined with the size and extent of the African-American community. We interpret this to mean that if blacks ostracized mulattos for separating themselves socially and economically, then the larger the black community (holding the number of mulatto households constant) the more costly it was to be ostracized. Similarly, whites became less accepting of a mulatto’s distinctiveness as the city became increasingly African American and thus showed mulattos fewer preferences.

Once we demonstrate that the choice of a mulatto identity was associated with racial composition of the individual’s neighborhood and city, we then investigate the economic consequences of adopting a mulatto identity.  We estimate differences in wealth between blacks and mulattoes and find that mixed-race householders, both male and female, accumulated more wealth than black householders. Regression decompositions suggest that a substantial portion of the wealth gap was due to racial identification and to community factors. Consistent with our model, we find that mixed-race people realized smaller advantages relative to blacks as the size of the African-American community increased both absolutely and relatively. Thus, mixed-race people benefited when they could form a distinct intermediate racial class, standing between the dominant white and subordinate black communities…

Read the entire paper here.