Mixed Race Studies

Brown Man and Fiancee Can Not Get Knot Tied

San Francisco Call
Volume 107, Number 106 (1910-03-16)
page 3, column 5
Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

Unfeeling Goldfield Sheriff Suggests a Hurried Departure

GOLDFIELD, Nev., March 15.—George Masaki, a Japanese gardener, and Juliette S. Schwann, both of Los Angeles, were unable to get a judge to make them man and wife here today. Masaki took out marriage license during the afternoon, but as soon as the sheriff found it out he hunted the couple up and escorted them to the railroad station, where he ordered them not to appear in Goldfield again. This action of the authorities was taken because of unpleasant publicity resulting from a recent case of miscegenation.

The couple took a train to Tonopah. The authorities in Tonopah have been warned.

Affirmative Action in Brazil: Slavery’s Legacy

The Economist
Americas View: The Americas
2013-04-26

H.J.
São Paulo

TO SUM up recent research predicting a mixed-race future for humanity, biologist Stephen Stearns of Yale University turns to an already intermingled nation. In a few centuries, he says, we will all “look like Brazilians”. Brazil shares with the United States a population built from European immigrants, their African slaves and the remnants of the Amerindian population they displaced. But with many more free blacks during the era of slavery, no “Jim Crow” laws or segregation after it ended in 1888 and no taboo on interracial romance, colour in Brazil became not a binary variable but a spectrum.

Even so, it still codes for health, wealth and status. Light-skinned women strut São Paulo’s upmarket shopping malls in designer clothes; dark-skinned maids in uniform walk behind with the bags and babies. Black and mixed-race Brazilians earn three-fifths as much as white ones. They are twice as likely to be illiterate or in prison, and less than half as likely to go to university. They die six years younger—and the cause of death is more than twice as likely to be murder…

…Brazilians’ notions of race are indeed changing, but only partly because of quotas, and more subtly than the doom-mongers fear. The unthinking prejudice expressed in common phrases such as “good appearance” (meaning pale-skinned) and “good hair” (not frizzy) means many light-skinned Brazilians have long preferred to think of themselves as “white”, whatever their parentage. But between 2000 and 2010 the self-described “white” population fell by six percentage points, while the “black” and “mixed-race” groups grew.

Researchers think a growing pride in African ancestry is behind much of the shift. But quotas also seem to affect how people label themselves. Andrew Francis of Emory University and Maria Tannuri-Pianto of the University of Brasília (UnB) found that some light-skinned mixed-race applicants to UnB, which started using racial preferences in 2004, thought of themselves as white but described themselves as mixed-race to increase their chances of getting in. Some later reverted to a white identity. But for quite a few the change was permanent…

Read the entire article here.

Miscegenation: Wedded Bliss Denied to Jap.

Los Angeles Daily Mirror
1910-03-16/1910-03-17

Seeks to Marry Los Angeles Woman in Nevada.

Gets License, But Finally Surrenders It.

Couple Get Cold Shoulders in Two Cities.

(By Direct Wire to the Times)

GOLDFIELD (Nev.) March 16.—[Exclusive Dispatch.] George Masaki, describing himself as a Japanese gardener, accompanied by Juliette Schwan. who admitted to 36 years, both from Los Angeles, appeared at the Courthouse this afternoon and applied to the Sheriff for permission to be married. That worthy referred them to the County Clerk for a license, which was issued after a short pause, and then the candidates for matrimonial chains made a tour of the building in an attempt to induce some of the judges to pronounce them man and wife.

Judge Stevens, who performed the first and only Asiatic marriage in Goldfield, said he would not repeat the experiment, as the feeling over his former action was so intense that he thought it would imperil his chances in the fall election when he will be a candidate for the bench.

The Sheriff sent out for the Justice of the Peace, who refused to be inveigled into the former marriage, but that officer, when he learned the object of the visit, told the waiting couple that they would have to go elsewhere.

By this time a large crowd had gathered at the Courthouse, and it began to look unpleasant for the prospective bridegroom.

Finally the under sheriff spoke to Masaki and told him it was against the law to perform marriages between whites and Japanese. Masaki was induced to surrender his license, the money was refunded and the pair were rushed into a closed carriage and taken to the depot where a Tonopah suburban train was about to pull out. They were shoved aboard as the whistle blew, and the telephone was used to advise Tonopah of the coming

Tonopah gave the couple a chilly reception as an advance canvass had been made of the town and every judicial officer and clergyman was pledged not to officiate. Masaki on his arrival trudged up town with his bride-elect a hundred paces in the rear.

The first stop was at a Chinese restaurant, where the pair took their supper, and then they adjourned to a cheap lodging-house where they rented rooms for the night.

Are the Tsarnaevs White?

The Daily Beast
2013-04-24

Peter Beinart, Senior Political Writer and Associate Professor of Journalism
City University of New York

also Editor-in-chief
Open Zion

In a word, yes. But why is this so hard for Americans to grasp? Peter Beinart on our country’s long track record of conflating religion and race.

The day after last week’s attack in Boston, David Sirota wrote a column for Salon entitled “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American,” arguing that this would limit the resulting crackdown on civil liberties. At first, conservatives were appalled. Then, when police fingered the Tsarnaev brothers, they were triumphant. “Sorry, David Sirota, Looks Like Boston Bombing Suspects Not White Americans,” snickered a headline in Newsbusters. “Despite the most fervent hopes of some writers over at Salon.com,” added a blogger at Commentary, “the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing are not ‘white Americans’.”

But the bombers were white Americans. The Tsarnaev brothers had lived in the United States for more than a decade. Dzhokhar was a U.S. citizen. Tamerlan was a legal permanent resident in the process of applying for citizenship. And as countless commentators have noted, the Tsarnaevs hail from the Caucasus, and are therefore, literally, “Caucasian.” You can’t get whiter than that.

So why did conservatives mock Sirota for being wrong? Because in public conversation in America today, “Islam” is a racial term. Being Muslim doesn’t just mean not being Christian or Jewish. It means not being white…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Theories in Context (Second Edition)

Cognella
2013
224 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-60927-056-8

Edited by:

Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies
University of California, Irvine

This book presents a critical framework for understanding how and why race matters — past, present, and future. The readings trace the historical emergence of modern racial thinking in Western society by examining religious, moral, aesthetic, and scientific writing; legal statutes and legislation; political debates and public policy; and popular culture. Readers will follow the shifting ideological bases upon which modern racial theories have rested, from religion to science to culture, and the links between race, class, gender, and sexuality, and between notions of race and the nation-state.

The authors of Racial Theories in Context discuss the relationship of racial theories to material contexts of racial oppression and to democratic struggles for freedom and equality:

• First and foremost in this discussion is the vast system of racial slavery instituted throughout the Atlantic world and the international movement that sought its abolition.
• Continuing campaigns to redress racial divisions in health, wealth, housing, employment, and education are also examined.
• There is a focus on the specificity of racial formation in the United States and the centrality of anti-black racism.
• The book also looks comparatively at other regions of racial inequality and the construction of a global racial hierarchy since the 15th century CE.

Contents

• Introduction / Jared Sexton
• A Long History of Affirmative Action—For Whites / Larry Adelman
• The Cost of Slavery / Dalton Conley
• Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison-Industrial Complex / INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and Critical Resistance
• Introduction To Racism: A Short History / George M. Fredrickson
• Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West / Darlene Clark Hine
• Understanding the Problematic of Race Through the Problem of Race-Mixture / Thomas C. Holt
• The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics / Martha Hodes
• The Original Housing Crisis / Derek S. Hoff
• The American Dream, or a Nightmare for Black America? / Joshua Holland
• The Hidden Cost of Being African American / Michael Hout
• Slavery and Proto-Racism in Greco-Roman Antiquity / Benjamin Isaac
• Colorblind Racism / Sally Lehrman
• The Wealth Gap Gets Wider / Meizhu Lui
• Sub-Prime as a Black Catastrophe / Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro
• Unshackling Black Motherhood / Dorothy E. Roberts
• Is Race -Based Medicine Good for Us? / Dorothy E. Roberts
• Understanding Reproductive Justice / Loretta J. Ross
• The History of the Idea of Race / Audrey Smedley
• The Liberal Retreat From Race / Stephen Steinberg
• “Race Relations” / Stephen Steinberg

Race and Ethnic Relations in the Twenty-First Century: History, Theory, Institutions, and Policy

Cognella
2011
436 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-93555-160-7

Edited by:

Rashawn Ray, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Maryland, College Park

This book examines the major theoretical and empirical approaches regarding race/ethnicity. Its goal is to continue to place race and ethnic relations in a contemporary, intersectional, and cross-comparative context and progress the discipline to include groups past the Black/White dichotomy. Using various sociological theories, social psychological theories, and subcultural approaches, this book gives students a sociohistorical, theoretical, and institutional frame with which to view race and ethnic relations in the twenty-first century.

Table of Contents

• Race and Ethnic Relations in the Twenty-First Century / Rashawn Ray
• The Embedded Nature of ‘Race’ Requires a Focused Effort to Remove the Obstacles to a Unified America / Dr. James M. Jones
• PART 1 THE SOCIOHISTORICAL CONTEXT OF RACE
  • The Science, Social Construction, and Exploitation of Race / Rashawn Ray
  • Science of Race
    • The Evolution of Racial Classification / Tukufu Zuberi
  • Social Construction of Race
    • Racist America: Racist Ideology as a Social Force / Joe R. Feagin
  • Exploitation of Race
    • White Racism and the Black Experience / St. Clair Drake
• PART 2 THEORETICAL AND CONCEPTUAL PERSPECTIVES
  • Racial Attitudes Research: Debates, Major Advances, and Future Directions / Rashawn Ray
  • Individual and Structural Racism
    • Racial Formation: Understanding Race and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era / Michael Omi and Howard Winant
    • From Bi-racial to Tri-racial: Towards a New System of Racial Stratification in the U.S.A. / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
  • The Social Psychology of Prejudice and Perceived Discrimination
    • Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position / Herbert Blumer
    • Reactions Toward the New Minorities of Western Europe / Thomas F. Pettigrew
  • Racial Attitudes and Public Discourses
    • Racial Attitudes and Relations at the Close of the Twentieth Century / Lawrence D. Bobo
  • Race, Gender, and Sexuality
    • Getting Off and Getting Intimate: How Normative Institutional Arrangements Structure Black and White Fraternity Men’s Approaches Toward Women / Rashawn Ray and Jason A. Rosow
  • Colorism, Lookism, and Tokenism
    • “One-Drop” to Rule them All? Colorism and the Spectrum of Racial Stratifi cation in the Twenty-First Century / Victor Ray
  • Assimilation Perspectives: Group Threat Theory, Contact Theory, and Ethnic Conflict
    • The Ties that Bind and Those that Don’t: Toward Reconciling Group Threat and Contact Theories of Prejudice / Jeffrey C. Dixon
  • Citizenship, Nationalism, and Human Rights
    • Citizenship, Nationalism, and Human Rights / Shiri Noy
• PART 3 THE CUMULATIVE PIPELINE OF PERSISTENT INSTITUTIONAL RACISM
  • The Cumulative Pipeline of Persistent Institutional Racism / Rashawn Ray
  • Individual and Structural Racism
    • A Different Menu: Racial Residential Segregation and the Persistence of Racial Inequality / Abigail A. Sewell
  • Education
    • Cracking the Educational Achievement Gap(s) / R. L’Heureux Lewis and Evangeleen Pattison
  • The Labor Market, Socioeconomic Status, and Wealth
    • Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination / Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan
    • Black Wealth/White Wealth: Wealth Inequality Trends / Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro
    • The Mark of a Criminal Record / Devah Pager
  • The Criminal Justice System
    • Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality / Robert J. Sampson and William Julius Wilson
  • The Health Care System
    • Root and Structural Causes of Minority Health and Health Disparities / Keon L. Gilbert and Chikarlo R. Leak
• PART 4 CONFRONTING THE PIPELINE: SOCIAL POLICY ISSUES
  • Engaging Social Change by Embracing Diversity / Rashawn Ray
  • When Is Affirmative Action Fair? On Grievous Harms and Public Remedies / Ira Katznelson
  • Engaging Future Leaders: Peer Education at Work in Colleges and Universities / Alta Mauro and Jason Robertson
  • What Do We Think About Race? / Lawrence D. Bobo

Loving in Virginia: A teacher’s work brings new life to an old case.

University of Virginia College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
Newsletter
February 2013

Caroline County, Virginia, 1958. Newlyweds Richard and Mildred Loving wake at 2 a.m. to the sound of their front door being kicked in. Before they are out of bed, the sheriff and two deputies place them under arrest. Their crime: Marriage. Richard, a white man, and Mildred, a black and American Indian woman, had violated Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, which prohibited interracial marriage. They plead guilty, are convicted on felony charges, and are banished from Virginia. The Lovings spend the next nine years trying to get home.

Most students in historian Grace Hale’s Southern History seminars find it difficult to believe that the Loving’s story is factual, and perhaps even more extraordinary that such events occurred only 55 years ago. Yet in June of 1958, 24 states, including Virginia, prohibited interracial marriage. With Hale they talk through the Voting Rights Act of 1964[5] and the Civil Rights Act of 1965[4]. But these topics, important in their own right, capture only a portion of the important history she teaches. For Hale, the history comes more alive through the story of the Lovings and their nine-year battle that resulted in the 1967 Supreme Court Decision that invalidated all state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Though she has taught the case for some time, only recently has it carried more weight to her. Just last year, HBO premiered The Loving Story, a documentary that tells the Loving’s dramatic tale, for which Hale served as an historical advisor…

Read the entire article here.

Of Mongrels and Men: The Shared Ideology of Anti-Miscegenation Law, Chinese Exclusion, and Contemporary American Neo-Nativism

bepress Legal Series
Working Paper 458
2005-02-16

Geoffrey A. Neri, Associate
Miller Barondess, LLP

Table of Contents

• I. INTRODUCTION
• II. BIRTH OF THE “ABOMINATION”: THE DEVELOPMENT OF ANTI-MISCEGENATION LAW
  • A. Origins and Early History
  • B. Anti-Miscegenation Ideology
    • 1. Monogenism and Christian Fundamentalism
    • 2. Polygenism and Pseudoscience
    • 3. Social Darwinism
    • 4. A Beacon of Light in the Dark Age of Racist Ideology
• III. THE “YELLOW PERIL”: ANTI-MISCEGENATION LAW AND CHINESE EXCLUSION
  • A. Chinese Migration to the United States in the 19th Century
    • 1. Pull Factors
    • 2. Push Factors
  • B. Anti-Chinese Immigration Legislation
  • C. The “Chinese Exclusion Case” and Plenary Power Doctrine
  • D. “Negroes or Mulattoes . . . and Mongolians”: The Anti-Miscegenation Expands to Include the Chinese
  • E. Effects of Anti-Miscegenation Law and Chinese Exclusion on Chinese Transnational Movement
• IV.MORE WHIMPER THAN BANG: THE END OF CHINESE EXCLUSION AND THE ANTI MISCEGENATION STATUTE
  • A. The End of Chinese Exclusion
  • B. The Demise of the Anti-Miscegenation Statute
    • 1. Early Challenges
    • 2. Loving
• V. THE CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE OF ANTI-MISCEGENATION LAW AND THE PERIOD OF CHINESE EXCLUSION
  • A. The Good News . . . More Progressive Racial Norms in the Modern Era
  • B. The Bad News . . . Neo-Nativism Serves up “Old Poison in New Bottles”
• VI.CONCLUSION

“We want no more mixture of races. . . . No strong nation was ever born of mongrel races of men.”
—U.S. Senator La Fayette Grover (addressing the “Chinese Problem”), June 30, 1872

I. INTRODUCTION

A complex interaction of push and pull factors created a substantial wave of Asian migration to the United States in the 19th century. In brief, acute political and economic instability and dislocation in China arising from European imperialism, internal conflict, and famine “pushed” Chinese laborers to the United States, while a demand for cheap, reliable labor brought on by burgeoning industrialization in the American West, the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, and the 1849 California gold strike at Sutter’s Creek “pulled” them. Due to America’s historic policy of open borders, this migration was virtually unrestricted and the rapid influx of Chinese immigrants into the American West almost immediately provoked “widespread concerns about the relationship between race and national identity” in the United States. The Chinese were perceived as possessing characteristics that amounted to unbridgeable racial differences and “fears of hybridity” proliferated, prompting one California legislator to warn that “were the Chinese to amalgamate at all with our people, it would be a hybrid of the most despicable, a mongrel of the most detestable that has ever afflicted the earth.

Anti-miscegenation laws, state laws prohibiting sex and/or marriage between individuals of different “races” originally crafted to prevent the mixing of whites and blacks, were quickly extended to regulate the interaction between whites and the Chinese, the new “other” race. In a process dubbed “Negroization” by historian Dan Caldwell, the Chinese were charged with the same negative racial qualities—“[h]eathen, morally inferior, savage, and childlike . . . lustful, sensual”—that had previously been hoisted on blacks and the rhetoric of anti-black racism became the rhetoric of anti-Chinese racism. This process of reassignment occurred a number of times as subsequent groups of Asian immigrants came to the United States and anti-miscegenation laws were extended further to apply to them: Japanese, Koreans, Indians, Filipinos and eventually all Asian immigrants were subject to the prohibition against commingling with whites.

This Article will examine the anti-miscegenation statute as well as other exclusionary laws specifically applied to the Chinese diaspora in America throughout the 19th and 20th century, describing the impact these racially restrictive laws had on Chinese transnational migration during the period. It will present the anti-miscegenation statute as an emblem of the broader concern of American nativism—a concern with defining and policing American political and civic culture, with protecting American republicanism from the perceived threat posed by foreigners deemed “unassimilable.” This Article will then situate the anti-miscegenation statute within the larger framework of the xenophobic ideology animating exclusionary laws in general—an ideology in which amalgamation between white and nonwhite persons is assumed to threaten the purity of the white American body politic as much as the white American body.

Viewed in this manner, the anti-miscegenation statute, far from being a relic of America’s racist past, is especially relevant to contemporary arguments regarding immigration. For although the primary thesis of anti-miscegenation law—the assertion that nonwhites are incompatible with whites physically—has been disproven (or at least driven underground) by modern science, a dangerous corollary to that thesis—the notion that certain classes of immigrants, by virtue of their race and/or country of origin, are incompatible with American civic and political culture—endures. The modern nativist revival, this Article will conclude, invokes the specter of anti-miscegenation law and Chinese exclusion in charging that the most recent wave of migration to the United States, comprised mostly of Latinos and Asians, “cannot or will not assimilate” and threaten to degrade and undermine “national identity”…

Read the entire paper here.

The Barber of Natchez

National Park Service
Natchez: National Historical Park, Mississippi
2012-07-19

Timothy Van Cleave, Park Ranger
Natchez National Historical Park

The Life of William Johnson

Known as the “barber” of Natchez, William Johnson began his life as a slave. His freedom at age eleven followed that of his mother Amy and his sister Adelia. After working as an apprentice to his brother-in-law James Miller, Johnson bought the barber shop in 1830 for three hundred dollars and taught the trade to free black boys. It was shortly after he established a barber shop in downtown Natchez that he began to keep a diary. The diary was a mainstay in Johnson’s life until his death in 1851.

As a young prominent citizen in the free black community of Natchez, Johnson’s interest in marriage and starting a family was strengthened by his thriving business. By 1835, his initial investment of three hundred dollars had grown to almost three thousand. His dress was impeccable and he was confident in his future. So confident that he caught the eye of twenty year old Ann Battles. Battles, also a free black married Johnson in 1835. Their eleventh child was born in 1851 at the time of Johnson’s death…

…In 1851 a boundary dispute with his neighbor Baylor Winn found the two men in court. Although, the judge ruled in Johnson’s favor, Winn was not satisfied. Winn, also a free black ambushed Johnson returning from his farm and shot him. Johnson lived long enough to name Winn as the guilty party. Through strange circumstances, Winn was never convicted of the killing. Winn and his defense argued that he was actually white and not a free person of color because of his Indian ancestry in Virginia. Therefore, the “mulatto” boy who accompanied Johnson on that fateful day could not testify against Winn. Mississippi law allowed for blacks to testify against whites in civil cases, but not in criminal cases. Two hung juries could not decide if he was white or black, so Johnson’s killer walked free…

Read the entire article here.

The Perils of Passing: The McCarys of Omaha

Nebraska History
Volume 71, Number 2 (Summer 1990)
pages 64-70

Willard B. Gatewood, Jr. (1931-2011), Former Chancellor and Emeritus Alumni Distinguished Professor of History (1931-2011)
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

This article presents various aspects of light-skinned black people “passing” for whites by examining the 1919 case of Francis Patrick Dwyer’s suit to annul his marriage to Clara McCary Dwyer after becoming suspicious that their new baby boy had Negro blood. While Dwyer was correct, he failed to win his suit, and his wife was able to divorce him and receive child support in 1923.

A strikingly handsome young woman and her three-year-old son, both fairhaired and blue-eyed, were the star attractions in a sensational court case in Omaha, Nebraska, in the summer of 1919. Her name was Clara McCary Dwyer, whose husband, Francis Patrick Dwyer, had filed suit to have their marriage annulled on the grounds that she had “negro blood in her veins.”· Until 1913 Nebraska law prohibited marriage between whites and persons possessing one-fourth or more Negro blood. In that year the legislature changed the law to ban marriages between white persons and those having “one-eighth or more negro, Japanese or Chinese blood.”

The courtroom drama, which occurred during the Red summer of 1919 when twenty-five race riots occurred in the United States, epitomized the prevailing white attitudes toward race and color. Throughout the spring and summer of that year, the denunciation of blacks as criminals, especially rapists, by the press and trade unions in Omaha undoubtedly had heightened racial tension in the city that ultimately erupted in a riot there late in September 1919. A complicating factor in the Dwyer case was that it involved the phenomenon of “passing,” a process by which fair-complexioned people of Negro ancestry “crossed over the color line” into the white world.

Several forms of “passing” existed among blacks in the United States. One was temporary or convenience passing by which fair-complexioned Negroes occasionally crossed the color line in order to secure decent hotel, travel, and restaurant accommodations or to attend the theater without having to sit in the Jim Crow balcony. Another form was known as “professional passing,” where by a person passed for white in order to hold jobs open only to whites but continued to maintain “a Negro social life.” The third form was passing permanently for white, which involved blotting out the past and severing all contacts with the black community. Among other risks was that of exposure. Because of the secretive nature of permanent passing, it is impossible to ascertain how many black Americans actually passed. Estimates ranged from a few hundred to many thousands annually.

Francis Dwyer, a clerk in a jewelry and leather goods store owned by his brother-in-law, assumed his wife was white until the birth of their son in 1916, when the attending physician, for reasons that are unclear, raised the possibility of Negro ancestry. Once Dwyer became suspicious of his wife’s racial heritage, he apparently refused to live with her and their son. He joined the army in 1917 and upon being mustered out of military service, decided to end the marriage legally on the grounds that he had been deceived by his wife. Because he was Catholic and had been married in the Catholic church, he insisted upon an annulment rather than a divorce…

Read the entire article here.