Mixed Race Studies

Miscegenation in South Africa

Cahiers d’études africaines
Volume 1, Number 4 (1960)
pages 68-84
DOI: 10.3406/cea.1960.3680

Pierre L. Van Den Berghe
University of Natal

A number of related factors make the Union of South Africa an ideal object of investigation in the field of miscegenation. The exceptionally virulent brand of racism that has developed in South Africa since the beginning of the 2oth century was accompanied by an increasingly morbid fear of miscegenation unparalleled in intensity anywhere else in the world. As consequence of this miscegenophobia South Africa went further than any other country in recent times in prohibiting by law all sexual relations whether marital or non-marital between whites and non-whites. Finally the South African government in its concern over bastardization provides the social scientist with the best data on inter-racial marriage and concubinage of any country known to the author.

The history of miscegenation in South Africa is as old as the first permanent Dutch settlement at the Cape in 1652. In the first few decades, some instances of marriage between Dutchmen and christianized Hottentot women took place as well as extensive non-marital relations between masters and female slaves. In the 1670’s, an estimated 3/4 of all children of female slaves had white fathers. With the rise of colour prejudice in the latter decades of the 17th century, legal unions of whites and non-whites became rare. A 1685 law prohibited marriage between white men and slave women; some legal unions of white men with free women of colour continued to take place, but with decreasing frequency. Miscegenation however, continued to flourish in the form common to most slave societies namely institutionalized concubinage between white men and non-white women.

The salient fact in the early history of miscegenation in South Africa is that while intermarriage became rapidly condemned, extra marital relations between white men and women of colour were not only tolerated, but even looked upon with amusement The slave lodge of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape was wide-open brothel of which Mentzel gives an interesting account:

“Female slaves are always ready to offer their bodies for trifle; and towards evening one can see string of soldiers and sailors entering the lodge where they misspend their time until the clock strikes 9… The Company does nothing to prevent this promiscuous intercourse since, for one thing it tends to multiply the slave population and does away with the necessity of importing fresh slaves. Three or four generations of this admixture for the daughters follow their footsteps have produced a half-caste population—a mestizo class—but a slight shade darker than some Europeans.”

Among the European bourgeoisie, interracial concubinage was also common:

“Boys who, through, force of circumstances have to remain at home during these impressionable years between 16 and 21 more often than not commit some folly, and get entangled with handsome slave-girl belonging to the household. These affairs are not regarded as very serious… the offence is venial in the public estimation. It does not hurt the prospects; his escapade is source of amusement, and he is dubbed young fellow who has shown the stuff he is made of.”

British visitor to the Cape in the beginning of the 19th century tells that slave girls were routinely assigned to the bedroom of white guests to enliven the latters’ nights. Slave girls were “loaned out” to Europeans by their masters:

“Female slaves sometimes live with Europeans as husband and wife with the permission of their masters who benefit in two ways: the cost of upkeep of the slave is reduced through the presents she receives from the man, and her children are the property of her master since children of female slaves are themselves slaves… In this manner the slave population is always increasing.”

Similarly, the whites interbred extensively with the nominally free Hottentots. Vaillant estimates the number of Bastards (for such was the contemporary designation of white-Hottentot half-breeds) in 1780’s as 1/6 of the inhabitants of the whole Cape Colony. In the first half of the 19th century, entire communities of Bastards settled along the Orange River where they established autonomous “states”. The offspring of these white-slave and white-Hottentot unions, as well as interbreeding between slaves and Hottentots gave rise to the people known today as the “Cape Coloureds”.

In this early period then, miscegenation was not only common but sanctioned so long as it took the form of concubinage between higher-status men and lower-status women. There was no trace of feeling of horror against miscegenation per se. The main concern of the dominant white group was the preservation of its superior status, and the latter was left unthreatened by master-slave concubinage. Intermarriage on the other hand, entailed measure of social equality and was consequently opposed…

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Mixed messages: ‘mixed race’ representations in film

Concordia University
August 2004
124 pages

Naomi Angel

The growing interest in issues pertaining to mixed race identities and communities, as well as a surge in films with mixed race characters has prompted this examination of representations of mixed race characters in film from the 1950s to the present. The study consists of an analysis of selected films, including Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Jungle Fever, Dr. No, Showboat and Rabbit Proof Fence, and situates this analysis within a historical framework based on the particular context in which each film was set and/or made.

The value in studying ‘mixed race’ representations in film lies in the reflection it provides of significant moments in ‘mixed race’ histories, and in the portrayal of cultural imaginings of people of ‘mixed race.’ By examining these representations, this thesis traces the development of ‘mixed race’ terminology, interrogates the history of anti-miscegenation law in the United States, and explores the sociological and commonsense views of ‘mixed race’ maladjustment in the early 1900s.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Blood Quantum Land Laws and the Race versus Political Identity Dilemma

California Law Review
Volume 96 (2008)
pages 801-838

Rose Cuison Villazor, Associate Professor of Law
Hofstra University

Modern equal protection doctrine treats laws that make distinctions on the basis of indigeneity defined on blood quantum terms along a racial versus political paradigm. This dichotomy may be traced to Morton v. Mancari and, more recently, to Rice v. Cayetano. In Mancari, the Supreme Court held that laws that privilege members of American Indian tribes do not constitute racial discrimination because the preferences have a political purpose – to further the right of self-government of federally recognized American Indian tribes. Rice crystallized the juxtaposition of the racial from the political nature of indigeneity by invalidating a law that privileged Native Hawaiians. That law, according to the Court, used an ancestral blood requirement to construct a racial category and a racial purpose as opposed to the legally permissible political purpose of promoting the right of self-government of American Indian tribes.

Close analysis of the dichotomy between the constitutive notion of indigenous blood as either racial or political has largely escaped scholarship. An analysis deconstructing their juxtaposition is sorely needed. As recent challenges to blood quantum laws show, there remain unanswered questions about the extent to which the racialized (and thus invalid) Native Hawaiian-only voting law impact other blood quantum laws. Among the laws implicated by the dichotomy between the racial and political meaning of indigeneity are land ownership laws that privilege indigenous peoples who are not federally recognized tribes. Specifically, in some jurisdictions in the United States, including Hawaii, Alaska, and the U.S. territories, only indigenous peoples may purchase or possess property. Perhaps more problematically, these property laws define indigeneity on the basis of blood quantum. Under the contemporary race versus political meaning of blood quantum, these laws arguably violate equal protection principles because they do not fit the current framing of what constitutes political indigeneity.

Using these laws, what I collectively refer to as blood quantum land laws, as frames of reference, this Essay interrogates and criticizes the juxtaposition of the racial and political meaning of indigeneity. Specifically, the Essay examines the legal construction of political indigeneity and demonstrates how its narrowed construction would undermine these blood quantum land laws that were enacted to reverse the effects of colonialism. Consequently, this Essay calls for the liberalization of the binary racial and political paradigm by expanding equal protection law’s interpretation of the meaning of political indigeneity. Toward this end, this Essay provides an initial analysis of how to broaden the political notion of indigeneity, focusing in particular on the relationships among property, indigeneity, and the right to self-determination.

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Tribal Rights vs. Racial Justice: Was the Cherokee Nation’s expulsion of black Freedmen an act of tribal sovereignty or of racial discrimination?

The New York Times
Room for Debate
2011-09-15

Kevin Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Matthew L. M. Fletcher, Professor of Law
Michigan State University

Cara Cowan-Watts, Acting Speaker
Cherokee Nation Tribal Council

Rose Cuison Villazor, Associate Professor of Law
Hofstra University

Heather Williams, Cherokee citizen and Freedman Descendent
Cherokee Nation Entertainment Cultural Tourism Department

Carla D. Pratt, Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs
Pennsylvania State University, Dickinson School of Law

Tiya Miles, Professor of History and Chair of the Department of Afro-American and African Studies
University of Michigan

Joanne Barker (Lenape), Associate Professor of American Indian studies
San Francisco State University

Introduction

When the Cherokee were relocated from the South to present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, their black slaves were moved with them. Though an 1866 treaty gave the descendants of the slaves full rights as tribal citizens, regardless of ancestry, the Cherokee Nation has tried to expel them because they lack “Indian blood.”

The battle has been long fought. A recent ruling by the Cherokee Supreme Court upheld the tribe’s right to oust 2,800 Freedmen, as they are known, and cut off their health care, food stipends and other aid in the process.

But federal officials told the tribe that they would not recognize the results of a tribal election later this month if the citizenship of the black members was not restored. Faced with a cutoff of federal aid, a tribal commission this week offered the Freedmen provisional ballots, a half-step denounced by the black members.

Is the effort to expel of people of African descent from Indian tribes an exercise of tribal sovereignty, as tribal leaders claim, or a reversion to Jim Crow, as the Freedmen argue? Kevin Noble Maillard, a professor of law at Syracuse University and a member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, organized this discussion of the issue.

Read the entire debate here.

The Mixed-Race Experience: Treatment of Racially Miscategorized Individuals under Title VII

Asian American Law Review
University of California
Volume 12 (2005)

Ken Nakasu Davison

This article argues that the static legal construction of race has the dangerous potential to permit cases of racially-based discrimination, thus circumventing its prohibition in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The author challenges the classification of race as an “immutable characteristic,” demonstrating how some physical characteristic by which employers are legally allowed to discriminate are actually grounded in individuals’ racial backgrounds. Lastly, the author uses the miscategorization of mixed-race individuals as a case study of the dangers and limitations of race as an immutable characteristic, instead arguing for a comprehensive understanding of race as a social construct.

I. Introduction
 
 One observer writes, “Race may be America’s single most confounding problem, but the confounding problem about race is that few people seem to know what race is.”  This remark poignantly captures the irony of race – that is, race still remains an enigma even though we live in a society in which race determines so much of our lives. Indeed, notions of race, to a large extent, govern our public and private identities by associating certain characteristics with socially constructed racial classes. Some characteristics that identify and associate a person with a racial group are susceptible to change and are viewed by the law as the result of mutable social forces. Under Title VII, some courts have adopted a mutability requirement under which employers may permissibly discriminate based upon “socially-driven” characteristics, even if they are a part of a person’s racial, sexual or ethnic identity. Social characteristics such as one’s language, manner of speech, style of hair, attire and choice of friends are all factors that are commonly viewed as indicators of a person’s racial ancestry, but remain unprotected under a mutability analysis.

Foremost amongst indicators of race is phenotype, which is defined as the interaction of an individual’s gene structure with his or her surroundings to create physical appearance.  Phenotype indicators, such as hair texture, facial features, and skin color, are assumed to be based on biology and to provide an accurate indication of a person’s racial ancestry…

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Choosing to be Multiracial in America: The Sociopolitical Implications of the “Check All That Apply” Approach to Race in the 2000 U.S. Census

Berkeley La Raza Law Journal
Volume 21 (2011)

Alaina R. Walker

I. INTRODUCTION

Race in America has long been a contentious subject, especially when the government has been involved. Race can mean something different to everyone, and yet, it is widely understood as having real implications and consequences. Many scholars understand that race is “a social construct[:] a social artifact, which results from a process through which social significance is attributed to some contingent attributes like skin color, and whose emergence, salience and influence can be studied and analyzed.” The government’s use of race has ranged from the horrific to the admirable, but has always been controversial. Analyzing the U.S. Census provides an interesting opportunity to discuss some of the significant roles race has played and continues to play in America. Racial data collected from the U.S. Census is currently used for the controversial purpose of furthering civil rights objectives, but some people worry that these objectives are now in danger. Due to the implementation of the “check all that apply” approach to the U.S. Census (the ability to select all races with which one identifies), critics are concerned that racial data will become convoluted and that civil rights objectives will be hindered. What is lacking from the conversation and arguably the civil rights agenda is the importance of the official recognition of multiracial identity, which the “check all that apply” approach acknowledges.

Although multiracial identity should be recognized on the U.S. Census, it is necessary to analyze how its recognition in the form of the “check all that apply”…

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Family Histories of ‘Passing’ from Black to White Documented in Book

Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
2011-09-06

Katti Gray

In the summer of 1993, as American-born Daniel Sharfstein registered Blacks to cast their first ballot in race-riven South Africa, he volunteered alongside a South African woman, who professed to be as authentically African as any other Black. This, she told then college student Sharfstein, despite her family’s decades-old designation as Coloured, a mixed-race label that elevated her clan above Blacks in the old White-run government’s hierarchy of peoples.
 
Though being Coloured insulated her from brutalities apartheid reserved for the so-called purely Black, she was, physically, hard to distinguish from the Black activists who had dominated the anti-apartheid movement, said Dr. Sharfstein, now 38 and a Vanderbilt University law professor. She was dark-skinned, and wore her hair Afrocentrically-braided.
 
That her family would choose to be misclassified racially was both fascinating and bewildering, Sharfstein said. “I came home and was immediately interested in the question of whether the same thing had happened here,” said Sharfstein, who holds a law degree from Yale, and a degree in history, literature and Afro-American studies from Harvard.
 
His book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, is the outgrowth of parallels Sharfstein drew between apartheid’s racial distortions and those of his own native land.
 
With this nation’s state-by-state variations on how many drops of Black blood legally made a person Black as both a backdrop and core of the 395-page tome, Sharfstein explores the human, financial and ephemeral costs of morphing from an imposed Blackness—notwithstanding one’s light skin, aquiline facial features and straight hair—to live as White…

…Cape Cod, Mass., is where Isabel Wall Whittemore’s forebears ended up.
 
“Until I read [Sharfstein’s] book, I didn’t realize that, in my mom’s day, 1/16 [of Black blood] was considered Colored,” said Whittemore, 74, now residing in Hickory Flat, Miss., with her oldest daughter Lisa Colby. “To tell you the truth… I’ve always gone as Caucasian. I had no reason not to. I’d love to know what I should be calling myself now, but it doesn’t matter to me either way… Race isn’t important.”
 
Roughly a decade before the February 2011 release of Sharfstein’s book, a homework assignment for Colby’s daughter revealed their place on the branches of O.S.B. Wall’s family tree. “I’ve met a lot of cousins who I didn’t know,” Colby said. “I, myself, think this is great … in terms of the history. My great, great-grandfather was able to come up from being a slave to being a lawyer.”
 
Not everyone who’s learned of their ties to Wall has been so effusive. One informed Sharfstein that “he’d become more racist since learning about his descent than ever before,” Sharfstein said. “Initially, he was so intent on maintaining his White identity—and nothing makes you more ‘White’ than hating Black people. That’s my inference.”…

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Are you white enough?

Salon.com
2008-11-10

Laura Miller, Senior Writer

From Jim Crow laws to workplace discrimination, the history of race and the American courtroom is incendiary.

Come January, Barack Obama will be sworn in as either the first black president of the United States or the 44th white one, or both, or neither, depending on how you interpret his race. Race is such a monumental force in American culture and politics that the idea that it has to be interpreted may strike many people as bizarre. Of course Obama is black, some might argue, judging by his appearance, or by his self-identification as an African-American or even by his marriage and important relationships with other African-Americans. Yet more than one commentator has complained that he isn’t “black enough,” by which they may mean that his complexion isn’t dark enough, or that he was raised by whites, or that his African father provided him with no heritage in North American slavery, or that he doesn’t sufficiently align himself with the policies of a certain portion of African-American political leadership.

The problem with race as Americans understand it is that it doesn’t really exist. It is a brutal fact of life for millions of citizens, and an inescapable problem for the rest, but it is also, as Ariela J. Gross writes in her densely researched “What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America,” a “moving target,” whose definition and meaning is always in flux. Many of us can avoid encountering this strange truth in the imprecise realms of cultural and social life, but when it comes to the law, imprecision just doesn’t cut it. Gross’ book, a history of cases in which people have challenged their official racial designation, eloquently demonstrates just how difficult it can be to say what race—mine, yours, anybody’s—actually consists of…

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White Weddings: The incredible staying power of the laws against interracial marriage

Slate
1999-06-15

David Greenberg, Associate Professor History, Journalism & Media Studies
Rutgers University

Last week, the Alabama Senate voted to repeal the state’s constitutional prohibition against interracial marriage, 32 years after the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s similar ban. Hadn’t these archaic laws gone out with Bull Connor? I asked myself as I read the news account. And haven’t we been hearing that America has rediscovered the melting pot, that in another generation or two we’ll all be “cablinasian,” like Tiger Woods?…

…When you think about it, it makes sense that some Alabamians found it hard to jettison overnight a 300-year-old custom. Laws against interracial marriage—and the taboos against black-white sex that they codify—have been the central weapon in the oppression of African-Americans since the dawn of slavery. President Abraham Lincoln’s detractors charged him in the 1864 presidential campaign with promoting the mongrelization of the races (that’s where the coinage “miscegenation,” which now sounds racist, comes from). Enemies of the 20th-century civil rights movement predicted that the repeal of Jim Crow laws would, as one Alabama state senator put it, “open the bedroom doors of our white women to black men.” Fears of black sexuality have been responsible for some of the most notorious incidents of anti-black violence and persecution, from the Scottsboro Boys to Emmett Till.

Intermarriage bans arose in the late 1600s, when tobacco planters in Virginia needed to shore up their new institution of slavery. In previous decades, before slavery took hold, interracial sex was more prevalent than at any other time in American history. White and black laborers lived and worked side by side and naturally became intimate. Even interracial marriage, though uncommon, was allowed. But as race slavery replaced servitude as the South’s labor force, interracial sex threatened to blur the distinctions between white and black—and thus between free and slave. Virginia began categorizing a child as free or slave according to the mother’s status (which was easier to determine than the father’s), and so in 1691 the assembly passed a law to make sure that women didn’t bear mixed-race children. The law banned “negroes, mulatto’s and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women, [and] their unlawfull accompanying with one another.” Since the society was heavily male, the prohibition on unions between white women and nonwhite men also lessened the white men’s competition for mates. (In contrast, sex between male slave owners and their female slaves–which often meant rape—was common. It typically met with light punishment, if any at all.)…

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Shades of Fraternity: Creolization and the Making of Citizenship in French India, 1790–1792

French Historical Studies
Volume 31, Number 4 (2008)
pages 581-607
DOI: 10.1215/00161071-2008-007

Adrian Carton
Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney, Australia

On October 16, 1790, a group of topas men wrote a petition to the Colonial Assembly at Pondichéry, protesting the decision of September that year to exclude them from the electoral list of active citizens on the basis of “race.” These propertied, free men of color demanded to have the same rights as Europeans and the métis. While historians of the French empire have long considered how mulatto and creole people in the French Caribbean negotiated the boundaries of citizenship after the Revolution, the debate that emerged in India offers a different view. This essay argues that the topas drew on precedents from other French colonies, as well as on the status of foreigners in France itself, to argue that domicile (ius solis) rather than bloodline (ius sanguinis) formed the basis of what it meant to be French. Hence skin color could not be a barrier to citizenship rights.

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