Mixed Race Studies

Elizabeth Warren’s Birther Moment

The New York Times
2012-05-04

Kevin Noble Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

If you are 1/32 Cherokee and your grandfather has high cheekbones, does that make you Native American? It depends. Last Friday, Republicans in Massachusetts questioned the racial ancestry of Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senate candidate. Her opponent, Senator Scott Brown, has accused her of using minority status as an American Indian to advance her career as a law professor at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas. The Brown campaign calls her ties to the Cherokee and Delaware nations a “hypocritical sham.”

In a press conference on Wednesday, Warren defended herself, saying, “Native American has been a part of my story, I guess since the day I was born, I don’t know any other way to describe it.” Despite her personal belief in her origins, her opponents have seized this moment in an unnecessary fire drill that guarantees media attention and forestalls real debate…

…The Republican approach to race is to feign that it is irrelevant — until it becomes politically advantageous to bring it up. Birthers question Obama’s state of origin (and implicitly his multiracial heritage) in efforts to disqualify him from the presidency. They characterize him as “other.” For Warren, Massachusetts Republicans place doubts on her racial claims to portray her as an opportunistic academic seeking special treatment. In both birther camps, opponents look to ancestral origins as the smoking gun, and ride the ambiguity for the duration…

Read the entire opinion here.

Elizabeth Warren says she’s Native American. So she is.

The Washington Post
2012-05-04

David Treuer

Suddenly many Americans wonder what it means that Elizabeth Warren, who is vying for Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown’s U.S. Senate seat, has identified herself as having Cherokee and Delaware Indian heritage. The claim wasn’t sudden, but the furor is.

Some 20 years ago, she listed herself as a minority in a directory of law professors. Recently the authenticity of her heritage, and her reasons for claiming it, have been called into question on the campaign trail. However, the debate should not be about whether she deserves this minority status, but whether we live in a meritocracy…

…An Indian identity is something someone claims for oneself; it is a matter of choice. It is not legally defined and entails no legal benefits. Being an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe, however, is a legal status that has nothing to do with identity and everything to do with blood quantum. Members must meet requirements set by the tribe in consultation with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (Elizabeth Warren is not enrolled in a tribe and doesn’t seem to have sought such status. She doesn’t claim an Indian identity, just Indian ancestry.) Indians who are not enrolled in a tribe aren’t eligible for the aforementioned programs and benefits, including casino profits, education assistance, hunting privileges and housing…

…My father is Jewish, but I didn’t really grow up around any of my Jewish relatives, so claiming a Jewish identity — despite that heritage — would feel strange, presumptuous, disrespectful. On my mother’s side we have an ancestor by the name of Bonga, who was African and ended up at Leech Lake in Minnesota, where he married a woman of the Ojibwe tribe, and where I grew up. Despite this heritage, it would likewise feel very odd to claim that I am African or African American. (I am something like one-156th African.)…

Read the entire opinion here.

Amy Locklear Hertel to Head American Indian Center at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Indian Country Today
2012-04-29

Tanya Lee

Amy Locklear Hertel, newly-selected director of the American Indian Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was admonished by her grandmother to pursue her education. “Grandmother told me to get all the education you can. What you learn in your head no one can take away. You need to learn all you can and use it to serve your community. I like to think she would be proud of me,” says Locklear Hertel, who starts her new job May 1.

“All the education you can get” so far includes a B.A. in interpersonal communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), a master’s degree in social work and a Juris doctor from Washington University in St. Louis and a nearly-completed Ph.D. from Washington University’s George Warren Brown School of Social Work.
 
Going back to UNC will take Locklear Hertel, her husband and their young children, Ava, 3, and Ahren, 1, back home. “I’ve wanted to go home for years, but the right opportunity never came up. I know my purpose is to serve our tribal communities in North Carolina. When this position became available, I felt like I had been training for it all along, with my interdisciplinary work, advocacy, and research in tribal communities. This job fits my interests and abilities and for me it answers the question, ‘How can I best serve our communities?’” Her family and community have been generous in welcoming her home. “Everybody back home has been wonderful, welcoming us,” she says. “They told me when I left I had to come back to serve in this community.”
 
Locklear Hertel grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a place halfway between her mother’s Coharie and her father’s Lumbee communities that her parents chose so that she and her younger brother would be able to participate in the life of both tribes. Her father worked in a glass factory, and her mother in the Fayetteville school system…

Read the entire article here.

A Classic Study of the History of Caribbean Women

H-Caribbean Reviews, H-Net Reviews
December 2008

Barbara Bush

Lucille Mathurin Mair. A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica, 1655-1844. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2006. 496 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-976-640-166-5; (paper), ISBN 978-976-640-178-8.

I first encountered Lucille Mathurin Mair’s work during the 1970s when I read her seminal article, “The Arrivals of Black Women,” published in Jamaica Journal in 1975. Her work, which influenced me and a number of other pioneering historians in the field, was seminal in developing research in gender and slavery. Mair’s research, however, went beyond Jamaican slave women of African origin; it also embraced white and mulatto, or “brown,” women, slave and free. Her doctoral thesis, supervised by Elsa Goveia, the first woman professor of history at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica, was awarded in 1974. Mair (née Waldrond) went on to become a well-known Jamaican historian, author, teacher, activist, and diplomat, but her dissertation remained unpublished. Verene A. Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles, both professors of history at the University of West Indies who have made a significant contribution to gendered perspectives on Caribbean history, are thus to be commended for transforming this monumental study into a published monograph.

The book is divided into three main sections that map Mair’s original structure. Part 1 addresses the origins of Jamaican society and examines female arrivals from 1655 to 1770. Part 2 focuses on creole slave society, while the final part, “Postscript, 1834-1844,” explores the beginnings of a free society. Each section weaves together the lives of white, black, and mulatto women, and explores their relationships to each other as well as to white, black, and mulatto men. Shepherd and Beckles have skilfully and sensitively edited the original text, making the minimum of changes. Their introduction effectively contextualizes Mair’s study in relation to developments in the field of women’s, gender, and feminist history since the 1970s, and its impact on the postcolonial historiography of slave and post-slave societies…

…One of Mair’s most interesting contentions is that the “original creole matriarch may not have been black but brown” (p. 292). Free brown women, she argues, tended to live in families dominated by women and looked down on black women and brown men, whom they regarded as “helpless.” These matriarchies may reflect the particular location of mulatto women in slave societies. Brown women were the cultural conduits between black and white worlds, as the mistresses of white men and as “grog house” keepers. But, observes Mair, their position in Jamaican society was ambivalent. As the object of white male desire, they could prosper but they could never match the ideal of white womanhood and achieve respectability. Religion was the other end of the spectrum of approved means of brown upward mobility, but, argues Mair, before the abolition of slavery in 1838, there does not seem to have been the same development of philanthropy and sense of civic duty as was found among the Barbadian urban free colored population. With emancipation, however, there was a decline in concubinage, a reflection of the pervasive emphasis on “respectability” in post-slavery society that separated the “civilized” and aspiring mulattos and blacks from their “primitive” African past…

Read the entire review here.

Constructing Afro-Cuban Womanhood: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Republican-Era Cuba, 1902-1958

University of Texas, Austin
343 pages
August 2011

Takkara Keosha Brunson

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation explores continuities and transformations in the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood in Cuba between 1902 and 1958. A dynamic and evolving process, the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood encompassed the formal and informal practices that multiple individuals—from lawmakers and professionals to intellectuals and activists to workers and their families—established and challenged through public debates and personal interactions in order to negotiate evolving systems of power. The dissertation argues that Afro-Cuban women were integral to the formation of a modern Cuban identity. Studies of pre-revolutionary Cuba dichotomize race and gender in their analyses of citizenship and national identity formation. As such, they devote insufficient attention to the role of Afro-Cuban women in engendering social transformations. The dissertation’s chapters—on patriarchal discourses of racial progress, photographic representations, la mujer negra (the black woman), and feminist, communist, and labor movements—probe how patriarchy and assumptions of black racial inferiority simultaneously informed discourses of citizenship within a society that sought to project itself as a white masculine nation. Additionally, the dissertation examines how Afro-Cuban women’s writings and social activism shaped legal reforms, perceptions of cubanidad (Cuban identity), and Afro-Cuban community formation. The study utilizes a variety of sources: organizational records, letters from women to politicians, photographic representations, periodicals, literature, and labor and education statistics. Engaging the fields of Latin American history, African diaspora studies, gender studies, and visual culture studies, the dissertation maintains that an intersectional analysis of race, gender, and nation is integral to developing a nuanced understanding of the pre-revolutionary era.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• Introduction: Constructing Afro-Cuban Womanhood: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Republican-Era Cuba, 1902-1958
• Historiographical Contributions
• Mapping the Dissertation
• A Note on Terminology
• Chapter 1: Patriarchy and Racial Progress within Afro-Cuban Societies in the Early Republic
  • Patriarchy, Racial Progress, and Social Hierarchy
  • Afro-Cuban Organizations during the Republican Era
    • Gender, Patriarchy, and Respectability
  • Afro-Cuban Social Life during the Early Decades of the Republic
    • Class, Gender, and Society Life in Santa Clara
  • A Shift in Discourse: Morality
    • Women, the Family, and Racial Regeneration
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 2: Exemplary Women: Afro-Cuban Women’s Articulation of Racial Progress
  • Racial Progress and Republican Womanhood
  • Republican Womanhood and the Work of Racial Improvement
    • Writing Republican Womanhood
  • Women of the Partido Independiente de Color (Independent Colored Party)
    • Patriarchy and Women’s Contributions to the PIC
  • Minerva and the Emergence of Afro-Cuban Feminism
    • Marriage and Divorce
  • Patriarchy and Political Voice Through Letter Writing
    • Writing for Work and Educational Opportunities
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 3: Visualizing Progress: Afro-Cuban Womanood, Sexual Politics, and Photography
  • Theoretical Framework and Methodology
  • Photography and Racism in Cuba
  • Afro-Cuban Photographic Portraiture and Racial Progress
  • Staging Racial Progress Through Adornment Practices
    • Racial Womanhood and Understandings of Beauty
  • The Legal and Moral Family
  • Modern Womanhood and Photography during the 1920s
    • Amelia González: Afro-Cuban Society and Modern Womanhood
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 4: La Mujer Negra (The Black Woman): The Transformation of Afro-Cuban Women’s Political and Social Thought during the 1930s
  • Popular Mobilization and the Tranformation of Gender Ideologies
    • The “Triple Discrimination” Confronted by Black Women
    • Political Debates on Race, Gender, and Citizenship
  • Black Women and National Politics
    • Afro-Cuban Feminism in the 1930s
  • Afro-Cuban Feminists and the Third National Women’s Congress of 1939
    • Black Womanhood and the Third National Women’s Congress
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 5: Enacting Citizenship: Afro-Cuban Womanhood in a New Constitutional Era
  • Political Alliances and Democratic Discourses
  • Afro-Cuban Women Communists in the New Constitutional Era
  • Labor and Citizenship
  • Afro-Cuban Women Communists and Popular Protests
    • Economic Reform and Anti-War Protests
    • Connecting Local Issues to Global Struggles after WWII
    • The Democratic Cuban Women’s Federation
  • Nuevos Rumbos (New Directions) and the Struggle for Citizenship
    • Women’s Political Representation and Civil Rights within Afro-Cuban Publications
  • Anti-Racial Discrimination Campaign
    • Racial Discrimination and the Law
  • Conclusion
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

List of Figures

• Figure 1: “Úrsula Coimbra Valverde,” Minerva (15 December 1888)
• Figure 2: “Úrsula Coimbra Valverde,” El Nuevo Criollo (17 December 1904)
• Figure 3: “Consuelo Serra y Heredia,” El Nuevo Criollo (18 June 1905)
• Figure 4: “Consuelo Serra y Heredia,” El Nuevo Criollo (18 June 1905)
• Figure 5: “Esperanza Díaz,” Minerva (September 1910)
• Figure 6: “Inéz Billini,” Minerva (30 September 1910)
• Figure 7: “Juana M. Mercado,” Minerva (15 December 1912)
• Figure 8: Advertisement for Pomada “Mora,” Minerva (15 December 1914)
• Figure 9: Portrait of Martín Morúa Delgado and his daughters, Arabella and Vestalina. Published in Rafael Serra’s Para blancos y negros: ensayos políticos, sociales y económicos
• Figure 10: Portrait of Martín Morúa Delgado, his wife, Elvira Granados de Morúa, and their daughters, Vestalina and Arabella. Published in El Fígaro (12 September 1910)
• Figure 11: “Amelia González,” El Mundo (1 December 1922)
• Figure 12: “Dámas de Atenas,” Revista Atenas (1931)

A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica, 1655–1844

University of The West Indies Press
2006
400 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 978-976-640-178-8

Author:

Lucille Mathurin Mair (1925-2009)

Edited by:

Hilary McD. Beckles, Principal
University of The West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados

Verene A. Shepherd, University Director
Centre for Gender & Dev Std-RC: Centre Research/Teaching
University of The West Indies, Mona

Contents

• List of Tables
• Editors’ Introduction: Hilary McD. Beckles and Verene A. Shepherd
• Author’s Preface
• Part 1: The Female Arrivants, 1655-1770
  • Chapter 1: The Arrivals ofWhite Women
  • Chapter 2: The Arrivals of Black Women
  • Chapter 3: The Growth of the Mulatto Group
• Part 2: Creole Slave Society, 1770-1834
  • Chapter 4: The White Woman in Jamaican Slave Society
  • Chapter 5: The White Woman: Legal Status, Family, Philanthropy and Gender Constraints
  • Chapter 6: The Black Woman: Demographic Profile, Occupation and Violent Abuse
  • Chapter 7: The Black Woman: Agency, Identity and Voice
  • Chapter 8: The Mulatto Woman in Jamaican Slave Society
• Part 3: Postscript, 1834-1844
  • Chapter 9: The Beginnings of a Free Society, 1834-1844
  • Afterword: Recollections into a Journey of a Rebel Past
  • Appendix: Population: St James Parish
• Notes
• Author’s Bibliography
• Editors’ Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author

Frau Doktor Nancy Stafford of Georgia: From Slave to Physician

The African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter
March 2009
ISSN: 1933-8651
95 pages

Mary R. Bullard

Tracy Moxhay Castle

Chapter 1

In 1850 a cotton planter named Robert Stafford fathered a daughter (later named Cornelia) by a woman named “Juda.” Three years later Juda bore him a second daughter (later named Nancy). On an inventory made for Stafford’s tax records they were simply young females, listed only by age, not by name or family. One was six years old, the other was nine years old. They were the only female mulattos in their age group. All the others in their age group were black. “Mulatto” indicated to the county tax assessor that, in this case, their father was a white man.

Their first appearance in the historical record was in an 1860 inventory in Camden County, Georgia. It was a slave inventory. They were slaves because Juda was a slave.

These events were not so unusual on the southern plantations of the United States, but ensuing developments were remarkable. This paper focuses upon Nancy’s life, for she grew up to follow a career. It was an unusual one for an African-American girl born before the Civil War. Considering that she was born of a slave mother, her choice of career was downright incredible. The child grew up to became a physician, to practice in Europe. She died in 1933. The location of her grave is unknown. Although her descendants told us she was buried in London, no confirming evidence has appeared.

The story is also one of Robert Stafford, an independent thinker, who did not follow the usual pattern of slave master. Nonetheless, he was a southerner and a Georgian. The location of his plantation is important for it throws some light upon the special circumstances of Nancy Stafford’s life. The people with whom Robert Stafford grew up were unenthusiastic about slave ownership, although its usefulness for them was absolute…

Read the entire article here.

Deconstructing a Manumission Document: Mary Stafford’s Free Paper

The Georgia Historical Quarterly
Volume 89, Number 3 (Fall 2005)
pages 285-317

Mary R. Bullard

This article examines the manumission document of Mary Stafford. In early nineteenth-century Georgia, manumitting one’s slave property was a personal matter loosely regulated by the state. In exchange for a one dollar token sum, Robert Stafford conveyed to Belton Copp and his heirs a piece of real estate in downtown Norwich, Connecticut, to be held in trust for Armand, Robert, and Mary. If these legatees died without legitimate heirs, then Stafford’s estate was to comply with Georgia law and go to his heirs-at-law equally, meaning his white niece and nephews, children of his two sisters, who resided in Georgia.

In early nineteenth-century Georgia, manumitting one’s slave property was a personal matter loosely regulated by the state. Bonds of affection between slaveowners and their housekeepers or mistresses were by no means unusual, and manumission was sometimes the reward for faithful service. Reversing an earlier trend, however, by the 1820s manumission became illegal in Georgia unless followed by immediate expulsion of the enfranchised from the state. A slaveowner’s personal ability to manumit had been proscribed as early as 1801, and owners attempting to “free negro slaves, mulatto, mustizo, or any other persons . . . of color” deemed slaves, had been wrarned that the only way to do so was to apply to the legislature. The individual runaway raised ominous images of thievery and rebellion. Nonetheless, fugitive slaves managed to make their way to areas in free states, where they found work, hopeful that former owners would not find them. As the…

Beyoncé, beauty and the all mighty dollar

Insight News
Minneapolis, Minnesota
2012-03-09

Irma McClaurin, Ph.D., Culture and Education Editor

Just for the record, we are not in, nor has there ever been, a post-racial moment in America.  And so, we must dive deep into historical memory of this country to understand why all the fuss about L’Oréal’s  latest advertisement for cosmetics featuring Beyoncé…

Read the entire article here.

Professor’s Bookshelf: Amy Cynthia Tang

The Wesleyan Argus
Middletown, Connecticut
2012-04-19

Miriam Olenick, Staff Writer

Assistant Professor Amy Cynthia Tang, of the American Studies and English departments, specializes in Asian-American and African-American literature—most recently, she has been reading satirical Asian-American plays. Professor Tang sat down with The Argus to discuss her favorite authors, her plans for future classes, and her manuscript.

The Argus: What’s on your bookshelf?

Amy Cynthia Tang: So almost everything on these shelves is either a work of American literature or a critical or theoretical text about American literature, mainly Asian-American and African-American. I have some sections on cultural studies, critical race theory, and narrative theory. I have the books for the courses I’m teaching this term—Trauma in Asian American Literature, and Racial Passing in American Literature. And I have a small section devoted to art history.

A: Do you have anything you’re reading just for fun, not related to classes?

ACT: Right now I’m finishing up this collection of plays by Young Jean Lee called “Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven.” It’s a satirical take on what people expect an Asian-American identity play to be about. She’s an experimental playwright, so the characters are non-realist, and she uses stereotypes to engage received ideas of Asian-American identity and push back against them. I was just thinking that it’s sort of related to Theresa Cha’s Dictee—which we’re reading for Trauma—since they’re both by Korean-American women writers, and they’re both very experimental and non-realist. So Lee’s book is both work and pleasure, I guess.

Also I commute from New Haven, so I listen to books on tape—that really is fun. I just finished Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” I got interested in Foer because I have a thesis student who wrote on “Everything is Illuminated.” And now I’m ready to start Ralph Ellison’s posthumously published, unfinished novel, “Juneteenth.” I’ve been meaning to read it for a long time, and finally broke down and said well, there’s the audio book. And bizarrely, I just started looking at it, and it turns out it’s a passing narrative, and I’m teaching a class on racial passing, so there will be some resonances there…

Read the entire article here.