Mixed Race Studies

The Melanin Millennium: Skin Color as 21st Century International Discourse

Springer
2013
348 pages
32 illustrations
Hardcover ISBN 978-94-007-4607-7
eBook ISBN: 978-94-007-4608-4
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-4608-4

Edited by:

Ronald E. Hall, Professor of Social Work
Michigan State University

• Addresses the issue of skin color in a worldwide context
• Discusses the introduction of new forms of visual media and their effect on skin color discrimination
• Touches up on the issue of skin bleaching and the Bleaching Syndrome

In the aftermath of the 60s “Black is Beautiful” movement and publication of The Color Complex almost thirty years later the issue of skin color has mushroomed onto the world stage of social science. Such visibility has inspired publication of the Melanin Millennium for insuring that the discourse on skin color meet the highest standards of accuracy and objective investigation.

This volume addresses the issue of skin color in a worldwide context. A virtual visit to countries that have witnessed a huge rise in the use of skin whitening products and facial feature surgeries aiming for a more Caucasian-like appearance will be taken into account. The book also addresses the question of whether using the laws has helped to redress injustices of skin color discrimination, or only further promoted recognition of its divisiveness among people of color and Whites.

The Melanin Millennium has to do with now and the future. In the 20th century science including eugenics was given to and dominated by discussions of race category. Heretofore there remain social scientists and other relative to the issue of skin color loyal to race discourse. However in their interpretation and analysis of social phenomena the world has moved on. Thus while race dominated the 20th century the 21st century will emerge as a global community dominated by skin color and making it the melanin millennium.

Contents

• Preface
• Chapter 1. The Bleaching Syndrome: Western Civilization vis-à-vis Inferiorized People of Color; Ronald E. Hall
• Chapter 2. The Historical and Cultural Influences of Skin Bleaching in Tanzania;  Kelly M. Lewis, Solette Harris, Christina Champ, Willbrord Kalala, Will Jones, Kecia L. Ellick, Justie Huff and Sinead Younge
• Chapter 3. Pathophysiology and Psychopathology of Skin Bleaching and Implicationa of Skin Colour in Africa; A. A. Olowu and O. Ogunlade
• Chapter 4. An Introduction to Japanese Society’s Attitudes Toward Race and Skin Color; Arudou Debito
• Chapter 5. The Inconvenient Truth of India, Caste, and Color Discrimination; Varsha Ayyar and Lalit Khandare
• Chapter 6. Indigeneity on Guahan: Skin Color as a Measure of Decolonization; LisaLinda Natividad
• Chapter 7. A Table of Two Cultures; Eneid Routté-Gómez
• Chapter 8. Where are you From?; Stéphanie Cassilde
• Chapter 9. Social Work Futures: Reflections from the UK on the Demise of Anti-racist Social Work and Emerging Issues in a “Post-Race'” Era; Mekada J. Graham
• Chapter 10. Shades of Conciousness: From Jamaica to the UK; William Henry
• Chapter 11. Fanon Revisited: Race Gender and Colniality vis-à-vis Skin Color; Linda Lane and Hauwa Mahdi
• Chapter 12. Pigment Disorders and Pigment Manipulations; Henk E. Menke
• Chapter 13. Skin Color and Blood Quantum: Getting the Red Out; Deb Bakken and Karen Branden
• Chapter 14. The Impact of Skin Color on Mental and Behavorial Health in African American and Latina Adolescent Girls: A Review of the Literature; Alfiee M. Breland-Noble
• Chapter 15. Characteristics of Color Discrimination Charges Filed with the EEOC; Joni Hersch
• Chapter 16. The Consequences of Colorism; Margaret Hunter
• Chapter 17. Navigating the Color Complex: How Multiracial Individuals Narrate the Elements of Appearance and Dynamics of Color in Twenty-first Century America; Sara McDonough and David L. Brunsma
• Chapter 18. The Fade-Out of Shirley, a Once-Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity; Lorna Roth
• Chapter 19. What Color is Red? Exploring the implications of Phenotype for Native Americans; Hilary N. Weaver
• Chapter 20. From Fair & Lovely to Banho de Lua: Skin Whitening and its Implications in the Multi-ethnic and Multicolored Surinamese Society; Jack Menke
• Chapter 21. Affirmative Action and Racial Identityin Brazil: A Study of the First Quota Graduates at the State University of Rio de Janneiro: Vânia Penha-Lopes
• Index

History 101.020: Betwixt and Between in the United States: Boundaries and the People who Defy Them

University of California, Berkeley
Spring 2013

MacKenzie Moore, Visiting Lecturer

This 101 seminar is geared toward any student who wants to study the boundaries among and between people, nations, or states, broadly defined. It is also perfect for those wishing to explore what happens when such barriers are (inevitably) ruptured, questioned, or otherwise revealed to be unstable. Some, but by no means all, possible topics include: immigrant history, Native American/colonial contact, the history of American sexuality, frontier environments, mixed-race communities or individuals, the US/Mexico Borderlands, religious synthesis, or urban communities.  We will begin the semester by exploring theoretical approaches to the question of boundaries and categories and the power that sustains them. We will also discuss what such categories mean to people as they construct communities, nations, and identities. We will then consider specific examples of people who, out of choice or circumstance, defy those boundaries. The rest of the semester will be run as a writing and reading seminar. We will support and encourage each other through peer editing, research partners, and other boundary-crossing activities.

AAS 490: Special Topics in Black World Studies: Section 008: Race and “Black Indians”

University of Michigan
Winter 2013
Theme Semester Courses

Tiya Miles, Professor of American Culture, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Native American Studies

This seven week mini course is a special winter 2013 offering for the LSA Theme Semester on Race. The course will introduce students to a range of issues and experiences related to the topic and identity category of “Black Indians.” Popularized in the 1980s by a book of the same title, the term “Black Indians” is often used to identify and describe people of mixed-race African American and Native American ancestry. It is also applied to people with strong bi-cultural connections across these groups who may or may not have Black and native “blood” ties. This class will explore and analyze three major aspects of our subject matter:

1. historical contexts for the interactions of Africans, African Americans and Native Americans;
2. personal experiences stemming from mixed race and bi-cultural Afro-Native identities;
3. meanings and effects of “racial stories” that have been crafted and told about “Black Indians” over time.

Major themes and ideas that will emerge in our discussions include: indigeneity, European and U.S. colonialism, slavery, racial formation and racial hierarchy, mixed-race coupling and family making, tribal sovereignty, personal and community identities, and racial and cultural authenticity.

Textbooks/Other Materials

• Confounding the Color Line, Author: Brooks, James F.
• Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage, Author: written by William Loren Katz.
• Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: the African diaspora in Indian country, Author: edited by Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland.
• IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas, Author: general editor, Gabrielle Tayac.

For more information, click here.

Hist7362: Histories of Exclusion: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America

University College of London
2013

Paulo Drinot, Senior Lecturer in Latin American History

This course examines race and ethnicity, and processes of racialised and ethnic exclusion, in Latin America in historical perspective. It invites us to consider the historical role played by race and ethnicity in hierarchically structuring Latin American societies and reproducing patterns of exclusion from full citizenship in a number of contrasting case studies from the wars of independence until c. 1950. Among some of the topics to be considered are: the role of Afro-descendants and the indigenous in the region’s independence from Spain and Portugal, the persistence of slavery in Brazil and Cuba in a context shaped by ostensibly liberal ideas, the so-called Indian question and its place in liberal thought in the nineteenth century, debates over desirable and non-desirable immigration and on immigration’s impact on the ‘racial stock’, the adoption and adaptation of scientific racism and eugenics by Latin American thinkers as well as the critiques that such approaches to race engendered, the rise and demise of indigenista ideas, policies, and cultural expressions in both Mesoamerica and the Andes, the development of the notion of ‘racial democracy’ in post-slavery Brazil and Cuba and of ‘whiteness’ in the Southern Cone and their role in shaping racialised social policies. More generally, the course considers the ideological and practical construction of ‘racial states’ throughout Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries…

..Course structure

1. Introduction
2. Independence and Race
3. Slavery in Brazil and Cuba
4. Liberalism and the Indian Question
5. Immigration: Europeans, Asians, Jews and Arabs
6. The Science of Racism
7. Indigenismo in Mexico and Central America
8. Indigenismo in the Andes
9. Racial Democracy in Brazil and Cuba
10. Race in the Southern Cone

For more information, click here.

Canada’s Métis win 142-year-old land ruling

BBC News
2013-03-08

Canada’s Supreme Court has ruled the government failed to hand out land grants properly to the Métis indigenous group 142 years ago.

In a 6-2 ruling, the top court said the failure was “not a matter of occasional negligence, but of repeated mistakes and inaction”.

The Métis are descendants of indigenous people and European immigrants.

The land was promised in a 1870 law, to settle a rebellion of existing Métis amid a wave of settlement in Manitoba.

After delays, it was eventually distributed via a lottery that largely benefited European settlers.

The Manitoba Métis Federation (MMF), which brought the suit, celebrated the end of three decades of legal challenges over the land-grant provision…

Read the entire article here.

Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation by Malinda Maynor Lowery (review)

Journal of American Folklore
Volume 126, Number 499, Winter 2013
pages 95-96
DOI: 10.1353/jaf.2013.0006

David Steven Cohen

This book from the University of North Carolina Press raises important questions about which groups are and are not recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as American Indian tribes. The book”€™s author, Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and holds a BA in History and Literature from Harvard University, an MA in Documentary Film Production from Stanford, and a PhD in History from UNC-Chapel Hill. She also happens to be a Lumbee Indian.

Professor Lowery claims that the Lumbees, numbering about 50,000, are the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi River. She acknowledges, however, they have no reservation, no treaties with the federal government, and no survivals of Indian language, customs, or beliefs. Her book purports to show how the Lumbee Indians “€œhave crafted an identity as a People, a race, a tribe, and a nation”€ (p. xii) in a dialogue between insiders and outsiders. Lowery”€™s argument is based on her extensive knowledge of the history of Native American relations with federal and state authorities and a sophisticated understanding of the concepts of the terms “€œrace,”€ “€œtribe,”€ and “€œnation.”€ She notes that these terms were imposed upon Native Americans by Europeans, and they must be viewed in the context of changing times. She frankly admits that both Lumbees and outsiders have used these terms to achieve certain goals in various contestations involving identity politics.

During the colonial period, the ancestors of the Lumbees were considered free Negroes or mulattoes. In the federal censuses from 1790 to 1830, Lumbee ancestors were listed as “€œfree persons of color,”€ a vague term that was used to describe people of racially mixed ancestry. Under the North Carolina Constitution of 1776, they were eligible to vote if they met the property qualification. The Lumbee ancestors were willing to accept free black identity, rather than be disqualified from voting as were American Indians, who were considered at that time to be members of foreign nations. During the Civil War, the Lumbees were assigned fortification duty, a job normally reserved for slaves and free blacks. In March 1865, Allen Lowery and his son William were murdered by the White Home Guard on suspicion that they deserted from fortification duty in Wilmington and aided escaped Union prisoners. Henry Berry Lowery, another son of Allen Lowery, led a band that took revenge on the murderers of his father and brother. From that day to the present, the Lowery Gang has been celebrated as legendary heroes.

North Carolina’s 1868 Constitution, passed under Republican rule during Reconstruction, allowed non-whites, including the Lumbees, the right to vote. When the Democrats regained control of the state legislature in 1875, they instituted a system of segregated schools. The so-called “€œRedeemers”€ sought the support of the Lumbees, who had voted up until then as Republicans. In 1885, a state legislator from Robeson County named Hamilton Macmillan introduced a bill to recognize the Lumbees as the “€œCroatan”€ Indian tribe, based on a folk legend that they were descended from the Lost Colony of Roanoke whose only remnant was the name “€œCroatan”€ carved on a palisade. Two years after the recognition of the Croatan Indians, the legislature provided public funds for an Indian normal school, later renamed Pembroke College, which is today the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Lowery acknowledges that the Lumbees assumed the identity as Indians as part of a political deal to vote Republican so that they could establish their own segregated schools. Lowery rationalizes this deal as the Lumbees”€™s “€œadopting (and adapting to) racial segregation and creating political and social institutions that protected their distinct identity”€ (p. xii).

Federal recognition required descent from a known tribe, and there was some doubt whether the name “€œCroatan”€ referred to a place or a people. In 1913, the Lumbees petitioned the state of North Carolina to designate them as “€œthe Cherokee Indians of Robeson County.”€ The federal Office…

Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity: Indian-Black Intermarriage in Southern New England, 1760-1880

The Journal of American History
Volume 85, Number 2 (September, 1998)
pages 466-501

Daniel R. Mandell, Professor of History
Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri

In the century following the American Revolution, Indians in southern New England struggled to survive as communities, families, and individuals, in the face of prejudice and the region’s rapidly shifting social and economic landscape. Their struggle was shaped by intermarriage with “foreigners & strangers,” mostly African American men. The persistence, adaptation, and acculturation of particular ethnic groups, and the assimilation of members of those groups, are not unusual topics of study for historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. But the story of New England Indians in the early republic is unusual because it took place on the side of America’s racial line where few studies of ethnicity have gone. Examining relations between Indians and blacks in southern New England illuminates the fundamental flaws of a bichromatic view of racial relations in American history, and it offers new insight into the complexity and uncertainty of ethnic identity and assimilation…

Native American Roots in Black America Run Deep

Indian Voices
2013-02-04

David A. Love

Do you have Indian in your family? That’s a common question asked in the black community. Many African- Americans lay claim to Native American ancestry, and yet very few blacks have taken the steps to research this part of the history, to learn about their Native American roots and embrace the culture.

Thanksgiving is known as a time for American families to reunite, partake in feast and be grateful. And yet for Native Americans it is a time for mourning, a reflection on the arrival of European settlers that ultimately led to their displacement and elimination by the millions.

Blacks in America are intertwined with that history, and yet the evidence they possess is mostly anecdotal, such as the grandmother who had long, straight black hair, high cheekbones or a red tint to her skin…

Read the entire article here.

Identity Politics: the Mixed-race American Indian Experience

Journal of Critical Race Inquiry
Volume 2, Number 1 (2012)
25 pages

Michelle R. Montgomery
University of Washington

This paper builds a Critical Race Theory approach to consider how mixed-race American Indian college students conform to, or resist, dominant black/non-black ideology. Current research on multiracials in the U.S. lacks the perspectives of mixed-race American Indians on the heightened disputes of “Indianness,” tribal enrollment, and tribal self-determination. Also under-explored is how mixed-race American Indian persons perceive themselves in racial terms, how they wish to be perceived, and how economic and historical perspectives inform their choices about racial self-identification. This paper provides an overview of the identity politics of mixed-race American Indians at a tribal college and highlights the need for tribal colleges to embrace a growing mixed-race population through self-determination education policies.

Read the entire article here.

Your Great-Great Grandmother Wasn’t a Cherokee

Indian Country Today Media Network
2013-01-25

Jay Daniels

Once, at a tribal consultation meeting, Larry Echo Hawk, Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs, asked me to join him for lunch. Upon learning that I was a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, he asked about my opinion of the Freedmen issue. I said “as a Bureau of Indian Affair’s employee, I can’t state my opinion.” Everyone laughed. He asked me again and I responded in the same manner. Everyone laughed again. Mr. Echo Hawk’s staff member reminded me that he was the Assistant Secretary and “you can answer his question.”

I have always been proud to be a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. I wasn’t looking for benefits, or because it was trendy, I’ve received no other tribal perks other than health services, attending Haskell Indian Junior College and eventually a career with the BIA. But, it gave me a purpose and identity of who and what I am – part of a people who respect life and others. What else is there?

Native Americans have always been a people who made room for others. We didn’t embrace these ways, but we made room for it. Making room in our homes for family and friends when necessary isn’t always easy, but it’s what we do. I grew up in north Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it wasn’t your normal little white picket fence neighborhood. There were Indians, blacks, some of this and some of that. Racism to me didn’t exist. We made room for everyone. The Cherokees are part of the Five Civilized Tribes not because we turned from our cultural and religious ways, but we made room for those who came to our land. We couldn’t use all of it so we made room for others. But, a house has only so much space, and when it’s full, we either have to add on, or shut the door on others. We never shut the door on those who belong in the house. Tribal sovereignty refers to the fact that each tribe has the inherent right to govern itself. Each tribe has the right to shape the course of its future that will ensure the continued and ongoing general welfare of its people without outside interference. What is an Indian? That is the question that divides us. Who is an Indian is better left up to the individual and the path they have chosen to follow…

Read the entire article here.