Mixed Race Studies

Factors in the Microevolution of a Triracial Isolate

American Journal of Human Genetics
Volume 18, Number 1 (January 1966)
pages 26-38

W. S. Pollitzer
Department of Anatomy
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

R. M. Menegaz-Bock
Genetics Training Committe
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

J. C. Herion
Department of Medicine
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Triracial Isolates today attract the attention of the anthropologist, the geneticist, and the medical scientist as questions arise concerning the origin of such isolates, their history, social status, breeding structure, and inherited pathological conditions. This paper describes the physical, serological, and clinical characteristics of a hybrid population in northeastern North Carolina (Witkop et al., 1960; Menegaz-Bock, 1962), its racial composition, and the cultural and biological factors in its evolution.

History

The population can be traced at least as far back as the American Revolution. The most common surname in this region today is the same as that of two brothers, said to be descended from Cherokee Indians and whites, who fought in that war. The census of 1790 for the county in which the majority of this population now live lists this name only under the designation “all other free persons;” four of seven other surnames frequent in this population are listed as “free white,” while three are listed under both of these headings. Many of these names, well-known in the isolate today, can be traced through the census reports of the nineteenth century. In 1800, ten are listed, mostly under “free persons of color,” and the census of 1810 lists six of these as “other free persons except Indians not taxed.” By 1820, most of these names appear in the column “free Negro.” Eleven surnames common in the current population are listed in the census of 1830 as “free colored persons,” and most of these are listed under the same heading again in 1840. The census of 1850, designating free inhabitants as “white,” “black,” and “mulatto,” registers a dozen of these family names as “mulattoes” and half of these also as “white.” In 1860, the census for the western district of the county listed 13 of the common names as free inhabitants, either white, black, or mulatto. In the 1870 census for the township where most of the population now lives, five of seven last names common in the group include mulattoes. The census of 1880 contains ten names common in the township now, and all but two of these are to be found under “mulatto.” The census of 1890 was destroyed, and names are not released for the censuses from 1900 on…

Read the entire article here.

Multiethnicity and Multiethnic Families: Development, Identity, and Resilience

Xlibris
2010
384 pages
ISBN 13 Softcover: 978-1-4500-1231-7
ISBN 13 Hardcover: 978-1-4500-1232-4
ISBN 13 Ebook: 978-1-4500-0340-7

Edited By:

Hamilton McCubbin, Krystal Ontai, Lisa Kehl, Laurie McCubbin, Ida Strom, Heidi Hart, Barbara DeBaryshe, Marika Ripke and Jon Matsuoka

Guided by the increasing number of interracial marriages, cross-cultural adoptions and resulting multiethnic individuals and  families, scholars and scientists reveal the complex and persistent changes in the ethnic profile of Americans, families and their communities. 

The editors of this book selected the research of 31 nationally and internationally recognized scholars who present 14 chapters of current knowledge on the changing demographics of multiethnicity and their implications for human development and identity development, social and family relationships, functioning, stress, coping and resilience.

The senior contributing scholars and their disciplines are:  Sharon Lee, PhD, Demography; Emmy Werner, PhD, Child Development; Jonathan Okamura, PhD, Sociology; Cathy Tashiro, PhD, Nursing;  Hamilton McCubbin, PhD, Family Science; Barbara DeBaryshe, PhD, Human Development; Cardell Jacobson, PhD, Sociology; Jenifer Bratter, PhD, Psychology;  Xuanning Fu, PhD, Anthropology; Richard Lee, PhD, Psychology;  Laurie McCubbin, PhD, Counseling Psychology;  Farzana Nayani, PhD, Ethnic Studies; Jeannette Johnson,  PhD, Psychology; and Michael Ungar, PhD, Social Work.

Multiethnicity and Multiethnic Families: Development, Identity, and Resilience (Le`a Publications) addresses core theoretical, methodological and policy issues surrounding the changing demographics of multiethnic and particularly indigenous groups in the United States. The issues of historical trauma, schema, appraisal, adaptation, measurement and intervention are magnified. The introduction and fourteen chapters aim to build upon prior writings and research and to improve upon our understanding of these populations with all their complexities. Present and future research and knowledge gained on what it means to be multiethnic is vital to our efforts to shape their futures and improve upon our professional understanding and investment in enabling this emerging population to thrive as well as survive.

Chapters include:

Multiraciality and health disparities: Encountering the contradictions and conundrums of race, ethnicity, and identity, by Cathy Tashiro

Read the front matter here.

Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference

DePaul University, Lincoln Park Campus
DePaul University Student Center
2250 N. Sheffield
Chicago, Illinois USA 60614
2010-11-05 through 2010-11-06

Sponsored by DePaul University Asian American Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies and co-sponsored by the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University and the MAVIN Foundation.

“Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies,” the first annual Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, will be held at DePaul University in Chicago on November 5-6, 2010.

The CMRS conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines nationwide. Recognizing that the diverse disciplines that have nurtured Mixed Race Studies have reached a watershed moment, the 2010 CMRS conference is devoted to the general theme “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies.”

Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) is the transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions of race. CMRS emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. CMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

Fanshen Cox, Tiffany Jones, and myself will participate in a Greg Carter (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) moderated round-table discussion titled “Exploring the Mixed Experience in New Media” on 2010-11-05 from 10:15 to 12:15 CDT at the conference.

View the finalized schedule here.

Organizers:

Wei Ming Dariotis, Assistant Professor Asian American Studies
San Francisco State University, IPride Board
dariotis@sfsu.edu

Camilla Fojas, Associate Professor and Chair
Latin American and Latino Studies
DePaul University

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

‘Half-breeds,’ racial opacity, and geographies of crime: law’s search for the ‘original’ Indian

Cultural Geographies
Volume 17, Number 4 (October 2010)
pages 487-506
DOI: 10.1177/1474474010376012

Renisa Mawani, Associate Professor of Sociology
The University of British Columbia, Canada

Discussions of hybridity have proliferated in cultural geography and in social and cultural theory. What has often been missing from these accounts are the ways in which mixed-race identities have been forged, contested, and embodied spatially. Inspired by recent calls in cultural geography to rematerialize race and drawing from the growing literature on law and geography, this article examines the material dimensions of hybridity, how it was legally produced, gained traction, and slipped in the quotidian spaces of everyday encounters. Focused on late-19th and early-20th-century British Columbia (Canada), I trace the emergence of the ‘half-breed’ as a new racial personage and juridical taxonomy that unsettled racial hierarchies and spatial distinctions between aboriginal and white settler populations. Unlike other colonial contexts, mixed-race peoples on Canada’s west coast did not threaten European superiority alone but were believed to endanger the protection and assimilation of aboriginal peoples. Proximities between ‘half-breeds’ and ‘Indians’ were politically charged for two reasons. First, racial differentiations between these populations were often imperceptible, and second, their putative distinctions were closely bound up with concerns over territory and with aboriginal well-being. The racial opacity of mixed-race peoples created some sites of mobility for those in-between. However, their unknowability shored up the uncertainties of colonial knowledge production and the limits of existing racial repertoires, creating persistent demands for new markers of racial otherness in the process. Crime and immorality became potent signifiers of racial inferiority aimed at differentiating half-breeds from Indians and providing authorities with additional optics through which to problematize and govern their affective and geographical encounters.

Read or purchase the article here.

Ethnic Studies 064: Mixed Race Descent in the Americas

Mills College, Oakland, California
Fall 2010

Melinda Micco, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies

This is an introductory course that examines the historical and theoretical development of identities and of communities of multiracial and multiethnic people. In the academy, in government, and in popular culture, the lives and experiences of racially mixed people, and how others perceive them, have become topics of intense debate and scrutiny since the late-1990s. Mostly recently, newly elected President Barack Obama’s racial and ethnic identity highlighted the issues and played a significant role in the 2008 presidential elections.

This course will examine the historical evolution of such terms as the “marginal man” and the “150% man” to understand the present concerns of racial and ethnic stereotyping. We will engage questions such as: Who are “mixed-race” people in the US? How are they perceived, described, and treated in various communities? What are the effects of various federal and state policies, such as anti-miscegenation laws, American Indian “relocation,” immigration, and Japanese American internment? What is the legacy of race-based chattel slavery on both African-American and non-African-American communities? What are racial and color hierarchies and how do they affect mixed-race people? What are real lived experiences of mixed-race people in the US?

Required Text

• Gaskins, P. F. (1999). What are you?: Voices of Mixed-Race Young People. New York: Macmillan.
• Ifekwunigwe, J. O. (Ed.) (2004). Mixed Race Studies: A Reader. New York: Routledge.
• Spickard, P. R., & Burroughs, W. J. (Eds.) (2000). We Are A People: Narrative and Multiplicity in Constructing Ethnic Identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

For more information, click here.

IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas

Smithsonian Institution
2009
256 pages
6 5/8 x 9 1/2 inches
115 color and black-and-white illustrations
ISBN: 978-1-58834-271-3

Twenty-seven passionate essays explore the complex history and contemporary lives of people with a dual heritage that is a little-known part of American culture. Authors from across the Americas share first-person accounts of struggle, adaptation, and survival and examine such diverse subjects as contemporary art, the Cherokee Freedmen issue, and the evolution of jazz and blues. This richly illustrated book brings to light an epic history that speaks to present-day struggles for racial identity and understanding.

IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas accompanies the groundbreaking exhibition of the same title developed by the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in partnership with the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES). Through the concepts of policy, community, creative resistance, and lifeways, the exhibition and publication examine the long overlooked history of Native American and African American intersections in the Americas.

The book features a foreword by NMAI Director Kevin Gover and NMAAHC Director Lonnie G. Bunch, III, essays by leading scholars, and approximately 100 object images, documents, and photographs. IndiVisible illuminates a history fraught with colonial oppression, racial antagonism, and the loss of culture and identity. Uncovered within that history, however, are stories of cultural resurgence and the need to know one’s roots. Guided by NMAI historian Gabrielle Tayac, five Native scholars served as curatorial advisors for the exhibition and contributors for the publication: Angela A. Gonzales, Robert K. Collins, Judy Kertész, Penny Gamble-Williams, and Thunder Williams. In addition to the curatorial advisors, esteemed authors Theda Perdue, Tiya Miles, Richard Hill, Sr., Herman J. Viola, and Ron Welburn—among the book’s many expert voices—discuss race relations in the Jim Crow South, creative resistance, the relationship between African Americans and the Haudenosaunee, the famed buffalo soldiers of the American West, and the roots of jazz and blues. Taken together, the book’s essays and images create a portrait of a vital American subculture.

Read the forward here.

African Creeks: Estelvste and the Creek Nation

University of Oklahoma Press
2007
368 pages, 6″ x 9″
Illustrations: 15 color illustrations, 4 maps
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806138152
Paperback ISBN: 9780806168951

Gary Zellar, Assistant Professor of History
University of Saskatchewan

A narrative history of the African Creek community

Among the Creeks, they were known as Estelvste—black people—and they had lived among them since the days of the first Spanish entradas. They spoke the same language as the Creeks, ate the same foods, and shared kinship ties. Their only difference was the color of their skin.

This book tells how people of African heritage came to blend their lives with those of their Indian neighbors and essentially became Creek themselves. Taking in the full historical sweep of African Americans among the Creeks, from the sixteenth century through Oklahoma statehood, Gary Zellar unfolds a narrative history of the many contributions these people made to Creek history.

Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Zellar reveals how African people functioned as warriors, interpreters, preachers, medicine men, and even slave labor, all of which allowed the tribe to withstand the shocks of Anglo-American expansion. He also tells how they provided leaders who helped the Creeks navigate the onslaught of allotment, tribal dissolution, and Oklahoma statehood.

In his compelling narrative, Zellar describes how African Creeks made a place for themselves in a tolerant Creek Nation in which they had access to land, resources, and political leverage—and how post–Civil War “reform” reduced them to the second-class citizenship of other African Americans. It is a stirring account that puts history in a new light as it adds to our understanding of the multi-ethnic nature of Indian societies.

Personal passion fuels Smithsonian exhibit

San Francisco State University News
2010-02-12

Denize Springer

The search for identity is particularly complex for Americans of both African and Native American heritage, according to Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies Robert Keith Collins.

Of Choctaw and African American descent, Collins has turned a personal passion into a career. His research, featured in a major exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, focuses on the racially motivated laws and other influences and issues that continue to complicate the lives of mixed-heritage people throughout the Americas.

According to the 2000 U.S. census, hundreds of thousands of Americans claim both African and Native American heritage. The tangled relationship between these groups began when Native Americans were enslaved, took African slaves, rescued them from slavery and married freed or freeborn African slaves. Collins’ research involves scouring historical records of the Americas, particularly the slave narratives compiled by the WPA (Works Project Administration) during the Great Depression, which illuminated the dynamics of slave life within Native American nations…

Read the entire article here.

“Who Do You Think You’re Border Patrolling?”: Negotiating “Multiracial” Identities and “Interracial” Relationships

Georgia State University
2008
348 pages

Melinda Anne Mills

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University

Research on racial border patrolling has demonstrated how people police racial borders in order to maintain socially constructed differences and reinforce divisions between racial groups and their members. Existing literature on border patrolling has primarily focused on white/black couples and multiracial families, with discussions contrasting “white border patrolling” and “black border patrolling,” in terms of differential motivations, intentions, and goals (Dalmage 2000). In my dissertation research, I examined a different type of policing racial categories and the spaces inbetween these shifting boundaries. I offer up “multiracial interracial border patrolling” as a means of understanding how borderism impacts the lives of “multiracial” individuals in “interracial” relationships. In taking a look at how both identities and relationships involve racial negotiations, I conducted 60 in-depth, face-to-face qualitative interviews with people who indicated having racially mixed parentage or heritage. Respondents shared their experiences of publicly and privately managing their sometimes shifting preferred racial identities; often racially ambiguous appearance; and situationally in/visible “interracial” relationships in an era of colorblind racism. This management included encounters with border patrolling from strangers, significant others, and self.

Not only did border patrolling originate from these three sources, but also manifested itself in a variety of forms, including benevolent (positive, supportive); beneficiary (socially and sometimes economically or materially beneficial); protective, and malevolent (negative, malicious, conflictive). Throughout, I discussed the border patrolling variations that “multiracial” individuals in “interracial” relationships face. I also worked to show how people’s participation in border patrolling encouraged their production of colorblind discourses as a strategy for masking their racial attitudes and ideologies about “multiracial” individuals in “interracial” relationships.

Table of Contents

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
  • Research Overview and Questions
  • Navigating Multiracial Interracial Borders
• CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW, THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND METHODS/METHODOLOGY
  • How Do You Solve A “Problem” Like Racial Mixture? Making Mixture Appear and Disappear
  • What is an “Interracial” Relationship?
  • Measuring Mixture, Exploring Mixed Matters
• CHAPTER THREE: BORDER PATROLLING FROM THE OUTSIDE IN
  • When Strangers Border Patrol Identities
  • When Strangers Border Patrol Both Identities and Partner Choices
  • Conclusions
• CHAPTER FOUR: BORDER PATROLLING FROM OUTSIDERS WITHIN/INSIDER OTHERS/INSIDERS WITHOUT
  • When Significant Others Border Patrol Identities
  • When Significant Others Border Patrol Both Identities and Partner Choices
  • Conclusions
• CHAPTER FIVE: BORDERISM FROM THE INSIDE OUT
  • When People Border Patrol Their Own Identities
  • When People Border Patrol Both Their Identities and Partner Choices
  • Conclusions
• CHAPTER SIX: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
  • Conclusions
  • Future Research
• REFERENCES
• APPENDICES
• APPENDIX A: INTERVIEW GUIDE
• APPENDIX B: APPROVED INFORMED CONSENT FORM

Read the entire dissertation here.

Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880-1920

University of Chicago Press
2005
224 pages
10 halftones  6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 9780226532424
Paper ISBN: 9780226532431
E-book ISBN: 9780226532523

Pablo Mitchell, Eric and Jane Nord Associate Professor of History and Comparative American Studies
Oberlin College

With the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in the 1880s came the emergence of a modern and profoundly multicultural New Mexico. Native Americans, working-class Mexicans, elite Hispanos, and black and white newcomers all commingled and interacted in the territory in ways that had not been previously possible. But what did it mean to be white in this multiethnic milieu? And how did ideas of sexuality and racial supremacy shape ideas of citizenry and determine who would govern the region?

Coyote Nation considers these questions as it explores how New Mexicans evaluated and categorized racial identities through bodily practices. Where ethnic groups were numerous and—in the wake of miscegenation—often difficult to discern, the ways one dressed, bathed, spoke, gestured, or even stood were largely instrumental in conveying one’s race. Even such practices as cutting one’s hair, shopping, drinking alcohol, or embalming a deceased loved one could inextricably link a person to a very specific racial identity.

A fascinating history of an extraordinarily plural and polyglot region, Coyote Nation will be of value to historians of race and ethnicity in American culture.

Table of Contents

Preface: A Note on Coyotes
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Bodies on Borders
2. Compromising Positions: Racializing Bodies at Pueblo Indian Schools
3. Carnal Knowledge: Racializing Hispano Bodies in the Courts
4. Transits of Venus: Ceremonies and Contested Public Space
5. Strange Bedfellows: Anglos and Hispanos in the Reproduction of Whiteness
6. “Promiscuous Expectoration”: Medicine and the Naturalization of Whiteness
7. “Just Gauzy Enough”: Consumer Culture and the Shared White Body of Anglos and Hispanos
8. Conclusion: Birth of a Coyote Nation
Notes
Bibliography
Index