Mixed Race Studies

Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871–1921 (review) [Allan Cho]

University of Toronto Quarterly
Volume 81, Number 3, Summer 2012
pages 690-691
DOI: 10.1353/utq.2012.0090

Allan Cho, Program Services Librarian
University of British Columbia

As part of a new collective at the University of British Columbia re-envisaging the landscape and boundaries of early Canada, Renisa Mawani’s Colonial Proximities exemplifies a new wave of scholarship on ‘Pacific Canada.’ Focusing on how migrants from Asia, Europe, and other parts of the Americas interacted with each other and with First Nations peoples historically, the important work of these scholars examines the parallels beyond the histories of French-English Canada and to larger histories in North America.

Situated in this intellectual context, Mawani argues that these early interracial encounters between aboriginal peoples, Chinese migrants, and other “racial enemies” provoked such deep concerns among colonial authorities that a production of a number of ‘juridical racial truths’ were needed to pave the way for modes of governance that eventually pervaded for the remaining century. As a contact zone saturated by interraciality, the colonial administrators sought a delicate balance of moral assimilation for its aboriginal populace and physical segregation of its Chinese settlers. Not only did fear of racial encounters promulgate accusations of either coerced or deliberate prostitution ever threatening to colonial morals, heterosexuality ultimately became a contested field among the colonial authorities that sought to regulate the social mores of its inhabitants.

Unfurling a bio-political conundrum, this settler colonialism produced a paradoxical blend of assimilation and segregation intersecting at one of the colony’s main economic engines, the salmon cannery industry. Could the economic fortunes that required an abundant supply of cheap labour from Chinese and aboriginal workers in the canneries justify the possibilities of this ‘contagion’ that would result from intimate contact between these races? Could the desire for racial purity within a racially mixed labour force even be possible?

Whereas aboriginal women were seen as an internal danger to the colony, Chinese women were racial enemies who threatened the racial balance of its white populace. Liquor provisions further worked to augment racial divisions and fortify existing power structures dominated by European colonialists. The illegal liquor trade served to underpin the hostility that exacerbated the accusation of Chinese selling liquor to aboriginals, which required an ‘interracial prevention.’ Matters became complicated, however, when mixed peoples, the ‘half breeds,’ challenged and defied colonial taxonomies, as colonial authorities could no longer easily pinpoint those that it needed to control.

Not surprisingly, these interracial exchanges among aboriginal peoples, European colonists, Chinese migrants, and mixed-race populations engendered racial anxieties that sustained colonial institutions run by the Indian agents, missionaries, and legal authorities who sought manifold ways to monitor these encounters through friendships, alliances, and even sexual relations. This legislation of race emerged as a common voice among the largely white administration. Lively debates and discussions eventually led to the creation of royal commissions, further solidifying colonial procedures and legislation that would systematically demarcate racial lines.

Colonial Proximities is an evolution of Mawani’s doctoral dissertation, showing a maturation of ideas. This fresh and more fluid understanding of early Canada is one that seeks to examine the role of trans-Pacific migration in multiple directions throughout the Pacific region, highlighting the history of racism and exploitation of migrants and displacement of First Nations people…

Parallels to country’s racist past haunt age of Obama

Cable News Network
In America: You define America. What defines you?
2012-11-01

John Blake, CNN

This is the second in an occasional series on issues of race, identity and politics ahead of Election Day, including a look at the optics of politics, a white Southern Democrat fighting for survival and a civil rights icon registering voters.

(CNN) – A tall, caramel-complexioned man marched across the steps of the U.S. Capitol to be sworn into office as a jubilant crowd watched history being made.
 
The man was an African-American of mixed-race heritage, an eloquent speaker whose election was hailed as a reminder of how far America had come.
 
But the man who placed his hand on the Bible that winter day in Washington wasn’t Barack Obama. He was Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first African-American elected to the U.S. Senate.
 
His election and that of many other African-Americans to public office triggered a white backlash that helped destroy Reconstruction, America’s first attempt to build an interracial democracy in the wake of the Civil War.
 
To some historians, Revels’ story offers sobering lessons for our time: that this year’s presidential election is about the past as well as the future. These historians say Obama isn’t a post-racial president but a “post-Reconstructionist” leader. They say his presidency has sparked a white backlash with parallels to a brutal period in U.S. history that began with dramatic racial progress.
 
Some of the biggest controversies of the 2012 contest could have been ripped from the headlines of that late 19th-century era, they say: Debates erupt over voting rights restrictions and racial preferences, a new federal health care act divides the country, an economic crisis sparks a small government movement. And then there’s a vocal minority accusing a national black political leader of not being a “legitimate” U.S. citizen.
 
All were major issues during Reconstruction, an attempt to bring the former Confederate states back into the national fold and create a new era of racial justice. And many of the same forces that destroyed Reconstruction may be converging again, some scholars and historians say…

…Obamacare, 19th century style
 
Beyond Revels, there are other parallels between today and the post-Reconstruction era, according to some historians.
 
The most commonly cited link revolves around the debate over voter ID laws. Since Obama’s election, 34 states have considered adopting legislation requiring photo ID for voters, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Seven have passed such laws, which typically require voters to present a government-issued photo ID at the polls.
 
During the post-Reconstruction era, many white Southerners viewed the onset of black voting power in apocalyptic terms. They created a thicket of voting barriers – “poll taxes,” “literacy tests” and “understanding clauses” – to prevent blacks from voting, said Dray.
 
“The idea was to invalidate the black vote without directly challenging the 15th Amendment,” Dray said….

Many contemporary voter ID laws are following the same script, he said.
 
“It just goes on and on. They’ve never completely gone away. And now they’re back with a vengeance.”
 
Some opponents of the voter ID laws note that these measures disproportionately affect the elderly and the poor, regardless of race.
 
Supporters of voter ID laws say they’re not about race at all, but about common sense and preventing voter fraud.
 
“That is not a racial issue and it certainly isn’t a hardship issue,” said Deneen Borelli, author of “Blacklash,” which argues Obama is turning America into a welfare nation.
 
“When you try to purchase over-the-counter medication or buy liquor or travel, you present photo ID. This is a basic part of everyday transactions.”
 
Historians say there are other ways the post-Reconstruction script is being dusted off and that some of them appear to have nothing to do with race on the surface.
 
Consider the debate over “Obamacare,” the nation’s new health care law. The controversy would be familiar to many 19th-century Americans, said Jim Downs, author of “Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction.”
 
The notion that the federal government should help those who cannot help themselves wasn’t widely accepted before the Civil War. There were a few charities and municipal hospitals that took care of the sick, but most institutions ignored ordinary people who needed health care, said Downs, a Connecticut College history professor who studies the history of race and medicine in 19th-century America.
 
Reconstruction changed that. Post-Civil War America was marked by epidemics: yellow fever, smallpox and typhus. Freed slaves, who were often malnourished and had few clothes and little shelter, died by the “tens of thousands,” he said.
 
The federal government responded by creating the nation’s first-ever national health care system, directed at newly freed slaves. It was called the Medical Division of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The division built 40 hospitals and hired hundreds of doctors to treat more than a million former slaves from 1865 until it was shut down in 1870 after losing congressional funding, Downs said.
 
“It absolutely radicalized health care,” he said. “You can’t argue that government intervention in health is something new or a recent innovation. It originated in the mid-19th century in response to the suffering of freed slaves.”
 
Critics at the time said the new health care system was too radical. They said it would make blacks too reliant on government. The system was expanded to include other vulnerable Americans, such as the elderly, children and the disabled. Yet some still saw it as a black handout, Downs said.
 
“The whole notion of the modern day “welfare queen” can be traced to the post-Civil War period when people became very suspicious of the federal government providing relief to ex-slaves,” Downs said. “They feared this would create a dependent class of people.”…

Read the entire article here.

Social Washington: the “Colored” Aristocracy

Edwardian Promenade
2009-01-08

Evangeline Holland

From the end of Reconstruction until the Great War, Washington was the center of the black aristocracy. Nowhere else in the United States possessed such a concentration of “old families,” not merely from the District and nearby Maryland and Virginia, but from throughout the country, whose emphasis on family background, good breeding, occupation, respectability, and color bound them into an exclusive, elite group. Upper-class blacks from Philadelphia, Boston, New Orleans and other places gravitated to Washington D.C. in sizable numbers due to its educational and cultural opportunities, the availability of jobs on par with their education, and the presence of a black social group that shared their values, tastes and self-perceptions.
 
The “black 400” of Washington consisted of fewer than a hundred families out of a black population of 75,000 in 1900, and centered around the family of Blanche K. Bruce, an ex-slave and former Mississippi Senator who served in Congress from 1875 to 1881, who was also the first Black American to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate. Bruce was born in Virginia to a black woman and a white man, who may have been their master. Fortunately, his slave master took an interest in Bruce and he was permitted to share lessons with the master’s son. In later years, Bruce shared that his life as a slave in Virginia, and later in Mississippi and Missouri, was in fact no different from that of his white peers. In 1850, Bruce moved to Missouri after becoming a printer’s apprentice and from there he escaped to Kansas and declared his freedom. After the Union Army rejected his application to fight in the Civil War, Bruce taught school and attended Oberlin College in Ohio for two years and from there, he went to work as a steamboat porter on the Mississippi River. In 1864, he moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where he established a school for blacks…

Read the entire article here.

Winton Triangle history in Chicago!

Chowan Discovery Group
2012-11-06

Marvin Jones

In Chicago, the CDG got the opportunity to introduce our history to a national audience of academics and students at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference at DePaul University in Chicago.

Writer Lars Adams, of the Chowanoke Descendants website, presented the history of the Choanoac (Chowanoke) people from the earliest evidence in the 8^th century, to their encounter with the English in 1586 in Hertford County and to their decline and supposed demise in Gates County 1821. Adams finished his account by relating the re-assertion of Choanoac heritage: the growth of the Robbins family near Cofield, the rise of the Meherrin-Chowanoke people, based in the Hertford County, and the Choanoac marker in Harrellsville that was erected last year.

My latest presentation of the Winton Triangle has since added the recent findings and events of the past year and a new map of Winton Triangle schools. Several audience members told me that is was best presentation they had seen so far, and on that strength, several of them returned to attend the next day’s panel about Melungeons and other mixed-race people in Appalachia. S. J Arthur, President of the Melungeon Heritage Association, and Wayne Winkler, from East Tennessee State University and author of Walking Toward Sunset, documented the historical diversity of mixed-race people in Appalachia. This panel was moderated by the Chowan Discovery Group…

…I’d like to thank Laura Kina of DePaul University for paving the way for our two panels, Meherrin-Chowanoke artist Gerry Lang for moderating the Choanoac-Winton Triangle panel, and Mayola Cotterman, a longtime family friend, for taking me into her comfy, lovely and conveniently-located home and attending both panels. Our friends Steven Riley and Julia Cates of Mixed Race Studies attended, and as always, were supportive…

Read the entire article here.

Afro-Brazilians: Cultural Production in a Racial Democracy

University of Rochester Press (an imprint of Boydell & Brewer)
2009-04-01
443 pages
9 x 6
Hardback ISBN: 9781580462624
eBook ISBN: 9781580467100

Niyi Afolabi, Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Brazil, the most racially diverse Latin American country, is also the most contradictory: for centuries it has maintained fantasy as reality through the myth of racial democracy. Enshrined in that mythology is the masking of exclusionism that strategically displaces and marginalizes Afro-Brazilians from political power.

In this absorbing new study, Niyi Afolabi exposes the tensions between the official position on racial harmony and the reality of marginalization experienced by Afro-Brazilians by exploring Afro-Brazilian cultural production as a considered response to this exclusion. The author examines major contributions in music, history, literature, film, and popular culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to reveal how each performance by an Afro-Brazilian artist addresses issues of identity and racism through a variety of veils that entertain, ridicule, invoke, provoke, protest, and demand change at the same time.

Raising cogent questions such as the vital role of Afro-Brazilians in the making of Brazilian national identity; the representation of Brazilian women as hapless, exploited, and abandoned; the erosion of the influence of black movements due to fragmentation and internal disharmony; and the portrayal of Afro-Brazilians on the national screen as domestics, Afolabi provides insightful, nuanced analyses that tease out the complexities of the dilemma in their appropriate historical, political, and social contexts.

Contents

1. Negotiating Cultural Production in a Racial Democracy
2. Two Faces of Racial Democracy
3. Quilombhoje as a Cultural Collective
4. Beyond the Curtains: Unveiling Afro-Brazilian Women Writers
5. (Un)Broken Linkages
6. The Tropicalist Legacy of Gilberto Gil
7. Afro-Brazilian Carnival
8. Film and Fragmentation
9. Ancestrality and the Dynamics of Afro-Modernity
10. The Forerunners of Afro-Modernity
11. (Un)Transgressed Tradition
12. Ancestrality, Memory, and Citizenship
13. Quilombo without Frontiers
14. Ancestral Motherhood of Leci Brandao
15. The Future of Afro-Brazilian Cultural Production

Fathers of Conscience with Bernie D. Jones

Research at the National Archives & Beyond
Blogtalk Radio
2012-11-08, 21:00 EST (2012-11-09, 02:00Z)

Bernice Bennett, Co-Host

Natonne Elaine Kemp, Co-Host

Bernie D. Jones, Associate Professor of Law
Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts

Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South

Bernice Bennett and Natonne Elaine Kemp welcome author Bernie D. Jones for an engaging discussion about her book—Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South. Jones is Associate Professor, Suffolk University Law School.  She is a graduate of the New York University Law School and the University of Virginia Department of History.

Fathers of Conscience examines high-court decisions in the antebellum South that involved wills in which white male planters bequeathed property, freedom, or both to women of color and their mixed-race children. These men, whose wills were contested by their white relatives, had used trusts and estates law to give their slave partners and children official recognition and thus circumvent the law of slavery. The will contests that followed determined whether that elevated status would be approved or denied by courts of law.

For more information, click here.

Is Elizabeth Warren an Indian?

The Aporetic
2012-09-27

Mike O’Malley

The ques­tion posed above is extremely hard to answer. She doesn’t “look like an indian.” But what do Indians look like?

Just to recap: Elizabeth Warren is run­ning for the Sen­ate in Massachusetts. She’s been widely mocked for claiming herself as “native Ameri­can” at var­i­ous points in her career. Warren grew up in what’s now Oklahoma, a vast region which the US government had originally reserved for Indian tribes relocated from the East…

…The racial past of Americans is far more complicated and ambiguous than Americans generally realize. My favorite example is very personal. According to Virginia, the state in which I now reside, I am a black man. Had my family stayed in VA, my father could not have attended white schools and my parents would not have been allowed to marry. It’s absurd, and ridiculous: I’m as white as any white man you’d ever imagine, and no one in my family even knew of this history till about a decade ago. But there it is, a mat­ter of record.

The man responsible, Walter Ashby Plecker, was convinced there were no “real” indians in VA. Instead, he argued, there lived a mongrel race of intermmarried people, the “WIN” tribe (White, Indian, Negro). If you listed yourself as “Indian” on official documents, Plecker would rewrite them, and change “indian” to “colored,” because there were no “real” indians. Had Warren grown up in VA, she would have been unable to prove any connec­tion to Indian ancestors, because Plecker destroyed the records. And yet, the descendants of Indians still live in Virginia today…

Read the entire article here.

Anatole Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

Journal of American Ethnic History
Volume 32, Number 1 (Fall 2012)
pages 95-100
DOI: 10.5406/jamerethnhist.32.1.0095

Greg Carter, Associate Professor of History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

I DESIGNED MY FIRST COURSE, Mixed Race Identity in American Culture, an elective surveying the history of racial mixing in the United States, as a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Four sections of the class have convened at two universities since then. During the first sessions, I always introduce undergraduates to the analytic lenses of race (and ethnicity), class, and gender, emphasizing that their meanings shift across time and place. From there, Gary Nash’s essay, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America” presents interracial intimacy of many configurations, privileging no particular combination (i.e., black and white). In addition to equipping students with the tools they will need throughout the term, these first two weeks emphasize that the class is historical, going from first contact to the present moment.

However, the class is also interdisciplinary, drawing from popular culture, sociological texts, feature articles, and scientific tracts. Along with helping students contextualize ideas around racial mixing, sampling various discourses addresses complex themes from different perspectives. Anti-intermarriage laws in colonial Virginia introduce students to the gradual development of the one-drop rule in the seventeenth century. Through antebellum ethnological and literary writings, they see the beginnings of hybrid degeneracy notions that follow racially mixed people well past the nineteenth century. An introduction to blackface minstrelsy shows that, in addition to deploying a hateful set of stereotypes, this mainstay of American popular culture involves a sort of racial mixing on the bodies of the actors. Later they see much of the same in the yellowface minstrelsy that targeted Asians in the United States.

I also present students with positive notions regarding racial mixing in the United States, from the Pocahontas myth to Thomas Jefferson’s policy of civilization and assimilation to some of the radical abolitionists’ visions of a post-Civil War racial democracy. In the unit immediately before the two weeks we focus on racial passing, we analyze the birth of the melting…

Read or purchase the article here.

Race, Religion, and Law in Colonial India. Trials of an Interracial Family [Review]

Reviews in History: Covering books and digital resources across all fields of history
October 2012

Peter Robb, Research Professor of the History of India
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London

Race, Religion, and Law in Colonial India. Trials of an Interracial Family, Chandra Mallampalli, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, ISBN: 9781107012615; 286pp.

This book uses the story of one family and its legal battles to uncover relationships between religion, race, gender, identity, and personal law in south India in the first half of the 19th century. Matthew Abrahams was an Indian Roman Catholic of lowly background but increasing wealth. He married an Anglo-Portuguese woman, Charlotte Fox, and adopted what was regarded as a largely ‘East Indian’ (or Anglo-Indian) lifestyle. His money was made from the abkari (liquor) contract, trading in arms and money lending in Bellary and also Kurnool after the annexation of 1839. One of his sons, Charles, was sent to Cambridge University to study for the law. After Matthew’s death, intestate, in 1842, his younger brother, Francis, continued to manage and develop the business. Starting in 1854, suits were brought against Francis by Charlotte and her sons, for possession of Matthew’s estate. They progressed from the Bellary District Court, on appeal to the Sadr Adalat in Madras, and then to the Privy Council in London.

The main point at issue was whether or not Matthew and Francis had operated on a joint family basis, as partners, or as master and servant. It suited Francis’s case to claim that the Abrahams were a joint family, in line with supposed Hindu custom, but also with the alleged practice of many Indian converts to Christianity. It suited Charlotte to insist that Francis had been a mere employee with no rights in his brother’s estate, which therefore ought to devolve according to ‘Christian’ principles. The District Court agreed with Charlotte; the appellant court found for Francis; and the Privy Council cut through both arguments, arguing that personal law ought to follow not inherited traditions but the lifestyle. This final judgment (of 1863) favoured Charlotte on the point of inheritance. But it also supported Francis’s rights as an active partner in business, entitled to rewards at very much the level Francis had offered to accept before the litigation began.

The story is used to advance several themes. The first concerns the conditions of life in the towns and military cantonments of a southern dry zone during a period of transition, from around 1812 to the 1850s. The second covers questions of family life, custom, and identity, particularly among liminal peoples such as the Abrahams, comprising as they did ‘Hindu’ Christians and mixed-race Protestant ‘East Indians’. (A chapter on Charles in Cambridge provides an intriguing but inconclusive footnote to this story.) Finally there are the legal and policy changes in the run-up to the establishment of the Indian High Courts in 1862, and in particular the development of a personal law according to religion – and hence the re-invention or formation of ‘communities’ in British India.

There is much of interest under the first two themes, many details being revealed in the trial papers. Several chapters are devoted to the growing wealth and status of the Abrahams. Bellary, ceded to the Company by Hyderabad in 1800 under the subsidiary alliance, is painted as a frontier place, dominated by the Company’s army and a host of camp followers. A very good impression is conveyed of the intermixture of races and communities. Bellary was clearly changing and offered opportunities to the resourceful, such as Matthew Abrahams. The Rev. John Hands of the non-denominational LMS, who converted Matthew to Protestantism, and who was later known for his translation of the Bible into Kannada, arrived in Bellary in 1810, before the change in the charter that permitted missionaries in Company territories (1813). On his arrival, Hands reported, the settlement already had seven native schools with 300 children.In this milieu, Matthew and then Francis shrugged off any links to an ‘untouchable’ paraiyar ancestry and became dora (big man). Their patterns of marriage and association show, it is suggested, somewhat obscurely, ‘how lower orders of society within an economic dry zone were uniquely suited for various forms and degrees of mixture’ (p. 26). More obviously, the circumstances seem to have provided for upward mobility…

Read the entire review here.

Spirometry, Measurement, and Race in the Nineteenth Century

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Volume 60, Number 2, April 2005
pages 135-169

Lundy Braun, Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence and Professor of Medical Science and Africana Studies
Brown University

Race correction is a common practice in contemporary pulmonary medicine that involves mathematical adjustment of lung capacity measurements in populations designated as “black” using standards derived largely from populations designated as “white.” This article traces the history of the racialization and gendering of spirometry through an examination of the ideas and practices related to lung capacity measurements that circulated between Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century. Lung capacity was first conceptualized as a discrete entity of potential use in the diagnosis of pulmonary disease and monitoring of the vitality of the armed forces and other public servants in spirometric studies conducted in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. The spirometer was then imported to the United States and used to measure the capacity of the lungs in a large study of black and white soldiers in the Union Army sponsored by the U.S. Sanitary Commission at the end of the Civil War. Despite contrary findings and contestation by leading black intellectuals, the notion of mean differences between racial groups in the capacity of the lungs became deeply entrenched in the popular and scientific imagination in the nineteenth century, leaving unexamined both the racial categories deployed to organize data and the conditions of life that shape lung function.