Mixed Race Studies

Portuguese and Luso-Asian Legacies in Southeast Asia, 1511-2011, Volume 2: Culture and Identity in the Luso-Asian World: Tenacities & Plasticities

Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
2012
368 pages
Soft cover ISBN: 978-981-4345-50-7
See Volume 1 here.

Edited by:

Laura Jarnagin, Visiting Professorial Fellow
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore
also Associate Professor Emerita in the Division of Liberal Arts and International Studies at Colorado School of Mines (Golden, Colorado)

“In 1511, a Portuguese expedition under the command of Afonso de Albuquerque arrived on the shores of Malacca, taking control of the prosperous Malayan port-city after a swift military campaign. Portugal, a peripheral but then technologically advanced country in southwestern Europe since the latter fifteenth century, had been in the process of establishing solid outposts all along Asia’s litoral in order to participate in the most active and profitable maritime trading routes of the day. As it turned out, the Portuguese presence and influence in the Malayan Peninsula and elsewhere in continental and insular Asia expanded far beyond the sphere of commerce and extended over time well into the twenty-first century.

Five hundred years later, a conference held in Singapore brought together a large group of scholars from widely different national, academic and disciplinary contexts, to analyse and discuss the intricate consequences of Portuguese interactions in Asia over the longue dure. The result of these discussions is a stimulating set of case studies that, as a rule, combine original archival and/or field research with innovative historiographical perspectives. Luso-Asian communities, real and imagined, and Luso-Asian heritage, material and symbolic, are studied with depth and insight. The range of thematic, chronological and geographic areas covered in these proceedings is truly remarkable, showing not only the extraordinary relevance of revisiting Luso-Asian interactions in the longer term, but also the surprising dynamism within an area of studies which seemed on the verge of exhaustion. After all, archives from all over the world, from Rio de Janeiro to London, from Lisbon to Rome, and from Goa to Macao, might still hold some secrets on the subject of Luso-Asian relations, when duly explored by resourceful scholars.”

—Rui M. Loureiro
Centro de Historia de Alem-Mar, Lisbon

“This two-volume set pulls together several interdisciplinary studies historicizing Portuguese ‘legacies’ across Asia over a period of approximately five centuries (ca. 1511-2011). It is especially recommended to readers interested in the broader aspects of the early European presence in Asia, and specifically on questions of politics, colonial administration, commerce, societal interaction, integration, identity, hybridity, religion and language.”

—Associate Professor Peter Borschberg
Department of History, National University of Singapore

Table of Contents

• Preliminary pages with Introduction
• PART I: CRAFTING IDENTITY IN THE LUSO-ASIAN WORLD
  • 1. Catholic Communities and their Festivities under the Portuguese Padroado in Early Modern Southeast Asia, by Tara Alberts
  • 2. A “Snapshot” of a Portuguese Community in Southeast Asia: The Bandel of Siam, 1684-86, by Rita Bernardes de Carvalho
  • 3. The Colonial Command of Ceremonial Language: Etiquette and Custom-Imitation in Nineteenth-Century East Timor, by Ricardo Roque
  • 4. Remembering the Portuguese Presence in Timor and Its Contribution to the Making of Timor’s National and Cultural Identity, by Vicente Paulino
• PART II: CULTURAL COMPONENTS: LANGUAGE, ARCHITECTURE AND MUSIC, by Alan Baxter
  • 5. The Creole-Portuguese Language of Malacca: A Delicate Ecology
  • 6. Oral Traditions of the Luso-Asian Communities: Local, Regional and Continental, by Hugo C. Cardoso
  • 7. Verb Markings in Makista: Continuity/Discontinuity and Accommodation, by Mario Pinharanda-Nunes
  • 8. From European-Asian Conflict to Cultural Hertiage: Identification of Portuguese and Spanish Forts on Ternate and Tidore Islands, by Manuel Lobato
  • 9. The Influence of Portuguese Musical Culture in Southeast Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by Christian Storch
• PART III: ADVERSITY AND ACCOMMODATION, by Roderich Ptak
  • 10. Portugal and China: An Anatomy of Harmonious Coexistence (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)
  • 11. “Aocheng” or “Cidade do Nome de Deus”: The Nomenclature of Portuguese and Castilian Buildings of Old Macao from the “Reversed Gaze” of the Chinese, by Vincent Ho
  • 12. Enemies, Friends, and Relations: Portuguese Eurasians during Malacca’s Dutch Era and Beyond, by Dennis De Witt
• Appendix: Maps
• Bibliography
• Index

The Métis

Métis National Council
Ottowa, Ontario, Canada
2011

Prior to Canada’s crystallization as a nation in west central North America, the Métis people emerged out of the relations of Indian women and European men. While the initial offspring of these Indian and European unions were individuals who possessed mixed ancestry, the gradual establishment of distinct Métis communities, outside of Indian and European cultures and settlements, as well as, the subsequent intermarriages between Métis women and Métis men, resulted in the genesis of a new Aboriginal people—the Métis.

Distinct Métis communities emerged, as an outgrowth of the fur trade, along part of the freighting waterways and Great Lakes of Ontario, throughout the Northwest and as far north as the McKenzie river…

Read the entire report here.

Jazz, Race Collide With War In 1930s Europe

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2012-03-26

Jacki Lyden, Host

The novel Half Blood Blues explores an often overlooked slice of history: black jazz musicians in Germany on the eve of World War II. The book moves from 1992 to 1939, from Baltimore to Berlin to Paris. It’s told by an elderly black jazz musician and his friend who survived the war. Guest host Jacki Lyden speaks with author Esi Edugyan.

Transcript:

This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I’m Jacki Lyden. Michel Martin is away this week. Now we’re going to take a trip back in time with the help of a prize-winning novelist.

The novel, “Half Blood Blues,” considers a slice of history that often gets overlooked: black jazz musicians and their fate in Germany just before World War II. The novel moves back and forth from 1992 to 1939, from Baltimore to Berlin, Berlin to Paris and it’s told through the eyes of an elderly Baltimore black jazz musician, Sid Griffiths, and his lifelong friend, Chippewa Jones, all in invented period slang.

The novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize this year and won the Giller Prize in Canada and its author, Esi Edugyan, joins us now from member station KUOW in Seattle. Welcome.

ESI EDUGYAN: Thank you.

LYDEN: Esi, just to establish, you are a Canadian author.

EDUGYAN: I am.

LYDEN: And you live in…

EDUGYAN: I was born and raised in Calgary.

LYDEN: Born and raised in Calgary, of Ghanaian parents and you live in Victoria?

EDUGYAN: Yes.

LYDEN: Well, please tell us about this novel, which has had so much success. Tell us about the men at the center of your story. They’re jazz musicians from a group called the Hot Time Swingers. We meet them in Paris. They already have escaped from Berlin. They’ve met Duke Ellington and at the center of the group is this really intriguing character you’ve invented called Hieronymus Falk. And he is eventually picked up by the Gestapo in June of 1940. Tell us about these fellows and Hieronymus.

EDUGYAN: Well, essentially, the novel is told in two parts and the first part centers around the Hot Time Swingers who, you know, are a jazz band who’s had quite a bit of success playing in Berlin. And, you know, now the Third Reich has been ushered in and they’re trying to decide exactly how to proceed now that they’ve been prohibited from playing in public.

And so the band consists of two African-American players, Sid and Chip from Baltimore, as well as the German players, Paul, who’s a pianist who has a Jewish background, and Ernst. And then Hieronymus Falk, who is an Afro-German, the child of a French colonial soldier and a German mother, and he’s the trumpet prodigy.

LYDEN: Hieronymus Falk really intrigued me, Esi Edugyan. He is, you say in the novel, the German word was mischling. He is of mixed race and there really were such Afro-Germans prior to the Nazis taking power…

Read the entire transcript here. Listen to the interview here. Download the interview here.

Children of the Occupation

NewSouth Publishing
2012-07-01

Walter Hamilton, Journalist and Author

Towards the end of an eventful life, George Budworth, who served with the Australian Army in Japan after the war, wrote an account describing the first time he saw his son, Peter. It was not in a hospital maternity ward but on the streets of Kure one chilly night in 1954:

In broken English, the woman said, ‘Please, you look my baby, he sick’. She turned her back to Quietly [George’s fictional alter ego]. The baby was tied on her back in a kind of carryall. Quietly reached down and flipped back the lid. Looking up at him was the pinched, undernourished white face of a very young baby. Quietly could see at a glance that the child was half Japanese ­– certainly not a full blood. ‘He now six weeks; he Goshu (Australian) baby-san,’ was all she said through her sobs.

George gave the woman all the money he was carrying. She later sought him out to return the change; they started a relationship; and George formed a close bond with the child, Hideki, whom he renamed Peter and formally adopted.

In 1956, as the British Commonwealth Forces Korea prepared to pull out of Japan, George was among a handful of soldiers and civilians seeking permission to take adopted children back to Australia. In the decade since the first Australian troops arrived in Occupied Japan, such a thing had never been allowed (though war brides were admitted after 1952). In George’s fictionalised memoir, Peter’s mother, Fusako, surrenders custody of her child because she fears for his future in Japan: ‘They could never go to school, never marry, or hold any job but as labourers, in other words a life worse than death was the best these children could expect’…

…Walter Hamilton’s book Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story will be published by NewSouth in June.

Read the entire article here.

The Miscegenation of Richard Mentor Johnson as an Issue in the National Election Campaign of 1835-1836

Civil War History
Volume 39, Number 1, March 1993
pages 5-30
DOI: 10.1353/cwh.1993.0043

Thomas Brown

White American men of the antebellum era abhorred few, if any, things more than the danger of an “amalgamation” of their race with African Americans through interracial sexual relations. But their concerns about miscegenation between whites and blacks were usually not a major factor in national politics. However, in the election of 1836, the Democratic candidate for vice president was Representative Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky, who was revealed to be a “practical amalgamator.” The opposition to the Democrats—an assortment of Antimasons, Whigs, and disaffected Democrats supporting three presidential candidates in different parts of the country—exploited Johnson’s candidacy to make the menace of amalgamation into a national political issue. Its attacks compelled the Democrats, in turn, to deal with the issue of Johnson’s private life in a manner designed to minimize the damage to their party, and perhaps even make an asset of a liability. The positions taken in the controversy over Johnson’s miscegenation are of great value and interest, for the spokesmen of the opposing sides had to grapple with…

American Dilemma: The Negro problem and Modern Democracy

Harper and Brothers Publishing
1944
822 pages

Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987)

With the Assistance of

Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose

This landmark effort to understand African-American people in the New World provides deep insight into the contradictions of American democracy as well as a study of a people within a people. The touchstone of this classic is the jarring discrepancy between the American creed of respect for the inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and opportunity for all and the pervasive violations of the dignity of blacks.

CONTENTS

• Foreword, by Frederick P. Keppel
• Author’s Preface
• Introduction
  1. The Negro Problem as a Moral Issue
  2. Valuations and Beliefs
  3. A White Man’s Problem
  4. Not an Isolated Problem
  5. Some Further Notes on the Scope and Direction of This Study
  6. A Warning to the Reader
• PART I. THE APPROACH
  • Chapter 1. American Ideals and the American Conscience
    1. Unity of Ideals and Diversity of Culture
    2. American Nationalism
    3. Some Historical Reflections
    4. The Roots of the American Creed in the Philosophy of Enlightenment
    5. The Roots in Christianity
    6. The Roots in English Law
    7. American Conservatism
    8. The American Conception of Law and Order
    9. Natural Law and American Puritanism
    10. The Faltering Judicial Order
    11. Intellectual Defeatism
    12. “Lip-Service”
    13. Value Premises in This Study
  • Chapter 2. Encountering the Negro Problem
    1. On the Minds of the Whites
    2. To the Negroes Themselves
    3. Explaining the Problem Away
    4. Explorations in Escape
    5. The Etiquette of Discussion
    6. The Convenience of Ignorance
    7. Negro and White Voices
    8. The North and the South
  • Chapter 3. Facets of the Negro Problem
    1. American Minority Problems
    2. The Anti-Amalgamation Doctrine
    3. The White Man’s Theory of Color Caste
    4. The “Rank Order of Discriminations”
    5. Relationships between Lower Class Groups
    6. The Manifoldness and the Unity of the Negro Problem
    7. The Theory of the Vicious Circle
    8. A Theory of Democracy
• PART II. RACE
  • Chapter 4. Racial Beliefs
    1. Biology and Moral Equalitarianism
    2. The Ideological Clash in America
    3. The Ideological Compromise
    4. Reflections in Science
    5. The Position of the Negro Writers
    6. The Racial Beliefs of the Unsophisticated
    7. Beliefs with a Purpose
    8. Specific Rationalization Needs
    9. Rectifying Beliefs
    10. The Study of Beliefs
  • Chapter 5. Race and Ancestry
    1. The American Definition of “Negro”
    2. African Ancestry
    3. Changes in Physical Appearance
    4. Early Miscegenation
    5. Ante-Bellum Miscegenation
    6. Miscegenation in Recent Times
    7. “Passing”
    8. Social and Biological Selection
    9. Present and Future Genetic Composition Trends
  • Chapter 6. Racial Characteristics
    1. Physical Traits
    2. Biological Susceptibility to Disease
    3. Psychic Traits
    4. Frontiers of Constructive Research
• PART III. POPULATION AND MIGRATION
  • Chapter 7. Population
    1. The Growth of the Negro Population
    2. Births and Deaths
    3. Summary
    4. Ends and Means of Population Policy
    5. Controlling the Death Rate
    6. The Case for Controlling the Negro Birth Rate
    7. Birth Control Facilities Tor Negroes
  • Chapter 8. Migration
    1. Overview
    2. A Closer View
    3. The Great Migration to the Urban North
    4. Continued Northward Migration
    5. The Future of Negro Migration
• PART IV. ECONOMICS
  • Chapter 9. Economic Inequality
    1. Negro Poverty
    2. Our Main Hypothesis: The Vicious Circle
    3. The Value Premises
    4. The Conflict of Valuations
  • Chapter 10. The Tradition of Slavery
    1. Economic Exploitation
    2. Slavery and Caste
    3. The Land Problem
    4. The Tenancy Problem
  • Chapter 11. The Southern Plantation Economy and the Negro Farmer
    1. Southern Agriculture as a Problem
    2. Overpopulation and Soil Erosion
    3. Tenancy, Credit and Cotton
    4. The Boll Weevil
    5. Main Agricultural Classes
    6. The Negro Landowner
    7. Historical Reasons for the Relative Lack of Negro Farm Owners
    8. Tenants and Wage Laborers
    9. The Plantation Tenant
  • Chapter 12. New Blows to Southern Agriculture During the Thirties: Trends and Policies
    1. Agricultural Trends during the ‘Thirties
    2. The Disappearing Sharecropper
    3. The Role of the A.A.A. in Regard to Cotton
    4. A.A.A. and the Negro
    5. The Local Administration of the A.A.A.
    6. Mechanization
    7. Labor Organizations
    8. The Dilemma of Agricultural Policy
    9. Economic Evaluation of the A.A.A.
    10. Social Evaluation of the A.A.A.
    11. Constructive Measures
    12. Farm Security Programs
  • Chapter 13. Seeking Jobs Outside Agriculture
    1. Perspective on the Urbanization of the Negro People
    2. In the South
    3. A Closer View
    4. Southern Trends during the Thirties
    5. In the North
    6. A Closer View on Northern Trends
    7. The Employment Hazards of Unskilled Work
    8. The Size of the Negro Labor Force and Negro Employment
    9. Negro and White Unemployment
  • Chapter 14. The Negro in Business, the Professions, Public Service and Other White Collar Occupations
    1. Overview
    2. The Negro in Business
    3. Negro Finance
    4. The Negro Teacher
    5. The Negro Minister
    6. The Negro in Medical Professions
    7. Other Negro Professionals
    8. Negro Officials and White Collar Workers in Public Service
    9. Negro Professionals on the Stage, Screen and Orchestra
    10. Note on Shady Occupations
  • Chapter 15. The Negro in the Public Economy
    1. The Public Budget
    2. Discrimination in Public Service
    3. Education
    4. Public Health
    5. Recreational Facilities
    6. Public Housing Policies
    7. Social Security and Public Assistance
    8. Specialized Social Welfare Programs during the Period After
    9. The Social Security Program
    10. Assistance to Special Groups
    11. Work Relief
    12. Assistance to Youth
    13. General Relief and Assistance in Kind
  • Chapter 16. Income, Consumption and Housing
    1. Family Income
    2. Income and Family Size
    3. The Family Budget
    4. Budget Items
    5. Food Consumption
    6. Housing Conditions
  • Chapter 17. The Mechanics of Economic Discrimination as a Practical Problem
    1. The Practical Problem
    2. The Ignorance and Lack of Concern of Northern Whites
    3. Migration Policy
    4. The Regular Industrial Labor Market in the North
    5. The Problem of Vocational Training
    6. The Self-Perpetuating Color Bar
    7. A Position or “Indifferent Equilibrium”
    8. In the South
  • Chapter 18. Pre-War Labor Market Controls and Their Consequences for the Negro
    1. The Wages and Hours Law and the Dilemma of the Marginal Worker
    2. Other Economic Policies
    3. Labor Unions and the Negro
    4. A Weak Movement Getting Strong Powers
  • Chapter 19. The War Boom—and Thereafter
    1. The Negro Wage Earner and the War Boom
    2. A Closer View
    3. Government Policy in Regard to the Negro in War Production
    4. The Negro in the Armed Forces
    5. …And Afterwards?
• PART V. POLITICS
  • Chapter 20. Underlying Factors
    1. The Negro in American Politics and as a Political Issue
    2. The Wave of Democracy and the Need for Bureaucracy
    3. The North and the South
    4. The Southern Defense Ideology
    5. The Reconstruction Amendments
    6. Memories of Reconstruction
    7. The Tradition of Illegality
  • Chapter 21. Southern Conservatism and Liberalism
    1. The “Solid South”
    2. Southern Conservatism
    3. Is the South Fascist?
    4. The Changing South
    5. Southern Liberalism
  • Chapter 22. Political Practices Today
    1. The Southern Political Scene
    2. Southern Techniques for Disfranchising the Negroes
    3. The Negro Vote m the South
    4. The Negro in Northern Politics
    5. What the Negro Gets Out of Politics
  • Chapter 23. Trends and Possibilities
    1. The Negro’s Political Bargaining Power
    2. The Negro’s Party Allegiance
    3. Negro Suffrage in the South as an Issue
    4. An Unstable Situation
    5. The Stake of the North
    6. Practical Conclusions
• PART VI. JUSTICE
  • Chapter 24. Inequality of Justice
    1. Democracy and Justice
    2. Relative Equality in the North
    3. The Southern Heritage
  • Chapter 25. The Police and Other Public Contacts
    1. Local Petty Officials
    2. The Southern Policeman
    3. The Policeman in the Negro Neighborhood
    4. Trends and Outlook
    5. Another Type of Public Contact
  • Chapter 26. Courts, Sentences and Prisons
    1. The Southern Courts
    2. Discrimination in Court
    3. Sentences and Prisons
    4. Trends and Outlook
  • Chapter 27. Violence and Intimidation
    1. The Pattern of Violence
    2. Lynching
    3. The Psychopathology of Lynching
    4. Trends and Outlook
    5. Riots
• PART VII. SOCIAL INEQUALITY
  • Chapter 28. The Basis of Social Inequality
    1. The Value Premise
    2. a. The One-Sidedness of the System of Segregation
    3. The Beginning in Slavery
    4. The Jim Crow Laws
    5. Beliefs Supporting Social Inequality
    6. The Popular Theory of “No Social Equality”
    7. Critical Evaluation of the “No Social Equality” Theory
    8. Attitudes among Different Classes of Whites in the South
    9. Social Segregation and Discrimination in the North
  • Chapter 29. Patterns of Social Segregation and Discrimination
    1. Facts and Beliefs Regarding Segregation and Discrimination
    2. Segregation and Discrimination in interpersonal Relations
    3. Housing Segregation
    4. Sanctions for Residential Segregation
    5. The General Character of Institutional Segregation
    6. Segregation in Specific Types of Institutions
  • Chapter 30. Effects of Social Inequality
    1. The Incidence of Social Inequality
    2. Increasing Isolation
    3. Interracial Contacts
    4. The Factor of Ignorance
    5. Present Dynamics
• PART VIII. SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
  • Chapter 31. Caste and Class
    1. The Concepts “Caste” and “Class”
    2. The “Meaning” of the Concepts “Caste” and “Class”
    3. The Caste Struggle
    4. Crossing the Caste Line
  • Chapter 32. The Negro Class Structure
    1. The Negro Class Order in the American Caste System
    2. Caste Determines Class
    3. Color and Class
    4. The Classes in the Negro Community
• PART IX. LEADERSHIP AND CONCERTED ACTION
  • Chapter 33. The American Pattern of Individual Leadership and Mass Passivity
    1. “Intelligent Leadership”
    2. “Community Leaders”
    3. Mass Passivity
    4. The Patterns Exemplified in Politics and throughout the American Social Structure
  • Chapter 34. Accommodating Leadership
    1. Leadership and Caste
    2. The Interests of Whites and Negroes with Respect to Negro leadership
    3. In the North and on the National Scene
    4. The “Glass Plate”
    5. Accommodating Leadership and Class
    6. Several Qualifications
    7. Accommodating Leaders in the North
    8. The Glamour Personalities
  • Chapter 35. The Negro Protest
    1. The Slave Revolts
    2. The Negro Abolitionists and Reconstruction Politicians
    3. The Tuskegee Compromise
    4. The Spirit of Niagara and Harper’s Ferry
    5. The Protest Is Still Rising
    6. The Shock of the First World War and the Post-War Crisis
    7. The Garvey Movement
    8. Post-War Radicalism among Negro Intellectuals
    9. Negro History and Culture
    10. The Great Depression and the Second World War
  • Chapter 36. The Protest Motive and Negro Personality
    1. A Mental Reservation
    2. The Struggle Against Defeatism
    3. The Struggle for Balance
    4. Negro Sensitiveness
    5. Negro Aggression
    6. Upper Class Reactions
    7. The “Function” of Racial Solidarity
  • Chapter 37. Compromise Leadership
    1. The Daily Compromise
    2. The Vulnerability of the Negro Leader
    3. Impersonal Motives
    4. The Protest Motive
    5. The Double Role
    6. Negro Leadership Techniques
    7. Moral Consequences
    8. Leadership Rivalry
    9. Qualifications
    10. In Southern Cities
    11. In the North
    12. On the National Scene
  • Chapter 38. Negro Popular Theories
    1. Instability
    2. Negro Provincialism
    3. The Thinking on the Negro Problem
    4. Courting the “Best People Among the Whites”
    5. The Doctrine of Labor Solidarity
    6. Some Critical Observations
    7. The Pragmatic “Truth” of the Labor Solidarity Doctrine
    8. “The Advantages of the Disadvantages”
    9. Condoning Segregation
    10. Boosting Negro Business
    11. Criticism of Negro Business Chauvinism
    12. “Back to Africa”
    13. Miscellaneous Ideologies
  • Chapter 39. Negro Improvement and Protest Organizations
    1. A General American Pattern
    2. Nationalist Movements
    3. Business and Professional Organizations
    4. The National Negro Congress Movement
    5. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
    6. The N.A.A.C.P. Branches
    7. The N.A.A.C.P. National Office
    8. The Strategy of the N.A.A.C.P.
    9. Critique of the N.A.A.C.P.
    10. The Urban League
    11. The Commission on Interracial Cooperation
    12. The Negro Organizations during the War
    13. Negro Strategy
  • Chapter 40. The Negro Church
    1. Non-Political Agencies for Negro Concerted Action
    2. Some Historical Notes
    3. The Negro Church and the General American Pattern of
    4. Religious Activity
    5. A Segregated Church
    6. Its Weakness
    7. Trends and Outlook
  • Chapter 41. The Negro School
    1. Negro Education as Concerted Action
    2. Education in American Thought and Life
    3. The Development of Negro Education in the South
    4. The Whites’ Attitudes toward Negro Education
    5. “Industrial” versus “Classical” Education of Negroes
    6. Negro Attitudes
    7. Trends and Problems
  • Chapter 42. The Negro Press
    1. An Organ for the Negro Protest
    2. The Growth of the Negro Press
    3. Characteristics of the Negro Press
    4. The Controls of the Negro Press
    5. Outlook
• PART X. THE NEGRO COMMUNITY
  • Chapter 43. Institutions
    1. The Negro Community as a Pathological Form of an American Community
    2. The Negro Family
    3. The Negro Church in the Negro Community
    4. The Negro School and Negro Education
    5. Voluntary Associations
  • Chapter 44. Non-Institutional Aspects of the Negro Community
    1. “Peculiarities” of Negro Culture and Personality
    2. Crime
    3. Mental Disorders and Suicide
    4. Recreation
    5. Negro Achievements
• PART XI. AN AMERICAN DILEMMA
  • Chapter 45. America Again at the Crossroads in the Negro Problem
    1. The Negro Problem and the War
    2. Social Trends
    3. The Decay of the Caste Theory
    4. Negroes in the War Crisis
    5. The War and the Whites
    6. The North Moves Toward Equality
    7. Tension in the South
    8. International Aspects
    9. Making the Peace
    10. America’s Opportunity
• Appendix 1. A Methodological Note on Valuations and Beliefs
  1. The Mechanism of Rationalization
  2. Theoretical Critique of the Concept “Mores”
  3. Valuation Dynamics
• Appendix 2. A Methodological Note on Facts and Valuations in Social Science
  1. Biases in the Research on the American Negro Problem
  2. Methods of Mitigating Biases in Social Science
  3. The History and Logic of the Hidden Valuations in Social Science
  4. The Points of View Adopted in This Book
• Appendix 3. A Methodological Note on the Principle of Accumulation
• Appendix 4. Note on the Meaning of Regional Terms as Used in This Book
• Appendix 5. A Parallel to the Negro Problem
• Appendix 6. Pre-War Conditions of the Negro Wage Earner in Selected Industries and Occupations
  1. General Characteristics of Negro Jobs
  2. Domestic Service
  3. Other Service Occupations
  4. Turpentine Farms
  5. Lumber
  6. The Fertilizer Industry
  7. Longshore Work.
  8. Building Workers
  9. Railroad Workers
  10. Tobacco Workers
  11. Textile Workers
  12. Coal Miners
  13. Iron and Steel Workers
  14. Automobile Workers
  15. The Slaughtering and Meat Packing Industry
• Appendix 7. Distribution of Negro Residences in Selected Cities
• Appendix 8. Research on Caste and Class in a Negro Community
• Appendix 9. Research on Negro Leadership
• Appendix 10. Quantitative Studies of Race Attitudes
  1. Existing Studies of Race Attitudes
  2. The Empirical Study of Valuations and Beliefs
  3. “Personal” and “Political” Opinions
  4. The Practical Study of Race Prejudice
• List of Books, Pamphlets, Periodicals, and Other Material Referred to in This Book
• Numbered Footnotes
• Index

From pages 102-106

If white Americans can believe that Negro Americans belong to a lower biological species than they themselves, this provides a motivation for their doctrine that the white race should be kept pure and that amalgamation should, by all means, be prevented. The theory of the inborn inferiority of the Negro people is, accordingly, used as an argument for the antiamalgamation doctrine. This doctrine, in its turn, has, as we have seen, a central position in the American system of color caste. The belief in biological inferiority is thus another basic support, in addition to the no-social-equality, anti-amalgamation doctrine, of the system of segregation and discrimination. Whereas the anti-amalgamation doctrine has its main importance in the “social” field, the belief in the Negro’s biological inferiority is basic to discrimination in all fields. White Americans have an interest in deprecating the Negro race in so far as they identify themselves with the prevailing system of color caste. They have such an interest, though in a lower degree, even if their only attachment to the caste order is that they do not stand up energetically as individuals and citizens to eradicate it…

…In adhering to this biological rationalization, specified in the six points stated above, the white man meets certain difficulties. A factual difficulty to begin with is that individual Negroes and even larger groups of Negroes often, in spite of the handicaps they encounter, show themselves to be better than they ought to be according to the popular theory. A whole defense system serves to minimize this disturbance of the racial dogma, which insists that all Negroes are inferior. From one point of view, segregation of the Negro people fulfills a function in this defense system. It is, of course, not consciously devised for this purpose, and it serves other purposes as well, but this does not make its defense function less important. Segregation isolates in particular the middle and upper class Negroes,” and thus permits the ordinary white man in America to avoid meeting an educated Negro. The systematic tendency to leave the Negro out when discussing public affairs and to avoid mentioning anything about Negroes in the press except their crimes also serves this purpose. The aggressive and derogatory altitude toward “uppity” Negroes and, in particular, the tendency to relegate all educated Negroes to this group also belongs to the defense system.

Since he has a psychological need to believe the popular theory of Negro racial inferiority, it is understandable why the ordinary white man is disincline to hear about good qualities or achievements of Negroes. ‘The merits of Negro soldiers should not be too warmly praised, especially in the presence of Americans,” reads one of the advices which the French Military Mission, stationed with the American Expeditionary Army during the First World War, circulated but later withdrew. It should be added that white people who work to help the Negro people and to improve race relations see the strategic importance of this factor and direct their work toward spreading information about Negroes of quality among the whites.

Another difficulty has always been the mulatto. White Americans want to keep biological distance from the out-race and will, therefore, be tempted to discount the proportion of mulattoes and believe that a greater part of the Negro people is pure bred than is warranted by the facts. A sort of collective guilt on the part of white people for the large-scale miscegenation, which has so apparently changed the racial character of the Negro people enforces this interest.

The literature on the Negro problem strengthens this hypothesis. Only some exceptional authors, usually Negroes, gave more adequate estimates of the proportion of mixed breeds, and it was left to Hrdlicka and Herskovits in the late ‘twenties to set this whole problem on a more scientific basis. The under-enumeration of mulattoes by the census takers decade after decade and also, until recently, the rather uncritical utilization of this material, indicate a tendency toward bias. The observations of the present author have, practically without exception, indicated that the nonexpert white population shows a systematic tendency grossly to underestimate the number of mulattoes in the Negro population.

It may, of course, be said against this assumption of a hidden purpose that one should not assume the ability of uninformed and untrained persons to distinguish a mulatto from a pure bred Negro. But the facts of historical and actual miscegenation are fairly well known, at least in the South, and are discussed with interest everywhere. And if a wrong estimate systematical goes in the same direction, there is reason to ask for a cause. It has also been observed that the ordinary white American gets disturbed when encountering the new scientific estimates that the great majority of American Negroes are not of pure African descent. Similarly, the ordinary white American is disturbed when he hears that Negroes sometimes pass for white. He wants, and he must want, to keep biological distance.

But the mulatto is a disturbance to the popular race theory not only because of his numbers. The question is also raised: Is the mulatto a deteriorated or an improved Negro? In fact, there seems never to have been popular agreement among white Americans whether the mulatto is worse than the pure bred Negro, or whether he is better because of his partially white ancestry. The former belief should per se strengthen the anti-amalgamation doctrine, in fact, make adherence to it to the interest of the entire society. The second belief can serve a purpose of explaining away Negro accomplishments which are, with few exceptions, made by mulattoes and which then could be ascribed to the white blood. Actually, I have often heard the same man use both arguments…

Read the entire book here.

Review of Mazón, Patricia M.; Steingröver, Reinhild, eds., Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History, 1890-2000

H-German, H-Net Reviews
June 2009

Lynn Kutch, Assistant Professor of German
Kutztown University of Pennsylvania

Patricia M. Mazón, Reinhild Steingröver, eds. Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History, 1890-2000. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005. xvii + 247 pp. cloth ISBN 978-1-58046-183-2.

A Defiant “We” Announces Its Birth: Understanding the Complexity of Black German Identity

Given the long and varied history of cultural interactions between Africans and Germans–from the 1400s, when Africans populated Europe as slaves and court servants, to the pinnacle of German colonization in Africa in the late 1800s, to the post-World War I Rhineland occupation–the dominant German culture, perhaps understandably, has always viewed Africans as foreigners. This multifaceted collection interrogates the difficulty of categorizing the experience of Afro-Germans, a new organizing term in its own right. In each essay, the authors seek to expand the relatively limited current base of knowledge about the black German experience and to rectify the oftentimes ill-informed German and international reaction to that tradition. As a whole, the collected essays represent, as Sander Gilman puts it, a “major confrontation between the German image of Blackness and the reality of the Black” (p. 83). Gilman’s “confrontation” materializes in each essay’s distinctly articulated challenges to the common notion that racism toward blacks never existed in Germany. The book’s authors and editors not only dispute that comfortable assumption, they also sharpen the markedly German angle of the examination by claiming that attention paid to Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the National Socialist past, has consistently overshadowed the German colonial legacy and historical attitude about Africans. A vital reading given its multicultural approach to German studies, the book demonstrates that, despite the widespread cultural eclipse of this theme, historians, writers, and filmmakers have successfully exploited their talent to display a new self-confidence while educating others on overt acts of prejudice and racism in Germany.

Building upon previous research in the field and combining disciplines and methodologies, the editors have organized the volume into two thematic sections that will appeal to Afro-German readers as well as scholars with varying degrees of interest in and knowledge about the subject. The first subdivision, “Afro-Germans in Historical Perspective,” traces African intersections with German history from the colonial period through 1945. The second portion, “Cultural Representations and Self-Representations of Afro-Germans,” offers specific examples from various disciplines of the ever-changing perceived image over time and how the community of Afro-Germans seeks to define itself as a reaction to those general perceptions…

Read the entire review here.

The Durability of Race

RaceFiles: On Race and Racism in our Politics and Daily Lives
2012-10-05

Scot Nakagawa, Senior Partner
ChangeLab

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the death of racism. Many believe that as the global demographics change and Generation Y rises, racism will fade in significance. Some even suggest that what we are witnessing in the Obama backlash is just death throes.
 
That argument ignores history.
 
Here’s what I mean.
 
Neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the abolitionist movement were enough to end slavery. Slavery was defeated in a Civil War that was fought not over race equality nor just for the cuase of freeing slaves, but over federal authority. The cynicism at the root of the “war against slavery” is revealed by the fact that when legal race slavery was finally defeated in 1865, the culture of  white supremacy survived, both in the North and the South.
 
Southern state governments, determined to maintain white supremacy, pivoted after the war and took advantage of an exception in the 13th Amendment that allowed for the indentured servitude of criminals. They created a set of legal codes that criminalized Black people. Crimes included changing employers without permission,vagrancy, and selling cotton after sunset.
 
Once imprisoned, African Americans were subjected to neo-slavery in the form of labor camps and chain gangs. But the impact of neo-slavery was not just on those enslaved. The system terrorized Blacks throughout the South keeping them subjugated to white employers who in many cases were their former masters…

Read the entire article here.

Travels of self-discovery: African heritage in Mexico

American Observer: American University’s Graduate Journalism Magazine
American University, Washington, D.C.
2009-11-12

Carmen Castro

Cesareo Moreno clearly remembers his family visit to Guanajuato, Mexico, in 2004.

He was on a mission to learn more about his Mexican heritage. Moreno told his uncle he wanted to learn more about the African culture.

His uncle thought Moreno was talking about a project [what project? Is it African-related?] on the Mexican coastal state of Veracruz, Moreno says. When he told his uncle his research was about [African in?] their home state of Guanajuato, Moreno says his gave a look of disbelief.

“He tells me in a dead serious way … just no there isn’t. It’s like it doesn’t exist. Not in our backyard. Not in our family. Not in our hometown,” Moreno said.

It’s reactions like this that have motivated Moreno to put so much time into learning about the history of Afro-Mexicans, descendants of African slaves.  They were brought to Mexico during the Spanish colonization era in the early 16th century. It is a study that emerged in the 1940s with the groundbreaking research of anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán…

Read the entire article here.

Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story

NewSouth Books (American Edition coming soon from Rutgers University Press)
July 2012
352 pages
234 x 153mm
Paperback ISBN: 9781742233314

Walter Hamilton, Journalist and Author

This is a beautifully written, deeply moving and well-researched account of the lives of mixed-race children of occupied Japan. The author artfully blends oral histories with an historical and political analysis of international race relations and immigration policy in North America and Australia, to highlight the little-known story of the thousands of children that resulted from the unions of Japanese women and Allied servicemen posted to Japan following WWII. It is a powerful narrative of loss, longing and reconnection, written by the ABC’s long-time Tokyo correspondent, Walter Hamilton.

Visit the website here.