Mixed Race Studies

Longtown Descendants Breathe New Life Into Historic Mixed-Race Community

WOSU Public Media
WOSU Radio
Columbus, Ohio
2017-05-31

Jerry Kenney

Kaiser family reunion at Longtown. Kaiser Family

In southwest Ohio, about a mile from the Indiana state line, a long-forgotten town with a special place in African American history is struggling to be reborn.

Longtown was established nearly 200 years ago in what is now Greenville. The settlement grew into a thriving mixed-race community and a major stop on the Underground Railroad.

Now, descendants of those pioneering settlers are working to bring Longtown back to life for others to experience.

Longtown’s Founding

In 1818, James Clemens, a freed slave from Rockingham County, Virginia, settled in Darke County, Ohio, with his wife Sophia Sellers and their five children, and began to farm.

“They were the sons and daughters of slave masters,” says historian and Longtown descendant Roane Smothers.

Smothers says some slave owners not only acknowledged the children they bore with slaves but also provided them with financial support. Such was the case with James and Sophia, who purchased land in Ohio with the help of Sellers’ father, he says…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the story (00:05:45) here.

How Interracial Love Is Saving America

The New York Times
2017-06-03

Sheryll Cashin, Professor of Law
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Mildred and Richard Loving in 1965. Credit Estate of Grey Villet

As a descendant of slaves and slaveholders, I embody uncomfortable incongruities — just as America does. In “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Thomas Jefferson wrote with anguish about the risks of amalgamation, or interracial sex, to a new nation. Whites were “stained” when they mixed with blacks, whom he speculated were inferior in mind and form.

There was a Strom Thurmond-esque artificiality to this cry for racial purity. Southern patriarchs made an art out of objecting to what was happening under their own noses — or pelvises. As history would prove, human urges, whether violent or amorous, inevitably muddy lines, and master-slave rape and coupling produced many mixed people.

Today, the “ardent integrators” who pursue interracial relationships are motivated by love and are our greatest hope for racial understanding. Although America is in a state of toxic polarity, I am optimistic. Through intimacy across racial lines, a growing class of whites has come to value and empathize with African-Americans and other minorities. They are not dismantling white supremacy so much as chipping away at it…

Read the entire article here.

ROR CHASING COLOR: EP 07 | Blacks Passing as White

Revolution of Race
Chasing Color
2017-05-02

Dr. Blair Proctor, Expert Host and Ph.D. Doctorate in Sociology

Pamela Lawrence, Moderator, Founder & Creative Director

The 7th Episode explores the hidden history with Blacks ‘passing’ as White. From ‘Free People of Color’ to ‘Creoles’ to Lawrence Dennis the so-called founder of American Facism that passed as a white man when all along he was a Black Man.

Dr Proctor breaks-down the entire landscape about Passing by exploring a host of issues like white-tonics and trans-racial and how the system of white supremacy among whites and respectability politics among blacks continues advance the narrative to poison the hearts & minds of human society.

This is longer episode than but worth every minute of discussion with Dr. Proctor which also includes the names of ‘blacks’ passing as white in present day.

Are you unapologetically Black?

ARTICLES OF INTEREST

• Lawrence Dennis
• Science States Hidden Identity
• Who Is Black
• Chosen Exile
• Rachel Dolezal South Africa

Listen to the episode (01:49:27) here.

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, by Allyson Hobbs

The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research
Volume 47, 2017 – Issue 2: After Madiba: Black Studies in South Africa
Pages 73-76
DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2017.1295355

Fabian Eggers, MA candidate of North American Studies
John F. Kennedy Institute at Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany

Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: History of Racial Passing in American Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014)

Read or purchase the review here.

Children of black American GIs, Going on holiday with mum, Salome at the National Theatre

Woman’s Hour
BBC Radio 4
2017-05-19

Jenni Murray, Presenter
Beverley Purcell, Producer

Carole Travers from Poole in Dorset is one of a number of mixed heritage children born to African-American fathers who were stationed in the UK during World War II. With their husbands away fighting the war, some women had relationships and children with them. Fiona Clampin talks to Carole who’s been trying to trace her father the whole of her adult life, and to John who is still deeply affected by his early experiences.

With the Election looming, we’re in Sunderland talking to some women about the issue that most concern them. The South African playwright and theatre director Yael Farber discusses her new play Salome, at The National Theatre, a radical revision of the biblical tale. And the joys and pitfalls of going on holiday with your mum no matter what age you are.

Listen to episode here.

The struggles of war babies fathered by black GIs

BBC News Magazine
2017-05-21

Getty Images

About 100,000 black GIs were stationed in the UK during the war. Inevitably there were love affairs, but US laws usually prevented black servicemen from marrying. So what happened to the children they fathered? Fiona Clampin met two such children in Dorset, now in their seventies, who have not given up hope of tracing their fathers.

A bottle of champagne has sat on a shelf in Carole Travers’s wardrobe for the past 20 years. Wedged between boxes and covered with clothes, it’ll be opened only when Carole finds her father. “There’s an outside chance he might still be alive,” she reflects. “I’ve got so many bits of information, but to know the real truth would mean the world to me – to know that I did belong to somebody.”

The possibility of Carole tracking down her father becomes more and more remote by the day. Born towards the end of World War Two, Carole, now 72, was the result of a relationship between her white mother and a married African-American or mixed-race soldier stationed in Poole, in Dorset.

Whereas some “brown babies” (as the children of black GIs were known in the press) were put up for adoption, Carole’s mother, Eleanor Reid, decided to keep her child. The only problem was, she was already married, with a daughter, to a Scot with pale skin and red hair.

“I had black hair and dark skin,” says Carole. “Something obviously wasn’t right.”…

Read the entire article here.

Racism, Stigma and Self-Discovery: the ‘Brown Babies’ of World War II

Lucy Bland, Professor of Social and Cultural History
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge

Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street
Room B34
London WC1E 7HX
United Kingdom
Wednesday, 2017-06-07, 18:00–21:00 BST (Local Time)

Of the 3 million US serviceman who passed through Britain during World War 11, up to 10% were African-American. Many of these black GIs had relationships with local women, resulting in the birth of an estimated 2,000 mixed-race babies. These children were subjected both to the stigma of illegitimacy (for the US army forbade marriage between black GIs and white British women) and racism in what was then a very white country.

Whether kept by mother or grandmothers, or sent to children’s homes, the ‘brown babies’, as the African-American press termed them, generally grew up knowing next to nothing about their fathers, thereby experiencing an acute sense of lack. Now in their early 70s, many have subsequently searched for their fathers and their American relatives. Drawing on oral history (interviews with 38 ‘brown babies’) the talk will explore their journey from frequently difficult…

For more information, click here.

American Mestizos, The Philippines, and the Malleability of Race: 1898-1961

University of Missouri Press
2017-04-28
208 pages
6 x 0.9 x 9 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0826221223

Nicholas Trajano Molnar, Assistant Professor of History
Community College of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
also Digital Humanities Officer, Immigration and Ethnic History Society

The American mestizos, a group that emerged in the Philippines after it was colonized by the United States, became a serious social concern for expatriate Americans and Filipino nationalists far disproportionate to their actual size, confounding observers who debated where they fit into the racial schema of the island nation.

Across the Pacific, these same mestizos were racialized in a way that characterized them as a asset to the United States, opening up the possibility of their assimilation to American society during a period characterized by immigration restriction and fears of miscegenation. Drawing upon Philippine and American archives, Nicholas Trajano Molnar documents the imposed and self-ascribed racializations of the American mestizos, demonstrating that the boundaries of their racial identity shifted across time and space with no single identity coalescing.

Those Who Belong: Identity, Family, Blood, and Citizenship among the White Earth Anishinaabeg

University of Manitoba Press
October 2015
214 pages
6 × 9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-88755-796-5

Jill Doerfler (White Earth Anishinaabe), Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies
University of Minnesota, Duluth

Despite the central role blood quantum played in political formations of American Indian identity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there are few studies that explore how tribal nations have contended with this transformation of tribal citizenship. “Those Who Belong” explores how White Earth Anishinaabeg understood identity and blood quantum in the early twentieth century it was employed and manipulated by the U.S. government, how it came to be the sole requirement for tribal citizenship in 1961, and how a contemporary effort for constitutional reform sought a return to citizenship criteria rooted in Anishinaabe kinship, replacing the blood quantum criteria with lineal descent.

Those Who Belong illustrates the ways in which Anishinaabeg of White Earth negotiated multifaceted identities, both before and after the introduction of blood quantum as a marker of identity and as the sole requirement for tribal citizenship. Doerfler’s research reveals that Anishinaabe leaders resisted blood quantum as a tribal citizenship requirement for decades before acquiescing to federal pressure. Constitutional reform efforts in the twenty-first century brought new life to this longstanding debate and led to the adoption of a new constitution, that requires lineal descent for citizenship.

Defining Métis: Catholic Missionaries and the Idea of Civilization in Northwestern Saskatchewan, 1845–1898

University of Manitoba Press
April 2017
240 pages
6 × 9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-88755-774-3

Timothy P. Foran, Curator of British North America
Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, Quebec

Defining Métis examines categories used in the latter half of the nineteenth century by Catholic missionaries to describe Indigenous people in what is now northwestern Saskatchewan. It argues that the construction and evolution of these categories reflected missionaries’ changing interests and agendas.

Defining Métis sheds light on the earliest phases of Catholic missionary work among Indigenous peoples in western and northern Canada. It examines various interrelated aspects of this work, including the beginnings of residential schooling, transportation and communications, and relations between the Church, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the federal government.

While focusing on the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and their central mission at Île-à-la-Crosse, this study illuminates broad processes that informed Catholic missionary perceptions and impelled their evolution over a fifty-three-year period. In particular, this study illuminates processes that shaped Oblate conceptions of sauvage and métis. It does this through a qualitative analysis of documents that were produced within the Oblates’ institutional apparatus—official correspondence, mission journals, registers, and published reports.

Foran challenges the orthodox notion that Oblate commentators simply discovered and described a singular, empirically existing, and readily identifiable Métis population. Rather, he contends that Oblates played an important role in the conceptual production of les métis.