Mixed Race Studies

Navigating Racial Boundaries: The One-Drop Rule and Mixed-Race Jamaicans in South Florida

Florida International University
2010
343 pages

Sharon E. Placide

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparitive Sociology

Like many West Indians, mixed-race Jamaican immigrants enter the United States with fluid notions about race and racial identifications that reflect socio-political events in their home country and that conflict with the more rigid constructions of race they encounter in the U.S. This dissertation explores the experiences of racially mixed Jamaicans in South Florida and the impact of those experiences on their racial self-characterizations through the boundary-work theoretical framework. Specifically, the study examines the impact of participants’ exposure to the one-drop rule in the U.S., by which racial identification has been historically determined by the existence or non-existence of black forebears. Employing qualitative data collected through both focus group and face-to-face semi-structured interviews, the study analyzes mixed-race Jamaicans’ encounters in the U.S. with racial boundaries, and the boundary-work that reinforces them, as well their response to these encounters. Through their stories, the dissertation examines participants’ efforts to navigate racial boundaries through choices of various racial identifications. Further, it discusses the ways in which structural forces and individual agency have interacted in the formation of these identifications. The study finds that in spite of participants’ expressed preference for non-racialism, and despite their objections to rigid racial categories, in seeking to carve out alternative identities, they are participating in the boundary-making of which they are so critical.

Table of Contents

• I. INTRODUCTION
  • Theoretical Framework
  • Rationale for Population and Location of Study
  • Research Methodology and Data Analysis
  • Defining Terms
  • Challenges and Limitations
  • Chapter Descriptions
• II. THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF A RACIAL DICHOTOMY IN THE U.S
  • Race as a Social Construction
  • Section 1 Race and Mixed-Race During Slavery: The Social Construction of the One-Drop Rule
    • The Construction of Race During Slavery
    • Miscegenation and the Emergence of the One-Drop Rule
  • Section 2 The Rise and Crystallization of Bright Boundaries
    • Contesting Racial Boundaries: Abolitionists, Free Negroes and Slaves Oppose Slavery
    • White Response: Entrenchment of Racist Ideology
    • Emancipation and Reconstruction Blur Boundaries
    • Southern Whites Defend their Status, Strengthening Racial Divides
    • Crystallization of the Bright Boundary: The One-Drop Rule
    • Mulattoes, Blacks, and Boundary-Work
    • Science Supports the One-Drop Rule
  • Section 3 Blurring Racial Boundaries
    • The Civil Rights Movement and its Impact
    • The Multi-Racial Challenge to the One-Drop Rule
    • Why the One-Drop Rule Persists
    • Chapter Conclusion
• III. THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF A COLOR HIERARCHY IN JAMAICA
  • Clarification of Terms: Color and Race
  • Section 1 Construction of Bright Boundaries: Formation of a Tripartite Color Hierarchy During Slavery (1655 to 1834)
    • African Slavery and the Beginnings of Race Ideology
    • The Impact of Demography
    • Miscegenation, Free Browns, and the Status Mixed Progeny (Slave and Free)
    • Free Browns Become Buffer
  • Section 2 Boundary Blurring: Color and Social Status from Abolition to the Independence (1834 to 1962)
    • Loss of Labor and Decline of the White Planting Class
    • Boundary-Blurring Continues: Rise of the Brown Class And Black Social Mobility
    • Complicating the Color Hierarchy: East Indians, Chinese, “Syrian” Immigrants
    • Creole Multiracialism Versus Black Nationalism
    • Persistence of a Color Hierarchy
  • Section 3 Boundary-Shifting: Race, Color and Social Status after Independence (1962 to present)
    • Boundary-Blurring: Race, Color, and Social Location
    • Color as Symbolic and Social Boundary
    • Chapter Conclusion
• IV. OUT OF MANY, ONE PEOPLE: RACE AND COLOR IN JAMAICA
  • Race is Not Important
  • Intersectionality: Class Plus Race
  • Color Draws Boundaries in Jamaica
  • Chapter Conclusion
• V. ENCOUNTERING BOUNDARIES AND BOUNDARY-WORK IN THE U.S
  • Race Draws Bright Boundaries in the U.S.: The Centrality of Race Boundary Maintenance: Two Worlds
  • South Florida: Three Worlds?
  • Theoretical Discussion
  • Chapter Conclusion
• VI. NAVIGATING RACIAL BOUNDARIES IN THE U.S.
  • I am Jamaican – Ethnic (Post-Racial) Identification
  • Racial Identification Choices
  • Factors Affecting Jamaicans’ Immigrants Racial Identifications
  • Choice or No Choice? The Impact of Structure on Agency and Vice Versa
  • Mixed-Race Jamaicans Doing Boundary-Work
  • Chapter Conclusion
• VII. CONCLUSION
  • Findings
  • Limitations and Directions for Future Research
  • REFERENCES
  • APPENDICES
  • VITA

Read the entire dissertation here.

SOC 139C. Betwixt and Between: Multiracial Identity in the United States

University of California, Santa Barbara

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Note from Steven F. Riley [I believe this is the longest actively running university course on multiracial identity in the United States.]

An examination of the factors that have influenced the social location of racially mixed individuals of African and European descent in the United States, in order to provide a context for understanding the complexities surrounding the newly emerging multiracial conciousness.

Take One Candle, Light a Room: A Novel

Pantheon Books an Imprint of Random House
2010-10-12
336 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-37914-6 (0-307-37914-0)

Susan Straight, Professor of Creative Writing
University of California, Riverside

Fantine Antoine is a travel writer, a profession that keeps her happily away from her southern California home most of the time. When she returns to mark the fifth anniversary of the murder of her close friend Glorette, she finds herself pulled into the tumultuous life of Glorette’s twenty-one-year-old son, Victor. After getting involved in a shooting, Victor— Fantine’s godson—has fled to Louisiana. Together with her father, Fantine follows Victor, determined to help him avoid the criminal future that he suddenly seems destined for.
 
But Fantine’s own fate will be altered on this journey as well: her father will reveal the wrenching secrets of his past, and she will be compelled to question the most essential choices she’s made in her life. And all three characters will come face-to-face with the issues of race that beset them: Fantine, whose light black skin has eased her way in the world; her father, who grew up in the Jim Crow South; and Victor, whose fall into violence mirrors the path of so many other black men his age.
 
Take One Candle, Light a Room is a powerfully moving story about the intricacies of human connection, and about the ways in which we find a place for ourselves within our families and the world.

School Racial Composition and Biracial Adolescents’ School Attachment

Sociological Quarterly
Volume 51, Issue 1 (Winter 2010)
Published Online: 2010-01-15
Pages 150 – 178
DOI: 10.1111/j.1533-8525.2009.01166.x

Simon Cheng, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

Joshua Klugman, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Psychology
Temple University

Despite extensive research on multiracial youth in recent years, to date, no empirical studies have analyzed how racial context may affect biracial adolescents’ sense of belonging in a social institution beyond families. In this study, we examine how the racial makeup of the student body affects self-identified biracial adolescents’ school attachment. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find that the proportions of white or black students in school significantly affect the school attachment of Hispanic/black, Asian/black, and American Indian/black biracial adolescents, but school racial composition in general has little influence on biracial adolescents with a partial-white identification (i.e., black/white, Hispanic/white, Asian/white, and American Indian/white). Our analyses also show that on average, students of most biracial groups display lower school attachment than their corresponding monoracial groups, but the differences from the monoracial groups with the lower school attachment are generally small. We discuss the implications of our findings for biracial adolescents’ perceived racial boundaries and contemporary American race relations.

Read the entire article here.

Demographic Knowledge and Nation-Building: The Peruvian Census of 1940

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Published online 2010-08-03
DOI: 10.1002/bewi.201001471

Raúl Necochea López
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Demographic Knowledge and Nation-Building: The Peruvian Census of 1940. The demographers who organized the 1940 census of Peru portrayed the increasingly mixed-race Peruvian population as indicative of the breaking down of cultural barriers to the emergence of a robust Peruvian identity, a process that, they claimed, would lead to greater national development. This paper analyzes the ways in which demographers constructed cultural heterogeneity as a potential national asset. This reveals how scientific knowledge of miscegenation affected the formation of a nationalist project in the second half of the twentieth century, and also how demographers’ ideological commitments to socialism shaped scientific practice.

Read or purchase the article here.

‘A modelling competition with a difference’ is being pioneered by social enterprise mix-d:™ at MMU’s business incubator, Innospace

News and Events
Manchester Metropolitan University Business School
Manchester, England
2010-08-02

A MODELLING competition – the first of its kind in the UK to find the mixed race face of 2010 is being organised by social enterprise, mix-d:™, based at Manchester Metropolitan University’s business incubator, Innospace, in collaboration with the prestigious agency Boss Model Management, Harvey Nichols and Vidal Sassoon.

The fundraiser event, due to be held later on the 30th October at the Monastery in Manchester, will include a catwalk competition where the two lucky winners will each win a photo shoot with a leading Manchester fashion photographer and could be signed up by Boss Model Management. They will also get involved in promoting awareness of mixed race issues….

Read the entire article here.

The social care system and mixed race young people: placing the individual child at the heart of decision making

People in Harmony
Central London, England
2010-11-11

A one-day conference from People in Harmony which will consider why mixed race young people are over-represented in the care system, how they fare in the system and beyond, and how existing procedures could be improved upon.

About the Conference

The emergence of a sizeable mixed race population provides us with the opportunity to look again at racial stereotyping, and at how public services engage with individuals who do not slot into a single racial group. The need for this is perhaps most acute in the area of looked after children and wider social care – the focus of this conference.

Mixed race young people are over-represented in the care system, which has important implications for their long term prospects. A number of reasons may contribute to explaining this over-representation – social class, cultural differences in attitudes to marriage and long term relationships, widely dispersed family and a consequent lack of informal support structures. However, the tendency of service providers to see ‘black’ children as separate from their white mothers and to question the ability of white mothers to raise ‘black’ children may also play a part.

There have been major disagreements about local authority policies which insist on the right ‘racial match’ between child and adoptive family (based on Children Act 1989 Section 22 (5) (c)). Much evidence suggests that the key to successful placements is not a good racial match, but the young person’s wishes and the warmth of the adoptive family.

This conference will seek to explore these difficult issues with openness and honesty, drawing on research and academic work, and on personal experience. It will provide delegates with an opportunity to consider:

• Whether too much time is spent finding the right label (is it dual heritage rather than mixed race, and does it really matter?).
• Why ‘racial matching’ between young people and adoptive families may have been over-emphasised at the expense of adopted children – has cultural competence simply become a new dogma?
• The direct experience of mixed race young people who have been in the care system.
• Why social class and social heritage means that outcomes are very different among mixed race young people.
• Whether there is sufficient support for parents, especially single parents, of mixed race children – and how this is informed by perception of white mothers with ‘black’ children.
• How the care system – including wider services like education and CAMHS – can work towards better outcomes?

Organisations which book places at this event are invited to take up free exhibition space to encourage an exchange of information and resources.

Certificates of attendance will be available.

For more information, click here.

Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review

The New York Times
2010-08-23

Patricia Cohen

For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century.

Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race/Mixed Space in Media Culture & Militarized Zones

Thursday Afternoon Forum Series
University of California, Berkeley
691 Barrows Hall
2010-10-07, 16:00 to 17:30 PDT (Local Time)

A Critical Race Theory Approach to Understanding Cinematic Representations of the Mixed Race Experience
Kevin Escudero, Ethnic Studies

This presentation focuses on the developmental trajectory of the portrayal of mixed race people in mainstream media.  Primarily looking at film, but also analyzing other media texts such as photography, stand-up comedy and particular sub-genres of film (Disney, television series, etc.) this presentation seeks to understand the ways in which different forms of media have portrayed mixed race people pre and post-Loving.  While much work has been done on the depiction of mixed race people in media post-Loving, there is a need for such work to be contextualized within the pre-Loving depictions of mixed race.  Furthermore, very little attention has been given to the ways in which pre-1967 depictions of mixed race characters (e.g. the tragic mulatto) oftentimes reflect as well as perpetuated racist stereotypes of mixed race people.  These depictions of mixed race people during the anti-miscegenation era are what I argue, has given rise to the utilization by mixed race people of multiple forms of self-expression available through various media in the post-Loving era. 

Using a framework of “neutralizing the Other” in combination with a Critical Race Theory analysis I will also examine the ways in which post-1967 depictions of mixed race people in media have resulted in a neutralizing of the pre-1967 “threat” of miscegenation and the resulting mixed race offspring of these marriages.  Using pre-1967 depictions as a backdrop for post-Loving discourse, this paper also comments as to the self-perception and self-representation of mixed race youth today in film.  In this analysis, other forms of marginalization and subordination are prevalent, specifically gender.  Not to be overlooked in mixed race and miscegenation discourse, women of color are more often than not depicted as hypersexualized, super-fertile beings while mixed race men depending on their racial mixture are depicted as either hyper-masculine beings (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Vin Deisel) or associated with a more effeminate masculinity (e.g. Keanu Reeves who is half Asian and half Caucassian).  Tiger Woods, on the other hand, and the media portrayal of his marriage scandal at the end of 2009, has been cast as the ultimate playboy among men.

Historical Development and Expression of Black-Okinawa: Mixed-Socio-Cultural Race/Space in Militarized Zone
Ariko Ikehara, Ethnic Studies

This paper examines the historicity of the Cold War and the Post-Cold War era and the narrativity of its aftermath in which the legacy and memories of the U.S.-Asia border (militarized Asia space) are apprehended, narrated and remembered from a transpacific gaze: mixed-space/race zone in the U.S. militarized Asia.   Thus, this project seeks to map out a genealogy of mixed-space/race in the U.S. militarized Asia zone in the historical context of the Cold War and Post-Cold War era.  Re-examining the “natural” phases of social-geographical expansion/spatial development brought on by the militarization of Asia during the Cold war and Post-Cold war era in Asia, my main focus is couched in the base cultural space (mixed-space) in Okinawa.  Some of the research questions are: what is the structure that maintains and fuels the military complex in Asia, what forms did the militarized place become mixed-space, and what are the different circumstances in which the mixed-race people (Amerasians) with or without mixed families traverse and move in and out and around (circulation) of the militarized Asia zone.  Centering the black-Amerasian history and narrativity as the loci of inquiry, I am particularly interested in exploring how the notion of “blackness” is apprehended, circulated, and performed in the mixed-space/race, and is reiterated over and again within the larger spatiality of transnational sites in between US and Asia.

For more information, click here.

Trading Races: Joseph and Marie Bunel, a Diplomat and a Merchant in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue and Philadelphia

Journal of the Early Republic
Volume 30, Number 3, Fall 2010
pages 351-376
E-ISSN: 1553-0620
Print ISSN: 0275-1275

Philippe R. Girard, Associate Professor of History
McNeese State University, Lake Charles, Louisiana

Based on extensive research in French, British, and U.S. archives, the article focuses on Joseph Bunel, a diplomatic and commercial envoy for Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and his wife Marie Bunel (Fanchette Estève), who spent her adult life as a merchant in Cap Français (Cap Haïtien) and Philadelphia. Joseph and Marie Bunel were a white Frenchman and a free black Creole, but their careers were shaped more by their social and monetary ambitions than by their racial background. After spending a few years in prerevolutionary Saint-Domingue (Haiti) as a merchant and a plantation manager, Joseph Bunel played an important administrative role in Louverture’s regime after 1798, first as a diplomatic envoy charged with drafting treaties of commerce and non-aggression with the United States and England during the Quasi-War, then as Louverture’s paymaster. Because of his closeness to the regime, he was deported to France during the Leclerc expedition. After moving to Philadelphia in 1803, he became a noted exporter of war contraband to Dessalines’ Haiti and in 1807 settled permanently in this country as a merchant. Marie Bunel, a prosperous free-colored merchant from Cap Français before the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, continued her mercantile activities throughout the revolutionary period. Though personally close to notable figures like Louverture and Henri Christophe, her political involvement in the revolutionary struggle was limited. Persecuted along with her husband during the Leclerc expedition, she moved to Philadelphia, where she lived as an independent merchant long after Haiti had declared its independence. It was not until 1810 that for personal reasons she moved back to Haiti, where little evidence is available to retrace the end of the Bunels’ eventful lives.

Read or purchase the article here.