Mixed Race Studies

An Irish Tradition With an Only-in-America Star

The New York Times
2012-03-17

Sabrina Tavernise

GREENVILLE, Ohio — For those feeling down about the United States and its place in the world, meet Drew Lovejoy, a 17-year-old from rural Ohio. His background could not be more American. His father is black and Baptist from Georgia and his mother is white and Jewish from Iowa. But his fame is international after winning the all-Ireland dancing championship in Dublin for a third straight year.

Drew is the first to admit that this is a lot to take in, so he sometimes hides part of his biography for the sake of convenience. As in 2010, when he became the first person of color to win the world championship for Irish dancing—the highest honor in that small and close-knit world—and a group of male dancers in their 70s, all of them Irish, offered their congratulations.

“They said, ‘We never thought it would happen, but we’re thrilled that it did,’ ” said Drew’s mother, Andee Goldberg. She added, “They don’t even know he’s Jewish. That hasn’t been broached. I think it would be too overwhelming.”…

…Neither mother nor son can remember a time Drew wasn’t dancing, or the reason that he started. Drew thought it might have had to do with his mother getting tired of Disney movies and playing Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly videos for him. She also took him to musicals and theater performances.

But when he went to a friend’s Irish dance competition in Indianapolis, and saw the girls and boys leaping and skipping, dancing that was part tap, part ballet set to very happy music, he was hooked.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, right,’ ” his mother said, shaking her head. “You’re biracial and you’re a Jew. We thought you had to be Irish and Catholic.”

He said, “I was like, ‘I want a medal.’”…

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Catholic records of slave baptisms in colonial New Orleans go online

New Orleans Times-Picayune
2011-02-01

Bruce Nolan, Beat Reporter

On Sunday, the 6th of May, 1798, an enslaved New Orleans woman named only Manon, owned by Mr. LeBlanc, presented her 2-year-old child, Antoine Joseph, at St. Louis Cathedral on the Plaza de Armas to be baptized at the hands of Father Luis Quintanilla, a Capuchin friar there.

Manon was probably accompanied by her owner, as was the custom of the day, according to Emilie Leumas, an expert on the era and the keeper of the Archdiocese of New Orleans’ sacramental records.

In racially complex, laissez-faire New Orleans, where categories of race were faithfully noted then sometimes dismissed, Quintanilla noted the pertinent details. Manon was a mulatto, or mixed-race woman, and the baby’s father was officially unrecognized but apparently white, as the baby is described with the Spanish term “quarteroon,” which means three-fourths white.

The record of that event has always been preserved in the rich archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. But it has never been easily accessible.

But Tuesday, the 1798 baptism of Antoine Joseph, with thousands of similar baptismal records from colonial New Orleans, were posted on the Internet as a new tool for genealogists everywhere.

“Now people can sit in their slippers at 11 o’clock at night and read away,” said Leumas, the archdiocese’s archivist…

..In Antoine Joseph’s case, the godparents were there: Marie Joseph and Antonio, neither with a family name. Still attentive to the complex categories of race and color, Quintanilla noted that the baby’s godfather was “metis”—another mixed-race classification, perhaps suggesting American Indian blood, according to Leumas.

By the end of 2012, the archdiocese hopes to go both forward and backward in time, posting all of its sacramental records—baptisms, marriages, funerals and other life cycle events—from the founding of the city in 1718 to the date of Louisiana’s admittance to the union in 1812, Leumas said…

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Rumblings of The Earth: Wifredo Lam, His Work and Words

Filmakers Library (an imprint of Alexander Street Press)
1996
23 minutes

Denise Byrd

Awards

• San Antonio CINEFEST, 1996
• Latin American Studies Association, 1995

The Afro-Cuban artist Wifredo Lam played a leading role in bringing the art of the non-white world to the attention of the international community. Of mixed race and cultural heritage, he was born in 1902 in Sangua La Grande, Cuba to a mother who was a descendent of slaves and a father who was a Chinese immigrant. In his youth he was exposed to the rich heritage of African, Santaria and Confucian traditions. These traditions affected him deeply and are reflected in his art which is in the collections of major museums here and abroad.

This film follows Lam from student days in Havana through his development as an artist in Europe where he became a close friend of Picasso and other luminaries. Upon returning to Cuba, Lam rediscovered his roots, became a leader in the Négritude movement, and produced his most famous work, “The Jungle.”

This richly illustrated film uses Lam’s paintings and writing along with interviews with authorities on art and Caribbean culture to trace the evolution of a unique and truly multicultural twentieth century artist.

‘all my Slaves, whether Negroes, Indians, Mustees, Or Molattoes.’: Towards a Thick Description of ‘Slave Religion’

The American Religious Experience
1999

Patrick Neal Minges

The time was in the late 1760’s and the place was Charleston, S.C. A young musician was on his way to a performance with his french horn tucked under his arm. As he passed by a large meetinghouse, he heard much commotion on account of a “crazy man was halloing there.” He might have ignored the event but his companion dared him to “blow the french horn among them” and disrupt the meeting. Thinking they might have some fun, John Marrant and his companion entered the meeting hall with the intent of mischief. As he lifted his horn to his lips, the crazy man — evangelist George Whitefield — cast an eye upon him, pointed his finger at John Marrant and uttered these words: “Prepare to Meet Thy God, O Israel!” Marrant was struck dead for some thirty minutes and when he was awakened, Reverend Whitefield declared “Jesus Christ has got thee at last.” After several days of ministrations by Reverend Whitefield, the Lord set John Marrant’s soul at liberty and he dedicated his life to the propagation of the gospel.

Marrant first witnessed to members of his family and when they rejected his newfound evangelical spirit, he fled to the wilderness where he sought solace among the beasts of the woods. Marrant was not afraid for God hade made the beasts “friendly to me.” When Marrant happened upon a Cherokee deer hunter, they spent ten weeks together killing deer by day and preparing brush arbors by night to provide sanctuary for themselves in the wilderness. Becoming fast friends by the end of the hunting season, the Cherokee deer hunter and the African American missionary returned to the hunter’s village where they would continue their cultural exchange. However, when he attempted to pass the outer guard at the Cherokee village, the Cherokees were less than excited with Marrant and he was detained and placed in prison. It was not that Marrant was a black man that troubled the Cherokee, the peoples of the Southeastern United States had relations with Africans that stretched back perhaps as far as a thousand years. It was just that ever since black people had started showing up with their friends, the white people, that things had started going particularly bad for the Indians of the Southeastern United States.

It seems that as soon as Europeans showed up on the coasts of the United States, they started reading from a formal document called the Requierimento that declared themselves to be Christians and by nature superior to the uncivilized heathens that they encountered. The indigenous people were then informed by the Requierimento that if they accepted Christianity they would become the Christian’s slaves in exchange for the gift of salvation; if they did not accept the gospel of Christianity, they would still become slaves but that their plight would be much worse.⁷ Everywhere that explorers such as Ponce De Leon, Vazquez De Ayllon, and Hernando De Soto went on their “explorations” throughout the American Southeast, they carried with them bloodhounds, chains, and iron collars for the acquisition and exportation of Indian slaves. A Cherokee from Oklahoma remembered his father’s tale of the Spanish slave trade, “At an early state the Spanish engaged in the slave trade on this continent and in so doing kidnapped hundreds of thousands of the Indians from the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts to work their mines in the West Indies…

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Racism and Ethnic Relations in the Portuguese-Speaking World

Oxford University Press
July 2012
300 pages
12 halftones, tables, and graphs
234x156mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-19-726524-6

Edited by

Francisco Bethencourt, Charles Boxer Professor of History
King’s College London

Adrian Pearce, Lecturer in Brazilian & Spanish American History
King’s College London

• Comprehensive overview of racism and ethnic relations throughout Portuguese-speaking world
• Radical updating – last overview was published in 1963
• Draws out new connections between different parts of this area over time
• Experiments with new methods, e.g. anthropological history, visual culture

How did racism evolve in different parts of the Portuguese-speaking world? How should the impact on ethnic perceptions of colonial societies based on slavery or the slave trade be evaluated? What was the reality of inter-ethnic mixture in different continents? How has the prejudice of white supremacy been confronted in Brazil and Portugal? And how should we assess the impact of recent trends of emigration and immigration? These are some of the major questions that have structured this book. It both contextualises and challenges the visions of Gilberto Freyre and Charles Boxer, which crystallised from the 1930s to the 1960s, but which still frame the public history of this topic. It studies crucial issues, including recent affirmative action in Brazil or Afro-Brazilian literature, blackness in Brazil compared with Colombia under the dynamics of identity, recent racist trends in Portugal in comparative perspective, the status of native people in colonial Portuguese Africa, discrimination against forced Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants in different historical contexts, the status of mixed-race people in Brazil and Angola compared over the longue durée, the interference of Europeans in East Timor’s native marriage system, the historical policy of language in Brazil, or visual stereotypes and the proto-ethnographic gaze in early perceptions of East African peoples. The book covers the gamut of inter-ethnic experiences throughout the Portuguese-speaking world, from the sixteenth century to the present day, integrating contributions from history, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, literary, and cultural studies. It offers a radical updating of both empirical data and methodologies, and aims to contribute to current debates on racism and ethnic relations in global perspective.

Table of Contents

• Francisco Bethencourt: Introduction
• Part I. Present Issues
  • 1: António Sérgio Guimarães: Colour and Race in Brazil: From Whitening to the Search for Afro-Descent
  • 2: Peter Wade: Brazil and Colombia: Comparative Race Relations in South America
  • 3: Jorge Vala and Cícero Pereira: Racism: An Evolving Virus
  • 4: Luiz Felipe de Alencastro: Mulattos in Brazil and Angola: A Comparative Approach, Seventeenth to Twenty-First Centuries
• Part II. The Modern Framework
  • 5: João de Pina-Cabral: Charles Boxer and the Race Equivoque
  • 6: Maria Lucia Pallares-Burke: Gilberto Freyre and Brazilian Self-Perception
  • 7: David Brookshaw: Writing from the Margins: Towards an Epistemology of Contemporary African Brazilian Fiction
  • 8: Michel Cahen: Indigenato Before Race? Some Proposals on Portuguese Forced Labour Law in Mozambique and the African Empire (1926-62)
  • 9: Miguel Jerónimo: The ‘Civilisation Guild’: Race and Labour in the Third Portuguese Empire, ca. 1870-1930
• Part III. The Long View
  • 10: Ricardo Roque: Marriage Traps: Colonial Interactions with Indigenous Marriage Ties in East Timor
  • 11: Herbert Klein: The Free Afro-Brazilians in a Slave Society
  • 12: Andrea Daher: The ‘General Language’ and the Social Status of the Indian in Brazil, Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries
  • 13: José Pedro Paiva: The New Christian Divide in the Portuguese-Speaking World (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries)
  • 14: Jean Michel Massing: From Marco Polo to Manuel I of Portugal: The Image of the East African Coast in the Early Sixteenth Century

Impostors: EUST-235

Amherst College
Spring 2012

Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture

Deborah R. Dizard, Visiting Lecturer in European Studies

An interdisciplinary exploration of the causes behind the social, racial, artistic, and political act—and art—of posing, passing, or pretending to be someone else. Blacks passing for whites, Jews passing for gentiles, and women passing for men, and vice versa, are a central motif. Attention is given to biological and scientific patterns such as memory loss, mental illness, and plastic surgery, and to literary strategies like irony. As a supernatural occurrence, the discussion includes mystical experiences, ghost stories, and séance sessions. The course also covers instances pertaining to institutional religion, from prophesy from the Hebrew and Christian Bibles to the Koran and Mormonism. In technology and communications, analysis concentrates on the invention of the telegraph, the telephone, and the Internet. Entertainment, ventriloquism, puppet shows, voice-overs, children’s cartoon shows, subtitles, and dubbing in movies and TV are topics of analysis. Posers in Greek mythology, the Arabian Nights, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip Roth, Oliver Sacks, and Nella Larsen are examined. Conducted in English.

Reflections: An Anthology of African-American Philosophy, 1st Edition

Cengage Learning
2000
464 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 0534573932  ISBN-13: 9780534573935

Edited by:

James Montmarquet, Professor of Philosophy
Tennessee State University

William Hardy, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion
Tennessee State University

This anthology provides the instructor with a sufficient quantity, breadth, and diversity of materials to be the sole text for a course on African-American philosophy. It includes both classic and more contemporary readings by both professional philosophers and other people with philosophically intriguing viewpoints. The material provided is diverse, yet also contains certain themes which instructors can effectively employ to achieve the element of unity. One such theme, the debate of the “nationalist” focus on blackness vs. the many critics of this focus, runs through a great number of issues and readings.

Table of Contents

• Preface.
• Introduction.
• PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS-RACE AND RACISM.
  • 1. W.E.B. DuBois: From The Souls of Black Folk.
  • 2. Molefi K. Asante: Racism, Consciousness, and Afrocentricity.
  • 3. Kwame Anthony Appiah: Racisms.
  • 4. J. L. A. Garcia: The Heart of Racisms. Contemporary Issue: Views on “Mixed Race”.
  • 5. Naomi Zack: Mixed Black and White Race and Public Policy.
  • 6. Lewis R. Gordon: Race, Biraciality, and Mixed Race-In Theory.
• PART TWO: MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY-NATIONALISM, SEPARATISM, AND ASSIMILATION.
  • 7. Martin R. Delaney: The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored Peoples of the United States.
  • 8. Frederick Douglass: The Future of the Negro, The Future of the Colored Race, The Nation’s Problem, and On Colonization.
  • 9. Marcus Garvey: From Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey.
  • 10. Maulana Karenga: The Nguzo Saba (The Seven Principles): Their Meaning and Message.
  • 11. Molefi K. Asante: The Afrocentric Idea in Education.
  • 12. Cornel West: The Four Traditions of Response. Contemporary Issue: “Ebonics”.
  • 13. Geneva Smitherman: Black English/Ebonics: What it Be Like?
  • 14. Milton Baxter: Educating Teachers about Educating the Oppressed. Feminism, Womanism, and Gender Relations.
  • 15. Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I a Woman?
  • 16. Patricia Hill Collins: The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought.
  • 17. bell hooks: Reflections on Race and Sex.
  • 18. Angela P. Harris: Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory.
  • 19. Charles W. Mills: Do Black Men Have a Moral Duty to Marry Black Women? Contemporary Issue: Women’s Rights and Black Nationalism.
  • 20. E. Francis White: Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counterdiscourse, and African American Nationalism.
  • 21. Amiri Baraka: Black Woman. Violence, Liberation, and Social Justice.
  • 22. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
  • 23. Malcolm X: Message to the Grass Roots.
  • 24. Howard McGary: Psychological Violence, Physical Violence, and Racial Oppression.
  • 25. Laurence M. Thomas: Group Autonomy and Narrative Identity. Contemporary Issue: Affirmative Action.
  • 26. Bernard Boxill: Affirmative Action.
  • 27. Shelby Steele: Affirmative Action. Ethics and Value Theory.
  • 28. Alain Locke: Values and Imperatives.
  • 29. Michele M. Moody-Adams: Race, Class, and the Social Construction of Self-Respect.
  • 30. Laurence M. Thomas: Friendship.
  • 31. Cornel West: Nihilism in Black America.
  • 32. Katie G. Cannon: Unctuousness as a Virtue: According to the Life of Zora Neale Hurston. Contemporary Issue: A Classic Question of Values, Rights, and Education.
  • 33. Booker T. Washington: Atlanta Exposition Address.
  • 34. W.E.B. DuBois: The Talented Tenth.
• PART THREE: PHILOSOPHY AND RELATED DISCIPLINES.
  • 35. Patricia J. Williams: Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights.
  • 36. Regina Austin: Sapphire Bound!
  • 37. Derrick Bell: Racial Realism-After We’re Gone: Prudent Speculations on America in a Post-Racial Epoch.
  • 38. John Arthur: Critical Race Theory: A Critique. Contemporary Issue: Racist Hate Speech.
  • 39. Charles Lawrence and Gerald Gunther: Prohibiting Racist Speech: A Debate. Aesthetics.
  • 40. James Baldwin: Everybody’s Protest Novel.
  • 41. Larry Neal: The Black Arts Movement.
  • 42. Angela Y. Davis: Billy Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”: Music and Social Consciousness.
  • 43. Ralph Ellison: Blues People. Contemporary Issue: Rap Music.
  • 44. Crispin Sartwell: Rap Music and the Uses of Stereotype.
  • 45. Kimberle Crenshaw: Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew. Philosophy and Theology.
  • 46. David Walker: David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United stated.
  • 47. James H. Cone: God and Black Theology.
  • 48. Victor Anderso: Ontological Blackness in Theology.
  • 49. Anthony Pinn: Alternative Perspectives and Critiques. Contemporary Issue: Womanist Theology and the Traditionalist Black Church.
  • 50. Cheryl J. Sanders: Christian Ethics and Theology in a Womanist Perspective.
  • 51. Delores Williams: Womanist Reflections on “the Black Church,” the African-American Denominational Churches and the Universal Hagar’s Spiritual Church.
• SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING.

Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes

University of Massachusetts Press
December, 2001
256 pages
6.125 x 9.25
ISBN (paper):  978-1-55849-310-0

Susan Sleeper-Smith, Professor of History
Michigan State University

An innovative study of cultural resilience and resistance in early America

A center of the lucrative fur trade throughout the colonial period, the Great Lakes region was an important site of cultural as well as economic exchange between native and European peoples. In this well-researched study, Susan Sleeper-Smith focuses on an often overlooked aspect of these interactions—the role played by Indian women who married French traders. Drawing on a broad range of primary and secondary sources, she shows how these women used a variety of means to negotiate a middle ground between two disparate cultures. Many were converts to Catholicism who constructed elaborate mixed-blood kinship networks that paralleled those of native society, thus facilitating the integration of Indian and French values. By the mid-eighteenth century, native women had extended these kin linkages to fur trade communities throughout the Great Lakes, not only enhancing access to the region’s highly prized pelts but also ensuring safe transport for other goods. Indian Women and French Men depicts the encounter of Old World and New as an extended process of indigenous adaptation and change rather than one of conflict and inevitable demise. By serving as brokers between those two worlds, Indian women who married French men helped connect the Great Lakes to a larger, expanding transatlantic economy while securing the survival of their own native culture. As such, Sleeper-Smith points out, their experiences illuminate those of other traditional cultures forced to adapt to market-motivated Europeans.

Contents

• Illustrations
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Fish to Furs: The Fur Trade in Illinois Country
• 2. Marie Rouensa and the Jesuits: Conversion, Gender, and Power
• 3. Marie Madeleine Réaume L’archêveque Chevalier and the St. Joseph River Potawatomi
• 4. British Governance in the Western Great Lakes
• 5. Agriculture, Warfare, and Neutrality
• 6. Being Indian and Becoming Catholic
• 7. Hiding in Plain View: Persistence on the Indiana Frontier
• 8. Emigrants and Indians: Michigan’s Mythical Frontier
• Notes
• Index

Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada: Mythic Discourse and the Postcolonial State

University of Manitoba Press
November 2008
314 pages
6 × 9
Paper, ISBN: 978-0-88755-734-7

Jennifer Reid, Professor of Religion
University of Maine, Farmington

Politician, founder of Manitoba, and leader of the Métis, Louis Riel led two resistance movements against the Canadian government: the Red River Uprising of 1869–70, and the North-West Rebellion of 1885, in defense of Métis and other minority rights.

Against the backdrop of these legendary uprisings, Jennifer Reid examines Riel’s religious background, the mythic significance that has consciously been ascribed to him, and how these elements combined to influence Canada’s search for a national identity. Reid’s study provides a framework for rethinking the geopolitical significance of the modern Canadian state, the historic role of Confederation in establishing the country’s collective self-image, and the narrative space through which Riel’s voice speaks to these issues.

Table of Contents

• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Setting the Stage: The North-West to 1885
• Chapter 2: Canadian Myths and Canadian Identity
• Chapter 3: Nation-states and National Discourses
• Chapter 4: Violence and State Creation
• Chapter 5: Revolution, Identity, and Canada
• Chapter 6: Riel and the Canadian State
• Chapter 7: Heterogeneity and the Postcolonial State
• Conclusion
• Notes

Books: Black and white thinking

The Christian Century
2012-01-26

Edward P. Antonio, Associate Professor of Theology and Social Theory
Iliff School of Theology, Denver, Colorado

Brian Bantum. Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2010. 260 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781602582934.

Redeeming Mulatto presents a complex argument about theology and race. It is impossible to do it justice in a short review. Brian Bantum persuasively challenges traditional ways of thinking about race in the United States by theologically retrieving interracial identity as an important category that has been unduly neglected. In this way he addresses the American tendency to understand race relations in terms of the binary opposition between black and white.

Bantum describes the historical experience of being mulatto/a by suggesting that race in the U.S. functions like religion or as a form of discipleship into which we are all recruited…

Read or purchase the article here.