Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • The Relationship of Identity to the Organizational Development of FLECHAS: Perceptions of Race from a Puerto Rican Perspective

    The Relationship of Identity to the Organizational Development of FLECHAS: Perceptions of Race from a Puerto Rican Perspective

    The Forensic Examiner
    June 2015

    Raul A. Avila

    The Puerto Rican preoccupation with “whitening” and incidents of black racism obfuscate Puerto Rican identity. The “deliberate amnesia” regarding their genetic and cultural connection with Black African slaves compels Puerto Ricans to disassociate themselves from “blackness” and everything that “blackness” unjustifiably represents among many: inferior intelligence, poverty, and a lack of ability to perform well in high-level positions. Puerto Rican whitening is the answer to the racial profiling of Blacks by law and society, especially in the United States. The resulting disassociation with the African Black heritage impedes the resolution of the Puerto Rican identity crisis.

    FLECHAS is an organization founded in New Haven, CT in 1977 to challenge this identity disorder among Puerto Ricans. FLECHAS is an acronym for “Feast of Loiza in Connecticut in Honor of Saint James the Apostle.” It is significant that Loiza, a city in northern Puerto Rico, was the Port of Call for Black African slaves. The founders of FLECHAS, natives of Loiza, grew up with positive images of being black and a strong sense of history rooted in their blackness. In fact the legend of Saint James, celebrated by the town for over two hundred years, runs parallel to that of the African god, Chango, who symbolizes strength and the peoples’ battle against slavery and injustice. Founders did not experience negative portrayals of blackness as Blacks in their day were policemen, elected officials, or teachers. It was not until they left Loiza that they experienced racism, so they founded FLECHAS to reestablish blackness to its rightful place of honor among the Puerto Rican community.

    FLECHAS is a Puerto Rican organization founded in New Haven, CT in 1977. (Appendix A) The founders are a group of citizens, who in the late 1960s migrated from the town of Loiza, Puerto Rico, the center of African slave trade during the period of Spanish colonialism in the New World. With membership composed of primarily Black Puerto Rican descendants, FLECHAS was created in response to the conviction that the Black Puerto Rican heritage has been either misrepresented or generally omitted in any discussion of Puerto Rican identity.

    The African influence on Puerto Rican culture is obvious. That influence can be found in Puerto Rican music, dance, art, food, and religion (Galvin, 2005). Moreover, DNA tests conducted by geneticists in 2000 found that 27% of Puerto Ricans on the Island have mitochondrial DNA from the people of Africa (Martinez-Cruzado, 2003). However, the Census of 2010 indicates that only 12% of Puerto Ricans self-report as being Black, while most scientists report that, for Puerto Ricans on both the island and in mainland United States, 47% have African blood (Kinsbruner, 1996). Although these findings are hotly contested, Via (2011) reports that the percentages of Puerto Ricans with African DNA average 20%. Apparently, Puerto Ricans have made a concerted effort to disassociate themselves from their Black African heritage.

    For Puerto Ricans, the issue of identity formation has been complicated by five hundred years of colonialism, four hundred of which were under Spanish rule. The issues of racism, Black and White intermarriage, and Puerto Rican identity today can be traced all the way back to the 8th century Moors, who ruled Spain for 800 years. During that period there was no discrimination against Blacks. Historians, such as Robert Martinez of Baruch College, indicate that society in Spain was devoid of racism toward Blacks, and this attitude carried over to Puerto Rico by the conquistadores. As a matter of fact, Martinez notes, racial intermarriage was not frowned upon. He writes:

    In the 8th century, nearly all of Spain was conquered (711-718) by the Muslim Moors who had crossed over from North Africa. A section of the city of Seville, which was a Moorish stronghold, was inhabited by thousands of Blacks. Black women were highly sought after by Spanish males. Therefore, it was no surprise that the first conquistadors who arrived to the island intermarried with the native Taino Indians and later with the African immigrants (Martinez, 1990, p. 3).

    Conversations with founders of FLECHAS indicate this was indeed the case in the province of Loiza on the island of Puerto Rico, where they were born and raised. There was neither discrimination nor racism in Loiza, as many descendants of African Black slaves like themselves held prestigious positions in Loiza as politicians, writers, teachers, and law enforcement officers. It was not the same situation outside of Loiza on the island, according to the founders of FLECHAS, and when Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States in 1898, Puerto Ricans experienced the same racist effects of “blackness” as African Americans. This writer’s role in composing this article as a participant observer is important and critical to consider since I am of Black Puerto Rican ancestry, a current member of FLECHAS, and a professional therapist for the Greater New Haven community in Connecticut…

    Read the entire article here.

  • How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts

    How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts

    University of California Press
    January 2014
    232 pages
    Hardcover ISBN: 9780520280076
    Paperback ISBN: 9780520280083
    Adbobe PDF E-Book ISBN: 9780520957190
    ePUB Format ISBN: 9780520957190

    Natalia Molina, Associate Dean for Faculty Equity, Division of Arts; Humanities and Associate Professor of History and Urban Studies
    University of California, San Diego

    How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican Americans—from 1924, when American law drastically reduced immigration into the United States, to 1965, when many quotas were abolished—to understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are constructed. These years shaped the emergence of what Natalia Molina describes as an immigration regime, which defined the racial categories that continue to influence perceptions in the United States about Mexican Americans, race, and ethnicity.

    Molina demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail. Examining legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to immigration, she advances the theory that our understanding of race is socially constructed in relational ways—that is, in correspondence to other groups. Molina introduces and explains her central theory, racial scripts, which highlights the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another. How Race Is Made in America also shows that these racial scripts are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups.

    Contents

    • List of Illustrations
    • Introduction
    • Part I. Immigration Regimes I: Mapping Race and Citizenship
      • Chapter One: Placing Mexican Immigration within the Larger Landscape of Race Relations in the U.S.
      • Chapter Two: “What is a White Man?”: The Quest to Make Mexicans Ineligible for U.S. Citizenship
      • Chapter Three: Birthright Citizenship Beyond Black and White
    • Part II. Immigration Regimes II: Making Mexicans Deportable
      • Chapter Four: Mexicans Suspended in a State of Deportability: Medical Racialization and Immigration Policy in the 1940s
      • Chapter Five: Deportations in the Urban Landscape
    • Epilogue: Making Race in the Twenty-First Century
    • Notes
    • Bibliography

  • Patrick Healy’s integration into the Jesuits and his success in society writ large required him to jettison his connections to blackness. He rose, not just despite, but in opposition to his heritage.

    Patrick Healy’s integration into the Jesuits and his success in society writ large required him to jettison his connections to blackness. He rose, not just despite, but in opposition to his heritage. The Jesuits called him the “Spaniard” — a name meant to explain his olive complexion.

    Matthew Quallen, “QUALLEN: Healy’s Inner Turmoil, Our Current Conflict,” The Hoya, November 20, 2015. http://www.thehoya.com/quallen-healys-inner-turmoil-our-current-conflict/.

  • Father Healy’s Imprint: Past, Present and Future

    Father Healy’s Imprint: Past, Present and Future

    The Hoya
    Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
    2004-11-09

    Moises Mendoza

    Every day thousands of students pass by Healy Hall and marvel at its towering steeples and complex intricacies. Few of them realize that the man responsible for this Georgetown trademark was every bit as complex and dynamic as the building bearing his name today.

    As the first black president of a predominantly white university, Fr. Patrick Healy, S.J., revolutionized Georgetown and helped build firm foundations for a young university.

    Yet Healy’s trek to greatness began not in the hallowed halls of academia, but on the Georgia cotton plantation where he was born on Feb. 27, 1834. The son of an Irish Catholic and a biracial domestic slave, Healy had great obstacles to overcome. Healy’s father Michael immigrated to the United States from Ireland through Canada around 1815. Experiencing great success in a series of land lotteries, he moved to Macon, Ga., where he built his own cotton plantation with the help of 49 slaves. Michael Healy became relatively prosperous and became a prominent businessman in the Macon community…

    Read the entire article here.

  • QUALLEN: Healy’s Inner Turmoil, Our Current Conflict

    QUALLEN: Healy’s Inner Turmoil, Our Current Conflict

    The Hoya
    Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
    2015-11-20

    Matthew Quallen, “Hoya Historian”
    School of Foreign Service

    Last week, President DeGioia accepted a recommendation to scrub the names Mulledy and McSherry from university buildings. The names Freedom and Remembrance took their places. Mulledy and McSherry symbolized what was most odious about Georgetown and the Maryland Jesuits’ history — the conclusion of a century of contest and deliberation about slavery, manumission and race with a mad dash towards a propitious sale.

    By contrast, Healy Hall and its namesake, Fr. Patrick Healy, stand as foils in our memory. Healy, after all, was the first black president of a predominantly white institution, as the accolade goes. But for Healy, who desperately toed the opposite side of the color line the situation, was more complicated.

    Fr. Patrick Healy was born in 1834 to Mary Eliza — a biracial former slave who had been purchased out of captivity by her soon-to-be husband, Michael. Michael Healy owned 49 slaves on a plantation in Macon, Ga. It was from his mother Mary Eliza that Patrick Healy inherited his vital if contrived one drop rule, which legally classified an individual as black if they possessed even “one drop” of black blood for the purposes of racially discriminating statutes. In his home state, the law considered Patrick Healy to be a slave (such status was usually maternal). So his selection as president of Georgetown in 1873 was nothing short of remarkable. It encapsulates a story of a rise to prominence unexpected for a black American in the mid-19th century. It also mistakenly post-dates Georgetown’s racial progress to 1873, although that transformation came much later…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life (Race & Difference Colloquium Series)

    Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life (Race & Difference Colloquium Series)

    Emory University
    Robert W. Woodruff Library, Jones Room
    540 Asbury Circle
    Atlanta, Georgia 30322
    Monday, 2016-02-01, 12:00-13:30 EST (Local Time)

    Presented by: James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference

    Jonathan Xavier Inda, Chair and Professor of Latino/a Studies
    University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne

    In the contemporary United States, matters of life and health have become key political concerns. Important to this politics of life is the desire to overcome racial inequalities in health; from heart disease to diabetes, the populations most afflicted by a range of illnesses are racialized minorities. The solutions generally proposed to the problem of racial health disparities have been social and environmental in nature, but in the wake of the mapping of the human genome, genetic thinking has come to have considerable influence on how such inequalities are problematized. In this Race and Difference Colloquium, Professor Jonathan Xavier Inda (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne) explores the politics of dealing with health inequities through targeting pharmaceuticals at specific racial groups based on the idea that they are genetically different. Drawing on the introduction of BiDil to treat heart failure among African Americans, her contends that while racialized pharmaceuticals are ostensibly about fostering life, they also raise thorny questions concerning the biologization of race, the reproduction of inequality, and the economic exploitation of the racial body.

    Engaging the concept of biopower in an examination of race, genetics and pharmaceuticals, Inda’s talk will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in medicine, health, bioscience, inequality and racial politics.

    For more information and to RSVP, click here.

  • A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Race & Difference Colloquium Series)

    A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Race & Difference Colloquium Series)

    Emory University
    Robert W. Woodruff Library, Jones Room
    540 Asbury Circle
    Atlanta, Georgia 30322
    Monday, 2016-02-15, 12:00-13:30 EST (Local Time)

    Presented by: James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference

    Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of History
    Stanford University

    In this Race and Difference Colloquium, Allyson Hobbs, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University, discusses her first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in October 2014. The book examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. A Chosen Exile won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book in American History and the Lawrence Levine Award for best book in American cultural history.

    For more information and to RSVP, click here.

  • Light-skinned privilege: It’s real AND it’s complicated

    Light-skinned privilege: It’s real AND it’s complicated

    Mixed Race Feminist Blog
    2016-01-30

    Nicola Codner

    Two men in a burning house must not stop to argue –African Proverb

    For the purposes of this article I will be talking about light skin privilege in relation to mixed race people with light skin who have both black and white heritage. I’ve read a lot of articles now on light-skinned privilege. It’s fairly common to come across them in good feminist communities whether they are predominantly black or white, or any other racial group.

    So, just what is light-skinned privilege? It’s probably easier to explain it by talking about shadism (or colourism as it’s called in the U.S), which is understood as a form of oppression darker-skinned women face. Shadism affects all communities of colour throughout the world to some degree and is the prejudice and discrimination amongst people of colour based on skin tone. There are many preconceived ideas about people with darker skin which are largely negative (such as being dangerous, less intelligent and less beautiful than people with lighter skin). Conversely people of colour with lighter skin, because of their proximity to a white skin tone, are more likely to be viewed in a positive light (innocent, desirable, capable and so on). I find it hard to imagine anyone saying light-skinned privilege isn’t real and that it’s not a serious problem in and affecting communities of colour. I know that I, as a mixed race women with a light skin tone, do have some privileges because of my skin colour. This article in no way contests light-skinned privilege. I accept it as a fact…

    Read the entire article here.

  • When it comes to race, confusion is the most intellectually defensible position.

    Ethics generally commends telling the truth. But in a situation in which our ordinary ways of thinking are at odds with reality, there can be no easy truth to be had. When it comes to race, confusion is the most intellectually defensible position.

    Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Can I Call My Nonbiological Twins Black Because My Husband Is?,” The Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, January 27, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/magazine/can-i-call-my-nonbiological-twins-black-because-my-husband-is.html.

  • Daughters of Interracial Couples are More Likely To Say They are Multiracial

    Daughters of Interracial Couples are More Likely To Say They are Multiracial

    TIME Magazine
    2016-01-28

    Carey Wallace

    Study suggests it’s because they’re considered “intriguing.”

    One of the fastest growing racial groups in the country isn’t a single racial group–it’s people from multiracial backgrounds, the children of interracial unions. A new study has found however, that young women are much more likely to call themselves multiracial than young men are.

    Since 1967, when the Supreme Court declared state laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional in Loving vs.Virginia, the rate of interracial marriages in the United States has climbed from below one percent to 10% of all new marriages today.

    And by 2050, as those numbers continue to rise, social scientists estimate that one out of every five Americans will be mixed-race.

    How will this growing population choose to identify themselves? Will they embrace one parent’s background more than the other? Will they create a blend of the two? Or will they create something completely new?

    To find out, Lauren Davenport, professor of political science at Stanford, sifted data from tens of thousands of incoming college freshmen with multi-racial backgrounds across the country…

    Read the entire article here.