Mixed Race Studies

Assessing Multiracial Identity Theory and Politics: The Challenge of Hypodescent

Ethnicities
Volume 4, Number 3 (September 2004)
pages 357-379
DOI: 10.1177/1468796804045239

Rainier Spencer, Professor
Department of Anthropology & Ethnic Studies
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

It is increasingly possible to detect a split in regard to current analyses of multiracial identity in the United States. On the one hand there remains a relatively naive brand of multiracial activism and identity politics that has deep roots in the recent movement to institute a US federal multiracial category; while on the other hand we find a steadily maturing body of scholarship on mixed-race identity that is several levels removed in terms of intellectual rigor and objectivity.  As this latter movement continues to mature, it increasingly forces the former to acknowledge and to confront important issues of logical consistency in the multiracial identity debate. This article represents an effort to guide and shape that discussion in assessing the ideological foundation of multiracial identity politics in the United States.

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Experiences of racism and the changing nature of white privilege among lone white mothers of mixed-parentage children in the UK

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 33, Issue 2 (February 2010)
pages 176-194
DOI: 10.1080/01419870903023652

Vicki Harman, Lecturer in the Centre for Criminology and Sociology
Royal Holloway, University of London

In a context where mixed relationships are often seen as a visible indicator of increased tolerance, this paper holds up a lens to the particular experiences of racism negotiated by lone white mothers of mixed-parentage children. Based on qualitative interviews with thirty mothers, this paper illustrates how, through their parenting, racism and racial injustice became more visible to the mothers in the study.  It is argued that, as well as experiencing racism directed at their children in a range of contexts (including the extended family, school and the local area), lone white mothers of mixed-parentage children are frequently facing social disapproval themselves.  Drawing on the notion of whiteness as a seemingly unmarked and invisible category, this paper argues that mothers’ experiences can challenge and complicate dominant conceptualizations of white privilege.

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Barriers between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Indiana University Press
2004-10-12
160 pages
1 bibliog., 1 index, 6.125 x 9.25
Paper ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21733-2; ISBN: 0-253-21733-4

Cassandra Jackson, Professor of English
The College of New Jersey

This provocative book examines the representation of characters of mixed African and European descent in the works of African American and European American writers of the 19th century.  The importance of mulatto figures as agents of ideological exchange in the American literary tradition has yet to receive sustained critical attention. Going beyond Sterling Brown’s melodramatic stereotype of the mulatto as “tragic figure,” Cassandra Jackson’s close study of nine works of fiction shows how the mulatto trope reveals the social, cultural, and political ideas of the period. Jackson uncovers a vigorous discussion in 19th-century fiction about the role of racial ideology in the creation of an American identity.  She analyzes the themes of race-mixing, the “mulatto,” nation building, and the social fluidity of race (and its imagined biological rigidity) in novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Richard Hildreth, Lydia Maria Child, Frances E. W. Harper, Thomas Detter, George Washington Cable, and Charles Chesnutt.

The Geographical Imagination of Barack Obama: Representing Race and Space in America

Southeastern Geographer
Volume 49, Number 3, Fall 2009
pages 221-239
E-ISSN: 1549-6929 Print ISSN: 0038-366X
DOI: 10.1353/sgo.0.0049

Robert J. Kruse, II

It has been noted that the geographical work on race and space has often overlooked the geographies of individual African-Americans. This paper adds to the literature on race and space by focusing upon Barack Obama, the 44^th president of the United States.  Unusual in many ways, Obama offers the opportunity to combine two types of analysis in this paper. First, his memoir, Dreams From My Father, is treated as a geographical text through which we may gain insight into his geographical imagination. Second, this paper discusses the spatialization of racial identities, particularly whiteness, that have informed the public’s impressions of Obama.  Together, these discussions may help us to understand the point at which Barack Obama’s personal geographies intersect with larger racialized landscapes that show increasing hybridity and permeability.

The Specter of Sex: Gendered Foundations of Racial Formation in the United States

State University of New York (SUNY) Press
August 2009
323 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-2753-9
Paperback ISBN13: 978-1-4384-2754-6

Sally L. Kitch, Distinguished Professor of Women and Gender Studies
Arizona State University

Genealogy of the formation of race and gender hierarchies in the U.S.

Theories of intersectionality have fundamentally transformed how feminists and critical race scholars understand the relationship between race and gender, but are often limited in their focus on contemporary experiences of interlocking oppressions. In The Specter of Sex, Sally L. Kitch explores the “backstory” of intersectionality theory—the historical formation of the racial and gendered hierarchies that continue to structure U.S. culture today. Kitch uses a genealogical approach to explore how a world already divided by gender ideology became one simultaneously obsessed with judgmental ideas about race, starting in Europe and the English colonies in the late seventeenth century. Through an examination of religious, political, and scientific narratives, public policies and testimonies, laws, court cases, and newspaper accounts, The Specter of Sex provides a rare comparative study of the racial formation of five groups—American Indians, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and European whites—and reveals gendered patterns that have served white racial dominance and repeated themselves with variations over a two-hundred-year period.

“This gracefully written synthesis of existing historical scholarship advances a position that both asserts distinction between ‘race’ and ‘gender’ as categories and privileges the gendered process of racial formation as key to understanding power and hierarchy in the United States. It is perfect for the classroom and will serve as a guide for theorists who need grounding in history.

Table Of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The “Purloined Letter” of Gendered Race
• Part I: Roots As the Twig is Bent
  • 1. “Women are a Huge Natural Calamity”: The Roots of Western Gender Ideology
  • 2. The First Races in Society: Gendered Roots of Race Formation
  • 3. Gendered Racial Institutions: World Slavery and Nationhood
  • Conclusion: From Gender to Race
• Part II: Bodies Whose Too, Too Solid Flesh?
  • 4. The American “Body Shop”: Gendered Racial Formation in the Colonies and New Republic
  • 5. Enslaved Bodies and Gendered Race
  • 6. Sexual Projection and Race: Science, Politics, and Lust
  • Conclusion: Embodying Race
• Part III: Blood “Off Women Com Owre Manhed”
  • 7. Defining, Measuring, and Ranking Racial Blood: The Ungendered Surface
  • 8. Hardly Gender Neutral
  • 9. Gendered Anti-Miscegenation: Laws and Their Interpretation
  • 10. Preserving White Racial Blood: Rape Accusations and Motherhood
  • Conclusion: Miscegenation as Racial Reconciliation?
• Part IV: Citizenship “My Folks Fought for This Country”
  • 11. What is Citizenship?: Gender and Race
  • 12. Engendering Citizenship: Dependency and Sex
  • 13. “No Can Do” Men and Their Others: Dependency and Inappropriate Gender
  • 14. Mixed Race, Suspect Gender: Both White and . . . Whatever
  • Conclusion: Homosexual Citizenship: A Gendered Racial Oxymoron
• Part V: Implications Patterns for a New Bridge
  • 15. Implications for Feminist Theories of Racial Difference and Antisubordination Politics
  • 16. Gender Implications for Theories of Racial Formation
• Conclusion: Interdependence
• Notes
• Index

Hybrid Border-Crossers? Towards a Radical Socialisation of ‘Mixed Race’

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Volume 35, Issue 1 (January 2009)
pages 115 – 132
DOI: 10.1080/13691830802489275

Jin Haritaworn, Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and Environment at the Faculty of Environmental Studies
York University, Canada

The celebration of ‘mixed race’ as the model ‘transgressive’ (post-)identity obfuscates the ambivalence at the root of this construct.  Far from ‘abolishing’ race or throwing it into crisis, ‘mixed-race’ bodies and minds continue to be evaluated as disparate, unwholesome and non-belonging, and appear to invite dissective reading practices such as stares, intrusive questions and comments which are commonly treated as a ‘normal reaction to abnormal bodies’. In this article I examine semi-structured interviews with 22 people of Thai and non-Thai parentage in Britain and Germany.  Drawing on Fanon’s existential phenomenology, I theorise interviewees’ everyday confrontations with intrusive reading practices of their bodies, origins, loyalties and families.  The persistence of pathologising discourses and practices on ‘mixed race’ renders celebratory notions of ‘hybrid border-crossers’ problematic.  Rather than a pre-social property of particular bodies which trigger intrusive labelling attempts, ‘ambiguous phenotype’ is socially produced in biologistic race discourses and violent reading practices. ‘Mixed race’ should be more aptly theorised as a dissective racialising technology which mobilises essentialised forms of knowledge and entitles some to gaze at and define others.   It is constituted in power relations which are socially produced and, hence, also open to contestation and change.

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Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887-1937

University of Nebraska Press
2006
278 pages
Illus.
hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-1829-1
paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-2487-2

Katherine Ellinghaus
University of Melbourne

Taking Assimilation to Heart examines marriages between white women and indigenous men in Australia and the United States between 1887 and 1937.  In these settler societies, white women were expected to reproduce white children to keep the white race “pure”–hence special anxieties were associated with their sexuality, and marriages with indigenous men were rare events. As such, these interracial marriages illuminate the complicated social, racial, and national contexts in which they occurred.

This study of the ideological and political context of marriages between white women and indigenous men uncovers striking differences between the policies of assimilation endorsed by Australia and those encouraged by the United States. White Australians emphasized biological absorption, in which indigenous identity would be dissolved through interracial relationships, while white Americans promoted cultural assimilation, attempting to alter the lifestyles of indigenous people rather than their physical appearance. This disparity led, in turn, to differing emphases on humanitarian reforms, education policies, and social mobility, which affected the social status of the white women and indigenous men who married each other.

Shifting from the personal to the local to the transnational, Taking Assimilation to Heart extends our understanding of the ways in which individual lives have been part of the culture of colonialism.

The Mulatta and the Politics of Race

University Press of Mississippi
2004
272 pages
bibliography, index
ISBN: 157806676X (9781578066766)

Teresa C. Zackodnik, Professor of English
University of Alberta, Canada

An analysis of how black women used the mulatta figure to contest racial barriers.

From abolition through the years just before the civil rights struggle began, African American women recognized that a mixed-race woman made for a powerful and, at times, very useful figure in the battle for racial justice.

The Mulatta and the Politics of Race traces many key instances in which black women have wielded the image of a racially mixed woman to assault the color line.  In the oratory and fiction of black women from the late 1840s through the 1950s, Teresa C. Zackodnik finds the mulatta to be a metaphor of increasing potency.

Before the Civil War white female abolitionists created the image of the “tragic mulatta,” caught between races, rejected by all. African American women put the mulatta to diverse political use.  Black women used the mulatta figure to invoke and manage American and British abolitionist empathy and to contest racial stereotypes of womanhood in the postbellum United States.  The mulatta aided writers in critiquing the “New Negro Renaissance” and gave writers leverage to subvert the aims of mid-twentieth-century mainstream American culture.

The Mulatta and the Politics of Race focuses on the antislavery lectures and appearances of Ellen Craft and Sarah Parker Remond, the domestic fiction of Pauline Hopkins and Frances Harper, the Harlem Renaissance novels of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, and the little-known 1950s texts of Dorothy Lee Dickens and Reba Lee.  Throughout, the author discovers the especially valuable and as yet unexplored contributions of these black women and their uses of the mulatta in prose and speech.

Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique

University of Pennsylvania Press
July 2009
312 pages
6 x 9; 7 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8122-4172-3
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8122-2227-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8122-0356-1

Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss, Associate Professor of History
Texas A & M University

From its founding, Martinique played an integral role in France’s Atlantic empire. Established in the mid-seventeenth century as a colonial outpost against Spanish and English dominance in the Caribbean, the island was transformed by the increase in European demand for sugar, coffee, and indigo. Like other colonial subjects, Martinicans met the labor needs of cash-crop cultivation by establishing plantations worked by enslaved Africans and by adopting the rigidly hierarchical social structure that accompanied chattel slavery.  After Haiti gained its independence in 1804, Martinique’s economic importance to the French empire increased.  At the same time, there arose questions, both in France and on the island, about the long-term viability of the plantation system, including debates about the ways colonists—especially enslaved Africans and free mixed-race individuals—fit into the French nation.

Sweet Liberty chronicles the history of Martinique from France’s reacquisition of the island from the British in 1802 to the abolition of slavery in 1848. Focusing on the relationship between the island’s widely diverse society and the various waves of French and British colonial administrations, Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss provides a compelling account of Martinique’s social, political, and cultural dynamics during the final years of slavery in the French empire. Schloss explores how various groups—Creole and metropolitan elites, petits blancs, gens de couleur, and enslaved Africans—interacted with one another in a constantly shifting political environment and traces how these interactions influenced the colony’s debates around identity, citizenship, and the boundaries of the French nation.

Based on extensive archival research in Europe and the Americas, Sweet Liberty is a groundbreaking study of a neglected region that traces how race, slavery, class, and gender shaped what it meant to be French on both sides of the Atlantic.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique
• 1. “That Your Hearts Will Blossom and Again Become French”: The Early Napoleonic Period
• 2. “Happy to Consider Itself an Ancient British Possession”: The British Occupation of Martinique
• 3. “Your French and Loyal Hearts”: The First Decade of the Restoration
• 4. “In the Colonies, It Is Impossible That a White Would Align Himself With Slaves”: Shifts in Colonial Policy
• 5. “To Ensure Equality Before Those Laws to Free Men, Whatever Their Color”: Changing Ideas of French Citizenship
• 6. “Amelioration of the White Race” and “The Sacred Rights of Property”: The End of Slavery in the French Atlantic
• Conclusion
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments

Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory: A Novel

University of Texas Press
September 2009
198 pages
6 x 9 in.; 1 map
ISBN: 978-0-292-71920-0 (hardcover, no dust jacket)
ISBN: 978-0-292-72128-9 (paperback)

Emma Pérez, Associate Professor and Chair of Ethnic Studies
University of Colorado

This literary adventure takes place in nineteenth-century Texas and follows the story of a Tejana lesbian cowgirl after the fall of the Alamo. Micaela Campos, the central character, witnesses the violence against Mexicans, African Americans, and indigenous peoples after the infamous battles of the Alamo and of San Jacinto, both in 1836. Resisting an easy opposition between good versus evil and brown versus white characters, the novel also features Micaela’s Mexican-Anglo cousin who assists and hinders her progress. Micaela’s travels give us a new portrayal of the American West, populated by people of mixed races who are vexed by the collision of cultures and politics. Ultimately, Micaela’s journey and her romance with a black/American Indian woman teach her that there are no easy solutions to the injustices that birthed the Texas Republic.

This novel is an intervention in queer history and fiction with its love story between two women of color in mid-nineteenth-century Texas. Pérez also shows how a colonial past still haunts our nation’s imagination. The battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto offered freedom and liberty to Texans, but what is often erased from the story is that common people who were Mexican, Indian, and Black did not necessarily benefit from the influx of so many Anglo immigrants to Texas. The social themes and identity issues that Pérez explores—political climate, debates over immigration, and historical revision of the American West—are current today.