Mixed Race Studies

Watson [Program] Will Allow Reid to Study Issues Multi-Racial People Face

Davidson University
Davidson, North Carolina
2007-04-02

Rachel Andoga

“When I went abroad to Strasbourg, France, I remember meeting everybody in my program on the plane, and this one girl said to me, ‘So, can we just get this out of the way—what are you?’”
 
Amy Reid, a senior biology major and dance team captain, has heard such questions about her ethnicity for years. Her light skin and curly black hair defy pigeon-holing her as white, black, Latino or somewhere in between. Realizing that she’s not alone in ethnic no-man’s land, she wrote a successful Watson Foundation proposal that will allow her to spend the coming year exploring the concept of ethnic identity in Brazil and Namibia.

Reid’s project seeks to compare and contrast multi-racial identity development within specific communities. She chose to visit Brazil and Namibia for their unique cultural heritages. “For a long time, people believed that there was no racism in Brazil since there is such extensive interracial mixing between the native groups, descendants of African slaves, and the Portuguese,” she said. “That’s no longer the popular belief.”…

Read the entire article here.

…Between 1913 and 1948–the latter date the abrogation of California’s law prohibiting racial intermarriage–80 percent of the Asian Indian men in California married Hispanic women.  To this day, several thousand of the children and grandchildren of these Punjabi-Hispanic marriages, which involved vows between Muslims and Catholics or Hindus and Catholics, can be found in Imperial Valley and San Joaquin Valley towns.  Many of the families can still be found under the name of Singh–the most common Sikh surname–but most have Hispanic first names, representing the mixed cultural heritage that emerged.  Hindu temples and Muslim mosques can be found all over the San Joaquin and Imperial valleys…

Nash, Gary B. “The Hidden History of Mestizo America”, In Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, edited by Martha Hodes, 113, 115-116.  New York, New York: New York University Press, 1999.

Free at Last: The secret of Esie Mae Washington Williams is out, but she still doesn’t have full control over her story

Bloomington Herald-Times
2004-02-14
Courtesy of: Black Film Center/Archive
Indiana University

Audrey T. McCluskey, Director Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center
Indiana University

After 78 years of harboring a less than well-kept secret, Essie Mae Washington-Williams proclaimed that by publicly naming South Carolina‘s Strom Thurmond, the once fiery segregationist senator and Dixiecrat presidential candidate as her father, for the first time she felt “completely free.” Her story garnered massive news coverage, not because the sexual exploitation of her 16-year-old black mother, Carrie Butler, by the 22-year-old Thurmond in whose household Butler worked as a maid was different from numerous other examples of lustful hypocrisy. The attention came because the late senator built his career on virulent racism, espousing the evils of race-mixing before moderating those views after he was well past his political prime. The kind of hateful rhetoric that Thurmond was good at caused many black men to lose their lives at the end of a rope, strung from a Poplar or Pecan or Live Oak tree. Their crime? It was to be accused of a liaison with a white woman or even of taking a wayward glance at one…

Read the entire article here.

A new paradigm of race: Visit to Brazil prompts the question: Can mixing everyone up solve the race problem?

Bloomington Herald-Times
2004-08-29
Courtesy of: Black Film Center/Archive
Indiana University

Audrey T. McCluskey, Director Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center
Indiana University

If Tiger Woods lived in Brazil he would not have had to coin the word “Cablanasian” to describe the multiracial mixture of caucasian, black, and Asian that makes up his lineage nor face derision from those of us who thought he was trippin’ (being silly, unreal). As my husband and I saw on a recent trip, in Brazil race-mixing is the rule, not the exception, with the majority of its 170 million people being visible incarnates of the slogan that officials like to tout: “We’re a multiracial democracy. We’re not white, or black, or Indian, we’re all Brazilians.”

Skeptical, but being swept along by the stunning beauty of the country and its people, I did begin to wonder if (contrary to learned opinion) Brazil had solved its race problem by just mixing everyone up. British scholar Paul Gilroy recently said that Brazil and South Africa – a country that I also visited recently and will invoke later – present “a new paradigm of race” that is more subtle and flexible than the U.S.’s old “one drop” (of black blood makes you black) rule that equates whiteness with mythical purity…

Read the entire article here.

Prejudice inspires filmmaker to discover Afro-German roots

Indiana Daily Student
Indiana University
2010-01-24

Abby Liebenthal, Staff Reporter

“It all started with a public threat on my life.”

Within the first few minutes of Mo Asumang’s documentary “Roots Germania,” students, faculty and Bloomington residents became part of a search for the director’s identity…

…Asumang said the journey to find her identity was driven by a desire to understand where racism toward Afro-Germans originated.

“It’s like a job to search for identity,” Asumang said. “It starts when you’re born in Germany – it’s not so easy to be part of that country.”

The film was triggered by a song, written by a Neo-Nazi band the “White Aryan Rebels,” that calls for Asumang’s murder. Lyrics in the song include “This bullet is for you, Mo Asumang.”…

Read the entire article here.

Coloring the Caribbean: Agostino Brunias and the Painting of Race in the British West Indies, 1765-1800

Mia L. Bagneris, Doctoral Candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

This dissertation explores interracial themes in the work of Agostino Brunias, a little known but fascinating Italian artist who painted for British patrons in the late-eighteenth-century colonial Caribbean. Brunias came to the Caribbean around 1770 in the employ of Sir William Young, a British aristocrat who had recently been appointed governor of the West Indian islands ceded to Britain from France at the conclusion of the Seven Years War. For the next twenty-five years the prolific artist created romanticized images of communities of color including native Caribs, enslaved Africans, and free mulattoes that obscured the horrors of colonial domination and plantation slavery. Instead of slave markets or sugar plantations, Brunias’s canvases offered picturesque market scenes, lively dances, and outdoor fantasies tinged with rococo naughtiness that selectively recorded the life of the colonized for the eye of the colonizer. Local Colors explores Brunias’s use of interracial sexuality, mixed-race bodies, and racial ambiguity in creating this selective visual record, aiming to discover why the bodies of mixed-race women in particular made such perfect canvases for mapping out the colonial desires of British patriarchs. The project also explores how Brunias’s work might be understood as simultaneously participating in and subtly, but significantly, troubling the solidification of racial classification of the eighteenth-century.

Comments by Steven F. Riley

Read a excellent essay about the life of Agostino Brunias by Dr. Lennox Honychurch at his website here.

Reconstruction, Segregation, and Miscegenation: Interracial Marriage and the Law in the Lower South, 1865-1900

American Nineteenth Century History
Volume 6, Issue 1
March 2005
pages 57-76
DOI: 10.1080/14664650500121827

Peter Wallenstein, Professor of History
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

On the eve of Congressional Reconstruction, all seven states of the Lower South had laws against interracial marriage. During the Republican interlude that began in 1867-68, six of the seven states (all but Georgia) suspended those laws, whether through judicial invalidation or legislative repeal. Yet by 1894 all six had restored such bans. The trajectory of miscegenation laws in the Lower South between 1865 and 1900 permits a reconsideration of the range of possibilities the Reconstruction era brought to public policy. More than that, it forces a reconsideration of the origins of the Jim Crow South. Legally mandated segregation in public transit, as C. Vann Woodward observed in 1955, took hold late in the century. But such segregation in public education, as Howard R. Rabinowitz pointed out with his formula ‘from exclusion to segregation,’ originated during the first postwar years. Segregation on the marital front – universal at the start of the period and again at the end, but relaxed in most Lower South states for a time in between – combined the two patterns into yet a third. Adding another layer of complexity was the issue of where the color line was located, and thus which individuals were classified on each side of it.

Read or purchase the article here.

Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law: An American History

Palgrave Macmillan
2002
336 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 16-page b/w photo insert
ISBN: 978-1-4039-6408-3, ISBN10: 1-4039-6408-4

Peter Wallenstein, Professor of History
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

The first in-depth history of miscegenation law in the United States, this book illustrates in vivid detail how states, communities, and the courts have defined and regulated mixed-race marriage from the colonial period to the present. Combining a storyteller’s detail with a historian’s analysis, Peter Wallenstein brings the sagas of Richard and Mildred Loving and countless other interracial couples before them to light in this harrowing history of how individual states had the power to regulate one of the most private aspects of life: marriage.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: “That’s No Good Here”
• Part I. Abominable Mixture and Spurious Issue
  • Sex, Marriage, Race, and Freedom in the Early Chesapeake
  • Indian Foremothers and Freedom Suits in Revolutionary Virginia
  • From the Chesapeake Colonies to the State of California
  • Race, Marriage, and the Crisis of the Union
• Part II. Equal Protection of the Laws
  • Post-Civil War Alabama
  • Reconstruction and the Law of Interracial Marriage
  • Accommodating the Law of Freedom of the Law of Race
  • Interracial Marriage and the Federal Courts, 1857-1917
  • Interlude: Polygamy, Incest, Fornication, Cohabitation – and Interracial Marriage
• Part III. Problem of the Color Line
  • Drawing and Redrawing the Color Line
  • Boundaries – Race and Place in the Law of Marriage
  • Racial Identiy and Family Property
  • Miscegenation Laws, the NAACP, and the Federal Courts, 1941-1963
• Part IV. A Breakthrough Case in California
  • Contesting the Antimiscegenation Regime – the 1960s
  • Virginia vesus the Lovings – and the Lovings versus Virginia
  • America after Loving v. Virginia
• Epilogue: The Color of Love after Loving
  • Appendices
  • Permanent Repeal of State Miscegenation Laws, 1780-1967
  • Intermarriage in Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa
  • Indentity and Authority: An Interfaith Couple in Israel
  • Transsexuals, Gender Identity, and the Law of Marriage

Deciding on Doctrine: Anti-Miscegenation Statutes and the Development of Equal Protection Analysis

Virginia Law Review
Number 95, Issue 3 (May 2009)
pages 627-665

Rebecca Schoff
University of Virginia School of Law

In 1967, the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States were in complete agreement that the statutory scheme before them in Loving v. Virginia, which criminalized interracial marriage, should be invalidated. They did not, however, agree on which legal doctrines justified the invalidation. Eight Justices signed on to an opinion that carefully hedged the question with arguments related to both the equal protection and the due process clauses. Justice Potter Stewart authored a terse concurring opinion asserting that there could be no valid state law “which makes the criminality of an act depend upon the race of the actor.” Although no other member of the Court was willing to sign on to this concurrence, it gave voice to a doctrine that had been a central argument of civil rights litigation, articulated as early as Justice [John Marshall] Harlan’s famed dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson.

This Note will explore why the Warren Court chose the path it did to invalidate anti-miscegenation laws. More generally, it will analyze the Warren Court’s treatment of anti-miscegenation statutes with the object of gaining perspective on the relationship between decision and doctrine: assuming that Justices are in agreement as to which party should prevail, what factors, legal and non-legal, can influence the Court’s preference for one doctrine over another? In Loving, the decision to reject Justice Stewart’s rationale had far-reaching consequences. Had the Court followed Justice Stewart’s reasoning, review of criminal statutes, at least, would not require even a cursory analysis of the legislature’s purpose once a racial classification was detected. It might be argued that the Court was simply seeking the narrowest grounds on which to decide the case and that Justice Stewart’s reasoning was simply too broad. Loving’s now-controversial place as a precedent supporting substantive due process analysis in right-to-marriage jurisprudence, however, would have been minimized, if not eliminated, by Justice Stewart’s approach. It may be difficult to predict the ramifications of doctrinal choices, particularly with respect to the interaction be-tween equal protection, due process, and fundamental rights. Ultimately, this Note will argue that the Warren Court showed a preference for a less rule-like approach to equal protection analysis, in part because the conditions surrounding desegregation exacer-bated the difficulty of analyzing the scope of rules. Dissecting the circumstances under which the Warren Court viewed its potential paths to a ruling against Virginia in Loving may help us to under-stand how and why the Court resolves such problems in particular ways…

Read the entire article here.

Mapping Identity – Opening Lecture by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Haverford University
KINSC Sharpless Auditorium
2010-03-19 16:00 EDT (Local Time)

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy
Princeton University

Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery presents Mapping Identity, curated by Carol Solomon, Visiting Associate Professor, and Janet Yoon, HC ’10. The show will run Friday, March 19 – Friday, April 30, 2010, with an opening reception Friday, March 19, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. in the Gallery.

Opening Lecture – Kwame Anthony Appiah
Called a post-modern Socrates, Kwame Anthony Appiah asks profound questions about identity and ethics in a world where the sands of race, ethnicity, religion and nationalism continue to realign and reform before our eyes. His seminal book Cosmopolitanism is a moral manifesto for a world where identity has become a weapon and where difference has become a cause of pain and suffering. In intellectually stimulating language, Appiah challenges you to look beyond the boundaries — real and imagined — that divide us, and to see our common humanity…

For more information, click here.