Mixed Race Studies

From Narratives of Miscegenation to Post-Modernist Re-Imagining: Toward a Historiography of Coloured Identity in South Africa

African Historical Review
Volume 40, Issue 1 (June 2008)
pages 77 – 100
DOI: 10.1080/17532520802249472

Mohamed Adhikari, Associate Professor of History
University of Cape Town, South Africa

This article traces changing interpretations of the nature of Coloured identity and the history of the Coloured community in South Africa in both popular thinking as well as the academy. It explores some of the main contestations that have arisen between rival schools of thought, particularly their stance on the popular perception that Colouredness is an inherent racial condition derived from miscegenation. This essay identifies four distinct paradigms in historical writing on the Coloured people. Firstly, there is the essentialist school which regards Colouredness as a product of miscegenation and represents the conventional understanding of the identity. Secondly, instrumentalists view Coloured identity as an artificial creation of the white ruling class who used it as a ploy to divide and rule the black majority. This explanation, which first emerged in academic writing in the early 1980s, held sway in anti-apartheid circles. Opposing these interpretations are what may be termed the social constructionists who from the early 1990s stressed the complexities of identity formation and the agency of Coloured people in the making of their own identities. Most recently the rudiments of a fourth approach, of applying postmodern theory, especially the concept of creolisation, to Coloured identity have appeared.

Read or purchase the article here.

A White Side of Black Britain: The Concept of Racial Literacy

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 27, Issue 6
November 2004
pages 878 – 907
DOI: 10.1080/0141987042000268512

France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Opposition to transracial adoption on both sides of the Atlantic, has been based, in part, on the assumption that white parents cannot understand race or racism and thus cannot properly prepare children of multiracial heritage to cope with racism. In this article I draw on a seven-year ethnographic study to offer an intensive case study of white transracial birth parents that counters this racial logic. I draw on a subset of data collected from field research and in-depth interviews with 102 members of black-white interracial families in England. I provide an analysis of three practices that I discovered among white transracial birth parents who were attempting to cultivate ‘black’ identities in their children of multiracial heritage. I offer the concept of ‘racial literacy’ to theorize their parental labour as a type of anti-racist project that remains under the radar of conventional sociological analyses of racism and anti-racist social movements.

Read or purchase the article here.

Brave new world: The complicated side-effects of Britain’s mixed-race households

The Independent (UK)
2009-08-22

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Bev is beautiful, with silky black skin and thick hair she ties in a bunch at the top, spurting like a fountain. At 15, her face reminds me of the young and feisty Winnie Mandela. Dressed in denim, she is wearing lots of African bracelets and rings on her ears. And, incongruously, pearls, several strings looped around her high neck. Her face changes like an English summer – bright and sunny one minute, then suddenly dark, brooding and sometimes stormy. She wants to talk, she tells me, otherwise she will go crazy. And what Bev tells me is a part of one of the least reported stories of family life in modern Britain, remarkable and complex, and perpetually shifting.

“My family is messy,” she explains. “There’s been divorce, remarrying, separation, step-parents. It’s hard to talk about that when we are all trying to be polite, faking it all the time. I was in a mood the other day – you know, you get into a mood. My mum came into my room, held my elbow so hard it hurt, and whispered: ‘You’ll lose me this man, too, you stupid girl.’

“Then there is RACE!” she continues. “We are black-and-white and inbetweenies, but no one mentions that either. We have to pretend that mum’s latest guy is not white, and I am not brown, and there isn’t an issue here.”

She doesn’t even take a breath as all this tumbles out. Is he unkind to her? I ask gently

“No, he’s OK, I mean doesn’t hit me or anything. But he has no idea. Comes from Norfolk or something. My mum loves all that – his fancy accent and that. She even went to Wimbledon ‘cos he gets free tickets, and then both of them were moaning about Serena and Venus having a pushy dad, and my mum says something horrible about my ex-dad, and whitie nodded – he always nods, like Noddy. As soon as I have done my GCSEs I am out of here.”

This country has more mixed-race families than any other in Europe. According to the latest social research, one in 10 young Britons lives in a mixed-race household and the number of bi-racial children is growing faster than any other “ethnic minority” group. We also have high divorce rates and – increasingly – step-families. Put all these factors together and you get a newish phenomenon: the rise of the mixed-race step-family. Social services, counsellors and academic researchers have not yet caught up with this social development. And those of us who find ourselves in these reconstituted multi-racial families make it up as we go along. I guess Bev’s mum and step-dad are having to do just that…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Slur Development Not Keeping Pace With Mixed-Race Births, Nation’s Bigots Report

The Onion
2010-03-13

WASHINGTON—A coalition of the nation’s most fervent bigots convened in Washington Monday to address growing concerns that the production of hateful new racial slurs has failed to keep pace with the rise in mixed-race births.

According to representatives from the American Racists and Bigots Council (ARBC), the growing number of children born to parents of different ethnicities has posed a real challenge to the nation’s hate-speech developers—a challenge they say threatens their way of life…

…According to statistics provided by the coalition, a rise in the birthrate of mixed-race Americans has left millions of confused racists with absolutely nothing prejudiced to say when confronted by a person of indeterminate or complex background. What frightens the coalition most is data suggesting that by 2015, ignorant bigots everywhere could be powerless when it comes to reducing mixed-raced individuals to profoundly uninformed cultural stereotypes…

Read (with tongue in cheek) the entire article here.

White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812

University of North Carolina Press
1968-09-25 (Republished: September 1995)
671 pages
8.9 x 6 x 1.4 inches
ISBN: 978-0-8078-4550-9
Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

Winthrop D. Jordan (1931-2007)

• Winner of the 1968 Francis Parkman Prize, Society of American Historians
• Winner of the 1969 National Book Award
• Winner of the 1969 Bancroft Prize, Columbia University
• Winner of the 1968 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, Phi Beta Kappa

The paperback edition of Jordan’s classic and award-winning work on the history of American race relations.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

Part One. GENESIS 1550-1700

I. First Impressions: Initial English Confrontation with Africans

1. The Blackness Without
2. The Causes of Complexion
3. Defective Religion
4. Savage Behavior
5. The Apes of Africa
6. The Blackness Within

II. Unthinking Decision: Enslavement of Negroes in America to 1700

1. The Necessities of a New World
2. Freedom and Bondage in the English Tradition
3. The Concept of Slavery
4. The Practices of Portingals and Spanyards
5. Enslavement: The West Indies
6. Enslavement: New England
7. Enslavement: Virginia and Maryland
8. Enslavement: New York and the Carolinas
9. The Un-English: Scots, Irish, and Indians
10. Racial Slavery: From Reasons to Rational

Part Two. PROVINCIAL DECADES 1700-1755
III. Anxious Oppressors: Freedom and Control in a Slave Society

1. Demographic Configurations in the Colonies
2. Slavery and the Senses of the Laws
3. Slave Rebelliousness and the White Mastery
4. Free Negroes and Fears of Freedom
5. Racial Slavery in a Free Society

IV. Fruits of Passion: The Dynamics of Interracial Sex

1. Regional Styles in Racial Intermixture
2. Masculine and Feminine Modes in Carolina and America
3. Negro Sexuality and Slave Insurrection
4. Dismemberment, Physiology, and Sexual Perceptions
5. The Secularization of Reproduction
6. Mulatto Offspring in a Biracial Society

V. The Souls of Men: The Negro’s Spiritual Nature

1. Christian Principles and the Failure of Conversion
2. The Question of Negro Capacity
3. Spiritual Equality and Temporal Subordination
4. The Thin Edge of Antislavery
5. Inclusion and Exclusion in the Protestant Churches
6. Religious Revivial and the Impact of Conversion

VI. The Bodies of Men: The Negro’s Physical Nature

1. Confusion, Order and Hierarchy
2. Negroes, Apes, and Beasts
3. Rational Science and Irrational Logic
4. Indians, Africans, and the Complexion of Man
5. The Valuation of Color
6. Negroes Under the Skin

Part Three. THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA 1755-1783
VII. Self-Scrutiny in the Revolutionary Era

1. Quaker Conscience and Consciousness
2. The Discovery of Prejudice
3. Assertions of Sameness
4. Environmentalism and Revolutionary Ideology
5. The Secularization of Equality
6. The Proslavery Case of Negro Inferiority
7. The Revolution as Turning Point

Pt. 4 SOCIETY AND THOUGHT 1783-1812
VIII. The Imperatives of Economic Interest and National Identity

1. The Economics of Slavery
2. Union and Sectionalism
3. A National Forum for Debate
4. Nationhood and Identity
5. Non-English Englishment

IX. The Limitations of Antislavery

1. The Pattern of Antislavry
2. The Failings of Revolutionary Ideology
3. The Quaker View Beyond Emancipation
4. Religious Equalitarianism
5. Humanitarianism and Sentimentality
6. The Success and Failure of Antislavery

X. The Cancer of Revolution

1. St. Domingo
2. Non-Importation of Rebellion
3. The Contagion of Liberty
4. Slave Disobedience in America
5. The Impact of Negro Revolt

XI. The Resulting Pattern of Separation

1. The Hardening of Slavery
2. Restraint of Free Negroes
3. The Walls of Separation
4. Negro Churches

Part Five THOUGH AND SOCIETY 1783-1812
XII. Thomas Jefferson: Self and Society

1. Jefferson: The Tyranny of Slavery
2. Jefferson: The Assertion of Negro Inferiority
3. The Issue of Intellect
4. The Acclaim of Talented Negroes
5. Jefferson: Passionate Realities
6. Jefferson: White Women and Black
7. Interracial Sex: The Individual and His Society
8. Jefferson: A Dichotomous View of Triracial America

XIII. The Negro Bound by the Chain of Being

1. Linnaean Categories and the Chain of Being
2. Two Modes of Equality
3. The Hierarchies of Men
4. Anatomical Investigations
5. Unlinking and Linking the Chain
6. Faithful Philosophy in Defense of Human Unity
7. The Study of Man in the Republic

XIV. Erasing Nature’s Stamp of Color

1. Nature’s Blackball
2. The Effects of Climate and Civilization
3. The Disease of Color
4. White Negroes
5. The Logic of Blackness and Inner Similarity
6. The Winds of Change
7. An End of Environmentalism
8. Persistent Themes

XV. Toward a White Man’s Country

1. The Emancipation and Intermixture
2. The Beginning of Colonization
3. The Virginia Program
4. Insurrection and Expatriation in Virginia
5. The Meaning of Negro Removal

XVI. Exodus

Note on the Concept of Race
Essay on Sources
Select List of Full Titles
Map: Percentage of Negroes in Total Non-Aboriginal Population, 1790
Index