Mixed Race Studies

African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens

University of North Carolina Press
July 2008
376 pages
5.5 x 8.5, 6 illus., 8 maps
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3203-5
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8078-5883-7

Celia E. Naylor, Associate Professor of History
Dartmouth College

Forcibly removed from their homes in the late 1830s, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Indians brought their African-descended slaves with them along the Trail of Tears and resettled in Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. Celia E. Naylor vividly charts the experiences of enslaved and free African Cherokees from the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma’s entry into the Union in 1907. Carefully extracting the voices of former slaves from interviews and mining a range of sources in Oklahoma, she creates an engaging narrative of the composite lives of African Cherokees. Naylor explores how slaves connected with Indian communities not only through Indian customs—language, clothing, and food—but also through bonds of kinship.

Examining this intricate and emotionally charged history, Naylor demonstrates that the “red over black” relationship was no more benign than “white over black.” She presents new angles to traditional understandings of slave resistance and counters previous romanticized ideas of slavery in the Cherokee Nation. She also challenges contemporary racial and cultural conceptions of African-descended people in the United States. Naylor reveals how black Cherokee identities evolved reflecting complex notions about race, culture, “blood,” kinship, and nationality. Indeed, Cherokee freedpeople’s struggle for recognition and equal rights that began in the nineteenth century continues even today in Oklahoma.

The relationship between the ‘racial’ experiences of the ‘half Japanese’ and Japanese identity/racial discourse: The process of ‘othering’

2008
58 pages

Marcia Yumi Lise

People of mixed heritage in Japan, often referred to as Hafu, are often subject to ethnic/racial hurdles in Japan. The distinct Japanese racial thinking and the monoethnic myth affect the ways in which Hafus are considered in Japanese society. It is often difficult for Hafus to be considered ‘ordinary’ Japanese regardless of their Japanese upbringing.

Through a qualitative research methodology, this study sets out to explore and address the issues of ‘othering’ experienced by Hafus in Japan and examine the ways in which Japanese racial thinking affects their position in society and their sense of belonging from the point of view of the Hafus.

Read the entire thesis here.

Our obsession with classification: What are the implications to mixed race studies?

2009-02-11
3 pages

Marcia Yumi Lise

Whether it is by gender, sex, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, age, or nationality, in contemporary society, we are immensely preoccupied by classifying people into categories. Social scientists collect and produce data to utilise it for analysis. We hold passports or identity cards (of some sort), which specify one’s nationality, gender, name, date of birth, place of birth etc. When taking up employment we are asked to fill in an ethnic monitoring form. What’s interesting is that in England for example the Domesday Survey is said to have started nearly 1,000 years ago (The National Archives). Objectification manifests everywhere in our world now.

…What does all this mean to the study of mixed race people and identities? When we speak of mixed race people, we are constantly drawing lines between different ethnicities, races, nationalities, heritages, or cultures to allow us to define “mixed race”. Academics have often stated that ‘mixed race’ people challenge existing classifications based on the aforementioned criterias. For instance, a Japanese and British individual instantly confronts conventional racial/national/ethnic/cultural classification. However we adjust to work in line with and make do with existing classification system. Recall how the concept of ‘race’ is ungrounded however. In this light the objectification of people using the criteria of ‘race’ is misleading…

Read the entire essay here.

Rethinking race at the Students of Color Dinner

University of Buffalo Law Links
University of Buffalo Law School
April 2010

On the day that civil rights icon Benjamin Hooks passed away, UB Law School’s 21st annual Students of Color Dinner took stock of the nation’s state of race relations – and celebrated achievements that transcended race and culture.

The April 15 dinner, held at the Buffalo Niagara Marriott, featured as keynote speaker UB Law Associate Professor Rick Su, who teaches and writes mostly in the areas of immigration and local government law. His remarks looked at the idea of America as a “post-racial society,” and he began with the news that President Obama, the son of a white mother and a Kenyan father, checked a single box on his 2010 Census form, indicating that he was “black, African-American or Negro.”

“Our racial history has always been very complicated,” Su said. “What is interesting is the fact that the Census had choosing to identify as mixed race as an option. Until 2000, the option of selecting mixed race was unavailable…

Read the entire article here.

‘If You Can’t Pronounce My Name, You Can Just Call Me Pride’: Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop

Gender & History
Volume 15 Issue 3 (November 2003)
Pages 460 – 486
DOI: 10.1111/j.0953-5233.2003.00316.x

Fatima El-Tayeb, Assistant Professor of African-American Literature and Culture
University of California, San Diego

The history of the black German minority, now estimated at around 500,000, goes back several centuries. It is only since the twentieth century, however, that Germans of African descent have been perceived as a group. This did not lead to their recognition as a national minority, but rather, from the 1910s to the 1960s, they were defined as a collective threat to Germany’s racial and cultural ‘purity’. When a sense of identity emerged among Afro-Germans themselves in the 1980s, the majority population continued to deny the existence of ethnic diversity within German society. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Afro-Germans seemingly suddenly appeared as a new, ‘hip’ minority. This appearance was largely focused on the immense public success of the Hip Hop collective ‘Brothers Keepers’, conceived as an anti-racist, explicitly Afro-German intervention into German debates around national identity and racist violence. This article explains the success of ‘Brothers Keepers’ by contextualising it within the tradition of two decades of Afro-German feminist activism and the transnational Hip Hop movement of European youth of colour.

Read or purchase the article here.

Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out

Orlanda Frauenverlag (German)
1986
University of Massachusetts Press (English)
1992
ISBN: 0-87023-759-4
Likely out of print.

Edited by

May Opitz [Ayim]
Katharina Oguntoye
Dagmar Schultz

Translated by Anne V. Adams

Foreword by Audre Lorde

May Ayim: A Woman in the Margin of German Society

The Florida State University College of Arts and Scienes
Spring Semester, 2005
76 pages

Margaret MacCarroll, Professor of Modern Languages: German Division
Florida State University

A thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

This work explores the life of the Afro-German writer May Ayim by analyzing her writings as well as by discussing the social circumstances in which she lived. Chapter 1 provides a look at the Ayim’s life, with special emphasis on major factors influencing her childhood. The effects of the personal as well as social pressures that Ayim dealt with as a child and young adult are also discussed. Chapter 2 focuses on the history of Afro-German children born shortly after World War II. Chapter 3 includes an explanation of Minor Literature and an examination of May Ayim as an author of such literature. Her importance as such is established. Due to Ayim’s position outside the mainstream of German society, social factors that greatly affected her life as a result of this situation are discussed in Chapter 4. These factors are: identity, culture, and ethnicity. In Chapter 5 Ayim’s attempts to incorporate both the white and black aspects of herself despite the deeply rooted history of racism in Germany are also discussed. Chapter 6 includes an examination of the toll that Ayim’s familial and social experiences played on her feelings of romantic love, especially toward another Afro-German. Chapter 7 examines the exhaustion that Ayim felt toward the end of her life.

Table of Contents

ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION

1. GROWING UP BLACK IN GERMANY
    Ayim’s Struggle with “Otherness“
    Childhood Pressure
    The White World and Ayim’s Black Father
    Grasping her Africanness
    Desire for Whiteness even in Africa

2. HISTORY OF RACISM IN GERMANY
    Recent History of Racism and Mischlingskinder after World War II

3. MAY AYIM, AUTHOR OF MINOR LITERATURE
    The Afro-German Minority Represented in Ayim’s Poetry

4. THE IDENTITY, CULTURE AND ETHNICITY OF PEOPLE ON THE FRINGES

5. MINOR RACE IN MAJORITY CULTURE
    Racism on the Global Scale
    Incorporating Her White and Black Self

6. MAY AYIM’S LOVE LIFE

7. AYIM’S EXHAUSTION ON THE FRINGE OF SOCIETY

CONCLUSION
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Read the entire thesis here.