Mixed Race Studies

Ethnic, Multi-Ethnic, and Nationalist Identity in Belize: Voices of Belizean Children

Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education
Volume 3, Number 1 (Spring 2001)
Theme: International Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity

Sarah Woodbury Haug

This paper discusses ethnicity and nationalism in children in the rural community of Punta Gorda, Belize. Ethnicity and nationalism are important aspects of identity in Belize because of a deliberate government policy to teach about these identities in the schools. My purpose in this paper is to contrast what is taught in schools about ethnicity and nationalism with how children describe their own identities.

Table of Contents

• The Government’s Plan
• Methodology
• Ethnicity in Punta Gorda
• Working in the Schools
• Voices of Ethnically Mixed Children
• Conclusion
• Endnotes
• References

Read the entire article here.

Ethnicity and Ethnically “Mixed” Identity in Belize: A Study of Primary School-Age Children

Anthropology & Education Quarterly
Volume 29, Issue 1 (March 1998)
pages 44–67
DOI: 10.1525/aeq.1998.29.1.44

Sarah Woodbury Haug

This article focuses on the ehtnic identity of children in Belize. Belizean nationalism, as taught in the primary schools, is both pan-ethnic and multiethnic. However, because the increasingly widespread practice of ethnic mixing is unacknowledged, there is a discrepancy between what is taught in school and the daily life of children. This has resulted in a paradox. Whereas the overt intent is to recognize and celebrate difference, the result has been to silence children’s voices.

Teacher: “Everyone here belongs to an ethnic group. You will draw the clothing of your group.”
Mixed Mestizo/Garifuna girl: “What if you are mixed?”
Teacher: “It doesn’t matter if you are mixed… you draw the Creole outfit.”
[Teacher tells four other children of mixed ethnicity which clothing they will draw.]
Anthropologist to teacher: “What ethnic group are you?”
Teacher: “I am mixed with Creole and Spanish but my husband is an East Indian.”
Anthropologist: “What ethnic group do your children belong to?”
Teacher [laughs and waves her hand dismissively]: “They are just mixed.”
Anthropologist: “Oh. What did you do with the mixed children in your class?”
Teacher: “Well, I assigned them to a group.”

This article illuminates the subjective nature of ethnic identification in a nation-state that promotes multiculturalism and ethnic diversity within its borders. The government of Belize supports the cultures of all its ethnic groups and teaches about them in schools as part of its program of nationalism. The scene above illustrates the combination of issues that are involved in locating children of mixed ethnicity within the government’s ethnic framework in Punta Gorda, a small town of 3,500 people on the southern coast. Because ethnic mixing is unacknowledged by the Belizean government and not discussed in schools, there is a great discrepancy between what is taught in the schools, and the daily life of such children. What schools teach and what children understand are not the same. The silence on the part of the government, however, speaks loudly to children as they attempt to place themselves within the ethnic framework of their community and country.

To many adults, not only Punta Gordans, children are reflections of the adult world. They are thought of as simple creatures who absorb all that is taught to them (Jenks 1996:2; Stephens 1996:12), or viewed as a means of measuring the values of society (Ndebele 1996:322). They are not, as Stephens writes, “social actors in their own right, engaged in making sense of and recreating the social worlds they inherit” (1996:23-24). However, my research shows that children clearly are active participants in the construction of their own identity, even if their constructions are not recognized by the adult community and even if children are labeled by adults according to adult needs and perceptions…

Read the entire article here.

Gender, Sexuality and the Formation of Racial Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Caribbean World

Gender & History
Volume 22, Issue 3 (November 2010)
pages 585–602
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2010.01613.x

Brooke N. Newman, John Carter Brown Library Scholar (2010-2011)
University of Oxford

In recent years, scholars have directed considerable attention to the influence of gender relations and sexual practices on developing racial formations in early British America, the colonial Caribbean and the wider British empire. Understanding that unauthorised intimacies in the imperial world threatened notions of Britishness at home has greatly enhanced our knowledge of the complexity and instability of the process of collective identity formation. Building on pioneering research in early American and British imperial history, this article charts the connection between gendered concepts of ‘whiteness’ in Anglo-Caribbean contexts and in metropolitan discourses surrounding British national identity, as articulated in eighteenth-century colonial legislation and official correspondence, popular texts and personal narratives of everyday life. It explores the extent to which the socio-sexual practices of British West Indian whites imperilled the emerging conflation between whiteness and Britishness.

Read or purchase the article here.

History’s most sordid cover-up

New African
February 2004

Stella Orakwue

The history of the former European colonies’ mixed-race populations is one of the world’s biggest hidden scandals. How did these populations come about? We did not miraculously or biblically produce mixed-race babies from thin air. Most of the black women were raped…

…Her children come from the Thurmond family line because Essie Mae Washington (below) has unveiled Strom Thurmond, the American senator famous for having been the country’s leading segregationist,  as her father. Thurmond died last June, aged 100. But in 1948 “Daddy” was very much alive, and kicking out at blacks, coloureds, Negroes, call them what you will. People not as white as he was. People like, as we now know, his daughter…

For black women, it is a horror subject that is almost blindingly difficult to go near. I’m finding this very difficult to write. I hate what I have to think about. But isn’t that why lies prosper, because people find deeply disturbing subjects too hard to discuss honestly? Therefore, the liars and the lies win. And we live our lives in pain without at least knowing what the source is.

Press on. Ask any Westerner whether when they visit North and South America, when they visit Africa—especially Southern Africa—when they visit the Caribbean, whether they think that these regions’ huge numbers of mixed-race and very light-skinned people appeared fully formed from nowhere?

Who originally created these populations of light-skinned people? I know you would think from the acres of trees felled to cover stories about the handful of white women who chose to have sexual relationships with black men during empire days that somehow white women are linked to these communities, but, no, the history of former European colonies’ mixed-race populations has nothing to do with white females.

How did these populations come about then? Let me make it clear for you. They are with us because black women had babies during the empire days whose fathers were white men. But the black women did not get to choose. They were not volunteers. Let us be precise here. Most of the black women who gave birth to those babies were raped by the white men…

Read the entire article here.

Achin surveyed hundreds of biracial adolescents through MySpace and Facebook, personal connections, and random interviews, asking probing personal questions of how they viewed themselves. She found that their responses clustered into five categories of identity: “Monoracials,” who defined themselves predominantly by a primary peer group; “Bidentifiers,” who identify confidently with more than one racial identity; “Sliders,” who were able to identify with whatever group in which they found themselves; “Raceless,” who refused to identify with any race, but prefer race-neutral descriptors such as “American”; and “Partial People,” who identify themselves as half a person, mostly as half-white, rarely as half-black.

Sally Holm, “CAMD Scholars Take On Variety of Complex Racial Issues in MLK Jr. Day Presentations,” Phillips Academy News, January 28, 2008.

Watershed Moment for Critical Mixed Race Studies
 
Laura Kina’s Art Blog
2010-11-14

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

Critical Mixed Race Studies Inaugural Conference

On November 5-6, 2010 DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois hosted the inaugural 2010 Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) conference “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies.” We had over 450 people registered and 430 people actually showed up from all over the U.S. from Hawaii to Tennessee to New York as well as scholars from Canada, Korea, and the UK…

…We want to thank everyone who participated in making CMRS 2010 happen and we are looking forward to the next steps for Critical Mixed Race Studies: founding an association and a peer reviewed online journal; planning for CMRS 2012 at DePaul University and CMRS 2014 (hopefully at the University of Washington); looking for ways us to continue to stay in touch virtually (listserv, dedicated website); and ways to keep the momentum going for CMRS for 2011. There is a lot of work to do and we’ll be sending out the business minutes shortly with ways for you all to get involved…

Read the entire article here.

A Silenced History from Belgian Congo: A Mixed Race History

Afro-Europe International Blog
2010-06-15

Sibo Kano

The Bastards in Our Colony: Hidden Stories of Belgian Metis

You haven’t heard much from me lately. I was writing a book and it’s finally finished and published. The book I wrote together with Kathleen Ghequière traces back a history of Africa and Europe that has been ignored for too much time. Some of you know about the mixed race children of Australia thanks to movies such as ‘Rabbit Proof Fence’ or even Baz Luhrmann’s latest ‘Australia’. But concerning Africa this history is unknown.

It seems as if the European colonizer didn’t have intimate relationships with the African colonized. But many children were born out of relations between white Europeans and black Africans during colonization. These children undermined the racial colonial order with their existence. These children have been hidden and their stories silenced. At least for the Belgian Congo this story is now unveiled and in this book the mixed race children of Belgium and Congo express their history freely…

Read the entire article here.