Mixed Race Studies

The Eurasians of Indonesia: A Problem and Challenge in Colonial History

Journal of Southeast Asian History
Volume 9, Issue 2 (1968)
pages 191-207
DOI: 10.1017/S021778110000466X

Paul W. van der Veur, Professor of History
Australian National University

Persons of mixed European and Asian parentage appeared in the Indonesian archipelago shortly after the arrival of the first “Westerners” in the sixteenth century. Although most of them were absorbed by the indigenous population, some were not and came to constitute a separate, identifiable group. The main reason, apart from paternal pride, seems to have been religious. Christianity, especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, encouraged a strong feeling of responsibility toward the biracial offspring of non-European women. A moral obligation was felt to baptize the child and give it the name of the father. Legal rules and regulations facilitated the process: the European father, for example, could “recognize” his natural child by a non-European woman, adopt it, or request a “Letter of legitimation”. Possession of “the status of European” in the nineteenth century permitted persons of mixed descent to benefit educationally from the rapid expansion of “European” (i.e. Dutch) schools. Finally, the Dutch nationality law of 1892—based squarely on the jus sanguinis principle—contained the crucial provision that all those who were considered Europeans when the act came into force (July 1, 1893)—including those who were legally assimilated and socially a part of the European group—became Dutch citizens.

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Brief History: Loving Day

Time Magazine
2010-06-11

Christopher Shay

In February 1961, Barack Obama’s parents did something that was illegal in 22 states and that 96% of the population disapproved of: they got married. In fact, interracial marriage, sex and cohabitation would remain illegal in much of the U.S. for another six years. Then on June 12, 1967, in the case Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the country’s anti-miscegenation laws, allowing interracial couples across the country to marry. Thirteen years after Brown v. Board of Education, the court took the last legal teeth out of the Jim Crow era, ridding the U.S. of its last major piece of state-sanctioned segregation. June 12 has since become a grass-roots holiday in the U.S., especially for multiracial couples and families. Known as Loving Day, the celebration commemorates the 1967 case and fights prejudice against mixed-race couples, and is a reason to throw an awesome, inclusive party…

Read the entire article here.

The “One Drop Rule” revisited: Mary Ann McQueen of Montgomery County, North Carolina

Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners
2010-12-21

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Many people, perhaps most, think of “race” as an objective reality. Historically, however, racial categorization has been unstable, contradictory, and arbitrary. Consider the term “passing.” Most of us immediately picture a light-skinned person who is “hiding” their African ancestry. Many would go further and accuse that person of denying their “real” racial identity. Yet few people would accuse a dark-skinned person who has an Anglo ancestor of trying to pass for “black,” and thereby denying their “true” Anglo roots!

So why is a white person with an African ancestor presumed to be “really” black? In fact, in this day of DNA testing, it’s become increasingly clear that many more white-identified people have a “drop” or two of African ancestry than most ever imagined. Are lots of white folks (or are they black?) “passing,” then, without even knowing it?

Having said all that, I’d like to provide some historical examples of the shifting and arbitrary nature of racial categorization. Those familiar with Newt Knight already know about the 1948 miscegenation trial of his great-grandson, Davis Knight. According to the “one drop rule” of race, Davis was a black man by virtue of having a multiracial great-grandmother (Rachel Knight). Yet, social custom and the law differed. One was legally “white” in Mississippi if one had one-eighth or less African ancestry, and Davis eventually went free on that legal ground…

…In 1884, Mary Ann McQueen, a young white woman about 33 years old, was suspected of having “black” blood. So strong were these suspicions that her mother, who had always been accepted as white, swore out a deed in the Montgomery County Court that “solemnly” proclaimed her daughter to be “purely white and clear of an African blood whatsoever.” But why did suspicions about the “purity” of Mary Ann McQueen’s “blood” arise in the first place?…

Read the entire essay here.

Mixing Races: From Scientific Racism to Modern Evolutionary Ideas

Johns Hopkins University Press
December 2010
136 pages
14 halftones
Hardback ISBN: 9780801898129
Paperback ISBN: 9780801898136

Paul Lawrence Farber, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Modern Life Sciences, Intellectual History
Oregon State University

This book explores changing American views of race mixing in the twentieth century, showing how new scientific ideas transformed accepted notions of race and how those ideas played out on college campuses in the 1960s.

In the 1930s it was not unusual for medical experts to caution against miscegenation, or race mixing, espousing the common opinion that it would produce biologically dysfunctional offspring. By the 1960s the scientific community roundly refuted this theory. Paul Lawrence Farber traces this revolutionary shift in scientific thought, explaining how developments in modern population biology, genetics, and anthropology proved that opposition to race mixing was a social prejudice with no justification in scientific knowledge.

In the 1960s, this new knowledge helped to change attitudes toward race and discrimination, especially among college students. Their embrace of social integration caused tension on campuses across the country. Students rebelled against administrative interference in their private lives, and university regulations against interracial dating became a flashpoint in the campus revolts that revolutionized American educational institutions.

Farber’s provocative study is a personal one, featuring interviews with mixed-race couples and stories from the author’s student years at the University of Pittsburgh. As such, Mixing Races offers a unique perspective on how contentious debates taking place on college campuses reflected radical shifts in race relations in the larger society.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. A Mixed-Race Couple in the 1960
• 2. Scientific Ideas on Race Mixing
• 3. Challenges to Opinions on race Mixing
• 4. The Modern Synthesis
• 5. The Modern Synthesis Meets Physical Anthropology and Legal Opinion
• 6. University Campuses in the 1960s
• 7. Science, “Race,” and “Race Mixing” Today
• Epilogue
• Suggested Further Reading
• Index

who and what you are

Contexts
Volume 8, Number 4 (Fall 2009)
Pages 64–65
DOI: 10.1525/ctx.2009.8.4.64

Sangyoub Park, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Washburn University

Barack Obama’s presidency and changes in how the U.S. Census tracks race underline the importance of the social construction of race and ethnicity in the United States. Changes in our racial landscape, including increases in interracial marriage and childbearing, pose intriguing questions about how future generations will respond to the growth of multiracial identities.

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The development of memory for own- and other-race faces

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
Volume 98, Issue 4 (December 2007)
pages 233–242
DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2007.08.004

Gail S. Goodman
Department of Psychology
University of California, Davis
University of Oslo

Liat Sayfan
Department of Psychology
University of California, Davis

Jennifer S. Lee
Department of Psychology
Cabrillo College, Aptos, California

Marianne Sandhei
University of Oslo

Anita Walle-Olsen
University of Oslo

Svein Magnussen
University of Oslo

Kathy Pezdek
Department of Psychology
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California

Patricia Arredondo
Department of Psychology
California State University, Los Angeles

This study demonstrates that experience and development interact to influence the ‘‘cross-race effect.’’ In a multination study (n = 245), Caucasian children and adults of European ancestry living in the United States, Norway, or South Africa, as well as biracial (Caucasian–African American) children and adults living in the United States, were tested for recognition of Asian, African, and Caucasian faces. Regardless of national or biracial background, 8- to 10-year-olds, 12- to 14-year-olds, and adults recognized own-race faces more accurately than other-race faces, and did so to a similar extent, whereas 5- to 7-year-olds recognized all face types equally well. This same developmental pattern emerged for biracial children and adults. Thus, early meaningful exposure did not substantially alter the developmental trajectory. During young childhood, developmental influences on face processing operate on a system sufficiently plastic to preclude, under certain conditions, the cross-race effect.

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Performing Miscegenation: Rescuing The White Slave from the Threat of Interracial Desire

Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (ISSN 0888-3203)
Volume 13, Number 1 (Fall 1998)
pages 71-86

Diana R. Paulin, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut

This examination of Bartley Campbell’s 1882 play, The White Slave, emerges out of a comprehensive study of the way in which representations of black/white unions in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century U.S. drama and fiction invoke anxieties about the impact of interracial contact, while simultaneously rehearsing the multiple possibilities of these transgressive relationships. Because of the way in which black/white, or interracial, intimate alliances have symbolized both explicit acts of racial transgression in and of themselves and implicit threats to essentialized racial categories, their representation creates space for complex readings of these racial identities. In fact, the ambivalent and liminal space in which interracial desire is most frequently represented does not merely complicate race, it provides a place for more productive and multivalent articulations of black and white subjectivities. Campbell’s play offers a useful site for exploring these issues because of the way in which it complicates black and white by “playing out” the possibility of an erotic cross-racial relationship. At the same time, through a multitude of complex plot twists and unexpected revelations, the logic of play’s narrative undermines the legitimacy of interracial unions and, thereby, helps to minimize their disruptive potential. By using the explosive and contested space of the play’s narrative, this reading helps to foreground moments in the past when blackness and whiteness are destabilized in a manner that reinforces current anti-essentialist debates about race and identity.

My reading of The White Slave suggests the way in which the play engages in multiple racial performances and depicts race in performative terms. That is to say that the play produces an interracial union that is part of a broader performance—a performance of multiple articulated racial subjectivities, of miscegenation, of hierarchical power relations—that simultaneously challenges and reinforces what it attempts to represent. The contradictions produced by these cross purposes demonstrate the ambivalence that usually characterizes depictions of interracial unions. For, while most portrayals of cross-racial relationships indicate that they will fail, they also leave many of the conflicting issues and possibilities generated by the union unresolved and unexplored. This ambiguity not only complicates these representations of intimate black/white relations, it also provides a starting point for rearticulating the complexity of racial identities that are, more often than not, defined in opposition to each other…

…Historicizing Miscegenation

The word miscegenation—a derogatory term for cross-racial sexual relations—was popularized in the United States by pro-slavery journalist David Croly in 1863. His inflammatory pamphlet, “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the White Man and the Negro,” intentionally played on the fears of many white Americans by disingenuously advocating interracial marriage and by suggesting that mixed races were superior to “pure” ones. Although cross-racial unions were not new and sexual relations between white planters and their black slaves were tenuously accepted as one of the unfortunate evils of slavery, this sensational document stirred up many anxieties about the negative effects of black and white sexual contact…

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“A blood mixture which experience has shown furnishes the very highest grade of citizen-material”: Selective Assimilation in a Polynesian Case of Naturalization to U.S. Citzenship

American Studies (ISSN: ISSN 0026-3079)
Volume 45, Number 3 (Fall 2004)
pages 33-48

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Associate Professor of American Studies and Anthropology
Wesleyan University

On the 11th of July, 1928, the front page of the Honolulu Pacific Advertiser read: “75 per cent white blood satisfies U.S.” The article reported what seems to be the landmark decision of U.S. District Court Judge William Lymer to allow a racially mixed Pacific Islander—Alfred Milner Stephen—to naturalize to U.S. citizenship. While the discussion focused on naturalization and citizenship, in Stephen’s case, blood racialization also played a key role. By blood quantum logic, Stephen was identified as three-quarters English and one-quarter Polynesian, the latter inherited from his mother, who was referred to as “half English and half Polynesian.” Judge Lymer argued that Stephen’s “predominance” of “white blood” qualified him for citizenship.

In 1790, when Congress passed a law to establish a uniform standard for naturalization—the Nationality Act—it was limited to “all free white persons.” Although Congress amended the Nationality Act in 1870, it did so only to conform to the intent of the Reconstruction amendments by expanding eligibility for naturalization only to “aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent” (Ancheta 1998, 23). Judge Lymer, who made clear that he was determining whether Stephen was a “white person” within the meaning of the 1870 nationality law, made him, in the words of Ian Haney Lopez, “white by law” (1996)…

…However, the justifications for racial prerequisites changed. For over thirty years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries courts assumed that scientific evidence and common knowledge were consistent in defining who was “white.” But, as contradictions between scientific evidence and common knowledge became more pronounced (e.g. as when anthropologists classified some dark-skinned people as Caucasians), courts increasingly came to rely on common knowledge justifications alone (Lopez 1996, 7).

The Stephen case revealed the confusion surrounding the “scientific” and “common knowledge” definitions of whiteness. In petitioning for naturalization, Stephen was challenging longstanding legal precedent based on “scientific evidence” and “common knowledge,” but, as courts increasingly relied on the latter, it became apparent that the two definitions could no longer be reconciled. Judge Lymer reflected this problem when he remarked that the Stephen case was the first time a federal court had considered status of a person with “more than half white blood” and “less than one half Polynesian, Malay, or Oriental blood.” The Stephen case reveals the complicated intersections of race and nation in early twentieth-century American culture.

This essay discusses the rationales that guided the judge’s decision. It was the “predominance” of whiteness mixed with Stephen’s “Polynesian blood” that made the difference in the court’s decision. But that factor alone did not motivate Judge Lymer’s decision. Pervasive notions about the potential for Hawaiians to assimilate and to fulfill the requirements of American citizenship were also crucial in this ruling. Although the court recognized Stephen as Polynesian, it deemed him white enough to become American. Stephen could be de-racialized as a legal subject in the courtroom because of racial logic that assumed the easy assimilation of Polynesians based on the historical treatment of racially mixed Hawaiians. Hawaiians and some other Pacific Islanders—in this case Stephen was identified as a Polynesian who came from “Neuru Island”—were inconsistently incorporated into whiteness through a process of selective assimilation. That is, they were selectively incorporated as whites when racially mixed (depending on degree), where white “blood”—in relation to indigenous “blood”—has been figured as a solvent…

Read the entire article here.

CU group promoting multiracial experience wins ’02 Perkins Prize

The Cornell Chronicle
Cornell University
2002-04-02

A Cornell campus organization that promotes and celebrates the multiracial experience at the university and in the Ithaca community will be the recipient of the 2002 James A. Perkins Prize for Interracial Understanding and Harmony.

The group BLEND (Bi-/Multiracial Lineages, Ethnicities and Nationalities Discussion) and its founder and president, Cornell senior Tamika Lewis, will be presented with the eighth annual Perkins Prize, including an award of $5,000, by Cornell President Hunter Rawlings during a ceremony Tuesday, April 9, at 4:15 p.m. in the Memorial Room of Willard Straight Hall on campus.

Also awarded will be two finalists for the prize: Salah Hassan, associate professor of Africana studies and chair of the Department of History of Art, for his organization of the 2001 Blackness in Color Art Exhibition at Cornell’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art; and the seminar series “Leadership, Management and Diversity in Corporate America” and the course “Diversity and Inclusion in Organizations,” developed by Quinetta Roberson, assistant professor in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. The two finalists each will be awarded cash prizes of $1,000.

BLEND, which was founded by Lewis in the fall semester of 2001, focuses on issues involved with being of mixed-racial background. The organization has hosted a film series at Robert Purcell Community Center, showing films about interracial relationships; co-sponsored with the Cornell Filipino Association a lecture by Melissa Howard of MTV’s The Real World, titled “The ‘Real’ Story on Ethnic Identity”; and also participated in the Anti-Racism Teach-In on campus Nov. 11, presenting a workshop on the mixed-race experience. BLEND also coordinated a program with the Greater Ithaca Activities Center and Beverly J. Martin Elementary School in Ithaca titled MIRAR (Multicultural Initiative for Racial Awareness through Reading). The program’s goals are to foster racial awareness in children and, in the process, hone their reading skills by using books that incorporate multiracial, interracial and multicultural themes. In the spring semester, BLEND brought an award-winning photo-text exhibit to Cornell titled “Of Many Colors: Portraits of Multiracial Families.”…

Read the entire article here.