Mixed Race Studies

Navigating the Racial Terrain: Blackness and Mixedness in the United States and the Dominican Republic

Transforming Anthropology
Volume 16, Issue 2 (October 2008)
pages 95–111
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-7466.2008.00019.x

Kimberly Eison Simmons, Associate Professor Anthropology & African American Studies
University of South Carolina

In this article, I draw on the experiences of students who participated in the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) Program in Spanish Language and Caribbean Studies, in Santiago, Dominican Republic, from 2000 to 2004, to situate the seemingly conflicting racial projects of the Dominican Republic and the United States. I discuss how, for African Americans and Dominicans, the question of race is actually very similar when it becomes a question of color as Blackness and mixedness are situated processes that encompass ideas of ancestry as well as phenotypic expression in both countries. I argue that racial discourses, and the politics surrounding race and color, for Dominicans in the United States, and African Americans in the Dominican Republic, is very similar because of historical colorization—which I define as intragroup racial and color-naming practices. I suggest that growing interactions between African Americans and Afro-Dominicans, and a growing understanding of race and the racial systems in both the United States and the Dominican Republic, contribute to how identities are being reconstructed. Particularly, African Americans in the Dominican Republic and Dominicans in the United States encounter a racial dilemma—how one is racially defined within a new national context as categories are often based on the state’s own definitions, series of laws, and informal ways of classifying people based on skin color.

Read or purchase the article here.

As We Are Now: Mixblood Essays on Race and Identity

University of California Press
January 1998
282 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520210738

edited by

William S. Penn, Professor of Creative Writing
Michigan State University

The thirteen contributors to As We Are Now invite readers to explore with them the untamed territory of race and mixblood identity in North America. A “mixblood,” according to editor W.S. Penn, recognizes that his or her identity comes not from distinct and separable strains of ancestry but from the sum of the tension and interplay of all his or her ancestral relationships. These first-person narratives cross racial, national, and disciplinary boundaries in a refreshingly experimental approach to writing culture. Their authors call on similar but varied cultural and aesthetic traditions—mostly oral—in order to address some aspect of race and identity about which they feel passionate, and all resist the essentialist point of view. Mixblood Native American, Mestizo/a, and African-American writers focus their discussion on the questions indigenous and minority people ask and the way in which they ask them, clearly merging the singular “I” with the communal “we.” These are new voices in the dialogue of ethnic writers, and they offer a highly original treatment of an important subject.

Table of Contents

Introduction
William S. Penn

Cutting and Pinning Patterns
Erika Aigner-Varoz

Howling at the Moon: The Queer but True Story of My Life as a Hank Williams Song
Craig Womack

Crossing Borders from the Beginning
Alfonso Rodriguez

Knots
Carol Kalafatic

What Part Moon
Inez Petersen

Tradition and the Individual Imitation
William S. Penn

On Mapping and Urban Shamans
Kimberly Blaeser

Race and Mixed-Race: A Personal Tour
Rainier Spencer

Visions in the Four Directions: Five Hundred Years of Resistance and Beyond
Arturo Aldama

Between the Masques
Diane DuBose Brunner

From the Turn of the Century to the New Age: Playing Indian, Past and Present
Shari Huhndorf

Troublemakers
Rolando Romero

Ritchie Valens Is Dead: E Pluribus Unum
Patricia Penn Hilden

Notes on Contributors

Black, White, Light, and Bright: A Narrative of Creole Color

Past Narratives/Narratives Past Graduate Conference
Stanford University, Stanford, California
2001-02-16 through 2001-02-18
20 pages

Christopher N. Matthews, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hofstra University

Much of the world of life is made real through the symbolic application of color, shade, hue, and other features of visual meaning to the physical matter around us. This interplay of light and dark gives shape to form and place to space. This same mode also works discursively allowing forms and spaces to be recognized not only physically but culturally as representations of the social construction of reality. This paper explores this issue by seeing color both in fact and symbol in the development of the Creole cultures of New Orleans. A city steeped in multiple traditions, New Orleans is a spectrum of colors which act out the tensions of past and present. At the root is a conflict between that which is Creole and that which is not. The archaeology here is a story about this story.

Race cannot allow ambiguity, fluidity, or mixture, for it then ceases to refer to something pure, something distinct. The absolute strength of mestizaje is the power it has—by its even being able to be thought—of dissolving race and everything associated with it, ultimately dissolving even itself.

Rainier Spencer, Race and Mixed-Race: A Personal Tour

Introduction: race and color

The discussion of color is simultaneously at the heart of American historical archaeology and left out altogether. Without doubt archaeologies of race and racism, of cultures of alterity framed by these social issues, and the relatively new yet established sub-field of African-American Archaeology are a center of concern and productivity for the field. It goes without saying that these archaeologies are concerned with exploring the dimensions of social life driven by color and the implied social and cultural differences that existed among past people. It is also agreed that because color continues to elicit deep social significance in contemporary society that the search through archaeology for its constructions and expressions carries some extra special resonance for archaeology today.

I contend, however, that historical archaeologists have yet to reveal the depth of meaning behind color differences that their subjects, collaborators, colleagues, institutions, and living social formations represent, struggle with and against, and perhaps too quickly assume. The historical archaeology of race and racism in particular has yet to explicitly consider how race becomes identity, choosing instead to employ racial identities as givens and produce archaeologies of their expression rather than their construction. To work against this, we must not produce archaeologies about race which assume its existence, but archaeologies that explain the material of racing and the materialities of racism (see also Orser 1998, Mullins 1999, Epperson 1999, Matthews et al n.d.)…

…Culture to Race

During this era of Creolization, however, the undoing of Louisiana’s Creole culture was literally born. Issued from the union of natives, settlers, and slaves, “mixedrace” children were regularly born in New Orleans after 1730. Their numbers were not large and to be sure they were not always planned, chosen, nor welcome. Nevertheless, throughout the 18th century their population grew with each decade (Hanger 1997, Bell 1997). A growing population, however, was not their problem. Rather, new influences emerged in Louisiana towards the end of the century that challenged the Creole tradition by redefining Creole in the terms of race….

Read the entire paper here.

The Ethics of Mixed Race Studies

The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
May 2009
215 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3363443
ISBN: 9781109229738

Justin Ponder

Natasha Trethewey talk

Theater Coffman Memorial Union
University of Minnesota
300 Washington Avenue SE
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455
2011-04-27, 19:30-21:00 CDT (Local Time)

Cost: Free

Natasha Trethewey, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing
Emory University

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey talks about her family’s experience on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and how it led to her 2010 book Beyond Katrina (The University of Georgia Press). Trethewey is the author of Native Guard: Poems (2006, Houghton Mifflin), Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000), winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet. She has won Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, among others, and her poems have appeared in several volumes of The Best American Poetry. She is Professor of English, holding the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry, at Emory University. Reception and booksigning to follow

For more information, click here.

In general, the absence of options for multiethnic or multiracial individuals reveals part of the problem in using race as a risk assessment tool: it neglects to account for the extent of genetic variation that underlies the concept of race. Thus, not only does it disregard a number of people who do not fit neatly into any of the given categories, but it may also misgauge the genetic contributions of individuals who do select a specific race or ethnicity with which they identify socially.

Atalie Nitibhon. “Race and health care: problems with using race to classify, assess, and treat patients” (Masters Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, pp 19).

An inhabitant of Africa remarked to Livingstone, that God made the white man, God made the black man, but the devil made the half-castes…

Alfred P. Shultz. Race or mongrel: a brief history of the rise and fall of the ancient races of earth: a theory that the fall of nations is due to intermarriage with alien stocks: a demonstration that a nation’s strength is due to racial purity: a prophecy that America will sink to early decay unless immigration is rigorously restricted. Boston: L. C. Page & Company, 1908), 8.

Nature prevents the development of the mongrel; in the few cases in which nature has for the time being successfully been outraged and a mongrel produced, nature degrades that mongrel mercilessly and in time stamps it out.

Nature suffers no mongrel to live.

Alfred P. Shultz. Race or mongrel: a brief history of the rise and fall of the ancient races of earth: a theory that the fall of nations is due to intermarriage with alien stocks: a demonstration that a nation’s strength is due to racial purity: a prophecy that America will sink to early decay unless immigration is rigorously restricted. (Boston: L. C. Page & Company, 1908), 4.

Minstrel passing: Citizenship, race change, and motherhood in 1850s America

Saint Louis University
2009
116 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3383188
ISBN: 9781109452945

Roshaunda D. Cade, Writing Coordinator, Academic Resource Center
Webster University, St. Louis, Missouri

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Saint Louis University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the egree of Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation explores how mixed race slave mothers in American literature of the mid-Nineteenth Century combine the performances of blackface minstrelsy and racial passing in order to perform minstrel passing and access the freedoms of citizenship. Minstrel passing seeks to gain the advantages of the other through performances of deception, and it gains more liberties for the performer than either passing or minstrelsy do alone. While minstrel passing does not grant freedom, it grants the freedom to behave like and be treated as a citizen. During this era, motherhood defined female citizenship. But instead of solely resigning women to the domestic sphere, motherhood emboldens women to try things they have never done before. For these slave women, motherhood pushes them to seek the benefits of citizenship.

I argue that in the following the texts, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe; Clotel (1853), William Wells Brown; The Bondwoman’s Narrative (2002), Hannah Crafts; Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Mark Twain, these bids for citizenship happen largely through the acts of blackface minstrelsy, racial passing, and minstrel passing. Because these performances privilege self-definition, they become tools in the feminist arsenal of autonomy and create space for feminist citizenship. Each of these novels deals with mixed race slave mothers minstrel passing their way into freedom. Additionally, the complexity of the minstrel passing situations intensifies in each novel, revealing the complicated nature of the mid-Nineteenth Century moment.

The mid-century collision of increasingly confusing racial definitions, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, the emergence of blackface minstrelsy as a national form of entertainment, and the Women’s Rights Movement created a unique atmosphere for American women, black and white. To that end, the 1850s offered a variety of ways for women to accommodate citizenship. I maintain that this era created a space for mixed race slave mothers to perform racial deception, in order to exercise autonomy and define their own spheres, and find the freedom to enjoy the privileges of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness inherent in U.S. citizenship.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: CREATING CITIZENSHIP IN 1850s AMERICA
• CHAPTER 2: CREATING CITIZENSHIP THROUGH MOTHERHOOD, MINSTRELSY, AND PASSING IN HARRIET BEECHER STOWE’S UNCLE TOM’S CABIN
  • Introduction
  • Stowe’s Search for Mother
  • Accidental Feminism
  • Citizenship
  • Eliza, George, and Harry: Minstrel Trio
  • Conclusion
• CHAPTER 3: SECURING LIBERTY AND CITIZENSHIP THROUGH PASSING AND MINSTRELSY IN WILLIAM WELLS BROWN’S CLOTEL
  • Introduction
  • Growing up with Currer
  • Althesa’s Attempts at American Liberty
  • Clotel’s Migration from Black Female Slave to Free White Man
  • Conclusion
• CHAPTER 4: MOTHERHOOD AND DECEPTION AS FREEDOM IN THE BONDWOMAN’S NARRATIVE BY HANNAH CRAFTS
  • Introduction
  • Searching for Mother
  • White Womanhood
  • Othermothering
  • Little Orphan Hannah
  • Conclusion; or, White Womanhood Revisited
• CHAPTER 5: MULATTA MAMA PERFORMING PASSING AND MIMICKING MINSTRELSY IN MARK TWAIN’S PUDD’NHEAD WILSON
  • Introduction
  • Mark Twain and Motherhood
  • Privilege, Citizenship, and Race
  • Roxy as Racial Passer
  • Roxy as Blackface Minstrel
  • Conclusion
• CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION: MINSTREL PASSING INTO AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP
• Works Cited
• Vita Auctoris

Purchase the dissertation here.

Census Bureau Reports Final 2010 Census Data for the United States

United States Census Bureau
Census 2010
2011-03-24

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that 2010 Census population totals and demographic characteristics have been released for communities in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. These data have provided the first look at population counts for small areas and race, Hispanic origin, voting age and housing unit data released from the 2010 Census. With the release of data for all the states, national-level counts of these characteristics are now available.

For each state, the Census Bureau will provide summaries of population totals, as well as data on race, Hispanic origin and voting age for multiple geographies within the state, such as census blocks, tracts, voting districts, cities, counties and school districts.

According to Public Law 94-171, the Census Bureau must provide redistricting data to the 50 states no later than April 1 of the year following the census. As a result, the Census Bureau is delivering the data state-by-state on a flow basis. All states will receive their data by April 1, 2011.

Highlights by Steven F. Riley

• The United States population (for apportionment purposes)  is 308,745,538. This represents a 9.71% increase over 2000.
• The U.S. population including Puerto Rico is 312,471,327.  This represents a 9.55% increase over 2000.
• The number of repondents (excluding Puerto Rico) checking two or more races (TOMR) is 9,009,073 or 2.92% of the population. This represents a 31.98% increase over 2000.
• The number of repondents (including Puerto Rico) checking TOMR is 9,026,389 or 2.89% of the population.  This represents a 29.23% increase over 2000.
• Hawaii has the highest TOMR response rate at 23.57%, followed by Alaska (7.30%), Oklahoma (5.90%) and California (4.87%).
• California has the highest TOMR population at 1,815,384, followed by Texas (679,001), New York (585,849), and Florida (472,577).
• Mississppi has the lowest TOMR response rate at 1.15%, followed by West Virginia (1.46%),  Alabama (1.49%) and Maine (1.58%).
• Vermont has the lowest TOMR population at 10,753, followed by North Dakota (11,853), Wyoming (12,361) and South Dakota (17,283).
• South Carolina has the highest increase in the TOMR response rate at 100.09%, followed by North Carolina (99.69%), Delaware (83.03%) and Georgia (81.71%).
• New Jersey has the lowest increase in the TOMR response rate at 12.42%, followed by California (12.92%), New Mexico (16.11%), and Massachusetts (17.81%).
• Puerto Rico has a 22.83% decrease in the TOMR response rate and New York has a 0.73% decrease in the TOMR response race.  No other states or territories reported decreases.

Tables compiled by Steven F. Riley. Source: United States Census Bureau

Tables compiled by Steven F. Riley.  Source: United States Census Bureau