Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America [Review: Diner]

American Historical Review
Volume 96, Number 2 (April 1991)
pages 624-625

Hasia R. Diner, Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History; Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies
New York University

Paul R. Spickard. Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1989. Pp. xii, 532 pages.

Paul R. Spickard has performed a tremendous service to historians and other students of ethnicity in writing this study of the historic patterns and changing meaning of out-group marriage. In focusing on the experiences of those Japanese Americans, American Jews, and African Americans who chose to wed nongroup members, and conversely on the experiences of white, Christian Americans as they took spouses from these three minority groups, the author seeks to link social structure and cultural constructs as explanations for particular patterns.

Spickard ought to be credited for authoring the first serious historical hook on the subject and for taking this extremely important topic out of the sole domain of sociologists, who are eager to build models and are therefore oblivious to subtleties of time and place. Indeed, the sociological generalizations about who has intermarried and why provides Spickard with the departure point for this analysis. He ultimately tests the extant models and asks which ones work under which circumstances. No historian before has tackled this issue, and, where they have attempted to address it, they have subsumed it under the rubric of a study of one group without any benefit of comparative analysis. The fact, for example, that intermarriage rates and patterns for Americans of Japanese ancestry and Jews resemble one another discounts, according to Spickard, the importance attributable to color and physical appearance as a barrier to romance across group lines. On the other hand, among African Americans and Jews the dominant pattern of minority-group men marrying majority-group women—rather than conversely—indicates that out-group marriage patterns can, under certain circumstances, be linked to social and economic mobility.

This study also takes the issue of intermarriage out of the hands of group activists, leaders, and apologists who are concerned about the implications of intermarriage rates for group solidarity. By offering a dispassionate and comparative study of the topic, analyzed historically and oriented toward looking for change over time, Spickard adds a note of clearheaded rationality to an otherwise intensely emotional subject. He convincingly proves that marriage outside the group does not always mean a loss to the group or a severing of the bonds between the out-marner and the community of his or her birth. Intermarriage, according to Spickard, has different meanings under varying circumstances. Spickard in no place denigrates the passionate feelings of group members worried about intermarriage or its implications for ethnic cohesion; he offers instead an alternative, cooler way of looking at the issues.

In several other ways, this book ought to be commended and recommended. For one, he treats the issue in its complexity rather than simplicity. To really study intermarriage, the scholar must recognize that members of two groups are involved, and the behavior and attitudes of both are crucial to a thorough analysis. Second, marriage involves both genders, and a study that does not take cognizance of differences in attitude, expectations, and social positions of men and women would not adequately cover the problem. But Spickard addresses these issues and provides historians of ethnicity, gender, and race with a thoroughly researched, sophisticated analysis that should displace the usual sociologically based, model-oriented generalizations that have dominated the field.

Cosmopolitan or mongrel? Créolité, hybridity and ‘douglarisation’ in Trinidad

European Journal of Cultural Studies
Volume 2, Number 3 (September 1999)
pages 331-353
DOI: 10.1177/136754949900200303

Eve Stoddard, Dana Professor of Global Studies
St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York

Grant H. Cornwell, President
College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio

The article examines a Trinidadian calypso and its reception as a case study to weigh the discourses of hybridity, creolisation, and a local variant, ‘douglarisation’. In cultural studies discourse, ‘creolisation’ is often used synonymously with hybridization. However, it is a different metaphor, with a different genealogy, and is much more grounded in specific histories and places, namely the New World sites of plantation slavery. In Trinidad, the pejorative term ‘dougla‘ sigmfies the offspring of a union between persons of African and Indian ancestry, while ‘douglarisation’ denotes the contested processes of Afro- and Indo-Trinidadian interculturation. ‘Douglarisation’ can be read as a particular instance of both hybridity and creolisation, but with very different implications. We argue that hybridity and creolisation advance different political agendas, the former attentive to multiple roots and the latter to new connections.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Invisible Line Between Black and White

Smithsonian.com
2011-02-18

T. A. Frail

Vanderbilt professor Daniel Sharfstein discusses the history of the imprecise definition of race in America

For much of their history, Americans dealt with racial differences by drawing a strict line between white people and black people. But Daniel J. Sharfstein, an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University, notes that even while racial categories were rigidly defined, they were also flexibly understood—and the color line was more porous than it might seem. His new book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, traces the experience of three families—the Gibsons, the Spencers and the Walls—beginning in the 17th century. Smithsonian magazine’s T.A. Frail spoke with Sharfstein about his new book:

People might assume that those who crossed the line from black to white had to cover their tracks pretty thoroughly, which would certainly complicate any research into their backgrounds. But does that assumption hold?

That’s the typical account of passing for white—that it involved wholesale masquerade. But what I found was, plenty of people became recognized as white in areas where their families were well known and had lived for generations, and many could cross the line even when they looked different. Many Southern communities accepted individuals even when they knew those individuals were racially ambiguous—and that happened even while those communities supported slavery, segregation and very hard-line definitions of race.

So how did you find the three families you wrote about?

It was a long process. I began by trying to find as many of these families as I could in the historical record. That involved reading a lot of histories and memoirs, and then moving from there to dozens and dozens of court cases where courts had to determine whether people were black or white, and from there to property records and census records and draft records and newspaper accounts. And I developed a list of dozens, even hundreds of families that I could be writing about, and then narrowed it down. The three families that I chose represent the diversity of this process of crossing the color line and assimilating into white communities. I chose families that lived in different parts of the South that became white at different points in American history and from different social positions.

And how did those families come to know about their ancestry?

For many generations, members of these three families tried to forget that they had ever been African-American—and yet when I traced the families to the present and began contacting the descendants almost everyone I contacted knew about their history. It seems that the secrets of many generations are no match for the Internet. In many families, people would talk about going to the library and seeing that it had, say, a searchable 1850 census. One woman described the experience of typing in her great-grandfather’s name, finding him, and then having to call over the librarian to go through the handwritten enumeration form with her—she had to ask the librarian what “MUL” meant, not knowing it meant he was mulatto, or of mixed race. Every family seemed to have a story like this…

Read the entire article here.

A Chat with Kat: Marissa Hui, President of HapaSC

Her Campus
2011-02-28

Katharine Goldman

I remember clearly the first time someone used the term “hapa”: I was a freshman, waiting for Campus Cruiser in front of New/North, when a random guy asked me if I was hapa.

Not knowing what it meant, I asked for a clarification. He told me that hapa is Hawaiian for half—it’s traditionally used as a term to refer to people who are half-Asian and half-Caucasian.

Marissa Hui, a senior communications major, knows the intricacies of this term well. She’s the president of HapaSC, an organization on-campus [University of Southen California] dedicated to exploring what it means to be of mixed race, and the exploration of identity that comes with the territory.

HC: Tell me about HapaSC.

Marissa: HapaSC has been around campus for about 10 years. It started originally as a club specifically for students that fit the traditional meaning of “hapa:” half-Asian and half-white. Since then, it’s become an all-encompassing club for students of multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural backgrounds.

Our mission is to create a diverse community where people can explore their identity. Specifically we deal with a lot of topics about being mixed raced and try to cater to that student population. Sometimes students who are mixed race don’t identify completely with [single-culture] groups, or want to be able to explore their backgrounds within one group and not have to sacrifice one group for another…

Read the entire article here.

College Essay Part II, Unabridged: The Undergraduate Years

Amherst College
The Amherst Story Project
Fall 2008

Brunnell Velázquez ’11

I enjoy looking at myself in the mirror. Lately, I find that the bathroom mirrors in Morrow dormitory give off the clearest reflections of my gorgeous, most handsome features. Since it is not in my nature to carry a portable mirror, I set a picture of myself as the wallpaper for my computer and my cellular phone. I developed a tradition of attaching photos of myself to thank you notes. All of my friends cannot help but notice my vanity. But I kept telling them that not enough people tell me how beautiful I am! No really!

What they don’t know, however, is that I use the mirror as a means for assurance—to remind myself that I do not look like how people usually perceive me.

I tell my reflection, I don’t get it, Brunnell. You don’t look Black. You’re Latino…

…The worst part is that people just assume that I am African-American. I get so offended; it’s like me being Korean and everyone thinks that I am Chinese. Upon meeting people, I have been asked about relations between the Black and African-American communities. I have been told, “Like wow, you’re, like, the first black guy I’ve met who’s not from Africa.” I have received caustic remarks for not being involved in the Black Student Union. A Jewish peer commented to a white friend of mine that I would get offended if she called me nigger. And he had the audacity to say it in front of me and he knew I was Latino. I apologize if the mentioning of this word offends anyone; just understand that to me it carries no emotional and historical weight…

… It is very hard for me to believe that I am Black because I grew up with a mixed-race family. I have family members (either by blood or marriage) who represent the whole white-black spectrum. Yet, there is the word Dominican that ties us together. I have never noted racism between the lighter ones and the darker ones. I never felt ugly because of my physical features.

Dominicans mix a lot; many cannot be easily categorized by a certain race. For example, my pastor has strong European features but has a kinky hair. A girl in my church is darker than me but has finer features and very fine hair. She looks Indian. Therefore, we transcend race and this is something I value as a Latino. Racially, we belong on the borderline between black and white.

The idea that we, Latinos, could be further categorized is absurd to me. What are White Hispanic and Black Hispanic? A “white” Dominican is never white in the U.S. because his culture and his identification with darker Dominicans “colors” him. A darker Dominican is never Black because he identifies with lighter skin people and because he is usually mixed. Black people seem to have the most problems with me not calling myself Black. Some of them claim I am product of racism. But really I must ask them, who told them that they were Black? I know that many African-Americans come in many skin tones. I look more Black than some of my African-American peers, but I see them as mixed race people. I will not tell them that in their face, but they cannot convince me otherwise. Now, if I were Black, then I would be denying my European roots. Part of being Latino is embracing our racial roots and our mixture because it is reflected in our physical features and our culture. I am now discovering that Black isn’t really a racial identity, but a categorization that people put on to mean “not-white.” Any mark of color means you are Black, which the definition is in of itself racist. So how am I a product of racism? Identifying myself Black for me is an act of defeat to racism. I should not let racists call me something that was never part of my identity…

Read the entire essay here.