Mixed Race Studies

Summer Blend Book Club Wraps Up

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2011-08-25

Michel Martin, Host

This series began in June with the help of Heidi Durrow, author and co-founder of the “Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival.” All summer long, Tell Me More has been covering books about the multicultural experience in America. Durrow checks back in with host Michel Martin to discuss the novels in the program’s Summer Blend Book Club.

MICHEL MARTIN, host: As we said earlier, our Summer Blend book series has taken us deep into the experience of the emerging story of mixed-race Americans.

We decided to end where we began, with a conversation with author Heidi Durrow. She is the author of the bestseller “The Girl Who Fell From the Sky.” She cofounded the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival, and she helped us kick off our series back in June. And she joins us once again from NPR West.

Heidi, welcome back. Thanks so much for joining us, and thank you for helping us with the series.

HEIDI DURROW: Thanks for having me back….

Read the transcript here.  Listen to the interview (00:06:30) here, download it here.

The Eastmans and the Luhans: Interracial Marriage between White Women and Native American Men, 1875-1935

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 23, Number 3 (2002)
pages 29-54
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2003.0009

Margaret D. Jacobs, Professor of History & Director, Women’s and Gender Studies
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

At a lavish wedding and reception in New York City in 1891 Elaine Goodale, daughter of a prominent New England family, married Charles Eastman, a member of the Wahpeton band of the Santee Sioux (Dakotas). Writing in her memoirs Elaine declared, “I gave myself wholly in that hour to the traditional duties of wife and mother, abruptly relinquishing all thought of an independent career for the making of a home. At the same time, I embraced with a new and deeper zeal the conception of life-long service to my husband’s people.” Charles, a medical doctor, described himself a few months before their marriage by writing, “I was soon to realize my long dream—to become a complete man! I thought of little else than the good we two could do together.” Both Charles and Elaine were members of a group of reformers who sought to solve the so-called Indian problem through assimilation, and they portrayed their marriage as a natural means to overcome Indian “backwardness” and poverty. The white woman would further uplift her already civilized Dakota husband, and the couple would work diligently to serve his people.

Fifty years later New York socialite Mabel Dodge moved to Taos, New Mexico, with her Russian émigré husband, the painter Maurice Sterne. Mabel soon became entranced with Tony Luhan, a Taos Pueblo Indian. Describing her feelings, Mabel wrote in her memoirs:

I had a strange sense of dislocation, as though I were swinging like a pendulum over the gulf of the canyon, between the two poles of mankind, between Maurice and Tony; and Maurice seemed old and spent and tragic, while Tony was whole and young in the cells of his body, with his power unbroken and hard like the carved granite rock, yet older than the Germanic Russian whom the modern world had destroyed.

Mabel and Tony eventually divorced their respective spouses and married each other in 1923. In this case Mabel saw herself as a bridge between Tony’s people and her own; she envisioned her marriage not as a vehicle by which to uplift and “serve her husband’s people,” but as a means to save her own race from the destruction wrought by the modern world.

The stories of the Eastmans’ and Luhans’ marriages contain all the necessary ingredients for two “racy” novels but they also provide more than voyeuristic romances. As Peggy Pascoe has written, “For scholars interested in the social construction of race, gender, and culture, few subjects are as potentially revealing as the history of interracial marriage.” Both the Eastmans and the Luhans operated at the outer boundaries of American racial norms. Yet, through writing and speaking about their marriages, both couples worked to transform the racial ideologies of their times. Similarly both couples were bound by the gender norms of their respective eras but they also actively reshaped gender and sexual conventions…

…As Pascoe argues, a study of interracial marriage can also yield a greater understanding of the construction of gender norms as well. Just as with the study of race, women’s historians and other feminist theorists have for decades documented the fleeting nature of gender norms and argued that gender is not a fixed set of notions that directly correlates with biological differences between the male and female sex. Many scholars of intermarriage have ignored gender; they have made little distinction between attitudes toward and laws aimed at relationships between white men and nonwhite women and those directed toward unions between white women and nonwhite men.10 But, as a growing number of other historians have shown, American society has had markedly different attitudes toward interracial marriage depending on the gender of the white person involved. In general, interracial relationships between white men of the colonizing, dominant group and nonwhite women of colonized, conquered, and/or enslaved groups have been tolerated. Although laws in many colonies and states forbid interracial marriage between white men and black women, for example, many white slave owners commonly engaged in forced sex, concubinage, and informal relationships with their female slaves without social opprobrium. As we shall see, relationships between white men and Indian women were similarly tolerated within American society. Liaisons between white men and nonwhite women did not violate the hierarchical order that developed between European Americans, African Americans, and American Indians. Rather, they represented extensions and reinforcements of colonialism, conquest, and domination.

As David Fowler, Kathleen Brown, and Martha Hodes have pointed out, however, white Americans were much more threatened by interracial sex and marriage that involved white women and nonwhite men. Where there was a higher incidence of such liaisons, as in Virginia and Maryland, colonies and states were much more likely to pass laws against interracial marriage. When white women and nonwhite men engaged in sexual relationships or married, they violated the colonial, racial, and patriarchal order. Within this order, white men dominated both their daughters and wives as well as groups of subjugated peoples, including American Indians and African Americans. By law, white women were economic, social, and sexual possessions of white men, therefore, a nonwhite man who “possessed” a white woman undermined the gendered and racialized dominance of white men. The children of such unions also threatened the social order, especially since southern colonies had conveniently passed laws establishing that children followed the condition of their mothers. Thus a union between a white woman and a nonwhite man could allow a child of a “Negro” or Indian man to be legally white…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed-Bloods, Mestizas, and Pintos: Race, Gender, and Claims to Whiteness in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It?

Western American Literature
Volume 36, Number 3 (Fall 2001)
pages 212-231

Margaret D. Jacobs, Professor of History & Director, Women’s and Gender Studies
University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Since the 1980s, a growing number of scholars in widely different fields have discredited race as a self-evident category of human social relations. Alongside the work of scientists who have found no genetic or biological basis for racial categorization, critical race theorists have looked to changes in legal definitions of race and citizenship to conclude that race is socially and culturally constructed. Historians have contributed to the field by analyzing the history of Whiteness and the so-called White race. Many groups considered “White” today were once deemed non-White; it was only through renouncing common cause with other stigmatized “races” that certain Americans such as Irish and Jewish immigrants were able to attain White status and privilege. Of course, “choosing” to become White has not been an option for some Americans whose skin color is not light enough to allow them to pass for White. But as George Fredcrickson argues, it is not from color alone that race is constructed. He asserts that “theessential element [in notions of race and racism] is that belief, however justified or rationalized, in the critical importance of differing lines of descent and the use of that belief to establish or validate social inequality”.

The social construction of race played out in myriad spaces: in brightly lit courtrooms and dark bedrooms, in factories and fields, in movie theaters and swimming pools, in classrooms and offices, in fast-moving trains and plodding city buses. The realm of literature as well became a space in which various American sought to envision and enforce their notions of race. The literature of the American West offers a particularly rich bounty of competing constructions of race. Until recently it has been all too common in the fields of both western American literature and western history to study Anglo-Americans’ views of the West and its peoples. A growing number of scholars, however, have challenged the ethnocentrism and cultural hegemony of this approach.

Significantly, though, we are not the first to engage in such a critique of Anglo-Americans’ portrayals of the West. Even as Easterners flooded bookstores and literary journals with their accounts of the West in the nineteenth century, an elite and well-educated Californians, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, penned her own challenge to such representations. In 1872, countering Anglo notions that Californians were a “half barbaric” race who were unfit to govern themselves, to hold property, or to occupy professional positions, Ruiz de Burton published Who Would Have Thought It?, a political satire dressed up as a romance novel. Although written twelve years before one of the most famous Anglo novels about nineteenth-century California, Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, Ruiz de Burton’s novel nevertheless reads like a sharp retort and a satire of Jackson’s view of California and the West…

Read the entire article here.

Scales of Whiteness and Racial Mixing: Challenging and Confirming Racial Categories

The Geographical Bulletin
Gamma Theta Upsilon – The International Geographic Honor Socieety
Volume 50-2, November 2009
pages 93-110

Serin D. Houston
Department of Geography
Syracuse University

This paper examines personal and public portrayals of the self and family articulated by heterosexual mixed-race households living in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. It argues that an attention to scale sheds light on how mixed-race partnerships and households both reproduce a racial hierarchy and express shifting racial identities. A focus on the work of whiteness—defined here as an evaluative set of practices and processes that implicitly or explicitly legitimate a static racial hierarchy—in the confirmation of and challenges to racial categories further specifies my claims. I explore seemingly contradictory expressions of race in an effort to 1) point to the resilience of racism and to 2) indicate moments and spaces wherein racial identities change. Through qualitative interviews and a scalar lens, I aim to contribute to conversations on where and how stalwart assumptions about race emerge and add to considerations of where and how interpretations of race adopt a more contextual and dynamic form. Recognizing both the instances when different racialized landscapes come to the fore and the times when ardent stereotypes surface can help pave the way for re-imagining racial futures.

Read the entire article here.

In search of the power of whiteness: A genealogical exploration of negotiated racial identities in America’s ethnic past

Communication Quarterly
Volume 50, Issue 3-4 (2002)
pages 391-409
DOI: 10.1080/01463370209385674

Roberto Avant‐Mier, Associate Professor of Communication
University of Texas, El Paso

Marouf Hasian Jr., Professor of Communation
University of Utah

In this essay, the authors explore some of the relational, intersectional, and contextual dimensions of negotiated racial identities. By employing a genealogical method of analysis that looks at three key cases (Anastasie Desarzant, Homer Plessy, and Suzie Phipps), they investigate how various historically‐situated communities in Louisiana have dealt with some of the contradictions, multiplicities and tensions of racial and ethnic identity formation. They then apply these insights in an analysis of issues relating to colorblindness versus color consciousness and commentaries on contemporary examples of how negotiated identities might affect various present‐day publics, debates, and politics.

Americans have always had ambivalent feelings regarding the question of what to do about the nation’s racial identities, and this was especially true when citizens had to deal with the ambiguities of the Enlightenment ideals. During the time of the Founders, civic leaders talked about the importance of the notion that “all men [sic] are created equal,” but when these ideals were put into practice, they had to compete with the economic and social hierarchies that were considered to be mirrors of natural inequalities. Given these normative expectations, it should come as no surprise that in 1790, the first Congress voted that a person must be “white” in order to be a citizen (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; Omi & Winant, 1994; Roediger, 1994). Since that time, the very notion of what it means to have either a “racial” or an “ethnic” identity has gotten even more complicated, as layers of legal, political, and cultural meanings have pulled us in the competing directions of defending either color con-…

Read or purchase the article here.

Racial Queer: Multiracial College Students at the Intersection of Identity, Education and Agency

University of Texas, Austin
May 2010
495 pages

Aurora Chang-Ross

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas a Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin

Racial Queer is a qualitative study of Multiracial college students with a critical ethnographic component. The design methods, grounded in Critical Race Methodology and Feminist Thought (both theories that inform Critical Ethnography), include: 1) 25 semi-structured interviews of Multiracial students, 2) of which 5 were expanded into case studies, 3) 3 focus groups, 4) observations of the sole registered student organization for Multiracial students on Central University’s campus, 5) field notes and 6) document analysis. The dissertation examines the following question: How do Multiracial students understand and experience their racialized identities within a large, public, tier-one research university in Texas? In addition, it addresses the following sub-questions: How do Multiracial students experience their racialized identities in their everyday interactions with others, in relation to their own self-perceptions and in response to the way others perceive them to be? How do Multiracial students’ positionalities, as they relate to power, privilege, phenotype and status, guide their behavior in different contexts and situations?

Using Holland et al.’s (1998) social practice theory of self and identity, Chicana Feminist Theory, and tenets of Queer Theory, this study illustrates how Multiracial college students utilize agency as racial queers to construct and negotiate their identities within a context where identity is both self-constructed and produced for them. I introduce the term, racial queer, to frame the unconventional space of the Multiracial individual. I use this term not to convey sexuality, but to convey the parallels of queerness (both as a term of empowerment and derogation) as they pertain to being Multiracial. In other words, queerness denotes a unique individuality as well as a deviation from the norm (Sullivan, 2003; Warner, 1993; Gamson, 2000).

The primary purpose of this study is to illustrate the agentic ways in which Multiracial college students come to understand and experience the complexity of their racialized identity production. Preliminary findings suggest the need to expand the scope of racial discourses to include Multiracial experiences and for further study of Multiracial students. Their counter-narratives access an otherwise invisible student population, providing an opportunity to broaden critical discourses around education and race.

Table of Contents

• Chapter One: Introduction
  • An Autobiographical Preface
  • Overview of Study
  • Research Question
  • Importance of the Topic
  • Outline of Study
• Chapter Two: Literature Review
  • Introduction
  • Critical Race Theory and the Social Construction/Lived Experience of Race
  • The Multiracial Population – The Census: “Check One or More”
  • Historical Origins of Multiraciality in the United States.
  • Multiracials as Underrepresented Group – One Step Forward or Backward?
  • Racial Identity Development Theories and Models – An Overview
  • Multiracial College Students
  • Student Development Theory & Campus Climate
  • Education and Multiracial Students
  • Conceptual Framework
    • Introduction
    • Social Practice Theory of Self and Identity
    • Chicana Feminist Theory
    • Tenets of Queer Theory
    • Racial Queer
• Chapter Three: Methodology
  • Reflections of a Multiracial Researcher
  • Genealogy of Methodology
  • Research Overview
  • Why Qualitative Research?
  • Setting
  • Participants
  • Selection Criteria
  • Counter Storytelling
  • Methods Rooted in Feminist Thought
  • Observations
  • Field Notes
  • Interviews
  • Case Studies
  • Focus Groups
  • Data Management and Analysis
  • Researcher’s Positionality
  • Making Sense of Methods
• Chapter Four: Portraits of Racial Queers
  • Introduction to Participant Narratives
  • Participant Narratives
    • Dee-Dee
    • Solomon
    • May
    • Jonathan
    • Melissa
    • Conclusion
• Chapter Five: Themes – Understanding and Experiencing Multiracial
  • Identity
  • Introduction
  • Racial Rubric – “I don’t have a racial rubric to follow.”
  • Racial Disclosure – “I couldn’t be passive about it. And I just told this girl, No! I am Hispanic!”
  • Identity Fusion – “There’s little way of being able to separate all of those identities out.”
  • Multiracial Entitlement–“ I felt more entitled to the [Multiracial] label.”
  • Development of Portraits/Narratives
  • Discussion
  • Agency
  • Culturally Responsive Teaching and Hidden Curriculum
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Six: Multiracial Students in the Daily Practice of Schooling
  • Introduction
  • Learning the meaning of race at school
  • General Findings
    • Identity
    • Findings Specific to Multiracial Identity
    • The Politics of racial identification terminology
    • Negotiating and Strategizing – Racial Identity and Relationships
    • Phenotype Matters
    • Collective Experiences – Multiracials as Community
    • Skills, Intuition and Perspective – Lessons in Constructing Multiracial Identity
    • Implications and Significance
    • Expansion of Racial Discourses-Challenging Racial
    • Inclusivity
    • Rethinking and Reevaluating of Educational Public Policies
  • Final Thoughts
  • Reflections of a Native Researcher
  • Recommendations for Future Research
  • Lessons Learned
• Appendix
  • -A Brief Genealogy
  • -Email to Participants
  • -Interview Questions and Prompts
  • -Informed Consent to Participate In Research
• References
• Vita

Read the entire dissertation here.

AAS 310: Constructing and Negotiating Multiracial Identity

University of Texas, Austin
Center for Asian American Studies
Fall 2008

This course serves as an introduction to the experiences of biracial and multiracial people, specifically with a focus on “mixed”/hapa Asian American, African American and Latino people in the U.S., concentrating on theories of race, racial identity formation, culture, media, and social justice struggles. As such, it presents the major themes and issues in a new and growing interdisciplinary field of scholarly research and cultural production.

Throughout the semester, the goal is to foster a classroom environment which will become a community space in which the beliefs and attitudes of all participants are respectfully considered.

For more information, click here.

The mulatta text and the muted voice in “Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon”: Revising the genre of the slave narrative

Marquette University
August 1995
202 pages

Rebecca Anne Ferguson

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English

From the earliest critical discussion of the slave narrative genre in Rev. Ephraim Peabody’s review essay of 1849 through the most recent scholarly analyses, unexamined assumptions have been advanced about the conventions, including structure, language, theme, and plot, which determine the inclusion of those slave narratives identified as generic texts. The 1988 publication of the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, under the editorship of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., includes several formerly unavailable slave narratives which constitute a new subgenre I am here defining for the first time as “mulatta texts.” Mulatta texts expose, in their structuring between unequal voices, the negotiations necessary in slavery, an institution defined as the “paradox of formal distance and physical intimacy” by historian C. Vann Woodward. I analyze the textual control and moral agenda that the named author, northern abolitionist Rev. Hiram Mattison, maintained over one exemplary mulatta text in the Schomburg Library, Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon, but I also attend carefully to the complex and “muted voice” (to borrow John Sekora’s term) of Louisa Picquet as she advances very different purposes. Determined to gain the financial contributions necessary to purchase the freedom of her mother and brother, Picquet cooperates with her interrogator even as she resists his familiar gaze and asserts her identity as a black woman in her own community. Although the last half of the text seems to erase Picquet, careful analyses of Louisa Picquet and other mulatta texts supports Toni Morrison’s project, as limned in Playing in the Dark, to re-examine the entire canon of American literature for the presences of “Africanisms.” Expanded understandings of the complexities of voice in mulatta narratives will allow us to respond to the voices of former slaves in other mulatta texts, narratives neither written nor controlled by the African Americans but nonetheless shaped by their powers of articulation and resistance.

Table of Contents

• I. A “Paradox of Formal Distance and Physical Intimacy”: Generic Criticism and the Mixed Nature of the Slave Narratives
• II. No Longer at the Margin: Mulatta Texts in the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers
• III. Assessing the Participation of Rev. Hiram Mattison in the Mulatta Text, Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon
• IV. “Multiple Forms of Resistance”: A Narrative of Louisa Picquet’s Voice
• V. The Competing Narrative Strategies in the Mulatta Text of Louisa Picquet
• Endnotes

Purchase the dissertation here.

Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon: or Inside Views of Southern Domestic Life (Electronic Edition)

Published by the Author
1861
60 pages

Hiram Mattison, A.M. (1811-1868), Pastor
Union Chapel, New York

Read the entire novel here.

Developing: Supreme Court vacates Freedmen ruling

Cherokee Phoenix
2011-08-23

Christina Good Voice, Senior Reporter

Tahlequah, Okla. – The Cherokee Nation Supreme Court issued a 16-page ruling Aug. 22 that reversed and vacated the decision of the CN District Court regarding the Cherokee Freedmen, stating that the Cherokee people had the right to amend the CN constitution and set citizenship requirements.

Acting Principal Chief Joe Crittenden addressed the ruling at the Aug. 22 council meeting in his State of the Nation.

“All of us, the council, the staff and myself got copies (of the ruling,)” he said. “I’m going to defer to our attorney general for some comments concerning this. I know there are a lot of questions on people’s minds.”

Hammons said the ruling, which was filed at 5 p.m. Monday evening, reverses the decision of the District Court…

…The court also found that the Treaty of 1866 only granted to Freedmen the rights of native Cherokees but that it was the constitution of the Cherokee people that granted them citizenship, she said.

“The freedmen at the time gained citizenship status in the Cherokee Nation by the Cherokee people’s sovereign expression in the 1866 constitutional amendment to the 1839 Cherokee Nation constitution,” according to the ruling. “It stands to reason that if the Cherokee People had the right to define the Cherokee Nation citizenship in the above mentioned 1866 Constitutional Amendment they would have the sovereign right to change the definition of the Cherokee Nation citizenship in their sovereign expression in the March 3, 2007 Constitutional Amendment.”…

Read the entire article here.