Mixed Race Studies

“Miss Eurafrica”: Men, Women’s Sexuality, and Métis Identity in Late Colonial French Africa, 1945-1960

Journal of the History of Sexuality
Volume 20, Number 3, September 2011
pages 568-593

Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Assistant Professor of African History
University of Chicago

The 1960 issue of the magazine L’Eurafricain (The Eurafrican) featured a cover photo of a woman announced as “Miss L’Eurafrique” (figure 1). Edited from Dakar under the auspices of the Union internationale des métis (International Union of Mixed-Race Persons), the magazine was written in French and printed in Paris. The membership of the union consisted of métis primarily from French-ruled sub-Saharan Africa. The primary mandate of the union was to advocate for financial, moral, and educational assistance to métis children. Published once or twice a year between 1945 and 1960, L’Eurafricain was the public face of the organization. The publication was a medium through which contributors sought to cultivate a sense of common identity among métis persons across geographical boundaries, facilitate communication among members, report on various métis social and cultural events, and promote the organization’s lobbying efforts. Contributors to L’Eurafricain included métis across French-speaking Africa as well as some black and white benefactors. It is not clear from extant records whether an actual pageant was held, what the criteria for judging were, who witnessed the pageant, how many contestants competed, and from where in French Africa these contestants hailed. The photo is a headshot of a café au lait-toned woman identified as Miss Marie Céline, a “young métisse (mixed-race woman) of Niger.”

A rather modest photo in comparison to those of post-World War II pageants in the United States, Miss L’Eurafrique looks at the camera in an unprovocative and grave manner. Her long hair is plaited into a single, neat braid without a stray hair in sight. Though her age is not indicated, she appears to be youthful, likely in her mid- to late teens. Her face is devoid of…

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Color Differentiation in the American Systems of Slavery

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Volume 3, Number 3 (Winter, 1973)
pages 509-541

Donald L. Horowitz, James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science
Duke University

In the comparative study of race relations, the evolution of group identity constitutes a central process. Although group boundaries tend to be taken as given, they are more fluid than is often supposed. The criteria of membership may change, and the inclusiveness of the groups may expand or contract accordingly.

The forces promoting the redefinition of ethnic group boundaries are only imperfectly understood. This applies particularly to the emergence of new groups. While the study of assimilation lias received much attention, the study of differentiation has not. Ethnic contact and the progeny it produces, for example, provide opportunities for the creation of new ethnic categories. But the opportunities arc not always taken. In some cases, distinctive “mixed-blood” groups emerge; in others, the offspring are incorporated in one or another of the original groups.

Examples of this process of group differentiation may be found in the history of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Some slave systems differentiated “mulattoes” from Africans and bestowed varying degrees of separate status; others suppressed such possible distinctions. Everywhere rules were formulated to define the boundaries of the respective groups, to specify the criteria of identification, to categorize marginal cases, and to permit individual exceptions to the rules of group membership…

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Black Pluralism in Post Loving America

Chapter in: Loving vs. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage

Cambridge University Press
May 2012
300 pages
Hardback ISBN-13: 9780521198585
Paperback ISBN-13: 9780521147989

Edited by

Kevin Noble Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Rose Cuison Villazor, Associate Professor of Law
Hofstra University

Chapter Author

Taunya Lovell Banks, Jacob A. France Professor of Equality Jurisprudence and Francis & Harriet Iglehart Research Professor of Law
University of Maryland School of Law

The face of late twentieth and early twenty-first century America has changed, as have attitudes about race, especially about persons with some African ancestry. Since 1967, the number of multi-racial individuals with some African ancestry living in the United States has increased dramatically as a result of increased out-marriage by black Americans and the immigration of large numbers of multiracial individuals from Mexico, the Caribbean, as well as Central and Latin America. Many members of the post-Loving generation came of age in the 1990s with no memories of de jure racial segregation laws or the need for the 1960s civil rights legislation to combat overt racial discrimination. Accordingly, they see race, racism and identity through different lens. In other words, we are witnessing a significant generational shift in thinking that is beginning to be reflected in popular culture and scholarly literature about race and identity, but not in the courts. American judges and policy-makers, composed primarily of the children of Brown v. Board of Education, remain stuck in a racial jurisprudence and rhetoric of the late twentieth century.

This chapter analyzes the experiences of and public dialogues about children of interracial parentage and how their differential treatment by non-blacks, as well as blacks, raises legal issues courts are not prepared to address. One emerging question is whether mixed-race individuals are more likely to experience situational blackness—whether one can be black for some but not for other purposes, and if so, when one is black for anti-discrimination purposes. This question is even more sharply drawn when questions about “racial authenticity” arise for individuals whose African ancestry is less apparent. As this chapter explains, the overriding question in both cases is whether interracial parentage confers some type of benefit and disadvantage on Afro-descendant children not experienced by individuals whose formal racial classification is black, and if so whether anti-discrimination law should take these differences into account.

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 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s “Passing”

Modern Language Studies
Volume 32, Number 2 (Autumn, 2002)
pages 109-138

Lori Harrison-Kahan, Full-time Adjunct Faculty in English
Boston College

In a scene from Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing, a white man, John Bellew, enters his Chicago hotel room to find his wife, Clare, taking tea with two of her childhood friends. To the astonishment of the two women, Bellew greets his wife with an unusual pet name: “Nig.” When Clare asks her husband to explain his form of address to the stunned women, he replies, “When we were first married, she was as white as—as—well as white as a lily. But I declare she’s gettin’ darker and darker. I tell her if she don’t look out, she’ll wake up one of these days and find she’s turned into a nigger” (171). The moment is rich in dramatic irony, for unbeknownst to Bellew, his wife and her two friends are African Americans who are passing as white.

Although Bellew calls his wife “Nig” as a “joke” (171), the interpellation works to erase Clare’s given name, which connotes clearness, light, and whiteness. That Clare responds to this nickname seals the process of subjection. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon notes the power of interpellation to constitute and deform the black body through a racialized naming such as “nigger” or “Negro.” In Fanon’s famous example of racial interpellation, the cry “Look a Negro!” pairs the derogatory naming with the fixing of the look. The simultaneous gaze (“Look”) and naming (“a Negro”) freeze the black man into “an object in the midst of other objects” (109). In Passing, Clare’s husband warns her that if she “don’t look out”—…

Study: Multiracial groups and social position, segregation in America

The JHU Gazette
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore Maryland
2011-12-19

Amy Lunday, Homewood

The American social hierarchy places people of mixed-race ancestry below whites but above blacks, while additional social stratifications along color lines are simultaneously taking place within the nation’s multiracial groups, according to a Johns Hopkins University sociologist’s study of U.S. Census data.

Pamela R. Bennett, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, studied the residential location of people who identified themselves with more than one racial group when filling out their 2000 and 2010 census forms…

…In both cases, she found that multiracial groups occupy a social position between blacks and whites, and that the multiracial groups themselves have their own racial stratifications. Bennett found a lesser degree of segregation among people who are of both black and white heritage when compared to those whose identities are fully black. Yet the black-white multiracials appear to be more segregated than Asian-white or American Indian–white multiracials across several segregation measures…

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Islands and autochthons: Coloureds, space and belonging in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe (Part 1)

Journal of Social Archaeology
Volume 4, Number 3 (October 2004)
pages 405-426
DOI: 10.1177/1469605304046423

Julia Katherine Seirlis
Department of Anthropology
University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

This article, the first in a two-part series, examines the ramifications of the complex relationships between race and space for definitions of the nation and national identity in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe. Most generally, the workings of race and space helped polarize Rhodesia and Zimbabwe between what was set up as ‘white’ and ‘black’, and limit the struggle for power and claims on belonging to those two poles. Racial identity was inscribed into spatial sensibilities and organization so that white space (the city) functioned as a series of islands and black space (the countryside) activated organic assertions of autochthony. More specifically, race and space informed the creation of an intermediate racial category, ‘Coloured’, with no substantive claim to a ‘real’ or ‘full’ identity and with no authoritative claim to the physical soil of the country.

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Power, Perception, and Interracial Sex: Former Slaves Recall a Multiracial South

The Journal of Southern History
Volume 71, Number 3 (August, 2005)
pages 559-588

Fay A. Yarbrough, Associate Professor of History
University of Oklahoma

My father’s name wuz Robert Stewart. He wuz a white man. My mother wuz named Ann. She wuz part Indian. Her father wuz a Choctaw Indian and her mother a black woman—a slave.” This is how Charley Stewart, a former slave, described his lineage. Stewart was not alone in claiming parents and grandparents of mixed racial heritage; there are many references to mixed-race ancestry in the interviews of ex-slaves collected by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s. The interviews also contain candid observations about interracial unions in general and about how people of African descent understood relationships that crossed social. legal, and racial boundaries. The former slaves described various combinations of racial unions and their ramifications for the participants, families, fellow slaves, and offspring. This article will consider the words of ex-slaves, using the WPA collection and a selection of biographies and autobiographies of slaves, and will re-create descriptions of and attitudes toward interracial sex during the nineteenth century. These accounts…

The Hybrid and the Social Process

Phylon (1940-1956)
Volume 6, Number 4 (4th Quarter, 1945)
pages 327-336

Jitsuichi Masuoka

An intermixture of blood is an invariable outcome of human migration, contact, and association. To this statement there seems to be no historical exception. Races and peoples, however much they may be physically and culturally dissimilar, if they come together at all, associate to produce individuals of nondescript physical type. In its essence, the hybridization of peoples and races is a biological process, but as it has a wider social implication, it may be studied as a part and parcel of social processes.

A study of changes in genetic factors, as a consequence of racial intermixing, belongs properly to the science of human genetics. Race mixture in its wider ramification is a sociological problem for reasons generally recognized but not always fully understood. Man’s sex appetite, as of all other human impulses, is everywhere culturally channeled, and in this broad sense, one may well speak of race mixture as falling within the orbit of sociology. Moreover, as the intermixture of races runs counter to the existing sex mores of the societies in contact and, as it undermines, in the long run, the pre-existing social order, the problem of race mixture comes to have a sociological rather than biological import. In this way it comes about that the problems of “race mixture” and “race problem” are inseparable in the minds of many; thus, making an objective study of racial hybridization difficult. Race mixing is freighted with heightened emotions and sentiments and intellectual stupidities rampage in this area of discourse. It seems important, therefore, that this problem be examined as a phase of general social process. By viewing it within this wider frame of reference, one may attain a reasonable degree of objectivity toward race mixture.

Much has been written about racial miscegenation by students of biology, psychology, and social sciences. But, the hybrid as a personality type received its first clear definitive statement from Reuter and Park. “The hybrids,” Reuter writes, “tend to be distinct in social position, cultural status, and personality organization: sociologically as well as racially, they are hybrid.” Resulting chiefly from their accessibility to wider cultural opportunities, the mixed-blood individuals occupy the status superior to that of the natives but inferior to that of the whites. However, this superior social position of the hybrid is not to be taken as an evidence of innate intellectual superiority. It should, as Reuter points…

A Pedigree Study of Amerindian Crosses in Canada

The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
Volume 58, (July – December, 1928)
pages 511-532

R. Ruggles Gates
Department of Anthropology
Harvard University

This paper is an attempt to apply genetical methods to the study of inter-racial crossing. In the anthropological studies which have hitherto been made of racial crosses, masses of anthropometric measurements have frequently been taken, which are capable, when analysed, of furnishing valuable evidence on many points. Rut it is seldom possible to extract from them the kind of evidence the geneticist wishes to have concerning the inheritance of individual character-differences. Anthropological measurements are quantitative and require statistical treatment. The inheritance of sizes and especially of shapes is the most difficult field in genetics, and much has still to be learned from experiments with animals and plants before it can be clearly applied to man. Such features as the colour of skin, eyes, and hair, or shape of the hair in cross-section, while often presenting qualitative racial differences, also require measurements for a complete analysis of their inheritance, since intermediate grades usually occur in the hybrids. But they have the advantage that the extreme conditions at least are easily recognizable as qualitatively distinct, while this may not be evident with a mean difference in, for instance, stature or cephalic index.

The difficulties of applying the genetical pedigree method to haphazard human matings are very great. Nevertheless, it is so important that this method should be taken up by anthropologists, in addition to the traditional biometric methods of studying racial differences, that I venture to put forward these necessarily very incomplete results. In the biometrical method, the individual is measured as one of a population, but no sufficient account is taken of his relation to others. The purpose of the genetical method is to trace individual pedigrees, and so follow the inheritance of racial differences through successive generations. We shall never have an adequate knowledge of human racial inheritance until this has been done on a large scale with crosses between different races in various parts of the world.

This paper contains an account of observations on inter-racial crosses between whites and Indians in Canada. A single pedigree with various interlacing branches has been followed, and the evidence concerning the inheritance especially of skin colour and eye colour has been made as complete as the circumstances would permit…

When It Counts—More On Obama and the Census

InterfaithFamiliy.com
2010-05-03

Ruth Abrams

Elizabeth Chang wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post last week, “Why Obama should not have checked ‘black’ on his census form,”

Although I knew Obama self-identifies as African American, I was disappointed when I read that that’s what he checked on his census form. The federal government, finally heeding the desires of multiracial people to be able to accurately define themselves, had changed the rules in 2000, so he could have also checked white. Or he could have checked “some other race.” Instead, Obama went with black alone.

I understand why Chang wrote this, and even though I’m mostly on the same page with her about a lot of this, I think she’s wrong.

Chang identifies as the mother of biracial children in an interfaith family, and as someone raising biracial Jewish children. The whole Jewish community is behind her in wanting her children to be able identify as more than one thing. Jewish and Chinese and Hawaiian? Beautiful, we are so on board with that.

But on the other hand, I think there is something to Chang’s phrase, “when it counts, he is black.” When it counts, stand up for the people who need you. Based on his experiences, Obama judged this was the time to count as an African American. I read the piece in Newsweek last September on the work ahead of parents who want to raise anti-racist children. Parenting “colorblind”—pretending that racism doesn’t exist and that people aren’t different—doesn’t make racism go away or make your children accept difference. In fact it demonstrably does the opposite…

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