Mixed Race Studies

The Interracial Family in Children’s Literature

The Reading Teacher
Volume 31, Number 8 (May, 1978)
pages 909-915

Margo Alexandre Long

Books about interracial families have just recently begun to reflect America’s pluralistic society.

A Discussion of the interracial family (a family unit in which members are of various racial backgrounds) in American children’s literature must begin with a brief historical account of the interracial family in the United States. Lystad states (1977, p. 238):

Children’s books reflect the attitudes and values of a people, as older generations go about educating younger ones to the ideals and standards they feel are most important… Changes in book content over the decades… reflect changes in people’s feelings about what is significant in their world and what is to be prized in human relationships and achievement.

In any given society, then, children’s books generally reflect the values and attitudes of those who dominate that society.

Race mixture has occured extensively throughout history. Yet many sociologists and anthropologists have stated that intermarriage is one of the strongest fears of many Americans, and indeed a great motivator for maintaining segregation. Myrdal (1944), for example, used a sociological survey to demonstrate White Americans’ fear of intermarriage as far back as 1944. Zabel (1965) suggested this trend in his review of the legal literature which prohibited interracial marriage, and Henriques (1975) substantiated this from a historical perspective. Most recently. Stember (1976) cited novelists, pollsters, psychoanalysts. Black leaders, and segregationists in postulating that “presumed sexual consequences are the biggest threat to integration.”

The U.S. has a tradition of miscegenation legislation specifically aimed at prohibiting marriage between Black and White. The first was…

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Creoles of Color of the Gulf South

University of Tennessee Press
1996
208 pages
Paper ISBN: 0-87049-917-3

Edited by:

James H. Dormon, Alumni Distinguished Professor of history and American Studies
University of Southwestern Louisiana

Consisting of eight original essays by noted scholars, this volume examines the history and culture of a unique population—those peoples in the Gulf region who descended from the colonial and antebellum free persons of color and who represent the middle ground in the region’s “tri-racial” social order.
 
Although the book begins with an analysis of the Creole population’s origins in the New Orleans area, the subsequent essays focus on the Creole communities outside that city. Throughout the volume the contributors demonstrate the persistence of the Creole ethnic identity. Included are examinations of Creole populations in the cities of Pensacola and Mobile, as well as those in the bayou and prairie regions of Louisiana. In addition to dealing with sociohistorical aspects of the Creole experience, the book features essays that examine language, music, and folklore. The concluding essay, which cuts across several disciplines, covers the late-twentieth-century revitalization of the Gulf Creole communities.

With its multidimensional, cross-disciplinary emphasis, Creoles of Color of the Gulf South constitutes an especially notable contribution to the current scholarly interest in ethnic minorities and racial dynamics in American history and culture.

Contributors: Barry Jean Ancelet, Carl A. Brasseaux, James H. Dormon, Virginia Meacham Gould, Kimberly S. Hanger, Loren Schweninger, Nicholas R. Spitzer, Albert Valdman.

Why Race Isn’t as ‘Black’ and ‘White’ as We Think

The New York Times
2005-10-31

Brent Staples

People have occasionally asked me how a black person came by a “white” name like Brent Staples. One letter writer ridiculed it as “an anchorman’s name” and accused me of making it up. For the record, it’s a British name—and the one my parents gave me. “Staples” probably arrived in my family’s ancestral home in Virginia four centuries ago with the British settlers.

The earliest person with that name we’ve found—Richard Staples—was hacked to death by Powhatan Indians not far from Jamestown in 1622. The name moved into the 18th century with Virginians like John Staples, a white surveyor who worked in Thomas Jefferson’s home county, Albemarle, not far from the area where my family was enslaved…

…As with many things racial, this story begins in the slave-era South, where sex among slaves, masters and mistresses got started as soon as the first slave ship sailed into Jamestown Harbor in 1619. By the time of the American Revolution, there was a visible class of light-skinned black people who no longer looked or sounded African. Free mulattos, emancipated by guilt-ridden fathers, may have accounted for up to three-quarters of the tiny free-black population before the Revolution.

By the eve of the Civil War, the swarming numbers of mixed-race slaves on Southern plantations had become a source of constant anguish to planters’ wives, who knew quite well where those racially ambiguous children were coming from.

Faced with widespread fear that racial distinctions were losing significance, the South decided to define the problem away. People with any ascertainable black ancestry at all were defined as black under the law and stripped of basic rights. The “one drop” laws defined as black even people who were blond and blue-eyed and appeared white.

Black people snickered among themselves and worked to subvert segregation at every turn. Thanks to white ancestry spread throughout the black community, nearly every family knew of someone born black who successfully passed as white to get access to jobs, housing and public accommodations that were reserved for white people only. Black people who were not quite light enough to slip undetected into white society billed themselves as Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, South Asian, Native American—you name it. These defectors often married into ostensibly white families at a time when interracial marriage was either illegal or socially stigmatized…

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Miscegenation and the Free Negro in Antebellum “Anglo” Alabama: A Reexamination of Southern Race Relations

The Journal of American History
Volume 68, Number 1 (June 1981)
pages 16-34

Gary B. Mills (1944-2002), Associate Professor of History
University of Alabama, Gadsden

More than a quarter-century ago, the southern historian Frank L. Owsley predicted: “If the history of every county, or even smaller community in every Southern State would be written from the basic sources, a history of the South would emerge vastly different from any previously written.” A new generation of historians has accepted this challenge, returning to those long-neglected basic sources. While their approach has been more topical than geographical (as Owsley suggested), the results have definitely called into question many of the standard interpretations of the antebellum South.

The southern free Negro—and the miscegenation that is credited with producing him—may serve as an excellent case at point. Traditional interpretations of his genesis and evolution generally have followed a monolithic pattern As a class, by and large, he owed his existence to libidinous, but conscience-stricken, white planters—male planters, necessarily, since the unwritten double-standard of southern white society winked at white male exploitation of Negro women but tolerated no sexual relations that hinted of racial equality, such as white female relations with Negro males or legal interracial marriages Within free Negro society, allegedly, the family unit was unstable, due as much to the pattern of sexual incontinency that slavery forced upon blacks as to the desire of free black women to breed lighter offspring who might pass into white society. As a class, the free black is believed to have been a threat to the institution of slavery. Thus his contacts with slaves were limited, he was ostracized by white society (with the occasional exception of white immigrants and urban working-class whites), and he was all but legis lated out of existence.

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The Social Negotiation of Ambiguous In-Between Stigmatized Identities: Investigating Identity Processes in Multiracial and Bisexual People

University of Massachusetts, Boston
December 2011
234 pages

Vali Dagmar Kahn

A Dissertation Presented by Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston, in partial fulfillment of  the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Clinical Psychology

To date, most bisexual and multiracial identity models in psychology capture a largely internal developmental process (Collins, 2000; Kich, 1992; Weinberg, Williams & Pryor, 1994). However, individuals learn to manage their socially stigmatized identities in social interactions (Goffman, 1963). While the demands to socially negotiate stigmatized identity affect all minority peoples, individuals with inbetween ambiguous stigmatized identities, such as multiracial and bisexual people, must negotiate also being situated at the margins of their own reference groups (e.g. heterosexual and gay/lesbian). Using a comparative grounded theory approach, this study explored the question: How do experiences of socially negotiating an inbetween ambiguous stigmatized identity influence one’s identity development? And the sub-question: What are the similarities and differences in these processes for multiracial and bisexual people?

between the ages of 20 and 36 years participated in semi-structured interviews addressing the following areas of inquiry: (1) Contextualizing current identifications and establishing shared understandings, (2) Experiences of social negotiations, and (3) Effects of these experiences on identities. Issues regarding the rigor and credibility of the study (Morrow, 2005) were addressed through peer debriefing; inquiry auditing; and member check discussions. Analysis followed a constant comparative method (Creswell, 2007) and a multi-step process resulting in a theory describing three negotiation cycles and associated identity effects common to both kinds of identities (multiracial and bisexual), with additional identity specific (multiracial or bisexual) variations: the first cycle was Catalyzing Experiences, the second was Active Negotiations, and the third Emerging Sense of Agency through New Understandings, Perspectives, and Positive Experiences. Cycles were described by multiracial and bisexual participants as fluid, iterative, and interacting. The model developed in this study offers a way of understanding stigma management strategies and their relation to influencing identities and stigmatizing processes. This deeper understanding can help clinicians and community organizers create inclusive environments and develop interventions to assist multiracial and bisexual individuals develop skills to deal with social stigmatizing processes, resolve initial questions, and develop a greater sense of agency in identity choice and performance.

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Census: Few among Az’s tribes claim to be multiracial

Tucson Sentinel
2012-01-26

Victoria Pelham
Cronkite News Service

WASHINGTON – The number of American Indians who claimed to be multiracial jumped sharply over the last decade, but not so much in Arizona, the Census Bureau reported Wednesday.

The bureau said the total number of American Indian or Alaska Natives grew from 4.1 million in 2000 to 5.2 million in 2010, a 27 percent increase. Of those, 2.3 million people, or 44 percent of the total, claimed to be Indian and at least one other race, the report said.

But Arizona saw relatively higher numbers of people claiming to be Indian only.

“There’s a common trend in the state of Arizona that is different from other states,” said Mellor Willie, executive director of the National American Indian Housing Council.

“That will definitely have an effect when you’re working with raw federal policy that has to meet the needs of all Indian people,” Willie said. “Tribes have to take that into consideration, especially the tribes in Arizona.”

The Census Bureau said the Navajo Nation, which has a significant presence in Arizona, had the largest number of single-race members of any tribal group in the country, with 287,000 of the tribe’s 332,129 people claiming to be single-race. That means just 13 percent of Navajo claim to be multiracial…

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Race and Humanity

Science
Volume 113, Number 2932 (1951-03-09)
pages 264-266
DOI: 10.1126/science.113.2932.264

Th. Dobzhansky (1900-1975)

Probably no other scientific concept  has been so notorious for vagueness and ambiguity as that of race. Certainly none has been more unceremoniously exploited as a cloak for prejudice and malevolence. And this despite the fact that anthropologists and biologists have studied races in man and in other organisms for more than a century and a half. A very heartening break in this situation has, however, become apparent within the past decade or two. The rapid advances in population genetics have shed new light on race as a biological phenomenon and as a stage of the evolutionary development of sexually reproducing species. It was, then, only a question of time when the study of races of man would be revised and revived under the impact of modern population genetics. This reformation of the raciological thinking in anthropology is now at hand. The first and the second of the three books under review are the harbingers of a new era. The third is a useful anthology of raciological writings covering the late eighteenth century up to the modem era.

Professor Count’s anthology provides a historical perspective and a contrasting background against which the modern reform will stand out in bold relief. From its very inception, the race concept has suffered from an inner contradiction (not to speak of its perennial misuse for political propaganda purposes). Race has been a practical and convenient category of classification, with the aid of which the diversity of human types could be efficiently described and neatly pigeonholed. For this purpose it is useful to set up so-called racial “types.” The types are arrived at by estimation, or by calculation, of averages of various traits observed in the samples of individuals examined. No objection could be raised against this procedure if it were used solely as a technique of cataloguing. But a type once created has an insidious way of dominating its maker. It becomes “the race” a sort of noumenon of which the existing individuals are only imperfect representatives. Needless to say, such a race concept is basically antievolutionist, as well as incompatible with Mendelian genetics. And yet the idea of change and development has been a part of anthropological thinking since the times of Buffon, Kant, and Blumenbach. Darwin entitled his great work The Origin of Species; origin of races would have been no striking novelty either to anthropologists or to biologists.

An uneasy compromise was arranged between the contradictory concepts of race as an abstract but stable type and race the ineluctably changing biological reality. This compromise involved the assumption that there existed at some obscure time in the past so-called primary races, which were supposedly “pure” and conformed to their ideal types. The primary races engaged, however, in long-continued miscegenation; the miscegenation has not only resulted in numerous “mixed” or “secondary” races, but also engulfed and largely obliterated the pure primary ones. The latter can be discerned at present, in the words of an outstanding living anthropologist (Howells), only “by a process of personal estimation which is reminiscent of divination.” Another trouble with the pure primary races is that a pure race makes no sense at all from the standpoint of genetics, except in asexually reproducing organisms. In sexual and cross-fertilizing species such as man, no two individuals are likely to have the same genotype; parents and offspring, as well as brothers and sisters, are genetically different Nevertheless, the compromise has continued down to our day, long after it has lost every semblance of justification. Professor Count might have saved a not-inconsiderable number of pages of his anthology by deletion of some of the more recent lucubrations concerning this topic.

Professor Boyd’s book contains a detailed, in places caustic, and altogether devastating critique of the abuses of old-fashioned raciology. But Boyd in certainly not one of those who need to conceal their intellectual sterility by being severely critical of the work of others. His book is primarily constructive. The central idea is that every human being is a member of a biological community within which marriages are concluded. Such a community, termed Mendelian population or isolate, possesses a gene pool, from which the genes of the individuals are drawn, and to which some of them are returned unless the individual dies childless. Mankind, the human species, is the most inclusive Mendelian population. It is, however, a very complex system of isolates, kept apart by geography or by social forces. It happens that these subordinate populations often differ in relative frequencies of genes for various traits in their gene pools. Such different populations are races. Boyd defines (p. 207) “a human race as a population which differs significant…

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Multiracial People are Multiplying

brianbantum: theology, culture, teaching and life in-between
2011-03-31

Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

The New York Times recently published a story highlighting the increase in numbers of multiracial children in the United States. The numbers of self identifying multiracial children has doubled in the United States to 2.9% of the entire population. With this data, coupled with a 2007 Pew Research Center report that interracial marriages represented 14% of all new marriages (up from 7% in 2000), we could begin to surmise an end to problematic racial distinctions and a truly new America, right?

Taken together these numbers indicate a movement towards greater acceptance of interracial/interethnic relationships as well as a greater freedom for multiracial children to claim this mixture as part of their identity. And perhaps this is the most significant aspect of these figures. While the idea of numbers doubling seems extraordinary, multiracial children still constitute only 2.9% of all children which means more often than not sexual desire and marriage is oriented towards similarity and homogeneity (it is also important to note how even mixed marriages follow patterns of desire away from African American women who marry outside of their race in the smallest numbers.)

In the midst of these numbers we must remember that multiracial identity is not confined to checking boxes. Interactions with friends, dating, interactions with co-workers do not begin with our self-assertions, but with a complicated set of markers and interpretations that the multiracial person is not entirely in control of.

The space to claim one’s “multi”ness is important, it is certainly important for myself and my children. At the same time, the existence of multiracial children does not diminish the realities of racial exclusion and economic oppression that are not only present, but becoming more vehement and stark in the wake of our first African American president. To put it a different way, we are not the future of America. Like all other people who are raised in a deeply racialized world, we are formed to resist certain notions of beauty, embrace or recoil from certain people…

…If we wish to celebrate the growth of multiracial children let us not pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, but begin to rage against the systemic realities that prevent these numbers from growing: mass incarceration of African American men, tragic inequities between white and black in access to education, anti-immigration legislation, perpetual wars that limit our economic options, images of beauty and health that implicitly deride dark bodies and work against white bodies, the perpetual differentiation, bullying and teasing that plants these seeds of difference in elementary age children…

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The Invisibility of Multiracial Students: An Emerging Majority by 2050

University of California, San Diego
January 2009
252 pages

Gina Acosta Potter

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership

By the nature of their existence, multiracial people call to question deeply held notions of race and racial classification held tightly by Americans. To acknowledge a person as multiracial, or a blending of more than one race, defies the conventional social construct that delineates clear, discernible, and discrete races. Even as multiracial students become increasingly visible in our nation’s schools, multiracial identity is seldom recognized as a critical topic of diversity within the educational arena. By 2050, the multiracial population will surface as a majority group of people whose presence will require our nation to redefine our current constructs of race, racial identification, and racial classification (Anderson, 2002; Winters & DeBose, 2003). This qualitative research study seeks to address the primary research question: How and to what extent do public policy decisions regarding academic accountability affect educational outcomes for multiracial students in two states that differ in their multiracial categorization policies?

The purpose of this study is to illuminate racial subgroups identified within accountability systems, determine the degree to which multiracial students are rendered visible in the academic accountability movement, and examine the needs of multiracial students. The research design is a comparative case study of two state education agencies and the public policies they employ when monitoring the academic achievement of multiracial students.

The major findings of this study reveal: 1) a misalignment between federal and state accountability systems for racial classification; 2) a variance in how two state education agencies racially classify mixed race students; 3) a nonstandardized approach to school enrollment categorization of multiracial students; 4) controversy regarding the meaning of race and ethnicity; 5) various approaches taken by multiracial students when self-identifying 6) data methodology challenges; and 7) a more than ten year lapse in time before the federal Department of Education moved towards complying with the White House Office of Management and Budget regulations allowing multiracial individuals to identify as more than one race.

The implications of this research indicate a significant need for the United States’ educational system to face the challenge of recognizing and responding to the histories, experiences, and identities of multiracial students within our schools.

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Ambiguity in Jean Toomer’s Cane

Berkely Undergraduate Journal
Volume 24, Issue 3 (2011)
pages 79-92

Amanda Licato
Department of English ’13
University of California, Berekely

When Jean Toomer’s modernist experimental novel Cane was published in 1923, both he and the text were taken to be representative voices of African American life, even though Toomer explicitly renounced these labels during Cane’s pre-publication promotion. The larger project of the Harlem Renaissance, during which Toomer lived and wrote Cane, was to validate and celebrate African American artists and their work. As a result, the author’s claims of racial ambiguity and multiracial identication, and their expression in his work, were poorly received. This paper looks at the tension between the aesthetically ambiguous qualities of the text as well as its role as a cultural artifact that can be explored and interpreted against different backdrops. Cane’s aesthetic elements work primarily through the text’s structural and linguistic ambiguity, a blurring of various themes that allow for readers to search for and conceive of their own meanings and experiences. To that end, I examine interpretations of racial identity in Cane during three signicant cultural periods: Cane’s initial publication in 1923 during the Harlem Renaissance, its re-publication at the cusp of the modern Civil Rights movement in 1951, and our current age of supposed “post-raciality” in which the modern reader first discovers the text.

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