Mixed Race Studies

Fearless Music: Garland Jeffreys ’65

Syracuse University Magazine
Volume 28, Number 3 (Fall/Winter 2011)

David Marc

From his ’70s hit “Wild in the Streets” to his latest album, legendary singer-songwriter Garland Jeffreys has taken on life’s big issues with his own eclectic brand of music

From the pages of The New Yorker to deep inside the blogosphere, legendary singer-songwriter Garland Jeffreys has been winning high praise for his new album, The King of In Between, released last summer on his own Luna Park label. Loved by fans and admired by colleagues for his fearless movements through rock, R&B, reggae, and whatever other styles he may need to articulate his borderless vision, Jeffreys puts his mastery of popular musical forms in the service of personal expression, a talent he shares with Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Feeling “too black to be white, too white to be black,” he occupies his own space and fills it with a gritty sweetness that is hard for likeminded souls to resist.

Growing up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, during the 1950s, Jeffreys learned a thing or two about “diversity” long before the term took on its full contemporary meaning. “I’m from a totally mixed-race family—black, white, Puerto Rican, Native American,” he says. “At the time, we were the only people of color in the Catholic church we attended every Sunday. At school, I had my close friends, but I was also often the only ‘colored’ kid in the class, and every time I met a girl I liked, I had to contend with a race issue. My music has always had a great deal to do with these experiences.” Jeffreys felt more at ease in nearby Coney Island, where beach, boardwalk, and carnival karma drew people of every background imaginable. He also enjoyed the privilege of seeing the Dodgers play at Ebbets Field. “I was just 4 years old, but I was there at the game, April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball,” he says. “Sports have always been an important part of my life, and even helped bring me to Syracuse. My father wanted me to go to Boston College. But Jim Brown [’57] went to Syracuse, and obviously I had to go to school where he went.”

Shortly after arriving on campus, Jeffreys met Lou Reed ’64, who became a lifelong friend. Although both were moving toward their careers as musicians, Reed was studying poetry and Jeffreys had his sights set on art history. “We hung out at the Orange Bar with Lou’s teacher, the poet Delmore Schwartz, and a bunch of people—I guess you’d call them ‘Beats,’” Jeffreys says. “It was a great place for me to be because race didn’t matter; it was all about hanging out and knowing each other.” Felix Cavaliere ’64, who was about to depart for the top of the pops as lead singer and keyboard man with The Young Rascals, was another friend Jeffreys first bumped into on Marshall Street…

Read the entire article here.

Jarocho’s Soul: Cultural Identity and Afro-Mexican Dance

University Press of America (an Imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
February 2004
182 pages
Size: 5 1/2 x 7 3/4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7618-2775-7

Anita González, Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Theatre Arts
State University of New York, New Paltz

Brown-skinned men and women move across Mexico’s national stages dancing the folkloric jarocho, a symbolic blend of Spanish, Native American, and African cultures. Jarocho’s Soul: Cultural Identity and Afro-Mexican Dance traces the evolution and transformation of an Afro-Mexican dance form into a national cultural icon. It is an ethnographic study that compares and contrasts Mexican performance of national identity with Untied States dance styles. The book uses the image of the jarocho as a window to explore the phenomena of racial/cultural mixing that is endemic to Mexico and increasingly apparent in the politics and aesthetics of United States cultural performances.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 List of Illustrations
• Chapter 2 Preface
• Chapter 3 Acknowledgments
• Chapter 4 Introduction: Crafting Self; Frames of Reference; Locale and Methodology; Chapter Overviews
• Chapter 5 Cultural Mixing and Mexican Performance: Mapping Art: Cultural Contexts; Studies in Revolutionary Nationalism: Manuel Ponce; Amalia Hernandez; Celestino Gorostiza; A Legacy of Performance Strategies; Provincial Identity
• Chapter 6 Roots of Jarocho Dance
• Chapter 7 Jarocho as Folkloric Dance: State Images Ballet Folklórico del la Universidad Veracruzana; Miguel Velez and the Authenticity Mission; Raices del Pueblo (The Peoples’ Roots)
• Chapter 8 Jarocho as Theater: Company History, Veracruz, Veracruz Interprets Jarocho; Actors’ Interpretive (Re)Circulations in Veracruz, Veracruz; Implications and Interpretations
• Chapter 9 Remembering and Transforming the Past: Fiesta de las Cruces; Rewriting Government Agendas
• Chapter 10 Conclusion
• Chapter 11 Glossary
• Chapter 12 References
• Chapter 13 Index

Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age

Rowman & Littlefield
288 pages
August 1997
Size: 6 1/4 x 9 1/4
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8476-8447-2
eBook ISBN: 978-0-585-20172-6

Lewis R. Gordon, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and Director of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies
Temple University

Winner of the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America.

In this exploration of race and racism, noted scholar Lewis R. Gordon offers a critique of recent scholarship in postcolonial Africana philosophy and critical race theory, and suggests alternative models that respond to what he calls our contemporary neocolonial age; an age in which cultural, intellectual, and economic forms of colonial domination persist. Through essays that address popular culture, the academy, literature, and politics, Gordon unsettles the notion of race and exposes the complexity of antiblack racism. An important book for philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, cultural critics, and anyone concerned with the overt and subtle ways of injustice.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 Foreword
• Chapter 2 Introduction: Her Majesty’s Other Children
• Part 1
  • Chapter 3 Philosophy, Race, and Racism in a Neocolonial World
  • Chapter 4 Context: Ruminations on Violence and Anonymity
  • Chapter 5 Fanon, Philosophy, and Racism
  • Chapter 6 Race, Biraciality, and Mixed Race—in Theory
  • Chapter 7 Sex, Race, and Matrices of Desire in an Antiblack World
  • Chapter 8 Uses and Abuses of Blackness: Postmodernism, Conservatism, Ideology
  • Chapter 9 In a Black Antiblack Philosophy
  • Chapter 10 African Philosophy’s Search for Identity: Existential Considerations of a Recent Effort
• Part 2
  • Chapter 11 The Intellectuals
  • Chapter 12 Lorraine Hansberry’s Tragic Search for Postcoloniality: Les Blancs
  • Chapter 13 Tragic Intellectuals on the Neocolonial—Postcolonial Divide
  • Chapter 14 Exilic “Amateur” Speaking Truth to Power: Edward Said
  • Chapter 15 Black Intellectuals and Academic Activism: Cornel West’s “Dilemmas of the Black Intellectual.” Right-Wing Celebration, Left-Wing Nightmare: Thoughts on the Centennial of Plessy v. Ferguson
• Part 3
  • Chapter 16 Aisthesis Demokrate
  • Chapter 17 Sketches of Jazz
  • Chapter 18 Aesthetico-Political Reflections on the AMTRAK: Rap, Hip-Hop, and Isaac Julien’s Fanon along the Northeast Line
• Chapter 19 Epilogue: The Lion and the Spider (An Anticolonial Tale)

Vietnamese Amerasians: A Study Of Identity Construction

University of Texas, Arlington
December 2010
78 pages

Ky-Giao C. Nguyen

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Sociology

“We define who we are by defining who we are not” (Daniel 1996). What happens when we don’t know who we are not, how can we determine who we are? What if the markers of family connections, community alliances and citizenship are missing and there are no peers with whom to make comparisons? “What are you? Where are you from?” Hispanic, Filipino, sometimes even Native American rather than Asian, are ethnicities often ascribed to Vietnamese Amerasians (children of Vietnamese and American parents). Curiously, for such a personal question, the reaction from others to the response “Vietnamese Amerasian” is often rejection or disbelief. For years, Amerasians have struggled with their place in society, within the U.S. based Vietnamese-American community as well as in the larger U.S. and Vietnamese societies. The life of the Amerasian born and raised in Vietnam is an example of the identity construction and socialization of persons whose lives were marginalized times three through denial of citizenship by country, desertion by family, and rejection by community. Triple marginalization is defined for my purposes as lack of national, familial, and societal affirmation of self. This triple marginalization offers no tangible core of positively valued identity, thus forcing the Amerasian to either accept the labels assigned or forge on to create their own identity. Loss of family, lack of community, and statelessness continues to haunt Amerasians today. The quest for a place to belong, a family to come home to, and a country to acknowledge them still influences their decisions and actions, in ways both detrimental and advantageous to the preservation of an identity built without solid foundation.

This project is a historically situated, qualitative research based look into the internal and external construction of identity of the Vietnamese Amerasians born during the Vietnam War, individually and as a group. For primary data collection, I utilized my membership in a local Amerasian organization to participate in regularly scheduled group discussions. I evaluated the transcripts of organized conversations among twenty subjects participating in group discussions sponsored through a local Amerasian organization, over five months, from March 2009 through July 2009. During the course of this research, I discovered that while individual participants’ lives were lived separately, there was a commonality to the experiences that helped each come to some definition of self. The members fell into three distinct groups: those who renounce any and all claim of their heritage, becoming wholly Americanized; those who completely immerse themselves in the Vietnamese communities, living much as they did prior to arriving in the U.S.; and those who learn to fluidly move between their two cultures, picking up nuances of themselves wherever they happen to exist, rarely clinging to just one identity.

Read the entire thesis here.

‘Amerasians’ in the Philippines fight for recognition

Cable News Network (CNN)
2012-03-03

Sunshine Lichauco de Leon

Manila, Philippines (CNN) — When Susie Lopez, 43, was a little girl she would run outside her home in Angeles City, near the U.S. Clark Airbase in the Philippines, every time she heard a plane fly by.

“I would say ‘bye bye, Dad’ because the only thing I knew about my father was my dad was riding a plane,” she recalls.

The daughter of an American naval pilot and a Filipino mother, Lopez is one of an estimated 52,000 “Amerasians” fathered by American military servicemen during the decades the U.S. Navy and Air Force had bases in the Philippines.

The majority of their mothers worked as bar girls in the area’s thriving “rest and recreation” industry, where soldiers were their regular clients. When the American military left the bases in the early 1990s, these children were left behind.

On March 4, in honor of International Amerasian Day, a group of 60 Filipino Amerasians from the cities surrounding former bases will celebrate in a special way. Their “100 Letters to our Fathers” campaign will see the group – whose members range from teenage to those in their 50s—reach out with messages of love and hope to fathers almost all of them never knew. Many of the handwritten letters will be read aloud and will be accompanied by their photos and a short video showing conditions Amerasians have faced…

…They were stigmatized for being illegitimate and for being the children of prostitutes. Amerasians fathered by African American soldiers say they suffered the most extreme prejudice.

Brenda Moreno, 44, does not know the name of her African-American father or her mother. She does not know where she belongs.

She remembers a childhood where she hid at home because she looked different. “They see my color and my hair and they tease me ‘negra’. I am always crying because I don’t feel good. I tell them when I grow up I am going to change my blood so I am going to be white,” she recalls…

…Alex Magno, Professor of Political Science at University of the Philippines, explains that this racial prejudice is deeply-rooted, but was strengthened by the country’s colonial past.

“We long ago considered the Malayo-Polynesian tribes superior and the Negrito tribes inferior,” he says. “Hispanic culture merely reinforced that prejudice with its Eurocentric paradigm. Superimpose Hollywood. The standard of beauty is fair skin, tall nose, straight hair.”

Growing up with such a lack of acceptance and economic hardship has taken an emotional and psychological toll on many.

According to a three-year study conducted by Dr. Peter Kutschera, Director of the Philippine Amerasian Research Institute in Angeles City, “we have a severely socioeconomically impaired population, especially among Africans, who contend with serious physical and mental stress issues, including homelessness, alcohol and drug abuse.”…

Read the entire article here.

‘all my Slaves, whether Negroes, Indians, Mustees, Or Molattoes.’: Towards a Thick Description of ‘Slave Religion’

The American Religious Experience
1999

Patrick Neal Minges

The time was in the late 1760’s and the place was Charleston, S.C. A young musician was on his way to a performance with his french horn tucked under his arm. As he passed by a large meetinghouse, he heard much commotion on account of a “crazy man was halloing there.” He might have ignored the event but his companion dared him to “blow the french horn among them” and disrupt the meeting. Thinking they might have some fun, John Marrant and his companion entered the meeting hall with the intent of mischief. As he lifted his horn to his lips, the crazy man — evangelist George Whitefield — cast an eye upon him, pointed his finger at John Marrant and uttered these words: “Prepare to Meet Thy God, O Israel!” Marrant was struck dead for some thirty minutes and when he was awakened, Reverend Whitefield declared “Jesus Christ has got thee at last.” After several days of ministrations by Reverend Whitefield, the Lord set John Marrant’s soul at liberty and he dedicated his life to the propagation of the gospel.

Marrant first witnessed to members of his family and when they rejected his newfound evangelical spirit, he fled to the wilderness where he sought solace among the beasts of the woods. Marrant was not afraid for God hade made the beasts “friendly to me.” When Marrant happened upon a Cherokee deer hunter, they spent ten weeks together killing deer by day and preparing brush arbors by night to provide sanctuary for themselves in the wilderness. Becoming fast friends by the end of the hunting season, the Cherokee deer hunter and the African American missionary returned to the hunter’s village where they would continue their cultural exchange. However, when he attempted to pass the outer guard at the Cherokee village, the Cherokees were less than excited with Marrant and he was detained and placed in prison. It was not that Marrant was a black man that troubled the Cherokee, the peoples of the Southeastern United States had relations with Africans that stretched back perhaps as far as a thousand years. It was just that ever since black people had started showing up with their friends, the white people, that things had started going particularly bad for the Indians of the Southeastern United States.

It seems that as soon as Europeans showed up on the coasts of the United States, they started reading from a formal document called the Requierimento that declared themselves to be Christians and by nature superior to the uncivilized heathens that they encountered. The indigenous people were then informed by the Requierimento that if they accepted Christianity they would become the Christian’s slaves in exchange for the gift of salvation; if they did not accept the gospel of Christianity, they would still become slaves but that their plight would be much worse.⁷ Everywhere that explorers such as Ponce De Leon, Vazquez De Ayllon, and Hernando De Soto went on their “explorations” throughout the American Southeast, they carried with them bloodhounds, chains, and iron collars for the acquisition and exportation of Indian slaves. A Cherokee from Oklahoma remembered his father’s tale of the Spanish slave trade, “At an early state the Spanish engaged in the slave trade on this continent and in so doing kidnapped hundreds of thousands of the Indians from the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts to work their mines in the West Indies…

Read the entire article here.

Passing as White: Anita Hemmings 1897

Vassar Alumnae/i Quarterly
Volume 98, Issue 1 (Winter 2001)
Features

Olivia Mancini ‘00

When Anita Florence Hemmings applied to Vassar in 1893, there was nothing in her records to indicate that she would be any different from the 103 other girls who were entering the class of 1897. But by August 1897, the world as well as the college had discovered her secret: Anita Hemmings was Vassar’s first black graduate — more than 40 years before the college opened its doors to African Americans.

In the late 19th century, Vassar’s atmosphere might have been best described as aristocratic. Since its opening in 1861, the prestigious women’s school had catered almost exclusively to the daughters of the nation’s elite. Had Hemmings marked her race as “colored” on her application, her admittance to the college most certainly would have been denied.

“She has a clear olive complexion, heavy black hair and eyebrows and coal black eyes,” a Boston newspaper wrote of a 25-year-old Hemmings in August 1897. “The strength of her strain of white blood has so asserted itself that she could pass anywhere simply as a pronounced brunette of white race.”

And pass she did, until her white roommate voiced suspicions about Hemmings’ background to her own father only a few weeks before the class was due to graduate.

The father hired a private investigator to travel to Hemmings’ hometown of Boston. There it was discovered that homemaker Dora Logan and janitor Robert Williamson Hemmings had conspired with their daughter to keep her race a secret…

Read the entire article here.

AIS 350 : Black-Indians in the Americas

San Francisco State University
Fall 2011

In this course students will be introduced to some of the major sociological and historical factors that have given rise to multiracial cultural identities in American Indian communities throughout the Americas and the Caribbean with a specific focus on Black-Indians within American Indian and African American Studies. Students will explore the ways that mainstream society comes to understand American Indians and their location within the social, legal, political, and economic sphere of race relations in the West. Students will engage key concepts and theories regarding blood quantum, sovereignty, and land rights as they apply to Natives of mixed ancestry. We will begin with a comprehensive analysis of the notion of a fixed or essential monolithic American Indian identity and how this construction has influenced social, legal, and political understanding of mixed-race Native Americans today and their role within the greater American Indian community. Issues of authenticity, group and community membership, as well as cultural vs. racial formation will be addressed in our weekly readings, lectures, discussions, films, guest lectures, and projects.

Variations in Multiracial Identity Integration

California State University, Los Angeles
2012-02-10

Patricia Y. Singim

The purpose of this study was to explore how multiracial people integrate their racial identities and if this integration was related to well-being. Furthermore, differences based on type of mix (half White vs. mixed with groups of color), positive interactions with racial groups, and discrepancy between appearance and culture were also examined. Five hypotheses were tested: (1) Higher levels of integration and multiracial pride will predict better well-being; (2) Multiracial Whites will have lower integration, less positive interactions, and greater discrepancy compared to Multiracials of Color; (3) Participants with positive interactions will have higher identity integration; (4) Greater discrepancy between appearance and culture will predict lower identity integration; (5) Greater discrepancy will predict lower well-being. It was found that lower integration predicted negative affect, pride predicted positive affect, and discrepancy predicted lower integration. Encouraging multiracials to accept inconsistencies between appearance and culture may increase identity integration and well-being.

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Population structure and admixture in Cerro Largo, Uruguay, based on blood markers and mitochondrial DNA polymorphisms

American Journal of Human Biology
Volume 18, Issue 4 (July/August 2006)
pages 513–524
DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.20520

Mónica Sans
Departamento de Antropología Biológica, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación
Universidad de la República

D. Andrew Merriwether
Department of Anthropology
Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York

Pedro C. Hidalgo
Laboratorio de Inmunogenética e Histocompatibilidad
Instituto Nacional de Donación y Trasplante de Células, Organos y Tejidos
Hospital de Clínicas “Manuel Quintela”

Nilo Bentancor
Laboratorio de Inmunogenética e Histocompatibilidad
Instituto Nacional de Donación y Trasplante de Células, Organos y Tejidos
Hospital de Clínicas “Manuel Quintela”

Tania A. Weimer
Laboratório de Biotecnologia Veterinária
Universidade Luterana do Brasil

Maria Helena L.P. Franco
Departamento de Genética, Instituto de Biociências
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Inés Alvarez
Laboratorio de Inmunogenética e Histocompatibilidad
Instituto Nacional de Donación y Trasplante de Células, Organos y Tejidos
Hospital de Clínicas “Manuel Quintela”

Brian M. Kemp
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Davis

Francisco M. Salzano
Departamento de Genética, Instituto de Biociências
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Recent studies of the Uruguayan population revealed different amounts of Amerindian and African genetic contributions. Our previous analysis of Afro-Uruguayans from the capital city of the Department of Cerro Largo showed a high proportion of African genes, and the effects of directional mating involving Amerindian women. In this paper, we extended the analysis to a sample of more than 100 individuals representing a random sample of the population of the whole Department. Based on 18 autosomal markers and one X-linked marker, we estimated 82% European, 8% Amerindian, and 10% African contributions to their ancestry, while from seven mitochondrial DNA site-specific polymorphic markers and sequences of hypervariable segment I, we determined 49% European, 30% Amerindian, and 21% African maternal contributions. Directional matings between Amerindian women and European men were detected, but differences involving Africans were not significant. Data about the specific origins of maternal lineages were also provided, and placed in a historical context.

Read the entire article here.