Mixed Race Studies

Obama’s purported link to early American slave is latest twist in family tree

The Washington Post
2012-07-30

Krissah Thompson

President Obama’s extraordinary family story gained a new layer this week as a team of genealogists found evidence that he is most likely a descendant of one of the first documented African slaves in this country.

The link to slavery, which scholars of genealogy and race in the United States called remarkable, was found to have existed approximately 400 years back in the lineage of Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. It was discovered by a team of four genealogists from Ancestry.com whose findings from two years of work were released in a report Monday.

Using property and tax records, the team uncovered “a lot of context and circumstantial evidence” that points to an enslaved black man named John Punch being Obama’s ancestor, said Joseph Shumway, one of the genealogists who worked on the report…

…Interest in the family trees of Obama and his wife has served to upend assumptions, said Sheryll Cashin, a Georgetown University law professor who documented her research into her own family history in the book “The Agitator’s Daughter.”

“It’s absolutely poetic,” Cashin said of the discovery. “Race mixing was here from the beginning.”

The discovery comes at a time when Americans of all backgrounds have been digging deeper into their family trees. It was such familial research that led the team at Ancestry to make the connection between Punch and Obama’s family line.

They first traced Obama’s mother’s heritage through her maternal grandmother to the Bunch family, who at one time lived in Virginia, where they “passed for white” and “intermarried with local white families,” according to the report. Members of the modern Bunch family, who had already begun to dig into their heritage, conducted DNA testing that found that the family had an ancestor from Africa, and they posted that information on a family Web site. Shumway and his colleagues set out to find that black ancestor…

Read the entire article here.

Almost White

Macmillan
1963
212 pages
Original Classication ID: E184.A1 B53
Source: University of Michigan via The Hathi Trust Digital Library

Brewton Berry

Contents

• Preface
• 1. The Myth of the Vanishing Indian
• 2. Where Are They?
• 3. Who Are They?
• 4. What the Whites Believe
• 5. What the Negro Thinks
• 6. Etiquette
• 7. How They Live
• 8. Their Schools
• 9. Almost Red
• 10. Almost Black
• 11. Almost White
• Bibliography
• Index

Preface

Miscegenation seems to be an inevitable consequence of the meeting of races and nationalities. Despite the fears and warnings of the Jeremiahs, hybrids are everywhere. Fortunately, most people of mixed blood are able to identify themselves with, and are accepted by, one or the other of the racial groups from which they have sprung. Thus, the American mulatto thinks of himself as a Negro and is accepted by other Negroes as one of themselves.

But here and there we find pathetic folk of mixed ancestry who never know quite where they belong. There are Eurasians in the Far East, Anglo-Indians in India, Cape Coloured and Afro-Asians in South Africa, Jamaica Whites in Jamaica, and Indo-Europeans in Indonesia. Elsewhere we find Bovianders, Lobos, Caboslos, Cafusos, Moplahs, Moriscos, Cholos and countless others. These are raceless people, neither fish nor fowl, neither white, nor black, nor red, nor brown. They bear a heavy cross.

We have such folk in the United States. I first became aware of them as a youth in Orangeburg, South Carolina where there are outcasts known as Brass Ankles, Red Legs, and Buckheads. But, like others of my class, I remained aloof from them and never gave them a passing thought. Not, at any rate, until 1937 when I read Everett Stonequist’s The Marginal Man. That set me to thinking, and for the past twenty-five years I have been searching out and visiting these hybrid communities. A fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation enabled me to spend one full year in the field, and another was made possible by a grant from the Graduate School of The Ohio State University.

My informants have been legion. Over the years I have corresponded with hundreds of persons who shared my interest. I have talked with thousands of whites and Negroes who live in proximity to these mixed-bloods. My indebtedness to all these is very great. Especially do I appreciate the help given me by Dr. William Harlen Gilbert, Jr., of the Library of Congress, Mr. Calvin L. Beale of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Dr. Edward T. Price of Los Angeles State College, and Mr. C. A. Weslager of Wilmington, Delaware. I am grateful to Dr. Chapman J. Milling, of Columbia, South Carolina, for permission to use his poem “Croatan” which appears in Chapter II. The editors of Phylon allowed me to reprint “The Myth of the Vanishing Indian,” and the University of North Carolina Press granted permission to quote from James Aswell’s God Bless the Devil!

Most of all I am indebted to the thousands of mixed-bloods, whom I call mestizos, who received me with kindness and courtesy, and who shared their secrets with me. I hope that this book will help to remove some of the prejudice and misunderstanding to which they have been subjected.

Brewton Berry

Read the entire book here.

Ancestry.com Discovers President Obama Related to First Documented Slave in America

Ancestry.com
Provo, Utah
2012-07-30

Research Connects First African-American President to First African Slave in the American Colonies

PROVO, UTAH – July 30, 2012 – A research team from Ancestry.com (NASDAQ:ACOM), the world’s largest online family history resource, has concluded that President Barack Obama is the 11th great-grandson of John Punch, the first documented African enslaved for life in American history. Remarkably, the connection was made through President Obama’s Caucasian mother’s side of the family.

The discovery is the result of years of research by Ancestry.com genealogists who, through early Virginia records and DNA analysis, linked Obama to John Punch. An indentured servant in Colonial Virginia, Punch was punished for trying to escape his servitude in 1640 by being enslaved for life. This marked the first actual documented case of slavery for life in the colonies, occurring decades before initial slavery laws were enacted in Virginia.

In the 372 years since, many significant records have been lost—a common problem for early Virginia (and the South in general)—destroyed over time by floods, fires and war. While this reality greatly challenged the research project, Ancestry.com genealogists were able to make the connection, starting with Obama’s family tree.

President Obama is traditionally viewed as an African-American because of his father’s heritage in Kenya. However, while researching his Caucasian mother, Stanley Ann Dunham’s lineage, Ancestry.com genealogists found her to have African heritage as well, which piqued the researchers’ interest and inspired further digging into Obama’s African-American roots. In tracing the family back from Obama’s mother, Ancestry.com used DNA analysis to learn that her ancestors, known as white landowners in Colonial Virginia, actually descended from an African man. Existing records suggest that this man, John Punch, had children with a white woman who then passed her free status on to their offspring. Punch’s descendants went on to be free, successful land owners in a Virginia entrenched in slavery…

…More details and supporting information on this discovery and additional research on President Obama’s family lineage can be found at www.ancestry.com/obama…

Read the entire press release here.

Halle Berry and the Resurgence of the Tragic Mulatto

The Root
2011-02-22

Clay Cane

The furor caused by Berry’s assertion that her daughter is black reminds us how confused Americans remain about race.

Halle Berry’s recent comments in Ebony magazine have brought up the complex subject of racial identity, which still seems to confuse many Americans. Asked if her daughter, Nahla, is African American, the Oscar-winning actress answered, “I feel like she’s black. I’m black and I’m her mother, and I believe in the one-drop theory.”
 
Blogs raged, and suddenly everyone was an expert on dissecting the social construction of race. Even many black websites roared that Nahla wasn’t black. It was as if a chapter from an Alex Haley book had come to life on the Web.
 
Berry has never used the words “mixed” or “biracial” to describe her racial identity. She identifies as a black woman. Similarly, President Barack Obama, Faith Evans, Jasmine Guy and even the late, great Bob Marley all embraced having a white parent—but didn’t identify by degree of blackness. Apparently, they subscribe to the belief that either you are black—or you are not.
 
In 2011, black is no longer praised as beautiful; everyone wants to be “multi.” People proudly run through their race, ethnicity and nationality as if it’s a résumé. “Mixed,” “multiethnic,” even the deeply offensive word “mulatto,” are resurging as the hottest labels around. Here’s another new term I recently heard: “double-raced.”…

…Today everyone wants to be a tragic mulatto, not knowing the history. The mulatto is a classic stereotype that first made an appearance in 19th-century American literature. Eventually this archetype became box office gold for films like 1934’s Imitation of Life and 1949’s Pinky…

…Race is not an individual choice; it’s a social choice. The key question is, “Do you or do you not have white privilege?” If you don’t, then you are a black person in America. If Nahla Ariela Aubry were white or could truly exist in this country under the imaginary label of “biracial,” then this volatile discussion about her color wouldn’t have started. As Halle told Ebony, “I had to decide for myself, and that’s what she’s going to have to decide — how she identifies herself in the world. And I think, largely, that will be based on how the world identifies her. That’s how I identified myself.”…

Read the entire article here.

From Negro to Caucasian: or, How the Ethiopian is Changing His Skin

Pilot Publishing Company, San Francisco, California
1929
65 pages
Source: University of Michigan via The Hathi Trust Digital Library

Louis Fremont Baldwin

A concise presentation of the manner in which many Negroes in America … have abandoned their… afiliation with Negroes

A concise presentation of the manner in which many Negroes in America who, being very fair in complexion, with hair naturally or artificially free from kink, have abandoned their one-time affiiliations with Negroes, including their own relatives,  and by mingling at first commercially or industrially, then socially with Caucasians, have ultimately been absorbed by the latter.

Prepared and published at the request of the Society for the Amalgamation of the Races
New York, Paris and London
Pilot Publishing Company
617 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, Calif.

PREFACE

The reader is earnestly asked to accept as authentic and reliable the information that is given in this book. The writer is indebted to many friends throughout the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the St. Lawrence to the Rio Grande.

These friends rendered valuable assistance enabling him to locate the individuals with whom he has held interviews related in the text, and from whom he was able to gather information that impressed him with the fact, of the enormous num ber of Colored Americans, who have sufficient ad mixture of bloods in their veins, to alienate them in appearance from the American Negro.

More startling still is the discovery of the great numbers of this contingent of the so-called Negro race, who have deserted-and forsaken kith and kin, and become merged with, or rather absorbed by the American Citizenry as the latter pursues the ordinary paths of trade, commerce, industry and professions, and . . and matrimony.

The reader will also recognize how complicated the situation—but this does not mean that the situation is necessarily calamitous,—but how difficult for any person, particularly those whose ancestors resided “In The South” to be perfectly sure that there is not “a drop of Negro blood in their veins!”  That it can be there, goes without saying, as the  incidents mentioned in the text that follows plainly show, but just as millions of Negroes—Negroes with fair complexions and perfectly straight hair,— those who have not “Crossed Over” as well as those who have, have white blood in their veins, why the author asks, can there not be millions of  persons who believe themselves to be white, yet  have Negro blood in their veins, obtained by the methods that it has been thought appropriate to  bring to the attention of the public through the publication of this book.

—THE AUTHOR.

Let the undersigned assure the readers of this book that after he had read the proof-sheets, he felt it his duty to give the author permission to add his personal testimony as to the prevalence of the practice alleged to be in vogue. He can confirm what is stated as occurring in so many instances, because a branch of his own family “Crossed Over” some few years ago, and has become completely absorbed in the white race.

—A. E. SHADD, Bishop of the United Holy Church of America; Western & Pacific Coast District

Read the entire book here.