Mixed Race Studies

Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self

Washington Square Press (an imprint of Simon & Schuster)
February 2004 (Originally Published in 1903)
224 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 0743467698; ISBN-13: 9780743467698
eBook ISBN-10: 1451604351; ISBN-13: 9781451604351

Pauline Hopkins (1859-1930)

Introduction by:

Deborah E. McDowell, Alice Griffin Professor of English
University of Virginia

Of One Blood is the last of four novels written by Pauline Hopkins. She is considered by some to be “the most prolific African-American woman writer and the most influential literary editor of the first decade of the twentieth century, though she is one of the lesser known literary figures of the much lauded Harlem Renaissance. Of One Blood first appeared in serial form in Colored American Magazine in the November and December 1902 and the January 1903 issues of the publication, during the four-year period that Hopkins served as its editor.

Hopkins tells the story of Reuel Briggs, a medical student who couldn’t care less about being black and appreciating African history, but finds himself in Ethiopia on an archeological trip. His motive is to raid the country of lost treasures—which he does find in the ancient land. However, he discovers much more than he bargained for: the painful truth about blood, race, and the half of his history that was never told. Hopkins wrote the novel intending, in her own words, to “raise the stigma of degradation from [the Black] race.” The title, Of One Blood, refers to the biological kinship of all human beings.

UWI lecturer on 2011 census: Mixed-race figures can change voting pattern in T&T

Guardian Media
Trinidad & Tobago Guardian Online
2013-02-22

Raphael John-Lall

The view that there is race-based voting in T&T is a mere “illusion,” says Dr Fuad Khan, Minister of Health and UNC MP for the Barataria/San Juan constituency. “We do not have race-based voting in T&T. We have political party voting. The illusion of race voting comes from the fact that the large ethnic groups historically support either political party. But race is not a huge factor, it is less that five per cent,” Khan told the T&T Guardian on Wednesday.
 
In the 2011 Population and Housing Census Demographic Report results released on Tuesday, the latest statistics show almost a quarter of T&T is racially mixed, giving rise to the phenomenon of T&T as a country of “minority races.” According to the census, 22.8 per cent or approximately 302,788 people in T&T are racially mixed. East Indians comprise 35.4 per cent of the population while people of African descent form 34.2 per cent.
 
Of the “mixed” category, 7.7 per cent refer to themselves as Douglas and 15.1 per cent are mixed but not Indian/African. All other ethnic groups totalled 1.4 per cent while 6.2 per cent of the population did not declare an ethnicity. University of the West Indies (UWI) lecturer and economist Hayden Blades said the census results should now be used as a platform to determine voting patterns in the future…

Read the entire article here.

US stopping use of term ‘Negro’ for census surveys

The Associated Press
2013-02-25

Hope Yen

WASHINGTON (AP) — After more than a century, the Census Bureau is dropping its use of the word “Negro” to describe black Americans in surveys.

Instead of the term that came into use during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, census forms will use the more modern labels “black” or “African-American”.

The change will take effect next year when the Census Bureau distributes its annual American Community Survey to more than 3.5 million U.S. households, Nicholas Jones, chief of the bureau’s racial statistics branch, said in an interview…

Read the entire article here.