Mixed Race Studies

Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (review)

Journal of Social History
Volume 33, Number 3, Spring 2000
pages 753-755
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2000.0037

Joshua D. Rothman, Associate Professor of History
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History. Edited by Martha Hodes (New York and London: New York University Press, 1999. xvi plus 542 pp.).

In his 1995 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, reprinted as the opening essay of this important collection, Gary Nash called the attention of his audience to the “hidden history of mestizo America.” Lost amidst America’s long and frequently tragic experience with racial and ethnic classification and separation is a past significantly shaped by sexual intermixture, cultural boundary crossing, and lives lived and identities forged in tension with dominant ideologies. Looking backward with a sensitivity to this “hybridity,” Nash proposed, might hold a key for moving beyond racialism in our future, and for finding a politics that transcends biological determinism without sacrificing the value of difference.

The twenty-three other essays assembled here by Martha Hodes (eight of which have been previously published in whole or in part) collectively explore the possibilities such a reconceptualization of the past holds. The subtitle of the volume is a bit misleading, since nearly all of the pieces deal principally with the European colonial territories that now comprise the continental United States rather than with Mexico or Canada. Still, the breadth of human experience and historical subfields traversed by the authors is astonishing. Working from discussions of the intersection of race and sex, the essays yield insight to historical issues of gender, sexuality, marriage and the family, class, religion, slavery, violence, national and personal identity, politics and political activism, diplomacy, culture, economics and commercial exchange, law, and crime, just to name those themes most prominent and recurring.

The collection is divided into five parts and arranged chronologically. Generally, the essays within each part are logically juxtaposed. Moreover, the separate parts are connected smartly to one another, producing a discernible, if subtle and fractured, narrative that describes important ebbs and flows in the history of sex across racial and ethnic lines in America since the 1690s. The essays in part one examine various regions of colonial North America, and cumulatively investigate European, Native American, and African American societies and cultures encountering each other, sexually and otherwise, for the first time. The authors here describe an era characterized by domination and distrust, but also by uncertainty, intercultural negotiation, and mutual accommodation. The early emergence of racial antipathy and the construction of racial hierarchy-both inseparable  from sex and sexuality-are never far from the surface in the stories told by Jennifer Spear about French Louisiana, Graham Hodges about German Lutherans in New York, Daniel Mandell about New England, and Richard Godbeer about the eighteenth-century Southern backcountry.

Part two moves on to the early national and antebellum periods. Here, slavery takes center stage. Most of the essays in this section focus on interracial sexual activity between whites and blacks-particularly in the South-which was commonplace despite being legally and culturally taboo. In the words of Sharon Block, who compares and contrasts the sexual vulnerability of white servant and black enslaved women, sex across the color line under slavery frequently yielded coercive situations where “economic mastery created sexual mastery.” As Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., and Josephine Boyd Bradley and Kent Anderson Leslie demonstrate in fascinating case studies, however, familial connections between whites and blacks under slavery also enabled some people of African descent to carve out personal identities and establish economic positions that transcended both their color and their ancestry.

In her essay on antebellum New York City, Leslie Harris demonstrates how fears of “amalgamation” were central to political discourse about abolitionism, urban poverty, and immigration. As a number of essays in part three make evident, interracial sex had even more volatile political implications in the Reconstruction-era South. In his…

Accordingly, the demand for statistical recognition of mixed-race persons—and acknowledgement of all aspects of an individual’s racial identity—is occurring within a sociopolitical context that values White ancestry and denigrates non-White ancestry. In such a racial caste system, it is impossible to acknowledge mixed-race persons officially without actually elevating the status of those who can claim to be other than “pure” Black, no matter how egalitarian the intent of the MCM [Multiracial Category Movement]. This same elevation of mixed-race classes is evident in various Latin American countries and in apartheid South Africa in ways that powerfully illuminate the implications of furthering multiracial discourse in the United States.

Tanya Katerí Hernández, “‘Multiracial’ Discourse: Racial Classifications in an Era of Color-blind Jurisprudence,” Maryland Law Review, Volume 57, Issue 1 (1998): 121. http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/mlr/vol57/iss1/5/.

The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity [review]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 3, 2013
Special Issue: Racialization and Religion: Race, culture and difference in the study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia
pages 517-518
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.737929

Robin Cohen, Emeritus Professor of Development Studies
University of Oxford

Michael J. Monahan, The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity. New York: Fordham University Press. 2011, ix + 247 pp. (paper).

This book is written by a philosopher who reworks the well-trodden ground of how we to understand race and racism. It is perhaps not too grand a claim to say that for many years US discussion about race and racism was directly or indirectly derived from Gunnar Myrdal’s formative study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). It is an indication of how far scholarship in this field has moved on that Myrdal does not even make an appearance in Monahan’s list of references. Instead he draws on three newer wellsprings of arguments—cultural studies, whiteness studies and creolization.

One of the great luminaries of cultural studies was Raymond Williams at Cambridge, became so weary of being hailed as one of the progenitors of the field that he complained, ‘I don’t know how many times I’ve wished that I’d never heard the damned word (culture)’. This is because the idea of culture is often so vague and so tantalizingly out of reach. For Monahan. cultural studies is accessed not so much through reactions and interpretations of literature (the British tradition), but through phenomenology. Phenomenology, Monahan avers, is characterized ‘first and foremost by a commitment to placing human consciousness at the forefront of philosophical investigations’ (p. 106). This gives him ‘the subject’ in the principal title of his book.

Trained in a more prosaic sociological tradition. I would have supposed that accessing the subject’ might be easier if the dramatis personae in the research were alive and able to be surveyed or at least interviewed. Monahan does not make it easy for himself by choosing, as the central characters in his research, seventeenth-century Irish servants who were indentured to masters in Barbados. The so-called ‘Redlegs’ of the Caribbean (they went also to St Vincent and the Grenadines) have rightly attracted considerable scholarly attention by fascinated historians. There were a few who were stricto sensu slaves (though Monahan denies this); most were semi-free workers who could not be sold or endowed and had to be freed after their indentures expired. They were often impoverished to the point that their…

Read or purchase the article here.

Self-concept and parental values: influences on the ethnic identity development of biracial children

San Jose State University
August 1994
46 pages

Julie Mari Oka

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Department of Psychology San Jose State University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts

In this thesis self-concept was measured across three ethnic groups (Japanese-American, Caucasian, and Japanese-American/Caucasian biracial). Forty-eight children divided by ethnicity and gender completed a self-concept measure and a perspective-taking measure. The perspective-taking measure was dropped from the study due to a ceiling effect. The self-concept measure yielded three scores for each child which included an overall self-concept score as well as scores for behavioral and physical self-concept.

Biracial boys and Caucasian girls scored highest when compared to other groups on overall self-concept. Furthermore, biracial boys scored highest on physical self-concept. Biracial girls scored lowest on both subscales. Girls scored significantly higher than boys on behavioral self-concept.

Parents completed a parental questionnaire designed to assess the extent to which parents would like their children to exhibit values and behaviors considered to be traditionally Japanese-American. Although not significant, mothers of biracial children tended to report more of a preference for their children to display traditional Japanese-American values.

Read the entire thesis here.

Identity Politics and the New Genetics: Re/Creating Categories of Difference and Belonging [Kate Reed Review]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 36, Issue 3, 2013
Special Issue: Racialization and Religion: Race, culture and difference in the study of Antisemitism and Islamophobia
pages 517-518
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.734393

Kate Reed, Senior Lecturer in Medical Sociology
University of Sheffield

Katharina Schramm,  David Skinner and Richard Rottenburg (eds.) Identity Politics and the New Genetics: Re/Creating Categories of Difference and Belonging, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012 (Volume 6 of Studies of the Biosocial Society), vi +221 pp. (hardback).

This is an interesting edited collection on race, ethnicity, identity and genetics. Focusing on exploring the intersections between genetic research and technology and the social and political construction of identities, the book offers a timely and original contribution to debates in the field. It explores the often uneasy relationship between new genetics and the politics of race, ethnicity and nation, highlighting the co-production of science and politics in the process. The text covers a range of issues related to race, ethnicity, identity and genetics at global, national, and local levels. It aims to unpack the concept of identity, further exploring the ways in which genetics affects local/global discussions of ethnicity and race. Overall, the book successfully highlights the complex and often contradictory nature of the relationship between politics and science.

After the editors’ introduction outlines the main themes and concerns of the collection, the volume begins with a contribution by Andrew Smart, Richard Tatton, Paul Martin and George Ellison. Their chapter offers a conceptual engagement with debates about social constructivism. They stress the importance of fluidity and flexibility in identity politics surrounding race and genetics on the one hand, without losing the focus on racialzation and racism as both historical and contemporary processes on the other. In chapter 2, David Skinner stays with the issue of race, categorization and genetics, this time focusing on the British criminal justice system. Skinner situates the emerging biopolitics of race, genetics and identity within the context of a varied and changing use of official systems of racial and ethnic categorization. Peter Wade’s chapter is also concerned with the changing dynamics of racial classification, particularly regarding the notion of “race-kinship congruity”. Drawing…

Read or purchase the review here.

“Multiracial” Discourse: Racial Classifications in an Era of Color-blind Jurisprudence

Maryland Law Review
Volume 57, Issue 1 (1998)
pages 97-173

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Professor of Law
Fordham University

• INTRODUCTION
• I. THE BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION OF THE MULTIRACIAL CATEGORY MOVEMENT
• II. THE ADVERSE CONSEQUENCES OF MULTIRACIAL DISCOURSE
  • A. The Reaffirmation of the Value of Whiteness in Racial Hierarchy
  • B. The Dissociation of a Racially Subordinated Buffer Class from Equality Efforts
  • C. The Continuation of the Color-Blind Jurisprudence Trajectory
    • 1. The Historical Meaning of Race Expelled from Analysis of Racial Discrimination
    • 2. Societal Discrimination Expelled from Analysis of Racial Discrimination
    • 3. The Judicial View of Race-Conscious Equality Measures as Harmful Stereotyping
    • 4. The Judicial Excision of Race from Racial Discrimination Discourse
  • D. Measurement of Racial Progress Hindered
• III. A RACE-CONSCIOUS RACIAL CLASSIFICATION PROPOSAL
• CONCLUSION

Introduction

The debate, in short, is really not so much about a multiracial box as it is about what race means-and what it will come to mean as the society approaches the millennium.
—Ellis Close

For the past several years, there has been a Multiracial Category Movement (MCM) promoted by some biracial persons’ and their parents for the addition of a “multiracial” race category on the decennial census. The stated aim of such a new category is to obtain a more specific count of the number of mixed-race persons in the United States and to have that tallying of mixed-race persons act as a barometer and promoter of racial harmony. As proposed, a respondent could choose the “multiracial” box in lieu of the presently listed racial classifications of American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black, White, or Other. The census schedule also includes a separate Hispanic Origin ethnicity question. On October 29, 1997, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) adopted a federal Interagency Committee recommendation to reject the multiracial category in favor of allowing individuals to check more than one racial category. Some MCM proponents are not satisfied with the OMB’s decision, because multiple box checking does not directly promote a distinct multiracial identity.  These MCM proponents are committed to continue lobbying for a multiracial category on the 2010 census. Further, an OMB official has indicated that the issue of a multiracial category might be reconsidered with an increase in mixed-race persons. Yet, the significance of the MCM extends beyond the actual decision of whether and how mixed-race persons should be counted.

The discourse surrounding the advocacy for a census count of mixed-race persons has social and legal ramifications apart from the limited context of revising a census form. The principle underlying this Article is that the law should be understood in terms of its social consequences. From a legal-realist perspective, it is important to scrutinize the neutral discourse characteristic among those proposing a legally mandated mixed-race census count. Such analysis exposes its moral and political significance and ramifications. “[L]anguage… can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive ‘othering’ of people.” The power of discourse arises from its ability to construct a public narrative and
then obstruct counter-explanations for social reality.

Multiracial discourse contends that a mixed-race census count is necessary because race has become too fluid to monitor. The theory posits that the inability to identify psychologically with just one racial category is inherent to mixed-race persons alone and that the growing number of mixed-race persons demonstrates the futility of racial categorization as a practice. For instance, MCM proponents often refer to the growing numbers of persons who choose the “Other Race” category to support the premise that the racial categories are inadequate for mixed-race persons. The multiracial narrative of modern race being more fluid than in the past corresponds with and reinforces the color-blind jurisprudence presentation of race as devoid of meaning. Thus, “multiracial discourse” has an immediate meaning as the rhetoric deployed in the campaign for a specific count of mixed-race persons, and a more expansive meaning as the approach to race that views the increasing diversity of society as deconstructing and transcending race. Multiracial discourse misconstrues the meaning of race used in the group measurement of racial disparity, with an individual focused assessment of fluid cultural identity. Such a view of race negates its sociopolitical meaning26 and thereby undermines effective legal mechanisms to ameliorate racial discrimination. In fact, the MCM can be viewed as a metonym for the more general colorblind approach to race evident in recent Supreme Court cases.

Both the immediate and expansive meanings of “multiracial discourse” are interrelated and involve a highly politicized discourse. Accordingly, this Article shall question the assumptions that underlie both levels of meaning in order to assess the continuing significance of the racial classifications that multiracial discourse challenges. This analysis reveals that although multiracial discourse may seem benign and appealing on a humanitarian level, its implementation will produce counter-egalitarian results in the struggle for racial equality. The MCM’s campaign for color-blind treatment of racial hierarchy cloaks the racial significance of ostensibly race-neutral laws, as the Supreme Court’s recent movement toward color-blind anti-discrimination jurisprudence has done.

Because of the manner in which the census context highlights the dangers of multiracial discourse to racial justice efforts, this Article will focus upon the census as a well-known paradigm for the way racial classifications function. In particular, to demonstrate the folly of color-blind approaches to race issues, the author enlists the debate centered on the demand for a census count of mixed-race persons. Because the census is the cornerstone of the federal statistical system, the battle over the reform of the census racial classifications is significant and far-reaching.The census reflects in large measure the nation’s struggle over how human beings will be known politically in a racially stratified society.  The debate over a multiracial category reveals an intriguing aspect about how we conceptualize race. An examination of multiracial discourse reveals that multiracial-category proponents misperceive the meaning of race relevant to the census inquiry by conflating a cultural approach to race with a sociopolitical approach to race. Therefore, this Article analyzes the widespread legal ramifications of the MCM and assesses whether the MCM’s proposal effectively advances its stated goal of promoting racial equality. After analyzing the legal import of multiracial discourse, the Article determines that the MCM misperception of race and its fluidity inadvertently furthers the progression of color-blind jurisprudence in direct contravention of the MCM goal of promoting racial equality. Part I provides background and identifies the motivating forces behind the MCM as a color-blind movement. Part II critiques the MCM for its adverse effects upon racial justice efforts in furthering the manner in which color-blind jurisprudence disregards actual experiences of racial discrimination in the promotion of White supremacy. Part III proposes a race-conscious classification system, which reflects the sociopolitical nature of race, to monitor racial discrimination more effectively and to dislodge the force of multiracial discourse…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937

New York University Press
October 2011
228 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780814752555
Paper ISBN: 9780814752562

Julia H. Lee, Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies
University of Texas, Austin

2013 Honorable Mention, Asian American Studies Association’s prize in Literary Studies

Why do black characters appear so frequently in Asian American literary works and Asian characters appear in African American literary works in the early twentieth century? Interracial Encounters attempts to answer this rather straightforward literary question, arguing that scenes depicting Black-Asian interactions, relationships, and conflicts capture the constitution of African American and Asian American identities as each group struggled to negotiate the racially exclusionary nature of American identity.

In this nuanced study, Julia H. Lee argues that the diversity and ambiguity that characterize these textual moments radically undermine the popular notion that the history of Afro-Asian relations can be reduced to a monolithic, media-friendly narrative, whether of cooperation or antagonism. Drawing on works by Charles Chesnutt, Wu Tingfang, Edith and Winnifred Eaton, Nella Larsen, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Younghill Kang, Interracial Encounters foregrounds how these reciprocal representations emerged from the nation’s pervasive pairing of the figure of the “Negro” and the “Asiatic” in oppositional, overlapping, or analogous relationships within a wide variety of popular, scientific, legal, and cultural discourses. Historicizing these interracial encounters within a national and global context highlights how multiple racial groups shaped the narrative of race and national identity in the early twentieth century, as well as how early twentieth century American literature emerged from that multiracial political context.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The “Negro Problem” and the “Yellow Peril”: Early Twentieth-Century America’s Views on Blacks and Asians
• 3. Estrangement on a Train: Race and Narratives of American Identity in The Marrow of Tradition and America through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat
• 4. The Eaton Sisters Go to Jamaica
• 5. Quicksand and the Racial Aesthetics of Chinoiserie
• 6. Nation, Narration, and the Afro-Asian Encounter in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess and Younghill Kang’s East Goes West
• 7. Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author

The Multiracial Category Movement originated in the 1980s when parents of biracial children began to challenge identification criteria on school data forms. By the 1990s, multiracial category advocates had shifted most of their energy to a campaign to secure the addition of a multiracial category on decennial census forms for the year 2000. Their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. The debate concerning racial categories, however, extends well beyond census classifications.

Although it is difficult to reduce such a controversial and complex topic to a few words, multiracial category proponents appear to believe that the category will: (1) challenge the use of racial categorization by forcing society to acknowledge that race is too fluid to monitor in an increasingly diverse society; (2) promote racial harmony by identifying a group that is capable of bridging the gap between Blacks and Whites; and (3) allow mixed-race persons to self-identify and to acknowledge all aspects of their racial heritages. Although one can understand the appeal of and the potential merit to these claims, proponents fail to engage sufficiently the complex history and present reality of colorism.

The first argument—that a multiracial category will eliminate racial classification altogether and move society beyond racial divisions—is debatable. The adoption of a multiracial category is equally likely to contribute to the proliferation of racial categories rather than to their elimination. Even assuming, arguendo, that a multiracial category will cause society to recognize that race is too fluid to monitor, this claim assumes that along with racial classifications, discrimination will also disappear. But, one event need not follow the other. The fact that racial labels may no longer be handy does not mean that discrimination will disappear. Rather, the virus of discrimination may simply mutate or find another host. Because skin color has been used historically as a basis for subordination in this country, skin color may provide an alternative site. That is, in the future, skin color differences may increasingly perform the role played by racial categories today. In this new social context, multiracial individuals and other persons of color will still be subject to discrimination on the basis of skin color to the extent that their skin is too dark or too light.

The second argument—that a multiracial category will produce an identifiable class of people who will facilitate interracial communications between Blacks and Whites—sounds like a modern-day appeal for a buffer class (a class distinguishable by its lighter skin tone). In the United States, however, buffer classes have not historically acted as catalysts for interracial harmony. Rather, they have served to increase the status of those in the middle (the buffer class) without fundamentally challenging the status quo for those on the top and bottom.1 In Brazil and Latin American countries where buffer classes have existed historically, the same dynamic has occurred. Thus, while tending to improve the lot of some, buffer categories fail to challenge existing racial and color hierarchies. In future discussions, proponents of a multiracial category must come forth with evidence that history will not repeat itself in the current context. In short, they must explain how a multiracial category will avoid simply reinforcing the existing racial and color hierarchy.

The third argument—that a multiracial category will allow mixed-race persons to self-identify and to acknowledge the totality of their racial heritages—is intuitively appealing. It seems that a goal of multiracial category proponents is to challenge the continued application of the one-drop rule (e.g., the notion that a person is Black if she has a trace of blackness in her physical appearance or in her ancestry). Again, this goal seems fair, neutral, and perhaps even laudable. However, as I explain below, an unintended consequence or negative externality of this objective must be considered: mixed-racial heritage and skin color may operate to elevate the status of lighter-skinned multiracial individuals, while doing nothing to alleviate the subordination of those who are darker or to change the idea that Black is undesirable.

Trina Jones, “Shades of Brown: The Law of Skin Color,” Duke Law Journal, Volume 49, Number 6 (April 2000): 1521-1525.

Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861

University of North Carolina Press
March 2003
360 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 1 genealogical chart, 4 maps, notes, bibl., index
Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-5440-2

Joshua D. Rothman, Associate Professor of History
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

Winner of the 2004 Outstanding Book Award, Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender.

Laws and cultural norms militated against interracial sex in Virginia before the Civil War, and yet it was ubiquitous in cities, towns, and plantation communities throughout the state. In Notorious in the Neighborhood, Joshua Rothman examines the full spectrum of interracial sexual relationships under slavery—from Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the intertwined interracial families of Monticello and Charlottesville to commercial sex in Richmond, the routinized sexual exploitation of enslaved women, and adultery across the color line. He explores the complex considerations of legal and judicial authorities who handled cases involving illicit sex and describes how the customary toleration of sex across the color line both supported and undermined racism and slavery in the early national and antebellum South.

White Virginians allowed for an astonishing degree of flexibility and fluidity within a seemingly rigid system of race and interracial relations, Rothman argues, and the relationship between law and custom regarding racial intermixture was always shifting. As a consequence, even as whites never questioned their own racial supremacy, the meaning and significance of racial boundaries, racial hierarchy, and ultimately of race itself always stood on unstable ground—a reality that whites understood and about which they demonstrated increasing anxiety as the nation’s sectional crisis intensified.

‘We have a race problem in England’

The Voice
London, England
2013-03-06

Hazelann Williams

Arinze Kene says he does not do politics. But for anyone who has seen one of Kene’s plays, it may sound like an unusual statement because the prolific playwright has written many plays about the state of society, ranging from life on a housing estate to African perceptions on Christianity. Yet, Kene says his plays are not political, they are humanistic.

“I’m not a political person, my plays always cover issues that people may say are political, but I’m tackling issues from the human perspective, from where it affects people personally. I can’t shun politics because I live on planet Earth but when I can I try to avoid it, because I don’t understand it. It gets me worked up and gets me stressed out and stress is the enemy,” confessed the 25-year-old.

In his latest play, God’s Property, Kene takes the audience back in time to the restless streets of Deptford, south London in the early 1980s, as estranged mixed race brothers Chima (Kinsley Ben-Adir) and Onochie (Ash Hunter) are unexpectedly reunited.

Not only covering the spiraling youth unemployment, inner city riots and economic downturn of the Eighties, the writer also is exploring the very divisive issue of race and where mixed race people stand in society. And although the Little Baby Jesus author tried to stay away from the political aspect of race he had to admit that, like 30 years ago, the UK still has a racial problem…

…“I know that some mixed raced people feel black, some feel mixed race and I thought I would explore that. It is still relevant, I don’t think discussing race is overdone, if you looked at the amount of time Great Expectations has been done and re-done, I don’t get bored of a good story and I don’t think this issue has been explored anywhere near enough as most. I think I am tapping into something that has not been explored enough,” said Kene…

Read the entire article here.