Mixed Race Studies

Bengali Harlem: Author documents a lost history of immigration in America

In America: You define America. What defines you?
Cable News Network (CNN)
2013-02-15

Editor’s note: CNN’s Moni Basu, a Bengali immigrant, was born in Kolkata, India.

Moni Basu

(CNN) – In the next few weeks, Fatima Shaik, an African-American, Christian woman, will travel “home” from New York to Kolkata, India.

It will be a journey steeped in a history that has remained unknown until the publication last month of a revelatory book by Vivek Bald. And it will be a journey of contemplation as Shaik, 60, meets for the first time ancestors with whom she has little in common.

“I want to go back because I want to find some sort of closure for my family, said Shaik, an author and scholar of the Afro-Creole experience.

That Americans like Shaik, who identify as black, are linked by blood to a people on the Indian subcontinent seems, at first, improbable.

South Asian immigration boomed in this country after the passage of landmark immigration legislation in 1965. But long before that, there were smaller waves of new Americans who hailed from India under the British Empire.

The first group, to which Shaik’s grandfather, Shaik Mohamed Musa, belonged, consisted of peddlers who came to these shores in the 1890s, according to Bald. They sold embroidered silks and cottons and other “exotic” wares from the East on the boardwalks of Asbury Park and Atlantic City, New Jersey. They eventually made their way south to cities like New Orleans and Atlanta and even farther to Central America.

The second wave came in the 1920s and ‘30s. They were seamen, some merchant marines.

Most were Muslim men from what was then the Indian province of Bengal and in many ways, they were the opposite of the stereotype of today’s well-heeled, highly educated South Asians.

South Asian immigration was illegal then – the 1917 Immigration Act barred all idiots, imbeciles, criminals and people from the “Asiatic Barred Zone.”

The Bengalis got off ships with little to their name.

They were mostly illiterate and worked as cooks, dishwashers, merchants, subway laborers. In New York, they gradually formed a small community of sorts in Spanish Harlem. They occupied apartments and tenement housing on streets in the 100s. They worked hard.

And they did all they could do to become American in a nation of segregation and prejudice.

A huge part of that meant marrying Latino and African-American women—there were no Bengali women around—and letting go of the world they left behind.

Unlike other immigrants of the time, they didn’t settle in their own enclaves. Rather, they began life anew in established neighborhoods of color: Harlem, West Baltimore and in New Orleans, Tremé.

By doing so, they also became a part of black and Latino heritage in America…

Read the entire article and view the photograph of “Bengalis and their Puerto Rican and African-American wives at a 1952 banquet at New York’s Pakistan League of America” here.

It Takes a Village: Building Support Structures for Mixed Race Students in Higher Education

National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE) 26th Annual National Conference
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-05-28 through 2013-06-01

2013-05-31, 15:15-17:15 CST (Local Time)

Lawrence-Minh Davis, Founding Co-Director
The Asian American Literary Review, Inc.

Jennifer Hayashida, Professor and Director of Asian American Studies
Hunter College, City University of New York

Marc Johnston, Candidate, Higher Education & Organizational Change
University of California, Los Angeles

Mary Danico, Professor of Sociology
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

From Hunter College, CUNY, which has no mixed race student organization, to University of San Diego, which has no services or resources for mixed race students whatsoever, many of our institutions of higher learning are unequipped to support our multiracial student populations, set to increase exponentially in the coming years. How to help these young people, grappling with racial and cultural self-identity, community belonging, isolation, confusion, and discrimination? How to help our institutions develop proper services—and academic coursework? The Mixed Race Initiative (MRI) is a national project designed to provide precisely that help: in Fall 2013 MRI will connect over 40 college and university classrooms, host a virtual conversation about race and mixed race, and build support structures for mixed race students across the country. This proposed workshop would bring together key participants in MRI to discuss the project and work with attendees on the following: identifying key challenges for students, faculty, and student services; identifying key resources; building networks—opening channels of exchange across institutional spaces; employing multimedia and social media to best effect; developing and establishing mixed race courses; and tailoring resources and best practices for specific environments.

For more information, click here.

Multiracial Identity and Intersectionality: New Ways of Understanding Racial Identity in Ourselves and Our Students

National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE) 26th Annual National Conference
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-05-28 through 2013-06-01

2013-05-30, 13:30-15:30 CST (Local Time)

Meg Chang, Faculty
California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, California

Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe, Consultant, Organizational Development and Social Justice Education
Delmar, New York

This highly interactive session uses new models of Multiracial Identity and the framework of Intersectionality to enhance our understanding of how race and identity are experienced by individuals. It presents an overview of shared, core characteristics found in the literature on Multiracial identity and Intersectionality. In addition, we examine models that represent identity as fluid, influenced by multiple factors, and a process in which race, gender, sexual orientation, class, generation, and other social identities interact and influence each other. Using a range of approaches, we apply the material to our own experience and examine the impact of other social identities (such as gender, age, and sexual orientation) and our campus roles (faculty, counselor, student affairs staff, or student) on how we experience and enact our racial identity on campus. While highlighting the connection between self authorship and racial identity, this session positions racial identity development within larger social and institutional systems, and dynamics of social power and privilege Through discussion, dialogue, and creative arts activities, presenters and participants explore ways of honoring our multiple racial heritages and our range of racial identities. In addition, we examine how racial identity is framed in our research, teaching, and work with Multiracial and other students. While discussion is directed by the topics raised by participants, questions we explore may include: How do we address situations where an individual’s chosen racial identity is inconsistent with the race ascribed to him or her by other people (often based on appearance)? Is it necessary to include attention to multiple social identities when we teach or conduct research on Multiracial issues? Do we need to recreate models of racial identity based on a more holistic and intersectional approach, and if so, what do we do with the old models? How do campuses acknowledge and provide for Multiracial students, and how may these programs be improved by incorporating the themes of self authorship and intersectionality?

For more information, click here.

Spaniards, ‘pardos’, and the missing mestizos: identities and racial categories in the early Hispanic Caribbean

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids
Volume 71, Numbers 1&2 (1997)
pages 5-19

Stuart B. Schwartz, George Burton Adams Professor of History
Yale University

Traces the history of the mestizos, the descendants of Spanish-Indian contacts during the early stages of Caribbean settlement. Author asks whether they constituted a separate ethnicity. He also looks at the question why the position of the mestizos in the Spanish Caribbean seems different from that in other areas in Spanish America.

On arrival in Puerto Rico today, one can not but help noticing the way in which the term criollo has become a descriptive adjective denoting things local or indigenous to the island: café criollo, comida criolla, müsica criolla, pan criollo, etc. The word criollo has become a way of claiming authenticity and a distinctive island identity. In the Americas, the term “criollo” had a complex history, many uses, and considerable regional variation. Used in Brazil (crioulo) and in early Spanish America as a designation for American-born black slaves, the term was often employed generically for anything locally-born. Hence usages such as ganado criollo (native cattle) or even, as in the case of Guatemala, of references to mestizos criollos (Megged 1992:422-24; Garcia Arévalo 1992a). The traditional usage of the term in colonial mainland Spanish America—as a designation a white person of European heritage born in the colony—had begun to take hold in the 1560s (Lavallé 1986, 1993; Lockhart 1994) but it had never fully taken hold in the islands. Father Agustfn Inigo Abbad y Lasierra (1971: 181-84) reported in the 1780s: “They give the name criollo without distinction to all those born on the island regardless of the caste or mixture from which they derive.” Clearly a fusion of categories of social and racial differences was summarized in this term. In it, an identity and a history are claimed (Sider 1994).

In the Hispanic Caribbean with its peculiar early demographic history of elimination of the indigenous population, low levels of European immigration, and the large-scale importation of Africans, the process of classification had a distinctive character and form in which whites, blacks, Indians, and people of mixed origins were grouped and categorized in different ways at different times. This study seeks to explore a small part of this process by examining the mestizos, the descendants of Spanish-Indian contacts during the early stages of Caribbean settlement. Mestizos, there from the outset, seem to fade from sight. What happened to them? Did they constitute a separate ethnicity, and why does their position in the Hispanic Caribbean seem different from that in other areas of Spanish America?…

…The word “mestizo” itself appeared in the Caribbean as early as the 1520s but it was rarely used, a fact surprisingly paralleled in early Peru and Paraguay where less pejorative terms like genizaro or montanés were preferred at first. In a place like Puerto Rico, for example, it is difficult to find any references to mestizos despite the fact that many already existed by the 1530s. The Lando census of 1530 enumerated Spaniards, Indians, and blacks but made no mention of persons of mixed origin. Over a century later, in the 1645 synod of San Juan there was no reference to mestizos, and the presiding Bishop, Damian López de Haro, in describing the island’s population made no mention of them. Still, modern historian Francisco Scarano (1993:199) has argued that by the seventeenth century mestizos “were probably more numerous than the Spaniards themselves.” What may be at stake here is not the definition of “mestizo,” but rather the definition of “Spaniard.” Mestizos, especially those born legitimately and who lived according to accepted colonial norms were being accepted as “Spaniards,” a term that now no longer indicated place of origin alone, but was being expanded to indicate status and a level of acceptance based on cultural attributes and probably to some extent on appearance (Schwartz 1995)…

Read the entire article here.

Anti-Miscegenation Laws in the United States

Duke Bar Journal (Duke Law Journal)
Volume 1, Issue 1 (1951)
pages 26-41

James R. Browning (1918-2012)

The word “miscegenation” is not included in the everyday vocabulary of a large part of our citizenry, but there are nonetheless laws in twenty-nine states prohibiting miscegenation. Etymologically, the term means intermarriage of persons of different races; when used in this paper, however, the word has reference to marriage between whites and non-whites.

Without suggesting an opinion on the desirability of anti-miscegenation laws, the writer proposes to sketch the provisions and effects of the present statutes on the subject. Various questions then arise: what is the purpose of such statutes and how effectively are they accomplishing that purpose? Also, what are the legal problems created in applying these laws?…

I. Provisions and Effects of Present Laws

The preceding chart presents a panorama of the statutory law of the twenty-nine states that have taken steps to prevent miscegenation. As one will note, the laws are about as varied as they are numerous; they disclose differing definitions of those in the prohibited class, the emphasis as to persons in this class significantly shifting with the geographical location of the states. All these states prohibit Negro-white marriages. Fourteen states, chiefly west of the Mississippi, forbid intermarriage of white and Mongoloid persons. Three states, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Oklahoma prohibit Negro-Indian intermarriage. Four states forbid Indian-white marriages. Six states consider racial intermarriage with such abhorrence that its prohibition is provided for in their Constitutions.

In contrast to the common law rule that issue of a void marriage are illegitimate, many states have statutes legitimating such issue. However, some legitimation statutes have been interpreted not to apply to children of miscegenous marriages; others, as indicated on the chart, have not been construed as to this point. Although the status of the issue is uncertain in many states, the marriages themselves seem generally to be void ab initio and not merely voidable…

The passing of the frontier, which provided one method of escape for the minority groups, and the ever increasing occasion for social contact in our present mobile society, serve as catalysts to the inter-group reaction and increase the awareness of the fact that some groups have not assimilated in certain areas. The opportunity of assimilation, which in the ultimate sense must include amalgamation, has been extended to Jewish, Italian and other white minorities; but colored groups-Black, Brown, Yellow and to a lesser extent Red-are considered unassimilable, and are denied intermarriage with whites.

The underlying animosity to colored minorities can be partially attributed to a desire in white groups to maintain economic and social advantages. Independent of this desire is a wish to avoid the physical consequences which are thought to flow from racial inter-marriage. Thus, as one court put it in upholding the constitutionality of an antimiscegenation statute:

“The amalgamation of the races is not only unnatural but is always productive of deplorable results.”

…The intimate relationship between the marital institution and the basic welfare of the States has been relied upon to justify close supervision by it of the matrimonial ventures of its domiciliaries. Without speculating as to the physical consequences of racial intermarriage, the writer suggests that the sociological effects upon the offspring must be considered. It may well be argued that the state, as parens patriae, has a privilege to bar marriage which would produce problem progeny. To apply this principle one can consider the situation of the child, of a mixed marriage.

If white and Negro intermarry, any children will normally be shunned by other whites if the child’s parentage is known; and the white parent may not be fully accepted by his child’s colored companions. Thus, a gap may develop in the home. More important, under the state segregation laws in many states the white parent will be barred by law from associating with his child in restaurants, theaters, and other public places. Will not the deprivation of the parent’s full companionship react adversely upon the child? This suggestion emphasizes that regulation of the family must take account of conditions of society with a view to producing normal children…

Read the entire article here.