Mixed Race Studies

SOCI 329-Multiracial America

Rice University
2013-2014

Multiracial America examines the phenomenon of race mixing (e.g. interracial interaction, multiracial identity) from a sociological perspective. The course covers the legal, political, and cultural contexts of interracial interaction and how these impact current understanding of what it means to be “mixed race.” Recommended Prerequisite(s): SOCI 101.

RRS 625: Mixed Race Studies: A Comparative Focus

San Francisco State University
Spring 2013

Introduction to the field of mixed race studies from a comparative and ethnic studies perspective. Exploration of various multiracial issues for ethnic studies from the viewpoint of scholars and cultural expressionists who are themselves of mixed-racial heritage. [Formerly ETHS 625]

Philosophy of Race (3050)

Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina
Fall 2013

Kim Hall, Professor of Philosophy

What is race?  What is the relationship between the category of race and racism?  What is the relationship between race and personal identity?  How do multiracial identities raise questions about the meaning of race and its relationship to identity?  What is the relationship between racialization and society?  What can philosophy help us to understand about race?  What are the relationships between race, gender, class, and sexuality?  How has the idea of race influenced the discipline and practice of philosophy?  This course will examine the metaphysical, epistemological, social, political, and ethical dimensions of race.  Class readings will include both historical and contemporary philosophical approaches to race and racism.

American Multicultural Studies (AMCS) 374: The Multiracial Experience

Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California
2012-2013

Elenita Fe (Leny) M Strobel, Associate Professor and Chair of American Multicultural Studies Department

A general survey of the historical and contemporary experience of people claiming more than one racial or ethnic background. Emphasis will be given to inter-racial relations, the impact of political and social factors, and the cultural expressions of the multiracial experience.

Children of the Occupation

Radio National
Big Ideals
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
2013-03-11

For a decade following the end of the Second World War, foreign troops occupied Japan.  During that time, thousands of mixed race children were born, the result of relationships between the occupying servicemen – Australians, Americans, Brits – and Japanese women.  What became of those children after their fathers returned home?  Former ABC Tokyo based correspondent, Walter Hamilton, has been finding out.

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

Letter documenting the struggle of two children’s attempt to attend school

Special Collections
University of Southern Mississippi Libraries
Item of the Month
March 2010

Jennifer Brannock, Special Collections Librarian

The Mississippi Department of Archives and History: Sovereignty Commission Online

[Note from Steven F. Riley: For more on Newton Knight, Rachel Knight, and the “Free State of Jones,” please read Victoria E. Bynum’s excellent monograph, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War.]

In 1964, 9-year-old Edgar and 8-year-old Randy Williamson had never attended a day of school. The debate over their admittance stems from the fact that they are 1/16 or 1/32 African American. They are the great, great grandchildren of Newt Knight and a slave woman, Rachel. Newt Knight is a well-known historical figure who was the man behind the “Free State of Jones.” Rachel was a slave owned by Knight’s uncle. Even though Knight was married, it is believed that he left his wife and lived with Rachel until her death.

Edgar and Randy Williamson’s great, great grandmother was African American which meant that they were 1/16 African American. According to Mississippi law at the time, a person had to be less than 1/8 African American to be considered white. In the case of the Edgar and Randy, their mother, a direct descendant of Newt and Rachel, was listed as black on her birth certificate (she was 1/8 African American) with Edgar and Randy as white (their father was white). The people in Stringer, a community in Jasper County, considered the children to be African American since their mother was. Due to these beliefs, school officials at the white school in Stringer anticipated strong objections and possible violence if the children were admitted…

Read the entire article here.

The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (Scarborough review)

Civil War History
Volume 49, Number 1, March 2003
pages 72-74
DOI: 10.1353/cwh.2003.0026

William Kauffman Scarborough, Professor Emeritus of History
University of Southern Mississippi

The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War. By Victoria E. Bynum. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. 316. Cloth.)

For generations the so-called legend of the “Free State of Jones” has circulated throughout Mississippi and, to a lesser extent, beyond the borders of the state. Anti-Confederate elements within this piney-woods county in south Mississippi, so the story goes, actually seceded from the Confederacy and established a small independent republic. As previous historians have discovered, the story is entirely apocryphal. In actuality a band of Confederate deserters led by Newton Knight formed a company in the fall of 1863 that subsequently gained control over much of this predominately non-slaveholding county and engaged in a number of skirmishes with Confederate cavalry units over a period of more than a year. The Knight Company was pretty well decimated during what the author term’s an “infamous” Confederate raid into the county in April 1864 led by Col. Robert Lowery, later a two-term governor of Mississippi (115). By the time the skirmishing ended, ten of the Jones County deserters had  been hanged, and most of the remainder had either fled to the swamps, returned to the Confederate army, or joined the Union army in New Orleans.

Those expecting to read a detailed account of the Civil War activities of Newt Knight and his intrepid band of dissident warriors will be disappointed with this book. Only two of the eight chapters (thirty-four pages in all) are devoted to the war. Instead, the author concentrates primarily on the background of the families that settled in this rural piney-woods county and on the interracial liaisons that resulted in the so-called community of “white Negroes” after the war. Indeed, as the dust jacket proclaims, this is actually an account of the “origins and legacy” of the legendary Jones County rebels from the American Revolution to the twentieth-century civil rights movement. With a heavy emphasis upon the currently fashionable theme of race, class, and gender, Bynum traces the movement of such families as the Knights, Collinses, Welborns, Bynums (the author’s father was a native of Jones County), Sumralls, Welches, and Valentines from their antecedents in the Carolinas, where they were allegedly influenced by the Great Awakening and the Regulator Movement, to their settlement in south Mississippi during the first third of the nineteenth century. It was these independent-minded nonslaveholding yeomen who opposed secession in 1861 and ultimately took up arms against the Confederacy, aided in no small measure by the female members of their families.

One of those women was Rachel Knight, a mulatto slave who had supported the Knight Company during the war and who later had a long-term intimate relationship with Knight, apparently bearing him at least two sons. Whatever the true relationship between Newt and Rachel, it is clear that the older children of the two intermarried beginning about 1878, thereby giving rise to a mixed-race community in Jones County that endures to this day. The ambiguous racial identities in the county were illuminated in 1948 when Davis Knight, a great-grandson of Rachel Knight, was convicted of violating the anti-miscegenation laws then on the books in Mississippi because he had married a white woman two years before. Although his conviction was overturned by the state supreme court, the case illustrates the complexity of the family relationships that resulted from the interracial unions inaugurated by Knight and his black paramour.

Bynum, who clearly sympathizes with Knight and his company of anti-Confederates, contends that the Civil War dissident has been stigmatized unfairly by his postwar defiance of racial customs. If he was not quite the Robin Hood figure depicted by his son, Thomas J. Knight, in a 1935 biography, he was certainly not the villainous traitor described by his segregationist grandniece, Ethel Knight, in what…

Brazil’s affirmative action law offers a huge hand up

The Christian Science Monitor
2013-02-12

Sara Miller Llana, Latin America Bureau Chief and Staff Writer

Public universities in Brazil will reserve half their seats to provide racial, income, and ethnic diversity – a law that goes the furthest in the Americas in attempting race-based equality. It will most greatly affect the large Afro-Brazilian population.

Rio de Janeiro—Thaiana Rodrigues, the daughter of an esthetician in Rio de Janeiro, tried to get into college three times. But having spent most of her childhood in poor public schools – her anatomy teacher in seventh grade never showed up to class so she simply never learned the subject – Ms. Rodrigues was unable to pass the entrance exam.

It was not until her fourth try, when she applied as a quota recipient based on her race and socioeconomic status, that she won a spot at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), a public university that pioneered a quota system for public school students.

Rodrigues graduated in August 2011 with a degree in social sciences and now has a job working as an administrative assistant in an educational exhibit in the state legislature. Although only in her first year, already she is earning what her mother makes and is positioning herself for a career in public policy.

Now, many more marginalized Brazilians may be able to reap the same benefit. A system that was an experiment at scores of universities like UERJ over the past decade has become law: public federal universities must reserve half of their spots for underprivileged students hailing from public schools, disproportionately attended by minorities.

The law, signed in August and set to be completely implemented within four years, will have the widest impact on Afro-Brazilians, who make up more than half of the nation’s population.

“Without the law, many black students could not get into the system,” says Rodrigues, who is Afro-Brazilian…

…Affirmative action has long been resisted in Latin America, which considered it an import of the US, where it was first tried. After abolishing slavery, Latin America never implemented the segregation policies of its neighbor to the north, and has intermixed racially and ethnically far more than has the US. But fuzzy definitions of race don’t preclude racism.

“The main problem is this idea that this is a mestizo country where mixed-blood people are the majority, and mixing bloods gave us democracy,” says Jaime Arocha, an anthropologist and expert on Afro-Colombians.

“This is the founding myth in most Latin America countries. [Many believe] that our systems are not as segregationist as those in the north,” Mr. Arocha says. “But if you go to a national university in Colombia, the amount of professors of African descent is not more than 2 percent. In terms of students, we do not have more than 5 percent. [Universities] should reflect the demographic profiles of the country.” (Some 10 percent of Colombia’s population is of African descent.)…

Read the entire article here.

Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia, 1846–1948

Duke University Press
2003
320 pages
Illustrations: 9 b&w photos, 5 maps
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-3092-9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-3080-6

Nancy P. Appelbaum, Associate Professor of History
Binghamton University, State University of New York

Colombia’s western Coffee Region is renowned for the whiteness of its inhabitants, who are often described as respectable pioneer families who domesticated a wild frontier and planted coffee on the forested slopes of the Andes. Some local inhabitants, however, tell a different tale—of white migrants rapaciously usurping the lands of indigenous and black communities. Muddied Waters examines both of these legends, showing how local communities, settlers, speculators, and politicians struggled over jurisdictional boundaries and the privatization of communal lands in the creation of the Coffee Region. Viewing the emergence of this region from the perspective of Riosucio, a multiracial town within it, Nancy P. Appelbaum reveals the contingent and contested nature of Colombia’s racialized regional identities.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Colombian elite intellectuals, Appelbaum contends, mapped race onto their mountainous topography by defining regions in racial terms. They privileged certain places and inhabitants as white and modern and denigrated others as racially inferior and backward. Inhabitants of Riosucio, however, elaborated local narratives about their mestizo and indigenous identities that contested the white mystique of the Coffee Region. Ongoing violent conflicts over land and politics, Appelbaum finds, continue to shape local debates over history and identity. Drawing on archival and published sources complemented by oral history, Muddied Waters vividly illustrates the relationship of mythmaking and racial inequality to regionalism and frontier colonization in postcolonial Latin America.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Riosucio: Race, Colonization, Region, and Community
• Part 1. Country of Regions, 1946-1886
  • 1. Beauty and the Beast: Antioquia and Cauca
  • 2. Accompanied by Progress: Cauca Intermediaries and Antioqueno Migration
  • 3. By Consent of the Indigenas: Riosucios Indigenous Communities
• Part 2. The White Republic, 1886-1930
  • 4. Regenerating Riosucio: Regeneration and the Transition to Conservative Rule
  • 5. Regenerating Conflict: Riosucios Indigenas in the White Republic
  • 6. Riosucio on the Margins of the Model Department
• Part 3. Remembering Race, Region, and Community
  • 7. Remembering Riosucio: Imagining a Mestizo Community
  • 8. Remembering San Lorenzo: Imagining an Indigenous Community
• Conclusion: Reimagining Region and Nation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index