Mixed Race Studies

Those who profess Christianity as the worldwide religion and yet justify the operation of a color line disprove and discredit their pretension. If Christianity is to be a biological religion, it cannot be universal. The ideal of Christianity is that all of its devotees, regardless of ethnic deviation, are baptised in one spirit. Spiritual kinship transcends all other relations among men. Unless Christianity can overcome the color line, the universality of its claim will be discredited, and the world must still repeat the query propounded by the rugged teacher of righteousness to his august relative and rival.

Kelly Miller, “The Mulatto in the United States. by Edward Byron Reuter—Review by: Kelly Miller,” American Journal of Sociology, Volume 25, Number 2 (Sep., 1919). 224.

Black Indians: An American Story

Rich-Heape Films
2001
60 Minutes
Close Captioned
NTSC All Regions

Steven R. Heape – Executive Producer/Producer
Chip Richie – Director/Producer
James Earl Jones – Narrator
Neville Brothers – Soundtrack
Daniel Blake Smith – Screenwriter
Howard Tyler – Editor

“Black Indians: An American Story”— (as seen on ABC) brings to light a forgotten part of Americans past—the cultural and racial fusion of Native and African Americans. Narrated by James Earl Jones, “Black Indians: An American Story” explores what brought the two groups together, what drove them apart and the challenges they face today.

Distinguished Awards:

• Award of Distinction, Indian Summer Festival 2005
• Cine Golden Eagle 2002
• Crystal Award of Excellence, Communicator Awards 2002
• Best Documentary, Native American Music Awards 2002
• Aurora Gold Award 2001

A society that wants to build the future must know its past, its real past, as it was.” But what if that past had been lost, forgotten, hidden, or denied?

“Black Indians: An American Story,” explores the issue of racial identity among Native and African Americans. This in-depth documentary examines the coalescence of these two groups in American history. Discounted, and often ignored by mainstream America, these minority peoples have often shared a common past. However, with their heritage ignored and their contributions denied they are all but invisible at the dawn of the new millennium.

It was a black and white world in the early days of the Republic and little or no thought was given to people of mixed race, especially if they looked “black.” “We were told ‘if you could pass for white, that’s who you’d be; if not, it was usually better to be identified as black than Indian,’” recalls Executive Producer Steven Heape. “It was this kind of thinking that later led to ‘pencil genocide’–changing one’s race on a birth certificate to fit the skin color of the child.”…

For more information, click here.

The Mulatto in the United States. by Edward Byron Reuter [Review by: Kelly Miller]

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 25, Number 2, September 1919
pages 218-224

Kelly Miller (1863-1939), Professor of Mathematics and Sociology
Howard University

The Mulatto in the United States. By Edward Byron Reuter. Boston: Badger, 1918. Pp. 417.

The case of the everlasting negro again intrudes itself on public attention in the form of a scientific treatise upon the mulatto in the United States. The author has brought together much interesting and valuable material bearing upon mixed-blood races in all parts of the world.

At the outset the author informs us that his treatise deals “with the sociological consequences of race intermixture, not with the biological problem of the intermixture itself.” The mulatto in the United States has no sociological status; the Eurasian, the half-caste product between the European and the Hindu, constitutes a tertium quid, an outcast by both parent types. But the mulatto in the United States is socially stratified with the mother-race. His case constitutes one of ethnological interest rather than of sociological significance. The three most conspicuous Englishmen produced by the world-war are Lord Kitchener, an Irishman, General Haig, a Scotchman, and Lloyd George, a Welshman. No comparable names have arisen of purely English blood, but the basal English idea predominates, and the racial identity of these illustrious names has not the slightest sociological importance. Moses, the renowned leader of the Israelites, might have been Egyptian, but it was his mighty works rather than incident of blood that counts through all the years. In the United States all negroid elements of whatever blood composition are forced into one social class by outside compulsion. The quantum of different bloods coursing through the veins of distinguished individuals in this class is, practically speaking, a sociological negligibility. The author is, therefore, discussing a theory which he eagerly advocates rather than a condition that actually exists.

The scientific pretension of this treatise is vitiated by the vagueness of fundamental definition. The word mulatto is used as “a general term to include all negroes of mixed ancestry regardless of the degree of intermixture.” This definition is not only unscientific but practically meaningless. A careful observation of negro schools, churches, and miscellaneous gatherings in all parts of the country convinces the reviewer that three-fourths of the negro race have some traceable measure of white blood in their veins. It is, therefore, not the least surprising that practically all eminent negroes in the different walks of life are classified as mulattoes. One is reminded of a famous historian who proved conclusively that the Caucasian race alone had made valuable contributions to civilization by claiming that all people who had made such contributions were Caucasians. At the expense of great labor and pains, the author has analyzed numerous lists of eminent negroes and by some unexplained process has separated the mulattoes from the blacks. Frederick Douglas tells us that genealogical trees did not flourish among slaves. It is indeed a wise negro who knows his own ancestry. Any negro can claim some degree of mixed blood without successful refutation. There is no scientific test of blood composition. The utter worthlessness of his classification is disclosed by a casual selection of four consecutive names arranged in alphabetical order on page 206. Monroe N. Work, R. R. Wright, Sr., R. R. Wright, Jr., and Charles Young are classified as mulattoes. Both in color and negroid characteristics these names would rank below the average of the entire negro race. To rank Nannie Burroughs and Mrs. C. J. Walker as mulattoes certainly evokes a smile. When William Pickens and Colonel Charles Young are so described, the smile breaks into uncontrollable laughter.

…The hundred thousand quadroons and the sixty-nine thousand octoroons together with numerous thousands of the nine hundred thousand mulattoes returned by the census of 1890 are crossing and are still likely to cross the great social divide and incorporate into the white race, in order to escape the lowest status of the despised fraction of their blood.

In some states a person with only one-eighth negro blood is given the legal status of white. The transition of the quadroon, octoroon, and lighter mulattoes will widen the physical margin between the two races. The male more easily crosses the social dead-line than the female. This gives a darker male a wider area for his well-known propensity to mate with a lighter female and will thus facilitate the rapid diffusion of white blood throughout the race…

…The author really proposes a triracial rather than a biracial division. The utter impracticability of this scheme would be found in the impossibility of identifying the so-called mulatto class. The mixed race always represents physical instability. I have known twin brothers who were so diverse in racial characteristics that the one easily crossed the color line and withheld all recognition from his brown brother who could not follow whither he went.

The dual caste system is undemocratic and un-Christian enough; to add a third would be inexcusable compounding of iniquity.

The first fruit of contact of two races of ethnic or cultural diversity is a composite progeny. There exists no biological dead line. Social custom and priestly sanction have never been able to control the cosmic urge to multiply and replenish the earth. The sons of God in their supercilious security never fail to look lustfully upon the daughters of men, while shielding their own females from the embrassure of the lower order of males. The composite progeny is generally the offspring of the male of the stronger race and the female of the weaker race. There is no discovered race repugnance or antipathy when it comes to the fundamental principles of reproduction. Political pronouncements, religious inhibition, social proscription, operate only upon the controlled sex. The first laws regulating slave relations were made to prevent intermarriages of negro males and white females. In the long run it makes no difference whether the races are mixed through the relation of the higher male and the lower female or by the reverse process. The social stigma against the bastard progeny dies out with the third and fourth generation. Intermingling of Norman and Saxon took place largely through bastardization, which has not the slightest influence or effect upon the pride of the Anglo-Saxon today…

Read the entire review here.

Photographer Interview: Albert Chong

Dodge & Burn: diversity in photography history
2011-02-08

Qiana Mestrich, Visual Artist + Writer

Dodge & Burn: Where are you from?

Albert Chong: I am originally from Kingston, Jamaica by way of Brooklyn, NY, San Diego, CA and presently Boulder, CO.

D&B: What kind of photography do you shoot and how did you get started – any “formal” training?

AC: My photography has been primarily focused on the use of the medium as a means of artistic and personal expression. My work has been a contributor to the discourses surrounding the contemporary visual arts of people of African and Asian descent. Inherent in these discourses are issues of race, identity, ethnicity, multiculturalism and postcolonial visual expression of methods of cultural retrieval.

My work has also investigated the role of family and ancestry in the constructed identity that is the artist. One of my better known body of work are the still life photographs that I construct sometimes using old family photographs, that in the context of the arrangement creates a shrine like tableaux that renders these Ancestors into Icons…

…D&B: Have you experienced any setbacks or different treatment along your photography career that you would attribute to being a woman and/or photographer of color? (this question is optional)

AC: Yes, I have had my share of racist discrimination, and I am fully aware that there are subtle methods and layers of exclusion that are designed to strain and filter out people whose difference was being from some demographic other than white, mainstream America. There were many instances in which I did not fit the prevailing notion among whites of what an artist looks like and that was generally white and male.

There was one incident that sticks out for me even after almost 30 years. I dropped off a portfolio of my photographs at a then very prestigious photography gallery called Light Gallery when I returned to retrieve it a few days later the gallerist was super enthusiastic about the work and mentioned that they were interested in giving the artist a show, she then asked me if I was the messenger and if I was would I relay this message to the artist. I then revealed that I was the artist and with her mouth agape in shock and surprise, the offer instantly evaporated.

There were many others including Aperture magazine in a meeting in 1992 the white man I met with I won’t mention his name told me they could not publish a book of my work because I was black and I was not famous and that their audience was primarily white. Well the irony there was that he was to become complicit in my fame when a traveling exhibition of photography my work was in hit New York and he was asked by the New York Times to review it and my photograph was used to advertise the show. At around the same time I was in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and my photograph was being used in the New York Times as well to advertise that one.

Read the entire interview here.

Capturing the Spirit World on Film: Albert Chong’s artistic recipe blends Jamaica, Catholicism, Santeria and America in an eclectic artistic stew

The Los Angeles Times
1993-10-10

Leah Ollman

When photographer and installation artist Albert Chong was about 6 years old, his parents bought a new house in Kingston, Jamaica.

Chong’s father invited a Catholic priest to bless the house by sprinkling holy water throughout. A few days later, his father brought in another priest, this time a black Obeahman, or shaman, who sacrificed two roosters and scattered their blood not far from where the holy water had just dried.

“My father thought he should cover all his bases,” Chong recalls, laughing. “We were Catholics, really. But when things would start getting really bad and you’d see forces that were being worked against you that the regular, established Catholic religion couldn’t help you with—you couldn’t go to your local priest and say, hey, somebody has worked some wicked magic on me. Yet it’s a real thing.”

Like his father, Chong has a lot of bases to cover. His life gives new meaning to the overused term multicultural. Half-Chinese, half-Jamaican Chong was raised Catholic but has followed Rastafarianism, the Ethiopian-inspired political/religious movement, and Santeria, the syncretic religion forged by African slaves living under Christian domination in the Caribbean. He is married to Frances Charteris, an artist from England, and their two children, Ayinde and Chinwe, are, he says with pride and just a touch of resignation, very American…

Read the entire article here.

The Flesh of Amalgamation: Reconsidering the Position (and the Labors) of Blackness

American Quarterly
Volume 65, Number 2, June 2013
pages 437-446
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2013.0021

Tryon P. Woods, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Anthropology, and Crime & Justice Studies
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance and the Ruses of Memory.
By Tavia Nyong’o. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. 230 pages.

Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracilism.
By Jared Sexton. Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 345 pages.

The story that cannot be told must not-tell itself in a language already contaminated, possibly irrevocably and fatally. . . . And only in not-telling can the story be told; only in the space where it’s not told—literally in the margins of the text, a sort of negative space, a space not so much of non-meaning as anti-meaning.

—NourbeSe Philip

In the postscript to her indomitable poetic treatise on black life and death in the making of the modern world, M. NourbeSe Philip writes of the ongoing mutilation of black humanity through the language of the legal text. She finds, for example, no word for recovering the millions of Africans buried in the “liquid grave” of the Middle Passage: “I find words like resurrect and subaquatic but not ‘exaqua.’ Does this mean that unlike being interred, once you’re underwater there is no retrieval—that you can never be ‘exhumed’ from water?” In the face of this historical cataclysm, Philip uses her poetry to foment a disorder of her own, in search of yet another site of maroonage from what Saidiya Hartman terms slavery’s afterlife. To “release the story that cannot be told,” Philip mutilates the text herself, seeking to “literally cut it into pieces, castrating verbs, suffocating adjectives, murdering nouns, throwing articles, prepositions, conjunctions overboard, jettisoning verbs.”

I find it compelling to consider how Philip’s meditations might extend to the contemporary study of race. Is there an imposition of meaning perpetuating a similar kind of violence on the black subject of critical race studies? Within the American studies community, for instance, there seem to be parallel discussions on race. The primary distinction between these two tracks hinges on what to make of racial blackness, a splitting reminiscent of “the presence of excised Africans” explored by Philip (199). Is blackness but one among a diversity of subjectivities and, historical particulars notwithstanding, essentially no different from these other positions, identities, and experiences in terms of authorizing analyses of suffering and struggle? Or is the rupture that blackness represents so essential to the formation of the social itself that any analysis of violence or injustice that is not centered in, derived from, or accountable to the suffering of African-descended peoples risks missing the crux (as opposed to the totality) of the social formation?

Tavia Nyong’o’s Amalgamation Waltz and Jared Sexton’s Amalgamation Schemes offer answers to these questions that might discomfit many American studies scholars. Indeed, perhaps their interventions into the matter of racial blackness and its place within the various analytic frameworks of American studies scholars has something to do with their heretofore quiet reception. While both books have been duly reviewed in a handful of journals, thus far they have enjoyed only scant critical engagement from American studies scholars. American studies has become a scholarly community that takes pride in its activist bona fides, that foregrounds its commitment to progressive politics, and that positions social justice as central to its avowed raison d’être. With this in mind, I am wondering if this reluctance to engage indexes Philip’s description of “slavery—the story that simultaneously cannot be told, must be told, and will never be told” (206).

In the June 2012 issue of American Quarterly, this two-track discourse on race was on full display. Dylan Rodríguez wrote a gentle indictment of the response to the public spectacle of state violence on November 18, 2011, at the University of California, Davis, when campus police pepper sprayed students engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience as part of the Occupy movement. Rodríguez rightfully contrasts the outrage and moral indignation from left-liberal quarters, which was both national and international because of the viral spread of video footage from the incident across social media, against the UC Davis police with what he calls “a broader, commonsense conspiracy of silence” about the larger logic of racist state violence, for which policing is the most visible and fundamental expression. Rodríguez is careful to include brown with black in the category…

Blackness/Mixedness: Contestations over Crossing Signs

Cultural Critique
Number 54 (Spring, 2003)
pages 178-212

Naomi Pabst, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and American Studies
Yale University

While studies of cultural syncretism, transnationalism, and “hybridity” have lately become all the rage, there is one area in which claims of racially “hybrid” identity are still subtly resisted, quietly repressed, or openly mocked. The child of both black and white parents encounters various forms of incomprehension in a society for which “blackness” and “whiteness” seem to constitute two mutually exclusive and antagonistic forms of identity.

—George Hutchinson, “Nella Larsen and the Veil of Race”

In spite of rumors regarding the infinite privileges open to those of us with visible white ancestry, there is always, yes always, a great deal of pain that comes with this “privilege.” Our sufferings as Black [people] of different shades are not identical, and they aren’t even always equal, but they most certainly are mutual. And because my experience of racism as it is felt through this light skinned body is not the same as that experience which is felt through darker colored flesh does not mean that either of the two is any truer, more valid or authentic.

—Kristal Brent Zook, “Light-Skinned(ded) Naps”

Much has been made, and rightfully so, of the hybridity, the mixedness, of African-Americans. Indeed, the vast majority of black Americans have white, native, and sometimes other cultural and racial ancestry in addition to African. And the refrain is by now familiar, even if it still bears repeating: there are no pure races or cultures to begin with. At the same time, much has been made of the “one-drop rule,” the law of hypodescent, which denies black/white interracial persons a legitimate claim to whiteness and assigns them to a purportedly lower rung on the heritage hierarchy. Through this practice, black/white mixed persons have generally come to be classified as black, legally and in popular imaginaries. This essay will examine the links and rifts between blackness and mixedness, with an eye to what is at once a chiasmus and a truism, that black people are mixed and (black/white) mixed people are black.

Through an analysis of various literary and critical representations of racial hybridity, this essay will demonstrate that the blackness/mixedness paradox is and always was but the very beginning and by no means the end of the story of American racial classification within the black/white schema. Even the most vociferous proponent of the one-drop rule would have to concede that it does not require, nor has it ever required, much of a stretch of the imagination to make a commonsense distinction, even if a fraught, provisional one, between authentic blackness and black/white interraciality. To even state that a mixed-race subject is black or the reverse is to reference the joint realities of both mixedness and blackness. The one-drop rule itself suggests quite literally that one can at once be fully black and only one drop black. Moreover, the tendency to overstate the historical ineluctability of the one-drop rule elides the a priori crisis of classification mulattoes have long presented within American discursive and cultural imaginaries. As Werner Sollors underscores in the introduction to Interracialism, “contrary to many assertions, the so-called one-drop rule (according to which any African ancestry, no matter how far removed, made an American ‘black’) was never widely applied” (6). Rather, contestations over the “true” racial and cultural status of mixed-race subjects are ongoing and can be traced a long way back.

Endless and passionate debate on how to situate black/white interraciality has penetrated the realms of legal classification, census taking, and grassroots movements, as well as the domains this essay mainly concerns itself with, the discursive, the ideological, and the popular. I problematize rather than contribute to these debates, for what is more interesting to me is the extent to which interracial subjects elide a classification that can be agreed on. I recommend that…

Read or purchase the article here.

Race Based Medication BiDil and African Americans

New York University
2009-10-16

Ann Morning, Associate Professor of Sociology
New York University

Ann Morning, Assistant Professor of Sociology, discusses race-based medications.

I first met Audre in 1984, when I was 22. She told me her grandfather had been Scottish, and that I didn’t need to choose between being Scottish and being black. “You can be both. You can call yourself an Afro Scot,” she said in her New York drawl. Lorde was Whitman-like in her refusal to be confined to single categories. She was large. She contained multitudes…

Jackie Kay, “My hero: Audre Lorde by Jackie Kay,” The Guardian, November 11, 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/18/my-hero-audre-lorde-jackie-kay

Dala or Diaspora? Obama and the Luo Community of Kenya

African Affairs
Volume 108, Issue 431 (2009)
pages 197-219
DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adp002

Matthew Carotenuto, Associate Professor History
St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York

Katherine Luongo, Assistant Professor of History
Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

As members of the ethnic group to which the American President’s paternal family belongs, Luo people in Kenya and in the diaspora have been eagerly claiming Barack Obama as ‘their own’ since 2004. This embrace speaks to a range of ethno-political developments in Kenya throughout the twentieth century. Luo identity has been primarily constituted within a diasporic context, beginning with the large-scale labour migrations of the early twentieth century and continuing with the activities of the ‘dot.com’ generation into the present. Simultaneously, patrimonial politics constituted along ethnic lines have rendered Luos political outsiders and heightened the urgency of securing a powerful patron. Given these two trends, Luo people at home and abroad have reached into the diaspora with hopes of finding their biggest ‘Big Man’ in the figure of Barack Obama.

Read or purchase the article here.