Mixed Race Studies

What’s History Got to Do with It? Evolving Classifications of Race

Brooklyn Historical Society
Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations
Othmer Library
Saturday, 2014-01-25, 15:00-18:00 EST (Local Time)

Part Three of the reading series Quantifying Bloodlines

• How did historical distinctions emerge, such as: mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, creole, 1/16th Native American…?
• What is the one-drop rule?
• Why do we talk about our backgrounds, bloodlines, ethnic and racial make-ups in terms of percentages and fractions?
• Does race-mixing mean racial harmony?
• Do people still “pass” to blend in in order to be accepted?

Join in an engaging discussion about the formation of racial classifications, privilege and pedigree. As a focus, we will read and review a historical novel, based on the real-life family history of Creole society in Central Louisiana. Cane River by Lalita Tademy describes this family and society as experienced through more than four generations of women’s lives.

Please plan to have read the book prior to our meeting.

Session is limited to 15 participants. Active participation is key. 

This reading and discussion group is co-sponsored by MixedRaceStudies.org

For more information, click here.

What’s Purity Got to Do with It? Searching Family History and Genealogy

Brooklyn Historical Society
Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations
Othmer Library
Saturday, 2013-12-07, 15:00-18:00 EST (Local Time)

Part Two of the reading series Quantifying Bloodlines

How do stories help us to understand the ways in which we dissect lineage?

Bring in your own family tree, genealogical research, family photos, or family name origins, while we take a close look at The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family by Joe Mozingo.  Short multi-media pieces will be screened detailing more about Joe Mozingo’s search for family history through a surname that both haunts, confuses and intrigues him, and unlocks hidden histories about migration and genealogy.

If you are just beginning a search for your family history or have searched for many years, this discussion session with Jennifer Scott, anthropologist and public historian at the New School, will help to illuminate the discovery process about lineage, identity and race.

Please plan to have read the book prior to our meeting.

Session is limited to 15 participants. Active participation is key.

This reading and discussion group is co-sponsored by MixedRaceStudies.org

For more information, click here.

Black Seminoles and The Underground Railroad

AC Bilbrew Library
150 E. El Segundo Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90061
310-538-3350
Saturday, 2013-11-23, 14:30 PST (Local Time)

Phil Wilkes Fixico

Celebrate Native American Heritage Month by exploring the history of free Blacks and fugitive slaves who escaped to Florida between the 1600s and 1800s, forging alliances with the Seminole Nation and establishing their own autonomous communities and unique culture.

Phil Wilkes “Pompey” Fixico is a Seminole Maroon descendant , member of the L.A. chapter of the Buffalo Soldiers and Dept. of Interior/National Park Service/ National Underground Railroad/ Network to Freedom Private-Sector Partner (Semiroon Historical Society). He is also the honorary spokesman for John Horse Band of the Texas Seminoles.

For more information, click here.

Afternoon Talk: Dr. Zélie Asava (Free Event)

Irish Film Institute
6 Eustace Street
Temple Bar
Dublin, Ireland

2013-10-11, 16:30 IST (Local Time)

Zélie Asava, Lecturer and Programme Director of Video and Film
Dundalk Institute of Technology, Louth, Ireland

In our Afternoon Talk on October 11th (16.30), Dr. Zélie Asava, Programme Director of Video and Film at Dundalk Institute of Technology will discuss aspects of the research in her recently published book The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Irish Identities on Film and TV (Peter Lang, 2013) which is available at the IFI Film Shop.

For more information, click here.

The Rise and Demise of the Gens De Couleur Libre Artists in Antebellum New Orleans

University of Florida
2012
173 pages

Karen Burt Coker

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

The gens de couleur libres of New Orleans occupied a unique position as worldly practitioners of the arts. This situation was created by social, legal and cultural circumstances. Louisiana, as a French colony, implemented the “Code Noir,” to control the large population of free people of color. These laws, although designed to control, granted opportunities for free people of color. This led to a three-caste social system with the gens de couleur libres occupying the central position, between whites and enslaved peoples.

Restrictions forbidding the marriage of free people of color to whites, or enslaved blacks, combined with the fact that free women of color outnumbered free men of color, led to the system of plaçage, an extralegal system of common-law marriage between white men and women of color. When children resulted from plaçage unions, additional laws sought to hinder those children from obtaining an education. This was remedied by the custom of wealthy white fathers sending their sons to Paris for schooling. This education frequently concentrated on the fine arts.

New Orleans was a rapidly growing city, eager to prove its sophistication and dispel any reputation as a backwater colony. The newly French-educated artists were eagerly received by Francophile New Orleans patrons keen for the newest demonstration of the superior culture of their motherland.

This thesis explores the work of these artists, while focusing upon the rise and fall of the tri-caste system that created a positive environment for artists of color when most free blacks faced open hostility elsewhere.

Read the entire thesis here.

Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue: avec des observations générales sur la population, sur le caractère & les moeurs de ses divers habitans, sur son climat, sa culture, ses productions, son administration  (Topographic description, physical, civil, and political history of the French part of the island Santo Domingo: with general observations on the population, on the character and manners of its various inhabitants, its climate, its culture, production, administration.)

Chez l’auteu
1797-1798
2 volumes : 2 ill., maps (engravings) ; 26 cm. (4to)
856 pages

M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry (Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry) (1750-1819)

From The John Carter Brown Library: The mixing of races in Saint Domingue occasioned a plethora of commentaries, mostly venomous and polemical, on the causes and consequences of the colony’s multiracial order. The most famous of these commentaries, though not the most polemical, was by Moreau de Saint-Méry, the colonial jurist and historian whose writings on Saint-Domingue are still a major resource for contemporary scholars. In volume one of his Description, Moreau counted and categorized 11 racial combinations in the colony. He argued that ancestry should be traced back seven generations and hence ultimately comprised 128 combinations. The “science” of skin color received one of its earliest formulations in this work, completed in 1789. Moreau was himself the father of a mixed-race child by his mulatto mistress.

Read the entire book here.

Bringing Black History Home

CUNY Newswire
The City University of New York
2011-04-15

Antoinette Martignoni, left, and her granddaughter Greta Blau hold a family Bible that contains the name of their ancestor, Dr. James McCune Smith, the nation’s first African American physician at Martignoni’s home in Fairfield, Conn., Thursday, Sept. 23, 2010. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill)

The name James McCune Smith meant little to Greta Blau in 1996, when she briefly mentioned him in a research paper she wrote for a History of Blacks in New York City course designed and taught by Joanne Edey-Rhodes.

Blau’s paper for the Hunter College class focused on the Colored Orphan Asylum, founded on Fifth Avenue to assist homeless and destitute African-American children. She noted that Smith, the asylum’s doctor, was the nation’s first professionally trained African-American physician — as well as an eminent 19th century abolitionist and author whose friends included antislavery movement leader Frederick Douglass.

Little did Blau know that the assignment would years later lead her on an engrossing journey into her own family’s roots.

It began one day in 2003, at her grandmother’s house in Connecticut, when she was looking through the family Bible that an Irish relative had. “The name was in there as the father of my great-grandmother’s second husband,” she said. “I knew I had heard that name before. I went home and Googled the name, and he came up. I said, ‘That can’t be the right person, because I’m white.’”…

Read the entire article here.

Rheinland

2013
Mokoari Street Productions
Berlin, Germany
Written and directed by Lemohang J. Mosese
Produced by Hannah Stockmann, Julius B. Franklin & Christian Wagner

During the first World War the French government forced African men—many coming from Senegal or Cameroon —from their colonies to fight for the French army in the Rheinland. ​In 1919, there were between 25,000 and 40,000 African soldiers from the colonies based in the Rhineland. After Germany’s defeat, some of the soldiers stayed and founded families.

Their lives, which were already scarred by discrimination and racism were threatened existentially when Hitler and the Nazi-Party seized power. In 1937 the so called Commission Number 3 was instated which had the secret order to sterilise all so called “Rheinlandbastards“, a derogatory term used for the offsprings of white German women and African men. Local officials reported the “Rheinlandbastards” living under their jurisdiction and with their help a vast number of children was forcefully sterilised or disappeared forever. In “Mein Kampf” Hitler referred to them as contaminators of the white race “by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe.”

Rheinland tells the story of the so called “Rheinlandbastards” through the eyes of 12-year-old Joachim, the son of the Senegalese Awa and the German Annemarie. Joachim is forced to deal with his identity when the village his family lives in becomes more and more hostile.

For more information, click here.

The Chinese in Mexico: No Longer a Forgotten History

Mixed Race Radio
Blog Talk Radio
2013-10-09, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Robert Chao Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

On Today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio we will meet Professor Robert Chao Romero. With a Mexican father from Chihuahua and a Chinese immigrant mother from Hubei in central China, Romero’s dual cultural heritage serves as the basis for his academic studies. He considers himself fortunate to be able to study himself for a living and his research examines Asian immigration to Latin America, as well as the large population of “Asian-Latinos” in the United States. He is also interested in the role played by religion in social activism.

His first book, The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940 (2010), tells the forgotten history of the Chinese community in Mexico.  The Chinese in Mexico received a Latino Studies Section Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association. Romero received his J. D. from UC Berkeley and his Ph.D. in Latin American history from UCLA.  

When he is not a professor, he is a pastor and director of Christian Students of Conscience, an organization which trains and mobilizes students in issues of race and social justice from a faith-based perspective.  He is also the author of Jesus for Revolutionaries: An Introduction to Race, Social Justice, and Christianity (October 2013).

Forced to pass and other sins against authenticity

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Volume 15, Issue 1, 2005
pages 17-32
DOI: 10.1080/07407700508571486

Kerry Ann Rockquemore

According to the identity commandments, passing is a sin against authenticity. Thou shall not pretend to be something that you are not. Men should not pretend to be women, married people should not pretend to be single, and black people should not pretend to be white. We all fit into some neat conglomeration of social categories and it’s just too confusing if we can’t take people at face value. Racial passing has a particular hold on our collective imagination because we assume that individuals belong to one, and only one, biologically defined racial group. This assumption disallows the possibility of being “mixed-race” and has historically necessitated elaborate rules and regulations order to classify what folks really are. The one-drop rule, a uniquely American norm that reflects our particular history of racial formation, dictates that people with any black ancestry whatsoever are black. Given the explicit racial hierarchy in the U.S., racial passing has always referred to a person who was really black pretending to be white.

As a woman who is black by self-definition, white by phenotype, and biracial by parentage, I am often perplexed by our limited conception of passing in post-Civil Rights America. Because we persist in assuming that race is a biological reality and not a social construction, passing continues to be conceptualized as voluntary; uni-…

Read or purchase the article here.