Mixed Race Studies

The many meanings of the Haitian declaration of independence

OUPblog: Oxford University Press’s Academic Insights for the Thinking World
2014-01-03

Philippe R. Girard, Associate Professor of History
McNeese State University, Lake Charles, Louisiana

Two hundred and ten years ago, on 1 January 1804, Haiti formally declared its independence from France at the end of a bitter war against forces sent by Napoléon Bonaparte. This was only the second time, after the United States in 1776, that an American colony had declared independence, so the event called for pomp and circumstance. Haiti’s generals, led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, gathered in the western city of Gonaïves, where they listened to a public reading of the Declaration by the mixed-race secretary Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre. A handwritten original has yet to be found, but early imprints and manuscript copies have survived.

The declaration is well known to Haitians, who celebrate its passage every year on 1 January, Haiti’s national holiday. They mostly remember it for its fiery defiance. According the Haitian historian Thomas Madiou, its author Boisrond-Tonnerre got the assignment after promising Dessalines that he would use “the skin of a white man” as parchment, its “skull” as inkwell, and its “blood” as ink. “What do we have in common with this people of executioners [the French]?” he asked in the Declaration. “They are not our brothers, and never will be.”

But the Declaration, which historians are just beginning to study in depth, was actually a layered text whose multiple meanings were tailored for six different audiences: the French, Creoles, Anglo-Americans, Latin Americans, mixed-race Haitians, and black Haitians…

Read the entire article here.

Gardening in the Tropics

Insomniac Press
2005 (originally published in 1994)
144 pages
5″ x 8″
Paperback ISBN: 1-897178-00-X

Olive Senior

Gardening in the Tropics contains a rich Caribbean world in poems offered to readers everywhere. Olive Senior’s rich vein of humour can turn wry and then sharp in satire of colour-consciousness, class-consciousness and racism. But her predominant tone is the verbal equivalent of a pair of wide-open arms.

Children (but not adults) judge similarity in own- and other-race faces by the color of their skin

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
Volume 130, February 2015
pages 56–66
DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2014.09.009

Benjamin Balas, Assistant Professor of Psychology
North Dakota State University

Jessie Peissig, Associate Professor of Psychology
California State University, Fullerton

Margaret Moulson, Assistant Professor & Director of Psychological Science Training
Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Highlights

• We examined how children and adults use shape and skin tone to recognize faces.
• Participants judged face similarity within multiple race categories.
• We used graphics techniques to match face shape and color in test faces.
• Use of face shape depends on age and stimulus race.

Both face shape and pigmentation are diagnostic cues for face identification and categorization. In particular, both shape and pigmentation contribute to observers’ categorization of faces by race. Although many theoretical accounts of the behavioral other-race effect either explicitly or implicitly depend on differential use of visual information as a function of category expertise, there is little evidence that observers do in fact differentially rely on distinct visual cues for own- and other-race faces. In the current study, we examined how Asian and Caucasian children (4–6 years of age) and adults use three-dimensional shape and two-dimensional pigmentation to make similarity judgments of White, Black, and Asian faces. Children in this age range are capable of making category judgments about race but also are sufficiently plastic with regard to the behavioral other-race effect that it seems as though their representations of facial appearance across different categories are still emerging. Using a simple match-to-sample similarity task, we found that children tend to use pigmentation to judge facial similarity more than adults and also that own-group versus other-group category membership appears to influence how quickly children learn to use shape information more readily. Therefore, we suggest that children continue to adjust how different visual information is weighted during early and middle childhood and that experience with faces affects the speed at which adult-like weightings are established.

Read or purchase the article here.

Confederate officer’s wartime diary decoded

The Associated Press
2014-10-13

Chris Carola

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. (AP) — A century and a half after Confederate officer James Malbone wrote his Civil War diary partly in code, a couple of Yankees have figured out why he took the precaution: He liked to gossip.

Sprinkled amid entries on camp recipes and casualties are encrypted passages in which Malbone dishes on such juicy topics as a fellow soldier who got caught in bed with another man’s wife.

Malbone also writes about meeting the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and describes her looks in an apparent echo of rumors at the time that she may have been of mixed race.

“That’s pretty shocking,” said Kent D. Boklan, the Queens College computer science professor and former National Security Agency cryptographer who deciphered Malbone’s code with little difficulty. “It’s a military diary and you expect military information, but you don’t expect the first lady of the Confederacy to make an appearance in this diary.”

According to Boklan, Malbone’s encrypted entry about Varina Howell Davis describes her as “dark complected” with “very very brown skin dark eyes” and “high cheek bones wide mouth.”.

Davis’ wife was a well-educated woman for her time, and as a result, was the target of “all kind of gossipy innuendos from the ladies” in Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, according to Sam Craghead of the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond…

Read the entire article here.

Race, sex, and colonialism

OUPblog: Oxford University Press’s Academic Insights for the Thinking World
2014-10-20

Carina Ray, Associate Professor of African and Afro- American Studies
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts

DJ/Presenter Reggie Yates and Dr. Carina Ray review historical documents

As an Africanist historian committed to reaching broader publics, I was thrilled when the research team for the BBC’s genealogy program Who Do You Think You Are? contacted me late last February about an episode they were working on that involved the subject of some of my research, mixed race relationships in colonial Ghana. I was even more pleased when I realized that their questions about shifting practices and perceptions of intimate relationships between African women and European men in the Gold Coast, as Ghana was then known, were ones I had just explored in a newly published American Historical Review article, which I readily shared with them. This led to a month-long series of lengthy email exchanges, phone conversations, Skype chats, and eventually to an invitation to come to Ghana to shoot the Who Do You Think You Are? episode.

After landing in Ghana in early April, I quickly set off for the coastal town of Sekondi where I met the production team, and the episode’s subject, Reggie Yates, a remarkable young British DJ, actor, and television presenter. Reggie had come to Ghana to find out more about his West African roots, but he discovered along the way that his great grandfather was a British mining accountant who worked in the Gold Coast for close to a decade. His great grandmother, Dorothy Lloyd, was a mixed-race Fante woman whose father — Reggie’s great-great grandfather — was rumored to be a British district commissioner at the turn of the century in the Gold Coast.

The episode explores the nature of the relationship between Dorothy and George, who were married by customary law around 1915 in the mining town of Broomassi, where George worked as the paymaster at the local mine. George and Dorothy set up house in Broomassi and raised their infant son, Harry, there for two years before George left the Gold Coast in 1917 for good. Although their marriage was relatively short lived, it appears that Dorothy’s family and the wider community that she lived in regarded it as a respectable union and no social stigma was attached to her or Harry after George’s departure from the coast…

Read the entire article here.

Who Here Is A Negro?

Michigan Quarterly Review
Volume 53, Issue 1 (Winter 2014)

Martha S. Jones, Arthur F Thurnau Professor, Associate Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies
University of Michigan

Last fall I made a migration south. The promise of a year’s sabbatical and an escape from the demands of teaching and administration lured me from my Midwestern academic post. “North Carolina?” my friends queried, their pursed lips conveying disapproval. I understood. Recently, North Carolina had earned distinction as the state most reviled by the left (edging out Arizona.) Deservedly so. We decried the legislature as it eviscerated what remained of the state’s liberal policies. North Carolina was quick to act when the US Supreme Court green-lighted the gutting of voting rights protections. “For shame,” my friends chided. I did not disagree.

But that was not my North Carolina, I insisted. My North Carolina was the land of my forbears. The Joneses had called Alamance and Guilford counties home since at least the 1820s, nearly two centuries. My North Carolina was the bucolic lawns and magnolia trees of a black college campus. It was afternoons in the hammock with a new comic book. My North Carolina was a cool bowl of orange sherbet on the steps of the back porch. It was fireflies dancing across the lawn at dusk. It was friends and neighbors, black men and women, who raised me up. It was my grandmother—Musie to us—who loved me fiercely. My North Carolina was heart. It was home.

In late July, just weeks before making the trek down I-95, memories of my summers spent in Greensboro came tiptoeing back. Had I brushed off too easily my friends’ trepidations? North Carolina was home, but perhaps over time I had idealized the place. Summers in the South were not always easy. My mother and father never said why they’d shipped me off from New York each June as elementary school ended. I thought they were mostly eager for a respite. Off went their three high-spirited kids to grandmother for a spell. I imagined them breathing a sigh, raising a glass, and grabbing a nap just as soon as we were out the door. It was a holiday for everyone. But, it was also the occasion for lessons about how I, a mixed-race girl, fit into a world fractured into black and white. Instructions about race, its politics and its etiquette, awaited us at Musie’s house…

Read the entire essay here.

The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada by Joanne Rappaport (review) [Roland review]

Journal of Latin American Geography
Volume 13, Number 3, 2014
pages 253-255
DOI: 10.1353/lag.2014.0045

L. Kaifa Roland, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of Colorado, Boulder

Joanne Rappaport, The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014)

Joanne Rappaport’s The Disappearing Mestizo is an important interrogation of the sixteenth and seventeenth century archives in service of detailing the construction of an enduring socio-racial category encountered throughout Latin America. What is a mestizo, or as Rappaport challenges: when, where, and for whom was the mestizo category activated?

As students of Latin American race are aware, mestizaje is understood to describe the condition of racial mixture, usually involving European and indigenous parentage. However, Rappaport finds the question of “impure blood” that mestizaje seems to indicate moves in and out of focus at various times, depending on a variety of contexts. “But must we confine our understanding of mestizaje to the offspring of mixed unions? In the early modern period, mixture resulted not only from sexual encounters but also from other sorts of activities, both public and intimate in character. That is, mixing was not necessarily genealogical in nature” (p.18). She invokes the title trope of “the disappearing mestizo” to address the instability of the category, and expertly engages the archives to ethnographically portray several men and women to whom the contentious label was ascribed in court cases.

After introducing some of the “characters” readers will meet in the course of the book (also denoted in the appendix), Rappaport highlights her strong interdisciplinary approach, while acknowledging the limitations of working with archival data in her ethnographic construction of colonial history. She concedes that she only has information on her subjects for the fragments of time that they enter the legal archives, filling in other parts from available genealogical records in the region. Rather than forcing the evidence to fit the model, she interrogates the record and asks questions of gaps left in the wake of absent data.

The greatest strength of the book is in its storytelling and the sensitive portrayal of historic individuals labeled or contesting the label of mestizo who were encountered in the archives. In chapter one, Rappaport introduces a series of vignettes in order to dismiss the notion that the “disappearing mestizo” phenomenon is an attempt at “passing” from one racial category to another. Rather, she finds individuals contesting or reinforcing classifications associated with Spanishness or indigenousness using color, gender, religion, and status to make the case. Given this fluidity, it can be anticipated that the second chapter’s inquiry into whether mestizos constituted a community is answered in the negative. While mestizo men, in particular, often found themselves on the fringes of society given their exclusion from both Spanish and indigenous society, they often associated with other marginalized individuals—and thus became associated with marginal behaviors like assaults, rapes, and kidnapping (p.87).

While distinctions in gendered experiences are discussed throughout the book, chapter three stands out in the book for the way it highlights why it was often easier for women to transcend mestizaje than it was for men. Certainly, marriage provided mestiza-born women access to different forms of mobility than it did for men, but Rappaport also emphasizes the importance in colonial Spanish society of honor and reputation—especially so in the New World where noble lineages were established through more diverse means than in the Old World. Whereas women could largely be absorbed into Spanish or indigenous communities without upsetting the system too much, men had to be categorized by their particular role in the tribute system. In trying to determine why mestizo men found themselves excluded from sites of power, Rappaport may rely too much on the question of bloodline and biological relationships given her earlier arguments about how mestizaje also took account of issues of cultural mixture like how one comports oneself in public or marriage pairings.

Chapter four turns the attention from mestizos contending with their elite Spanish heritage, to mestizos fighting to be recognized among the chiefly indigenous cacique class. Rappaport introduces readers to two men who try to use their mestizo status to their advantage—arguing their Catholic religion and Spanish practices would help them better “civilize” their indigenous subjects. Their quest is complicated, however, by the position they take in defending the indigenous from unfair tributes, such that they find anti-mestizo opposition from the various groups who benefit from the tribute…

The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada

Duke University Press
2014
368 pages
6 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5629-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5636-3

Joanne Rappaport, Professor of Anthropology, and Spanish and Portuguese
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Much of the scholarship on difference in colonial Spanish America has been based on the “racial” categorizations of indigeneity, Africanness, and the eighteenth-century Mexican castas system. Adopting an alternative approach to the question of difference, Joanne Rappaport examines what it meant to be mestizo (of mixed parentage) in the early colonial era. She draws on lively vignettes culled from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century archives of the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia) to show that individuals classified as “mixed” were not members of coherent sociological groups. Rather, they slipped in and out of the mestizo category. Sometimes they were identified as mestizos, sometimes as Indians or Spaniards. In other instances, they identified themselves by attributes such as their status, the language that they spoke, or the place where they lived. The Disappearing Mestizo suggests that processes of identification in early colonial Spanish America were fluid and rooted in an epistemology entirely distinct from modern racial discourses.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Note on Transcriptions, Translations, Archives, and Spanish Naming Practices
• Introduction
• 1. Mischievous Lovers, Hidden Moors, and Cross-Dressers: Defining Race in the Colonial Era
• 2. Mestizo Networks: Did “Mestizo” Constitute a Group?
• 3. Hiding in Plain Sight: Gendering Mestizos
• 4. Good Blood and Spanish Habits: The Making of a Mestizo Cacique
• 5. “Asi lo Paresçe por su Aspeto”: Physiognomy and the Construction of Difference in Colonial Santafé
• 6. The Problem of Caste Conclusion
• Appendix: Cast of Characters
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography

Albert Chong: “The Photomosaics: Works on Paper, Wood, and Stone”, on view through November 1, 2014

Counterpath
613 22nd Street
Denver, Colorado 80205
(303) 953-2692
2014-10-03 through 2014-11-01

“Angela” (2011) by Albert Chong

Opening Friday, October 3, 2014, at 7 p.m., and on view through November 1, 2014, Counterpath is excited to host an exhibit of recent work by Albert Chong, “The Photomosaics: Works on Paper, Wood, and Stone.” The work consists of image transfers onto gridded ceramic or stone tiles that combine to make up a larger image. Included are blatantly political portraits of presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, made from portraits of thousands of dead soldiers, to a portrait of activist and former Black Panther Party member Angela Davis, her iconic afro consisting of thousands of portraits of African American women with processed hair. Photomosaics have the mass and presence of sculpture and the transmissive abilities of photography.

For more information, click here.

I raised my sons to be racially neutral

Salon
2014-10-18

Terry Baker Mulligan

Two mixed-race boys, one lighter skinned than the other. Did I make a mistake telling them they were the same?

One Saturday night in St. Louis about decade ago my younger son, then a teen, was driving around town with two white friends. I’m black and my husband is white, so our two sons are biracial. This particular son has his father’s straight hair and aquiline nose. His skin is brown like mine.

The friend in the back seat behind my son stuck a paint pellet gun out the back window and shot a stop sign. He didn’t see two police cars parked just ahead. The cops hustled out of their squad cars and did the “Whoa, what the ‘F’ are you doing?” routine. The kids were taken to the police station, the gun was confiscated, and eventually all the parents were called to come to the station.

Back up about eight years. As a young family, we usually didn’t talk about race or even acknowledge it, because at the time we didn’t see the need. Then one night at the dinner table I got my first reality check when our younger boy, who was 7 at the time, said, “Dad, I want white skin and braces. And a new first name, like Michael.”…

Read the entire article here.