Mixed Race Studies

INTERVIEW: Martha S. Jones, University of Michigan Professor

Impolite Conversations
2014-12-10

John L. Jackson Jr., Richard Perry University Professor of Communication, Anthropology, and Africana Studies
University of Pennsylvania

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

Impolite Conversations is a fascinating collection of essay that captures a set of exchanges between journalist Cora Daniels and cultural anthropologist John L. Jackson, Jr. I make an appearance in Jackson’s chapter titled “All my best friends are light skinned women.” You’ll have to read the book to see how I fare. But check out my brief exchange with John about how I think about the question of skin color today here. This episode is part of their Impolite Conversations Web Series.

View the interview here. Download the interview here.

In Memoriam: María Elena Martínez-López, 47

University of Southern California
News
2014-11-20

Susan Bell, Senior Writer
(213) 740-7894

María Elena Martínez-López, associate professor of history and American studies and ethnicity at USC Dornsife and a leading scholar of colonial Latin America has died. She was 47.

Martínez-López died at home in Los Angeles, surrounded by family and close friends on Nov. 16 after being diagnosed with cancer in late May.

“Professor Martínez-López was a brilliant scholar of Spanish American and colonial Mexican history,” said William Deverell, professor and chair of history, and director of the USC-Huntington Institute on California and the West at USC Dornsife. “Her historical insights on race, conquest and religion garnered richly deserved awards and praise, and her dedication to scholarship and her students was exemplary. We will miss her terribly.”

Martínez-López joined USC Dornsife in 2001. Her work focused on colonial Mexico, the cultural connections between Spain and the Americas, and more generally the formation of the Iberian Atlantic world. She taught courses on Latin American history, slavery in the Atlantic world, early modern religion and race, and gender and sexuality in Spanish America…

…While at USC Dornsife, she published a number of articles on space, religion, gender and race in New Spain. Her groundbreaking book Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2008) reinterpreted the historical foundations of race. It received the American Historical Association’s 2009 James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History and the American Historical Association’s Conference on Latin American History’s prize for the best book on Mexican history.

Most recently she was working on the relationship of Spanish colonial law and indigenous “genealogical histories” in central Mexico as well as on science and theories of race and sex in the 18th century Spanish Atlantic world.

She had been conducting extensive research in Mexican, Spanish and U.S. archives for her new book titled The Enlightened Creole Science of Race and Sex: Naturalizing the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Atlantic World.This was intended to be an extension of her first book about ideas of blood purity and race in the early-modern Spanish Atlantic world, examining how religion provided the epistemological foundations for racial discourses in Spain and colonial Mexico…

Read the entire article here.

The Talk: After Ferguson, a Shaded Conversation About Race

The New York Times
2014-12-13

Dana Canedy, Senior Editor

LIKE so many African-American parents, I had rehearsed “the talk,” that nausea-inducing discussion I needed to have with my son about how to conduct himself in the presence of the police. I was prepared for his questions, except for one.

“Can I just pretend I’m white?”

Jordan was born to African-American parents, but recessive genes being what they are, he has very fair skin and pale blue eyes. I am caramel brown, and since his birth eight years ago people have mistaken me for his nanny.

When I asked why he would want to “pass” for white, I struggled with how to respond to his answer.

“Because it’s safer,” Jordan replied. “They won’t hurt me.”…

Read the entire article here.

Mr. Obama Considers the Nationwide Protests From Three Points of View

The New York Times
2014-12-12

Brent Staples, Editorial Writer

Barack Obama understood when he sought the presidency that a black candidate who spoke candidly about racism would never attract enough white support to win. He avoided using race as a platform for grievance, kept his distance from people who did and presented his life and career as an example of racial progress.

His optimism appealed to white voters; it asked nothing of them and implied a hopeful end to the racial hostilities that have dogged the country since its founding. But the easy-listening approach to racism was received skeptically by young African-Americans who live in communities that bear the brunt of unemployment, economic segregation and police harassment.

Anger over the police problem coalesced into a national movement after a grand jury in St. Louis County, Mo., declined to indict the white police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, and a grand jury in New York took the same stance on the white officer who applied the chokehold that killed Eric Garner, who was also black and also unarmed.

As the demonstrations spread, Mr. Obama must have recognized that it would be wise to make contact with the young leaders of this movement.

When he met with them last week at the White House, he had three roles to play: as the president of the United States, who must refrain from putting his thumb on the scales of justice in cases like the ones that have sparked the recent demonstrations; as an African-American man who knows the experience of being presumed a criminal by police officers who once harassed him because of his skin color; and as a former community organizer who recognizes that the demonstrations could focus the country’s attention on abusive police practices that have long been a national problem…

Read the entire article here.

Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization

Dream House Publishing Company
346 pages
1947
ISBN-10: 1258772795; ISBN-13: 978-1258772796

Theodore G. Bilbo (1877-1947), State Senator, Lt. Governor, twice Governor, three terms United States Senator
State of Mississippi

The incontrovertible truths of this book and its sincere warnings are respectfully inscribed to every white man and woman, regardless of nationality, who is a bona fide citizen of the United States of America.

The title of this book is Take Your Choice–Separation or Mongrelization. Maybe the title should have been “You Must Take or You Have Already Taken Your Choice–Separation or Mongrelization,” but regardless of the name of this book it is really and in fact a S.O.S call to every white man and white woman within the United States of America for immediate action, and it is also a warning of equal importance to every right-thinking and straight-thinking American Negro who has any regard or respect for the integrity of his Negro blood and his Negro race.

For nine years I have read, studied and analyzed practically all the records and everything written throughout the entire world on the subject of race relations, covering a period of close on to thirty thousand years. For more than three years I have been writing the message of warning to the white men and women, regardless of nationality, of the United States that you will find recorded on the pages of this book.

This book is not a condemnation or denunciation of any race, white, black or yellow because I entertain no hatred or prejudice against any human being on account of his race or color—God made them so. I have endeavored to bring to the attention of the white, the yellow, and the black races the incontrovertible truths of history over a span of thirty thousand years, all in an honest attempt to conserve and protect and perpetuate my own white race and white civilization, and at the same time impress especially the black and yellow races with the fact that they must join in an effort to protect the integrity of their own race, blood, and civilization.

Be it said to the credit of the black or Negro race in the United States that no right-thinking and straight-thinking Negro desires that the blood of his black race shall be contaminated or destroyed by the commingling of his blood with either the white or yellow races. The desire to mix, commingle, interbreed or marry into the white race by the Negro race is advocated largely by the mulattoes or mongrels who are now to an alarming degree found within the Negro race in this country.

Surely every decent white man and woman in America should have cause to be alarmed over the mongrelization of their white race and the loss of their white civilization when Dr. Ralph S. Linton, a leading Professor of Anthropology of Columbia University, New York City, said just recently that at the present rate of intermarrying, interbreeding, and intermixing within nine generations, which is only 300 years, that there would be no white race nor black race in America—that all would be yellow. And in a recent article entitled “Who Is A Negro,” Herbert Asbury makes the alarming and sickening statement that “more than two million United States Negroes have crossed the color line, contributing, among other things an ever-widening stream of black blood to the native white stock.”

In the face of these two startling statements, the truth of which is established beyond every reasonable doubt by the contents of this book, the time has arrived—the clock has struck, when something must be done immediately by every white man and woman in this great and glorious country to stay or to escape the certain and tragic fate that awaits the future of our children’s children of generations yet to be born.

It is indeed a sorry white man and white woman who when put on notice of the inevitable result of mongrelization of their race and their civilization are yet unwilling to put forth any effort or make any sacrifice to save themselves and their off-spring from this great and certain calamity. YOU MUST TAKE YOUR CHOICE!

Personally, the writer of this book would rather see his race and his civilization blotted out with the atomic bomb than to see it slowly but surely destroyed in the maelstrom of miscegenation, interbreeding, intermarriage and mongrelization. The destruction in either case would be inevitable—one in a flash and the other by the slow but certain process of sin, degradation, and mongrelization.

It is not too late—we can yet save the integrity and civilization of both the white and the black races. Many great men of the past have suggested the only solution—the only salvation. A physical separation as advocated from the days of Thomas Jefferson to the present is the only solution. To do this may be a Herculean task, but it is not impossible.

On the pages of this book the author has tried to give you the indisputable truth, expose forces and influences that seek the amalgamation of our races and has pointed out the only proper solution to America’s greatest domestic problem. May God in His infinite wisdom and mercy direct us and lead us into the ways of our only salvation.

Theodore G. Bilbo, United States Senate
The Dream House
Poplarville, Mississippi
August 1, 1946…

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction by Earnest Sevier Cox
• i. The Race Issue—Our Greatest Domestic Problem
• ii. Race and Civilization
• iii. The Negro Problem in American History
• iv. Southern Segregation and the Color Line
• v. The Demands of the Negro Leaders
• vi. Inequalities of the White and Negro Races
• vii. False Interpretations of American Democracy
• viii. False Concepts of the Christian Religion
• ix. The Campaign for Complete Equality
• x. Astounding Revelations to White America
• xi. The Springfield Plan and Such
• xii. The Dangers of Amalgamation
• xiii. Physical Separation—Proper Solution to the Race Problem
• xiv. Outstanding Advocates of Separation
• xv. The Negro Repatriation Movement
• xvi. Standing at the Crossroads

Read the entire book here.

Pope Francis Prays for New Ways of Development in Latin America.

America: The National Catholic Review
2014-12-12

Gerard O’Connell, Associate Editor/Vatican Correspondent

The enchanting music and song of the Missa Criolla resounded through St Peter’s Basilica on the evening of December 12 as Francis, the first Latin American pope, celebrated mass on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe and expressed the hope that the continent where he was born would distinguish itself in the future by “new ways of development” marked by its care for the poor, the exploited, the persecuted and its work for justice and peace.

“Today, with gratitude and joy, the peoples and nations of our great Latin American homeland commemorate the feast of their “patron”, Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose devotion extends from Alaska to Patagonia”, Francis, in his homily, told a congregation of thousands of Latin Americans in the basilica, including ambassadors, and thousands of priests, nuns, religious and lay people from all countries of this continent, and a far greater audience following on TV in many countries..

The two-hour celebration began with the recitation of the Guadeloupian Rosary, presided over by the cardinal archbishop of Mexico City, Norberto Rivera Carrera, and concluded with the rousing popular hymn to Our Lady of Guadalupe known as “La Guadalupana”.

Immediately after the rosary, one could sense a great sense of Latin American pride fill the basilica as the flags of the different countries were carried in parade through the central aisle and placed at the side of the high altar…

…In his homily, Pope Francis recalled that when Our Lady appeared to Saint Juan Diego in Tepeyac Hill (on the outskirts of Mexico City), December 1531, she introduced herself as the “ever perfect Holy Virgin Mary, Mother of the True God” (Nican Mopohua)”. Then, he said, “she tenderly hastened to embrace the new people of the Americas at the dramatic moment they came into being” and “assumed within herself the cultural and religious symbolism of the native people, announcing her Son and giving Him to the new and suffering people of mixed race.”

He recalled how Jesus, the Son of Mary, “reveals himself from the origins of this new peoples’ history, as the ‘true God who gives us Life,’ as the good news of filial dignity of all the inhabitants of America.” As a result of this, Francis said that in this continent “no longer is anyone a servant, but we are all children of the same Father, brothers and sisters together.” And, he added, “The Holy Mother of God not only visited these people, but she chose to remain with them.”…

Read the entire article here.

“Race”: a Political Weapon

Counterpunch: Tells the Facts and Names the Names
2014-12-03

Luciana Bohne, Professor
Edinboro University, Edinboro, Pennsylvania

“The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically.”

—US Census

According to a widely circulated statistic, the police kill a young black man every twenty-eight hours in America. Without doubt, the police have a problem with race. Moreover, the justice system appears to have a problem, too, as proven by the Grand Jury’s failed indictment of Darren Wilson in the killing this summer of young Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The failed indictment does not mean that Wilson is innocent; only that he will not be brought to trial. This is a terrible perversion of the path to justice. It suggests deliberate prevention of trial on the nearly 100% certainty that Wilson would be found guilty if tried. I am disturbed, however, by the well-intentioned flagellants among the white, non-racist community virtually calling for “America’s” white male blood, metaphorically speaking. I am disturbed because this is the wrong response to the judicial outrage in Ferguson. We should be calling for ruling-class blood, not dividing ourselves into blacks and whites. Isn’t this division a benefit that our divide-and-rule oppressors hardly deserve? Let us not play with the cards in their deck.

To begin with, is “America” racist? Real, existing Americans voted for a black candidate for president, one, moreover, who ticked off only the “African American” category on race in the US Census of 2010. In choosing the less privileged racial group than white, Obama adhered to the principle of “hypo descent,” which the US has traditionally used to determine the race of a child born of a mixed-race union. We have a black political class in the Congress; a black Supreme Court justice; two blacks have been secretary of state (one a woman). We have not one institution in which blacks don’t figure more or less prominently. Mixed marriages have been legal since 1967. In 2008, about 14% of all first marriages were mixed race; 9% of whites, 16% of blacks, 26% of Hispanics, and 31% of Asians were interracially married…

Read the entire article here.

Want to know how the average African-American came to be 65 percent sub-Saharan African, 29 percent European, and 2 percent Native American (source: Ancestry.com)? Most of America doesn’t want to talk about how the beginnings of “mixed-race utopia” started with slave owners raping slaves. And do you really need me to explain how not-utopic that’s turned out?

What this Mixed-Race Fantasia really implies is: The more we erase Black/Brown/Foreign bodies (who are the targets of racism), the less racism there will be. By romanticizing a future of mixed-race babies as symbols for “racial progress” without more meaningful interrogations of history, we equate an end of racism with the eradication of people of color.

Kristina Wong, “UNPOPULAR OPINION: 6 Reasons Why Your Utopic Vision for a Mixed-Race Future is My Nightmare,” xoJane. December 10, 2014. http://www.xojane.com/issues/your-mixed-race-utopia-is-my-nightmare.

See How They Love One Another – #BlackLivesMatterSunday

Grace Sandra: Always Grace. Always Advocate. Always Hope.
2014-12-13

Frank Robinson, Retired Pastor and author of Letters To A Mixed Race Son

Around 260 AD the second of two great plagues killed much of the world. It was estimated two thirds of Alexandria died as result. Frightened people immediately began to shove diseased loved ones outside. They were dumped in roadways before they died and the dead were left unburied. Many who fled died of this epidemic, as it was nearly inescapable.

The Christians responded differently. They stayed and cared for the sick. They saw to basic needs of those who suffered. Many of these Christians became ill and lost their own lives, even while heroically nursing the sick, burying the dead and caring for others.

There was such a vivid contrast between pagans, who immediately abandoned their dearest to die alone, and the Christian community, who stayed and fed, nursed and served others to the end. According to Tertullian, the Romans marveled, “See how they love one another!”…

…In response to recent, tragic events in our nation, Bishop Charles Blake, presiding officer of the Church of God in Christ asked his denomination to hold a “Black Lives Matter” awareness and prayer event this Sunday. It is intended to mourn, remember and honor two recently deceased African American men, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, both killed by police. The event also is to remind all of the importance of all African American lives. Pastors and members of COGIC churches are asked to wear black Sunday December 14, 2014 to show solidarity. A special prayer will be given for all men present in the service…

Read the entire article here.