Mixed Race Studies

Russo: Telling my biracial boys the truth

The Cincinnati Enquirer
Cincinnati, Ohio
2016-02-21

Regina Carswell Russo

Hyde Park resident Regina Carswell Russo is a public relations professional, cultural arts ambassador and CEO of RRight Now Communications.

My beautiful sons are blissfully unaware of their blended heritage. More specifically, their blended race. It’s how my husband and I have been raising them. You see, we teach them that they are African-American and Italian, and we teach them about our respective cultures. But we haven’t really taught them about race and color. Each year they get older, I’m faced with the certain reality that if I don’t, the world will.

Don’t get me wrong. My elementary school-aged children know Daddy is Italian and has white skin, and Mommie is African-American and has brown skin. They get that, but they don’t know what it means to be a brown-skinned boy with a white father, or to be a light-skinned male with a black mother in this time of Ferguson, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Black Lives Matter. They are just children – pure, innocent and unaware of the different lines people must walk based on their race and color.

And unfortunately, it’s going to have to be me, their African-American mother, who breaks it to them. Their fiercest protector will have to crack the lens through which they view this world, before the world does it, so that I can protect them…

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Purchasing Whiteness: Race and Status in Colonial Latin America

Not Even Past: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” —William Faulkner
Department of History
University of Texas at Austin
2015-09-01

Ann Twinam, Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

Let’s start with a question and a comparison.

What do you think would have happened if a free mulatto — someone of mixed white and African heritage — living in New York or Virginia, had sent a letter to either of the Georges, either King George III (1760-1820) or President George Washington (1789-1797) asking if he might purchase whiteness? Do you think he would have even received a reply, much less transformation to the status of white? The very idea that mulattos could pay to become “whites” or that an English king or a U.S. president might grant such a change seems unbelievable — because it was.

Yet, during the same period in the Spanish empire, such alterations for mulattos –also known as pardos or castas — became possible. This was so, even though the Spanish state had also institutionalized severe discriminations against those of mixed African descent, just as in the British Empire and in the American republic. Laws forbade their practice of numerous occupations including physician, notary, lawyer, priest, the holding of public offices, service in the regular military, entrance to universities, and marriages with whites. Still, it was also possible for Cuban Manuel Baez to receive a royal decree in 1760 that erased “the defect that you suffer from birth and leave you able and capable as if you did not have it, repealing this time in your favor whatever laws, ordinances or constitutions speak otherwise.”…

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