Mixed Race Studies

Developing a genealogy of racial prejudice in Saint-Domingue, [Julien] Raimond began with a study of the colony’s history. He noted that, in the early 18th century, during the first generations of the colony’s existence, almost all the white settlers who travelled to the colony had been men. They had married African women. They – and the French state – acknowledged these relationships. They freed and recognised their mixed-race children, setting them up as plantation-owners in their own rights. A mixed-race property-owning class emerged, equal in rights and wealth to their white neighbours and relatives. By the 1760s, however, white colonists increasingly saw free people of colour as a threat to access to land and capital in a colony that was increasingly crowded, filled with recent immigrants from France seeking to become rich. Using racial difference as a weapon in their economic struggle, white colonists began to impose discriminatory legislation against mixed-race people.

Blake Smith, “On prejudice,” Aeon, March 5, 2018. https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-prejudice-isnt-what-causes-racism.

New $10 bill starring Nova Scotian will debut in Halifax next week

CBC News
Nova Scotia
2018-03-02

Wanda Robson, the sister of Viola Desmond, smiles as it is announced during a ceremony in 2016 that her sister will be featured on Canadian currency. (Canadian Press)

Viola Desmond’s banknote will be unveiled at Halifax Central Library on Thursday

Canadians will get their first peek at the new $10 bill featuring civil rights pioneer Viola Desmond at an event in Halifax next week.

The banknote will be unveiled Thursday at the Halifax Central Library by federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau and Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz…

Read the entire article here.

Viola Desmond, the new face of the $10 bill, ‘represents courage’

The Globe and Mail
2016-12-09

Laura Stone

Viola Desmond, shown in this undated handout image provided by Communications Nova Scotia, often described as Canada’s Rosa Parks for her 1946 decision to sit in a whites-only section of a Nova Scotia movie theatre, will be the first woman to be celebrated on the face of a Canadian banknote.

Viola Desmond just wanted to watch a movie.

The year was 1946 and the movie was The Dark Mirror, a psychological thriller starring Olivia de Havilland. Ms. Desmond, a beauty-school owner from Halifax, was temporarily stranded in New Glasgow, N.S., after some car trouble. She hadn’t been to the movies in years, probably not since Gone with the Wind came out in 1939.

So, she walked to a nearby theatre, bought a ticket and sat in the front – a better view for the petite woman with poor eyesight.

There was only one problem: She was black…

Read the entire article here.

A Family Affair

Ball Bearings Magazine
2018-02-26

Merritt Mclaughlin

Photos/Illustrations by Annelise Hanshaw

When a child is raised with parents from different cultures, they are exposed to different perspectives and beliefs that shape how they approach the world.

In the Celtic culture, the most valuable things are said to come in threes—The Earth, the Sea, and the Sky, and the three stages of life. Representing this ideology is the Celtic knot, known also as the Triquetra or the Trinity Knot.

The Celtic knot is composed of lines woven together meeting at three key points. The knot has been adopted into many other cultures despite its Celtic origin.

The knot, a versatile and ornate symbol, adorns wedding rings, glows with sunlight streaming through stained glass church windows, and even shows up on TV shows.

Celebrating Differences

Stephen Baker’s Celtic knot is embedded in his skin, a tattoo laying directly over his heart. For him, its points represent his mom, his siblings, and his step-dad.

Like the knot, his family is woven together despite the staggering differences in their cultures.

Stephen is biracial, and he appreciates all the different cultures and people who came together to create his unique worldview…

Read the entire article here.

On prejudice

Aeon
2018-03-05

Blake Smith, Postdoctoral Fellow
European University Institute, Florence, Italy

Famille Métisse (1775) by Marius-Pierre le Masurier. Photo courtesy Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac/RMN

An 18th-century creole slaveholder invented the idea of ‘racial prejudice’ to defend diversity among a slave-owning elite

n 1791, Julien Raimond published one of the first critiques of racial prejudice. Raimond was a free man of racially mixed ancestry from the French colony of Saint-Domingue (today the country of Haiti), and his essay ‘Observations on the Origin and Progress of White People’s Prejudice against People of Colour’ argued that legal discrimination against people of African origin resulted from psychological biases. Raimond’s work was the first sustained account of how racial prejudice operates – and how it might be eliminated. Today, the idea that unconscious biases permeate individual psychology, prompting discriminatory behaviours and perpetuating social inequality, is central to discussions of race in politics, academia and everyday life. But this idea was the product of a specific 18th-century moment, with surprising and troubling motivations behind it.

Raimond was an activist for the rights of people of colour. In 1789, he left his home in Saint-Domingue just before the outbreak of the French Revolution. He went to Paris to lobby the government to grant equal status to free people of African origin. In Paris, Raimond joined a circle of radical thinkers and politicians who believed that racial equality had to be part of the emerging Revolution. But Raimond was no opponent of slavery. On the contrary, while his allies argued for its abolition, Raimond insisted that racial equality and abolition of slavery had nothing to do with each other. The first page of his treatise claimed that a cabal of ‘white plantation-owners … have cleverly conflated the cause of people of colour with that of slaves’. Raimond, in fact, wanted to preserve slavery. He believed that eliminating racial prejudice would bring white and non-white slave-owners together in a united front against enslaved Africans. He drew on the pro-slavery arguments of white plantation-owners. Raimond’s idea that there is such a thing as ‘racial prejudice’ and that discrimination is rooted in this psychological phenomenon originated in these plantation-owners’ defences of slavery.

Raimond’s ideas strike many present-day readers as bizarre and hypocritical. After all, he pioneered modern critiques of racial prejudice while also defending slavery. Most people today presume that racism led to slavery, and that slavery and racism were practically synonymous. But in the 18th century, this was not so clearly the case. From Raimond’s perspective, as an 18th-century creole slave-owner, slavery and racism were distinct, and it seemed urgent to disentangle them. Slavery, after all, had existed for thousands of years, while modern racial discrimination, Raimond held, was something recent, contingent and reformable. Like many thinkers of his era (including many of the United States’ Founding Fathers), Raimond saw the world divided between an elite of propertied men and a servile mass of labourers. He saw that the power of a tiny elite would be more resilient if the privileged included people of different colours…

Read the entire article here.

A Long Way from Home, A novel

Knopf
2018-02-27
336 pages
6-1/4 x 9-1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 9780525520177
eBook ISBN: 9780525520184

Peter Carey

The two-time Booker Prize-winning author now gives us a wildly exuberant, wily new novel that circumnavigates 1954 Australia, revealing as much about the country/continent as it does about three audacious individuals who take part in the infamous 10,000-mile race, the Redex Trial.

Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in southeastern Australia. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent, over roads no car will ever quite survive. With them is their lanky, fair-haired navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champion and failed schoolteacher who calls the turns and creeks crossings on a map that will remove them, without warning, from the white Australia they all know so well. This is a thrilling high-speed story that starts in one way, and then takes you someplace else. It is often funny, more so as the world gets stranger, and always a page-turner even as you learn a history these characters never knew themselves.

Set in the 1950s, this is a world every American will recognize: black, white, who we are, how we got here, and what we did to each other along the way.

A Long Way from Home is Peter Carey’s late-style masterpiece.

We Have Not Stopped Trembling Yet: Letters to My Filipino-Athabascan Family

State University of New York Press
February 2018
200 pages
Paperback ISBN13: 978-1-4384-6952-2

E. J. R. David, Associate Professor of Psychology
University of Alaska, Anchorage

A father’s personal and intimate account of his Filipino and Alaska Native family’s experiences, and his search for how to help his children overcome the effects of historical and contemporary oppression.

In a series of letters to his mixed-race Koyukon Athabascan family, E. J. R. David shares his struggles, insecurities, and anxieties as a Filipino American immigrant man, husband, and father living in the lands dominated by his family’s colonizer. The result is We Have Not Stopped Trembling Yet, a deeply personal and heartfelt exploration of the intersections and widespread social, psychological, and health implications of colonialism, immigration, racism, sexism, intergenerational trauma, and internalized oppression. Weaving together his lived realities, his family’s experiences, and empirical data, David reflects on a difficult journey, touching upon the importance of developing critical and painful consciousness, as well as the need for connectedness, strength, freedom, and love, in our personal and collective efforts to heal from the injuries of historical and contemporary oppression. The persecution of two marginalized communities is brought to the forefront in this book. Their histories underscore and reveal how historical and contemporary oppression has very real and tangible impacts on Peoples across time and generations.

Bending Their Way Onward: Creek Indian Removal in Documents

University of Nebraska Press
February 2018
834 pages
10 illustrations, 17 maps, index
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-9698-5

Christopher D. Haveman, Assistant Professor of History
University of West Alabama

Between 1827 and 1837 approximately twenty-three thousand Creek Indians were transported across the Mississippi River, exiting their homeland under extreme duress and complex pressures. During the physically and emotionally exhausting journey, hundreds of Creeks died, dozens were born, and almost no one escaped without emotional scars caused by leaving the land of their ancestors.

Bending Their Way Onward is an extensive collection of letters and journals describing the travels of the Creeks as they moved from Alabama to present-day Oklahoma. This volume includes documents related to the “voluntary” emigrations that took place beginning in 1827 as well as the official conductor journals and other materials documenting the forced removals of 1836 and the coerced relocations of 1836 and 1837.

This volume also provides a comprehensive list of muster rolls from the voluntary emigrations that show the names of Creek families and the number of slaves who moved west. The rolls include many prominent Indian countrymen (such as white men married to Creek women) and Creeks of mixed parentage. Additional biographical data for these Creek families is included whenever possible. Bending Their Way Onward is the most exhaustive collection to date of previously unpublished documents related to this pivotal historical event.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1. The Voluntary Emigrations 1827-1836
  • 1. The First McIntosh Party, 1827-1828
  • 2. The Second McIntosh Party, 1828
  • 3. The Third Voluntary Emigrating Party, 1829
  • 4. Chilly McIntosh’s Emigrating Party, 1833
  • 5. The Fourth Voluntary Emigrating Party, 1834-35
  • 6. The Fifth Voluntary Emigrating Party, 1835-36
• Part 2. The Forced Removals, 1836
  • 7. Removal of the First Detachment of Creek Prisoners, July 1836-August 1836
  • 8. Second Detachment of Creek Prisoners
• Part 3. The Coerced Relocations, 1836-37
  • 9. Detachments 1-6
  • 10. Detachment 1
  • 11. Detachment 2
  • 12. Detachment 3
  • 13. Detachment 4
  • 14. Detachment 5
  • 15. Detachment 6
• Part 4. The Refugee Removals, 1837
  • 16. The Removal of the Refugee Creeks in the Cherokee and Chickasaw Countries
  • Part 5. The Voluntary Self-Emigrations and Reunification Emigrations, 1831-77
  • 17. The Reunification Emigrations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Iola Leroy or, Shadows Uplifted

Broadview Press
2018-02-28
352 pages
5½” x 8½”
Hardcover ISBN: 9781554813858 / 1554813859
(Originally published in 1892)

Frances E. W. Harper (1825-1911)

Edited by:

Koritha Mitchell, Associate Professor of English
Ohio State University

Frances Harper’s fourth novel follows the life of the beautiful, light-skinned Iola Leroy to tell the story of black families in slavery, during the Civil War, and after Emancipation. Iola Leroy adopts and adapts three genres that commanded significant audiences in the nineteenth century: the sentimental romance, the slave narrative, and plantation fiction. Written by the foremost black woman activist of the nineteenth century, the novel sheds light on the movements for abolition, public education, and voting rights through a compelling narrative.

This edition engages the latest research on Harper’s life and work and offers ways to teach these major moments in United States history by centering the experiences of African Americans. The appendices provide primary documents that help readers do what they are seldom encouraged to do: consider the experiences and perspectives of people who are not white. The Introduction traces Harper’s biography and the changing critical perspectives on the novel.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: A Brief Chronology
• A Note on the Text
• Iola Leroy; Or, Shadows Uplifted
• Appendix A: Slavery, Civil War and Emancipation, Reconstruction and Its Demise
  1. From the Fugitive Slave Act (1850)
  2. United States Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, the Dred Scott Decision (1857)
  3. From the First Confiscation Act (1861)
  4. From the Second Confiscation Act (1862)
  5. The Emancipation Proclamation (1863)
  6. From the Freedmen’s Bureau Act (1865)
  7. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865)
  8. From the Fourteenth Amendment (1868)
  9. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870)
  10. The Compromise of 1877
  11. From United States Supreme Court Justice Billings Brown, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
• Appendix B: Not White? Then You Can’t Be Equal
  1. From Abraham Lincoln, Address on Colonization to a Deputation of Negroes (1862)
  2. From Frances Harper, “Mrs. Frances E. Watkins Harper on the War and the President’s Colonization Scheme,” Christian Recorder (27 September 1862)
  3. From Michigan Supreme Court Justice James Campbell, The People v. Dean (1866)
• Appendix C: Black Families in Slavery and Freedom
  1. From Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
  2. Dictated letters between enslaved husbands and wives while separated by their owners
  3. From “Arrest of Fugitive Slaves,” Cincinnati Gazette (29 January 1856)
  4. Frances Harper, “The Slave Mother: A Tale of Ohio” 1857)
  5. Testimony about enslaved men and women who fled slavery to join the Union effort and often planned to return to help family members escape (1863)
  6. Letter from a black soldier to his children (1864)
  7. Letter from a black soldier to the owner of one of his daughters (1864)
  8. Newspaper Notices in Hopes of Finding Lost Loved Ones after Emancipation (1866–93)
• Appendix D: Education in Slavery and Freedom
  1. From the South Carolina Negro Act (1740)
  2. Account about an enslaved woman who ran a midnight school (1881)
  3. Account of teaching/learning in secret during slavery (1902)
  4. An account of finding the spark for learning while enslaved (1885)
  5. Accounts of the consequences of learning to read and write
  6. Account of black soldiers wanting education
  7. Account of recently emancipated people’s eagerness to learn
  8. Testimony on Ku Klux Klan preventing school attendance after Emancipation (1872)
• Appendix E: Preventing Freedom Even after Emancipation
  1. Laws constraining black girls and boys via apprenticeship and African Americans of every age via vagrancy statutes (1865)
  2. Testimony about Ku Klux Klan raping black women whose husbands/fathers voted (1871)
  3. From Henry W. Grady, “The Race Problem in the South” (1889)
  4. From Ida B. Wells, The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895)
• Appendix F: Black Women’s Activism
  1. From Frances Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together” (1866)
  2. Frances Harper, “Aunt Chloe’s Politics” (1872)
  3. From Frances Harper, “Colored Women of America,” Englishwoman’s Review (15 January 1878)
  4. From Frances Harper, “The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the ColoredWoman,” African Methodist Episcopal Church Review (1888)
  5. From Frances Harper, “Enlightened Motherhood: An Address … Before the Brooklyn Literary Society” (15 November 1892)
  6. From Fannie Barrier Williams, “The Intellectual Progress of The Colored Women of the United States Since the Emancipation Proclamation” (1893)
• Appendix G: Being Black and a Woman: Aesthetics and Reception
  1. William J. Watkins, “The Reformer,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper (7 April 1854)
  2. Grace Greenwood, Impressions of Harper as a Speaker (1866)
  3. From Anna Julia Cooper, “The Status of Woman in America” (1892)
  4. Reviews of Iola Leroy
     1. “Publications Reviewed,” Christian Recorder (12 January 1893)
     2. From “Review 1,” Independent (5 January 1893)
     3. Richmond Planet (21 January 1893)
     4. From “Recent Fiction,” The Nation (23 February 1893)
     5. From “Our Book List,” A.M.E. Church Review (April 1893)
     6. “Book Review,” Friends’ Review; a Religious, Literary and Miscellaneous Journal (22 June 1893)
     7. Review of Reviews (January 1895)
     8. From “Recent Fiction,” Independent (29 October 1896)
     9. From Edward Elmore Brock, “Brock’s Literary Leaves,” Freeman (Indianapolis) (14 August 1897)
     10. [W.E.B. Du Bois,] “Writers,” Crisis (April 1911)
• Works Cited and Select Bibliography

To modern ears, it’s hard to believe that “race” is an invention. But the modern framework of race — a hierarchy with white on top and black on the bottom — is a relatively recent fabrication. “Black people,” for example, weren’t invented until around 500 years ago by Europeans to justify slavery and their colonial conquest of much of the world, says [Rainier] Spencer, the UNLV scholar.

John Blake, “Are you racially fluid?,” Cable News Network, March 2, 2018. https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/02/us/racial-fluidity/index.html.