Mixed Race Studies

Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race

Harvard University Press
2022-03-22
320 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
21 photos, 1 table
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674244269

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alfonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor; Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Andrew S. Curran, William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities
Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut

The first translation and publication of sixteen submissions to the notorious eighteenth-century Bordeaux essay contest on the cause of “black” skin—an indispensable chronicle of the rise of scientifically based, anti-Black racism.

In 1739 Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences announced a contest for the best essay on the sources of “blackness.” What is the physical cause of blackness and African hair, and what is the cause of Black degeneration, the contest announcement asked. Sixteen essays, written in French and Latin, were ultimately dispatched from all over Europe. The authors ranged from naturalists to physicians, theologians to amateur savants. Documented on each page are European ideas about who is Black and why.

Looming behind these essays is the fact that some four million Africans had been kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic by the time the contest was announced. The essays themselves represent a broad range of opinions. Some affirm that Africans had fallen from God’s grace; others that blackness had resulted from a brutal climate; still others emphasized the anatomical specificity of Africans. All the submissions nonetheless circulate around a common theme: the search for a scientific understanding of the new concept of race. More important, they provide an indispensable record of the Enlightenment-era thinking that normalized the sale and enslavement of Black human beings.

These never previously published documents survived the centuries tucked away in Bordeaux’s municipal library. Translated into English and accompanied by a detailed introduction and headnotes written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew Curran, each essay included in this volume lays bare the origins of anti-Black racism and colorism in the West.

Table of Contents

• Preface: Who’s Black and Why?
• Note on the Translations
• I
  • Introduction: The 1741 Contest on the “Degeneration” of Black Skin and Hair
  • 1. Blackness through the Power of God
  • 2. Blackness through the Soul of the Father
  • 3. Blackness through the Maternal Imagination
  • 4. Blackness as a Moral Defect
  • 5. Blackness as a Result of the Torrid Zone
  • 6. Blackness as a Result of Divine Providence
  • 7. Blackness as a Result of Heat and Humidity
  • 8. Blackness as a Reversible Accident
  • 9. Blackness as a Result of Hot Air and Darkened Blood
  • 10. Blackness as a Result of a Darkened Humor
  • 11. Blackness as a Result of Blood Flow
  • 12. Blackness as an Extension of Optical Theory
  • 13. Blackness as a Result of an Original Sickness
  • 14. Blackness Degenerated
  • 15. Blackness Classified
  • 16. Blackness Dissected
• II
  • Introduction: The 1772 Contest on “Preserving” Negroes
  • 1. A Slave Ship Surgeon on the Crossing
  • 2. A Parisian Humanitarian on the Slave Trade
  • 3. Louis Alphonse, Bordeaux Apothecary, on the Crossing
• Select Chronology of the Representation of Africans and Race
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Index

The Half-Blood: A Cultural Symbol in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

University Press of Kentucky
1979-12-31
128 pages
5.50 x 8.50 in
Hardcover ISBN: 9780813113906

William J. Scheick, J.R. Millikan Centennial Professor Emeritus of English
University of Texas, Austin

The half-blood—half Indian, half white—is a frequent figure in the popular fiction of nineteenth-century America, for he (or sometimes she) served to symbolize many of the conflicting cultural values with which American society was then wrestling. In literature, as in real life the half-blood was a product of the frontier, embodying the conflict between wilderness and civilization that haunted and stirred the American imagination. What was his identity? Was he indeed “half Indian, half white, and half devil”—or a bright link between the races from which would emerge a new American prototype?

In this important first study of the fictional half-blood, William J. Scheick examines works ranging from the enormously popular “dime novels” and the short fiction of such writers as Bret Harte to the more sophisticated works of Irving, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, and others. He discovers that ambivalence characterized nearly all who wrote of the half-blood. Some writers found racial mixing abhorrent, while others saw more benign possibilities. The use of a “half-blood in spirit”—a character of untainted blood who joined the virtues of the two races in his manner of life—was one ingenious literary strategy adopted by a number of writers, Scheick also compares the literary portrayal of the half-blood with the nineteenth-century view of the mulatto.

This pioneering examination of an important symbol in popular literature of the last century opens up a previously unexplored repository of attitudes toward American civilization. An important book for all those concerned with the course of American culture and literature.

Adwoa Aboah on acting, recovery and her racial awakening: ‘I am a Black woman. I have a lot to say’

The Guardian
2022-03-19

Hannah J. Davies, Deputy Editor, Newsletters, and a Culture Writer

She is one of the world’s most in-demand models, but it wasn’t always this way. As she gets her big acting break in Top Boy, she explains how she got through a tumultuous decade

A few weeks ago, Adwoa Aboah experienced what she describes as “a sombre moment”. “I was at my mum and dad’s, clearing out my childhood room,” she says, her voice a little shaky. “I was going through all these old Vogues I had kept, and I was like … ‘Why did I do that? What was I looking at … who was I looking at?’ Because no one in these magazines looks like me.” Despite signing with the giant modelling agency Storm at 16, Aboah’s self-esteem as a teenager and into her 20s was, she says, “so low. I was on this trajectory of really wanting to be someone else. I couldn’t count on my hands any models who looked like me who were killing it. Obviously there was Jourdan Dunn, and Naomi Campbell, but … ” she pauses, sighs. “I didn’t have the emotional intelligence, nor the language, to articulate why I wasn’t doing well, why I wasn’t in the places that I thought should have been an option for me. Why wasn’t I being supported by British publications? I was like: ‘Is it me? What’s wrong with me?’ Not in a kind of self-pitying way but … I just didn’t understand.”.

Now 29, Aboah is one of Britain’s most recognisable and successful models, as likely to be seen endorsing Dior or Burberry as H&M or Gap. She was named model of the year by the British Fashion Council in 2017 and, in the same year, memorably featured on the cover of Edward Enninful’s first issue of British Vogue, a vision of retro cool in a patterned headscarf and masses of blue eyeshadow. She’s also an activist, having founded the organisation Gurls Talk – which educates young women on topics including feminism, race, sex and body image – in 2015, and now she has her first regular acting role in the new series of Netflix’s Top Boy, one of the coolest shows on TV. It’s hard to believe that Aboah ever felt like a misfit and, worse still, thought that it was somehow her fault…

Read the entire interview here.

Blood and Boundaries: The Limits of Religious and Racial Exclusion in Early Modern Latin America

Brandeis University Press
2020-11-01
212 pages
5.5 x 8.5 in.
Cloth ISBN: 9781684580194

Stuart B. Schwartz, George Burton Adams Professor of History
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

In Blood and Boundaries, Stuart B. Schwartz takes us to late medieval Latin America to show how Spain and Portugal’s policies of exclusion and discrimination based on religious origins and genealogy were transferred to their colonies in Latin America. Rather than concentrating on the three principal divisions of colonial society—Indians, Europeans, and people of African origins—as is common in studies of these colonial societies, Schwartz examines the three minority groups of moriscos, conversos, and mestizos. Muslim and Jewish converts and their descendants, he shows, posed a special problem for colonial society: they were feared and distrusted as peoples considered ethnically distinct, but at the same time their conversion to Christianity seemed to violate stable social categories and identities. This led to the creation of “cleanliness of blood” regulations that explicitly discriminated against converts. Eventually, Schwartz shows, those regulations were extended to control the subject indigenous and enslaved African populations, and over time, applied to the growing numbers of mestizos, peoples of mixed ethnic origins. Despite the efforts of civil and church and state institutions to regulate, denigrate, and exclude, members of these affected groups often found legal and practical means to ignore, circumvent, or challenge the efforts to categorize and exclude them, creating in the process the dynamic societies of Latin America that emerged in the nineteenth century.

Contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Moriscos: Real, Occasional, and Imaginary Muslims
• Conversos: The Mestizos of Faith
• Mestizos: “A Monster of . . . Many Species”
• Notes
• Index

Interwoven Lives: Indigenous Mothers of Salish Coast Communities

Washington State University Press
2019
310 pages
Illustrations / maps / notes / bibliography / index
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-87422-364-4
eBook ISBN: 978-0-87422-389-7

Candace Wellman

In this companion work to Peace Weavers, her previous book on Puget Sound’s cross-cultural marriages, award-winning author Candace Wellman depicts the lives of four additional intermarried indigenous women who influenced mid-1800s settlement in the Bellingham Bay area. She describes each wife’s native culture, details ancestral history and traits for both spouses, and traces descendants’ destinies, highlighting the families’ contributions to new communities.

• Finalist, 2020 Willa Literary Award, scholarly nonfiction
• 2020 Washington State Historical Society WOW selection

Being Mestiza

Enchantment Learning & Living Blog
2020-09-22

Dr. Maria DeBlassie, Professor, Writer, Bruja
Albuquerque, New Mexico

I’ve been getting a lot of questions from readers about what I mean when I say I’m mestiza. That fact is always one of the first pieces of information in all my author bio and that’s intentional. Although the term has been around for a long time, I specifically use the definition from Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which focuses on developing a new mestiza consciousness. For those that aren’t familiar with the term, mestiza or mestizaje means a person of mix-raced decent.

Being mestiza is different for everyone—everyone’s mix is a little different and, in many cases, few of us know everything about the mix that is our cultural background. This is because we are, in one way or another, products of colonization. And as a result of colonization, histories of the colonized sometimes get lost, erased, or suppressed. So it is important to remember that, like the wider Hispanic and Latinx communities, the mestizaje community is not a monolith. Our mixed heritage and our relationship to it are as complex and diverse as our backgrounds…

Read the entire article here.

MIXED MESSAGES episode five – Steve

Mixed Messages
2022-03-20

Sarah Doneghy, Host

Steve [Majors] discusses his book, “High Yella.” He tells what it was like growing up in a Black family and being told he was Black, to being white assumed as an adult while raising two Black daughters. In his search for identity, Steve discovers being Black is not only skin deep.

René Jones, one of 4 Black CEOs in the Fortune 500, on his ‘secret’ for success: ‘You have to tell your story’

CNBC
2022-02-27

Jade Scipioni, Senior Reporter, Make It

This story is part of the Behind the Desk series, where CNBC Make It gets personal with successful business executives to find out everything from how they got to where they are to what makes them get out of bed in the morning to their daily routines.

René Jones says banking executives have a “bad rap.” His reason might surprise you.

“I think it’s because we’re not really good storytellers,” Jones, 56, tells CNBC Make It.

Jones, who has served as the chairman and CEO of Buffalo, New York-based regional bank M&T since 2017, is currently one of only four Black CEOs in the Fortune 500. He started there as an executive associate in 1992, and today oversees its 17,000-plus employees and market valuation of $23 billion.

Over time, he says, he’s learned to lean into his own personal story as his “secret weapon” — sharing it with employees has helped him form deeper and more meaningful workplace relationships. Growing up with five siblings in a biracial family, for example — especially as the lightest-skinned of his siblings — taught him early on not to form stereotypes about people…

Read the entire article here.

Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865

University of Georgia Press
2021-03-31
Illustrations: 13 b&w images
Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
Hardcover ISBN: 9-780-8203-6012-6

Nik Ribianszky, Lecturer in History
Queen’s University, Belfast, United Kingdom

In Generations of Freedom Nik Ribianszky employs the lenses of gender and violence to examine family, community, and the tenacious struggles by which free blacks claimed and maintained their freedom under shifting international governance from Spanish colonial rule (1779-95), through American acquisition (1795) and eventual statehood (established in 1817), and finally to slavery’s legal demise in 1865.

Freedom was not necessarily a permanent condition, but one separated from racial slavery by a permeable and highly unstable boundary. This book explicates how the interlocking categories of race, class, and gender shaped Natchez, Mississippi’s free community of color and how implicit and explicit violence carried down from one generation to another. To demonstrate this, Ribianszky introduces the concept of generational freedom. Inspired by the work of Ira Berlin, who focused on the complex process through which free Africans and their descendants came to experience enslavement, generational freedom is an analytical tool that employs this same idea in reverse to trace how various generations of free people of color embraced, navigated, and protected their tenuous freedom. This approach allows for the identification of a foundational generation of free people of color, those who were born into slavery but later freed. The generations that followed, the conditional generations, were those who were born free and without the experience of and socialization into North America’s system of chattel, racial slavery. Notwithstanding one’s status at birth as legally free or unfree, though, each individual’s continued freedom was based on compliance with a demanding and often unfair system.

Generations of Freedom tells the stories of people who collectively inhabited an uncertain world of qualified freedom. Taken together-by exploring the themes of movement, gendered violence, and threats to their property and, indeed, their very bodies-these accounts argue that free blacks were active in shaping their own freedom and that of generations thereafter. Their successful navigation of the shifting ground of freedom was dependent on their utilization of all available tools at their disposal: securing reliable and influential allies, maintaining their independence, and using the legal system to protect their property-including that most precious, themselves.

Theorizing People of Mixed Race in the Pacific and the Atlantic

Social Sciences
Volume 11, Issue 3 (Published 2022-03-14)
14 pages
DOI: 10.3390/socsci11030124

Yasuko Takezawa, Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Sociology
Institute for Research in the Humanities, Kyoto University, Kyoto

Stephen Small, Professor
Department of African Diaspora Studies
University of California, Berkeley

The most extensive theoretic and empirical studies of people of mixed racial descent extant today have addressed nations across the Atlantic. This article reveals how this literature on people of mixed racial descent is limited in its claims to represent a “global model”. In contrast, we argue that by juxtaposing institutional factors in the Atlantic region and Japan we can expand our understanding of people of mixed racial descent across a far wider range of social and political terrains. A consideration of Japan uncovers a fascinating combination of factors impactful in the emergence of populations of mixed origins in the Pacific region more generally. By identifying this range of variables, we believe this analysis can be instructive for scholars of race focusing on the Atlantic and can contribute to a more encompassing approach for theorizing people of mixed racial descent.

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.