Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • From Narratives of Miscegenation to Post-Modernist Re-Imagining: Toward a Historiography of Coloured Identity in South Africa

    From Narratives of Miscegenation to Post-Modernist Re-Imagining: Toward a Historiography of Coloured Identity in South Africa

    African Historical Review
    Volume 40, Issue 1 (June 2008)
    pages 77 – 100
    DOI: 10.1080/17532520802249472

    Mohamed Adhikari, Associate Professor of History
    University of Cape Town, South Africa

    This article traces changing interpretations of the nature of Coloured identity and the history of the Coloured community in South Africa in both popular thinking as well as the academy. It explores some of the main contestations that have arisen between rival schools of thought, particularly their stance on the popular perception that Colouredness is an inherent racial condition derived from miscegenation. This essay identifies four distinct paradigms in historical writing on the Coloured people. Firstly, there is the essentialist school which regards Colouredness as a product of miscegenation and represents the conventional understanding of the identity. Secondly, instrumentalists view Coloured identity as an artificial creation of the white ruling class who used it as a ploy to divide and rule the black majority. This explanation, which first emerged in academic writing in the early 1980s, held sway in anti-apartheid circles. Opposing these interpretations are what may be termed the social constructionists who from the early 1990s stressed the complexities of identity formation and the agency of Coloured people in the making of their own identities. Most recently the rudiments of a fourth approach, of applying postmodern theory, especially the concept of creolisation, to Coloured identity have appeared.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • A White Side of Black Britain: The Concept of Racial Literacy

    A White Side of Black Britain: The Concept of Racial Literacy

    Ethnic and Racial Studies
    Volume 27, Issue 6
    November 2004
    pages 878 – 907
    DOI: 10.1080/0141987042000268512

    France Winddance Twine, Professor of Sociology
    University of California, Santa Barbara

    Opposition to transracial adoption on both sides of the Atlantic, has been based, in part, on the assumption that white parents cannot understand race or racism and thus cannot properly prepare children of multiracial heritage to cope with racism. In this article I draw on a seven-year ethnographic study to offer an intensive case study of white transracial birth parents that counters this racial logic. I draw on a subset of data collected from field research and in-depth interviews with 102 members of black-white interracial families in England. I provide an analysis of three practices that I discovered among white transracial birth parents who were attempting to cultivate ‘black’ identities in their children of multiracial heritage. I offer the concept of ‘racial literacy’ to theorize their parental labour as a type of anti-racist project that remains under the radar of conventional sociological analyses of racism and anti-racist social movements.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Brave new world: The complicated side-effects of Britain’s mixed-race households

    Brave new world: The complicated side-effects of Britain’s mixed-race households

    The Independent (UK)
    2009-08-22

    Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

    Bev is beautiful, with silky black skin and thick hair she ties in a bunch at the top, spurting like a fountain. At 15, her face reminds me of the young and feisty Winnie Mandela. Dressed in denim, she is wearing lots of African bracelets and rings on her ears. And, incongruously, pearls, several strings looped around her high neck. Her face changes like an English summer – bright and sunny one minute, then suddenly dark, brooding and sometimes stormy. She wants to talk, she tells me, otherwise she will go crazy. And what Bev tells me is a part of one of the least reported stories of family life in modern Britain, remarkable and complex, and perpetually shifting.

    “My family is messy,” she explains. “There’s been divorce, remarrying, separation, step-parents. It’s hard to talk about that when we are all trying to be polite, faking it all the time. I was in a mood the other day – you know, you get into a mood. My mum came into my room, held my elbow so hard it hurt, and whispered: ‘You’ll lose me this man, too, you stupid girl.’

    “Then there is RACE!” she continues. “We are black-and-white and inbetweenies, but no one mentions that either. We have to pretend that mum’s latest guy is not white, and I am not brown, and there isn’t an issue here.”

    She doesn’t even take a breath as all this tumbles out. Is he unkind to her? I ask gently

    “No, he’s OK, I mean doesn’t hit me or anything. But he has no idea. Comes from Norfolk or something. My mum loves all that – his fancy accent and that. She even went to Wimbledon ‘cos he gets free tickets, and then both of them were moaning about Serena and Venus having a pushy dad, and my mum says something horrible about my ex-dad, and whitie nodded – he always nods, like Noddy. As soon as I have done my GCSEs I am out of here.”

    This country has more mixed-race families than any other in Europe. According to the latest social research, one in 10 young Britons lives in a mixed-race household and the number of bi-racial children is growing faster than any other “ethnic minority” group. We also have high divorce rates and – increasingly – step-families. Put all these factors together and you get a newish phenomenon: the rise of the mixed-race step-family. Social services, counsellors and academic researchers have not yet caught up with this social development. And those of us who find ourselves in these reconstituted multi-racial families make it up as we go along. I guess Bev’s mum and step-dad are having to do just that…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Racial Slur Development Not Keeping Pace With Mixed-Race Births, Nation’s Bigots Report

    Racial Slur Development Not Keeping Pace With Mixed-Race Births, Nation’s Bigots Report

    The Onion
    2010-03-13

    WASHINGTON—A coalition of the nation’s most fervent bigots convened in Washington Monday to address growing concerns that the production of hateful new racial slurs has failed to keep pace with the rise in mixed-race births.

    According to representatives from the American Racists and Bigots Council (ARBC), the growing number of children born to parents of different ethnicities has posed a real challenge to the nation’s hate-speech developers—a challenge they say threatens their way of life…

    …According to statistics provided by the coalition, a rise in the birthrate of mixed-race Americans has left millions of confused racists with absolutely nothing prejudiced to say when confronted by a person of indeterminate or complex background. What frightens the coalition most is data suggesting that by 2015, ignorant bigots everywhere could be powerless when it comes to reducing mixed-raced individuals to profoundly uninformed cultural stereotypes…

    Read (with tongue in cheek) the entire article here.

  • White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812

    White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812

    University of North Carolina Press
    1968-09-25 (Republished: September 1995)
    671 pages
    8.9 x 6 x 1.4 inches
    ISBN: 978-0-8078-4550-9
    Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

    Winthrop D. Jordan (1931-2007)

    • Winner of the 1968 Francis Parkman Prize, Society of American Historians
    • Winner of the 1969 National Book Award
    • Winner of the 1969 Bancroft Prize, Columbia University
    • Winner of the 1968 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, Phi Beta Kappa

    The paperback edition of Jordan’s classic and award-winning work on the history of American race relations.

    Table of Contents

    Preface
    Acknowledgments

    Part One. GENESIS 1550-1700

    I. First Impressions: Initial English Confrontation with Africans

    1. The Blackness Without
    2. The Causes of Complexion
    3. Defective Religion
    4. Savage Behavior
    5. The Apes of Africa
    6. The Blackness Within

    II. Unthinking Decision: Enslavement of Negroes in America to 1700

    1. The Necessities of a New World
    2. Freedom and Bondage in the English Tradition
    3. The Concept of Slavery
    4. The Practices of Portingals and Spanyards
    5. Enslavement: The West Indies
    6. Enslavement: New England
    7. Enslavement: Virginia and Maryland
    8. Enslavement: New York and the Carolinas
    9. The Un-English: Scots, Irish, and Indians
    10. Racial Slavery: From Reasons to Rational

    Part Two. PROVINCIAL DECADES 1700-1755
    III. Anxious Oppressors: Freedom and Control in a Slave Society

    1. Demographic Configurations in the Colonies
    2. Slavery and the Senses of the Laws
    3. Slave Rebelliousness and the White Mastery
    4. Free Negroes and Fears of Freedom
    5. Racial Slavery in a Free Society

    IV. Fruits of Passion: The Dynamics of Interracial Sex

    1. Regional Styles in Racial Intermixture
    2. Masculine and Feminine Modes in Carolina and America
    3. Negro Sexuality and Slave Insurrection
    4. Dismemberment, Physiology, and Sexual Perceptions
    5. The Secularization of Reproduction
    6. Mulatto Offspring in a Biracial Society

    V. The Souls of Men: The Negro’s Spiritual Nature

    1. Christian Principles and the Failure of Conversion
    2. The Question of Negro Capacity
    3. Spiritual Equality and Temporal Subordination
    4. The Thin Edge of Antislavery
    5. Inclusion and Exclusion in the Protestant Churches
    6. Religious Revivial and the Impact of Conversion

    VI. The Bodies of Men: The Negro’s Physical Nature

    1. Confusion, Order and Hierarchy
    2. Negroes, Apes, and Beasts
    3. Rational Science and Irrational Logic
    4. Indians, Africans, and the Complexion of Man
    5. The Valuation of Color
    6. Negroes Under the Skin

    Part Three. THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA 1755-1783
    VII. Self-Scrutiny in the Revolutionary Era

    1. Quaker Conscience and Consciousness
    2. The Discovery of Prejudice
    3. Assertions of Sameness
    4. Environmentalism and Revolutionary Ideology
    5. The Secularization of Equality
    6. The Proslavery Case of Negro Inferiority
    7. The Revolution as Turning Point

    Pt. 4 SOCIETY AND THOUGHT 1783-1812
    VIII. The Imperatives of Economic Interest and National Identity

    1. The Economics of Slavery
    2. Union and Sectionalism
    3. A National Forum for Debate
    4. Nationhood and Identity
    5. Non-English Englishment

    IX. The Limitations of Antislavery

    1. The Pattern of Antislavry
    2. The Failings of Revolutionary Ideology
    3. The Quaker View Beyond Emancipation
    4. Religious Equalitarianism
    5. Humanitarianism and Sentimentality
    6. The Success and Failure of Antislavery

    X. The Cancer of Revolution

    1. St. Domingo
    2. Non-Importation of Rebellion
    3. The Contagion of Liberty
    4. Slave Disobedience in America
    5. The Impact of Negro Revolt

    XI. The Resulting Pattern of Separation

    1. The Hardening of Slavery
    2. Restraint of Free Negroes
    3. The Walls of Separation
    4. Negro Churches

    Part Five THOUGH AND SOCIETY 1783-1812
    XII. Thomas Jefferson: Self and Society

    1. Jefferson: The Tyranny of Slavery
    2. Jefferson: The Assertion of Negro Inferiority
    3. The Issue of Intellect
    4. The Acclaim of Talented Negroes
    5. Jefferson: Passionate Realities
    6. Jefferson: White Women and Black
    7. Interracial Sex: The Individual and His Society
    8. Jefferson: A Dichotomous View of Triracial America

    XIII. The Negro Bound by the Chain of Being

    1. Linnaean Categories and the Chain of Being
    2. Two Modes of Equality
    3. The Hierarchies of Men
    4. Anatomical Investigations
    5. Unlinking and Linking the Chain
    6. Faithful Philosophy in Defense of Human Unity
    7. The Study of Man in the Republic

    XIV. Erasing Nature’s Stamp of Color

    1. Nature’s Blackball
    2. The Effects of Climate and Civilization
    3. The Disease of Color
    4. White Negroes
    5. The Logic of Blackness and Inner Similarity
    6. The Winds of Change
    7. An End of Environmentalism
    8. Persistent Themes

    XV. Toward a White Man’s Country

    1. The Emancipation and Intermixture
    2. The Beginning of Colonization
    3. The Virginia Program
    4. Insurrection and Expatriation in Virginia
    5. The Meaning of Negro Removal

    XVI. Exodus

    Note on the Concept of Race
    Essay on Sources
    Select List of Full Titles
    Map: Percentage of Negroes in Total Non-Aboriginal Population, 1790
    Index

  • Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century

    Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century

    New York University Press
    2010-03-22
    320 pages, 8 illustrations
    ISBN: 9780814797174

    Susan Zeiger

    Throughout the twentieth century, American male soldiers returned home from wars with foreign-born wives in tow, often from allied but at times from enemy nations, resulting in a new, official category of immigrant: the “allied” war bride. These brides began to appear en masse after World War I, peaked after World War II, and persisted through the Korean and Vietnam Wars. GIs also met and married former “enemy” women under conditions of postwar occupation, although at times the US government banned such unions.

    In this comprehensive, complex history of war brides in 20th-century American history, Susan Zeiger uses relationships between American male soldiers and foreign women as a lens to view larger issues of sexuality, race, and gender in United States foreign relations. Entangling Alliances draws on a rich array of sources to trace how war and postwar anxieties about power and national identity have long been projected onto war brides, and how these anxieties translate into public policies, particularly immigration.

    Table of Contents

    • Acknowledgments
    • Introduction
    • 1. “Cupid in the AEF”: U.S. Soldiers and Women abroad in World War I
    • 2. “The Worst Kind of Women”: Foreign War Brides in 1920s America
    • 3. GIs and Girls around the Globe: The Geopolitics of Sex and Marriage in World War II
    • 4. “Good Mothers”: GI Brides after World War II
    • 5. Interracialism, Pluralism, and Civil Rights: War Bride Marriage in the 1940s and 1950s
    • 6. The Demise of the War Bride: Korea, Vietnam, and Beyond
    • Notes
    • Index
    • About the Author

    …One of the most important factors in the structuring of soldier marriage has been race. The state’s repression and condemnation of interracial relationships was a feature of war bride marriage for much of the century. In World War I, for instance, U.S. military and civilian authorities took a paternalistic stance toward white soldiers, determined to “protect” them from sexually promiscuous foreign women. But this attitude was reversed in the case of “colored troops,” as military officials warned allies of the sexual danger that African American servicemen allegedly posed to the white women of other nations. By World War II, racial ideology in the United States had begun to face resistance by activists of color and their white allies, who challenged racial segregation in the military and at home, as well as “oriental exclusion” in immigration policy. Yet despite the state of flux in race relations in the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. government, with the urging of the armed services, maintained its segregationist policies in soldier marriage.  These included initially excluding Asian women from the GI Brides Act and denying the marriage requests of black and white interracial couples on the grounds that “miscegenous unions” were illegal in many U.S. states. Deeply held views about racial inferiors and superiors continued to underlie American military engagement in the Cold War. The legacy of biracial relationships in the Vietnam War, as it involved Vietnamese women, American men, and their “Amerasian” children, is one further indication of the centrality of race in analyzing gender relationships in wartime and postwar periods…

  • Preserving Racial Identity: Population Patterns and the Application of Anti-Miscegenation Statutes to Asian Americans, 1910-1950

    Preserving Racial Identity: Population Patterns and the Application of Anti-Miscegenation Statutes to Asian Americans, 1910-1950

    Berkeley Asian Law Journal
    Volume 9, Number 1 (2002)
    pages 1-40

    Gabriel J. Chin
    University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law; University of Arizona School of Government and Public Policy

    Hrishi Karthikeyan
    New York University School of Law

    This essay explores the relationship between Asian American population and applicability of anti-miscegenation laws to that group in the first half of the 20th Century, testing legal scholar Gilbert Thomas Stephenson‘s theory that racial restrictions would arise whenever non-whites of any race exist in considerable numbers. Several states prohibited Asian-white intermarriage even though the Asian American numbers failed even remotely to approach those of the white population in those states. These anti-miscegenation statutes were unique in the Jim Crow regime in the degree of specificity with which they defined the racial categories subject to the restrictions, using precise terms like Japanese or Mongolians, rather than broad terms like colored. Further, the number of statutes applicable to Asians more than doubled between 1910 and 1950, even though census data shows that the proportion of Asian population was stable or declining in these states, and in any event tiny.

    The proliferation of anti-Asian miscegenation laws raises important questions about the racial landscape of our country during this period. Correlating census data with the development of anti-miscegenation statutes suggests that population does have an impact on whether states would restrict Asian marriage, but in a more complex way than Stephenson proposed. In all states in which Asian-white marriage was restricted by race, so too was African American-white intermarriage; no statutes targeted Asians alone. But in virtually all states restricting African American intermarriage where there was a discernable Asian population – 1/2000th or more – Asian intermarriage was also regulated. The combination of a state’s inclination to segregate, plus a visible Asian population, reliably predicts when Asians would be covered by a statute. This suggests that in the states where racially diverse populations were seen as threats appropriately subject to legal regulation, the nature of the problems presented by the various races was the same.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Mixing Bodies and Beliefs: The Predicament of Tribes

    Mixing Bodies and Beliefs: The Predicament of Tribes

    Columbia Law Review
    Volume 101, Number 4 (May 2001)

    L. Scott Gould

    This Article considers a dilemma faced by tribes in a post-inherent sovereignty world. Tribes have increasingly come to be defined through the use of blood quanta as racial entities. This practice raises the legal question whether and to what extent Congress can confer benefits on tribes pursuant to the Indian Commerce Clause without violating the equal protection component of the Due Process Clause. Professor Gould explores the current dilemma from legal, historical, and demographic perspectives. He concludes that a recent Supreme Court decision involving Native Hawaiians portends growing judicial hostility to groups that base their memberships on common ancestry. Based on recent demographic trends, the Article observes that tribes are already multi-racially diverse. In conclusion, Professor Gould urges tribes to redefine their membership criteria, risking change in order to regain sovereignty and ultimately preserve tribal cultures.

  • Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism: Historical Footnotes to Loving v. Virginia

    Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism: Historical Footnotes to Loving v. Virginia

    University of California, Davis Law Review
    Volume 21, Number 2 (1988)
    pages 421-452

    Paul A. Lombardo, Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law
    Georgia State University

    This Essay explores private correspondence contained in a restricted manuscript collection along with contemporary news accounts and government documents to explain how eugenics—a popular “scientific” movement during the 1920’s—was used to bolster the arguments in favor of the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924 that was struck down in Loving v. Virginia.  The genesis of the Act is described with reference to the private correspondence of the two Virginians [Walter Plecker and John Powell] who lobbied for its passage.  Their involvement with the white supremacist Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America is revealed as an aid to understanding the true motives behind the anti-miscegenation law.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Race and Genetics: Attempts to Define the Relationship

    Race and Genetics: Attempts to Define the Relationship

    BioSocieties
    Volume 2, Issue 2 (June 2007)
    pages 221-237
    DOI: 10.1017/S1745855207005625

    Duana Fullwiley, Associate Professor Anthropology
    Stanford University

    Many researchers working in the field of human genetics in the United States have been caught between two seemingly competing messages with regard to racial categories and genetic difference. As the human genome was mapped in 2000, Francis Collins, the head of the publicly funded project, together with his privately funded rival, announced that humans were 99.9 percent the same at the level of their genome. That same year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began a research program on pharmacogenetics that would exploit the .01 percent of human genetic difference, increasingly understood in racial terms, to advance the field of pharmacy. First, this article addresses Collins’ summary of what he called the ‘vigorous debate’ on the relationship between race and genetics in the open-access special issue of Nature Genetics entitled ‘Genetics for the Human Race’ in 2004. Second, it examines the most vexed (if not always openly stated) issue at stake in the debate: that many geneticists today work with the assumption that human biology differs by race as it is conceived through American census categories. It then presents interviews with researchers in two collaborating US laboratories who collect and organize DNA by American notions of ‘race/ethnicity’ and assume that US race categories of classification largely traduce human biogenetic difference.  It concludes that race is a practical and conceptual tool whose utility and function is often taken for granted rather than rigorously assessed and that ‘rational medicine’ cannot precede a rational approach to addressing the nature of racial disparities, difference and inequality in health and society more broadly.

    …Race and nominalism
    Race is a thing of our world like no other. Americans in general often use the word without much reflection. It might indeed occupy a tiny portion of what philosopher Martin Heidegger amorphously termed ‘the background’, that which just is and does not warrant our reflection until its unity ‘breaks down’. Even when the breakdown of race occurs in many areas of American social life, it is often reconstructed and made ‘whole’ again. One recent example of this was in the 2000 US census race classification that allowed respondents to report themselves as ‘mixed race’. Many African-Americans with mixed ancestry did not choose this option, but simply marked the category that best represented descriptions that they had been raised to understand themselves ‘to be’ in North America—that is ‘monoracially’ black (Lee and Bean, 2004: 233). The decision to mark oneself or not mark oneself as mixed-race differed according to where respondents lived—notably between those who lived in the deep South and those who lived in the ten states where 64 percent of all multiracial identification took place (New York and California among them, as well as Hawaii). In general, those in cosmopolitan centers, with high rates of immigration, diversity, and more demonstrated tolerance of others, were more likely to report racial mixing (Lee and Bean, 2004: 235). Perhaps more telling, when Americans acted on the liberty of marking more than one category, the National Center for Health Statistics created a formula that, in effect, ‘reallocated’ the multiracial population back into a single race group (Wellner, 2003: 2). This move, and the technology permitting it, was presented as an aid to market researchers who were vexed by the 2000 census data, which complicated their traditional formulas of ‘niche’ advertising to racial groups (Wellner, 2003: 2)…

    Read the entire article here.