Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Status, Race, and Marriage: French Continental Law versus French Colonial Law

    Status, Race, and Marriage: French Continental Law versus French Colonial Law

    American Historical Association
    124th Annual Meeting
    Friday, 2010-01-08 14:30 PST (Local Time)
    Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego
    Manchester Ballroom F (Hyatt)
    San Diego, California

    Valérie Gobert-Sega
    École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France

    In its most traditional moral and legal conception, marriage had for consequence to erase the crime of cohabitation and dissoluteness. Independentently of geographic space and by virtue of the principle of the unity of French laws and customs, the institution of marriage could not be left supplant under colonial law and order. In 1685, the Edict administering the rights and the duties of slaves and emancipated slaves as well as their relationships with white people in the French colonies established legitimacy and religious rules. However, the rigidity of statutory tripartition of the population could not concretely integrate these justifiable, legally valid but socially prohibited unions. The first legal ban was introduced into the Code of Louisiana in 1724 and the second was imposed by the prescription of April, 1778 for continental France. Meanwhile, the Monarchy was never resolved to reform article 9 of the Code of 1685. In doing so, the administration strategically restricted the civil and professional rights of those who chose to go against the social misalliance. It isn’t until the promulgation of the Civil code of 1805 that the restriction based on race and status is finally unified. But once again even if the principle is acquired, its execution remains unpredictable: it extends to all people, of color or black, in colonies but only to black people in metropolitan France. However, for more than two centuries, the legislator, conscientiously maintained a flaw in the prohibition: whether it be in the colonies or in France, these marriages will never be punished by nullity. This absence of penalty will finally allow the Supreme Court and the Abolitionists to declare the legal ban on interracial marriages invalid and to overrule it.

  • Intimacy and the Atlantic World

    Intimacy and the Atlantic World

    American Historical Association
    124th Annual Meeting
    Friday, 2010-01-08 14:50 PST (Local Time)
    Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego
    Manchester Ballroom F (Hyatt)
    San Diego, California

    Jennifer L. Palmer, Collegiate Assistant Professor of History
    University of Chicago

    In 1755 the merchant Aimé-Benjamin Fleuriau returned to his native city of La Rochelle, a bustling port on France’s Atlantic coast, after twenty years in the colonies where he made his fortune in indigo and sugar produced by slaves who worked his plantation. But he did not return alone: he brought five of his mixed-race children with him, his sons and daughters by a woman named Jeanne, one of his former slaves. The children’s gender determined their varied paths: the boys returned to Saint-Domingue where they supervised their father’s plantation, while the girls remained close to their father in La Rochelle. With his support, his daughters Jeanne-Marie and Marie-Charlotte set up house just a few blocks from where Aimé-Benjamin lived in the most splendid house in town with his new, white French wife and children. In spite of the ocean between them, Jeanne-Marie and Marie-Charlotte remained in touch with their brothers in the colonies, and made every effort to reinforce these family ties that distance threatened to pull asunder. In doing so, they drew on family strategies long-established in Europe and deployed them to define their own trans-oceanic, multi-racial family unit. This paper argues that intimacy provides a critical lens through which to view the Atlantic world. It was in the context of the family that enduring relationships between white men and people of color were most common, and examining how such intimate family relationships were constructed and maintained provides insight into how Europeans, including black and mixed-race Europeans, participated in and shaped the Black Atlantic. The results of such a view are sometimes surprising: free women of color, who might at first glance seem among the least influential members of a society that valued rank, name, and status, found ways to shape family structures and strategies.

  • Patterns of Mixed-Race Migration to Britain in the Eighteenth-Century Black Atlantic

    Patterns of Mixed-Race Migration to Britain in the Eighteenth-Century Black Atlantic

    American Historical Association
    124th Annual Meeting
    Friday, 2010-01-08 15:10 PST (Local Time)
    Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego
    Manchester Ballroom F (Hyatt)
    San Diego, California

    Daniel Alan Livesay, Assistant Professor of History
    Drury University, Springfield, Missouri

    With tremendous gender and racial disparities, miscegenation and interracial cohabitation became the norm in eighteenth-century Jamaica.  A large number of mixed-race children came from these unions, and in many cases these individuals received financial and personal assistance from their white fathers.  Lacking schools, and with almost no professional prospects for free people of color on the island, many fathers sent their mixed-race children to Britain for a better chance at schooling and employment.  These individuals took their place in the upper ranks of metropolitan society, with large colonial fortunes behind them.  Their interactions with white relatives, and scholarly success in Britain, paved the way for continued achievement in the metropole, or for a more advanced position in Jamaican society, if they chose to return. This paper examines the wills of over 2200 Jamaican residents from 1770-1815 to provide a quantifiable look at mixed-race migration to Britain.  Gathered from the Island Record Office in Central Village, Jamaica, these wills shed light not only on the frequency and regularity of this practice over the period in question, but also on the gender and class dynamics that dictated life for mixed-race Jamaicans who traveled to the metropole.  Though primarily a male phenomenon, mixed-race migration to Britain also included a large number of women who, more often than their male counterparts, stayed in the metropolis permanently.  This paper will argue that such movement became an important component in the development of the Black Atlantic, and that the remigration of mixed-race Jamaicans from the metropole to the periphery constituted a vital force in the creolization of the West Indies.

  • Crossing Boundaries, Claiming a Homeland: The Mexican Chinese Transpacific Journey to Becoming Mexican, 1910s-1960s

    Crossing Boundaries, Claiming a Homeland: The Mexican Chinese Transpacific Journey to Becoming Mexican, 1910s-1960s

    2009 Meeting of the Latin American Studies Association
    Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
    2009-06-11 through 2009-06-14

    Julia María Schiavone Camacho, Assistant Professor of History
    University of Texa, El Paso

    On May 12, 1960, the Mexican Chinese community leader in Macau, Ramón Lay Mazo, wrote to a prominent Mexican widow, Doña Concepción Rodríguez Viuda de Aragón, in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico. Seeking her continued support for the Mexican Chinese repatriation cause, he conveyed the deep, devoted love Mexican women living in China felt for their nation, Mexico. When he asked Mexican women in China whether they wanted to move to other countries, they replied, “Ni que me den un palacio allá, prefiero México, aunque vaya a vivir bajo un mesquite” (“Not even if they gave me a palace there, I prefer Mexico, even if I have to live under a mesquite”). Disheartened by the Mexican government’s disregard for them and their desperate situations, Ramón tried to convince Mexican women to consider living elsewhere. He warned them that Mexico might not be the same as it once was and that it might be more difficult to survive in the communities where they had once lived. To this the women rejoined, “Aunque vayamos a escarbar camotes amargos a la sierra, queremos México” (“Even if we have to dig for bitter sweet potatoes in the sierra, we want Mexico”). The conditions, where in the nation they might live, and how long they might have to wait were no matter. They wanted to return to the Mexican homeland they had longed for since years past…

    Read the entire paper here.

  • Ethnic Identity Among Mixed-Heritage People In Hawaii

    Ethnic Identity Among Mixed-Heritage People In Hawaii

    Symbolic Interaction
    Volume 14, Number 3 (Fall 1991)
    Pages 261–277
    DOI 10.1525/si.1991.14.3.261

    Cookie White Stephan, Emeritus Professor of Sociology
    New Mexico State University

    In this study, intensive interviews were used to explore the identity of a sample of mixed-heritage Hawaiian college students from a variety of ethnic groups. The great majority of respondents listed at least one multiple-heritage identity (e.g., Chinese-Japanese). While cultural exposure and ethnic identity were strongly associated, cultural exposure is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for ethnic identity to occur. Differences in perceptions of ethnic identity between respondents with stable and situtionally changing identities were discussed. The conceptions of identity proposed by processual and structural symbolic interactionists both received some support in these data.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • The White Blackbird: Miscegenation, Genre, and the Tragic Mulatta in Howells, Harper, and the “Babes of Romance”

    The White Blackbird: Miscegenation, Genre, and the Tragic Mulatta in Howells, Harper, and the “Babes of Romance”

    Nineteenth-Century Literature
    Volume 56, Number 4 (March 2002)
    Pages 495–517
    DOI 10.1525/ncl.2002.56.4.495

    Debra J. Rosenthal, Associate Professor of English
    John Carroll University

    In this essay I construct a literary genealogy that situates William Dean Howells in the middle of a call-and-response literary conversation with popular women writers about race, gender, and genre. Since Howells correlated racial questions with realism, his only novel that treats intermarriage, An Imperative Duty (1891), offered Howells an opportunity to deploy his presumably objective, scientific, realist knowledge about race in order to challenge women’s romantic miscegenation plots found in Margret Holmes Bates’s The Chamber over the Gate (1886) and Alice Morris Buckner’s Towards the Gulf (1887), two novels that he had recently read and reviewed. Yet the tragic mulatta stereotype, a stock figure of romanticism and sentimentality that was resistant to scientific discourse, ruptures Howells’s goal of representing the figure according to the tenets of realism. In Iola Leroy (1892), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper cunningly recasts the tragic mulatta stereotype both to critique Howells’s project and to represent the potential of black womanhood. Knowledge of Bates and Buckner can change critical conversation about the influence of women writers on Howells, the understanding of the role of the racialized woman in his fiction, and his conception of the link between the romantic mulatta and realist representation. Likewise, Harper takes issue with Howells’s supposed ironic sophistication about race, and in Iola Leroy she rewrites many of his views in order to show the ways that miscegenation is at once a novelistic and a national problem.

  • Multiracial Groups and Educational Inequality: A Rainbow or a Divide?

    Multiracial Groups and Educational Inequality: A Rainbow or a Divide?

    Social Problems
    Volume 56, Number 3 (August 2009)
    Pages 425–446
    DOI 10.1525/sp.2009.56.3.425

    Mary E. Campbell, Associate Professor of Sociology
    University of Iowa

    How do multiracial groups “fit” into the system of racial oppression and privilege in the United States? Are the outcomes of multiracial individuals explained by the Latin Americanization hypothesis (Bonilla-Silva 2002), or a hardening racial divide between blacks and all other racial groups (Gans 1999; Yancey 2006)? Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, I address these questions and show that the educational outcomes of multiracial groups and individuals are not consistently explained by measures of appearance, as suggested by these theories. Although the educational outcomes of Latinos and single-race groups are significantly associated with skin color and the racial perceptions of observers, multiracial young adults’ high school and college educational outcomes are not consistently related to either measure of appearance. Parental education and family income are the most important predictors of educational outcomes for multiracial respondents across different types of outcomes. The implications of these findings for racial inequality and research on multiracial groups are discussed.

    One of the key debates about the future of racial and ethnic inequality in the United States is the question of how multiracial Americans will fit into the United States’ system of racial oppression and privilege. These groups may be a bellwether we can use to discern how racial inequality is changing, since they straddle racial boundaries and therefore are often the first to experience changes in those boundaries and systems of racialized advantage. For example, Eduardo Bonilla Silva (2002; Bonilla Silva and Embrick 2006) has argued that the United States is moving towards a three-tier racial stratification system that is increasingly similar to Latin American systems of racial stratification based on skin tone, and thus biracial groups that are lighter skinned will have greater privilege than those that are darker skinned. George Yancey (2006) and Herbert Gans (1999), in a distinct but related argument, contend that we are moving away from a binary system that used a narrow and exclusive definition of “whiteness” to disadvantage anyone perceived as “not white” towards an evolving binary system that systematically disadvantages anyone seen as “black” and advantages anyone seen as “not black” (even those who are not considered “white”). Under this shifting system, biracial individuals perceived as black will experience oppression, while the rest of the multiracial groups will experience positive outcomes that become more similar to whites over time…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Who And What You Are

    Who And What You Are

    Contexts
    Fall 2009
    Vol. 8, No. 4
    Pages 64–65
    DOI 10.1525/ctx.2009.8.4.64

    Sangyoub Park, Assistant Professor of Sociology
    Washburn University

    Barack Obama‘s presidency and changes in how the U.S. Census tracks race underline the importance of the social construction of race and ethnicity in the United States. Changes in our racial landscape, including increases in interracial marriage and childbearing, pose intriguing questions about how future generations will respond to the growth of multiracial identities.

  • Mixing It Up

    Mixing It Up

    Contexts
    Volume  4, Number 4 (Fall 2005)
    Pages 15–16
    DOI 10.1525/ctx.2005.4.4.15

    Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Associate Professor
    Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University

    Jamie Tibbetts is a member of the Generation Mix National Awareness Tour. He and four other mixed-race young adults are driving across the country, making stops in sixteen cities to “raise awareness of America’s multiracial baby boom” and “promote a national dialogue about the mixed-race experience.” The tour is sponsored by the Mavin Foundation, which advocates on behalf of people who identify as being of mixed race in the United States. The Mavin Foundation continues and extends the work of earlier multiracial advocacy groups that coalesced around the issue of census classification in the 1990s and successfully challenged the federal “check one only” policy of racial enumeration. Beginning in 2000, the U.S. Census instructed people to “mark one or more” racial categories, resulting in new statistical measures of the “two or more races” population. (This interview was conducted in April 2005.)

  • Crossing Boundaries, Claiming a Homeland: The Mexican Chinese Transpacific Journey to Becoming Mexican, 1930s–1960s

    Crossing Boundaries, Claiming a Homeland: The Mexican Chinese Transpacific Journey to Becoming Mexican, 1930s–1960s

    Pacific Historical Review
    Volume 78, Number 4 (November 2009)
    pages 545–577
    DOI 10.1525/phr.2009.78.4.545

    Julia María Schiavone Camacho, Assistant Professor of History
    University of Texa, El Paso

    This article follows Mexican Chinese families from Mexico, across the Mexican-U.S. border, to China, and back to Mexico. Settling in northern Mexico in the nineteenth century, Chinese formed multiple ties with Mexicans. An anti-Chinese movement emerged during the Mexican Revolution and peaked during the Great Depression. The Mexican government deported several thousand Chinese men and their Mexican-origin families from Sonora and neighboring Sinaloa, some directly to China and others to the United States, whose immigration agents also deported the families to China. They arrived in Guangdong (Canton) Province but eventually congregated in Macau where they forged a coherent Mexican Chinese enclave. Developing a strategic Mexican nationalism, they appealed for repatriation. The Mexican Chinese “became Mexican” only after authorities compelled them to struggle for years from abroad for the inclusion of their mixed-race families in the nation. They became diasporic citizens and fashioned hybrid identities to survive in Mexico and China.