Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Meeting the Needs of Multiethnic and Multiracial Children in Schools

    Meeting the Needs of Multiethnic and Multiracial Children in Schools

    Merrill an imprint of Pearson
    2003-10-23
    256 pages
    ISBN-10: 0205376088
    ISBN-13:  9780205376087

    Francis Wardle
    Red Rocks Community College, Colorado

    Maria I. Cruz-Janzen, Associate Professor of Multicultural Education
    Florida Atlantic University

    From one of the premiere experts on the subject comes this “crash course” for teachers on understanding the developmental needs of multiethnic, multicultural, and multiracial children.

    This book educates teachers through the experiences of children culturally, ethnically, and racially mixed heritage. In doing so, the authors challenge even longtime multicultural experts to broaden how we think and approach multicultural education. Wardle and Cruz-Janzen push the envelope of typical awareness. They are the harbingers of questions and information in a changing climate of race and culture ripe for redress and new ways of thinking, talking, and educating.

    Both of these authors bring to this topic a wealth of personal experience and academic scholarship and insight. They courageously embrace new ideas and concepts of race and culture, both nationally and globally, and provide new and exciting ways of thinking, talking, learning and educating.

    Features

    • Authors encourage the reader to critically think about diverse family constellations and individual racial and ethnic identity.
    • Different models of multiracial identity development are reviewed.
    • Focus Questions at the beginning of each chapter help give students direction.
    • A variety of tools are provided to help students critically examine their own perceptions, and to evaluate materials, curricular approaches, and instructional methods.

    Author Bios

    Francis Wardle first became involved in issues regarding multiethnic and multiracial children when his four-year-old daughter came to him in tears, after a peer used race as a put down. Since then he has created the Center for the Study of Biracial Children, given presentations on multiethnic and multiracial issues throughout the US and Canada, written extensively on the topic, and been quoted in newspapers, magazines, TV programs, and radio stations including NPR. Currently Dr. Wardle teaches at Red Rocks Community College and the University of Phoenix/Colorado Campus, consults for the National Head Start Migrant Program, and writes for a variety of national publications.

    Marta I. Cruz-Janzen is Associate Professor of Multicultural Education at Florida Atlantic University. She received a Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction from the University of Denver, a Master of Arts and Master of Education in Human Development from Columbia University Teachers College, and a Bachelor of Science from Cornell University. Her dissertation, Curriculum and the Self-Concept of Biethnic and Biracial Persons received the University of Denver Phi Delta Kappa 1996-97 Dissertation of the Year Award. Marta has been a bilingual teacher and elementary school principal.

    Table of Contents

    1. Multiethnic and Multiracial Children.
      • Multiethnic and Multiracial Children in Our Schools.
      • Myths and Realities.
      • Chapter Feature: Eva.
      • Diversity in the Classroom.
      • Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People.
      • Needs of Multiethnic and Multiracial Children.
      • Development of Racial and Ethnic Identity.
      • Student Profile.
      • Supporting Multiethnic and Multiracial Children.
    2. Traditional Approaches.
      • Single Race-Ethnicity Approach.
      • Avoid Diversity by Celebration.
      • Student Profile.
      • Multicultural Education.
      • Group Membership.
      • Getting on the Same Page.
      • Approaches to Multicultural Education.
      • Banks’ Dimensions of Multicultural Education.
      • Banks’ Approaches to Multicultural Education.
      • Reforming Multicultural Education.
    3. Historical Developments.
      • Student Profile.
      • Development of a Racial System.
      • Origins of U.S. Racism.
      • Rejection of Racial Mixing.
      • Latinos.
      • Student Profile.
      • Immigration.
      • Racism and Segregation.
      • Desegregation in Education.
    4. Categorizing People.
      • Student Voices.
      • Understanding Race, Racism and Categorizing People.
      • Not Quite White: The Arab American Experience.
      • The Ethnic Category.
      • The Race Myth.
      • After the Civil War.
      • How Other Nations Categorize People.
      • The Legacy of Slaves and Slave Owners.
      • Maintaining the Color Line.
      • Today’s Multicultural and Multiethnic Children.
    5. Identify Development of Multiethnic and Multiracial Children.
      • Identity Development.
      • Identity Development Models.
      • Chart Showing the Identity Models.
      • Developmental and Ecological Model of Identity Development.
      • Student Voices.
      • Diagram of the Ecological Components of the Multiethnic/Multiracial Identity Model.
    6. Families and Communities.
      • The Multiethnic and Multiracial Family.
      • Myths and Realities.
      • Table of Age-Related Issues for Interracial and Interethnic Families.
      • Raising Healthy, Happy Interracial Children.
      • Different Family Structures.
    7. Curricular Approaches.
      • Early Childhood.
      • Student Voices.
      • Late Elementary.
      • Student Voices.
      • How to Evaluate a Textbook/Reading Book for P-12 Programs.
      • Middle School.
      • Student Voices.
      • Multicultural School Activities.
      • High School.
      • Student Voices.
      • Comments About Interracial Marriage and Multiracial Identity by Frederick Douglass and Bob Marley.
      • Hidden Curriculum.
      • Multicultural Model.
      • Anti-Bias and Ecological Model of Multicultural Education.
      • Case Study of the Anti-Bias and Ecological Model.
    8. Instructional Strategies.
      • The Impact of Standards on Instruction.
      • The Influence of the Teacher.
      • Student Voices.
      • Materials and Activities Checklist.
      • Biased Instructional Materials.
      • Culturally Authentic Bias.
      • Suggestions for Instructional Techniques.
      • Analysis of a Teaching Unit.
      • Multicultural Music and Dance.
    9. Teaching Teachers.
      • The Nature of Public Education.
      • Preparing Future Teachers.
      • Teacher Preparation Programs.
      • Student Voices.
      • Sociopolitical Construction of Multiethnic and Multiracial Persons.
      • What Teachers Must Know and Be Able to Do.
      • Twenty-Five Recommendations for Teacher Education and Educational Leadership Faculty, Pre-Service Teacher Candidates, and Participate in Teacher In-Service.

  • Why Are People Different?: Multiracial Families in Picture Books and the Dialogue of Difference

    Why Are People Different?: Multiracial Families in Picture Books and the Dialogue of Difference

    The Lion and the Unicorn
    Volume 25, Number 3, September 2001
    pages 412-426
    E-ISSN: 1080-6563
    Print ISSN: 0147-2593
    DOI: 10.1353/uni.2001.0037

    Karen Sands-O’Connor

    The issue of race has often been contentious in children’s literature, from controversies over Twain‘s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to Bannerman‘s Little Black Sambo, to Keats‘s The Snowy Day, to Herron’s Nappy Hair. How race is portrayed and who portrays it have been crucial for many critics. Violet J. Harris suggests this preoccupation with cultural authenticity, as she terms it, centers on “individual books and their portrayals of people of color, as well as the representation of specific aspects of their cultures such as values, customs, and family relationships” (40-41). Francis Wardle counters, “presenting the Black race and cultural group as a single, unified, world-wide entity is not only inaccurate, but denies the tremendous richness of economic, cultural, linguistic, national, political, social and religious diversity that exists in the world-wide Black community” (“Mixed-Race Unions” 200). This insistence on cultural authenticity poses even more problems when more than one culture is portrayed within a family, and it is perhaps for this reason that little has been written on the multiracial family as portrayed in literature…

    Purchase the entire article here.

  • Multiracial Classification on the United States Census: Myth, Reality, and Future Impact

    Multiracial Classification on the United States Census: Myth, Reality, and Future Impact

    Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales
    Volume 21, Number 2 (2005)
    Pages 111-134

    Ann Morning, Associate Professor of Sociology
    New York University

    The 2000 census in the United States provoked a flurry of media attention in the months leading up to it, as well as in its aftermath. At issue was the new federal decision permitting Americans to identify themselves with more than one race on the census form. Advocated in large part by interracially-married couples and their offspring, this bureaucratic change in racial classification practices was widely interpreted in the press as having a wider significance for the nation as a whole. As one reporter put it, “the change is fueling a weighty debate about the meaning of race” (2000). Other articles spoke to the same thought-provoking effect of the new classification standards: the Washington Post ran “Mixed-Race Heritage, Mixed Emotions: In Census and Society, Question of Categories Yields Many Answers” (Fears, 2001), while Newsday asked, “Does It All Add Up? New Census Race Categories Raise Questions About How They’re Used” (Winslow, 2001). According to the latter, “the impact of racial classifications on the latest census has far-reaching implications– socially, politically, even statistically– that have sown anger, suspicion, uncertainty and excitement in varying quarters.”

    This essay examines the expectations – both positive and negative- that characterized public discourse about the introduction of multiple-race reporting on the 2000 U.S. census. More importantly, I revisit these predictions in order to assess whether they have proved accurate. In so doing, the paper aims for a clear stock-taking of the impact of multiple-race reporting to date: which expectations have been borne out, which have not, and what unforeseen developments seem most likely to be the medium or long-term legacy of the revision of the federal racial standards?

    I begin by recalling both the benefits and the drawbacks that commentators in the late 1990s and early 2000s expected from multiple-race classification. With the understanding that some predictions were too long-term to fully assess today, I nonetheless consider each and offer a prognosis. I then extend the discussion to consider two potential results of multiple-race reporting that have received less attention: its impact on essentialist or biological interpretations of race, and its implications for the classification of the Hispanic population. In conclusion, I argue that the most widely-publicized hopes and fears about multiracial classification are likely to prove minor outcomes, while the unanticipated consequences may well be more significant…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Effects of Mixed-Race Households on Residential Segregation

    The Effects of Mixed-Race Households on Residential Segregation

    Journal Urban Geography
    Issue Volume 28, Number 6, August 16-September 30, 2007
    Online Date: 2007-11-27
    Pages 554-577
    ISSN: 0272-3638
    DOI 10.2747/0272-3638.28.6.554

    Mark Ellis
    University of Washington

    Steven R. Holloway
    University of Georgia

    Richard Wright
    Dartmouth College

    Margaret East
    The University of Texas, Arlington

    This paper investigates how household-scale racial mixing affects measurements of neighborhood-scale racial segregation. This topic is increasingly important as mixed-race households are becoming more common across the United States.  Specifically, our research asks two questions: What is the sensitivity of neighborhood racial segregation measures to levels of household-scale racial mixing? And what is the relationship between neighborhood racial diversity and the presence of mixed-race households? We answer these questions with an analysis that uses confidential long-form data from the 1990 U.S. census. These data provide information on household racial composition at the tract level. The results show that racial mixing within households has meaningful effects on measurements of neighborhood segregation, suggesting that patterns of mixed-race household formation and residential location condition understandings of neighborhood segregation dynamics. We demonstrate that mixed-race households are a disproportionate source of neighborhood diversity in the least racially plural neighborhoods. This article also reflects on the complications that mixed-race households pose for the interpretations of neighborhood-scale segregation and cautions against drawing conclusions about residential desegregation based on racial mixing in households.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century

    New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century

    SAGE Publications, Inc.
    Paperback ISBN: 9780761923008
    2001
    432 pages

    Edited by

    Loretta I. Winters
    California State University, Northridge

    Herman L. DeBose
    California State University, Northridge

    How multiracial people identify themselves can have major consequences on their positions in their families, communities and society. Even the U.S. Census has recognized the rapidly increasing numbers of those who consider themselves multiracial, adding a new racial category to the 2000 Census form: two or more races.

    New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century examines the multiracial experience, its history and the political issues and consequences surrounding biracial and multiracial identity, bringing together top names in the field to give readers cutting edge views and insights gained from contemporary research.

    This important new text follows the trail blazed by Maria Root, who contributes its opening chapter. An introduction places the issues of multiracial identity into context via a discussion of U.S. Census data and debates, providing an overview of the varied readings to come covering such topics as:

    • Race as a social, rather than biological, construction
    • The Multiracial Movement
    • Racial/Ethnic Groups in America and Beyond
    • Race, Gender & Hierarchy
    • Gang Affiliation and Self-Esteem
    • Black/White Interracial Couples and the Beliefs that Help Them to Bridge the Racial Divide

    The book concludes with “The Multiracial Movement: Harmony and Discord,” by co-editor Loretta Winters, an epilogue putting the readings into perspective according to three models in the multiracial identity literature: the Multiracial Movement model, the Counter Multiracial movements model and the Ethnic Movement model.

    Timely and comprehensive in its range of topics, this is an important resource for many audiences: students in Ethnic Studies, Race Relations and related courses; human service professionals including psychologists, counselors, social workers and school personnel and, importantly, multiracial individuals themselves.

    Forward  
    Introduction Herman L. DeBose
    Acknowledgments  
    PART I: RACE AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION  
    1. Five Mixed Race Identities: From Relic to Revolution Maria P. P. Root
    2. The New Multiracialism: An Affirmation or an End to Race as we Know It? Mary Thierry Texeira
    PART II: THE MULTIRACIAL MOVEMENT  
    3. New Faces, Old Faces: Counting the Multiracial Population (Click here to read.) Ann Morning
    4. Multiracial Identity: From Personal Problem to Public Issue Kimberly McClain DaCosta
    5. From Civil Rights to the Multiracial Movement Kim M. Williams
    6. Census 2000: Assessments in Significance Rainier Spencer
    7. Evolution of Multiracial Organizations: Where We Have Been & Where We Are Going Nancy G. Brown & Ramona E. Douglas
    PART III: RACIAL/ETHNIC GROUPS IN AMERICA & BEYOND  
    8. The Dilemma of Biracial People of African American Descent Herman L. DeBose & Loretta L. Winters
    9. Check All That Apply: Trends & Perspectives Among Asian Descent Multiracials Teresa Williams-Leon
    10. Beyond Mestizaje: The Future of Race in America Gregory Velazco y Trianosky
    11. Colonization, Cultural Imperialism, and the Social Construction of American Indian Mixed Blood Identity Karren Baird-Olson
    12. “Race,” “Ethnicity,” and “Culture” in Hawai’i: The Myth of the “Model Minority” State Laura Desfor Edles
    13. Multiracial Identity in Global Perspective: The United States, Brazil, and South Africa G. Reginald Daniel
    PART IV: RACE, GENDER & HIERARCHY  
    14. Does Multiraciality Lighten? Me-too Ethnicity & the Whiteness Trap Paul Spickard
    15. The Hazards of Visibility: “Biracial Women,” Media Images, and Narratives of Identity Caroline A. Streeter
    16. Masculine Multiracial Comedians Darby Li Po Price
    PART V: SPECIAL TOPICS  
    17. Gang Affiliation & Self-Esteem: The Effects of a Mixed Heritage Identity Patricia O’Donnell Brummett & Loretta I. Winters
    18. Black/White Interracial Couples & the Beliefs That Help Them to Bridge the Racial Divide Kristyan M. Kouri
    Epilogue: The Multiracial Movement: Harmony & Discord Loretta I. Winters
    Index  
    About the Editors  
    About the Contributors

  • Mixed Heritage – Identity, Policy and Practice

    Mixed Heritage – Identity, Policy and Practice

    Runnymede Trust
    ISBN-10: 0-9548389-6-3
    ISBN-13: 978-0-9548389-6-6
    EAN: 9780954838966
    40 pages
    September 2007

    Edited by Jessica Mai Sims

    Although they are often invisible in debates on race and ethnicity, the 2001 census reveals that the ‘Mixed’ population is the third largest ethnic category in the UK, with predictions that it will become the single largest minority group recognised by the Census by the end of 2020.

    Over the summer months we have developed our thinking on this area of study through a seminars, roundtables, and conferences by partnering with the CRE, CLG, and London South Bank’s Families and Social Capital Research Group. Through this partnership we have established the following series of activity that forms that basis for future work on mixed heritage, which seeks to challenge the prevalent understandings and assumptions of the people who are thought to comprise of this group.

    Table of Contents

    • Foreword – Rob Berkeley
    1. Statistics: The Mixed Category in Census 2001 — Charlie Owen
    2. The Diversity of ‘the’ Mixed Race Population in Britain — Miri Song
    3. Gendering Mixed-Race, Deconstructing Mixedness — Suki Ali
    4. Thai-British Families: Towards a Deeper Understanding of ‘Mixedness’ — Jessica Mai Sims
    5. Meeting the Educational Needs of Mixed Heritage Pupils: Challenges for Policy and Practice — Leon Tikly
    6. Mixed Heritage: Perspectives on Health and Welfare — Mark R. D. Johnson
    7. Adoption and Fostering Issues: ‘Judgement of Solomon’ — Savita de Sousa & John Simmonds
    8. ‘Mixed’ Families: Assumptions and New Approaches — Chamion Caballero
    9. It’s Time for Foundation — Sharron Hall
    10. I loathe the term ‘mixed race’… — Linda Bellos
    11. People in Harmony — Jill Olumide
    • Biographical Information on Contributors
    • Bibliography

    Read the entire document here.

  • Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’

    Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’

    Pluto Press an imprint of MacMillan
    May 2001
    5.5 x 8.25 inches, 208 pages, 4 figures
    ISBN: 978-0-7453-1567-6
    ISBN10: 0-7453-1567-4

    Edited by

    David Parker, Lecturer and Faculty of Social Sciences
    School of Sociology and Social Policy
    University of Nottingham

    Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
    University of Kent

    One of the fastest growing ethnic populations in many Western societies is that of people of mixed descent. However, when talking about multicultural societies or ‘mixed race’, the discussion usually focuses on people of black and white heritage. The contributors to this collection rectify this with a broad and pluralistic approach to the experiences of ‘mixed race’ people in Britain and the USA. The contributors argue that people of mixed descent reveal the arbitrary and contested logic of categorisation underpinning racial divisions. Falling outside the prevailing definitions of racialised identities, their histories and experiences illuminate the complexities of identity formation in the contemporary multicultural context.  The authors examine a range of issues.  These include gender; transracial and intercountry adoptions in Britain and the US; interracial partnering and marriage; ‘mixed race’ and family in the English-African diaspora; theorising of ‘mixed race’ that transcends the black/white binary and includes explorations of ‘mixtures’ among non-white minority groups; and the social and political evolution of multiracial panethnicity.

    Table of Contents

    Introduction: Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’ David Parker and Miri Song
    1.  How Sociology Imagined Mixed Race—Frank Furedi
    2.  Re-Membering ‘Race’: On Gender, ‘Mixed Race’, and Family in the English-African Diaspora—Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe
    3.  Same Difference: Towards a More Unified Discourse in Mixed Race Theory—Minelle Mahtani and April Moreno
    4.  The Subject is Mixed Race: The Boom in Biracial Biography—Paul Spickard
    5.  Triples: The Social Evolution of a Multiracial Panethnicity: An Asian American Perspective

  • The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed-Heritage Asian Americans

    The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed-Heritage Asian Americans

    Temple University Press
    June 2001
    296 pages
    7×10
    2 tables 4 figures 3 halftones
    paper: EAN: 978-1-56639-847-3 (ISBN: 1-56639-847-9)

    edited by Teresa Williams-León and Cynthia L. Nakashima, foreword by Michael Omi

    Largely as a result of multiracial activism, the US Census for 2000 offers people the unprecedented opportunity to officially identify themselves with more than one racial group. Among Asian-heritage people in this country and elsewhere, racial and ethnic mixing has a long but unacknowledged history. According to the last US Census, nearly one-third of all interracial marriages included an Asian-descent spouse, and intermarriage rates are accelerating. This unique collection of essays focuses on the construction of identity among people of Asian descent who claim multiple heritages.

    In the U.S., discussions of race generally center on matters of black and white; mixed heritage Asian Americans usually figure in conversations about race as an undifferentiated ethnic group or as exotic Eurasians. The contributors to this book disrupt the standard discussions by considering people of mixed Asian ethnicities. They also pay particular attention to non-white multiracial identities to decenter whiteness and reflect the experience of individuals or communities who are considered a minority within a minority. With an entire section devoted to the Asian diaspora, The Sum of Our Parts suggests that questions of multiracial and multiethnic identity are surfacing around the globe. This timely and provocative collection articulates them for social scientists and students.

    Table of Contents

    • Foreword – Michael Omi
    • Acknowledgments
    • Introduction: Reconfiguring Race, Rearticulating Ethnicity – Teresa Williams-León and Cynthia L. Nakashima
    • Part I: Multiraciality and Asian America: Bridging the Hybrid Past to the Multiracial Present
      • 1. Who Is an Asian? Who Is a Pacific Islander? Monoracialism, Multiracial People, and Asian American Communities – Paul Spickard
      • 2. Possibilities of a Multiracial Asian America – Yen Le Espiritu
      • 3. Servants of Culture: The Symbolic Role of Mixed-Race Asians in American Discourse – Cynthia L. Nakashima
      • 4. “The Coming of the Neo-Hawaiian American Race”: Nationalism and Metaphors of the Melting Pot in Popular Accounts of Mixed-Race Individuals – John Chock Rosa
    • Part II: Navigating Sociocultural Terrains of Family and Identity
      • 5. Factors Influencing the Variation in Racial and Ethnic Identity of Mixed-Heritage Persons of Asian Ancestry – Maria P. P. Root
      • 6. Alaska’s Multiracial Asian American Families: Not Just at the Margins – Curtiss Takada Rooks
      • 7. The Diversity of Biracial Individuals: Asian-White and Asian-Minority Biracial Identity – Christine C. Iikima Hall and Trude I. Cooke Turner
      • 8. Black, Japanese, and American: An Asian American Identity Yesterday and Today – Michael C. Thornton and Harold Gates
    • Part III: Remapping Political Landscapes and Communities
      • 9. A Rose by Any Other Name: Names, Multiracial/Multiethnic People, and the Politics of Identity – Daniel A. Nakashima
      • 10. Multiracial Comedy as a Commodity in Hawaii – Darby Li Po Price
      • 11. Doing the Mixed-Race Dance: Negotiating Social Spaces Within the Multiracial Vietnamese American Class Typology – Kieu Linh Caroline Valverde
      • 12. The Convergence of Passing Zones: Multiracial Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals of Asian Descent – Teresa Williams-León
      • 13. Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall: Mapping Discussions of Feminism, Race, and Beauty in Japanese American Beauty Pageants – Rebecca Chiyoko King
      • 14. Mixed but Not Matched: Multiracial People and the Organization of Health Knowledge – Cathy J. Tashiro
    • Part IV: Asian-Descent Multiraciality in Global Perspective
      • 15. “We Paved the Way”: Exemplary Spaces and Mixed Race in Britain – David Parker
      • 16. A Dutch Eurasian Revival? – Mark Taylor Brinsfield
      • 17. Multiethnic Lives and Monoethnic Myths: American-Japanese Amerasians in Japan – Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
      • 18. The Racial Politics of Being Dogla and of “Asian” Descent in Suriname – Loraine Y. Van Tuyl
      • 19. The Tiger and His Stripes: Thai and American Reactions to Tiger Woods’s (Multi-) “Racial Self” – Loraine Y. Van Tuyl
    • Bibliography
    • About the Contributors

  • Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s Mulattos: From Barefoot Madonna to Maggie the Ripper

    Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s Mulattos: From Barefoot Madonna to Maggie the Ripper

    Journal of American Studies
    Volume 41, Issue 1 (April 2007)
    pages 83-114
    DOI: 10.1017/S0021875806002763

    Jo-Ann Morgan, Associate Professor of Art History and African American Studies
    Western Illinois University

    With emancipation a fait accompli by 1865, one might ask why Kentucky-born Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835–1907), former Confederate soldier, son of a border state slaveholder, began painting slaves then. Noble had known the “peculiar institution” at first hand, albeit from a privileged position within the master class. As a result, his choice to embark upon a career as a painter using historical incidents from slavery makes for an interesting study. Were the paintings a way of atoning for his Confederate culpability, a rebel pounding his sword into a paintbrush to appease the conquering North? Or was he capitalizing on his unique geographic perspective as a scion of slave-trafficking Frankfort, Kentucky, soon to head a prestigious art school in Cincinnati, the city where so many runaways first tasted freedom? Between 1865 and 1869 Noble exhibited in northern cities a total of eight paintings with African American subjects. Two of these, The Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis (1865, repainted ca. 1870) and Margaret Garner (1867), featured mixed-race women, or mulattos, as they had come to be called. From a young female up for auction, to the famous fugitive Margaret Garner, his portrayals show a transformation taking place within perceptions of biracial women in post-emancipation America. Opinions about mulattos surfaced in a range of theoretical discussions, from the scientific to the political, as strategists North and South envisioned evolving social policy.


    Margaret Garner or The Modern Medea (1867)

  • Raising Eurasia: Race, Class, and Age in French and British Colonies

    Raising Eurasia: Race, Class, and Age in French and British Colonies

    Comparative Studies in Society and History
    Volume 51, Issue 2 (April 2009)
    pages 314-343
    DOI: 10.1017/S0010417509000140

    David M. Pomfret, Associate Professor
    The University of Hong Kong

    Sexual relationships between European men and indigenous women produced racially mixed offspring in all of Europe’s empires. Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has shown how these persons of mixed race, seen as transgressing the interior frontiers of supposedly fixed categories of racial and juridical difference upon which colonizers’ prestige and authority rested, posed a challenge to the elaborate but fragile sets of subjective criteria by which “whiteness” was defined.  Scholars critiquing the traditional historiography of empire for its tendency to present colonial elites as homogeneous communities pursuing common interests have emphasized the repertoire of exclusionary tactics, constructed along lines of race, class, and gender, devised within European colonial communities in response to the presence of “mixed bloods.” This article aims to show that the presence of people of biracial heritage inspired collaborative as well as exclusionary responses in outposts of European empire during the late imperial era. It also illustrates how, with white prestige and authority at stake, age, age-related subcategories, and in particular childhood and adolescence, powerfully underpinned responses to the threat this group posed to the cultural reproduction of racialized identity.

    Footnotes
    Acknowledgments: Research for this article was generously supported by the Hong Kong Government Research Grants Council Competitive Earmarked Research Grant (HKU7455/05H).