Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Brief communication: Admixture analysis with forensic microsatellites in Minas Gerais, Brazil: The ongoing evolution of the capital and of an African-derived community

    Brief communication: Admixture analysis with forensic microsatellites in Minas Gerais, Brazil: The ongoing evolution of the capital and of an African-derived community

    American Journal of Physical Anthropology
    Volume 139, Issue 4 (August 2009)
    pages 591–595
    DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.21046

    Marília O. Scliar
    Departamento de Biologia Geral, ICB
    Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, MG, Brazil

    Marco T. Vaintraub
    GENETICENTER—Centro de Genética e Reprodução, Nova Lima, MG, Brazil

    Patrícia M.V. Vaintraub
    GENETICENTER—Centro de Genética e Reprodução, Nova Lima, MG, Brazil

    Cleusa G. Fonseca
    Departamento de Biologia Geral, ICB
    Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, MG, Brazil

    We report the estimated allele frequencies for 13 and 14 microsatellite loci in two populations of Minas Gerais, Brazil as follows: Belo Horizonte (the capital) and Marinhos (an African-derived community). Analysis of the African, Amerindian, and European genetic contributions to both populations, together with historical information, revealed distinct differences between the two populations. Estimates for Belo Horizonte revealed a higher-European (66%) than African (32%) contribution, and a minimal Amerindian contribution. These results are consistent with the peopling of the city mainly by people from the Minas Gerais hinterland, a people highly admixed but with more European ancestry. Estimates for Marinhos confirmed the high-African component of the population. However, a temporal analysis of two datasets—CURRENT (representing the population living in Marinhos today) and ORIGINAL (representing families, who have lived in Marinhos since the onset of the 20th century),—identified a diminishing of the population’s African ancestry from 92% in the ORIGINAL group to 67% in the CURRENT group. This change is here interpreted as a consequence of the growing migration into the village of people with more European ancestry and subsequent admixture with the local population.

    Description of the supporting document:

    Supporting Table S1. Origin and size of parental sample populations used in admixture analyses. Supporting Table S2. Allele frequencies distribution of 13 STRs loci in Belo Horizonte population. Supporting Table S3. Allele frequencies distribution of 14 STRs loci in Marinhos (CURR) population. Supporting Table S4. Allele frequencies distribution of 14 STRs loci in Marinhos (ORIG) population. Supporting Table S5. Admixture proportions and 90% confidence intervals for each individual of Marinhos population obtained with the Structure 2.0 program.

    Read or purchase the article here. Read the supporting document (in Microsoft Word) here.

  • The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Literature

    The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Literature

    Peter Lang
    1998
    142 pages
    ISBN: 978-0-8204-4265-5

    Juda Charles Bennett, Associate Professor of English
    The College of New Jersey

    Cover The Passing Figure

    How and when does literature most effectively uncover race to be a metaphor? The passing figure, a light-skinned African-American capable and willing to pass for white, provides the thematic focus to this provocative study. In exploring the social and cultural history of this distinctly American phenomenon, Bennett moves freely between literature, film, and music, arguing that the passing figure is crucial to our understanding of past and present conceptions of race.

  • Multiple Passings and the Double Death of Langston Hughes

    Multiple Passings and the Double Death of Langston Hughes

    Biography
    Volume 23, Number 4 (Fall 2000)
    pages 670-693
    E-ISSN: 1529-1456 Print ISSN: 0162-4962
    DOI: 10.1353/bio.2000.0043

    Juda Charles Bennett, Associate Professor of English
    The College of New Jersey

    Desire to us
    Was like a double death,
    Swift dying
    Of our mingled breath,
    Evaporation
    Of an unknown strange perfume
    Between us quickly
    In a naked
    Room.

    Langston Hughes, “Desire”

    At the very beginning of his career and throughout most of his forty years of writing, Langston Hughes repeatedly returned to the theme of racial passing, exploring the subject in two autobiographies, several poems and short stories, a brief scene in his first novel, and at least one play. More than those writers who could easily pass for white—Jean Toomer and Walter White—and more than those writers who have become central to the growing study of passing literature—Nella Larsen and William Faulkner—Langston Hughes examines this figure through all the major genres, and more importantly, with an incredible range and inventiveness. In surveying the work, however, it becomes apparent that Hughes began to abandon the theme of racial passing just as he was beginning to explore the interrelated themes of homosexuality and homophobia. As Hughes moves to this “new” material, he can be found structuring it, perhaps as many authors do, upon his early work, with the more familiar drama of racial passing informing his approach to homosexuality. Perhaps less obvious are the ways that the early representations of racial passing, including…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • A Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (review)

    A Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (review)

    Journal of American Folklore
    Volume 124, Number 491 (Winter 2011)
    pages 120-121
    E-ISSN: 1535-1882 Print ISSN: 0021-8715

    Sharon Downey Varner
    Department of English
    University of South Alabama

    Hodes, Martha. A Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2007.

    This meticulously researched historical narrative is reconstructed from letters written by the subject and her family members. In A Sea Captain’s Wife, historian Martha Hodes brings to life the story of an obscure New England woman who marries a black man after the Civil War and takes up residence in the Cayman Islands. Hodes is a professor of history at New York University and the author of White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth Century South.

    Eunice Richardson, the subject of this book, was born a white, working-class woman in New England in 1831. She was first married to William Stone, a fellow New Englander, with whom she moved to Mobile, Alabama, for a period of time. Hodes speculates that it was in Mobile that Eunice first became acquainted with Smiley Connolly, an African American who would become her second husband.

    Hodes leaves no stone unturned and no document undogged. Her storyteller’s bent, her understanding of the complex racial climate of the late 1800s, and her extensive historical knowledge combine to produce an engaging historical document that reads like a novel…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Notes on physical anthropology of Australian aborigines and black-white hybrids

    Notes on physical anthropology of Australian aborigines and black-white hybrids

    American Journal of Physical Anthropology
    Volume 8, Issue 1 (January/March 1925)
    pages 73–94
    DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330080105

    Charles B. Davenport, Director
    Department of Experimental Evolution
    (Carnegie Institution of Washington)
    Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York

    Introduction

    In September 1914, after the meetings of the British Association in Australia, I was given transportation by the Government of New South Wales, enabling me to go to the government reservation for aborigines at Brewarrina on the Burke division of the State railroad. This reservation is on the Barwon fork of the Darling River, about 60 miles south of the Queensland boundary.  The purpose of the visit was to observe near by a number of  individuals of the fast disappearing race.

    While at Brewarrina, during about six days, I enjoyed the hospitality of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold’s tact and good judgment that I was enabled to see as many of the inhabitants of the Station as time permitted and to make some simple measurements upon them…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • The Catholic Church and the Formation of Metis Identity

    The Catholic Church and the Formation of Metis Identity

    Past Imperfect
    Volume 9 (2001)
    pages 65-87

    Jacinthe Duval

    This essay explores the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the Metis in the Red River colony in the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how missionaries, via their intellectual artifacts, have been responsible for shaping popular contemporary images of Metis culture. In analyzing the writings of missionaries, this paper also notes the ambiguity with which these individuals viewed Metis society. Priests steeped in European ecclesiastical and national values who hoped the Metis might form the basis of a new Francophone prairie society viewed some mixed-blood cultural practices as inimical to this end. From the perspective of the missionaries, the tantalizing familiarity of the French, Catholic aspect of the Metis contrasted jarringly with their ‘alien’ indigenous cultural and economic traits. As such, the Metis represented both a promise and a threat to the nation-building project. Although Metis identity has been stamped with the official seal of the church, the contradictions missionaries saw in this culture offer a promising avenue for the exploration of the complex processes of identity formation.

    Read the entire article here.

  • An Exploration of the Experiences of Inter-racial Couples

    An Exploration of the Experiences of Inter-racial Couples

    Canadian Journal of Family and Youth (Le Journal Canadien de Famille et de la Jeunesse)
    Volume 1, Number 2 (2008)
    pages 75-111
    ISSN: 1718-9748

    Temitope Oriola
    Department of Sociology
    University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada

    This study utilizes in-depth interviews of five interracial heterosexual couples to explore how couples live, and re/de/construct their everyday lives within a multiethnic society. I examine how couples experience public spaces, negotiate their identities, raise biracial children and confront cultural differences. The study also investigates the process of acceptance of partners by couples’ respective families and the media representation of interracial relationships. This paper demonstrates that minority families are more likely to raise strong objections or resistance to their children marrying Whites. Another major finding of this study is that subjects experience gradual shifts in their identities and changes in their worldviews as a result of their relationships with their spouses regardless of whether they adopt a ‘colourblind’ or ‘colour-conscious’ approach. Subjects’ narratives are also laced with intermingling discourse of race and culture.

    Introduction

    More than most concepts, ‘race’ and its concomitant outcomes like racism, racialization and racial profiling have been subjects of intense debate by the academia and laity. Amid widespread issues of marginalization and inequality, it is easy to dismiss the ties that bind some members of the various groups—dominant or dominated—together. One of these is interracial intimacy like common-law heterosexual unions and marriages. Why do some individuals in spite of the ‘one drop of blood’ rule, widespread stereotypes, social (mis)construction of the Other, potential loss of privilege and historically entrenched and societally enforced boundaries cross the colour line when it comes to love and/or marriage? How do interracial couples negotiate their way in public spaces and raise biracial kids? What influence does their relationship have on their worldview and identities? How does society encompassing significant others like family, friends, neighbours, and the sea of unknown faces they encounter daily relate with them? How do interracial couples assess the representation of interracial unions on Canadian television? These are the questions this study attempted to explore through in-depth interviews conducted with five interracial couples in Canada between February and March, 2008.

    Integration and Social Construction of Interracial Unions

    Most studies done on interracial unions are American or British in origin, even though Canada, compared to the United States, has a higher proportion of interracial couples (Milan and Hamm, 2004). There are, however, some Canadian studies on the unease over mixed race offspring from heterosexual relations between First Nations’ women and White men in British Colombia by Mawani (2002) and the experiences of White women involved with Black men by Deliovsky (2002). From issues such as the media representations of interracial relationships as aberration, events and/or spectacles Perry and Sutton, 2006) to the contestedness of the identity of children of interracial ouples (Barn and Harman, 2006), to why young, upwardly mobile and career-driven lack men ostensibly prefer White women regardless of class (Craig-Henderson, 2006) to short (melo-dramatic) autobiographical accounts of interracially-involved young eople (Alderman, 2007) to the making of ‘multiracials’ and the problematic of the intersticial space of mixedness (DaCosta, 2007), to the ironic and paradoxical contradiction of ‘talking Black, sleeping White’ among some activists in post-bellum United States (Romano, 2003); interracial relationships have come to stay as evidenced in the ‘proliferation’ of those called a myriad of names like ‘coloured’, ‘mulattoes,’ ‘halfcaste’ and ‘mixed race’ (Barn and Harman, 2006: 1314) but are still largely seen as problematic. There is an urgent need to fill the intriguing lacuna in the Canadian literature on the experiences of interracial couples…

    …Data Analysis—Interviews

    In this section, findings from the interviews with all five couples are presented under thematic issues. These include reaction of subjects’ families to their choice of spouses, experiences in public spaces, shifts in identities and changes in the worldview of subjects, concerns about the identities of their biracial children, experiences in public spaces and media representation. The results show how divergent subjects’ experiences were when they introduced their partners to their families, how they began to learn, adopt and adapt to otherwise ‘alien’ cultures, and what impact these have had on their identities. The results indicate that except in one case, minority families are generally reluctant to accept their children’s White partners. Subjects also opine that the medium of television and movies seldom cast couples that look like them preferring to depict more ‘conventional’ couples…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Moya `Tipimsook (“The People Who Aren’t Their Own Bosses”): Racialization and the Misrecognition of “Métis” in Upper Great Lakes

    Moya `Tipimsook (“The People Who Aren’t Their Own Bosses”): Racialization and the Misrecognition of “Métis” in Upper Great Lakes

    Ethnohistory
    Volume 58, Number 1 (Winter 2011)
    pages 37-63
    DOI: 10.1215/00141801-2010-063

    Chris Andersen, Associate Professor of Native Studies
    University of Alberta

    Scholars have long noted the central place of racialization in the last five centuries of colonial rule and likewise the crossracial encounters and eventual colonial intimacies regulated in its shadow. In the conceptual terrain posted by these demarcations, this article explores how, in the absence of extensive documentation on historical self-ascriptions, contemporary ethnohistorians examining upper Great Lakes fur trade settlements have attempted to come to terms with the historical social ontologies that long preceded official attempts to regulate them. Specifically, we examine the racialized logics governing the retrofitting of these settlements as “métis” and “Métis” and, secondarily, the recent creep of juridical logics into ethnohistorical conversations. Rather than challenging ethnohistorical conclusions that these settlements were/are Métis, this article challenges how they are ethnohistorically imagined as such, and in doing so it appeals for a Métis “counter-ethnohistory” alternatively anchored in an analytics of peoplehood.

  • Blacks and Native Americans have deep ties

    Blacks and Native Americans have deep ties

    Our Weekly: Our Truth, Our Voice
    Los Angeles, California
    2010-11-18

    Manny Otiko, Our Weekly Contributor

    November is Native Heritage month

    There is an old joke in the Black community about women attributing long hair to having “Indian blood” in their family. But like all jokes, there is an element of truth in this statement. There are deep ties between Native Americans, America’s first residents, and Black Americans, America’s first sizable minority group.

    Los Angeles resident Phil Wilkes Fixico claims both Native American and African American roots on both sides of his family. Fixico, a performance artist and activist for Black Indian culture, says that he first started exploring his genealogy, when he got into his 50s.

    Fixico said he has been on an 11-year journey to identify with his Native American roots. This has included reaching out to relatives in Oklahoma, producing a DVD about the Black-Indian experience and doing presentations about Native American culture around Los Angeles…

    …Fixico said that he grew up a troubled youth, who was in an out of the juvenile system. After a stint in a correctional institution, he finally turned his life around. He received help from people of all races to do this.

    Fixico attributes much of his problems to an identity crisis caused by lack of knowledge about his history. At 52, he decided to start investigating his background. He knew his mother, who raised him alone, was of Creek, White and African descent, but he later learned that his biological father was also part Seminole.

    Fixico discovered that his ancestors were Seminole Maroons, slaves who opted to escape captivity and form alliances with the Seminole Indians in Florida…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Phil Wilkes Fixico — a True Native Son

    Phil Wilkes Fixico — a True Native Son

    L. A. Watts Times
    2010-03-11

    Darlene Donloe, Contributing Writer

    Phil Wilkes Fixico’s life is more dramatic than virtually any soap opera.

    It took him about 52 years to find out who he was after growing up in what he calls a “web of lies.”

    His intriguing story is part of the Smithsonian Institution’s “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas,” a book and exhibit that will tour the country for five years and make its Los Angeles debut at the California African American Museum, tentatively in March 2011. The book speaks to the challenges and triumphs of dual African American and Native American heritage.

    A “home-grown” kid who grew up in the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts, Fixico, 62, came up hard. His mother not only hid the identity of his biological father, but as a kid he was in and out of four juvenile institutions, experienced rejection, used drugs, committed crimes and witnessed domestic violence, said Fixico, who lives in Inglewood.

    Fixico, a member of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Buffalo Soldiers 9th and 10th Horse Cavalry, and the “Seminole Negro Indian Scouts,” said he “grew up as a troubled youth because I kept bumping into the truth and half-truth.

    “I knew there was more than what I was being told, but I didn’t know what it was. I certainly didn’t know it was this.”

    What he discovered 10 years ago rocked his core: He is a “Seminole–Maroon descendant.” He now describes it as an “identity crisis.”

    By appearance, Fixico looks like a black man to some, but he doesn’t think of himself that way; instead, he describes himself as a “Seminole-Maroon descendant.”…

    …To understand why he calls himself a Seminole-Maroon descendant is a long story that he pieced together through research.

    “I don’t call myself black,” said Fixico, who is one-eighth Seminole Indian, one-fourth Cherokee Freedman, one-fourth Seminole Freedman, one-fourth mulatto and one-eighth Creek Freedman, according to a Smithsonian researcher. “The reason I don’t say black is because that doesn’t really describe the nuances of who I am. I’m a shade of black, a flavor of black.

    “When someone asks, ‘Are you black?’ it gives me pause. I can’t take the same credit as someone coming out of Africa who is pure. I can’t take their same degree of blackness.”

    To be clear, Fixico doesn’t have a problem with being called black or with black people.

    “It’s not that I don’t want to be black,” said Fixico, who explained his mother was African and Cherokee and his father African and Seminole. “I’ve been the product of a mixture. The one-drop rule says I’m black as anybody.

    “Under America’s concept of black, I’m black. But when I look at it as my own sense of self, I’m a flavor of black.”…

    Read the entire article here.