Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

recent posts

about

  • American Triracial Isolates: Their Status and Pertinence to Genetic Research

    American Triracial Isolates: Their Status and Pertinence to Genetic Research

    Eugenics Quarterly
    Volume 4, Issue 4 (December 1957)
    pages 187-196
    (Curteousy of The Melungeon Heritage Assoication)

    Calvin L. Beale (1923-2008)
    United States Department of Agriculture

    In the 1950 Census of Population, 50,000 American Indians are listed as living in states east of the Mississippi River. These people do not constitute the sole biological legacy of the aboriginal population once found in the East, of course. The remnants of many tribes were removed west of the Mississippi where they retain their tribal identity today. Nor is it uncommon to meet Easterners, thoroughly Caucasian in appearance and racial status, who boast of an Indian ancestor in the dim past. Other intfusio9ns of Indian blood were absorbed into the Negro population, and in this context may also be referred to with pride even if they afford no differential social status.

    It is another class of people, however, that engages the attention of this article—a class more numerous than the Indians remaining in the East, more obscure than those in the West, less assured than the white man or the Negro who regards his link of Indian descent as a touch of the heroic or romantic. The reference is to population groups of presumed triracial descent. Such isolates, bequeathed of intermingled Indian, white, and Negro ancestry, are as old as the nation itself and include not less than 77,000 persons. They live today in more than 100 counties of at least 17 Eastern States with settlements ranging in size from less than 50 persons to more than 20,000. Their existence has furnished material for the writings of local historians, folklorists, journalists, and novelists. Occasionally, they have come to the attention of cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and—here and there—a geographer or educator. Attention to the triracial isolates by geneticists is largely confined to the last three years, however. It is the object of this discussion to describe the nature, location, and status of such Indian-white-Negro groups in Eastern States and to indicate the potential interest they hold for the field of human genetics.

    Although the precise origin of these groups is unknown in most instances, they seem to have formed through miscegenation between Indians, whites, and Negroes—slave or free—in the Colonial and early Federal periods. In places the offspring of such unions—many of which were illegitimate under the law—tended to marry among themselves. Within a generation or so this practice created a distinctly new racial element in society, living apart from other races. The forces tending to perpetuate such groups, and die strength of these forces, differed from place to place. Some groups subsequently dispersed or were assimilated during the 19th century. Some waxed in numbers; others waned. Most have persisted to the present day. A majority of the triracial isolates originated in the Atlantic Coastal Plain. Their members were among the early pioneers in the Appalachian Plateaus and the Tennessee River Valley. Many left the South and moved to Northern States such as Ohio and…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Telling Our Own Stories: Lumbee History and the Federal Acknowledgment Process

    Telling Our Own Stories: Lumbee History and the Federal Acknowledgment Process

    The American Indian Quarterly
    Volume 33, Number 4, Fall 2009
    pages 499-522
    E-ISSN: 1534-1828, Print ISSN: 0095-182X

    Malinda Maynor Lowery, Assistant Professor of History
    University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

    Being part of and writing about the Lumbee community means that history always emerges into the present, offering both opportunities and challenges for my scholarship and my sense of belonging. I was born in Robeson County, North Carolina, a place that Lumbees refer to as “the Holy Land,” “God’s Country,” or, mostly, “home,” regardless of where they actually reside. My parents raised me two hours away in the city of Durham, making me an “urban Indian” (or as my cousins used to say, a “Durham rat”). I have a Lumbee family; both of my parents are Lumbees, and all of my relatives are Lumbees—I’m just a Lum, I’m Indian. This is how I talk about myself, using terms and categories of knowledge (like “home” and “Lum”) that have specific meanings to me and to other Lumbees but may mean nothing special to anyone else. Stories and places spring from these categories and become history.

    I was drawn to researching and writing about my People’s history in part because the opportunity to tell our own story was too rare for me to pass up. Outsiders, people who do not belong to the group, have told our stories for us, often characterizing us as a “tri-racial isolate,” “black Indians,” or “multi-somethings.” Lumbees seem to have a particular reputation for multiracial ancestry. Perhaps our seemingly anomalous position in the South raises the question—as nonwhites, the argument goes, whites must have classed Lumbees socially with African Americans; therefore, Lumbees must have married African Americans extensively because they could not have married anyone who was white. At the heart of these arguments are two converging assumptions: one, that ancestry and cultural identity are consanguineous rather than subject to the changing contexts of human relations, and two, that white supremacy is a timeless norm rather than a social structure designed to ensure the dominance of a certain group. Race has been linked to blood and ancestry…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • “What Ain’t Called Melungeons is Called Hillbillies”: Southern Appalachia’s In-Between People

    “What Ain’t Called Melungeons is Called Hillbillies”: Southern Appalachia’s In-Between People

    Forum for Modern Language Studies
    Volume 40, Issue 3 (2004)
    page 259-278
    DOI: 10.1093/fmls/40.3.259

    Rachel Rubin, Professor of American Studies
    University of Massachusetts, Boston

    The essay investigates literary evocations of Appalachia’s “in-between” people, the Melungeons. Melungeons are deployed by some as mystery (no one has conclusively traced their origins) and by others as solid fact (they are non-white) to shore up their own contingent sense of white privilege. The construction of Melungeon identity by outsiders has facilitated a process of “re-centring” whereby those poor white people so frequently scorned as “hillbillies” place themselves at the heart of a racialised mountain landscape.

    Read the entire article here.

  • A Free Man of Color [Theater Review]

    A Free Man of Color [Theater Review]

    The Faster Times
    2010-11-18

    Johnathon Mandell

    Opening Date: 2010-11-18
    Closing Date: 2011-01-09

    Written by John Guare
    Directed by George C. Wolfe

    As “A Free Man of Color” begins, its hero, an ex-slave, is a bewigged, bejeweled fop who is the wealthiest and most sexually desirable man in New Orleans. Like the character, the play seems to have everything going for it: deeply talented creators, an exciting cast, splendid costumes, a fascinating period in American history. By the end of the play, the character has been destroyed, in a harrowing half hour that is the dramatic and theatrical highlight of the piece. Long before that end, however, the average theatergoer is likely to feel let down by John Guare’s new play. If it frustrates our expectations, “A Free Man of Color”—ambitious, inventive, daring, sprawling—is an honorable failure with much to recommend it, even while it is difficult to sit through.

    Set largely in New Orleans between 1801 and 1806, but wandering around the world, the play, which has now opened at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, presents the complex intrigue surrounding the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States, and imagines the effects of these actual historical events on fictitious characters.

    The historical tidbits sprinkled throughout the play are tantalizing, especially those with contemporary parallels. To pick one of the more obscure examples: If the 21st century has civil unions for gay people, early 19th century New Orleans had plaçage, an arrangement between a white man and a woman of color…

    Read the entire review here.

  • UK in 2051 to be ‘significantly more diverse’

    UK in 2051 to be ‘significantly more diverse’

    University of Leeds
    2010-07-13

    The ethnic makeup of the UK will change dramatically over the next 40 years, with the country becoming far more ethnically diverse and geographically integrated, according to new projections.

    In a report published this week, researchers from the University of Leeds predict that ethnic minorities will make up one-fifth of the population by 2051 (compared to 8% in 2001), with the mixed ethnic population expected to treble in size. Their projections also indicate that the UK will become far less segregated as ethnic groups disperse throughout the country. 

    These initial findings of a three-year study include population projections for 352 local authorities in England, and projections for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, for each year until 2051.

    Key projections for 2051

    • UK population could reach almost 78 million* (59 million in 2001)
    • White British, White Irish and Black Caribbean groups to experience slowest growth
    • Other White (Australia, US and Europe) and Mixed to experience the biggest growth
    • Ethnic minority share of the population to increase from 8% (2001) to around 20%
    • Ethnic minorities to shift from deprived local authorities to more affluent areas
    • Ethnic groups to be significantly less segregated from the rest of the population…

    Read the entire news release here.

  • The Quadroon Ball on stage one week only Oct. 13-17 [2010]

    The Quadroon Ball on stage one week only Oct. 13-17 [2010]

    Lone Star College
    The Woodlands, Texas
    2010-09-22

    Lone Star College-CyFair Drama Department presents Damon Wright’s play “The Quadroon Ball” on stage Oct. 13 through Oct. 17 [2010].

    “The Quadroon Ball” is a moving drama taking place in New Orleans just prior to the Civil War.  It focuses on the women of mixed race who were prized for their beauty and yet regarded as second-class citizens, said LSC-CyFair Director Ron Jones. The play traces the life of a beautiful Quadroon woman (one quarter black and three quarters white) whose life is affected both by the man of royalty who loves her and the presence of slavery in society.

    With a cast of 22 community and college actors, this poignant and elegant story begins as Jeanette is introduced at a cotillion for women of her stature and continues for 20 years, marking her rise to fame and her ultimate demise.

    According to The New York Times, “Damon Wright’s ‘The Quadroon Ball’ is an intelligent, affecting new play about race, family, honor and freedom.”  Jones adds that this play is for mature audiences only due to adult subject matter and graphic language.

  • Half and Half: An (Auto)ethnography of Hybrid Identities in a Korean American Mother-Daughter Relationship

    Half and Half: An (Auto)ethnography of Hybrid Identities in a Korean American Mother-Daughter Relationship

    Journal of International and Intercultural Communication
    Volume 2, Issue 2 (May 2009)
    pages 139-167
    DOI: 10.1080/17513050902759512

    Stephanie L. Young, Associate Professor of Communication Studies
    University of Southern Indiana

    This essay focuses on how immigrant mothers and second generation interracial daughters construct, perform, and negotiate racial and ethnic hybrid identities. Placing my mother’s experiences in dialogue with my own experiences, I (auto)ethnographically examine how we navigate our mother-daughter relationship and intercultural and interracial identities in relation to discourses of Asian American-ness. I identify three sites for identity formation: location, language, and the dialectical tension of assimilation-preservation. I argue that the enactment of a racial self is not always a conscious part of one’s identity. Rather, we each enact racialized cultural identities that are contextually performed and continuously shifting.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • The Great Unraveling [Book Review of “Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America”]

    The Great Unraveling [Book Review of “Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America”]

    The New York Times
    2010-12-29

    Raymond Arsenault, Visiting Scholar, Florida State University Study Center in London
    and John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History, University of South Florida

    Eugene Robinson, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America (New York: Doubleday, 2010).

    When Henry Louis Gates Jr. told Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge police, “You don’t know who you’re messing with,” he was speaking truth to power, albeit in a manner more akin to arrogance than erudition. The big shock here, according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson, is not that a Harvard professor misused the subjective case (“who” for “whom”) and inelegantly ended a sentence with a preposition; it is, rather, that Gates belongs to an elite enclave beyond the sergeant’s experience or imagination. Gates’s life as an academic superstar places him among a select group of black Americans aptly labeled “Transcendent” by Robinson. Think of Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé, Kobe Bryant, Vernon Jordan and Richard Parsons, the retired chief executive of Time Warner…

    …These Transcendent men and women, Robinson tells us at the outset, live and work in a privileged world of wealth and power. Despite the color of their skin, they do not belong to the black community.

    Fair enough, but Robinson does not stop there. Over the next 200 pages, he demonstrates rather convincingly that no one belongs to the black community anymore…

    …During the past four decades, Robinson persuasively argues, black America has splintered into four subgroups: the Transcendent elite; the Mainstream middle class, which now accounts for a majority of black Americans; an Emergent community made up of mixed-race families and black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean; and the Abandoned, a large and growing underclass concentrated in the inner cities and depressed pockets of the rural South…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Not Quite White: Race Classification and the Arab American Experience

    Not Quite White: Race Classification and the Arab American Experience

    This paper was first presented at a symposium on Arab Americans by:
    The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies
    Georgetown University
    1997-04-04

    (This is also a chapter in Arabs in America: Building a New Future)

    Issues of race and identity are certainly dominant factors in American social history. The dual legacies of slavery and massive immigration – and how they have intersected over time—deeply conditioned the ways in which the citizenry relates to race, and how the government intercedes to classify the population.

    Throughout the more than 100 years that Arabs have immigrated to the U.S., there has been the need to clarify, accommodate and reexamine their relationship to this peculiar American fixation on race. In each historical period, Arabs in America have confronted race-based challenges to their identity. Today, the constituency known as Arab American is situated at an interesting social crossroads, where issues of minority and majority affiliation demand more attention—and reflection.

    The purpose of this chapter is to examine race classification policy as it has impacted the Arab American experience. Rather than approach the question of identity development from within the ethnic boundaries (which continues to be ably and amply studied), this view is principally to examine the externally—imposed systems of classification in the American context: how and why they have developed, changed over time, and how they have related historically to Arab immigrants and ethnics…

    …The effect of racial classification on Arab Americans thus became one of the topics that continued to be debated throughout the three-year review process. Under the heading of “emerging categories”, the AAI proposal was presented at the next major phase of the review process, a workshop sponsored by the National Research Council in February 1994 to discuss further the federal standards and make recommendations to the Office of Management and Budget. The other principal emerging category issue proposed was the addition to the race choices of a multi-racial check off for individuals of mixed parentage who in the current framework are obliged to select one identifying race. Although other refinements to the federal guidelines were entertained, such as reclassifying Hawaiians as Native Americans and merging Hispanics into the race categories, the mixed race question was clearly the most controversial recommendation, one that generated the most organized public pressure and one that virtually every stakeholder requiring data on race—including the minority communities—oppose on the grounds that it skews continuity of race data and, in effect, serves to undermine policies that implement affirmative action.

    Though overshadowed by the mixed race issue, the Arab American proposal continued to be raised in the final phase of the federal review: a series of public hearings sponsored by the OMB around the country during the summer of 1994. By then, a similar proposal for a specific “Arab American” category—as a linguistically-based identifier—was introduced by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). Testimony for the regional category (Middle East/North African) with ethnic subgroups (Arab, Iranian, Turk, Cypriot, Assyrian, etc.) was presented alongside support for a distinctly Arab American classifier—a mixed signal cited in the OMB report as a lack of consensus over the definition of the population in question. This was in fact one of several findings cited by the OMB as not justifying further research in this area at this time; another factor was the relatively small size of the population. By September 1997, the review process was complete and the OMB decided against the Arab American proposals, leaving open the possibility of study at some future date…

    Read the entire paper here.

  • The Eurasians of Indonesia: A Problem and Challenge in Colonial History

    The Eurasians of Indonesia: A Problem and Challenge in Colonial History

    Journal of Southeast Asian History
    Volume 9, Issue 2 (1968)
    pages 191-207
    DOI: 10.1017/S021778110000466X

    Paul W. van der Veur, Professor of History
    Australian National University

    Persons of mixed European and Asian parentage appeared in the Indonesian archipelago shortly after the arrival of the first “Westerners” in the sixteenth century. Although most of them were absorbed by the indigenous population, some were not and came to constitute a separate, identifiable group. The main reason, apart from paternal pride, seems to have been religious. Christianity, especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, encouraged a strong feeling of responsibility toward the biracial offspring of non-European women. A moral obligation was felt to baptize the child and give it the name of the father. Legal rules and regulations facilitated the process: the European father, for example, could “recognize” his natural child by a non-European woman, adopt it, or request a “Letter of legitimation”. Possession of “the status of European” in the nineteenth century permitted persons of mixed descent to benefit educationally from the rapid expansion of “European” (i.e. Dutch) schools. Finally, the Dutch nationality law of 1892—based squarely on the jus sanguinis principle—contained the crucial provision that all those who were considered Europeans when the act came into force (July 1, 1893)—including those who were legally assimilated and socially a part of the European group—became Dutch citizens.

    Read or purchase the article here.