Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

recent posts

about

  • Chinos and Paisanos: Chinese Mexican Relations in the Borderlands

    Chinos and Paisanos: Chinese Mexican Relations in the Borderlands

    Pacific Historical Review
    Volume 79, Number 1 (February 2010)
    Pages 50–85
    DOI: 10.1525/phr.2010.79.1.50

    Julian Lim
    Cornell University

    Using the testimonio of Manuel Lee Mancilla, a Chinese Mexican man born in Mexicali in 1921, this article explores the experiences of the Chinese in northern Mexico in the early 1900s. It examines the conditions under which Chinese immigrants came to and helped build new borderland communities and simultaneously recovers the day-to-day relationships that were negotiated and nurtured there. Meaningful moments of Chinese Mexican cooperation emerged amid intense conflict and despite the anti-Chinese campaigns of the Mexican Revolution and the infamous Sonoran purges of the 1930s. Challenging static notions of ethnic and racial identities and relations, and analyzing the anti-Chinese movements in less monolithic terms, this article examines not only how Chinese and Mexicans weathered revolutionary violence and xenophobia but also the turbulent forces of U.S. capital and labor exploitation on both sides of the border.

    In 1920 Manual Lee Chew’s family held a great wedding banquet at the Casa Blanca restaurant, located in the center of Mexicali’s la Chinesca [Chinatown].  All of the Lees, along with their paisanos [countrymen], were there to celebrate. It was a momentous occasion as well, for the bride was one of the first Mexicans to marry a Chinese in Mexicali.  For family friends such as Samuel Lee, it was the perfect event for sharing their good fortune and wishes with the happy couple: Samuel Lee proudly lent his cherished Cadillac to Lee Chew for the wedding.  More that seventy years later, memories about the great celebration and other experiences of Chinese immigrants in the Mexican borderlands…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • “Sons of White Fathers”: Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto”

    “Sons of White Fathers”: Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto”

    Nineteenth-Century Literature
    Volume 65, Number 1 (June 2010)
    Pages 1–37
    DOI: 10.1525/ncl.2010.65.1.1

    Marlene L. Daut, Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies
    Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California

    Although many literary critics have traced the genealogy of the tragic mulatto/a to nineteenth-century U.S. letters, in this essay I argue that the theme of tragedy and the mixed-race character predates the mid-nineteenth-century work of Lydia Maria Child and William Wells Brown and cannot be considered a solely U.S. American concept. The image can also be traced to early-nineteenth-century French colonial literature, where the trope surfaced in conjunction with the image of the Haitian Revolution as a bloody race war. Through a reading of the Louisiana-born Victor Séjour’s representation of the Haitian Revolution, “Le Mulâtre” or “The Mulatto,” [Read the entire text in French here.] originally composed in French and first published in Paris in 1837, this essay considers the implications of the conflation of the literary history of the tragic mulatto/a with the literary history of the Haitian Revolution in one of the first short stories written by an American author of African descent.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Consequences of Racial Intermarriage for Children’s Social Integration

    Consequences of Racial Intermarriage for Children’s Social Integration

    Sociological Perspectives
    Volume 53, Number 2     (Summer 2010)
    Pages 271–286
    DOI: 10.1525/sop.2010.53.2.271

    Matthijs Kalmijn, Professor of Sociology
    Tilburg University, The Netherlands

    Much has been written on ethnic and racial intermarriage, but little research is available on the social consequences of intermarriage. Are the children of mixed marriages more strongly connected to the majority, or are they incorporated in the ethnic or racial minority group? To answer this question, this article uses a minority survey from the Netherlands with data collected from both parents and children. The focus is on Antilleans and Surinamese and children of marriages in which both spouses are black are compared to children of marriages in which one spouse is white and one spouse is black. The analyses provide strong support for the integrative effects of intermarriage on children. These effects are not conditional on the socioeconomic status of the parents. Moreover, the effect on children can be explained in terms of the more diverse meeting opportunities that parents in a mixed marriage provide to their children.

    Intermarriage has long been considered a core indicator of the integration of ethnic and racial minorities in society (Kalmijn 1998; Qian and Lichter 2007; Schermerhorn 1970). The most important reason for this is that when members of ethnic and racial groups marry with other groups, this is a sign that these groups accept each other as equals. Intermarriage is also considered important, however, for its potential consequences. Intermarriage may reduce group identities and prejudice in future generations because the children of mixed marriages are less likely to identify themselves with a single group (Saenz, Hwang, and Anderson 1995; Xie and Goyette 1997). In addition, the children of mixed marriages are believed to interact more frequently across group boundaries and they tend to choose a marriage partner from the majority more often (Okun 2004). Finally, high rates of intermarriage make it more difficult to define who is belonging to an ethnic or racial group and this by itself could also weaken the salience of ethnic and racial boundaries in society (Davis 1991). In short, ethnic and racial intermarriages are not only considered a reflection of integration in society, they may also contribute to integration.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Mixing in the Mountains

    Mixing in the Mountains

    Southern Cultures
    Volume 3, Issue 4 (Winter 1997)
    pages 25-35

    John Shelton Reed, William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Research in Social Science
    University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

    One January day in 1996, I picked up the Wall Street Journal to find a story headlined “Rural County Balks at Joining Global Village.” It told about Hancock County, Tennessee, which straddles the Clinch River in the ridges hard up against the Cumberland Gap, where Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee meet.

    This is a county that has lost a third of its 1950 population, which was only ten thousand to begin with. A third of those left are on welfare, and half of those with jobs have to leave the county to work. The only town is Sneedville, population 1300, which has no movie theater, no hospital, no dry cleaner, no supermarket, and no department store.

    I read this story with a good deal of interest because the nearest city of any consequence is my hometown of Kingsport, thirty-five miles from Sneedville as the crow flies, but an hour and a half on mountain roads. (If you don’t accept my premise that Kingsport is a city of consequence, Knoxville’s a little further from Sneedville, in the opposite direction.)

    The burden of the article was that many of Hancock County’s citizens are indifferent to the state of Tennessee’s desire to hook them up to the information superhighway—a job that will take some doing, especially for the one household in six that doesn’t have a telephone. The Journal quoted several Hancock Countians to the effect that they didn’t see the point. The reporter observed that the county offers “safe, friendly ways, pristine rivers, unspoiled forests and mountain views,” and that many residents simply “like things the way they are.”

    So far a typical hillbilly-stereotype story. But the sentence that really got my attention was this: “Many families here belong to a hundred or so Melungeon clans of Portuguese and American Indian descent, who tend to be suspicious of change and have a history of self-reliance.”…

    …Anyway, the Melungeons’ problems, historically, haven’t been due to their American Indian heritage. Like the South’s other triracial groups, they have been ostracized and discriminated against because their neighbors suspected that they were, as one told Miss Dromgoole, “Portuguese niggers.” (Do not imagine that the absence of racial diversity in the mountains means the absence of racial prejudice.) Until recently most Melungeons have vociferously denied any African American connection and have simply refused to accept the attendant legal restrictions. As one mother told Brewton Berry, “I’d sooner my chilluns grow up ig’nant like monkeys than send ’em to that nigger school.” But those neighbors were probably right: DeMarce has now established clear lines from several Melungeon families back to eighteenth-century free black families in Virginia and the Carolinas…

    …In her pioneering article on the Melungeons, Miss Dromgoole reveals an interesting misconception: “a race of Mulattoes cannot exist as these Melungeons have existed,” she wrote. “The Negro race goes from Mulattoes to quadroons, from quadroons to octoroons and there it stops. The octoroon women bear no children. Think about that: “Octoroon women bear no children.” Like mules. Who knows how many genteel southern white women held that comforting belief-comforting, that is, to one who accepted the “one drop” rule of racial identification that was enshrined in the laws of many states. But in one sense Miss Dromgoole was right. Not only is there no word for people with one black great-great-grandparent, it’s almost true, sociologically speaking, that there are no such people…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Some Observations on Identity Problems in Children of Negro-White Marriages

    Some Observations on Identity Problems in Children of Negro-White Marriages

    Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease
    Volume 146, Issue 3 (March 1968)
    pages 249-256

    Joseph D. Teicher (1912-2000)
    University of Southern California School of Medicine

    The Los Angeles County General Hospital population includes every case, and, inevitably, many Negro-white families present themselves for service at the hospital’s Child Psychiatry Unit. The problems of the children in these families are directly related to the fact that one parent is Negro and the other Caucasian. Such comments as “Any white woman who marries a Negro man is sick!” and “The children are always a mess!” are common, and yet no systematic research has been done in this area. As some of the unit’s staff began to explore the special problems of the children of Negro-white marriages, they became interested in refining the methods of studying these interracial families. The report that follows presents, in brief, a statement of the problem, a review of the literature, three case histories and a description of the study now in progress.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • History and Current Status of the Houma Indians

    History and Current Status of the Houma Indians

    Midcontinent American Studies Journal
    Volume 6, Number 2 (Fall 1965)
    pages 149-163

    Ann Fischer
    Tulane University

    Brewton Berry, in Almost White, reports that there are some 200 groups of “racial orphans” in the United States. Among these, those who have some claim to Indian ancestry are known as “so-called Indians.” This term is apt, for these peoples have a tenuous racial status. Although so called Indians are of mixed ancestry, they emphasize their Indian identity. Mulatto groups, on the other hand, consider their own status to be midway between white and Negro. Both Mulatto and so-called Indian groups may be found today in Louisiana, living in separate, isolated social units. In these Indian groups in Louisiana, there has been consistent strong resistance to identification with Negroes. Whites, Indians and Negroes agree that as a result of this resistance the Indian groups are more deprived than Negroes who live in the same areas. The racial status of these people varies from parish to parish, and migration can often overcome the problems of racial identity.

    The so-called Indians of Louisiana live in settlements which are isolated from the Negro settlements of the same area. Negroes work in the cane fields and usually live in identical unpainted houses in rows perpendicular to the road, surrounded by sugar cane fields. Indians live in houses, often run-down, along the levees in the typical line villages of the bayou country. In many parts of this region white and Indian houses maybe mixed in the line villages, due to the movement of the whites down the line. Negro and Indian housing, on the other hand, is never mixed in the situations which I have observed. Many Indians know no Negroes, and when they compare themselves to any other group it is usually to the white French. They reject the white judgment that they are sexually immoral, pointing out, probably accurately, that the same sexual patterns are common to both groups. It is in sexual behavior and the differences in the standard of living that Indians compare themselves to others. When Indians improve their economic circumstances and these improvements become visible, they feel that the whites resent their successes and think they are not entitled to them…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Are Mixed-Race Children Better Adjusted?

    Are Mixed-Race Children Better Adjusted?

    Time Magazine
    2009-02-21

    John Cloud

    Americans like answers in black and white, a cultural trait we confirmed last year when the biracial man running for President was routinely called “black”.

    The flattening of Barack Obama’s complex racial background shouldn’t have been surprising. Many multiracial historical figures in the U.S. have been reduced (or have reduced themselves) to a single aspect of their racial identities: Booker T. Washington, Tina Turner, and Greg Louganis are three examples. This phenomenon isn’t entirely pernicious; it is at least partly rooted in our concern that growing up with a fractured identity is hard on kids. The psychologist J. D. Teicher summarized this view in a 1968 paper: “Although the burden of the Negro child is recognized as a heavy one, that of the Negro-White child is seen to be even heavier.”

    But new research says this old, problematized view of multiracial identity is outdated. In fact, a new paper in the Journal of Social Issues shows that multiracial adolescents who identify proudly as multiracial fare as well as—and, in many cases, better than—kids who identify with a single group, even if that group is considered high-status (like, say, Asians or whites). This finding was surprising because psychologists have argued for years that mixed-race kids will be better adjusted if they pick a single race as their own…

    …In short, multiracial kids seem to create their own definitions for fitting in, and they show more psychological flexibility than those mixed-race kids who feel bound to one choice or another…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Mitsawokett to Bloomsbury: Archaeology and History of a Native-American Descendant Community in Central Delaware

    Mitsawokett to Bloomsbury: Archaeology and History of a Native-American Descendant Community in Central Delaware

    Chapter 5. A Larger Ethnic Community

    2008
    383 pages
    Delaware Department of Transportation Project 88-110-01
    Federal Highway Administration Project F-NH-1003(13)
    Delaware Department of Transportation Archæological Series Number 154
    Carolann Wicks, Secretary

    Original and redraft prepared by

    Edward F. Heite and Cara L. Blume
    Heite Consulting, Inc., Camden, Delaware

    Redraft of original compiled by

    Heite Consulting, Inc., Frederica, Delaware

    DelDOT [Delaware Department of Transportation] has edited all cultural resource documents on this website. The documents were edited to protect the location of archaeological sites, any culturally sensitive material, and all State Historic Preservation Office (archaeological) cultural resource forms. Section 304 of the National Historic Preservation Act, as amended in 1992, 36 CFR pat 800.11 of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation’s regulations implementing Section 106 of that same Act, Section 9(a) of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, and Delaware Code Title 7, Chapter 53 and 5314 provide the legal authority for restricting access to information on the location and nature of archaeological resources.

    At least three Bloomsbury households belonged to a distinct local ethnic enclave. Similar, related, communities existed along the Eastern Seaboard

    The preservation planning regime requires that each property must be considered in terms of its larger cultural and historical context. An obvious context for the subject property is the post-contact history of “isolate” populations of Native American descent in Delaware, not previously noticed by the planning process. While creation of a new full-blown planning context is not appropriate in a site-specific study, some information is necessary in order to place the site in its own proper ethnic milieu.

    An ethnic group may be defined by any combination of such traits as consanguinity, shared foodways, settlement patterns, and common customs. A Kent County isolate community included several Bloomsbury residents. By some definitions, this closed community can be described as a distinct ethnic group, part of a series of similar, interrelated, ethnic enclaves along the eastern seaboard.

    Members of Delaware’s racial isolate communities have been known by a bewildering variety of labels over the years. Labels have shifted, depending upon the era and individual points of view. It is useful to analyse the meaning behind these labels, remembering that they reflect observer bias.

    As the local group developed, similar communities were coming into existence up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Genealogical research firmly connects the local community with nearby groups. On a larger scale, similar circumstances and surname similarities suggest that there was, at an early date, an informal network of such communities over long distances. In any case, research for this project indicates that the local “isolate” community was not an isolated or a unique phenomenon.

    These isolate groups share certain characteristics that are consistent from North Carolina northward at least to New Jersey. Shared attributes of the various communities include:

    1. Iberian surnames appear in all the communities as early as the seventeenth century, and always before the middle of the eighteenth century.
    2. Families with documented Native American heritage are related to at least some members of each community. Some of the documented Native American families are found among several communities, and migrations can be traced.
    3. At least by the middle of the eighteenth century, each community had begun to intermarry, thereby removing themselves from the larger local pool of prospective marriage partners.
    4. People moved among the communities and married, thereby suggesting that they early recognized and embraced one another as similar cultural communities.
    5. Aside from the term “Mulatto” applied with increasing frequency as time passed, most community members were not identified racially until after the Revolution…

    Read the entire chapter here.

  • Facts for Families: Multiracial Children

    Facts for Families: Multiracial Children

    American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
    Number 71, October 1999
    2 pages

    Multiracial children are one of the fastest growing segments of the U.S. population. The number of mixed-race families in America is steadily increasing, due to a rise in interracial marriages and relationships, as well as an increase in transracial and international adoptions. Publicity surrounding prominent Americans of mixed cultural heritage, such as athletes, actors, musicians, and politicians, has highlighted the issues of multicultural individuals and challenged long-standing views of race. However, despite some changes in laws and evolving social attitudes, multiracial children still face significant challenges.

    Read the fact sheet here.

  • The “Multiracial” Option: Social Group Identity and Changing Patterns of Racial Categorization

    The “Multiracial” Option: Social Group Identity and Changing Patterns of Racial Categorization

    American Politics Research
    Volume 39, Number 1 (January 2011)
    pages 176-204
    DOI: 10.1177/1532673X10378845

    Natalie Masuoka, Assistant Professor of Political Science
    Tufts University

    This article focuses on a new and growing trend in the United States: multiracial (or mixed race) identification. Multiracial self-identification forces us to consider that the norms of racial identification are shifting in which Americans perceive greater individual agency in how they choose to racially identify compared to the choices offered in the past. Given this, is the willingness to identify as multiracial a proxy for changing political attitudes about American race relation? Using a unique data set that includes multiple measures of racial identification, this article examines the individual-level determinants that predict who is willing to self-identify as multiracial and the political consequences of this identity. This research demonstrates the complexity of racial identification today as well as the need to reconsider how race is measured in public opinion surveys. Most importantly, the data demonstrate that those who self-identify as multiracial hold different racial attitudes than those who do not.

    Read or purchase the article here.