Mixed Race Studies

Mixed race kids a new phenomenon in the Netherlands? We think not.

Africa Is a Country
2014-06-11

Chandra Frank

Mieke Weisemann

This week cultural centre de Balie in Amsterdam will be hosting an event titled ‘LovingDay.nl: (In)visibly Mixed’ on “mixed race” families and relationships (BTW, the Netherlands uncritically accepts this terminology, along with the assumption that certain people are “pure” and others are “mixed”, thereby reifying 19th century race theories). Loving Day takes the end of anti-miscegenation laws in America in 1967 as its starting point to celebrate the growing number of mixed couples and children in the Netherlands. Mixed children are a growing phenomenon in the Netherlands (up from 30% to 37% from 2007 in Amsterdam) but oddly, the program claims, this growth is not visible in Dutch policy or imaging of the Dutch identity.

Being designated as “mixed race” ourselves, we don’t deny that there’s a lot to talk about, but we were mildly surprised to see that this program completely ignores the historical and socio-economical context of mixed race identities within Dutch colonial history. We say mildly, because it wouldn’t be the first time the Dutch conveniently forgot about their colonial adventures. There were clear strategies to instill and secure Dutch “purity” and a cultural sense of belonging in both South Africa and Indonesia. But of course, there were those “Others” that produced in both former colonies. Indos (people of mixed Indonesian European descent) have existed within the former Dutch-East Indies (and thus the Netherlands) for over 300 years, and the same can be said about the Coloured community in South Africa. Let’s not forget that there were and has been strong Dutch policy surrounding and creating these “mixed” identities beginning with the colonial period and existing well into the present…

Read the entire article here.

The problem with sub-Saharan Africa and DNA analysis tools

Genealogy Adventures
2014-07-08

Brian Sheffey

This is the first post in a series that covers issues I’ve experienced with reporting of sub-Saharan African results in DNA analysis. This series of posts will have a particular emphasis on DNA testing for African Americans. Over the next series of posts, I’ll be looking at the strengths and weaknesses of DNA admixture analysis tools – with tips for things to look out for.

I recently had the opportunity to upload my Ancestry.com DNA results to Gedmatch.com. And what a revelatory experience Gedmatch.com has been. To be honest, this DNA analysis service is proving fascinaing. There is just so much to explore and comprehend. I have been doing a LOT of research in order to get my head around all of the information Gedmatch has provided.

My experience with Gedmatch has better enabled me to finely tune a quibble I’ve had with my Ancestry.com results. Don’t get me wrong, Ancestry’s DNA test has done exactly what I wanted it to – put me in touch with distant (and not so distant) relations from my various family lines. It’s allowed me to find my 4x great Sheffey grandfather. And it put me on the right track towards identifying my 4 x Roane great-grandfather.

My niggle with Ancestry’s results has to do with my admixtures and the countries it genetically tied me to. These results were always going to be general in nature. Ancestry.com states as much. The quibble I had has to do with Africa. And my recent experience with Gedmatch has allowed me to better understand the nature of my quibble.

DNA test results are based on data sets. These data sets are compiled by DNA test result databases. A database can only be as precise as the data that’s put into it. In this case, precision DNA results rely on large numbers of a population 1) having a DNA test and 2) those results being added to a data set which is imported into a database. For instance, a data set with 200,000 DNA results from the Baltic region of Eastern Europe will provide more precise insights than a data set of 50,000 individuals from the same region. It also depends on how each individual is classified and sub-classified (i.e. Bulgarian, Caucasian Bulgarian, Central Asian Bulgarian, Altaic Bulgarian, etc).

This brings me to my quibble about Africa. The way African DNA test results are classified, you would thing Africa was one large country populated by a homogenous people. This simply is not the case. The continental African population is arguably one of the most heterogenous populations. The admixture analysis tools and reports I’ve used on Ancestry.com and Gedmatch simply don’t reflect this diversity of African peoples…

Read the entire article here.

A surprising number of people change their race and ethnicity from one Census to the next

The Washington Post
2014-08-06

Emily Badger, Reporter

On Census forms, the option to check a box for racial or ethnic identity presupposes that there’s an unambiguous answer: white, black, American Indian, Hispanic, etc. But identity is a fluid thing. And, it turns out, about eight percent of us change our answers to the Census questions pictured at right from one decade to the next.

Researchers at the Census Bureau and the University of Minnesota have calculated this with the most comprehensive survey yet of our shifting sense of race and ethnicity, in a new working paper based on the matched responses of 162 million Americans captured in the 2000 and 2010 censuses (a preview of their findings circulated earlier this spring is here; here is the full paper)…

Read the entire article here.

America’s Churning Races: Race and Ethnic Response Changes between Census 2000 and the 2010 Census

CARRA Working Paper Series
Working Paper #2014-09
Center for Administrative Records Research and Applications
United States Census Bureau
Washington, D.C.
2014-08-04
56 pages

Carolyn A. Liebler
University of Minnesota

Sonya Rastogi
U. S. Census Bureau

Leticia E. Fernandez
U. S. Census Bureau

James M. Noon
U. S. Census Bureau

Sharon R. Ennis
U. S. Census Bureau

Race and ethnicity responses can change over time and across contexts – a component of population change not usually taken into account. To what extent do race and/or Hispanic origin responses change? Is change more common to/from some race/ethnic groups than others? Does the propensity to change responses vary by characteristics of the individual? To what extent do these changes affect researchers? We use internal Census Bureau data from the 2000 and 2010 censuses in which individuals’ responses have been linked across years. Approximately 9.8 million people (about 6 percent) in our large, non-representative linked data have a different race and/or Hispanic origin response in 2010 than they did in 2000. Several groups experienced considerable fluidity in racial identification: American Indians and Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders, and multiple-race response groups, as well as Hispanics when reporting a race. In contrast, race and ethnic responses for single-race non-Hispanic whites, blacks, and Asians were relatively consistent over the decade, as were ethnicity responses by Hispanics. People who change their race and/or Hispanic origin response(s) are doing so in a wide variety of ways, as anticipated by previous research. For example, people’s responses change from multiple races to a single race, from a single race to multiple races, from one single race to another, and some people add or drop a Hispanic response. The inflow of people to each race/Hispanic group is in many cases similar in size to the outflow from the same group, such that cross-sectional data would show a small net change. We find response changes across ages, sexes, regions, and response modes, with variation across groups. Researchers should consider the implications of changing race and Hispanic origin responses when conducting analyses and interpreting results.

Read the entire paper here.

“Where a Man is a Man”?: Ancestral Possibilities in Charles Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand, F.M.C.

African American Review
Volume 46, Numbers 2-3, Summer/Fall 2013
pages 397-411
DOI: 10.1353/afa.2013.0048

Susan M. Marren, Associate Professor
University of Arkansas

This essay reads Charles Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand, F.M.C. not as a historical romance (as Chesnutt’s contemporaneous publishers deemed it) but rather as a peculiarly modernist passing novel. It argues that the novel’s hybrid possibilities stage a confrontation between an eighteenth-century standard of impartial “right reason” and the racially pluralistic world of nineteenth-century New Orleans.

The Octoroon

Broadview Press
2014-05-16 (orignially published in 1859)
136 pages
Paperback / PDF / ePub
ISBN: 9781554812110 / 1554812119

Dion Boucicault

Edited by:

Sarika Bose, Lecturer of English
University of British Columbia

Joseph Black, Professor of English
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

et al.

Regarded by Bernard Shaw as a master of the theatre, Dion Boucicault was arguably the most important figure in drama in North America and in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century. He was largely forgotten during the twentieth century—though he continued to influence popular culture (the iconic image of a woman tied to railway tracks as a train rushes towards her, for example, originates in a Boucicault melodrama). In the twenty-first century the gripping nature of his plays is being discovered afresh; when The Octoroon was produced as a BBC Radio play in 2012, director and playwright Mark Ravenhill described Boucicault’s dramas as “the precursors to Hollywood cinema.”

In The Octoroon—the most controversial play of his career—Boucicault addresses the sensitive topic of race and slavery. George Peyton inherits a plantation, and falls in love with an octoroon—a person one-eighth African American, and thus, in 1859 Louisiana, legally a slave. The Octoroon opened in 1859 in New York City, just two years prior to the American Civil War, and created a sensation—as it did in its subsequent British production.

This new edition includes a wide range of background contextual materials, an informative introduction, and extensive annotation.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• A Note on the Text
• The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana
• Appendix A: American Reviews
  • 1. “‘The Octoroon.’ A Disgrace to the North, a Libel on the South,” Spirit of the Times; A Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage (17 December 1859)
  • 2. From “The Octoroon,” The Charleston Courier, Tri-Weekly (22 December 1859)
  • 3. From “Winter Garden–First Night of ‘The Octoroon,'” The New York Herald (7 December 1859)
• Appendix B: English Reviews
  • 1. “Saving the Octoroon,” Punch (21 December 1861)
  • 2. From “Theatres and Music,” John Bull (Saturday, 23 November 1861)
  • 3. From “Adelphi” (Review of The Octoroon), The Athenaeum (23 November 1861)
  • 4. “Pan at the Play,” Fun (Saturday, 30 November 1861)
  • 5. “Adelphi Theatre” (Review of Revised Play), The Times [London] (12 December 1861)
• Appendix C: Letters to Editors Concerning the Lawsuit
  • 1. “The Octoroon Conflict: Financial and Political View of the Case–Letter from Mrs. Agnes Robertson Boucicault,” The New York Herald (Friday, 16 December 1859)
• Appendix D: A Selection of Letters from Boucicault Defending the Content of The Octoroon
  • 1. “Letter from the Author of the ‘Octoroon,'” The New York Herald (7 December 1859)
  • 2. “The Octoroon Gone Home,” New York Times (9 February 1860)
  • 3. “‘The Octoroon’: To the Editor of the Times,” The Times [London] (Wednesday, 20 November 1861)
• Appendix E: Boucicault on Acting
  • 1. From Dion Boucicault, “The Art of Acting” (1882)
• Appendix F: Alternative Endings
  • 1. The Illustrated London News (14 December 1882)
  • 2. “Music and the Drama,” Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (Sunday, 15 December 1861)
  • 3. From The Octoroon: Founded on Dion Boucicault’s Celebrated and Original Melodrama (1897)
  • 4. From Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon, Lacy’s Acting Edition, No. 963 (c. 1861)
  • 5. From Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon: A Drama in Three Acts (26 October 1861)
• Appendix G: On Slavery
  • 1. From Dion Boucicault, unpublished note, Theatre Museum, London (1861)
  • 2. From Fredrika Bremer, “Fredrika Bremer Sees the New Orleans Slave Market” (1853)
  • 3. From Civil Code of the State of Louisiana
• Appendix H: Illustrations
  • 1. From The Illustrated London News (30 November 1861)
  • 2. Cover, Reynolds Miscellany (4 January 1862)
  • 3. Cover, The Octoroon (Dick’s Standard Plays)
• Permissions Acknowledgments

First Métis Families of Quebec, 1622-1748. Volume 1: Fifty-Six Families

Genealogical Publishing Company
2012
226 pages
8½” x 11”
Paperback ISBN: 9780806355610

Gail Morin

The term Métis originally referred to the offspring produced from the intermarriage of early French fur traders with Canadian Native Americans. Later, there were also Anglo Métis (known as “Countryborn”)–children of Scottish, English, and other European fathers and indigenous mothers. The Métis were also formerly known as half-breeds or mixed-bloods. Today, the French and Anglo Métis cultures have essentially merged into a distinct group with official recognition as one of the three Aboriginal Peoples of Canada.

The first Frenchman known to have Métis offspring was Jean Nicolet de Belleborne. He arrived in Quebec in 1618 and was employed as a clerk and trained as an interpreter by the Company of Merchants, the fur-trading monopoly owned by French noblemen. He ran a Hudson Bay Company store and traded with the Lake Nipissing (Ontario) people for several years. His informal or country marriage to a Nipissing woman resulted in the birth in 1628 of a daughter, Madeleine or Euphrosine Nicolet. Jean Nicolet returned to the Company in Quebec in 1633 with Madeleine. Madeleine married Jean Leblanc in 1643 and Elie Dussault dit Lafleur in 1663. Both marriages resulted in generations of descendants in Canada and the United States that continue today.

Many in the fur trade followed Jean Nicolet’s lead, first marrying a Native American for safety and convenience, and later marrying a settler’s daughter. For example, Martin Prevost or Provost arrived in Quebec before 1639. He was a settler and farmed near Beauport, Quebec. On 3 November 1644 Prevost married Marie-Olivier, the daughter of Roch Manithabewich, a Huron Indian, and the adopted daughter of Olivier Letardif. Together they had eight children whose descendants continue to the 21st century.

In the 100 years following Martin Prevost and Marie Olivier’s marriage in 1644, only 56 Métis marriages were officially recorded. In some cases they were the second or third marriage for the bride or groom and resulted in no descendants. There are probably many unrecorded Métis or mixed blood families who are lost for now.

This new work, the first in a purported six-volume series, traces the descendants of the 56 original Métis families for up to three generations. Richly detailed, fully sourced, and indexed, this work must be regarded as the starting point for Métis genealogy. Future volumes will concentrate on subsequent generations of those Métis families whose progeny settled in western North America in the 20th century, namely, the families of Jean Nicolet, Martin Prevost, Pierre Couc dit Lafleur (later called Montour), Jean Durand, Pierre Lamoureux, and Daniel-Joseph Amiot.

See also the other volumes in this series:

• First Métis Families of Quebec, 1622-1748. Volume 2: Jean Nicolet and a Nipissing Woman
• First Métis Families of Quebec, 1622-1748. Volume 3: Martin Prevost and Marie Olivier Sylvestre Manitouabeouich

Your words don’t change who I am

The Race Card Project (by Michele Norris)
2014-08-05

Blake Coffey
Van Nuys, California

In a world where being mixed is supposed to be looked at as beautiful, it’s not as easy when you are. People automatically assume that all mixed people are supposed to look mixed just like they assume all Mexicans are brown. I’m born to a mixed black/white father who looks full black and society deems him so, and a white mother. I’ve looked for people that are the same thing or mixed but not looked at as mixed but I’ve always felt left out. I don’t look at people as a certain race but they sure look at me like I am. I’m judged and denied of who I am because genetics determined that I wouldn’t come out looking mixed. Although I’ve faced racism from every race.

Today is the day when I fully accept myself for who I am. I’m not denying myself or anyone else of who I truly am…

Read the entire essay here.

Now We Will Be Happy

University of Nebraska Press
September 2014
140 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-5539-5

Amina Gautier
Department of English
University of Miami

Winner of the 2013 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction

Now We Will Be Happy is a prize-winning collection of stories about Afro-Puerto Ricans, U.S.-mainland-born Puerto Ricans, and displaced native Puerto Ricans who are living between spaces while attempting to navigate the unique culture that defines Puerto Rican identity. Amina Gautier’s characters deal with the difficulties of bicultural identities in a world that wants them to choose only one.

The characters in Now We Will Be Happy are as unpredictable as they are human. A teenage boy leaves home in search of the mother he hasn’t seen since childhood; a granddaughter is sent across the ocean to broker peace between her relatives; a widow seeks to die by hurricane; a married woman takes a bathtub voyage with her lover; a proprietress who is the glue that binds her neighborhood cannot hold on to her own son; a displaced wife develops a strange addiction to candles.

Crossing boundaries of comfort, culture, language, race, and tradition in unexpected ways, these characters struggle valiantly and doggedly to reconcile their fantasies of happiness with the realities of their existence.

Read an excerpt here.

Afro-Chinese marriages boom in Guangzhou: but will it be ’til death do us part’?

South China Morning Post Magazine
South China Morning Post
Hong Kong, China
2014-06-01

Jenni Marsh, Assistant Editor

Jennifer Tsang and Eman Okonkwo at their wedding in Guangzhou in April. Photo: Jenni Marsh

Guangzhou is witnessing many Afro-Chinese marriages, but the mainland’s lack of citizenship rights for husbands and a crackdown on foreign visas means families live in fear of being torn apart, writes Jenni Marsh

Eman Okonkwo’s foot-tapping at the altar is not a sign of nerves. The groom’s palms aren’t sweaty, there are no pre-wedding jitters and certainly no second thoughts. Today he is realising a dream imagined by countless African merchants in Guangzhou: he is marrying a Chinese bride.

Seven days earlier, Jennifer Tsang’s family was oblivious to their daughter’s romance. Like many local women dating African men, the curvaceous trader from Foshan, who is in her late 20s – that dreaded “leftover woman” age – had feared her parents would be racially prejudiced.

Today, though – having tentatively given their blessing – they snuck into the underground Royal Victory Church, in Guangzhou, looking over their shoulders for police as they entered the downtown tower block. Non-state-sanctioned religious events like this are illegal on the mainland.

Okonkwo, 42, doesn’t have a single relative at the rambunctious Pentecostal ceremony, but is nevertheless delighted.

“Today is so special,” beams the Nigerian, “because I have married a Chinese girl. And that makes me half-African, half-Chinese.”

In Guangzhou, weddings like this take place every day. There are no official figures on Afro-Chinese marriages but visit any trading warehouse in the city and you will see scores of mixed-race couples running wholesale shops, their coffee-coloured, hair-braided children racing through the corridors…

Guinean trader Cellou with his wife, Cherry, and their children. Photo: Robin Fall

…Chinese prejudice against Africans is normally based on three aspects: traditional aesthetic values, an ignorance of African culture and society, and the language barrier.

Furthermore, until the 1970s, foreigners were not permitted to live in the mainland, let alone marry a Chinese. When a child is born, the parents must register its ethnicity with the authorities: of the 56 boxes they can tick, “mixed-race” is not an option.

But there are factors other than racism that might lead a family to reject a mixed marriage.

Linessa Lin Dan, a PhD student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong researching Afro-Chinese relations in Guangzhou, says many African men who propose already have wives in their home countries – Muslims are permitted by their religion to take multiple spouses. Furthermore, Lin has heard tales of husbands returning to Nigeria on a business trip, leaving a mobile-phone number that doesn’t connect and disappearing.

“The Chinese wife is left with their children, and shamed for marrying a hei gui [black ghost],” says Lin…

Read the entire article here.