Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Hapa-Palooza Festival: September 12, 13 & 15, 2012

    Hapa-Palooza Festival: September 12, 13 & 15, 2012

    Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
    2012-09-12, 2012-09-13 and 2012-09-15

    Hapa-Palooza: A Vancouver Celebration of Mixed-Roots Arts and Ideas is a new cultural festival that celebrates the city’s identity as a place of hybridity, synergy and acceptance. A vibrant fusion of music, dance, literary, artistic and film performances, Hapa-Palooza places prominence on celebrating and stimulating awareness of mixed-roots identity, especially amongst youth.

    For more information, click here.

  • Brazil Enacts Affirmative Action Law for Universities

    Brazil Enacts Affirmative Action Law for Universities

    The New York Times
    2012-08-30

    Simon Romero, Brazil Bureau Chief

    RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil’s government has enacted one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping affirmative action laws, requiring public universities to reserve half of their admission spots for the largely poor students in the nation’s public schools and vastly increase the number of university students of African descent across the country.

    The law, signed Wednesday by President Dilma Rousseff, seeks to reverse the racial and income inequality that has long characterized Brazil, a country with more people of African heritage than any nation outside of Africa. Despite strides over the last decade in lifting millions out of poverty, Brazil remains one of the world’s most unequal societies.

    “Brazil owes a historical debt to a huge part of its own population,” said Jorge Werthein, who directs the Brazilian Center for Latin American Studies. “The democratization of higher education, which has always been a dream for the most neglected students in public schools, is one way of paying this debt.”…

    …But while affirmative action has come under threat in the United States, it is taking deeper root in Brazil, Latin America’s largest country. Though the new legislation, called the Law of Social Quotas, is expected to face legal challenges, it drew broad support among lawmakers.

    Of Brazil’s 81 senators, only one voted against the law this month. Other spheres of government here have also supported affirmative action measures. In a closely watched decision in April, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the racial quotas enacted in 2004 by the University of Brasília, which reserved 20 percent of its spots for black and mixed-race students…

    …Brazil’s 2010 census showed that a slight majority of this nation’s 196 million people defined themselves as black or mixed-race, a shift from previous decades during which most Brazilians called themselves white…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Race, Theory, and Scholarship in the Biracial Project

    Race, Theory, and Scholarship in the Biracial Project

    Chapter in:

    Race Struggles
    University of Illinois Press
    2009
    352 pages
    6.125 x 9.25 in.; 4 tables
    Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07648-0

    Edited by:

    Theodore Koditschek, Professor of History
    University of Missouri, Columbia

    Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Associate Professor of History; Associate Professor of African American Studies
    University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

    Helen A. Neville, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Educational Psychology
    University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

    Chapter Author:

    Minkah Makalani, Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies
    University of Texas, Austin

    Since the early 1990s, there has emerged in the United States a push to racially reclassify persons with one black and one white parent as biracial. A central feature of what I am calling the biracial project is a cohort of scholars, themselves biracial identity advocates, who argue that such an identity is more appropriate for people of mixed parentage (PMP) than a black one. These scholars maintain that when PMP identify as biracial, they gain a more mentally healthy racial identity, have fewer experiences of alienation, and are able to express their racial and cultural distinction from African Americans. In addition to the presumed personal benefits of such an identity, these scholars suggest that a biracial identity is a positive step in moving society beyond race and toward a color-blind society. What remains troubling about this scholarship, though, is a tendency to conceptualize PMP as a distinct racial group, and the inattention to the potentially negative political impact such a reclassification would have on African Americans.

    Historically and currently, white supremacy in the United States has hinged on the oppression of people of African descent. The position of African Americans in the political economy has served as the basis for developing a racialized social system, restructuring that system at different historical moments, and incorporating new social groups into the racial hierarchy as races. Asserting a new racial group premised on a claim to an inherent (biological) whiteness and a rejection of blackness taps into the intricacies, logics, and values of that very system. It is therefore important to remember that the push for a biracial racial category arose and made its greatest strides amid predictions that by the year 2050 whites will be a numerical minority. More than a question of self-identity, the push for a biracial identity concerns substantiating the existence of a new race to be positioned as an intermediary between blacks and whites in a reordered racialized social system. Indeed, in the United States there have always been multiple racial groups situated below whites in the racial hierarchy. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has recently argued that, increasingly, different groups are beginning to hold a position of “honorary whiteness” within that hierarchy. Taking into account the structures of race in Latin America and the Caribbean, I remain unconvinced that an honorary white racial status in the United States would include PMP, as Bonilla-Silva suggests, though I agree with his claim that various racialized groups that were previously denied the privileges of whiteness increasingly enjoy advantages, privileges, and access to centers of power that continue to be denied black people and those whom Bonilla-Silva calls the “collective black.” Far from helping to erase existing color lines or challenging the new racial formations described by Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Bonilla-Silva, it would draw yet another color line. And unlike certain Asian and Latino groups, a new biracial race stakes its claim, quite literally, on possessing whiteness.

    The biracial project approaches racial identity as racial identification, or the assertion of a racial category. Using identity as a synonym tor race has also entailed inadequate attention to the complexities of identity. Consequently, these works rarely engage the psychological scholarship on black identity formation, not to mention the historical, sociological, and cultural interrogations of blackness that have appeared in Black Studies over the past century. Most troubling is the inattention, if not utter aversion, to the history of PMP considering themselves black and struggling over the meanings of blackness.

    It is hardly coincidental that these scholars presume certain antiracist attributes to inhere in a biracial identity. In asserting the subversive character of a biracial identity, Maria P. P. Root maintains that it “may force us to reexamine our construction of race and the hierarchical social order it supports.” Naomi Zack and G. Reginald Daniel more plainly argue that a biracial identity hastens the end of racial categories altogether by challenging popular notions of race. For Zack in particular, a biracial identity serves as the basis for “ultimately disabus(ing) Americans of their false beliefs in the biological reality of race,” thus leading society away from racial classifications and hastening racisms demise. Still, the progressive qualities of a biracial identity are more apparent than real, largely asserted with little research substantiating the claims of its proponents.

    The presence of a biracial race would certainly disrupt popular ideas about race, but as scholars supporting biracial identity root it in biological notions of race “mixture,” it seems unlikely that such a disruption would result in the end of racial classifications. Work on race in the Caribbean and Latin America shows that a racially mixed identity is entirely consistent with a racialized social system. Moreover, recent work interrogating-color blindness has shown that this is the current dominant racial ideology, suggesting that a color-blind society as a goal is more likely to ensure the persistence of racism than its decline. I therefore find especially troubling the claims by Naomi Zack, G. Reginald Daniel, Kathleen Odell Korgen, Paul R. Spickard, Maria P. P. Root, and others discussed below, that the biracial project represents a progressive social movement.” In my view, based both on the popular push for such a reclassification and the scholarship discussed here, this project is less concerned with ending racism than with responding to the racialization of all people of African descent in the United States as black.

    Situating the discussion of biracial identity in the context of race and racial oppression as structural relationships, I provide a detailed review of the theoretical and prescriptive literature advocating a biracial identity. Specifically, I am concerned with this racial projects theoretical basis for a biracial identity, how it conceptualizes race and racism, the place of the one-drop rule in this conceptualization, and the defense of biracial identity as an antiracist tool…

    Read the chapter here.

  • A quantitative method of morphological assessment of hybridization in the U. S. Negro-White male crania

    A quantitative method of morphological assessment of hybridization in the U. S. Negro-White male crania

    American Journal of Physical Anthropology
    Volume 41, Issue 2 (September 1974)
    pages 269–278
    DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330410209

    Sudha S. Saksena
    Department of Sociology and Anthropology
    Muskingum College [Muskingum University], New Concord, Ohio

    Portions of this paper are based on a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Indiana, Bloomington, Indiana, in 1967. Part of this paper appeared in abstract form in American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Vol. 29, No. 1, 1968, pp. 124–125.

    The study develops a morphological method of assessing the amount of parental components in a U.S. Negro-White Hybrid sample and tests to what extent a multivariate discriminant analysis actually reflects the morphological pattern of hybridization.

    To formulate norms of description for the parental and hybrid populations, a seventeenth century London Farringdon Street series of 94 crania was selected to represent the British White ancestral component and the data on the cadaverand-skeletal series in the T. W. Todd collection of Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, were used in the selection of 115 Unmixed Negro and 115 Negro-White Hybrid male crania.

    The conclusions are: (1) the morphological scores of the Negro-White Hybrid series shows a biological overlap with the two parental series in the proportion of 1:3 (i.e., 25% White to 75% Negro). This overlap reflects the probable porportion of ancestral mixture in the ratio of one-fourth White to three-fourths Negro in the Negro-White Hybrid sample; and (2) the morphological approach to the assessment of the parental components with multivariate discriminant analysis as a tool, proves to be highly reliable in providing a biologically meaningful index of relationship.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Mothers and Their Biracial Children: Growing Up Biracial in a One Race Fits All Society

    Mothers and Their Biracial Children: Growing Up Biracial in a One Race Fits All Society

    Cedarville University, Cedarville, Ohio
    November 2009
    86 pages

    Kristin Felts-Keller

    A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Education

    This thesis is a qualitative study on the Mothers of biracial children and the formation of a biracial identity in a one race fits all society. The goal of this study was to gain a deeper understanding and explore the concerns mothers of biracial children hold for their children. It is not intended to be applied to the general population but it does however, give us an insight into what it means to be biracial, how it is perceived as a race and how the Mothers of these children teach their children to cope with their race and form a positive sense of self-identity.

    Read the entire thesis here.

  • Cole Porter Scores An Interracial Couple’s Highs And Lows

    Cole Porter Scores An Interracial Couple’s Highs And Lows

    National Public Radio
    All Things Considered
    Music: Mom and Dad’s Record Collection
    2012-08-30

    NPR Staff

    As summer winds down, All Things Considered is winding down its series “Music: Mom and Dad’s Record Collection.”

    For the past few months, the show has asked listeners to tell their stories about a particular piece of music they associate with their parents. Listener Melanie Cowart of San Antonio, Texas, wrote in to explain how Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” — a song that’s been interpreted by Artie Shaw, Ella Fitzgerald and many others — became a running soundtrack for her parents’ relationship.

    “My father was African-American; my mother was white,” Cowart tells NPR’s Melissa Block. “They met in 1929, at a time when that type of a relationship was not something that was acceptable in society. In fact, in many states, including in Missouri where they met, it was against the law. But they fell in love and formed a very strong bond.”…

    Read the entire transcript here. Download the audio here (00:05:42).

  • Purdu­e Hapa Stude­nt Assoc­iatio­n Callo­ut Sept. 17, 2012

    Purdu­e Hapa Stude­nt Assoc­iatio­n Callo­ut Sept. 17, 2012

    Purdue University
    West Lafayette, Indiana
    Class of 1950, Room 121
    2012-09-17, 18:00-20:00 CDT (Local Time)

    The term “Hapa” refers to a biracial/multiracial person with Asian and/or Pacific Islander roots. As a club, we promote both diversity and unity, and we strive to raise awareness of identity crisis amongst Hapas, as well as Asian interest on campus. With leadership and volunteering opportunities, memorable events, and fellow club members to create long lasting memories and friendships, Purdue HSA is Purdue’s newest upcoming organization. Come to our callout to learn more about what HSA is all about!

    For more information, click here.

  • While others may see me as “half,” I know that I am whole.

    As the child of a native Japanese woman and an Irish American father, a salient feature of my life has been this ethnic heritage and the circumstances into which I was born in post—World War II Tokyo. My life, between Japan and the United States, has been marked heavily by my connections to these diverse roots. I have found meaning in my life through learning to accept and appreciate these roots, to balance their influences and blend them into a synergistic whole. While others may see me as “half,” I know that I am whole. This whole me is greater than the sum of its parts and connects me to something beyond my self, to communities of others and to a collective self.

    Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, When Half Is Whole: Multiethnic Asian American Identities, (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012), 2.

  • The Species Problem: Nineteenth-Century Concepts of Racial Inferiority in the Origin of Man Controversy

    The Species Problem: Nineteenth-Century Concepts of Racial Inferiority in the Origin of Man Controversy

    American Anthropologist
    Volume 72, Issue 6 (December 1970)
    pages 1319–1329
    DOI: 10.1525/aa.1970.72.6.02a00060

    John S. Haller, Jr., Emeritus Professor of History
    Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

    The species problem and its implications in the origin of man controversy had grown in importance in prewar America owing largely to the question of slavery. Implicit in the problem was the position of the so-called inferior races in society. The monogenists, despite their emphasis on environmentalism, were no more favorable to the Negro, except in their remote theoretical stance. The Civil War—not Darwin—brought the controversy to an end in America, but it continued to rage in Europe. The apparent synthesis of the schools during the 1870s did not disturb the stereotyped ideas of racial inferiority. The “inferior races” remained the basis of evolutionary discussion, leaving them as remote outcasts of the evolutionary struggle.

    Though most nineteenth-century anthropologists were busily engaged in the technical aspects of somatometry, a good number of them were also concerned with the more problematic question of man’s origin. Like somatometry, the speculation into origin grew out of the awareness of differences in the broad spectrum of genus Homo. The taxonomic system of Linnaeus not only precipitated an intensive study of comparative structures, but led also to the question of whether the various “races” of man originated in one primitive stock. Were the Negroes, Hottentots, Eskimos, and Australians really men in the full sense of the term, sharing in the intellectual endowments of the European, or were they half-brutes, not belonging to what the French scientist Bory de Saint-Vincent called the “race adamique”? Defined in other terms, the problem concerned whether humanity descended from a monogenetic type, or whether humanity had distinct polygenetic ancestors. If it were true that these peoples were really subspecies, or subraces, then, some argued, they should become subject to the superior races. The subsequent controversy between the monogenists and polygenists became the longest of the internecine battles among the physical scientists of man. Though ostensibly concerned only with origin, the controversy highlighted a major confrontation between science and religion. It also illuminated the peculiar role played by the “inferior races” to the higher categories of man, a role that was fundamentally the same in both schools and remained unchanged during the decades before and after Darwin. The apparent synthesis of the two opposing schools during the 1870s seemed not to disturb the continuity of race stereotypes and the ideas of racial inferiority…

    …The early polygenists favored the term “species” in their belief in the diversity of man. In the context of their definition, species were “fixed” and did not naturally cross with other species, except under artificial conditions. Although there was occasional fertility between the separate species, the product of the union was sterile or tending toward sterility, proving the “unnaturalness” of the original union. The concept of species was important to those nineteenth-century scientists who drew their schematization of the universe from the logical and spatial arrangement of the chain of being. For if one hybrid were capable of increase, the divine arrangement of the creator would have been distorted and a destructive imbalance set into the order of the world. All living things formed one chain of universal being from the lowest to the highest. None of the species originally formed were extinct. Nature proceeded according to divine plan and admitted of no improvement. The continuation of this belief into the nineteenth century precipitated an enormous amount of speculation as to whether the mulatto was more or less fertile than either of the two original stocks. The general consensus was that the mulatto was less fertile, and hence, an artificial hybrid tending toward extinction.As the nineteenth-century polygenists turned to the term “race” rather than “species” to define human types, so they borrowed the word “mongrel” in exchange for “hybrid” to identify the offspring of mixing (Vogt 1864: 441; Huxley 1876:412). In doing so, however, they created a confusion in terminology because the monogenist’s criteria for “species,” “race,” “mongrel,” and “hybrid” remained unchanged…

    Read the entire article here or here.

  • Reconstructing Molly Welsh: Race, Memory and the Story of Benjamin Banneker’s Grandmother

    Reconstructing Molly Welsh: Race, Memory and the Story of Benjamin Banneker’s Grandmother

    University of Massachusetts, Amherst
    September 2008
    194 pages

    Sandra W. Perot

    Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department of History

    Molly Welsh, oral tradition captured in the nineteenth century tells us, was a white Englishwoman who worked as an indentured servant. The same tradition has it that she owned slaves, although she is said to have married (or formed a union with) one of them. I aim not only to recover the life of Molly Welsh Banneker, but also to consider its various tellings—probing in particular at Molly’s shifting racial status. By examining a multiplicity of social and cultural aspects of life for seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Maryland women, I test whether these various narratives are even possible or plausible reconstructions of the Molly Welsh story. My project thus sheds light on the woman Molly Welsh was, how her story was constructed, what factors contributed to the retelling of her story, and why and at what point various narratives deviate from each other. By comparing the various Molly Welsh/Benjamin Banneker narratives it is possible to uncover or at least posit the most reliable narrative, while at the same time coming to a greater understanding of how such historically undocumented stories are constructed and what part memory plays in their reconstruction. An extensive bias informs many of these narratives, shaped by the various “memories” generated by family loyalty, by the growing tensions between the North and the South over slavery, by Reconstruction, and by new standards in historical accuracy that appeared with the founding of the American Historical Association in 1884.
     
    While Molly Welsh may appear to be a near-silent character in her grandson Benjamin Banneker’s story, it is possible that new discoveries will be made that further verify (or refute) the long-standing tradition that Molly Welsh was a white English dairymaid transported to Maryland and that she married one of her own slaves by whom she had four daughters. Recent interest in new ways of approaching history, a greater acceptance of oral traditions as an important historical source, and a renewed appreciation for exploring stories of the untold masses, including women and minorities, may someday locate Molly’s voice and allow her to speak for herself. The chances of uncovering Molly Welsh’s story through documentary sources has improved with the recent emergence of powerful databases and electronic search tools have made many things possible that once were not (ancestry.com, the Old Bailey records for example). And then, perhaps Molly might come to represent other seventeenth-century women who married or had children with African men, like Eleanor Atkins who had a “Molattoe” child and who subsequently received twenty-four lashes for her crime, Elizabeth Day who admitted before the court that she had an illegitimate “Malatto” child by a “Negro man named Quasey belonging to her master,” or Eleanor Price who pleaded guilty to “Fornication with a Negro Man named Peter Belonging to Mr. John Walker,” received twenty-one lashes, and whose child, Jeremiah, was bound out until the age of twenty-one. Through their stories we might come to accept that one of the few choices these women had may have been with whom they had a child, though even this is subject to question. Regardless, Molly Welsh’s story is one that does not appear to stand alone. Through her we might see how women survived their indentures and prospered, or managed at the very least to endure life in Maryland, women whose lives until now never managed to become a footnote in anyone’s biography.

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    • ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    • INTRODUCTION: LOCATING MOLLY WELSH: MEMORY AND MYTH IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MARYLAND
    • I THE DAIRYMAID AND THE PRINCE
    • II “OF THE DEEPEST DYE”: EARLY NARRATIVES
    • III “A REMARKABLY FAIR COMPLEXION”: THE EMERGENCE OF MOLLY WELSH
    • IV “ACT WELL YOUR PART, THERE ALL THE HONOR LIES”: THE RECONSTRUCTION OF MOLLY WELSH’S CHARACTER
    • V “THE TALE AS IT WAS TOLD FOR A HUNDRED YEARS ON THE RIDGE”: EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY AFRICAN-AMERICAN SCHOLARS REVITALIZE MOLLY’S STORY
    • VI “TRUE NOBILITY’S CONFINED TO NONE”: MOLLY IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
    • VII “BUT WHAT ARE COLOURS? DO COMPLEXIONS CHANGE?” TWENTYFIRST CENTURY PERSPECTIVES ON MOLLY WELSH.114
    • VIII EPILOGUE
    • APPENDICES
      • I CHRONOLOGY OF PRINT CONCERNING ANCESTRY OF BENJAMIN BANNEKER
      • II BANNEKER FAMILY TREE
      • III INTERNET RESPONSES TO MOLLY WELSH
      • IV MARYLAND LAWS DIRECTLY PERTAINING TO SLAVERY, RACE, INDENTURED SERVITUDE, WOMEN, AND MARRIAGE IN SEVENTEENTH- AND EARLY-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MARYLAND
      • V 1685 INDENTURE
      • VI A BRIEF EXAMINATION OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY TRANSPORTATION RECORDS
      • BIBLIOGRAPHY

    Read the entire thesis here.