Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Malaga Island: A century of shame

    Malaga Island: A century of shame

    Maine Sunday Telegram
    2012-05-20

    Colin Woodard, Staff Writer

    A new exhibit at the Maine State Museum tells the story of the eviction of Malaga Island’s residents, one of the state’s most disgraceful official acts ever.

    AUGUSTA — A century ago this spring, Maine Gov. Frederick Plaisted oversaw the destruction of a year-around fishing hamlet on Malaga Island, a 42-acre island in the New Meadows River, just off the Phippsburg shore. The island’s 40 residents—white, black and mixed race—were ordered to leave the island, and to take their homes with them, else they would be burned. A fifth of the population was incarcerated on questionable grounds at the Maine School for the Feebleminded in New Gloucester, where most spent the rest of their lives. The island schoolhouse was dismantled and relocated to Louds Island in Muscongus Bay.

    Leaving no stone unturned, state officials dug up the 17 bodies in the island cemetery, distributed them into five caskets and buried them at the School of the Feebleminded—now Pineland Farms—where they remain today.

    Several islanders spent the rest of their lives in this state-run mental institution. One couple, Robert and Laura Darling Tripp, floated from place to place in a makeshift houseboat, but, unwelcomed, wound up moored to another scrap of an island. Malnourished, Laura fell sick during a gale; when her husband returned with help, he found the couple’s two children clinging to her lifeless body. Many others suffered from the stigma of being associated with the island.

    “After the island was cleared, people did not really want to talk about this incident, especially the descendants, because to raise your hand and say you were from Malaga supposedly meant you were feebleminded or had black blood in you or both,” said Rob Rosenthal, whose 2009 radio documentary “Malaga: A Story Better Left Untold” helped draw attention to what is one of the most disgraceful official acts in our state’s history. “Nobody wanted to declare that.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Gay male pornography and the re/de/construction of postcolonial queer identity in Mexico

    Gay male pornography and the re/de/construction of postcolonial queer identity in Mexico

    New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film
    ISSN: 14742756
    Volume 8 Issue 2 (November 2010)

    Gustavo Subero, Independent Researcher

    Since colonial times, the figuration of the Latin(o) male homosexual has been highly exoticized and troped in western media accounts (Shohat and Stam 1994; Ramirez Berg 2002), as they are depicted as hypermasculine figures whose raw sexuality functions as an unquestionable sign of their inner primal machismo. This view on male (homo)sexuality has been further reinforced through the kind of images of Latin(o) men that have been presented in male gay pornography. Such stereotyped representations of male (homo)sexuality have permeated into a global, socio-sexual imaginary that persists in placing such men within a sexual and erotic order in which their bodies convey an extreme form of primal sexuality. As a result, the emergence of national gay pornographic industry(ies) in Mexico has resulted in a re-evaluation of the social and sexual notions commonly associated with male (homo)sexuality. The mestizo (mixed race) gay man is both deconstructed from his positions of sexual subordination (differently from submission) to a white subject (even when such coloured individuals take the active role during sex) and reconstructed in a new space of libidinal economy. This article offers an analysis of the role that national gay pornography has played in shaping Mexican gay men’s perception of their own sexuality taking as a point of departure their own national and ethnic background. The research will focus on a number of films made by Mecos Films and Eros Digital in Mexico, and demonstrate that such films have challenged notions of gender and sexual universalism, and instead offer new alternatives for the production and execution of desire amongst coloured men.

  • In Praise of Michelle Cliff’s Creolite

    In Praise of Michelle Cliff’s Creolite

    North Carolina State University
    2002-11-13
    62 pages

    Quincey Michelle Hyatt

    A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts—English

    Focusing on feminism, language, and history, this thesis explores the ways in which the theories of creolization set forth in Michelle Cliff’s novels, Abeng (1984), No Telephone to Heaven (1987), and Free Enterprise (1990), explain existence in an increasingly cross-cultural world.

    Read the entire thesis here.

  • Discovering the life of Afro-Germans

    Discovering the life of Afro-Germans

    The Philadelphia Inquirer
    2012-06-06

    Edward Colimore, Inquirer Staff Writer

    When she was growing up in Willingboro as the only child of Walter and Perrie Haymon, she felt like “a little princess.” She was the center of her parents’ lives, attended private school, and took piano and ballet lessons.

    But Wanda Lynn Haymon “always had something gnawing” at her, she said. Relatives whispered about her at family gatherings and cousins told her that she was not really part of the family.

    She had recurrent nightmares, too, of being an infant abandoned on a snowy doorstep with uniformed men – possibly soldiers – standing around her.

    “I really had doubts,” she said. “I’d go to my parents and ask if I was adopted and they’d say, ‘Do you feel adopted?’ I would say ‘No’ because I was treated so well.”

    She found out—through documentation in 1994—that “I wasn’t who I thought I was.”

    Wanda Lynn Haymon was actually Rosemarie Larey, a native of Germany who had been adopted. Her biological father was black, possibly an African American soldier, and her mother was white and a German national.

    She was born in 1956, only 11 years after the Nazis, who regarded blacks as racially inferior, sent 25,000 Afro-Germans to concentration camps, where many were subjected to medical experiments and sterilization.

    Even after the war, the stigma of having a biracial child caused many mothers – including Rosemarie’s – to give up their children for possible placement with African American families.

    Now, as Rosemarie Peña, she heads the Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey ( http://blackgermans.us/), an organization whose name belies its reach: It connects Afro-Germans internationally and seeks to document their experience.

    About 200 people attended the group’s convention last year in Washington and a greater number is expected for the second convention, Aug. 10-11 at Barnard College in New York City…

    Read the entire article here.

  • What I’ve learned from living with HIV

    What I’ve learned from living with HIV

    The Melissa Harris-Perry Blog
    2012-07-01


    Macalester College

    Ed. note: This is a guest column by our guest today, Christopher MacDonald-Dennis, the Dean of Multicultural Life at Macalester College. Chris normally tweets this essay out every December 1 to commemorate World AIDS Day, but was kind enough to allow us to share it in this space.

    My name is Chris, and I live with HIV.

    I know some were here last year [on my Twitter timeline], so I’ll try not to bore you. I just want to remind us that we are here among you, living, thriving, sometimes barely surviving w HIV/AIDS. I’d like to tell my story: why I made choices I did and what I’ve learned-because I have learned a great deal about myself from this disease.

    To start: I have been positive for 15 years. March 10, 2010 was  my anniversary. I am 41 years old. In fact, I was born exactly 1 week before Stonewall rebellion in NYC. I was born and raised in a working-class Boston neighborhood. I grew up in uber-dysfunctional family: brother diagnosed as sociopath in teens, dad an alcoholic, mom mentally ill. It was hell in that family, I was a little “sissy” who knew at early age he was gay. I was OK with it but knew others wouldn’t be. I was terrorized as kid-ass kicked a lot. My city didn’t like “femme” boys. Also, I am mixed: dad was white, mom Latina…long before mixed folks were cool. We just were odd. So I grew up alone, and lonely…

    Read the entire essay here.

  • Racial Democracy and Intermarriage in Brazil and the United States

    Racial Democracy and Intermarriage in Brazil and the United States

    The Latin Americanist
    Volume 55, Issue 3 (September 2011)
    pages 45–66
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1557-203X.2011.01063.x

    Jack A. Draper III, Associate Professor of Portuguese
    University of Missouri

    “We see a blurring of the old lines.”
    —Michael Rosenfeld, Regional-Americanist sociologist

    “The maintenance of interracial barriers and the reproduction of inequalities are assured […]”
    —José Luis Petruccelli, Brazilianist sociologist

    Introduction: A Tripartite Scholarly Geography of U.S. and Brazilian Race Relations

    Various scholars have emphasized that exogamy is a key indicator of the assimilation of racial and ethnic minorities in a given society (Silva and Hasenbalg 1992,17-18). Increased marriage across racial/ethnic lines is generally understood to indicate a higher degree of intimacy between members of the respective racial/ethnic groups, since marriage is traditionally considered to represent the “maximum degree of material and affective intimacy” to which individuals can aspire (Pinto 1998 [1953], 176). In keeping with this insight, this article traces developments in conceptions of race relations through an analysis of contemporary academic discourses on interracial marriage in Brazil and the United States. I categorize these discourses into three major geographical-ideological groups, namely, regional-Americanist, cosmopolitan-Americanist and Brazilianist studies of race relations. The regional-Americanist strand of scholarship on interracial marriage is implicitly isolationist, virtually devoid of any international comparative perspective with which to contextualize the conclusions made about exogamy rates in the United States in recent decades. Cosmopolitan-Americanist scholarship, on the other hand, is far more cognizant of racial discourses outside of the U.S. national context, and therefore, with its comparative perspective on race relations, is able to provide a more measured assessment of perceived progress in US racial assimilation in relation to that achieved in other countries. Finally, Brazilianist scholarship on interracial marriage inherits the international, comparative tradition firmly established by anthropologist Gilberto Freyre since his earliest writings (Freyre 1922). While this category of scholarship thus has much in common with cosmopolitan-Americanist scholarship on race relations, it has also inherited a post-Freyrean critical tradition since the 1950s (Pinto 1998 [1953]; Bastide and Fernandes 1959) that has established relatively strict criteria for determining the real extent of racial discrimination…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • “You are an Anglo-Indian?” Eurasians and Hybridity and Cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

    “You are an Anglo-Indian?” Eurasians and Hybridity and Cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

    The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
    Volume 38, Number 2 (April 2003)
    pages 125-145
    DOI: 10.1177/00219894030382008

    Loretta Mijares

    The term “Anglo-Indian”, emerging as early as 1806, originally referred to the British in India. In India today, however, the term is universally understood to refer to the mixed-race descendants of British-Indian liaisons. In between these two historical markers lies a complex history of changing notions of racial mixture and affiliations with colonial power. At the same time, the “half-caste” has been a perennial figure in colonial fiction, and continues to appear regularly in contemporary Indian writing in English. Discussion of the literary figure of the half-caste, however, has taken place (if at all) by and large in the absence of any acknowledgement of the history of this community. A literary analysis of the “half-caste” attentive to this history offers valuable lessons about the usefulness and limitations of such theoretical notions as “hybridity” by calling attention to the shifting historical valences of literal experiences of hybridity. As a case-study in such an approach, this essay examines the role of racial mixture in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, with due attention to the Anglo-Indian community in India. This reveals how racial mixture in the literary imagination often becomes a metaphor for something else, and in this process of metaphorization is alienated from the history from which it originates. This process has parallels in literary theory: theoretical abstractions such as hybridity have become rarefied and need to be reconnected to their geographical and historical contexts if they are to retain any efficacy in explaining the processes of identity construction they claim to describe.

    In India, the mixed-race population was known as “Eurasian”, with “half-caste” as a derogatory term. By the late nineteenth century, however. “Eurasian” had likewise accumulated a pejorative connotation…

    Read the entire article here.

  • A Case of Identity: Ethnogenesis of the New Houma Indians

    A Case of Identity: Ethnogenesis of the New Houma Indians

    Ethnohistory
    Volume 48, Number 3 (Summer 2001)
    pages 473-494
    DOI: 10.1215/00141801-48-3-473

    Dave D. Davis
    University of Southern Maine

    Throughout the twentieth century, anthropologists and historians have regarded the Houma Indians of southern Louisiana as the descendants of the Houma Indians encountered along the Mississippi River by French explorers and settlers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Oral history of the contemporary Houma traces the group’s origin to Native Americans of the Houma and other tribes who moved into the bayou country of southeastern Louisiana during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. However, anthropologists and historians from the Bureau of Indian Affairs have concluded that there is no documentary evidence of any cultural or genealogical link between the modern Houma and the Houma of the French colonial period. Available documentary sources indicate that the modern Houma originated in the nineteenth century as a multiethnic group that included Europeans, African Americans, and some Native Americans, none of whom are known to have been Houmas. The genesis of the modern group’s identity as Houma Indians can be understood as a response to legally sanctioned racial classifications and race discrimination in Louisiana from the late nineteenth century on.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Mix-d: Museum: Timeline

    Mix-d: Museum: Timeline

    Mix-d: Museum
    Mix-d:
    2012-06-30

    This work-in-progress Timeline draws on material from a British Academy project conducted by Dr. Chamion Caballero (Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, London South Bank University) and Dr. Peter Aspinall (University of Kent) which explored the presence of mixed race people, couples and families in the early 20th century, particularly in the period 1920-1950, a time when racial mixing and mixedness tended to be viewed very negatively by British authorities.

    The project sourced a range of archival material from national and local archives. It included official documents, autobiographical recordings and photo and film material to understand how social perceptions of racial mixing and mixedness emerged and the effect they had on the lives of mixed race people, couples and families themselves, as well as their place in shaping contemporary ideas and experiences.

    The project’s findings indicated that while mixed race people, couples and families certainly experienced prejudice and hostility in this ‘era of moral condemnation’, they were not inherently ‘tragic’, ‘marginal’ or ‘doomed’, but simply another part of the longstanding diversity and difference that is a feature of British life.

    The findings from the research formed the foundation of the three part BBC2 series ‘Mixed Britannia’ presented by George Alagiah and was also the subject of an article in The Guardian.

    View the Timeline here.

  • Re-searching Metis Identity: My Metis Family Story

    Re-searching Metis Identity: My Metis Family Story

    University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon
    April 2010
    200 pages

    Tara Turner

    A Thesis Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Psychology

    This research explores Metis identity through the use of a Metis family story. The participants of this Metis family were my father and his two sisters and his two brothers. As children, they lost both their parents at the same time in a car accident. After the death of their parents my participants all encountered the child welfare system, through adoption, orphanage, and foster care. Through adoption, the two youngest participants were separated from their siblings, and any knowledge of their Metis heritage, until they were adults. Individual interviews were conducted with each participant to gather their life stories. Two additional gatherings of the participants were completed in order to share individual and family stories. The second and final gathering was conducted as a talking circle. A culturally congruent qualitative research process was created with the use of stories, ceremonies, and the strengthening of family relationships. Analysis was completed with the use of Aboriginal storytelling guidelines. The themes examined through my family’s story include trauma, the child welfare system, and Metis identity. A significant piece of the research process was the creation of a ‘Metis psychological homeland’ (Richardson, 2004, p. 56), a psychological space of both healing and affirming Aboriginal identity. This dissertation is an example of how research can be completed in a way that does not perpetuate the mistrust between Aboriginal people and researchers, and that works to improve this relationship.

    Read the entire dissertation here.