Mixed Race Studies

“The Girl Isn’t White”: New Racial Dimensions in Octavia Butler’s Survivor

Extrapolation
Volume 47, Number 1 (2006)
pages 35-50
DOI: 10.3828/extr.2006.47.1.6
ISSN: 0014-5483 (Print); 2047-7708 (Online)

Crystal S. Anderson, Associate Professor of English Department
Elon University, Elon, North Carolina

Since the publication of her first novel, Octavia Butler’s popularity has increased, making her now a staple for individuals attracted to the fiction of Afro-futurism. Sandra Govan argues that Butler “forge[s] a black presence in science fiction,” a presence that consistently challenges assumptions regarding inter-group and intra-group relations (87). Butler’s Patternist series of novels focuses on the tensions between groups with psychic abilities and those without, and her Xenogenesis trilogy explores the ramifications of blending humans with an alien race. Much of Butler’s success among African Americans surely rests on the connections readers make between the themes of these novels and their experiences in a race-conscious society. Changes in American society, particularly the dynamic between ethnic groups, prompt a reexamination of Butler’s early fiction. Survivor (1978) anticipates the challenges contemporary blacks face in an increasingly diverse society. Butler uses Alanna, an Afro-Asian protagonist, to illuminate strategies of negotiation for African Americans who engage a variety of ethnic groups.

During the late 1970s, African Americans became increasingly aware of other ethnic groups, particularly Asians. This time period witnesses a mode of civil rights that acknowledges the parallel struggle of American blacks and Asian groups, especially in radical political circles. Bill Mullen reminds us that “beginning with the 1955 meeting of decolonizing African and Asian nations in Bandung, Indonesia, until at least the early 1970s, African American and Asian radicals imagined themselves as antipodal partners in cultural revolution, pen pals for world liberation” (76) Asian cultures so interpenetrated African American cultural movements in the 1970s, Robin Kelley declares, “although the Black Arts Movement was the primary vehicle for black cultural revolution in the United States United States,  it is hard to imagine what that revolution would have looked like without China” (107). Butler’s early foray  into fiction demonstrates its awareness of similar Afro-Asian dynamics by meditating on racial dynamics contrary to the traditional black-white racial paradigm.

…Butler’s use of an Afro-Asian protagonist disrupts conventional tendencies that read all biracial identities according to a black-white paradigm. The reader learns of Alanna’s heritage during a flashback: “There was a man, as lean and tall as Alanna was now. His coloring was dark brown, almost black, contrasting strangely with the very fair skin of the woman. Alanna stood between them, her eyes only slightly narrowed, her skin a smooth medium brown” (27). Initially, Butler does not identify the race of each parent, but uses phrases such as “dark brown” and “fair skin” to imply they are both non-white. As Alanna stands between them, her appearance operates as a visual median, taking the “medium brown” coloring from her father and her narrow eyes possibly from her mother. Butler intentionally delays racial identification, explaining, “if I had given the characters’ race away earlier … possibly the reader wouldn’t react, but, instead, maybe discard that information” (Butler, “Radio,” 52). Such a strategy suggests that Alanna’s background is not an insignificant detail. Butler’s narrative soon confirms Alanna’s unique mixed-race identity when Neila reveals that Alanna’s “Afro-Asian from what she says of her parents. Black father, Asian mother” (31).

As the product of two minority groups, Alanna’s racial identity produces a different set of issues than the traditional black-white racial identity. Butler is aware of such differences, for when she was a child, she discovered that a neighbor had a black father and a Japanese mother. That discovery informs her adult thoughts on minority mixed-race identity: “It didn’t change anything about the way I thought about her except that I was intensely curious about her life. How is her life different because she’s from this unusual situation?” (Butler, “Radio,” 52). Butler recognizes that minority mixed-race individuals may have a different perspective because they culturally partake from two similarly marginalized groups within society. Christine C. Iijima Hall and Trude I. Cooke Turner assert, “the minority-minority individual does not have to choose between being a member of a minority or a majority group. Because these individuals already belong to two minority groups, their social standing in American culture is usually minority” (82). Alanna’s bifurcated identity signals to the reader that she is uniquely suited to see situations from a point of view not associated with the dominant group. She has a perspective attuned to difference. According to Lucille Fultz, diverging from traditional characterizations of the racial backgrounds of characters encourages readers to “rethink received notions of difference based on race and class and question their own investment in the cultural constructions of such categories” (26). Alanna’s mixed-race identity will underscore her engagement with multiple groups…

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Panel to discuss racism and medical issues

The Daily Bruin
University of California, Los Angeles
2012-02-10

Ariana Ricarte

The topic of racism in health care, genetics and other medical issues will be the central point of discussion at a panel in De Neve Auditorium on Saturday [13:00-15:00 PST].

The panel, called “Race in Medicine: A Dangerous Prescription,” will discuss disparities between people of different races in the health care system and the ways a patient’s ethnicity can affect decisions made by doctors and insurance companies. The event is hosted by UCLA’s Mixed Student Union, a student group founded in 2010 that aims to provide a safe and open environment for people of multiracial and multiethnic heritage, said chairwoman Camila Lacques.

The panel will go over topics such as the role of ethnicity in prescription medicine and bone marrow and stem cell transplants. When it comes to transplants, multiracial people have a more difficult time finding matches because of their unique genetic composition, said panelist Athena Asklipiadis…

[Note by Steven F. Riley: Everyone—except their identical twin—has an “unique genetic composition.”  Race is a social, not biological construction and as such, is not linked to genetics. Please read Dorothy Roberts excellent (and sobering) monograph on race and medicine titled, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century for more information.]

…G. Reginald Daniel, a panelist at Saturday’s event and a sociology professor at UC Santa Barbara, said he plans to focus on the positive and negative images applied to multiracial people, as well as talk about the issue in terms of genetic variety.

“I think people need to step out of mono-racial thinking,” Daniel said. “We need to see the connections we have with each other, whether we like it or not.”…

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Being Black

The Barry Morgan Show
CJAD, 800 AM
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
2012-02-10

Barry Morgan, Host

Yaba Blay, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Lafayette College

Have you ever heard of the (1)ne Drop Project? I never had until I spoke with its pioneer, Yaba Blay, visiting Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Lafayette College.
 
Blay studied people who identify as black but don’t who don’t exactly look black (many are often mistaken for Latino) to find out how they define their ‘blackness.’
 
She uses portrait documentaries (book and film), photography exhibitions, and public programming for the purpose of raising social awareness and sparking community dialogue about the complexities of Blackness as both an identity and a lived reality.
 
The (1)ne Drop effectively seeks to challenge narrow, yet popular perceptions of what “Blackness” is and what “Blackness” looks like.
 
(1)ne Drop basically hopes to awaken a long-overdue and much needed dialogue about racial identity and skin color politics.

Listen to the interview here.

Charles Marsh recounts the formation and activities of The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission.

The Civil Rights Movement as Theological Drama
The Project on Lived Theology
University of Virginia

Charles Marsh

In 1956, a new organization appeared, predisposed to the same political concerns articulated by the Citizen’s Council, but now underwritten by the state legislature.  The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was formed to broaden the scope of protecting “the Southern Way of Life.”  The commission expressed purpose was “to do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi, and her sister states, from encroachment thereon by the Federal Government”; nevertheless, it operated as “something akin to NKVD among the cotton patches,” as journalist Wilson Minor put it.  With an extensive surveillance network solidly in place, the Sovereignty Commission vigilantly monitored civil rights activists and any Mississippi citizens suspected of heterodoxy–“persons whose utterances or actions indicate they should be watched with suspicion on future racial attitudes.”  The commission pursued its ordained work by dispatching investigators and spies to gather information on civil rights workers, white liberals, and anyone else suspected of racial indiscretion.  By 1967, the commission had amassed an archive of more than ten thousand reports on people who worked for or represented “subversive, militant, or revolutionary groups.”  (By 1974, the files would grow to 87,000 names.)
 
Although the Sovereignty Commission’s principal motivation was “to prevent encroachment upon the rights of this and other states by the Federal Government” (as the charter stated), its obsession with racial purity could not be entirely explained by state’s rights fervor.  The commission’s agents seemed to spend as much energy tracking down reports of mixed-race babies and children as it did investigating the activities of subversive, militant and revolutionary groups.  Sadly, a reading of the available Sovereignty Commission files regarding rumors of interracial sex show us (in Adam Nossiter’s words) “cool accounts of lives damaged, destroyed, or threatened because black men were suspected of consorting with white women.”

Then there are reports that are stranger than fiction.  In , the director of the commission himself, Erle Johnston, Jr., wrote an eight page, single spaced report in December of 1963 explorinthe case of the woman Louvenia K. and her two sons, Edgar and Randy Edg the racial composition of the boys and their mother…

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The History and Evolution of Racism and Discrimination in Sierra Leone

The Sierra Leone Daily Mail
2012-02-10

In 1961, the independence constitution of Sierra Leone created a single nationality, without any distinction by race, ethnic group or sex. ‘Every person’ born in the former colony or protectorate who was a citizen of the United Kingdom and colonies or a British protected person on 26 April 1961 became a citizen of Sierra Leone on 27 April 1961, unless neither of his or her parents nor any of his or her grandparents was born in Sierra Leone.
 
The 1961 constitution also had an extensive bill of rights guaranteeing the protection of the rights of all individuals without discrimination. Thus, the small population of ‘Lebanese’ and the offspring of interracial marriages were all recognized as citizens of Sierra Leone. Within a year after independence, Sierra Leone’s constitutional provisions on citizenship were amended twice to become more restrictive and discriminate against individuals on the basis of race, colour and sex. First, the words ‘of negro African descent’ were inserted immediately after the words ‘every person’, to apply retroactively from the date of independence.
 
Then the non-discrimination clause that prohibited any law that is ‘discriminatory of itself or in its effect’ was amended to exclude laws relating to citizenship. Individuals who were not of ‘negro African descent’ but who had acquired citizenship by virtue of the 1961 constitution were thus stripped of their citizenship of Sierra Leone after less than a year. (In Britain, meanwhile, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act introduced for the  first time restrictions on immigration to Britain for citizens of former colonies. Though not explicitly racial in its language, the new provisions were aimed at non-white immigrants from the newly independent countries of Africa and the Caribbean; the effect was to leave some residents of former British colonies with no right of citizenship in any country.)…

…The change to the law was motivated by political considerations; in particular, to narrow the set of candidates eligible to contest elections due to be held in 1962, by depriving Lebanese and mixed-race Sierra Leoneans of the political rights conferred by citizenship. Subsequent laws restricted the rights of non-citizens to acquire property both in the Western Area (the historic colony, near Freetown) and in the provinces (though it did not take any right away from those non-citizens who had already purchased property in the Western Area)…

…John Joseph Akar, a prominent mixed-race Sierra Leonean with political ambitions, became the best-known case of those affected by the changes to citizenship law and the face of efforts to reverse them. Akar’s mother was a black Sierra Leonean; his father was of Lebanese origin and thus not ‘of negro African descent’, though he had never visited Lebanon. When Sierra Leone became independent on 27 April 1961, Akar automatically became a citizen by operation of the constitution, as both he and one of his parents had been born in Sierra Leone. With the 1962 amendments, however, he lost his citizenship by birth; though he did apply for and was granted citizenship by registration. He challenged the amendments in court. In his application, he contended that the true intention of the amendments was to exclude persons not of ‘negro African descent’ from being elected to the House of Representatives. He succeeded in the High Court, but the Court of Appeal subsequently reversed the decision…

…Persons who were Afro-Lebanese (i.e. those whose mothers were black Sierra Leonean and whose fathers were not ‘negro’ African) could apply to be naturalized under this provision (though no procedures to do so were established). The 1973 Act does not define who is a ‘negro African’, and the 1962 amendment had also provided little clarity. The presumption was that the phrase meant black African, reducing the essential condition for the acquisition of citizenship to the colour of the person’s skin. Thus a black man’s children by a Sierra Leonean black woman were citizens by birth wherever they were born. A white or mixed-race man’s children by a Sierra Leonean woman could acquire Sierra Leonean citizenship only by naturalization. The 1983 Births and Deaths Registration Act reinforced this discrimination by requiring the officer registering a child’s birth to include the race of the child’s parents in the birth certificate…

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Nationalism, Racism and Propaganda in Early Weimar Germany: Contradictions in the Campaign against the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’

German History
Volume 30, Issue 1 (March, 2012)
pages 45-74
DOI: 10.1093/gerhis/ghr124

Julia Roos, Associate Professor of History
Indiana University, Bloomington

During the early 1920s, an average of 25,000 colonial soldiers from North Africa, Senegal and Madagascar formed part of the French army of occupation in the Rhineland. The campaign against these troops, which used the racist epithet ‘black horror on the Rhine’ (schwarze Schmach am Rhein), was one of the most important propaganda efforts of the Weimar period. In black horror propaganda, images of alleged sexual violence against Rhenish women and children by African French soldiers served as metaphors for Germany’s ‘victimization’ through the Versailles Treaty. Because the campaign initially gained broad popular and official support, historians have tended to consider the black horror a successful nationalist movement bridging political divides and strengthening the German nation state. In contrast, this essay points to some of the contradictions within the campaign, which often crystallized around conflicts over the nature of effective propaganda. Extreme racist claims about the Rhineland’s alleged ‘mulattoization’ (Mulattisierung) increasingly alienated Rhinelanders and threatened to exacerbate traditional tensions between the predominantly Catholic Rhineland and the central state at a time when Germany’s western borders seemed rather precarious in the light of recent territorial losses and separatist agitation. There was a growing concern that radical strands within the black horror movement were detrimental to the cohesion of the German nation state and to Germany’s positive image abroad, and this was a major reason behind the campaign’s decline after 1921/22. The conflicts within the campaign also point to some hitherto neglected affinities between the black horror and subsequent Nazi propaganda.

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Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860

McFarland
2012 [Originally Published by University of South Carolina press in 1985]
300 pages
6 x 9
Softcover ISBN: 978-0-7864-6931-4

Larry Koger, Historian

Most Americans, both black and white, believe that slavery was a system maintained by whites to exploit blacks, but this authoritative study reveals the extent to which African Americans played a significant role as slave masters. Examining South Carolina’s diverse population of African-American slaveowners, the book demonstrates that free African Americans widely embraced slavery as a viable economic system and that they—like their white counterparts—exploited the labor of slaves on their farms and in their businesses.

Drawing on the federal census, wills, mortgage bills of sale, tax returns, and newspaper advertisements, the author reveals the nature of African-American slaveholding, its complexity, and its rationales. He describes how some African-American slave masters had earned their freedom but how many others—primarily mulattoes born of free parents—were unfamiliar with slavery’s dehumanization.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Free Black Slaveholding and the Federal Census
• 2. The Numbers and Distribution of Black Slaveholding
• 3. From Slavery to Freedom to Slaveownership
• 4. “Buying My Chidrum from Ole Massa”
• 5. Neither a Slave Nor a Free Person
• 6. The Woodson Thesis: Fact or Fiction?
• 7. White Rice, White Cotton, Brown Planters, Black Slaves
• 8. Free Black Artisans: A Need for Labor
• 9. The Denmark Vesey Conspiracy: Brown Masters vs. Black Slaves
• 10. No More Black Massa
• Appendix A. Tables for Chapter One
• Appendix B. Table for Chapter Two
• Appendix C. Tables for Chapter Six
• Notes
• Index

Use of Blood Groups in Human Classification

Science Magazine
Volume 112, Number 2903 (1950-08-18)
pages 187-196
DOI: 10.1126/science.112.2903.187

William C. Boyd
Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts

—Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him!
Plato, The Republic

In recent years there has been an increasing feeling, on the part of both geneticists and physical anthropologists, that genetical methods ought to be applied to the problems of the classification of man, and a number of proposals to this effect have been made. Nevertheless, new books of anthropology, as they have been published, have been found to contain much the same old classifications based on morphological characteristics, skin color, etc., even though the authors may have started with the announced intention of making use of the newer methods. It is clear that many a worker, attempting to apply genetical methods of taxonomy to man, has been disappointed, and, in fact, one scientist, formerly quite active in the field of physical anthropology, has now given it up, and announced in a letter to me: “I tried to see what blood groups would tell me about ancient man, and found the results very disappointing.”

A careful analysis of the situation will show that such disappointment is based largely on two circumstances. First, there is the fact that the blood grouping genes affect invisible serological characteristics of the individual, and are thus never visible to the naked eye. It is to be feared that we are all too much inclined to be impressed by the visible as opposed to the invisible. Second, there is the fact that the layman’s concept of race (which is that the human species can be divided up by valid, scientific methods, into various groups that are pretty different from each other and which will look pretty different from each other) has been unconsciously retained by many scientific workers, and the hypothetical dissenting readers are unconsciously expecting that the new system we propose to introduce will also provide us with startling differences in the appearance and behavior of the different “races” we define, and will feel let down to discover that the new classification does not, when all is said about it, reveal any very dramatic results.

If the blood grouping genes had affected, not characteristics of the blood, but prominent morphological or physical characteristics such as the shape of the head, color of the skin, etc., there cannot be the slightest question that they would already have been made the chief basis of a racial classification and would have been considered entirely adequate for that purpose.

Equivalence of Genes

From our knowledge of genetics we may see that there is nothing fundamentally different between the blood grouping genes as genes, and the genes which do affect morphological features. It is simply a historical accident that fairly adequate information was obtained about the mode of transmission of blood grouping genes before any information at all equivalent in amount or value was obtained about the genes affecting physical appearance.

In view of these facts, and since there seems to be no reason to suppose that the location of a gene in a chromosome, or the nature of the particular chromosome in which the gene resides, determines in advance the main or even the subsidiary characteristics which are to be influenced by the gene, it might be instructive to let our imaginations roam a bit. The outwardly observable effects of the blood group genes are, so far as we know, zero. Therefore let us make some arbitrary assumptions as to the sort of effect which the blood grouping genes could have produced, supposing them to have affected some of the external and visible char-…

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A Critical Discussion of the “Mulatto Hypothesis”

The Journal of Negro Education
Volume 3, Number 3, The Physical and Mental Abilities of the American Negro (July, 1934)
pages 389-402

Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963)

The Two “Mulatto Hypotheses”

What is the “mulatto hypothesis?” The phrase may be used to indicate a point of view concerning the desirability or undesirability  of racial crossing, wherever this has occurred, and between whatever peoples it has taken place. The question as to the character of the hypothesis itself, however,  is somewhat difficult to answer, for there is not one position but two taken on the matter. Since each of these two positions, which are diametrically opposed, claim support from the findings of studies made on human and animal populations, it is important that they be differentiated at the outset of our discussion. The first of them holds that racial crossing is pernicious in its effects; the second maintains that inbreeding is inadvisable, since new strains must be introduced into a population if fertile, virile offspring are to be assured. Any consideration of these two “mulatto hypotheses,” then, must range beyond the confines which would be set if The Two “Mulatto Hypotheses” What is the “mulatto hypothesis?” The phrase may be used to indicate a point of view concerning the desirability or  undesirability  of racial crossing, wherever this has occurred, and between whatever peoples it has taken place. The question as to the character of the hypothesis itself, however,  is somewhat difficult to answer, for there is not one position but two taken on the matter. Since each of these two positions, which are diametrically opposed, claim support from the findings of studies made on human and animal populations, it is important that they be differentiated at the outset of our discussion. The first of them holds that racial crossing is pernicious in its effects; the second maintains that inbreeding is inadvisable, since new strains must be introduced into a population if fertile, virile offspring are to be assured. Any consideration of these two “mulatto hypotheses,” then, must range beyond the confines which would be set if only Negro-white crossing were studied, while such a consideration must similarly include not only a discussion of the results of crossing on the intellectual capabilities of mixed-bloods, but also on their physical potency and social efficiency.

The first of the two positions has perhaps been best phrased by Gates, who is one of its strongest proponents:

Crossing in mankind may be regarded as of three types: (1) Between individuals of the same race. (2) Between different, but nearly related, races; e.g., between the Nordic, Mediterranean and Alpine or East Baltic races, or between different African tribes, or Chinese and Japanese stocks. Such intercrossing goes on continually without causing comment or raising serious problems. (3) Between more distantly related races. Here we might again distinguish (a) crosses between two primitive or two advanced races from (b) crosses between an advanced and a primitive stock. It is only the last type which raises serious difficulties, and is probably undesirable from every point of view. Of course there is no sharp line between the most advanced and the most primitive races, but all intergrades occur. Nevertheless, the distinction I have drawn is certainly an important one.

This author there upon devotes some pages to a discussion of the studies that have been made on human crossed groups. Thus a study made by MacCaughey is quoted concerning the results of mixture in the “microcosmic melting-pot” of Hawaii, with the conclusion

…that such racial intermingling is usually undesirable in its results. Most of the Hawaiian-white hybrids seem to combine the least desirable traits of both parents, and intermarriages of North European and American stocks with dark-skinned races are considered biologically wasteful.

Lundborn is similarly quoted as concluding, on the basis of studies made in Sweden, “that the crossing of races degenerates the constitution and increases degradation.” After considering such studies, Gates summarizes….

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American Chiaroscuro: The Status and Definition of Mulattoes in the British Colonies

The William and Mary Quarterly
Third Series, Volume 19, Number 2 (April, 1962)
pages 183-200

Winthrop D. Jordan (1931-2007)

The word mulatto is not frequently used in the United States. Americans generally reserve it for biological contexts, because for social purposes a mulatto is termed a Negro. Americans lump together both socially and legally all persons with perceptible admixture of Negro ancestry, thus making social definition without reference to genetic logic; white blood becomes socially advantageous only in overwhelming proportion. The dynamic underlying the peculiar bifurcation of American society into only two color groups can perhaps be better understood if some attempt is made to describe its origin, for the content of social definitions may remain long after the impulses to their formation have gone.

After only one generation of European experience in America, colonists faced the problem of dealing with racially mixed offspring, a problem handled rather differently by the several nations involved. It is well known that the Latin countries, especially Portugal and Spain, rapidly developed a social hierarchy structured according to degrees of intermixture of Negro and European blood, complete with a complicated system of terminology to facilitate definition. The English in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, on the other hand, seem to have created no such system of ranking. To explain this difference merely by comparing the different cultural backgrounds involved is to risk extending generalizations far beyond possible factual support. Study is still needed of the specific factors affecting each nation’s colonies, for there is evidence with some nations that the same cultural heritage was spent in different ways by the colonial heirs,..

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