Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Escaping to Destinations South: The Underground Railroad, Cultural Identity, and Freedom Along the Southern Borderlands

    Escaping to Destinations South: The Underground Railroad, Cultural Identity, and Freedom Along the Southern Borderlands

    National Park Service
    Network to Freedom
    2012-06-20 through 2012-06-24
    St. Augustine, Florida

    The Network to Freedom has joined with local partners to present an annual UGRR [Underground Railroad] conference beginning in 2007. These conferences bring together a mix of grass roots researchers, community advocates, site stewards, government officials, and scholars to explore the history of the Underground Railroad. Rotated to different parts of the country, the conferences highlight the unique history of various regions along with new research.

    The 2012 Conference theme is the resistance to slavery through escape and flight to and from the South, including through international flight, from the 16th century to the end of the Civil War. Traditional views of the Underground Railroad focus on Northern destinations of freedom seekers, with symbols such as the North Star, Canada, and the Ohio River (the River Jordan) constructed as the primary beacons of freedom. This conception reduces the complexity of the Underground Railroad by ignoring the many freedom seekers that sought to obtain their freedom in southern destinations.

    Likewise, borders and the movement across them by southern freedom seekers are also very crucial to our understanding of the complexities of the Underground Railroad. Freedom seekers often sought out political and geographical borderlands, as crossing these locations usually represented the divide between slavery and freedom. To this end, the conference will explore how southern freedom seekers seized opportunities to escape slavery into Spanish Florida and the Seminole Nation, to the Caribbean Islands, and into the western borderlands of Indian Territory, Texas, and Mexico.

    Escape from enslavement was not just about physical freedom, but also about the search for cultural autonomy. The conference will explore the transformation and creation of new cultural identities among southern freedom seekers that occurred as a result of their journeys to freedom, such as the dispersal of Gullah Geechee culture and the formation of Black Seminole cultural identity.

    The 2012 Conference will include participation by independent and academic scholars at all levels, educators, community activists, public historians and preservationists, and multi-media and performance artists. The conference seeks to create a cultural, historical, and interpretive exchange between domestic and international descendent communities of southern freedom seekers.

    Gullah Geechee and Black Seminole descendants are particularly welcome at the conference.

    For more information, click here.  Call for papers information (Deadline 2012-01-15) is here.

  • Methods of Racial Analysis

    Methods of Racial Analysis

    Science Magazine
    Volume 63, Number 1621 (1926-01-22)
    pages 75-81
    DOI: 10.1126/science.63.1621.75

    E. A. Hooton

    Significance of the Term “Race”

    The term “race” as applied to man is commonly employed with no accurate and well-defined meaning. One often sees references to the “white race,” the “Jewish race,” the “Latin race,” the “Irish race.” Such indiscriminate use of the word “race” implies a confusion of criteria. To speak of the “white” race is to assume that race is a matter of skin pigmentation; to refer to the “Jewish race” is to differentiate race on a basis of religion; a “Latin race” implies a linguistic criterion, and finally any reference to an “Irish race” must mean a race characterized either by geographical position or, failling that, temperament. Such confusions of usage are usually confined to the non-anthropological writing public. All anthropologists agree that the criteria of race are physical characters. The tests of racial distinction are the morphological and metrical variations of such bodily characters as hair, skin, nose, eyes, stature—differences in shape and proportions of the head, the trunk and the limbs.

    Although there exists among anthropologists this general agreement as to the physical basis of race, there is no such unanimity of opinion with respect to the further implications of a classification of mankind on the score of bodily attributes.

    One school of anthropologists is disposed to deny that there are any cultural or psychological correlates of race. For these the somatological variations whereby race is determined are of little significance, except as convenient characters for classificatory purposes. They regard them principally and ultimately as effects of environment, though perhaps immediately heritable. Pigmentation may be dismissed by such as a result of climate, stature as a consequence of nutrition, head-form as a manifestation of individual variation or a by-product of separately inherited size-factors. Logically, such anthropologists refuse to recognize that language, material culture, mental capacity or social organization stand in any biological, mathematical or rational relationship to races as determined by these plastic and transitory’ physical characters.   For them race is a congeries of environmentally determined bodily features, significant principally because it effects differences in outward appearance which arouse the prejudice of the ignorant…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil

    The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil

    University of North Carolina Press
    February 1999
    168 pages
    6.125 x 9.25, notes, bibl., index
    Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-4766-4

    Hermano Vianna

    Edited and translated by

    John Charles Chasteen, Associate Professor of History
    University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

    Samba is Brazil’s “national rhythm,” the foremost symbol of its culture and nationhood. To the outsider, samba and the famous pre-Lenten carnival of which it is the centerpiece seem to showcase the country’s African heritage. Within Brazil, however, samba symbolizes the racial and cultural mixture that, since the 1930s, most Brazilians have come to believe defines their unique national identity.

    But how did Brazil become “the Kingdom of Samba” only a few decades after abolishing slavery in 1888? Typically, samba is represented as having changed spontaneously, mysteriously, from a “repressed” music of the marginal and impoverished to a national symbol cherished by all Brazilians. Here, however, Hermano Vianna shows that the nationalization of samba actually rested on a long history of relations between different social groups–poor and rich, weak and powerful–often working at cross-purposes to one another.

    A fascinating exploration of the “invention of tradition,” The Mystery of Samba is an excellent introduction to Brazil’s ongoing conversation on race, popular culture, and national identity.

    Table of Contents

    • Translator’s Preface
    • Author’s Preface to the U.S. Edition
    • Acknowledgments
    • 1. The Encounter
    • 2. The Mystery
    • 3. Popular Music and the Brazilian Elite
    • 4. The Unity of the Nation
    • 5. Race Mixture
    • 6. Gilberto Freyre
    • 7. The Modern Samba
    • 8. Samba of My Native Land
    • 9. Nowhere at All
    • 10. Conclusions
    • Notes
    • Index

  • The African Presence in Brazil: Slavery, Resistance, Miscegenation and Strategic Popularization of Afro-Brazilian Music Culture

    The African Presence in Brazil: Slavery, Resistance, Miscegenation and Strategic Popularization of Afro-Brazilian Music Culture

    Kalamazoo College
    2004
    69 pages

    Danielle Dubois Flax

    This thesis intends to investigate the history of slavery in Brazil, its effects on the demographic, psychological and political reality of Afro-Brazilians, and most essentially: how representations of Afro-Brazilian music and culture that were de-valorized, persecuted and outlawed for such extended periods of time became appropriated by the powerful, white Brazilian communities and subsequently became the quasi-official symbols of Brazilian culture. This research also focuses on Samba as one of these appropriated cultural symbols that, as the focus of Hermano Vianna’s book, The Mystery of Samba, made an “unexplained leap from infamous outcast to (virtually official) national emblem, a transformation conventionally mentioned only in passing…”(12).

    Login to read the thesis here.

  • Multicultural ‘obsession’ drives new Parliamentary Poet Laureate

    Multicultural ‘obsession’ drives new Parliamentary Poet Laureate

    The Globe and Mail
    Toronto, Canada
    2011-12-21

    Jane Taber, Senior Political Writer

    Fred Wah is a little more familiar with the outside of Parliament than the inside, having from time to time protested on its sweeping lawn as part of the Writers’ Union of Canada.

    But that’s about to change. Tuesday, the award-winning scribe was appointed the country’s new Parliamentary Poet Laureate. As such, the 72-year-old Saskatchewan-born Vancouverite is not required to be reciting poetry on the floor of the Commons or the Senate, but is hoping to at some point unleash his pen on the country’s political institutions…

    …Although he sees his appointment as “a symbolic gesture,” he’s got some ideas about what he wants to do, including the “possibility of developing some educational aspects” into the post. “I think there is a great need to get some our poetry and some of our Canadian literature into our schools,” he said.

    Characterizing himself as a “Heinz 57,” Mr. Wah’s father was half-Chinese, his mother Swedish and he grew up “in my father’s Chinese-Canadian restaurant.” That has helped to fuel his “obsession” to the issue of race and multiculturalism. “And I’m very interested in the whole notion of hybridity and how we negotiate that in our culture,” he added.

    He points to his book of short prose fiction, Diamond Grill, as a example of that. In it, he looks at family and identity. He is also proud of his 1985 book of poetry, Waiting for Saskatchewan, for which he won the Governor-General’s Literary Award…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Irish and ‘brown’ – Mixed ‘race’ Irish women’s identity and the problem of belonging

    Irish and ‘brown’ – Mixed ‘race’ Irish women’s identity and the problem of belonging

    Women’s Movement: Migrant Women Transforming Ireland
    Selection of papers from a conference held in
    Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
    2003-03-20 through 2003-03-21
    pages 86-90

    Angeline Morrison
    Falmouth College of Arts

    People are beginning to talk about the ‘invisibility’ of Whiteness. I am referring in particular to Richard Dyer’s project to ‘make Whiteness strange’, to hold it up for inspection and to question the tacit association of ‘Whiteness’ with ‘the human condition’ (Dyer 1997) I want to talk about another kind of Whiteness that has almost total invisibility—this is the Whiteness of the Mixed Race subject. I use the term ‘Mixed Race’ mindfully, aware that the term is contested and that some find its reference to the unscientific non-sense of ‘Race’ offensive (Harker 2000). For now, I want to define ‘Mixed Race’ people as the offspring of one White and one non-White parent. Such people have, inscribed on their bodies, evidence of migration somewhere along the line. Such people have, also, traditionally had problems at the tricky task of belonging. Although visually combining a phenotypic mixture of both White and Black features, the Mixed Race subject in a White, racialised society has, overwhelmingly, tended to be read by that society as, simply, ‘Black’. I am interested in also considering the Whiteness of the Mixed Race subject, particularly since this is something that both Black and White racialised societies alike – and by ‘racialised’ I mean operating according to what Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe has referred to as the ‘popular folk concept’ of ‘race’–have tended to deny. (Ifekwunigwe 2001:42).

    So, the Mixed Race subject as I define her here, inhabits Blackness and Whiteness equally–but in a racialised society, she inhabits Whiteness invisibly. Her whiteness is like a deep stratum; present and felt, but rendered invisible by society. Whilst scholars have written about the cultural or behavioural Whiteness of Mixed Race subjects, I am so far unaware of any work that specifically foregrounds or makes visible the actual, lived, and (usually) ignored Whiteness that the brown-skinned subject of Mixed Race may claim as a birthright, should she so desire…

    Read the paper here.

  • A White Woman From Kansas

    A White Woman From Kansas

    The New York Times
    2011-06-02

    Roger Cohen

    LONDON—For a long time Barack Obama’s mother was little more than the “white woman from Wichita” mentioned in an early Los Angeles Times profile of the future president. She was the pale Kansan silhouette against whom Obama drew the vivid Kenyan figure of his absent Dad in his Bildungsroman of discovered black identity, “Dreams from My Father.”

    Now, thanks to Janny Scott’s remarkable “A Singular Woman,” absence has become presence. Stanley Ann Dunham, the parent who raised Obama, emerges from romanticized vagueness into contours as original as her name. Far from “floating through foreign things,” as one colleague in Indonesia observes, “She was as type A as anybody on the team.”

    That may seem a far-fetched description of a woman who was not good with money, had no fixed abode and did not see life through ambition’s narrow prism. It was the journey not the destination that mattered to Dunham. She was, in her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng’s words, “fascinated with life’s gorgeous minutiae.” To her son the president, “idealism and naïveté” were “embedded” in her.

    Yet she was also a pioneering advocate of microcredit in the rural communities of the developing world, an unrivaled authority on Javanese blacksmithing, and a firm voice for female empowerment in an Indonesia “of ‘smiling’ or gentle oppression” toward women, as she wrote in one memo for the Ford Foundation…

    …I found myself liking Dunham—the nonjudgmental irreverence; the determination to live what she loved; the humor (after a stomach-turning surfeit of peanuts, she notes, “Yes, peanuts do have faces—smirky, nasty little faces, in fact”); the frankness with friends—“I don’t like you in your arrogant bitch mode.” Her 52 years were rich.

    She missed her son. The decision to send him to get educated in America was brave—and has changed the world in that Obama would not otherwise have become a black American. This is a central conundrum of a book that makes Obama’s white parent palpable for the first time.

    In an affecting passage one colleague, Don Johnston, describes how Dunham “felt a little bit wistful or sad that Barack had essentially moved to Chicago and chosen to take on a really strongly identified black identity” that had “not really been part of who he was when he was growing up.” She felt that “he was distancing himself from her” in a “professional choice.”

    Was it political calculation, love of Michelle Robinson, dreams of his father, or irritation with a dreamer-mother that made Obama black? After all, he was raised white. He chose black. Or perhaps he had no choice. Being biracial in the America Obama grew up in was not much of an option…

    Read the entire opinion piece here.

  • Obama’s story resonates in racially diverse Brazil

    Obama’s story resonates in racially diverse Brazil

    Washington Post
    2011-03-18

    Juan Forero, Staff Writer

    RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil is a big gumbo of ethnicities, its people proud of their diversity and confident their country is among the most tolerant of nations. But this country—a leading center of black culture—has never had a black president.

    So like many Brazilians, Carlos Jose Melo said he would eagerly turn out for President Obama when he tours the country’s signature city on Sunday, a day after meeting with President Dilma Rousseff in Brasília.

    Melo has spent most of his life in favelas, Rio’s rough-and-tumble shantytowns, which were first settled by former slaves and dirt-poor soldiers.

    “In Brazil, we have all kinds of culture, people, and our inner identity comes from black people,” said Melo, 47, a drug abuse counselor in City of God, a favela Obama is expected to visit on Sunday. “That’s why I think Obama is important for the world, because a poor guy suddenly becomes the most important man in the world.”

    Obama’s story—the humble beginnings and the rise to prominence and power—is familiar here. And so is his race, which has struck a chord in a country with the world’s second-largest black population, after Nigeria.

    …T-shirt dealer Dilci Aguiar de Paula, who is black and has worked at the base of Sugar Loaf for 25 years, said she can hardly contain her excitement.

    “He is a president the whole world likes, a black president,” she said. “I would give him a hug. I would tell him he is a good president.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • My Experience on the Indian-Negro Color Line

    My Experience on the Indian-Negro Color Line

    Indian Country Today
    2011-12-27

    Julianne Jennings
    Arizona State University

    Growing-up on the Indian-Negro color line (I am the daughter of a European mother and a black and Indian father), I lived with mixed signals and coded information by the dominant culture. It had determined that white European culture and people were superior in contrast to those who were generally classified as darker, “primitive” and “uncivilized.” Applying the adage “write what you know,” my master’s thesis was titled “Blood, Race and Sovereignty: The Politics of Indian Identity.” This work would not have been possible without the professors in the Department of Anthropology at Rhode Island College (RIC). They taught me how to challenge racial paradigms and stereotypes that Western society has about Indians; and how to brave racial orthodoxy and search new ways of thinking about our country’s seemingly insoluble problems with race.

    Classroom discussions about race motivated me, at the age of 46, to reclaim my Indian ancestry by having my birth certificate changed from “Negro” to “American Indian.” The experience was emotionally overwhelming as I had been denied my birthright as an E. Pequot–Nottoway. Changing my birth certificate was not because I was ashamed of my multiracial identity; it was an affirmation of my survival as an Indian and an act of self-determination in a country that has gone so far to erase my ancestry from history. I assert my tri-racial identity, but most of America’s forms, like birth certificates, at present allow listing only one race. To employ biological over cultural definitions of American Indians reflects a fundamental ignorance of American history and its unprocessed shame of slavery and American Indian traditions. Thus, issues about race are especially important to me, as “mixed-blood” Indians are not considered “authentic” by mainstream society. We have to dress in buckskin; feathers and beads to be taken seriously, yet those with European ancestry do not have to wear tall black hats or buckled shoes to convince others of their ancestry…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Talking Race w/ Social Critic/Legal Scholar Dorothy Roberts

    Talking Race w/ Social Critic/Legal Scholar Dorothy Roberts

    Blogtalk Radio
    Tuesday, 2011-10-11

    Michelle McCrary, Host
    Is That Your Child?

    Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
    University of Pennsylvania

    ITYC is honored to welcome leading legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts to the podcast. Author of the over 75 articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review, Robert’s latest work Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, is an eye-opening look at the way race continues to be reproduced and legitimized in our society.

    Roberts is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Northwestern University School of Law and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. She is also the author of Killing the Black Body and Shattered Bonds and has received fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, Searle Fund, Fulbright Scholars Program, Harvard University Program in Ethics and the Professions, and Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

    ..this was a book that really, completely, changed and challenged everything that I knew and I thought I knew about race. And I thank you for that, because it’s just one of those books that really, really kind of changes your life in a way because it sort of opens things up and makes you think about the world a completely different way, it’s a really powerful book.

    Download the interview here (01:17:41).