Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Playwright discusses biracialism

    Playwright discusses biracialism

    The Dartmouth
    2006-01-18

    Ashley Zuzek, The Dartmouth Staff

    William S. Yellow Robe, Jr., author of the play “Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers,” discussed the psychology of racial duality during a Tuesday night discussion at the Hopkins Center and emphasized the need for Americans of mixed blood to identify with a single race rather than getting lost between the two.

    Having mixed blood, Yellow Robe said, “has created a psychology that no one has dealt with. People go into this panic of being too native or not being native enough.”

    Yellow Robe, who is both Native American and African American, described the difficulty of being biracial during his discussion, “Claiming Our Relations.”

    While Yellow Robe identifies more with his Native American ancestry than his African American ancestry, he is not ashamed of his mixed race.

    “I honor it and I never deny it,” he said. However, he cautioned that people of mixed race should not “straddle both paths,” and that he has never regretted identifying with his Native American side…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers and Other Untold Stories

    Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers and Other Untold Stories

    UCLA American Indian Studies Center
    2009
    375 pages
    10-digit ISBN: 0-935626-59-X
    13-digit ISBN: 978-0-935626-59-9

    William S. Yellow Robe Jr., Playwright, Director, Poet, Actor, Writer, and Educator

    Edited by:

    Margo Lukens, Associate Professor of English
    University of Maine

    Five Plays by William S. Yellow Robe Jr.

    This collection of five plays portrays the complex issues that arise when mixed-blood American Indian characters come up against traditional Native beliefs. It shows how legislated and internalized racism has ravaged human relationships and created divisive struggles within Native American families and communities. The title play, Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers, examines the lingering effects of colonial exploitation of tensions between African American and Native American people in the nineteenth century. All of Yellow Robe’s plays meditate on “the returning” to home, to community, and how the matter of belonging is a privilege.

    Contents

    • Foreword
    • Introduction
    • A Stray Dog
    • Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers
    • Mix Blood Seeds
    • Better-n-Indins
    • Pieces of Us: How the Lost Find Home
    • Biographies

  • The Monacan Indian Nation of Virginia: The Drums of Life

    The Monacan Indian Nation of Virginia: The Drums of Life

    University of Alabama Press
    2008
    248 pages
    Quality Paper ISBN: 978-0-8173-5488-6
    Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8173-1615-0
    E Book ISBN: 978-0-8173-8113-4 
     
    Rosemary Clark Whitlock, Monacan Indian and Independent Scholar

    The contemporary Monacan Nation had approximately 1,400 registered members in 2006, mostly living in and around Lynchburg, Virginia, in Amherst County, but some are scattered like any other large family. Records trace the Monacans of Virginia back to the late 1500s, with an estimated population of over 15,000 in the 1700s.
     
    Like members of some other native tribes, the Monacans have a long history of struggles for equality in jobs, health care, and education and have suffered cultural, political, and social abuse at the hands of authority figures appointed to serve them. The critical difference for the Monacans was the actions of segregationist Dr. Walter A. Plecker, Director of the Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912 until he retired at age 85 in 1946. A strong proponent and enforcer of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Law of 1924 (struck down in 1967), which prohibited marriage between races, Plecker’s interpretation of that law convinced him that there were only two races–white and colored–and anyone not bearing physically white genetic characteristics was “colored” and that included Indians. He would not let Indians get married in Virginia unless they applied as white or colored, he forced the local teachers to falsify the students’ race on the official school rolls, and he threatened court clerks and census takers with prosecution if they used the term “Indian” on any official form. He personally changed government records when his directives were not followed and even coerced postpartum Indian mothers to list their newborns as white or colored or they could not take their infants home from the hospital. Eventually the federal government intervened, directing the Virginia state officials to begin the tedious process of correcting official records. Yet the legacy of Plecker’s attempted cultural genocide remains. Through interviews with 26 Monacans, one Episcopal minister appointed to serve them, one former clerk of the court for Amherst County, and her own story, Whitlock provides first person accounts of what happened to the Monacan families and how their very existence as Indians was threatened.

  • White and mixed-race youths rank high in alcohol, substance abuse

    White and mixed-race youths rank high in alcohol, substance abuse

    Los Angeles Times
    2011-11-07

    Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times/For the Booster Shots blog

    The first-ever survey of adolescent alcohol and drug abuse to recognize youths of mixed race or ethnicity has found that such kids hover closest to white adolescents in the rate at which they suffer substance abuse disorders. That is not reassuring, because white adolescents are among the most likely ethnic and racial groups to have substance-use disorders.

    Of all ethnic groups, Native Americans were found to suffer the highest rates of drug and alcohol abuse and dependence—about 15% in a given year. African American adolescents were among the least likely to abuse or be dependent on drugs or alcohol: on a yearly basis, roughly 5% of black teens fit the criteria for substance-use disorder—almost as low a rate as prevails among adolescents of Asian or Pacific Islander ethnicity (3.5%).

    Latino youths—the fastest-growing ethnic group in this age cohort—fell below white and multi-ethnic adolescents in their rate of substance-use disorders, but not by much: 7.7% qualified as having dangerously abused or been dependent on drugs or alcohol in the past year.

    The survey was published Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Between 2005 and 2007, researchers plumbed the drug and alcohol use patterns of 72,561 adolescents between age 12 and 17. They conducted computer-assisted interviews with adolescents  about their use in the past 12 months of alcohol and a wide range of illicit drugs, including marijuana, cocaine and opioid painkillers taken for non-medical reasons…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Race, Reproduction and Family Romance in Moreau de Saint-Mery’s Description. ..de la partie francaise de l’isle Saint Domingue

    Race, Reproduction and Family Romance in Moreau de Saint-Mery’s Description. ..de la partie francaise de l’isle Saint Domingue

    Eighteenth-Century Studies
    Volume 38, Number 2, Winter 2005
    pages 227-246
    DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2005.0008

    Doris Lorraine Garraway, Associate Professor of French
    Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

    This paper analyzes the colonial jurist and historian Moreau de Saint-Méry’s racial classification system with an aim to disclose its ideology of family romance and reproduction. By examining the sexual allegory implicit in the tabular demonstration of métissage, I argue that Moreau’s racial science represents a sexual fantasy for white colonials whose libertine practices threatened the fragile demographic balance of colonial society. Moreau de Saint-Méry revises Enlightenment ideas about racial degeneration and infertility to arrive at an original hypothesis for the biological reproduction of colonial humanity, one that places the control of such procreation squarely in the hands of white men.

    The publication in 1797 of the colonial jurist and historian Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue represented a milestone in Enlightenment racial theory. Within the first volume of the encyclopedic account of the colony on the eve of the Haitian Revolution, there appeared a systematic classification of human variety in the colonies, unprecedented in its scope and detail. Expanding on previous taxonomies of De Pauw and Hilliard d’Auberteuil, and borrowing from eighteenth-century innovations in algebra and statistics, Moreau devised an exhaustive tabular, arithmetic and narrative typology of “nuances of the skin” along a continuum between white and black. Comprising nearly twenty pages, this attempt to delineate and classify human color variation in the colony of Saint-Domingue represented much more than an experiment in Enlightenment rationality or the science of amalgamation. By meticulously theorizing the genealogical progression between black and white, Moreau de Saint-Méry fixated on the one difference that carried political consequences in Saint-Domingue—that between white and non-white, or “sang-mêlé” (mixed-blood).

    In the decades leading up to the Haitian Revolution, whites faced increasing challenges to their economic and political supremacy from the growing class of free people of color. As established slaveholders, planters, entrepreneurs, skilled laborers, artisans, and military leaders, they had acquired considerable wealth and property in land and slaves. As such, they aspired to the same political recognition and elite titles and offices held by whites. While mulatto activists such as Julien Raymond traveled to Paris to petition the royal government on behalf of free people of color, those at home sought to improve their position by building social networks, sending their children to be educated in France, adhering to French moral codes regarding marriage and legitimacy, and, in some cases, marrying their daughters to white men. The social ambitions of free people of color did little to quell the long-standing controversy over the prevalence of interracial sexual relationships in Saint-Domingue. In addition to engaging in sexual relations with slave women, elite white men frequently sought free women of color to serve as ménagères, their live-in housekeepers and lovers. In the late eighteenth century, colonial writers sensationalized mulatto women as icons of sensual pleasure and sexual excess, figures both loved and blamed for the luxury, indebtedness and moral laxity of the colony. Yet this stereotype concealed the fact that free women of color were among the most entrepreneurial and financially independent women in the colony, owing to their connections to white benefactors and their prevalence in urban marketing and commerce. While interracial marriage was never officially outlawed in the colony, the colonial leadership made many attempts to suppress the practice and in the end settled for a series of punitive measures against “misallied” white men. More difficult to control, however, was the massive increase in the population of free people of color in the last decades of French rule. In the two decades prior to the revolution, their numbers increased at nearly twice the rate of whites in the same period, such that by 1789 each population amounted to approximately 30,000 persons.

    Faced with the population increase, social ambition, wealth and political demands of free people of color, the white elite responded with an extraordinarily oppressive regime of racially exclusionary laws intended to halt their advancement. Free people of color were forbidden to wear luxurious clothing, take the name of a white person, carry arms, practice certain professions and hold public office. By 1785, Moreau de Saint-Méry had become a leading figure of colonial jurisprudence. Born in 1750 to the white Creole elite of Martinique, Moreau had risen through the ranks of the magistrature to become a counselor on the Superior Court in Cap-Français, Saint-Domingue, and premier historian of colonial law. He was also a prominent figure of the colonial Enlightenment, holding memberships in the colonial Chamber of Agriculture and the Cercle des Philadelphes, later named the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences. This organization made Cap-Français a center of scientific debate, comparable in its time to Philadelphia and Boston. Moreau’s rise in the colonies was concomitant with his growing notoriety on the French political and cultural scene. In the 1780s, he took a leading role in the pre-revolutionary assemblies in Paris as a spokesperson for the colonial elite, arguing polemically against mulatto rights and the proposals of the Société des Amis des noirs. His address of May 12, 1791 provoked Robespierre’s famous speech calling for the end of the colonies should they compromise revolutionary principles…

  • …we found that when discussing instances in which their biracial or multiracial identity caused them to feel tension, mixed-race individuals spontaneously mentioned demographic questionnaires that forced them to select only one racial group…

    The two studies reported here show that mixed-race individuals in the United States who identify as biracial or multiracial can encounter difficulty in asserting their identities, and that such constraints can lead to negative psychological consequences. In Study 1 we found that when discussing instances in which their biracial or multiracial identity caused them to feel tension, mixed-race individuals spontaneously mentioned demographic questionnaires that forced them to select only one racial group. Using this real-world experience as a model, Study 2 found that compared with those who were able to choose multiple racial groups, those who were constrained to only one racial group showed lower performance self esteem and motivation. Additionally, this constraint, even after it was removed, influenced participants’ subsequent report of their racial identities. Those who had been forced to choose only one racial group were more likely to report a discrepancy between their chosen identity and their social experience.

    Sarah S. M. Townsend, Hazel R. Markus, Hilary B. Bergsieker, “My Choice, Your Categories: The Denial of Multiracial Identities,” Journal of Social Issues, Volume 65, Number 1 (2009): 185-204.

  • The French colonial question and the disintegration of white supremacy in the Colony of Saint Domingue, 1789-1792

    The French colonial question and the disintegration of white supremacy in the Colony of Saint Domingue, 1789-1792

    The University of North Carolina, Wilmington
    2005
    94 pages

    Molly M. Herrmann

    A Thesis Submitted to the University of North Carolina Wilmington in Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

    This thesis argues that the class of free people of color in the French colony of Saint Domingue threatened the dichotomy of master and slave, as defined by a strict divide between white and black and as was necessary for the perseverance of racial slavery. In restricting the free people of color from the right to vote and hold public office, white supremacy was maintained by upholding a racial divide within the free sector of Saint Domingue’s planter society. By the end of the eighteenth-century, the free people of color launched an aggressive campaign, by way of French legislative reform, to attain their rights as free and propertied citizens of France.

    The perception that the white race was unalterably superior to the black race was at the core of the planter society of Saint Domingue to safeguard racial slavery against a rapidly emerging class of free people of color. Once the free people of color seized upon French legislative reform as a means to win their rights, white supremacy was challenged and ultimately exposed as a social and political system that was alterable. The subsequent failure of French legislation to officially enfranchise them motivated the free people of color to openly ally with insurgent slaves in a revolution against a common adversary, white supremacy. The result of this coalescence, I argue, was the rapid and complete debilitation of white power in the colony by April 1792 when the National Assembly declared full and equal citizenship for all free people of color.

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    • ABSTRACT
    • ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    • DEDICATION
    • INTRODUCTION
    • CHAPTER 1. RACIAL SLAVERY AND THE COLOR LINE DRAWN BETWEEN WHITE AND BLACK
    • CHAPTER 2. THE “IMPRINT OF SLAVERY” AND THE FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR IN SAINT DOMINGUE
    • CHAPTER 3. THE FRENCH COLONIAL QUESTION AND THE SLAVE INSURRECTION OF 1791
    • CHAPTER 4. THE ABOLITION OF THE COLOR LINE AND THE END OF WHITE SUPREMACY IN SAINT DOMINGUE
    • EPILOGUE
    • BIBLIOGRAPHY

    Read the entire thesis here.

  • The whole being of a mulâtresse is given over to sensual pleasure…

    The whole being of a mulâtresse is given over to sensual pleasure and the flame of this goddess burns in her heart so as only to be snuffed out with life itself… Even the most inflamed imagination can conceive of nothing that she has not fathomed, concocted, experienced. Her sole vocation is to bewitch the senses, deliver them to the most delicious ecstasies, enrapture them with the most seductive temptations; nature, pleasure’s accomplice, has given her charms, endowments, inclinations, and what is indeed more dangerous, the ability to enjoy such sensations even more keenly than her partners, including some unknown to Sappho.

    Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie Française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, (1797): 104.

  • Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880

    Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880

    Johns Hopkins University Press
    2007
    344 pages
    11 halftones, 2 line drawings
    Hardback ISBN: 9780801886942; Paperback ISBN: 9780801898198

    Daniel R. Mandell, Professor of History
    Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri

    • Winner, 2008 Lawrence W. Levine Award, Organization of American Historians

    Tribe, Race, History examines American Indian communities in southern New England between the Revolution and Reconstruction, when Indians lived in the region’s socioeconomic margins, moved between semiautonomous communities and towns, and intermarried extensively with blacks and whites.

    Drawing from a wealth of primary documentation, Daniel R. Mandell centers his study on ethnic boundaries, particularly how those boundaries were constructed, perceived, and crossed. He analyzes connections and distinctions between Indians and their non-Indian neighbors with regard to labor, landholding, government, and religion; examines how emerging romantic depictions of Indians (living and dead) helped shape a unique New England identity; and looks closely at the causes and results of tribal termination in the region after the Civil War.

    Shedding new light on regional developments in class, race, and culture, this groundbreaking study is the first to consider all Native Americans throughout southern New England.

  • Redrawing the Color Line: Gender and the Social Construction of Race in Pre-Revolutionary Haiti

    Redrawing the Color Line: Gender and the Social Construction of Race in Pre-Revolutionary Haiti

    Journal of Caribbean History
    Volume 30, Numbers 1 & 2 (1996)
    pages 28-50

    John D. Garrigus, Associate Professor of History
    University of Texas, Austin

    This article examines the social and political construction of race in French colonial Saint-Domingue. After 1763 white elites redefined the category “free coloured” using negative images of femininity rooted in French political discourse. This engendering of racial stereotypes solidified a racial hierarchy that whites found alarmingly fluid. Planters’ councils and the governors they opposed evoked images of sexually powerful women and effeminized men to explain colonial despotism and disorder. In the late 1780s, however, free men of colour deliberately asserted their civic virtue and virility, challenging these stereotypes and eventually destroying the colonial racial hierarchy.

    By 1789 French Saint Domingue was home to the largest, wealthiest, and most self-confident free population of African descent in the Americas. Comprising close to half the colony’s free population, these gens de couleur won civil equality with whites from the French Legislative Assembly in April 1792 and their political demands helped produce the Haitian Revolution. Why did such an extraordinary population emerge in this colony?

    This article contends that the size, wealth, and self-confidence of this group were partly the result of new social and legal definitions of race formulated in Saint-Domingue after 1763. As this frontier society became the centerpiece of the French empire after the Seven Years’ War, prejudice established a deep and apparently permanent gulf between “whites” and “people of colour.” This new legal and social discrimination was deeply influenced by politicized French gender stereotypes, which whites used to reinforce a new, biological conception of racial difference. Old colonial families were relabeled gens de couleur. After 1769 whites considered free people of mixed African/European descent to be not merely “between” whites and blacks, but morally and physically inferior to both races. This exaggeration of the difference between white and brown colonists reinforced the ambiguous category “free people of colour” and served as an effective target during the French Revolution for wealthy “mulattos” and “quadroons” eager to claim full citizenship.

    At the heart of the new racism were conflicts over Saint-Domingue’s political and cultural identity. After the Seven Years’ War new immigration from Europe and the increasingly “civilized” tone of elite colonial society raised the question of how “French” Saint-Domingue could become. Could a slave plantation colony produce a civic-minded public of the sort said to be emerging in France at this time? Many colonial planters, magistrates, and merchants wanted to believe it could. These elites appropriated metropolitan political discourse to explain why free Dominguan society differed from France. After the Seven Years’ War they began to describe free men and women of colour as passionate, narcissistic, and parasitic, terms used in France to vilify powerful women at court. This redirected and highly politicised misogyny helped solidify the ambiguous category gens de couleur, placing these families and individuals firmly outside respectable colonial society. The new image of people of mixed ancestry answered troubling questions about white behaviour in Saint-Domingue and seemed to guarantee that an orderly, rational colonial public could emerge. Grafting a stereotyped effeminacy onto emerging biological notions of race legitimised the disenfranchising of free people of colour, some of whom were indistinguishable from “whites” in wealth, education, distance from slavery, even physical appearance. In Saint-Domingue’s rough-and-tumble seventeenth-century buccaneer society, race was not the obsession it would later become. Early censuses did not distinguish between “whites” and “mulattoes,” but between free and enslaved residents. Before the massive importation of slaves for sugar work, children of mixed African/European descent were apparently considered free from birth. Even in 1685, the metropolitan authors of France’s slave law, the Code Noir, were more concerned about sin than race and racial mixture. The Code ordered colonial officials to confiscate mixed-race children and slave concubines from their owners, but stated that if a master married his slave mistress, she would be automatically free, as would the children of their union. Under the original terms of the Code Noir, ex-slaves enjoyed all the rights of French subjects…

    For example, as he charted the somatic varieties produced by different combinations of African and European “blood,” Moreau also described distinct moral qualities. Blacks were strong and passionate while whites were graceful and intelligent. Therefore, mulattoes, who were one-half black, were stronger than quarterons, who were only one-quarter African. According to Moreau, African appetites for physical pleasure were especially pronounced when combined with white qualities. Mulattoes lived for sexual gratification, and the offspring of a mulatto and a black had a “temperament impossible to contain.”

    Convinced that black women had strong psychological and physical inclinations to be mothers, Moreau believed that mulatto and quadroon women had difficulty giving birth, due to their physical and moral deficiencies. Men of mixed descent were similarly flawed. Mulattos were often intelligent and attractive, but they were lazy, beardless, foppish, and sensual, according to Moreau. Nor did free coloured military service challenge this image:

    It seems that then [in the ranks a mulatto] loses his laziness, but all the world knows that a soldier’s life, in the leisure it provides, has attractions for indolent men … A mulatto soldier will appear exactly to the calls of day, perhaps even to those of the evening, but it is in vain that one tries to restrict his liberty at night; [the night|] belongs to pleasure and he will not indenture it, no matter what commitments he has made elsewhere…

    Read the entire article here.