Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Métis/Mulâtre, Mulato, Mulatto, Negro, Moreno, Mundele Kaki, Black,… The Wanderings and Meanderings of Identities

    Métis/Mulâtre, Mulato, Mulatto, Negro, Moreno, Mundele Kaki, Black,… The Wanderings and Meanderings of Identities

    Chapter in: Problematizing Blackness: Self Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States
    Routledge
    2003-09-30
    240 pages

    Edited by

    Jean Muteba Rahier, Associate Professor of Anthropology and African & African Diaspora Studies
    Florida International University

    Percey C. Hintzen, Professor of African American Studies
    University of California, Berkeley

    Chapter 6
    pages 85-112

    Jean Muteba Rahier, Associate Professor of Anthropology and African & African Diaspora Studies
    Florida International University

    I have no race except that which is forced upon me. I have no country except that to which I’m obliged to belong. I have no traditions. I’m free. I have only the future.

    Richard Wright

    I was born in 1959, in what was then the Belgian Congo, of a Congolese colonized mother and a Belgian colonial father. I grew up in Belgium.

    Belgian Explorations: My Father’s Congo

    The Congo Free State (C.F.S.) was created as a private property of the Belgian King Leopold II in 1884–85 at the Berlin Conference and lasted until 1908. It was succeeded by the Belgian Congo, which lasted from 1908 until 1960, when the country gained its independence (see Vangroenweghe 1986; Ndaywel è Nziem 1998; Hochschild 1998). During the short history of colonial rule, the organization and implementation of the colonial enterprise were conducted almost exclusively by males. There was a contingent development of the institution of the ménagères, wherein African women and the male colonizers developed relationships of sexual intimacy. These relations occurred between female “housekeepers” (the ménagères) and the male colonizers whom they were serving. These relationships developed within the context of the absence of European women—an absence legitimized by their supposed biological unsuitability for the African tropical climate (Habig 1944, 10–11; Stoler 2002). The practice of sexual relations between the male colonizers and the colonized African women was universal and widespread, particularly outside the most important urban centers of Leopoldville, Elisabethville, and Stanleyville. Once in the Congo, many agents of the state and many employees of private colonial companies looked for the companionship of African women, who provided them with housekeeping, affection, and sexual favors. Usually, Belgian men kept their ménagères with them until the end of their tour of duty.

    State employees and agents of private companies were contractually employed for a three-year term. They would normally leave at the end of the term, usually spending six months’ vacation in Belgium, after which they had the option of returning to the colony for another three-year tour of service. This could continue indefinitely.Upon their return to the colony, it was customary for them either to retain the same ménagères in their “employ” or to choose another from among the “available African women.” Sometimes, the ménagères would become pregnant. If she did, she was typically sent back to her village with a small “financial indemnity” and material compensation. Usually, the colonial agent would then choose a new, young African woman to replace her in his house and in his bed.

    The number of children born out of the widespread practice of sexual intimacy forced the colonial administration and the Belgian Parliament to debate what they termed the problème des métis, “the mulatto problem.” The issue was the treatment of the mulatto offspring of these unions: whether they should endure the same status as the rest of the Congolese population or whether they should be considered an intermediate group above the latter but beneath the Europeans. Attempts at resolving the dilemma produced a series of contradictory policies, resulting in considerable ambiguity. This ambiguity came to characterize the lives of the growing population of métis throughout the entire colonial period (Jeurissen 1999; Stoler 2002). Usually, the status of the métis depended upon the degree of recognition and acknowledgment of parenthood by their fathers. Those who were not recognized were often abandoned by their mothers because of the ostracism that they faced when returning to their native villages. The abandoned children usually ended up living in Catholic and Protestant missionary boarding schools, which were created for this purpose.

    Read the entire chapter here…

  • What being mixed race has taught me

    What being mixed race has taught me

    MsAfropolitan: the cosmopolitan African woman
    2011-01-26

    Minna Salami

    It’s a shame that we black people are the ones that analyse and debate race and racism the most. If society was as post-racial as some try to claim, then I believe that it is white people that should be analysing and debating the effects racism has had on the world, whilst black people should be discussing how to heal from the effects racism has had on us…
     
    …First of all let me say, in the simplest of summaries, that I think that race is a fallacy, a social and scientific construct, developed by mid-century europeans to justify a financial venture.
     
    Nevertheless, racial profiling is now part of our culture so there’s no use denying it. Although I would argue that mixed race people who want to constitute another race are adding another layer to the madness. After all we may accept that racial divides exist, but we can’t build new truths from something that was untrue to start with. But as I’ve said before, we mixed race people have issues. Either way, racial constructions may now appear to be fact, but that’s because people of similar melanin count share similar social experiences.
     
    And it is in this light, not in the ‘one-drop-rule’ light, that I am black. That is to say, people with my particular skin tone and genetic make up share the same ancestral history with those with two African or diaspora parents. We share the history of slavery, oppression and colonization. This history is a shared legacy of the black experience…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Medieval black Briton found

    Medieval black Briton found

    The Times of London
    2010-05-02

    Gillian Passmore

    A SKELETON uncovered in the ruins of a friary is the earliest physical evidence of a black person living in Britain in medieval times.
     
    The remains of a man, found in the friary in Ipswich, Suffolk, which was destroyed by Henry VIII, have been dated to the 13th century.
     
    It is the first solid indication that there were black people in Britain in the 1,000-year period between the departure of the Romans, who had African slaves, and the beginnings of the age of discovery in the 15th century…
      
    …He predates by 150 years the three black people previously known to have lived in Britain. They were identified from tax records…

    Read the entire article here.

  • But Don’t Call Me White: Mixed Race Women Exposing Nuances of Privilege and Oppression Politics

    But Don’t Call Me White: Mixed Race Women Exposing Nuances of Privilege and Oppression Politics

    Sense Publishers
    September 2011
    258 pages
    Hardback ISBN: 978-94-6091-692-2
    Paperback ISBN 978-94-6091-691-5

    Silvia Cristina Bettez, Assistant Professor of Cultural Foundations
    School of Education
    University of North Carolina, Greensboro

    Highlighting the words and experiences of 16 mixed race women (who have one white parent and one parent who is a person of color), Silvia Bettez exposes hidden nuances of privilege and oppression related to multiple positionalites associated with race, class, gender and sexuality. These women are “secret agent insiders” to cultural Whiteness who provide unique insights and perspectives that emerge through their mixed race lenses.  Much of what the participants share is never revealed in mixed—White/of color—company.  Although critical of racial power politics and hierarchies, these women were invested in cross-cultural connections and revealed key insights that can aid all in understanding how to better communicate across lines of cultural difference.

    This book is an invaluable resource for a wide range of activists, scholars and general readers, including sociologists, sociologists of education, feminists, anti-oppression/social justice scholars, critical multicultural educators, and qualitative researchers who are interested in mixed race issues, cross cultural communication, social justice work, or who simply wish to minimize racial conflict and other forms of oppression.

  • Mixed-race numbers double since 2000

    Mixed-race numbers double since 2000

    The Tuscaloosa News
    Tuscaloosa, Alabama
    2011-10-04

    Dana Beyerle, Montgomery Bureau Chief

    More than twice as many people in Alabama say they are of two races than 10 years earlier

    MONTGOMERY | Alabama’s black population increased slightly between 2000 and 2010, but the number of people claiming mixed-race status more than doubled, according to researchers at the University of Alabama.

    More than twice as many people in Alabama indicated they were of mixed race in 2010 as they did on the 2000 Census, the first time the option was available.

    In 2000, 13,068 Alabamians reported they were of two races, one of which was black. For the 2010 Census, 29,807 Alabamians indicated that they were of mixed-race status.

    Carolyn Trent, socio-economic analyst at the Center for Business and Economic Research’s state data center, said Monday the mixed-race increase probably reflects a growing willingness to identify a person’s dual heritage…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Visualizing a Critical Mixed-Race Theory

    Visualizing a Critical Mixed-Race Theory

    Stance: An International Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
    Volume 2 (Spring 2009)
    pages 18-25
    Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana
    ISSN: 1943-1880

    Desiree Valentine, Departments of Philosophy and Communication Studies
    Marquette University

    In this paper, questions regarding the cultural understanding of mixed race are explored, which have the ability to complicate the accepted portrayal of race in society as a black/white binary system. Thus, the acknowledgement of something other than this binary system offers new ways of theorizing about race, particularly concerning the sociopolitical implications of mixed-race designation. This paper argues that the visually mixed-race person has a certain direct ability to challenge the binary and its racist logic. Furthermore, this paper goes on to offer a unique interpretation of where power for working against a racially oppressive system lies within critical mixed-race theory.

    I was in kindergarten when I had a clear understanding of the racialized world in which we live, when I had to check a box on my school registration papers recognizing myself as either black or white. This simple action can be quite complicated when one is a daughter of a black father and white mother. I was finally offered the choice of “mixed” by the time I reached Jr. High. But what is this concept of “mixed” and what does it offer a nation still infused with racism years after the time period known as the “Civil Rights Era” has ended?

    Questions of mixed race bring with them complications to the established black/white binary system and thus offer new ways of theorizing race as well as the sociopolitical implications of mixed race designation. As Lewis Gordon states, “In spite of contemporary resistance to ‘binary’ analyses, a critical discussion of mixed-race categories calls for an understanding of how binary logic functions in discourses on race and racism. Without binaries, no racism will exist.” Can a breakdown of the current binary logic, which places social and political advantages on white individuals, occur with the inception of a critical mixed race theory? And could this lead to a society free of racism?

    This essay will focus on the views of theorists Lewis Gordon and Naomi Zack and their conceptions of the racial binary system and mixed race. I will begin by looking at both theorists’ views on the racial binary system, posing the question, “How do we understand the spectrum of race?” From there, I will explore the approaches each theorist offers for deconstructing the binary, followed by a comparison and critique of both theorizations, with the end goal of offering my own interpretation of where power for working against a racially oppressive system lies within a critical mixed race theory. It is my view that what often gets overlooked in these theorizations is the effect of visual incoherency to the black/white binary that can be provided by the mixed race individual. The concept of the “visibly mixed race person” will be used in this essay to explore the transformative areas for a society still enmeshed in the ugly history of racism…

    Read the entire article here.

  • ‘Going out of stock’: Mulattoes and Levantines in Italian literature and cinema of the Fascist period

    ‘Going out of stock’: Mulattoes and Levantines in Italian literature and cinema of the Fascist period

    University of Connecticut
    2008
    255 pages
    Publication Number: AAT 3329116
    ISBN: 9780549826118

    Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto

    A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut

    My dissertation examines, within Fascist propagandist literature and cinema of the 1930s, the hybrid figures of mulattoes—the offspring of interracial unions between Italian men and native women of Italy’s African colonies—and Levantines—white Italian immigrant merchants and craftsmen living in Alexandria, Egypt, who culturally intermingled with other ethnic groups. The popular novels and feature films I examine reveal the mulattoes and Levantines as interchangeable characters invalidating Benito Mussolini’s efforts at establishing a national identity based on a common cultural background, racial attributes, and religious beliefs. As my title suggests, I take mulattoes and Levantines out of the cinematic and literary “stock” of propaganda, where they were depicted as outside the stirpe (stock) of the Italian people, to reveal the inconsistencies within Fascist ideals of racial and cultural purity. In historical and anthropological terms, I intend to bring to light how literary and cinematic devices used to stigmatize mulattoes and Levantines often undermine themselves, calling attention to what was supposed to be absent or different from what was in “stock,” in the works themselves, in the actual peoples depicted and even in the motives of Fascist colonial enterprises. My analysis is informed by the framework of studies on exoticism, hybridity and mimicry, passing and the tragic mulatto, masculinity and femininity, and cultural studies, all of which lead back to the question: Why did Italians resist the ethnic and cultural metissage during colonialism and still to this day insist on “whiteness” when they describe themselves and their culture?

    Table of Contents

    • Approval Page
    • Acknowledgments
    • Table of contents
    • Introduction
    • Chapter One: ‘Speaking of Itself:’ Exoticism in ‘African Works’ of the Early Italian Colonialism
      • 1.1. Introduction
      • 1.2. Italian Colonialism from the Purchase of the Bay of Assab to the Ethiopian Campaign
      • 1.3. Exoticism and Colonialism
      • 1.4. Exploration and First Italian Colonization: Piaggia, Franzoj, Bianchi and Martini
      • 1.5. Italian Anthropology in the Second Half of the 19th Century and the Hamitic Theory
      • 1.6. Africa in the Literary Works of De Amicis, Salgari, D’Annunzio and Marinetti
    • Chapter Two: ‘Art of Darkness:’ The Aestheticization of Black People in Fascist Colonial Novel
      • 2.1. Introduction
      • 2.2. Mixed Race Children in Italy’s African Colonies
      • 2.3. The Colonial Novel
      • 2.4. Disciplining the Native Population and the Italian Audience
      • 2.5. Rosolino Gabrielli’s II piccolo Brassa
      • 2.6. Arnaldo Cipolla’s Melograno d’Oro, regina d’Etiopia
    • Chapter Three: Undermining Fascist Policies of Order and Risanamento. The Dissident Literature of Enrico Pea and Fausta Cialente
      • 3.1. Introduction
      • 3.2. Alexandria of Egypt: Historical Framework
      • 3.3. The Italian Emigrants of Alexandria
      • 3.4. Growing up in the Shadow of Alexandria
      • 3.5. Enrico Pea’s Egyptian Novels
      • 3.6. Fausta Cialente’s Levantine Characters
    • Chapter Four: Fade to White:’ How Italian Cinema Affiliated with Fascism Framed the Native Population of Italy’s African Colonies
      • 4.1. Introduction
      • 4.2. Demographic Colonization of Ethiopia
      • 4.3. Italian Cinema before Fascism
      • 4.4. ‘African Films’ during the Fascist Period
      • 4.5. Augusto Genina’s Lo squadrone bianco
      • 4.6. Guido Brignone’s Sotto La Croce del Sud
    • Bibliography

    Purchase the dissertation here.

  • Race and Class in Political Science

    Race and Class in Political Science

    Michigan Journal of Race and Law
    Volume 11, Issue 1 (Fall 2005)
    pages 99-114

    Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies
    Harvard University

    As a discipline, political science tends to have a split personality on the issue of whether the driving force behind political action is material or ideational. Put too crudely, White scholars tend to focus on structural conditions as the cause of group identity and action, whereas scholars of color tend to focus on group identity and conflict in order to explain structural conditions. More generally, the relevant debate within political science revolves less around Jacques Derrida versus Karl Marx (as in critical race studies) than around W. E. B. DuBois versus Thomas Hobbes—that is, whether “the problem of the twentieth [and other] centur[ies] is the problem of the color line” or whether people are fundamentally self-interested individualists whose social interaction is shaped by the opportunities presented in a given political structure.
     
    This paper examines those propositions by discussing important recent work by political scientists in several arenas, including ethnic conflict, nationalism, and a belief in linked fate. I then briefly discuss my own research on the relationship between race and class, and on the possible malleability of racial and ethnic concepts and practices to show one way that identity-based and interest-based political analyses interact. I conclude that material forces drive most important political disputes and outcomes, but that politics is best understood through a combination of material and ideational lenses.

    Introduction
     
    The discipline of political science tends to have a split personality on the issue of whether the underlying driving force behind political action is material or ideational. Put too crudely, mainstream (disproportionately White) scholars tend to focus on structural conditions such as laws or the economy, the self-interest of leaders or activists, political incentives, or even geography in order to explain ethnic identification and conflict. Conversely, scholars who study racial politics (disproportionately people of color), tend to start from racial or ethnic identity and conflict in order to explain structural conditions, understandings of self-interest, or political incentives. This generalization, like most, is indeed too crude, and one can immediately identify exceptions; but, it is arguably accurate enough to be a good starting point for further exploration. I develop this argument, with reference to the most prominent work of political scientists in several subfields, in the next two sections below.
     
    Few political scientists, and even fewer in mainstream, high-status departments, focus on discourse analysis growing out of continental European philosophy. Most who do are political philosophers whose central mission does not include explaining empirical phenomena. As a result, the relevant debate within political science revolves less around Derrida versus Marx than around DuBois versus Hobbes—that is, whether “the problem of the twentieth [and other] centur[ies] is the problem of the color line” or whether people are fundamentally self-interested individualists whose social interaction is shaped by the opportunities offered in a given political structure.
     
    This paper begins by examining and illuminating that proposition through discussion of important recent work by political scientists. I then briefly discuss my own prior work on the relationship between race and class, and use my current research to illuminate how tensions between identity-based politics and interest-based politics play out in academic political science as well as in actual political arenas. I conclude roughly where Richard Delgado does: that material forces and access to resources drive most significant political disputes and outcomes, but that politics is most fully understood through a combination of material and ideational lenses…

    …Multiracialism shows some of the same effects. The values placed on multiracial identity are at present completely mixed, even contradictory and mutually hostile. Some people of color (and Whites) embrace the new politics and culture of multiracialism as a means of breaking down the old rigid color lines, as a way to enable people to recognize and identify with their full heritage, as a necessity for good medical care, or as a new frontier for civil rights advocacy. Others see the embrace of multiracialism as merely one more attempt by outsiders to undermine Black or Hispanic solidarity, as a strategy to disrupt litigation or legislation around civil rights, voting rights, and employment discrimination, or as an underhanded way to distance oneself from Blackness (or Latino identity). Still others see it as a pragmatic reality, given rates of immigration and intermarriage, that political actors must accommodate as well as they can. Regardless of how one feels about it, there is growing evidence that the fact of being multiracial has important consequences for one’s life chances. For example, the socioecononomic status of biracial children fall consistently between those of their lower status parent and those of their higher status parent. Thus, on the one hand, the fact of having mixed racial or ethnic ancestry has real, material, consequences for one’s life – independent of the language with which we understand that fact. But on the other hand, the growth of and contestation around a multiracial movement show that the mere fact of having parents of different races is politically and personally very different from the claim of a multiracial identity and community…

    Read the entire essay here.

  • Who Will You Let Me Be?

    Who Will You Let Me Be?

    Race, Ethnicity, and Me: Autobiographical Reflections by Trinity University Students
    Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas
    Fall 2008

    Claire Murphy-Cook

    Race, Ethnicity, and Me is a collection of autobiographical essays written by Trinity University students as an assignment for a course taught by Professor David Spener in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. In their essays, students use research findings and scholarly concepts to analyze their own experiences involving racial and ethnic identities in the United States. The collection is intended for use by students and educators as a tool for promoting dialogue about diversity issues as they affect their academic institutions and communities. The essays it contains were written by students in the fall 2008 semester.

    Claire Murphy-Cook comes from what, in her words, “can only be described as an alternative family.” She has two lesbian mothers who have been in a relationship for nearly thirty years. Both her mothers are non-Hispanic whites. Her father is a mixed-race, gay man from Brazil who was asked by her mothers to be their sperm donor. He has, nonetheless, been an active presence in Claire’s life. In her essay, she describes how traveling to Brazil with him as a teenager gave her a new sense of her own identity in racial and ethnic terms.

    To be mixed race means not having a place in any defined racial categories. It means being defined by standards that do not recognize who you are or where you came from, checking too many bubbles on Scantrons, and puzzling over census categorizations. What is it exactly that places us in these arbitrary categories? How does a person come to terms with the gaps in society’s perceptions about you and the way you see yourself?…

    …Though I am aware that American society perceives me as white, I view myself as half Irish (white) and half Brazilian (Latina), someone multiracial. Growing up, there was always an emphasis of both of these identities; I can remember numerous times when my parents told me that I was “not just white.” They also told me that because of societal perceptions of my race that I was treated better than if than if my skin were darker. They were not so overt as to tell me that I had white privilege, but we always talked about how my dad used to be stopped and searched in the airport all the time. Then my moms would bring up how we never got stopped or searched at the airport, and tell my sister and I that it was because we were two white ladies traveling with young daughters. Although never explicitly mentioned as such, I have always been both aware and wary of my white privilege…

    Read the entire essay here.