Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Emerging Voices in Academia: Critical Mixed Race Theory

    Emerging Voices in Academia: Critical Mixed Race Theory

    Little Theater, Building 1200
    Nappa Vally College
    Napa, California
    2011-09-22, 16:00 PDT (Local Time)

    Andrew Jolivétte, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies (Also see biographies at Speak Out! and Native Wiki.)
    Center for Health Disparities Research and Training
    San Fransisco State University

    Dr. Andrew Jolivétte is an accomplished educator, writer, speaker, and social/cultural critic. His work spans many different social and political arenas – from education reform and LGBT/Queer community of color identity issues to mixed-race identity, critical whiteness studies, gay marriage, and AIDS disparities among people of color. Jolivétte is currently an assistant professor in the American Indian Studies Department and also teaches in the Ethnic Studies Program at San Francisco State University. He recently completed a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship through the National Academy of Sciences. Professor Jolivétte is a mixed-race studies specialist with a particular interest in Comparative Race Relations, Creole studies, Black-Indians, critical mixed-race movement building, and mixed-race health disparities. He is the author of, Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority (Policy Press, February 2012), Cultural Representation in Native America (AltaMira Press, July 2006) which is a part of the Contemporary Native American Communities Series and Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed Race Native American Identity (Lexington Books, January 2007).

    For more information, click here.

  • Mixed Race Britain – How The World Got Mixed Up

    Mixed Race Britain – How The World Got Mixed Up

    BBC Press Office: Press Packs
    2011-09-05


    Ruth Williams, Seretse Khama and family

    This one-off documentary explores the historical and contemporary social, sexual and political attitudes to race mixing.

    Throughout modern history, interracial sex has been one of society’s great taboos, and across many parts of the world, mixed race relationships have been subjected to a range of deterrents. Mixed couples have endured shame, stigma and persecution and many have risked the threat of ostracism from their friends and families.

    In several parts of the world, including South Africa during the apartheid era, governments introduced legislation to prohibit race mixing. Laws against race mixing were still in force in 16 American states until they were declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court’s verdict in the Loving v Virginia case of 1967.

    Yet despite the social and legal constraints–and the even more violent extra-judicial attempts to discourage race mixing organised by extreme nationalist groups like the Ku Klux Klan–interracial relationships have been an ever-present feature of societies throughout modern times.

    Through the stories of interracial relationships which created scandals in their own time–including the liaisons between the East India Company’s James Achilles Kirkpatrick and the Muslim princess Khair un-Nissa at the beginning of the 19th Century, and the romance of the Botswanan royal Seretse Khama and the middle-class British girl Ruth Williams in the years after the Second World War–the film examines the complex history of interracial relationships and chronicles the shifts in attitudes that for centuries have created controversy and anxiety all around the world.

    Contributors to this film include the former Labour Cabinet minister Tony Benn; who founded the Seretse Khama Defence Council; and the esteemed moral philosopher Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose mother Peggy Cripps–the daughter of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps married his father, the Ghanaian political activist Joe Appiah in 1953.

  • Mixed Race Britain – Mixed Britannia

    Mixed Race Britain – Mixed Britannia

    BBC Press Office: Press Packs
    2011-09-05

    In this three-part series George Alagiah explores the remarkable and untold story of Britain’s mixed-race community and examines through the decades how mixed race has become one of the country’s fastest growing ethnic groups. Most of all, the films tell a tale of love, of couples coming together to fight prejudice and create a new society.

    The first film (1910-1939) [Air Date: 2011-10-06, 20:00Z] discovers the love between merchant seamen and liberated female workers and witnesses the riots in British port cities as returning white soldiers find local girls in relationships with other men. George hears about the eugenics research examining mixed-race children and learns how Britain avoided the race laws and race hatred of fascism that scarred other countries in Europe.

    The second film (1940-1965) sees the Second World War creating a miniature baby boom of “brown babies” born to local British women and African American GIs, and tells the tragic story of the British-Chinese children in Liverpool who lost their Chinese seamen fathers. With the post-war mass immigration, mixed couples, once rare and exotic, were becoming more common and society finally witnessed the first interracial kiss on British television.

    In the Seventies a new wave of immigration was settling in Britain, the National Front was on the march and mixed-race families faced violence on the street (film three, 1965-2011). George learns about the debates surrounding mixed race adoption and hears about a 21st story love-story as the couple struggle to overcome the cultural prejudice from the community.

    Notes from Steven F. Riley.

    For some early 20th century background material on the topics covered in Mixed Britannia, see:

  • Mixed Race Britain – Introduction

    Mixed Race Britain – Introduction

    BBC Press Office: Press Packs
    2011-09-05


    Mixed Race Britain is put under the spotlight this September on BBC Two in a collection of revealing and compelling new programmes.

    Britain in 2011 has proportionately the largest mixed population in the Western world, but a hundred years ago people of mixed race lived on the edges of British society. With an exciting mix of drama and documentaries, this season explores the mixed race experience in Britain–and around the world–from the distant past to the present-day, using the testimonies of a range of people, both ordinary and extraordinary, to illuminate this seldom-told story.

    Janice Hadlow, Controller of BBC Two, says: “It is 10 years since the full ‘mixed race’ category was added to the 2001 census and a timely moment to explore this subject matter. But this is not just a season for mixed race people, or those in a mixed race relationship. It’s BBC Two’s role to reflect contemporary society and the story of mixed-race Britain is a valuable exploration into the way we live now. I hope our audience will find it fresh and inspiring.”…

    Read the entire press release here.

  • A Snug Little Flock: The Social Origins of the Riel Resistance, 1869-70

    A Snug Little Flock: The Social Origins of the Riel Resistance, 1869-70

    Watson & Dwyer Publishing, Winnipeg, Manitoba
    1991
    290 pages
    ISBN: 0-920486-48-7

    Frits Pannekoek, President
    Athabasca University, Athabasca, Alberta, Canada

    Questions about the identities of the mixed-blood Indian-European peoples of Canada and the United States have puzzled historians and anthropologists in both countries. Who are the mixedbloods of North America? Why do they have a strong collective identity in Canada, and virtually none in the United States? Why is the collective identity in Canada largely French-Cree and Catholic? What happened to the English-speaking Protestant Halfbreeds? Why do the Protestant, English-speaking mixed-bloods no longer exist as a unique group either in Canada or in the United States, but identify themselves as White, Indian or Métis in Canada and Indian or White in the United States? While it has become commonplace to view mixed-blood peoples as products of the culture and economy of the fur trade, it is much more difficult to trace the roots of the process that created an identifiable Metis ‘nation’. It is even more difficult to determine why no strong mixed-blood identity emerged in the United States.

    Table of Contents

    • Acknowledgements
    • Preface
    • Introduction
    • 1 The Red River Setting
    • 2 A Question of Leadership
    • 3 The First Years
    • 4 A Little Britain in the Wilderness
    • 5 Free Trade and Social Fragmentation
    • 6 A Strife of Blood
    • 7 The Rev. G. O. Corbett and an Uprising of the People
    • 8 The Halfbreeds and the Riel Protest
    • 9 The Métis and the Riel Protest
    • 10 Conclusion
    • Historiographical Note
    • Selected Bibliography
    • End Notes
    • Index

    Read the entire book here.

  • Are you white enough?

    Are you white enough?

    Salon.com
    2008-11-10

    Laura Miller, Senior Writer

    From Jim Crow laws to workplace discrimination, the history of race and the American courtroom is incendiary.

    Come January, Barack Obama will be sworn in as either the first black president of the United States or the 44th white one, or both, or neither, depending on how you interpret his race. Race is such a monumental force in American culture and politics that the idea that it has to be interpreted may strike many people as bizarre. Of course Obama is black, some might argue, judging by his appearance, or by his self-identification as an African-American or even by his marriage and important relationships with other African-Americans. Yet more than one commentator has complained that he isn’t “black enough,” by which they may mean that his complexion isn’t dark enough, or that he was raised by whites, or that his African father provided him with no heritage in North American slavery, or that he doesn’t sufficiently align himself with the policies of a certain portion of African-American political leadership.

    The problem with race as Americans understand it is that it doesn’t really exist. It is a brutal fact of life for millions of citizens, and an inescapable problem for the rest, but it is also, as Ariela J. Gross writes in her densely researched “What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America,” a “moving target,” whose definition and meaning is always in flux. Many of us can avoid encountering this strange truth in the imprecise realms of cultural and social life, but when it comes to the law, imprecision just doesn’t cut it. Gross’ book, a history of cases in which people have challenged their official racial designation, eloquently demonstrates just how difficult it can be to say what race—mine, yours, anybody’s—actually consists of…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction

    Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction

    American Literary History
    Volume 23, Number 3 (Fall 2011)
    pages 574-599
    E-ISSN: 1468-4365 Print ISSN: 0896-7148

    Ramón Saldívar, Professor of History
    Stanford University

    Since the turn of the century, a new generation of minority writers has come to prominence whose work signals a radical turn to a postrace era in American literature. Outlining a paradigm that I term historical fantasy, I argue that in the twenty-first century, the relationship between race and social justice, race and identity, and indeed, race and history requires these writers to invent a new “imaginary” for thinking about the nature of a just society and the role of race in its construction. It also requires the invention of new forms to represent it. In this light, I address the topic of race and narrative theory in two contexts: in relation to the question of literary form and in relation to history. Doing so will allow me to explain the reasons for what I take to be the inauguration of a new stage in the history of the novel by twenty-first-century US ethnic writers.

    At the outset, I wish to make one thing clear about my use of the term “postrace”: race and racism, ethnicity and difference are nowhere near extinct in contemporary America. W. E. B. Du Bois’s momentous pronouncement in 1901 that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” could not have been a more accurate assessment of the fate of race during the twentieth century (354). Today race remains a central question, but one no longer defined exclusively in shades of black or white, or in the exact manner we once imagined. That is, apart from the election of Barack Obama, one other matter marks the present differently from the racial history of the American past: race can no longer be considered exclusively in the binary form, black/white, which has traditionally structured racial discourse in the US. If for no other reason than the profoundly shifting racial demographics of early twenty-first-century America, a new racial imaginary is required to account for the…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Between Two Worlds: Consequences of Dual-Group Membership among Children

    Between Two Worlds: Consequences of Dual-Group Membership among Children

    University of Texas, Austin
    May 2008
    98 pages

    Katherine Vera Aumer-Ryan

    Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

    Increasing numbers of individuals are simultaneously members of two or more social categories. To investigate the effects of single- versus dual-identity status on children’s group views and intergroup attitudes, elementary-school-age children (N = 91) attending a summer school program were assigned to novel color groups that included single-identity (“blue” and “red”) and dual-identity (“bicolored,” or half red and half blue) members. The degree to which dual-identity status was verified by the authority members was also manipulated: teachers in some classrooms were instructed to label and make use of three social groups (“blues,” “reds,” “bicolors”) to organize their classrooms, whereas teachers in other classrooms were instructed to label and make use of only the two “mono-colored” groups (“blues” and “reds”). After several weeks in their classrooms, children’s (a) views of group membership (i.e., importance, satisfaction, perceived similarity, group preference), (b) intergroup attitudes (i.e., traits ratings, group evaluations, peer preferences), and (c) categorization complexity (i.e., tendency to sort individuals along multiple dimensions simultaneously) were assessed. Results varied across measures but, in general, indicated that dual-identity status affected children’s views of their ingroup. Specifically, dual-identity children in classrooms in which their status was not verified were more likely to (a) perceive themselves as similar to other ingroup members (i.e., bicolored children), (b) want to keep their shirt color, and (c) assume that a new student would want their shirt color more than their single-identity peers. They also showed higher levels of ingroup bias in their competency ratings of groups than their single-identity peers, and demonstrated greater cognitive flexibility when thinking about social categories than their single-identity peers. Overall, these results suggest that dual-identity children experience identity issues differently than their single-identity peers and that additional theories are needed to address the complexities of social membership and bias among children with dual memberships.

    Table of Contents

    • List of Figures
    • List of Tables
    • Chapter One: Introduction and Literature Review
      • Introduction
      • Theoretical Background
      • Single- Versus Dual-Group Identity
      • Contextual, Individual Differences and Developmental Factors
    • Chapter Two: Method
      • Participants
      • Overview of Procedure
      • Experimental Conditions
      • Posttest Measures
      • Views of Group Membership
      • Categorization Complexity
      • Conformity
    • Chapter Three: Results
      • Overview
      • Effects of Identity Status and Condition on Views of Group Membership
      • Effects of Identity Status on Intergroup Attitudes
      • Categorization Task
      • Individual and Developmental Differences
    • Chapter Four: Discussion
    • Figure
    • Tables
    • Appendices
      • Appendix A: Intergroup Outcome Measures
      • Appendix B: Conformity
      • Appendix C: Sample of Presidential Poster
      • Appendix D: Novel Categorization Stimuli
    • References
    • Vita

    List of Figures

    • Figure 1: Average Scores of Similarity to a Child’s In-Group Across Conditions and Identities

    List of Tables

    • Table 1: Participant Characteristics Across Conditions
    • Table 2: Means (and Standard Deviations) for Posttest Measures Across Conditions and Identities
    • Table 3: HLM Results for the Predictors of Children’s Ratings for Group Importance, Happiness, and Similarity
    • Table 4: HLM Results for the Interactions of Predictors of Children’s Ratings of Similarity
    • Table 5: HLM Results for Predictors of Children’s Ratings for Peer Preferences and Traits
    • Table 6: HLM Results for Predictors of Children’s Ratings of Group Competencies
    • Table 7: HLM Results for Predictors of Children’s Novel Categorization Task
    • Table 8: Percentage of Children who Desired to Change their Shirt to Red, Blue, or Bicolored Across Identities
    • Table 9: Percentage of Children who Desired to Change their Shirt to Red, Blue, or Bicolored Across Conditions
    • Table 10: Percentage of Children Wanting to Keep their Group Membership
    • Table 11: Percentage of Children Wanting to Keep their Group Membership Across Conditions
    • Table 12: Percentage of Children Predicting a New Student’s Preference of Shirt Color Across Identities
    • Table 13: Percentage of Children by Condition Predicting a New Student’s Preference of Shirt Color Across Conditions
    • Table 14: Percentage of Children Predicting a New Student’s Preference of Shirt Color Across Conditions and Identities
    • Table 15 Means and Standard Errors of Self-Group Similarity Across Identity
    • Table 16: Means and Standard Errors of In-Group Peer Preference Across Conditions
    • Table 17: Intergroup Correlation Matrix
    • Table 18: Betas of Age, Conformity, and Manipulation on Dependent Variables

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • Deconstructing Jaco: Genetic Heritage of an Afrikaner

    Deconstructing Jaco: Genetic Heritage of an Afrikaner

    Annals of Human Genetics
    Volume 71, Issue 5 (September 2007)
    pages 674–688
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-1809.2007.00363.x

    J. M. Greeff, Professor of Genetics
    University of Pretoria

    It is often assumed that Afrikaners stem from a small number of Dutch immigrants. As a result they should be genetically homogeneous, show founder effects and be rather inbred. By disentangling my own South African pedigree, that is on average 12 generations deep, I try to quantify the genetic heritage of an Afrikaner. As much as 6% of my genes have been contributed by slaves from Africa, Madagascar and India, and a woman from China. This figure compares well to other genetic and genealogical estimates. Seventy three percent of my lineages coalesce into common founders, and I am related in excess of 10 times to 20 founder ancestors (30 times to Willem Schalk van der Merwe). Significant founder effects are thus possible. The overrepresentation of certain founder ancestors is in part explained by the fact that they had more children. This is remarkable given that they lived more than 300 years (or 12 generations) ago. DECONSTRUCT, a new program for pedigree analysis, identified 125 common ancestors in my pedigree. However, these common ancestors are so distant from myself, paths of between 16 and 25 steps in length, that my inbreeding coefficient is not unusually high (f≈0.0019).

    Introduction

    ‘After three centuries of evolution the population structure of the Afrikaners is still far from stable, and there does not appear to be much prospect of its ever attaining uniformity… The numerous and often mutually contradictory genetic statements frequently made about them can consequently all be simultaneously true. The Afrikaner is a product of miscegenation, the last ‘pure European’, pathologically inbred and a manifestation of hybrid vigour, all at the same time.’ (Nurse et al. 1985)

    Afrikaners are often considered a rather homogeneous, probably rather inbred, white population of Dutch ancestry. Yet, as the above quotation illustrates, there are uncertainties about the genetic composition of Afrikaners. Due to Afrikaners’ high linkage disequilibrium, they are seen as a fruitful hunting ground for genes associated with disease (Hall et al. 2002). It is thus important that we have a clear appreciation of the Afrikaners’ genetic heritage. In what follows I address the questions of racial admixture, nationalities, founder effects and inbreeding in the Afrikaner. I do so in a novel way: rather than taking a sample of modern Afrikaners and genotyping them, I start with one living Afrikaner and trace most of his South African ancestors. In this way I cast a net into his past and hope to get an impression of what the genetic heritage of a typical Afrikaner may be…

    …Given that genealogists could show that as much as 7% of Afrikaner genetic heritage is not of European descent (Heese, 1971), I find it curious that a system such as apartheid worked in South Africa. Seven percent is not a trivial amount, and is equivalent to having slightly more than a great-great-grandparent who was non-European. Since most of this non-European genetic heritage came into the Afrikaner population via female slaves, one would expect that as much as 14% of Afrikaner mitochondrial DNA is not even European. This female bias influx stems from the fact that emigrants were predominantly male, resulting in a male biased sex ratio of adults (Gouws, 1981).

    Similarly, genetic studies also give support for this mixed racial ancestry. Working with a number of blood group gene frequencies, Botha & Pritchard (1972) estimated that beween 6–7% admixture between western European and slaves from Africa and the East, and/or Khoikhoi, would be required to explain the allele frequencies. Nurse et al. (1985) listed a number of alleles typical to the Khoisan and Bantu-speaking peoples that are found in low frequencies in Afrikaners (ABO system: Abantu; glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase: GdA- and GdA; Rhesus: Rº; Haemoglobin C)…

     Read the entire article here.

  • Mulattoes may be viewed as the apotheosis, or as the nadir, of Afro-American strength…

    In conclusion, then, mulattoes may be viewed as the apotheosis, or as the nadir, of Afro-American strength—as the hope or despair of the future. In this regard, these recent studies often differ profoundly. However, they do demonstrate significant points of agreement regarding the historical roots and role of Americans of mixed black-white ancestry—regarding their growing predominance within Afro-America itself, and regarding the very early origins of their distinctiveness. Under certain historical circumstances, their distinctiveness from black Americans was viewed and treated as an asset; under different circumstances it became a liability, particularly when and where white supremacy was threatened. During the Jim Crow era the one-drop ideology was used as a weapon to put them back in place—to prevent the growth of this “mongrelized race” which was neither white nor black. But ironically, it was this oppression which drove mulattoes to identify themselves with black Americans, thereby strengthening Afro-American solidarity and self-assertion…

    Patricia Morton, “From Invisible Man to ‘New People’: The Recent Discovery of American Mulattoes,” Phylon (1960-), Volume 46, Number 2 (1985): 106-122.