Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Whites can be black if they wish, says lecturers’ union

    Whites can be black if they wish, says lecturers’ union

    The Telegraph
    2019-11-18

    Mike Wright, Social Media Correspondent

    Anthony Lennon 
    Anthony Lennon, a white theatre director who describes himself as an ‘African born again’ Credit: Twitter

    People should be allowed to identify as black no matter what colour they are born, a lecturers’ union has said.

    The University and College Union (UCU), which represents more than 100,000 university lecturers and staff, set out its position on whether people should be able to self-identify as different races or genders.

    In the paper “UCU Position on Trans Inclusion”, it stated: “The UCU has a long history of enabling members to self-identify, whether that is being black, disabled, LGBT or women.”…

    …The debate over racial self-identification has become heated in recent years. Last November, Anthony Lennon, a white theatre director who describes himself as an “African born again”, drew criticism for securing public funding intended to help ethnic minorities develop their stage careers.

    Mr Lennon, 53, who was born in London and whose parents are Irish, won a place on a two-year Arts Council-funded scheme, after a leading black theatre company accepted his claim to be of “mixed heritage”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • UAH professor publishes new book on mixed-race at home and abroad

    UAH professor publishes new book on mixed-race at home and abroad

    University of Alabama in Huntsville
    2019-11-21

    jennifer sims
    Dr. Jennifer Patrice Sims, Assistant Professor of Sociology at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) recently published her second book
    Photo Credit Michael Mercier

    Dr. Jennifer Patrice Sims, Assistant Professor of Sociology at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) recently published her second book, Mixed-Race in the US and UK: Comparing the Past, Present, and Future coauthored with UK-based scholar Dr. Chinelo L. Njaka. The book is the second in the Critical Mixed Race Studies book series by Emerald Publishing…

    Read the entire press release here.

  • Despite this history, and although denying people civil rights according to their race is no longer legal, socially, the one-drop rule is still very much alive.

    Despite this history, and although denying people civil rights according to their race is no longer legal, socially, the one-drop rule is still very much alive. Many Americans, including liberals who politically reject racism, routinely define white people who have black ancestors as “passing” for white. The same Americans would find it absurd to accuse a black person who has white ancestors of “passing” for black, since the one drop rule is based on hypodescent—i.e., the belief that African “blood” overwhelms all others. Sadly, folks who employ the term “passing” seem unaware that they are repeating two centuries of essentialist pseudoscience developed by white supremacists to justify slavery and segregation. —Victoria Bynum

    Eric London, “Historian Victoria Bynum on the inaccuracies of the New York Times 1619 Project,” World Socialist Web Site, October 30, 2019. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/10/30/bynu-o30.html.

  • The return of race science — the quest to fortify racism with bad biology

    The return of race science — the quest to fortify racism with bad biology

    Quirks & Quarks
    CBC Radio
    2019-11-15

    Bob McDonald, Host and CBC’s Chief Science Correspondent


    An anti-racism demonstrator holds a placard during a protest march in 2018 in London, U.K. Author Angela Saini said when she grew up as an ethnic minority in the city, there was a lot of racism in her area. (Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty)

    A look at the re-emergence of ‘scientific’ attempts to explain perceived racial differences

    In an era of rising ethnic nationalism and white supremacy, a British science writer’s new book explores why old notions of “race science” are finding new popularity.

    This revival drew Angela Saini to explore the history and new life that’s been given to the idea that science can justify old ideas of human difference based on skin colour, nationality or religion — what she called the biologization of race. The persistence of this idea in the modern era can be seen in a variety of ways, from the popularity of dubious DNA ancestry testing to shadowy online groups repackaging scientific racism for the 21st century.

    In her new book Superior: The Return of Race Science, Saini traces the history of race science back to the Age of Enlightenment, when philosophers and European thinkers started to classify human beings based on colour or other superficial features, the same way they classified plants or other animals.

    Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald spoke with Saini about a range of topics: how modern science shows that racial categories are social constructs, not well-defined biological categories; how notions of race science are fed by and feed into politics; and how well-intentioned scientists should think about studying questions about human difference, including marginalized groups who may share susceptibility to disease…

    Read the article an listen to the interview here.

  • ‘Please don’t get a tan’: passing as white in Hong Kong is a reward for hard work you didn’t do

    ‘Please don’t get a tan’: passing as white in Hong Kong is a reward for hard work you didn’t do

    Hong Kong Free Press
    2018-11-04

    Sarah Denise Moran

    Sarah Denise Moran
    Photo: Sarah Denise Moran.

    Twenty-six years ago, my Filipino mother left behind everything familiar to work abroad as a domestic helper. Around the same time, my British father also left his home country in search of better opportunities.

    Then in 1995, I won the lottery of birth by being born in Hong Kong to a British father and a Filipino Mum. That day, I gained a British passport, white skin, and a lifetime of privilege.

    I grew up in local schools in Hong Kong. I can speak, read, and write Chinese fluently and half of my friends are Chinese. Which is why despite not being Chinese in Hong Kong, I never felt like I was different or didn’t fit in.

    Until this one time, when I was seven years old, my teacher started explaining to the class how the Chinese term gwai mui (literally ghost girl in Cantonese, used to describe western females) came about. Apparently, when Westerners arrived in China for the first time, Chinese people thought they were so white, they could almost be ghosts.

    Being the only foreigner in a local Chinese school, I was naturally the “ghost girl” in class. What followed was a week of my classmates shying away from me, and occasional gwai mui remarks. That was the first time I realised skin colour meant something, and my only close-to-negative experience from being white-passing in Hong Kong…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Historian Victoria Bynum on the inaccuracies of the New York Times 1619 Project

    Historian Victoria Bynum on the inaccuracies of the New York Times 1619 Project

    World Socialist Web Site
    2019-10-30

    Eric London


    Victoria Bynum

    An interview with the author of The Free State of Jones

    Historian Victoria Bynum, author of The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), spoke to the World Socialist Web Site’s Eric London on the historical falsifications involved in the New York Times’ “1619 Project.”

    The 1619 Project, launched by the Times in August, presents American history in a purely racial lens and blames all “white people” for the enslavement of 4 million black people as chattel property.

    Bynum is an expert on the attitude of Southern white yeomen farmers and impoverished people toward slavery. Her book The Free State of Jones studied efforts by anti-slavery and anti-confederate militia leader Newton Knight, who abandoned the Confederate army and led an armed insurrection against the Confederacy during the Civil War. It was adapted for the big screen in Gary Ross’s 2016 film Free State of Jones.

    * * *

    WSWS: Hello Victoria, it is a pleasure to speak to you. The New York Times writes that slavery is “America’s national sin,” implying that the whole of American society was responsible for the crime of slavery.

    But [Abraham] Lincoln said in his second inaugural address in 1865 that the Civil War was being fought “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” What was the attitude of the subjects of your study toward slavery? Is it possible to separate those attitudes from the economic grievances that many white farmers and poor people harbored against the Confederate government of the slavocracy?

    Victoria Bynum: Direct comments about the injustice of slavery are rare among plain Southern farmers who left few written records. Knowing this at the outset of my research, I was delighted to find clear and strong objections to slavery expressed by the Wesleyan Methodist families of Montgomery County, North Carolina, which I highlighted in my first book, Unruly Women. In 1852, members of the Lovejoy Methodist Church invited the Rev. Adam Crooks, a well-known abolitionist, to address their church…

    …WSWS: Do you see parallels between the New York Times’ references to genetics (the historic “DNA” of the United States) and the argument, advanced by the slavocracy, that “one drop” of black “blood” was enough to count a light-skinned person in the expanded the pool of slave labor. Can you expand on this?

    VB: The frequent correlation of identity with ancestral DNA continues to mask the historical economic forces and shifting constructions of class, race and gender that have far more relevance to one’s identity than one’s DNA can ever reveal. Historically, race-based slavery required legal definitions of whiteness and blackness that upheld the fiction that British/US slavery was reserved for Africans for whom the institution “civilized.” From the earliest days of colonization, however, both forced and consensual sexual relations created slaveholding and non-slaveholding households that were neither “black” nor “white,” but rather were mixed-race. The frequent rape of enslaved women by slaveholders produced multitudes of such children, but so also were many mixed-race children born to whites and free blacks. Slave law dictated that the child of an enslaved woman was also a slave—and therefore “black”—regardless of who fathered the child. Conversely, deciding the race of children born to free women who crossed the color line was not so easy, and became even more difficult after slavery was abolished. In the segregated South, where one’s ability to work, live, love, travel and enjoy the full benefits of American citizenship depended on one’s perceived race, such questions might end up in court, as was the case in 1946 for Newt Knight’s mixed-race great-grandson, Davis Knight, after he married a white woman. While custom dictated that Davis Knight was “black” based on his great-grandmother Rachel’s mixed-race status, state laws required more precise evidence. Under Mississippi law, unless one was proved to have at least one-fourth African ancestry, one was legally—though not socially—white. On this basis, Davis Knight went free…

    Read the entire interview here.

  • But I was unprepared for intense cross-examination about where I was from. I did not understand, until I was a teenager, that my father was coaching me in the art of being a “good” black girl, acceptable to white people.

    After my school experiences, any demands to explain where I came from disconcerted me. My parents taught me to hold my head erect, to look directly at adults who addressed me, to smile with my eyes not just my teeth, to speak clearly, and to be conspicuously open, transparent and honest. My dad said that if I did not follow this advice I would be regarded as “shifty”, duplicitous and unworthy of attention. But I was unprepared for intense cross-examination about where I was from. I did not understand, until I was a teenager, that my father was coaching me in the art of being a “good” black girl, acceptable to white people.

    Hazel Carby, “My Jamaican dad was an RAF hero. Why did no one believe me?” The Guardian, November 16, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/nov/16/jamiacan-father-raf-hero-.

  • Raptors GM draws on mixed upbringing in building team’s post-Kawhi Leonard identity

    Raptors GM draws on mixed upbringing in building team’s post-Kawhi Leonard identity

    The Washington Post
    2019-11-19

    Ben Golliver, NBA Reporter


    “I don’t think I look super Asian or white,” said Toronto Raptors General Manager Bobby Webster, who became the NBA’s youngest GM when he was appointed in 2017. “Being both was freeing.” (Chris Young/The Canadian Press/Associated Press)

    LOS ANGELES — When Bobby Webster took the stage as a guest speaker at the U.S.-Japan Council’s annual conference earlier this month, the moderator introduced him as a world champion and a hapa.

    The first label was self-evident: Webster is the Toronto Raptors’ general manager, a low-key strategic planner and salary cap specialist who reports to Masai Ujiri, the organization’s brash, larger-than-life president.

    The second term — a Hawaiian phrase that means “part” and refers to people of mixed race — described Webster’s Japanese-American background. Webster’s mother, Jean, descended from Japanese immigrants who came to work in the stables at a Hawaiian sugar plantation around the turn of the 20th century. Webster’s father, Bob, a redheaded Chicago native, moved to Hawaii in his late 20s and never left…

    Read the entire article here.

  • My Jamaican dad was an RAF hero. Why did no one believe me?

    My Jamaican dad was an RAF hero. Why did no one believe me?

    The Guardian
    2019-11-16

    Hazel Carby, Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies; Professor of American Studies
    Yale University


    Hazel Carby: ‘I learned that I was not considered British.’ Photograph: Michel Huneault/The Guardian

    My Welsh mother met my father during the war. From childhood, I have grown to dread the question: ‘Where are you from?’

    I was in primary school the first time it happened. The boy who sat at the desk to my right – the one who used to pinch my arm whenever the teacher’s back was turned – finished talking about his father’s war experience of heat and flies and deserts while driving tanks across Egypt, and looked at me smugly as if to say, “Beat that.” It was my turn to describe my father’s contribution to the war effort. I stated clearly that my father served in the RAF. On the piano at home stood a photograph of a young man in RAF uniform, with an enigmatic smile, head tilted at a slightly rakish and daredevil angle, holding a pipe in his hand. In my eyes he was the epitome of wartime British heroism.

    Before I could describe the photograph, I was interrupted by the teacher who told me to sit and listen carefully. I sat. The entire class was stunned. Silenced by her anger, they stared at me, the culprit, as the teacher issued a warning about the dire consequences of telling lies. She insisted that there were no “coloured” people in Britain during the war, that no coloured people served in any of the armed services, and certainly not in the RAF, the most elite branch of the British military.

    Speaking in the slow and deliberate tone of voice that she adopted when she would brook no opposition, she declared that coloured people were not British, but immigrants who arrived on these shores after the war had been fought and won. We all shifted back in our seats, and I cowered in shock and humiliation…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and “The American Negro”

    Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and “The American Negro”

    University of Georgia Press
    2019-11-15
    416 pages
    Paperback ISBN: 9-780-8203-5626-6

    John David Smith, Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History
    University of North Carolina, Charlotte

    The classic biography of the infamous black Negrophobe William Hannibal Thomas, with a new preface by the author

    William Hannibal Thomas (1843-1935) served with distinction in the U.S. Colored Troops in the Civil War (in which he lost an arm) and was a preacher, teacher, lawyer, state legislator, and journalist following Appomattox. In many publications up through the 1890s, Thomas espoused a critical though optimistic black nationalist ideology. After his mid-twenties, however, Thomas began exhibiting a self-destructive personality, one that kept him in constant trouble with authorities and always on the run. His book The American Negro (1901) was his final self-destructive act.

    Attacking African Americans in gross and insulting language in this utterly pessimistic book, Thomas blamed them for the contemporary “Negro problem” and argued that the race required radical redemption based on improved “character,” not changed “color.” Vague in his recommendations, Thomas implied that blacks should model themselves after certain mulattoes, most notably William Hannibal Thomas.

    Black Judas is a biography of Thomas, a publishing history of The American Negro, and an analysis of that book’s significance to American racial thought. The book is based on fifteen years of research, including research in postamputation trauma and psychoanalytic theory on self-hatred, to assess Thomas’s metamorphosis from a constructive race critic to a black Negrophobe. John David Smith argues that his radical shift resulted from key emotional and physical traumas that mirrored Thomas’s life history of exposure to white racism and intense physical pain.