Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

recent posts

about

  • Interview: Whiteness Redux

    Interview: Whiteness Redux

    borderlands: e-journal
    Volume 3, Number 2 (2004)

    Mike Hill, Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies
    State University of New York, Albany

    Damien W. Riggs
    University of Adelaide, South Australia

    1. Damien: As a research area that is rapidly growing within ‘Western nations’, how would you understand whiteness studies as both creating the potential for critique, but also the potential for reinforcing the normative status of whiteness?

    2. Mike: It’s interesting that you use the word “potential.” Because one of the issues that the whiteness studies phenomena in the US has raised—productively, if painfully—is whether or not humanities research in Western nations is at this moment capable of doing anything significant at all, critical, normative, whatever. Whither whiteness, and with it, whither scholarly books as the most effective basis for political agency? From a historical vantage point this is not a flippant question. We assume that writing leads to what significant social event, exactly? On the whiteness front, we know that writing has lead, well, to more writing, more conferences, additional debate. Do we presume a connection between this relatively recent outpouring of scholarship and progressive mass movements, radical insurgencies, real social change? The relation between humanities knowledge and the masses has I believe never been more confused. But neither has it been more crucial.

    …15. Damien: There has been much talk recently, particular within the US and UK, of white people engaging in a movement towards ‘race abolitionism’, and as being ‘race traitors’. Do you think this connects with work in the area of whiteness studies, and in what regards (if any) do you see it as creating the potential for challenging the racialised structures of ‘Western societies’?

    16. Mike: That word “potential” again. If we could only measure such a force in some way beyond just saying “yes, this or that provides our one true hope,” or “no, it surely does not.” I’ve been somewhat critical of the race traitor movement in the US on the grounds that it was voluntaristic and prone to all sorts of ontological thefting, to fetishizing the margins, to romantically blackening up, and so on. Maybe these charges were facile, or the underlying logic not so clear. But I still wonder, as I did in an article for Postmodern Culture back in 1997, about programatically performing “treason to whiteness” in order to ensure one’s “loyalty to humanity,” as that historically imperious neo-Enlightenment slogan goes. Humanity is a nice desire. But I wonder if this term, as evoked by the race traitor group, might turn on the way white men in particular are playing out a sense of late-capitalist public disenfranchisement, variously retooling, or really, gearing up their affective relations to colour, for everyone to witness and once again applaud…

    …36. Damien: Whilst it is important to recognise the very local ways in which whiteness achieves hegemony, it has also been suggested that there are broader connections between the practices of whiteness in differing countries, particularly through their relation to discourses of empire and imperialism. Where do you see some of the important international connections within the study of whiteness?…

    …40. Mike: Enter here the multiracial movement, which maintains an express disavowal of whiteness and, for that matter, disavows allegiance to blackness, our two longstanding oppositional correlates. There are something like sixty multiracial organizations in the US touting the cause of civil rights, self- and state-recognition, full and frank disclosure that the population designated black is mostly mixed race (as if race is a quantifiable set of blood ratios!). As I said, it’s significant that, for them, “white” is a bunk historical fiction. But it’s a horror for the NAACP that so too is “black.” The multiracial activists seek the right to be counted as one would choose, which means the full extension of a civil rights legacy that emphasises self- over observer-enumeration. Race is addressed once again as the matter of getting identity correct in one’s own eyes and in the eyes of the state. This time though, the traditional categories of race are exhausted thevery moment that race is embraced.

    41. What the old civil rights organization’s realised, especially given the enthusiasm of republican legislators to get multiracial people officially counted, is that the new abundance of race categories threaten to terminate the juridical unity of race altogether. A new and accelerated civil rights lexicon increases the number of race categories that individuals may legally claim. On this order, race is everywhere significant and nowhere identifiable in the old formalist sense. So you have the NAACP’s awkward defence of the one-drop rule of hypo-descent—formerly associated with Jim Crow—as a sort of desperate, ironic collective self-defence against the difficulties implicit in the post-civil rights epoch.

    42. This latest process of governing vis-à-vis racial distinction is different from previous civil rights struggles, which tried to liberalise the state and get government justly interested in the racial identities it once denied. Under this new set of protocols, the state has admitted racial interest and with ever greater freedom and nuance. But it has done so in order to rob racial coherency of its former political significance.

    43. If you pursue the multiracialism debate to its logical ends, you can start to see how an individual’s right to self-identify, paradoxically, provides an opportunity for racial identity itself to release the state from its previous civil rights obligations. In this way, the state jettisons the most important historical cite of domestic dissent the very moment it presumes to go global. You could say that the neo-nationalist end of liberalism is hereby found dormant in the logic of its once benevolent ends. In effect, all and no race relations exist in the eyes of a racially emancipated state. Multiplicity is unleashed upon identity, and the organizational capacity of government is both maximised and evaporated within the simple act of saying, “I am…”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Turning Aboriginal—Historical Bents

    Turning Aboriginal—Historical Bents

    borderlands: e-journal
    Volume 7, Number 2 (2008)
    pages 1-19

    Regina Ganter, Associate Professor, School of Humanities
    Griffith University, Queensland, Australia

    Under the pressures of binary identity politics the search for Aboriginal identity among people of mixed descent has become a Russian roulette that may end up with a public hanging where those with a larger public profile draw a bigger crowd. This essay explores the historical dimensions that underpin confusion and uncertainty: changing definitions of Aboriginality and the external, often discretionary, imposition of identity. Historical case studies illustrate that a certain slippage was always part and parcel of the quest to define who is, and who is not, considered as Aboriginal.

    Read the entire article here.

  • The threat of offspring of interracial unions…

    The offspring of interracial unions were threatening to whites primarily because they blurred the lines between what many of them understood to be a naturally superior white race and a naturally inferior black race. As long as there was a clear distinction between the two racial categories—in other words, as long as the two categories could be thought to be mutually exclusive—then the hierarchical racial regimes represented first by slavery, and later by legal segregation, could be more effectively defended. The existence of interracial children destabilized and threatened the understanding of racial groups as essentialized categories that existed prior to, and independent of, human norms and understandings. To put it differently, interracial children showed that racial categories, seemingly distinct and immutable, were instead highly malleable. Therefore, from a white supremacy perspective, it was important to try to deter the creation of interracial children as much as possible, and the ban on interracial marriage was a crucial means to attaining that goal.

    Carlos A. Ball, “The Blurring of the Lines: Children and Bans on Interrracial Unions and Same-Sex Marriages,” Fordham Law Review, Volume 76, Number 6 (2008): 2733-2770.

  • Making Race: The Role of Free Blacks in the Development of New Orleans’ Three-Caste Society, 1791-1812

    Making Race: The Role of Free Blacks in the Development of New Orleans’ Three-Caste Society, 1791-1812

    University of Texas, Austin
    May 2007
    219 pages

    Kenneth Randolph Aslakson, Assistant Professor of History
    Union College, Schenectady, New York

    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 The University of Texas at Austin May, 2007

    “Making Race: The Role of Free Blacks in the Development of New Orleans’ Three-Caste Society, 1791-1812” excavates the ways that free people of African descent in New Orleans built an autonomous identity as a third “race” in what would become a unique racial caste system in the United States. I argue that in the time period I study, which encompasses not only the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, but also the rise of plantation slavery and the arrival of over twelve thousand refugees from the revolution torn French West Indies, New Orleans’s free blacks took advantage of political, cultural and legal uncertainty to protect and gain privileges denied to free blacks elsewhere in the South. The dissertation is organized around three sites in which free blacks forged and articulated a distinct collective identity: the courtroom, the ballroom, and the militia. This focus on specific spaces of racial contestation allows me to trace the multivalent development of racial identity. “Making Race” brings together the special dynamism of the Atlantic world in the Age of Revolution with the ability of individuals to act within structures of power to shape their surroundings. I show that changing political regimes (in the time period I study New Orleans was ruled by the Spanish, the French and the Americans) together with the socio-economic, ideological and demographic impact of the Haitian Revolution created opportunities for new social and legal understandings of race in the Crescent City. More importantly, however, I show how members of New Orleans’s free black community, strengthened numerically and heavily influenced by thousands of gens de couleur refugees of the Haitian Revolution, shaped the racialization process by asserting a collective identity as a distinct middle caste, contributing to the creation of a tri-racial system.

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction
      • Free Blacks in Slave Societies
      • Race and Revolution in the Atlantic World
      • The Laws and Legal Systems in Racially Based Slave Societies
      • Organization of the Dissertation
    • Chapter 1 Racial Identity Formation in a Burgeoning Port City
    • Chapter 2 “When the Question is Slavery or Freedom:” The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans
      • New Orleans in the Age of Slavery and Revolution
      • Making Slavery: The Precariousness of Freedom
      • Making Freedom: Status Suits in the New Orleans City Court
      • Making Race: The Legal Resolution of the Slave-Free Paradox
      • Conclusion
    • Chapter 3 The Power of Weakness: Free Black Women in the New Orleans City Court
      • Black Litigation in Spanish Louisiana and the Impact of the Louisiana Purchase
      • Escape From Marriage Law: The Litigiousness of Free Women of African Descent
      • The Power of Weakness: Fraud and Assault Cases in the New Orleans City Court
      • The New Racial Order: Changing Color and Changing Laws
      • Conclusion
    • Chapter 4 The Politics of Dancing: Control, Resistance, and Identity in the Early New Orleans Ballroom
      • Fear of Black Dancing and the Origins of the Public Ball
      • Vice, Violence, and the Origins of the (Tri-) Colored Balls
      • The Great Purchase, Immigration, and the Segregation of Dancing Centers
      • Control, Resistance, Identity and the Origins of the Quadroon Balls.143
      • Conclusion
    • Chapter 5 “We Shall Serve with Fidelity and Zeal:” The Citizen-Soldiers of the Free Colored Militia
      • The Demographics of Defense: Free Colored Militias in New World Slave Societies
      • Fear and Opportunity: the Free Colored Militia in Spanish Louisiana During the Age of Revolution
      • “Free Citizens of Louisiana:” The Free Colored Militia in Territorial New Orleans
      • The Militia’s Swansong: Andrew Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans
      • Conclusion
    • Conclusion “In [and Outside] the Eye of Louisiana Law:” Creole of Color Identity Before and After Plessy
    • Bibliography
    • Vita

    Introduction

    In October of 2003, having recently arrived in New Orleans to do research for this dissertation, I attended the “Creole Studies Consortium” held at Tulane University. Most of the people attending this gathering (which was part academic conference, part genealogical convention, and part family reunion) called themselves “Creoles of color” or simply “Creoles,” though it soon became clear to me that there was some disagreement as to the precise meaning of this term. For some, a Creole is someone whose ancestors were free people of color when slavery still existed in Louisiana. For others, the European ancestors of Creoles must have been of Spanish or (preferably) French descent. The most exclusive definition holds that a true Creole can trace his or her French and African ancestry back to the colonial period in Louisiana before the Louisiana Purchase. Nevertheless, all agreed that a Creole is a person whose ancestors were free and of mixed European and African descent with roots in pre-Civil War Louisiana. While they do not deny their partial African ancestry, most of Louisiana’s present day Creoles do not self identify as “black” or even “African-American,” even though most people from outside of the state Louisiana (and many within) would consider them to be such.

    This dissertation examines the origins of the distinct racial identity of the group of people who today call themselves Louisiana “Creoles” (or “Creoles of Color”) by excavating the ways in which free people of color in early New Orleans built an autonomous identity as a third “race” in what would become a unique racial caste system rise of plantation slavery and the arrival of over twelve thousand refugees from the revolution-torn French West Indies, New Orleans’s free people of color took advantage of political, cultural and legal uncertainty to protect and gain privileges denied to free blacks elsewhere in the South. I show that changing political regimes (in this time period New Orleans was ruled by the Spanish, the French and the Americans), a transforming economy, and the ideological and demographic impact of the Haitian Revolution combined to create opportunities for new cultural and legal understandings of race in the Crescent City. More importantly, however, I show how members of New Orleans’s free colored community, strengthened numerically and heavily influenced by thousands of gens de couleur refugees, shaped the racialization process by asserting a collective identity as a distinct middle caste, contributing to the creation of a tri-racial system. In other words, the emergence of a three tiered racial caste system in the Crescent City was not the necessary product of global structures. Rather, the free people of color of New Orleans made their own distinct racial identity, and protected the relative rights and privileges that went with it.

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • Is the Design for Our Cultural Programs Ethical?

    Is the Design for Our Cultural Programs Ethical?

    Journal of College and Character
    Volume 11, Issue 4 (November 2010)
    3 pages
    DOI: 10.2202/1940-1639.1743

    Larry D. Roper, Vice Provost for Student Affairs
    Oregon State University

    Kimberly McAloney
    Oregon State University

    The designs for cultural programs on most campuses seem to imply that students possess mono-cultural identities. However, with the increase in bi-racial and multi-racial students on campus, it is time for student affairs leaders to question the design for these programs.

    With the election of Barack Obama, the first acknowledged biracial President of the United States, we have noticed an increase in conversation regarding race and the status of racial issues. While the election and the subsequent interest in race do not provide answers to the challenges facing colleges and universities, one of the recurring questions generated in the conversation about the racial identity of our President, “Is Barack Obama Black?,” does provide the opportunity to address a significant issue facing our campuses.

    Questions regarding the racial identity of and the ethnic/racial community with which biracial and multiracial people should identify arise daily in the lives of a growing number of college students. On our campuses we have offices and cultural centers designed to serve and meet the needs of groups that have been historically underrepresented and underserved in U.S. higher education. While the creation of these centers and programs has been crucial in addressing the history of discrimination among collegiate institutions, as well as increasing opportunities for success of underrepresented racial groups, we are at a place where we need to enter uncomfortable territory and have serious conversation about the future of such centers and programs…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • The importance of being “other”: A natural experiment about lived race over time

    The importance of being “other”: A natural experiment about lived race over time

    Social Science Research
    Volume 36, Issue 1     (March 2007)
    pages 159-174
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2005.11.002

    J. Scott Brown, Associate Professor of Gerontology, Scripps Research Fellow
    Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

    Steven Hitlin, Assistant Professor of Sociology
    University of Iowa

    Glen H. Elder, Jr., Research Professor of Sociology and Psychology
    University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

    Despite recent concern with the measurement of race, almost no scholarship has explored the residual response category of “other” itself. The 2000 census included a significant number selecting “other,” suggesting that the option was not simply a residual response. Using a serendipitous change in the measurement of race in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we explore the social reality of the “other” category at three levels of analysis: self-identification, external attribution, and structural interpretation. Far from being a residual category, we find that “other” is a meaningful social category for about half of the Hispanics in Add Health. Current measurement conventions that distinguish between race and ethnicity, while established for laudable reasons, misrepresent the ways that Americans—Hispanic and otherwise—utilize social categories. Individuals do not treat Hispanics differently than blacks or Asians when seen as members of a meaningful social group. The separation of race from ethnicity leads to confusion and measurement difficulty. Such problems are compounded when “other” is removed as a potential response.

    1. Introduction

    “We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.”
    W. H. Auden (1907–1973)

    Concern with racial measurement has flourished in recent years (Harris and Sim, 2002; Hirschman et al., 2000) as sociologists and demographers have increasingly focused on the fluid nature of a once taken-for-granted concept. The growing number of multiracial individuals in the United States has underscored the difficulty of adequately measuring what has long been understood to be a meaningful and stable criterion for social grouping. Studies of racialfluidity and multiracial individuals have largely overlooked an important aspect of racial measurement in the US, namely, the (supposedly) residual “other” category. Originally intended to allow individuals more latitude for recording their self-understandings of race (see Snipp, 2003), this category has a substantive reality in its own right (Hirschman et al., 2000). In almost all cases in the 2000 census, the “other” category represents a proxy for “Hispanic,” demonstrating that the lived experience of millions of individuals contradicts the academic reification between race and ethnicity. An in-depth examination of the “other” category suggests that current racial measurement conventions do not accurately reflect Americans’ social reality.

    Using a serendipitous change in the measurement of race in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we track individuals’ changes in racial self-identification across time when the “other” option is removed from the racial measurement item. We explore the socialreality of the “other” category at three levels of analysis: self identification, external attribution, and structural interpretation. This approach extends traditional concerns with racialmeasurement that focus on self-identification in two directions. First, it allows us to examine the process of social attribution as it reflects external views of racial/ethnic group membership. Second, we suggest that this measurement convention biases social science research findings. All three levels of analysis are based on social psychological understandings of the psychological process of social categorization that underlies the perception of race/ethnicity. We find that “other” is an important response category for Hispanics, the best proxy they have available within the currently separated race and ethnicity format. Such self-reports have profound implications for national statistics and social science analyses. We conclude with a call for altering the official racial measurement instrument to more accurately reflect the cognitive processes that individuals use to delineate their meaningful social groups.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Our Changing Identities

    Our Changing Identities

    The New Black Magazine
    2010-10-18

    Adam K. Raymond

    On forms asking their racial or ethnic backgrounds, young people of multi-racial origin give different answers at different times.

    As a teenager, Cameron Clark, whose mother is white and father is black, always checked “African-American” on forms that asked about his race.

    “I needed to identify as being black so people would know I’m equally proud of both sides of my heritage,” said Clark whose blonde hair and blue eyes suggest that Caucasian might be a more apt description.

    These days, though, Clark, a 22-year-old television reporter in Green Bay, Wisconsin, describes himself as multiracial. “I decided that identifying with one race shows you don’t embrace your other side as much,” he explained. “People need to be equally proud of both sides of their heritage, and using the label ‘multiracial’ is the most effective way to do that,” he said.

    Clark is one of a large contingent of biracial young adults who have struggled with fluctuating ethnic identities.

    A recent study by researchers at The University of Iowa, Miami University, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that biracial adolescents tend to change how they self-identify over time.

    The researchers looked at how respondents described their race on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health over a period of five years. In the course of that time, the young adults’ answers changed.

    “Ideas about race are not fixed,” said Steven Hitlin, assistant professor of sociology at Iowa University and one of the authors of the study. Racial identity, he said, seems to be “fluid.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Multiethnicity and Multiethnic Families: Development, Identity, and Resilience

    Multiethnicity and Multiethnic Families: Development, Identity, and Resilience

    Xlibris
    2010
    384 pages
    ISBN 13 Softcover: 978-1-4500-1231-7
    ISBN 13 Hardcover: 978-1-4500-1232-4
    ISBN 13 Ebook: 978-1-4500-0340-7

    Edited By:

    Hamilton McCubbin, Krystal Ontai, Lisa Kehl, Laurie McCubbin, Ida Strom, Heidi Hart, Barbara DeBaryshe, Marika Ripke and Jon Matsuoka

    Guided by the increasing number of interracial marriages, cross-cultural adoptions and resulting multiethnic individuals and  families, scholars and scientists reveal the complex and persistent changes in the ethnic profile of Americans, families and their communities. 

    The editors of this book selected the research of 31 nationally and internationally recognized scholars who present 14 chapters of current knowledge on the changing demographics of multiethnicity and their implications for human development and identity development, social and family relationships, functioning, stress, coping and resilience.

    The senior contributing scholars and their disciplines are:  Sharon Lee, PhD, Demography; Emmy Werner, PhD, Child Development; Jonathan Okamura, PhD, Sociology; Cathy Tashiro, PhD, Nursing;  Hamilton McCubbin, PhD, Family Science; Barbara DeBaryshe, PhD, Human Development; Cardell Jacobson, PhD, Sociology; Jenifer Bratter, PhD, Psychology;  Xuanning Fu, PhD, Anthropology; Richard Lee, PhD, Psychology;  Laurie McCubbin, PhD, Counseling Psychology;  Farzana Nayani, PhD, Ethnic Studies; Jeannette Johnson,  PhD, Psychology; and Michael Ungar, PhD, Social Work.

    Multiethnicity and Multiethnic Families: Development, Identity, and Resilience (Le`a Publications) addresses core theoretical, methodological and policy issues surrounding the changing demographics of multiethnic and particularly indigenous groups in the United States. The issues of historical trauma, schema, appraisal, adaptation, measurement and intervention are magnified. The introduction and fourteen chapters aim to build upon prior writings and research and to improve upon our understanding of these populations with all their complexities. Present and future research and knowledge gained on what it means to be multiethnic is vital to our efforts to shape their futures and improve upon our professional understanding and investment in enabling this emerging population to thrive as well as survive.

    Chapters include:

    Multiraciality and health disparities: Encountering the contradictions and conundrums of race, ethnicity, and identity, by Cathy Tashiro

    Read the front matter here.

  • Addressing Issues of Biracial Asian Americans

    Addressing Issues of Biracial Asian Americans

    Reflections on Shattered Windows: Promises and Prospects for Asian American Studies
    Washington State University Press
    1988
    Chapter 15, pages 111-116

    Edited by: G. Y. Okihiro, S. Hune, A. A. Hansen, and J. M. Liu

    Stephen L. Murphy-Shigematsu

    Revising the Asian American Studies curriculum

    One of the more dramatic changes in the post-World War II Asian American population is the increase in those of biracial ancestry. Over the past forty years large numbers of Asian women have married Americans and come to the United States. [n 1] During this period, too, thousands of Asian American men and women have married outside their ethnic group. [n 2] The burgeoning population of biracial youth that has resulted from these developments, represents a significant change in the face of Asian America.

    In the light of the above situation, one of the challenges confronting Asian American Studies is to adapt and revise a curriculum created in the early 1970s that was designed primarily for American born Chinese and Japanese. It has become necessary to redesign courses to better accommodate the needs, interests, and backgrounds of the more diverse group of Asian Americans who are presently underrepresented in the curriculum, and increasingly in Asian American Studies classes and in the general population. Those of biracial ancestry are one emerging group whose experiences and needs must be addressed in curriculum development…

    Read the entire chapter here.

  • Sniffing Elephant Bones: The Poetics of Race in the Art of Ellen Gallagher

    Sniffing Elephant Bones: The Poetics of Race in the Art of Ellen Gallagher

    Callaloo
    Volume 19, Number 2, Spring 1996
    E-ISSN: 1080-6512 Print ISSN: 0161-2492
    pages 337-339
    DOI: 10.1353/cal.1996.0074

    Judith Wilson, Former Assistant Professor of African American Studies, Assistant Professor of Art History and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies
    University of California, Irvine

    What she said once, unforgettable, was that the stereotype is the distance between ourselves—our real, our black bodies—& the image

    [T]he greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; … for to use metaphors well is to see the similarity in dissimilars. —Aristotle, The Poetics Image

    These three sites have been crucially linked in recent cultural theory and practice. Thirty years old and a native of New England, painter Ellen Gallagher has been described as working “in the gap between image and body (the gap that is language).” That understanding of her project, of course, simultaneously echoes and significantly revises a late modernist agenda epitomized by Robert Rauschenberg: “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)” Post-pop, post-painterly, and post-minimal, Gallagher operates in a space cleared by contemporary feminist, semiotic, black, and cultural studies discourses. Yet her art negotiates these busy intersections in a starkly independent fashion. In conversation, she readily shifts from charting the ancestry of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse (whose origins, she…