Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • White Negro Communities: Too White To Be Black And Too Black To Be White

    White Negro Communities: Too White To Be Black And Too Black To Be White

    Johnathon Odell: Discovering Our Stories
    2010-07-25

    John Odell

    Yvonne Bivins had to make a choice very few Americans have forced upon them.  She could live as a black woman or a white woman.

    Yvonne’s ancestry is enmeshed with the Knights of Jones County [Mississippi]. She was born into one of the so-called “White Negro” communities that sprang up after the Civil War all over through the Piney Woods. These communities grew up around Piney Woods plantations, actually no bigger than farms. There’s Six Town and Soso and Sheeplow. Her community is called Kelly Settlement and located few miles miles outside of Laurel.

    Hold on to your hats and I’ll tell you how Kelly Settlement came into existence.  John Kelly, an early petitioner in Mississippi Territory, purchased 640 acres on the Leaf River. His son, Green Kelly had a liaison with a slave named Sarah. Sarah had children by her white master, by a white neighbor and by another slave on the farm. That made three sets of children, a total of eleven.

    This may surprise you. It sure did me. But according to Yvonne, it was not an uncommon practice for Piney Woods slave owners, perhaps because of the intimacy created by these modest estates that demanded close-quarters living, to provide for all their offspring, regardless of color. We just don’t hear about it. Newt Knight was vilified not because he sired darker offspring, but because he refused to deny them…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880-1920

    Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880-1920

    University of Chicago Press
    2005
    224 pages
    10 halftones  6 x 9
    Cloth ISBN: 9780226532424
    Paper ISBN: 9780226532431
    E-book ISBN: 9780226532523

    Pablo Mitchell, Eric and Jane Nord Associate Professor of History and Comparative American Studies
    Oberlin College

    With the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in the 1880s came the emergence of a modern and profoundly multicultural New Mexico. Native Americans, working-class Mexicans, elite Hispanos, and black and white newcomers all commingled and interacted in the territory in ways that had not been previously possible. But what did it mean to be white in this multiethnic milieu? And how did ideas of sexuality and racial supremacy shape ideas of citizenry and determine who would govern the region?

    Coyote Nation considers these questions as it explores how New Mexicans evaluated and categorized racial identities through bodily practices. Where ethnic groups were numerous and—in the wake of miscegenation—often difficult to discern, the ways one dressed, bathed, spoke, gestured, or even stood were largely instrumental in conveying one’s race. Even such practices as cutting one’s hair, shopping, drinking alcohol, or embalming a deceased loved one could inextricably link a person to a very specific racial identity.

    A fascinating history of an extraordinarily plural and polyglot region, Coyote Nation will be of value to historians of race and ethnicity in American culture.

    Table of Contents

    Preface: A Note on Coyotes
    Acknowledgments
    1. Introduction: Bodies on Borders
    2. Compromising Positions: Racializing Bodies at Pueblo Indian Schools
    3. Carnal Knowledge: Racializing Hispano Bodies in the Courts
    4. Transits of Venus: Ceremonies and Contested Public Space
    5. Strange Bedfellows: Anglos and Hispanos in the Reproduction of Whiteness
    6. “Promiscuous Expectoration”: Medicine and the Naturalization of Whiteness
    7. “Just Gauzy Enough”: Consumer Culture and the Shared White Body of Anglos and Hispanos
    8. Conclusion: Birth of a Coyote Nation
    Notes
    Bibliography
    Index

  • “A Fascinating Interracial Experiment Station”: Remapping the Orient-Occident Divide in Hawai’i

    “A Fascinating Interracial Experiment Station”: Remapping the Orient-Occident Divide in Hawai’i

    American Studies
    Volume 49, Number 3/4, Fall/Winter 2008
    pages 87-109
    E-ISSN: 2153-6856
    Print ISSN: 0026-3079

    Shelley Sang-Hee Lee, Assistant Professor of Comparative American Studies and History
    Oberlin College

    Rick Baldoz, Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology
    Oberlin College

    Introduction

    During the 1920s and 1930s, American intellectuals on the U.S. continent often described Hawai’i as a “racial frontier,” a meeting ground between East and West where “unorthodox” social relations between Native Hawaiians, Asians, and Caucasians had taken root. The frontier metaphor evoked two very different images, the “racial paradise” and the “racial nightmare,” and in both characterizations, Asians figured prominently. In 1930, of the islands’ civilian population of nearly 350,000, about 236,000 or 68 percent were classified as Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, or Korean.  Political, religious, and educational leaders in Hawai’i were the main propagators of the racial paradise image, which expressed optimism in the ability of Caucasians and Asians to live together, while also celebrating the presence of Portuguese, Spanish, Puerto Ricans, Native Hawaiians, and an array of mixed-race groups.  They touted the assimilative powers of American institutions and promoted Hawai’i as a model of colonial progress to audiences on the U.S. mainland. David Crawford, the president of the University of Hawai’i,  summarized this view during a 1929 visit to Los Angeles where he spoke before a group called the Advertising Club. Hawai’i society, explained Crawford, was “demonstrating the possibility of the meeting of Orient and Occident on terms of friendship that practically eliminate race prejudice.”

    This celebration of interracial harmony and cultural assimilation contrasted with views advanced by West Coast nativists who portrayed Hawai’i and its preponderance of Asians in the population as a cautionary example of the pitfalls of American expansionism. During debates in the early 1920s over renewing the Alien Land Law in California, anti-Japanese agitators cited Hawai’i as a failed experiment where the color line had been irretrievably breached by a vanguard force of…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Family Matters in the Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt

    Family Matters in the Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt

    The Southern Literary Journal
    Volume 33, Number 2, Spring 2001
    pages 30-43
    E-ISSN: 1534-1461
    Print ISSN: 0038-4291
    DOI: 10.1353/slj.2001.0012

    William M. Ramsey, Professor of English
    Francis Marion University

    Writing fiction one hundred years ago, Charles W. Chesnutt believed that America’s racial future was best embodied in himself, a mixed-race American. A light-skinned mulatto living on the color line, he argued that racial amalgamation, through passing and miscegenation, would slowly erode the rigid white-black dichotomy of America’s caste system. Eventually, he foresaw, America would become one race, as his stories of light-skinned protagonists on the color line seemed to predict. Unfortunately for his literary reputation, this racial prescription for a New America was premature. By the time of his death in 1932, the Harlem Renaissance had celebrated a New Negro who was no light-skinned assimilationist, but one who, like Langston Hughes, stood on the racial mountaintop of a proud, culturally distinct, dark-skinned self. It is now a century after Chesnutt’s first book publications, and America is changing. Racial amalgamation, according to federal statistics, occurs at a more rapid pace than ever before. From 1970 to 1990, marriages between blacks and whites rose from two percent of all marriages to six percent. The number jumped to over twelve percent by 1993 (“With This Ring”). Nearly ten percent of black men marry white women..

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • The case of Ebony and Topaz: Racial and Sexual Hybridity in Harlem Renaissance Illustrations

    The case of Ebony and Topaz: Racial and Sexual Hybridity in Harlem Renaissance Illustrations

    American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography
    Volume 15, Number 1, (2005)
    pages 86-111
    E-ISSN: 1548-4238
    Print ISSN: 1054-7479
    DOI: 10.1353/amp.2005.0006

    Caroline Goeser, Assistant Professor of Art History
    University of Houston

    >
    University of Virginia

    Ebony and Topaz was issued once in 1927 as a collection of essays, poetry, and illustrations edited by Charles S. Johnson, the African American editor of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. Though the volume has received little scholarly attention, it articulated the theme of racial hybridity that not only proved an integral component of Harlem Renaissance cultural production but marked the diversity of American modernism between the wars. Significantly, Johnson’s editorial method in Ebony and Topaz, which promised minimal interference and direction, allowed his contributors freedom to broach controversial subjects shunned by the more conservative African American editors of the period, such as W. E. B. DuBois. As a result, Johnson’s compendium resisted limitation to the facile theme of racial uplift and challenged restrictive classifications of racial identity. The most culturally subversive production came from two illustrators of Ebony and Topaz, Charles Cullen and Richard Bruce Nugent. Seemingly benign at first glance, their illustrations interrogated the…

    [View some of Richard Bruce Nugent’s artwork here.]

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • What Can DNA Really Tell Us About Race?

    What Can DNA Really Tell Us About Race?

    UCtelevision
    Unviersity of California
    2007-04-25
    00:54:55

    Introduction by
    Howard Winnant, Professor of Sociology
    University of California, Santa Barbara

    Troy Duster, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology
    University of California, Berkeley

    and
    Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge
    New York University

    One of the leading authorities on race and science, Troy Duster discusses how the understanding of race is being reshaped by the genomics revolution. Sometimes unintentionally and sometimes not so innocently, genomics may be generating a new and more sophisticated racism, not so different from the eugenics-based and criminological racism that flourished in decades gone by. Series: “Voices” [7/2007] [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 13008]

  • Racial Choice at Century’s End in Contemporary African American Literature

    Racial Choice at Century’s End in Contemporary African American Literature

    University of Maryland
    2008
    161 pages

    Kaylen Danielle Tucker

    Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2008

    This dissertation introduces the term “racial choice” to describe a contemporary idea that racial identity can be chosen or elected, as can the significance and the influence of race on an individual’s identity. Racial choice emerges out of the shifting historical, cultural, and social discussions of race and identity we have witnessed after integration. This dissertation examines the resulting representations of contemporary black identity in African American literature by analyzing texts that were published in the last quarter of the twentieth century and that feature protagonists that come of age during or after integration. Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips (1984), Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998), and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996) are representative texts that engage racial choice to register how the racial hierarchy has changed in the late twentieth century and how that change affects the African American literary tradition of race writing. In their attempts to write outside of the existing racial paradigm—using white flight, passing, and satire as narrative strategies—the authors test the racial boundaries of African American literature, finding that writing outside of race is ultimately unachievable.

    The introductory chapter explains the cultural, literary, and scholarly context of my study, arguing that because race matters differently in the late twentieth century contemporary African American literature handles race uniquely. I argue in my first chapter that Lee uses white flight as a narrative form to move Sarah Phillips beyond the influence of racialization and to suggest class as an alibi for racial difference. Continuing this theme amidst the Black Power Movement of the 1970s and the multiracial project of the 1990s, my second chapter analyzes Senna’s Caucasia, which revises the passing narrative form and explores the viability of choosing a biracial identity. In my third chapter, I show how Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle satirizes the African American protest tradition to point up the performativity necessary in maintaining racial binaries and suggests that culture is a more accurate identifier than race.

    My concluding chapter argues that though the three novels under study challenge racial categories—and by extension race writing—to different degrees, they all use similar methods to point up the shifting significance of race, racial categories, and racial identity. By historicizing attitudes about racial categories, challenging the dichotomous understanding of race, representing the tensions of racial authenticity, and showing the performativity necessary to maintain racial categories, the novels illustrate the traditional boundaries of racial choice and attempt to stretch the limits of the African American literary tradition.

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction: The Future American: The “Color Line” and “Racial Choice” at the Millennium
    • Chapter One: Integration and White Flight in Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips
    • Chapter Two: Racial Choice and the Contemporary Passing Paradigm
    • Chapter Three: Satire, Performance, and Race in The White Boy Shuffle
    • Conclusion: The Future of Racial Identity and African American Literature
    • Works Cited

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • Rethinking race and politics: Mixed race and the trajectory of minority politics in the United States

    Rethinking race and politics: Mixed race and the trajectory of minority politics in the United States

    University of California, Irvine
    2007
    232 pages
    AAT 3274346
    ISBN: 9780549148944

    Natalie Masuoka, Assistant Professor of Political Science
    Tufts University

    This project addresses how minority communities frame collective identities and organize political agendas amidst growing levels of racial and ethnic diversity. Using the rise of a politicized Mixed Race identity as a case study, I examine how Asian American, Black, Latino and White Americans choose to exert their racial group identities as a response to the Mixed Race public policy agenda. Using a multi-method research design consisting of survey data and qualitative interviews with leaders of minority non-profit advocacy organizations, I examine how identity group politics functions at two levels: First, at the elite level, how do Mixed Race and traditional minority group activists frame their right to political representation? Second, at the mass level, how do each of these racial groups utilize these identities in their evaluation of various political issues? I find that Mixed Race Americans, regardless of their political efforts to gain recognition for their distinctive racial identities, have adopted a political agenda and individual political attitudes which corresponds with the civil rights agenda advanced by the traditional minority groups.

    Purchase the dissertation here.

  • Equivocal subjects: The representation of mixed-race identity in Italian film

    Equivocal subjects: The representation of mixed-race identity in Italian film

    University of California, Irvine
    2007
    226 pages
    AAT 3296258
    ISBN: 9780549410775

    Shelleen Maisha Greene, Assistant Professor of Conceptual Studies
    University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

    My dissertation seeks to establish a critical framework for the analysis of mixed-race subjects in Italian film. Within the Italian context, mixed-race subjects emerged out of the colonial conditions stemming from the nation’s occupation and settlement of its east African colonies beginning in the nineteenth century. However, racial mixture has also served as a metaphor for the internal division of Italy between North and South, a historical formation that arguably allows for the development of analytics, such as the “Southern Question,” by which to essentialize a racially heterogeneous population. Through an examination of four historically contextualized films, I examine the presentation of mixed-race subjects in Cabiria (1914), Sotto la croce del sud (1938), Il Mulatto (1949/1951), and Il fiore delle mille e una notte (1974). I argue that the mixed-race subject is a constitutive element of the Italian cinema, a figure that serves as a nodal point for the intersection of conceptions of race and the nation.

    Purchase the disseration here.

  • “A Mongrel Breed of Citizens”: Animus Against Multiracial People

    …One might argue that discrimination against multiracial people is merely a subset—perhaps even a milder one—of discrimination against monoracial individuals. In other words, a person who is identified as partially Black might be subject to the same kind of animus as one who is identified as fully Black. This Part aims to disprove that notion and demonstrate that animus against people identified as multiracial is a unique phenomenon.

    I readily acknowledge some overlap between what we might call monoracial and multiracial animus: a racist who dislikes people who she views as Asian might well dislike an individual whom she identifies as part-Asian for some of the same reasons. But viewing someone as part-Asian also lends itself to unique forms of animus not directed at those perceived as monoracial. A mixed-race person may be viewed as polluted, defective, confusing or confused, passing, threatening, or—in our diversity-obsessed society—as opportunistic, gaining an advantage by identifying with a group in which he is at best a partial member. These negative associations may be distinguished from those directed at people perceived as monoracial.

    I use history, sociology, and jurisprudence to buttress my claim that animus against multiracial people is a unique form of animus that is distinguishable from animus directed at any monoracial group. In the process, I hope to demonstrate that animus against racially mixed individuals is anything but benign or mild.

    Other scholars have attempted to illuminate the reason underlying the persistent discomfort with racial mixing and racial mixedness. My own view is that different groups’ discomfort with mixing is so heterogeneous that any theory attempting to explain animus toward multiracial people will by necessity be quite complicated. While I believe that development of such a theory is an important project, it is one I do not address in this Article. Instead, I focus on demonstrating that racism directed at people who are viewed as multiracial is a real phenomenon that may result in tangible negative consequences to the lives of the people thus identified…

    Nancy Leong, “Judicial Erasure of Mixed-Race Discrimination,” American University Law Review, Volume 59, Number 3 (2010): 483-484.