Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies [Review by Paul D. Escott]

    The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies [Review by Paul D. Escott]

    H-Net Reviews
    May, 2010
    3 pages

    Paul D. Escott, Reynolds Professor of History
    Wake Forest University

    “Few histories,” writes Victoria Bynum, “are buried faster or deeper than those of political and social dissenters” (p. 148). The Long Shadow of the Civil War disinters a number of remarkable dissenters in North Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas. It introduces the reader to stubbornly independent and courageous Southerners in the North Carolina Piedmont, the Mississippi Piney Woods, and the Big Thicket region around Hardin County, Texas. These individuals and family groups were willing to challenge their society’s coercive social conventions on race, class, and gender. They resisted the established powers when dissent was not only unpopular but dangerous–during the Civil War and the following decades of white supremacy and repressive dominance by the Democratic Party. Their histories remind us of two important truths: that the South was never as monolithic as its rulers and many followers tried to make it; and that human beings, though generally dependent on social approval and acceptance by their peers, are capable of courageous, independent, dissenting lives…

    …In nearby Orange County, North Carolina, there was “a lively interracial subculture” whose members “exchanged goods and engaged in gambling, drinking, and sexual and social intercourse” (p. 9). During the war these poor folks, who had come together despite “societal taboos and economic barriers,” supported themselves and aided resistance to the Confederacy by stealing goods and trading with deserters. During Reconstruction elite white men, who felt that their political and economic dominance was threatened along with their power over their wives and households, turned to violence to reestablish control. Yet interracial family groups among the poor challenged their mistreatment and contributed to “a fragile biracial political coalition” (pp. 55-56) that made the Republican Party dominant before relentless attacks from the Ku Klux Klan nullified the people’s will…

    …Professor Bynum closes her book with a chapter on the interracial offspring of Newt and Rachel Knight. Called “white Negroes” or “Knight’s Negroes” by their neighbors, these individuals continued to exhibit an independent spirit as they dealt with their society and with each other. They chose to identify themselves in a variety of ways; different members of the family adopted different approaches to life. Some passed as white, others affirmed their African American identity, and still others saw themselves as people of color but kept a distance from those whom society defined as Negroes. Within the family group there were many independent spirits. One woman, the ascetic Anna Knight, forged a long and energetic career as an educator and Seventh-Day Adventist missionary…

    Read the entire review here.

  • AM Northwest KATU-TV Live Interview with Heidi W. Durrow

    AM Northwest KATU-TV Live Interview with Heidi W. Durrow

    AM Northwest
    KATU-TV (Portland, Oregon)
    Friday, 2010-05-21 09:00-10:00 PDT (Local time), (12:00-1300 EDT, 16:00-17:00Z)

    Heidi Durrow appeared on the program AM Norwthwest on KATU-TV (Portland, Oregon) to discuss her new book, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky.

    You may view the recorded segment below by pressing the start button or by clicking here.

  • Dartmouth Junior wins Beinecke Scholarship

    Dartmouth Junior wins Beinecke Scholarship

    Dartmouth College Office of Public Affairs
    Press Release
    Media Contact: Kelly Sundberg Seaman
    2010-05-18

    Anise Vance, a member of the Dartmouth Class of 2011, has been named a Beinecke Scholar, one of 20 college juniors nationally. The award, which supports the “graduate education of young men and women of exceptional promise,” provides $4,000 prior to entering graduate school and an additional $30,000 while attending graduate school. He joins Gabrielle Ramaiah ’10 and Jodi Guinn ’09 as the third Dartmouth student tapped for the scholarship in the past three years.

    Vance, of Weston, Mass., is majoring in geography. “This is a huge honor,” he says, “both for the validation of my aspirations, and the financial support.” On the other hand, he notes, “it raises expectations. The call from the award committee came while I was working in the library; I phoned my parents, and then went right back to work.”

    Issues of social justice, in the United States and globally, engage Vance. He traces his drive to ask questions about who lives where — and what results from that mix of space and identity — to his childhood “growing up all over the place”: Vance attended school in Kenya, Botswana, and Egypt. Growing up, as he calls himself, “a mixed race child of an Iranian mother and an African American father,” he was aware that the perceptions of others were often linked to one’s environment. This understanding has formed the basis of his research thus far…

    …My current research for my senior thesis as a Mellon Mays Fellow investigates the causes of and mechanisms by which residential segregation continues to plague urban centers and their populations,” he reports. “Using a variety of methods, including ethnographic research, census-data analysis and structural examination of lending and real estate practices, I hope to provide a comprehensive investigation of African American segregation in my father’s hometown of Hartford, Connecticut.”…

    Read the entire press release here.

  • Census trend shows mixed-race Americans are more likely to identify with their multiracial background

    Census trend shows mixed-race Americans are more likely to identify with their multiracial background

    Daily Bruin
    University of California, Los Angeles
    2010-05-18

    Brittany Wong, Bruin contributor

    When President Barack Obama got to Question No. 9 on the 2010 Census, he did what mixed-race respondents nationwide were asked to do: pare down and define his complex racial background by checking all the boxes he saw fit.

    His decision to exclusively check “Black, African Am., or Negro” and the fractured response that followed speaks to the complex nature of being mixed race today, said Kyeyoung Park, an associate professor of sociocultural anthropology at UCLA who teaches a class about race.

    A new generation of mixed-race people are coming into their own this decade, and as they do, many are more comfortable self-identifying in a way that encompasses all of their background, Park said…

    …Miguel Unzueta, a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management who conducted a study that showed that self-identified mixed-race children were better adjusted in school, said he was somewhat surprised by Obama’s decision. Given the president’s discussion of his mixed heritage during the primaries, he said he expected a census answer more in line with his talk on the campaign trail.

    But the decision also speaks to the reality that the way Americans talk about race is not always the way they think, he said.

    “I think people are more comfortable with having a mixed-race background, but there still isn’t a label that we’re comfortable with in society,” Unzueta said…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Priming Race in Biracial Observers Affects Visual Search for Black and White Faces

    Priming Race in Biracial Observers Affects Visual Search for Black and White Faces

    Psychological Science
    Volume 17, Number 5 (2006)
    Pages 387-392

    Joan Y. Chiao, Assistant Professor of Brain, Behavior, and Cognition; Social Psychology
    Northwestern University

    Hannah E. Heck
    Harvard University

    Ken Nakayama, Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology
    Harvard University

    Nalini Ambady, Professor and Neubauer Faculty Fellow
    Tufts University

    We examined whether or not priming racial identity would influence Black-White biracial individuals’ ability to visually search for White and Black faces. Black, White, and biracial participants performed a visual search task in which the targets were Black or White faces. Before the task, the biracial participants were primed with either their Black or their White racial identity. All participant groups detected Black faces faster than White faces. Critically, the results also showed a racial-prime effect in biracial individuals: The magnitude of the search asymmetry was significantly different for those primed with their White identity and those primed with their Black identity. These findings suggest that topdown factors such as one’s racial identity can influence mechanisms underlying the visual search for faces of different races.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Seeing Like Citizens: Unofficial Understandings of Official Racial Categories in a Brazilian University

    Seeing Like Citizens: Unofficial Understandings of Official Racial Categories in a Brazilian University

    Journal of Latin American Studies
    Number 41 (2009)
    pages 221–250
    DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X09005550

    Luisa Farah Schwartzman, Assistant Professor of Sociology
    University of Toronto

    This paper investigates how students at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), one of the first Brazilian universities to adopt race-based quotas for admissions, interpret racial categories used as eligibility criteria. Considering the perspectives of students is important to understand the workings of affirmative action policies because UERJ’s quotas require applicants to classify themselves. Students’ interpretations of those categories often diverge from the interpretations intended by people who shaped the policy. Students’ perspectives are formed by everyday experiences with categorisation and by their self-assessment as legitimate beneficiaries of quotas. In contrast, the policies were designed according to a new racial project, where black consciousness-raising and statistics played an important role.

    Brazil has a long history of discrimination based on skin colour and a well documented association between people’s racial category and their access toresources, patterns of socialisation and family formation. At the same time, recently implemented affirmative action policies, designed to address these social injustices, have generated a heated debate over whether it is possible (or appropriate) for such policies to rely on racial classification. Some commentators claim that accurate categorisation is impossible in Brazil because Brazilians are a mixed-race people with no clear racial boundaries. Others suggest that classification is difficult due to ‘fraud’: people can dishonestly declare their racial category in order to benefit from the policy. This paper argues that indeed potential policy beneficiaries often classify themselves differently from how policymakers and advocates would expect them to, but not simply for the above-mentioned reasons. More importantly, there is mismatch between the worldviews and knowledge that policy beneficiaries (those who are able to define whether official categories apply to themselves) and policy designers (who have determined or influenced the shaping of the policies) bring with them when considering the appropriate rules for classifying people for affirmative action purposes…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century

    Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century

    Columbia University Press
    August 1997
    248 pages
    Paper ISBN: 978-0-231-10493-7
    Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-10492-0

    Kevin Mumford, Professor of African-American History
    University of Iowa

    Interzones is an innovative account of how the color line was drawn—and how it was crossed—in twentieth-century American cities. Kevin Mumford chronicles the role of vice districts in New York and Chicago as crucibles for the shaping of racial categories and racial inequalities.

    Focusing on Chicago’s South Side and Levee districts, and Greenwich Village and Harlem in New York at the height of the Progressive era, Mumford traces the connections between the Great Migration, the commercialization of leisure, and the politics of reform and urban renewal. Interzones is the first book to examine in depth the combined effects on American culture of two major transformations: the migration north of southern blacks and the emergence of a new public consumer culture.

    Mumford writes an important chapter in Progressive-era history from the perspectives of its most marginalized and dispossessed citizens. Recreating the mixed-race underworlds of brothels and dance halls, and charting the history of a black-white sexual subculture, Mumford shows how fluid race relations were in these “interzones.” From Jack Johnson and the “white slavery” scare of the 1910’s to the growth of a vital gay subculture and the phenomenon of white slumming, he explores in provocative detail the connections between political reforms and public culture, racial prejudice and sexual taboo, the hardening of the color line and the geography of modern inner cities.

    The complicated links between race and sex, and reform and reaction, are vividly displayed in Mumford’s look at a singular moment in the settling of American culture and society.

  • Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? By G. Reginald Daniel. [Book Review: Skidmore]

    Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? By G. Reginald Daniel. [Book Review: Skidmore]

    Hispanic American Historical Review
    Volumes 88, Number 2 (May 2008)
    pages 348-349
    DOI: 10.1215/00182168-2007-156

    Thomas E. Skidmore, Emeritus Professor of History
    Brown University

    In 1933, Gilberto Freyre published his classic Casa-grande y senzala. Although it was ostensibly about the uniquely Portuguese origins of Brazilian civilization, it included innumerable obiter dicta about the difference between the role of race in Portuguese and English America. Freyre argued that the relatively harmonious Brazilian race relations were due to more or less smooth Afro-European miscegenation, which contrasted so sharply with the rigid “one-drop rule” of the United States.

    In the years since Freyre published his classic, Brazilian and U.S. scholars and social critics have been debating Freyre’s claims. But the issue has been viewed largely through the prism of each country’s distinct racial experience. In the earlier literature, in particular, relatively few scholars achieved an analysis that could be described as truly objective. That situation began to change several decades ago, as scholars emerged who were generally familiar with both countries. Reginald Daniel is certainly prominent among that number and has given us a systematic work on what is a most complex issue, making the volume useful for scholars in a variety of disciplines…

    Read the entire review here.

  • G. Reginald Daniel. More Than Black: Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order [Book Review: Harrison]

    G. Reginald Daniel. More Than Black: Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order [Book Review: Harrison]

    Journal of African American Men
    Volume 6, Number 4 (June, 2002)
    pages 96-97

    Lisa Harrison
    California State University, Sacramento

    Many people in the United States have worked tirelessly to develop a truly egalitarian society that embraces all people, regardless of individual differences. Although there is an abundance of evidence to demonstrate that the United States has yet to achieve that goal, social change advocates have contended that one way to encourage social egalitarianism is to develop a national consciousness that fully accepts and embraces multiculturalism. Attempts at this endeavor have been  plagued with conflict, but some progress has been made. For example, there is growing recognition of the importance of adding a multicultural component to the core curriculums of our learning institutions. Thus, there is an increasing emphasis on understanding how ethnic and racial identity influences individual human behavior and larger social groups. However, most of this emphasis has been on understanding the experiences of singlerace groups. Therefore, little empirical or theoretical work has emerged on the experiences of multiracial individuals or the complexity of their position within the larger culture. Dr. [G.] Reginald Daniel’s timely examination of multiracial identity within the United States, aptly titled More Than Black, strives to correct this troublesome gap in the literature by exploring the historical legacy of multiracial identity within the United States and the contemporary impediments facing mixed-race persons…

    Read the entire review here.

  • More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order by G. Reginald Daniel [Book Review: Bonilla-Silva]

    More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order by G. Reginald Daniel [Book Review: Bonilla-Silva]

    Social Forces
    Volume 81, Number 2 (December 2002)
    pages 674-676

    Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
    Duke University

    Most books on multiracial matters are as fluffy as a goose-down pillow. These books are often edited collections in which personal narratives by multiracial people from middle-class backgrounds are paraded with very little historical analysis to provide context, no theoretical argument on how multiracialism fits in the larger racial system, and no regard for how representative the stories are. Fortunately, this is not the case with G. Reginald Daniel’s book, More than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order. This is a sophisticated, historically complex, and theoretically driven analysis of multiracialism in the U.S…

    Read the entire review here.