Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Black, White, Other: Racial categories are cultural constructs masquerading as biology

    Black, White, Other: Racial categories are cultural constructs masquerading as biology

    Natural History Magazine
    December 1994
    pp. 32–35

    Jonathan Marks, Associate Professor of Anthropology
    University of North Carolina, Charlotte

    While reading the Sunday edition of the New York Times one morning last February, my attention was drawn by an editorial inconsistency. The article I was reading was written by attorney Lani Guinier (Guinier, you may remember, had been President Clinton’s nominee to head the civil rights division at the Department of Justice in 1993. Her name was hastily withdrawn amid a blast of criticism over her views on political representation of minorities.) What had distracted me from the main point of the story was a photo caption that described Guinier as being “half-black.” In the text of the article, Guinier had described herself simply as “black”

    How can a person be black and half black at the same time? In algebraic terms, this would seem to describe a situation where x = 1/2 x, to which the only solution is x = 0.

    The inconsistency in the Times was trivial, but revealing. It encapsulated a longstanding problem in our use of racial categories—namely, a confusion between biological and cultural heredity. When Guinier is described as “half-black,” that is a statement of biological ancestry, for one of her two parents is black. And when Guinier describes herself as black, she is using a cultural category, according to which one can either be black or white, but not both.

    Race—as the term is commonly used—is inherited, although not in a strictly biological fashion. It is passed down according to a system of folk heredity, an all-or-nothing system that is different front the quantifiable heredity of biology. But the incompatibility of the two notions of race is sometimes starkly evident—as when the state decides that racial differences are so important that interracial marriages must be regulated or outlawed entirely. Miscegenation laws in this country (which stayed on the books in many states through the 1960s) obliged the legal system to define who belonged in what category. The resulting formula stated that anyone with one-eighth or more black ancestry was a “negro.” (A similar formula, defining Jews, was promulgated by the Germans in the Nuremberg Laws of the 1930s.).

    Applying such formulas led to the biological absurdity that having one black great-grandparent was sufficient to define a person as black, but having seven white great grandparents was insufficient to define a person as white. Here, race and biology are demonstrably at odds. And the problem is not semantic but conceptual, for race is presented as a category of nature…

    …Unlike graduated biological distinctions, culturally constructed categories are ultrasharp. One can be French or German, but not both; Tutsi or Hutu, but not both; Jew or Catholic, but nor both; Bosnian Muslim or Serb, but not both; black or white, but not both. Traditionally, people of “mixed race” have been obliged to choose one and thereby identity themselves unambiguously to census takers and administrative bookkeepers—a practice that is now being widely called into question…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Family Identity: Black-White Interracial Family Health Experience

    Family Identity: Black-White Interracial Family Health Experience

    Journal of Family Nursing
    (2006)
    Vol. 12, No. 1
    Pages 22-37
    DOI: 10.1177/1074840705285213

    Marcia Marie Byrd, PhD, RN
    College of St. Catherine

    Ann Williams Garwick, PhD, RN, LP, LMFT, FAAN
    University of Minnesota

    The purpose of this interpretive descriptive study was to describe how eight Black-White couples with school-aged children constructed their interracial family identity through developmental transitions and interpreted race to their children. Within and across-case data analytic strategies were used to identify commonalities and variations in how Black men and White women in couple relationships formed their family identities over time. Coming together was the core theme described by the Black-White couples as they negotiated the process of forming a family identity. Four major tasks in the construction of interracial family identity emerged: (a) understanding and resolving family of origin chaos and turmoil, (b) transcending Black-White racial history, (c) articulating the interracial family’s racial standpoint, and (d) explaining race to biracial children across the developmental stages. The findings guide family nurses in promoting family identity formation as a component of family health within the nurse-family partnership with Black-White mixed-race families.

  • Tragic Mulatto Girl Wonder: The paradoxical life of Philippa Duke Schuyler

    Tragic Mulatto Girl Wonder: The paradoxical life of Philippa Duke Schuyler

    QBR The Black Book Review
    February/March 1996

    Lise Funderburg

    Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler
    by Kathryn Talalay
    Oxford University Press (317 pp.)
    Hardcover ISBN 0-19-509608-8

    As a child prodigy, pianist and composer, Philippa Duke Schuyler incited both awe and envy. Performing at the 1939 New York World’s Fair when she was just eight, she seemed to live a charmed life, full of whirlwind concert tours in distant lands, where she met politicians, artists and royals. But while she was known as a gifted and serious musician and, later, a journalist, she was also viewed as the quintessential tragic mulatto. (Her father was the conservative black journalist and satirical novelist George Schuyler; her mother, a rebellious white Southern belle who married across the color line.) She seemed trapped at times by her talents and the constraints of relentlessly watchful parents whose aspirations for her were often suffocating. She acquired a reputation both as a temptress whose greatest interest in life was men and sex and as a perpetually frightened child. When she died in 1967, at age 35, in a helicopter crash in Vietnam during a war-orphan airlift, she met with a final irony. For all her achievements and worldliness, she could not swim to save her life…

    …Talalay places Philippa’s racial identity at the center of this biography and rightfully so. Here was a woman whose parents placed tremendous expectations on her to transcend race, even as her music career was constantly limited by it. Philippa had few opportunities to make real friends among any racial group and never developed a community of support beyond her immediate family, which had its own tensions and estrangements. Her father, who adored her, was frequently away on reporting trips. As Philippa grew older, she began to see his politics and his color as embarrassments. When he ventured to spend five pages of a 150-word manuscript, The Negro in America, on his daughter, she wrote to her mother from Europe: “Get me OUT of that book. Everyone here thinks of me as a Latin, and that’s the way I want it. Anyone who had any paternal sentiments would want a child to escape suffering.” Her mother, whom the author describes as “forever Machiavellian,” collaborated on Philippa’s many acts of racial passing. As Talalay found in her research into George Schuyler’s papers, to this day the manuscript has not one, but three blank pieces of paper taped over each of the five pages concerning Philippa…

    Read the entire book review here.

  • Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler

    Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler

    Oxford University Press
    January 1995
    360 pages
    47 halftones
    6-1/8 x 9-1/4
    ISBN13: 978-0-19-511393-8
    ISBN10: 0-19-511393-4

    Kathryn Talalay

    The Tragic Saga of Harlem’s Biracial Prodigy

    George Schuyler, a renowned and controversial black journalist of the Harlem Renaissance, and Josephine Cogdell, a blond, blue-eyed Texas heiress and granddaughter of slave owners, believed that intermarriage would “invigorate” the races, thereby producing extraordinary offspring. Their daughter, Philippa Duke Schuyler, became the embodiment of this theory, and they hoped she would prove that interracial children represented the final solution to America’s race problems.

    Able to read and write at the age of two and a half, a pianist at four, and a composer by five, Philippa was often compared to Mozart. During the 1930s and 40s she graced the pages of Time and Look magazines, the New York Herald Tribune , and The New Yorker . But as an adult she mysteriously dropped out of sight, leaving America to wonder what had happened to the “little Harlem genius.” Suffering the double sting of racial and gender bias, Philippa was forced to find recognition abroad, where she traveled constantly, performing for kings and queens, and always in search of her self. At the age of thirty-five, Philippa finally began to embark on a racial catharsis: she was just beginning to find herself when on May 9, 1967, while on an unauthorized mission of mercy, her life was cut short in a helicopter crash over the waters of war-torn Vietnam.

    The first authorized biography of Philippa Schuyler, Composition in Black and White draws on previously unpublished letters and diaries to reveal an extraordinary and complex personality. Extensive research and personal interviews from around the world make this book not only the definitive chronicle of Schuyler’s restless and haunting life, but also a vivid history of the tumultuous times she lived through. Talalay has created a highly perceptive and provocative portrait of a fascinating woman.

  • Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America

    Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America

    University of Nebraska Press
    2002
    396 pages
    Illus., map
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-6194-5

    Edited by

    James F. Brooks, President and Chief Executive Officer
    School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico

    Confounding the Color Line is an essential, interdisciplinary introduction to the myriad relationships forged for centuries between Indians and Blacks in North America. Since the days of slavery, the lives and destinies of Indians and Blacks have been entwined-thrown together through circumstance, institutional design, or personal choice. Cultural sharing and intermarriage have resulted in complex identities for some members of Indian and Black communities today.

    The contributors to this volume examine the origins, history, various manifestations, and long-term consequences of the different connections that have been established between Indians and Blacks. Stimulating examples of a range of relations are offered, including the challenges faced by Cherokee freedmen, the lives of Afro-Indian whalers in New England, and the ways in which Indians and Africans interacted in Spanish colonial New Mexico. Special attention is given to slavery and its continuing legacy, both in the Old South and in Indian Territory. The intricate nature of modern Indian-Black relations is showcased through discussions of the ties between Black athletes and Indian mascots, the complex identities of Indians in southern New England, the problem of Indian identity within the African American community, and the way in which today’s Lumbee Indians have creatively engaged with African American church music.

    At once informative and provocative, Confounding the Color Line sheds valuable light on a pivotal and not well understood relationship between these communities of color, which together and separately have affected, sometimes profoundly, the course of American history.

  • Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family

    Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family

    Oxford University Press
    July 2006
    312 pages
    2 maps, 15 halftones, 1 line illus.
    6-1/8 x 9-1/4
    ISBN13: 978-0-19-531310-9
    ISBN10: 0-19-531310-0

    Claudio Saunt, Associate Professor of History and Associate Director of the Institute of Native American Studies
    University of Georgia

    Winner of the William P. Clements Prize, Clements Center for Southwest Studies

    Deceit, compromise, and betrayal were the painful costs of becoming American for many families. For people of Indian, African, and European descent living in the newly formed United States, the most personal and emotional choices–to honor a friendship or pursue an intimate relationship–were often necessarily guided by the harsh economic realities imposed by the country’s racial hierarchy. Few families in American history embody this struggle to survive the pervasive onslaught of racism more than the Graysons.

    Like many other residents of the eighteenth-century Native American South, where Black-Indian relations bore little social stigma, Katy Grayson and her brother William–both Creek Indians–had children with partners of African descent. As the plantation economy began to spread across their native land soon after the birth of the American republic, however, Katy abandoned her black partner and children to marry a Scottish-Creek man. She herself became a slaveholder, embracing slavery as a public display of her elevated place in America’s racial hierarchy. William, by contrast, refused to leave his black wife and their several children and even legally emancipated them.

    Traveling separate paths, the Graysons survived the invasion of the Creek Nation by U.S. troops in 1813 and again in 1836 and endured the Trail of Tears, only to confront each other on the battlefield during the Civil War. Afterwards, they refused to recognize each other’s existence. In 1907, when Creek Indians became U.S. citizens, Oklahoma gave force of law to the family schism by defining some Graysons as white, others as black. Tracking a full five generations of the Grayson family and basing his account in part on unprecedented access to the forty-four volume diary of G. W. Grayson, the one-time principal chief of the Creek Nation, Claudio Saunt tells not only of America’s past, but of its present, shedding light on one of the most contentious issues in Indian politics, the role of “blood” in the construction of identity.

    Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy in the United States and compelled to adopt the very ideology that oppressed them, the Graysons denied their kin, enslaved their relatives, married their masters, and went to war against each other. Claudio Saunt gives us not only a remarkable saga in its own right but one that illustrates the centrality of race in the American experience.

  • Health and Behavior Risks of Adolescents with Mixed-Race Identity

    Health and Behavior Risks of Adolescents with Mixed-Race Identity

    American Journal of Public Health
    Volume 93, Number 11 (November 2003)
    Pages 1865-1870

    J. Richard Udry, PhD, Kenan Professor of Maternal and Child Health and Sociology
    Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

    Rose Maria Li, PhD
    Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

    Janet Hendrickson-Smith, MA
    Analytical Sciences, Inc.

    Objectives. This study compared the health and risk status of adolescents who identify with 1 race with those identifying with more than 1 race.

    Methods. Data are derived from self-reports of race, using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), which provides a large representative national sample of adolescents in grades 7 through 12. Respondents could report more than 1 race.

    Results. Mixed-race adolescents showed higher risk when compared with single-race adolescents on general health questions, school experience, smoking and drinking, and other risk variables.

    Conclusions. Adolescents who self-identify as more than 1 race are at higher health and behavior risks. The findings are compatible with interpreting the elevated risk of mixed race as associated with stress.

    Read the entire article here.

  • “We Have Always Been:” Mixed Race Experiences in the USA and French Polynesian (Tahitian) Contexts: 2010 Exploration Seminar in Tahiti

    “We Have Always Been:” Mixed Race Experiences in the USA and French Polynesian (Tahitian) Contexts: 2010 Exploration Seminar in Tahiti

    University of Washington Exploration Seminars
    Dates of Instruction: 2010-08-22 through 2010-09-10

    Program Director: Steve Woodard and Alejandro Espania (Minority Affairs)

    Ia Ora Na, friend!  Please know that this three (3) week seminar will take place in Tahiti, one of 130 main islands within the French Polynesian archipelago.   The dates for this seminar are August 22, 2010 through September 10, 2010. Participants should plan to participate in a pre-seminar, which will take place during the latter part of Spring Quarter 2010 at the University of Washington.

    We invite you to join us as we traverse through, and push upon the boundaries of, the system of knowledge collectively referred to in the literature as multiracial theory.  Our expected resources include seminal and newly published texts about the mixed race experience, as well as the participants’ (and instructors’) own respective personal narratives.  Both ways of knowing will be routinely explored via purposeful dialogues, structured self-reflections, and organized large/small group and one-on-one community interactions…

    For more information, click here.

  • Thinking about Race, Sexuality, and Marriage: A Roundtable on Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally

    Thinking about Race, Sexuality, and Marriage: A Roundtable on Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally

    American Historical Association
    124th Annual Meeting
    Friday, 2010-01-10, 08:30-10:30 PST (Local Time)
    Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego
    Manchester Ballroom D (Hyatt)
    San Diego, California

    Thinking about Race, Sexuality, and Marriage: A Roundtable on Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally

    Chair:
    Eileen Boris, Professor of History, Chair and Professor of Feminist Studies
    University of California, Santa Barbara

    Commentator:
    Vicki L. Ruiz, Chair and Professor of History
    University of California, Irvine

    Sponsored by the AHA Working Group for Historical Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage

    Panel Discussion
    Kristin Celello, Assistant Professor of History
    Queens College, City University of New York

    For the past several decades, historians have argued effectively that far from being stable and unchanging until the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, marriage–as a legal and social institution–has changed in significant ways over the course of American history.  Pascoe’s book reminds us that race must necessarily be integrated into this discourse, contending not only that who has had access to marriage has varied but also that the state has played a crucial role in the creation of marital “norms.”

    Panel Discussion
    Matt J. Garcia, Associate Professor of American Civilization, Ethnic Studies and History
    Brown University

    Given the ascendancy of Obama and claims by media that we have arrived in a “post-Racial” era with his election, this book reminds us that such moments have come before in court cases concerning interracial unions and did not result in the end of race and racism that has been associated with these relationships.  Pascoe’s book, in other words, contributes to an evolving history of interracial relations, a subject that will have increasing interest as children of this generation go to college.  I plan to talk about the future audiences for her book by reflecting on my teaching the history of interracial relations and mixed race people over the last ten years.

    Panel Discussion
    Valerie Matsumoto, Associate Professor of History
    University of California, Los Angeles

    Peggy Pascoe‘s landmark work raises questions regarding post-World War II changes not only in the dominant US society but also within East Asian American communities, which had their own strong preferences for endogamous marriage.  Her research also draws attention to the roles played by Asian Americans in confronting old racial structures, as embedded in law.  Challenges to miscegenation laws in the US West were mounted by Nisei such as Noriko Sawada Bridges and Harry Oyama during the critical period of Japanese American community reconfiguration and rebuilding after World War II. I will consider how the Japanese American community’s understandings of racialization shifted in this era; I will also examine perceptions of interracial marriage within the ethnic community.

    Panel Discussion
    Jessica Millward, Assistant Professor of History
    University of California, Irvine

    I suggest that the implications of Peggy Pascoe‘s work on miscegenation laws stretch beyond the geographical setting of the West, and the temporal setting of the Progressive era, and signal key points of inquiry among scholars of African American Women’s history writ large. In particular, I focus on laws of slavery and manumission in 18th and 19th centuries.  Laws governing manumission held particular ramifications for enslaved African American women as they used their consensual and non-consensual relationships with owners, and consensual relationships with free black men to access freedom for themselves and their children.  I suggest that laws governing manumission served as precursors to miscegenation laws in the 20th century. Likewise, I suggest that “marriage” and uplift constituted a range of definitions based on the particular angle of vision of African American women in both slavery and in freedom.

  • Becoming Mexican Across the Pacific: The Expulsion of Mexican Chinese Families from Mexico to China and Diasporic Imaginings of a Mexican Homeland, 1930s–60s

    Becoming Mexican Across the Pacific: The Expulsion of Mexican Chinese Families from Mexico to China and Diasporic Imaginings of a Mexican Homeland, 1930s–60s

    American Historical Association
    124th Annual Meeting
    Friday, 2010-01-10 11:40 PST (Local Time)
    San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina
    Torrey 3 (Marriott)
    San Diego, California

    Julia María Schiavone Camacho, Assistant Professor of History
    University of Texa, El Paso

    Chinese men arrived in Mexico after Chinese Exclusion in the United States. Chinese concentrated in the north due to its proximity to the United States and opportunities in the developing economy. Chinese men forged a variety of ties with Mexicans including romantic liaisons with Mexican women. Anti-Chinese campaigns emerged in the border state Sonora during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Spreading rapidly and gaining tremendous power, the movement reached its zenith during the Great Depression when the United States forcibly repatriated hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. Overlapping partially with Mexican “repatriation,” a mass expulsion of Chinese occurred in Sonora and its southern neighbor Sinaloa. Mexican women and Chinese Mexican children accompanied Chinese men for a variety of reasons. Some Chinese men and Mexican Chinese families departed Sonora and Sinaloa through Mexican ports. Others traversed the Mexican-U.S. borderlands, landing in the custody of U.S. Immigration Service agents who, in enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, jailed and deported them to China. Complicating international relations, the United States accused officials in Sonora of violating its immigration laws by forcing Chinese across its border. Mexican Chinese families faced great challenges in their new locations in Guangdong province. While some families remained unified, others broke apart. The Mexican Chinese families, congregated in Portuguese Macau. The colony’s Catholic and Iberian culture was similar to Mexico’s and the Mexican Chinese found niches. Over time, they created a coherent enclave whose web extended to British Hong Kong as well as Guangdong. The concept of the “Mexican homeland” gained increasing salience in the context of great flux in mid-twentieth-century China. The Mexican Chinese “became Mexican” over time and from abroad as they struggled to return to Mexico. Following these families across borders and oceans, this paper examines larger questions of nationalism and “diasporas.”