Mixed Race Studies

The history of interracial sex: It’s much more than just rape or romance.

The Los Angeles Times
2015-09-28

Carina Ray, Associate Professor of African and Afro- American Studies
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts

Carina Ray is associate professor of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University and the author of “Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana.”

When South African comedian Trevor Noah takes over as host of “The Daily Show” on Monday night, he’ll probably introduce his new audience to his family biography. Born in Johannesburg to a black South African mother and a white Swiss German father in 1984, when apartheid was still firmly in place and interracial marriage was illegal, Noah made his parents’ struggles the subject of his widely acclaimed stand-up routine “Born a Crime.”.

Their story represents an exception to one of apartheid’s harshest realities: White men sexually violated black women with impunity. But neither is it a romantic tale of racial transcendence. Noah has been frank about how his Xhosa mother paid the greater price for her relationship with a white man. Not only did she face social stigma and arrest, she was also left to raise Noah alone when his father exercised his white male privilege and left South Africa.

In my academic research, I grapple with stories like the one Noah tells, of interracial sexual relations that resist neat labels. They’re not uncommon. Yet when power dynamics are so profoundly unequal, there’s a strong incentive to deny the possibility of complexity or murkiness by falling back on binaries like rape or romance…

Read the entire article here.

Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana

Ohio University Press
October 2015
364 pages
11 illus., 3 maps
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8214-2179-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8214-2180-2
Electronic ISBN: 978-0-8214-4539-6

Carina E. Ray, Associate Professor of African and Afro- American Studies
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts

Interracial sex mattered to the British colonial state in West Africa. In Crossing the Color Line, Carina E. Ray goes beyond this fact to reveal how Gold Coasters—their social practices, interests, and anxieties—shaped and defined these powerfully charged relations across racial lines. The interplay between African and European perspectives and practices, argues Ray, transformed these relationships into key sites for consolidating colonial rule and for contesting its racial and gendered hierarchies of power.

With rigorous methodology and innovative analyses, Ray brings Ghana and Britain into a single analytic frame by examining cases in both locales. Intimate relations between black men and white women in Britain’s port cities emerge as an influential part of the history of interracial sex and empire in ways that are connected to rather than eclipsed by relations between European men and African women in the colony.

Based on rich archival evidence and original interviews, the book moves across different registers, shifting from the micropolitics of individual disciplinary cases against colonial officers who “kept” local women to transatlantic networks of family, empire, and anticolonial resistance. In this way, Ray cuts to the heart of how interracial sex became a source of colonial anxiety and nationalist agitation during the first half of the twentieth century.

Race, sex, and colonialism

OUPblog: Oxford University Press’s Academic Insights for the Thinking World
2014-10-20

Carina Ray, Associate Professor of African and Afro- American Studies
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts

DJ/Presenter Reggie Yates and Dr. Carina Ray review historical documents

As an Africanist historian committed to reaching broader publics, I was thrilled when the research team for the BBC’s genealogy program Who Do You Think You Are? contacted me late last February about an episode they were working on that involved the subject of some of my research, mixed race relationships in colonial Ghana. I was even more pleased when I realized that their questions about shifting practices and perceptions of intimate relationships between African women and European men in the Gold Coast, as Ghana was then known, were ones I had just explored in a newly published American Historical Review article, which I readily shared with them. This led to a month-long series of lengthy email exchanges, phone conversations, Skype chats, and eventually to an invitation to come to Ghana to shoot the Who Do You Think You Are? episode.

After landing in Ghana in early April, I quickly set off for the coastal town of Sekondi where I met the production team, and the episode’s subject, Reggie Yates, a remarkable young British DJ, actor, and television presenter. Reggie had come to Ghana to find out more about his West African roots, but he discovered along the way that his great grandfather was a British mining accountant who worked in the Gold Coast for close to a decade. His great grandmother, Dorothy Lloyd, was a mixed-race Fante woman whose father — Reggie’s great-great grandfather — was rumored to be a British district commissioner at the turn of the century in the Gold Coast.

The episode explores the nature of the relationship between Dorothy and George, who were married by customary law around 1915 in the mining town of Broomassi, where George worked as the paymaster at the local mine. George and Dorothy set up house in Broomassi and raised their infant son, Harry, there for two years before George left the Gold Coast in 1917 for good. Although their marriage was relatively short lived, it appears that Dorothy’s family and the wider community that she lived in regarded it as a respectable union and no social stigma was attached to her or Harry after George’s departure from the coast…

Read the entire article here.

Who Do You Think You Are? Reggie Yates [with Reggie Yates]

Who Do You Think You Are?
BBC One
Series 11: Episode 8 of 10
Running Time: 00:59:09
First Aired: 2014-09-25

Presenter and DJ Reggie Yates grew up knowing very little about his father’s side of the family. Reggie sets out on the trail of his grandfather, Harry Philip Yates. His journey takes him to Ghana, where he unravels a complex family history where Ghanaian culture and British colonialism collide.

[Features Fordham University history professor Carina Ray.]

For more information, click here.

Examining the Legacy of European Names in the Elmina-Cape Coast Area of Ghana

Afroeuropa: Journal of Afroeuropean Studies
Volume 1, Number 3 (2007)
22 pages

Amma Kyerewaa Akrofi
Texas Tech University

Lawrence Owusu-Ansah
Texas Tech University

The prevalence of European family and place names in Fante areas of Ghana is one of the best known vestiges of the interaction between African and European cultures, but there has been little systematic study of it. The aim of this research was to investigate the European and Europeanized names commonly found in the Cape Coast–Elmina area. Using data obtained from interviews and a variety of written sources, the names were collected, classified, and their linguistic characteristics analyzed. The results of the study show that 1) there is a pervasiveness of such names still used by the citizens of the area under study, 2) the names are classifiable according to origin, and 3) there is a tendency toward hybridization.

1. Ancient Cities Marked by History

The interaction between Europe and modern day Ghana dates back to the fifteenth century. Francis K. Buah (1980) recounts that the Portuguese were the first European power to arrive on Ghana’s shores in January 1471, lured by the rich trade in gold. They operated from Elmina where, in 1492, they built the Sao Jorge da Mina castle and settled for about a century and a half being engaged in trade. Later, the Dutch came and conquered the Portuguese and, after staying there for about half a century, they also left, selling their holdings to the English. Buah further informs us that about a century and a half after the advent of the Portuguese, the English settled in Cape Coast and in 1664 built the Cape Coast Castle. From there they traded in merchandise and slaves and later ruled the colony until the capital was moved to Accra in 1876. Joseph Brookman-Amissah (1972) supports Buah’s account and provides further evidence of other Europeans frequenting the coastal towns of Cape Coast and Elmina. Notable among them were the French, the Danes, the Swedes and even the German Bradenbergers, the latter two staying for only a short time. Therefore, Mylène Rémy and Jean-Claude Klotchkoff’s (1992, 109) description of Elmina and Cape Coast as ancient cities marked by history is appropriate. Rémy and Klotchkoff elaborate this portrayal (1992, 109) with an assertion that the past seems more present than the present itself in both towns. However, in making this statement, Rémy and Klotchkoff’s thoughts seem to dwell more on historical monuments like the castles and forts and colonial architecture than on anything else, as evidenced by the following description of central Elmina as an aggregate of:

old creole-style houses, a totally unexpected Italian palace, and the equally startling statue of a doughty Queen Victoria in the middle of one of the town squares (Rémy and Klotchkoff 1992, 109).

But it is not only the antiquated European architecture that gives the two towns their nostalgic charm. They get their charm also from a unique characteristic –the prevalence of European and Europeanized family names. Buah (1980, 75) referred to this phenomenon as another lasting result of European activities in the country.

It is most intriguing that after 50 years of independence, the people of Cape Coast and Elmina still maintain the pre-colonial and colonial practice of giving European and Europeanised family names to their offspring. However, apart from brief and scattered comments such as the one by Buah quoted above, no systematic study has been made of those names, although they constitute some of the most obvious vestiges of the interaction between Europe and Ghana. This study attempted to establish that the names are an important record not only of that interaction but also of the different European powers who visited that part of the world. We asked the following research questions: 1) what kinds of European and Europeanized names are currently used in the area, 2) why are they used, and 3) what are the future trends? The cordial relationship between the Europeans and the Africans as evidenced by those names is a living testimony of the oneness of humanity, a fact that is often ignored in a world struggling to come to terms with ethnic conflicts and racial intolerance…

…6. Reasons for Adopting European and Europeanized Names

The informants who were interviewed gave five main reasons for adopting European or Europeanized names: European ancestry, conversion to Christianity, acquisition of formal education, to obtain colonial jobs, and miscellaneous reasons. We discuss these below.

6.1. European ancestry

Several of the European names, especially those of Portuguese and Dutch origin, were given directly by European fathers to their children with African women and these have been passed down to the present generation. A very good example of this is the name Bartels, which is common in Elmina. Originally German, it came to Elmina when Governor Bartels, whose family had migrated to Holland earlier, married a Fante woman.2 The Bartels family in Elmina today is descended from the children of this marriage, including Johann Carl Bartels who was a very rich merchant in his day. In addition to this, many families whose histories are not well documented claim direct descent from European forebears, e.g. the LeJeune and Guichard families of Elmina and Cape Coast, respectively. In both cases, as in many others, bi-racial characteristics support the claim…

Read the entire article here.

The Latin American Identity and the African Diaspora: Ethnogenesis in Context

Cambria Press
2010-08-08
360 pages
ISBN: 9781604977042

Antonio Olliz-Boyd, Emeritus Professor of Latin American Literature
Temple University

Just beneath the surface of most scholars’ research on the ethno-racial composition of Spanish-speaking America lies a definitive connection between the African Diaspora and the Latin American identity. Although to a lesser extent, this is also true of Portuguese-speaking Brazil—the existence of African-related people and their role as an integral part of the total Latin ethnicity currently appears to be more readily accepted and discussed in Brazil than in other Latin American countries. Afro-Peruvians, Afro-Colombians, Afro-Venezuelans, Afro-Uruguayans, or Afro-Mexicans—to name just a few—are rarely openly acknowledged in most of Spanish-speaking Latin America. However, one cannot deny that African slavery was a fact of life in all the territories colonized and settled by Spain and Portugal in the Americas, and with this, of course, came widespread miscegenation between the European male and the subjugated African female.

More than likely, because of the diversity of racial features, most non-natives do not see the extent to which Latin America’s genetic amalgam can often mask the phenotypic effects of race-mixing. As a result, many researchers and scholars of the area are reluctant to divulge that someone is a descendant of African forebears because doing so might run the risk of one being considered politically incorrect or having debased that person’s character. Whereas in the United States there is little to no stigma attached to the president’s African ancestry, for any president of a Latin American country, one cannot overtly attribute a genetic link to African heritage.

There is extensive research found both in books and articles on the various topics of Afro Latinism/Afro Hispanism that is directed mainly at the non-native. Nonetheless, one still notices either cultural confusion or political reluctance to accept the identity of Blackness that the Latin American native lives with—for himself or for others—on a daily basis. For the average Cuban, Venezuelan, Peruvian, and so forth, along with their Latin counterparts, Blackness in racial terms surfaces as a matter of degrees of African-relatedness that is then counterbalanced by degrees of European and/or Amerindian genomic components. It is only in non-native cultures that one encounters such disparate comparisons as “statistics for Hispanics versus statistics for Blacks.” But is it not possible to find persons that are ethnoracially Black included in the demographics for Hispanics?

The overarching aim of this book, then, is to determine whether it is possible to perceive a constituency within the Latin American whole who is also an integral part of the African Diaspora. It examines the concept of African-relatedness within the totality of the Latin American sphere—not just in one isolated country or region—through a careful process of literary analysis. By exploring the works of Latin American novelists, poets, and lyricists, this study shows how they creatively expose their most intimate feelings on ethnic Blackness through a semiotic reliance on the inner voice. At the same time, the reader becomes a witness to the writers’ associations with a sense of Africanness as it artistically affects them and their communities in their formulations of self-identity.

Unique to this volume is the scholarly presentation of the presence of a group of people in Ghana, West Africa, who owe their raison d’être as a clan to their ancestral origins in Brazil. Having been accepted and received by an endemic tribe of what was called the Gold Coast at an historical moment in the nineteenth century, a community of escaped slaves and deported ex-slaves from Brazilian bondage regrouped as an ethnic whole. The reality of their existence gives new meaning to the term African Diaspora. To this day, their descendants identify themselves as displaced Latin Americans in Africa. Undoubtedly, both this surprising feature of Latin Americans returning to the African continent and the book as a whole will stimulate further discussion on the issue of who is Black and who is Hispanic as well as generate continued, in-depth research on the relationship between two continents and their shared genotypology.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Essay I: Aesthetic Blackness in the Creative Literature of the Latin/Hispanic Reality
• Essay II: The Aesthetics of Language as an Experience of the Afro Latin/Afro Hispanic Reality
• Essay III: An Aesthetic Experience: The Reality of Phenotypes and Racial Awareness in Dominican Literature (Julia Alvarez and Loida Maritza Pérez)
• Introduction to Essay IV
• Essay IV: A Latin Identity, An African Experience: The Tabom Brazilians of Ghana
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index