Mixed Race Studies

The Mulatto In The United States: Including A Study Of The Role Of Mixed-Blood Races Throughout The World

Greenwood Press Reprint
918 (Reprint Publication Date: 1969-05-08)
417 pages
ISBN: 0-8371-0938-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-8371-0938-1
DOI: 10.1336/0837109388

Edward Byron Reuter (1880-1946)

An historical study of the role of the mulatto in American society, with a discussion of the mixing of races in other parts of the world. Edward Byron Reuter (1880-1946) received his doctoral degree in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1919 for this dissertation. He served (in 1933) as the 22nd President of the American Sociological Society.

Read the entire book here.

Commentary by Steven F. Riley

For 21st century readers this book will most likely considered a racist trope on ‘racial mixing’.

On page 103 in Rainier Spencer‘s Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, he discusses Reuter and says…

…It would be best to begin with a frank examination of Reuter’s racial views.  With absolute bluntness Reuter assured his readers that the “lower culture of the Negro people is of course a simple observational fact and is to be accepted as such.  To question is to deny the obvious.”  He was quite clear about the relative cultural merits of the Negro and white races, which he posited as representing “the antipodal degrees of human culture: at the one extreme are the standards of West Africa; at the other, those of Western Europe.”  Nor did Reuter seem to think that there was any bias inherent in this arrangement, feeling certain enough of it to write that “no Negro questioned the superior ability of the white, and probably there is no Negro today who does not subconsciously believe the white man superior”…

It would be easy (and perhaps desirable) to dismiss the influence of Reuter, but according to his biography at the American Sociological Association:

…Reuter was an active and influential participant in the development of the sociological profession, serving as president of the American Sociological Society in 1933, as secretary-treasurer of the Sociological Research Association from 1936 to 1938 and as president of this group in 1939. He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. From 1928 until a few months before his death in 1946, he was consulting editor of the McGraw-Hill “Publications in Sociology” series. He served approximately ten years as an advisory editor of The American Journal of Sociology….

Shades of Difference: A History of Ethnicity in America: Perspectives on Multiracial America

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
June 2006
208 pages
Cloth: 0-7425-4316-1 / 978-0-7425-4316-4
Paper 0-7425-4317-X / 978-0-7425-4317-1
 
Richard Rees, Assistant professor of American Literature
Antioch College

From its prehistory in the biological theories of racial difference formulated in the 1800s to its current position in academic debate, Richard Rees investigates the diverse fields of scholarship from which the multifaceted understanding of the term ethnicity is derived. At the same time, Rees traces the broader historical forces that shaped the needs to which the concept of ethnicity responded and the social purposes to which it was applied. Centrally, he focuses upon the emergence of ethnicity in the early 1940s as a means of resolving contradictions and ambiguities in the racial status of European immigrants and its subsequent legacy and implications on race and caste. Shades of Difference introduces new perspectives on the definition of “whiteness” in America, and makes an original contribution to the larger discussion of race through a detailed account of ethnicity’s original meaning and its revaluation when later appropriated by the discourse of Black Nationalism in the 1960s and 70s. Rees has produced a powerful new analysis of the cultural and political history of ethnicity in America.

Table of Contents

• The Invention of (the Concept of) Ethnicity
• Introduction: From the Invention of Race to the Rise of the Inbetween People, 1840 – 1924
• Whiteness and the Limits of the New Environmentalism
• Inventing Ethnicity in the Context of Race and Caste, 1930 – 45
• Black Ethnicity and the Transformation of a Concept, 1962 – 72
• Conclusion: Toward a Hybrid Discourse of Ethnicity

‘Canadian’ and ‘Being Indian’: Subject Positions and Discourses Used in South Asian-Canadian Women’s Talk about Ethnic Identity

Culture & Psychology
Volume 15, Number 2 (2009)
pages 255-283
DOI: 10.1177/1354067X09102893

Rebecca L. Malhi
University of Calgary, Canada, rmalhi@ucalgary.ca

Susan D. Boon
University of Calgary, Canada, sdboon@ucalgary.ca

Timothy B. Rogers
University of Calgary, Canada

Ethnic identity descriptions can be viewed as ‘subject positions’ (Davies and Harré, 1990) that are dynamically adopted and discarded for pragmatic purposes through the medium of socialinteraction.  Inthe present paper, we use positioning theory to explore the multiple ways our participants—South Asian-Canadian women—positioned themselves and others in conversations about their ethnic identity.  A discourse analysis of participants’ talk revealed a tendency to privilege a ‘hybrid’ Canadian/South Asian identity over a unicultural one.  Moreover, in the rare instances when participants positioned themselves with a unicultural identity, subtle social pressure from conversational partners seemed to induce them to reposition themselves (or others) with a hybrid identity. We conclude by giving possible reasons for such a preference and by discussing the ways in which the current study corroborates and expands on the extant literature.

Read or purchase the article here.