Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • An Interview with Paisley Rekdal

    An Interview with Paisley Rekdal

    Kenyan Review
    2021-07-07

    Ruben Quesada

    Paisley Rekdal is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, where she is also the creator and editor of West: A Translation, as well as the community web projects Mapping Literary Utah and Mapping Salt Lake City. In May 2017, she was named Utah’s Poet Laureate and received a 2019 Academy of American Poets’ Poets Laureate Fellowship. Appropriate: A Provocation, which examines cultural appropriation, was published from W.W. Norton in Feb. 2021.

    Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes (2009, 2013), Narrative’s Poetry Prize, the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize, and various state arts council awards. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, the Best American Poetry series (2012, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019), and on National Public Radio, among others.

    RUBEN QUESADA: What is the earliest memory you have about your relationship to literature?

    PAISLEY REKDAL: I recall when I felt I understood something about literature that other people didn’t. It was in fifth grade, when we were discussing Lord of the Flies, and the teacher asked who the self-sacrificial character Piggy might also remind us of. Piggy was meant to stand in for Jesus and I remember muttering that in class while the rest of the students looked a little baffled. I understood then that works of literature were often telling multiple stories at once; this multiplicity of meaning seemed to irritate other people, though it didn’t irritate me…

    Read the entire interview here.

  • Learning Your Own Name

    Learning Your Own Name

    The Gay & Lesbian Review
    2022-02-25

    Ren Iris

    The author in fourth grade, holding a basketball trophy

    IF GENDER had a tagline, it would be “Gender: Paradoxes Abound.” Every day, we make countless assumptions based on gender expectations and societal norms. Sex assigned at birth and gender are often conflated and/or repurposed to fit institutional check-the-box guidelines. Gender—the abstraction, the perceived reality—is a chimera. Like most other words acting as a placeholder for an abstract concept, it is ever shifting and always context-dependent, even if it’s relegated to a box to be checked on a form.

    We’ve gotten less restrictive lately, thanks to activists and antidiscrimination policies, and thanks also to the dissemination of intersectional training, often featuring educational resources such as the “gender unicorn” or “gender bread” person. But even with all that knowledge, we must constantly unlearn the restrictive, prescriptive understandings of gender. And in real time, during present interactions, referring to a gender-inclusive cheat sheet before responding is usually a thankless endeavor…

    Read the entire article here.

  • There’s a sense of gratitude in her voice as she describes “championing the Black community … I’m really happy that I did take that opportunity, because I am very much part of that community. I am a Black woman. I have a lot of things to say, which I hadn’t had the confidence to speak about.”

    After the murder of George Floyd, and a renewed energy around the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, [Adwoa] Aboah found her conversations on her Gurls Talk podcast getting “a lot deeper. Everyone had so much to say, and everyone was going through such personal experiences, growth and sadness.” It also led to a second Vogue cover, this time alongside Marcus Rashford, shot in the footballer’s garden in Manchester, for an issue spotlighting “faces of hope”. It was a huge moment – and one she almost turned down. At the time, Aboah says, she “didn’t think it was my place to be that person. I think it’s because I hadn’t really delved into race and my feelings around it, and what I had been through. My mum’s white, my dad’s Black, and there had been a lot of confusion personally as to how I felt about it all. And, actually, it was great.” There’s a sense of gratitude in her voice as she describes “championing the Black community … I’m really happy that I did take that opportunity, because I am very much part of that community. I am a Black woman. I have a lot of things to say, which I hadn’t had the confidence to speak about.”

    Hannah J. Davies, “Adwoa Aboah on acting, recovery and her racial awakening: ‘I am a Black woman. I have a lot to say’,” The Guardian, March 19, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/mar/19/adwoa-aboah-acting-recovery-racial-awakening-black-woman-lot-to-say.

  • The Journey to Separate but Equal: Madame Decuir’s Quest for Racial Justice in the Reconstruction Era

    The Journey to Separate but Equal: Madame Decuir’s Quest for Racial Justice in the Reconstruction Era

    University Press of Kansas
    April 2021
    256 pages
    Hardback ISBN: ISBN 978-0-7006-3183-4

    Jack M. Beermann, Professor of Law and Harry Elwood Warren Scholar
    Boston University School of Law

    In The Journey to Separate but Equal: Madame Decuir’s Quest for Racial Justice in the Reconstruction Era, Jack Beermann tells the story of how, in Hall v. Decuir, the post–Civil War US Supreme Court took its first step toward perpetuating the subjugation of the non-White population of the United States by actively preventing a Southern state from prohibiting segregation on a riverboat in the coasting trade on the Mississippi River. The Journey to Separate but Equal offers the first complete exploration of Hall v. Decuir, with an in-depth look at the case’s record; the lives of the parties, lawyers, and judges; and the case’s social context in 1870s Louisiana. The book centers around the remarkable story of Madame Josephine Decuir and the lawsuit she pursued because she had been illegally barred from the cabin reserved for White women on the Governor Allen riverboat.

    The drama of Madame Decuir’s fight against segregation’s denial of her dignity as a human and particularly as a woman enriches our understanding of the Reconstruction era, especially in Louisiana, including political and legal changes that occurred during that time and the plight of people of color who were freed from slavery but denied their dignity and rights as American citizens. Hall v. Decuir spanned the pivotal period of 1872–1878, during which White segregationist Democrats “redeemed” the South from Republican control. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Hall overturned the application of an 1869 Louisiana statute prohibiting racial segregation in Madame Decuirs case because of the status of the Mississippi River as a mode of interstate commerce. The decision represents a crucial precedent that established the legal groundwork for the entrenchment of Jim Crow in the law of the United States, leading directly to the Courts adoption of separate but equal in Plessy v. Ferguson.

  • Understanding Race in Sweden: The Racialisation and Deracialisation of Multiethnic and Multiracial Swedes

    Understanding Race in Sweden: The Racialisation and Deracialisation of Multiethnic and Multiracial Swedes

    Nordic Journal of Social Research
    2022-02-23
    pages 51-66
    DOI: 10.18261/njsr.13.1.5

    Sayaka Osanami Törngren, Associate Professor in International Migration and Ethnic Relations; Senior Researcher at Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare
    Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden

    Mixed populations are becoming increasingly visible in Swedish society, although they are not always recognised as such. In a colour-blind Swedish society, mixed Swedes fall into the dichotomised binary of ‘Swedes’ and ‘immigrants’. The experiences of twenty-one interviewees with multiethnic and multiracial Swedes can be broadly categorised into three types: those who feel that they are not discriminated against or racialised, those who feel that they are not discriminated against but are racialised, and those who feel that they are both discriminated against and racialised. The analysis illustrates interviewed mixed Swedes’ unique position in the racial hierarchy in Sweden and how fluid their racial experiences are. Their different experiences also show how understandings of white and non-white racial groups are formed through the processes of racialisation and deracialisation in Sweden.

    Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

  • New Rules: Navigating Black Spaces in Changing Times

    New Rules: Navigating Black Spaces in Changing Times

    Mixed Auntie Confidential
    2022-03-19

    TaRessa Stovall

    Twenty-one years ago, I was interviewed for a cover story in the late, great Black Issues Book Review magazine, with fellow Mixed-Black authors Walter Mosley, Staceyann Chin, and Mat Johnson. The article, by Elizabeth Atkins, explored how we identified on the heels of the then brand-new Census category that made history by including a way for Mixed folks to designate themselves. That’s me in the upper left corner.

    Times change, and with them the ways in which some of us move through once-familiar spaces. Lately, I’ve been challenged with how to respond to the new dynamic of Mixed-Black folks being gatekept out of some Black spaces…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race

    Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race

    Harvard University Press
    2022-03-22
    320 pages
    6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
    21 photos, 1 table
    Hardcover ISBN: 9780674244269

    Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alfonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor; Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research
    Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

    Andrew S. Curran, William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities
    Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut

    The first translation and publication of sixteen submissions to the notorious eighteenth-century Bordeaux essay contest on the cause of “black” skin—an indispensable chronicle of the rise of scientifically based, anti-Black racism.

    In 1739 Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences announced a contest for the best essay on the sources of “blackness.” What is the physical cause of blackness and African hair, and what is the cause of Black degeneration, the contest announcement asked. Sixteen essays, written in French and Latin, were ultimately dispatched from all over Europe. The authors ranged from naturalists to physicians, theologians to amateur savants. Documented on each page are European ideas about who is Black and why.

    Looming behind these essays is the fact that some four million Africans had been kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic by the time the contest was announced. The essays themselves represent a broad range of opinions. Some affirm that Africans had fallen from God’s grace; others that blackness had resulted from a brutal climate; still others emphasized the anatomical specificity of Africans. All the submissions nonetheless circulate around a common theme: the search for a scientific understanding of the new concept of race. More important, they provide an indispensable record of the Enlightenment-era thinking that normalized the sale and enslavement of Black human beings.

    These never previously published documents survived the centuries tucked away in Bordeaux’s municipal library. Translated into English and accompanied by a detailed introduction and headnotes written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew Curran, each essay included in this volume lays bare the origins of anti-Black racism and colorism in the West.

    Table of Contents

    • Preface: Who’s Black and Why?
    • Note on the Translations
    • I
      • Introduction: The 1741 Contest on the “Degeneration” of Black Skin and Hair
      • 1. Blackness through the Power of God
      • 2. Blackness through the Soul of the Father
      • 3. Blackness through the Maternal Imagination
      • 4. Blackness as a Moral Defect
      • 5. Blackness as a Result of the Torrid Zone
      • 6. Blackness as a Result of Divine Providence
      • 7. Blackness as a Result of Heat and Humidity
      • 8. Blackness as a Reversible Accident
      • 9. Blackness as a Result of Hot Air and Darkened Blood
      • 10. Blackness as a Result of a Darkened Humor
      • 11. Blackness as a Result of Blood Flow
      • 12. Blackness as an Extension of Optical Theory
      • 13. Blackness as a Result of an Original Sickness
      • 14. Blackness Degenerated
      • 15. Blackness Classified
      • 16. Blackness Dissected
    • II
      • Introduction: The 1772 Contest on “Preserving” Negroes
      • 1. A Slave Ship Surgeon on the Crossing
      • 2. A Parisian Humanitarian on the Slave Trade
      • 3. Louis Alphonse, Bordeaux Apothecary, on the Crossing
    • Select Chronology of the Representation of Africans and Race
    • Notes
    • Acknowledgments
    • Credits
    • Index

  • The Half-Blood: A Cultural Symbol in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

    University Press of Kentucky
    1979-12-31
    128 pages
    5.50 x 8.50 in
    Hardcover ISBN: 9780813113906

    William J. Scheick, J.R. Millikan Centennial Professor Emeritus of English
    University of Texas, Austin

    The half-blood—half Indian, half white—is a frequent figure in the popular fiction of nineteenth-century America, for he (or sometimes she) served to symbolize many of the conflicting cultural values with which American society was then wrestling. In literature, as in real life the half-blood was a product of the frontier, embodying the conflict between wilderness and civilization that haunted and stirred the American imagination. What was his identity? Was he indeed “half Indian, half white, and half devil”—or a bright link between the races from which would emerge a new American prototype?

    In this important first study of the fictional half-blood, William J. Scheick examines works ranging from the enormously popular “dime novels” and the short fiction of such writers as Bret Harte to the more sophisticated works of Irving, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, and others. He discovers that ambivalence characterized nearly all who wrote of the half-blood. Some writers found racial mixing abhorrent, while others saw more benign possibilities. The use of a “half-blood in spirit”—a character of untainted blood who joined the virtues of the two races in his manner of life—was one ingenious literary strategy adopted by a number of writers, Scheick also compares the literary portrayal of the half-blood with the nineteenth-century view of the mulatto.

    This pioneering examination of an important symbol in popular literature of the last century opens up a previously unexplored repository of attitudes toward American civilization. An important book for all those concerned with the course of American culture and literature.

  • Adwoa Aboah on acting, recovery and her racial awakening: ‘I am a Black woman. I have a lot to say’

    Adwoa Aboah on acting, recovery and her racial awakening: ‘I am a Black woman. I have a lot to say’

    The Guardian
    2022-03-19

    Hannah J. Davies, Deputy Editor, Newsletters, and a Culture Writer

    Adwoa Aboah: ‘Acting in Top Boy was so out of my comfort zone.’ Photograph: Andy Jackson/The Guardian

    She is one of the world’s most in-demand models, but it wasn’t always this way. As she gets her big acting break in Top Boy, she explains how she got through a tumultuous decade

    A few weeks ago, Adwoa Aboah experienced what she describes as “a sombre moment”. “I was at my mum and dad’s, clearing out my childhood room,” she says, her voice a little shaky. “I was going through all these old Vogues I had kept, and I was like … ‘Why did I do that? What was I looking at … who was I looking at?’ Because no one in these magazines looks like me.” Despite signing with the giant modelling agency Storm at 16, Aboah’s self-esteem as a teenager and into her 20s was, she says, “so low. I was on this trajectory of really wanting to be someone else. I couldn’t count on my hands any models who looked like me who were killing it. Obviously there was Jourdan Dunn, and Naomi Campbell, but … ” she pauses, sighs. “I didn’t have the emotional intelligence, nor the language, to articulate why I wasn’t doing well, why I wasn’t in the places that I thought should have been an option for me. Why wasn’t I being supported by British publications? I was like: ‘Is it me? What’s wrong with me?’ Not in a kind of self-pitying way but … I just didn’t understand.”.

    Now 29, Aboah is one of Britain’s most recognisable and successful models, as likely to be seen endorsing Dior or Burberry as H&M or Gap. She was named model of the year by the British Fashion Council in 2017 and, in the same year, memorably featured on the cover of Edward Enninful’s first issue of British Vogue, a vision of retro cool in a patterned headscarf and masses of blue eyeshadow. She’s also an activist, having founded the organisation Gurls Talk – which educates young women on topics including feminism, race, sex and body image – in 2015, and now she has her first regular acting role in the new series of Netflix’s Top Boy, one of the coolest shows on TV. It’s hard to believe that Aboah ever felt like a misfit and, worse still, thought that it was somehow her fault…

    Read the entire interview here.

  • Blood and Boundaries: The Limits of Religious and Racial Exclusion in Early Modern Latin America

    Blood and Boundaries: The Limits of Religious and Racial Exclusion in Early Modern Latin America

    Brandeis University Press
    2020-11-01
    212 pages
    5.5 x 8.5 in.
    Cloth ISBN: 9781684580194

    Stuart B. Schwartz, George Burton Adams Professor of History
    Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

    In Blood and Boundaries, Stuart B. Schwartz takes us to late medieval Latin America to show how Spain and Portugal’s policies of exclusion and discrimination based on religious origins and genealogy were transferred to their colonies in Latin America. Rather than concentrating on the three principal divisions of colonial society—Indians, Europeans, and people of African origins—as is common in studies of these colonial societies, Schwartz examines the three minority groups of moriscos, conversos, and mestizos. Muslim and Jewish converts and their descendants, he shows, posed a special problem for colonial society: they were feared and distrusted as peoples considered ethnically distinct, but at the same time their conversion to Christianity seemed to violate stable social categories and identities. This led to the creation of “cleanliness of blood” regulations that explicitly discriminated against converts. Eventually, Schwartz shows, those regulations were extended to control the subject indigenous and enslaved African populations, and over time, applied to the growing numbers of mestizos, peoples of mixed ethnic origins. Despite the efforts of civil and church and state institutions to regulate, denigrate, and exclude, members of these affected groups often found legal and practical means to ignore, circumvent, or challenge the efforts to categorize and exclude them, creating in the process the dynamic societies of Latin America that emerged in the nineteenth century.

    Contents

    • Contents
    • Foreword
    • Acknowledgments
    • Introduction
    • Moriscos: Real, Occasional, and Imaginary Muslims
    • Conversos: The Mestizos of Faith
    • Mestizos: “A Monster of . . . Many Species”
    • Notes
    • Index