Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Documentary ‘Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story’ Tells Untold Stories of Bi-Racial World War II Era Children

    Documentary ‘Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story’ Tells Untold Stories of Bi-Racial World War II Era Children

    The AFRO
    2014-01-15

    Maria Adebola

    Emmy-winning journalist Regina Griffin was inspired to tell a story and that’s how her film, Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story was born.

    A family friend, entrepreneur Doris McMillon, had told stories about growing up the half-Black, half-White child of a Black G.I. and White German woman and the story was horrifying. Unwanted by both nations, the children often lived their lives as unwanted, ignored and forgotten people,

    “I got chills learning about their lives, in orphanages and beyond,” said Griffin.

    Griffin transformed her research into a documentary about the lives of the babies. The film was screened recently in front of about 50 people at the William McGowan Theater located at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

    The film scrapes the surface of the difficulties that resulted from the interracial relationships between Black soldiers and German women during World War II. Many of the children ended up being adopted or sent to orphanages because their German mothers feared the public scrutiny that came with having a mixed-race child out of wedlock.

    Some of the Black soldiers who wanted to marry their German girlfriends found it difficult because the relationships were viewed as forbidden. Those who wanted to return home to the African-American girlfriends and sometimes wives didn’t want to bring along children whose presence would indicate they had been unfaithful.

    The children were caught in the middle…

    Read the entire article here.

  • From Mushkegowuk to New Orleans: A Mixed Blood Highway

    From Mushkegowuk to New Orleans: A Mixed Blood Highway

    NeWest Press
    April 2008
    48 pages
    ISBN: 978-1-897126-29-5

    Joseph Boyden

    In 2007, Joseph Boyden, author of the bestselling novel Three Day Road and 2008 Giller Prize winner for Through Black Spruce, was invited by the Canadian Literature Centre | Centre de littérature canadienne to deliver the inaugural Henry Kreisel Lecture at the University of Alberta. Boyden spoke passionately, relating Aboriginal people in Canada to poor African Americans, Whites, and Hispanics in post-Katrina New Orleans. At the end of his lecture he presented a manifesto to the audience, demanding independence from the shackles of North American governments on behalf of these oppressed cultures. The lecture was received with much acclaim and enthusiasm.

    In collaboration with the Canadian Literature Centre, NeWest Press is pleased to present the Henry Kreisel Lecture Series publications, a forum for open, inclusive critical thinking, and a tribute to Henry Kreisel himself.

  • 10 Most Amazingly Bizarre Paintings of Obama on Etsy

    10 Most Amazingly Bizarre Paintings of Obama on Etsy

    Houston Press
    Houston, Texas
    2013-05-09

    Jef With One F

    As Houston Press’ bizarre Etsy art expert, I thought I’d see how a nation of crafty lunatics would portray our commander-in-chief. The answer is somewhere between “awesomely” and “needs medication badly.”

    Mike and Mollie took the title commander-in-chief a little too literally, and here we have Barack Obama looking like a cross between a Bjork dress and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. The weirdest part is he sports a hammer and sickle button, and if anyone can explain to me where the Soviet Union and Native American heritage intersect then kindly let me know in the comments which mental health facility is offering the free wifi you’re using to view this…

    …This piece is described by Psychic Unicorns as imagining our president as the cult cinema anti-hero John Shaft. I choose to describe it as, “President Obama’s purple rage will leave thugs riddled with bullets as he rings the bell of liberty.” Seriously, this is a lot of freakin’ purple. Are we sure Prince didn’t do this…

    Read the entire article here.

  • (Re)mapping the Borderlands of Blackness: Afro-Mexican Consciousness and the Politics of Culture

    (Re)mapping the Borderlands of Blackness: Afro-Mexican Consciousness and the Politics of Culture

    Duke University
    2013
    233 pages

    Talia Weltman-Cisneros

    Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University

    The dominant cartography of post-Revolutionary Mexico has relied upon strategic constructions of a unified and homogenized national and cultural consciousness (mexicanidad), in order to invent and map a coherent image of imagined community. These strategic boundaries of mexicanidad have also relied upon the mapping of specific codes of being and belonging onto the Mexican geo-body. I argue that these codes have been intimately linked to the discourse of mestizaje, which, in its articulation and operation, has been fashioned as a cosmic tool with which to dissolve and solve the ethno-racial and social divisions following the Revolution, and to usher a unified mestizo nation onto a trajectory towards modernity.

    However, despite its rhetoric of salvation and seemingly race-less/positivistic articulation, the discourse of mestizaje has propagated an uneven configuration of mexicanidad in which the belonging of certain elements have been coded as inferior, primitive, problematic, and invisible. More precisely, in the case of Mexicans of African descent, this segment of the population has also been silenced and dis-placed from this dominant cartography.

    This dissertation examines the coding of blackness and its relationship with mexicanidad in specific sites and spaces of knowledge production and cultural production in the contemporary era. I first present an analysis of this production immediately in the period following the Revolution, especially from the 1930’s to the 1950’s, a period labeled as the “cultural phase of the Mexican Revolution.” This time period was strategic in manufacturing and disseminating a precise politics of culture that was used to reflect this dominant configuration and cartography of mexicanidad. That is, the knowledge and culture produced during this time imbedded and displayed codes of being and belonging, which resonated State projects and narratives that were used to define and secure the boundaries of a unified, mestizo imaginary of mexicanidad. And, it is within this context that I suggest that blackness has been framed as invisible, problematic, and foreign. For example, cultural texts such as film and comics have served as sites that have facilitated the production and reflection of this uneasy relationship between blackness and mexicanidad. Moreover, this strained and estranged relationship has been further sustained by the nationalization and institutionalization of knowledge and culture related to the black presence and history in Mexico. From the foundational text La raza cósmica, written in 1925 by José Vasconcelos, to highly influential corpuses produced by Mexican anthropologists during this post-Revolutionary period, the production of knowledge and the production of culture have been intimately tied together within an uneven structure of power that has formalized racialized frames of reference and operated on a logic of coloniality. As a result, today it is common to be met with the notion that “no hay negros en México” (there are no blacks in Mexico).

    Yet, on the contrary, contemporary Afro-Mexican artists and community organizations within the Costa Chica region have been engaging a different cultural politics that has been serving as a tool of place-making and as a decolonization of codes of being and belonging. In this regard, I present an analysis of contemporary Afro-Mexican cultural production, specifically visual arts and radio, that present a counter-cartography of the relationship between blackness and mexicanidad. More specifically, in their engagement of the discourse of cimarronaje (maroonage), I propose that these sites of cultural production also challenge, re-think, re-imagine, and re-configure this relationship. I also suggest that this is an alternative discourse of cimarronaje that functions as a decolonial project in terms of the reification and re-articulation of afromexicanidad (Afro-Mexican-ness) as a dynamic and pluri-versal construction of being and belonging. And, thus, in their link to community programs and social action initiatives, this contemporary cultural production also strives to combat the historical silence, dis-placement, and discrimination of the Afro-Mexican presence in and contributions to the nation. In turn, this dissertation offers an intervention in the making of and the relationships between race, space and place, and presents an interrogation of the geo-politics and bio-politics of being and belonging in contemporary Mexico.

    Contents

    • Abstract
    • List of Figures
    • Acknowledgements
    • Introduction
    • Chapter One: Mapping Blackness Elsewhere: Mestizaje, Anthropology, and the Coloniality of Knowledge
      • 1.1 Mestizaje and the Mapping of Blackness Beyond the Borders of Modern Mexicanidad
      • 1.2 Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran: The Production of Knowledge and the Anthropological (Dis)placement of Blackness in Post-Revolutionary Mexico
      • 1.3 Recuerdos del Jarocho: The Museumification of Blackness
      • 1.4 The Coloniality of Knowledge and the Dis-placement of Blackness
    • Chapter Two: Forjando Patria: Framing and Performing Blackness in the “Golden Age” of Mexican Culture
      • 2.1 Memin Pinguin: Dis-locating Blackness
      • 2.2 Angelitos negros: Absorbing Blackness and Saving the National Family
      • 2.3 Al son del mambo: Discovering and Modernizing the Primitive Place of Blackness
      • 2.4 On Framing Blackness and Popular Culture as a Racialized Regime of Representation
    • Chapter Three; Cimarronaje Cultural: Towards a Counter-Cartography of Blackness and Belonging in Mexico
      • 3.1 Articulating the Place of Blackness in the Costa Chica
      • 3.2 Understanding Cimarronaje Cultural as a Counter-Cartography of Blackness and as a Place-Making Narrative
      • 3.3 Cimarronaje Cultural: Towards a Counter-Cartography of Blackness
        • 3.3.1 El Centro Cultural Cimarron
        • 3.3.2 Naufragio and the Work of Aydée Rodriguez Lopez
        • 3.3.3 Cimarron: La Voz de los Afromestizos
      • 3.4 Conclusions: Cimarronaje as a Decolonial Project
    • Chapter Four: Towards a Re-mapping of Blackness and Belonging in Mexico
      • 4.1 México Negro and the Encuentro de los Pueblos Negros: From Pluri-versal Networks to Social and Political Action
      • 4.2 Nomenclature, Identity in Politics, and the Re-thinking of Afro-Mexican Consciousness
    • Conclusions
    • Figures One-Six
    • Bibliography
    • Biography

    LIST OF FIGURES

    • Figure 1: Mural Painting, Centro Cultural Cimarrón
    • Figure 2: Mural Painting, Centro Cultural Cimarrón
    • Figure 3: Mural Painting, Centro Cultural Cimarrón
    • Figure 4: Naufragio, Aydée Rodriguez Lopez
    • Figure 5: Naufragio, Aydée Rodriguez Lopez
    • Figure 6: Naufragio, Aydée Rodriguez Lopez

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • Passing Strange

    Passing Strange

    The New York Times
    2007-10-21

    Joyce Johnson

    In 1855, Henry Broyard, a young white New Orleans carpenter, decided to pass as black in order to be legally entitled to marry Marie Pauline Bonée, the well-educated daughter of colored refugees from Haiti, who was about to have his child; their marriage license describes them both as “free people of color.” A century and a half later, their great-great-granddaughter, Bliss Broyard, who had been raised as white, abruptly found herself confronting the implications of her newly discovered black identity.

    The daughter of the writer and New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard, she had grown up with a feeling “that there was something about my family, or even many things, that I didn’t know.” What was lacking was any real sense of the history of the father she adored or any contact with his relatives, apart from one dimly remembered day in the past when her paternal grandmother had once visited them in their 18th-century house in the white enclave of Southport, Conn. Even in the last weeks of his life, the secret Anatole Broyard had kept from Bliss and her brother, Todd, was one he could not bear to reveal himself; it was their mother who finally told them, “Your father’s part black,” not long before Broyard died of prostate cancer…

    …In one way, he wasn’t wrong at all. “My father truly believed,” Bliss Broyard writes in “One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life — a Story of Race and Family Secrets,” “that there wasn’t any essential difference between blacks and whites and that the only person responsible for determining who he was supposed to be was himself.” But for Broyard to construct a white identity required the ruthless and cowardly jettisoning of his black family. He would later lamely tell his children that their grandmother and their two aunts, one of them with tell-tale dark skin, simply didn’t interest him. During the 1960s, he expressed no sympathy for the civil rights movement, opposed, his daughter writes, to a movement that required “adherence to a group platform rather than to one’s ‘essential spirit.’ ” His posthumously published memoir, “Kafka Was the Rage,” revealed only that his people were from New Orleans…

    Read the entire review here.

  • What Comes Naturally: A Racially Inclusive Look at Miscegenation Law

    What Comes Naturally: A Racially Inclusive Look at Miscegenation Law

    Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
    Volume 31, Number 3, 2010
    pages 15-21
    DOI: 10.1353/fro.2010.0020

    Jacki Thompson Rand, Professor of History; American Indian and Native Studies
    University of Iowa

    In What Comes Naturally Peggy Pascoe interrogates the U.S. racial regime through a study of civil marriage and miscegenation law. Her admirable work traces the development of legislation and court decisions about mixed marriage between White settlers and African Americans, Latinos and Latinas, Asians, and American Indians. Bans against mixed marriages, or miscegenation, between White men and women of color, Pascoe argues, served to protect White supremacy and heteronormative patriarchy. By maintaining boundaries between the races, and material consequences that favored men in land disputes and White relatives in estate disputes, for example, White men’s economic and social positions were reinforced while women’s positions were undermined. Pascoe includes American Indians in her study because their lands, unique relationship with the federal government, and kinship systems presented complications not found in other cases. Pascoe also briefly mentions tribal miscegenation laws among the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Creeks.

    Pascoe’s book and a recent special issue of the journal Frontiers, on interracial marriage and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North American Indians, White settlers, and African Americans, complement each other in some ways. French fur traders in the Northeast and Great Lakes region and Spanish and Mexicans in the Southwest mixed with Native women long before the creation of the United States. The French were early astute observers of Native people and soon realized the crucial role kinship played in providing access to prime beaver-trapping grounds along rivers. French men married into Native groups to enhance their trade. By the nineteenth century White American men also sought Native women who held land as a way of gaining access to resources. The federal government looked upon such unions as a means to facilitate Indian acculturation and assimilation into White society, even well into the twentieth century. In many instances Native families saw the marriage of their daughters to White men as a means to enhance their access to trade goods and to a more secure life.

    Pascoe treats miscegenation law that covered American Indians primarily in the case of Oregon. In fact, miscegenation law evolved from initially targeting White and African American unions to include White unions with other races, including American Indians. The creation and enforcement of laws that pertained to marriages with Native Americans, Pascoe notes, seemed to coincide with external or individual circumstances where the acquisition or loss of land was at stake. Like the unions of French men and Native women, many marriages followed the custom of the country, where the partners were bound to each other outside of civil law. In the mid-nineteenth century the Oregon Territorial Supreme Court heard a case to determine whether such marriages were legal under territorial law. Oregon settler land claims at that time were unstable, so it is not surprising that the court and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the custom of the country. While this chapter of American Indian history diverged from the history of barring mixed marriages, Pascoe demonstrates that the tolerance of mixed marriage between White men and Indian women also secured White male patriarchy. It was a variation on the theme of White supremacy.

    Like settler regimes elsewhere White American society viewed race through a biological lens that assessed parentage, phenotype, and blood quantum. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both the American and the Australian governments encouraged intermarriage to Whiten and eventually erase indigenous populations. The coexistence of miscegenation laws that pertained to Native peoples and assimilation proponents of interracial marriage arose from conflicting impulses. On one hand, intermarriage was objectionable on the grounds Pascoe depicts in her book: the progeny of mixed marriages challenged racial regimes, White supremacy, and White male privilege. But the federal government and settler society’s twin desires to avert an unaffordable war with Indians and to expropriate lands in Native possession weakened the resolve to bar mixed marriages. In the Frontiers special issue Cathleen Cahill explores the federal Indian Service as a site of applied assimilation policy where marriages between Whites and American Indians were made possible by putting numbers of White women in proximity to eligible Native men.

    In the same period intermarriage could also serve as a vehicle for the expropriation of Native…

  • Dr. Eliot Favors Racial Dead Line

    Dr. Eliot Favors Racial Dead Line

    The New York Times
    1909-03-15
    page 3

    Declares the South’s Future Depends On the Whites Preserving Their Integrity

    MISQUOTED IN INTERVIEW

    Did Not Say That Irish and Italians Furnished Race Problem for North Like Negroes In South

    ATLANTA, Ga., March 14.—Sharply denying that he had been taken to task by a Massachusetts committee for his recently expressed views on the negro question, ex-President C. W. Eliot of Harvard, who is staying In Atlanta, to-day reiterated his belief that the South is handling the racial problem in the right way, and that the best interests of both whites and blacks require that a racial dead line be established. Racial Intermingling, Dr. Eliot declared, would be fatal to both white and black.

    The future of the South depends, according to Dr. Eliot, on the preservation by the whites of their racial integrity, and, therefore, he thinks they are handling the negro problem in the proper way.

    “Why you believe,” said Dr. Eliot, “that your race problem is a new one, but it has been experienced before, only it is intensified here. The negro cannot be expected to be ready for all phases of civilization, when he is a few decades removed from the time when he first began to enjoy civilization as a free man. After 500 or 1,000 years we may expect more substantial growth.”

    It was Dr. Eliot’s opinion that the negro will need all the professions to enable him to maintain his racial integrity, especially physicians and nurses. Negro women, when properly trained, make good nurses, he said.

    Dr. Eliot mentioned the amalgamation of the Germans and Chinese as an admixture of races that had been suggested as being practical, but he said that he did not believe that such an intermingling would stand.

    Dr. Eliot said he had been misquoted in the interview sent out from Montgomery, in which he was credited with saying that the Irish and Italians furnished a race problem for the North similar to that created for the South by the negroes. He said that he did not suggest the examples of racial intermingling that were mentioned in the interview, but he repeated the statement that to maintain racial integrity an individuality was a good thing. For that reason he opposed the intermingling of racial stocks, even of the Aryan branch. The fact that a number of races are associated in a country should not prevent them from dwelling together in harmonious relations.

    When the English people were cited as an example of intermingling of’ Jutes, Angles, Saxons, and Normans, that was successful, Dr. Eliot replied:

    “But notice how long it required for them to unite. Races that dwell together, of course, tend to become similar.”

  • English 4640G: Construction of Racial Identity in Post Civil War America

    English 4640G: Construction of Racial Identity in Post Civil War America

    Huron University College at Western University
    London, Ontario, Canada
    Winter 2013

    Neil Brooks, Associate Professor, English

    Course Description: Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination argues that the canonical American literary tradition can only be understood after recognizing the presence of an often silenced, but almost ubiquitous Africanist persona. This persona served as a negative stereotype against which the dominant American identity could define itself. However, even Morrison’s groundbreaking work re-inscribes the binary between Black and White in America and fails to theorize adequately the ways in which bi-racial and multi-racial identity have complicated the ideologies she discusses. This course will begin with Morrison’s analysis and then look at several novels and stories which the explore the instability of any color line between Black and White in America.

    Course Objectives: This course addresses the examination of how racial identity, particularly mixed race identity, is constructed in America through close engagement with selected literary works written by Americans since the end of the Civil War. By the end of the course students should have improved their critical reading and writing in ways which will enable their success in a wide variety of University courses. Further, students will have learned American historical background, feminist literary theory, patterns of racial construction, theories of performativity, and skills in analyzing artistic achievement within the works. Finally, the course aims to provide the framework for applying these skills and knowledge in engaging with the narratives students will encounter and create outside the classroom.

    Course Material:

    For more information, click here.

  • 477A Race Mixing in U.S.A. History

    477A Race Mixing in U.S.A. History

    California State University, Fullerton
    2013-2015

    History of racial mixing in the United States. Experiences of interracial families and especially their mixed race progeny. Complicates understanding of racial categories and hierarchies over time.

  • Red, White, and Black: A Personal Essay on Interracial Marriage

    Red, White, and Black: A Personal Essay on Interracial Marriage

    Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
    Volume 29, Numbers 2 & 3, 2008
    pages 51-58
    DOI: 10.1353/fro.0.0021

    Jacki Thompson Rand, Professor of History; American Indian and Native Studies
    University of Iowa

    About a month before my father died, a long-held question spilled out of my ten-year-old mouth. “Daddy, why do you hate colored people so much and love Mama?” The silence that filled the kitchen where my mother was cooking blocked out the evening news blaring from the television. It was another nightly report about the blacks’ grim battle for freedom from racial segregation. The March on Washington and rise of black power had energized their struggle, making for significant advances, but the struggle continued. My father’s routine rants against the “coloreds” had unexpectedly pulled the naïve question from my throat where it had been lodged for some time. My mother began to cry. I looked up into his usually loving face and saw cold silent anger. Somehow, I had intuited that it would be this way. For the first time in my life I was sent to bed without supper and told to stay upstairs until morning. My parents never brought up our exchange and several weeks later my father died of a heart attack in front of me. Some forty years later I asked my mother if she recalled that event and she looked at me levelly, “Why, yes, I certainly do.” The cold indignation in her eyes and my silence formed an unspoken agreement that we would not revisit the incident that took place in the kitchen in early 1967. In the intervening decades, however, I had given it much thought, peeling away the layers of my confusion about my experiences in a racially mixed household where black, white, and red shaped our familial relations, individual identities, and confused interpretations of how race had come to define us.

    In retrospect it seems that both race and color were at the center of our family relations. My mother’s darkness was the basis of a terrible insecurity that played out in her comments about her children and about other dark-skinned people. Simultaneously, my father’s open racism against blacks contradicted his seeming blindness to my mother’s insecurity-inducing darkness. I recall my father’s special song for my mother. “Portrait of my Love,” a syrupy popular tune suggesting that extraordinary beauty cannot be captured by the artist’s brush. Their romanticized fraught defiance of convention became swept up in the growing momentum of the civil rights movement. Historically invisible dark people filled television screens, as well as white-sheeted Klansmen, water cannons, billy clubs, and jeering white crowds. Under the circumstances, my mother’s insecurity about her darkness intensified. Events taking place outside our family charged the dynamics among us. We all became actors on her stage, which she directed relentlessly to buffer herself against a pervasive racism that could easily and frequently did sweep her up in the net of all denigrated colored peoples.

    My parents’ relationship married my mother’s ever-present awareness of her dark skin to my father’s insecurities about his origins and driven desire to escape them. He sought membership in the American middle class and spent his life accumulating what he believed were the essential requirements: comportment, a steady job, children, a home, and car. My father’s near-obsession with “good manners” and appropriate appearances was most evident in our relationship. My little brother and ally was a mute, invisible actor throughout our time with both parents, while I received the bounty of attention due a Southern princess. My parents insisted on tightly controlling how I wore my hair and how I was clothed. Trained as an excellent, creative seamstress, my mother made many of my clothes. My occasional effort to follow a fashion trend—one year it was empire waist summer dresses—was usually quashed by my father. (“Jean, that thing makes her look pregnant. Take it back.” I was probably all of eight or nine.) White anklets and some version of Mary Janes rounded out my outfits. As the only girl in the family with two brothers I seemed an inescapable target of monitoring and molding into Southern perfection. My mother was uncharacteristically unquestioning and compliant in these matters.

    My parents were a striking, charismatic pair. My mother is the daughter of…