Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • signare

    Signare was the name for the Mestizo French-African women of the island of Gorée in French Senegal during the 18th and 19th centuries. These woman of color held some power in a patriarchal system throughout the Atlantic Slave Trade. These women were the wives of merchants. Signares commonly had power in networks of trade and wealth within the limitations of slavery. The influence held by these women led to changes in gender roles in the family structure archetype. Signares commonly had power in networks of trade and wealth within the limitations of slavery. Some owned masses of land as well as slaves. Many signares were wed under “common local law” that was recognized by priests of the Catholic faith. These marriages were for economic and social reasons. Both signares and their husbands gained from these partnerships. Europeans passed their names down to the offspring and with it their lineage.

    Source: Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signare

  • Goree: of Slavery, Signares and Foreigners with Cash

    Goree: of Slavery, Signares and Foreigners with Cash

    dofo kow/ߘߝߏ ߞߏ ߎ/history matters
    2013-01-16

    Jody Benjamin

    Two of the hottest Hollywood films out right now deal with American slavery, “Lincoln” and “Django Unchained.” The history of slavery in the United State is once again in mainstream cultural vogue, this time with A-list directors Stephen Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino putting this difficult subject before popular audiences in new ways.

    So it was an interesting time to visit Goree Island, off the coast of Dakar, Senegal. The small volcanic formation off the western tip of Senegal (Dakar’s skyline is clearly visible from the island) was unoccupied when Portuguese traders first came there in the 15th century, using it as a base from which to trade in gold with Africans, but then becoming the first among many Europeans after them to focus on trading slaves.

    The settled part of Goree Island is so small you can walk leisurely around it in two hours or so. The biggest chunk of the tourist crowd that travels over daily by ferry from Dakar do just that before returning the same day. Every day. Like clock work. Beginning with the first ferry crosses over about 10:30, ferries arrive every two hours dumping groups of FWC (“Foreigners With Cash”) onto the island famously associated with the Atlantic slave trade—although historians say the island played only a small role, contrary to popular belief…

    …There is still much about this house in particular, and the island in general, that I am still learning. But the “Maison des Esclaves” appears to have been owned by Anne Pepin, a Senegalese signare, one of a wealthy class of mulatto women who were critical to business transactions between Africans and Europeans throughout this part of the African coast. (In other words, according to some American black nationalist interpretations, and the old fashioned American racial logic of the “one-drop” rule, I was basically standing in the foyer of a black woman’s house!) It is still unclear who built the house (help me out if you know) whether it was Anne and her husband, or her brother Nicholas. Anne was reportedly the lover to the island’s French governor in the late 18th century, Chevalier de Boufflers, to the apparent humiliation of his wife, Ann Sabran. It was Anne Pepin’s niece, Anna Cola, who is depicted (in the lower left, wearing the white shawl) in an image of the home in 1839 about a generation after Anne Pepin lived.

    Usually, the offspring of European men and African women, signares typically became the “local wives” of European traders who were valued for their family connections to local Africans as well as their facility with European language, culture and entree into the transient European society. Signares were frequently slave traders, slave owners and active in any number of other lucrative trades such as the trades in gum Arabic, in cloth and other commodities. Because of their wealth and location within a web of gendered, racialized social and economic relations, signares (from the Portuguese ‘senhora’ or ‘lady’) were often the figurative and literal “belles of the Ball,” on Goree. In coastal settlements from the Senegal river to Freetown, Sierra Leone, they were key figures in trade between Africans and Europeans. Tastemakers, they are often represented in drawings and paintings from the period draped in varied and expensive fabrics and jewelry…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Honoring one of their own

    Honoring one of their own

    Bucks County Courier Times
    Levittown, Pennsylvania
    2013-11-13

    Phil Gianficaro, News columnist

    The inscription on the small old tombstone in the shadow of the majestic oak tree is practically illegible. Weathered and darkened by 148 years, the tablet-shaped marker pales in comparison to others that are more ornate in the Hatboro Baptist Church Cemetery. A noteworthy war veteran from Hatboro, it would seem, deserves a more appropriate remembrance.

    Now he has one.

    Near that barren oak tree this week, they gathered on a sunny Veterans Day morning to honor one of their own, Barclay J. Stagner, the town’s first man of color to serve in the Civil War. A new tombstone, supplied by the Veterans Administration, was dedicated to Stagner and placed several feet from the old stone and beside the gravestone of his mother, Elizabeth.

    “This is a special, long overdue honor,” said David Shannon, Hatboro historian and curator of the cemetery, before a small gathering at the graveside. “While many in the congregation were aware of Barclay, we were intent on letting the community know he existed.”…

    …Stagner was born during the time of slavery. He wasn’t a member of the Hatboro Baptist Church, but was a close friend of Union Army Gen. William Davis, who was. That relationship, combined with his light skin color and blue eyes that belied his race, likely helped Stagner get accepted into the Union Army at a time before blacks were recruited or permitted to enlist.

    “We don’t know if Barclay was black or what used to be called mulatto, or a mixed race,” Shannon said. “He was likely of mixed race. But because he wasn’t dark skinned, they probably didn’t know.”

    Stagner became a sergeant in the 6th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry, and fought in the Battle of Gettysburg. Upon his re-enlistment as a veteran volunteer, he rose to the rank of corporal. He died in Virginia at age 28 on Jan. 3, 1865, and his remains were sent to Hatboro to be interred…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Feature: Between two worlds: challenges of being mixed-race in Japan

    Feature: Between two worlds: challenges of being mixed-race in Japan

    China Daily
    Xinhua News Agency
    2013-11-13

    TOKYO, November 13 (Xinhua) — The latest statistics from Japan’s health ministry show that one in 49 babies born in Japan today are born into families with one non-Japanese parent, giving way to a growing demographic of mixed-race nationals in Japan, known colloquially as “Hafu.”

    “Hafu,” the Japanese popular phonetic expression for the English word “Half,” describes those of mixed-racial, Japanese heritage, and, more precisely, those who are half Japanese and half non-Japanese.

    The phrase has been widely coined by popular media here, as those of mixed-race backgrounds born or living in Japan have made their way into the celebrity limelight and as the general socio- demographic ethnicity of Japan undergoes a shift away from its former homogeneity, and towards multiculturalism…

    …”What we see on TV and in magazines regarding mixed-raced celebrities is great in terms of a seeming mainstream acceptance to this emerging demographic, by a notably homogenous society, but this doesn’t exactly paint a perfect picture of the challenges faced by mixed-race people in Japan,” Keiko Gono, a sociologist and parent of a mixed-race teenager, told Xinhua…

    …For the families well-networked socially and professionally in multicultural circles and can afford the advantages Japan’s international schools can provide, raising a bicultural child is a relatively smooth process.

    But for others, it can be a truly testing lifestyle, both for parents and their mixed-race children.

    “I’ve lived in Japan all my life. My father is from Nigeria and my mother is Japanese,” Edwin Tanabe, a software designer for a U. S. firm in Tokyo, told Xinhua. He took his mother’s family name in elementary school as nobody could pronounce his name properly.

    “It was tough at school because I was the only ‘gaijin’ ( foreigner) in the school, yet I couldn’t speak English and had no knowledge of the world, as I was born and raised in Japan, just like my peers,” he said…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Being Black: It’s not the skin color

    Being Black: It’s not the skin color

    Philadelphia Weekly
    2013-11-13

    Kennedy Allen et al.

    Drexel prof Yaba Blay’s striking new photo book “One Drop” explores how a wide range of different skin tones affects Americans’ personal identities. In  this PW excerpt, eight Philadelphia-area residents of mixed heritage concur: However light they may be, they’re still most certainly Black. Our own Kennedy Allen agrees…

    Growing up in Mt. Airy, an ethnic and economically diverse neighborhood, instilled within me a level of acceptance and tolerance regarding my fellow man that, confoundingly, many didn’t seem to share. I was one of seven Black kids in a class of 42. Because I spoke English properly and preferred rock to rap, I was deemed “White girl” by my racial peers—a label that haunted me for what felt like eons. I knew I wasn’t White, nor did I ever have the urge to be, outside of wishing my hair would blow in the wind like some of the girls in my class. Flash-forward to my final years of high school, in a black school where I was the “light-bright girl who talks White.” Dark-skinned people still sneer at me, somehow assuming that I believe myself to be “better” than they are because of my buttered-toffee skin tone.

    When all is said and done, racial or ethnic identity rests upon the individual and their experiences. I identify myself as a black woman who happens to have Irish and Cherokee lineage. What of all the others who identify as black, but appear otherwise? Scholar and activist Arturo Schomburg, whose extensive collection of books and historical records of African people’s achievements eventually became the famed Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, N.Y., identified as an Afro-Puerto Rican. (In fact, his passion for gathering all those documents was born after a grade-school teacher told him that black people had no history, heroes or accomplishments.) Would Schomburg’s experience be less valid because it fails to meet some homogenous notion of Blackness? Who has the right to determine these standards in the first place? And in an age of global interconnectedness and the instant, worldwide exchange of information and ideals, why does it still even matter?

    Dr. Yaba Blay wondered some of the same things. A first-generation Ghanian-American and the co-director of Drexel’s Africana studies program, Blay has spent the past two years gathering vibrant portraits and intimate stories from nearly 60 individuals across the country in an attempt to shine some light upon questions of racial ambiguity and legitimacy. Those portraits now comprise a new book that she’s edited and published, (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race—as well as an exhibit of the same name, currently on display at the Painted Bride Art Center…

    Read the entire article and eight subject profiles from the book here.

  • Here, inclusion of the mixed race subject not only reifies the dominance of whiteness, but also further otherizes blackness.

    In the narrative about mixed race bodies that Allure weaves, identity is individualized, privatized and depoliticized. The mixed race subject is included in the institution of beauty, but this comes at the cost of others. Here, inclusion of the mixed race subject not only reifies the dominance of whiteness, but also further otherizes blackness. This inclusion also hinges upon racialized and gendered paradigms of bodily essentialism. While mixed people may be welcomed into the institution of beauty, it is under specific stipulations. Mixed race identity is defined as inherently different from all other racialized groups, as necessarily part-white, as socially and racially flexible, and as inherently beautiful.

    Clara Younge, “Faces of the Future: Race, Beauty and the Mixed Race Beauty Myth” (2012). Macalester College Honors Projects. Paper 8. http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/amst_honors/8.

  • Obstructing the right of black humans and white humans to form families is a central feature of American racism…

    The problem here isn’t that we think Richard Cohen gags at the sight of an interracial couple and their children. The problem is that Richard Cohen thinks being repulsed isn’t actually racist, but “conventional” or “culturally conservative.” Obstructing the right of black humans and white humans to form families is a central feature of American racism. If retching at the thought of that right being exercised isn’t racism, then there is no racism.

    Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Richard Cohen in Context,” The Atlantic, (November 12, 2013). http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/richard-cohen-in-context/281426/.

  • Red: Racism and the American Indian

    Red: Racism and the American Indian

    UCLA Law Review
    Volume 56, Issue 3 (February 2009)
    pages 591-656

    Bethany R. Berger, Thomas F. Gallivan, Jr. Professor of Real Property Law
    University of Connecticut

    How does racism work in American Indian law and policy? Scholarship on the subject too often has assumed that racism works for Indians in the same way that it does for African Americans, and has therefore either emphasized the presence of hallmarks of black-white racism, such as uses of blood quantum, as evidence of racism, or has emphasized the lack of such hallmarks, such as prohibitions on interracial marriage, to argue that racism is not a significant factor. This Article surveys the different eras of Indian-white interaction to argue that racism has been important in those interactions, but has worked in a distinctive way. North Americans were not primarily concerned with using Indian people as a source of labor, and therefore did not have to theorize Indians as inferior individuals to control that labor. Rather, the primary concern was to obtain tribal resources and use tribes as a flattering foil for American society and culture. As a result, it was necessary to theorize tribal societies as fatally and racially inferior groups, while emphasizing the ability of Indian individuals to leave their societies and join non-Indian ones. This theory addresses the odd paradox that the most unquestionably racist eras in Indian-white interaction emphasized and encouraged assimilation of Indian individuals. It also contributes to the ongoing effort to understand the varying manifestations of racism in a multiracial America. Most important, it provides a new perspective on efforts to curtail tribal sovereignty in the name of racial equality, revealing their connection to historic efforts to maintain the inferiority of Indian tribes by treating them as racial groups rather than political entities with governmental rights.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Beyond Our Hearts: The Ecology of Couple Relationships

    Beyond Our Hearts: The Ecology of Couple Relationships

    California Law Review Circuit
    Volume 4, October 2013
    pages 155-164

    Holning Lau, Professor of Law
    University of North Carolina School of Law

    In his review of Professor Angela Onwuachi-Willig’s book, According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family, Professor Holning Lau extends Professor Onwuachi-Willig’s analysis of how external support is instrumental to the success of relationships beyond multiracial couples. Arguing that ecological factors should play a larger role in policy discussions about marital relations, Professor Lau examines the debates surrounding same-sex marriage and the Healthy Marriage Initiative and concludes that policymakers should more carefully consider how exogenous circumstances affect the success of intimate relationships.   

    Read the entire article here.

  • According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family

    According to Our Hearts: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and the Law of the Multiracial Family

    Yale University Press
    2013-06-18
    344 pages
    6 1/8 x 9 1/4
    30 b/w illus.
    Cloth ISBN: 9780300166828

    Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Charles M. and Marion J. Kierscht Professor of Law
    University of Iowa

    This landmark book looks at what it means to be a multiracial couple in the United States today. This book begins with a look back at a 1925 case, in which a two-month marriage ends with a man suing his wife for misrepresentation of her race, and shows how our society has yet to come to terms with interracial marriage. Angela Onwuachi-Willig examines the issue by drawing from a variety of sources including her own experiences. She argues that housing law, adoption law, and employment law fail, in important ways, to protect multiracial couples.  In a society in which marriage is used to give, withhold and take away status—in the workplace and elsewhere—she says interracial couples are at a disadvantage, which is only exacerbated by current law.