Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Written records agree with Melungeon DNA results

    Written records agree with Melungeon DNA results

    Jack Goins’ Melungeon and Appalachian Research
    October 2013

    William E. Cole
    University of Tennessee

    Joe Stevenson Looney
    University of Tennessee

    Written records agree with Core Melungeon DNA Results. The Core Melungeon DNA Project was formed with Family Tree DNA on July 25, 2005. The goal of the project was to determine the origin of the Melungeons and to find matches in the data base. Our project results were submitted to a peer review board and published April 24, 2012 in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy and published by Associated Press reporter Travis Loller in May 2012, the results of the first generation are offspring of Sub-Saharan African men and white women of Northern and central European origin. http://www.jogg.info/72/files/Estes.pdf.

    The majority of the male core groups were haplogroup E1b1a Sub-Saharan African and the maternal mtDNA group was European. The first mixed generation was the children from Sub-Saharan African men and white women of Northern and central European origin, the exact date of this mixing is unknown. Some from this first mixed generation eventually intermarried with white settlers in colonial Virginia and took their names. Part of this tri-racial clan may have remained in Colonial Virginia and others migrated to North Carolina who would eventually become known as Melungeons (Calloway Collins told Will Allen Dromgoole the Collins and Gibsons, had stolen those names from white settlers in Virginia where they were living as Indians, before migrating to North Carolina”). Calloway Collins was a great grandson of Benjamin whose origin was African and we also know all Africans took English surnames, even the ones who became slaves…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Blood: The Stuff of Life

    Blood: The Stuff of Life

    House of Anansi Press
    2013-10-26
    272 pages
    5 x 8
    Paperback ISBN: 978-1-77089-322-1
    eBook ISBN: 978-1-77089-324-5

    Lawrence Hill

    In this year’s CBC Massey Lectures, bestselling author Lawrence Hill offers a provocative examination of the scientific and social history of blood, and on the ways that it unites and divides us today.

    Blood runs red through every person’s arteries and fulfills the same functions in every human being. The study of blood has advanced our understanding of biology and improved medical treatments, but its cultural and social representations have divided us perennially. Blood pulses through religion, literature, and the visual arts. Every time it pools or spills, we learn a little more about what brings human beings together and what pulls us apart. For centuries, perceptions of difference in our blood have separated people on the basis of gender, race, class, and nation. Ideas about blood purity have spawned rules about who gets to belong to a family or cultural group, who enjoys the rights of citizenship and nationality, what privileges one can expect to be granted or denied, whether you inherit poverty or the right to rule over the masses, what constitutes fair play in sport, and what defines a person’s identity.

    Blood: The Stuff of Life is a bold meditation on blood as an historical and contemporary marker of identity, belonging, gender, race, class, citizenship, athletic superiority, and nationhood.

  • Racial Democracy: The Sociological History of a Concept

    Racial Democracy: The Sociological History of a Concept

    Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies
    Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies
    University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
    2013-02-15

    Antonio Sergio Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
    Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil

    I will examine the coining, the uses, and meanings of the expression “racial democracy” from the 1930’s onwards including its transformation into an ideal for interracial cohabitation and of political inclusion of Blacks in postwar Brazilian modernity. It will also examine the refusal of the expression by the Black activists of the MNU (Movimento Negro Unificado) in the 1970s and their denunciation of its mythical character, as well as its current uses by anthropologists and sociologists engaged in the critique of identity politics.

  • Race was created in America in the late 1600s in order to preserve the land and power of the wealthy…

    Biologically speaking, there’s no such thing as race. As hard as they’ve tried, scientists have never been able to define it. That’s because race is a human creation, not a fact of nature. Like money, it only exists because people accept it as “real.” Races exist because humans invented them.

    Why would people invent race? Race was created in America in the late 1600s in order to preserve the land and power of the wealthy. Rich planters in Virginia feared what might happen if indigenous tribes, slaves, and indentured servants united and overthrew them. So, they cut a deal with the poor English colonists. The planters gave the English poor certain rights and privileges denied to all persons of African and Native American descent: the right to never be enslaved, to free speech and assembly, to move about without a pass, to marry without upper-class permission, to change jobs, to acquire property, and to bear arms. In exchange, the English poor agreed to respect the property of the rich, help them seize indigenous lands, and enforce slavery.

    This cross-class alliance between the rich and the English poor came to be known as the “white race.” By accepting preferential treatment in an economic system that exploited their labor, too, the white working class tied their wagon to the elite rather than the rest of humanity. This devil’s bargain has undermined freedom and democracy in the U.S. ever since.

    Joel Olson, “Whiteness and the 99%,” Bring the Ruckus. (October 20, 2011). http://www.bringtheruckus.org/?q=node%2F146.

  • Imagining Caribbean Womanhood: Race, Nation and Beauty Competitions, 1929–70

    Imagining Caribbean Womanhood: Race, Nation and Beauty Competitions, 1929–70

    Manchester University Press
    October 2013
    192 pages
    216 x 138 mm
    Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7190-8867-4

    Rochelle Rowe
    University of Exeter

    Over fifty years after Jamaican and Trinidadian independence, Imagining Caribbean Womanhood examines the links between beauty and politics in the Anglophone Caribbean, providing a first cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions, spanning from Kingston to London. It traces the origins and transformation of female beauty contests in the British Caribbean from 1929 to 1970, through the development of cultural nationalism, race-conscious politics and decolonisation.

    The beauty contest, a seemingly marginal phenomenon, is used to illuminate the persistence of racial supremacy, the advance of consumer culture and the negotiation of race and nation through the idealised performance of cultured, modern beauty. Modern Caribbean femininity was intended to be politically functional but also commercially viable and subtly eroticised. The lively discussion surrounding beauty competitions, examined in this book, reveals that femininity was used to shape ideas about Caribbean modernity, citizenship, and political and economic freedom. This cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions will be of value to scholarship on beauty, Caribbean studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, ‘race’ and racism studies and studies of the body.

    Contents

    • Introduction: Caribbean beauty competitions in context
    • 1. The early ‘Miss Jamaica’ competition: cultural revolution and feminist voices, 1929–1950
    • 2. Cleaning up carnival: race, culture and power in the Trinidad ‘Carnival Queen’ beauty competition, 1946–1959
    • 3. Parading the ‘crème de la crème’: constructing the contest in Barbados, 1958–1966
    • 4. Fashioning ‘Ebony Cinderellas’ and brown icons: Jamaican beauty competitions and the myth of racial democracy, 1955–1964
    • 5. ‘Colonisation in reverse’: Claudia Jones, the West Indian Gazette and the ‘Carnival Queen’ contest in London, 1959–1964
    • Afterword: a Grenadian ‘Miss World’, 1970
    • Bibliography
    • Index

  • Review of Brazilian Telenovelas and the Myth of Racial Democracy by Samantha Nogueira Joyce

    Review of Brazilian Telenovelas and the Myth of Racial Democracy by Samantha Nogueira Joyce

    TriQuarterly: a journal of writing, art, and cultural inquiry from Northwestern University
    Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois
    2013-10-01

    Reighan Gillam, Postdoctoral Research Fellow
    Department of Afroamerican and African Studies
    University of Michigan

    Telenovelas, or soap operas, are the main staple of television entertainment throughout Brazil and in many other Latin American countries. Unlike in the United States, where soap operas can run for decades, in Brazil telenovelas end after presenting their storyline over a six- to eight-month period. They are designed to attract men, women, and children as viewers and have dominated in television’s primetime slots for the last thirty years. Although the plotlines, characters, and settings are fleeting, telenovelas have remained Brazilians’ favorite form of primetime entertainment.

    Often Latin American telenovelas have served as vehicles to introduce social issues by depicting a common problem, such as gender inequality or limited access for the disabled, in order to raise awareness and stimulate discussion. In Brazilian Telenovelas and the Myth of Racial Democracy, Samantha Nogueira Joyce takes one particular telenovela, Duas Caras (Two Faces), as her subject of study. Running for eight months in 2007–8, this telenovela deserves particular scrutiny because it was the first to include an Afro-Brazilian actor as the lead character and the first to make race relations and racism a constant theme. Joyce uses this telenovela as an opportunity to examine the role of television in contemporary currents of social change in Brazil. Through her analysis of Duas Caras, Joyce aims to demonstrate how “telenovelas are a powerful tool for introducing topics for debate and pro-social change, such as the instances where the dialogues openly challenge previously ingrained racist ideas in Brazilian society.”

    The myth of racial democracy to which Joyce’s title refers is the Brazilian national narrative that defines the country’s citizens and identity as racially mixed. Put simply, it is generally thought that the Brazilian populace and culture emerged from a mixing of European, indigenous, and African people. Many believe that because there are no rigid racial lines that delineate black from white in Brazil, racism and racial discrimination do not exist there. In contrast to the “one-drop rule” of the United States, where “one drop of black blood” renders a person black, in Brazil, Joyce explains, “the racial blending has been validated not into a binary, but a ternary racial classification that differentiates the population into brancos (whites), pardos (multiracial individuals, also popularly known as mulatos), and pretos (blacks).”…

    Read the entire review here.

  • Reading Series: Quantifying Bloodlines

    Reading Series: Quantifying Bloodlines

    Brooklyn Historical Society
    Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations
    Othmer Library
    Saturdays, 2013-11-16, 2013-12-07 and 2014-01-25; 15:00-18:00 EST (Local Time)

    Quantifying Bloodlines is a monthly reading group organized by anthropologist and oral historian Jennifer Scott.  Join others interested in exploring the relationship between biology and race, as we discuss three widely acclaimed books. Each work offers different examples of tracing family history—through a surname, through biological cells, through a specific geographic locale, through four generations of women’s lives. Through stories, we will discuss how we segment heritage and explain descent, paying close attention to past and existing ideas of purity, racial and economic privilege, and scientific thinking.

    All sessions meet in the Othmer Library at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Light refreshments will be provided.

    Sign up for individual sessions for $20, or join us for all three at a discounted price of $45! All sessions are available for a sliding scale fee, and no-one will be turned away for lack of funds.

    What’s Biology Got to Do with It? The Social Life of Genetics
    November 16th, 2013, 3:00 PM
    Reading: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
    Guest Speaker: Sociologist Ann Morning, author of The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference

    What’s Purity Got to Do with It? Searching Family History and Genealogy
    December 7th, 2013, 3:00 PM
    Reading: The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family by Joe Mozingo

    What’s History Got to Do with It? Evolving Classifications of Race
    January 25th, 2014, 3:00 PM
    Reading: Cane River by Lalita Tademy

    Quantifying Bloodlines Reading and Discussion Series is co-sponsored by MixedRaceStudies.org

    For more information, click here.

  • Mixing Racial Messages

    Mixing Racial Messages

    Hyperallergic: Sensitive to Art & its Discontents
    2013-10-30

    Ryan Wong

    Starting with its title, the group exhibition War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art  at Seattle’s Wing Luke museum asks a provocative question: how do those seen by Americans as products of either colonial domination or subversive desire move past those categories? How do they escape, as the curators put it, an “identity defined by their parentage,” “fixed in the status of infants or children”?

    Paradoxically, War Baby/Love Child begins with that parentage in order to make room for the artist to grow past it. Organized by Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis, it is the most significant exhibition on the subject since Kip Fulbeck’s groundbreaking Hapa Project, which began in 2002. In the decade since, we have seen America’s multiracial population grow a third, to 9 million, not to mention the election of our first mixed race President…

    Read the entire article here.

  • African-Americans and Latinos: Conflict or Collaboration?

    African-Americans and Latinos: Conflict or Collaboration?

    Ebony Magazine
    2012-09-25

    Eugene Holley, Jr.

    As Latinos now outnumber African-Americans as this country’s largest minority, could there be a political, social and economic union with our brown brothers and sisters?

    In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month – which runs through October 15th – EBONY interviewed African-Americans and Hispanics about the challenges, complexities and collaborations between these two groups. 

    “The Census suggested a competition,” says Miriam Jiménez Román, Executive Director of the AfroLatin@forum: a research and resource center focusing on Black Latinos and Latinas in the United States. “And it ignored a history of, not only just collaboration, but inclusion within the rubric of Blackness. We are not in competition with the African-American community. They have been at the vanguard, in terms of assuring civil rights in this country. And for that reason, all of the privileges that we have as Latinos in this country owe so much to the African-American struggle.”

    The New York-born Puerto Rican, who also co-edited the book, The Afro-Latin@ Reader, also points out that there are many Hispanics of visible African descent. “Many African-Americans don’t realize that the majority of Black people in the Americas are in Latin America and the Caribbean,” she states. “Ninety five percent of all the enslaved Africans landed in those places. There are 150 million people of African descent in Latin America.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Black History’s Missing Chapters: ‘The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross,’ on PBS

    Black History’s Missing Chapters: ‘The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross,’ on PBS

    The New York Times
    2013-10-18
     
    Felicia R. Lee

    The television mini-series “Roots,” about the slave Kunta Kinte and his descendants, is a classic, inspired by real lives and real history. But it is a truism among historians that young people do not know enough about African-American contributions to history. Even a tiny slice of recent history — the civil rights movement — is not required teaching in most states, the Southern Poverty Law Center found in a recent assessment.

    “It boils down to Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and ‘I Have a Dream,’ ” Maureen Costello, director of the center’s Teaching Tolerance Project, said of the typical level of knowledge. Films and the occasional series on black history have helped fill in the gaps, creating a kind of “cultural accretion,” Ms. Costello added, but television in recent years has not consistently offered informative entertainment.

    When “Roots” was broadcast in 1977, “the whole nation watched it because there were three networks vying for our attention,” Ms. Costello said. “As a culture, we’ve become so fragmented. I think more Americans can reasonably discuss the meth trade or the Mafia because of ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘The Sopranos’ than they can African-American history.”

    Into the breach has stepped Henry Louis Gates Jr., assisted by dozens of historians. His six-part series, “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross,” beginning on Tuesday on PBS, aims to chronicle 500 years of black history. The program starts with Juan Garrido, a free black man whose 1513 expedition with Spanish explorers in Florida made him the first known African to arrive in what is now the United States, and ends with Barack Obama in the White House in 2013, a time of complexity and contradictions for black Americans. In between, Professor Gates, director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, draws on the latest scholarship to put flesh on characters like the resilient South Carolina slave girl Priscilla as well as her descendants…

    Read the entire article here.