Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Analysis of a Tri-Racial Isolate

    Analysis of a Tri-Racial Isolate

    Human Biology
    Volume 36, Number 4 (December 1964)
    pages 362-373

    William S. Pollitzer
    Department of Anatomy
    University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

    Based on a paper presented at the meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Philadelphia, May 2, 1962

    A relatively isolated population in the state of North Carolina, composed of persons who call themselves Indian but who appear to be of tri-racial origin, provides a model for the study of analysis by gene frequencies of a mixed population of White, Negro, and Indian ancestry.

    A people considered Indian is known to have occupied this territory by the mid-eighteenth century; they spoke English, tilled the soil, and owned slaves. English, Scotch Highlanders, and French Huguenots migrated into the area in the eighteenth century also. Planters from neighboring states settled in this vicinity, often bringing slaves and a few free Negroes with them. The most common names of the free Negroes are the same as those of the present-day mixed population.

    The origin of the Indian component of this hybrid population is open to speculation; three ideas have been advanced. The most colorful theory is that the people of the present isolate are the descendants of Raleigh’s famous “Lost Colony” who mixed with the Croatan Indians, an Algonquin-speaking tribe on the coast. Some similarity in the names of the colonists and the names in the present population, plus a few cultural traits, have been construed as evidence for this view. Another suggestion is that the Cherokee, a powerful Iroquois-speaking tribe who had general overlordship in the Western Carolinas, contributed the Indian genes to the hybrid group. Finally, the view has been advanced that the Siouan-speaking tribes who lived in the Piedmont Carolinas, e.g., the Catawba, were the Indian stock involved.

    Considerable phenotypic variation is found within the isolate today, with extremes of skin color from light to dark and of hair form from very curly to straight- The morphology of the face also suggests broad racial backgrounds. It is therefore of interest to learn what the blood factors and hemoglobins tell of the composition of this population of multiple racial origins.

    In 1958, in cooperation with Dr. Amoz Chernoff, blood samples were…

  • Booker Sworn In as U.S. Senator

    Booker Sworn In as U.S. Senator

    The New York Times
    2013-10-31

    Jennifer Steinhauer, Congressional Reporter

    WASHINGTON — Cory A. Booker, who gained celebrity as a danger-dodging, super-tweeting mayor of Newark, was sworn in as New Jersey’s junior United States senator on Thursday, the first African-American to be elected to the chamber since Barack Obama in 2004…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Mixing Race, Risk, and Reward in the Digital Age (Sawyer Seminar IV)

    Mixing Race, Risk, and Reward in the Digital Age

    University of Southern California
    Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
    Center for Japanese Religions and Culture
    University Park Campus
    Doheny Memorial Library (DML), East Asian Seminar Room: 110C
    2013-11-05, 13:00-17:00 PST (Local Time)

    USC Conference Convenors:

    Duncan Williams, Associate Professor of Religion
    University of Southern California

    Brian C. Bernards, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
    University of Southern California

    Velina Hasu Houston, Associate Dean for Faculty Recognition and Development, Director of Dramatic Writing and Professor
    University of Southern California

    What are the outcomes of evolving racial ideologies in North America and how are they impacting 21st century American identities?  How do 21st century multiracial identities and representations reflect and challenge historical constructions of racial mixing?  How does racial mixing inform transhumanistic enterprises (i.e., wearable technology) and impact educational experiences dedicated to mixed-race studies in digital spaces?

    PRESENTERS:

    “Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity”

    Marcia Dawkins, Clinical Assistant Professor of Communication Studies
    University of Southern California (Author of Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity (Baylor University Press, 2012) and Eminem: The Real Slim Shady (Praeger, 2013).)

    “Frizzly Studies: Law, History, Narrative, and the Color Line”

    Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
    Vanderbilt University (Author of The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin Press, 2013) and “Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the Emergence of the One-Drop Rule, 1600-1860,” Minnesota Law Review (2007).)

    “Tweeting into the Future: Mixing Race and Technology in the 21st Century”

    Ulli K. Ryder, Scholar in Residence, Office of the Chaplains and Religious Life
    Brown University (Author of forthcoming book Mixed Race 3.0: Mixing Race, Risk & Reward in the Digital Age (Annenberg Press, 2014).)

    For more information, click here.

  • 350:445 Revisiting Racial Passing in the 21st Century

    350:445 Revisiting Racial Passing in the 21st Century

    Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
    Summer 2013

    This is a course on racial passing, which many people wrongly believe is an antiquated phenomenon. Passing has historically referred to light-skinned African Americans who use their phenotypes to pretend to be white and enjoy the privileges of whiteness. As we will discuss in our seminar, today people pass in a variety of ways, and not just racially. For example, folks regularly pass economically, religiously, and/or through gender. In discussing contemporary passing, we will begin with President Barack Obama, who some have argued has engaged in a form of passing by having black skin yet “white politics.”

    We will read primary and secondary material on this literary genre, to determine the tropes, images, themes, and formal elements that comprise “the passing narrative.” We will also consider the ways in which it has been expanded in this “post-race” era.

    Primary texts will include:

    Films will include: “Imitation of Life” (1934 & 1959) and “The Human Stain” (2003).

    For more information, click here.

  • Passing: When People Can’t Be Who They Are

    Passing: When People Can’t Be Who They Are

    PublicAffiars an imprint of Perseus Books Group
    2004-11-30
    288 pages
    Paperback ISBN: 978-1-58648-287-9
    5 1/2 x 8 1/4

    Brooke Kroeger, Professor of Journalism
    New York University

    Through the provocative stories of six contemporary “passers,” and examples from history and literature, a renowned journalist illuminates passing as a strategy for bypassing prejudice and injustice

    Despite the many social changes of the last half-century, many Americans still “pass”: black for white, gay for straight, and now in many new ways as well. We tend to think of passing in negative terms—as deceitful, cowardly, a betrayal of one’s self. But this compassionate book reveals that many passers today are people of good heart and purpose whose decision to pass is an attempt to bypass injustice, and to be more truly themselves.

    Passing tells the poignant, complicated life stories of a black man who passed as a white Jew; a white woman who passed for black; a working class Puerto Rican who passes for privileged; a gay, Conservative Jewish seminarian and a lesbian naval officer who passed for straight; and a respected poet who radically shifts persona to write about rock’n’roll. The stories, interwoven with others from history, literature, and contemporary life, explore the many forms passing still takes in our culture; the social realities which make it an option; and its logistical, emotional, and moral consequences. We learn that there are still too many institutions, environments, and social situations that force honorable people to twist their lives into painful, deceit-ridden contortions for reasons that do not hold.

    Passing is an intellectually absorbing exploration of a phenomenon that has long intrigued scholars, inspired novelists, and made hits of movies like The Crying Game and Boys Don’t Cry.

  • Subjecting Pleasure: Claude McKay’s Narratives of Transracial Desire

    Subjecting Pleasure: Claude McKay’s Narratives of Transracial Desire

    Journal of Black Studies
    Volume 44, Number 7 (October 2013)
    pages 706-724
    DOI: 10.1177/0021934713507579

    Smita Das, 2012-2013 Dissertation Fellow
    University of Illinois, Chicago

    This article explores the threat posed by the Afro-Asian body in Claude McKay’s novels, Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933). Banjo’s narrative of transracial alliances converges onto the body of the Afro-Asian prostitute, whose positioning as a “conjunction” exposes contradictions surrounding immigration within French liberalism. Banana Bottom also maps a conflictual relationship between a licentious Afro-Asian coolie woman, and a Black subject who both wrestle with attaining national belonging within an idyllic Jamaica. While Banjo reveals McKay’s yearnings for transnational Black affiliations without the Afro-Asian woman, Banana Bottom reconciles the wrought relations between Black middle-class Jamaicans and the bastardized “coolie gal.”

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Biracial Costa Ricans worse off than black Ticos, says UNPD report

    Biracial Costa Ricans worse off than black Ticos, says UNPD report

    The Tico Times
    San José, Costa Rica
    2013-10-30

    Zach Dyer

    Fewer than 10 percent of Ticos with one white and one black parent attend university, compared to more than 17 percent of self-identified black Costa Ricans.

    Biracial Costa Ricans struggle with higher rates of high school desertion and unemployment than self-identified black Ticos, according to a new report from the United Nations Development Program.

    The report, presented to black Costa Rican community leaders and the public in San José Tuesday morning, stressed the economic and educational gaps experienced by the country’s Afro-descendent population, especially between urban and rural groups.

    “If you’re mulatto, living in the countryside in Costa Rica, you’re much more likely to be poor, have problems dealing with education and unemployment, or employment of poor quality,” said Silvia García, regional coordinator for the project…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Dr. Yaba Blay on shifting the lens on race

    Dr. Yaba Blay on shifting the lens on race

    Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane
    WHYY 90.9 FM
    Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
    2013-10-30

    Who is black? And who is not? “Mixed/Jamerian,” “Black/Latina,” “Appalachian African American” are examples of how some people of color describe themselves. Drexel University Africana Studies professor Dr. Yaba Blay explores the nuances of the politics of racial identity and hair and skin color. Her work sheds light on the legacy of the outdated “one-drop” law – that if a person had a drop of black blood, they would be forever identified as black. Through interviews and research, she shows the diversity of the many ways bi-racial and multi-racial people self-identify. Her new portrait essay book is “(1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race.”

    Download the episode here.

  • Living in Ambiguity: The Mixed Race Experience at Colorado State University

    Living in Ambiguity: The Mixed Race Experience at Colorado State University

    Colorado State University
    Fall 2012
    77 pages

    Carl Izumi Olsen

    In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts Colorado State University, Fort Collins

    This study analyzes the experiences of mixed race students at Colorado State University by using semi-structured interviews of nineteen students. The interviews reveal that multiracial students exhibit different forms of racialization as compared to monoracial students. Despite some commonalities, the study also demonstrates that multiracial students are not monolithic group. In an effort to highlight the uniqueness embedded in the diversity of multiracial students, the study analytically identifies three main clusters based on how they are perceived. These include: Non-White Mixed Race, In-Between Mixed Race, and White-Identified Mixed Race. The interviews also show that the three dominant themes mediate their multiracial identity: perception, self-identification and connection to culture. Finally, the participants in this study all point to the inability of the existing cultural centers in meeting their specific needs and call for the establishment of multiracial center that would provide resources for education, outreach and retention issues for multiracial students.

    Read the entire thesis here.

  • Unbecoming blackness: the diaspora cultures of Afro-Cuban America [Review]

    Unbecoming blackness: the diaspora cultures of Afro-Cuban America [Review]

    Ethnic and Racial Studies
    Volume 37, Issue 5, 2014
    pages 889-890
    DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.847200

    Nora Gámez Torres, Visiting scholar
    Cuban Research Institute
    Florida International University, Miami

    Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora cultures of Afro-Cuban America, by Antonio López, New York, New York University Press, 2012, xi + 272 pp., (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8147-6547-0.

    Unbecoming Blackness poses directly the question of an underdiscussed afrolatinidad in Cuban American Studies. The book opens up by analysing the lives and performances of key figures in the Afro-Cuban diaspora in the USA during the first half of the twentieth century: Alberto O’Farrill, a writer and blackface actor in the teatro bufo a theatrical Cuban genre he helped to export to New York: and Eusebia Cosme, a renowned performer of poesía negra (black poetry) and actress. This is the first significant accomplishment of the book, since these histories had to be carefully recovered and reconstructed by collecting disperse information, the ‘fragments attaches’ (14) common to black diasporas in the Americas.

    The third chapter, examining the afrolatinidad and specific Puerto Rican identifications in the work of Cuban-born anthropologist Rómulo Lachatañeré and Cuban-descendent writer Piri Thomas, continues building the main theme of the book: how Afro-Cubans actively negotiate their racialization in the USA, by cither asserting or concealing their ‘Hispanic’ heritage through linguistic choices, or by forging alliances with black Americans and other Latin/o groups. In so doing, they enact an afrolatinidad that is malleable and transnational, and thus, unsettling for hegemonic Cuban and Cuban American identities, rooted in nationalism and whiteness. That performers such as Cosme and O’Farrill and scholars such as Lachatañeré travelled to the USA looking for better professional opportunities and decided to associate to ‘subaltern’ subjects such as black Americans and other Latino groups, generated an anxiety among Cuban writers and intellectuals of the time who defended the idea of mestizaje, as López shows in these chapters. The point of conflict is brilliantly captured in the following passage by Lopez: (the implication) ‘that Afro-Cubans are somehow ‘better off’ being in and belonging to an explicitly racist US nation rather than, it turns out, Cuba. This being and belonging is asserted against ‘the best interests’ of a postracial, mestizo, even negro island-Cuban nation—indeed, against the ‘best interests’ of Afro-Cubans themselves’ (9). To speak of an afrolatinidad in this context disrupts both Cuban American and Cuban fictions of national identity. Precisely due to the implications of the book for a critical debate on Cuban racial identities on and off the island, it would have been very useful for the leader to have a contextual analysis of what was happening in Cuba in different moments and in the different fields the author explores.

    Less accomplished is the following chapter, in which López lacks the clarity to successfully connect ‘texts around 1979 in Miami and the overlapping histories of the illicit drug trade. African American uprising, Mariel migration‘ (16), to Cuban American reactions to the ‘blackening’ of their community after Mariel and the African Americans…

    Read or purchase the article here.