Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • The Rise and Demise of the Gens De Couleur Libre Artists in Antebellum New Orleans

    The Rise and Demise of the Gens De Couleur Libre Artists in Antebellum New Orleans

    University of Florida
    2012
    173 pages

    Karen Burt Coker

    A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

    The gens de couleur libres of New Orleans occupied a unique position as worldly practitioners of the arts. This situation was created by social, legal and cultural circumstances. Louisiana, as a French colony, implemented the “Code Noir,” to control the large population of free people of color. These laws, although designed to control, granted opportunities for free people of color. This led to a three-caste social system with the gens de couleur libres occupying the central position, between whites and enslaved peoples.

    Restrictions forbidding the marriage of free people of color to whites, or enslaved blacks, combined with the fact that free women of color outnumbered free men of color, led to the system of plaçage, an extralegal system of common-law marriage between white men and women of color. When children resulted from plaçage unions, additional laws sought to hinder those children from obtaining an education. This was remedied by the custom of wealthy white fathers sending their sons to Paris for schooling. This education frequently concentrated on the fine arts.

    New Orleans was a rapidly growing city, eager to prove its sophistication and dispel any reputation as a backwater colony. The newly French-educated artists were eagerly received by Francophile New Orleans patrons keen for the newest demonstration of the superior culture of their motherland.

    This thesis explores the work of these artists, while focusing upon the rise and fall of the tri-caste system that created a positive environment for artists of color when most free blacks faced open hostility elsewhere.

    Read the entire thesis here.

  • Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue: avec des observations générales sur la population, sur le caractère & les moeurs de ses divers habitans, sur son climat, sa culture, ses productions, son administration (Topographic description, physical, civil, and political history of the French part of the island Santo Domingo: with general observations on the population, on the character and manners of its various inhabitants, its climate, its culture, production, administration)

    Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue: avec des observations générales sur la population, sur le caractère & les moeurs de ses divers habitans, sur son climat, sa culture, ses productions, son administration  (Topographic description, physical, civil, and political history of the French part of the island Santo Domingo: with general observations on the population, on the character and manners of its various inhabitants, its climate, its culture, production, administration.)

    Chez l’auteu
    1797-1798
    2 volumes : 2 ill., maps (engravings) ; 26 cm. (4to)
    856 pages

    M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry (Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry) (1750-1819)

    From The John Carter Brown Library: The mixing of races in Saint Domingue occasioned a plethora of commentaries, mostly venomous and polemical, on the causes and consequences of the colony’s multiracial order. The most famous of these commentaries, though not the most polemical, was by Moreau de Saint-Méry, the colonial jurist and historian whose writings on Saint-Domingue are still a major resource for contemporary scholars. In volume one of his Description, Moreau counted and categorized 11 racial combinations in the colony. He argued that ancestry should be traced back seven generations and hence ultimately comprised 128 combinations. The “science” of skin color received one of its earliest formulations in this work, completed in 1789. Moreau was himself the father of a mixed-race child by his mulatto mistress.

    Read the entire book here.

  • Bringing Black History Home

    Bringing Black History Home

    CUNY Newswire
    The City University of New York
    2011-04-15

    Antoinette Martignoni, left, and her granddaughter Greta Blau hold a family Bible that contains the name of their ancestor, Dr. James McCune Smith, the nation’s first African American physician at Martignoni’s home in Fairfield, Conn., Thursday, Sept. 23, 2010. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill)

    The name James McCune Smith meant little to Greta Blau in 1996, when she briefly mentioned him in a research paper she wrote for a History of Blacks in New York City course designed and taught by Joanne Edey-Rhodes.

    Blau’s paper for the Hunter College class focused on the Colored Orphan Asylum, founded on Fifth Avenue to assist homeless and destitute African-American children. She noted that Smith, the asylum’s doctor, was the nation’s first professionally trained African-American physician — as well as an eminent 19th century abolitionist and author whose friends included antislavery movement leader Frederick Douglass.

    Little did Blau know that the assignment would years later lead her on an engrossing journey into her own family’s roots.

    It began one day in 2003, at her grandmother’s house in Connecticut, when she was looking through the family Bible that an Irish relative had. “The name was in there as the father of my great-grandmother’s second husband,” she said. “I knew I had heard that name before. I went home and Googled the name, and he came up. I said, ‘That can’t be the right person, because I’m white.’”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Rheinland

    Rheinland

    2013
    Mokoari Street Productions
    Berlin, Germany
    Written and directed by Lemohang J. Mosese
    Produced by Hannah Stockmann, Julius B. Franklin & Christian Wagner

    During the first World War the French government forced African men—many coming from Senegal or Cameroon —from their colonies to fight for the French army in the Rheinland. ​In 1919, there were between 25,000 and 40,000 African soldiers from the colonies based in the Rhineland. After Germany’s defeat, some of the soldiers stayed and founded families.

    Their lives, which were already scarred by discrimination and racism were threatened existentially when Hitler and the Nazi-Party seized power. In 1937 the so called Commission Number 3 was instated which had the secret order to sterilise all so called “Rheinlandbastards“, a derogatory term used for the offsprings of white German women and African men. Local officials reported the “Rheinlandbastards” living under their jurisdiction and with their help a vast number of children was forcefully sterilised or disappeared forever. In “Mein Kampf” Hitler referred to them as contaminators of the white race “by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe.”

    Rheinland tells the story of the so called “Rheinlandbastards” through the eyes of 12-year-old Joachim, the son of the Senegalese Awa and the German Annemarie. Joachim is forced to deal with his identity when the village his family lives in becomes more and more hostile.

    For more information, click here.

  • The Chinese in Mexico: No Longer a Forgotten History

    The Chinese in Mexico: No Longer a Forgotten History

    Mixed Race Radio
    Blog Talk Radio
    2013-10-09, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT)

    Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

    Robert Chao Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies
    University of California, Los Angeles

    On Today’s episode of Mixed Race Radio we will meet Professor Robert Chao Romero. With a Mexican father from Chihuahua and a Chinese immigrant mother from Hubei in central China, Romero’s dual cultural heritage serves as the basis for his academic studies. He considers himself fortunate to be able to study himself for a living and his research examines Asian immigration to Latin America, as well as the large population of “Asian-Latinos” in the United States. He is also interested in the role played by religion in social activism.

    His first book, The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940 (2010), tells the forgotten history of the Chinese community in Mexico.  The Chinese in Mexico received a Latino Studies Section Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association. Romero received his J. D. from UC Berkeley and his Ph.D. in Latin American history from UCLA.  

    When he is not a professor, he is a pastor and director of Christian Students of Conscience, an organization which trains and mobilizes students in issues of race and social justice from a faith-based perspective.  He is also the author of Jesus for Revolutionaries: An Introduction to Race, Social Justice, and Christianity (October 2013).

  • Forced to pass and other sins against authenticity

    Forced to pass and other sins against authenticity

    Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
    Volume 15, Issue 1, 2005
    pages 17-32
    DOI: 10.1080/07407700508571486

    Kerry Ann Rockquemore

    According to the identity commandments, passing is a sin against authenticity. Thou shall not pretend to be something that you are not. Men should not pretend to be women, married people should not pretend to be single, and black people should not pretend to be white. We all fit into some neat conglomeration of social categories and it’s just too confusing if we can’t take people at face value. Racial passing has a particular hold on our collective imagination because we assume that individuals belong to one, and only one, biologically defined racial group. This assumption disallows the possibility of being “mixed-race” and has historically necessitated elaborate rules and regulations order to classify what folks really are. The one-drop rule, a uniquely American norm that reflects our particular history of racial formation, dictates that people with any black ancestry whatsoever are black. Given the explicit racial hierarchy in the U.S., racial passing has always referred to a person who was really black pretending to be white.

    As a woman who is black by self-definition, white by phenotype, and biracial by parentage, I am often perplexed by our limited conception of passing in post-Civil Rights America. Because we persist in assuming that race is a biological reality and not a social construction, passing continues to be conceptualized as voluntary; uni-…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • One Drop of Love: Finding the Love in the One-drop Rule through Documentary Storytelling and Performance

    One Drop of Love: Finding the Love in the One-drop Rule through Documentary Storytelling and Performance

    California State University, Los Angeles
    May 2013
    84 pages

    Fanshen DiGiovanni

    A Project Report Presented to The Faculties of the Departments of Television, Film & Media Studies, and Music, Theatre & Dance In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Fine Arts

    One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for her Father’s Racial Approval is a solo-play incorporating filmed images, photographs and animation to examine how ‘race’ came to be in the United States, and how it influences the relationship between a father and daughter. The show journeys from the 1700s to the present, to cities throughout the United States, and to East and West Africa where both father and daughter spent time in search of their ‘racial’ roots. This project report chronicles and evaluates Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni’s process as a playwright, producer and actor in developing One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for her Father’s Racial Approval.

  • Deconstructing the Mixed-Race Experience of Passing

    Deconstructing the Mixed-Race Experience of Passing

    California State University, San Marcos
    May 2006
    172 pages

    Victoria Baldo Segall

    A Thesis Submitted for Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Literature and Writing Studies

    In “Beauty and the Beast: On Racial Ambiguity” Carla Bradshaw describes passing as an attempt to achieve acceptability by claiming membership in some desired group while denying other racial elements in oneself thought to be undesirable (79). In literature on passing, the mixed-race individual may, as Bradshaw suggests, become a “chameleon” if s/he desires; s/he may choose to pass as one race over another and blend with one race for reasons such as self-preservation. Bradshaw’s description of passing as gaining “false access” to a particular group or identity aides in setting thetone for passing as a harmful experience for the mixed-race individual. Specifically, this thesis will show that, as we’ll see with Nella Larsen’s “Passing,” Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, not only does passing present the instability of race, but it emotionally and physically destroys the mixed-race individual; the characters have the power and ability to perform and live within different racial worlds, but through their passing they ultimately disempower the non-dominant race of which they are a part and empower the dominant race.

    To support this argument, Chapters One through Three will explore how, imbedded within all three texts, there are four themes in particular that play influential roles in the discussion of mixed-race identity and its relation to passing:

    • fixed identity vs. unfixed identity
    • performance of identity
    • displacement
    • racial consciousness

    Table of Contents

    • I. Introduction
    • II. Chapter One: The Fall of Nella Larsen’s “Passing”
    • III. Chapter Two: The Supposed Super Hybrid Birdie of Danzy Senna’s Caucasia
    • IV. Chapter Three: The Problem with Hybrid Vigor in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia
    • V. Conclusion

    Read the entire thesis here.

  • The Buddha of Suburbia

    The Buddha of Suburbia

    Penguin Press
    1990
    288 pages
    5.07 x 7.83in
    Paperback ISBN: 9780140131680

    Hanif Kureishi

    Karim Amir lives with his English mother and Indian father in the routine comfort of suburban London, enduring his teenage years with good humor, always on the lookout for adventure—and sexual possibilities. Life gets more interesting, however, when his father becomes the Buddha of Suburbia, beguiling a circle of would-be mystics. And when the Buddha falls in love with one of his disciples, the beautiful and brazen Eva, Karim is introduced to a world of renegade theater directors, punk rock stars, fancy parties, and all the sex a young man could desire. A love story for at least two generations, a high-spirited comedy of sexual manners and social turmoil, The Buddha of Suburbia is one of the most enchanting, provocative, and original books to appear in years.

  • The mulatto may, in some respects, be an improvement on the negro, but he is certainly no improvement on the white man, and in the long run the mulatto, like all the other hybrids, becomes extinct.

    I have never seen the results of amalgamation on so large a scale as the Doctor proposes with his great caldron; but I have seen the white, black and Indian, all mixed up in one person, but that person was nothing like Dr. Talmage’s beauty nor was he 95 per cent. beyond anything I had ever seen. The white and yellow were very much marred in the mixture, and the black not much improved, if improved at all. The mulatto may, in some respects, be an improvement on the negro, but he is certainly no improvement on the white man, and in the long run the mulatto, like all the other hybrids, becomes extinct. My long observation goes to prove that in mixing the races all are weakened and none are benefitted.

    Rev. S. P. Richardson, D.D., “Amalgamation,” Weekly Banner-Watchman [Athens, Georgia], (March 26, 1889). Source: Digital Library of Georgia.