Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Speaking in Tongues

    Speaking in Tongues

    The New York Review of Books
    Volume 56, Number 3 (2009-02-26)

    Zadie Smith

    The following is based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008.

    1.

    Hello. This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place—this is not the voice of my childhood. I picked it up in college, along with the unabridged Clarissa and a taste for port. Maybe this fact is only what it seems to be—a case of bald social climbing—but at the time I genuinely thought this was the voice of lettered people, and that if I didn’t have the voice of lettered people I would never truly be lettered. A braver person, perhaps, would have stood firm, teaching her peers a useful lesson by example: not all lettered people need be of the same class, nor speak identically. I went the other way. Partly out of cowardice and a constitutional eagerness to please, but also because I didn’t quite see it as a straight swap, of this voice for that.

    My own childhood had been the story of this and that combined, of the synthesis of disparate things. It never occurred to me that I was leaving the London district of Willesden for Cambridge. I thought I was adding Cambridge to Willesden, this new way of talking to that old way. Adding a new kind of knowledge to a different kind I already had. And for a while, that’s how it was: at home, during the holidays, I spoke with my old voice, and in the old voice seemed to feel and speak things that I couldn’t express in college, and vice versa. I felt a sort of wonder at the flexibility of the thing. Like being alive twice.

    But flexibility is something that requires work if it is to be maintained. Recently my double voice has deserted me for a single one, reflecting the smaller world into which my work has led me. Willesden was a big, colorful, working-class sea; Cambridge was a smaller, posher pond, and almost univocal; the literary world is a puddle. This voice I picked up along the way is no longer an exotic garment I put on like a college gown whenever I choose—now it is my only voice, whether I want it or not. I regret it; I should have kept both voices alive in my mouth. They were both a part of me. But how the culture warns against it! As George Bernard Shaw delicately put it in his preface to the play Pygmalion, “many thousands of [British] men and women…have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue.”…

    …2…

    …Until Obama, black politicians had always adhered to these unwritten rules. In this way, they defended themselves against those two bogeymen of black political life: the Uncle Tom and the House Nigger. The black politician who played up to, or even simply echoed, white fears, desires, and hopes for the black community was in danger of earning these epithets—even Martin Luther King was not free from such suspicions. Then came Obama, and the new world he had supposedly ushered in, the postracial world, in which what mattered most was not blind racial allegiance but factual truth. It was felt that Jesse Jackson was sadly out of step with this new postracial world: even his own son felt moved to publicly repudiate his “ugly rhetoric.” But Jackson’s anger was not incomprehensible nor his distrust unreasonable. Jackson lived through a bitter struggle, and bitter struggles deform their participants in subtle, complicated ways. The idea that one should speak one’s cultural allegiance first and the truth second (and that this is a sign of authenticity) is precisely such a deformation.

    Right up to the wire, Obama made many black men and women of Jackson’s generation suspicious. How can the man who passes between culturally black and white voices with such flexibility, with such ease, be an honest man? How will the man from Dream City keep it real? Why won’t he speak with a clear and unified voice? These were genuine questions for people born in real cities at a time when those cities were implacably divided, when the black movement had to yell with a clear and unified voice, or risk not being heard at all. And then he won. Watching Jesse Jackson in tears in Grant Park, pressed up against the varicolored American public, it seemed like he, at least, had received the answer he needed: only a many-voiced man could have spoken to that many people.

    A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward. In his memoir, Obama takes care to ridicule a certain black girl called Joyce—a composite figure from his college days who happens also to be part Italian and part French and part Native American and is inordinately fond of mentioning these facts, and who likes to say:

    I’m not black…I’m multiracial…. Why should I have to choose between them?… It’s not white people who are making me choose…. No—it’s black people who always have to make everything racial. They’re the ones making me choose. They’re the ones who are telling me I can’t be who I am….

    He has her voice down pat and so condemns her out of her own mouth. For she’s the third bogeyman of black life, the tragic mulatto, who secretly wishes she “passed,” always keen to let you know about her white heritage. It’s the fear of being mistaken for Joyce that has always ensured that I ignore the box marked “biracial” and tick the box marked “black” on any questionnaire I fill out, and call myself unequivocally a black writer and roll my eyes at anyone who insists that Obama is not the first black president but the first biracial one. But I also know in my heart that it’s an equivocation; I know that Obama has a double consciousness, is black and, at the same time, white, as I am, unless we are suggesting that one side of a person’s genetics and cultural heritage cancels out or trumps the other…

    Read the entire article here.

  • There is nothing new about crossing racial boundaries

    There is nothing new about crossing racial boundaries; what is new is the frequency of border crossings and boundary hoppings and the refusal to bow to the thorn-filled American concept, perhaps unknown outside the United States, that each person has a race but only one. Racial blending is undermining the master idea that race is an irreducible marker among diverse peoples—an idea in any case that always has been socially constructed and has no scientific validity. (In this century, revivals of purportedly scientifically provable racial categories have surfaced every generation or so. Ideas die hard, especially when they are socially and politically useful.) Twenty-five years ago, it would have been unthinkable for Time-Life to publish a computer-created chart of racial synthesizing; seventy-five years ago, an issue on “The New Face of America” might have put Time out of business for promoting racial impurity.

    Gary B. Nash, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” The Journal of American History, Volume 82, Number 3 (December, 1995): 941-964.

  • Plus ça Change? Multiraciality and the Dynamics of Race Relations in the United States

    “…The articles by Binning, Unzueta, Huo, and Molina (2009) and by Townsend, Markus, and Bergsieker (2009) showed the positive benefits that accrue when multiracial individuals are free to claim their multiracial backgrounds. Binning et al. (2009), for example, found that multiracial students who identify multiracially demonstrate higher levels of psychological and organizational well-being than multiracial students who identify with a single racial group… …The message in these articles is clear: when multiracial individuals are given the freedom to identify multiracially rather than being forced to identify with only one racial category, and they perceive little conflict with and distance from their identities, they display higher levels of psychological adjustment…”

    Frank D. Bean and Jennifer Lee, “Plus ça Change…? Multiraciality and the Dynamics of Race Relations in the United States,” Journal of Social Issues, Volume 65, Number 1 (March 2009): 205-219

  • What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America

    What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America

    Oxford University Press
    December 2008
    404 pages
    ISBN13: 9780195094633
    ISBN10: 0195094638

    Peggy Pascoe (1954-2010), Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History
    University of Oregon

    • Winner of the Ellis W. Hawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians (2009)
    • Winner of the Lawrence W. Levine Award of the Organization of American Historians (2009)
    • Winner of the William H. Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association
    • Winner of the James Willard Hurst Prize of the Law and Society Association
    • Winner of the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association
    • Finalist, John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association

    A long-awaited history that promises to dramatically change our understanding of race in America, What Comes Naturally traces the origins, spread, and demise of miscegenation laws in the United States–laws that banned interracial marriage and sex, most often between whites and members of other races. Peggy Pascoe demonstrates how these laws were enacted and applied not just in the South but throughout most of the country, in the West, the North, and the Midwest.  Beginning in the Reconstruction era, when the term miscegenation first was coined, she traces the creation of a racial hierarchy that bolstered white supremacy and banned the marriage of Whites to Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as the marriage of Whites to Blacks.  She ends not simply with the landmark 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court finally struck down miscegenation laws throughout the country, but looks at the implications of ideas of colorblindness that replaced them. What Comes Naturally is both accessible to the general reader and informative to the specialist, a rare feat for an original work of history based on archival research.

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction
    • Part I: Miscegenation Law and Constitutional Equality, 1863-1883
      • 1. Engendering Miscegenation
      • 2. Sexualizing Miscegenation Law
    • Part II: Miscegenation Law and Race Classification, 1860-1948
      • 3. Configuring Race in the American West
      • 4. The Facts of Race in the Courtroom
      • 5. Seeing Like a Racial State
    • Part III: Miscegenation Law and Its Opponents, 1913-1967
      • 6. Between a Rock and a Hard Place
      • 7. Interracial Marriage as a Natural Right
      • 8. Interracial Marriage as a Civil Right
    • Part IV: Miscegenation Law, Civil Rights, and Colorblindness, 1964-2000
      • 9. Lionizing Loving
      • Conclusion: The Ghost of the Past

  • Challenging Multiracial Identity

    Challenging Multiracial Identity

    Lynne Rienner Publishers
    2006
    135 pages
    Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-58826-424-4

    Rainier Spencer, Director and Professor of Afro-American Studies; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
    University of Nevada, Las Vegas

    What is multiracialism—and what are the theoretical consequences and practical costs of asserting a multiracial identity? Arguing that the multiracial movement bolsters, rather than subverts, traditional categories of race, Rainier Spencer critically assesses current scholarship in support of multiracial identity.

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction: Expecting Excellence in the Field of Multiracial Identity Studies
    • Projection as Reality: Three Authors, Three Studies, One Problem
    • Psychobabble, Socioblather, and the Reinscription of the Pathology Paradigm
    • White Mothers, the Loving Legend, and Manufacturing a Biracial Baby Boom
    • Distinction Without Difference: The Insidious Argument for First-Generation Black/White Multiracial Identity
    • The Road Forward

  • The 1850 census marked a watershed in census-taking in several ways…

    The 1850 census marked a watershed in census-taking in several ways. For our purposes, a large part of its significance rests in the introduction of the “mulatto” category and the reasons for its introduction. This category was added not because of demographic shifts, but because of the lobbying efforts of race scientists and the willingness of certain senators to do their bidding. More generally, the mulatto category signaled the ascendance of scientific authority within racial discourse. By the 1850s, polygenist thought was winning a battle that it had lost in Europe. The “American school of ethnology” distinguished itself from prevailing European racial thought through its insistence that human races were distinct and unequal species. That polygenism endured at all was a victory, since the European theorists to abandon it. Moreover, there was considerable resistance to it in the United States. Although most American monogenists were not racial egalitarians, they were initially unwilling to accept claims of separate origins, permanent racial differences, and the infertility of racial mixture. Polygenists deliberately sought hard statistical data to prove that mulattoes, as hybrids of different racial species, were less fertile than their pure-race parents and lived shorter lives.

    Melissa Nobles, “History Counts: A Comparative Analysis of Racial/Color Categorization in US and Brazilian Censuses,” American Journal of Public Health, Volume 90, Number 11 (November 2000): 1738-1745.

  • Runaway

    Runaway

    Western Carolinian
    Salisbury, North Carolina
    1832-09-17
    page 3, column 6
    Source: The North Carolina Newspaper Digitization Project

    On the 10th of September last, from my plantation in Jones county, two negroes, one named WASHINGTON, about 27 years of age, a very bright mulatto, on one of his hands there is a scar occasioned by a gin; he will change his name and endeavor to pass for a free man. The other named JOHN, a common mulatto, about 30 years  of age, Very intelligent; he will probably pass as the servant of Washington, and change his name. A reward of 25 dollars will be given for the delivery of either in any jail so that I can get them.

    James Lamar
    October 16th

    The Georgian, Sahavanah; the Telescope, Columbia, S.C.; and Richmand Enquirer, are requested to publish the above weekly until forbid, and then forward their accounts to J. Lamar.

  • Identity for mixed-race kids? ‘Eurasian’ already exists

    Identity for mixed-race kids? ‘Eurasian’ already exists

    The Straits Times
    Singapore
    Forum Letters
    2013-03-30

    Michael Ang York Poon

    I am baffled by Mr Peter Wadeley’s letter (“S’porean identity must include mixed-race kids“; March 16).

    What he is calling for already exists – that is, Eurasians, who are one of Singapore’s four main racial groups.

    In the first four decades of Singapore’s independence, immigration was not as common as it is now, and the number of migrants relatively insignificant. Hence, it would have been absurd to even wonder if Eurasian youngsters were non-native…

    Read the entire letter here.

  • S’porean identity must include mixed-race kids

    S’porean identity must include mixed-race kids

    The Straits Times
    Singapore
    Forum Letters
    2013-03-16

    Peter Wadeley

    MRS MARIETTA Koh Ai-meng (“Citizens have every right to expect privileges”; last Saturday) claims that rising consciousness of what it means to be Singaporean should not be decried as chauvinistic or jingoistic.

    Last year, former president S R Nathan said that a clear Singaporean identity has yet to develop (“Building a S’porean culture takes time, says ex-president”; March 18, 2012).

    Whenever such an identity is formed, it must be broad enough to include all Singaporeans, without distinction of race.

    My children are Singaporean, have lived here their whole lives, and speak Singlish and Chinese. Most importantly, they identify themselves as Singaporean.

    But as they are “only” half Chinese and look different from other children, they are, regrettably, treated accordingly…

    Read the entire letter here.

  • Cross-Cultural Affinities between Native American and White Women in “The Alaska Widow” by Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far)

    Cross-Cultural Affinities between Native American and White Women in “The Alaska Widow” by Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far)

    MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
    Volume 38, Number 1 (Spring 2013)
    pages 155-163
    DOI: 10.1093/melus/mls002

    Mary Chapman, Associate Professor of English
    University of British Columbia

    When her work was recovered in the 1980s, Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far) was credited with founding the canon of Asian-North American literature. The earliest Eaton scholarship focused on her resistance to yellow-peril discourse through her sympathetic portrayals of diasporic Chinese and Eurasians. This scholarship contrasted Edith Eaton’s “authentic” self-presentation as the half-Chinese “Sui Sin Far” with her sister Winnifred’s posturing as Japanese noblewoman author “Onoto Watanna.” Although fascinating in many ways, this scholarship was circumscribed by both an exclusive focus on the politics of race as it intersected with gender—and the lack of access to Eaton’s complete and more internally self-contradictory oeuvre. Scholars relying on the same handful of anthologized works—“The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese” (1910), “Her Chinese Husband” (1910), “In the Land of the Free” (1909), “The Wisdom of the New” (1912), “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” (1910), and “The Inferior Woman” (1910)—explored only a few of Eaton’s themes, most notably Eurasian marriage, tricksterism, and American anti-Asian racism. By focusing on Eaton’s depictions of North American Chinatowns, scholars have rarely recognized the broader transnational political contexts in which Eaton wrote or the cross-racial collaborations depicted in many of her works. Most have understated the significance of Eaton’s British, Canadian, Jamaican, and Chinese cultural referents and ignored significant interactions with the native communities—French Canadian, Caribbean, and even Native North American—that she depicts in much of her work. Nor have scholars adequately appreciated the carefully framed politics of what Sean McCann dismisses as Eaton’s “ordinary, mundane and domestic” settings (76).

    In the past ten years, scholars have located numerous unknown essays, works of fiction, and journalism by Eaton that expand her known oeuvre and challenge the Asian American dualism for which she is known. In 2002, Dominika Ferens uncovered a daily column Eaton wrote…

    Read or purchase the article here.