Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Creating a “Latino” Race

    Creating a “Latino” Race

    The Society Pages: Social Science That Matters
    2013-03-13

    Wendy D. Roth, Associate Professor of Sociology
    University of British Columbia
    (Author of Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race)

    Editors’ Note: The author prefers to capitalize Black and White along with other socially constructed racial categories.

    For much of American history, race has been a dichotomous, Black-White affair where the “one-drop rule” dictated that people with any amount of racial mixture were defined legally and socially as Black. In recent generations, however, with the rise of intermarriage and the entrance of new immigrants from all over the world, American racial categories and conceptions have become much more complicated and contested. Latinos provide a particularly revealing case of the new complexities of race in America.

    Persons of Hispanic ancestry have long had mixed racial identities and classifications. The history of Latin America is characterized by the mixing of European colonizers, native Indigenous groups, and Africans brought over as slaves. As a result, the diverse Latino group includes people who look White, Black, and many mixtures in between. In the mid-20th century, it was assumed that as they Americanized, Latinos who looked European would join the White race, while those with visible African ancestry would join the Black race, and others might be seen as Native American. For fifty years, the Census has supported this vision by informing us that Latinos could be classified as White, Black, or “other,” but not as a race themselves. “Hispanic” remained an ethnic, not a racial, category.

    To answer this question, I studied Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, two groups whose members span the traditional Black/White color line. I interviewed sixty Dominican and Puerto Rican migrants in New York City, and another sixty Dominicans and Puerto Ricans who have never migrated out of their countries of origin. We spoke about how they understand and classify their own and other people’s races, their perception of races in the mainland United States and their home country, what race means to them, and the migrants’ integration experiences. Their interviews revealed that most identify with a new, unified racial category that challenges not only the traditional Black-White dichotomy but also the relationship between race and ethnicity in American society. In other words, the experiences of these groups help us to better understand how immigrants’ views of collective identity and the relationship between color and culture are reshaping contemporary American racial classifications…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Stated more bluntly, the true motive behind the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was the maintenance of white supremacy and black economic and social inferiority…

    An investigation of the people who laid the groundwork for Virginia‘s miscegenation law reveals that the pseudo-science of eugenics was a convenient facade used by men whose personal prejudices on social issues preceded any “scientific theory.”  Stated more bluntly, the true motive behind the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was the maintenance of white supremacy and black economic and social inferiority—racism, pure and simple.  It was an accident of history that eugenic theory reached its peak of acceptability in 1924 so as to be available as a respectable veneer with which to cover ancient prejudice.  For Powell, Plecker, and their ilk, eugenical ideology was not a sine qua non for legislation, but merely a coincidental set of arguments that provided intellectual fuel to the racist fires.

    Paul A. Lombardo. “Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism: Historical Foonotes to Loving v. Virginia,” University of California, Davis Law Review. 1988, Volume 21, Number 2, pages 421-452. http://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/21/2/essays/DavisVol21No2_Lombardo.pdf.

  • The most perfect expression of the white ideal…

    Virginia has made the first serious attempt to stay or postpone the evil day when this is no longer a white man’s country. Her recently enacted law “for the preservation of racial integrity” is, in the words of Major E. S. [Earnest Sevier] Cox, “the most perfect expression of the white ideal, and the most important eugenical effort that has been made during the past 4,000 years.”

    W. A. Plecker, “Virginia’s Attempt to Adjust the Color Problem,” The American Journal of Public Health, Volume 15, Number 2 (1925): 111-115. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1320724/.

  • Let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people…

    In the third year of his presidency, Thomas Jefferson pleaded “to let our settlements and theirs [Indians] meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people.” Six years later, just before returning to Monticello, Jefferson promised a group of western Indian chiefs, “you will unite yourselves with us,… and we shall all be Americans; you will mix with us by marriage, your blood will run in our veins, and will spread with us over this great island.”5

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

  • Reinforcing, rather than challenging prevailing notions of racial difference

    Yet, just as Douglass had done in his own time, the multiracial movement exaggerates the extent to which the post-civil rights increase of interracial marriages and their mixed-race offspring constitutes a solution to the problem of racism. As critics of multiracial ideology have noted, positive perceptions of mixed-race people as less threatening are often rooted in pejorative assumptions about blacks as angry or inferior. In other words, this idealised view of ‘bi-racial’ people reinforces, rather than challenges, prevailing notions of racial difference, of white superiority and black inferiority. The fascination with Obama as a seemingly ‘raceless’ mediator, once praised by a news presenter who gushed after a major presidential speech, “For an hour, I forgot he was black,” is a far cry from the resentful perception in some quarters of his wife, Michelle, as an “angry black woman.” The belief that a mixed race president heralds an era of racial harmony seems not just naïve, but misguided…

    Kevin Gaines, “Vision Turns to Division,” American Review, Issue 2 (May 2010): 12-15. http://americanreviewmag.com/opinions/Vision-turns-to-division

  • The loving bride drank the blood, made the necessary oath, and his honour joined their hands, to the great satisfaction of all parties.

    In 1819 a Scotsman named James Flint crossed the Atlantic Ocean, made his way from New York to Pittsburgh, sailed down the Ohio, and settled for eighteen months in Jeffersonville, Indiana, just opposite Louisville, Kentucky. His letters home described everything from native trees and shrubs to the “taciturnity” of American speech, “adapted to business more than to intellectual enjoyment.” Soon after arriving in Jeffersonville, Flint recounted the time when a “negro man and a white woman came before the squire of a neighbouring township, for the purpose of being married.” The official refused, citing a prohibition on “all sexual intercourse between white and coloured people, under a penalty for each offence.” Then he thought the better of it. He “suggested, that if the woman could be qualified to swear that there was black blood in her, the law would not apply. The hint was taken,” Flint wrote, “and the lancet was immediately applied to the Negro’s arm. The loving bride drank the blood, made the necessary oath, and his honour joined their hands, to the great satisfaction of all parties.”

    Daniel J. Sharfstein, “Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the One-Drop Rule, 1600–1860,” Minnesota Law Review, Volume 91, Number 3 (February 2007): 592-656.

  • A separate category for mixed race is necessary to redress the unique harms targeting mixed-race persons.

    A separate category for mixed race is necessary to redress the unique harms targeting mixed-race persons. In order to be most effective any scheme proposing such a category must address many pitfalls and complexities in Title VII doctrine. Any categorization must be flexible, just as race can be fluid and contextual. The general argument against a separate category for mixed race ignores the fact that courts are in the midst of selectively choosing where to embrace it and that society already constructs such a category for some individuals. Instead, we must examine the treatment of individuals based on belonging to this category, not the harm of merely being categorized. Many participants of the contemporary discourse argue for why the category is beneficial as a general matter, and these arguments demonstrate possible benefits to adopting such a category in Title VII.

    Scot Rives, “Multiracial Work: Handing Over the Discretionary Judicial Tool of Multiracialism,” UCLA Law Review, Volume 58, Number 5 (2011): 1334-1335.

  • While multiracial identities give the appearance of a deconstruction of a social order based on race, I suggest otherwise.

    While multiracial identities give the appearance of a deconstruction of a social order based on race, I suggest otherwise. For example, many multiracial Americans of African/European descent understandably attempt to claim and reassert their non-African ancestry; reminding us how they are “a little French, a little Scottish, Italian, etc.,” few of us stop to ponder the near utter destruction of their African ancestry and how it has-even with the inclusion of European ancestry-been reduced to “black.”  While some may embrace a “Black/White” identity, I ask where are the “Luba/Lithuanians,” “Shona/Scottish,” “Ewe/Estonians,” “Igbo/Icelanders?”  It used to be our identities told us and others, where we came from, what we did, how we hunted, how we gathered our food, where we pressed our wine, how we made cheese, when we planted, how we worshiped, and how we lived.  Only a few seem to know or notice these nearly infinite identities (even from Europe) have been reduced through the centuries by the onslaught of white supremacy to just a handful of exploitable commoditized categories. We think we can manipulate the morally corrupt framework of “race” into a modern utopia, but even the so-called “new” hybrid identities may be reabsorbed or discarded back into the oppressive essentialist elements.

    Steven F. Riley, “Don’t Pass on Context: The Importance of Academic Discourses in Contemporary Discussions on the Multiracial Experience,” (paper presented at the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival, Los Angeles, California, June 11, 2011).

  • 18th Century Irish Inter-Racial Marriages and Affairs in the Caribbean

    In 1775, nineteen-year-old Charles Fitzgerald, naval officer, brother to Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and third son of Emily, Duchess of Leinster, wrote to his mother with literary panache that ‘the jet black ladies of Africa’s burning sands have made me forget the unripened beauties of the north’. A few months later he followed this up with the news that she could look forward to ‘a copper coloured grandchild’ (Tillyard 1995:331).

    Relations between Irish men and African women were as much a staple of the Caribbean experience as malaria, yellow fever, hurricanes, rum drinking and turtle soup, but it is an area of life which rarely appears on the written record. The earliest emigrant letters hint at this scheme of things. In 1675 John Blake, a merchant settler from Galway admitted to the veracity of his brother Henry’s accusation that he had brought a ‘whore’ from Ireland to Barbados along with his wife, but excused himself on the grounds of domestic necessity; his wife’s ‘weak constitution’ meant that she could not manage everything herself ‘for washing, starching, making of drink and keeping the house in good order is no small task to undergo here’. He could not dispense with the services of the prostitute until the African girl he had bought was properly trained in household matters (Oliver 1909-19, II: 55).

    Nini Rogers, “The Irish in the Caribbean 1641-1837: An Overview,” Irish Migration Studies in Latin America, Volume 5, Number 3 (November 2007): 145-156.

  • Ultimately though, I identify as a daughter of the Diaspora.

    Ultimately though, I identify as a daughter of the Diaspora. The descendants of the millions of Africans taken to the new world share a similar heritage to mine; black African and white European, and I feel an affinity with these fellow Diasporians. I reject a racist hierarchy of value and worth and refuse to position myself as separate from other black people in a bid to try and position myself that little bit closer to whiteness. The historical processes, of which we Diasporians are a part, stem from the same source: the European slave trade and the subsequent European colonisation of Africa. And it is for this reason that I locate myself within this historical continuum rather than buy into an ideologically problematic, a-historical approach which constructs being ‘mixed-race’ as something new.

    Emma Dabiri, “Why I see myself as a daughter of the Diaspora rather than mixed-race,” Black Girl Dancing at Lughnasa (March 12, 2013). http://thediasporadiva.tumblr.com/post/45223779733/why-i-see-myself-as-a-daughter-of-the-diaspora-rather.