Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

People of mixed racial heritage, or “mulattoes,” symbolized the dependence of white men on black labor, both in the field and in the bed. Marked by their very skin color and other features as products of the white-black encounter in the South, mulatto women were obviously white and not-white, like “our white Caroline.” They were products of the long encounter between white exploiters of labor and black sources of labor, productive and reproductive. Their commodification reminded all that, in the South, every child of an enslaved mother was some form of slave laborer, an arrangement that enabled plantation slavery to function. Every enslaved man, woman, and child was a repository of reproductive capital and a source of production. The white political economy of the South would have collapsed without the legal and cultural fictions that assigned the “mulatto” and other children of African women to the created categories “black” and “enslaved.” Women like the “fair maid Martha,” and “the Yellow Girl Charlott” also, in their phenotypes, illustrated the long past of white sexual assault. “Mulatto” women thus embodied white dependency and white power, and offered men the chance to recapitulate and reexamine the past that had produced both white power and mixed-race individuals. Unwillingly, such women introduced a pornographic history, one obscene yet for that very reason more lusted-after, into the parlors, bedrooms, and above all, the markets of the elite white man’s world. They made flesh the years of white men desiring and depending on women (and men) who were supposedly less than civilized, Christian, or even human.

Edward E. Baptist, ““Cuffy,” “Fancy Maids,” and “One-Eyed Men”: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States, 1876,” The American Historical Review, (December, 2001).

‘Mixed Britannia’ – research by LSBU’s Dr Caballero informs BBC series

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Social Science, United Kingdom on 2011-10-06 22:19Z by Steven

‘Mixed Britannia’ – research by LSBU’s Dr Caballero informs BBC series

London South Bank University
2011-10-05

Research conducted by Dr Chamion Caballero, Senior Research Fellow in London South Bank University’s Families and Social Capital Research Group, has formed the foundations of a BBC2 series starting on Thursday 6 October.

Dr Caballero was an academic consultant for the three-part series ‘Mixed Britannia‘, which is presented by George Alagiah. This is part of a season of BBC programmes which explores what it means to be part of Britain’s mixed-race community.

Dr Caballero is interviewed for the final programme in the series which will air on Thursday 20 October…

…Dr Chamion Caballero says: “Despite there being a long presence of mixed race people and couples in Britain, there is still a tendency to herald their presence as part of a new multicultural phenomenon which has been dubbed the rise of ‘Beige or Brown Britain’. Yet such groups have a long history in Britain…

Read the entire article (and view a family portrait circa, 1916) here. Find out more about the research here.

Tags: BBC Two, BBC2, British Broadcasting Corporation, Chamion Caballero, George Alagiah, London South Bank University, Mixed Britannia

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Mixed Race Studies

‘Mixed Britannia’ – research by LSBU’s Dr Caballero informs BBC series

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