Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The multiracial idea has at least two versions. One is that multiracial people are of mixed blood or mixed genetic material. The other is that multiracial people are those with parents of different recognizable races. On examination, both of these positions present problems. The first is most blatantly tied to the racist science of the nineteenth century. It suggests that a person with both black and white ancestry is not adequately or accurately described as black (or white). This assertion rests on the discredited biological model. To sustain this position, one would have to show not only that bloodlines or genes are the appropriate foundations upon which to classify races, but also that bloodlines or genetic indicators are clear. Stated more strongly, this view implies that pure blood-lines—people who are uniracial—define the current racial categories.

Many of the proponents of new multiracial categories are politically left of center and reject the overt racism of nineteenth-century biology. Yet, a number of the assumptions adopted by these advocates end up relying, unwittingly, on the same discredited science, one of the main assertions of which was that race and racial categories were based on blood or genes. Supposed racial difference cannot be sustained on this basis, however; the majority of white Americans have African ancestry, the majority of blacks have white ancestry, and a substantial number of each have American Indian ancestry. Indeed, under the old hypodescent or “one drop” rule, which asserts that “white blood” is pure and therefore contaminated by even one drop of “black blood,” most white Americans are, in fact, African American.

john a. powell, Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 39.

Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America

Posted in Books, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2015-11-18 22:33Z by Steven

Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America

Oxford University Press
2014-01-27
336 Pages | 9 halftones
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199313501

Katy L. Chiles, Associate Professor of English
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

First detailed study of “literary race” in eighteenth-century America
Brings together the scholarly discourses on American Indian identity, the racial regime of African slavery, and the developing discourse of race in eighteenth-century natural history with convincing literary analysis
Covers canonical texts by Ben Franklin, Samson Occum, Phillis Wheatley, and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur

As surprising as it might seem now, during the late eighteenth century many early Americans asked themselves, “How could a person of one race come to be another?” Racial thought at the close of the eighteenth century differed radically from that of the nineteenth century, when the concept of race as a fixed biological category would emerge. Instead, many early Americans thought that race was an exterior bodily trait, incrementally produced by environmental factors and continuously subject to change. While historians have documented aspects of eighteenth-century racial thought, Transformable Race is the first scholarly book that identifies how this thinking informs the figurative language in the literature of this crucial period. It argues that the notion of “transformable race” structured how early American texts portrayed the formation of racial identities. Examining figures such as Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Samson Occom, and Charles Brockden Brown, Transformable Race demonstrates how these authors used language emphasizing or questioning the potential malleability of physical features to explore the construction of racial categories.

Tags: Ben Franklin, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Brockden Brown, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Katy Chiles, Katy L. Chiles, Oxford University Press, Phillis Wheatley, Samson Occum

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Mixed Race Studies

Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America

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