Rutgers Student, a German ‘Brown Baby,’ Helps Others Search for their Identities and Creates Community

Posted in Articles, Biography, Europe, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States on 2013-04-02 02:43Z by Steven

Rutgers Student, a German ‘Brown Baby,’ Helps Others Search for their Identities and Creates Community

Focus: News for and about Rutgers faculty, students, and staff
Rutgers University
2012-05-01

Carrie Stetler

She grew up in Willingboro, New Jersey, as Wanda Lynn Haymon, the only child of an African-American mother and father who made her feel special and loved.
 
But when relatives whispered at family gatherings, she knew they were talking about her. One day she asked her parents if she was adopted.
 
 “Do you feel adopted?’’ they answered.
 
She did, but had no proof until 1994 when Wanda Lynn discovered that she was born Rosemarie Larey in Viernheim, Germany, the daughter of a black soldier and German mother. Although she was born in 1956, just 11 years earlier, Nazis, who regarded blacks as racially inferior, sent some of the estimated 25,000 Afro-Germans to concentration camps. Many were subject to medical experiments or were forcibly sterilized. Others simply disappeared.
 
After the war, the stigma of bearing a bi-racial child was so great that many mothers brought their children to orphanages, which often placed them with African-American families in the United States.
 
Today, Rosemarie Pena  (her married name) is completing her master’s degree at the Rutgers-Camden, in the Department of Childhood Studies, researching the history of “brown babies,’’ as they were known at the time of their birth, as well as people who identify as Afro-German around the world.
 
Pena also heads the Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey, an academic organization that connects Afro-Germans internationally. Its mission is to document and inform others about black Germans and their history. For post-war adoptees like Pena, the society helps them find closure and connects them with others who share their experience…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , , ,

Critical Theories: Hybridity and African Diaspora

Posted in Caribbean/Latin America, Course Offerings, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2012-11-24 20:50Z by Steven

Critical Theories: Hybridity and African Diaspora

Rutgers University, Newark
Spring 2013

Belinda Edmondson, Professor and Director, Women’s & Gender Studies

This course will investigate the concept of the hybrid society, or “hybridity”, in African-American and Caribbean literature. Hybridity here refers to both culturally and ethnically hybrid communities and peoples. Specifically, we will concentrate on the ambivalent representations of the multiracial ideal for African-descended societies, from W.E.B. DuBois’ articulation of African-American identity as a dual, or “double-voiced”, one, to Caribbean images of the mixed-race citizen as the core of a uniquely Caribbean identity. Course readings will emphasize historical context as well as the theoretical foundations for hybridity discourse.

Tags: ,

Rutgers Group Brings Students Together to Explore the Complexities of Being Multiracial

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States on 2012-09-22 15:48Z by Steven

Rutgers Group Brings Students Together to Explore the Complexities of Being Multiracial

Focus
Rutgers University News
September 2012

Carrie Stetler

By 2050, one in five Americans is likely to be multiracial

It’s a question Joan Gan hears a lot: “What are you?” She instantly knows what it means.

Her father is Chinese and her mother is Greek, so when people meet her for the first time, they often have trouble identifying her ethnicity.

Gan, a Rutgers junior who grew up in Parsippany, understands their curiosity, and the questions don’t really bother her. But other aspects of growing up biracial were harder to negotiate.

“In high school I saw lots of ethnic clubs, and at colleges, too, and I didn’t really know which one to join,” says Gan, an environmental science major. “Even though I’m technically Asian, people don’t consider me one of them and technically I’m white, but people don’t always consider me that, either.”

During her first year at Rutgers, Gan discovered Fusion: Rutgers Union of Mixed People, which gives her and other students an opportunity to come together and explore the challenges and complexities of being multiracial…

…Fusion began seven years ago when Rutgers psychology professor Diana Sanchez, who is now the club’s adviser, started researching biracial and multiracial identity.

“As a way of connection multiracial students and getting participants for my research, I asked a student I knew to start an organization and he did,’’ says Sanchez, an an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, in the School of Arts and Sciences.. “Multiracial people hold a unique view of race; they’ve questioned it in a very different way. If you feel ‘in between’ communities, there is another identity you form that has to do with the merging of both those identities.”

Phillip Handy, who graduated in 2009, was one of the co-founders of Fusion. He is half European and half African American. “Racial conversations at Rutgers … often viewed race in a very categorical way,” says Handy, who grew up in Howell and now lives in California.“I thought the discussions would be enhanced by a multiracial student group.”…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Don’t box us in

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States on 2012-01-22 21:43Z by Steven

Don’t box us in

Focus
Rutgers University
2008-04-09

Ashanti M. Alvarez

Prompted by Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, The New York Times recently tackled the issue of mixed-race Americans, and did so by profiling a group of students from Rutgers. I read with interest, as I myself am mixed.
 
Common constructs abound in this article, and in most discussions of multiethnic and multiracial individuals. Invariably, these articles and discussions are about identity and the struggle to find one. What box do we check? Which cultural customs do we adopt? Who will accept us? How do we deal with rejection?
 
These inquiries and expositions almost always echo, however subtly, the persistent “tragic mulatto” meme transmitted through the decades from antebellum United States. The person born to parents of African and European ancestry (usually a woman, more easily portrayed as a sympathetic victim) struggles to navigate the fine line between a predictably privileged life and one relegated to the underclass. Her inability to find acceptance from others or from herself leads to self-undoing through alcoholism, insanity, or suicide.
 
But for me, being multicultural has brought great personal freedom. After all, who wants to be confined to a box? Not me. At times I wonder how it feels to grow up as part of a cohesive community, one with strong religious, culinary, and family customs. That must provide a distinct sense of security, belonging, and identity that I am missing…

Read the entire essay here.

Tags: , ,

Generation, Degeneration, Miscegenation

Posted in Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Forthcoming Media, History, Live Events, United States on 2011-09-08 21:30Z by Steven

Generation, Degeneration, Miscegenation

Intstitute for Research on Women
IRW Distinguished Lecture Series 2011-12: (De)Generations: Reimagining Communities
Rutgers University
Thursday, 2012-04-12
(16:00 EDT reception; 16:30 EDT lecture)

César Braga-Pinto, Associate Professor of Brazilian Studies
Northwestern University

Focusing on the cases of Brazil and the U.S., this presentation proposes to articulate the role played by gender representations in debates around miscegenation in the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Generation, understood in its vertical, genealogical, reproductive aspect is one of the most contested issues in the late 19th century both in Brazil and the U.S., and it is always haunted by miscegenation and the threat of degeneration. This paper aims to understand how horizontal calls for the formation of a new generation (in the sense of brotherhood, nationality, contemporaneity and intellectual-literary communities) in the beginning of the 20th century struggles to resolve the pessimism associated with mixed-race subjects and communities.

For more information, click here.

Tags: , ,

Embodying race: gender, sex, and the sciences of difference, 1830-1934

Posted in Dissertations, Health/Medicine/Genetics, History, Media Archive, Slavery, United States on 2011-08-02 00:52Z by Steven

Embodying race: gender, sex, and the sciences of difference, 1830-1934

Rutgers University, New Brunswick
May 2008
356 pages

Melissa Norelle Stein, Postdoctoral Fellow
Center for Race and Ethnicity
Rutgers University

A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in History

This project uses the body as a site to examine the complex relationship between science, culture, and politics in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, and the ways in which gender and sex can be used to conceptualize other categories of difference, such as race and sexuality. Scientists during this period naturalized racial difference and socio-political exclusion by insisting that the bodies of racial minorities were not fully male or female at a time when power, citizenship, property, and protection were conferred according to sex. My dissertation makes other important interventions in the existing scholarship on nineteenth-century racial and scientific thought, as well as American race relations. Rather than treating ethnology as static, I reveal significant change over time in scientific discourse on race with regard to gender and sex. Scientists’ shifting uses of sex and gender to denote racial difference corresponded to larger shifts in American politics and culture, including Emancipation and the gendered questions of citizenship it raised, the rise of evolutionary theory, and turn-of-the-century fears about miscegenation, immigration, homosexuality, and “race suicide.” This discourse was not one-sided or monolithic, however. Accordingly, I also explore tensions within and challenges to white racialist science. Moreover, I demonstrate that scientific discourse was not divorced from the lives of real people; it had a tangible impact on how living human bodies were treated. Finally, while recent scholarship has identified important parallels between racial and sexual science, my work reveals that ethnology and sexology not only shared similar cultural politics in America, they were literally populated by the same prominent scientists.

While at its core an intellectual history of scientific thought on race and gender, this dissertation is not concerned only with ideas and discourse, but how such ideas were received and how they shaped race relations. Thus, my work utilizes a variety of sources—including scientific and medical texts, newspaper articles, private correspondence, political writing, and visual materials such as political cartoons and campaign posters—to interrogate scientists’ engagement with sociopolitical issues as well as the incursion of scientific thought into political culture.

Table of Contents

  • Abstract
  • Acknowledgements
  • List of Tables
  • List of Illustrations
  • Introduction
  • Section One—Gendering Scientific Racism
    • Chapter One—“Races of Men”: Ethnology in Antebellum America
    • Chapter Two—An “Equal Beard” for “Equal Voting”: Gender, Slavery, and Citizenship in American Ethnology, 1850-1877
  • Section Two—Bodily Threats, Threatening Bodies
    • Chapter Three—Inverts, Perverts, and Primitives: Racial Thought and the American School of Sexology
    • Chapter Four—Unsexing the Race: Lynching, Racial Science, and Black Mobilization, 1893-1934
  • Conclusion—The Fall and Rise of Racial Science
  • Appendix
  • Bibliography
  • Curriculum Vita

List of tables

  • Focus of Racial Science Texts by Race, 1830-1859 (Figure 1.1)
  • Thematic Focus of Antebellum Racial Science Texts (Figure 1.3)
  • Changing Focus of Racial Science Texts, 1830-1879 (Figure 2.2)

List of illustrations

  • Illustration, The Races of Men (Figure 1.2)
  • “The Candidate of Many Parties” (Figure 1.4)
  • Frontispiece, Negroes and Negro “Slavery” ( Figure 2.1)
  • Illustration, Types of Mankind (Figure 2.3)
  • “Marriage of the Free Soil and Liberty Parties” (Figure 2.4)
  • “Syphilis” (Figure 2.5)
  • “Nativity of the most capable soldier” (Figure 2.6)
  • “The Two Platforms” (Figure 2.7)
  • Illustrations, The Six Species of Men (Figure 2.8)
  • “Front View of Author at Thirty-three” (Figure 3.1)
  • “Rear View of Author at Thirty-three” (Figure 3.2)
  • “Fairie Boy” (Figure 3.3)
  • “Hermaphroditos” (Figure 3.4)
  • “Profile” (Figure 4.1)
  • “Photo from life by the author” (Figure 4.2)
  • “Walter White, 1935” (Figure 4.3)

…Sterile Hybrids and the Species of Men: Racial Mixture, Taxonomy, and Human Descent

Racial mixture also featured in the origins debate in antebellum ethnology. Numerous ethnologists of the era argued that the offspring between a black parent and white parent were largely infertile and thus incapable of producing a “permanent stock” beyond that first generation. This proved that the two races constituted separate species. Indeed, the word “mulatto” derived from the word “mule” or “a sterile hybrid.”

Not surprisingly, both black and white women were more present in discussions of racial mixture than in general considerations of the original unity or diversity of the races. Even though “mulatto” men and women alike were thought to be weak and largely infertile, discussions of sterile hybridity were more likely to target biracial women specifically as bad breeders. For example, Drs. H.A. Ramsey and W.T. Grant, the editors of the Georgia Blister and Critic, a journal largely dedicated to scientific justifications of chattel slavery, asked its readers: “In the cross of the white and negress, do the Ovary Cells diminish with each cross, until the fourth, and then nearly disappear entirely?” Like Van Evrie characterizing miscegenation between a black man and white woman as an absurdity, the Blister’s focus on the “cross of the white and negress” hinted at the reality of interracial sex in antebellum America. More often than not, it occurred between white men and black women in a culture in which the bodies of female slaves were legally owned by their white masters, and even free black women’s rights to their own bodies were frequently ignored in law and practice.

Hoping to collect opinions and anecdotal evidence from the Blister’s readership to assist his research, Samuel Cartwright had submitted this revealing query about ovary cells, but he was less interested in women per se than in uncovering further evidence of (permanent) racial difference. For their part, the Ramsey and Grant were happy to oblige, noting that “the question is important, and we ask for it a candid and careful investigation.” They admitted they had “presumed an answer, without the necessary data to confirm it.” Their presumptive answer presented no information about black, however. Instead, it made an observation about animals, just as Jefferson had done in the previous century in his own discussion of racial mixture. The editors wrote, “We think it quite probable that the Ovary Cells in the cross of the negress and white, may diminish, until sterility would be the result. Our dissections are not ample enough to determine the point precisely, but we see a cross in the horse and mule, produce sterility and why not in the white and black biped race? We see no reason to question.” They concluded by offering their own anecdotal example: “We will here remark, we had a negro man…with a wife, who is a fourth cross, as far as we can ascertain. She does not breed, although healthy, and her husband has been heretofore the father of children.” Perhaps not surprisingly in a society in which black women, particularly slaves, so often faced sexual exploitation that made the paternity of their children either difficult to ascertain or all too tempting for whites to ignore, white men wanted to believe that “mulatto” women in particular were sterile—at least by the fourth cross.

However, investigations of hybridity usually focused less on women—white or black—than on the the question of whether the races constituted different species or variations of the same species. In a two-part lecture before the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia in 1846, later published as an article in the American Journal of Science and Arts, Morton stated, “The facts connected with hybridity in the inferior classes of animals, have an important bearing on one of the most interesting questions in Ethnography.” Whereas Morton did not contend that human “mulattoes” were sterile, he maintained that their ability to reproduce did not prove the races to be one species of singular origin either. As Morton’s counter argument indicates, many scientists had made “hybridity the test of specific character,” arguing that animals of different species were unable to reproduce fertile offspring. For some, “sterile hybrids” were thus proof that the races were distinct species.

For Morton, however, the original unity or diversity of the races hinged less on the potential for reproduction between the races and more on the correct definition of “species” and “races.” “Races are properly successions of individuals propagated from any given stock,” Morton argued, “and we agree with the learned Dr. Pritchard, from whom we cite these definitions, that when races can be proved to possess certain primordial distinctions, which have been transmitted unbroken, they should be regarded as true species.” Arguments for the separate origins of the races were best supported by the distinct and unchanging character of the various races over thousands of years rather than the reproductive capacities of racial “hybrids.”

Other ethnologists were not so quick to divorce the issue of racial hybridity from the origins question or to concede that mulattoes could themselves reproduce, but their arguments were similarly geared toward proving longstanding and permanent racial difference. In introducing his 1844 Two Lectures, on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races, Nott discussed the “effect of crossing races.”65 He also thought that animals could shed light on questions of race, but he believed that the natural sciences had not adequately addressed the issue: “Naturalists have strangely overlooked the effects of mixing races, when the illustrations drawn from the crossing of animals speak so plainly—man physically is, but an animal at last, with the same physiological laws which govern others.” Elsewhere, Nott conceded that though fertile offspring could be produced from black and white parents, such offspring did not have the fecundity of its parent races and that over time it was “the higher type that in the end predominates.” However, no amount of infusion of white blood could turn the black race white or enable a mulatto to escape detection, for the skilled eyes of Nott and other racial experts could always “instantaneously trace the Negro type in complexion and feature.” And why did the “higher type” predominate but never subsume the lower race? Nott concluded, “The only physiological reason that may be assigned is this: the mulattoes, or mixed-breeds, die off before the dark stain can be washed out by amalgamation. No other rational explanation can be offered.” In a text that also offered an explicit defense of slavery—under which the sexual exploitation of slave women by their white masters was actually profitable—it was politically expedient to render racial mixture non-threatening. Thus, Nott argued that the issue of hybridity was of considerable interest to ethnologists, but he dismissed the human “hybrids” themselves as inconsequential, weak and ultimately destined to die out…

Read the entire dissertation here.

Tags: , , ,

Life on the boundary: “Passing” and the limits of self-definition

Posted in Dissertations, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2011-08-02 00:03Z by Steven

Life on the boundary: “Passing” and the limits of self-definition

Rutgers University, Camden
May 2011
46 pages

Raven Marlenia Moses

A thesis submitted to the Graduate School-Camden Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Graduate Program in English

With the advent of various state laws that classified as black any individual with at least “one-drop” of African blood and the legalization of racial segregation enacted by the Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, the American post-Reconstruction era was a period in which the line separating races became more and more distinct. However, as the legal definitions and hierarchical categorizations of racial difference became more discrete, the physical basis of racial distinction became increasingly destabilized. Nella Larsen’s Passing and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man are novels from this period that depict the struggles of characters who suffer because of the social and legal distinction between “black” and “white.” Because of the social imperative that these characters be black even though they have visibly white skin, the distinction between “black” and “white” actually becomes an arbitrary distinction between “white” and “not-white.” The protagonists of both novels—Clare Kendry, Irene Redfield, and the unnamed Ex-Colored Man—all seek stable self-definitions that successfully integrate both their personal and social identities. However, because of their inability to resolve the paradox created by their visible “whiteness” and legal classification as “black,” none of the protagonists are able to successfully negotiate the threats posed by their racially and socioeconomically oppressive environment while keeping their personal identities continuously intact. Unable to form stable, coherent identities through the blending of mutually agreeable public and private “selves,” Clare, Irene, and the Ex-Colored Man remain in irresolvable positions with identities that are permanently indeterminate.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Tags: , , , , ,

Elite (re-)constructions of coloured identities in a post-apartheid South Africa: Assimilations and bounded transgressions

Posted in Africa, Dissertations, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science, South Africa on 2011-04-14 01:18Z by Steven

Elite (re-)constructions of coloured identities in a post-apartheid South Africa: Assimilations and bounded transgressions

Rutgers The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick
2006
328 pages
AAT 3249339

Michele René Ruiters

A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School – New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Political Science

This thesis engages with issues of identity, diversity and democracy through a study of the reconstruction of colouredness, a marginal identity, in post-apartheid South Africa. I argue that coloured elites reconstruct their apartheid-designated racialized identities in order to create new identities that reflect their own and their communities’ experiences and needs. This reconstruction process often results in a reification of past expressions of each identity, which needs to be negotiated in a contemporary era. Ultimately, self-definition creates agency and therefore a stronger citizen who participates more effectively within their polity and thus strengthens democratic practices. I argue that diversity enhances democracy only if a politics of recognition is practiced.

The thesis also examines the possibility of releasing identities from historical baggage in the sense that a new identity could be constructed. I show that ‘new’ identities are constrained by the past and often struggle to free themselves from existing constructions. I argue that this is possible only if elites are willing to let go of past constructions and to be more inclusive in their visions for the future. The state, however, should continue to recognize marginal groups in order to combat the emergence of isolationist and reactionary politics from those groups.

My project examines one community’s search for recognition from a state that has, since 1994, rejoined a larger African community, which is largely unknown to ordinary South Africans. I argue that this process of reconstructing a coloured identity, which certain coloured elites have undertaken, is not a social movement but is a spiritual search for belonging, which provides a social network of similar minded people who wish to redefine their identities. I also contend that the reconstruction of coloured identities has to occur within a new framework in which an African identity is more inclusive and within which attempts have been made to move away from past constructions of identities.

Table of Contents

  • II. ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
  • III. DEDICATION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  • Chapter 1: Introduction and Methodology
    • Who is ‘Coloured’?
    • Why Identity?
    • Race and Ethnicity
    • Insider Re-vision of History
    • A National Identity
    • Methodology
    • Chapter Synopses
    • Conclusion
  • Chapter 2: Elites, Marginal Identities and the Public Sphere
    • Political identities
    • Marginal Identities
    • Censuses and control
    • Passing
    • ‘Errors’ and ‘Mistakes’
    • The Public Sphere
    • Elites, Institutions and Ideology
    • Citizenship and Belonging
    • ‘New’ constructions of Race-Ethnic Identities
    • Marginal Groups and Agenda-setting
    • Conclusion
  • Chapter 3: Colonial Constructions of Coloured Identity
    • Arrival of the Colonists
    • Race at the Cape
    • Social life and gender
    • Slavery at the Cape
    • Impositions and Adoptions
    • Miscegenation and Misfits
    • Imagined Communities
    • ‘I am Coloured’
    • Expressions of ‘coloured’ politics
    • Conclusion
  • Chapter 4: Apartheid Opportunities and Constraints
    • Apartheid Apparatus
    • Definitions of ‘Coloured’
    • Social spaces and Political issues
    • Imagined Community Realized
    • Black Politics and State Repression
    • Challenging Identities
    • Language
    • Political Constraints and Opportunities post-1984
    • The End of Apartheid
    • Conclusion
  • Chapter 5: Emerging Constructions of Coloured Identity – Post-1994
    • The National Question
    • Elites Change Identities
    • New Coloured Identities
    • Brown Identities
    • The December First Movement and Slave Identities
    • KhoiSan Identities
    • Creoles and Africans
    • Way Forward
  • Chapter 6: The Politics of Newly Constructed Identities in South Africa
    • What is the African Renaissance?
    • Who is an African?
    • Marginal voices on African identities
    • The State’s Options
    • Existing Options
    • New Identities?
    • Conclusion
  • Chapter 7: Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • Appendices: Transcriptions of Three Interviews
  • Curriculum Vitae

Chapter I: Introduction and Methodology

In 1994, South Africa entered a new political era. Racialism was outlawed and Black people could take their rightful place in a new democracy. The dominant party, the African National Congress, introduced a new ideological framework that was to guide our relations with each other within the country and to guide South Africa’s relations with the region, continent and world. The overarching ideology was based on an African renaissance which was to favorably reposition Africa in a global system. In this context, identity re-cmcrged as an important category in South Africa, despite the ANC’s call to non-racialism, as people jostled for what they perceived to be scarce resources. Social relations in South Africa have always been defined in terms of difference based on whether people were ‘white’, ‘Black African’, ‘Indian’ or ‘coloured’. The term Black African is newly constructed. ‘Black’ or ‘African’ were used in the past to denote people who were of Nguni origin, or in ‘other’ terms, people who were not white or coloured. Black was also used to denote a political identity in the liberation struggle and it included everyone that was not white (see Kuhn 2001:21). I have chosen to use Black African because ‘African’ presently refers to all who live on the continent while ‘Black African’ has the same constricted meaning as ‘African’ did under apartheid rule.

During the apartheid era, the state imposed racialized identities onto people and, more often than not, did not take into consideration people’s everyday experiences with their identities. Two processes are occurring simultaneously. The state is reinventing itself as an African nation with an 4 African’ identity that has not been clearly defined to date. Secondly, groups within South Africa are grappling with the process of (re-)naming themselves within this new political milieu. The South African state needs to redefine itself in a post-apartheid, globalizing world and is attempting to do so through the creation of a ‘new’ South African identity that can be shared by all South Africans. The introduction of an overarching ‘African’ identity has created insecurities in South African society and has resulted in people holding on to their apartheid-defined identities. How can South Africanness be created in the light of a fragmented society? Can we use old identities to forge a new identity and can we move beyond race and ethnicity in the twenty-first century? What can the state and groups do to construct identities that depict novel ‘imagined communities’? How docs the state overcome the past to forge a new society based on political ideals of justice, democracy, equality and humanism?…

…Who is ‘Coloured’?

The coloured people were defined as a ‘mixed’ race group that was neither white nor Black. It was constructed as a buffer group between the two racially divided extremes in this country. Some people accepted the imposed apartheid identities while others opposed the state’s denial of their agency to choose their own identities. For this reason coloured identity is very peculiar to the South African context, however, it also provides a snapshot of the experiences of many marginal groups across the world. The Cold Warand the reconfiguration of power relations within the world have provided opportunity spaces for marginal groups to claim a space and identity for themselves. How are marginal identities reconfigured and re-imagined in this globalizing world? How do they define themselves, obtain recognition and negotiate with power? These questions make it imperative that we provide a historical overview of how the state and coloured elites construct coloured identity. Under the colonial and apartheid eras colouredness was an in-between category, supposedly without a culture, without an obvious and authoritative history; and arguably without a political home. Coloured identity in South Africa remains a hotly contested subject in the twenty-first century and will continue to be so as more and more people disrupt imposed racial categorizations (see Erasmus 2001, Wasserman and Jacobs 2003, Hendricks 2000b, Jung 2000, Zegeye 2001a). This work provides a new perspective on coloured identities as they relate to the social, political and economic constraints placed on the identity by larger structural relations.

Colouredness historically dates to social interaction with the first Dutch settlers who arrived in the 1600s. The local people of the southernmost region of the continent, the Khoi and San, entered into economic and social relationships with the white settlers. When East African, Indonesian and Indian slaves came into the region and the indigenous tribes from the north moved south, a ‘new’ identity evolved through social and political interaction between the various race groups. ‘Miscegenation‘ between the white settlers, the indigenes and the slaves, gave rise to a ‘mixed’ race person. The assumption that coloured identity was born from a combination of different people is problematic because it incorrectly assumes that identities arc primordial and fixed. Identities are not immutable therefore they should be examined temporally to determine how they have addressed and dealt with changing relations within a society.

Coloured identities occupied a space that previously did not exist; one that was deemed to be ‘better than Black African but not quite white. Courtney Jung asserts:

Coloureds by their very existence, inhabited an oppositional space. They existed at the intersections of multiple racial classifications, occupying a residual, clearly non-racial category. Coloureds defied racialization. Under apartheid, those ‘outside’ racial stereotypes were redefined in racial terms, to support the ideological proposition that the world was naturally divided into separate races that belonged apart (2000:168).

Under colonial rule the state created a new racialized identity into which people labeled ‘coloured’ could fit. The apartheid government legislated those identities into formal existence and maintained racial differences until the early 1990s when F. W. de Klerk’s watershed speech unbanned the liberation movements and released Nelson Mandelaafter twenty-seven years in prison. Coloured elites have opened up debates since 1994 on coloured identities and have proposed that communities and individuals re-imagine their identities and frame them in terms they have chosen for themselves: KhoiSan, Creole, slave-descendent, and African being the more common self-chosen identities. Elites who have chosen these identities have begun to debate with the overarching concept of ‘ Africanness’ in an attempt to determine where they fit into the new political, economic and social dispensation…

Purchase the dissertation here.

Tags: , , , , ,

Phillip Handy – Race and gender in the family

Posted in Family/Parenting, Identity Development/Psychology, New Media, Videos on 2010-03-19 19:36Z by Steven

Phillip Handy – Race and gender in the family

Rutgers University Undergraduate Research Spotlight
2009-07-26

Phillip Handy
Rutgers University

Phillip Handy discusses his research, which looks into the question of how mother-daughter and father-son relationships impact a mixed-race child’s racial identity.

Phillip is advised by Dr. Diana Sanchez, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University.

Tags: , , ,