{"id":19602,"date":"2012-01-06T05:03:57","date_gmt":"2012-01-06T05:03:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=19602"},"modified":"2012-01-06T18:45:29","modified_gmt":"2012-01-06T18:45:29","slug":"attempts-at-resolving-the-dilemma-produced-a-series-of-contradictory-policies-resulting-in-considerable-ambiguity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=19602","title":{"rendered":"Attempts at resolving the dilemma produced a series of contradictory policies, resulting in considerable ambiguity&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>The number of children born out of the widespread practice of sexual intimacy forced the colonial administration and the Belgian Parliament to debate what they termed the probl\u00e8me des m\u00e9tis, \u201cthe mulatto problem.\u201d The issue was the treatment of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=450\" target=\"_blank\">mulatto<\/a> offspring of these unions: whether they should endure the same status as the rest of the Congolese population or whether they should be considered an intermediate group above the latter but beneath the Europeans. Attempts at resolving the dilemma produced a series of contradictory policies, resulting in considerable ambiguity. This ambiguity came to characterize the lives of the growing population of m\u00e9tis throughout the entire colonial period (Jeurissen 1999; Stoler 2002). Usually, the status of the metis depended upon the degree of recognition and acknowledgment of parenthood by their fathers. Those who were not recognized were often abandoned by their mothers because of the ostracism that they faced when returning to their native villages. The abandoned children usually ended up living in Catholic and Protestant missionary boarding schools, which were created for this purpose.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Jean Muteba Rahier, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=16966\" target=\"_blank\">M\u00e9tis\/Mul\u00e2tre, Mulato, Mulatto, Negro, Moreno, Mundele Kaki, Black,&#8230; The Wanderings and Meanderings of Identities<\/a>\u201d in <em>Problematizing Blackness: Self Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States<\/em>, eds. Jean Muteba Rahier and Percey C. Hintzen, (London: Routledge, 2003): 86.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The number of children born out of the widespread practice of sexual intimacy forced the colonial administration and the Belgian Parliament to debate what they termed the probl\u00e8me des m\u00e9tis, \u201cthe mulatto problem.\u201d The issue was the treatment of the mulatto offspring of these unions: whether they should endure the same status as the rest [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1295,3],"tags":[7778,7777,7779],"class_list":["post-19602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-excerpts","tag-jean-m-rahier","tag-jean-muteba-rahier","tag-jean-rahier"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19602\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}