Mixed Race Studies

Miscegenation and the Free Negro in Antebellum “Anglo” Alabama: A Reexamination of Southern Race Relations

The Journal of American History
Volume 68, Number 1 (June 1981)
pages 16-34

Gary B. Mills (1944-2002), Associate Professor of History
University of Alabama, Gadsden

More than a quarter-century ago, the southern historian Frank L. Owsley predicted: “If the history of every county, or even smaller community in every Southern State would be written from the basic sources, a history of the South would emerge vastly different from any previously written.” A new generation of historians has accepted this challenge, returning to those long-neglected basic sources. While their approach has been more topical than geographical (as Owsley suggested!, the results have definitely called into question many of the standard interpretations of the antebellum South

The southern free Negro—and the miscegenation that is credited with producing him—may serve as an excellent case at point. Traditional interpretations of his genesis and evolution generally have followed a monolithic pattern As a class, by and large, he owed his existence to libidinous, but conscience-stricken, white planters—male planters, necessarily, since the unwritten double-standard of southern white society winked at white male exploitation of Negro women but tolerated no sexual relations that hinted of racial equality, such as white female relations with Negro males or legal interracial marriages Within free Negro society, allegedly, the family unit was unstable, due as much to the pattern of sexual incontinency that slavery forced upon blacks as to the desire of free black women to breed lighter offspring who might pass into white society. As a class, the free black is believed to have been a threat to the institution of slavery. Thus his contacts with slaves were limited, he was ostracized by white society (with the occasional exception of…

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The Social Negotiation of Ambiguous In-Between Stigmatized Identities: Investigating Identity Processes in Multiracial and Bisexual People

University of Massachusetts, Boston
December 2011
234 pages

Vali Dagmar Kahn

A Dissertation Presented by Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston, in partial fulfillment of  the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Clinical Psychology

To date, most bisexual and multiracial identity models in psychology capture a largely internal developmental process (Collins, 2000; Kich, 1992; Weinberg, Williams & Pryor, 1994). However, individuals learn to manage their socially stigmatized identities in social interactions (Goffman, 1963). While the demands to socially negotiate stigmatized identity affect all minority peoples, individuals with inbetween ambiguous stigmatized identities, such as multiracial and bisexual people, must negotiate also being situated at the margins of their own reference groups (e.g. heterosexual and gay/lesbian). Using a comparative grounded theory approach, this study explored the question: How do experiences of socially negotiating an inbetween ambiguous stigmatized identity influence one’s identity development? And the sub-question: What are the similarities and differences in these processes for multiracial and bisexual people?

between the ages of 20 and 36 years participated in semi-structured interviews addressing the following areas of inquiry: (1) Contextualizing current identifications and establishing shared understandings, (2) Experiences of social negotiations, and (3) Effects of these experiences on identities. Issues regarding the rigor and credibility of the study (Morrow, 2005) were addressed through peer debriefing; inquiry auditing; and member check discussions. Analysis followed a constant comparative method (Creswell, 2007) and a multi-step process resulting in a theory describing three negotiation cycles and associated identity effects common to both kinds of identities (multiracial and bisexual), with additional identity specific (multiracial or bisexual) variations: the first cycle was Catalyzing Experiences, the second was Active Negotiations, and the third Emerging Sense of Agency through New Understandings, Perspectives, and Positive Experiences. Cycles were described by multiracial and bisexual participants as fluid, iterative, and interacting. The model developed in this study offers a way of understanding stigma management strategies and their relation to influencing identities and stigmatizing processes. This deeper understanding can help clinicians and community organizers create inclusive environments and develop interventions to assist multiracial and bisexual individuals develop skills to deal with social stigmatizing processes, resolve initial questions, and develop a greater sense of agency in identity choice and performance.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Census: Few among Az’s tribes claim to be multiracial

Tucson Sentinel
2012-01-26

Victoria Pelham
Cronkite News Service

WASHINGTON – The number of American Indians who claimed to be multiracial jumped sharply over the last decade, but not so much in Arizona, the Census Bureau reported Wednesday.

The bureau said the total number of American Indian or Alaska Natives grew from 4.1 million in 2000 to 5.2 million in 2010, a 27 percent increase. Of those, 2.3 million people, or 44 percent of the total, claimed to be Indian and at least one other race, the report said.

But Arizona saw relatively higher numbers of people claiming to be Indian only.

“There’s a common trend in the state of Arizona that is different from other states,” said Mellor Willie, executive director of the National American Indian Housing Council.

“That will definitely have an effect when you’re working with raw federal policy that has to meet the needs of all Indian people,” Willie said. “Tribes have to take that into consideration, especially the tribes in Arizona.”

The Census Bureau said the Navajo Nation, which has a significant presence in Arizona, had the largest number of single-race members of any tribal group in the country, with 287,000 of the tribe’s 332,129 people claiming to be single-race. That means just 13 percent of Navajo claim to be multiracial…

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Race and Humanity

Science
Volume 113, Number 2932 (1951-03-09)
pages 264-266
DOI: 10.1126/science.113.2932.264

Th. Dobzhansky (1900-1975)

Probably no other scientific concept  has been so notorious for vagueness and ambiguity as that of race. Certainly none has been more unceremoniously exploited as a cloak for prejudice and malevolence. And this despite the fact that anthropologists and biologists have studied races in man and in other organisms for more than a century and a half. A very heartening break in this situation has, however, become apparent within the past decade or two. The rapid advances in population genetics have shed new light on race as a biological phenomenon and as a stage of the evolutionary development of sexually reproducing species. It was, then, only a question of time when the study of races of man would be revised and revived under the impact of modern population genetics. This reformation of the raciological thinking in anthropology is now at hand. The first and the second of the three books under review are the harbingers of a new era. The third is a useful anthology of raciological writings covering the late eighteenth century up to the modem era.

Professor Count’s anthology provides a historical perspective and a contrasting background against which the modern reform will stand out in bold relief. From its very inception, the race concept has suffered from an inner contradiction (not to speak of its perennial misuse for political propaganda purposes). Race has been a practical and convenient category of classification, with the aid of which the diversity of human types could be efficiently described and neatly pigeonholed. For this purpose it is useful to set up so-called racial “types.” The types are arrived at by estimation, or by calculation, of averages of various traits observed in the samples of individuals examined. No objection could be raised against this procedure if it were used solely as a technique of cataloguing. But a type once created has an insidious way of dominating its maker. It becomes “the race” a sort of noumenon of which the existing individuals are only imperfect representatives. Needless to say, such a race concept is basically antievolutionist, as well as incompatible with Mendelian genetics. And yet the idea of change and development has been a part of anthropological thinking since the times of Buffon, Kant, and Blumenbach. Darwin entitled his great work The Origin of Species; origin of races would have been no striking novelty either to anthropologists or to biologists.

An uneasy compromise was arranged between the contradictory concepts of race as an abstract but stable type and race the ineluctably changing biological reality. This compromise involved the assumption that there existed at some obscure time in the past so-called primary races, which were supposedly “pure” and conformed to their ideal types. The primary races engaged, however, in long-continued miscegenation; the miscegenation has not only resulted in numerous “mixed” or “secondary” races, but also engulfed and largely obliterated the pure primary ones. The latter can be discerned at present, in the words of an outstanding living anthropologist (Howells), only “by a process of personal estimation which is reminiscent of divination.” Another trouble with the pure primary races is that a pure race makes no sense at all from the standpoint of genetics, except in asexually reproducing organisms. In sexual and cross-fertilizing species such as man, no two individuals are likely to have the same genotype; parents and offspring, as well as brothers and sisters, are genetically different Nevertheless, the compromise has continued down to our day, long after it has lost every semblance of justification. Professor Count might have saved a not-inconsiderable number of pages of his anthology by deletion of some of the more recent lucubrations concerning this topic.

Professor Boyd’s book contains a detailed, in places caustic, and altogether devastating critique of the abuses of old-fashioned raciology. But Boyd in certainly not one of those who need to conceal their intellectual sterility by being severely critical of the work of others. His book is primarily constructive. The central idea is that every human being is a member of a biological community within which marriages are concluded. Such a community, termed Mendelian population or isolate, possesses a gene pool, from which the genes of the individuals are drawn, and to which some of them are returned unless the individual dies childless. Mankind, the human species, is the most inclusive Mendelian population. It is, however, a very complex system of isolates, kept apart by geography or by social forces. It happens that these subordinate populations often differ in relative frequencies of genes for various traits in their gene pools. Such different populations are races. Boyd defines (p. 207) “a human race as a population which differs significant…

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Multiracial People are Multiplying

brianbantum: theology, cultury, teaching and life in-between
2011-03-31

Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

The New York Times recently published a story highlighting the increase in numbers of multiracial children in the United States. The numbers of self identifying multiracial children has doubled in the United States to 2.9% of the entire population. With this data, coupled with a 2007 Pew Research Center report that interracial marriages represented 14% of all new marriages (up from 7% in 2000), we could begin to surmise an end to problematic racial distinctions and a truly new America, right?

Taken together these numbers indicate a movement towards greater acceptance of interracial/interethnic relationships as well as a greater freedom for multiracial children to claim this mixture as part of their identity. And perhaps this is the most significant aspect of these figures. While the idea of numbers doubling seems extraordinary, multiracial children still constitute only 2.9% of all children which means more often than not sexual desire and marriage is oriented towards similarity and homogeneity (it is also important to note how even mixed marriages follow patterns of desire away from African American women who marry outside of their race in the smallest numbers.)

In the midst of these numbers we must remember that multiracial identity is not confined to checking boxes. Interactions with friends, dating, interactions with co-workers do not begin with our self-assertions, but with a complicated set of markers and interpretations that the multiracial person is not entirely in control of.

The space to claim one’s “multi”ness is important, it is certainly important for myself and my children. At the same time, the existence of multiracial children does not diminish the realities of racial exclusion and economic oppression that are not only present, but becoming more vehement and stark in the wake of our first African American president. To put it a different way, we are not the future of America. Like all other people who are raised in a deeply racialized world, we are formed to resist certain notions of beauty, embrace or recoil from certain people…

…If we wish to celebrate the growth of multiracial children let us not pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, but begin to rage against the systemic realities that prevent these numbers from growing: mass incarceration of African American men, tragic inequities between white and black in access to education, anti-immigration legislation, perpetual wars that limit our economic options, images of beauty and health that implicitly deride dark bodies and work against white bodies, the perpetual differentiation, bullying and teasing that plants these seeds of difference in elementary age children…

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The Invisibility of Multiracial Students: An Emerging Majority by 2050

University of California, San Diego
January 2009
252 pages

Gina Acosta Potter

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership

By the nature of their existence, multiracial people call to question deeply held notions of race and racial classification held tightly by Americans. To acknowledge a person as multiracial, or a blending of more than one race, defies the conventional social construct that delineates clear, discernible, and discrete races. Even as multiracial students become increasingly visible in our nation’s schools, multiracial identity is seldom recognized as a critical topic of diversity within the educational arena. By 2050, the multiracial population will surface as a majority group of people whose presence will require our nation to redefine our current constructs of race, racial identification, and racial classification (Anderson, 2002; Winters & DeBose, 2003). This qualitative research study seeks to address the primary research question: How and to what extent do public policy decisions regarding academic accountability affect educational outcomes for multiracial students in two states that differ in their multiracial categorization policies?

The purpose of this study is to illuminate racial subgroups identified within accountability systems, determine the degree to which multiracial students are rendered visible in the academic accountability movement, and examine the needs of multiracial students. The research design is a comparative case study of two state education agencies and the public policies they employ when monitoring the academic achievement of multiracial students.

The major findings of this study reveal: 1) a misalignment between federal and state accountability systems for racial classification; 2) a variance in how two state education agencies racially classify mixed race students; 3) a nonstandardized approach to school enrollment categorization of multiracial students; 4) controversy regarding the meaning of race and ethnicity; 5) various approaches taken by multiracial students when self-identifying 6) data methodology challenges; and 7) a more than ten year lapse in time before the federal Department of Education moved towards complying with the White House Office of Management and Budget regulations allowing multiracial individuals to identify as more than one race.

The implications of this research indicate a significant need for the United States’ educational system to face the challenge of recognizing and responding to the histories, experiences, and identities of multiracial students within our schools.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Ambiguity in Jean Toomer’s Cane

Berkely Undergraduate Journal
Volume 24, Issue 3 (2011)
pages 79-92

Amanda Licato
Department of English ’13
University of California, Berekely

When Jean Toomer’s modernist experimental novel Cane was published in 1923, both he and the text were taken to be representative voices of African American life, even though Toomer explicitly renounced these labels during Cane’s pre-publication promotion. The larger project of the Harlem Renaissance, during which Toomer lived and wrote Cane, was to validate and celebrate African American artists and their work. As a result, the author’s claims of racial ambiguity and multiracial identication, and their expression in his work, were poorly received. This paper looks at the tension between the aesthetically ambiguous qualities of the text as well as its role as a cultural artifact that can be explored and interpreted against different backdrops. Cane’s aesthetic elements work primarily through the text’s structural and linguistic ambiguity, a blurring of various themes that allow for readers to search for and conceive of their own meanings and experiences. To that end, I examine interpretations of racial identity in Cane during three signicant cultural periods: Cane’s initial publication in 1923 during the Harlem Renaissance, its re-publication at the cusp of the modern Civil Rights movement in 1951, and our current age of supposed “post-raciality” in which the modern reader first discovers the text.

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Passing as Black? Some Initial Thoughts…

brianbantum: theology, cultury, teaching and life in-between
2010-12-17

Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

Thomas Chatterton Williams has written an intriguing article highlighting recent trends of multiracial children “passing as black.” If I let myself go I will write a short book on this before I finish, so I will refrain and simply offer a few thoughts and questions and invite your comments and thoughts as well.
 
Mongrel and biracial are not the same thing…. First, I think Williams is concerned that blackness is often construed so narrowly it creates a necessity to “pass.” He wants to point to biracial as more naturally a category within black existence and thus free biracial people to live into being black while also expanding what it means to be black.
 
I am deeply sympathetic to this project, but I wonder if it doesn’t collapse racial modalities of an earlier American era with our contemporary reality. That is, the biracial child of slavery was a child of rape or illicit love, but in either case their birth could be monetarily quantified. They were still a slave…

…The reason for this brief historical context is to highlight an important difference in the experience of biracial people today. Many of us remain with our parents or live in households where racial difference exists together. While Williams wants to expand the tent of blackness, I worry this expansion simplifies a reality that can only be repeatedly and necessarily complicated. That is, part of the tension felt by biracial people today is the remaining structure of racial certainty that presses upon us. And yet,  radically near or domestic realities render such formulations of certainty, and their cultural practices, unstable at best.
 
To simply say everyone is black is to ignore the important tensions that exist inside of households and yet are so often resisted or separated in a biracial person’s daily life. This is very different from a genealogical claim that “we all have mixture.” Of course, there are no “pure” people, but that is hardly evident from the structural and cultural realities of our daily life (as Williams himself suggests in his important book Losing My Cool.)…

…First, while the idea of passing as black is a fascinating trend, mixed marriages of black and (anything) remain the lowest of all mixed marriages in the United States and marriages of black women to anyone else remain the lowest of all mixed marriages. There is something going on here. While many who pass as black are definitely embracing something of themselves and seeking to live into a difference that is both perceived and real, there remain real problems of representation, standards of beauty and desire that we need to account for.
 
Second, I can’t help but think there is an element of class here that is going without analysis. Who are those who have the freedom to choose? What are the economic and social realities that permit mixed marriages in the first place? How will the re-segregation of schools shift this trend in twenty years? Could this phenomenon be one of the first (and last) fruit of school desegregation? Obviously, Williams does not have the space to address such questions, but these are things that are rattling around nonetheless…

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Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity

Baylor University Press
2010-10-01
260 pages
9in x 6in
Hardback ISBN: 9781602582934

Brian Bantum, Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

How mulatto identity challenges racial religiosity and existence

The theological attempts to understand Christ’s body have either focused on “philosophical” claims about Jesus’ identity or on “contextual” rebuttals—on a culturally transcendent, disembodied Jesus of the creeds or on a Jesus of color who rescues and saves a particular people because of embodied particularity.

But neither of these two attempts has accounted for the world as it is, a world of mixed race, of hybridity, of cultural and racial intermixing. By not understanding the true theological problem, that we live in a mulatto world, the right question has not been posed: How can Christ save this mixed world? The answer, Brian Bantum shows, is in the mulattoness of Jesus’ own body, which is simultaneously fully God and fully human.

In Redeeming Mulatto, Bantum reconciles the particular with the transcendent to account for the world as it is: mixed. He constructs a remarkable new Christological vision of Christ as tragic mulatto—one who confronts the contrived delusions of racial purity and the violence of self-assertion and emerges from a “hybridity” of flesh and spirit, human and divine, calling humanity to a mulattic rebirth. Bantum offers a theology that challenges people to imagine themselves inside their bodies, changed and something new, but also not without remnants of the old. His theology is one for all people, offered through the lens of a particular people, not for individual possession but for redemption and transformation into something new.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Part I: Renunciation: Racial Discipleship and the Religiosity of Race
  • 1. I Am Your Son, White Man! The Mulatto/a and the Tragic
  • 2. Neither Fish nor Fowl: Presence as Politics
• Part II: Confession: Christ, the Tragic Mulatto
  • 3. Unto Us a Child Is Born or “How can this be?” The Mulatto Christ
  • 4. I Am the Way: Mulatto/a Redemption and the Politics of Identification
• Part III: Immersion: Christian Discipleship or the New Discipline of the Body
  • 5. You Must Be Reborn: Baptism and Mulatto/a ReBirth
  • 6. The Politics of Presence: Prayer and Discipleship
• Benediction
• Notes

Redeeming Mulatto: Race, Culture, and Ethnic Plurality from Quest Church on Vimeo.

Spring 2008 Feature: Acting on a Dream

Farmington First: Alumni Magazine
University of Maine, Farmington
Spring 2008

Marc Glass

The stages of H’Nette DeTroy’s dramatic life include theater, dance and even commercial casting

Looking at H’Nette DeTroy’s resume, you might think she suffers from career wanderlust. Since graduating from UMF in 2006, she’s been a nurse, a cheerleader and a bus-commuting business executive—not to mention a disgruntled gas-station patron, a terminally ill hospital patient and a drunk-driving fatality. A southern Maine-based actor, DeTroy takes pride in her many professional personas—whether that means extolling the virtues of an alternative-fuel Mercedes Benz in a television commercial, playing a nurse in a hospital training video, dramatizing the perils of operating under the influence in an MTV-aired public service announcement or taking to the stage in a community theater production of Disney’s High School Musical.

“It’s a lot of fun to lose yourself in a role, creatively making it whatever you want it to be,” said DeTroy on a rare day of downtime away from auditions, teaching children’s dance lessons and rehearsing with the Portland-based hip-hop dance company Rhythm Factor. “When I’m acting, dancing or singing, I lose all concept of time and the trivial stuff in life. This is something I love. It’s what life is about for me.”…

…With what she calls her “multiracial” background (courtesy of a German father and Vietnamese mother), DeTroy has been slating of sorts for most of her life.

“People have always asked me ‘What are you?’ or ‘Are you Latina?’ My mom is as third-world as you can get. Growing up in as unforgiving and wealthy a place as Fairfield County makes you aware of your identity. I’m used to defining myself in the first three seconds,” she said. “I remember growing up and thinking ‘there’s no one on TV who looks like me.’ Seeing Jennifer Lopez in the film Selena, a minority actress actually making it, was very motivational.”…

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