Slaves Imported from Africa&#8230;

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

There is good reason to expect that in the United States today individuals who identify as multiracial experience negative treatment. Multiracial individuals report encountering discrimination and microaggressive behaviors such as racial exclusion and marginalization, exoticization, invalidation of their racial identities, and racial essentialization.² These behaviors are in part a result of the kinds of racism that all groups of color face, and in part products of monoracism, a system which privileges single-race categories over racial mixing.³ This system leads to the systematic exclusion and reduction of multiracial identities. For example, during much of the history of the United States, the “one-drop rule” (the idea that every person with any black ancestry was to be identified as only black) was both a social and a legal principle that was heavily enforced.”⁴

Monoracism and the discriminatory and microaggressive behavior it produces continue to affect multiracial individuals today. For example, there have been numerous cases of workplace racial discrimination presented to courts by multiracial plaintiffs alleging the violation of Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.⁵ A common type of microaggressive behavior found in many of the court cases was racial essentialization; individuals were assigned to a single, monoracial group by others despite their multiracial background.⁶ For example, multiracial individuals with a black parent are typically described and treated as if they are solely African American.⁷ Even the courts themselves generally describe multiracial people with any black ancestry as simply black. Many scholars who are supporters of the “Personal Identity Equality” approach have critiqued this pattern, arguing that the “misrecognition of one’s identity” is a form of “social subordination,”⁸ although it is not against the law to refuse to acknowledge the racial identity that a person claims.

Mary E. Campbell and Sylvia M. Emmanuel, “On The Edge: Multiracial Groups and Public Policies,” in How Public Policy Impacts Racial Inequality, Josh Grimm and Jaime Loke eds. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019), 96.

Slaves Imported from Africa…

The slaves imported from Africa by no means represented “pure Negro races.” Of the original tribal stocks, many had admixture of Caucasoid genes from crosses with Mediterranean peoples. During the slave trade more white genes were added. The Portuguese who settled on the Guinea Coast had relations with the natives. The slave traders themselves were known frequently to have had promiscuous intercourse with their female merchandise.

Spencer, Rainier. “New Racial Identities, Old Arguments: Continuing Biological Reification”, In Mixed Messages: Multiracial Identities in the “Color-Blind” Era, edited by David L. Brunsma, 89. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006. Originally published in Myrdal G., R. Sterner, and A. M. Rose. 1944. An American Dilema. New York: Harper and Row, 123.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 02:55Z and is filed under Excerpts/Quotes, History, Slavery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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Mixed Race Studies

Slaves Imported from Africa…

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