mulatto

Mulatto denotes a person with one white parent and one black parent or a person who has both black ancestry and white ancestry.  The term may be perceived as pejorative in some cultures and situations.  Its current usage varies greatly.

The etymology of the term is uncertain. It may be derived from the Portuguese and Spanish word mulato, which itself is derived from mula, mule; from Old Spanish; from Latin mūlus), by analogy with the mule, which is the hybrid offspring of a horse and a donkey…

Wikipedia

42 Responses to “mulatto”

  1. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance Says:

    [...] all the images to arise from the Harlem Renaissance, the most thought-provoking were those of the mulatta. For some writers, artists, and filmmakers, these images provided an alternative to the stereotypes [...]

  2. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » Barriers between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Says:

    [...] works of African American and European American writers of the 19th century.  The importance of mulatto figures as agents of ideological exchange in the American literary tradition has yet to receive [...]

  3. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » Metisse Narratives Says:

    [...] individuals – mixed ‘race’, mixed heritage, mixed parentage, mestizo, mestiza, mulatto, mulatta, Creole, coloured, mixed racial descent, etc. I deploy the terms metisse (f), metis (m), [...]

  4. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » The Mulatta and the Politics of Race Says:

    [...] analysis of how black women used the mulatta figure to contest racial [...]

  5. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » The One-Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration France Says:

    [...] are also pragmatic reasons why the decree has been forgotten.  The black and mulatto population in metropolitan France was small in the period, at most 5000 people, and there are few [...]

  6. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » Political Discourse on Racial Mixture: American Newspapers, 1865 to 1970 Says:

    [...] War through the civil rights era. We use two new sources of data: counts of keywords such as “mulatto” and “multiracial” in two black and four white newspapers over 150 years, and a content [...]

  7. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » quadroon Says:

    [...] of one-quarter caucasian ancestry and three-quarters black ancestry.  A quadroon has a biracial (mulatto) parent (black and white) and one white parent or black [...]

  8. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » Mixing It Up: Early African American Settlements in Northwestern Ohio Says:

    [...] Africans in this section of the country.  Descendants of these unions were dubbed Melungeon, mulatto, or colored, depending on the discretion of oft-illiterate census takers. Though much is written [...]

  9. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean Says:

    [...] finding a connection between the Moors of “Old Spain” and the morenos-the blacks and mulattos of the New World-but also offering a profound critique of creole and imperial discourses. [...]

  10. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » Working with children of mixed parentage Says:

    [...] Mulatto, marginal man, half-caste, mixed race: the one-drop rule in professional practice. [...]

  11. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » The Dismissal of the “Mulatto”… Says:

    [...] Dismissal of the “Mulatto”… The dismissal of the “mulatto” through his emasculation is historically grounded: “so frequently did nineteenth century [...]

  12. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » Racial Mixture and Affirmative Action: The Cases of Brazil and the United States Says:

    [...] and New Orleans, but only temporarily), the one-drop rule defined mixed bloods (even the lightest mulattos) as black. In Brazil, by contrast, racial attribution depended on how the person looked and on the [...]

  13. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » Sab and Autobiography Says:

    [...] in North America, an aristocratic Cuban woman told an impassioned story of the fatal love of a mulatto slave for his white owner’s daughter. So controversial was Sab’s theme of miscegenation [...]

  14. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » La Mulata: Cuba’s National Symbol Says:

    [...] paper explores the idea of the mulatto female as a symbol of Cuban identity and national consciousness. The mulata’s image was used by [...]

  15. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » An interview with Henry Wiencek: Slaves and Slavery in George Washington’s World Says:

    [...] by mixed-race people, how could the masters and mistresses of the era staff their houses with mulattoes? Wouldn’t you expect mulattoes to be shunned, exiled? Jefferson is a prime example. He spoke [...]

  16. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » Adding up preoccupations about color, race in literature Says:

    [...] an art class on color theory, but instructor Cassandra Jackson intends for her class to explore mulatto figures and miscegenation in 19th and 20th century American [...]

  17. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » The Slave South Says:

    [...] women from interracial sexual unions.  This preoccupation, combined with the custom of lumping mulattoes and blacks into the same category, provides a crucial insight into the social and legal [...]

  18. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » Mixed Race Hollywood (review) Says:

    [...] and attitudes. Though some might credit “liberal Hollywood” for ushering America into the “mulatto millennium,” it is obvious from the collection of essays in this book that Hollywood is not [...]

  19. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » Hybridity haunts… Says:

    [...] infuriated racists, as demonstrated by the efforts of nineteenth-century scientists to prove that mulattos were infertile and would naturally die out.  But hybridity also interrupts the ability of race to [...]

  20. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » Coloring the Caribbean: Agostino Brunias and the Painting of Race in the British West Indies, 1765-1800 Says:

    [...] romanticized images of communities of color including native Caribs, enslaved Africans, and free mulattoes that obscured the horrors of colonial domination and plantation slavery. Instead of slave markets [...]

  21. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » Legal Transplants: Slavery and the Civil Law in Louisiana Says:

    [...] In 1691, English women were fined for having a bastard child with a negro. In 1705, all mulatto children were made servants to the age of 31 in Virginia; Maryland and North Carolina adopted the [...]

  22. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » Judicial Erasure of Mixed-Race Discrimination Says:

    [...] one historian documents the punishment of Captain Daniel Elfrye for “too freely entertaining a mulatto” in 1632. Since then, racial mixing has engendered a continuously evolving social unease, [...]

  23. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » Blood-Lines That Waver South: Hybridity, the “South,” and American Bodies Says:

    [...] sense of a particularly mixed-race and thoroughly modern American nationalism, the United States mulatto writer Jean Toomer (1895-1967) and the Mexican mestiza painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) each would [...]

  24. Mixed Race Studies » Blog Archive » The Media Depiction of Alice Jones Rhinelander Says:

    [...] whites, joined African Americans in blaming southern white men for the existence of the substantial mulatto population that now (supposedly) threatened the racial purity of white America both by its very [...]

  25. Mixed Race Studies » Scholarly Perspectives on Mixed-Race » Misplaced Bodies: Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful Says:

    [...] in Western literary traditions. In both Europe and the Americas, the origins of the “mulatta” as cultural icon are linked to the erotic/exotic fantasies of a white (male) imagination. In [...]

  26. Mixed Race Studies » Scholarly Perspectives on Mixed-Race » Census and Consensus? A Historical Examination of the US Census Racial Terminology Used for American Residents of African Ancestry Says:

    [...] Black, Negro, Mulatto, Quadroon, Octoroon, African American. This book provides an in-depth analysis of the language [...]

  27. Mixed Race Studies » Scholarly Perspectives on Mixed-Race » Slave Mothers and White Fathers: Defining Family and Status in Late Colonial Cuba Says:

    [...] that typically under girded African slavery in the Americas. As white men mated with black and mulatta women, they were critical agents in the initial determination of their children’s status-as [...]

  28. Mixed Race Studies » Scholarly Perspectives on Mixed-Race » Policies of Racial Classification and the Politics of Racial Inequality Says:

    [...] the United States census bureau reported that the nation contained 6,337,980 negroes, 956,989 “mulattoes,” 105,135 “quadroons,” and 69,936 “octoroons.” In the early twentieth century it also [...]

  29. Mixed Race Studies » Scholarly Perspectives on Mixed-Race » 3 Questions: Melissa Nobles on the U.S. Census Says:

    [...] 1850 census first introduced the category “mulatto,” at the behest of a southern physician, in order to gather data about the presumed deleterious [...]

  30. Mixed Race Studies » Scholarly Perspectives on Mixed-Race » Race and Social Problems: Interview with Dean Larry E. Davis Says:

    [...] Mulattos and Octaroons [3:30] [...]

  31. Mixed Race Studies » Scholarly Perspectives on Mixed-Race » Racial Discrimination and Miscegenation: The Experience in Brazil Says:

    [...] 1888, Brazil, with a mostly black and mixed race or mulatto population, was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery. During more than 300 [...]

  32. Mixed Race Studies » Scholarly Perspectives on Mixed-Race » Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix Says:

    [...] links the mulatto past with the mulatto present in order to plumb the contours of the nation’s mulatto future. He [...]

  33. Mixed Race Studies » Scholarly Perspectives on Mixed-Race » Founding Chestnut Ridge: The Origins of Central West Virginia’s Multiracial Community Says:

    [...] Henry Dalton, moved west after completing indentures that had resulted from their illegitimate “mulatto” birth. Others, like Hugh Kennedy, were descendents of multigenerational multiracial families [...]

  34. Mixed Race Studies » Scholarly Perspectives on Mixed-Race » Gabriela Meets Olodum: Paradoxes of Hybridity, Racial Identity, and Black Consciousness in Contemporary Brazil Says:

    [...] novel first appeared in print, Gabriela became the latest in a long line of enchanting female mulatto characters in Brazilian literature. To a greater or lesser degree, all of these fictional females, [...]

  35. Mixed Race Studies » Scholarly Perspectives on Mixed-Race » Fluidity without Postmodernism: Michelle Cliff and the “Tragic Mulatta” Tradition Says:

    [...] Laughing Mulatto (Formerly a Statue) Speaks,” Michelle Cliff invokes past stereotypes of the mulatto and the sculptors who remolded them. From Edmonia Lewis (1844-1909)—the half-black, half-Chippewa [...]

  36. Mixed Race Studies » Scholarly Perspectives on Mixed-Race » Robert Stafford of Cumberland Island: Growth of a Planter Says:

    [...] his personal life was not. He never married, but fathered six children by Elizabeth Bernardey, a mulatto slave nurse. Bullard’s discussion of Stafford’s decision to move his family to Groton, [...]

  37. Mixed Race Studies » Scholarly Perspectives on Mixed-Race » Unmixing for Race Making in Brazil Says:

    [...] Brazilian census has used the categories branco (white), pardo (brown or mulatto), preto (black), and amarelo (yellow or Asian descent) since 1940 and added the indígena [...]

  38. Mixed Race Studies » Scholarly Perspectives on Mixed-Race » Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present Says:

    [...] Introduction: The Mulatto in Law and Literature 2: Pre-Emancipation Stories of Race: Marly and The Woman of Colour 3: [...]

  39. Mixed Race Studies » Scholarly Perspectives on Mixed-Race Says:

    [...] helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of millions of mulattoes, and in ineffable [...]

  40. Mixed Race Studies » Scholarly Perspectives on Mixed-Race » Mixed bodies, separate races: The trope of the “(tragic) mulatto” in twentieth-century African literature Says:

    [...] primarily from nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American fiction. I argue, however, that the mulatto occupies a similarly vexed discursive space in the historiography of sub-Saharan Africa and [...]

  41. Mixed Race Studies » Scholarly Perspectives on Mixed-Race » AAS 434-Constructions of Racial Ambiguity Says:

    [...] study of miscegenation, mulattos, and passing in the United States. Focuses on the Afro-American context, using historical, [...]

  42. Mixed Race Studies » Scholarly Perspectives on Mixed-Race » “What is In My Blood?”: Contemporary Black Scottishness and the Work of Jackie Kay [Book Chapter] Says:

    [...] of white attempts to theorise about people of obviously complex racial ancestry: If you Dare mutter mulatto hover around hybrid hobble on half-caste and intellectualize on the “Mixed race problem”, I [...]

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