2

Mapping Race

Multiracial People and Racial Category Construction in the United States and Britain

“Mapping Race” was a first foray into international comparisons of racial systems. Drawing on my work on multiraciality in the United States, I examined the different ways that Britain was dealing with an increasingly complicated domestic population, racially speaking. The version here has been updated substantially from its 1996 incarnation. The essay made two main observations about race in Britain that some might have seen as controversial at the time: (1) the coalition of pigment-rich minority peoples then articulating themselves as politically “Black”—whose ancestry was African, Caribbean, or South Asian—was fragile and not likely to last; and (2) Britain seemed ill poised to embrace the idea of racial multiplicity. In the nearly two decades since I made those predictions, the former has come true, and the latter has turned out to be quite in error.

The social construction of what are often called “racial” categories has proceeded differently in different places. The bases of ascription and group identity, the placement of the boundaries between groups, and the power dynamics between groups have changed dramatically over time and social and political circumstance in each place. This essay is a meditation and speculation on the ways that racial categories have been constructed and have changed in the United States and Britain over the course of the twentieth century.¹ It uses the identity situations of people of multiple ancestries—Black and White, Asian and African, and so on—as a tool to deconstruct the meanings assigned to racial categories and the power dynamics that underly those categories.

The essay lays out some things that the situation of multiracial people—some of whose ancestors were Africans and some of whose ancestors came from somewhere else—tells us about the ways racial categories and meanings have evolved over the course of the twentieth century in the United States and in Britain. It finds, in sum, that White Americans have long had clearer ideas than White Britons about what they wanted to do with race; that over the past few decades those clear categories in the United States have been breaking down, in part because of the rise of a multiracial consciousness on the part of some people of mixed parentage; and that a British innovation of the 1970s and 1980s, a common Black identity for all non-White Britons, has not taken firm hold.

MIXED PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES

By early in the twentieth century, the United States had come to consensus that its race relations would be framed by the one-drop rule (what G. Reginald Daniel calls the “rule of hypodescent”).² That is, America was deemed to be a two-category society racially. The White category was imagined to be biologically pure, and people with any known African ancestry (“one drop of Black blood”) were assigned to the African or Black or Negro or Colored category. There were always other peoples in America (Native Americans, Asians, Latinos, others), but the dominant racial discourse was about Africans and Europeans, and the two categories were deemed to be sealed off from each other.

It was not that way always and everywhere. From very early on (the 1640s in Virginia) there was a pattern of equating African ancestry with slave status. Yet there always were some free people of African descent who constituted a small middle category. There also always were some mating and some marriage across the slave-free, Black-White line. Throughout most of the slave era, because of various factors such as masters manumitting their children and favoritism for very light slaves, a higher percentage of free people of color than slaves possessed mixed ancestry. The free population of color was a bit lighter than the slave. In fact, in a few places such as New Orleans and Charleston, “Mulattoes”—people of mixed ancestry—formed an intermediate caste between the two main races.³

After slavery was abolished, White Americans reinforced the line between themselves and their former slaves—and thus their dominance—in a number of ways. One was gradually to push the mixed population firmly and completely into the Black category. Joel Williamson records a number of subtle markers of the change, but even census categories reflected, crudely and somewhat belatedly, the evolving definitions of the races. From 1850 to 1920, the census usually recorded numbers of Negroes, Whites, and Mulattoes; thereafter, there were only Negroes and Whites, and by the 1920s, all mixed people were consigned to the Negro group.⁴

In such a two-category society, the place of mixed people was officially clear: they were supposed to be Black.⁵ Mary Church Terrell, Booker Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois were all emphatically Black leaders, although they were all of mixed parentage. Nonetheless, there were always issues for mixed people that the two-category system did not quite resolve. One was ambiguity. Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, and his father were functionally Black. Yet they were blond and blue-eyed, and no one on the street would have taken either for an African American. In 1931, Walter White’s light brown uncle raced to the hospital in Atlanta where his brother-in-law, White’s father, had been taken after being struck by a car. He could not find the elder man in the Colored ward and so went looking in the White wing of the hospital across the street. When the brown man found his brother-in-law, the horrified hospital staff dispatched their patient to the understaffed, underequipped wing for African Americans. There he died, perhaps in part for want of the treatment he could have received across the street.⁶

Another issue was choice. In the early decades of the twentieth century the writer Jean Toomer moved from a Mulatto consciousness to Blackness to Whiteness to an emphatic assertion that race was not an issue in his life. Toomer was on record in the public mind as Black by virtue of his pathbreaking Harlem Renaissance novel Cane, and he was pitied by some for his ambivalence. Other mixed people with lower profiles managed to make the break and pass as White. Contrast that with Herb Jeffries, a popular singer and star of all-Black movies from the 1930s to the 1950s. He eschewed the opportunity to pass as Spanish and claimed African ancestry, even, as he claimed, when it cost him mainstream movie roles. Later in life, Jeffries told interviewers that he in fact had no African ancestry at all but only Irish and Italian. He said he took on a Black identity because it allowed him entry into the Detroit jazz scene as a youth, and he stuck with that choice.⁷

Both Black and White publications from the 1920s through the 1950s titillated their readers with frequent tales of passing, which was usually viewed as a variety of psychopathology.⁸ Some African Americans excoriated the practice; others celebrated it as putting one over on Whites. Whites, for their part, had a salacious interest in the subject of passing because of a lingering fear that the person beside one in bed might not be whom one supposed. What went unnoticed was that the majority of mixed people were denying their ancestry in a different way: they were passing for Black.

The mixing, of course, was not just between Black and White. The two-category racial system emphasized that dichotomy, but in fact more mixing took place between African Americans and Native Americans. Most African Americans recognize they have some Native American ancestors, and a much larger percentage of Native Americans than is generally recognized possess some African ancestry.⁹ Then there were pockets of mixing of other sorts, such as between Blacks and Chinese in Mississippi and between Whites, Mexicans (themselves a mixed people), and Indians in the Southwest.¹⁰ In short, the two-category system masked what was a multiethnic reality in American society all along.

Since World War II, and especially since the 1980s, at least three factors have begun to deconstruct the two-category system and rearrange the place of multiracial people. There has been an increase in interracial marriages of various sorts. The numbers are not completely clear, but it seems likely that the number of Black-White intermarriages about doubled each decade from the 1940s through the 2000s. However, the numbers were so small at the start of the period that the current figure is only about 17 percent.¹¹ Compare that to some other combinations, such as Asians and Whites or Native Americans and non-Indians, which approach an intermarriage rate of 50 percent.¹² More intermarriage begets more people with multiple ancestries, whose very existence and variety tend to disrupt the two-category system.

Perhaps more important, there has been a growing recognition that race in America is not just about Black and White. The racial categories in most of the reports of the 1940 census were White and Nonwhite (by which the census designers meant mainly African-derived people).¹³ In 1950 and 1960, the categories were somewhat more elaborate: White, Negro, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino, with a separate grid for people with Spanish surnames. After 1970, the categories began to multiply rapidly, so that by the 1990 census we had reached a total of forty-three different racial designations: White; Black or African American; American Indian, Eskimo, or Aleut; Asian or Pacific Islander, with eleven Asian subcategories (Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Asian Indian, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, Thai, and Other Asian) and four Pacific Islander subcategories (Hawaiian, Samoan, Guamanian, and Other Pacific Islander); Other Race; and across this a Hispanic Origin grid, with Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Other Hispanic (Dominican, seven Central American subcategories, and seven South American subcategories). This proliferation of racial categories reflected the growing realization that America was not simply the “two nations, separate and unequal,” of the 1968 Kerner Commission report but a vast mosaic of myriad hues.¹⁴ In fact, it was always thus, but Americans at large were coming to realize it in the 1980s and 1990s.

The 1990s saw something of a challenge to the meaning of the category “Black or African American” by some people of mixed ancestry. With the multiplying of boxes came an increased awareness that many people possess more than one ancestry and may in fact regard themselves, be regarded by others, and function as multiracial people. Highly regarded books from the 1990s by Mary Waters, Karen Leonard, and Lise Funderburg bore the titles Ethnic Options, Making Ethnic Choices, and Black, White, Other respectively—reflecting notions that would have sounded absurd just a few years earlier.¹⁵ It was widely remarked that the fastest-growing racial category in both the 1980 and the 1990 census was “Other.”¹⁶

In the mid-1990s, such groups as the Association for Multi-Ethnic Americans, the Biracial Family Network, and Multiracial Americans of Southern California lobbied to change the category systems of the US Census Bureau and the Office of Management and Budget (hence school forms and many other pieces of bureaucratic paper) either to include a mixed category or to allow a person to check more than one box. Their efforts culminated in the 1997 OMB decision to allow individuals to check more than one racial box. The 2000 and 2010 censuses thus proved much more complex—not only having many monoracial categories but also with many people choosing to represent themselves as racially complex. It was a nightmare for the tabulators.¹⁷

The implications of this trend are several. On the one hand, one can view the trend toward recognition of multiplicity in mixed individuals as a healthy psychological development—getting in touch with all the parts of themselves, recognizing both parents, and so forth. Surely, if one has any compassion for the situation of individuals, this is a step forward from the days when people like Jean Toomer lacked a multiracial option.

On the other hand, there were some real dangers for African Americans as a group. One is blatantly political and has to do with access to power and funds. Many African American community leaders and pundits decried the advocates of multiracial identity as would-be escapees from Black America. They recognized that most people who were called African Americans also could legitimately acknowledge some other heritage. Yet they feared that opening the multiracial option would mean that some people would choose not to be African Americans at all, that the Black community would lose both their talents in service to the community and their numbers when apportionments of public services were being made—with, for example, fewer majority-Black congressional districts. As Joe Wood wrote, “Fair voting and fair employment and fair housing laws would need recalculation if a sizeable number of people abandoned Black…. [Since] the present generation of self-identified ‘bi-racial’ adolescents is mostly middle class, a light flight represents loss of middle-class people.”¹⁸ Finally, some suspected—mistakenly, I think—that choosing a multiracial identity implied a denigration of Blackness.¹⁹

These were real fears nonetheless, and they must be accounted for in the new shape the racial system has begun to take. Still, whether it is a good idea or not and whatever the costs to Black America, it seems clear that in recent decades the two-category system of American racial thinking and doing has gradually been dismantled, and a multicultural vision, including multiplicity within individuals, is taking its place.

MIXED PEOPLE IN BRITAIN

The shape of racial categorizing and the contents of those categories have been rather different in Britain than in the United States, mainly because of Britain’s experience as the center of a polyglot, worldwide empire rather than a plantation economy. Whereas in the United States the main categories from very early on were Black and White, slave and free, in Britain the main distinction was between English and Other, and most of the Others were not in Britain. Much the same sense of national superiority and entitlement accompanied the British conquerors of Ireland as those who asserted hegemony over India, Hong Kong, and Kenya.²⁰ While British intellectuals took part in the pseudoscientific racial theorizing of the nineteenth century, while those ideas still hold the imagination of some silly people today, and while there is a resonant chord of hegemony in a lot of White British public discourse on racial questions, in fact British ideas about racial categories have never been clearly fixed.

There were not a lot of people of color in Britain before the mid-twentieth century, even though there were some racial incidents. A tiny African population existed in Britain from Roman times. Early in the twentieth century, a few thousand sailors whom native Britons called “Coloured”—men from places as varied as Aden, Somalia, Nigeria, India, and Jamaica—worked on British ships during World War I and then found themselves in ports like Cardiff and Liverpool at war’s end. Some stayed, and some of those married White British women and started families (a few others chose mates from among the much smaller numbers of native Black British women). In 1919, White sailors and others rioted against these foreign workers in Cardiff, Liverpool, London, Glasgow, and elsewhere.²¹ Six years later, the government joined the fray, passing the Coloured Alien Seamen Order, England’s first overtly racist piece of legislation. This act forced some British subjects to register as aliens because they were not White; that made it hard for them to get work. The act also threatened legal resident aliens with deportation on account of their color. There was further pressure by White Britons, shipboard workers and others, throughout the 1930s.²²

This seems quite a lot of attacking and restricting for a very small and inconsequential non-European population. The centerpiece of White public debate and the source of White fear was the fact that some of the non-European men had married British women and sired children. Quite a literature grew up about the “half-caste problem.” Drawing on some of the same mythology as the Tragic Mulatto literature in the United States, there were extravagant suppositions that mixed people must be tortured and pathological souls.²³ There was even a philanthropic Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children that operated in the 1920s and 1930s.²⁴

What is arresting to note in all this is that people from all over the Empire and later much of the Commonwealth—East Africans, West Africans, East Indians, West Indians—were being treated together as “Coloured.” That does not mean that they were in fact a single group or that they had or felt much in common, only that many native, White Britons could not or did not bother to tell them apart.²⁵

The Nationality Act of 1948 granted British citizenship to citizens of the remaining colonies and the Commonwealth countries. In the next three decades there followed a rapid rise of labor immigration from the New Commonwealth Countries and from Pakistan, to the point that by 1978, 1.9 million residents of the British Isles (about 3.5 percent of the total population) were either immigrants from those countries or their children.²⁶ Immigration continued unabated through the 2000s, with increasing numbers from West, South, and East Asia, despite opposition from many White Britons.

Various government entities have attempted unsuccessfully to come to grips with race. From 1851 to 1961, the census included a question about nationality but none about race. The 1925 act, noted above, threw all pigmented peoples together as “Coloured” and chose them for discrimination together. Government people counters lately seem not to have been sure how to handle the multiracial reality in the United Kingdom. In 1970, the Department of Employment told its people to make a visual assessment of whether unemployed people belonged in the “Coloured” category; if these people were deemed “Coloured,” then the department asked a question about origin. For the 1981 census a proposal was made to count people by the following categories: “White; West Indian; African; Indian; Pakistani; Bangladeshi; Arab; Turkish; Chinese; Other or Mixed (specify).” A 1979 Labour Force Survey took that list and further broke the Whites down into English, Welsh, Scottish, or Irish; Polish; Italian; and Other European.²⁷ The 1991 census arrived at this set of categories: “White; Black Caribbean; Black African or Black Other (please specify); Indian; Pakistani; Bangladeshi; Chinese; Any other ethnic group (please describe).” Significantly for my purposes here, after this list of categories in the 1991 census, there was this statement: “If the person is descended from more than one ethnic or racial group, please tick the group to which the person considers he/she belongs, or tick the Any other ethnic group’ box and describe the person’s ancestry in the space provided.”²⁸ It is not clear what sorts of people in fact chose to exercise this last option, or what terms they then chose to describe their ancestry. In the 2011 census, the categories morphed again, as described in chapter 1. It is important to note here that the 2011 census tabulations made ample room for people to choose one of several mixed-race options.

These disparate peoples have not formed anything like a unified cultural or social group in the United Kingdom, and they only sporadically function in common politically. Nonetheless, from the late 1970s through the 1990s they were treated together as “Blacks” (sometimes NCWP—New Commonwealth and Pakistani), especially by political activists and scholars on the left.²⁹ Laura Tabili argued that her “use [of] the term ‘Black’ as it is used by [then] current scholars of Black British history and the contemporary Black movement in Britain, to refer to colonized people of Asia as well as of Africa and the Caribbean,” is justified by “ample evidence of this usage in the 1920s and 1930s.”³⁰ The term used in official documents in the 1920s and 1930s, of course, was not Black but Coloured, although Black had wide popular usage among the citizenry. Tabili showed that Britain’s White government defined a widely diverse set of people as “Coloured” on the basis of common colonial subjection. That does not mean, however, that they perceived themselves as belonging to one group. Surely Tabili was right that the processes by which native White Britons dominated Africans, West Indians, and South Asians were parallel and related. Just as surely—her usage to the contrary—they were not the same people and did not think themselves so. Other scholars, like the anthropologist Susan Benson, regarded such linguistic agglomerations as “the New Commonwealth and Pakistani population” as “socially meaningless terms,” but the proponents of bringing disparate groups together conceptually were undaunted.³¹

The British use of the term Black has evolved over the past several decades. It began as a charged political term borrowed from the US Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s. The boundaries, contents, and meanings of the category “Black” have always been ambiguous and contested. “Blackness” has involved three strains of meaning: (1) an externally imposed racist definition owing much to pseudoscience and the notion of races as subspecies, a definition that has much in common with similar definitions in the United States and South Africa; (2) the notion of Blacks as a people with common origins and a common culture, which in this case refers to African-derived peoples only; and (3) the idea of Blacks as all people who experience a common White racism and who together resist it, which meant, for a time at least in the 1980s and 1990s, people from the New Commonwealth countries and Pakistan—the definition that the activists preferred.³² This is essentially a reflexive form of the first, White racist definition, one that empowers instead of oppresses. It is in some senses parallel to terms like Asian American and Hispanic in the United States—not natural groupings, but labels imposed by Whites, which nonetheless came to be used by the people to whom they were applied for purposes of self-empowerment.³³

I do not propose to try to sort out the politics, much less the cultural complexities and personal dilemmas posed by this idea of Blackness. Let me just observe that while it may be politically important for oppressed peoples to band together as “Blacks” in order successfully to resist their oppression, it is highly unlikely that this is a category that organizes much of any person’s life. I suspect there are very few Indian Britons who get up in the morning thinking, “I am Black.” Their social networks and cultural expressions are almost certainly not Black but Indian, and probably one religious and language group of Indians.³⁴ At the level of personal relationships—and that is where most people live—there is almost no one, not even the most ardent Black activist, who would not view a marriage between a Pakistani man and a Jamaican woman as an intermarriage, and some might be faintly scandalized by it. Their child would be viewed by almost any observer as a mixed person with significant intercultural issues to confront.

So while an inclusive Black group may have been an important political category for organizing activism by peoples of color in the eyes of some 1980s and 1990s activists, it is not a useful analytical category. In addition, as Tariq Modood points out, when the category “Black” is widely applied, it is frequently done to subsume and then forget the non-African-derived peoples.³⁵ Modood suggests that South Asians, at least, are more appropriately thought of as a separate group or several.

In the 1980s a political concept of blackness was hegemonic, but is increasingly having to be defended, even within the sociology of race. This is to be welcomed and seven reasons are given why the concept harms British Asians. The use of “black” encourages a “doublespeak”. It falsely equates racial discrimination with colour-discrimination and thereby obscures the cultural antipathy to Asians and therefore the character of the discrimination they suffer. “Black” suggests also a false essentialism: that all non-white groups have something in common other than how others treat them. The fourth reason is that “black”, being evocative of people of African origins, understates the size, needs and distinctive concerns of Asian communities. Fifthly, while the former can use the concept for purposes of ethnic pride, for Asians it can be no more than “a political colour”, leading to a too politicised identity. Indeed, it cannot but smother Asian ethnic pride—the pride which is a precondition of group mobilisation and assertiveness. Finally, advocates of “black” have tried to impose it on Asians rather than seek slower methods of persuasion, with the result that the majority of Asians continue to reject it. The new emphasis on multi-textured identities is therefore encouraging, as long as we are not simply exchanging a political for a cultural vanguardism.³⁶

In the final event, most devotees of the inclusive Black identification cannot sustain their assertion of commonality. For example, Stephen Small, in a book on racialized barriers in the United Kingdom and the United States, quickly moved from a wide definition of Blackness to an African-derived definition “because inclusion of these [other] groups would have added considerably more complexity to an already complex topic.”³⁷ Richard Skellington lumped the “Black and Asian population” together in a 1992 statistical study.³⁸ Several studies treated African-descended peoples together, whether their direct origins were in Africa, in the Caribbean, or elsewhere, and then treated Asian peoples separately but in parallel.³⁹ The Oxford Companion to Black British History treats all African-descended peoples as a monolith, no matter their origins or admixture, and ignores Asians utterly.⁴⁰

All this testifies to several trends in British thinking about race. On the part of government statisticians, there was a groping after how to cope conceptually with the increasing diversity of British society, without a clear sense of what they were about. On the part of scholars and some community activists, there was an attempt for a time in the 1980s and 1990s to bring together colonized peoples conceptually if not practically. On the part of individual Asian Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, and others whom some called “Black,” there was an attempt simply to get on with life amid the racial disabilities White Britons would impose.

For a long time people of mixed ancestry did not fit anybody’s boxes very well, despite the fact that there have been mixed people in Britain almost as long as there have been people of color. St. Clair Drake and Kenneth Little conducted studies in the 1940s of the communities in Cardiff, London, and Liverpool that reached back to the 1920s. One of the major themes of their work was interracial marriages and the mixed children who were produced by them. There have also been studies of the mixed children of British women and World War II–era African American soldiers. But only in the twenty-first century has people’s racial mixture been widely recognized.⁴¹

The rates of intermarriage have been a bit more modest in the United Kingdom than in the United States, but intermarriages there have been, and the numbers are going up. In the 1970s, about 5 percent of Asian men, 2 percent of Asian women, 8 percent of West Indian men, and 1 percent of West Indian women married Whites, and presumably most of them had children.⁴² Yet in that same period, about 9 percent of the population of color was mixed, and perhaps as many as 20 percent of the births involving NCWP parents were to mixed couples.⁴³ No one seems to have been keeping detailed records of interracial marriages in Britain in the new century, but something like 9 percent of British marriages and partnerships in 2008–10 were between native Britons and immigrants from other countries, according to the statistical arm of the European Union. And a 2009 study by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission found that one in ten British children lived in a mixed-race household.⁴⁴

The place mixed people have occupied in British society may have varied; at least there is not agreement on the subject. Most scholars and politicians for a long time assumed that mixed people were members of the Black group and placed them there in their writing and speeches.⁴⁵ More careful observation, such as that undertaken by Sheila Patterson in the 1960s, Susan Benson in the 1970s, and France Winddance Twine in the 2000s, suggests that most people of mixed Black West Indian and White British families possessed keen senses of themselves as mixed, not just as Black, and that in fact they had stronger cultural orientations toward and stronger connections with White British society than Black.⁴⁶

The long history of White British racism, together with the intensity of the rhetoric of the Black British movement, once led me to conclude that widespread recognition of a multiracial identity was unlikely in the United Kingdom. However, in the past two decades a rich literature has grown up around racial mixedness in Britain. The census has kept statistics on mixed-race people since 2001. Multiracial organizations proliferate. There has been a sharp decline in public opposition to interracial marriage—from 50 percent in the 1980s to 15 percent in 2012. Mixed-race figures like the Olympic heptathlete Jessica Ennis have become emblems of British national identity. The United Kingdom is not without significant racial problems, but it has come to recognize multiraciality as part of its social fabric. In both these respects, the racial category system in the United Kingdom and the system in the United States have come to resemble each other.⁴⁷

NOTES

This chapter first appeared in Immigrants and Minorities 15 (July 1996): 107–19. An earlier version was presented to the Collegium for African American Research in Tenerife, Canary Islands, on February 16, 1995. I am grateful for the comments of Sarah Meer, the late Robin Kilson, and Patrick Miller.

  1. I will use “race” and “ethnic” more or less interchangeably in this essay. The relationships between these two terms are complex. My views on them are laid out elsewhere in this volume.

  2. Winthrop D. Jordan, “Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States,” ed. Paul Spickard, Journal of Critical Mixed-Race Studies 1 (2013): 98–132; Christine B. Hickman, “The Devil and the One-Drop Rule: Racial Categories, African Americans, and the U.S. Census,” Michigan Law Review 95 (1997): 1175–76; G. Reginald Daniel, “Beyond Black and White: The New Multiracial Consciousness,” in Racially Mixed People in America, ed. Maria P. P. Root (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992), 333–41. The material for this section is more fully set forth in Paul Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 235–342; Maria P. P. Root, “Within, Between, and Beyond Race,” in Root, Racially Mixed People, 3–11; G. Reginald Daniel, “Passers and Pluralists: Subverting the Racial Divide,” in Root, Racially Mixed People, 91–107; F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); Virginia Dominguez, White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980); and Cynthia L. Nakashima, “An Invisible Monster: The Creation and Denial of Mixed-Race People in America,” in Root, Racially Mixed People, 162–78.

  3. Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Random House, 1974); James Oliver Horton, Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993); Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families in Virginia, 1878–1861 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1813 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Emily Clark, The Strange History of the Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Sybil Klein, ed., Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, eds., Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992).

From this intermediate caste and from the leadership positions that former free people of color held in the era of emancipation, as well as from continuing interactions with the dominant White caste, there emerged a color hierarchy that has plagued African Americans down to the present generation. See, e.g., Spickard, Mixed Blood, 317–24; E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957); Charles S. Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1941); W. Lloyd Warner et al., Color and Human Nature: Negro Personality Development in a Northern City (Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1970; orig. 1941); Kathy Russell et al., The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color among African Americans (New York: Doubleday, 1992); Gwendolyn Brooks, “If You’re Light and Have Long Hair,” in Black-Eyed Susans, ed. Mary Helen Washington (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), 37–42; Richard Udry et al., “Skin Color, Status, and Mate Selection,” American Journal of Sociology 76 (1971): 722–33; Margaret L. Hunter, Race, Gender, and the Politics of Skin Tone (New York: Routledge, 2005); Cedric Herring et al., eds., Skin/Deep: How Race and Complexion Matter in the “Color-Blind” Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Evelyn Nakano Glenn, ed., Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). For Asian Americans and colorism, see Joanne L. Rondilla and Paul Spickard, Is Lighter Better? Skin-Tone Discrimination among Asian Americans (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Little-field, 2007).

  4. Williamson, New People.

  5. Silly myths about mulattoes with tortured psyches and split personalities, like those in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (Enoch Producing Corporation, 1915), need not detain us here; see Judith Berzon, Neither Black nor White: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction (New York: New York University Press, 1978).

  6. Walter White, A Man Called White (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995; orig. 1948), 134–38.

  7. Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, “By the Least Bit of Blood: The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans of African Descent, 1863–1916” (unpublished MS); BBC Radio, “From Our Own Correspondent: The Black Cowboy,” March 21, 2013, www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01r9sks/From_Our_Own_Correspondent_The_Black_Cowboy/ (retrieved July 28, 2013). The social and psychic rewards and costs of passing are vividly portrayed in Nella Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance novels, Quicksand (New York: Knopf, 1928) and Passing (New York: Knopf, 1928), and in Shirlee Taylor Haizlip’s family memoir, The Sweeter the Juice (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). Reginald Daniel offers a provocative interpretation of the political-personal implications of passing in “Passers and Pluralists.” Note that Toomer was not trying to pass as White. He was just trying to be all of himself (see chapter 8).

  8. This fashion has come back to life in the twenty-first century in at least two unfortunate books: Brooke Kroeger, Passing: When People Can’t Be Who They Are (New York: Public Affairs, 2003); Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

  9. This is for at least two reasons. One of the largest southeastern tribes, the Seminole, were from the beginning a mixture of Creeks and runaway slaves. The Cherokee and Choctaw, on the other hand, were owners of large numbers of African American slaves, with whom they intermixed to a considerable extent, both in the Southeast and then in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) after they were removed from their homeland by the US government in the 1830s. See Daniel F. Littlefield, Africans and Seminoles: From Removal to Emancipation (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001); Theda Perdue, “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003); Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); James F. Brooks, ed., Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Claudio Saunt, Black, White, and Indian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland, eds., Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

10. James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 135–53.

11. Paul Taylor et al., The Rise of Intermarriage: Rates, Characteristics Vary by Race and Gender (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2012); M. Kalmijn, “Trends in Black/White Intermarriage,” Social Forces 72 (1991): 119–46.

12. Taylor et al., Rise of Intermarriage; Spickard, Mixed Blood.

13. For some parts of the 1940 census, there was a slightly further breakdown to White, Negro, Indian, and Other.

14. This is not to suggest that there was not what Stephen Small calls “racialised inequality”; Racialised Barriers: The Black Experience in the United States and England in the 1980’s (London: Routledge, 1994). It is just to note that two categories were not enough.

15. Waters, Ethnic Options; Karen I. Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi-Mexican Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Lise Funderburg, Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk about Race and Identity (New York: Morrow, 1994).

16. Paul Spickard, “Pacific Islander Americans and Multiethnicity: A Vision of America’s Future?,” Social Forces 73.4 (June 1995): 1365–83; US Bureau of the Census, 1980 Census of Population, 1B: General Population Characteristics: United States Summary (PC80-1-B1) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1983), 22; US Bureau of the Census, 1990 Census of Population: General Population Characteristics: United States (CP-1-1) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1992), 3.

17. Carlos A. Fernández, “Government Classification of Multiracial/Multiethnic People,” in The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier, ed., Maria P. P. Root (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 15–36; Susan R. Graham, “The Real World,” in Root, Multiracial Experience, 37–62; Joel Perlmann and Mary C. Waters, eds., The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002); G. Reginald Daniel, More than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Kim M. Williams, Mark One or More: Civil Rights in Multiracial America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006); Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, ed., “Mixed Race” Studies: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 205–60.

18. Joe Wood, “Fade to Black: Once upon a Time in Multiracial America,” Village Voice, December 6, 1994, 25ff.

19. See, e.g., Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Jon Michael Spencer, The New Colored People: The Mixed-Race Movement in America (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Rainier Spencer, Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999); Michelle Elam, The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).

20. The most important distinction seems to have been between colonizer and colonized, although later a distinction arose between those who were citizens of Commonwealth countries that possessed patrial rights and those who were citizens of nonpatrial nations.

21. St. Claire Drake, “Value Systems, Social Structure and Race Relations in the British Isles” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1954); Paul B. Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

22. See Rich, Race and Empire; Laura Tabili, “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Laura Tabili, “The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925,” Journal of British Studies 33 (1994): 54–98. Tabili is at pains to insist that it was not White labor but the government that was behind this act; Rich thinks otherwise and is more believable. See also Laura Tabili, Global Migrants, Local Culture: Natives and Newcomers in Provincial England, 1841–1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Panikos Panayi, ed., Racial Violence in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, rev. ed. (London: Leicester University Press, 1996).

23. Eve Allegra Raimon, The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Teresa C. Zackodnik, The Mulatta and the Politics of Race (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004); Carolyn A. Streeter, Tragic No More: Mixed-Race Women and the Nexus of Sex and Celebrity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012).

24. St. Clair Drake, “The ‘Colour Problem’ in Britain: A Study in Social Definitions,” Sociological Review, n.s., 3 (1955): 197–217; Rich, Race and Empire, 120–44.

25. St. Clair Drake, in interviews with sailors and their families in Cardiff in 1947–48, did find considerable friendly interaction among the various ethnic groups, especially such groups as Arabs and Somalis, who shared Islam. Yet each national origin group also maintained a separate identity in its own eyes. See Drake, “Value Systems, Social Structure and Race Relations,” esp. 328–55.

26. New Commonwealth Countries are nations that joined the Commonwealth after World War II, nearly all pigment-rich peoples of the Global South. Usha Prashar et al., Britain’s Black Population (London: Heinemann, 1980), 1–7. This increase occurred despite explicit attempts by Conservative governments to discourage non-White immigrants from coming to Britain. Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Patrick Hennessy, “Blair Calls for Quotas on Immigrants from ‘New Commonwealth,’” Daily Telegraph, June 6, 2004.

27. Heather Booth, “Identifying Ethnic Origin: The Past, Present, and Future of Official Data Production,” in Britain’s Black Population, ed. Ashok Bhat et al., 2nd ed. (Aldershot, UK: Gower, 1988), 23766.

28. Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis, Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle (New York: Routledge, 1992), 148–55.

29. Prashar, Britain’s Black Population; Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1982).

30. Laura Tabili, “‘Keeping the Natives under Control’: Race Segregation and the Domestic Dimensions of Empire, 1920–1939,” International Labor and Working-Class History 44 (1993): 64–78.

31. Tabili, “Construction of Racial Difference”; Susan Benson, Ambiguous Ethnicity: Interracial Families in London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 145–46.

32. Anthias and Yuval-Davis, Racialized Boundaries, 140–46.

33. Kwesi Owusu, ed., Black British Culture and Society (London: Routledge, 1999); Houston A. Baker Jr., Black British Cultural Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).

34. Tariq Modood, “Political Blackness and British Asians,” Sociology 28 (1994): 859–76.

35. Tariq Modood, “‘Black,’ Racial Equality and Asian Identity,” New Commonwealth 14.3 (1988): 397–404.

36. Modood, “Political Blackness”; Tariq Modood, Sharon Beishon, and Satnam Virdee, Changing Ethnic Identities (London: Policy Studies Institute, 1994); Tariq Modood, Multiculturalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 101 passim. It is fair to point out that another prominent South Asian Briton, A. Sivanadan, took the opposite view, in A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 1991).

37. Small, Racialized Barriers, 35.

38. Richard Skellington, with Paulette Morris and Paul Gordon, “Race” in Britain Today (London: Sage/Open University, 1992).

39. E.g., Modood, Beishon, and Virdee, Changing Ethnic Identities; Dave Gunning, Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010).

40. David Dabydeen, John Gilmore, and Cecily Jones, eds., The Oxford Companion to Black British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

41. Drake, “Value Systems”; Kenneth Little, Negroes in Britain (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1947); No Mother, No Father, No Uncle Sam, dir. Sebastian Robinson (Htv West, 1990).

42. Prashar, Britain’s Black Population, 12.

43. Benson, Ambiguous Ethnicity, 145; Gary A. Cretser, “Intermarriage between ‘White’ Britons and Immigrants from the New Commonwealth and Pakistan,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 21.2 (1990): 227–38.

44. Giampaolo Lanzieri, “Merging Populations: A Look at Marriages with Foreign-Born Spouses in European Countries,” Eurostat: Statistics in Focus (2012 report no. 29), http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat (retrieved July 29, 2013); Sholto Byrnes, “Mixed Blessings: Britain’s Acceptance of Mixed-Race Relationships is a New and Precious Phenomenon,” The Guardian, January 20, 2009.

45. Small, Racialised Barriers, 35; Michael Banton, The Coloured Quarter: Negro Immigrants in an English City (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955).

46. It is worth noting that many people of unmixed African heritage also identify themselves fiercely as Black Britons, though not all White Britons would acknowledge their claim. Sheila Patterson, Dark Strangers: A Sociological Study of the Absorption of a Recent West Indian Migrant Group in Brixton, South London (London: Tavistock, 1963); Benson, Ambiguous Ethnicity; France Winddance Twine, A White Side of Black Britain: Interracial Intimacies and Racial Literacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

47. Louise Eccles, “Britain’s Mixed Race Population Leaps over One Million as Research Reveals Prejudices Have Sharply Dropped,” Daily Mail, December 9, 2012; Lanre Bakare, “Britain Is Now a Better Place to Grow Up Mixed Race; But Don’t Celebrate Yet,” The Observer, December 15, 2012; Peter Aspinall, “The Conceptualisation and Categorisation of Mixed Race/Ethnicity in Britain and North America: Identity Options and the Role of the State,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 27 (2003): 289–92. Among the highlights of British mixed-race literature are Suki Ali, Mixed-Race, Post-Race: Gender, New Ethnicities and Cultural Practices (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Mixed Feelings: The Complex Lives of Mixed-Race Britons (London: Women’s Press, 2001); Peter J. Aspinall and Miri Song, Mixed Race Identities (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of Race, Nation and Gender (London: Routledge, 1999); Jill Olumide, Raiding the Gene Pool: The Social Construction of Mixed Race (London: Pluto Press, 2002); David Parker and Miri Song, eds., Rethinking “Mixed Race” (London: Pluto Press, 2001); Miri Song, Choosing Ethnic Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003); Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood, eds., Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism (London: Zed, 1997).