Mixed race

According to oral tradition, white men courted women of mixed race at so-called quadroon balls and negotiated the terms of their relationships with the women s families. Some men settled large sums, up to 8000, on the woman of their choice. The man generally bought her a house and agreed to set aside a certain sum for their children. The connection typically lasted several years or more. 

The widespread miscegenation of a society that was formally dedicated to quasi-apartheid created some extraordinarily complex relationships and a special legal class of mixed-race African Americans, many of whom were light-skinned, educated, prosperous, and, like Norbert and his mother, free. 

The most virulent opposition to the notion that people of mixed race can carve out an identity that is neither black nor white is now coming from Afro-Americans. Mixed-ethnicity children who do not have a black parent are not subject to the same One Drop rule, but for those with a black parent, there is often intense pressure to cleave to the black, and accusations of racial betrayal if the individual chooses not to choose to be only black. Surely it is a significant irony that, one century after Euro-Americans were trying to write mulattos out of existence, the repression is now coming from Afro-essentialists. It seems we are witnessing another instance of the construction of the racial out of the denial of the interracial. (33)... 

No industrialized nation has so large a percentage of its population in prison as does the United States. And no such nation is producing so many mixed race people. These two facts about the United States are not directly related. Yet they bear mention together because of the antithetical implications these two realities have for... 

Monoracial is a term used widely in the essays collected by Root (1992a, 1996b). Like Spencer (1999), I take it as a terminological indicator of the disavowed reassertion of racial purity that characterizes the academic literature on people of mixed race to date. 

See, for example, the definition in Gaskins (1999) Monoracial A so-called racially pure person someone who identifies himself or herself as white, black, or Asian/Pacific Islander, for example (12). The notion of racial purity, while admitted here to be conventional, constructed, and so-called, is nonetheless absolutely necessary to the possibility of conceptualizing a mixed-race project. 

Alcoff, Linda. 1995. Mestizo Identity. In Naomi Zack (ed.), American Mixed Race The Culture of Microdiversity. New York Rowman and Littlefield. 

Allman, Karen. 1996. (Un)Natural Boundaries Mixed Race, Gender, and Sexuality. In Maria Root (ed.). The Multiracial Experience Racial Borders as the New Frontier. Thousand Oaks, Calif Sage. 

Camper, Carol, ed. 99S. Miscegenation Blues Voices cf Mixed Race Women. Toronto Sister Vision Press. 

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