Mixed Race Studies

Letter to Governor Paul B. Johnson Jr. and Lieutenant Governor Carroll Gartin

University of Southern Mississippi Libraries
Special Collections: Exhibits and Events
1964-02-14

Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission
New Capitol Building
Jackson, Mississippi

Erle Johnston, Jr., Director
Governor Ross R. Barnett, Chairman

Phones: FL 4-3218; FL 2-1022

MEMORANDUM

TO: Honorable Paul B. Johnson, Governor; Honorable Carroll Gartin, Lieutenant Governor

FROM: Director, Sovereignty Commission

SUBJECT: Louvenia Knight (Williamson) and her two sons, Edgar Williamson, born May 1, 1954, and Randy Williamson, born October 10, 1955

1. This a condensation of a very voluminous file in the Sovereignty Commission on the two Williamson boys, shown on their birth certificates to be white males, sons of white parents, but possessing an amount of Negro blood believed to be between 1/16 and 1/32.
2. This family lives in the Stringer community of Jasper County. A school bus from Stringer white attendance center passes in front of their home and also a school bus from the white attendance center at Soso in Jones County. The School Board in Jasper County will not permit them to go to the white school and the School Board in Jones County will not take them on transfer. They cannot and will not attend the Negro schools because they are white and because this would be violating Mississippi law. They are now eight and nine years old respectively and have never attended school one day.
3. The State Department of Education asked the Sovereignty Commission to investigate and try to work out a solution to this problem. The Sovereignty Commission has made every attempt, through investigation and meeting with the school board personnel, to get these boys into a white school. We have even advised the officials involved that we can expect a lot of bad publicity on Mississippi if the boys are not admitted to a school. As of now, the newspapers, who know about the case, are withholding publication at the request of the Sovereignty Commission Director. We cannot maintain this black-out indefinitely.
4. Unless the influence of the Governor’s office and/or the Lieutenant Governor’s office can be of some assistance in solving this problem, the Sovereignty Commission must close its files with the situation remaining status quo. When we close our files without progress we are afraid the news media will begin to publicize this case as two white boys who cannot go to school in Mississippi. As a newspaper man myself, I realize this story would make national headlines and we hare attempted to avoid it.
5. The Sovereignty Commission Director will be happy to hear any recommendations from the Governor or Lieutenant Governor. The Commission file on this case is available if you wish to study it in detail.

Erle Johnston, Jr.
EJ/ea

View the letter here.

Label me American

The Massachusetts Daily Collegian
University of Massachusetts
2008-03-24

John Gruenenfelder

I come to you today as the son of a mixed race couple, of a white father and a Hispanic mother. And yet, I feel allegiance to neither. I look at my father and say, yes, he is white. And I look upon my mother and say, yes, she is Hispanic.

Yet I, the child of both, am neither. I am not white, nor am I Hispanic. I am both. I am not a Mexican-American, nor a white-American. Rather, I am just an American.

This is, I believe, something rather unique to our nation. If I had to assign a label, I suppose I would be a Mexican-American, but that does not begin to tell the whole truth…

…To be honest, I have never felt like an outcast. Though my last name of Gruenenfelder might lead you to think otherwise, I am indeed half Hispanic, or Mexican, or Latino or whatever. I look at my father and he is most definitely white. I look at my mother and she is most definitely Hispanic. Yet I am neither.

Of course, I grew up and spent my first 25 years in the Southwest. Surely this will color my opinion. Arizona has, especially of late, not looked fondly at its mixed heritage, but it is there nonetheless.

I do not feel put off by this. Rather, I consider myself an American. I am a product of those who came before me. I read the Constitution and wholeheartedly believe that our forefathers had remarkably forward thinking ideals – ideals which I believe in and wish to uphold.

I am not white, nor am I Hispanic. I am both, and I am an American. A wholly unique demographic shared by those people who are children of this land, half native, half immigrant or otherwise. I feel no less American than those who have lived here for five generations. Indeed, my Hispanic grandmother has just become a great-great grandmother. Is she no less American than I?…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Mississippi rebel’s descendants seek family facts

The Jackson Sun
2013-07-04

Laura Tillman, Associated Press

SOSO, MISS. — One hundred and fifty years have passed since the Civil War, but in Mississippi, the descendants of a legendary rebel are still separating the facts of his life from fiction.

Newton Knight, a white farmer from central Mississippi’s Jones County, rebelled against the Confederate Army. He spent years evading capture, living in swamps and the Piney Woods. He married a white woman named Serena and later moved in with a former slave named Rachel. She was owned by Knight’s family and carried their surname, and she had helped him during his days dodging the Confederate Army.

He shared his life with both women.

Today, Florence Knight Blaylock, 81, and her sister, Dorothy Knight Marsh, 69, are among those fascinated with the family legend. The sisters — who live in Soso — consider Newton and Rachel Knight their great-grandparents…

…According to historian Victoria Bynum, the county first acquired a reputation as the “Free State of Jones” because of the plentiful land that could be claimed by squatters. The title gained new significance after Knight’s rebellion against the Confederate Army.

Some say Rachel was of African descent, while others say she was an American Indian. Still others say she had a mixture of African, American Indian and white ancestry. Confusion is increased by the existence of several photographs purporting to show Rachel — all of different women.

The popular narrative holds that Serena, Newton’s wife, was white, but others say she also had American Indian ancestry…

…Davis Knight, a great-grandson of Newton Knight, Serena Knight and Rachel Knight, was tried in court on charges of illegal interracial marriage in 1948. Edgar and Randy Williamson, Newton Knight’s great-great-grandchildren, went to court in the 1960s after they were banned from a white school.

Blaylock recalls her family being called names such as “half-breed” and “white negro,” or worse, in the 1930s or ’40s. She remembers being stared at and whispered about as a child, and watching a band of rowdy white men pull her father and brother out of the house to beat them…

…Bynum, whose family also descends from Jones County, has written about the complicated social and legal terrain Knight’s descendants were forced to negotiate. Her work has been made more challenging by conflicting stories passed down by different branches of the Knight family…

Read the entire article here.

Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning?

The New York Times
2013-07-06

Shaila Dewan, Economics Reporter

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As a racial classification, the term Caucasian has many flaws, dating as it does from a time when the study of race was based on skull measurements and travel diaries. It has long been entirely unmoored from its geographical reference point, the Caucasus region. Its equivalents from that era are obsolete — nobody refers to Asians as “Mongolian” or blacks as “Negroid.”

And yet, there it was in the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action. The plaintiff, noted Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in his majority opinion, was Caucasian.

To me, having covered the South for many years, the term seems like one of those polite euphemisms that hides more than it reveals. There is no legal reason to use it. It rarely appears in federal statutes, and the Census Bureau has never put a checkbox by the word Caucasian. (White is an option.)…

…The use of Caucasian to mean white was popularized in the late 18th century by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German anthropologist, who decreed that it encompassed Europeans and the inhabitants of a region reaching from the Obi River in Russia to the Ganges to the Caspian Sea, plus northern Africans. He chose it because the Caucasus was home to “the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgians,” and because among his collection of 245 human skulls, the Georgian one was his favorite wrote Nell Irvin Painter, a historian who explored the term’s origins in her book “The History of White People.”…

…Susan Glisson, who as the executive director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation in Oxford, Miss., regularly witnesses Southerners sorting through their racial vocabulary, said she rarely hears “Caucasian.” “Most of the folks who work in this field know that it’s a completely ridiculous term to assign to whites,” she said. “I think it’s a term of last resort for people who are really uncomfortable talking about race. They use the term that’s going to make them be as distant from it as possible.”

There is another reason to use it, said Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government and African-American studies at Harvard. “The court, or some clever clerk, doesn’t really want to use the word white in part because roughly half of Hispanics consider themselves white.” She added, “White turns out to be a much more ambiguous term now than we used to think it was.”

There are a number of terms that refer to various degrees of blackness, both current and out of favor: African-American, mulatto, Negro, colored, octaroon. There are not a lot of options for whites. In Texas, they say Anglo. And there is the pejorative we were so pithily reminded of when a witness in the racially charged George Zimmerman trial said the victim, Trayvon Martin, had called Mr. Zimmerman a “creepy-ass cracker.”…

Read the entire article here.

Redefining la raza

U.S. Catholic
2011-07-06

Father Tom Joyce, CMF

There use to be an unspoken pattern to Hispanic migration to the United States: Mexicans drifted to Los Angeles or South Texas, Puerto Ricans—soon followed by Dominicans—to New York City. Cubans stayed in Miami for a quick return to Havana that never came. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans shared Chicago—Mexicans on the Southwest side and Puerto Ricans on the Northwest. Over the years Central Americans drifted into Florida and the nation’s capital, and Mexicans followed meatpacking into the plains states.

The recent plague of xenophobic nastiness in state laws aren’t confined to Arizona and Utah, who have long known Hispanics, but are now popping up in Georgia, Indiana, and Alabama. The latest census confirms the spread of the 50 million-plus Latino population across the entire nation. Our largest minority, they are now on the way to being the majority in the latter part of the 21st century, according to projections.

But a funny thing is happening on the way to that majority: It’s getting more diverse every day. The most recent census gave respondents more choice when selecting their racial identity—mostly to accommodate the growing number of mixed race individuals. We have long had black Hispanics—look at any major league baseball team—and they have usually identified as Hispanics first. They are unmindful of color or that racial prejudice has a long nasty history in their homelands.

The result of the 2010 census of New York City has added another twist to those identifying as Latino or Hispanic. Out of the 57,000 who identified themselves as American Indian in New York City, 40,000 were Latino from Mexico; the rest were from Latin America. Even families long established in the United States check American Indian and Hispanic on their census forms…

Read the entire article here.

Let’s face it: We need a new way to talk about race

U.S. Catholic
July 2013

Anthony Walton

Our conversation about race in America is still stuck in black and white. In order to move forward, we all need to learn a new vocabulary.

By any measure, we are living in the best period of racial experience in American history, exemplified not only by the obvious fact that the president, Barack Obama, is a twice-elected African American, but also that all around us there is evidence of the astonishing social progress that has been made in the last 50 years.

A half century after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, African Americans have progressed into positions of visibility and authority in virtually every field of employment. There is growing acceptance of African Americans by other groups socially and intimately. There is also evidence of significant numbers of African Americans gaining economic purchase and power, including a few joining the ranks of the absolute wealthiest, while millions more enjoy middle-class prosperity. And then there is what can loosely be called the “Obama Coalition,” the disparate group of Americans from across the national demographic that banded together in 2008 and 2012 and which was most powerfully observed during crowd shots including Americans from all walks of life during the two election night celebrations.

But this undeniable progress must be paralleled with a reality that illustrates that this is a less than optimum time in American racial experience. While great numbers of African Americans have progressed into what we can loosely call the mainstream of the wider society, equal numbers have been essentially running in place in poverty or losing ground during the post-civil rights era, the disparities of family wealth by group remaining immense and growing. A most distressingly enormous number has become trapped in a hard-to-transcend culture of dispiriting poverty, where segregation, unequal education, economic exploitation (payday loans, food deserts, etc.), gang violence, and an unending cycle of incarceration combine to make everyday life crushingly difficult. They are seemingly unseen unless they gain head-
lines for violently criminal activity…

Read the entire article here.

The End of the ‘Postrace’ Myth

The Conversation: Online opinion on ideas and higher education
The Chronicle of Higher Education
2013-01-14

Pamela Newkirk, Professor of Journalism
New York University

Over the past four years, it had become increasingly difficult to mount a public discussion about how racial bias continues to permeate our society, North and South, in boardrooms and newsrooms. Despite glaring signs of racial segregation in our schools, prisons, and pews, many commentators—including some scholars—idealistically clung to President Obama’s 2008 election as evidence of a new, postracial era.

John H. McWhorter, a linguist and fellow at the Manhattan Institute, was among the first to proclaim that Obama’s 2008 election proved that we had moved beyond race as a major impediment for black people. His optimism was widely embraced by the media…

…Now, as President Obama is set to begin his second term, after an election marred by blatant forms of black and Latino voter suppression that evoked post-Reconstruction practices, our blinders have been yanked aside, exposing claims of a postracial nation as premature.

What can be said of the spectacle of prominent men reduced to “birthers” demanding that the nation’s first black president reveal his birth certificate and college transcript? Or state officials and a defeated presidential candidate openly lamenting the strength of black and Latino voter turnout? Residents of some states have called for secession rather than face the reality of a multiracial America. White college students in Mississippi rioted over Barack Obama’s re-election…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Children in Black and Mulatto Families

American Journal of Sociology
Volume  39, Number 1 (July 1933)
pages 12-29

E. Franklin Frazier (1894-1962), Professor of Sociology
Fisk University

Although the belief in the hereditary inferiority of the mulatto has been slowly dissipated by the accumulation of scientific knowledge, it is still echoed occasionally in scientific studies. In order to determine how far this belief is substantiated or refuted by census data, the writer has analyzed the 1910 and 1920 statistics for children in over 13,000 Negro families for each enumeration in three cities and three rural counties in the South. On the whole, the mulattoes have a smaller proportion of families without children and there is on the average a larger number of children in the mulatto families. Further analysis of the 1910 statistics for the number of children born and living in 10,921 families showed: (1) mulattoes and blacks had about the same proportion of families in which no children were born; (2) on the whole, the mulattoes and blacks in the same community had the same average number of children born; (3) for the entire group a larger proportion of black families had one or more children dead; (4) the blacks had lost on the average a larger number of children; (5) the mulattoes had about 7 per cent more of all their children living than the blacks. Differences in the socio-economic status of these two groups as reflected in literacy and home-ownership seemed to point to cultural rather than biological causes for the differences between them.

In 1860 a physician who contributed monthly articles on the Negro to the American Cotton Planter gave considerable space in the December issue to a comparison of the physical qualities of pure Negroes and mulattoes. From that article, which was presumably supported by the best contemporary scientific opinion, we cite the following observations.

…. mulattoes are generally much shorter lived than negroes of unmixed blood. The pure African, when judiciously managed, has a reasonable prospect of reaching his three score and ten; and instances of much greater longevity abound. Not so with mulattoes; from want of congeniality in the mixture of white and black blood, or from some unexplained, and perhaps inexplicable cause, they die early as a general rule…..Dr. Cartwright and other learned men might say “the offspring is a tertium quid, unlike either father or mother, and incapable of perpetuating its existence beyond a few generations.” We think it would be much better to say at once, it is so, because God made it so; and that he made it so because it was not pleasing to him that the fruits of such an unnatural and unholy commerce should remain long on the earth. But whatever the explanation, there can be but little doubt of the fact for it seems to be established by the concurrent testimony of numerous observers…..

Prof. Dugas, of the Medical College of Georgia …. forcibly taught in his lectures that mulattoes are short lived; …. The testimony of Dr. Merrill, of Memphis, is …. that the amalgamation alluded to, exercises important physiological and pathological influences, one of the tendencies of which is, to impair the energies of the vital forces, predispose to a dynamic (low, typhoid) diseases, and to shorten life. These conditions, it is natural to suppose, must have a tendency, also, to the impairment of the procreative powers, and thus to retard increase; while the congenital debility and disordered innervation resulting, give rise to a still greater sacrifice of infant life, than with the full-blooded negro … if active, intelligent, house-servants are a prime consideration, and if planters have sufficient means to consult pleasure and convenience before interest, it may do to rest in this mongrel race; but if stout hearty, durable, long lived slaves are wanted, and if  pecuniary interest is a permanent consideration, the pure African should be chosen in preference to the mulatto; and the blacker the better. The jet black, shiny, unadulterated, greasy-skinned, strong-smelling negro is the best every way, after he has been in the country long enough to undergo proper training, and to get rid of some of his native, African notions.

Although the writer was fearful at the time that “the truth that mulattoes are short lived is not as extensively known, and as firmly established in the minds of the southern people as it should be,” during the following half-century the beliefs expressed in his article not only became the foundation of popular opinions concerning the mulatto but characterized supposedly scientific studies. In 1896 Hoffman, who concluded that mulattoes were “physically the inferior of the white and pure black,” based his opinion largely on the testimony of physicians who examined recruits during the Civil War. The following is a typical testimony: “Although I have known some muscular and healthy mulattoes, I am convinced that, as a general rule, any considerable admixture of white blood deteriorates the physique and impairs the powers of endurance, and almost always introduces a scrofulous taint.”…

UW communication professor unveils new book about race

The Daily of the University of Washington
2013-02-07

LaVendrick Smith

Ralina Joseph discusses her book cover art at “Troubling the Family and Transcending Blackness” held at the UW bookstore. Photo by Dario Nanbu

Race, reality, and pop culture collide in a new book written by one UW communication professor.

In “Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial,” Ralina Joseph, a UW associate professor of communication, explores how multiracial African Americans were represented in the 10 years leading up to President Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Joseph held a joint book-signing and discussion about mixed-race relations with UW English professor Habiba Ibrahim at the U Book Store Feb. 7.

In “Transcending Blackness,” Joseph compares real-life depictions of multiracial African Americans to their roles in pop culture and politics.

“I’m just sort of interested in seeing how multiracial people have been and are represented,” she said.

Joseph, a multiracial African American herself, said that while researching the topic, she noticed a clear difference in the way multiracial people identify in real life and the way they are identified through the media.

“What I was seeing on TV, in movies, in novels, and memoirs, was not like the kind of complex people I knew in real life,” she said.

She said multiracial African Americans she encounters in real life have fluidity in the way they identify themselves, whereas she saw a constant need to identify mixed race in pop culture in a way that often degraded African Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Discrimination in Medicine versus Race-Based Medicine: The Ethical, Legal and Policy Implications on Health Disparities

Georgetown Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives
Volume 3, Issue 1 (Spring 2011)
pages 59-86

Christopher Ogolla, LL.M., J.D., M.A., M.P.H., B.A., Academic Support Instructor
Thurgood Marshall School of Law
Texas Southern University

This paper explores the history of racial discrimination in medicine and evaluates the ethical and policy issues raised by race-based medicine. It notes that proponents of race-based medicine have failed to frame the debate in such a way that distinguishes it from racial discrimination in medicine and suggests that race-based medicine is more likely to pass muster if it is framed in terms of elimination of health disparities among different segments of the population. The paper attempts to answer questions such as whether race was and is still a dominant factor in medicine, and whether it is ethical to tie one’s advice (as a medical professional) to a patient’s race. More importantly, the paper explores the issue of whether race-based medicine can ever be justified.

The paper argues that traditional medicine sometimes supported by the government, fostered bias and discrimination against minorities and suggests that this history has injected a level of suspicion and cynicism in public discussions of race-based medicine. The paper evaluates benefits and pitfalls of race-based medicine and analyzes the ethical, legal and policy implications of such a practice. It recommends that there is some value in understanding the variable response to drugs and the ethics of producing drugs for those who need it most, even if they happen to be members of one ethnic group. The paper concludes by noting that race-based medicine promises to achieve optimal medical outcomes by helping physicians and patients choose patient-specific disease management approaches based on a patient’s genetic profile.

Read the entire article here or here.