Mixed Race Studies

‘Plessy v. Ferguson’: Who Was Plessy?

The Root
2013-06-10

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor of History
Harvard University

100 Amazing Facts About the Negro: Learn about the man whose case led to decades of legal segregation.

Amazing Fact About the Negro No. 35: Who was the Plessy in the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case that established the separate-but-equal policy for separating the races?

‘How many mysteries have begun with the line, “A man gets on a train … “? In our man’s case, it happens to be true, and there is nothing mysterious about his plan. His name is Homer Plessy, a 30-year-old shoemaker in New Orleans, and on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 7, 1892, he executes it perfectly by walking up to the Press Street Depot, purchasing a first-class ticket on the 4:15 East Louisiana local and taking his seat on board. Nothing about Plessy stands out in the “whites only” car. Had he answered negatively, nothing might have.

Instead, as historian Keith Weldon Medley writes, when train conductor J.J. Dowling asks Plessy what all conductors have been trained to ask under Louisiana’s 2-year-old Separate Car Act—”Are you a colored man?”—Plessy answers, “Yes,” prompting Dowling to order him to the “colored car.” Plessy’s answer started off a chain of events that led the Supreme Court to read “separate but equal” into the Constitution in 1896, thus allowing racially segregated accommodations to become the law of the land.

Here’s what happens next on the train: If a few passengers fail to notice the dispute the first or second time Plessy refuses to move, no one can avoid the confrontation when the engineer abruptly halts the train so that Dowling can dart back to the depot and return with Detective Christopher Cain. When Plessy resists moving to the Jim Crow car once more, the detective has him removed, by force, and booked at the Fifth Precinct on Elysian Fields Avenue. The charge: “Viol. Sec. 2 Act 111, 1890” of the Louisiana Separate Car Act, which, after requiring “all railway companies [to] provide equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races” in Sec. 1, states that “any passenger insisting on going into a coach or compartment to which by race he does not belong, shall be liable to a fine of twenty-five dollars, or in lieu thereof to imprisonment for a period of not more than twenty days in the parish prison.”

It takes only 20 minutes for Homer Plessy to get bounced from his train, but another four years for him to receive a final decision from the United States Supreme Court. He is far from alone in the struggle. The 18-member citizens group to which Plessy belongs, the Comité des Citoyens of New Orleans (made up of “civil libertarians, ex-Union soldiers, Republicans, writers, a former Louisiana lieutenant governor, a French Quarter jeweler and other professionals,” according to Medley), has left little to chance.

In fact, every detail of Plessy’s arrest has been plotted in advance with input from one of the most famous white crusaders for black rights in the Jim Crow era: Civil War veteran, lawyer, Reconstruction judge and best-selling novelist Albion Winegar Tourgée, of late a columnist for the Chicago Inter-Ocean who will oversee Plessy’s case from his Mayville, N.Y., home, which Tourgée calls “Thorheim,” or “Fool’s House,” after his popular novel, A Fool’s Errand (1879). Even the East Louisiana Railroad, conductor Dowling and Detective Cain are in on the scheme.

Critically important to the legal team is Plessy’s color—that he has “seven eighths Caucasian and one eighth African blood,” as Supreme Court Justice Henry Billings Brown will write in his majority opinion, an observation that refers to the uniquely American “one drop rule” that a person with any African blood, no matter how little, is considered to be black. That Plessy’s particular “mixture of colored blood” means it is “not discernible” to the naked eye is not the only thing misunderstood about his case…

Read the entire article here.

Prodigy and Prejudice

The New York Times
1995-12-10

Phyllis Rose

Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler. By Kathryn Talalay. Illustrated. 317 pp. New York: Oxford University Press

This enthralling, heartbreaking book restores to attention Philippa Schuyler, child prodigy of the 1930’s, pianist, composer, Harlem’s Mozart, “the Shirley Temple of American Negroes.” Her father was George Schuyler, a well-known black journalist. Her mother was Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, the white daughter of a Texas rancher. Insisting that her daughter was the normal product of “hybrid vigor” and good nutrition, Jody Schuyler dedicated her to the cause of integration: Philippa’s brilliance would break down racial barriers in America. Instead, as Kathryn Talalay tells this important story, racial barriers and a manipulative, demanding mother broke Philippa.

Based on fascinating family papers in New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, “Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler” begins by plunging us into a 1920’s world of race enthusiasm: “Nordics” go to Harlem for the night life and white girls date black men to rattle their families and prove to themselves they have interesting lives. Josephine Cogdell arrived in New York in 1927, wanting to write. She had contributed pieces to The Messenger, a left-wing black publication whose editor was George Schuyler. They met and were immediately attracted to each other.

A fanatic diarist, Jody even described their first kiss, revealing (or boasting) that she found George’s lips “softer and more sensuous than white lips.” Her primitivist ideas — the flip side of racism—glorified everything African and saw salvation in miscegenation. She encouraged herself to marry Schuyler with the thought that “the white race . . . is spiritually depleted and America must mate with the Negro to save herself.”…

…From the age of 8, Philippa concertized constantly, a darling of both the black and the white press, a role model in black communities throughout America. Her visibility was achieved through George’s press connections and Jody’s tireless management. At 15, she soloed with the New York Philharmonic at Lewisohn Stadium before an audience of 12,000, in a program that included one of her own compositions. (A symphony she wrote at 13 was, Virgil Thomson said, as interesting as the symphonies Mozart wrote at that age.)

But some thought her playing had been undermined by her relentless performance schedule, and the older she got the more it seems emotional turmoil prevented her from being a great artist. She made the transition from child prodigy to concert pianist, but by her mid-teens, whether because of her own inadequacies or racial barriers or both, she had gone as far as she would go as a performer in America—she was a success with black audiences, but of limited appeal to whites…

Read the entire review here.

However, the scientific founding behind the distinction of race based on geographic ancestry is highly questionable, and theorists in favor of social construction philosophy seeking to uphold race as a social construct refute the ancestry-race connection, calling it an antiquated and generalized treatment of the multifarious and intricate notion that is racial identity and heritage. By locating race within one’s ancestral historic place of origin, biological determinism fails to acknowledge the constant “migration and gene flow [which] have spread human genes around the world in a myriad of ways. Successive migrations, conquests, absorptions, intermarriages, alliances, and extinctions of populations have produced a constant, never-ending shuffling of human genetic material” (Alland 2002: 47). How can biological determinism account for the massive population of mixed race?

At the core of biological determinism theories is the deprecating confusion of geographic ancestry and race. For example, Senegalese, Jamaican, and African American are all considered part of the same conglomerate race: black. All Chinese, Japanese and Koreans are Asian. Polish, German, French, and Canadian; white. Race, “as used by the average educated speaker of English, connotes geographic ancestry” (Levin 2002: 25) that has then been messily combined into general genetic racial groups. However these peoples, of vastly differing geographic location but the same socially constructed racial group are almost guaranteed to have very drastically different genetic profiles because of the connection between geographic ancestry and genetics. Two people considered the same race but from separate poles of the world will not be genetically similar, yet two people from the same location but of considered different races are very likely to share very similar genomes due to ancestral intermarriage and proximity.

Danielle Antonia Craig, “From Medical Innovation to Sociopolitical Crisis: How Racialized Medicine Has Shifted the Scope of Racial Discourse and its Social Consequences,” (Senior Essay, Wesleyan University, 2013), 11-12.

Family Money: Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century

Oxford University Press
November 2012
224 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199897704

Jeffory A. Clymer, Professor of English
University of Kentucky

• Sophisticated interdisciplinary treatment of literature’s interaction with the law
• Dramatically revises scholarship on racial identity by emphasizing race’s connection to family and property rights
• Demonstrates that race was entwined with economics well beyond direct issue of slavery in the nineteenth century
• Nuanced, flexible, non-doctrinaire interpretations of both well-known and less familiar literary works

Family Money explores the histories of formerly enslaved women who tried to claim inheritances left to them by deceased owners, the household traumas of mixed-race slaves, post-Emancipation calls for reparations, and the economic fallout from anti-miscegenation marriage laws. Authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, to Lydia Maria Child recognized that intimate interracial relationships took myriad forms, often simultaneously-sexual, marital, coercive, familial, pleasurable, and painful. Their fiction confirms that the consequences of these relationships for nineteenth-century Americans meant thinking about more than the legal structure of racial identity. Who could count as family (and when), who could own property (and when), and how racial difference was imagined (and why) were emphatically bound together. Demonstrating that notions of race were entwined with economics well beyond the direct issue of slavery, Family Money reveals interracial sexuality to be a volatile mixture of emotion, economics, and law that had dramatic, long-term financial consequences.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “This Most Illegal Family”: Sex, Slavery, and the Politics of Inheritance
• 2. Blood, Truth, and Consequences: Partus Sequitur Ventrem and the Problem of Legal Title
• 3. Plantation Heiress Fiction, Slavery, and the Properties of White Marriage
• 4. Reparations for Slavery and Lydia Maria Child’s Reconstruction of the Family
• 5. The Properties of Marriage in Chesnutt and Hopkins
• Coda “Race Feeling”
• Notes
• Index

Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia

University of Hawai‘i Press
March 2013
192 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8248-3664-1
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8248-3736-5

L. Ayu Saraswati, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies
University of Hawai‘i

In Indonesia, light skin color has been desirable throughout recorded history. Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race explores Indonesia’s changing beauty ideals and traces them to a number of influences: first to ninth-century India and some of the oldest surviving Indonesian literary works; then, a thousand years later, to the impact of Dutch colonialism and the wartime occupation of Japan; and finally, in the post-colonial period, to the popularity of American culture. The book shows how the transnational circulation of people, images, and ideas have shaped and shifted discourses and hierarchies of race, gender, skin color, and beauty in Indonesia. The author employs “affect” theories and feminist cultural studies as a lens through which to analyze a vast range of materials, including the Old Javanese epic poem Ramayana, archival materials, magazine advertisements, commercial products, and numerous interviews with Indonesian women.

The book offers a rich repertoire of analytical and theoretical tools that allow readers to rethink issues of race and gender in a global context and understand how feelings and emotions—Western constructs as well as Indian, Javanese, and Indonesian notions such as rasa and malu—contribute to and are constitutive of transnational and gendered processes of racialization. Saraswati argues that it is how emotions come to be attached to certain objects and how they circulate that shape the “emotionscape” of white beauty in Indonesia. Her ground-breaking work is a nuanced theoretical exploration of the ways in which representations of beauty and the emotions they embody travel geographically and help shape attitudes and beliefs toward race and gender in a transnational world.

From Medical Innovation to Sociopolitical Crisis: How Racialized Medicine Has Shifted the Scope of Racial Discourse and its Social Consequences

Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut
May 2013
51 pages

Danielle Antonia Craig

An essay submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors in Sociology

Using a case study of a congestive heart failure, BiDil, patented in 2005 for use only in African Americans, I attempt to understand and analyze how the movement of racialized medicine has informed and effected American understandings of race, racial identity, and health.

Read the entire essay here.

love, desire, and impossible measures

The State
2013-06-08

Tiana Reid
Columbia University

Children rule. No, certain children rule the ways in which we measure fantasies of progress. I read Meagan Hatcher-Mays’ Jezebel piece, “I’m Biracial, and That Ad Is a Big Fucking Deal. Trust Me.,” before I saw the Cheerios commercial itself. The commercial, like most ads, is simple and taps into the unsupervised kiddie trope: it presents a chubby-cheeked maybe-blonde making a mess. Distressingly enough, my first reaction was to claim a resolutely anti stance to not watch the video but respond to the Jezebel post and say, “I’m Biracial, and That Ad Is the Worst Thing Ever. Trust Me.” Quickly, however, I felt it and thought, “Oh, fuck no. I’m black.” And it’s not the ad, but the liberal reactions to it, the way it becomes a siphon for deliciously delirious national imaginaries of cosmopolitan ideas of race that cracks my core. (For instance: how could they say those things about that cute little girl?!) But here I am, writing…

…It’s hard enough, I would think, to hate on a beautiful little “mixie” and wonder what or how her presence, no, the way in which she is presented, eclipses other lives. Hatcher-Mays, whose hyphenated name perhaps tells us what we need to know of her wholeness, went as far to say that the commercial “validates the existence of biracial and multiracial people.” (Her emphasis.) The way we think about “mixed-race,” however, is grounded in a neoliberal narrative that is narrowly individualized (again, “Mixie Me”). What does it mean for children of color to bring into “existence” this “biracial” child who is not one or the other or even both but maybe, here, a symbol of what’s to come? Who has access to this claim? What does it even mean to grope for a way to ask such questions? When visibility becomes the proxy for “the state of things”—when it becomes a measure of who we are and that we exist, what we lose is vitality….

…If the goal is to normalize mixed-race families, as Hatcher-Mays applauds Cheerios for, then we should all be scared for our lives. Normalization is a bit like reform—as simultaneously boring and dangerous—and, as American sociologist and race theorist Howard Winant wrote in a nod to Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, “reformism is better understood as incorporation and absorption of conflict than as conflict resolution.” Multiculturalism, multiracialism, pluralism, diversity, and the endless etc. of 21^st century neologisms fit into this schema of subsumption rather than disruption. What isn’t embraced in the script is that Blackness isn’t that normal at all…

Read the entire article here.

In spite of the unique histories of slavery and persons of African descent in each of the six countries discussed in this book, certain themes recur. In a sense, this book is a study of the growth and demise of the sugar economy in many of these countries, along with that of coffee and tobacco. In most of these societies, a great deal of miscegenation and genetic admixture occurred between masters and their slaves, very early on in the history of slavery there. Several of these countries sponsored official immigration policies of “whitening,” aiming to dilute the numbers of its citizens who were black or darker shades of brown by encouraging Europeans to migrate there.

And speaking of skin color, each of these countries had (and continues to have) many categories of color and skin tone, ranging from as few as 12 in the Dominican Republic and 16 in Mexico to 134 in Brazil, making our use of octoroon and quadroon and mulatto pale by comparison. Latin American color categories can seem to an American as if they are on steroids. I realized as I encountered people who still employ these categories in everyday discussions about race in their society that it is extremely difficult for those of us in the United States to see the use of these categories as what they are, the social deconstruction of the binary opposition between “black” and “white,” outside of the filter of the “one-drop rule,” which we Americans have inherited from racist laws designed to retain the offspring of a white man and a black female slave as property of the slave’s owner. Far too many of us as African Americans see the use of these terms as an attempt to “pass” for anything other than “black,” rather than as historically and socially specific terms that people of color have invented and continue to employ to describe a complex reality larger than the terms black, white, and mulatto allow for.

After extended periods of “whitening,” many of these same societies then began periods of “browning,” as I think of them, celebrating and embracing their transcultural or multicultural roots, declaring themselves unique precisely because of the extent of racial admixture among their citizens. (The abolition of “race” as an official category in the federal censuses of some of the countries I visited has made it extremely difficult for black minorities to demand their rights, as in Mexico and Peru.) The work of José Vasconcelos in Mexico, Jean Price-Mars in Haiti, Gilberto Freyre in Brazil, and Fernando Ortiz in Cuba compose a sort of multicultural quartet, though each approached the subject from different, if related, vantage points. The theories of “browning” espoused by Vasconcelos, Freyre, and Ortiz, however, could be double-edged swords, both valorizing the black roots of their societies yet sometimes implicitly seeming to denigrate the status of black cultural artifacts and practices outside of an ideology of mestizaje, or hybridity.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Black in Latin America, (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 10-11.

Photo of the Week: An Interracial Family in 1962

The Brooklyn Historical Society Blog
The Brooklyn Historical Society
2013-06-05

Sady Sullivan, Director of Oral History

The Bibuld Family, ca. 1962, V1989.22.14; Bob Adelman photographs of Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) demonstrations collection, V1989.002; Brooklyn Historical Society.

This photograph from the Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) collection shows the Bibuld family: parents Elaine and Jerome, and their three children Melanie, Carrington, and Douglass (L to R).

The Bibulds, an interracial family, lived in Crown Heights in the early 1960s and the children attended a neighborhood school that had a Gifted and Talented program and enrichments like art, music, and field trips.  After their home caught fire in the fall of 1962, the Bibulds moved to Park Slope, and the children’s new neighborhood school had substandard academics and few enrichments — and the student body was more than 70% African American and Puerto Rican.

Elaine and Jerry Bibuld, both members of the Brooklyn chapter of CORE, were angered by this educational inequity and concerned for their children who were very bored at their new school. So, they pulled their children out of this racially segregated public school and sat them in an all-white school in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn. Technically, the children were not enrolled in school and the City considered them truants, which opened the parents up to imprisonment for parental neglect. For roughly three months, the Bibuld protest was the most important desegregation case in the city…

Read the entire article here.

Negro-White Marriages Here Show Rise Despite Problems of Prejudice

The New York Times
1963-10-18

Fred Powledge

Marriages between Negroes and whites have been increasing in New York and have become a poignant part of the life of the city.

The precise number of such marriages may never be known. Documents on file at the City License Bureau do not reveal clear figures because many couples refuse to state their color in the applications. But City Clerk Herman Katz, who issues licenses and performs marriages at the Municipal Building, said that on the basis of observations the number of mixed marriages had definitely risen in the last two years.

Civil rights organizations, other interested observers and interracial couples themselves said they were aware of an obvious increase in the number of marriages between Negroes and whites.

Some of them interpreted the increase as a logical extension of the desegregation movement, which has captured the emotions and attention of the country. “There’s more interracial everything these days,” said one observer.

The Negro-white couples lead special lives in New York—lifetimes of curious stares, of subtle expressions of prejudice, of occasional signs of outright hostility, and of the constant awareness that as couples they are set apart in the eyes of the city…

…”It is very often evidence of a sick revolt against society,” said a psychiatrist who studies the emotions of race relations.

But a clergyman who has married interracial couples said:

“Fundamentally, the mixed marriage is a demonstration of the tightness and justice of it all, the feeling that human: beings may marry whomever; they please.”…

…Staring Not Unusual

The experience in the Village was not unusual. Dr. Charles E. Smith, a New York psychotherapist who wrote a doctoral dissertation in 1960 on the subject of interracial marriage, found that being stared at was a part of the lives of 22 New York couples he interviewed. Dr. Smith is a Negro.

He wrote in his thesis that the couples “considered staring by far to be the most difficult reaction from others to which interracial couples must become accustomed. This was described as a tremendous phenomenon to which to adjust…

…There are two problems of interracial marriages that are not generally shared by Negro couples. The men and women who were interviewed agreed that these two problems—children and acceptance by friends, family and society—were perhaps their greatest concerns.

In his study of 22 interracial couples, Dr. Smith found that none had decided against having children. His respondents were aware that their children would be considered Negroes by society, and that society would show some hostility toward the offspring.

“Yet,” he wrote, “these factors did not act as deterrents, as the couples felt not to have children would be acquiescing to societal restrictions and would also represent an unfulfilled marriage. In some way a childless marriage would be seen as an actual threat to the marriage.” He added:

“The parents were actually getting the main brunt of societal reactions. Generally the couples felt that the true test for the children could be expected to come as they reached pubescence and adolescence and begin to expand their area of socialization.

“It is then that the restrictions from society are expected to be strongest and will probably have the greatest effect upon the children. For the most part,  the  experiences of the children are expected to be very much similar to those of other Negro  children  in the United States.” …

…Married 35 Years

George S. Schuyler, 68-year-old associate editor of The Pittsburgh Courier, a Negro newspaper with offices in New York, has been married to a white Texan since 1928.

He observed that other couples were “not worried about the children,” and explained: “They know that’s inevitable. They’re concerned, sure. They’re concerned about what effect it will have on the children’s future, and what degree of discrimination they’ll meet. But that doesn’t keep anybody from having children.”…

…Andrew D. Weinberger, New York attorney who has made studies of miscegenation statutes, used a projection to arrive at an estimate of one million couples in the nation, 70.000 of them in the New York metropolitan area.

His figures include a large number of light-skinned Negroes who pass for white. Mr. Weinberger used previously published scientific tables to calculate that one million American Negroes of marriage age are “passing.” He reduced the figure to 810,000 to allow for persons not married or not interracially married…

…High Jewish Percentage

Researchers, including Dr. Smith, have found in most cases that the Negro partner was the husband. They also re port that in New York the percentage of whites who also are Jews is high enough to attract notice…

Read or purchase the article here.