Mixed Race Studies

Biography of American Author Jean Toomer, 1894-1967

Edwin Mellen Press
2002
248 pages
ISBN 10:  0-7734-7088-3; ISBN 13:  978-0-7734-7088-0

John Chandler Griffin, Distinguished Professor Emeritus
University of South Carolina, Lancaster

This comprehensive biography of writer Jean Toomer, known as the Herald of the Harlem Renaissance, uses previously untapped sources, including lengthy meetings with Toomer’s widow and associates. It examines his ancestors and early life, the publication of Cane in 1923, and then the strange events of his later life, including his association with Waldo Frank and his wife Margery Naumberg, through whom he would come to be involved with Georges Gurdjieff, an Armenian mystic. It examines his marriages, his involvement with Quakerism, his declining health (and subsequent involvement with psychic healers such as Edgar Cayce and Ron Hubbard). The volume includes an interview with Marjorie Content Toomer, his widow, and a Jean Toomer bibliography.

Table of Contents

• Foreword
• 1. The Racial Enigma of Jean Toomer
• 2. A Search for Identity
• 3. A Literary Breakthrough
• 4. Waldo Frank and the Publication of Cane
• 5. Toomer Meets Margaret Naumberg and Georges Gurdjieff
• 6. Toomer Becomes a Gurdjieffian
• 7. From Rags to Riches
• 8. A Life in Decline An Interview with Margery Content Toomer
• A Jean Toomer Bibliography
• Index

Brown Eyes: A Selection of Creative Expressions by Black and Mixed Race Women

Troubador Publishing
2006
292 pages
5 x 0.6 x 8 inches
ISBN 10: 1905237146; ISBN-13: 978-1905237142

Edited by:

Nicole Moore

Brown Eyes is a rare collection of poetry and autobiographical writing from a diverse group of black and mixed-race women—everyday women expressing themselves in their own unique and readable style. One of the first anthologies of its kind, Brown Eyes offers a fresh and challenging insight into the lives of black and mixed-race women in 21st century Britain.

As well as being an important contribution towards Black British literature, the book celebrates, reflects upon and embraces our diverse female identities and the common-thread that unites all of us living the UK experience.

Some of the contributions explode with energy, others speak with softness, many discuss childhood, motherhood, love, while others deal with loss and historical betrayal. The voices collected in Brown Eyes range from teenage to mature, rural and urban, from mothers and daughters, and countless others, all contributing to this anthology’s diverse creativity.

The Negro in Washington: A Study in Race Amalgamation

Walter Neale, Publisher, New York
1930
332 pages
Original Classification ID: E185.93.D695
Source: University of California via The Hathi Trust Digital Library

A. H. Shannon, B. D., M. A.
Former Chaplain of the Mississippi State Penetentiary
Member, American Anthropological Association

CONTENTS

• A. A Personal Word to the Reader.
• B. Introduction.
• I. Statement of the Case.
• II. The Mulatto
• III. Illegitimacy
• IV. Isabella and Jamestown
• V. The Near-White.
• VI. The Poor-White
• VIII. Politics and the Race Problem
• III. Race and Religion
• IX. Colonization as a Solution of the American Race Problem
• X. Some Conclusions and a Forward Look

A PERSONAL WORD TO THE READER

The author of this book has been, for some years, a  close observer of race relations and a student of those  problems growing out of racial contacts. As Chaplain of the Mississippi State Penitentiary, he was called  upon to minister to several hundred Negro prisoners,  thus gaining a measure of intimate knowledge of the Negro criminal. As a teacher in the employ of the  Imperial Government of Japan, he was privileged to  make a brief study of an Oriental civilization. Here  was gained some knowledge of the Eurasian problem, so acute in some of the Asiatic countries and in evidence  wherever contact of East and West has occurred.

The chief interest of the author in the Negro problem has centered about the matter of racial intermixture—the Mulatto problem—and most of his writings have had to do with this evil. The present study, while endeavoring to ascertain and to state fact impartially, necessarily gives a large measure of personal reaction  to certain of the problems involved in present-day contacts of the two races, the black and the white, in the United States. Whoever really understands conditions now obtaining in North America is prepared to understand the situation wherever two dissimilar races occupy the same territory, or wherever casual racial contacts occur—as they now do throughout the greater part of the world.

There is a conscious and an intentional limiting of this study largely to those features of the situation which may well tend toward discouragement, if not toward hopeless pessimism. Since it now appears fashionable to approach the Negro problem from the standpoint of the invincible optimist, resolutely ignoring or consciously discarding those facts which, fairly faced, would shatter so many pleasing theories, it is well that some one should present the darker side of the picture, for there is a terribly dark side. The reader, once the situation is clearly analyzed and its elements indicated, may be trusted to interpret aright the issues unquestionably involved. Americans, white and black alike, are not awake to the real situation confronting them, a fact clearly evidenced by more than half century of silence and indifference touching the vital issue of race amalgamation and the conditions under which this is now occurring.

As an answer to the ever-ready charge of ministering to, if not creating, racial antagonisms and hates—a charge behind which there sometimes lurks more of moral and of intellectual inertia than some good people are aware of—there is to be noted the difference between a clear statement of fact, a clear-cut challenge to the self-respect of each of two groups, and a maligning of one group by the other. If it has come to the pass that a calm facing of fact, a thorough analysis of a given situation, must be opposed because it reveals the destructiveness of an inherited unreasonable and unreasoned program, there should, at least, be a clear understanding of the attitudes displayed and a close scrutiny of the motives behind these attitudes.

Both races in America, especially in the United States, are confronted by facts demanding careful consideration; by problems the solution of which depends primarily upon thorough analysis as the basis for a full understanding of what is really involved. Various organizations, secular and religious, are in the field, voluntarily endeavoring to carry out programs which they are free to make what they will. Most of these would resent the charge that they are contributing directly to moral confusion and to racial degradation. Most of them would resent the charge that their work and the attitudes upon which it rests constitute the most destructive influence against which the full-blood Negro must contend at the present time. Can it be shown that such charge is untrue? If only there could be a general and an honest, dispassionate inquiry, bringing these matters into the realm of conscious thought and purposive program, there would be hope of constructive action. If this volume assists the reader to break with traditional lines of thought and the attitudes and the programs based upon these lines of thought, thus promoting independent analysis and rationally constructive programs, it will serve a useful and a timely purpose.

The author is forced into a position which is es sentially unpleasant. It becomes necessary to point out the grounds of criticism, the delinquencies, of those who, holding positions of leadership—political, educational, religious—have failed to see, or seeing have failed to meet, or have met with utter indifference, the problems here discussed. Upon the part of the leaders of both races there has been, at best, a light estimate of the trust reposed in their leadership. No further evidence is necessary to establish this fact than to call attention to present conditions and to the manner in which these conditions have grown up, without effective protest or warning, and that they are now generally accepted, without analysis, and without intelligent evaluation of their logical, their inevitable, results.

The thanks of the author are due to both Authors  and Publishers permitting the use of quotations appear ing in this volume. Credit is given in each case. Professor E. B. Reuter has been especially generous, permitting the unrestricted use of material the collection of which necessarily cost him much expense, in addition, to time and labor involved. His book, The Mulatto in the United States, is a very valuable statement of ultimate fact.

Read the entire book here.

What Miscegenation is! And What We are to Expect Now That Mr. Lincoln is Re-elected

Waller & Willets, Publishers, New York
c. 1865
8 pages
Source: Harvard University via The Hathi Trust Digital Library

L. Seaman, LL. D.

“What, is Miscegenation?” is an oft repeated inquiry. A word not recognized by Webster, Johnson, or Worcester, and yet in general use. The following definition is according to the popular acceptation of the term:

Miscegenation, noun—The act of mixing or state of being mixed; a mass or compound of different ingredients; in logic, thought of in relation to an actual existence; opposed to abstract.

Miscegenate, verb transitive—Literally, to unite and blend as one common brotherhood different races; to blend promiscuously; to coalesce.

It is unnecessary for us to enter into a lengthy definition of the word as the artist who engraved our frontispiece portrays that which our pen fails to accomplish. Our illustration represents an “intelligent gentleman of color” affectionately saluting a pretty white girl of sixteen, with auburn hair and light complexion; the different shades of complexion of the two contrasting beautifully and lending  enchantment to the scene. The thick tufts of wool of the one lends beauty to the long, waving auburn hair of the other, and the sweet, delicate little Roman nose of the one does not detract from the beauty of the broad, flat nose, with expanded nostrils of the other—while the intellectual, bold and majestic forehead of the one forms an unique, though beautiful contrast to the round, flat head, resembling a huge gutter mop, of the other. Contrast is the order of the day: a desire for sameness was an hallucination of the ancients, but we of the Nineteenth Century are going to bring about a new order of things…

…Actual Miscegenationists were first discovered in the South, but the atrocious crime was not popular although it was committed to a considerable extent, and men have been known to sell their own children into slavery, simply because of the supposed attaintment of the offspring from its mother. But such beasts are only to be found in the South. Here in the North, we have a finer sense of the beautiful. Dark blood, in the estimation ot the Northmen, instead of attainting, purifies. A man whose veins are coursed by a certain amount of dark blood, and whose skin is correspondingly dark, is believed to be a superior being.

Many of our best orators have been advocating this mixture for some time. Wendel Phillips can’t see why a negro is not the equal of a white man, and, in many instances, why he has not proved himself superior. When coalescesion takes place he believes that the excellent properties of Sambo’s component parts are intensified and the sluggish material of the white man purified and renovated…

Read the entire pamphlet here.

An Imperative Duty

Broadview Press
March 2010 (Originally Published in 1891)
200 pages
ISBN: 9781551119144 / 1551119145

W. D. Howells (William Dean Howells) (1837-1920)

Edited by:

Paul R. Petrie, Professor of English
Southern Connecticut State University

An Imperative Duty tells the story of Rhoda Aldgate, a young woman on the verge of marriage who has been raised by her aunt to assume that she is white, but who is in fact the descendant of an African-American grandmother. The novel traces the struggles of Rhoda, her family, and her suitor to come to terms with the implications of Rhoda’s heritage. Howells employs this stock situation to explore the newly urgent questions of identity, morality, and social policy raised by “miscegenation” in the post-Reconstruction United States. The novel imagines interracial marriage sympathetically at a time when racist sentiment was on the rise, and does this in one of Howells’s most aesthetically economical performances in the short novel form.

Appendices to this Broadview Edition include material on the “tragic mulatta” in literature, interracial marriage, the “science” of race in the nineteenth century, and Howells’s literary realism.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• W.D. Howells: A Brief Chronology
• A Note on the Text
• An Imperative Duty
• Appendix A: Contemporary Reviews and Responses
• Appendix B: The “Tragic Mulatta” in Literature
  1. From Grace King, “The Little Convent Girl” (1893)
  2. From Matt Crim, “Was It An Exceptional Case?” (1891)
  3. W.D. Howells, “The Pilot’s Story” (1860)
• Appendix C: Interracial Marriage & the “Science” of Race
  1. From Joseph-Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853)
  2. From J.C. Nott, Types of Mankind (1854)
  3. From Frederick L. Hoffman, The Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896)
  4. Pace v. State of Alabama, 1883
  5. From Henry W. Grady, “In Plain Black and White” (1885)
  6. From Charles W. Chesnutt, “The Future American” (1900)
  7. From W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races” (1897)
• Appendix D: W.D. Howells’s Theory of Realism—The “Editor’s Study” Columns
  1. May 1886 [Realism and Romance]
  2. November 1886 [Aesthetics and Ethics]
  3. April 1887 [Art, Truth, and Morality]
  4. September 1887 [Realism and Democracy]
  5. Dec 1887 [The Real and the Ideal Grasshopper]
  6. March 1888 [Can Fiction Help the People It Depicts?]
  7. December 1888 [Christmas Literature]
• Select Bibliography

Read the entire novel here.

How Jews Became White Folks and What That says about Race in America

Rutgers University Press
1998-10-01
272 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-2589-1
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-2590-7

Karen Brodkin, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
University of California, Los Angeles

A wide-ranging and provocative assessment of how race, class, and gender shape social identity in the United States.

We fashion identities in the context of a wider conversation about American nationhood, to whom it belongs and what belonging means. Race and ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality are all staple ingredients in this conversation. They are salient aspects of social being from which economic practices, political policies, and popular discourses create “Americans.” Because all of these facets of social being have such significant meaning on a national scale, they also have major consequences for both individuals and groups in terms of their success and well-being, as well as how they perceive themselves socially and politically.

The history of Jews in the United States is one of racial change that provides useful insights on race in America. Prevailing classifications have sometimes assigned Jews to the white race and at other times have created an off-white racial designation for them. Those changes in racial assignment have shaped the ways American Jews of different eras have constructed their ethnoracial identities. Brodkin illustrates these changes through an analysis of her own family’s multi-generational experience. She shows how Jews experience a kind of double vision that comes from racial middleness: on the one hand, marginality with regard to whiteness; on the other, whiteness and belonging with regard to blackness.

Class and gender are key elements of race-making in American history. Brodkin suggests that this country’s racial assignment of individuals and groups constitutes an institutionalized system of occupational and residential segregation, is a key element in misguided public policy, and serves as a pernicious foundational principle in the construction of nationhood. Alternatives available to non-white and alien “others” have been either to whiten or to be consigned to an inferior underclass unworthy of full citizenship. The American ethnoracial map-who is assigned to each of these poles-is continually changing, although the binary of black and white is not. As a result, the structure within which Americans form their ethnoracial, gender, and class identities is distressingly stable. Brodkin questions the means by which Americans construct their political identities and what is required to weaken the hold of this governing myth.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. How Did Jews Become White Folks?
• 2. Race Making
• 3. Race, Gender, and Virtue in Civic Discourse
• 4. Not Quite White: Gender and Jewish Identity
• 5. A Whiteness of Our Own? Jewishness and Whiteness in the 1950s and 1960s
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

The Passing of Anatole Broyard

Chapter in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man
Random House
1997
256 pages
ISBN: 978-0-679-77666-6

Chapter pages: 180-214

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research
Harvard University

In 1982, an investment banker named Richard Grand-Jean took a summer’s lease on an eighteenth-century farmhouse in Fairfield, Connecticut; its owner, Anatole Broyard, spent his summers in Martha’s Vineyard. The house was handsomely furnished with period antiques, and the surrounding acreage included a swimming pool and a pond. But the property had another attraction, too. Grand-Jean, a managing director of Salomon Brothers, was an avid reader, and he took satisfaction in renting from so illustrious a figure. Anatole Broyard had by then been a daily book reviewer for the Times for more than a decade, and that meant that he was one of literary America’s foremost gatekeepers. Grand-Jean might turn to the business pages of the Times first, out of professional obligation, but he turned to the book page next, out of a sense of self. In his Walter Mittyish moments, he sometimes imagined what it might be like to be someone who read and wrote about books for a living—someone to whom millions of readers looked for guidance.

Broyard’s columns were suffused with both worldliness and high culture. Wry, mandarin, even self-amused at times, he wrote like a man about town, but one who just happened to have all of Western literature at his fingertips. Always, he radiated an air of soigné self-confidence: he could be amiable in his opinions or waspish, but he never betrayed a flicker of doubt about what he thought. This was a man who knew that his judgment would never falter and his sentences never fail him.

Grand-Jean knew little about Broyard’s earlier career, but as he rummaged through Broyard’s bookshelves he came across old copies of intellectual journals like Partisan Renew and Commentary, to which Broyard had contributed a few pieces in the late forties and early fifties. One day, Grand-Jean found himself leafing through a magazine that contained an early article by Broyard. What caught his eye, though, was the contributor’s note for the article—or, rather, its absence. It had been neatly cut out, as if with a razor.

A few years later, Grand-Jean happened on another copy of that magazine, and decided to look up the Broyard article again. This time, the note on the contributor was intact. It offered a few humdrum details—that Broyard was born in New Orleans, attended Brooklyn College and the New School for Social Research, and taught at New York University’s Division of General Education. It also offered a less humdrum one: the situation of the American Negro, the note asserted, was a subject that the author “knows at first hand.” It was an elliptical formulation, to be sure, but for Anatole Broyard it may not have been elliptical enough.

Broyard was born black and became white, and his story is compounded of equal parts pragmatism and principle. He knew that the world was filled with such snippets and scraps of paper, all conspiring to reduce him to an identity that other people had invented and he had no say in. Broyard responded with X-Acto knives and evasions, with distance and denials and half-denials and cunning half-truths. Over the years, he became a virtuoso of ambiguity and equivocation. Some of his acquaintances knew the truth; many more had heard rumors about “distant” black ancestry (wasn’t here a grandfather who was black? a great-grandfather?). But most were entirely unaware, and that was as he preferred it. He kept the truth even from his own children. Society had decreed race to be a matter of natural law, but he wanted race to be an elective affinity, and it was never going to be a fair fight. A penalty was exacted. He shed a past and an identity to become a writer—a writer who wrote endlessly about the act of shedding a past and an identity…

Read the entire chapter here.

Almost White

Macmillan
1963
212 pages
Original Classication ID: E184.A1 B53
Source: University of Michigan via The Hathi Trust Digital Library

Brewton Berry

Contents

• Preface
• 1. The Myth of the Vanishing Indian
• 2. Where Are They?
• 3. Who Are They?
• 4. What the Whites Believe
• 5. What the Negro Thinks
• 6. Etiquette
• 7. How They Live
• 8. Their Schools
• 9. Almost Red
• 10. Almost Black
• 11. Almost White
• Bibliography
• Index

Preface

Miscegenation seems to be an inevitable consequence of the meeting of races and nationalities. Despite the fears and warnings of the Jeremiahs, hybrids are everywhere. Fortunately, most people of mixed blood are able to identify themselves with, and are accepted by, one or the other of the racial groups from which they have sprung. Thus, the American mulatto thinks of himself as a Negro and is accepted by other Negroes as one of themselves.

But here and there we find pathetic folk of mixed ancestry who never know quite where they belong. There are Eurasians in the Far East, Anglo-Indians in India, Cape Coloured and Afro-Asians in South Africa, Jamaica Whites in Jamaica, and Indo-Europeans in Indonesia. Elsewhere we find Bovianders, Lobos, Caboslos, Cafusos, Moplahs, Moriscos, Cholos and countless others. These are raceless people, neither fish nor fowl, neither white, nor black, nor red, nor brown. They bear a heavy cross.

We have such folk in the United States. I first became aware of them as a youth in Orangeburg, South Carolina where there are outcasts known as Brass Ankles, Red Legs, and Buckheads. But, like others of my class, I remained aloof from them and never gave them a passing thought. Not, at any rate, until 1937 when I read Everett Stonequist’s The Marginal Man. That set me to thinking, and for the past twenty-five years I have been searching out and visiting these hybrid communities. A fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation enabled me to spend one full year in the field, and another was made possible by a grant from the Graduate School of The Ohio State University.

My informants have been legion. Over the years I have corresponded with hundreds of persons who shared my interest. I have talked with thousands of whites and Negroes who live in proximity to these mixed-bloods. My indebtedness to all these is very great. Especially do I appreciate the help given me by Dr. William Harlen Gilbert, Jr., of the Library of Congress, Mr. Calvin L. Beale of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Dr. Edward T. Price of Los Angeles State College, and Mr. C. A. Weslager of Wilmington, Delaware. I am grateful to Dr. Chapman J. Milling, of Columbia, South Carolina, for permission to use his poem “Croatan” which appears in Chapter II. The editors of Phylon allowed me to reprint “The Myth of the Vanishing Indian,” and the University of North Carolina Press granted permission to quote from James Aswell’s God Bless the Devil!

Most of all I am indebted to the thousands of mixed-bloods, whom I call mestizos, who received me with kindness and courtesy, and who shared their secrets with me. I hope that this book will help to remove some of the prejudice and misunderstanding to which they have been subjected.

Brewton Berry

Read the entire book here.

From Negro to Caucasian: or, How the Ethiopian is Changing His Skin

Pilot Publishing Company, San Francisco, California
1929
65 pages
Source: University of Michigan via The Hathi Trust Digital Library

Louis Fremont Baldwin

A concise presentation of the manner in which many Negroes in America … have abandoned their… afiliation with Negroes

A concise presentation of the manner in which many Negroes in America who, being very fair in complexion, with hair naturally or artificially free from kink, have abandoned their one-time affiiliations with Negroes, including their own relatives,  and by mingling at first commercially or industrially, then socially with Caucasians, have ultimately been absorbed by the latter.

Prepared and published at the request of the Society for the Amalgamation of the Races
New York, Paris and London
Pilot Publishing Company
617 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, Calif.

PREFACE

The reader is earnestly asked to accept as authentic and reliable the information that is given in this book. The writer is indebted to many friends throughout the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the St. Lawrence to the Rio Grande.

These friends rendered valuable assistance enabling him to locate the individuals with whom he has held interviews related in the text, and from whom he was able to gather information that impressed him with the fact, of the enormous num ber of Colored Americans, who have sufficient ad mixture of bloods in their veins, to alienate them in appearance from the American Negro.

More startling still is the discovery of the great numbers of this contingent of the so-called Negro race, who have deserted-and forsaken kith and kin, and become merged with, or rather absorbed by the American Citizenry as the latter pursues the ordinary paths of trade, commerce, industry and professions, and . . and matrimony.

The reader will also recognize how complicated the situation—but this does not mean that the situation is necessarily calamitous,—but how difficult for any person, particularly those whose ancestors resided “In The South” to be perfectly sure that there is not “a drop of Negro blood in their veins!”  That it can be there, goes without saying, as the  incidents mentioned in the text that follows plainly show, but just as millions of Negroes—Negroes with fair complexions and perfectly straight hair,— those who have not “Crossed Over” as well as those who have, have white blood in their veins, why the author asks, can there not be millions of  persons who believe themselves to be white, yet  have Negro blood in their veins, obtained by the methods that it has been thought appropriate to  bring to the attention of the public through the publication of this book.

—THE AUTHOR.

Let the undersigned assure the readers of this book that after he had read the proof-sheets, he felt it his duty to give the author permission to add his personal testimony as to the prevalence of the practice alleged to be in vogue. He can confirm what is stated as occurring in so many instances, because a branch of his own family “Crossed Over” some few years ago, and has become completely absorbed in the white race.

—A. E. SHADD, Bishop of the United Holy Church of America; Western & Pacific Coast District

Read the entire book here.

Racial Theories (2nd Edition)

Cambridge University Press
April 1998
264 pages
Dimensions: 228 x 152 mm
Paperback ISBN:9780521629454

Michael Banton, Emeritus Professor of Sociology
University of Bristol

This thoroughly revised and updated edition of Michael Banton’s classic book reviews historical theories of racial and ethnic relations and contemporary struggles to supersede them. It shows how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concepts of race attempted to explain human difference in terms of race as a permanent type and how these were followed by social scientific conceptions of race as a form of status. In a new concluding chapter, “Race as Social Construct,” Michael Banton makes the case for a historically sensitive social scientific understanding of racial and ethnic groupings that operates within a more general theory of collective action and is, therefore, able to replace racial explanations as effectively as they have been replaced in biological science. This book is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand contemporary debates about racial and ethnic conflict. This new edition is thoroughly updated and contains a new chapter on developments in recent years.

Features

• Reviews history of racial theories and place of race in history of science
• Proposes new social science of racial and ethnic relations
• Distinguishes racial and ethnic explanations and puts contemporary ideas in historical perspective

Table of Contents

1. Race as designation
2. Race as lineage
3. Race as type
4. Race as subspecies
5. Race as status
6. Race as class
7. Race as social construct