Mixed Race Studies

A Textual Analysis of Barack Obama’s Campaign Discourse Regarding His Race

Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana
April 2011
44 pages

Andrea Dawn Andrews

This study is a textual analysis of Barack Obama’s nine most noteworthy speeches from 2004 to 2009 during his rise to prominence and presidential campaign. Because Obama was considered an inspiring speaker and because he was the first African American to win either a major party’s presidential nomination or a general presidential election, this study examines how Obama’s use of language about his race may have contributed to his success. Previous research has shown that use of six rhetorical devices resonates with the American people: abstraction, democratic speech conversational speech, valence messages, conciliatory messages and imagery. The study analyzed Obama’s speeches for use of these devices in relation to his race. In the nine speeches studied, Obama addressed his race twenty-nine times and used all six rhetorical devices frequently when doing so. Recurring themes he discussed using these devices were the American dream, heritage and family, and unity. His overarching message about his race was that racial differences and a negative history of race relations could be overcome because the U.S. is a land of possibility, and he offered himself as proof of that idea. Previous research shows that the rhetorical devices Obama used to present this message about his race are those that would have helped him connect with his audience and appeal to the public. Thus, Obama’s use of rhetorical devices and presentation of a positive message about his race may have helped him win votes to become the first African American president of the United States.

Read the entire thesis here.

RTF 386 – Beyond Binaries: Mixed Race Representation and Critical Theory

University of Texas, Austin
Spring 2012

Mary Beltrán, Associate Professor of Media Studies

This graduate seminar surveys historical and critical and cultural studies scholarship on the evolution of mixed race in U.S. film and media culture. American histories, cultures, and identities have traditionally been understood through rubrics of racial binaries and negations. Given this tradition, characters of mixed racial and ethnic heritage and interracial romances have served as powerful symbols within mediated story worlds, while mixed-race actors also seen be seen to highlight fault lines in the nation’s and Hollywood’s construction of race. We’ll explore the growing body of scholarship analyzing the evolution of mixed-race representation within film, media, and celebrity culture and its implications with respect to past and contemporary notions of race and the increasingly diverse U.S. audience.

In the Place of Clare Kendry: A Gothic Reading of Race and Sexuality in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Callaloo
Volume 34, Number 1, Winter 2011
pages 143-157
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2011.0024

Johanna M. Wagner
Maastricht University

Feeling her colour heighten under the continued inspection, she slid her eyes down. What, she wondered, could be the reason for such persistent attention? Had she, in her haste in the taxi, put her hat on backwards? Guardedly she felt at it. No. Perhaps there was a streak of powder somewhere on her face. She made a quick pass over it with her handkerchief. Something wrong with her dress? She shot a glance over it. Perfectly all right. What was it?

—Nella Larsen, Passing

In a book where the protagonist prides herself in knowing who she is, the final question in the epigraph above is indicative of Irene Redfield’s willful self-ignorance. It is also a reasonable question readers have had about the protagonist and her relationship with the notorious Clare Kendry. What was it between the two women that in the end warrants Clare’s demise? The answer to this question lies somewhere within Irene’s need for ontological certainty—sureness in the knowledge of her own being—that begets security in every aspect of her life. Irene’s security is based on, among other things, stasis. When we meet her, Irene has already meticulously defined and secured her concepts of race and sex and relegated them to their respective compartments in her psyche, never to be revisited. For revisiting either of these ideas would surely breach the serene outlook she entertains about her life. It is her resolve to maintain security that drives the action of the novel and will illuminate what it “was” in Clare that incites such anxiety.

On the roof of the Drayton, unsure of why she elicits a stranger’s scrutiny, Irene responds to the stubborn stare by inspecting herself, mentally running through a list of possible reasons for this unsettling attention (Larsen 149). Her mind whirls as she attempts to pinpoint what it is about her appearance that might be worthy of this penetrating gaze. It is not until after she has exhausted the list of possible material/physical anomalies that she finally resolves to ignore the woman and “let her look!” (149). Ironically, however, foreshadowed by her heightening “colour,” at length Irene suspects “it” may be something less visual, less tangible than her hat, makeup, or dress: “Gradually there rose in Irene a small inner disturbance, odious and hatefully familiar. She laughed softly, but her eyes flashed. Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro?” (150). This early scene is indicative of Irene’s incongruous character. She prides herself in her bourgeois participation toward racial uplift, and yet race does not cross her mind until there is no other alternative. It is a remarkable juxtaposition between the title of the novel Passing, which implies race as no less than the major theme, and the absentminded protagonist who pinpoints the issue only after she has ruled out all else. It is no wonder criticism of Passing has struggled with its importance. Because Irene’s interest in race proves sparse and erratic, the reader may resist its significance to the novel, and certainly to Irene, altogether.

Ambiguity surrounding the issue of race is not the only thing vague in Larsen’s novel. The book has a penchant for opacity: the unreliable narrator, the conflation of protagonist with antagonist, the shocking and uncertain ending; critics have been flustered by this murkiness since its publication. For example, in his 1958 book The Negro Novel in America, Robert A. Bone dismisses the novel as Larsen’s “less important” one, preferring Larsen’s other work Quicksand (101). His dismissive attitude is illustrated through his irritation by certain structural features in Passing. For Bone, “a false and shoddy denouement prevents the novel from rising above mediocrity” (102). Hoyt Fuller has similar concerns; in his introduction to the 1971 publication of Passing, he asserts that Larsen’s “deliberate scene setting” is reminiscent of a “mediocre home magazine story teller” (18). Because these critics position the work within the realm of the “typical” passing novel (Bone 101) and presume the tragic mulatto myth to explain any social or psychological issues, themes such as “race” are relegated to the background of their criticism while their interests in convention and composition are foregrounded…

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“The Role of Implicatures in Kate Chopin’s Louisiana Short Stories”

Journal of the Short Story in English
Issue 40, Spring 2003
pages 69-84

Teresa Gibert, Professor of English
Spanish National University of Distance Education (UNED) in Madrid

It is tempting, in interpreting a literary text from an author one respects, to look further and further for hidden implications. Having found an interpretation consistent with the principle of relevance—an interpretation (which may itself be very rich and vague) which the writer might have thought of as adequate repayment for the reader’s effort—why not go on and look for ever richer implications and reverberations? (Sperber and Wilson 1996: 278)

The popular renown and the critical praise that Kate Chopin received during her lifetime resulted essentially from her Louisiana short stories, published first in various magazines and subsequently collected in the volumes Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). After her death in 1904, a few of these stories were included in various anthologies and thus became virtually the only pieces of Chopin’s literary production available to the general public, whereas her later works went out of print or remained unpublished. For several decades her name was almost invisible in the field of literary criticism, except as a “local colorist,” a term that nowadays some scholars are reluctant to apply to her (Forkner and Samway xxii), partly because it has so often been used derogatorily, although there have been recent attempts to reappraise it, emphasizing its positive value (Ewell and Menke xvi). Others have taken into account her own ambivalence towards the local-color movement, from which she unsuccessfully tried to detach herself (Papke 24, Staunton 203, Steiling 197, Taylor 156). Indeed, for many years the status of Kate Chopin was that of a marginalized local colorist because she was associated exclusively with her early narratives set in Louisiana, which were taken to exemplify local-color fiction, a genre that captivated American readers in the 1880s and 1890s but which experienced a decrease in popularity during the twentieth century.

When modern scholarship rediscovered Chopin’s writings in the 1970s—following Per Seyersted’s publication of Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography and his edition of her Complete Works, both in 1969—they were mainly analyzed from feminist perspectives. Consequently, attention was focused on her most mature works, with a particular emphasis on The Awakening (1899) and those short stories which were labeled “proto-feminist.” When A Vocation and a Voice—Chopin’s third collection of short stories, which she had begun writing in 1893—was finally published in 1991, it was also warmly welcomed by feminists. Meanwhile, her early Louisiana short stories became comparatively neglected. Not until recently have they been subjected to close scrutiny in the light of various theoretical frameworks, some of which are unrelated to feminism…

…Due to its explicitness, “The Storm” has not generated any contrasting interpretations, in spite of the close critical attention to which it has been submitted. Likewise, another of Chopin’s mature short narratives, “The Story of an Hour” (composed and first published in 1894) does not allow for much conjecture. Little effort of elucidation is needed to understand that it is about the sense of freedom enjoyed by a woman during the hour she mistakenly thinks that she is a widow, until she discovers that her husband is still alive. Both “The Storm” and “The Story of an Hour” exemplify maximum explicitness, and consequently, maximum consensus on the author’s intentions and readers’ interpretations. In order to illustrate the opposite end of the spectrum, that is, maximum implicitness, and therefore, a wide range of diverging opinions, I would like to focus on Chopin’s most famous Louisiana short story: “Désirée’s Baby.”

Désirée, a foundling raised by Monsieur and Madame Valmondé in their Louisiana plantation as if she were their own daughter, “grew to be beautiful and gentle, affectionate and sincere.” At eighteen she married Armand Aubigny, the heir to another plantation, and was cruelly rejected by him after giving birth to a mixed-race baby whose black ancestry derived in fact from the child’s paternal grandmother. We learn this at the very end of the story, once we have been told that Désirée and the baby have disappeared forever into the bayou. This is an extremely brief outline of the plot, which is almost impossible to summarize in a satisfactory manner because Chopin’s text resists further reduction. The richness of the story is based on the accumulation of significant details, and thanks to its concise prose, the author managed to compress into 2,152 words the contents of what she could have expanded into a whole novel. Chopin’s verbal economy partially accounts for her need to implicate, rather than explicate, but apart from the requirements of condensation inherent in the short fiction genre, there were also other reasons for her preference to communicate through veiled suggestions and resort to understatement. At the time of composing “Désirée’s Baby,” Kate Chopin was striving to be accepted by northern editors as a serious professional writer in the carefully regulated market of magazine and book publishing, controlled by censoring eyes, and consequently she could not work as spontaneously as she claimed (Complete Works 722), but under constraints that inhibited her treatment of socially sensitive topics.

This story was composed in 1892, and when it was published by Vogue in January of the following year under the title of “The Father of Désirée’s Baby,” it was an immediate success. It was included in Bayou Folk (1894), Chopin’s first collection of twenty-three short stories and sketches which received over two hundred reviews and press notices. “Désirée’s Baby” was frequently singled out for praise, and as it was often anthologized, it remained continuously in print while most of Kate Chopin’s work was virtually unavailable. Among the reasons that may account for such acclaim, we should mention the fact that Kate Chopin’s main themes—marriage and motherhood—are explored here through a submissive and vulnerable female protagonist who is far from being like the emancipated heroines that people her later fiction. A third theme, that of miscegenation, which is rather unusual in Chopin’s fiction, was particularly controversial when the story was first published, but thanks to the author’s “masterful phrasing and subtle word-choice” (Reilly 1942: 135), her audience, far from feeling offended, was delighted. It was indeed a period of “latent and massive social antagonism against miscegenation […] among both blacks and whites” (Williamson 90)…

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Afro-Mexican History: Trends and Directions in Scholarship

History Compass
Volume 3, Issue 1 (January 2005)
14 pages
DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2005.00156.x

Ben Vinson, III, Vice Dean for Centers, Interdepartmental Programs, and Graduate Programs
Johns Hopkins University

This article surveys the development of a relatively new and vibrant subfield in Latin American History, mapping out the major stages of its evolution and signaling key intellectual debates. While much of the scholarship on Afro-Mexican history has been produced in the last thirty-five years, this article aims to contextualize these writings within a broader historical framework. This process shows more clearly the various independent and interdependent tracks that exist within the study of Mexico’s black population.

Until very recently, the study of Mexico’s black population could not be categorized as forming any particular school of thought or intellectual inquiry. The impressionistic nature of the writings on blacks, which persisted even well into the 20th century, frequently worked to subordinate Afro-Mexican history to broader themes, such as nationalism, the economy, regional development, and general social conditions. Nevertheless, it is still possible to outline the evolution of historical scholarship on blacks in Mexico, extending back into the colonial period. What we discover is that in many ways, the discussion of blacks has followed the trajectory of the political development of the nation. Writings on Afro-Mexicans can be grouped into periods that correspond to (1) Mexico’s colonial and independence era (1521–1821); (2) the pre-revolutionary period (1822 –1910); and (3) the post-revolutionary period (1921 to current). Within these periods there is much nuance to account for, but by and large, they provide useful markers by which to evaluate the progression of the intellectual conversation on Mexico’s blackness.

In the colonial period, outside of the abundant ecclesiastical and government documentation that can still be found in the colonial archives, very few published works concentrated directly upon blacks. What survives comes mainly in three forms: traveler’s accounts, narrative accounts of the Conquest of Mexico, and political treatises. In terms of travelogues, the narratives of men such as Thomas Gage, Juan F. Gemelli Carreri, Fray Francisco de Ajofrín, and Alexander von Humbolt are revealing for the patterns of discourse that they uncover. By and large, their writings depict mulattos, pardos, and negros in a negative light, to the extent that they cite these populations as bearing a corrupting influence on the social development of the colonies. Meanwhile, the accounts of the Conquest, frequently referred to as the “chronicles,” represent a different, although related genre. More historically grounded, the writings of men such as Francisco López de Gomara (c. 1552), Bernal Díaz del Castillo (c. 1562), and Fray Diego Durán (c. 1580) make reference to the black military auxiliaries who accompanied the Spanish conquistadors. As can be imagined, blacks appear as ornaments to the main story, or as scapegoats and anti-heroes that complemented the dominant Spanish presence. Finally, in colonial political treatises, blacks make equally brief appearances in works discussing social conditions, military organization, and municipal control. Perhaps more than in the other types of texts however, the Afro-Mexican population appears less of a novelty, being discussed as an embedded element of colonial life. It is here where we find blacks becoming more tightly associated with the colony’s amorphous “plebeian” class…

…Debates about the worth of blacks took a slightly different course in the context of the Mexican Revolution. Indeed, the cultural landscape produced by this seminal event had a lasting effect on Afro-Mexican historiography. After the revolution, Mexico placed a heightened emphasis on the hybrid nature of its population to demonstrate the strength of its national character. But a certain type of hybrid phenotype was praised – the mestizo, or mixture of white and Indian. Blacks were literally written out of the national narrative. Excluding blacks from the national image was a process that was long in the making, but arguably, it was in the 1920s when the process had some of its strongest influences…

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Symphony in Black and White: Krazy Kat Kontinued

The Albany Times-Union
Albany, New York
2008-11-20

Alexander Stern

Don’t Touch My Comics: The Times Union Comics Panel takes a critical look at the funny pages.

Some months ago, I wrote an appreciation of George Herriman’s classic strip, Krazy Kat; a strip frequently lauded as one of the greatest achievements in the comics medium. Omitted from that article—whether by design or by accident—was a biographical detail that has become increasingly controversial in recent years. It concerns George Herriman’s racial background. While some might argue that such considerations should be irrelevent in art, it seems particularly pertinent in this specific time and place: It seems only fitting to note—here, in the year 2008—when a man with African heritage has just been elected to the highest office in the land—that Krazy Kat (arguably the greatest American comic strip) was authored by a man with a similar background. It is significant to note, however, that while the world celebrates the election and the history of Barack Obama, the world was never told the history of George Herriman during the artist’s lifetime.

Throughout his life, Herriman’s racial and ethnic background remained shrouded in mystery. His collegues weren’t sure exactly what the olive-complexioned Herriman was. Some of his friends and fellow cartoonists began referring to Herriman as “the Greek.” ”I didn’t know what he was, so I named him the Greek,” recalls cartoonist Tad Dorgan in Jeet Heer’s essay “The Kolors of Krazy Kat,” the introduction to A Wild Warmth of Chromatic Gravy – The Complete Full-Page Krazy and Ignatz: 1935-36 (published by Fantagraphics Books in 2005). Much was also made during Herriman’s life of his devotion to hats. Dorgan again: ”Like Chaplin with his cane, [Herriman] is never without his skimmer. [Cartoonist Harry] Hirshfeld says that he sleeps in it.” Indeed, Herriman was seldom photographed bare-headed. Some of his contemporaries claimed that Herriman “had a growth on the back of his skull. He referred to it as a ‘wen’ and was embarassed to expose it in public.” On the other hand, those candid photos that exist of a hatless Herriman reveal a man with short wavy hair. Herriman himself referred to his hair as “kinky.” Was his refusal to be publicly seen without a hat part of a concious desire for Herriman to “pass” for white?…

Read the entire article here.

Krazy Kat and Racial Identity

Graphic Novels: ENGL 375TT (Spring 2009)
University of Mary Wahsington
2009-02-01

Zach Whalen, Assistant Professor of English
University of Mary Washington

After doing some research on George Herriman, the writer and artist for Krazy Kat, I discovered that there has been a lot of critical analysis applied to this comic looking specifically at racial identity. There seems to be some uncertainty as to Herriman’s ethnicity—his parents were listed as “mulatto” in the 1880 census, his own birth certificate says “colored” but his death certificate says “caucasian.” From what I can tell, Herriman was a person of mixed races, but it seems that he chose to “pass” as white for much of his life. Apparently many have speculated that he wore a hat all the time to cover up his “kinky” hair, which he thought was the only identifiably “black” physical trait that he had…

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A measured freedom: national unity and racial containment in Winslow Homer’s The Cotton Pickers, 1876

The Mississippi Quarterly
Spring, 2002

Susanna W. Gold, Assistant Professor of Art
Tyler School of Art, Temple University

The Cotton Pickers Winslow Homer (United States, Massachusetts, Boston, 1836-1910) United States, 1876 Oil on canvas Canvas: 24 1/16 × 38 1/8 in. (61.12 × 96.84 cm) Frame: 35 1/4 × 49 1/2 × 4 in. (89.54 × 125.73 × 10.16 cm) Acquisition made possible through (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) Museum Trustees: Robert O. Anderson, R. Stanton Avery, B. Gerald Cantor, Edward W. Carter, Justin Dart, Charles E. Ducommun, Camilla Chandler Frost, Julian Ganz, Jr., Dr. Armand Hammer, Harry Lenart, Dr. Franklin D. Murphy, Mrs. Joan Palevsky, Richard E. Sherwood, Maynard J. Toll, and Hal B. Wallis (M.77.68)

After Traveling to Virginia during the Civil War as a field illustrator for the New York journal Harper’s Weekly, Winslow Homer returned to this area toward the end of the Reconstruction period to paint primarily around Richmond and Petersburg. Having abandoned his career as illustrator to devote himself exclusively to painting, Homer sketched outdoors near the shanties in black neighborhoods and wandered among the fields to find inspiration for several images of Southern black life that included his 1876 painting, The Cotton Pickers (Fig. 1).

Depicted are two young black women in the midst of a vast, seemingly endless field abounding in ripened snowy-white cotton bursting from its hulls and awaiting harvest The pair, rendered in robust and healthy proportion, stand engulfed in thigh-high cotton plants at the front of the picture plane and are the focus of the painting as they pause from their work picking cotton. Most scholarship on The Cotton Pickers interprets the artist’s rendering of Southern blacks as sympathetic, and perceives an optimistic future for the black situation under the new political and social structures following the Civil War. Public reception of The Cotton Pickers was favorable; the painting was purchased immediately at its first exhibition at New York’s Century Association in 1877, and a subsequent exhibition review claimed that “the freshest piece of figure painting that Mr. Winslow Homer has put his name to is his latest work, the Cotton Pickers, which provoked the admiration of the artists at the latest reception.” Noted art critic George W. Sheldon acknowledged Homer’s black genre works for their “total freedom from conventionalism and mannerism, in their strong look of life and in their sensitive feeling for character,” and the New York Times praised Homer as “one of the few artists who have the boldness and originality to make something of the Negro for artistic purposes.”

Among contemporary scholars, one author notes in his 1990 study of the history of the black image in American art, that Homer’s “sensitive recording of the uniqueness of individuality” in his black genre paintings “represents a high water mark in nineteenth-century artistic expression of African-American identity.” Another analysis praises The Cotton Pickers as a work that “stands apart from paintings of its period in the degree of grace and majesty it gives to its subjects” (Quick, p. 61), and yet a third study recognizes that “these black women seem larger than life and filled with strength and confidence in their ability to chart their own destinies” (Wood and Dalton, p. 97). Indeed, Homer seems to have been consistently admired for his ability to render the Southern black laborer with empathy and respectful sobriety in a world accustomed to regarding blacks as inferior…

…Emancipation may have destroyed the master-slave relationship, but the slaveholding ideologies remained intact up through the year of the Centennial.

The exploitation inherent in the forms of free labor in the postbellum South can be seen in the imagery of The Cotton Pickers. Because the vast expanse of land appears to be part of a large farm or plantation, the two figures are most likely common wage laborers rather than the more economically advantaged sharecroppers or landowners. Had the land been tenanted under the sharecropping system or owned by the laborers, we might expect to see a much smaller parcel of land spotted with cabins, garden plots, or other family members engaged in domestic work such as tending farm animals or collecting firewood. The age and gender of the figures represent the most profitable wage employee to the planter, as women and children received only one-half to two-thirds of the wages of men, and thus proved to be economically advantageous to planters who gained a greater profit from their labor.  As both wage earners and as young women, these figures would have been doubly exploited.

Homer depicts the extensive plantation completely full of cotton, as the entire field has yet to be worked. No progress from the women’s labor is visible, although the basket and sack are full. The fact that the end of the field is nowhere in sight suggests that the work can never be completed, that these women are trapped by the boundless field of cotton. As if to underscore this vision of entrapment, the cotton plants figuratively cut off the legs of the women, so that they are unable to move and escape from their situation. Like the labor system under which they work, this combination of pictorial elements that bind the women to the field suggests hopelessness in the place of tree emancipation.

The suggestion of a fruitless future for the black American is reinforced in the faces of the two young figures. Homer endows the women with traditional Caucasian features by painting them with light skin and slender facial bone structure. By representing the figures with a combination of both prototypical black and white physical characteristics, Homer portrays them as products of sexual mingling between the races. Although interracial cohabitation had been prevalent since the Colonial era, mulattos born in the period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries were often the result of sexual relations between white males of the planter class and their domestic slaves. Common almost to the point on institutionalization, wealthy Southern planters kept regular concubines and bred entire families of mixed-race children, the result being an unprecedented increase in mulatto slavery during the years 1850-60.  Based on the appearance of the two figures in Homer’s 1876 painting, their logical birth dates would fall near the height of interracial procreation, raising the distinct possibility that these women were fathered by the plantation owner.

The mixed-blood heritage of these women posed another problem in the progress of the black American. According to racial mythology advanced by the white population in response to the imagined threat to the purity of the white race, mulattos were doomed to biological eradication and could not reproduce beyond a few generations. Unable to sustain their heritage, the mulatto would be denied a place in America’s future, and the world of the powerless mixed-race individual was understood by whites to be one in which significant progressive change for the black situation could never occur.

Although Homer translates the limited progress of blacks toward a successful future in his painting by depicting the two young women as mulattos, the reality of the black situation in the Centennial decade proved quite a different situation. Precisely because many mulattos of the mid-nineteenth century were born to wealthy white fathers, they often received special treatment both within the black community and from their slaveholding relations. Planter fathers commonly provided property rights to their illegitimate mulatto children in their wills, and sometimes even granted their manumission. Protected by their masters-fathers, these children were customarily relieved from backbreaking field labor and given education and specialized training for favorable work assignments from carpentry or building and machine maintenance to dressmaking, cooking, and child care (Williamson, New People, p. 56). Respected for their highly ranking labor positions and esteemed for the valuable association with white blood, mulatto offspring of white planters generally enjoyed a privileged status on the plantation among the slaves (Williamson, After Slavery, p. 315)…

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Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age

Rowman & Littlefield
288 pages
August 1997
Size: 6 1/4 x 9 1/4
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8476-8447-2
eBook ISBN: 978-0-585-20172-6

Lewis R. Gordon, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and Director of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies
Temple University

Winner of the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America.

In this exploration of race and racism, noted scholar Lewis R. Gordon offers a critique of recent scholarship in postcolonial Africana philosophy and critical race theory, and suggests alternative models that respond to what he calls our contemporary neocolonial age; an age in which cultural, intellectual, and economic forms of colonial domination persist. Through essays that address popular culture, the academy, literature, and politics, Gordon unsettles the notion of race and exposes the complexity of antiblack racism. An important book for philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, cultural critics, and anyone concerned with the overt and subtle ways of injustice.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 Foreword
• Chapter 2 Introduction: Her Majesty’s Other Children
• Part 1
  • Chapter 3 Philosophy, Race, and Racism in a Neocolonial World
  • Chapter 4 Context: Ruminations on Violence and Anonymity
  • Chapter 5 Fanon, Philosophy, and Racism
  • Chapter 6 Race, Biraciality, and Mixed Race—in Theory
  • Chapter 7 Sex, Race, and Matrices of Desire in an Antiblack World
  • Chapter 8 Uses and Abuses of Blackness: Postmodernism, Conservatism, Ideology
  • Chapter 9 In a Black Antiblack Philosophy
  • Chapter 10 African Philosophy’s Search for Identity: Existential Considerations of a Recent Effort
• Part 2
  • Chapter 11 The Intellectuals
  • Chapter 12 Lorraine Hansberry’s Tragic Search for Postcoloniality: Les Blancs
  • Chapter 13 Tragic Intellectuals on the Neocolonial—Postcolonial Divide
  • Chapter 14 Exilic “Amateur” Speaking Truth to Power: Edward Said
  • Chapter 15 Black Intellectuals and Academic Activism: Cornel West’s “Dilemmas of the Black Intellectual.” Right-Wing Celebration, Left-Wing Nightmare: Thoughts on the Centennial of Plessy v. Ferguson
• Part 3
  • Chapter 16 Aisthesis Demokrate
  • Chapter 17 Sketches of Jazz
  • Chapter 18 Aesthetico-Political Reflections on the AMTRAK: Rap, Hip-Hop, and Isaac Julien’s Fanon along the Northeast Line
• Chapter 19 Epilogue: The Lion and the Spider (An Anticolonial Tale)

The “ethnology” of Josiah Clark Nott

Journal of Urban Health
Volume 50, Number 4 (April 1974)
pages 509–528.

C. Loring Brace, Ph.D.
Museum of Anthropology
University of Michigan

It is only rarely that a person so completely transcends the ethos of his age that the recorded results of his scientific endeavors can be read a century or more later with any real profit, and apart from the desire to gain some historical perspective on the time in question. Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein, among others, can still be read with instruction, not so much for their conclusions, but for the methods by which these were reached. This is because the conclusions, while now taken for granted, are no more intuitively obvious today than when they were first advanced.

Except for the rare transcending genius, the best minds of an age tend to typify the thinking of the time rather than to advance it. It is no surprise, then, to discover that the ablest figures in the American South prior to the Civil War, including Josiah Clark Nott, were unanimous in the defense of their “peculiar institution,” slavery. Although educated Southerners were unanimous in their defense of slavery, they diverged widely in their justification for doing so. As the 19th century progressed, two camps emerged which were engaged in vigorous, prolonged, and often acerbic debate at the time the Civil War broke out. Both sides took it as self-evident that Negroes were inferior and slavery justified, but they differed in their attempts to explain how racial differences arose in the first place.

The issue, at bottom, involved the relation between scientific and historical reality, and the written accounts in the Protestant Bible. On the one side it was argued that the words in the Bible were inspired by God and must therefore be literally true-all men, black and white, slave and free, were the descendants of Adam and Eve. On the other, the argument suggested that the inspiration in Holy Writ was largely moral and that the geographic and scientific information reflected the human fallibility and ignorance of the human authors. Neither side questioned the rectitude of a world view dominated by Protestant Christianity; both declared that, by definition, the basic teachings of science and religion must be in agreement. However, since there were apparent discrepancies between the views of the two realms, disputes arose over which should bend to accommodate the other…

…On August 12, 1845, Nott wrote to his friend John Henry Hammond, governor of South Carolina, that “the negro question was the one that I wished to bring out and embalmed it in Egyptian ethnography, etc., to excite a little more interest.”‘ He was referring specifically to his second published foray into the realm of “anthropology,” which had appeared just the year before and which set the tone and the dimensions of everything he was to write in an anthropological vein for the next 20 years. Once started, his involvement snowballed. As he wrote Hammond in a subsequent letter, September 4, 1845, “the nigger business has brought me into a large and heterogeneous correspondence,” and he declared his intention “to follow out the Negro, moral and physical in all his ramifications.”

Nott’s first anthropological contribution, entitled “The Mulatto a Hybrid-Probable Extermination of the Two Races If the Whites and Blacks Are Allowed to Intermarry,” was published in i843 in the highly respectable American Journal of the Medical Sciences.’ In this article, Nott became the first American public figure to declare that whites and blacks belonged to separate species of the genus Homo. As he stated, “this I do believe, that at the present day the Anglo-Saxon and Negro races are, according to common acceptation of the terms, distinct species, and that the offspring of the two is a Hybrid” (italics Nott’s) . To support this conclusion he reprinted figures from a paper that had appeared the year before in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, written by an anonymous author who signed himself Philanthropist.

The figures purported to show that the life spans of mulattoes are the shortest of any kind of human population, indicating that in the long run they were destined for eventual extinction. While it was not so acknowledged, the data on which these conclusions were based originally came from the census of  1840, which was filled with unverifiable claims and gross errors and slanted in a blatantly proslavery manner. Nott could hardly have been ignorant of the problems associated with the data of the census since these had been exposed in the very same Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, but he used them anyway without apology or qualification. In this instance, as in many others in his “anthropological” career, it is clear that the lip-service he gave to science was mainly camouflage to cover the racist advocacy that lay beneath.

Despite the weakness in his case, Nott’s hybridity argument drew favorable notice from Morton and helped enlist the latter in the ensuing debate. The ostensible issue was the criterion for the establishment of valid species. If members of different populations either could not crossbreed or, having done so, could only produce offspring that were sterile or of reduced viability and fertility, then the populations could be considered as different biological species. All agreed that the failure to crossbreed or the production of sterile offspring-the mule, for example-indicated a valid specific difference. The argument concerned the evidence for cases of reduced viability and fertility. In Mobile, Ala., Nott lacked the library resources as well as the time and inclination to pursue the matter beyond its initial stages. Morton, however, had the inclination; he also had the collections of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. He had just completed the second of his two principal contributions to anthropological research, his Crania Aegyptiaca, in which he had demonstrated that the physical characteristics of Caucasian and Negro populations were just as distinct in ancient Egypt as they are today. With the dates of Egyptian antiquity established by the follow-up of Champollion’s translation of the Rosetta stone, and with a concept of the antiquity of human existence assumed to be on the order of those appended to the English Bible by Archbishop Ussher, Morton felt that human racial distinctions must have existed “in the beginning. Realizing that such an opinion was likely to stir up controversy, Morton was diffident about advancing it, but he finally did so with qualified caution in his defence and expansion of Nott’s hybridity position…

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