Mixed Race Studies

Brit Bennett Reimagines the Literature of Passing

The New Yorker
2020-06-15

Sarah Resnick

Photograph by Miranda Barnes for The New Yorker

In her second novel, the author uses a familiar genre to explore startling visions of selfhood.

In “The Vanishing Half,” the story of two sisters divided by the color line yields new models of identity and authenticity.

In 1954, a pair of identical twins—creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair—flee a small town in Louisiana and the narrow future it affords: nothing but more of the same. Desiree and Stella Vignes are sixteen and headed to New Orleans. They scrape by for a while, and eventually Stella applies for a position as a secretary at a fancy department store, a job only white girls get. She doesn’t mention she’s black, and no one asks. She’s apprehensive—has she done something wrong?—but her sister is adamant: why should the two of them starve “when Stella, perfectly capable of typing, became unfit as soon as anyone learned that she was colored?” Stella gets the job. Every morning, on the ride to the office, she transforms into her double, Miss Vignes—“White Stella,” as Desiree calls her—and every night she undergoes the process in reverse. It’s “a performance where there could be no audience. Only a person who knew her real identity would appreciate her acting, and nobody at work could ever know.” For a while, the twins are brought together by the joint pleasure of pulling off the performance. But gradually the gap between them widens: “Desiree could never meet Miss Vignes. Stella could only be her when Desiree was not around.” One day, Stella disappears, leaving her sister a note: “Sorry honey, but I’ve got to go my own way.”

“The Vanishing Half” (Riverhead), the second novel by Brit Bennett, tells the story of the Vignes sisters’ diverging paths. In doing so, it belongs to a long tradition of literature about racial passing. From the antebellum period until the end of Jim Crow, countless black Americans crossed the color line to pass as white—to escape slavery or threats of racial violence, or to gain access to the social, political, and economic benefits conferred by whiteness. Narratives that dramatized this passage became a fixture of popular fiction, written by black and white, male and female authors alike. Charles W. Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen wrote about it, as did William Dean Howells and Kate Chopin. “Imitation of Life,” the 1933 novel by Fannie Hurst, was twice made into a movie (in 1934, by John M. Stahl, and in 1959, by Douglas Sirk). These stories repeat some version of a generic arc: the “tragic mulatto,” often a woman, chooses to leave home and pass for white; in time, anguished by the betrayal of her black identity, she returns to her family, only to be met with a harsh fate—sometimes death…

Read the entire article here.

‘Complicating my place:’ multiracial women faculty navigating monocentricity in higher education––a polyethnography

Race Ethnicity and Education
Published online: 2020-04-23
DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2020.1753679

Kelly F. Jackson, Associate Professor of Social Work
Arizona State University

Dana J. Stone, Associate Professor of Educational Psychology and Counseling
California State University, Northridge

E. Namisi Chilungu, Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychology
Georgia State University

Jillian Carter Ford, Associate Professor of Social Studies Education
Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia

This polyethnography is an interdisciplinary collaboration between four multiracial women faculty employed at different universities across the US to examine their experiences navigating monocentricity in higher education. This insightful study amplifies the voices of a particular subset of women of color faculty who identify multiracially – a group overlooked in existing literature examining diverse faculty experiences in higher education. Utilizing Multiracial Critical Race Theory (MultiCrit), we reflex on the similarities and nuances that exist within and between our written stories of experience. Conjointly, our critical reflections reveal the prevalence of monoracism within institutions of higher education, which places both internal and external pressures on multiracial women faculty to demarcate themselves monoracially, while simultaneously maintaining a clandestine borderland identity within their departments. Implications for this study reveal the importance of multiracial counterspaces for multiracial faculty as a form of resistance against monocentricity in US institutions of higher education.

Read or purchase the article here.

How Should I Think About Race When Considering a Sperm Donor?

The Ethicist
The New York Times Magazine
2020-06-16

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor of Philosophy, Law
New York University

Illustration by Tomi Um

I am an American woman, of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, and I strive to live my life as an active agent against racism and white supremacy. I am beginning to consider having children and am open to bearing a child as a single mother. It is possible to sort through sperm donors by race, eye color, education level and so on. If I choose a donor of color, am I condemning my child to be born into a system designed not to serve them? Or can I use my white privilege to help them fight that system? Would my future child of color feel separated from their heritage with me as their mother? If I choose a white donor, am I succumbing to racist ideas of what traits are “desirable,” or taking the “easy road” in knowing my child will look more like me? What do you think? Name Withheld

Women have been making choices about their children’s possible appearance and identity from the beginning of human history. Long before genetics, people knew that parental characteristics show up in their offspring. With modern technologies, the prospects for trying to fix your child’s heritable characteristics are expanding, raising plenty of ethical issues. Race, however, is not a biological fact but a social fact — a social fact that, for example, Americans who are known to have African ancestry are regarded as African-American. What’s more, having an African-American donor doesn’t tell you what your child’s skin or hair will look like. You can be socially black without looking black, like Walter White, the longtime head of the N.A.A.C.P.

I’m spelling all this out because your question about having a child with a sperm donor of color presupposes that it will produce a child who won’t look “white,” and that’s not necessarily the case. Suppose you have a white-looking son with an African-American sperm donor. Then you and your child will have a choice to make about whether he or she should identify as African-American. Some people think that failing to do so — “passing for white” — is somehow dishonest. Yet to hold that you must identify as black in those circumstances would be to accede to a longstanding American notion (“the one-drop rule”) that one black ancestor makes you black. You could reasonably reject that notion, which is rooted in the history of slavery and the nonsensical racial theories that grew up with it…

Read the entire article here.

My Wife Is Black. My Son Is Biracial. But White Supremacy Lives Inside Me

Cognoscenti
WBUR
Boston, Massachusetts
2020-06-22

Calvin Hennick

The author and his son (Courtesy)

My son is 9 years old. He’s big and beautiful and biracial, and although my wife and I have always known we would need to prepare him to face racism, we’ve never talked to him or his little sister about police violence against Black people. Not until now.

He wept when we told him about George Floyd. His voice shaking, he asked whether the same thing would one day happen to him.

My wife and I told him to draw about his feelings, and what he brought back to us broke both our hearts. In pen, he’d drawn a white police officer standing in front of a cruiser, holding up a smoking gun and looking down at an unseen corpse. My son had written the words “Killed Me,” with an arrow pointing down at his own body, lying lifeless just outside the frame of the page.

There’s nothing my son can do to prevent this nightmare from becoming a reality. There’s nothing he can do to change the way the world will see him when he grows into a tall, broad-shouldered Black man.

To protect my son, and every other Black boy and girl in America, white people must change the way our own eyes see the world. We must do the work of stamping out white supremacy where it lives: in our systems, and in ourselves…

Read the entire article here.

As a White Mom to Black Children, I Question Other Parents’ Intentions 24/7

Working Mother
2020-06-12

Audrey Goodson Kingo, Deputy Editor

I must protect my 4-year-old son and 9-month-old daughter.

To be a good mom to my kids, I must be their fiercest advocate at all times, because the world won’t be.

I remember my biggest parenting mistake with perfect clarity. The shame still turns my stomach when I recall the moment I sided with white parents, who look like me, instead of my Black son…

Read the entire article here.

Comfortable in My Own Skin

Sojourners
January 2020

Maika Llaneza
New Orleans, Louisiana

My theology says brown skin is beautiful, but my Pinterest page said otherwise.

MY EXPERIENCE BEING color-shamed began when I was 5 years old and still living in the Philippines. My mom and aunts often told me that I could be mistaken for “the maid’s daughter,” due to my darker brown skin. Even at a young age, I understood it was intended as an insult.

As I grew up, billboards, films, television shows, and magazines bombarded me with images of white Americans and Filipinas with white facial features. Mestiza Filipina models and actresses—celebrities admired by young girls like me—advertised skin-whitening products.

Color-shaming by other Filipinas continued after I moved to the United States at age 7. My mom, titas (aunts or older women), and lolas (grandmothers or elderly women) told me to “stay away from the sun” and “try not to get so dark.” They told me I would look even prettier if I had lighter skin…

Read the entire article here.

Afro-Mexican Women in Saint-Domingue: Piracy, Captivity, and Community in the 1680s and 1690s

Hispanic American Historical Review
Volume 100, Issue 1 (2020-02-01)
pages 3-34
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-7993067

Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, Assistant Professor of History
University of Rochester, Rochester, New York

This article focuses on the experiences of women of African descent who were made captives (and, in some cases, recaptives) after the 1683 buccaneer raid on Veracruz, the most important port in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (colonial Mexico). Although the raid is well known to historians of piracy, its implications for women’s history and African diaspora studies have not been properly contextualized in a period of expanding Atlantic slavery. This article proposes a close reading of contraband cases, parochial registers, slave codes, and eyewitness accounts centered on Afro-Mexican women who were kidnapped to Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti). A focus on displacement and resilience opens new narratives through which to understand women who transcended their captivity by becoming spouses to French colonists and free mothers to Saint-Domingue’s gens de couleur (people of mixed race).

Read or purchase the article here.

The Confederate Flag Didn’t Bother Bubba Wallace. Until It Did.

The New York Times
2020-06-19

Juliet Macur

Barry Cantrell

The only black driver in NASCAR’s top tier, he has emerged as an impassioned activist who got the flag banned at races in the largely white sport after years of putting up with it.

Darrell “Bubba” Wallace Jr., the only black driver in NASCAR’s top racing series, has drawn widespread attention and acclaim for his principled stand that got the Confederate flag banned from races in a largely white sport.

Yet, after years of often quiet acceptance of the sport’s “racist label,” as he put it, nobody was more surprised than his mother that he had become a central figure in the sports world’s upheaval regarding race.

“I was shocked,” his mother, Desiree Wallace, said in a telephone interview. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, is this my son? The one who doesn’t really care about anything but getting in the car and driving?’ I’m tripping that he’s gone from being a racecar driver to becoming a daggone activist. Who does that? Not Bubba.”

Yet a series of events, particularly the killing of a black man, Ahmaud Arbery, while he was jogging in a predominantly white neighborhood in Georgia, flipped a switch in Wallace, he and those who know him said…

Read the entire article here.

Revisiting The Pioneering Composer Florence Price

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2019-01-21

Tom Huizenga, Music Producer

Florence Price was the first African-American woman to have her music performed by a major symphony orchestra. Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries

In 1933, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra gave the world premiere of Symphony No. 1 by a then little-known composer named Florence Price. The performance marked the first time a major orchestra played music by an African-American woman.

Price’s First Symphony, along with her Fourth, has just been released on an album featuring the Fort Smith Symphony, conducted by John Jeter.

Fans of Price, especially in the African-American community, may argue that her music has never really been forgotten. But some of it has been lost. Not long ago, a couple bought a fixer-upper, south of Chicago, and discovered nearly 30 boxes of manuscripts and papers. Among the discoveries in what turned out to be Price’s abandoned summer home was her Fourth Symphony, composed in 1945. This world-premiere recording is another new piece of the puzzle to understanding the life and music of Price, and a particular time in America’s cultural history.

Read the story here. Listen to the story (00:04:00) here.

Rebecca Hall Talks Complicated Notions Of Bi-Racial Identity In Directorial Debut ‘Passing,’ ‘Tales From The Loop’ & More [Deep Focus Podcast]

The Playlist
2020-06-10

Rodrigo Perez

Actor Rebecca Hall comes from a unique and interesting pedigree and lineage. There’s the surface element of that pedigree which could be seen as aristocratic privilege in the world of the arts. She is the daughter of the famous theatre director Sir Peter Hall (who passed away in 2017) and her mother is the legendary opera singer and stage actress Maria Ewing. Hall attended Cambridge University’s constitute school, St Catharine’s College, studied English, and eventually found her way back to acting after some time briefly spent as an actor during childhood.

Known for an eclectic career that took off after an early breakthrough performance in Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige,” Hall’s also appeared in such movies as “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” “Frost/Nixon,” Nicole Holofcener’s “Please Give,” Ben Affleck’s “The Town,” Joel Edgerton’s “The Gift,” and Antonio Campos’ striking indie “Christine” which brought her much extra acclaim to an already celebrated career.

But her personal identity, or at least the one of her parents, is much different. Hall’s mother is from Detroit, Michigan—perhaps an unlikely place as any to birth an opera singer—and bi-racial with African American and Dutch ancestry. Her grandfather was also bi-racial and to hear Hall tell it, both of them had a very complicated and complex struggle with their identity and how they appeared to others in the world.

This struggle, this question of identity and who you pass as in the world is something Hall tries to reckon with in “Passing,” her upcoming directorial debut which probably couldn’t be more timely. An adaption written by Hall as well, and something she’d been hoping to make for years, “Passing” is based on Nella Larsen’s 1920s Harlem Renaissance novel of the same name that explores the practice of racial passing, a term used for a person classified as a member of one racial group who seeks to be accepted by a different racial group. The film stars Tessa Thompson and Oscar nominee Ruth Negga as two reunited high school friends, whose renewed acquaintance ignites a mutual obsession that threatens both of their carefully constructed realities.

In this latest episode of our Deep Focus Podcast, Hall discussed “Passing” at length, including the ideas of permission and permits needed to try and tell these kinds of stories and the charges of cultural appropriation that can be lobbied at one when making them. But her original statement of intent is perhaps most succinct and eloquent when she said: “I came across [Passing] at a time when I was trying to reckon creatively with some of my personal family history, and the mystery surrounding my bi-racial grandfather on my American mother’s side. In part, making this film is an exploration of that history, to which I’ve never really had access.”

At the time, she described “Passing” as an astonishing book “about two women struggling not just with what it meant to be Black in America in 1929, but with gender conventions, the performance of femininity, the institution of marriage, the responsibilities of motherhood, and the ways in which all of those forces intersect.”…

Read the entire article and listen to the podcast (01:04:15) here.