Mixed Race Studies

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life by Allyson Hobbs (review) [Cutter]

African American Review
Volume 48, Number 3, Fall 2015
pages 381-383

Martha J. Cutter, Professor of English and Africana Studies
University of Connecticut

Hobbs, Allyson, A Chosen Exile: History of Racial Passing in American Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014)

The historian Allyson Hobbs opens her book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life with an anecdote about a young child living on Chicago’s South Side in the late 1930s who is light enough to pass for white. Her parents (who are also light enough to pass) make the heart-wrenching decision to send her to live as a white person in Los Angeles, without them. She cries, pleads, and begs to stay with her parents, but they are adamant. Many years later when the father is dying the mother calls home the daughter, now a young woman who has married a white man and has had white children, but she refuses to return. This incident—sourced as “one of my family’s stories” (4)—seems an unusual way to begin a book titled A Chosen Exile, for the young girl’s exile is not chosen by any means. It is also a curiously ambiguous story. We may wonder (for example) why the parents do not go with the child, whether she has relatives in California to whom she is sent, and what age she is when this event occurs. This tantalizing story leaves a reader with more questions than it answers, and it belies the richness of Hobbs’s work in the book as a whole. Hobbs does not use this anecdote to elucidate some of the mysteries around passing or the difficulty of excavating the history of the racial passer, who disappears into whiteness. Instead, the story is deployed in support of the central argument of her book—that “racial passing is an exile” (4) and “the core issue of passing is not becoming what you pass for, but losing what you pass away from” (18). But how can we know that passing is “losing what you pass away from” based on this anecdote? In Hobbs’s book, the young girl is never heard from again. Perhaps she found freedom in her whiteness, or perhaps not. She might have had a permanent sense of exile, but this is never elucidated.

The use of this anecdote reflects a systemic flaw in Hobbs’s otherwise powerful and eloquent book. Her source material often opens up in provocative ways the can of worms that is racial passing, but then she sometimes forces those messy, squiggly worms back into a single “can”—the frame of family loss and exile. Hobbs makes the dubious claim that “historians and literary scholars have paid far more attention to what was gained by passing as white rather than to what was lost by rejecting a black racial identity” (11). To counter this tendency, she mines historical sources on passing “to discover a coherent and enduring narrative of loss” (24). At various points, she does acknowledge the shifting meaning of racial passing; for example, she states that “to pass as white varied and cannot be collapsed into a singular narrative” (15) and that “passing was by no means a static practice” (25). By the end of the book, her argument evolves into a more nuanced one: “Loss was a prerequisite of passing. But the losses that passing demanded were not all the same for those who passed. … For some, [passing] was undoubtedly a bitter bargain. But for others, the connection with oneself and one’s past had been lost long ago” (230). Hobbs here articulates some of the plural possibilities of passing—the way it can come to mean both conscription to a certain racial ideology and liberation from this very same ideology at one and the same time.

Hobbs’s book might have put forward from its start, then, a slightly more nuanced overarching framework. But in many ways this book is a very valuable resource for scholars interested in the history of passing, as well as students who may need a broad overview of the phenomenon. It examines the more-than-250-year history of passing in the United States, reaching back to the time of the American Revolution and forward to our current so-called “mulatto millennium,” or “Generation E.A.”—“ethnically ambiguous” (276). Most unique about the book is the wealth of source materials (much of which is…

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The Racial Discrimination Embedded in Modern Medicine

Newsweek
2015-10-20

Lindsey Konkel

Minutes separated Are’Yana Hill from death as she struggled to breathe in the hallway of her San Francisco high school. The 18-year-old had lived with asthma attacks since before she could talk, and on that day, in April 2014, she could not speak. She thrust the rescue inhaler she carried in her backpack between her lips and inhaled. No relief. It felt, she thought, as if a charley horse had formed in her chest, knotting her lungs—each gasp trammeled by tightening airways. Her pursed lips turned gray, and all she could think about was her unborn baby. Hill, eight months pregnant, clutched her inhaler and prayed for paramedics to arrive.

“I take my medicine every day. I do everything the doctors tell me. I’ve tried every single thing, and I still have attacks,” Hill said a little more than a year later, as a nurse at San Francisco General Hospital’s Asthma Clinic placed a stethoscope on her back, between her shoulders. Her wheezing was barely audible. Each expiration sounded like the whistle of a distant tea kettle.

The attack in 2014 put Hill in the hospital. Asthma attack patients in the emergency room are often given oxygen and albuterol or other medications to relax the airways through a nebulizer mask. These treatments typically last a couple of hours, but Hill’s airways weren’t opening. She breathed through a nebulizer continuously for a week while the doctors closely monitored her pregnancy. Hill has brittle asthma—severe and unpredictable attacks that are poorly controlled, even with medication. Two weeks after she left the hospital, her son was born, healthy. Others are not as lucky…

…In the U.S. medical community, studying racial differences in disease susceptibility and response to treatments remains controversial. Race and ethnicity are social constructs that have been used to marginalize and exploit. Scientifically, race serves only as a crude proxy for what experts call genetic ancestry—the diverse signatures that arose in the genetic code as our ancestors traversed the globe.

Some experts worry that a focus on finding genetic differences obscures the need to address the socioeconomic disparities that lead to uneven access to health care in the U.S. “Focusing on inclusion in clinical trials is a great way to ignore the fact that large numbers of poor and minority people are getting less than optimal health care,” says Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society.

Yet because of its social baggage, race remains a powerful tool for studying patterns of disease and health, according to Sam Oh, an epidemiologist in Burchard’s laboratory at UCSF. A person’s self-identified race or ethnicity can offer important clues beyond genetic ancestry about important cultural, socioeconomic and environmental factors that may influence disease risk…

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Hold Fast to Blackness

Medium
2015-07-29

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy; Core Faculty Member in Women’s Studies
University of New Hampshire

Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, Nederland

This is not another essay about how hard it is to be light skinned in a dark man’s world. Why? Because the suggestion that this is a dark man’s world is ridiculous. Unless you’ve had your head up your butt, we quite clearly do not live in a version of the universe where overall it is better to be dark. The reality is that 2Pac was speaking in opposition to mainstream logic when he rapped, “the darker the berry, the sweeter the juice. I say the darker the flesh, the deeper the roots.”

I’m sure there are many light skinned people including those with bi- and multiracial/ethnic families who would complain that 2Pac spoke words of erasure. But to make this complaint is to not acknowledge, plainly, that in fact he is speaking against erasure. To be light skinned, in reality, is to have a choice about what role we play in this process, for or against, constructive or destructive.

I have a Black Caribbean momma and a white Jewish father. My mom’s family hails from Barbados, vaguely of “West African Origin.” We don’t really know where or if maybe we come from somewhere else because identity and language are one of the many things European slave traders and slave owners stole from kidnapped Africans and their descendents. My dad’s family was chased out of the Ukraine and Russia by anti-Jewish pogroms and were Yiddish speaking until it became clear that looking like them and being English speaking was better.

When I was born, my parents were scared to introduce me to my dad’s maternal grandfather. It wasn’t clear whether he would accept a “nigger baby.” This is the first story I know of that clearly delineates the difference between my white father and me. My white father lives in the tent of whiteness: he is accepted as white and is treated as such on the street, in airports, by the police, by shop clerks, by everyone who speaks to and everyone who sees him. My dad lives in a version of the world where who he is is the default and where no one ever had to ask whether he would be excluded by members of his family simply because of his skin color.

It is true that my father has a different experience with the tent of whiteness than his father did in his early years. Born in 1917 in Yiddish-speaking Brooklyn, my Grandpa Norman would have been a dirty Jew to many white non-Jews. But when he died in 1988 Los Angeles, my Grandpa was white with the rest of them. The tent of whiteness expands as people sufficiently European-looking become broadly accepted as, “not-Black, not heading toward Black or any of the other darker kinds.” This expansion is predicated somewhat on the fundamental belief that the darker people are, the more dangerous, deficient and less human they are.

I am dark enough to not live within the tent of whiteness, but I am light enough that many people experience significant confusion when trying to class what level of “not-white, maybe heading toward-Black, deficient” I am. Depending on the year and location, I am a “dirty Arab/Muslim,” a fellow Latina, a Mulatto, a Mizrahi Jew, a half-white person who suspiciously may not be down with Black folks…

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Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears

Smithsonian Magazine
November 2015

Edward Ball, Lecturer in English
Yale University

A coffle of slaves being marched from Virginia west into Tennessee, c. 1850. (Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia)

Edward Ball is the author of five books of nonfiction and a lecturer in English at Yale University. His book, Slaves in the Family (1998) won the National Book Award and was a New York Times bestseller.

America’s forgotten migration – the journeys of a million African-Americans from the tobacco South to the cotton South

When Delores McQuinn was growing up, her father told her a story about a search for the family’s roots.

He said his own father knew the name of the people who had enslaved their family in Virginia, knew where they lived—in the same house and on the same land—in Hanover County, among the rumpled hills north of Richmond.

“My grandfather went to the folks who had owned our family and asked, ‘Do you have any documentation about our history during the slave days? We would like to see it, if possible.’ The man at the door, who I have to assume was from the slaveholding side, said, ‘Sure, we’ll give it to you.’

“The man went into his house and came back out with some papers in his hands. Now, whether the papers were trivial or actual plantation records, who knows? But he stood in the door, in front of my grandfather, and lit a match to the papers. ‘You want your history?’ he said. ‘Here it is.’ Watching the things burn. ‘Take the ashes and get off my land.’…

…New Orleans, the biggest slave market in the country, had about 50 people-selling companies in the 1840s. Some whites went to the slave auctions for entertainment. Especially for travelers, the markets were a rival to the French Opera House and the Théâtre d’Orléans.

Today in New Orleans, the number of monuments, markers and historic sites that refer in some way to the domestic slave trade is quite small. I make a first estimate: zero.

“No, that’s not true,” says Erin Greenwald, a curator at the Historic New Orleans Collection. “There is one marker on a wall outside a restaurant called Maspero’s. But what it says is wrong. The slave-trade site it mentions, Maspero’s Exchange, was diagonally across the street from the sandwich place.”…

…Developing the exhibit, Greenwald and her team created a database of names of the enslaved who were shipped from the Eastern states to New Orleans. William Waller and his gang, and other hundreds of thousands arriving by foot, did not leave traces in government records. But people who arrived by ship did.

“We studied hundreds of shipping manifests and compiled data on 70,000 individuals. Of course, that is only some.”

In 1820, the number of ships carrying slaves from Eastern ports into New Orleans was 604. In 1827, it was 1,359. In 1835, it was 4,723. Each carried 5 to 50 slaves.

The auction advertisements at the end of the Slave Trail always said, “Virginia and Maryland Negroes.”

“The words ‘Virginia Negroes’ signaled a kind of brand,” Greenwald says. “It meant compliant, gentle and not broken by overwork.

“One thing that is hard to document but impossible to ignore is the ‘fancy trade.’ New Orleans had a niche market. The ‘fancy trade’ meant women sold as forcible sex partners. They were women of mixed race, invariably. So-called mulatresses.”

Isaac Franklin was all over this market. In 1833, he wrote the office back in Virginia about “fancy girls” he had on hand, and about one in particular whom he wanted. “I sold your fancy girl Alice for $800,” Franklin wrote to Rice Ballard, a partner then in Richmond. “There is great demand for fancy maids, [but] I was disappointed in not finding your Charlottes­ville maid that you promised me.” Franklin told the Virginia office to send the “Charlottesville maid” right away by ship. “Will you send her out or shall I charge you $1,100 for her?”

To maximize her price, Franklin might have sold the “Charlottesville maid” at one of the public auctions in the city. “And the auction setting of choice was a place called the St. Louis Hotel,” Greenwald says, “a block from here.”…

Read the entire article here.

New Film Shows Misty Copeland’s Journey as a Black Ballerina

NBC News
2015-09-30

Maya Chung

The 2015 Urbanworld Festival closed out on Saturday night with the highly anticipated documentary “A Ballerina’s Tale,” which details Misty Copeland’s journey to become a principal ballerina.

The film festival, founded in 1997, is a five-day event that showcases narrative features, documentaries, short films, and spotlight screenings with the goal of redefining and advancing the impact of the multicultural community in the film world.

“A Ballerina’s Tale” is one film that is making that impact. The documentary gives an in-depth picture of Copeland’s struggles with being black in a predominantly white Ballet world and it chronicles her experience recovering from a leg fracture – one that could’ve stopped her dream of becoming a principal dancer…

…Copeland, 33, beat the odds and became the American Ballet Theatre’s first black female principal dancer in the company’s 75-year history this past June. But, it wasn’t easy and the film makes that clear. She explained that she struggled being a black dancer when she first began in the professional ballet world.

“I’ve never strayed away from being black. I’m biracial but something that my mom constantly said to me growing up in southern California was ‘Yes, you are Italian, you are German, and you are black, but you are going to be viewed by the world as a black woman’,” Copeland said. “I never felt different growing up but when I came into the ballet world as a professional I immediately felt different.”…

Read the entire interview here.

New ‘Hysterical’ Web Series Explores Single Life for 40-Something Women of Color

Chic Rebellion
2015-10-01

Elayne Fluker, Chief Executive Officer

“You know, marriage is hard. I’m not always happy–the shit gets hard.” So goes a line by Rain Pryor to actress Esther Friedman in Friedman’s new web series, Hysterical Historical Hillary–which screens at the Bushwick Film Festival on Saturday, October 3, 2015 in Brooklyn, New York. Friedman plays Hillary, a 40-something woman longing for love in New York City. Having had a successful web series on FunnyorDie.com in 2008 and a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2014 that raised $8430, the New York native teamed up with her sixteen-year-old brother Sam Friedman, already an award winning filmmaker, to tell stories of what they call “the not-so-hot topics of human experiences.” And as any singleton in New York knows that if dating in the Big Apple is anything it is certainly an experience!

ChicRebellion.TV caught up with Friedman to chat about meaning of the phrase “hysterical historical, her personal connection to Hillary, if web series have helped even the playing field for women of color who have a story to tell, and why she chose the path less traveled when deciding how to distribute her work…

Read the entire interview here.

Korla Pandit — Disguising identity: From Black to Indian

Northwest Asian Weekly
Seattle, Washington
Volume 34, Number 43 (October 17 – October 23, 2015)
2015-10-16

Andrew Hamlin

Korla Pandit

Two hands hold a large censer. A voice speaks of wisdom and rubies. A deep, slightly scraggly voice. The action fades-in to a man in a turban with a jewel mounted between his eyes. Fixing his eyes upon the camera, Korla Pandit begins his act.

And his act was the Hammond Organ, augmented with a Steinway piano to his right. Playing mostly organ, occasionally piano, sometimes one with each hand, Pandit played for fifteen minutes on Los Angeles’ KTLA-TV from 1949 until 1951. He did not rock and roll and he did not get down and dirty with the blues, but he flitted easily between all other types of music, playing popular tunes, show tunes, traditional, and ethnic music from around the world. He was one of the first television stars, but he never spoke on camera. The narrator off-screen was someone else.

And Korla Pandit had reason to never speak. Speaking might have given away his secret…

Read the entire article here.

Regulating Mixed Marriages through Acquisition and Loss of Citizenship

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Volume 662, Number 1, November 2015
pages 170-187
DOI: 10.1177/0002716215595390

Betty de Hart, Professor of Law
Radboud University, The Netherlands

Mixed marriages have always had an ambiguous and often problematic relationship with the law. On one hand, mixed marriages have been seen as a key indicator of sociocultural integration into mainstream society. In terms of the law, this perception has been expressed, for example, as privileged access to citizenship status for immigrant family members of citizens. On the other hand, mixed marriages have been seen as a threat to society and social cohesion. In this article, I argue that these contradictory perceptions of mixed relationships have informed the development of citizenship law over time. Building on literature on the regulation of mixed marriages in law, as well as gender and citizenship law, I use the Netherlands as a case study to demonstrate how citizenship law has been used as a tool to prevent certain types of “undesirable” mixed couples and how this approach has informed Dutch citizenship law until today.

Read or purchase the article here.

Diversity and cohesion in Britain’s most mixed community

Financial Times
2015-10-14

John McDermott

At the Barking Road Community Centre in Plaistow, dancers sway and twirl to calypso beats. If the music hints at the centre’s past as an Afro-Caribbean club, the mix of elderly boppers suggest how the composition of this pocket of east London is changing. As well as women with Nigerian and Jamaican heritage, there are those with roots in India, Pakistan, Colombia, Poland and the Philippines. They show why Plaistow is the clearest example of what researchers describe as London’s “super-diversity”.

“If London is the most diverse city in the world, and Plaistow is the most diverse part of the city, Plaistow might be the most diverse place in the world,” says Forhad Hussain, a local councillor. When Hussain came to the area in 1983 with his Bangladeshi-born parents, this part of the city was mostly white and working-class, home to dockers and their families who had stayed put as Plaistow was rebuilt after the devastation wrought by the Blitz…

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Race Correction and Inequalities in Medicine

ANTH 1310 S01: International Health: Anthropological Perspectives
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
2015-10-02

Methma Udawatta

The history of medicine is fraught with unnecessary racialization. In “The Diseased Heart of Africa: Medicine, Colonialism, and the Black Body,” Comaroff writes about how the black body became “associated with degradation, disease, and contagion” and how colonial medicine “link[ed] racial intercourse with the origin of sickness.” These overtly racist ideas have decreased in influence over time. However, even today, the remainders of these ideas still manifest themselves in racial inequalities in treatment and access to medical resources, and in the general racialization of medicine, both in the U.S. and around the world.

Smedley and Smedley write about the consistent racial and ethnic disparities in health care in their paper, “Race as Biology is Fiction, Racism as a Social Problem is Real.” They report a series of shocking statistics, which include that Africans Americans and Hispanics in the U.S. tend to receive lower quality health care across many different disease areas, African Americans are more likely than whites to “receive less desirable services, such as amputation,” and that these disparities are “found across a wide range of clinical settings including public and private hospitals, teaching and nonteaching hospitals.…” Similarly, Livingston details a scenario where a patient O (a black man) is expected to endure an incredible amount of pain during a bone-marrow biopsy without making any sounds of pain. When Mr. J (a white man) undergoes a similar bone marrow aspiration, Dr. A holds his hand and the Motswana nurse comforts him. Livingston writes that “his whiteness apparently creates different expectations around his stoicism.” Smedley and Smedley write that racialized science (and any science that looks for differences between racial groups) can only maintain and reinforce existing inequalities. Although many racial disparities in health are also the product of socioeconomic differences, Smedley and Smedley argue that when we accept this concept, there is the implicit idea that these socioeconomic differences are acceptable…

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