Mixed Race Studies

Bro. Richard Potter: “The Great Magician”

Scottish Rite Journal
The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry
Supreme Council, 33°
Washington, D.C.
Southern Jurisdiction, U.S.A.
March-April 2011

Elliott Saxton, 32°

Bro. Richard Potter [see also here] was the first professional American-born magician and is also credited with being our first successful ventriloquist. His fame was such that the town of Potter Place, New Hampshire, still carries his name. His tricks included dipping his hands into molten lead, crawling through solid logs, and causing men’s hats to speak. Perhaps one of his most famous feats was dancing on a pile of eggs without cracking a single shell.

In November 1811, he joined African Lodge No. 459 of Boston under the premier Grand Lodge of England (Moderns). Richard Potter is named in the June 18, 1827, “Declaration of Independence” of African Lodge as one of three Royal Arch Masons to whom the three signing Past Masters of the lodge delivered the “Grand Charter.” This is the document that created Prince Hall Masonry…

…Richard Potter was born in 1783 in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and his mother was a slave named Dinah owned by Sir Charles Frankland, a pre-Boston-Tea-Party tax collector of the Port of Boston. Richard Potter’s paternity was never established, but he was raised by Sir Charles. It is thought that Potter’s father was Frankland’s son.

At the age of ten, he traveled to Britain as a cabin boy with a friend of the family, Captain Skinner. While in England, he decided that a life at sea was not for him and went on his own. He supposedly saw John Rannie, a magician and ventriloquist, perform at an English fair, and soon thereafter he began touring Britain and Europe with Rannie as his assistant. About 1800 Rannie and Potter came to the United States and joined a travelling circus…

…Because of his dark complexion, Potter was often thought to be an American Indian or Hindu, all of which added to his air of mystery. He was described in advertisements as a “Black Yankee”. He sometimes dressed in a turban and performed as an Asian or introduced his wife (accurately) as an American Indian. Potter took full advantage of his perceived exotic appearance and fueled the mystery over the origin of his birth by claiming to be the son of Benjamin Franklin. (Although Bro. Franklin was known to be quite the ladies’ man, he was out of the country at the time of Potter’s conception.)…

Read the entire article here.

Special report: Why Brazil’s would-be first black president trails among blacks

Reuters
2014-10-03

Brian Winter, Chief Correspondent

SAO PAULO – Brazilians could make history this month by electing Marina Silva, the daughter of impoverished rubber tappers from the Amazon, as their first black president.

Yet Silva is trailing incumbent President Dilma Rousseff, who is white, among the half of voters who are of African descent.

That disadvantage, which contrasts with U.S. President Barack Obama’s overwhelming support from African-Americans in the 2008 and 2012 elections, could cost Silva victory in this extremely close election.

The reasons behind Silva’s struggles speak volumes about Brazil’s history, its complex relationship with race, and the recent social progress that has made Rousseff a slight favorite to win a second term despite a stagnant economy.

In recent weeks, Reuters interviewed two dozen Brazilians of color in three different cities. Many said they would be proud to see Silva win – especially in a country where people of color have historically been underrepresented in government, universities and elsewhere.

Yet they also said they were more focused on the economy than any other factor. Since taking power in 2003, Rousseff’s leftist Workers’ Party has made enormous strides in reducing poverty – especially among blacks.

“No one wants to go back to the past,” said Gustavo Leira, 71, a retired public servant in Brasilia. Silva’s race is important, he said, “but it’s not the most important thing.”…

…In 2008, Obama won 95 percent of the African-American vote. That advantage, plus his support from two-thirds of Hispanic voters, helped him overcome a 12 percentage point deficit among white voters. The margins were broadly similar when Obama won re-election in 2012.

While Obama did not make race a theme of his campaigns, he did address it at key moments – including a famous speech in March 2008 in which he discussed the anger felt by many in the black community, and what it was like to be the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya.

Silva also comes from a mixed racial background – just like many, if not most, Brazilians…

Read the entire article here.

Remains will stay in old family cemetery in Bedford

The News & Advance
Lynchburg, Virginia
2014-10-01

Alex Rohr, Beat Reporter

BEDFORD — The remains of at least 20 people buried in Bedford will stay interred despite a request by the Bank of the James to move them.

The bank’s request to the Bedford County Circuit Court, challenged by David Lowry a descendant of former Bedford County plantation owners, was denied after a hearing that lasted about four hours.

The cemetery — which may be the final resting place of slaves — was overgrown with trees and undergrowth when the bank acquired the land in a 2009 foreclosure. The property, just east of Applebee’s on U.S. 460 in Bedford, was covered until March.

Judge James Updike’s decision drew applause from over a dozen members of the extended Lowry family who were present during the hearing…

…Charles Lowry, a witness and relative of James W. Lowry, looked to the heavens in thankful prayer after Updike made his decision.

“God works in mysterious ways,” he said.

Charles Lowry, who is black, and David Lowry, who is white, believe they share ancestors…

…Brent Staples, who has written about his family history for The New York Times editorial page, traces his lineage to the area and a woman named Somerville who birthed several children by Marshall Lowry, a white farm manager.

“As a son of Virginia, and a son of Bedford County and as a descendent of slaves on the Lowry plantation, my concern would be there if they were not blood-related,” Staples said…

…David Lowry, Charles Lowry and Staples said they intend to get DNA tests to verify whether they are related. Combining oral and family history, they are confident the results will be in the affirmative.

“If Somerville’s story is accurate, then I am his cousin,” Staples said on the stand, pointing at David Lowry…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial family embraces twins’ uniqueness

News 10, KXTV
Sacramento, California
2014-10-02

Daria Givens, News 10 Staff

A Lincoln family embodies California’s melting pot and embraces their uniqueness.

LINCOLN – Fraternal twins Viviana and Dennis look very different from each other. They are part of the Ng Family, a multiracial family from all parts of the world.

The twins’ parents Kenika and Ashley Ng also come from multiracial families. Kenika Ng’s is African-American and Hispanic; his father is Hawaiian and Chinese. Ashley Ng is Irish and Hispanic.

Combine their racial make-up, and their children have more of a unique blend. Ten-month-old Viviana, who is four minutes older than her brother, has bright blue eyes and light brown hair like her mother and looks white. Dennis on the other hand, with the big brown eyes and black hair looks like his dad.

Read the entire article and watch the story here.

In a new play, Adrienne Dawes delves into racial identity

Austin American-Statesman
Austin, Texas
2014-10-01

Jeanne Claire van Ryzin, Reporter/Arts Critic

Before the dialogue begins, before the first stage direction is explained, the complexities of race and racial identity percolate up from the script of “Am I White,” a new play by Austin writer Adrienne Dawes.

Take the cast list: “Wesley Connor, biracial (passes as white), member of the White Order of Thule,” “Ryan Cahill, white, member of the Aryan Brotherhood” and “Justine Ramos, biracial (could pass as black).”

Ricocheting back and forth in time, seguing into nightmarish scenes played out as a disturbing minstrel show, “Am I White” tells the story of an imprisoned neo-Nazi convicted of plotting terrorist acts who must confront his own mixed-race heritage.

Directed by Jenny Larson, “Am I White” opened Wednesday for a three-week run at Salvage Vanguard Theater.

“Am I White” is based on the true story of Leo Felton, a white supremacist who hid his own mixed-race identity as the child of a short-lived idealistic Civil Rights-era marriage between a black architect and a white former nun…

Read the entire review here.

Latino and Race: Together and Separately

Latino Rebels
2014-10-01

Vilma Ortiz, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Los Angeles

Just when I think that the notion of “white Hispanic” has faded away, several more commentaries continue to appear. All raise important points yet miss others that are equally important. (I want to thank Christina Saenz-Alcánatra for effectively and succinctly explaining the arguments of various commentaries.)

To discuss “white Hispanics,” means to discuss two issues: one is being Latino in the U.S. context and the other is variation in skin color. I argue that these need to be discussed separately and together in order to understand the impact on individuals. Being Latino in the U.S. is frequently a racialized experience, which matters for most members even if they are light-skinned. But that does not negate the additional effect of being dark-skinned in a society that privileges whiteness…

Read the entire article here.

Who and What the Hell Is a White Hispanic?

Latino Rebels
2014-09-25

Christina Saenz-Alcántara

Since The New York Times’ ridiculous piece in May claiming that more Latinos are identifying as “white” between the 2000 and 2010 Census, Latino and non-Latino commentators alike have been weighing in on the many shades of color within the Latino community and the role of the “white Hispanic” within it. An intense discussion about race also continues on social media. This is not a discussion of Afro-Latinos against white Latinos or the white Spanish against the indigenous. It is more about how Latinos are making sense of the confusing label of the “white Hispanic.” What does it mean to be labeled or take on the label of a “white Hispanic?” Some in our own social media community have attempted to make sense of the term “white Hispanic” as a role within and on behalf of our community. Others have seen it as a product of confusion, while even others have dismissed the identity altogether. In this post, I will go through each of the different ways that the social media community has attempted to understand the question: who and what the hell is a “white Hispanic?”…

…For example, in the U.S., there is the one-drop rule. If you have even one ancestor who is African, Asian, or indigenous, you’re automatically non-white. In Puerto Rico, the one-drop rule is that you are considered white if you have even one white ancestor in the previous four generations (known as the Regla del Sacar or Gracias al Sacar laws). In the U.S., a Latino historically is not white since Latinos by definition are a mixture of Spanish, indigenous, African and Asian blood. Yet in Puerto Rico, a Latino is white if they have just one white ancestor. For academics like Cordero-Guzmán, the  “white Hispanic” is a negotiation between two conflicting racial classifications…

Read the entire article here.

Lawsuit: Wrong sperm delivered to lesbian couple

The Chicago Tribune
2014-10-01

Meredith Rodriguez, Tribune reporter

A white Ohio woman is suing a Downers Grove-based sperm bank, alleging that the company mistakenly gave her vials from an African-American donor, a fact that she said has made it difficult for her and her same-sex partner to raise their now 2-year-old daughter in an all-white community.

Jennifer Cramblett, of Uniontown, Ohio, alleges in the lawsuit filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court that Midwest Sperm Bank sent her the vials of an African-American donor’s sperm in September 2011 instead of those of a white donor that she and her white partner had ordered.

After searching through pages of comprehensive histories for their top three donors, the lawsuit claims, Cramblett and her domestic partner, Amanda Zinkon, chose donor No. 380, who was also white. Their doctor in Ohio received vials from donor No. 330, who is African-American, the lawsuit said.

Cramblett, 36, learned of the mistake in April 2012, when she was pregnant and ordering more vials so that the couple could have another child with sperm from the same donor, according to the lawsuit. The sperm bank delivered vials from the correct donor in August 2011, but Cramblett later requested more vials, according to the suit…

…”On August 21, 2012, Jennifer gave birth to Payton, a beautiful, obviously mixed-race baby girl,” the lawsuit states. “Jennifer bonded with Payton easily and she and Amanda love her very much. Even so, Jennifer lives each day with fears, anxieties and uncertainty about her future and Payton’s future.”

Raising a mixed-race daughter has been stressful in Cramblett and Zinkon’s small, all-white community, according to the suit. Cramblett was raised around people with stereotypical attitudes about nonwhites, the lawsuit states, and did not know African-Americans until she attended college at the University of Akron…

Read the entire article here.

Race, Religion and Law in Colonial India: Trials of an Interracial Family by Chandra Mallampalli (review) [Epstein]

Victorian Studies
Volume 56, Number 3, Spring 2014
pages 519-520
DOI: 10.1353/vic.2014.0064

James Epstein, Distinguished Professor of History
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

Mallampalli, Chandra, Race, Religion and Law in Colonial India: Trials of an Interracial Family (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011)

The case of Abraham v. Abraham (1854–63) was extraordinary. It took nearly a decade to decide as it passed through the district civil court at Bellary in southern India, the appeals court at Madras, and finally the Privy Council’s Judicial Committee. The case repeatedly confounded legal categories based alternately on Hindu and English law and the fixed categories of Britain’s post-1857 colonial regime. In Race, Religion and Law in Colonial India, Chandra Mallampalli skillfully guides readers through the intricacies of the case, studying the social world inhabited by one family drawn into litigation and measuring the gap between their life-world and the protocols of the court. The period was one of imperial crisis and transition, as the British Crown assumed direct control over Indian territories following the 1857 Rebellion and authorities adopted a more cautious approach in governing Indian society. As the author writes, the more conservative turn of liberal governance “gave rise to an imperial multiculturalism, a policy of classifying colonial subjects according to race, religion, caste, or ethnicity,” while accentuating the difference between colonial subjects and colonizers (5).

Matthew Abraham was born into a Tamil-speaking family of “untouchables” (paraiyar community) who had converted to Catholicism. He subsequently converted to Protestantism and married Charlotte Fox, a Eurasian of Anglo-Portuguese descent. Matthew was part of the mobile group of camp followers who gravitated to the garrison town of Bellary. Access to the colonial culture centered on Bellary’s cantonment. The town’s thriving bazaar economy gave scope for Matthew’s enterprising talents and ambition; the locality’s social fluidity proved important to his self-fashioning. At the time of his marriage in 1820, he was working in the arsenal and selling military surplus items. Fairly soon he owned a distillery and most crucially was granted the East India Company contract to produce and supply liquor to the troops and local retailers—an irony, given his conversion to Evangelical Protestantism. The family prospered. Matthew assumed English customs and associated predominately with Europeans. He belonged to the class of doras, persons of local prominence, and was identified as an east Indian, a term usually reserved for those of mixed European and native blood. By a twist of fate, an oversight perhaps, the underlying complexities of this personal success story emerged in court records and now again in this fascinating book. Matthew died having left no will. His wife and his brother, Francis, who was involved in the family’s expanding business networks, fell out; they were unable to agree on a settlement or a legal heir, a necessary condition for their business dealings. From Matthew’s death in 1842 until Charlotte filed suit in 1854, the Abrahams “were a family in search of a law” (99). Once the case came to court, it produced a huge archive, with evidence taken from 271 witnesses and a series of conflicting verdicts.

In simplest terms, the case turned on whether Hindu or English law pertained. The Anglo-Indian system of civil or personal law mandated that Indians were governed according to their own laws whether Hindu or Muslim. As Mallampalli notes, a policy initially meant to promote religious tolerance also helped to create the fiction of coherent religious communities. The law seemed incapable of accommodating the intermingling of conditions and fluid identities that characterized the lives of the Abrahams. The legal agency of Charlotte and Francis depended on their ability to exploit the legal options open to them (in a sense, this is true of all legal proceedings). Hindu law worked to the advantage of male heirs. Charlotte and her legal councilors insisted that the family had been completely assimilated into the religion, customs, and lifestyle of Europeans and was therefore subject to English law with its emphasis on individual enterprise and ownership. Matthew’s brother was merely a business agent and subordinate family member. In contrast, Francis argued for continuity with Hindu tradition and his and Matthew’s undivided brotherhood, which would leave him as sole family heir. In this version, despite their Christian religion and European attitudes, the two brothers had been born into a class of persons who continued to observe the practice of Hindu…

Reading Rivalry, Race, and the Rise of a Southern Middle Class in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition

Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory
Volume 70, Number 3, Autumn 2014
pages 157-184
DOI: 10.1353/arq.2014.0018

Rachel A. Wise, Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of English
University of Texas, Austin

This essay argues that a sustained reading of the courtship plot and Lee Ellis’s role in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition allows us to see the novel as ultimately envisioning a New South in which racial loyalty still trumps middle-class and professional solidarity. It reads the novel’s romantic triangle as a dramatization of the rise of a white middle class whose professional capital overtakes the central role of a plantation-based aristocracy. In the process, this new class remakes a whiteness that fails to significantly challenge either the essential hierarchy of white over black or the bloody lynch law that enforces that hierarchy. Because Ellis, who initially seems one of the least prejudiced whites in the novel, succumbs to race loyalty, his romantic triumph over Tom suggests the hopelessness of any chances for solidarity, highlighting The Marrow of Tradition’s critique of black middle-class enculturation as a viable form of racial uplift.