Mixed Race Studies

Detecting Winnifred Eaton

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Published online: 2014-01-16
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlt078

Jinny Huh, Assistant Professor of English
University of Vermont

In her recent introduction to Winnifred Eaton’s Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model (1916), Karen E. H. Skinazi explores the relationship between racial ambiguity—that of both the anonymous author and the heroines in Marion and its predecessor, Me: A Book of Remembrance (1915)—and the audience’s ability to detect racial coding. “Me’s success,” Skinazi states, “has been predicated on a mystery that allowed each reader the chance to become a literary Sherlock Holmes, cracking the codes of its vault of shocking secrets” (xvii). Later, Skinazi writes that a New York Times reviewer, playing detective, solves Eaton’s racial passing utilizing the science of detection à la Edgar Allan Poe (xxi-xxii). Skinazi’s allusions to the art of detection, although brief, are astute, leading to this essay’s rereading of Eaton’s legacy through the lens of detection and the anxieties produced by its failures, especially the threat of racial passing. It is no coincidence that Eaton published her fiction at a time when both classic detective fiction and African American passing tales were at the peak of their popularity.

Few critics have examined Eaton’s role in the detective genre. This essay responds to this oversight by arguing that Eaton’s reliance on a trope of racial and ethnic passing, both in her choice of pseudonym and in her Japanese romances, cannot be fully appreciated without situating her within the context of the panic about detecting passing that swept America during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The unique lens of detective fiction allows us further to conceptualize Eaton’s role as a founding figure of Asian American fiction. This essay also highlights Eaton’s familiarity with rules of genre, particularly detective fiction and African American passing narratives, and her participation in the construction of racial epistemologies that were then being codified by…

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Brazil Endorses International Decade for People of African Descent

Americas Quarterly: The Policy Journal for Our Hemisphere
Blog
2014-01-16

Shari Wejsa

On Monday, December 23, 2013, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing the International Decade for People of African Descent, which will run from January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2024. The aim will be to raise social consciousness in the fight against prejudice, intolerance, xenophobia, and racism.

The resolution follows a series of related efforts, including the General Assembly’s December 12, 1997 resolution, which convened the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, and the December 16, 2005 resolution, which guided the implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action.

Assembly representatives emphasized its importance. Verene Shepherd, chair of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, stated that the “indigestible fishbone of slavery” continued to stick in the throat due to the persistence of its legacies.  She added that the impact of slavery and colonialism were most obvious in the Americas and on the African content itself.

Responses from Brazilian representatives reinforced this perspective.  Bruno Santos de Oliveira noted that the 2010 national census data indicated that “more than 100 million Brazilians, more than half the population, had declared themselves African descendants,” and that the country has the largest number of people of African descent outside of Africa. The Brazilian Delegation recalled that the country continues to face racism and intolerance inherited from its colonial past.

This legacy is evident in high poverty levels, which vary significantly by region within Brazil. More than half of all poor Brazilians live in the Northeast, which is home to the highest concentration of African descendants. In the Northeast, the head of the household is often illiterate, despite attending school, and works in agriculture. Poor households are generally quite large, having nearly twice as many children when compared to families in higher socioeconomic levels, with limited resources and access to utilities. In Salvador, the capital of the northeastern state of Bahia, approximately 80 percent of the population is said to be of African ancestry.  Some critics claim that “the majority of Brazilians of African descent in Salvador are an example of continuing discrimination, living in the poorest areas, their lives often blighted by violence and largely excluded from political power.” Although recent studies indicate that the income gap between black and mixed race Brazilians and that of white Brazilians has been falling, a notable difference remains. From access to a high quality education to health and housing, Brazilians of African descent are usually worse off than their white counterparts…

Read the entire article here.

Editorial January 2014: On Reading Two Recent Memoirs by Afro-Germans

The Collegium for African American Research (CAAR)
January 2014

Gundolf Graml, Associate Professor of German and Director of German Studies
Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia

Two recent memoirs by German authors with an African connection emphasize that German history cannot be written without including the histories and perspectives of black Germans (as well as that of many other non-white people).

In Deutsch sein und Schwarz dazu [Being German and also Being Black], published in 2013 with Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, author Theodor Michael takes a long and probing look back at his experiences as a black German. Born in 1925 to a white German mother from the Eastern Prussian provinces and a black Cameroonian father, Michael’s childhood and youth coincided with the decline of the democratic German Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism.

In a low key style Michael recollects his participation in the infamous Völkerschauen [colonial peoples exhibits] organized by circusses and zoos. He describes his attempts to get by as hotel page and as extra in some of the Third Reich’s anti-British colonial films. And he details the toll that life under the Nuremberg race laws took on his body and mind. While his siblings managed to get out of Germany, Theodor Michael stayed behind, spending the last years of the regime as a forced laborer in a factory outside of Berlin, where he survived the war. After liberation, he managed to get into the Western zone, where he then tried to rebuild his life…

…Jennifer Teege’s memoir, Amon: Mein Großvater hätte mich erschossen [Amon: My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me], published in 2013 with Rowohlt Verlag, addresses the topic from the perspective of the second postwar generation of Germans. Teege, born in 1970 to a white German mother and a Nigerian father, grew up in an orphanage and later was adopted by a white middle-class German family. Decades later she finds out that her mother’s father, her grandfather, was Amon Göth, the concentration commander of Plaszow near Krakow, whose brutality and inhumanity are depicted in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. For Teege, who has lived in Israel for several years and worked with Holocaust survivors, the sudden discovery of a biological connection to one of the most infamous Nazi perpetrators was surpassed only by the shock that the grandmother to whom she has been attached so closely was Göth’s girlfriend and one of his most ardent defenders…

Read the entire review of the books here.

Growing Up Half Asian American: Curse or Gift?

Asian Fortune: your source for all things asian american
2014-01-15

Tamara Treichel

In this era of globalization and liberalization, being – and identifying as – biracial is becoming increasingly common. Yet only a few decades ago, unions between the races which may lead to biracial offspring were punishable by law in different countries. Think about Nazi-era Germany and eugenics, where Rassenschaender (“defilers of race”) were paraded through the streets for marrying or having intimate relationships with “non-Aryans,” Apartheid-era South Africa, where interracial relationships were also punishable by law, and yes, even the proverbial melting pot, the United States….

…In fact, interracial marriages were prohibited in the United States as early as colonial times, and were only permitted in the United States some three centuries later, in 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia finally legalized marriage across racial lines.

Asian Fortune talked to several HAPAs both at home and as far abroad as Tokyo about the challenges and opportunities facing this unique demographic group. (A note on terminology: HAPA is used here in the sense of Half Asian Pacific American; meanwhile, there is a Hawaiian Pidgin term hapa, which means “part” or “mixed,” and Hawaiians use it to refer to persons of any kind of mixed ethnic heritage). Many of them talked about the difficulties they have in identifying with any particular race…

…Kip Fulbeck, a well-known artist, slam poet and filmmaker said he identified with HAPA more than any specific race. Fulbeck is the author of several books including Part Asian, 100% HAPA as well as the director of a dozen films such as Banana Split and Lilo & Me. His “HAPA Project” is a stunning collection of portraits and handwritten words of HAPA individuals…

Read the entire article here.

Annual Question (2014): What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement? [Race]

Edge
2014-01-16

Race

Nina Jablonski, Biological Anthropologist and Paleobiologist; Distinguished Professor of Anthropology
Pennsylvania State University

Race has always been a vague and slippery concept. In the mid-eighteenth century, European naturalists such as Linnaeus, Comte de Buffon, and Johannes Blumenbach described geographic groupings of humans who differed in appearance. The philosophers David Hume and Immanuel Kant both were fascinated by human physical diversity. In their opinions, extremes of heat, cold, or sunlight extinguished human potential. Writing in 1748, Hume contended that, “there was never a civilized nation of any complexion other than white.”

Kant felt similarly. He was preoccupied with questions of human diversity throughout his career, and wrote at length on the subject in a series of essays beginning in 1775. Kant was the first to name and define the geographic groupings of humans as races (in German, Rassen). Kant’s races were characterized by physical distinctions of skin color, hair form, cranial shape, and other anatomical features and by their capacity for morality, self-improvement, and civilization. Kant’s four races were arranged hierarchically, with only the European race, in his estimation, being capable of self-improvement…

…The mid-twentieth century witnessed the continued proliferation of scientific treatises on race. By the 1960s, however, two factors contributed to the demise of the concept of biological races. One of these was the increased rate of study of the physical and genetic diversity human groups all over the world by large numbers of scientists. The second factor was the increasing influence of the civil rights movement in the United States and elsewhere. Before long, influential scientists denounced studies of race and races because races themselves could not be scientifically defined. Where scientists looked for sharp boundaries between groups, none could be found…

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Documentary ‘Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story’ Tells Untold Stories of Bi-Racial World War II Era Children

The AFRO
2014-01-15

Maria Adebola

Emmy-winning journalist Regina Griffin was inspired to tell a story and that’s how her film, Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story was born.

A family friend, entrepreneur Doris McMillon, had told stories about growing up the half-Black, half-White child of a Black G.I. and White German woman and the story was horrifying. Unwanted by both nations, the children often lived their lives as unwanted, ignored and forgotten people,

“I got chills learning about their lives, in orphanages and beyond,” said Griffin.

Griffin transformed her research into a documentary about the lives of the babies. The film was screened recently in front of about 50 people at the William McGowan Theater located at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

The film scrapes the surface of the difficulties that resulted from the interracial relationships between Black soldiers and German women during World War II. Many of the children ended up being adopted or sent to orphanages because their German mothers feared the public scrutiny that came with having a mixed-race child out of wedlock.

Some of the Black soldiers who wanted to marry their German girlfriends found it difficult because the relationships were viewed as forbidden. Those who wanted to return home to the African-American girlfriends and sometimes wives didn’t want to bring along children whose presence would indicate they had been unfaithful.

The children were caught in the middle…

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10 Most Amazingly Bizarre Paintings of Obama on Etsy

Houston Press
Houston, Texas
2013-05-09

Jef With One F

As Houston Press’ bizarre Etsy art expert, I thought I’d see how a nation of crafty lunatics would portray our commander-in-chief. The answer is somewhere between “awesomely” and “needs medication badly.”

Mike and Mollie took the title commander-in-chief a little too literally, and here we have Barack Obama looking like a cross between a Bjork dress and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. The weirdest part is he sports a hammer and sickle button, and if anyone can explain to me where the Soviet Union and Native American heritage intersect then kindly let me know in the comments which mental health facility is offering the free wifi you’re using to view this…

…This piece is described by Psychic Unicorns as imagining our president as the cult cinema anti-hero John Shaft. I choose to describe it as, “President Obama’s purple rage will leave thugs riddled with bullets as he rings the bell of liberty.” Seriously, this is a lot of freakin’ purple. Are we sure Prince didn’t do this…

Read the entire article here.

Passing Strange

The New York Times
2007-10-21

Joyce Johnson

In 1855, Henry Broyard, a young white New Orleans carpenter, decided to pass as black in order to be legally entitled to marry Marie Pauline Bonée, the well-educated daughter of colored refugees from Haiti, who was about to have his child; their marriage license describes them both as “free people of color.” A century and a half later, their great-great-granddaughter, Bliss Broyard, who had been raised as white, abruptly found herself confronting the implications of her newly discovered black identity.

The daughter of the writer and New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard, she had grown up with a feeling “that there was something about my family, or even many things, that I didn’t know.” What was lacking was any real sense of the history of the father she adored or any contact with his relatives, apart from one dimly remembered day in the past when her paternal grandmother had once visited them in their 18th-century house in the white enclave of Southport, Conn. Even in the last weeks of his life, the secret Anatole Broyard had kept from Bliss and her brother, Todd, was one he could not bear to reveal himself; it was their mother who finally told them, “Your father’s part black,” not long before Broyard died of prostate cancer…

…In one way, he wasn’t wrong at all. “My father truly believed,” Bliss Broyard writes in “One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life — a Story of Race and Family Secrets,” “that there wasn’t any essential difference between blacks and whites and that the only person responsible for determining who he was supposed to be was himself.” But for Broyard to construct a white identity required the ruthless and cowardly jettisoning of his black family. He would later lamely tell his children that their grandmother and their two aunts, one of them with tell-tale dark skin, simply didn’t interest him. During the 1960s, he expressed no sympathy for the civil rights movement, opposed, his daughter writes, to a movement that required “adherence to a group platform rather than to one’s ‘essential spirit.’ ” His posthumously published memoir, “Kafka Was the Rage,” revealed only that his people were from New Orleans…

Read the entire review here.

What Comes Naturally: A Racially Inclusive Look at Miscegenation Law

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 31, Number 3, 2010
pages 15-21
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2010.0020

Jacki Thompson Rand, Professor of History; American Indian and Native Studies
University of Iowa

In What Comes Naturally Peggy Pascoe interrogates the U.S. racial regime through a study of civil marriage and miscegenation law. Her admirable work traces the development of legislation and court decisions about mixed marriage between White settlers and African Americans, Latinos and Latinas, Asians, and American Indians. Bans against mixed marriages, or miscegenation, between White men and women of color, Pascoe argues, served to protect White supremacy and heteronormative patriarchy. By maintaining boundaries between the races, and material consequences that favored men in land disputes and White relatives in estate disputes, for example, White men’s economic and social positions were reinforced while women’s positions were undermined. Pascoe includes American Indians in her study because their lands, unique relationship with the federal government, and kinship systems presented complications not found in other cases. Pascoe also briefly mentions tribal miscegenation laws among the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Creeks.

Pascoe’s book and a recent special issue of the journal Frontiers, on interracial marriage and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North American Indians, White settlers, and African Americans, complement each other in some ways. French fur traders in the Northeast and Great Lakes region and Spanish and Mexicans in the Southwest mixed with Native women long before the creation of the United States. The French were early astute observers of Native people and soon realized the crucial role kinship played in providing access to prime beaver-trapping grounds along rivers. French men married into Native groups to enhance their trade. By the nineteenth century White American men also sought Native women who held land as a way of gaining access to resources. The federal government looked upon such unions as a means to facilitate Indian acculturation and assimilation into White society, even well into the twentieth century. In many instances Native families saw the marriage of their daughters to White men as a means to enhance their access to trade goods and to a more secure life.

Pascoe treats miscegenation law that covered American Indians primarily in the case of Oregon. In fact, miscegenation law evolved from initially targeting White and African American unions to include White unions with other races, including American Indians. The creation and enforcement of laws that pertained to marriages with Native Americans, Pascoe notes, seemed to coincide with external or individual circumstances where the acquisition or loss of land was at stake. Like the unions of French men and Native women, many marriages followed the custom of the country, where the partners were bound to each other outside of civil law. In the mid-nineteenth century the Oregon Territorial Supreme Court heard a case to determine whether such marriages were legal under territorial law. Oregon settler land claims at that time were unstable, so it is not surprising that the court and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the custom of the country. While this chapter of American Indian history diverged from the history of barring mixed marriages, Pascoe demonstrates that the tolerance of mixed marriage between White men and Indian women also secured White male patriarchy. It was a variation on the theme of White supremacy.

Like settler regimes elsewhere White American society viewed race through a biological lens that assessed parentage, phenotype, and blood quantum. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both the American and the Australian governments encouraged intermarriage to Whiten and eventually erase indigenous populations. The coexistence of miscegenation laws that pertained to Native peoples and assimilation proponents of interracial marriage arose from conflicting impulses. On one hand, intermarriage was objectionable on the grounds Pascoe depicts in her book: the progeny of mixed marriages challenged racial regimes, White supremacy, and White male privilege. But the federal government and settler society’s twin desires to avert an unaffordable war with Indians and to expropriate lands in Native possession weakened the resolve to bar mixed marriages. In the Frontiers special issue Cathleen Cahill explores the federal Indian Service as a site of applied assimilation policy where marriages between Whites and American Indians were made possible by putting numbers of White women in proximity to eligible Native men.

In the same period intermarriage could also serve as a vehicle for the expropriation of Native…

Dr. Eliot Favors Racial Dead Line

The New York Times
1909-03-15
page 3

Declares the South’s Future Depends On the Whites Preserving Their Integrity

MISQUOTED IN INTERVIEW

Did Not Say That Irish and Italians Furnished Race Problem for North Like Negroes In South

ATLANTA, Ga., March 14.—Sharply denying that he had been taken to task by a Massachusetts committee for his recently expressed views on the negro question, ex-President C. W. Eliot of Harvard, who is staying In Atlanta, to-day reiterated his belief that the South is handling the racial problem in the right way, and that the best interests of both whites and blacks require that a racial dead line be established. Racial Intermingling, Dr. Eliot declared, would be fatal to both white and black.

The future of the South depends, according to Dr. Eliot, on the preservation by the whites of their racial integrity, and, therefore, he thinks they are handling the negro problem in the proper way.

“Why you believe,” said Dr. Eliot, “that your race problem is a new one, but it has been experienced before, only it is intensified here. The negro cannot be expected to be ready for all phases of civilization, when he is a few decades removed from the time when he first began to enjoy civilization as a free man. After 500 or 1,000 years we may expect more substantial growth.”

It was Dr. Eliot’s opinion that the negro will need all the professions to enable him to maintain his racial integrity, especially physicians and nurses. Negro women, when properly trained, make good nurses, he said.

Dr. Eliot mentioned the amalgamation of the Germans and Chinese as an admixture of races that had been suggested as being practical, but he said that he did not believe that such an intermingling would stand.

Dr. Eliot said he had been misquoted in the interview sent out from Montgomery, in which he was credited with saying that the Irish and Italians furnished a race problem for the North similar to that created for the South by the negroes. He said that he did not suggest the examples of racial intermingling that were mentioned in the interview, but he repeated the statement that to maintain racial integrity an individuality was a good thing. For that reason he opposed the intermingling of racial stocks, even of the Aryan branch. The fact that a number of races are associated in a country should not prevent them from dwelling together in harmonious relations.

When the English people were cited as an example of intermingling of’ Jutes, Angles, Saxons, and Normans, that was successful, Dr. Eliot replied:

“But notice how long it required for them to unite. Races that dwell together, of course, tend to become similar.”