Mixed Race Studies

Thyra Johnston, 91, Symbol Of Racial Distinctions, Dies

The New York Times
1995-11-29

Robert McG. Thomas, Jr. (1939-2000)

Thyra Johnston, a blue-eyed fair-skinned New Hampshire homemaker who became a symbol of the silliness of racial distinctions when she and her husband announced that they were black, died on Nov. 22 at her home in Honolulu. She was 91.

She was the real-life heroine of “Lost Boundaries,” a movie that stunned the nation in 1949.

It is doubtful that Norman Rockwell could have dreamed up a family that better epitomized the small-town Depression-era American ideal than Albert and Thyra Johnston and their four children.

Dr. Johnston, who was born in Chicago, graduated with honors from the University of Chicago Medical School and studied radiology at Harvard. He was such a respected figure that in the 10 years that he practiced in Gorham, N.H., he headed the school board, was a selectman, was president of the county medical society and became chairman of the local Republican Party.

Mrs. Johnston, who was born in New Orleans, grew up in Boston and married her husband when he was a medical student, and was at once a model homemaker and mother and a civic and social leader whose well-appointed home in exclusive Prospect Hill was the scene of the annual Christmas social of the Congregational Church.

But Mrs. Johnston, described by her son Albert Jr. as looking as Irish as any of her neighbors, had a secret. In a society of such perverse attitudes that black “blood” was simultaneously scorned and regarded as so powerful that the tiniest trace was considered the defining racial characteristic, she was born one-eighth black, enough to qualify her as “Negro” on her birth certificate…

Read the entire obituary here.

Stanford historian re-examines practice of racial ‘passing’

Stanford News
The Humanities at Stanford
2013-12-18

Nate Sloan, Doctoral Candidate in Musicology
Stanford University

In the margins of historical accounts and the dusty corners of family archives, Stanford history Professor Allyson Hobbs uncovers stories long kept hidden: those of African Americans who passed as white, from the late 18th century to the present.

Dr. Albert Johnston grew up in Chicago, attended the University of Chicago Medical School in the 1920s, and went on to become a radiologist in a small town in New Hampshire. He and his wife were black – a fact they initially hid so that Johnston could secure an internship – and for 20 years, they kept this secret from their neighbors, and even their children.

After the United States entered World War II, Johnston effectively “outed” himself by applying for the Navy. He was rejected because of his racial background, and word of his mixed-race roots spread. What motivated Johnston to sacrifice his social status and job security? Was it wartime patriotism, or something else: a desire to have the truth out in the open?

Questions like these have motivated the latest research project of Stanford history Professor Allyson Hobbs. The Johnstons’ story is one of the many instances of racial “passing” – the practice in which light-skinned African Americans chose to present themselves as white – that Hobbs profiles in her upcoming book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing (Harvard University Press, 2014)…

Read the entire article here.

Chesnutt’s Genuine Blacks and Future Americans

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Volume 15, Number 3, Discovery: Research and Interpretation (Autumn, 1988)
pages 109-119

SallyAnn H. Ferguson, Professor of English
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Scholarship on novelist and short story writer Charles W. Chesnutt stagnates in recent years because his critics have failed to address substantively the controversial issues raised by his essays. Indeed, many scholars either minimize or ignore the fact that these writings complement his fiction and, more importantly, that they often reveal unflattering aspects of Chesnutt the social reformer and artist. In a much-quoted journal entry of 16 March 1880, Chesnutt himself explicitly links his literary art with social reform, saying he would write for a “high, holy purpose,” “not so much [for] the elevation of the colored people as the elevation of the whites/’ Using the most sophisticated artistic skills at his command, he ultimately hopes to expose the latter to a variety of positive and non-stereotypic images of the “colored people” and thereby mitigate white racism. As he remarks in a 29 May 1880 entry, “it is the province of literature to open the way for him [the colored person] to get it [equality]—to accustom the public mind to the idea; and while amusing them [whites], to lead people out, imperceptibly, unconsciously, step by step, to the desired state of feeling.” Throughout his entire literary career, Chesnutt never strays far from these basic reasons for writing, in fiction and nonfiction alike.

It is in his essays, however, that Chesnutt most clearly reveals the limited nature of his social and literary goals. Armed with such familiar journal passages as those cited above, scholars have incorrectly presumed that this writer seeks to use literature primarily as a means for alleviating white color prejudice against all black people in this country. But, while the critics romantically hail him as a black artist championing the cause of his people, Chesnutt, as his essays show, is essentially a social and literary accommodationist who pointedly and repeatedly confines his reformist impulses to the “colored people”—a term that he almost always applies either to color-line blacks or those of mixed races. This self-imposed limitation probably stems from the fact that he wrote during a time of intense color hatred in America,…

New York Times and The American Riddle

Only-NeverInSweden
2013-09-03

Larry Lundgren
Linköping, Sweden

The [New York] Times accepted two comments on OpEd article by Charles Blow: “The Most Dangerous Negro.”

Here are the two books that I presently cite in comments on this and related articles

Prewitt, Kenneth, 2013, What is Your Race-The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans: Princeton University Press, Princeton

Roberts, Dorothy, 2011, Fatal Invention-How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century: The New Press, London

These are the two most important books on this subject that I have read. They should be read by every American professor who daily employs the nomenclature of the US Census Bureau classification of Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Witnessing Charles Chesnutt: The Contexts of “The Dumb Witness”

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Volume 38, Issue 4 (December 2013)
pages 103-121
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlt045

Benjamin S. Lawson
Florida State University

The silence and silencing of the character Viney in Charles Chesnutt’s short story, “The Dumb Witness” (c. 1897), artfully addresses the issue of exploitation related to race, gender, and slavery. Viney has no voice, no speaking, and no say-so; however, she employs this voicelessness for her own subversive ends. The story’s technique of embedded narratives problematizes issues of identity and consequent uses of power. Who is exploiting whom? Chesnutt’s narrator is a sympathetic white outsider who gains knowledge of the rural South by quizzing a slave, Uncle Julius. Yet Uncle Julius solidifies his own status by being a story-telling virtuoso who knows and narrates the tale of the mixed-race Viney and her cruel master. The suggestiveness of this theme expands beyond the story’s borders, for scholars have posited that Chesnutt himself was a black voice censored and exploited by his white publisher. Or was Chesnutt actually using his publisher to promote his own reputation? Decades later, African American studies appropriated Chesnutt as a primarily black rather than Southern writer. Mainstream and African American academic institutions and publishers promote him variously to express their own perspectives. We as readers continue to dictate the parameters of his realities—to manipulate his voice—as we use him for our own academic and political purposes. We forget that Chesnutt himself was immensely complex and conflicted as an Ohio-born and mostly-white man. Just as we witness Charles Chesnutt, he witnesses us: he interrogates our motives.

Read or purchase the article here.

Creating Multiracial Identities in the Work of Rebecca Walker and Kip Fulbeck: A Collective Critique of American Liberal Multiculturalism

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Volume 38, Issue 4 (December 2013)
pages 171-190
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlt053

Gino Michael Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

Americans of multiracial descent recently have become noticeable, respectable, marketable, and, in the case of Barack Obama, presidential. In the last two decades, a growing body of creative and critical work about multiracial lives and issues has materialized. This social and historical development has become an ideological battleground for advocates, politicians, scholars, journalists, and marketers who have appropriated and interpreted its products and personalities in relation to their own beliefs, objectives, and commitments. According to many popular and political accounts, the growing number of interracial marriages and self-identified multiracials indicates that American society quickly is becoming post-racial. Scholars of this development, however, have been mostly skeptical of accounts that claim or assume that race-mixing leads to post-racial societies. Among scholars, there is ongoing debate over the precise impact that the emergent self-identified multiracial population is having on race, racial hierarchy, and white supremacy. Many scholars agree with G. Reginald Daniel, who claims that self-identified multiracials challenge race and racial hierarchy. However, Rainier Spencer and others argue the opposite: self-identified multiracials maintain racial hierarchy and reproduce race insofar as they rely on established racial categories to articulate their experiences and identities. Hence, this debate is at an impasse.

One way to negotiate this impasse is to shift the focus of the debate from the impact that self-identified multiracials have had on race and racial hierarchy to the conditions that have made mixed-race individuals possible in ethno-racial combinations besides black and white. Of course, scholars who analyze this development through a black/white framework will likely object to this move on the grounds that all other ethno-racial categories must fall between black and white in the racial hierarchy, thus orienting multiracial identities, old and new, toward whiteness and away from blackness. Their objection, however, presumes stable racial categories, groups, and ways…

Read or purchase the article here.

Arabs, Hispanics seeking better US Census recognition

Aljazeera America
2013-12-17

Haya El Nasser, Los Angeles Digital Reporter

 Many community organizations hope for a new Middle East and North Africa category in the next Census.

When Hassan Jaber, a Lebanese-American, fills out his Census questionnaire, the race question gives him pause. White? No. Black? No. Asian? American Indian? Native Hawaiian? No, no, no.

So he checks off the only other option: “some other race.”

“The categories really don’t represent us,” said Jaber, executive director of the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS) in Dearborn, Mich. “Even putting it under ‘other’ makes the reliability of the information very questionable.”

But all this could soon change.

In the face of an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic population that no longer fits neatly into traditional classifications set by the government, the Census Bureau has been testing major changes in how it asks people to identify their race and ethnicity.

Hispanic, an ethnicity, not a race, may soon be lumped into a broader “race and origin” category, effectively treating it as a race for the first time.

The line between race and ethnicity has become artificial, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and the author of an upcoming book on the nation’s diversity. “What’s the definition of race? It’s not nationality. It’s not skin color, necessarily,” he said. “It’s sort of a mishmash.”

Last summer, the Arab American Institute sent a letter signed by 30 advocacy groups asking the Census Bureau and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which sets race standards, to create a MENA (Middle East and North Africa) category.

Nicholas Jones, chief of the Census racial-statistics branch, calls the letter “historic.”

Several populations are clamoring for their own categories, but, Jones said, “it’s the only group we’ve received a letter from requesting a separate ethnicity box.”…

Read the entire article here.

Telling Multiracial Tales: An Autoethnography of Coming Out Home

Qualitative Inquiry
Volume 20, Number 1 (January 2014)
pages 51-60
DOI: 10.1177/1077800413508532

Benny LeMaster
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

What follows are experimental autoethnographic tales of ambiguous embodiment. The tales weave in and out of the text and work to articulate gender in unsuspecting spaces. Together, we reconsider gender through multiple locations at once. I offer an autoethnography of multiracial tales: a simultaneous telling of embodiment as it manifests in my multiracial body. Rather than privileging one “side” of the family over another, I experiment with a concurrent telling. That is, multivocality in one body. To help anchor the telling, I use the academy as an assemblage of meaning. In the end, I find that my White family resists and rejects my queer masculinity because of my pursuit of higher education while my Asian family embraces my queer masculinity because of the same pursuit. These stories can only be known when told and processed concurrently; never alone, and never separate.

Read or purchase the article here.

One Drop, but Many Views on Race

The New York Times
2013-12-16

Maurice Berger, Research Professor and Chief Curator
Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

In the 2010 census — when respondents could check more than one racial group — President Obama, the son of a black African father and a white mother, checked a single box: “Black, African-American or Negro.” Mr. Obama himself was unequivocal about it: “I self-identify as African-American — that’s how I am treated and that’s how I am viewed. And I’m proud of it.”

Yet the president’s words are nuanced: While he opts to classify himself as black, he implies that his racial identity is also contingent on how he is seen and treated by others in a nation prone to racial absolutes, no matter how he sees himself.

Those observations are among the provocative arguments presented by Yaba Blay in “(1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race” (BLACKprint Press), which examine what it means to be black. In it, she demonstrates how racial identity is not just biological or genetic but also a matter of context and even personal choice. It is revealing that the president’s definitive answer came after years of being dogged by outside doubters who questioned not just his race, but also his very nationality.

“(1)ne Drop” explores the intricate and fraught issue of race through the observations of 60 contributors from 25 countries who self-identify, at least partly, as black, even if they are not always seen as such because of light skin, facial features or interracial ancestry. Their words are accompanied by portraits by Noelle Théard and a team of photographers directed by her. The book challenges narrow conceptions about blackness, both as an identity and as an experience, and the stereotypes and rigid boundaries of color that continue to divide us…

…The books subject’s recount how their efforts to define themselves clashed with society’s imperative to assign neat racial categories in order to “make something that is fluid and uncertain more certain,” as a contributor, Deborah Thomas, noted. Some described the bewilderment and prying questions of acquaintances, co-workers and strangers attempting to discern their race. Others pointed to the social stigma of having complexions that are frustratingly — or insultingly — viewed as too dark or too light…

Read the entire review here.

Obama: I’m Not Interested in Talking About Race in the Abstract

The New York Observer
New York, New York
2007-11-26

Jason Horowitz

During a question-and-answer session in Berlin, New Hampshire last night, Barack Obama received a multi-part question about how he identified himself racially, race relations and his commitment to civil rights from an elderly liberal in a green ball cap…

…As for how he identified himself, Obama was clear.

“I’m an African American,” he said. “But I am somebody, like many African Americans, who has all kinds of stuff in him.”…

Read the entire article here.