Mixed Race Studies

The New New Thing, Again

MPG: unofficial thoughts, whimsical critiques, and occasional cultural commentary
2013-02-08

Matthew Pratt Guterl, Professor of Africana studies and American studies
Brown University

Someone referred to mixed race children as particularly “beautiful” the other day, and it made me think of this:

In 1993, the cover of Time magazine featured a fresh-faced young woman, designated the “New Face of America.” For twenty years, this image has circulated as a referent for the new, new thing, for the mixed-race future gestating in a womb somewhere in the U.S.  Often, it is embraced enthusiastically, and “she” is offered up as an icon for a pretty and happy future.  Sometimes, the image is described as a way-too-seductive advertisement for race-suicide. (That last link is NSFW and, really, not safe for any decent human being).

“Take a good look at this woman,” the scrawl read, encouraging a close reading of her face.  “She was created by a computer.”  In truth, though, she wasn’t.  With brown eyes and light brown skin, she was imagined by renowned graphic artist Milton Glaser, conceived through software created by engineer Kim Wah Lam, a composite of hundreds of photographs taken by Ted Thai. A chorus line of willing employees in the Time Life building provided the visual DNA. The design team selected a handful of idealized “types,” borrowed features from them, and assembled the image by cutting the features out and stitching them together. The near future in digital flesh, “she” stood without clothes, with a slight smile and a direct gaze, and looked right into the eyes of the present tense.

Tellingly, every student sees “her” as “Mexican,” as if that national category were itself a precise synonym for mixture…

Read the entire article here.

Walking While Black in the ‘White Gaze’

The New York Times
2013-09-01

George Yancy, Professor of Philosophy
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

“Man, I almost blew you away!”

Those were the terrifying words of a white police officer — one of those who policed black bodies in low income areas in North Philadelphia in the late 1970s — who caught sight of me carrying the new telescope my mother had just purchased for me.

“I thought you had a weapon,” he said.

The words made me tremble and pause; I felt the sort of bodily stress and deep existential anguish that no teenager should have to endure.

This officer had already inherited those poisonous assumptions and bodily perceptual practices that make up what I call the “white gaze.” He had already come to “see” the black male body as different, deviant, ersatz. He failed to conceive, or perhaps could not conceive, that a black teenage boy living in the Richard Allen Project Homes for very low income families would own a telescope and enjoyed looking at the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.

A black boy carrying a telescope wasn’t conceivable — unless he had stolen it — given the white racist horizons within which my black body was policed as dangerous. To the officer, I was something (not someone) patently foolish, perhaps monstrous or even fictional. My telescope, for him, was a weapon.

In retrospect, I can see the headlines: “Black Boy Shot and Killed While Searching the Cosmos.”

That was more than 30 years ago. Only last week, our actual headlines were full of reflections on the 1963 March on Washington, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and President Obama’s own speech at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate it 50 years on. As the many accounts from that long ago day will tell you, much has changed for the better. But some things — those perhaps more deeply embedded in the American psyche — haven’t. In fact, we should recall a speech given by Malcolm X in 1964 in which he said, “For the 20 million of us in America who are of African descent, it is not an American dream; it’s an American nightmare.”…

…The president’s words, perhaps consigned to a long-ago news cycle now, remain powerful: they validate experiences that blacks have undergone in their everyday lives. Obama’s voice resonates with those philosophical voices (Frantz Fanon, for example) that have long attempted to describe the lived interiority of racial experiences. He has also deployed the power of narrative autobiography, which is a significant conceptual tool used insightfully by critical race theorists to discern the clarity and existential and social gravity of what it means to experience white racism. As a black president, he has given voice to the epistemic violence that blacks often face as they are stereotyped and profiled within the context of quotidian social spaces…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Let’s Learn From the Past: Cumberland Posey Jr.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
2013-08-29

Michele Sneddon, History Center Communications Assistant

As a standout player, manager and owner, Cumberland Willis Posey Jr. built the Homestead Grays into one of the most successful franchises in Negro League baseball history.

Born on June 20, 1890, Posey grew up in a wealthy African-American household in Homestead. His father, Cumberland “Cap” Posey Sr., was general manager for the Delta Coal Co., president of Diamond Coal and Coke, and president of the Pittsburgh Courier Publishing Co., which became one of the nation’s most influential African-American newspapers.

At Homestead High School, Posey starred as a power-hitting right fielder on the baseball diamond, a fullback on the football field and a dominant guard on the basketball court. Posey attended Penn State University and then the University of Pittsburgh before landing at the Pittsburgh Catholic College of the Holy Ghost, now Duquesne University. He played basketball there and led his team in scoring for three years as “Charles Cumbert,” a fake name used to gain eligibility as a “white” player. While Posey never graduated from college, he established a reputation as one of the region’s top athletes…

Read the entire article here.

The Social Evolution of the Term “Half-Caste” in Britain: The Paradox of its Use as Both Derogatory Racial Category and Self-Descriptor

Journal of Historical Sociology
Volume 26, Issue 4 (December 2013)
pages 503–526
DOI: 10.1111/johs.12033

Peter J. Aspinall, Emeritus Reader in Population Health
University of Kent, UK

The term “half-caste” had its origins in nineteenth century British colonial administrations, emerging in the twentieth century as the quotidian label for those whose ancestry comprised multiple ethnic/racial groups, usually encompassing “White”. From the 1920s–1960s the term was used in Britain as a derogatory racial category associated with the moral condemnation of “miscegenation”. Yet today the label continues to be used as a self-descriptor and even survives in some official contexts. This paradox – of both derogatory racial category and self descriptor – is explored in the context of the term’s social evolution, drawing upon the theoretical constructs of the internal-external dialectic of identification and labelling theory.

Read or purchase the article here.

Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands [DeLeón Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 99, Issue 4 (March 2013)
page 1284
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jas678

Arnoldo DeLeón, Professor of History
Angelo State University, San Angelo Texas

Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. By Grace Peña Delgado. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. xvi, 304 pp.

Several theses drive this book’s narrative, among them are three that the author develops scrupulously. First, international and national influences shaped the histories of the borderlands of Arizona and Sonora. Migration—created in the nineteenth century by civil war in China and global demands for labor—brought the Chinese to the United States and Mexico. Chinese communities sprouted in both countries by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though they were more successful in Mexico where the Chinese established themselves as merchants. Commerce among these businessmen involved crossing borders and…

Read or purchase the review here.

Return to the rainforest: A son’s search for his Amazonian mother

BBC News Magazine
2013-08-28

William Kremer
BBC World Service

David Good’s parents come from different countries – hardly unusual in the US where he was raised. But the 25-year-old’s family is far from ordinary – while his father is American, his mother is a tribeswoman living in a remote part of the Amazon. Two decades after she left, David realised he had to find her.

After three days on the Orinoco River, David Good felt sick.

He had been eaten alive by the relentless biting gnats, he was tired and thirsty. The air was dank and humid. Fierce rays of sunlight bounced off the surface of the piranha-filled river as the 40-horsepower motor puttered and the launch pushed further upriver, deeper into the Amazon.

His stomach was a knot of apprehension – he had not slept the previous night at all.

He was not a natural traveller or explorer. The lawns and parks of eastern Pennsylvania were his habitat and this trip to the Venezuelan Amazon – in July 2011 – was his first outside the US since early childhood…

…In 1968, the US anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon published his bestseller Yanomamo: The Fierce People. He described the tribe as being prone to petty disputes – usually over women – which escalate into wars between villages. He painted a picture of a world where chronic warfare, gang rape and murder were all facts of life.

It was as a graduate student of Chagnon’s that David Good’s father, Kenneth Good, first travelled to the Amazon in 1975. He travelled up the Orinoco past the Guajaribo Rapids, just as his son did 36 years later. He made his home in a little hut a short distance from the Hasupuweteri.

The plan was to stay for 15 months of fieldwork, measuring the animal protein intake of all the village members. This was to give Chagnon the data he needed to show his many critics that inter-village warfare was not related to the scarcity of food but stemmed from the drive to maximise reproductive success…

Read the entire article here.

Thomas Cole: Reading the Paintings from The Last of the Mohicans

James Fenimore Cooper Society Website
Oneonta College, State University of New York
July 2013

Roberta Gray Katz
DePaul University

Presented at the 18th Cooper Seminar, James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art at the State University of New York College at Oneonta, July, 2011

Originally published in James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art, Papers from the 2011 Cooper Conference and Seminar (No. 18), The State University of New York College at Oneonta. Oneonta, New York. Steven Harthorn and Hugh MacDougall, editors. (pp. 56-63)

In 1826-27, artist Thomas Cole produced four exhibition paintings based on the recent publication of James Fenimore Cooper’s historical novel, The Last of the Mohicans; A Narrative of 1757 (1826). As landscape compositions, the images from The Last of the Mohicans occupy a significant place in the painter’s oeuvre and in nineteenth-century European and American art. Representing some of the earliest landscapes derived from American rather than biblical, classical, or European literature, the Mohican pictures revitalized the genre of “landscape composition,” a part of the artistic hierarchy. Unlike a “landscape view,” a “landscape composition” conveyed imaginative ideas and human feelings like history painting or poetry. Yet, despite the reception of the paintings from The Last of the Mohicans as “landscape compositions,” most of the art criticism has favored the landscape over the literary, or focused on an individual painting instead of the group. Cole did not plan the Mohican pictures as a narrative series, but he depicted the dramatic climax rather than random events. Arranged narratively, the paintings include: 1. Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans,” Cora Kneeling at the Feet of Tamenund, 1827, (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut). 2. Landscape Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans,” 1827, (Cora Kneeling at the Feet of Tamenund. Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York). 3. Landscape Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans,” The Death of Cora, 1827, (University of Pennsylvania Art Collection, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). 4. Landscape with Figures: A Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans,” 1826, (Death of Magua. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois).

This paper proposes that Cole enlarged the genre of landscape composition by introducing American literary subjects and settings that offer a view of the colonial past as windows to the national present (1820s). Through the lens of Cooper’s popular text, set during the French and Indian Wars, the artist re-imagined a group of frontier encounters, transforming the anxiety of the European Romantics into the turbulence of an American story, both real and fictive. As the painter portrayed the interactions of Anglo-Americans, Native Americans, and an African-American mulatto in the northeast wilderness, he suggested a distinctive land and diverse people engaged in social conflict. In doing so, Cole established his artistic identity as a literary painter in landscape compositions that critiqued the American culture they celebrated. Rather than reading these pictures as topographic views, this paper regards the literary and the landscape as a bold visual narrative that recovered colonial history or legend as a fragile part of imagining a nation…

…A Violent Captivity: Landscape Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans,” The Death of Cora, 1827

Cole probably placed Landscape Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans,” The Death of Cora and Landscape with Figures: A Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans, the death of Magua, in the area of Lake George, the site of Cooper’s novel. The artist traveled to the region in 1826, visiting Glen Falls, Fort Edward, and Fort William Henry, all of which became popular tourist sites after the commercial success of The Last of the Mohicans. For the Death of Cora, the artist portrayed several episodes on various picture planes to produce a visually moving captivity narrative of gender and sexual violence. In the story, Tamenund released Cora to Magua, who retained his captive under tribal law. As a female character, Cora moves from hope and strength at the Indian Council to near helplessness, dependence, and despair. In the lower center of the canvas, Magua is ready to scalp the young heroine. With outstretched arm and knife in hand, he hesitates, but lurking below, another Huron brave will wield the fatal blow. On her knees, Cora prays to God while high on a precipice, the noble Uncas jumps to save her, but he is too far away and too indistinct so we read his failed effort. Cole heightened the captivity by confining the heroine to a dark and narrow space. Squeezed from behind by boulders, rocks, and broken tree limbs, Cora faces a massive rock wall at the cliff’s edge on a dark and stormy day. When the picture was on view at the National Academy of Design (1827), the Exhibition Catalogue included Magua’s famous lines, offering Cora the option of life with him or death. The passage reinforced Cora’s Christian faith and fateful choice:

“Woman,” he said, “choose! the wigwam or the knife of Le Subtil!” Cora regarded him not; but dropping on her knees, with a rich glow suffusing itself over her features, she raised her eyes and stretched her arms toward heaven, saying in a meek and yet confiding voice—”I am thine! Do with me as thou seest best!”— But Cora neither heard nor heeded his demand. The form of the Huron trembled in every fiber, and he raised his arm on high, but dropped it again, with a wild and bewildered air, like one who doubted. Once more he struggled with himself and lifted the keen weapon again-but a piercing cry was heard above them, and Uncas appeared, leaping franticly [sic] from a fearful height, upon the ledge. Last of the Mohicans, Vol. II, p. 266.

The Death of Cora recalls history paintings of sex, violence, and captivity, such as Titian’s Rape of Europa (1559-1562), or Nicolas Poussin’s The Abduction of the Sabine Women (1634-35), or Jacques Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799), or the Death of Jane McCrea (1804) by American artist John Vanderlyn, or later Cole’s attempted rape scene in the Destruction from the Course of Empire series (1836). Captivity narratives served various purposes. At the end of the revolutionary eighteenth century, captivity images of cages and prisons served to dramatize liberty by showing constraint. American captivity narratives functioned as a form of interaction crossing gender and cultural boundaries, and they varied in the alternatives men and women sought. In the Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824), purportedly a real life story, the colonial captive Mary Jemison chose to remain with the Seneca Indians rather than return to her own society. On the other hand, the fictive Cora, who finds Magua’s offer untenable, relinquished herself up to God and death. Nineteenth-century Americans could appropriate a captivity narrative to promote their own ambitious program of Manifest Destiny. Pictures of American Indians scalping white women warranted, in the mind of some people, policies of Indian removal. Frontier violence could be real or imagined, in the colonial or national period, but “savage” brutality threatened the safety of women, civilization, and national progress.

The Death of Cora complicated a clear reading of American identity by suggesting Cora’s significant but unstable role as an African-American mulatto. Bound by gender and class, Cora and Alice share the same father Lieutenant Colonel Munro. But, Cora was born to a West Indies mother “only remotely descended from black slaves.” While she belonged to an Anglo-American culture, Cora also identified with her black heritage, and she told Tamenund: the curse of my ancestors has fallen heavily on their child (II. XII. 214). Cole placed Cora in the near foreground, where we see her pale complexion, long black hair, slim figure, and white dress, like the dress of her half-sister Alice. At least one Cooper critic thought the author might have changed the tragic ending to an assimilated (tri-racial) match between Cora and Uncas, “as this sort of arrangement is coming into fashion, in real life, as in fiction.” In The Invisible Line, law professor Daniel Sharfstein argues that “people of African ancestry have crossed the color line and faded into the world around them,” throughout American history. At the same time, mixed families “did not escape the nation’s collective belief in a line separating black from white.” Sharfstein opens up the possibilities of considering the fluid yet tight racial boundaries, and the unstable nature of a fixed and unchanging identity…

Read the entire article here.

Are Latinos “White”?

Jesus For Revolutionaries: A Blog About Race, Social Justice, and Christianity
2013-08-30

Robert Chao Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Hundreds of years of cultural politics underly the current debate over the proper racial categorization for Latinos.   For the greater part of U.S. history, Latinos argued for legal “whiteness” as a means of shielding itself from racial discrimination.  At the same time, up until the present day, many Latinos have consistently identified as “white” based upon the influence of colonial notions of race in Latin America.  Such identification with whiteness has the dual negative effect of disassociating the Latino community from the contemporary civil rights struggle in the United States, and perpetuating Latin American racist ideology.

Following the Mexican American War of 1848, Anglo American politicians struggled with how to incorporate more than 115,000 former Mexican citizens into United States society.  Many politicians argued vehemently, and publically, that they did not wish to confer the full rights of American citizenship upon the Mexican population which they viewed as an inferior cultural group.   The compromise, articulated in Article IX of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, was that Mexicans in the conquered territories could choose to become U.S. citizens, but that such citizenship would not take effect until an undetermined future date to be decided upon by Congress.  More than two decades after the signing of the treaty in 1848, the citizenship status of thousands of Mexicans remained ambiguous and unresolved.

Mexicans in California were finally declared to be American citizens in 1870 as part of the famous case of People v. De la Guerra.  Since U.S. citizenship at that time was reserved for those defined by the law as “white,” Mexicans at that moment gained not only citizenship, but also an implicit judicial declaration of whiteness.   Despite their legal whiteness, however, Mexicans, and other Latinos continued to experience explicit, and pervasive, racial discrimination in housing, education, and every other facet of American life…

Read the entire essay here.

New Book by Dr. Yaba Blay Explores Racial Identity and Skin Color Politics

Drexel Now
Drexel University
2013-07-31

News Media Contact: Alex McKechnie, News Officer, University Communications
Phone: 215-895-2705; Mobile: 401-651-7550

What does it mean to be Black? Is Blackness a matter of biology or consciousness? What determines who is Black and who is not? A new book by Dr. Yaba Blay, an assistant professor and co-director of the Africana Studies program in Drexel University’s College of Arts and Sciences, seeks to challenge narrow perceptions of what Blackness is and what it looks like. 

The book, entitled (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race, combines candid narratives and photos of 60 contributors from 25 different countries, providing a living testimony to the diversity of Blackness. It is intended to spark dialogue about the intricacies and nuances of racial identity and the influence of skin color politics.

The book is part of Blay’s larger, multi-platform project called (1)ne Drop – a reference to the “one-drop rule” from the early 1900s that held that anyone with 1/32 of “African Black blood” was Black.

The project, which includes an online and traveling exhibition, ultimately seeks to raise social awareness and inspire community conversation about the complexities of Blackness as both an identity and a lived reality.

The project was the inspiration behind “Who is Black in America?”, the fifth installation of CNN’s Black in America television documentary series with Soledad O’Brien in 2012, on which Blay served as a consulting producer…

Read the entire press release here.

Saluting a Dream, and Adapting It for a New Era

The New York Times
2013-08-28

Peter Baker and Sheryl Gay Stolberg

WASHINGTON — President Obama stepped into the space on Wednesday where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once stood, summoning his iconic dream of a colorblind society in a celebration of a half-century of progress and a call to arms for the next generation.

On a day of overcast skies and misty rain, tens of thousands of Americans — black, white and every shade in between — returned to the site of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to listen to the nation’s first black president pay tribute to the pioneers who paved the way for his own ascension to the heights of American government.

“Because they kept marching, America changed,” the president said as Dr. King’s family watched. “Because they marched, a civil rights law was passed. Because they marched, a voting rights law was signed. Because they marched, doors of opportunity and education swung open so their daughters and sons could finally imagine a life for themselves beyond washing somebody else’s laundry or shining somebody else’s shoes.

“Because they marched,” he added, “city councils changed and state legislatures changed and Congress changed and, yes, eventually, the White House changed.”

The symbolic journey from Dr. King to Mr. Obama on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial animated the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom more than any oratory. While Mr. Obama’s line about the White House changing was his only reference to his unique place in history, the power of his presence was lost on no one.

But it also underscored the challenge to a movement to reframe its mission for a new era. With an African-American in the Oval Office, it is harder to argue about political empowerment than it was in 1963, and much of the day’s message centered on tackling persistent economic disparity, as well as newer frontiers of civil rights like equality for gay men and lesbians…

Read the entire article here. Read President Obama’s full remarks here.