Mixed Race Studies

Self-Writing, Literary Traditions, and Post-Emancipation Identity: The Case of Mary Seacole

Biography
Volume 23, Number 2, Spring 2000
pages 309-331
DOI: 10.1353/bio.2000.0009

Evelyn J. Hawthorne, Professor of English
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

“ . . . unless I am allowed to tell the story of my life in my own way, I cannot tell it at all.”

Written at the height of the Victorian period, The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands (1857) is a paradigmatic black woman’s text of self-authoring that has been lauded as “one of the most readable and rewarding black women’s autobiographies in the nineteenth century” (Andrews, Introduction xxviii). Representing a locus classicus of culturally sanctioned feminine self-reliance, it was written and published in England by Mary Jane Grant Seacole (1805-1881), a free-born Jamaican who achieved fame for her work as a nurse during the Crimean War, meriting several medals. Transgressing gender, race, and class roles as an adventuring businesswoman in Jamaica, London, Haiti, New Granada, and Cuba, and as a female who, undaunted by the horrors of the battlefield, deployed herself to the Crimean War, this heroine is extraordinary by any standard. But in addition to its biographical importance, this work is an invaluable means of espying how the free(d) female subject fashioned her identity, from a socially, racially, and economically disempowered position in the post-Emancipation historical environment. Wonderful Adventures is a cultural text that reveals how Seacole, a woman of color, exploited critical historical moments to construct a new social identity. At the same time, though, Seacole’s independence raises questions about the role of the dominant power in the free(d) subject’s search for equality and social rights, for Seacole seems to have advanced through her own machinations, rather than through the inconsistent British script of freedom offered to the colonial, racial subject.

I will argue that Seacole’s textual and rhetorical strategies encode contestatory practices that enable her to author herself and to critique and unsettle Victorian ideology. By manipulating genre and linguistic conventions, Seacole promotes a double-voicedness that allows her to challenge “disciplining” systems (in Foucault’s sense of non-coercion)—practices which mark her as a resisting subject. By foregrounding cultural issues of race and gender, thus forcing them into higher public visibility, Seacole also contends against the contradictory and conflictual text of freedom. Though seemingly ideologically compliant, then, the work’s signifying strategies produce a text that contests authority while textualizing the authenticity of difference and hybrid subjectivity.

When the location of the center shifts from Jamaica to England, Seacole finds this new site of difference less predictable than the colonial one. The rejection Seacole encountered when she applied to serve as a nurse under Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War suggests how confusing the faces of freedom were for the post-Emancipation subject in nineteenth-century Britain. In Jamaica, Seacole had learned medicine from British surgeons. Her work there and in Panama, especially during cholera and yellow fever epidemics, had earned her a reputation as a nurse, and the title of “yellow doctress.” When she became aware of the desperate conditions at the Crimean warfront — the newspapers were full of stories about untended soldiers dying more from diseases and lack of care and sanitation than from war wounds — a self-assured Seacole traveled to England to volunteer, carrying letters of recommendation from well-ranking surgeons. But despite her training and her letters of support, both the Secretary of War and the Office of Quatermaster-General ignored her. Seacole responded by getting to the Crimea on her own. Forming a corporation with an old family friend, she financed her own expedition to set up there as a “sutler.” Sailing first from England to Constantinople with her warehouse of provisions, she then made her way to Balaclava. At a place near the battlefield, she spent the considerable sum of eight hundred pounds to erect her store, the “British Hotel.” Since she had also…

I Found One Drop: Can I Be Black Now?

The Root
2013-05-01

Jenée Desmond-Harris

Race Manners: Time for a racial gut check. Has your African-American ancestor really changed anything?

“I recently availed myself of my university’s online resources and did some genealogical digging about my white conservative family. It turns out that one of our ancestors was an African-American slave who passed as white. His is an incredibly powerful story about a dark chapter in our nation’s history, and I believe that it is important that his suffering be remembered. I thought that my family would also be excited about this new information, but instead the responses ranged from rejection to contempt.

“Despite that, I’ve embraced this revelation and started to study African-American history. I’m proud to be part black and want to learn as much as I can about this part of me, but here’s my quandary: Do I check on forms that I am both Caucasian and African American? I technically qualify, according to the Office of Management and Budget definition, which states that ‘ “Black or African American” refers to a person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa,’ but I don’t look black and didn’t grow up in African-American culture.

“Do I check both, and come across as a liar to those who don’t know my history? Or do I check just white, and feel like a self-loathing racist (just like my family)?”—Suddenly African American

First, I congratulate you on developing a perspective different from that of your relatives, who sound horrible. If everyone thought as seriously as you do about his or her public and private statements about race, we’d all be better off.

Second, breathe. No, seriously. Calm down and set the forms aside for now. There are options other than “liar” and “self-loathing racist.” You don’t have to be either…

…Race Is Messy. This Is Up to You

On that note, I can’t give you a rule about whether you should check the “black” box. I know! That’s the whole reason you wrote. Sorry to disappoint.

But here’s why. As David J. Leonard, chair of the department of critical culture, gender and race studies at Washington State University at Pullam, put it, your question “points to a belief that race is real, rather than a social construction.” And that’s just not the case. (See this explanation, which probably should be a permanent Race Manners footnote. In short: Race is not based on biology but rather on ever-changing, lumped-together groups created pretty messily by humans.)

So, even your super-official government definition (to say nothing of the old “one-drop rule” that preceded it) leaves some wiggle room about what’s really meant by “black.”

I asked Ulli K. Ryder, scholar-in-residence at Brown University, who studies identity formation and communication, about your query, and she said, “The most important thing is for her to do what feels right for her.”

So, good news: You can do what you want. Bad news: You can only control your perception of yourself, not how others perceive you.

Read the entire article here.

In new book, two Kentucky families discover surprising racial histories

Lexington Herald-Leader
Lexington, Kentucky
2011-05-15

Linda B. Blackford

Freda Spencer Goble of Paintsville knew that she hailed from a proud and hardworking clan that carved a life out of the hills and hollows of frontier Johnson County. What she didn’t know was that one of those frontiersmen, her great-great grandfather, was partly black.

William LaBach is a Georgetown lawyer and genealogist who has long studied his Gibson relatives, a clan of Louisiana sugar planters who made a second home in Lexington before the Civil War. He’d heard that a colonial forebear was part African, but could never confirm it.

These two Kentucky families are now the subject of a new book by Vanderbilt University law professor Daniel Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey From Black to White reveals the complex and shifting history of race in America, a history about people’s most basic — and yet most unreliable — assumptions about their own identity…

…Thanks to books like Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball and revelations about President Thomas Jefferson’s black descendants, people have become more used to the idea that family trees branch with different ethnicities. However, the idea they might be a different ethnicity themselves is a new idea that is only recently emerging in genealogy and other historical studies.

“This is a more unsettling story. … The story really changes the way people approach race,” Sharfstein said. “For a lot of the descendants I spoke with, being white meant they really didn’t have to think about race for most of their lives. But now they’re really paying attention.”…

Read the entire article here.

Cornel West: ‘They say I’m un-American’

The Guardian
2013-05-12

Hugh Muir, Diary Editor

The American academic and firebrand campaigner talks about Britain’s deep trouble, fighting white supremacy and where Obama is going wrong

Cornel West, the firebrand of American academia for almost 30 years, is causing his hosts some problems. They are on a schedule but such things barely move him, for as he saunters down the high street there are people to talk to, and no one can leave shortchanged. Everyone, “brother” or “sister”, is indeed treated like a long lost family member. And then there is the hug; a bear-like pincer movement. There’s no escape. It happens in New York, where the professor/philosopher usually holds court. And now it’s the same in Cambridge.

The best students accord their visitors a healthy respect, but West’s week laying bare the conflicts and fissures of race and culture and activism and literature in the US and Britain yielded more than that during his short residency at King’s College. There are academics who draw a crowd, but the West phenomenon at King’s had rock star quality: the buzz, the poster beaming his image from doors and noticeboards; the back story – Harvard, Princeton, Yale, his seminal work Race Matters, his falling-in and falling-out with Barack Obama.

Others can teach, and at Cambridge the teaching is some of the best in the world, but standing-room-only crowds came to see West perform. He performed. Approaching 60 now, he is slow of gait. But he always performs…

Read the entire article here.

A Statistical Octoroon

Los Angeles Herald
Volume XXIX, Number 2 (1901-10-03)
page 4, columns 6-7
Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

The Average American Seven Parts White and One Part Colored

The average adult American is a statistical octoroon, says Dr. Henry Gannett In Everybody’s Magazine. If the blood in the veins of all our of people, white and black, were pooled and redistributed, each person would have about seven parts white and one part negro blood. The white strain in him, moreover, is by no means purely American White strains of foreign origin, derived from Germany, Ireland, Scandinavia, Canada, Great Britain and the countries of southern Europe, are collectively more powerful in his composition than is the negro strain. Thus going back only one generation, we find him to be a composite, the creation of widely differing bloods and nationalities. The peoples of the earth, from the Congo under the equator to the North Cape of Europe, have contributed, either immediately or remotely, to his composition. But with it all we find the Anglo-Saxon strain the dominant one. His political Institutions, his laws, his social conditions and his mental characteristics, his power of Initiative, and his independence of thought and action are Anglo-Saxon, sharpened and intensified by fresh contact with nature under new and untried conditions. It is a strange and a gratifying thing to witness, in connection with this mixture, of blood, the complete dominance of the Anglo-Saxon strain, and it argues well for its strength and vitality, an well as for the welfare of the country which he occupies and governs.

First Person: ‘We’ve made diversity our official civic religion in Leicester’

This is Leicestershire
Leicester Mercury
2013-03-27

Ben Ravilious

I was delighted to learn the city mayor has given the green light to Leicester’s City of Culture bid. However, I already have nagging doubts about the direction this might be taking.

It’s the flogging of the word “diversity” that concerns me. We’ve made diversity our official civic religion in Leicester but I think we should place more emphasis on the ways in which we mix to give us the best chance of winning.

Let’s be clear, my wife is of a different race, religion and nationality to me, we have two mixed-race daughters and my life is far richer as a result.

I also think it’s essential to continue the battle for equality so everyone in Leicester can all feel equally represented and respected.

But diversity alone is just a statistic and having diversity doesn’t necessarily mean harmony or cultural significance. It’s what we do with it that counts…

Read the entire article here.

Census 2011: Leicester ‘most ethnically diverse’ in region

BBC News
2012-12-11

Leicester is one of the most diverse cities in the UK and the largest in the East Midlands, the latest census shows.

Information from the 2011 survey shows there are 329,000 people living in the city, 24,000 more than in Nottingham, while 250,000 live in Derby. [See Leicester details here.]

Half of Leicester’s population describe themselves as white British, compared with 80% nationally and 63.9% in 2001.

Deputy Mayor of Leicester Rory Palmer said they viewed its diversity as a major strength.

The details emerged in the latest round of information released from the 2011 census taken in March.
 
Leicester was widely tipped to be the first city with a minority white population but just missed out on the landmark with 50.6% describing themselves as white.

But it does have one of the lowest rates of residents who identify themselves as white British, at 45%, and the highest proportion of British Indians, at 28.3%…

Mr. Palmer, deputy city mayor, said: “What it means is that we have a very diverse population and we view this as a great strength and something the city can be very proud of.

“We saw the Queen and the royal family kick off their Diamond Jubilee in March this year here in Leicester, probably because Leicester is a very real reflection of modern, vibrant, multi-cultural Britain.”

While Nottingham’s population remains smaller than Leicester’s at 305,680 – 38,692 more than in 2001 – it does have a higher than average mixed race community.

About 6% are mixed ethnicity, with 4% white and black Caribbean…

Read the entire article here.

Internal migration and ethnic division: the case of Palmas, Brazil

The Australian Journal of Anthropology
Volume 22, Issue 2, August 2011
pages 203–219
DOI: 10.1111/j.1757-6547.2011.00134.x

Mieke Schrooten
Anthropology Department
Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven

Starting from the observation that Brazilian history has led to the development of a very distinct system of race relations, this paper focuses on the (re)creation of ethnic divisions in a new city, Palmas, the capital of the Brazilian state Tocantins. Because the city was only founded in 1990, internal migration has heavily influenced the composition of the city’s population. The research shows that residential proximity and interaction between whites and non-whites is largely limited to the poor neighbourhoods of the city. Subtle racism continues to exist, deriving from a way of thinking that naturalises the racial hierarchy. The absence of clearly defined racial categories and the centrality of miscegenation to the Brazilian identity complicate the further dismantling of this racist culture.

Read or purchase the article here.

Amalgamation, North and South

Sacramento Daily Union
Volume 24, Number 3619 (1862-11-03)
page 4, column 2
Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

Driven from every other position by the force of argument or the force of facts, the advocates of a doomed system flourish before the eyes of the ignorant the bugbear of amalgamation. Amalgamation, they urge, is the natural result of entertaining sentiments hostile to slavery. The Marysville Express returns to the charge, quoting that eminent statistician, Voorhees of Indiana, to show that in proportion to the negro population of the North there is at the present time a frightful excess of quadroons, mulattoes and octoroons in the free States over the slave States. “Voorhees proved,” says the Express, “by reference to these unerring statistics [these of the census], that in 1860 the number of mixed bloods was much greater in the free States than in 1850, in proportion to the unmixed black population–thus showing that as abolitionism has grown in the North, this evil of amalgamation has increased. Another remarkable but disgusting fact accounts for the larger proportion of mixed bloods in our section, and that is, the by no means uncommon cohabitation of negro men with white women in the strong Abolition communities. This the census also shows. The same census returns show that such an occurrence is exceedingly rare in the slave States—a very few instances being reported. These are facts that cannot be denied. In addition to such authority, we have proof furnished by the papers and correspondents from the East, that the amalgamation theories of the Abolitionists are rapidly becoming practicalized. Marriage and cohabitation have become so common in New York and Boston as scarcely to attract attention, except as the astounding fact occasionally breaks upon one, that there are whole blocks and rows of houses with ‘every tenement occupied by families the head of each of which is, the one black and the other white!’ That there are also mixed bloods in the slave States is a fact, and a deplorable one. But the evil can never become so corrupting where the two races occupy the relative positions that slavery fixes.”

We have seen no census returns in which the number of quadroons, mulattoes and octoroons in the Northern States has been given, with a division according to the shade of complexion. Those having African blood in their veins are generally, if not always, returned in the census as “colored persons.” Perhaps Voorhees had access to statistics that have not yet reached the public in the form of an authorized publication. But, however that may be, an increase of the mixed breeds in the North cannot be more justly attributed to the growth of  “Abolitionism” than to the growth of the railroad interest or the progress of common schools. The Express, to establish the preposition, must first show that none but Abolitionists in the North practice amalgamation, and then prove that there is no amalgamation in the South, where abolitionism is held in abhorrence. Now, in regard to the Northern cities, it is quite true that in what ore sometimes called the “infected districts” of New York, Boston and Philadelphia, whites and blacks are sometimes found living together in loathsome habitations; but these districts are the “nurseries of Democracy.” Amid all the changes of opinion that have come over the respectable portion of the community, those sections of the great cities in which practical amalgamation may be observed, invariably give large majorities for the ticket labeled “Democratic.” What then? Does it follow that Democracy leads to amalgamation? Yet that inference is quite as legitimate as the one drawn by the Express. When the Express asserts that “Marriage and cohabitation (of the two races) have become so common in New York and Boston as scarcely to attract attention, except as the astounding fact occasionally breaks upon one that there are whole blocks and rows of houses with every tenement occupied by families the head of each of which is, one black and the other white,” it either willfully misrepresents the state of the case or else it has been egregiously gulled. Nowhere in the United States is the prejudice against the negro race more general and intense than it is in the city of New York. The simple appearance of a black man and white woman, arm in arm, on Broadway, would provoke a riotous demonstration. It is only in the by ways of the metropolis, and among the very dregs of society, that a case of amalgamation can be found; and.in every case, rum and vice, not hostility to slavery, explain the association.

The Express admits the existence of amalgamate in the South. Logically, then, if the mixture of the races be such a disgusting evil, the Express should condemn the institution of slavery, which brings the races into such intimate association. “But the evil can never become so corrupting where the two races occupy the relative positions that slavery fixes.” Why not? In the language of a recent candidate for office in this State, “the blood of the chivalry flows through the veins of a half million slaves on Southern plantations.” Does the fact of men holding and selling as chattels those who share their own lifeblood, palliate or darken the offense of amalgamation? Among men of right feeling and intelligence there can be but one answer. Mongrelism pervades the South, and the emancipation policy of the Administration, instead of stimulating the evil, will rather tend to check its extension by arousing that prejudice of race which is the true safeguard of Caucasian purity. The prevailing sentiment of the North is well interpreted by Orestes A. Brownson, as “anti-slavery, but anti-negro.”

Checking More Than One Box: A Growing Multiracial Nation

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2013-05-12

Arun Rath, Host

[Note from Steven F. Riley: My wife and I live in the White Oak neighborhood of Silver Spring, Maryland, USA.]

Larry Bright holds his 3-year-old son’s hand while the boy steps through a leafy playground in Silver Spring, Md., and practices counting his numbers in English.

At the top of the slide, the boy begins counting in his other language: Vietnamese.

Bright, the boy’s father, is African-American; his mother, Thien Kim Lam, is Vietnamese. The couple has two children.

“They are a perfect mix between the two of us,” Lam tells Arun Rath, host of weekends on All Things Considered.

Bright and Lam’s son and 7-year-old daughter are multiracial, just two of thousands born in what’s been called a multiracial baby boom. Today, 15 percent of marriages are interracial and inter-ethnic…

…Evolving Perspectives

Multiracial people identifying as just one race is part of a long trend. University of Southern California professor Marcia Alesan Dawkins’ father was one such man: part black and part white.

“He has lived his life as an African-American man. He lived through segregation, he lived through civil rights,” Dawkins says. “And though he acknowledges these other aspects of his identity, he sees the world from the perspective of a black man. That’s how he chooses to identify.”

But just one generation makes all the difference for Dawkins herself, who claims black, white and Latino heritage. Dawkins and her sister see the world a little differently, she says.

“I don’t think it’s better or worse, but I think it’s a credit to the progress in both ways that people can choose to identify just as one, or choose to identify as two or more,” Dawkins says.

Despite the trend, Dawkins says it is important to remember that it is still less than 3 percent of the population that identifies as multiracial. The overwhelming majority of Americans identify as having one race only.

“That’s not a bad thing, but we have to be really careful how we read and interpret and spin these census results,” she says.

Read the entire story here. Listen to the story here.  Download the audio here.