Mixed Race Studies

Miscegenation and “the Dicta of Race and Class”: The Rhinelander Case and Nella Larsen’s Passing

MFS Modern Fiction Studies
Volume 36, Number 4, Winter 1990
DOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.1034
pages 523-529

Mark J. Madigan, Professor / Fulbright Program Advisor in English
Nazareth College, Rochester, New York

The 1986 Rutgers University Press edition of Nella Larsen’s two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), represents an important step in the resurrection of a neglected writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Larsen was the first African-American woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing (1930), and both of her novels were highly acclaimed before her literary career ended abruptly in the early 1930s for reasons that are still not wholly clear. There were well-publicized but unproven charges of plagiarism of a short story, yet, like most details of Larsen’s life, the reasons for her disappearance from the literary scene remain a mystery. Larsen wrote no more than the two novels and the one story titled “Sanctuary,” and in 1963 she died in obscurity after working some thirty years as a nurse in Brooklyn.
 
The Rutgers edition has made Larsen’s novels more accessible not only by publishing both in one volume with a substantial introduction but also by annotating references in the text to public figures, events, and parlance of the late 1920s. There is, however, a reference to “the Rhinelander case” in an important paragraph in Passing that remains unidentified in the Rutgers first and second printings and only briefly explained in those following. A deeper understanding of the details of this controversial divorce case not only helps to explicate the paragraph in Larsen’s novel but also provides an important historical subtext for the book and the several other Harlem Renaissance works dealing with racial passing.
 
The title of Larsen’s novel refers to the capability of light-skinned African-Americans to cross, or “pass,” the color line undetected. In writing of racial passing, Larsen worked within a well-established tradition: William Wells Brown, Charles W. Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, and James Weldon Johnson were only a few of the writers who had dealt with this topic before her. Passing, however, is distinguished by its deft presentation of the subject from the perspectives of two mulatto women of the 1920s: Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield. The novel begins in an expensive Chicago restaurant where both women are passing. There, Clare recognizes Irene as a childhood friend and invites her to tea at her home. Irene, the wife of a successful Harlem doctor, keeps the date, but when she meets Clare’s racist white husband—who does not know his wife’s true race—vows never to see her old friend again. The two do meet again, however, when Clare pays a visit to New York City two years later. Despite Irene’s reluctance to rekindle the friendship, Clare makes frequent visits to the Redfields’ apartment, and the plot is complicated when Irene begins to suspect that her husband is having an affair with Clare. Clare’s husband further complicates matters when he learns by chance that his wife is actually a mulatto. Irene then fears that her own husband will leave her if Clare is divorced. The Rhinelander case is mentioned at this crucial point in the narrative, as Irene wonders whether racial deception could be grounds for Clare’s divorce:

What if Bellew should divorce Clare? Could he? There was the Rhinelander case. But in France, in Paris, such things were easy. If he divorced her—If Clare were free—But of all the things that could happen, that was the one she did not want. She must get her mind away from that possibility. She must. (228)

Larsen’s offhand manner of referring to the Rhinelander case assumes a familiarity on the part of her readers, but what was once common knowledge now demands some explanation. The case centered on the marriage of Leonard Kip Rhinelander, a member of one of New York’s oldest and wealthiest families, and Alice B. Jones, a mulatto chambermaid, on 14 October, 1924—just one week after the twenty-two year-old Rhinelander had received a share of his family’s fortune in cash, jewels, real estate, and stocks. The improbable love-affair between the young…

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The Future of the ‘Tan Generation’

The Root
2012-06-08

Jenée Desmond-Harris

Browner America: Marcia Alesan Dawkins says an increase in nonwhite births doesn’t mean more social justice.

(The Root)—Recent census data reveal that, for the first time, racial and ethnic minorities make up more than half of all children born in the United States, with 50.4 percent of children under age 1 identified as Hispanic, black, Asian American or members of another ethnic minority group.

In terms of the overall population, African Americans are the second-largest minority group in the nation (after Hispanics), with a 1.6 percent increase between 2010 and 2011. Minorities now make up nearly 37 percent of the overall U.S. population, and it’s predicted that by 2042, a minority of Americans will be non-Hispanic whites.

What do all these numbers mean for our understanding of race, for the issues that affect communities of color and for our very concept of who is a “minority” in this country? The Root has gathered a variety of perspectives on the significance of America’s becoming a browner nation for a series of interviews on whether, and why, we should pay attention to these demographic changes.

For the second in the series, The Root talked to Marcia Alesan Dawkins, visiting scholar at Brown University and author of the forthcoming Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity. She describes her extensive writing on racial identity as an expression of her interest in “how people figure out who they are and how they connect with others,” and has warned against rushing to assume that demographic changes will do away with America’s troubled racial past…

…The Root: Are we going to need a new vocabulary, a new word for “minority,” when minorities become the majority? As more Americans have nonwhite ancestry, will the definition of whiteness itself be affected?

Marcia Dawkins: Yes, on both counts. We are going to need new terms that reflect numerical reality and social-political reality. Part of that implies thinking about what race and ethnicity mean in general and what specific racial and ethnic, and multiracial and multiethnic, identities mean in particular. At the same time, we’ve got to remember that every racial or ethnic community has some issues and experiences in common and is also unique.

For one, these changes mean that the white-black and white-people of color binaries need to be rethought and replaced with a full-color perspective on race and ethnicity. A full-color perspective acknowledges that racial and ethnic mixing has been part of our social fabric since Europeans met and mated with Native Americans; that it continued on through African enslavement and segregation and Asian exclusion and internment; that it progressed with increased rates of Hispanic immigration and is still with us as increasing numbers of interracial and multiracial couples get together and have children today. A full-color perspective must also acknowledge that racial and ethnic mixing has been occurring for centuries in same-sex communities as well.

On one hand, sociologists predict that the definition of whiteness will expand to include Hispanic and Asian groups but will always exclude those with African-American descent in order to maintain political and social power. On the other hand, this prediction is reductive because it assumes that only those who will continue to identify as white will be privileged and that those who will continue to identify as black will be non-privileged. It also ignores the fact that, generally speaking, to be African American is to be racially mixed…

Read the entire article here.

Librarian of Congress Appoints Natasha Trethewey Poet Laureate

Library of Congress
News from the Library of Congress
2012-06-07

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington today announced the appointment of Natasha Trethewey as the Library’s Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2012-2013.

Trethewey, the 19th Poet Laureate, will take up her duties in the fall, opening the Library’s annual literary season with a reading of her work on Thursday, September 13 in the Coolidge Auditorium. Her term will coincide with the 75th anniversary of the Library’s Poetry and Literature Center and the 1937 establishment of the Consultant-in-Poetry position, which was changed by a federal law in 1986 to Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.
 
“Natasha Trethewey is an outstanding poet/historian in the mold of Robert Penn Warren, our first Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry,” Billington said. “Her poems dig beneath the surface of history—personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago—to explore the human struggles that we all face.”…

Read the entire press release here.

Selected Poems by Natasha Trethewey

The New York Times
2012-06-06

Poems by Natasha Trethewey, the newly named poet laureate.

…PASTORAL

In the dream, I am with the Fugitive
Poets. We’re gathered for a photograph.
Behind us, the skyline of Atlanta
hidden by the photographer’s backdrop —
a lush pasture, green, full of soft-eyed cows
lowing, a chant that sounds like no, no. Yes,
I say to the glass of bourbon I’m offered.
We’re lining up now — Robert Penn Warren,
his voice just audible above the drone
of bulldozers, telling us where to stand.
Say “race,” the photographer croons. I’m in
blackface again when the flash freezes us.
My father’s white, I tell them, and rural.
You don’t hate the South? they ask. You don’t hate it?

Read the poems here.

The Origin of the Van Guilders

History’s Faces
2012-05-25

Debra Winchell

Recently the Associated Press published an article by Travis Loller saying that DNA study seeks the origin of Appalachia’s Melungeons. In a excerpt Mr. Loller wrote:

In recent years, it has become a catchall term for people of mixed-race ancestry and has been applied to about 200 communities in the eastern U.S. — from New York to Louisiana.

Among them were the Montauks, the Mantinecocks, Van Guilders, the Clappers, the Shinnecocks and others in New York. Pennsylvania had the Pools; North Carolina the Lumbees, Waccamaws and Haliwas and South Carolina the Redbones, Buckheads, Yellowhammers, Creels and others. In Louisiana, which somewhat resembled a Latin American nation with its racial mixing, there were Creoles of the Cane River region and the Redbones of western Louisiana, among others.

As a result of researching the Van Guilders for over fifteen years, I know that the Van Gilders/Van Guilders from western Massachusetts, upstate New York and Vermont are not Melungeon.   The founder of the family was Jan Van Gelder, a Mohican–Wappinger man who married the German Palatine woman Anna Maria Koerner in Kingston, New York, in 1719.  They lived in what is now present day Berkshire County on the west bank of the Green River, southwest of Great Barrington…

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New Laureate Looks Deep Into Memory

The New York Times
2012-06-06

Charles McGrath

The Library of Congress is to announce Thursday that the next poet laureate is Natasha Trethewey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of three collections and a professor of creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta. Ms. Trethewey, 46, was born in Gulfport, Miss., and is the first Southerner to hold the post since Robert Penn Warren, the original laureate, and the first African-American since Rita Dove in 1993.

“I’m still a little in disbelief,” Ms. Trethewey said on Monday.

Unlike the recent laureates W. S. Merwin and her immediate predecessor, Philip Levine, both in their 80s when appointed, Ms. Trethewey, who will officially take up her duties in September, is still in midcareer and not well-known outside poetry circles. Her work combines free verse with more traditional forms like the sonnet and the villanelle to explore memory and the racial legacy of America. Her fourth collection, “Thrall,” is scheduled to appear in the fall. She is also the author of a 2010 nonfiction book, “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.”…

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Some Anthropological Characteristics of Anglo-Negro Children

The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
Volume 73, Numbers 1/2 (1943)
pages 57-73

K. L. Little, M.A., Ph.D.
The Duckworth Laboratory
University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Cambridge

I. Introduction

Although fairly large Negro communities have been in existence in Liverpool, Cardiff, London and other ports of the kingdom since the time of the Great War, very little advantage has so far been taken of the opportunities ostensibly available there for the study of racial mixture. The work of Miss R. M. Fleming (1939), who examined a large number of Anglo-Negro and other crosses, mainly in Liverpool, is an exception, but she designed her investigations more from the standpoint of family than of group inheritance. In the present inquiry, which was carried out during a series of visits to Cardiff, Hull and Liverpool in the summer months of 1941, 1942, and 1943, an attempt has been made—so far as the nature of the material allows—to examine certain aspects of mixture on linen more familiar to the anthropologist. The data presented relate to groups rather than to individuals. Perhaps a word on the methodological implications of this point may be permitted. It is evident, in the popular discussion of the topic, that a great deal of confusion has arisen in this country, as well as elsewhere, through failure to appreciate the significance of individual, as opposed to group, situations. Yet the issue is quite plain, provided its nature is understood. Since the term “race” is essentially a concept relating to a group of people, it is incorrect to speak of certain results following from racial mixture unless such results can be shown as well marked characteristics of a “hybrid” population, regarded not as the product of individuals genetically more or less unrelated to each other, but as the product of racially unrelated groups of individuals. This significant distinction has been made somewhat pungently by Ruth Benedict (1942) in a book in which she points out that miscegenation, like race, is an abstraction: the mating of two persona is a reality. It is possible, also, that a great deal of unnecessary controversy, as well as confusion, would be obviated if it was realised more widely that biological differences between individual members of the same racial group are usually greater than the differences between typical individuals representing different racial groups. Marked “overlapping ” in anthropological characteristics is nearly always found in comparisons between different populations, even when they are racially quite distinct.

The urgency of clarification of this matter needs to be emphasised. Until the biological and sociological aspects of the problem are recognised as quite separate parts of the field, and until the problem has been shorn of biological mysticism, the study of racial mixture in this country, considered as a topic concerning human biology, will remain a difficult and unenviable task for the investigator.

II. Anthropometric Criteria Employed

The data which are analysed in the following Tables and Figures relate to some 460 male and female ” English” and Anglo-Negro children, the offspring of members of the seafaring communities of the ports mentioned. Most of these subjects were living in Cardiff and Liverpool, and they had an environment, in their dockland habitat, which is not unlike that of other children of the same social and economic class as themselves. On nearly all these subjects some two dozen measurements and a number of observations regarding the colours of hair, eye and skin, and the condition of the teeth, were taken. The object of the investigation was to compare the Anglo-Negro (“hybrid”) and ” English ” populations in terms of the central tendency, variation and growth of physical characters. The latter sample may reasonably be regarded as being made up by juvenile representatives of one of the parental stocks from which the former was derived.   As wide an assortment of characters as was practicable was employed, and having regard to the racial elements concerned—-i.e. Negroid and Caucasoid — special attention was paid to features such as nasal breadth and shape, thickness of lip, colour of skin, etc., which make the clearest distinction between the parental groups. In view of the relative consistency of environmental factors, it was thought best to include for secondary consideration some of the more modifiable characters such as stature, height sitting, and weight…

A Color Problem in England

The Journal of the American Medical Association
Volume 95, Number 3 (1930-07-19)
Foreign Letters: London Letter
pages 210-211
DOI: 10.1001/jama.1930.02720030040020

From Our Regular Correspondent (1930-06-21)

There is no color line in England such as exists in America. This does not mean that the English do not appreciate differences of race. They are keen on such differences, even between European races, and often contrast the Latin races with themselves. They are by no means without race prejudices but at the same time they have a strong tendency to take a man for what he is, regardless of race or of color. His color may arouse prejudice but this may be overcome when he is known. This absence of a color line has given rise to a color problem. The great seaport of Liverpool is frequented by seamen of many races, including Chinese and many Negroes from West Africa. The cohabitation of these races with the women of the city has given rise to a half-caste population. The number of Anglo-Negroid families is about 450 and the children born of this union amount to about 1,350. On the other hand, the Anglo-Chinese children do not provide any particular problem. The Anglo-Chinese child is declared to be mentally equal if not superior to the white, and since coloring and features are far less distinctive than those of the Anglo-Negroids they are not such a handicap. Further, the family life appears to be stable, the man remaining faithful to one woman though not married to her. The Anglo-Negroid family is far different. A Liverpool association for the welfare of half-caste children has been formed. The chairman, Prof. P. M. Roxby, says that the conditions under which colored seamen from West Africa enter Liverpool are a social menace and detrimental to the best interests of blacks and whites alike.

Miss Muriel E. Fletcher has for nearly two years been occupied with an inquiry for the association into the condition of half-caste children in Liverpool, where they are more numerous than in any other port. Of the Anglo-Negroid unions she says there is little harmony between the parents; the colored man generally despises the woman with whom he consorts, while the majority of the women have little affection for the men. They regret their union but stay for the sake of the children. The mothers are generally good to the children while they are small but later resent the fact that the children cannot get work and grudge having to keep them. The children find their lives full of conflict, and all the circumstances give undue prominence to sex. These families have a low standard of life morally and economically, and there appears to be little future for the children. They attend school in the poor districts and do not show any inferiority of health or proneness to infections compared with white children. The balance of evidence is that their intelligence is below the average. Their relations with the white children are friendly but they begin to feel outcast when they leave school and this feeling develops rapidly. There is no evidence that they have any special delinquent tendencies, but all their circumstances give undue prominence to sex. Owing to their unemployment, fondness of dress and finery, and the persistence of men, it is practically impossible for them to remain chaste, even if they desire to do so. As employers are unwilling to engage colored labor, the association has tried training schemes for colored girls but with limited success. It is thought that a larger and more intensive scheme might have greater success. It has been suggested that the obvious solution of the difficulty is to replace colored firemen by white on all British ships coming to this country, but the shipowners say that white men could not work in the heat of the stokeholds on the West Coast of Africa. However, the National Union of Seamen denies this. Other suggestions are the signing on of men in Africa so that they would be obliged to take the round trip and receive no pay in this country, and greater discrimination in the issue of British passports.

The Hybridity Revolution

Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review
2012-05-31

Michelle La Flamme

Adebe DeRango-Adem (Editor) and Andrea Thompson (Editor), Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out.

Societies that pride themselves on an imagined monoracial norm have rare glimpses into the multi-racial experience. The contemporary literary phenomenon some refer to as the “boom in bi-racial biography” (Spickard) has offered nuanced reflections on the ontological impact of this liminal hybrid position. At their thematic core, most bi-racial and multiracial narratives demonstrate the complexity of this form of embodiment and the semiotics of a body continually affected, and constructed, by the racialized gaze. Several thematic issues are repeated in both Carol Camper’s seminal anthology, Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women (1994), and the more recent Other Tongue: Mixed Race Women Speak Out (2010). The writing in both anthologies is a bold testament to the pervasiveness of multiraciality and ultimately counters many social scientific conclusions. The interest in such anthologies is also in keeping with the rise in autobiography and critical race theories. In both fields there is a consistent tendency to privilege personal accounts of the mixed race experience and, as Camper claims in her preface, the importance of “speaking for ourselves” as “experts on our own lives.”

The women writers in Other Tongues outline moments of interpellation, the power of the racialized gaze, and the stages of their shifting notions of self based on multiply-coded bodies that challenge monoracial definitions of identity. The work accounts for various individual experiences of “passing” and the complexities of a body that is repeatedly read for signs of authenticity. These writers contest the notion of a “post-racial” world in that these poems, memoirs, short stories, and art work continually reference the fact that visual identifiers of race are understood within “always already” historical and cultural conditions that lead to the racialization of the body despite the individual’s efforts (or best intentions) to defy these norms. The editors of Other Tongues suggest that it offers unique perspectives on the “changing racial landscape that [has] occurred over the last decade” in order to offer a “snapshot of the North American terrain of questions about race, mixed-race, racial identity, and how mixed-race women in North American identify in the twenty-first century” in a time that is marked by “the inauguration of the first mixed-race Black president in North America.” However, the anthology is more personal than critical, privileges women’s voices, and fails to represent the range of mixedness in North America. Given that the themes and content echo Camper’s 1994 anthology, the uniqueness of this collection is perhaps overstated…

Read the entire review here.

“Out of an obscure place”: Japanese War Brides and Cultural Pluralism in the 1950s

differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
Volume 10, Number 3 (1998)
pages 47-81

Caroline Chung Simpson, Associate Professor of English
University of Washington

In the spring of 1954, the American philosopher Horace Kallen was invited to deliver a series of lectures at the University of Pennsylvania reviewing the state of cultural pluralism in American postwar society. The concept of cultural pluralism was Kallen’s own invention, an idea of American society first expressed in his 1915 essay, “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot,” in which he defended America’s growing racial and ethnic diversity-“the federation or commonwealth of nationalities” that seemed to emerge in the wake of early-twentieth-century immigration-as the strength rather than the curse of the nation. Although by 1954 the supposed menace of immigration had long since been checked, most notably by the 1924 Immigration Act that imposed severe restrictions on immigration from Europe and Asia, the diversity Kallen had defended earlier in the century was once more poised to overwhelm the national imagination. As Kallen delivered his lectures that spring, the Supreme Court was hearing the Brown case, the culmination of a stream of compelling legal arguments that contested the notion of “separate but equal” established in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. Given the anxiety that racial desegregation provoked in many whites, Kallen and the liberal intellectuals attending his lectures understood the need to reassess and restate the case for cultural pluralism.

In the face of tense public and legal debate over desegregation, Kallen reasserted the promise of pluralism in stirring strains that seemed at times to evoke an almost radiant vision of what Americans might yet achieve. His vision depended on the willingness of white Americans in particular to embrace change. As he put it, “the dogma that we cannot change the past is not an understanding of the process of change but a prejudice of our resistance to it and a static illusion symbolizing our fear of it” (“Meanings” 24). The chief effect of his lectures and the published responses to them was to affirm that the coming changes in race relations anticipated by the Brown deliberations would be generative rather than enervating:

It is the variety and range of his participations, which does in fact distinguish a civilized man from an uncivilized man, a man of faith and reason from an unreasoning fanatic, a democrat from a totalitarian, a man of culture from a barbarian. Such a man obviously orchestrates a growing pluralism of associations into the wholeness of his individuality.

In descriptions like this one, Kallen recasts the threat of integration as a deft “orchestration” of differences that would leave the nation “whole” rather than fractured. But while most Americans might have assumed this orchestration would soon occur through increased interactions between blacks and whites, as indeed it did, there were other, less visible avenues by which public voices sought to orchestrate or imagine the successful transition to racial integration in the mid-1950s…

….Such is the case of Japanese Americans in the postwar period, a group often neglected in considerations of American pluralism and postwar integration despite the fact that the meaning and shape of Japanese American identity was caught in a tremendous crisis. The relocation and internment experience was, of course, the most startling evidence of that crisis. But the postwar dilemma of Japanese Americans as citizen-subjects, while often limited to discussions of the internment experience of the West Coast population, in fact incorporates a range of national experiences and histories, including the resettlement program after the war and the impact of the immigration of Japanese war brides on the meaning of Japanese American citizenship.

Japanese war brides were perhaps the most visible representatives of Japanese American life in the postwar period, although they did not always self-identify as Japanese Americans. Still they were often presented as emergent members of a new kind of Japanese American community, which was primarily attractive because the war brides were seen solely as compliant wives and mothers unfettered by the disturbing public history of internment. Settling into domestic life in the 1950s, with little fanfare, as unfamiliar national subjects who had formerly been citizens of an enemy nation, Japanese war brides soon became meaningful figures in the discourse on racial integration and cultural pluralism. As white Americans tried to negotiate the threat of black integration, and government programs tried in vain to resettle interned Japanese Americans, Japanese war brides provided at least one “unofficial or obscure place” out of which the redemption of cultural pluralism, as an ideal that stabilized relations rather than disrupted them, would reemerge as a distinct possibility. In significant ways, the postwar popular media’s changing view of Japanese war brides projects them as an early form of the Asian American model minority. The 1950s transformation of the Japanese war bride from an opportunistic and ignorant alien seeking to penetrate the suburban affluence of white America to the gracious and hard-working middle-class housewife was an early exemplar for achieving the integrated future in America, a halcyon story of domestic bliss and economic mobility difficult to extract from the stories of long-time racialized citizen-subjects…

…But even more troubling for the concept of national identity was the issue of “the Eurasian children of these marriages.” In tow with their mothers, they promised to increase “the Japanese-race population back home” (25). However, the underlying concern of the Post authors is less that the Japanese American race would be replenished by these immigrant women than that their mixed race marriages and their “Eurasian children” would eventually erode the distinctions between the white and Japanese races. “The effect of these mixed marriages on American life at home is still to come,” conclude the authors, who imagine in mythic terms “the arrival of thousands of dark-skinned, dark-eyed brides in Mississippi cotton hamlets and New Jersey factory cities, on Oregon ranches or in Kansas country towns” where “their bright-eyed children soon will be knocking on school doors in most of the forty-eight states” (25). The probability of mixed race families living openly in formerly white or non-Asian areas of the nation not only renders these regions unfamiliar; it also disturbs miscegenation anxieties that are the bedrock of white resistance to racial integration. The interracial marriages of Japanese war brides, then, established the limits of white-Japanese relations, limits that had been checked in the case of resettled Nisei by the idiom of patronage that defined their contacts with whites. Although, as the passage of time revealed, these limits did not necessarily contain the ambivalent feelings often expressed by most of the fifteen Nisei respondents to the 1943 study…

Read the entire article here.