Mixed Race Studies

Skin Bleaching and Global White Supremacy: By Way of Introduction

Journal of Pan African Studies
Volume 4, Number 4 (2011)
pages 4-46
23 illustrations

Yaba Amgborale Blay, Assistant Teaching Professor of Africana Studies
Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The cosmetic use of chemical agents to lighten the complexion of one’s skin, also referred to as skin whitening, skin lightening, and/or skin bleaching, is currently a widespread global phenomenon. While the history of skin bleaching can be traced to the Elizabethan age of powder and paint, in its current manifestations, skin bleaching is practiced disproportionately within communities “of color” and exceedingly among people of African descent. While it is true that skin bleaching represents a multifaceted phenomenon, with a complexity of historical, cultural, sociopolitical, and psychological forces motivating the practice, the large majority of scholars who examine skin bleaching at the very least acknowledge the institutions of colonialism and enslavement historically, and global White supremacy contemporarily, as dominant and culpable instigators of the penchant for skin bleaching. As an introduction to this Special Issue of The Journal of Pan African Studies focusing on skin bleaching and global White supremacy, the purpose of this paper is to critically examine the symbolic significance of whiteness, particularly for and among African people, by outlining the history of global White supremacy, both politically and ideologically, discussing its subsequent promulgation, and further investigating its relationship to the historical and contemporary skin bleaching phenomenon.

Read the entire article here.

Black No More: Skin Bleaching and the Emergence of New Negro Womanhood Beauty Culture

The Journal of Pan African Studies
Voume 4, Number 4 (June 2011)
pages 97-116

Treva B. Lindsey, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
University of Missouri, Columbia

This article examines the usage of skin bleaching products and processes among some African American women in the urban upper south in the United States during the early twentieth century. Numerous African American women invested in these products and processes as means to shed vestiges of enslavement and to configure “urbane” and “modern” identities. More specifically, as African American women exercised their ability to function as consumer citizens, manufacturers and advertisers built upon prevailing beauty aesthetics among whites and on a black intra-racial beauty standard that posited dark skin as inferior. By exploring the history of skin lightening in this particular community, I uncover a politics of appearance that intersected with white cultural hegemony as well as gendered discourses about urban black modernity and social mobility. Although pre-Emancipation enslaved and freedwomen struggled against the devaluation of their darker hues, the privileging of white skin imparted lasting effects on African American beauty culture and intra-racial class and color politics. Some African Americans internalized beauty aesthetics that privileged whiteness. Among African American women in the urban upper south, skin bleaching rose in popularity during the early twentieth century. I discuss what factors led to this rise in popularity such as the desires of some African American women to perform urban modernity and to participate in the public sphere as consumer citizens through the purchasing and usage of products associated with fashioning a “New Negro” self. Beauty culture, and in particular, discourse surrounding skin bleaching, served as sites for competing ideals and perspectives regarding the aesthetics of New Negro womanhood.

Introduction

Understand, we do not advertise this bleach to make one white.
God alone can accomplish this, and it would be miraculous.¹

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, skin bleaching products and procedures became increasingly popular in African American communities across the United States. Many African American newspapers and periodicals carried numerous advertisements for these products and procedures in their consumer sections. Although skin bleaching/lightening had a long history in African American communities in the U.S., the formalization of a raciallyspecific consumer marketplace during the Progressive and New Negro eras created opportunities for manufacturers and sellers to target new, potential customers. The rhetoric extant in these advertisements trumpeted whiteness and or lightness as preferential and aesthetically desirable. Advertisers marketed their skin bleaching products and processes to African American communities throughout the United States. African American women in urban centers became central to advertising discourses. African American men participated in various arenas of beauty culture, however, beauty culture existed as a feminized space. Through purchasing a skin bleach cream or a bar of complexion soap, New Negro women in the U.S. embraced their fledgling status as consumer citizens and contributed to broader discussions about the interplay of race, class, color, gender, aesthetics, urbanity and modernity.

At the core of the New Negro Movement was a desire for a re-creation of self, both individually and collectively. New Negroes acted upon this desire for re-creation through reconfiguring aesthetic and cultural traditions. African Americans engaged in new practices and aesthetic discourses with an unprecedented sense of possibility for self-determination and autonomy. Through the altering, adorning, and maintenance of physical appearance, African Americans could literally reconstruct and refashion themselves and create new models of black aesthetic identity. Aesthetic practices were integral to African Americans in shedding the vestiges of enslavement and for asserting their place within the modern world…

…Prior to Emancipation, many African Americans associated light skin with greater freedom and opportunity as well as with membership in an elite class of African Americans. Some free African American women were of both European (white) and African (black) descent, and subsequently certain phenotypical features, including lighter skin, represented freedom to enslaved and impoverished African Americans. While not accepted fully by whites, free African American women often attained comparatively more social and economic freedoms than enslaved women. Many of the African American elite in Washington, arguably because of their mixed-race heritage had lighter skin. For many of them, their skin color in its unaltered state was the ideal to which thousands of African Americans strove to achieve. The physical appearance of the “Negro Elite” became integral to an African American politics of appearance that intersected with ideas about African American possibility and the fashioning of a New Negro identity. According to black beauty scholars Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps, “by the time slavery was officially abolished in 1865, ‘good’ hair and light skin had become the official keys to membership in the Negro elite,” although exceptions were made based upon educational attainment and occupation. Free African American women were the foremothers of the “Negro Elite” class that continued to grow after Emancipation.

The ideal of light and white skin were foundational to how white manufacturers who dominated the African American beauty industry throughout the nineteenth century created and marketed racially-specific beauty products and how some African Americans consumed beauty products. From the midnineteenth century onward, white-owned companies manufactured and sold skin care products that claimed to lighten and whiten black skin. These advertisements appeared in African American periodicals and reified lighter skin as both “American” and modern beauty ideals. Freedwomen were the prime consumers of these products. A small market for skin care products for the African American elite in D.C. emerged in the 1840s and 1850s. Among black Washington women of all classes, skin-lightening continued to flourish after emancipation and well into the twentieth century. These beauty practices often reflected the aspirations of some Washington women to adhere to prevailing beauty norms and to escape the vestiges of “physical blackness,” which located them at the bottom of the U.S. beauty hierarchy and connected them to their past as slaves or poor workers. Attempting to escape their cultural past and their labor identities, some African American women migrating to Washington in the late nineteenth century mimicked styling choices and practices of D.C.’s African black and white women. Dark skin was not viewed as attractive or modern within certain elite circles in Washington and within the U.S. more broadly. Consequently, the racially-specific enterprise of African American skincare that emerged post-Emancipation honed in on a racial-social-class-color-gender hierarchy that devalued dark skin and that further solidified the primacy of physical whiteness…

…The advertisement for Black Skin Remover champions the product’s ability to make black skin several shades whiter and mulatto skin “perfectly white.” The “before” and “after” images used in the advertisement display a stark transformation of dark skin to white skin. While boasting other “positive” effects such as the removal of wrinkles and pimples, the most significant selling point of the face bleach was its ability to achieve whiteness for its purchaser. Toward the end of the advertisement, the manufacturer notes that the product will be sent to the consumer in a way in which, the contents of the package would be known only to the consumer. Despite the popularity of skin-lightening processes among some African Americans, this small section of the advertisement suggests a potential backlash from African Americans who viewed skin lightening/whitening as an anti-black cultural practice. It also suggests that consumers of skin lightening products desired a transformation that appeared “natural” and not achieved through usage of products.

On the same page of the advertisement for Black Skin Remover is an advertisement for another skin bleaching product, Hartona Face Bleach. Similar to the advertisement for Black Skin Remover, the Hartona Remedy Company claims that its face bleach “will gradually turn the skin of a black or dark person five or six shades lighter, and will turn the skin of a mulatto person almost white.” The advertisement also promises that the face bleach will be “sent securely sealed from observation.” Both advertisements capture the effects of white cultural hegemony on African American beauty culture as well as the existence of African Americans opposing the consumption and usage of skin bleaching products and processes. Through the advertising culture that emerged in Washington’s African American press, physical whiteness was constructed as the ideal to which African American women should strive. Notably, the advertisements focus on African American and “mulatta” women as consumers. African American men also consumed these products, however, throughout the New Negro era, advertisers primarily targeted African American women and identified African American beauty culture as a feminized space. At the expense of the devaluation of their skin colors, African American women became the central figures of a racially-specific aesthetic-based enterprise that responded to perceived and real desires for social mobility and aesthetic valuation within a cultural hierarchy premised upon white cultural hegemony…

Read the entire article here.

How the Movies Made a President

The New York Times
2009-01-16

Manohla Dargis

A. O. Scott

Barack Obama’s victory in November demonstrated, to the surprise of many Americans and much of the world, that we were ready to see a black man as president. Of course, we had seen several black presidents already, not in the real White House but in the virtual America of movies and television. The presidencies of James Earl Jones in “The Man,” Morgan Freeman in “Deep Impact,” Chris Rock in “Head of State” and Dennis Haysbert in “24” helped us imagine Mr. Obama’s transformative breakthrough before it occurred. In a modest way, they also hastened its arrival.

Make no mistake: Hollywood’s historic refusal to embrace black artists and its insistence on racist caricatures and stereotypes linger to this day. Yet in the past 50 years—or, to be precise, in the 47 years since Mr. Obama was born—black men in the movies have traveled from the ghetto to the boardroom, from supporting roles in kitchens, liveries and social-problem movies to the rarefied summit of the Hollywood A-list. In those years the movies have helped images of black popular life emerge from behind what W. E. B. Du Bois called “a vast veil,” creating public spaces in which we could glimpse who we are and what we might become…

Read the entire article here.

The Tragic Mulatto Theme in Six Works of Langston Hughes

Phylon (1940-1956)
Volume 16, Number 2 (2nd Qtr., 1955)
pages 195-204

Arthur P. Davis (1904-1996)

The Weary Blues (1925), the first publication of Langston Hughes, contained a provocative twelve-line poem entitled “Cross,” which dealt with the tragic mulatto theme. Two years later when Mr. Hughes brought out Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), he included another poem on racial intermixture which he named “Mulatto.” During the summer of 1928 when Hughes was working with the Hedgerow Theatre at Moylan Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, he completed a full-length drama on the tragic mulatto theme, which he also called Mulatto. This play was produced on Broadway in 1935 where it ran for a full year, followed by an eight month’s tour across the nation. From the play, the poet composed a short story, “Father and Son,” which though written later than the play, appeared in The Ways of White Folks (1934), a year before the drama was produced. Returning once more to the theme, Hughes in 1949 reworked the play Mulatto into an opera, The Barrier, the music for which was written by the modern composer, Jan Meyerowitz. The opera was first produced at Columbia University in 1950. And finally in 1952, Hughes published another short story on the tragic mulatto theme entitled “African Morning.” This sketch appears in Laughing to Keep from Crying, a second collection of short stories. In short, for over a quarter of a century, the author has been concerned with this theme; returning to it again and again, he has presented the thesis in four different genres, in treatments varying in length from a twelve-line poem to a full-length Broadway play.

Before discussing Mr. Hughes’ several presentations of the theme, however, let us understand the term “tragic mulatto.” As commonly used in American fiction and drama, it denotes a light-colored, mixed-blood character (possessing in most cases a white father and a colored mother), who suffers because of difficulties arising from his bi-racial background. In our literature there are, of course, valid and convincing portrayals of this type; but as it is a character which easily lends itself to sensational exaggeration and distortion, there are also many stereotypes of the tragic mulatto to be found And these stereotypes, as Professor Brown has so…

Georgia Historical Society Announces Georgia History Book of the Year [Writing The South Through The Self]

Georgia Historical Society
2012-05-07

Brandy Mai, Director of Communications

SAVANNAH, Ga., May 7, 2012 – The Georgia Historical Society has named Writing The South Through The Self by John C. Inscoe as the recipient of its 2012 Malcolm Bell Jr. and Muriel Barrow Bell Award. Given for the best book on Georgia history published in the previous year, the award is named in honor of Malcolm Bell, Jr., and Muriel Barrow Bell in recognition of their contributions to the recording of Georgia’s history. Published by University of Georgia Press, Writing The South Through The Self is a series of essays on the southern experience as reflected in the life stories of those who lived it, and explores the emotional and psychological dimensions of what it has meant to be southern…

Read the entire press release here.

Le Mélange of Francophone Culture in William Wells Brown’s Clotel

The Undergraduate Review
Volume 7, Issue 1 (2011)
pages 8-11

Sandra Andrade
Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts

In Clotel; Or, The President’s Daughter, William Wells Brown argues that for fugitive African American slaves France represented freedom. This connection between African Americans and France that is familiar to many Americans in the twentieth century was existent at the time of Brown’s own escape. The Francophone culture became a major motivator in the author’s personal life and also in his writings. This project covers many themes, including the “tragic mulatta”, American identity, American freedom and slavery, and explores readings from Anna Brickhouse’s Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere, and Eve A. Raimon’s The Tragic Mulatta Revisited. Brown questions not only the impossibility of being accepted in the American society as a person of mixed race but argues that the French are better interpreters of the Declaration of Independence than the Americans. In France, Brown found a secure home among French elites and his positive experience with francophone culture helped shape his most well-known work of literature, the novel Clotel. In this sentimental novel, Brown creates a character whose hope for freedom is based upon the author’s experiences in France. Being the first western European nation to abolish slavery in its colonies, France provided hope to many African Americans.

Read the entire article here.

Indians and Diversity

Indian Country Today Media Network
2012-05-03

Steve Russell, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice
Indiana University

This term, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case about affirmative action in university admissions, where my alma mater is on the side of diversity for a change. Most observers agree diversity is likely to lose, but if that happens it does not mean Indians have to quit banging on the doors of higher education.
 
Indians know diversity, and knew it before Columbus got lost. My people, woodland hunters and farmers, traded with salt water fishermen on the coast and some copper ornaments smelted in Cherokee country turned up in Southwestern pueblos, where they grew the “three sisters” crops on dry land farms and built with stucco. When the Spanish proved unable to keep track of their livestock, many tribes took up the buffalo culture on the Great Plains. Athabascan speakers live in icy Alaska and desert Utah. We know diversity.
 
To the colonists, we are all “Indians,” one of the most exotic minorities in modern politics. We all have this experience at some point if we leave home: “Do you want to be called Indian or Native American?” Tribal identity requires explanation, and it does get tiresome.
 
African-Americans, by the tragedy they have endured, belong in any discussion of diversity in the United States. The Civil War was, much as the Confederates denied it afterward, about slavery…

…Homer Plessy’s case was particularly ironic. Plessy was one-eighth African-American by blood quantum, and so considered himself a white man—but the Court found he was not white enough to sit where he pleased on public transportation. There things stood until Rosa Parks came along not claiming to be a white woman, but insisting she was a human being…

Read the entire article here.

Why genes don’t count (for racial differences in health)

American Journal of Public Health
Volume 90, Number 11 (November 2000)
pages 1699-1702
DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.90.11.1699

Alan H. Goodman, Professor of Biological Anthropology
Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts

There is a paradoxical relationship between “race” and genetics. Whereas genetic data were first used to prove the validity of race, since the early 1970s they have been used to illustrate the invalidity of biological races. Indeed, race does not account for human genetic variation, which is continuous, complexly structured, constantly changing, and predominantly within “races.” Despite the disproof of race-as-biology, genetic variation continues to be used to explain racial differences. Such explanations require the acceptance of 2 disproved assumptions: that genetic variation explains variation in disease and that genetic variation explains racial variation in disease. While the former is a form of geneticization, the notion that genes are the primary determinants of biology and behavior, the latter represents a form of racialization, an exaggeration of the salience of race. Using race as a proxy for genetic differences limits understandings of the complex interactions among political-economic processes, lived experiences, and human biologies. By moving beyond studies of racialized genetics, we can clarify the processes by which varied and interwoven forms of racialization and racism affect individuals “under the skin.”

…Professor Armelagos hinted at a powerful lesson: that scientific ideas can endure and be made to seem real if they have social and political–economic utility. An evolutionary framework that explained human variation had been established for more than a century, ever since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. In the 1940s, Montagu used the “new evolutionary synthesis” to explain clearly why race was a biological myth. Yet the idea of race as biology persists today in science and society.

I was aware of the power of race as a worldview in 1973. But what I understood less was the idea’s ability to persist after it had been proven unscientific. If I had been asked in the 1970s whether race would survive as a way to think about human biological variation in 2000, I would have answered emphatically, “No!” I was naive to the durability of an economically useful idea.

Acceptance of the notion of race-as-biology declined in anthropology throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. Yet, during the past decade, racialized notions of biology have made a comeback. This is especially true in human genetics, a field that, paradoxically, once drove the last nail into the coffin of race-as biology. In this commentary, I explain why race should not be used as a proxy for genetic or biological variation. I then explain and illustrate the unfounded assumptions that are needed for an acceptance that racial differences in disease are due to genetic differences among races…

…The Double Error Inherent in Genetic Explanations of Racial Differences

Two errors—2 leaps of illogic—are necessary for acceptance of the idea that racial differences in disease are due to genetic differences among races. The first leap is a form of geneticization, the belief that most biology and behavior are located “in the genes.”

Genes, of course, are often a part of the complex web of disease causality, but they are almost always a minor, unstable, and insufficient cause. The presence of Gm allotype, for example, might correlate to increased rates of diabetes in Native Americans, but the causal link is unknown. In other cases, the gene is not expressed without some environmental context, and it may interact with environments and other genes in nonadditive and unpredictable ways.

The second necessary leap of illogic is a form of scientific racialism, the belief that races are real and useful constructs. Importantly, this leap propels one from explaining disease variation as caused by genetic variation to explaining that racial differences in disease are caused by genetic variation among races.To accept this logic, one needs to also accept that genetic variation occurs along racial divides: that is, most variation occurs among races. However, we know from Lewontin’s work that this assumption is false for simple genetic systems. For a disease of complex etiology, genetics is an illogical explanation for racial differences.

Read the entire article here.

Breaking the Bonds of Race and Genomics

GeneWatch
Volume 25, Issue 1 (January-February, 2012): Genetics in 20 Years

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Twenty years ago it appeared that mainstream science finally was abandoning the concept of biological human races. From 18th century typologists to 20th century eugenicists, scientists have always been instrumental in justifying the myth that the human species is naturally divided by race. But the rejection of eugenics after World War II and discoveries by human evolutionary biologists in subsequent decades brought hope that a new science of human genetic diversity would replace the old racial science. In 2000, the Human Genome Project, which mapped the entire human genetic code, confirmed the genetic unity of the human species and the futility of identifying discrete racial groups in the remaining genetic difference. Biologically, there is only one human race. Race applied to human beings is a social grouping; it is a system originally devised in the 1700s to support slavery and colonialism that classifies people into a social hierarchy based on invented biological, cultural, and legal demarcations.

But instead of hammering the last nail in the coffin of an obsolete system, the science that emerged from sequencing the human genome has been shaped by a resurgence of interest in race-based genetic variation. Some scientists claim that clusters of genetic similarity detected with novel genomic theories and computer technologies correspond to antiquated racial classifications and prove that human racial differences are real and significant. Others are searching for genetic differences between races that could explain staggering inequalities in health and disease as well as variations in drug response, with the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries poised to convert the new racial science into race-specific products. As we wait for the promise of gene-tailored medicine to materialize, race has become an avenue for turning the vision of tomorrow’s personalized medicines into today’s profit making commodities. While uncritically importing antiquated racial categories into research, the emerging racial science has a new twist—it claims to measure biological distinctions across races and “admixed” populations with more accurate precision, and without social bias…

Read the entire article here.

A race-based detour to personalized medicine

Canadian Medical Association Journal
Volume 184, Number 7 (2012-03-12)
DOI: 10.1503/cmaj.109-4133

Roger Collier, News Staff

Few experts in medical genetics would argue that June 23, 2005 wasn’t an important day. Consensus on whether it was a good or bad day is another matter. Some claim a major step on the long road to personalized medical care was taken. Others are far less convinced, suggesting it was the day the United States government decided, unwisely, to push the field of medical genetics into the heated realm of racial politics.

On that date, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved, for the first time, a drug for a specific race, to wit, the fixed-dose combination drug isosorbide dinitrate and hydralazine (BiDil) for use as a heart disease medication within the black population, who have a much higher risk of heart failure than whites…

…The licensing of isosorbide dinitrate/hydralazine thus became a turning point in discussions on the merits of race-based medicine, a debate that continues to rage. Critics of race-specific therapies argue that focusing on genetics rather than on social and economic inequalities will not reduce disparities in health outcomes and access to care among different ethnic groups. Furthermore, they say, race is a social, rather than a biological, construct.

“Using race is a bad proxy for genetic ancestry,” says Althea Grant, chief of the Epidemiology and Surveillance Branch, Division of Blood Disorders, National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This opinion is shared by one of the world’s most famous geneticists: Craig Venter, the genetics pioneer who led the team that first sequenced the human genome in 2001. He has referred to the use of race and ethnicity in medical genetics as a crude tool and a personal pet peeve, suggesting that it will no longer be necessary once the price of sequencing genomes falls to an amount that would make it reasonable to sequence everybody’s genome, a figure he pegged at US$1000…

…The first problem with using race in medical genetics is determining which races constitute a part of someone’s background. Few people have extensive knowledge of their ancestral lineage, and skin colour and other external markers don’t tell the full story. Even people who are aware of their mixed heritage often place themselves in one camp — or are put there by others. Prominent examples include US President Barack Obama and professional golfer Tiger Woods, who are often referred to as black even though the former has a white mother and the latter’s mother hails from Thailand.

“People tend to self-identify with a particular race more than another even if there is a mix,” says Grant. “They might not even know all the ancestries that are in the mix.”

In some areas of medicine, using race as a screening tool has already been shown to create problems, both practical and ethical. That’s why states abandoned the practice of screening only black newborns for hemoglobinopathies, such as sickle cell disease, Grant and colleagues concluded (Ethn Health 2011;16:377–88). The state of Georgia, the last holdout for ethnicity-based newborn screening, discontinued its use in 1998…

“If we go back to its origins, we find that BiDil did not begin as an ethnic drug. Rather it became ethnic over time and through a complex array of legal, commercial, and medical interventions, that transformed the drug’s identity,” wrote Jonathan Kahn, a law professor at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota (www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/pageDocuments/PLMVM6FTAO.pdf). Unlike “racialized medicine, which treats race as genetic, the use of race in medical practice has many legitimate and important places. Collecting broad-based epidemiological data is perhaps foremost among these. Only by using social categories of race is it possible to identify and track racial disparities in health, health care access and outcomes.”

Read the entire article here.