Mixed Race Studies

Onerous passions: colonial anti-miscegenation rhetoric and the history of sexuality

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 45, Issue 4, 2011
pages 319-340
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2011.605843

Nadine Ehlers, Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Ehlers’s analysis revisits Foucauldian conceptualizations of the history of sexuality in order to map the inextricability of race, gender and sexuality as they emerged in the context of the early American colonies. The salience of such an analysis lies in its ability to extend the terrain of Foucault’s history, and brings new considerations to bear regarding the specific configurations of race, gender and sexual intersections in North American history. If, as Foucault insists, sexuality is a set of effects produced in bodies, behaviours and social relations, Ehlers reorients these claims to consider how these effects were racialized within the rubric of colonial anti-miscegenation rhetoric. Through such a tracing, it becomes evident that, from the early colonial context, sexuality was deployed to produce ‘ideal’ sexuality as a bastion of whiteness: that is, to configure and maintain ‘ideal’ sexuality as white.

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Passing Fancies: Color, much more than race, dominated the fiction of the Harlem Renaissance

The Wall Street Journal
2011-09-03

James Campbell

Harlem Renaissance Novels, Edited by Rafia Zafar, Library of America, 1,715 pages

Harlem in the autumn of 1924 offered a “foretaste of paradise,” according to the novelist Arna Bontemps. He was recalling the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance and was perhaps a little dazzled in retrospect—Bontemps was writing in 1965—by his memories of “strings of fairy lights” illuminating the uptown “broad avenues” at dusk.

A gloomier perspective is found in the writings of James Baldwin, born in Harlem Hospital in August 1924. His novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain” (1953) and his memoir, “The Fire Next Time” (1963), both evoke a Harlem childhood dominated by poverty, fear, brutality, with the dim torch of salvation locked in a storefront church. Baldwin scarcely mentions the renaissance or its principals in all his writings—despite the remarkable coincidence of his having attended schools where two mainstays of any account of the Harlem Renaissance were teachers: the poet Countee Cullen and the novelist Jessie Redmon…

…Any rebirth is bound to be bloody, and perhaps the better for it. Grudge, guilt and prejudice notwithstanding, the Harlem Renaissance produced a lot of good writing, some of it worth reading eight decades later. Almost all the novels chosen by Rafia Zafar for the Library of America’s two-volume collection contain scenes of interest, even when the interest is mainly sociological. (The exception is George Schuyler’s 1931 “Black No More,” a far-fetched, burlesque yarn about passing for white that might have been omitted in favor of Van Vechten’s “Nigger Heaven.”) The predominant theme of the majority of novels here—to the point of obsession—is not so much prejudice as plain color. Bigoted white voices are heard, but light-skinned blacks expressing distaste for their darker neighbors speak louder. As the heroine of Nella Larsen’s “Quicksand” (1928) observes: “Negro society . . . was as complicated and as rigid in its ramifications as the highest strata of white society.”

The most arresting tale, in this respect, is “The Blacker the Berry” (1929) by Wallace Thurman, in which poor Emma Lou Morgan, daughter of a “quite fair” mother, realizes that her “luscious black complexion” is despised by those around her, many of whom can pass for white. Emma Lou’s “unwelcome black mask” has been inherited from her “no good” father, who had “never been in evidence.” Ill-treatment from white students and teachers at school is bad enough; but when Emma Lou gets to Harlem, the humiliation turns to cruelty. She tries to rent a room from a West Indian woman. “A little girl had come to the door, and, in answer to a voice in the back asking, ‘Who is it, Cora?’ had replied, ‘monkey chaser wants to see the room you got to rent.’ ” Emma Lou remains, for the time being, homeless. When she shows her admiration “boldly” for an “intelligent-looking, slender, light-brown-skinned” man on Seventh Avenue, he “looked at her, then over her, and passed on.” Far worse are a group of Harlem youths who notice Emma Lou powdering her nose near the same spot…

…It was the same sigh, rather than crude shame, that led Jean Toomer to describe himself on his marriage certificate of 1931 as “white.” His exquisite sequence of prose episodes and poems, “Cane” (1923), is the earliest of the books gathered here. It requires but a sampling of Toomer’s humid Georgia prose to induce in the reader a different quality of intoxication from that brought about by the rough beverages of McKay, Hughes and Schuyler: “Karintha, at twelve, was a wild flash that told the other folks just what it was to live. At sunset, when there was no wind, and the pine-smoke from over by the sawmill hugged the earth, and you couldn’t see more than a few feet in front, her sudden darting past you was a bit of vivid color, like a black bird that flashes in light. With the other children one could hear, some distance off, their feet flopping in the two-inch dust. Karintha’s running was a whir.”…

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Intermarriage rates soar as stereotypes fall

The Washington Post
2012-02-16

Carol Morello

Virginia leads the nation in the percentage of marriages between blacks and whites, a new study by the Pew Research Center shows, barely four decades after state laws criminalizing interracial marriage were struck down by the Supreme Court. And one in five new married couples in the District crossed racial and ethnic lines.

The prevalence of intermarriage in and around the Washington area reflects demographic changes that are pushing interracial marriage rates to an all-time high in the United States while toppling historical taboos among younger people…

…Dan Lichter, a Cornell University sociologist who has studied intermarriage, said the trend shows the continuing blurring of racial boundaries.

“Different racial and ethnic minorities are increasingly sharing the same social space, in their neighborhoods, their job settings and schools,” Lichter said. “It’s a reflection of declining inequality on a lot of fronts, including income and education.”

But a postracial society remains a long way off, he added.

“Most of the minorities who outmarry are not marrying other minorities,” Lichter said. “They’re outmarrying to whites. It’s not a melting pot.”

Nathan Nash, a black man who is divorced from a Korean American woman he was married to for five years, said that is particularly true for African Americans. A technology consultant who used to live in the District and now lives in Orange County, Calif., Nash said he has Asian friends who would not consider dating blacks…

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Interracial marriage in US hits new high: 1 in 12

The Miami Herald
2012-02-16

Hope Yen, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Interracial marriages in the U.S. have climbed to 4.8 million—a record 1 in 12—as a steady flow of new Asian and Hispanic immigrants expands the pool of prospective spouses. Blacks are now substantially more likely than before to marry whites.

A Pew Research Center study, released Thursday, details a diversifying America where interracial unions and the mixed-race children they produce are challenging typical notions of race.

“The rise in interracial marriage indicates that race relations have improved over the past quarter century,” said Daniel Lichter, a sociology professor at Cornell University. “Mixed-race children have blurred America’s color line. They often interact with others on either side of the racial divide and frequently serve as brokers between friends and family members of different racial backgrounds,” he said. “But America still has a long way to go.”

The figures come from previous censuses as well as the 2008-2010 American Community Survey, which surveys 3 million households annually. The figures for “white” refer to those whites who are not of Hispanic ethnicity. For purposes of defining interracial marriages, Hispanic is counted as a race by many in the demographic field…

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Obama Has Shattered America’s Racial Ceiling

San Diego Union-Tribune
2012-02-12

Constance M. Carroll, Chancellor
San Diego Community College District

If he could visit 21st-century America, Alexis de Tocqueville would be amazed to find Barack Obama, an African-American, as president of the United States. However, he would not be surprised to find that, despite this powerful symbolism of progress, race is still a divisive force in the country.
 
Following his tour of this young nation in the 19th century, Tocqueville, a French historian and political activist, published “Democracy in America” in 1835. In this book, he described slavery as “the most formidable evil threatening the future of the United States.” Aware of the growing impetus to abolish this practice, Tocqueville noted, “I see that slavery is in retreat, but the prejudice from which it arose is immovable.”
 
173 years later, Americans elected an African American to hold the highest office in the nation. During election eve on Nov. 4, 2008, many wept, shared their enthusiasm with friends and family across the country, and actually believed that this was it: the end of racial strife in America. Given the nation’s difficult journey from slavery and its abolition, from Jim Crow laws and their dissolution, from segregation and its demise, to the continuing civil rights struggle to eliminate the vestiges of this dark history, Barack Obama’s election was heralded by many as the start of a new era of equality and racial peace…

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Mixed-race children face new obstacles

Korea Joongang Daily
2012-02-16

Yim Seung-hye

Abandonment and abuse put them at disadvantage from the start

It was around 5 a.m. on the morning of March 20, 2010, when a woman surnamed Park from Bangbae-dong, southern Seoul, heard a baby crying and ran to her door. On her doorstep was a dark-skinned newborn in a box with a note that said, “Please take good care of my baby. His name in English is Jeromy. I don’t have enough money to support him. I really love him. He was born at home on March 19, 2010, at 10:15 a.m.”

Park called the police, and Jeromy was transferred to the Seoul Child Welfare Center, which found a permanent home for him at Eden I Ville, an infants’ home in Seongdong District, eastern Seoul.

“We predict Jeromy was born of a Korean father and a Filipino mother,” said Lee So-young, the director of Eden I Ville. “As we want all children who were abandoned to be adopted and find a family, we wanted Jeromy to be adopted as well, but because he differs in appearance from other Korean children, most of the Korean couples who have visited our center have been reluctant to consider him.”

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Not White Enough, Not Black Enough

International Herald Tribune (The Global Edition of the New York Times)
2012-02-15

Eusebius McKaiser, political Analyst
Wits University, Johannesburg, South Africa

JOHANNESBURG – A few weeks ago, a British friend of mine served a sumptuous confession as a starter for dinner, “I only realized recently that you’re not actually black!” We had met several years back in the English midlands, where, judging by her remark, I had passed as black. But now that she has lived in South Africa for a few months, she is fluent in the local racial vocabulary: things are not quite black and white.

Let me explain. In South Africa I’m referred to as “colored,” a term that does not have the same derogatory denotation here as it does in the United States when it is hurled at black Americans. I am not black. I am of mixed racial heritage, as my parents are and their parents were.

When racist colonial settlers arrived at the southern tip of Africa during the 17th century, their racism did not preclude sexual relations with the locals. Several generations later, the colored community is ostensibly an ethnic group just like the Xhosas or the Zulus or any of the other myriad groupings within South Africa’s borders. It makes up  9 percent of the country’s population of 50.6 million.

…The lack of adequate economic opportunity for coloreds since the dawn of democracy here — combined with their lingering, paralyzing sense of victimhood — explains why the colored community is the most class-homogenous racial grouping in South Africa: an essentially poor, lower-working-class community. Very few of its members escape that stereotype.

In the Western Cape, the province with the largest concentration of colored people in the country, rates of fetal alcohol syndrome are some of the worst in the world. This community is like the drunken uncle of the South African family, the relative you tuck away when posh visitors come around. Paradoxically, many more colored people are worse off than black Africans now than were during apartheid…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

The Real American Love Story: Why America is a lot less white than it looks

Slate
1999-10-05

Brent Staples

The PBS broadcast last month of An American Love Story—a 10-hour film about an interracial family—spawned a great deal of chatter to the effect that mixed-race couplings were the wave of the future. In fact, they are the wave of the past. Interracial marriages accounted for only 2.2 percent of all marriages in the Current Population Survey of 1992, a gain of only two-tenths of a percent over 1980, and the number of mixed couplings actually decreased slightly in 1991. The census pattern suggests that slightly more interracial couples will fall into each other’s arms in the coming years but that there will be nothing resembling a dramatic acceleration of marriage across the color line.

But America already has almost 400 years of race mixing behind it, beginning with that first slave ship that sailed into Jamestown harbor carrying slaves who were already pregnant by members of the crew. Americans have grudgingly accepted the fact that sex between masters and slaves such as Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was frequent, leading to a many-hued race of people who do not look African at all, even though they call themselves “African-American.” Outside of recent African immigrants to the United States, there are virtually no black Americans of purely African descent, which is to say no black people who lack white ancestry, left in this country.

Four centuries of race mixing have had a similar impact on Americans who define themselves as white. Convincing estimates show that by 1950 about one in five white Americans had some African ancestry. This inheritance most often arrived at the bedroom door in the form of a fair-skinned black person who had slipped over the color line to live as white. Put another way, most Americans with African blood in their veins think of themselves as white and conduct themselves as such—and check “white” when they fill out census forms…

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Brazil in black and white? Race categories, the census, and the study of inequality

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 35, Number 8, August 2012
pages 1466-
1483
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.607503

Mara Loveman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Jeronimo O. Muniz, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Federal University of Minas Gerais

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Many scholars advocate the adoption of a black-and-white lens for the analysis of racial inequality in Brazil. Drawing on a nationally representative dataset that includes race questions in multiple formats, we evaluate how removal of the ‘brown’ category from the census or other social surveys would likely affect: (1) the descriptive picture of Brazil’s racial composition; and (2) estimates of income inequality between and within racial categories. We find that a forced binary question format results in a whiter and more racially unequal picture of Brazil through the movement of many higher income mixed-race respondents into the white category. We also find that regardless of question format, racial inequality in income accounts for relatively little of Brazil’s overall income inequality. We discuss implications for public policy debates in Brazil, and for the broader scientific and political challenges of ethnic and racial data collection and analysis.

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Loving and the Legacy of Unintended Consequences

Wisconsin Law Review
2007,  Number 2
Pages 241-281

Rachel F. Moran, Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles

Table of Contents

• I. Introduction
• II. Making History Rest on Traditional Assumptions
  • A. The Significance of Race
  • B. The Meaning of Marriage
  • C. A Domestic Paradigm of Race and Intimacy
• III. Undoing Traditional Assumptions: The Unintended Consequences of Loving
  • A. New Frontiers in Race: Multiracialism and Colorblind Segregation
    • 1. The Mixed Promise of Multiracialism
    • 2. The Rise of Colorblind Segregation
  • B. New Paradigms of Intimacy: Same-Sex Marriage Advocacy and the Rise of Marriage-Minded Singlehood
    • 1. The Same-Sex Marriage Movement
    • 2. Marriage-Minded Singlehood
  • C. From the Color Line to the International Border
• IV. Conclusion

Introduction

If it can take a decade for a person to appreciate the implications of a major life event, it can take even longer to realize the significance of a turning point in the history of a nation. Perhaps for that reason, we hold commemorative events like this one.  An anniversary is an opportunity to reflect on a pivotal moment with distance and detachment and to weigh the consequences more fully than was possible at the time. On this fortieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, perhaps what is most striking is that a case deemed pathbreaking in its day now seems to have taken so much for granted.  Because the United States Supreme Court interrogated the meaning of neither race nor marriage, Loving has been invoked in a number of later struggles in ways that might have taken the Justices by surprise. This result, of course, is part of the law of unintended consequences: the more that is left unexamined, the more likely that a fresh look will reveal implications beyond those originally contemplated.

Here, I will explore Loving’s unintended consequences by considering why the Court took so much for granted and how the opinion later was deployed in unexpected ways. After briefly examining the facts and holdings in the case, I will show that the Justices accepted monoracial categories as a given, despite evidence of multiracial complexity. The Court’s treatment of race reflected the need to implement desegregation orders that turned on clearcut racial distinctions. The Justices also regarded marriage as a longstanding tradition. Already under attack for conjuring up unenumerated rights that did not appear in the Constitution, the Court was loath to suggest that marriage was anything other than an uncontroversial historical institution.

Ironically, the Court’s assumptions about race and marriage have been directly subverted by those who most openly lay claim to Loving’s legacy. Proponents of multiracialism and advocates of same-sex marriage argue that their reform proposals are a natural outgrowth of the Court’s conceptualization of freedom and equality. At the same time, Loving’s subtler consequences have gone largely unaddressed. The case arguably ushered in a jurisprudential philosophy that treats colorblindness and ongoing segregation as compatible. In addition, the decision entrenched the primacy of marriage in the law’s recognition of close personal relationships. Finally, Loving acquiesced in the presumption that romance happens only among Americans and so the decision has been of little import in dignifying and protecting the intimate attachments of noncitizens. Such a complex legacy demonstrates why a perfectly factual account of Loving simply will not do, and so it may take some time to appreciate the consequences.

Read the entire article here.