Mixed Race Studies

The importance of being “other”: A natural experiment about lived race over time

Social Science Research
Volume 36, Issue 1 (March 2007)
pages 159-174
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2005.11.002

J. Scott Brown, Associate Professor of Gerontology, Scripps Research Fellow
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

Steven Hitlin, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Iowa

Glen H. Elder, Jr., Research Professor of Sociology and Psychology
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Despite recent concern with the measurement of race, almost no scholarship has explored the residual response category of “other” itself. The 2000 census included a significant number selecting “other,” suggesting that the option was not simply a residual response. Using a serendipitous change in the measurement of race in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we explore the social reality of the “other” category at three levels of analysis: self-identification, external attribution, and structural interpretation. Far from being a residual category, we find that “other” is a meaningful social category for about half of the Hispanics in Add Health. Current measurement conventions that distinguish between race and ethnicity, while established for laudable reasons, misrepresent the ways that Americans—Hispanic and otherwise—utilize social categories. Individuals do not treat Hispanics differently than blacks or Asians when seen as members of a meaningful social group. The separation of race from ethnicity leads to confusion and measurement difficulty. Such problems are compounded when “other” is removed as a potential response.

1. Introduction

“We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.”
W. H. Auden (1907–1973)

Concern with racial measurement has flourished in recent years (Harris and Sim, 2002; Hirschman et al., 2000) as sociologists and demographers have increasingly focused on the fluid nature of a once taken-for-granted concept. The growing number of multiracial individuals in the United States has underscored the difficulty of adequately measuring what has long been understood to be a meaningful and stable criterion for social grouping. Studies of racialfluidity and multiracial individuals have largely overlooked an important aspect of racial measurement in the US, namely, the (supposedly) residual “other” category. Originally intended to allow individuals more latitude for recording their self-understandings of race (see Snipp, 2003), this category has a substantive reality in its own right (Hirschman et al., 2000). In almost all cases in the 2000 census, the “other” category represents a proxy for “Hispanic,” demonstrating that the lived experience of millions of individuals contradicts the academic reification between race and ethnicity. An in-depth examination of the “other” category suggests that current racial measurement conventions do not accurately reflect Americans’ social reality.

Using a serendipitous change in the measurement of race in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we track individuals’ changes in racial self-identification across time when the “other” option is removed from the racial measurement item. We explore the socialreality of the “other” category at three levels of analysis: self identification, external attribution, and structural interpretation. This approach extends traditional concerns with racialmeasurement that focus on self-identification in two directions. First, it allows us to examine the process of social attribution as it reflects external views of racial/ethnic group membership. Second, we suggest that this measurement convention biases social science research findings. All three levels of analysis are based on social psychological understandings of the psychological process of social categorization that underlies the perception of race/ethnicity. We find that “other” is an important response category for Hispanics, the best proxy they have available within the currently separated race and ethnicity format. Such self-reports have profound implications for national statistics and social science analyses. We conclude with a call for altering the official racial measurement instrument to more accurately reflect the cognitive processes that individuals use to delineate their meaningful social groups.

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Our Changing Identities

The New Black Magazine
2010-10-18

Adam K. Raymond

On forms asking their racial or ethnic backgrounds, young people of multi-racial origin give different answers at different times.

As a teenager, Cameron Clark, whose mother is white and father is black, always checked “African-American” on forms that asked about his race.

“I needed to identify as being black so people would know I’m equally proud of both sides of my heritage,” said Clark whose blonde hair and blue eyes suggest that Caucasian might be a more apt description.

These days, though, Clark, a 22-year-old television reporter in Green Bay, Wisconsin, describes himself as multiracial. “I decided that identifying with one race shows you don’t embrace your other side as much,” he explained. “People need to be equally proud of both sides of their heritage, and using the label ‘multiracial’ is the most effective way to do that,” he said.

Clark is one of a large contingent of biracial young adults who have struggled with fluctuating ethnic identities.

A recent study by researchers at The University of Iowa, Miami University, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that biracial adolescents tend to change how they self-identify over time.

The researchers looked at how respondents described their race on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health over a period of five years. In the course of that time, the young adults’ answers changed.

“Ideas about race are not fixed,” said Steven Hitlin, assistant professor of sociology at Iowa University and one of the authors of the study. Racial identity, he said, seems to be “fluid.”…

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Sniffing Elephant Bones: The Poetics of Race in the Art of Ellen Gallagher

Callaloo
Volume 19, Number 2, Spring 1996
E-ISSN: 1080-6512 Print ISSN: 0161-2492
pages 337-339
DOI: 10.1353/cal.1996.0074

Judith Wilson, Former Assistant Professor of African American Studies, Assistant Professor of Art History and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies
University of California, Irvine

What she said once, unforgettable, was that the stereotype is the distance between ourselves—our real, our black bodies—& the image

[T]he greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; … for to use metaphors well is to see the similarity in dissimilars. —Aristotle, The Poetics Image

These three sites have been crucially linked in recent cultural theory and practice. Thirty years old and a native of New England, painter Ellen Gallagher has been described as working “in the gap between image and body (the gap that is language).” That understanding of her project, of course, simultaneously echoes and significantly revises a late modernist agenda epitomized by Robert Rauschenberg: “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)” Post-pop, post-painterly, and post-minimal, Gallagher operates in a space cleared by contemporary feminist, semiotic, black, and cultural studies discourses. Yet her art negotiates these busy intersections in a starkly independent fashion. In conversation, she readily shifts from charting the ancestry of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse (whose origins, she…

Biraciality and Nationhood in Contemporary American Art

Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Art and Culture
Volume 14, Number 53 (Winter 2001-2002)
pages 43–54

Kymberly N. Pinder, Associate Professor of Art History
School of the Art Insitute of Chicago

An article on work by artists responding to racial hybridity that features a discussion of Lorraine O’Grady’s diptych, “The Clearing”.

For when we swallow Tiger Woods, the yellow-black-red-white man, we swallow something much more significant than Jordan or Charles Barkley. We swallow hope in the American experiment, in the pell-mell jumbling of genes. We swallow the belief that the face of the future is not necessarily a bitter or bewildered face, that it might even, one day, be something like Tiger Wood’s face: handsome and smiling and ready to kick all comers’ asses.

The hope in ‘the yellow-black-red-white man’, reflected in the Tigermania that swept the US in the mid-1990s, is indicative of the racial crossroads at which the US, as a nation, finds itself at the close of the twentieth century. As Stanley Crouch describes, ‘We have been inside each other’s bloodstreams, pockets, libraries, kitchens, schools, theatres, sports arenas, dance halls, and national boundaries for so long that our mixed-up and multiethnic identity extends from European colonial expansion and builds upon immigration.’ Where are we as a nation regarding race when Woods can consider himself ‘Cablinasian’ while some southern states are still officially ending their ‘one-drop’ rules and [taking] laws against mixed marriages off the books? How can we address the concerns of those who see Affirmative Action as all but dead?

Some contemporary artists in the US have been struggling with these issues during the 1980s and 1990s. Lorraine O’Grady is one of them. She originally titled her photomontage diptych The Clearing in 1991, however, later, she lengthened the title to The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N and Me to clarify the historical and personal relevance of the work. The left half of the piece presents the relationship between the black woman and white man as loving while the right as malevolent. The skeletal face of the man and the gun in the pile of clothing provide elements of violence and death. Yet O’Grady says, ‘it isn’t a “before/after” piece; it’s a “both/and” piece. This couple is on the wall in the simultaneous extremes of ecstasy and exploitation.’ The complex relationship between exploitation and defiance for such ‘women of color’ as La Malinche and Sally Hemings has become a trope of American hybridity and assimilation.

Though anthropologists have established the mixed-race heritage of all humans with the discovery of ‘missing link’ hominids in Central and South Africa, racial purity, mixing and conflict are still hotly debated issues in American society. I am not contesting any scientific definitions of race and human origins in this essay, but I will focus on representations of multiraciality and their socio-political currency in American society, specifically contemporary popular culture. Throughout this article, I will use the terms biracial, mixed-race, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, racial hybridity and multicultural with the understanding that such terms are socially constructed and based on perceptions, either of oneself or by others in our society. These terms and their instability reflect the challenge we face to discuss meaningfully the reality of racial mixing, as well as to create the very language needed to do so. Of course, the reality of a nation of immigrants, the legacy of slavery, and the genocide of native populations prevents issues of race and difference from being resolved in the US. In the last decade or so, as the collapse of Affirmative Action initiatives and the rise of white supremacy groups attest, racial divides seem to be widening rather than narrowing. Some race scholars such as Crouch think otherwise and see the increased mixing of the races in the US as the ‘end of race’:

The international flow of images and information will continue to make for a greater and greater swirl of influences. It will increasingly change life on the globe and also change our American sense of race… In that future, definition by racial, ethnic and sexual groups will most probably have ceased to be the foundation of special-interest power… Americans of the future will find themselves surrounded in every direction by people who are part Asian, part Latin, part African, part European, part Indian.

As panaceas or true saviors, historical figures, like Hemings, and contemporary celebrities, like Woods, have become national touchstones for unity. These biracial or multiracial individuals who were once outcast traces of taboo sexual transgressions, the stereotypical ‘tragic mulattos’, are now signifiers of a future of racial harmony. In February 1995, Newsweek devoted an entire issue to the ‘New Race’ in America and though its surveys showed some significant pessimism among blacks and whites regarding our nation’s race relations, the magazine presented the nation’s growing mixed-race population as a future remedy for current racial conflicts. As one biracial writer responded, the magazine declared it ‘hip to be mixed’. Another article, with a markedly flippant tone, in Harper’s Magazine in 1993, even recommended a more practical ‘need’ for racial mixing: melanin rich skin for the survival of future generations as our ozone layer erodes. Popular movies such as Bulworth (1998), written and directed by Warren Beatty, present a jaded white politician who, after living a few days with a black family in South Central Los Angeles, makes ‘procreative, racial deconstruction’ his political platform, his remedy for racial discrimination and the economic disparities it has caused in this country…

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Optical Illusions: Images of Miscegenation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Art

American Art
Volume 5, Number 3 (Summer, 1991)
pages 88-107

Judith Wilson, Former Assistant Professor of African American Studies, Assistant Professor of Art History and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies
University of California, Irvine

miscegenationn. [Latin miscere to mix + genus race…]: a mixture of races; esp: marriage or cohabitation between a white person an a member of another race.
—Webster’s Seventh  New Collegiate Dictionary

Today, most physical anthropologist do not believe that pure races ever existed.
—Bruce G. Trigger

What the matter came down to, of course, was visibility.  Anyone whose appearance discernibly connected him with the Negro was held to be such.
—Winthrop Jordon

“Race” is a peculiarly optical system of classification as Hugh Honour and Albert Boimehave observed. In the English-speaking world, it is a concept that characteristically stresses a single feature or color—value—and is structured by polarities “white” and “black,” “white” and “non-white,” “the white race” and “the darker races,” 0r “white people” and “people of color.” Miscegenation, the sexual union of individuals assigned to different racial categories, blurs such distinctions, thereby threatening race-based systems of social order and privilege. Indeed, as both anthropologist Bruce Trigger and philosopher Anthony Appiah have suggested, the age-old historical fact of miscegenation undermines the validity of race as either a scientific or a philosophical construct.

North American attitudes toward race are notoriously rigid and denial oriented in their insistence upon what anthropologist Virginia R. Dominguez has labeled “the binary system”:

Whereas descendants of Africans and Europeans in the United States, regardless of miscegenation, are typically allowed membership in only two racial categories—white and black—the Afro-Latin world… has long used miscegenation as a mechanism for the construction of a new category of people epistemologically separate from both whites and blacks.

North American practice is unique, not only in its tendency to view miscegenation primarily in African- versus European-American terms—a tendency that both excludes additional levels of genealogical complexity (e.g., the possibility of African, European, and Native American ancestry) and erases other histories (e.g., the record of anti-Asian sentiment and legislation, with its accompanying prohibitions of interracial sex). Thus reduced to a black-white issue, the sex-race conjunction has given rise to forms of literary and cinematic representation that are well known: American authors ranging from James Fenimore Cooper to William Faulkner have shared a preoccupation with the supposed tragedy of mixed ancestry, and filmmakers ranging from D. W. Griffith to Spike Lee have lamented the alleged horrors of interracial sex…

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Mixed heritage models set to face off

Mancunian Matters
Manchester, England
2010-10-29

Natasha Carter

Models will take to the catwalk in the UKs first mixed-race model contest held by a Manchester-based social enterprise tomorrow.

Twenty finalists, all of mixed heritage, will go head to head on October 30th for the title of the Face of Mix-d 2010 and a 12 month modeling contract with Boss Model Management.

Mix-d:, formed in 2006, is a social enterprise aiming to help people explore contemporary mixed-race identity.

Bradley Lincoln, founder of Mix-d:, said: “The fashion industry will admit that they tend to go for people who are single heritage. With mixed-race people being the fastest growing ethnic minority group, at some point we’ve got to have some form of competition to show that this proportion of society needs representing on the catwalk…

He added: “It’s quite pioneering, the first mixed-race competition in the UK, in history actually, and I want Manchester to be proud that we were the first city to host this idea.

“It’s not about separating people, it’s about showing them they actually share more in common than people realise.”…

…“All the time I get ‘You’re black! You’re white! You’re confused!’, I always have to correct people and say ‘No! I’m mixed-race!’” said finalist Zachary Watson.

“Taking part in the next mixed-race face of the UK is a fantastic opportunity to give people that understanding that we’re more than the stereotypes they label us with!”…

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Everyone Looks a Little Bit Asian

truthdig: drilling beneath the headlines
2010-10-27

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Like many other Hispanics, I am a member of Generation E.A. (ethnically ambiguous). Over the years I’ve been mistaken for just about every racial or ethnic combination—from Eurasian to Afro-Irish to Arab-Native American.

This guessing game is something members of Generation E.A. are used to in discussions with acquaintances, classmates, co-workers and curious passersby. Sometimes it’s even educational. But this is never something one would expect to hear from a politician, particularly a politician addressing the Hispanic Student Union at Rancho High School in Las Vegas, Nev. Yet this is exactly what happened when Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for Senate in Nevada, told a group of students that she did not know if the brown border crossers featured in her “Best Friend” commercial were all Hispanic because “some of you look a little more Asian to me.” She continued, “What we know, what we know about ourselves is that we are a melting pot in this country. My grandchildren are evidence of that. I’m evidence of that. I’ve been called the first Asian legislator in our Nevada State Assembly.”…

…But the most recent confusing remarks about race and ethnicity are different because they serve a unique purpose. They provide an opportunity to open dialogue in a campaign season that has been more focused on economics than on ethnicity. Could it be that the two are connected?

“The interesting thing about Angle’s version of racial and ethnic talk is that it is more focused on Hispanic issues than on the traditional black-white paradigm,” according to professor Ulli K. Ryder of Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. “What’s happening here is that Hispanics and Asians are being compared and confused because they both equal foreign in the U.S. racial imagination.” So, Angle is saying that these two foreign groups can melt and look alike, but that they will never look like Americans...

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“A Little Yellow Bastard Boy”: Paternal Rejection, Filial Insistence, and the Triumph of African American Cultural Aesthetics in Langston Hughes’s “Mulatto”

Robert Paul Lamb, Professor of English
Purdue University

College Literature
Volume, 35, Number 2 (Spring 2008)
pages 126-153
DOI: 10.1353/lit.2008.0012

When Langston Hughes published “Mulatto” in his second poetry collection, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), it was highly praised by both African American and white reviewers. But because it did not seem germane to the heated controversy caused by that volume—over whether the blues were an acceptable poetic form and whether Hughes’s vernacular representations of African Americans were genuine or else racialist stereotypes—“Mulatto” has been mostly ignored by scholars ever since. This richly complex poem demands to be read in several contexts: Hughes’s difficult relationship with his own father, his lifelong near obsession with biracialism, and the poem’s deliberate intertextuality with Jean Toomer’s Cane. Most important, Hughes’s intricate and innovative employment of African American cultural aesthetics—call and response, signifying, and the blues—is essential to any meaningful reading of what is one of the finest poems ever written on the biracial experience in America.

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Star-Light, Star-Bright, Star Damn Near White: Mixed-Race Superstars

The Journal of Popular Culture
Volume 40, Issue 2 (April 2007)
pages 217–237
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5931.2007.00376.x

Sika Alaine Dagbovie, Professor of English
Florida Atlantic University

In an episode of the “Chris Rock Show,” comedian Chris Rock searches the streets of Harlem to find out what people think of Tiger Woods. When he asks three Asian storekeepers if they consider Woods Asian, one replies, “‘Not even this much,” pressing two of his fingers together to show no space. This comic scene and the jokes chat surround Wood’s self-proclaimed identity reveal a cultural contradiction that I explore in this essay, namely the simultaneous acceptance and rejection of blackness within a biracial discourse in American popular culture. Though Wood’s self-identification may not fit neatly into the black/white mixed-race identity explored in this project, he still falls into a black/white dichotomy prevalent in the United States. The Asian storekeepers agree with Rock’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that Tiger Woods is as black as James Brown, opposing sentiments like “The dude’s more Asian than he is anything else” on an Asian-American college Internet magazine (“Wang and Woods”). Woods cannot escape blackness (a stereotypical fried-chicken-and-collard-green-eating blackness according to Fuzzy Zoeller), and yet he also represents a multicultural posterboy, one whose blackness pales next to his much-celebrated multi-otherness.

Through advertising, interviews, and publicity, biracial celebrities encode a distinct connection to blackness despite their projected (and sometimes preferred) self-identification. Drawing from Richard Dyer’s Stars I read biracial celebrities Halle Berry, Vin Diesel, and Mariah Carey by analyzing autobiographical representations, celebrity statuses, public reception, and the publicity surrounding each of the…

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Miscegenation, assimilation, and consumption: racial passing in George Schuyler’s “Black No More” and Eric Liu’s “The Accidental Asian”

MELUS
Volume 33, Number 3 (Fall 2008) Multicultural and Multilingual Aesthetics of Resistance
pages 169-190

Hee-Jung Serenity Joo, Associate Professor of English
University of Manitoba

“[E]ither get out, get white or get along.”
—Schuyler, Black No More (11)

“Some are born white, others achieve whiteness, still others have whiteness thrust upon them.”
—Liu, The Accidental Asian (34-35)

In her influential essay “Eating the Other,” bell hooks examines the ways in which race is commodified in our intensifying hypercapitalist world. She expects that “cultural, ethnic, and racial differences will be continually commodified and offered up as new dishes to enhance the white palate”. The other is “eaten” and the white self is satiated through consumption of aspects of the other’s culture—food, tattoos, music, language, tourism, or even the other’s body. Over a decade later, a casual stroll down any drug store cosmetics aisle attests to the voraciousness of this white appetite. L’Oreal’s True Match foundation line caters to a wide range of skin tones, with white, Asian, and black models posing for its stylish magazine spreads. True to hooks’s observations, the darker the color of the foundation, the more edible the skin tone becomes: on the lighter side of the pigment spectrum are colors such as “porcelain,” “alabaster,” “ivory,” “nude,” and “natural.” In contrast, the darker end includes “honey,” “caramel,” “crème café,” “cappuccino,” “nut brown,” and “cocoa.” No matter that the latter colors are also advertised as daily specials on any Starbucks menu, the blatant metaphors of consumption and the exotic appeal of dark skin juxtaposed against the purity and neutrality of light skin are hard to ignore.

Two seemingly disparate texts, George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) and Eric Liu’s The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker (1998), pick up the question the cosmetic industry begs us to ask: what impact will consumerism have on the perpetually changing meaning of race in this age of late capitalism? In theory, in this post-Civil Rights world the category of race is less dependent on the state for its demands of equality; legally, at least, for example, the state no longer sanctions Jim Crow segregation or condones lynching. Perhaps in this epoch race has become a marker of personal taste, one that can be consumed by the highest bidder. In contrast to hooks’s emphasis on the white cannibalistic consumption of the other, these two texts complicate this racist schema by positing others as the ones who can consume their way out of their respective races and into the white one. This article compares the literary trope of racial passing in Black No More to the social narrative of assimilation in The Accidental Asian to show the changing nature of race under the pressures of late capitalism. In Black No More, racial passing challenges segregation laws that deny racial minorities entry into the labor market in the interest of protecting capitalist accumulation. In The Accidental Asian, assimilation is the contemporary version of racial passing; assimilation is promoted to incorporate racial minorities into the market as consumers, to make them pass into an appropriate category of consumption and whiteness. Despite their attempts at imagining a nation where race no longer matters, the persisting racial passing narratives of both texts question their proclamations of “post-racism.”

Though written over sixty years apart, both Black No More and The Accidental Asian present eerily similar futures of an anti-racist nation premised on miscegenation. Historically, miscegenation derived from the white slave owner’s exploitation of the black female body in order to protect and increase his property. Under Jim Crow segregation, miscegenation signified a danger to the white racial “purity” of the nation in the form of a supposed black sexual threat against white women. For Asian Americans, miscegenation has served historically as a contested battleground for legal inclusion into the nation in the forms of marriage and immigration laws. At the turn of the twenty-first century, however, miscegenation sometimes is celebrated as a means to achieve a multicultural and racism-less society. Tracing the changing nature of racial passing and miscegenation in these two texts reveals the ongoing political implications of color-blind consumerism and late capitalist consumption.

Published during the Harlem Renaissance while legal segregation flourished, Schuyler’s Black No More concerns a machine that literally turns African Americans into white (Caucasian) individuals. As Dr. Junius Crookman, the African American scientist who invents the machine, states, this will “solve the American race problem” . After all, he argues, “if there were no Negroes, there could be no Negro problem”. He then opens a business christened “Black-No-More, Incorporated” to capitalize on the success of his scientific endeavor. Predictably and often comically, instead of eliminating the race problem in the United States, Black-No-More, Inc. only thrusts the entire nation into chaos and racial paranoia by making it impossible to distinguish “real” whites from former African Americans who have “become” white via the machine. The complexities of the color line that the characters transgress attests to the intimate relationship between the state and early-twentieth-century mass production (Fordist) capitalism, which created a white working class by rejecting black bodies in the pursuit of a coherent national identity. At the same time, the thrust of the capitalist Black-No-More “machine” already foreshadows the rise of global capitalism that marks Liu’s historical moment.

Similar to Schuyler’s novel, The Accidental Asian also attempts to depict an ideal anti-racist society. In Liu’s vision, set in an era of globalization and late capitalism, racial identities are fluid and racial passing has become a consumerist choice. He argues that in this day and age, “you don’t have to have white skin anymore to become white”. The book is Liu’s poignant memoir of assimilation into the elite upper class of the US. Journalist, author, and former speechwriter for Bill Clinton, Liu confesses that because US society conflates class and race by equating power and wealth with whiteness, the illogic of assimilation unfortunately but inevitably makes him white; therefore, as his title suggests, he is Asian only by accident. He lists a variety of specifically consumerist practices that make him white, including “wear[ing] khaki Dockers,” “eat[ing] gourmet greens,” and “furnish[ing] [his] condo a la Crate and Barrel”. The contemporary racial passing proposed by Liu shows a significant shift in the social meaning of race; now race is influenced by consumerism and flexible capital spending, rather than by the state. In Black No More, becoming white mediates the state’s racism, while Liu’s text presents a scenario in which certain assimilated and affluent people of color regard racial and ethnic identities as commodities. This relatively malleable definition of race is compounded by the ever increasing popularity of white subjects who desire to pass for exotic ethnics.

Racial passing narratives have often been used to reveal the constructed and fragile nature of racial categories and to critique the hypocritical and discriminatory system of US democracy that equated white skin with freedom and citizenship? In African American literary history, in particular, the racial passing narrative has been an important genre. Beginning with slave narratives and continuing through the domestic “tragic mulatto” novels of the Civil War and into Harlem Renaissance literature, the trope of the racial passer has been deployed to reveal the unjust treatment of African Americans in US history.  Whether under slavery or during the Jim Crow era, mixed-race subjects with light skin often passed for white in order to gain their freedom or assert their constitutional rights.

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