Mixed Race Studies

Free at Last: The secret of Esie Mae Washington Williams is out, but she still doesn’t have full control over her story

Bloomington Herald-Times
2004-02-14
Courtesy of: Black Film Center/Archive
Indiana University

Audrey T. McCluskey, Director Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center
Indiana University

After 78 years of harboring a less than well-kept secret, Essie Mae Washington-Williams proclaimed that by publicly naming South Carolina‘s Strom Thurmond, the once fiery segregationist senator and Dixiecrat presidential candidate as her father, for the first time she felt “completely free.” Her story garnered massive news coverage, not because the sexual exploitation of her 16-year-old black mother, Carrie Butler, by the 22-year-old Thurmond in whose household Butler worked as a maid was different from numerous other examples of lustful hypocrisy. The attention came because the late senator built his career on virulent racism, espousing the evils of race-mixing before moderating those views after he was well past his political prime. The kind of hateful rhetoric that Thurmond was good at caused many black men to lose their lives at the end of a rope, strung from a Poplar or Pecan or Live Oak tree. Their crime? It was to be accused of a liaison with a white woman or even of taking a wayward glance at one…

Read the entire article here.

A new paradigm of race: Visit to Brazil prompts the question: Can mixing everyone up solve the race problem?

Bloomington Herald-Times
2004-08-29
Courtesy of: Black Film Center/Archive
Indiana University

Audrey T. McCluskey, Director Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center
Indiana University

If Tiger Woods lived in Brazil he would not have had to coin the word “Cablanasian” to describe the multiracial mixture of caucasian, black, and Asian that makes up his lineage nor face derision from those of us who thought he was trippin’ (being silly, unreal). As my husband and I saw on a recent trip, in Brazil race-mixing is the rule, not the exception, with the majority of its 170 million people being visible incarnates of the slogan that officials like to tout: “We’re a multiracial democracy. We’re not white, or black, or Indian, we’re all Brazilians.”

Skeptical, but being swept along by the stunning beauty of the country and its people, I did begin to wonder if (contrary to learned opinion) Brazil had solved its race problem by just mixing everyone up. British scholar Paul Gilroy recently said that Brazil and South Africa – a country that I also visited recently and will invoke later – present “a new paradigm of race” that is more subtle and flexible than the U.S.’s old “one drop” (of black blood makes you black) rule that equates whiteness with mythical purity…

Read the entire article here.

Prejudice inspires filmmaker to discover Afro-German roots

Indiana Daily Student
Indiana University
2010-01-24

Abby Liebenthal, Staff Reporter

“It all started with a public threat on my life.”

Within the first few minutes of Mo Asumang’s documentary “Roots Germania,” students, faculty and Bloomington residents became part of a search for the director’s identity…

…Asumang said the journey to find her identity was driven by a desire to understand where racism toward Afro-Germans originated.

“It’s like a job to search for identity,” Asumang said. “It starts when you’re born in Germany – it’s not so easy to be part of that country.”

The film was triggered by a song, written by a Neo-Nazi band the “White Aryan Rebels,” that calls for Asumang’s murder. Lyrics in the song include “This bullet is for you, Mo Asumang.”…

Read the entire article here.

Reconstruction, Segregation, and Miscegenation: Interracial Marriage and the Law in the Lower South, 1865-1900

American Nineteenth Century History
Volume 6, Issue 1
March 2005
pages 57-76
DOI: 10.1080/14664650500121827

Peter Wallenstein, Professor of History
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

On the eve of Congressional Reconstruction, all seven states of the Lower South had laws against interracial marriage. During the Republican interlude that began in 1867-68, six of the seven states (all but Georgia) suspended those laws, whether through judicial invalidation or legislative repeal. Yet by 1894 all six had restored such bans. The trajectory of miscegenation laws in the Lower South between 1865 and 1900 permits a reconsideration of the range of possibilities the Reconstruction era brought to public policy. More than that, it forces a reconsideration of the origins of the Jim Crow South. Legally mandated segregation in public transit, as C. Vann Woodward observed in 1955, took hold late in the century. But such segregation in public education, as Howard R. Rabinowitz pointed out with his formula ‘from exclusion to segregation,’ originated during the first postwar years. Segregation on the marital front – universal at the start of the period and again at the end, but relaxed in most Lower South states for a time in between – combined the two patterns into yet a third. Adding another layer of complexity was the issue of where the color line was located, and thus which individuals were classified on each side of it.

Read or purchase the article here.

Deciding on Doctrine: Anti-Miscegenation Statutes and the Development of Equal Protection Analysis

Virginia Law Review
Number 95, Issue 3 (May 2009)
pages 627-665

Rebecca Schoff
University of Virginia School of Law

In 1967, the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States were in complete agreement that the statutory scheme before them in Loving v. Virginia, which criminalized interracial marriage, should be invalidated. They did not, however, agree on which legal doctrines justified the invalidation. Eight Justices signed on to an opinion that carefully hedged the question with arguments related to both the equal protection and the due process clauses. Justice Potter Stewart authored a terse concurring opinion asserting that there could be no valid state law “which makes the criminality of an act depend upon the race of the actor.” Although no other member of the Court was willing to sign on to this concurrence, it gave voice to a doctrine that had been a central argument of civil rights litigation, articulated as early as Justice [John Marshall] Harlan’s famed dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson.

This Note will explore why the Warren Court chose the path it did to invalidate anti-miscegenation laws. More generally, it will analyze the Warren Court’s treatment of anti-miscegenation statutes with the object of gaining perspective on the relationship between decision and doctrine: assuming that Justices are in agreement as to which party should prevail, what factors, legal and non-legal, can influence the Court’s preference for one doctrine over another? In Loving, the decision to reject Justice Stewart’s rationale had far-reaching consequences. Had the Court followed Justice Stewart’s reasoning, review of criminal statutes, at least, would not require even a cursory analysis of the legislature’s purpose once a racial classification was detected. It might be argued that the Court was simply seeking the narrowest grounds on which to decide the case and that Justice Stewart’s reasoning was simply too broad. Loving’s now-controversial place as a precedent supporting substantive due process analysis in right-to-marriage jurisprudence, however, would have been minimized, if not eliminated, by Justice Stewart’s approach. It may be difficult to predict the ramifications of doctrinal choices, particularly with respect to the interaction be-tween equal protection, due process, and fundamental rights. Ultimately, this Note will argue that the Warren Court showed a preference for a less rule-like approach to equal protection analysis, in part because the conditions surrounding desegregation exacer-bated the difficulty of analyzing the scope of rules. Dissecting the circumstances under which the Warren Court viewed its potential paths to a ruling against Virginia in Loving may help us to under-stand how and why the Court resolves such problems in particular ways…

Read the entire article here.

What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Review)

Law and Politics Book Review
American Political Science Association
2009-03-23
pp. 218-220

Mark Kessler, Chair of the Department of History & Government and Professor of Government
Texas Woman’s Univeristy

What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. By Peggy Pascoe. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2009. 404 pages. Cloth ISBN13: 9780195094633, ISBN10: 0195094638)

In this highly original and important book, Peggy Pascoe describes and analyzes three centuries of laws in the United States prohibiting interracial marriages and sexual relations. In perhaps the most comprehensive and systematic study of legal marriage and sex prohibitions to date, Pascoe argues that these laws were central ideological tools used in constituting and reproducing white supremacy in the United States. Placing her study in its broadest context, she argues that examining the rise and decline of these laws “provides a locus for studying the history of race in America” (p.2). Pascoe’s study demonstrates how historical research, combined with critical cultural theory and analysis, may shed new light on significant questions regarding the power of law and legal interpretation in constructing and reconstructing social reality.

Throughout this work, the writing is admirably accessible, while the analyses and arguments are deeply nuanced. Pascoe begins many of the eleven chapters with stories describing the people and circumstances involved in miscegenation cases throughout history. These stories are carefully selected to show the great variation in characteristics of participants, laws, and regions of the country in which the cases arose, and to help address the broader questions of nation-building and nation-formation that emerge from this study. Pascoe uses these very human stories, along with landmark appellate court decisions and local legal practices, to explore the many and varied ways in which social and political relations based on race, gender, and sexuality illuminate the rise and fall of miscegenation law in the United States.

Pascoe’s narrative begins in the Reconstruction era, when the term “miscegenation” was first invented and applied to interracial marriage and sex. Her discussion focuses on the ways in which judges, legislators, and lawyers employed notions of what is “natural” and “unnatural” in conventional cultural discourses about sex, gender, and sexuality to create and apply laws prohibiting interracial marriage and sex. Such laws emerged first in the South and North and typically applied exclusively to relations between those categorized racially as “white” and as “black.”…

Read the entire review here.

Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key’s Freedom Suit – Subjecthood and Racialized Identity in Seventeenth Century Colonial Virginia

Akron Law Review
University of Akron
Volume 41, Number 3 (2007-2008)
pages 799-837

Taunya Lovell Banks, Jacob A. France Professor of Equality Jurisprudence and Francis & Harriet Iglehart Research Professor of Law
University of Maryland School of Law

Elizabeth Key, an African-Anglo woman living in seventeenth century colonial Virginia sued for her freedom after being classified as a negro by the overseers of her late master’s estate. Her lawsuit is one of the earliest freedom suits in the English colonies filed by a person with some African ancestry. Elizabeth’s case also highlights those factors that distinguished indenture from life servitude – slavery in the mid seventeenth century. She succeeds in securing her freedom by crafting three interlinking legal arguments to demonstrate that she was a member of the colonial society in which she lived. Her evidence was her asserted ancestry – English; her religion, Christian; and the inability to be enslaved for life that stems from the first two statuses. These factors, I argue, determined who was the equivalent of white in seventeenth century Virginia.

I. Introduction

Elizabeth Key, an Afro-Anglo woman, was born around 1630 in the Virginia Colony. Twenty-five years later she sued for her freedom after the overseers of her late master’s estate classified her and her infant son as negroes (Africans or descendants of Africans) rather than as an indentured servant with a free-born child.  Unwilling to accept permanent servitude, Elizabeth sued for their freedom, and after protracted litigation she and her son were set free.

A few historians and legal scholars mention her case in passing as proof that by the mid seventeenth century people of African ancestry were held as slaves in Virginia.  Only feminist historian Kathleen Brown even mentions that Elizabeth’s lawsuit involved not only her freedom, but that of her son. To the rest of the historians she was simply a slave, her gender, son and mixed ancestry were irrelevant. None looked closely at the significance of her three interlinking legal arguments: (1) that she was a practicing Christian; (2) who was the daughter of a free Englishman; (3) who bound her out as an indentured servant for nine years which period had expired.

Arguably Elizabeth’s pleadings might be an early example of what Kenji Yoshino characterizes as “covering,” downplaying aspects of one’s identity. In crafting her legal argument around her father’s ancestry and subjecthood Elizabeth downplayed the African ancestry of her enslaved mother. Her argument also might be an example of “racial performance” where the extent one does things that English women and men did during the period becomes an important determinant of one’s legal status.  But as I explain in this article other cases decided during this period suggest otherwise…

Read the entire article here or here.

Mixed Race America and the Law: A Reader (Review)

Law and Politics Book Review
American Political Science Association
Volume 13,  Number 4 (April 2003)

Barbara L. Graham, Professor of Political Science,
University of Missouri, St. Louis

Mixed Race America and the Law: A Reader. By Kevin R. Johnson (Editor). (New York and London: New York University Press, 2003. 505 pages. Cloth ISBN: 0-8147-4256-4. Paper ISBN: 0-8147-4257-2)

In Mixed Race America and the Law: A Reader, Kevin R. Johnson has edited one of the most important and timely anthologies on the general topic of race mixture and the law. The anthology addresses a range of provocative issues concerning the mixed race experience and the law and its impact on mixed race peoples. For readers who are unfamiliar with the vast literature on the mixed race experience, I am confident that they will find this book’s interdisciplinary approach indispensable in its grappling with issues raised by multiracialism and the law. Johnson’s book, part of the Critical America Series published by New York University Press, takes critical race theory into another direction in its emphasis on mixed race scholarship.  As with many of the writings of critical race theorists, Johnson’s book has seriously challenged the conventional wisdom of the black-white paradigm. The writings persuasively demonstrate that America has always been a mixed race society, that the law has played a major role in shaping racial categories, classification schemes, intermarriage, immigration and trans-racial adoption issues to name a few. Race is addressed as a social construct and Johnson – as well as the other contributors – acknowledges how law has not kept up with the fluid racial boundaries in the American context. This book covers the diversity of the mixed race experience in America, including African American, Indian, Latina(o) and Asian populations. Johnson argues in the introduction that “racial mixture will undoubtedly shape the future study of race and civil rights in the United States. As minorities of many different types intermarry and rates of immigration of diverse peoples to this country remain high, more racial mixtures and mixed race peoples will emerge.”  The writings in the anthology take the reader on a journey in an effort to understand the complexities of racial mixture in the United States and abroad.

Johnson has carefully selected eighty-seven edited scholarly writings, primarily law review articles published in the 1990s and a few court cases.  The reader is divided into twelve parts in an attempt to examine the complexities of racial categories and what they mean for a mixed race society.  Part I addresses the history and slow demise of anti-miscegenation laws. The edited selections cover issues such as an historical overview of these laws, the history of racial identification and the regulation of interracial sex in colonial Virginia, and the relationship between lynchings and interracial relationships.  As expected, Johnson includes writings on an analysis of Loving v. Virginia (1967) and its impact.  Readers may be unfamiliar with an important precursor to Loving, Perez v. Sharp (1948), where the California Supreme Court held that the state anti-miscegenation law violated the Constitution.  Going beyond the white-black context, the other writings in Part I cover attempts to regulate intermarriage between Indians and whites and Asians and whites…

Read the entire review here.

White Enough to Be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation (Review)

Law and Politics Book Review
American Political Science Association
Vol. 18 No.9 (2008-09-15)
pp. 788-791

Daniel Lipson, Professor of Political Science
State University of New York, New Paltz

White Enough to Be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation. By Lauren L. Basson. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 256 pages.)

At a moment in United States history when Barack Obama is inspiring millions in his presidential bid, the reality of mixed-race Americans is becoming increasingly salient in a nation long obsessed with dichotomous black and white racial categories. With the population of people of color in the United States accelerating at rates unmatched by any other country in the world, racial discourse in the US has gradually come to accommodate the full cast of official minorities, moving beyond the limited focus on blacks and whites. Yet the historical precedent in the United States has been to leave little space for mixed-raced Americans, instead preserving the racial order by forcing them into monoracial categories. As Lauren Basson explains in White Enough to Be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation, the turn of the 20th century proved to be a highly dynamic period that left a major imprint on the distinctive American model of racial categorizations…

Read the entire review here.

Art Showcase Seeks to Study Racial Identity

Daily Nexus
University of California, Santa Barbara
2010-02-02
Issue 70, Volume 90

Julie Epstein, Staff Writer

The UCSB Women’s Center is currently hosting a multicultural art exhibit featuring work from students and professional artists.

The art on display ranges from paintings to photography, and even includes a work consisting of human hair on canvas. The show, entitled “Mixed Like Me,” will run until April 16. Third-year art major and show curator Lillian Edwards said the exhibit explores racial identity through an artistic lens.

“The theme of the show is to explore what it means to have a multiracial background,” Edwards said. “The goal is to bring an awareness and discussion about race through art.”

Read the entire article here.