Mixed Race Studies

Spinning on Margins: An Analysis of Passing as Communicative Phenomenon

Queen: a journal of rhetoric and power
Special Issue: Rehtorics of identity: Place, Race, Sex and the Person (January 2005)
From the conference held from 2005-01-20 through 2005-01-22 at the University of Redlands
21 pages

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Acts of black-to-white racial passing in the United States represent a struggle between self-identity and the social structures into which one is born. From a historical perspective, passing is a strategy of representation through which light-skinned black Americans attempt(ed) to reconcile “two unreconciled ideals:” their limited opportunities as black people in a segregated society with their idealized life goals as full American citizens in the pre-civil rights era (DuBois, 1903; Gandy, 1998). In other words, passing is a strategy employed by many light-skinned black Americans to resolve being excluded from the general white world of social activity by “the vast veil;” the physical, legal, psychological, and social obstacles structurally embedded between blacks and whites (DuBois, 1903).

This individual paper employs Structuration Theory, legal precedent, literature and rhetorical analysis to respond to the following specific interrogations: (1) is it possible to develop a vocabulary about “passing,” which is an activity based on nonverbal communication and physicality and enshrouded in a code of silence? And, in a broader sense, (2) how do acts of passing themselves become communicative behaviors that express identity?

This three-pronged analysis of the passing phenomenon will work to call the ideological and epistemological foundations of race itself into question. First, Giddens’s Structuration Theory will explain that passers note a contextual diversity/dissonance at the macro level between the general white world of social activity and the general black world of social activity. Second, a rhetorical analysis of legal precedent will highlight America’s investment in race as the basis for defining and partaking in social and material privileges that become routine and critical aspects of day-to-day life. Court cases such as Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, and People v. Dean are pivotal points in tracing whiteness from “color to race to status to property” (Harris, 1993, p. 1714). Additionally, these cases address the debate of social versus legal whiteness as the grounds for constituting full participation in society. Third, available literature, including narratives written by enslaved Africans along with novels, diaries, and memoirs from the Harlem Renaissance, recounts tales of passing and the emotional and social tolls paid in the process (Harris, 1993; Johnson, 1912; Hughes, 1933; Williams, 1991; Ifekwunigwe, 1999). Rhetorical analysis of this literature will uncover the tropes of a vocabulary of passing and reveal race as a “fantasy theme” and social resource that individuals who are not in the mainstream of white America utilize to attain economic, political, and personal fulfillment.

Read the entire article here.

Rodney King juror: ‘My father was black’

Ventura County Star
Camarillo, California
2012-04-28

Gretchen Wenner, Staff Reporter

SQUAW VALLEY — Juror No. 8 from the Rodney King beating trial has always heard the 12-member panel described as either all white or as having no blacks.
 
Now, he wants the public to know that’s not the whole story: His father was a black man.
 
“Nobody’s ever guessed that I was black,” Henry King Jr. told The Star.
 
From the get-go, the media made a big thing about the jury having no blacks, said King, a 69-year-old retiree living in Fresno County.

“It made you feel like they didn’t think we could come out with a fair verdict because we were supposed to be an all-white jury,” he said…

…”There are a few things about me that people don’t know,” he initially said, then choked back tears before saying his father was black.
 
It’s something he didn’t share with other jurors during the trial and doesn’t recall sharing when they occasionally socialized afterward. Nor had he talked about it with a reporter.
 
“Forty years ago, you really didn’t say that you were part black,” said King. “Now, I’m proud of it.”
 
When he applied last year to be on the Fresno County Grand Jury, one of the first things he told them was that his father was black.
 
“They thought I was joking,” he said.
 
During interviews on the phone and at his home on 5 acres in the southern Sierra Nevada foothills, King shared family photos and thoughts on his background and the trial. Both of his parents have since died.
 
“I look pretty white,” said King, whose friends call him Hank. “If you looked at me, you wouldn’t know I had black blood in me.”
 
His eyes are blue; his skin is light.
 
King variously described himself as part black, as having black blood and occasionally as black or mixed-race.
 
“I don’t know if you would say mulatto or what,” he said at one point.
 
In his younger years, he didn’t often think about his racial background…

Read the entire article here.

The ambivalence of authority and secret lives of tears: transracial child placements and the historical development of South African Law

Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume 18, Issue 2, (June 1992)
pages 372-404
DOI: 10.1080/03057079208708319

Frederick Noel Zaal, Professor of Law
University of Kwazulu-Natal

The negative attitudes towards racially mixed familial groups which underlay many mid‐twentieth century South African statutes had deep historical roots. Early in the seventeenth century it became fashionable for Dutch travellers to write memoirs in which they routinely condemned the effects of transracial sexual relationships which they had witnessed in the colonies of other nations and in which they ascribed witch-like powers to women of colour who consorted with Europeans. The pessimistic mythology about miscegenation that was thus begun affected policy makers when the Dutch East India Company subsequently began to establish the first Dutch colonies in the East Indies. Both in the Indies and at the small Dutch colony in South Africa, uncomfortable tensions resulted because of the fears and racial prejudice engendered by this mythology in the face of a contrary need to assimilate the offspring of miscegenation. In South Africa the legal mechanisms which the Dutch East India Company had developed to cater for this need were forgotten by the late nineteenth century. However, the mythology about the undesirability of racially mixed familial groups lived on into the twentieth century. As the century progressed, it resulted in an erosion of the legal status and rights of children whose parents were given different population group classifications by a government which steadily increased the number of such groups. During the period 1960–1990 there was a series of governmental attempts to prevent the artificial creation of mixed familial groups by prohibiting transracial adoptions. The legislation which was designed for this purpose remained ambiguously worded because modern Western notions about the rights and vulnerability of children compelled a covert approach. In the early 1990s, as the white minority fears for its future, there has been an unwitting return to the kind of selectively acquisitive child placement strategies once utilized by the Dutch East India Company.

Read or purchase the 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.

Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White

W. W. Norton & Company
May 2002
320 pages
5.5 × 8.3 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-32309-2

Earl Lewis, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
Emory University

Heidi Ardizzone, Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of Notre Dame

When Alice Jones, a former nanny, married Leonard Rhinelander in 1924, she became the first black woman to be listed in the Social Register as a member of one of New York’s wealthiest families. Once news of the marriage became public, a scandal of race, class, and sex gripped the nation—and forced the couple into an annulment trial.

Affirmative action backed in largely black Brazil

Associated Press
2012-05-04

Bradley Brooks

SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazil’s top court has backed sweeping affirmative action programs used in more than 1,000 universities across this nation, which has more blacks than any country outside Africa yet where a severe gap in education equality between races persists.

The Supreme Court voted 7-1 late Thursday to uphold a federal program that has provided scholarships to hundreds of thousands of black and mixed-race students for university studies since 2005. Its constitutionality was challenged by a right of center party, The Democrats. Three justices abstained from the vote.

The court ruled last week in a separate case that it was constitutional for universities to use racial quotas in determining who is admitted.

“If I didn’t have the scholarship, I wouldn’t be here. It pays my entire tuition,” said 22-year-old student Felipe Nunes, taking a break between classes at the privately run Univerisdade Paulista in Sao Paulo.

Nunes, the mixed-race son of a mechanic, said he’s the first person in his family to attend university. He’s one of 919,000 recipients of a “ProUni” scholarship since 2005. The ProUni program funds studies in private universities for black, mixed race, indigenous and poor students whose primary education was in the public school system…

…Norma Odara, a 20-year-old journalism student at Mackenzie University in Sao Paulo, considers herself black, though her mother is white, and her youthful face embodies Brazil’s mixed heritage.

She’s not the recipient of any government scholarship and her university does not use any sort of quota system, something made clear by the fact Odara was one of the few black students in a sea of whites on Mackenzie’s leafy campus. Still, Odara said quotas and other such programs are only temporary fixes, and that what is needed is more government spending in public grade schools where most black Brazilians study, so that they are better prepared to enter universities on academic merit alone…

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The Historiography of Métis Land Dispersal, 1870-1890

Manitoba History
Number 30, Autumn 1995

Brad Milne
History Department
University of Manitoba

The Manitoba Act of 1870 provided substantial land grants to the Métis at Red River. Section 31 set aside 1.4 million acres of land for distribution among the children of Métis heads of families residing in the province, while section 32 guaranteed all old settlers, Métis or white, “peaceable possession” of the lots they occupied in the Red River settlement prior to 15 July, 1870. Subsection 32(5) guaranteed allotments of land to commute the rights of hay and common in the outer two miles that accompanied many of the old river lots. Additional legislation of 1874 granted $160 scrip, redeemable in Dominion lands, to all Métis heads of families. However, as most students and scholars of Métis history are aware, very little of this land and scrip remained in Métis hands by the late 1870s. Instead, the period from 1870 to 1890 saw the widespread dispersal of the Métis from Red River.

In the last two decades, a virtual “explosion in Métis scholarship” has emerged to determine why this large scale migration occurred.With native political organizations and the governments of Canada and Manitoba embroiled in an on-going court battle, various scholars have received generous financial support to investigate Métis land claims in Manitoba. For two scholars in particular, Douglas Sprague and Thomas Flanagan, the Métis dispersal has become a subject of bitter dispute. Flanagan, a University of Calgary political scientist and a historical consultant for the federal Department of Justice, believes that the federal government fulfilled the land provisions of the Manitoba Act. On the other hand, Sprague, a historian retained by the Manitoba Métis Federation to undertake research into Métis land claims, argues that through a process of formal and informal discouragement, the Métis were victims of a deliberate conspiracy in which John A. Macdonald and the Canadian government successfully kept them from obtaining title to the land they were to receive under terms of the Manitoba Act of 1870. Although Sprague and Flanagan remain the central combatants in this historiographical battle, significant research has been conducted by many other scholars, most notably Gerhard Ens and Nicole St-Onge.

In short, the issue of Métis land dispersal is controversial and is the focus of an impressive historiographical debate. This article will not add to the debate. It is designed to help those who are not specialists in Métis history gain an understanding of the state of the argument over land claims…

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Cultural Inversion and the One-Drop Rule: An Essay on Biology, Racial Classification, and the Rhetoric of Racial Transcendence

Albany Law Review
Volume 72, Issue 4 (2009)
Pages 909-928

Deborah W. Post, Professor Emeritus of Law
Touro College, Jacob D. Fuchsberg School of Law
Central Islip, New York

The great paradox in contemporary race politics is exemplified in the narrative constructed by and about President Barack Obama. This narrative is all about race even as it makes various claims about the diminished significance of race: the prospect of racial healing, the ability of a new generation of Americans to transcend race or to choose their own identity, and the emergence of a postracial society. While I do not subscribe to the post-racial theories that have been floated in the press and other media, I do believe that something of great cultural significance occurred which made the candidacy and the election of Barack Obama possible. This essay is an attempt on my part to consider what that change might have been by examining the relationship between science and social change, language and cultural categories, and the role law has played, if any, in dismantling the structures of racism.

What I have to say has very little to do with biology, except to the extent that racial classification is a cultural practice that sometimes deploys biological arguments strategically. Early in the Twentieth century sociologists and anthropologists noted that in the United States, race was more a matter of caste than class and that, unlike other caste systems, it is not cultural, but “biological.” In a racial caste, one sociologist argued, “the criterion is primarily physiognomic, usually chromatic, with socio-economic differences implied.”  Another noted that “American caste is pinned not to cultural but to biological features—to color, features, hair form, and the like.” Biology was used in this early sociological literature on race in a way that made it synonymous with physical appearance or physical characteristics. In politics and legal discourse at the time, racial purity was about “blood” and rules of descent…

…In this article, my thesis is simple. If racial caste has been upended by changes in legal rules that created a hierarchical racial structure, its demise also has been hastened by the use of symbols, a strategy of cultural inversion with respect to the meaning of race.  The operative terms of a centuries-old debate have been inverted. Instead of policing racial purity with arguments about blood and biology or the modern version of them, DNA and genes, these instruments of exclusion, the tools of white supremacists and segregationists, have been used effectively, most recently by Barack Obama, to demonstrate the physical connection between groups that are still treated discursively, politically and socially, as racially distinct…

…The movement to escape the one-drop rule, the rule that examines blood lines as far back as five generations or more, if that is what the multiracial movement is all about, is not, as far as I know, a movement that began in the black community. A major proponent is a white woman, Susan Graham, founder of “Project RACE,” which is the acronym for Reclassify All Children Equally.  What Susan Graham demands is that the children of parents who come from different races be acknowledged as the product of both groups. In other words, this white mother of a child or children whose father is a black man demands that the public, the discourse, the political  instrumentalities, the private institutions, acknowledge the status of her child as white as well as black…

…The demand for multiracial identity for the children of interracial marriage, however, may be explained in terms of a desire for status as long as we live in a society in which there is still a clear racial hierarchy. The demand that multiracial children be recognized as partly white did not come from blacks.  Nor is it surprising that Susan Graham, a major advocate for the multiracial category on the United States Census found an ally in Newt Gingrich, who opined that such a category might “‘be an important step toward transcending racial division.’” The enthusiasm for such alternative classifications leads skeptics to believe that this system of reclassification and the rhetoric of transcendence will make it easy to ignore the reality and the structure of racism.

It may be that the promotion of a multiracial identity provides some white parents with the assurance that they have not been rejected by their own children. Their children are part of them and, therefore, partly white. People who cross racial lines to marry do not leave behind all of their attitudes towards race; their internalized assumptions about racial characteristics and racial hierarchy can be a source of misunderstanding, a vulnerability that at the very worst can injure or divide family members…

Read the entire article here.

Brazil’s top court backs racial quotas in universities

The Australian
2012-05-01

BRAZIL’s Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that racial quotas used in universities are constitutional and are meant to redress inequalities stemming from centuries of slavery.

The ruling issued by the 10-member court concerned the case of the University of Brasilia which in 2004 set up quotes to reserve 20 per cent of admissions to black, mixed-race and indigenous students…

…The court ruling followed an appeal lodged in 2009 by the right-wing DEM party which argued that the University of Brasilia quota policy ran counter to the principle of equality and fostered racism by creating privileges based on racial criteria.

But the judges countered that quotas were a legitimate method to redress slavery-derived inequalities and discrimination that still continues to affect Afro-Brazilians…

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Deconstructing a Manumission Document: Mary Stafford’s Free Paper

The Georgia Historical Quarterly
Volume 89, Number 3 (Fall 2005)
pages 285-317

Mary R. Bullard

This article examines the manumission document of Mary Stafford. In early nineteenth-century Georgia, manumitting one’s slave property was a personal matter loosely regulated by the state. In exchange for a one dollar token sum, Robert Stafford conveyed to Belton Copp and his heirs a piece of real estate in downtown Norwich, Connecticut, to be held in trust for Armand, Robert, and Mary. If these legatees died without legitimate heirs, then Stafford’s estate was to comply with Georgia law and go to his heirs-at-law equally, meaning his white niece and nephews, children of his two sisters, who resided in Georgia.

In early nineteenth-century Georgia, manumitting one’s slave property was a personal matter loosely regulated by the state. Bonds of affection between slaveowners and their housekeepers or mistresses were by no means unusual, and manumission was sometimes the reward for faithful service. Reversing an earlier trend, however, by the 1820s manumission became illegal in Georgia unless followed by immediate expulsion of the enfranchised from the state. A slaveowner’s personal ability to manumit had been proscribed as early as 1801, and owners attempting to “free negro slaves, mulatto, mustizo, or any other persons . . . of color” deemed slaves, had been wrarned that the only way to do so was to apply to the legislature. The individual runaway raised ominous images of thievery and rebellion. Nonetheless, fugitive slaves managed to make their way to areas in free states, where they found work, hopeful that former owners would not find them. As the…