Mixed Race Studies

White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001

University of Texas Press
2005
299 pages
6 x 9 in., 20 halftones
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-292-71274-4

Michael Phillips, Historian

The first history of race relations in Dallas from its founding until today.

From the nineteenth century until today, the power brokers of Dallas have always portrayed their city as a progressive, pro-business, racially harmonious community that has avoided the racial, ethnic, and class strife that roiled other Southern cities. But does this image of Dallas match the historical reality? In this book, Michael Phillips delves deeply into Dallas’s racial and religious past and uncovers a complicated history of resistance, collaboration, and assimilation between the city’s African American, Mexican American, and Jewish communities and its white power elite.

Exploring more than 150 years of Dallas history, Phillips reveals how white business leaders created both a white racial identity and a Southwestern regional identity that excluded African Americans from power and required Mexican Americans and Jews to adopt Anglo-Saxon norms to achieve what limited positions of power they held. He also demonstrates how the concept of whiteness kept these groups from allying with each other, and with working- and middle-class whites, to build a greater power base and end elite control of the city. Comparing the Dallas racial experience with that of Houston and Atlanta, Phillips identifies how Dallas fits into regional patterns of race relations and illuminates the unique forces that have kept its racial history hidden until the publication of this book.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Through a Glass Darkly: Memory, Race, and Region in Dallas, Texas
• 1. The Music of Cracking Necks: Dallas Civilization and Its Discontents
• 2. True to Dixie and to Moses: Yankees, White Trash, Jews, and the Lost Cause
• 3. The Great White Plague: Whiteness, Culture, and the Unmaking of the Dallas Working Class
• 4. Consequences of Powerlessness: Whiteness as Class Politics
• 5. Water Force: Resisting White Supremacy under Jim Crow
• 6. White Like Me: Mexican Americans, Jews, and the Elusive Politics of Identity
• 7. A Blight and a Sin: Segregation, the Kennedy Assassination, and the Wreckage of Whiteness
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

1. The Music of Cracking Necks: Dallas Civilization and Its Discontents

Toward the end of her life, Lizzie Atkins looked back on the days since Texas Emancipation and, despite the abolition of slavery, believed that the African American community had degenerated. The Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s sent a host of interviewers across the South to collect anecdotes from former slaves. Interviewed at her home in Madisonville, Texas, 144 miles southeast of Dallas, Atkins insisted that something bad had happened to black Texans since the end of the Civil War. Blacks grew lazy, becoming liars and thieves, Atkins said, because “they are mixing with the white people too much, so many half-breeds, and this shows they are going backwards instead of forwards.”

Atkins, who grew up as a slave in Washington County, about 204 miles southeast of Dallas, believed that before the Civil War a solid color line existed between black and white. On one side, blackness equaled dignity, honesty, and thrift. On the other, whiteness meant degeneracy. Atkins could not hide her contempt for white people or their culture. In spite of the inequality it generated, Texas’ color line allowed a separate black society to develop in which African Americans judged the world and their peers on their own terms. Seven decades after slavery, Atkins saw this separation as natural and miscegenation violated this fundamental order.

Atkins’ comments reflect one basic truth. Much of East and North Central Texas before the Civil War had a simpler black-white racial structure. As this chapter will argue, soon after Anglo Texas’ separation from Mexico in the 1835-1836 revolution, white elites created a society rooted in the absolute legal separation of the white and black worlds. In order to prevent the development of a mulatto population that might inherit the political and economic wealth of the racial ruling class, white leaders promulgated harsh legal penalties in the 1840s and 1850s attached to blackness. Blacks faced slavery, the death penalty for many crimes punished less severely for whites, and laws defining the offspring of mixed-race parents as enslaved bastards ineligible for inheritance. Whiteness was defined simply as the absence of blackness, Indian blood, or other racial “pollution,” although many who were socially accepted as white had been polluted in this manner. Elites hoped that the social superiority all whites ostensibly enjoyed over blacks ameliorated disparities of power and wealth within the white community.

To the dismay of elites, however, frequently severe weather and a cash-strapped economy made life insecure for the non-slaveholding majority. In Dallas, divisions developed along economic and regional lines, leading to outbursts of violence that disturbed elite confidence and security. When a fire destroyed downtown Dallas in 1860, elite suspicions settled on white abolitionists born outside the South. The violence of 1860 created the terrain on which postwar racial ideology developed. Elites labeled those opposed to their notions of race and class hierarchy as uncivilized and therefore not fully white. After Reconstruction, the city leadership embraced a more fluid concept of race in which white status could be gained or lost based on acceptance of elite social norms. This more flexible definition of whiteness, which held dissent in check, shaped Dallas politics for more than 130 years afterward.

The legal division of Texas into completely separate white and black boxes purportedly meant that all white people were created equal. The poorest white Texans were at least not black slaves and could claim higher social status than their servile neighbors. It was just that some white Texans were more equal than others. Dallas’ wealthiest pioneer Anglo families saw no contradiction in creating a community in which a few families rapidly accumulated great wealth while simultaneously praising the principles of democracy. Men such as Frank M. Cockrell, son of the city’s first business magnates, Alexander and Sarah Cockrell, divorced the concept of aristocracy from anything so crass as monetary wealth. Dallas, Frank Cockrell insisted, developed as a racial aristocracy, with a white ruling class atop a permanent black underclass.

From the perspective of the 1930s, Cockrell admired the culture of 1850s Dallas, where “[t]here were among the women the refined, cultured and accomplished. Socially all on an equality. Merit the only distinction.” Cockrell, however, emphasized another distinction: “the adaptability and self-government of the Anglo-Saxon race, characteristic of the Southern people,” which made the average pioneer in early Dallas “a very superior immigrant.” Cockrell’s words carried a particular sting in the 1930s after many non-Anglo-Saxons from Europe made America their home and faced mixed assessments of their whiteness by their contemporaries. Early on, elites like Cockrell portrayed Anglo-Saxons as the sole creators of civilization, a vital first element of the city’s Origin Myth. The Anglo-Saxon majority participated, at least theoretically, in what sociologist Howard Winant calls a herrenvolk democracy, a nominally free society in which political participation depends on skin color or ethnicity.

William H. Wharton, pleading with Americans to support the 1835-1836 Texas Revolution, declared that God would prevent Texas from becoming “a howling wilderness, trod only by savages, or that it should be permanently benighted by the ignorance and superstition, the anarchy and rapine of Mexican misrule . . . the wilderness of Texas has been redeemed by Anglo-American blood and enterprise.” The founders of Anglo Texas envisioned a race-based society in which Indians would be driven out, blacks exploited as slaves, and Mexicans reduced to the role of surplus labor. The state’s white leadership shuddered at the thought of miscegenation. “[A]malgamation of the white with the black race, inevitably leads to disease, decline and death,” Galveston State Representative and later Dallas mayor John Henry Brown warned in 1857. The Constitution of the Texas Republic adopted in 1836 specifically denied citizenship to “Africans, the descendents of Africans, and Indians.” Interracial sex, particularly if it involved slaves, threatened this racial order. In 1837 the Texas Congress criminalized marriage between persons of European ancestry and African ancestry, even free blacks. The law denied black consorts’ claims to white lovers’ estates and reduced mulatto children to illegitimacy.

Hoping to discourage miscegenation, the Texas Legislature in August 1856 defined the children of mixed-race unions as persons “of color.” By law, anyone with at least “one eighth African blood” would be excluded from whiteness and defined as a slave. Such mixed-race persons immediately suffered the same social and political disabilities as African Americans. Both slave and free African Americans could suffer the death penalty, according to a December 1837 state law, not just for murder but also for insurrection or inciting insurrection, assaulting a free white person, attempting to rape a white woman, burglary, and arson…

Read the entire Introduction here.

2011 Brigitte M. Bodenheimer Lecture on Family Law by Professor Angela Onwuachi-Willig: “According to Our Hearts: What Does the Rhinelander v. Rhinelander Case Teach Us about Race, Law, and Family?”

University of California, Davis
School of Law
Kalmanovitz Appellate Courtroom
2011-11-08, 16:00-18:00 PST (Local Time)
Run Time: 01:05:58

Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Charles M. and Marion J. Kierscht Professor of Law
University of Iowa

The 2011 Brigitte M. Bodenheimer Lecture on Family Law features Professor Angela Onwuachi-Willig. She delivers a lecture entitled, “According to Our Hearts: What Does the Rhinelander v. Rhinelander Case Teach Us about Race, Law, and Family?”

Professor Angela Onwuachi-Willig explores the social and legal meanings of the Rhinelander v. Rhinelander case by examining its various lessons regarding law and society’s joint role in framing the normative ideal of family as monoracial.

The Rhinelander trial of 1925 involved a lawsuit in which wealthy, white Leonard Kip Rhinelander sued his wife, Alice Beatrice Rhinelander, for an annulment based on fraud. Leonard alleged that Alice claimed to be white when she was actually “of colored blood.” Legend has it that the two were madly in love, but Rhinelander’s father encouraged the annulment proceeding because he did not approve of the relationship.

Professor Onwuachi-Willig analyzes the case as a representation of the simultaneously tragic and inspiring story about race and race relations in the United States.

A former member of the UC Davis law faculty, Professor Onwuachi-Willig is the Charles M. and Marion J. Kierscht Professor of Law at the University of Iowa. She specializes in the areas of Employment Discrimination, Family Law, Feminist Legal Theory, and Race and the Law.

Established in 1981 in memory of Professor Brigitte M. Bodenheimer, this endowed lecture brings scholars and practitioners to King Hall to discuss recent developments affecting the family.

The Case of Loving v. Bigotry

The New York Times
2012-01-01

Julie Bosman

Photography by: Grey Villet

In 1958, Richard and Mildred Loving were arrested in a nighttime raid in their bedroom by the sheriff of Caroline County, Va. Their crime: being married to each other. The Lovings—Mildred, who was of African-American and Native American descent, and Richard, a bricklayer with a blond buzz cut—were ordered by a judge to leave Virginia for 25 years. In January, the International Center of Photography is mounting a show [2012-01-20 through 2012-05-06] of Grey Villet’s photographs of the couple in 1965. That exhibit is complemented by an HBO documentary, ‘‘The Loving Story,’’ directed by Nancy Buirski, which will be shown on HBO on Feb. 14…

Read the entire text and view the photographs here.

Were the riots about race?

The Guardian
2011-12-08

Reading the Riots: Investigating England’s summer of disorder
In partnership with the London School of Economics
Supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Open Society Foundations

Hugh Muir, Diary Editor

Yemisi Adegoke, Freelance Journalist

Some commentators were quick to call them ‘race riots’, but the true picture was more complicated

Amid the chaos and confusion of this summer’s riots, a few commentators felt the benefit of certainty. “These riots were about race. Why ignore the fact?” chided the Telegraph columnist Katharine Birbalsingh. Abroad, there seemed no need for deeper reflection. “Over 150 arrested after London hit by huge race riots,” said one US business website. “Let’s talk about those race riots in London,” urged talkshow hosts in New Zealand. Those on the other side of the debate could appear just as certain. “This is not about race at all,” Max Wind-Cowie of the left-leaning thinktank Demos told the Huffington Post…

…Of the 270 rioters interviewed by the Guardian and the LSE, 50% were black, 27% were white, 18% of mixed race and 5% Asian…

Read the entire article here.

Hypodescent: A history of the crystallization of the one-drop rule in the United States, 1880-1940

Princeton University
September 2011
383 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3480237
ISBN: 9781124939179

Scott Leon Washington

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE BY THE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

This dissertation examines the crystallization of the one-drop rule in the United States between 1880 and 1940. The “one-drop rule” is a colloquial expression, a phrase which reflects the belief that a person bearing a trace of African ancestry (literally, a single drop of black or Negro “blood”) is black. Historians and social scientists have tended to assume that, as a principle of classification, the one-drop rule can be traced back to the institution of slavery. This study provides a different account. Using a variety of methods, it attempts to explain how the one-drop rule developed, when it became institutionalized, and why. It also adopts a new approach to the study of race, ethnicity, and nationalism, an approach based largely although by no means exclusively on the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The study in its present form has been limited to five chapters. Chapter One explores the origins and development of the one-drop rule, while Chapter Two provides a detailed reading of the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Chapter Three provides a quantitative account of the country’s history of anti-miscegenation legislation, while Chapter Four examines the role lynching played in the South as a means of social demarcation. The study ends in Chapter Five with a brief synopsis, an inquiry into the relationship between slavery and democracy, and a nonpartisan look at the legacy of the one-drop rule.

Contents

• Abstract
• Maps and Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• I. Introduction: A Prehistory of the Present
  • 1.1. An American Anomaly
  • 1.2. The Origins and Development of the One-Drop Rule
  • 1.3. An Outline of the Argument
  • 1.4. Words about Words
  • 1.5. References
• II. The Blood of Homer Plessy
  • 2.1. Introduction
  • 2.2. Digression: The Virtues of Virtual History
  • 2.3. The Wider Context
  • 2.4. Plessy v. Ferguson: Background Information
  • 2.5. The Tourgée Brief
  • 2.6. The Majority Opinion
  • 2.7. Counterfactual Scenario
  • 2.8. Plausibility Defense
  • 2.9. Conclusion
  • 2.10. References
• III. Crossing the Line
  • 3.1. Introduction
  • 3.2. A Brief History of Laws Prohibiting Interracial Sex and Marriage
  • 3.3. Trends in Anti-Miscegenation Activity
  • 3.4. Data and Methods
  • 3.5. Results
  • 3.6. Discussion
  • 3.7. Conclusion
  • 3.8. References
  • 3.9. Appendix
• IV. The Killing Fields Revisited: Lynching and Anti-Miscegenation Legislation in the Jim Crow South, 1882-1930
  • 4.1. Introduction
  • 4.2. Lynching: Background Information
  • 4.3. Anti-Miscegenation Legislation: Background Information
  • 4.4. The Strange Career of Judge Lynch: A Review of the Literature
  • 4.5. Data and Methods
  • 4.6. Results
  • 4.7. Discussion
  • 4.8. Conclusion
  • 4.9. References
• V. Conclusion: The Legacy of the One-Drop Rule
  • 5.1. Permanence and Change
  • 5.2. Synopsis
  • 5.3. Slavery and Democracy
  • 5.4. A Final Note
  • 5.5. References

Maps and Figures

• 3.1A. Colonies Prohibiting Interracial Sex or Marriage, 1776
• 3.1B. States and Territories, Prohibiting Interracial Sex or Marriage, 1861
• 3.1C. States and Territories, Prohibiting Interracial Sex or Marriage, 1877
• 3.1D. States Prohibiting Interracial Sex or Marriage, 1938
• 3.1E. States Prohibiting Interracial Sex or Marriage, 1967
• 3.2A. Anti-Miscegenation Activity, 1619-2000
• 3.2B. Anti-Miscegenation Activity, Excluding Significant Cases, 1619-2000
• 3.3A. Anti-Miscegenation Bills Defeated, 1913
• 3.3B. Anti-Miscegenation Bills Defeated, 1927
• 3.4A. Statutory Definitions, 1861
• 3.4B. Statutory Definitions, 1877
• 3.4C. Statutory Definitions, 1938
• 3.5A. Statutory Penalties, 1861
• 3.5B. Statutory Penalties, 1877
• 3.5C. Statutory Penalties, 1938
• 3.6. Punishments Against Secondary Parties, 1938
• 3.7. Racial Coverage of Laws Prohibiting Miscegenation, 1938
• 3.8. Appellate Litigation Concerning Definitions of Race, 1776-2000
• 3.9A-G. Severity of Definitions, 1880-1940
• 3.10A-G. Severity of Penalties, 1880-1940
• 4.1. Lynching and Anti-Miscegenation Legislation in the Jim Crow South, 1882-1930
• 4.2. Lynching and Anti-Miscegenation Legislation in the Jim Crow South, Integrated Trends, 1882-1930
• 4.3. The Moving Effects of Anti-Miscegenation Activity and the Constant Dollar Price for Cotton, 1882-1930
• 5.1. Percent of Americans Marrying Out of Race, 1970-2000
• 5.2A. Percent of Whites Marrying Out of Race, 1880-2000
• 5.2B. Percent of Blacks Marrying Out of Race, 1880-2000
• 5.3A. Percent of Whites Marrying Out of Race, Adjusting for Relative Numbers in the Population, 1880-2000
• 5.3B. Percent of Blacks Marrying Out of Race, Adjusting for Relative Numbers in the Population, 1880-2000
• 5.4. Percent within Categories Reporting Two or More Races, 2000

TABLES

• 1.1. The Longue Durée of the One-Drop Rule, 1619-2000
• 3.1. Percent of Colonies, Territories, and States Prohibiting Interracial Sex or Marriage, 1776-1967
• 3.2A. Anti-Miscegenation Activity, 1619-2000
• 3.2B. Anti-Miscegenation Activity, Excluding Significant Cases, 1619-2000
• 3.3A. Average Severity of Definitions, 1861, 1877, 1938
• 3.3B. Average Severity of Definitions, Excluding States without Definitions, 1861, 1877, 1938
• 3.4A. Average Severity of Penalties, 1861, 1877, 1938
• 3.4B. Average Severity of Penalties, Excluding States without Penalties, 1861, 1877, 1938
• 3.5. Expected Relationships
• 3.6. ARMA (1,1) Regression of Anti-Miscegenation Activity on Selected Variables
• 3.7. ARMA (1,1) Regression of Severity of Definitions on Selected Variables
• 3.8. ARMA (1,1) Regression of Severity of Penalties on Selected Variables
• 3.9. Racial Categories Used by the United States Census Bureau, 1880-1940
• 3.10. Growth of the Decennial Census, 1880-1940
• 3.11A. Significant Cases, 1810-1894
• 3.11B. Significant Cases, 1895-1972
• 4.1. ARMA (1,1,1) Regression of Black Lynchings on Selected Variables
• 4.2. ARMA (1,1) Regression of Black Lynchings on Selected Variables
• 4.3. The Impact of Anti-Miscegenation Activity and the Market for Southern Cotton Before and After 1900
• 5.1. Percent of Americans Marrying Out of Race, 1970-2000
• 5.2. Black-White Intermarriage Rates, 1970-2000
• 5.3. Total Population by Number of Races Reported, 2000
• 5.4. Percent within Categories Reporting Two or More Races, 2000
• 5.5. Multiple-Race Population, 2000

Purchase the dissertation here.

’Marginal Whiteness

California Law Review
Volume 98, Number 5 (October 2010)
pages 1497-1594

Camille Gear Rich, Associate Professor of Law
University of Southern California

How are whites injured by minority-targeted racism? Prior to filing her Title VII interracial solidarity claim, Betty Clayton thought she knew. For years, Clayton, a white cafeteria worker employed by the White Hall School District, was granted a nonresidency privilege that allowed her to enroll her daughter in one of the district’s schools. This was a special arrangement, as neither she nor her daughter lived within the district’s boundaries. This special arrangement abruptly came to an end when one of Clayton’s black coworkers learned that she had been given the nonresidency privilege and asked the district for the same benefit. The district refused the black worker‘s request and, to rebut any claim of racial favoritism, rescinded Clayton’s right to the privilege as well. The district then reinstituted an old rule that provided that only “teachers” and certified “administrative” workers were entitled to the nonresidency benefit, thereby ensuring that both Clayton and her black co-worker were ineligible. Clayton found herself the victim of what she believed was an obvious case of explicit racial bias.

Was Clayton a victim of race discrimination? Her claim may give some readers pause. Some might conclude that she was not subject to race discrimination, arguing instead that she was merely a secondary victim that fell prey to “friendly fire”—a white casualty incidentally injured by the district’s attempt to discriminate against her black coworker. Others might share Clayton’s view, arguing that she was a victim of discrimination. But for the districts desire to discriminate against her black coworker, the district would not have reinstated the stricter benefits rule and denied Clayton the residency privilege. But for the district’s discriminatory actions, Clayton would have been able to preserve her access to a valuable economic benefit: the ability to send her daughter to a White Hall school. And Clayton’s supporters would note that there was ample evidence in her case to prove the district’s racially discriminatory motivations, including: the district’s prior discriminatory behavior; the timing of the district’s decision to return to the old residency rule; and the absence of a reasonable nondiscriminatory justification for the old rule’s reinstatement.

Clayton seemed to believe that the merits of her claim were self-evident; however, her confidence was misplaced, as her allegations raise thorny questions about how courts, antidiscrimination scholars, and indeed even laypersons see whites’ relationship to minority-targeted discrimination in the workplace. Courts called upon to review these questions, particularly in Title VII cases, spend precious little time exploring how whites perceive minority-targeted discrimination to operate, or the range of ways in which minority-targeted discrimination perpetrated by certain whites can directly harm other whites’ interests. A case in point: in Clayton, the court quickly concluded that whites can be injured by minority-targeted discrimination but then tracked Clayton’s claim into a little known area of Title VII precedent, referred to here as interracial solidarity doctrine. As Clayton soon discovered, this analytic turn was less of a boon than it initially seemed, as interracial solidarity doctrine exerts an extraordinary regulatory power over white plaintiffs who attempt to use Title VII to challenge minority-targeted discrimination in the workplace. Rather than merely sorting out strong claims from weak ones, the doctrine functions as a kind of normative litmus test used to assess whether the type of harm white plaintiffs allege as a consequence of minority-targeted discrimination counts as compensable injury. As this Article shows, the doctrine plays this powerful gatekeeping function because it is informed by certain historically specific civil rights era propositions about whites and their relationship to race and race discrimination. The Article examines the costs the doctrine’s strong normative commitments have imposed on Title VII plaintiffs and asks whether the enforcement of interracial solidarity doctrine has become an end in itself, regardless of whether it actually serves Title VII’s larger policy goals.

Specifically, Title VII interracial solidarity doctrine currently only recognizes two kinds of harm whites can suffer from minority-targeted discrimination, and therefore only permits plaintiffs to plead these two kinds of injury. The first injury a plaintiff may claim is the frustration of his associational interests. This injury is based on the civil rights era norm establishing that whites are entitled to the benefits of diversity, that is, the economic, cultural, and educational relationships they can form by associating with mino-ities. The second injury a plaintiff can raise is the violation of a plaintiff’s right to a “colorblind” or nondiscriminatory workplace. This injury is informed by the civil rights era norm that whites have an interest in striving for a colorblind society. The “colorblindness” injury is based on the understanding that racial prejudice is a moral wrong because it compromises the struggle to make the United States a race-blind meritocracy. Scholars will recognize that both the diversity and colorblindness concepts of harm appear in areas of antidiscrimination law other than the interracial solidarity cases; however, these concepts play a special role in Title VII interracial solidarity doctrine, as they are the only bases the doctrine recognizes as a source of harm…

…In summary, this Article reviews cases involving Title VII interracial solidarity claims to reveal the hold that civil rights era norms have on legal understandings about whites’ relationship to minority-targeted discrimination. My goal is to reveal the burdens these norms impose on low-status or marginal whites as they attempt to plead their Title VII claims. My hope is that the discussion of marginal whites’ interests will help reveal their potential as allies in antidiscrimination struggles. However, this potential can only be fully realized if marginal whites’ problems and challenges are better reflected in Title VII doctrine and explored in antidiscrimination scholarship. To this end, this Article also shows that the two kinds of injury courts currently recognize under interracial solidarity doctrine—the denial of the enjoyment of a colorblind workplace and the frustration of one’s interest in diversity-based associational opportunities—are second-order concerns, and consequently fail to motivate substantial numbers of white persons. Indeed, the doctrine‘s focus on second-order injuries seems even more puzzling when one considers that it almost entirely overlooks the more highly motivating first-order injuries marginal whites suffer because of minority-targeted discrimination, including basic economic and dignitary harms. A doctrine that attended to these first-order interests would be far more effective in causing whites to initiate interracial solidarity actions. Therefore, the Article uses “failed” Title VII interracial solidarity cases like Clayton to develop a more expansive and nuanced account of how whites are injured by minority-targeted discrimination in the workplace, providing an essential supplement to the existing concepts of harm in Title VII interracial solidarity doctrine.

This Article, however, is more than a descriptive account that catalogues overlooked or undervalued injuries present in interracial solidarity cases. It also uses these injuries to develop a theory of “marginal whiteness,” a framework that allows courts and scholars to consider how white racial identity dynamics can be linked to interracial conflicts in the workplace. The discussion begins by defining the class of “marginal whites”—individuals who, because they possess some nonracial, socially stigmatized identity characteristic, have more limited access to white privilege, and relatedly have a more attenuated relationship to white identity. I argue that this attenuated relationship to whiteness often causes marginal whites to chafe at other whites’ requests that they bear burdens to support the maintenance of white privilege. Put differently, marginal whites’ ambivalence about whiteness becomes a critical frame that can allow low-status whites to see how higher-status whites’ attempts to limit the options of minorities actually materially interfere with marginal whites’ immediate economic and dignitary interests. The Article posits that, if Title VII provided these marginal whites with a compelling account of their injuries, they would be more likely to bring Title VII claims. The Article then considers how the marginal whiteness framework can help improve antidiscrimination scholars’ analysis of intraracial and interracial conflicts more generally…

…Part IV anticipates concerns about the social and intellectual transmission of the marginal whiteness framework, addressing questions about its descriptive accuracy, theoretical ambitions, and its potential to disrupt or undermine contemporary antidiscrimination mobilization efforts directed at whites. Part IV explains that, rather than wholly replacing civil-rights-era-influenced normative and descriptive accounts of whites’ interests, the concept of marginal whiteness provides an essential supplement to existing accounts of harm. Part IV also more specifically considers the ways in which marginal whiteness can function as a useful analytical tool in understanding contemporary “white racial formation” projects, including the overtures being made to and the identity politics struggles associated with multiracial whites, white Latinos, and Middle Eastern whites. It explores marginal whiteness’s potential explanatory power for understanding questions of ethnic and class fractures within the category of whiteness, while acknowledging the need for additional study on these questions. Part IV concludes by highlighting the ways in which the marginal whiteness framework breaks substantially from early Critical White Studies’ accounts of white interests, demonstrating its promise as a better analytic tool for analyzing post–civil rights era whites‘ struggles regarding racial identity than existing models of their interests.

Therefore, although a person may claim a “white” identity, she is merely a putative white person and therefore may not be socially recognized as white in all contexts. The unstable nature of putative whites’ whiteness claims is more easily seen in the case of multiracial whites or whites with phenotypic characteristics that may suggest they are of mixed or prominent ethnic ancestry. What is less often acknowledged is that putative whites with phenotypic characteristics that technically mark them as white may still exhibit features, engage in behaviors, or be otherwise marked in some way that signals to other whites that they are marginal or low-status white persons. Circumstances of scarce resources—or political, cultural, or social conflicts—may trigger higher-status whites to use these features to effectively redraw the lines of whiteness in a particular context and deny marginal whites access to resources (or white privilege). These low-status or marginal whites may find that they are, for all practical purposes, being treated like minorities, as they are subject to defamatory statements and denial of privileges available to other white workers. Consequently, people who exhibit low-status identity markers, but self-identify as white may find that their anxiety levels are increased when they are exposed to new or unfamiliar communities of whites, as they fear potential rejection or unfair treatment by other whites who do not regard them to be true white persons.

Although anxieties about racial misrecognition trouble all persons invested in maintaining their racial identities, individuals seeking to claim whiteness often suffer from particularly acute anxieties, because being socially recognized can confer a raft of social and material benefits. Stated alternatively, these putative whites know that misrecognition is not merely a source of irritation, embarrassment, or inconvenience, as might be experienced by a minority not properly identified with her chosen racial group. Rather, misrecognition may impose significant material costs for self-identified whites, costs that can affect their life chances…

…Finally, whites may be attracted to the marginal whiteness framework because it responds to America‘s changing demography. The number of multiracial persons in the United States who identify as mixed-race has risen significantly. At the same time, there has been a willingness by some white communities to accept mixed-race persons as white. Additionally, Latinos and Middle Easterners encounter institutional and social pressures that encourage them in some contexts to identify as white persons. Together these changes have created a situation in which many persons socially recognized in some spaces as being white are treated as minorities in others. This split consciousness may cause these contingently recognized whites to have a distant relationship with whiteness, similar to that predicted by the marginal whiteness model. Taken together, the demographic and social changes described above present antidiscrimination scholars and courts with a critical challenge: will we construct a doctrine that responds to these whites‘ potential to develop more of a critical stance on whiteness and white privilege, or will we allow this potential to go unmined? As studies show more whites growing disengaged from discussions about race, there will be more pressure to find novel ways to encourage whites to rejoin antidiscrimination efforts…

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Check One Box: Reconsidering Directive No. 15 and the Classification of Mixed-Race People

California Law Review
Volume 84, Number 4 (July, 1996)
pages 1233-1291

Kenneth E. Payson

Introduction

“What are you?” As the child of a Japanese mother and a White father, I have often been asked this question. While I am also male, heterosexual, law student, spouse, sibling, and child, this query is usually directed at my racial identity. As a mixed-race person, I am part of an ill-defined, amorphous group of persons who are increasingly becoming the subject of private and public scrutiny. As one commentator quipped, one “cannot turn on ‘Oprah’ without seeing a segment on multiraciality…” The simple question “What are you?” illustrates the fundamental role race plays in defining our relationships with others. When faced with ambiguous morphology, we seek clarification of another’s racial identity so that we may begin defining our…

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A More Noble Cause: A. P. Tureaud and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Louisiana

Louisiana State University Press
April 2011
328 pages
6 x 9 inches, 21 halftones
Hardcover ISBN: 9780807137932

Alexander P. Tureaud, Jr.

Rachel L. Emanuel

Throughout the decades-long legal battle to end segregation, discrimination, and disfranchisement, attorney Alexander Pierre Tureaud was one of the most influential figures in Louisiana’s courts. A More Noble Cause presents both the powerful story of one man’s lifelong battle for racial justice and the very personal biography of a black professional and his family in the Jim Crow-era Louisiana.

During a career that spanned more than forty years, A. P. Tureaud was at times the only regularly practicing black attorney in Louisiana. From his base in New Orleans, the civil rights pioneer fought successfully to obtain equal pay for Louisiana’s black teachers, to desegregate public accommodations, schools, and buses, and for voting rights of qualified black residents.

Tureaud’s work, along with that of dozens of other African American lawyers, formed part of a larger legal battle that eventually overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized racial segregation. This intimate account, based on more than twenty years of research into the attorney’s astounding legal and civil rights career as well as his community work, offers the first full-length study of Tureaud. An active organizer of civic and voting leagues, a leader in the NAACP, a national advocate of the Knights of Peter Claver—a fraternal order of black Catholics—and a respected political power broker and social force as a Democrat and member of the Autocrat Club and Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, Tureaud worked tirelessly within the state and for all those without equal rights.

Both an engrossing story of a key legal, political, and community figure during Jim Crow-era Louisiana and a revealing look at his personal life during a tumultuous time in American history, A More Noble Cause provides insight into Tureaud’s public struggles and personal triumphs, offering readers a candid account of a remarkable champion of racial equality.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Underestimated and Misperceived
• 2. Of Creole Heritage
• 3. Educating Alex
• 4. Southern Exodus
• 5. Preparing for a Legal Career
• 6. Return to New Orleans
• 7. Meeting Lucille
• 8. Growing Community Involvement
• 9. The War Years
• 10. NAACP Lawyer
• 11. Law and Fatherhood
• 12. “Separate but Equal” Strengthened in the Face of Desegregation
• 13. Desegregation of Primary and Secondary Schools
• 14. The Politician
• 15. Desegregation Battles after Brown
• 16. Enforcing Brown’s Mandate in New Orleans Grade Schools
• 17. Catholics and Desegregation
• 18. More to the Desegregation Mandate
• 19. Reconstructing Public Education
• 20. More Direct Action
• 21. Courts Are the Way
• 22. Race against Time
• Notes
• Index

Underestimated and Misperceived

He sat in that chair day after day, reflecting on his life as he spoke haltingly into the tape recorder. He was a man whose erect bearing had once projected calm assurance and deep human insight and whose physique had once reflected his lifetime enjoyment of the rich Creole cuisine of New Orleans.

He looked much older than his seventy-three years, and a casual visitor might have thought that his lack of movement and energy reflected a mental exhaustion as well. Despite the fact that he was now gaunt and barely had enough strength to rise from a chair without assistance, he refused to give in to the constant pain that increasing doses of medication could not relieve. As he ruminated over his life, he recalled names, dates, places, and events with unerring accuracy.

The depth of knowledge and perseverance the old man exhibited seemed implausible for one in his condition. But then his entire life had been one impossible challenge after another. Through sheer will, he had changed the face of Louisiana forever. He had helped to stifle rampant segregation through a series of historic lawsuits. He had altered attitudes and conquered adversity with a disarming but unyielding demeanor. The wizened old man in the chair did not look as if he had done any of those things. But then Alexander Pierre Tureaud had been consistently underestimated and was often misperceived by others.

Knocking on the doors of houses in the Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans, whose owners awaited their early morning deliveries of French bread and other baked goods, Alexander Pierre (“Alex”) Tureaud, nine years old, cheerfully greeted the customers as he delivered purchases to their doorstep. The white woman who managed the neighborhood store where he worked assumed, when hiring the curly-haired boy, that he was white.

When the owner of the store later discovered that Alex was a Negro, he instructed the manager to fire him. It did not matter that Alex did a good job, was conscientious, punctual, polite, and liked by the customers. In fact, the store manager paid him a little extra each week, called “lagniappe” by Creoles, because she was more than satisfied with his performance. Following the directive of the owner, the manager fired Alex, and the boy’s initial opportunity to earn his own money was taken away because of racial discrimination.

A wide-eyed, hopeful young Creole experienced his first painful rejection as a colored person during the early 1900s in the segregated South. The wages from the part-time job, though only $1 a week, enabled him to contribute to his family’s meager household income and allowed him to have his own spending money.

Years later, Alexander P. Tureaud greeted two white men with a collegial tip of his hat as he walked by them and entered the courthouse. “Seen that nigger lawyer, yet?” one ol the men asked. Realizing that the man was addressing him, Tureaud shook his head, chuckled to himself, and proceeded up the steps without a second glance in their direction. As he entered the building, he overheard the man’s next remark: “We’re gonna have some fun with that nigger today.” It was then that Tureaud realized that these men were his opposing counsel.

Instead of being angered by their racist comments, Tureaud was amused. Their off-the-cuff statements would create a psychological advantage when he confronted them later in court. Tlieir remarks served to fuel his enthusiasm for the legal battle ahead.

Once inside the courtroom, the two white lawyers could not conceal their surprise when Tureaud introduced himself as the attorney for the plaintiffs and smiled respectfully at the opposing counsel. Tureaud had been mistaken as white many times before, and he knew he could use it to advance his objectives…

…Born three years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which declared racial segregation the law of the land, Tureaud, in addition to his legal career, became a student of history. lie was particularly inquisitive about his lineage as a New Orleans Creole of color.

The desire to fight racial injustice had been set long ago in the Creole culture of Louisiana. Tureaud found within his culture role models of activism and aligned himself with men and women determined to achieve equality. Pride in his heritage taught him that it is more noble to fight injustice, no matter what, than to resign oneself to it…

Black Pluralism in Post Loving America

Chapter in: Loving vs. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage

Cambridge University Press
May 2012
300 pages
Hardback ISBN-13: 9780521198585
Paperback ISBN-13: 9780521147989

Edited by

Kevin Noble Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Rose Cuison Villazor, Associate Professor of Law
Hofstra University

Chapter Author

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

The face of late twentieth and early twenty-first century America has changed, as have attitudes about race, especially about persons with some African ancestry. Since 1967, the number of multi-racial individuals with some African ancestry living in the United States has increased dramatically as a result of increased out-marriage by black Americans and the immigration of large numbers of multiracial individuals from Mexico, the Caribbean, as well as Central and Latin America. Many members of the post-Loving generation came of age in the 1990s with no memories of de jure racial segregation laws or the need for the 1960s civil rights legislation to combat overt racial discrimination. Accordingly, they see race, racism and identity through different lens. In other words, we are witnessing a significant generational shift in thinking that is beginning to be reflected in popular culture and scholarly literature about race and identity, but not in the courts. American judges and policy-makers, composed primarily of the children of Brown v. Board of Education, remain stuck in a racial jurisprudence and rhetoric of the late twentieth century.

This chapter analyzes the experiences of and public dialogues about children of interracial parentage and how their differential treatment by non-blacks, as well as blacks, raises legal issues courts are not prepared to address. One emerging question is whether mixed-race individuals are more likely to experience situational blackness—whether one can be black for some but not for other purposes, and if so, when one is black for anti-discrimination purposes. This question is even more sharply drawn when questions about “racial authenticity” arise for individuals whose African ancestry is less apparent. As this chapter explains, the overriding question in both cases is whether interracial parentage confers some type of benefit and disadvantage on Afro-descendant children not experienced by individuals whose formal racial classification is black, and if so whether anti-discrimination law should take these differences into account.

Read the chapter here.

The Anatomy of Grey: A Theory of Interracial Convergence

College of Law Faculty Scholarship
Paper 74
January 2008
56 pages

Kevin Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Janis L. McDonald, Professor of Law
Syracuse University

This article offers a theory of racial identity divorced from biological considerations. Law fails to recognize the complexity of racial performance and identity, thus categorically simplifying a perceived polarity of black and white. Ground-breaking scholarship addressing racial boundaries, as written by Randall Kennedy, Elizabeth Bartholet, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig, generally focuses on the enduring legacy of race discrimination. We approach these boundaries from a different angle—whites who become “less white.” We bring together the challenges of passing and adoption to offer a theory of fluid racial boundaries.

Transracial adoption provides one viable channel to discuss the possibilities of white-to-black racial identity transformation. By confronting the meaning of white identity in relation to their black surroundings, adoptive parents may engage along a continuum of what we term “interracial convergence.” Parents who adopt transracially potentially face some of the pressures of being black in the United States. The Interethnic Placement Act forbids the consideration of race in adoption placements, but white adoptive parents nevertheless receive sharp criticism from black social workers for lacking the ability to teach “survival skills” necessary for the child’s racial identity development. We argue, alternatively, that it creates a grey space where racial convergers—adoptive parents and racial passers—can challenge the stability of racial boundaries.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• I. Introduction
• II. Invisible Racial Connections
  • A. Racial Defection
  • B. Racial Intentions And Performance
  • C. The Performativity Of Passing
• III. White Racial Identity Development
  • A. Colorblindness
  • B. Willful Racial Ignorance
• IV. White Parents: Black Children: Racial Performativity
• V. Transformative White Identity: Interracial Convergence
  • A. The Pre-Encounter Stage
  • B. Encounter and Disorientation
    • a) Initial Racial Disorientation
    • b) Awareness of Repetitive Racial Incidents
    • c) Reckoning with Privilege
  • C. Augmenting a White Racial Identity
• VI. Conclusion: Interracial Convergence

I. INTRODUCTION

In 1998, Boston city authorities terminated the eleven-year employment of two firefighters who had falsified their employment applications. Twin brothers, Philip and Paul Malone, transformed themselves from white to black on their applications in order to benefit from a federal diversity program. Although their family had identified as white for three successive generations, the brothers claimed their black ancestry from their maternal great-grandmother. They relied on the traditional, although controversial rule in law and social practice of hypo-descent, or the “one-drop” rule, to justify their status. A hearing officer held that the twin brothers, who had lived most of their lives as white, “willfully and falsely identified themselves as black in order to receive appointments to the department.” The officer based her determination of their racial identity on three criteria: visual observation of facial features, documentary evidence, and social reputation of the families. Under this test, the Malones failed to qualify as “black.” In a different case, a Pennsylvania social service agency failed to approve a potential adoption placement for Dante, a biracial black/white child, with his white foster parents, Victor and Mary Jane DeWees. Before the family accepted Dante as a foster child Mrs. DeWees expressed to a social worker that she preferred a white child because she “did not want people to think that [she] or her daughter were sleeping with a black man.” The social service agency based their denial on the DeWees’ negative racial attitudes, which they believed conflicted with Dante’s best interests. In return, the foster parents argued that their views had changed in the two years that they fostered Dante and they were ready to “accept [him] as any other child.” Nevertheless they did not view race as important to Dante’s upbringing: they informed the social worker that race had “no impact” on the self-esteem and identity of minority children, and refused “to manufacture black friends.” Challenging the relevance of the child’s racial identity, Mr. and Mrs. DeWees brought suit against the agency in federal court.

Both Malone and DeWees demonstrate the inherent difficulties of rigid racial categorization. The two forms of racial subversion we examine here, passing and transracial adoption, effectively question the rigidity of racial boundaries. While passing facilitates the secret transference of racial membership, adoption across the color line compels an open form of interracial kinship. Both require a journey into unfamiliar racial territory which reorients racial identity from a biological status to a performative measurement based on the choices made by the individuals involved…

…Both cases present potential situations where transracial adoption and racial passing intersect in some ways. Passing, for those persons born as white, means confronting unearned racial privilege inherited at birth. This article seeks to expand on traditional discussions of passing by offering a theory of racial identity divorced from biological considerations. Law fails to recognize the complexity of racial performance and identity, thus categorically simplifying a perceived polarity of black and white. While the majority of passing scholarship focuses on the enduring legacy of white supremacy, much less work focuses on whites relinquishing the trappings of race privilege—whites who become “less white.” This discourse, as it stands, lacks a rigorous examination of the ways that whites might join this destabilization of racial boundaries…

…This Article proceeds in four parts. Section One addresses traditional racial “passing,” where necessary subterfuge and identity performance undermined socially identified and controlled racial divisions. In this cautious challenge to the biological essence of white identity, passers expose the different ways that white identities could be performed. Section Two introduces the continuum of white identity development, beginning with a “pre-encounter,” stage of racial awareness. The section examines the contributing role of colorblindness and racial recklessness in supporting the existence of a pre-encounter stage. Section Three introduces the application of interracial convergence into the transracial adoption debate as it relates to considerations of the child’s need to develop a healthy black racial identity. Recent changes in federal adoption law require a colorblind placement process, which eliminates scrutiny of the racial attitudes of the adoptive parents. The DeWees parents, despite their deliberate ignorance of their foster child’s racial needs, might have been approved under these new interpretations of the law. Section Four identifies the potential stages of a transformative white identity for adoptive parents. Our model identifies stages that progress from a colorblind, preencounter stage, followed by a disorienting racial encounter stage, to various stages that recognize the role of white privilege, progressing toward a stage of interracial convergence and, perhaps, a new, transformative white identity…

Read the entire paper here.