Mixed Race Studies

Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (an imprint of MacMillan)
April 1998
84 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-374-52533-0, ISBN10: 0-374-52533-1

Patricia J. Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law
Columbia Law School

In these five eloquent and passionate pieces (which she gave as the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC) Patricia J. Williams asks how we might achieve a world where “color doesn’t matter”—where whiteness is not equated with normalcy and blackness with exoticism and danger. Drawing on her own experience, Williams delineates the great divide between “the poles of other people’s imagination and the nice calm center of oneself where dignity resides,” and discusses how it might be bridged as a first step toward resolving racism. Williams offers us a new starting point—“a sensible and sustained consideration”—from which we might begin to deal honestly with the legacy and current realities of our prejudices.

Racial Revolutions: Antiracism and Indian Resurgence in Brazil

Duke University Press
2001
392 pages
46 b&w photos, 1 map, 3 figures
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-2731-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-2741-7

Jonathan W. Warren, Associate Professor of International and Latin American Studies
University of Washington

Since the 1970s there has been a dramatic rise in the Indian population in Brazil as increasing numbers of pardos (individuals of mixed African, European, and indigenous descent) have chosen to identify themselves as Indians. In Racial Revolutions—the first book-length study of racial formation in Brazil that centers on Indianness—Jonathan W. Warren draws on extensive fieldwork and numerous interviews to illuminate the discursive and material forces responsible for this resurgence in the population.

The growing number of pardos who claim Indian identity represents a radical shift in the direction of Brazilian racial formation. For centuries, the predominant trend had been for Indians to shed tribal identities in favor of non-Indian ones. Warren argues that many factors—including the reduction of state-sponsored anti-Indian violence, intervention from the Catholic church, and shifts in anthropological thinking about ethnicity—have prompted a reversal of racial aspirations and reimaginings of Indianness. Challenging the current emphasis on blackness in Brazilian antiracist scholarship and activism, Warren demonstrates that Indians in Brazil recognize and oppose racism far more than any other ethnic group.

Racial Revolutions fills a number of voids in Latin American scholarship on the politics of race, cultural geography, ethnography, social movements, nation building, and state violence.

Designated a John Hope Franklin Center book by the John Hope Franklin Seminar Group on Race, Religion, and Globalization.

Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

The Penguin Press
2009-02-05
384 pages
5.98 x 9.01in
Hardcover ISBN 9781594202001

Martha A. Sandweiss, Professor of History
Princeton University

National Book Critics Circle Awards Winner

The secret double life of the man who mapped the American West and the woman he loved

Clarence King is a hero of nineteenth-century western history. Brilliant scientist and witty conversationalist, bestselling author and architect of the great surveys that mapped the West after the Civil War, King was named by John Hay “the best and brightest of his generation.” But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport: for thirteen years he lived a double life—as the celebrated white explorer, geologist, and writer Clarence King and as a black Pullman porter and steelworker named James Todd. The fair, blue-eyed son of a wealthy China trader passed across the color line, revealing his secret to his black common-law wife, Ada King, only on his deathbed.

Noted historian of the American West Martha Sandweiss is the first writer to uncover the life that King tried so hard to conceal from the public eye. She reveals the complexity of a man who while publicly espousing a personal dream of a uniquely American “race,” an amalgam of white and black, hid his love for his wife and their five biracial children. Passing Strange tells the dramatic tale of a family built along the fault lines of celebrity, class, and race—from the “Todds” wedding in 1888 to the 1964 death of Ada, one of the last surviving Americans born into slavery, to finally the legacy inherited by Clarence King’s granddaughter, who married a white man and adopted a white child in order to spare her family the legacies of racism.

A remarkable feat of research and reporting spanning the Civil War to the civil rights era, Passing Strange tells a uniquely American story of self-invention, love, deception, and race.

Interracial Families: Current Concepts and Controversies

Routledge
2008-11-26
176 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-99034-9

George Alan Yancey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of North Texas

Richard Lewis, Jr., Special Assistant to the President and Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Texas, San Antonio

A unique book offering both a research overview and practical advice for its readers, this text allows students to gain a solid understanding of the research that has been generated on several important issues surrounding multiracial families, including intimate relations, family dynamics, transracial adoptions, and other topics of personal and scholarly interest.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures and Tables
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Overview of Intergroup Relations and Their Impact on Interethnic and Interracial Marriages
• Chapter 3: Interracial Dating
• Chapter 4: Interracial Marriage
• Chapter 5: Multiracial Identity
• Chapter 6: The Multiracial Movement and the U.S. Census Controversy
• Chapter 7: Transracial Adoption
• Chapter 8: Multiracial Families: Conclusions and Looking Ahead
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Forsaking All Others: A True Story of Interracial Sex and Revenge in the 1880s South

University of Tennessee Press
2010-11-10
160 estimated pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-57233-724-4; 1572337249
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-57233-740-4; 1-57233-740-0

Charles F. Robinson, Vice Provost for Diversity; Associate Professor of History and Director of African American Studies
University of Arkansas

The electronic book (E-Book) is available now.

An intensely dramatic true story, Forsaking All Others recounts the fascinating case of an interracial couple who attempted—in defiance of society’s laws and conventions—to formalize their relationship in the post-Reconstruction South. It was an affair with tragic consequences, one that entangled the protagonists in a miscegenation trial and, ultimately, a desperate act of revenge.

From the mid-1870s to the early 1880s, Isaac Bankston was the proud sheriff of Desha County, Arkansas, a man so prominent and popular that he won five consecutive terms in office. Although he was married with two children, around 1881 he entered into a relationship with Missouri Bradford, an African American woman who bore his child. Some two years later, Missouri and Isaac absconded to Memphis, hoping to begin a new life there together. Although Tennessee lawmakers had made miscegenation a felony, Isaac’s dark complexion enabled the couple to apply successfully for a marriage license and take their vows. Word of the marriage quickly spread, however, and Missouri and Isaac were charged with unlawful cohabitation. An attorney from Desha County, James Coates, came to Memphis to act as special prosecutor in the case. Events then took a surprising turn as Isaac chose to deny his white heritage in order to escape conviction. Despite this victory in court, however, Isaac had been publicly disgraced, and his sense of honor propelled him into a violent confrontation with Coates, the man he considered most responsible for his downfall.

Charles F. Robinson uses Missouri and Isaac’s story to examine key aspects of post-Reconstruction society, from the rise of miscegenation laws and the particular burdens they placed on anyone who chose to circumvent them, to the southern codes of honor that governed both social and individual behavior, especially among white men. But most of all, the book offers a compelling personal narrative with important implications for our supposedly more tolerant times.

Robert Stafford of Cumberland Island: Growth of a Planter

University of Georgia Press
1995
376 pages
Illustrated
Trim size: 6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8203-1738-0

Mary R. Bullard

Society, politics, agriculture, and mixed-race unions in a coastal Georgia planter community

Robert Stafford of Cumberland Island offers a rare glimpse into the life and times of a nineteenth-century planter on one of Georgia’s Sea Islands. Born poor, Robert Stafford (1790-1877) became the leading planter on his native Cumberland Island. Specializing in the highly valued long staple variety of cotton, he claimed among his assets more than 8,000 acres and 350 slaves.

Mary R. Bullard recounts Stafford’s life in the context of how events from the Federalist period to the Civil War to Reconstruction affected Sea Island planters. As she discusses Stafford’s associations with other planters, his business dealings (which included banking and railroad investments), and the day-to-day operation of his plantation, Bullard also imparts a wealth of information about cotton farming methods, plantation life and material culture, and the geography and natural history of Cumberland Island.

Stafford’s career was fairly typical for his time and place; his personal life was not. He never married, but fathered six children by Elizabeth Bernardey, a mulatto slave nurse. Bullard’s discussion of Stafford’s decision to move his family to Groton, Connecticut—and freedom—before the Civil War illuminates the complex interplay between southern notions of personal honor, the staunch independent-mindedness of Sea Island planters, and the practice and theory of racial separation.

In her afterword to the Brown Thrasher edition, Bullard presents recently uncovered information about a second extralegal family of Robert Stafford as well as additional information about Elizabeth Bernardey’s children and the trust funds Stafford provided for them.

Dreaming with the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women in Texas and Mexico

University of Oklahoma Press
December 2010
400 pages
30 B&W Illus., 2 Maps
6.125″ x 9.25″
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806140537

Shirley Boteler Mock, Research Fellow
Mesoamerican Archaeological Research Laboratory, University of Texas, Austin

Explores a unique and eclectic culture rooted in African traditions

Indian freedmen and their descendants have garnered much public and scholarly attention, but women’s roles have largely been absent from that discussion. Now a scholar who gained an insider’s perspective into the Black Seminole community in Texas and Mexico offers a rare and vivid picture of these women and their contributions. In Dreaming with the Ancestors, Shirley Boteler Mock explores the role that Black Seminole women have played in shaping and perpetuating a culture born of African roots and shaped by southeastern Native American and Mexican influences.

Mock reveals a unique maroon culture, forged from an eclectic mixture of religious beliefs and social practices. At its core is an amalgam of African-derived traditions kept alive by women. The author interweaves documentary research with extensive interviews she conducted with leading Black Seminole women to uncover their remarkable history. She tells how these women nourished their families and held fast to their Afro-Seminole language—even as they fled slavery, endured relocation, and eventually sought new lives in new lands. Of key importance were the “warrior women”—keepers of dreams and visions that bring to life age-old African customs.

Featuring more than thirty illustrations and maps, including historic photographs never before published, Dreaming with the Ancestors combines scholarly analysis with human interest to open a new window on both African American and American Indian history and culture.

Cinderella Story: A Scholarly Sketchbook about Race, Identity, Barack Obama, the Human Spirit, and Other Stuff that Matter

AltaMira Press
February 2010
228 pages
Cloth ISBN: 0-7591-1176-6 / 978-0-7591-1176-9  

James Haywood Rolling, Jr., Associate Professor of Art Education
Syracuse University

Cinderella Story is an experimental autoethnography that explores critical racial issues in America through the media of language and images. Rolling asks, How do words and images-involving stories and paradigms, past and future, perceptions of beauty and ugliness-become flesh? How are they done and undone? In this supple and complex narrative, the author peers deeply into his own life and attitudes, and into the racial images and ideas made explicit by American history as a whole, to sort out fact from fiction in new and ingenious ways.

Table of Contents

Prologue: An Old Story
Episode One: Borderlines
Episode Two: Homelessness
Episode Three: Origins
Episode Four: Breech Births and Cinderella Endings
Episode Five: Monsters Deconstructed
Episode Six: Figuring Myself Out
Episode Seven: Messing around with Identity Constructs
Episode Eight: Disruptions
Episode Nine: Secular Blasphemy
Episode Ten: Propaganda
Episode Eleven: Invisibility and In/di/visuality
Episode Twelve: The Meeting
Episode Thirteen: Self-Portrait, with Stern Resistance
Episode Fourteen: (Re)Appearances
Episode Fifteen: Self Portrait, with Backlighting
Episode Sixteen: The One-Drop Rule
Episode Seventeen: Self-Portrait, with Possibilities
Episode Eighteen: Epilogue, with New Story Values

Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500–1900

Duke University Press
2010
296 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4745-3
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4764-4

Vanita Seth, Associate Professor of Politics
University of California, Santa Cruz

Europe’s Indians forces a rethinking of key assumptions regarding difference—particularly racial difference—and its centrality to contemporary social and political theory. Tracing shifts in European representations of two different colonial spaces, the New World and India, from the late fifteenth century through the late nineteenth, Vanita Seth demonstrates that the classification of humans into racial categories or binaries of self-other is a product of modernity. Part historical, part philosophical, and part a history of science, her account exposes the epistemic conditions that enabled the thinking of difference at distinct historical junctures. Seth’s examination of Renaissance, Classical Age, and nineteenth-century representations of difference reveals radically diverging forms of knowing, reasoning, organizing thought, and authorizing truth. It encompasses stories of monsters, new worlds, and ancient lands; the theories of individual agency expounded by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; and the physiological sciences of the nineteenth century. European knowledge, she argues, does not reflect a singular history of Reason, but rather multiple traditions of reasoning, of historically bounded and contingent forms of knowledge. Europe’s Indians shows that a history of colonialism and racism must also be an investigation into the historical production of subjectivity, agency, epistemology, and the body.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Self and Similitude: Renaissance Representations of the New World
2. “Constructing” Individuals and “Creating” History: Subjectivity in Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau
3. Traditions of History: Mapping India’s Past
4. Of Monsters and Man: The Peculiar History of Race
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Another Way Home: The Tangled Roots of Race in One Chicago Family

University of Chicago Press
2004
200 pages
22 halftones, 5-1/2 x 8-1/2
Cloth ISBN: 9780226318219
Paper ISBN: 9780226318233

Ronne Hartfield

In her prologue to Another Way Home, Ronne Hartfield notes the dearth of stories about African Americans who have occupied the area of mixed race with ease and harmony for generations. Her moving family history is filled with such stories, told in beautifully crafted and unsentimental prose. Spanning most of the twentieth century, Hartfield’s book celebrates the special occasion of being born and reared in a household where miscegenation was the rule rather than the exception—where being a woman of mixed race could be a fundamental source of strength, vitality, and courage.

Hartfield begins with the early life of her mother, Day Shepherd. Born to a wealthy British plantation owner and the mixed-race daughter of a former slave, Day negotiates the complicated circumstances of plantation life in the border country of Louisiana and Mississippi and, as she enters womanhood, the quadroon and octoroon societies of New Orleans. Equally a tale of the Great Migration, Another Way Home traces Day’s journey to Bronzeville, the epicenter of black Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century. Here, through the eyes of Day and, ultimately, her daughter, we witness the bustling city streets and vibrant middle-class culture of this iconic black neighborhood. We also relive crucial moments in African American history as they are experienced by the author’s family and others in Chicago’s South Side black community, from the race riots of 1919 and the Great Depression to the murder of Emmett Till and the dawn of the civil rights movement.

Throughout her book, Hartfield portrays mixed-race Americans navigating the challenges of their lives with resilience and grace, making Another Way Home an intimate and compelling encounter with one family’s response to our racially charged culture.

Read an excerpt here.

Table of Contents

Prologue
1. Alpha: The Long Mysterious Exodus of Death
2. Beginnings: Strange Fates
3. Sacred Wounds
4. On the Place
5. Matriarchy
6. The Lightning Fields
7. New Orleans
8. Day and the City
9. The Ring
10. A Stern Destiny: Chicago Found and Lost
11. The Post-Depression Years
12. Streetcars
13. In the Castle of Our Skin
14. Dining In
15. Go Down the Street
16. Naming the Holy
17. Strange Fruit
18. Our Father’s Freight Train Blues
19. Lifelines
20. Last Years
21. Omega
Epilogue
Acknowledgments