Mixed Race Studies

White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812

University of North Carolina Press
1968-09-25 (Republished: September 1995)
671 pages
8.9 x 6 x 1.4 inches
ISBN: 978-0-8078-4550-9
Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

Winthrop D. Jordan (1931-2007)

• Winner of the 1968 Francis Parkman Prize, Society of American Historians
• Winner of the 1969 National Book Award
• Winner of the 1969 Bancroft Prize, Columbia University
• Winner of the 1968 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, Phi Beta Kappa

The paperback edition of Jordan’s classic and award-winning work on the history of American race relations.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

Part One. GENESIS 1550-1700

I. First Impressions: Initial English Confrontation with Africans

1. The Blackness Without
2. The Causes of Complexion
3. Defective Religion
4. Savage Behavior
5. The Apes of Africa
6. The Blackness Within

II. Unthinking Decision: Enslavement of Negroes in America to 1700

1. The Necessities of a New World
2. Freedom and Bondage in the English Tradition
3. The Concept of Slavery
4. The Practices of Portingals and Spanyards
5. Enslavement: The West Indies
6. Enslavement: New England
7. Enslavement: Virginia and Maryland
8. Enslavement: New York and the Carolinas
9. The Un-English: Scots, Irish, and Indians
10. Racial Slavery: From Reasons to Rational

Part Two. PROVINCIAL DECADES 1700-1755
III. Anxious Oppressors: Freedom and Control in a Slave Society

1. Demographic Configurations in the Colonies
2. Slavery and the Senses of the Laws
3. Slave Rebelliousness and the White Mastery
4. Free Negroes and Fears of Freedom
5. Racial Slavery in a Free Society

IV. Fruits of Passion: The Dynamics of Interracial Sex

1. Regional Styles in Racial Intermixture
2. Masculine and Feminine Modes in Carolina and America
3. Negro Sexuality and Slave Insurrection
4. Dismemberment, Physiology, and Sexual Perceptions
5. The Secularization of Reproduction
6. Mulatto Offspring in a Biracial Society

V. The Souls of Men: The Negro’s Spiritual Nature

1. Christian Principles and the Failure of Conversion
2. The Question of Negro Capacity
3. Spiritual Equality and Temporal Subordination
4. The Thin Edge of Antislavery
5. Inclusion and Exclusion in the Protestant Churches
6. Religious Revivial and the Impact of Conversion

VI. The Bodies of Men: The Negro’s Physical Nature

1. Confusion, Order and Hierarchy
2. Negroes, Apes, and Beasts
3. Rational Science and Irrational Logic
4. Indians, Africans, and the Complexion of Man
5. The Valuation of Color
6. Negroes Under the Skin

Part Three. THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA 1755-1783
VII. Self-Scrutiny in the Revolutionary Era

1. Quaker Conscience and Consciousness
2. The Discovery of Prejudice
3. Assertions of Sameness
4. Environmentalism and Revolutionary Ideology
5. The Secularization of Equality
6. The Proslavery Case of Negro Inferiority
7. The Revolution as Turning Point

Pt. 4 SOCIETY AND THOUGHT 1783-1812
VIII. The Imperatives of Economic Interest and National Identity

1. The Economics of Slavery
2. Union and Sectionalism
3. A National Forum for Debate
4. Nationhood and Identity
5. Non-English Englishment

IX. The Limitations of Antislavery

1. The Pattern of Antislavry
2. The Failings of Revolutionary Ideology
3. The Quaker View Beyond Emancipation
4. Religious Equalitarianism
5. Humanitarianism and Sentimentality
6. The Success and Failure of Antislavery

X. The Cancer of Revolution

1. St. Domingo
2. Non-Importation of Rebellion
3. The Contagion of Liberty
4. Slave Disobedience in America
5. The Impact of Negro Revolt

XI. The Resulting Pattern of Separation

1. The Hardening of Slavery
2. Restraint of Free Negroes
3. The Walls of Separation
4. Negro Churches

Part Five THOUGH AND SOCIETY 1783-1812
XII. Thomas Jefferson: Self and Society

1. Jefferson: The Tyranny of Slavery
2. Jefferson: The Assertion of Negro Inferiority
3. The Issue of Intellect
4. The Acclaim of Talented Negroes
5. Jefferson: Passionate Realities
6. Jefferson: White Women and Black
7. Interracial Sex: The Individual and His Society
8. Jefferson: A Dichotomous View of Triracial America

XIII. The Negro Bound by the Chain of Being

1. Linnaean Categories and the Chain of Being
2. Two Modes of Equality
3. The Hierarchies of Men
4. Anatomical Investigations
5. Unlinking and Linking the Chain
6. Faithful Philosophy in Defense of Human Unity
7. The Study of Man in the Republic

XIV. Erasing Nature’s Stamp of Color

1. Nature’s Blackball
2. The Effects of Climate and Civilization
3. The Disease of Color
4. White Negroes
5. The Logic of Blackness and Inner Similarity
6. The Winds of Change
7. An End of Environmentalism
8. Persistent Themes

XV. Toward a White Man’s Country

1. The Emancipation and Intermixture
2. The Beginning of Colonization
3. The Virginia Program
4. Insurrection and Expatriation in Virginia
5. The Meaning of Negro Removal

XVI. Exodus

Note on the Concept of Race
Essay on Sources
Select List of Full Titles
Map: Percentage of Negroes in Total Non-Aboriginal Population, 1790
Index

Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century

New York University Press
2010-03-22
320 pages, 8 illustrations
ISBN: 9780814797174

Susan Zeiger

Throughout the twentieth century, American male soldiers returned home from wars with foreign-born wives in tow, often from allied but at times from enemy nations, resulting in a new, official category of immigrant: the “allied” war bride. These brides began to appear en masse after World War I, peaked after World War II, and persisted through the Korean and Vietnam Wars. GIs also met and married former “enemy” women under conditions of postwar occupation, although at times the US government banned such unions.

In this comprehensive, complex history of war brides in 20th-century American history, Susan Zeiger uses relationships between American male soldiers and foreign women as a lens to view larger issues of sexuality, race, and gender in United States foreign relations. Entangling Alliances draws on a rich array of sources to trace how war and postwar anxieties about power and national identity have long been projected onto war brides, and how these anxieties translate into public policies, particularly immigration.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “Cupid in the AEF”: U.S. Soldiers and Women abroad in World War I
• 2. “The Worst Kind of Women”: Foreign War Brides in 1920s America
• 3. GIs and Girls around the Globe: The Geopolitics of Sex and Marriage in World War II
• 4. “Good Mothers”: GI Brides after World War II
• 5. Interracialism, Pluralism, and Civil Rights: War Bride Marriage in the 1940s and 1950s
• 6. The Demise of the War Bride: Korea, Vietnam, and Beyond
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author

…One of the most important factors in the structuring of soldier marriage has been race. The state’s repression and condemnation of interracial relationships was a feature of war bride marriage for much of the century. In World War I, for instance, U.S. military and civilian authorities took a paternalistic stance toward white soldiers, determined to “protect” them from sexually promiscuous foreign women. But this attitude was reversed in the case of “colored troops,” as military officials warned allies of the sexual danger that African American servicemen allegedly posed to the white women of other nations. By World War II, racial ideology in the United States had begun to face resistance by activists of color and their white allies, who challenged racial segregation in the military and at home, as well as “oriental exclusion” in immigration policy. Yet despite the state of flux in race relations in the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. government, with the urging of the armed services, maintained its segregationist policies in soldier marriage.  These included initially excluding Asian women from the GI Brides Act and denying the marriage requests of black and white interracial couples on the grounds that “miscegenous unions” were illegal in many U.S. states. Deeply held views about racial inferiors and superiors continued to underlie American military engagement in the Cold War. The legacy of biracial relationships in the Vietnam War, as it involved Vietnamese women, American men, and their “Amerasian” children, is one further indication of the centrality of race in analyzing gender relationships in wartime and postwar periods…

Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820–1920

University of Massachusetts Press
July 2002
296 pages
6 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-55849-341-7
Paper ISBN: 978-1-55849-417-6

James M. O’Toole, Clough Professor of History
Boston College, Boston, Massachusets

• An alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club
• Winner of the New England Historical Association Book Award

The remarkable saga of a mixed-race family in nineteenth-century America

Through the prism of one family’s experience, this book explores questions of racial identity, religious tolerance, and black-white “passing” in America. Spanning the century from 1820 to 1920, it tells the story of Michael Morris Healy, a white Irish immigrant planter in Georgia; his African American slave Eliza Clark Healy, who was also his wife; and their nine children. Legally slaves, these brothers and sisters were smuggled north before the Civil War to be educated.

In spite of the hardships imposed by American society on persons of mixed racial heritage, the Healy children achieved considerable success. Rejecting the convention that defined as black anyone with “one drop of Negro blood,” they were able to transform themselves into white Americans. Their unlikely ally in this transition was the Catholic church, as several of them became priests or nuns. One brother served as a bishop in Maine, another as rector of the Cathedral in Boston, and a third as president of Georgetown University. Of the two sisters who became nuns, one was appointed the superior of convents in the United States and Canada. Another brother served for twenty years as a captain in the U.S. Coast Guard, enforcing law and order in the waters off Alaska.

The Healy children’s transition from black to white should not have been possible according to the prevailing understandings of race, but they accomplished it with apparent ease. Relying on their abilities, and in most cases choosing celibacy, which precluded mixed-race offspring, they forged a place for themselves. They also benefited from the support of people in the church and elsewhere. Even those white Americans who knew the family’s background chose to overlook their African ancestry and thereby help them to “get away” with passing.

By exploring the lifelong struggles of the members of the Healy family to redefine themselves in a racially polarized society, this book makes a distinctive contribution to our understanding of the enduring dilemma of race in America.

View a 58 minute-long discussion from 2002-12-04 with the author here.

Blended Nation: Portraits and Interviews of Mixed-Race America

Channel Photographics
2009-08-11
140 pages
11 x 11 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-9773399-2-1

Mike Tauber

Pamela Singh

What are you? On the 2000 U.S. Census, for the first time, multiracial individuals were allowed to indicate more than one race. Nearly seven million Americans did so. Blended Nation: Portraits and Interviews of Mixed Race America features individuals from this rapidly growing demographic of mixed race Americans across the country who identify as more than one race.

Through words and images, Mike Tauber and Pamela Singh explore the concept of race in America through the prism of the very personal experiences of people of mixed race heritage. Ann Curry writes in her Foreword, “As dad would say, ‘You are the best of both worlds,’ and so are the people you see on these pages, who cannot but strengthen America’s dream, as they are living proof it comes true.”

Sociology Noir: Studies at the University of Chicago in Loneliness, Marginality and Deviance, 1915–1935

McFarland Publishers
2007
196 pages
7 photos, bibliography, index
softcover ISBN: 978-0-7864-2990-5

Roger A. Salerno, Professor of Sociology
Pace University, New York

Between 1915 and 1935 the University of Chicago was the center for the production of innovative sociological research that unearthed the marginalized existence of unconventional Americans. Referred to as the Chicago school monographs by social historians, these works brought acclaim to the country’s premiere graduate program in sociology. Working at the shadowy margins of the city, these Chicago school scholars dramatically examined the lives of delinquents, prostitutes, gangsters, and homeless men. Their work harmonized with narratives of proletarian and pulp fiction and the serialized newspaper accounts of urban vice and deviance. This book offers a survey of some of these key monographs such as The Unadjusted Girl, The Hobo, The Jack-Roller and The Taxi Dance Hall.

The Sorcery of Color: Identity, Race, and Gender in Brazil

Temple University Press
November 2006
336 pages
6×9
6 tables
Paper EAN: 978-1-59213-351-2; ISBN: 1-59213-351-7
Cloth EAN: 978-1-59213-350-5; ISBN: 1-59213-350-9
Electronic Book EAN: 978-1-59213-352-9

Elisa Larkin Nascimento, Director
IPEAFRO Afro-Brazilian Studies and Research Institute, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Originally published in 2003 in Portuguese, The Sorcery of Color argues that there are longstanding and deeply-rooted relationships between racial and gender inequalities in Brazil. In this pioneering book, Elisa Larkin Nascimento examines the social and cultural movements that have attempted, since the early twentieth century, to challenge and eradicate these conjoined inequalities.

The book’s title describes the social sleight-of-hand that disguises the realities of Brazilian racial inequity. According to Nascimento, anyone who speaks of racism—or merely refers to another person as black—traditionally is seen as racist. The only acceptably non-racist attitude is silence. At the same time, Afro-Brazilian culture and history have been so overshadowed by the idea of a general “Brazilian identity” that to call attention to them is also to risk being labeled racist.

Incorporating leading international scholarship on Pan Africanism and Afrocentric philosophy with the writing of Brazilian scholars, Nascimento presents a compelling feminist argument against the prevailing policy that denies the importance of race in favor of a purposefully vague concept of ethnicity confused with color.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction to the English Edition
• Preface – Kabengele Munanga
• Introduction
• 1. Identity, Race, and Gender
• 2. Brazil and the Making of “Virtual Whiteness”
• 3. Constructing and Desconstructing the “Crazy Creole”
• 4. Another History: Afro-Brazilian Agency (São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, 1914-1960)
• 5. The Black Experimental Theater: Plots, Texts, and Actors
• Glossary of Brazilian Words
• Bibliographical References

…The second obstacle to the discussion of race in Brazil is resistance to the idea that African populations in different parts of the world share a common experience. The presumption is that blacks in Brazil are in a unique situation determined solely by the circumstances of their society and have little or nothing in common with black populations in other parts of the world. Critics have frequently accused the black social movement in Brazil of attempting to import foreign standards and raising a problem that has never existed before. On the other hand, the concerns of the black movement often revolve around issues specific to Brazil rather than racism as a world phenomenon.

But racist domination is worldwide in scope. It derives from the historical imposition of Western hegemony over non-Western peoples and its essence is expressed in the ideology of white supremacy. The standard of whiteness affects the identity constructs of all dominated peoples, making the issue of identity crucial, but oftentimes, it is expressed in specific local terms. In Brazil, the sorcery of color transforms mixed-race identity into a permanent search for the simulation of whiteness…

Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789-1879

University of Arkansas Press
1992
304 pages
ISBN Cloth: 1-55728-214-5
ISBN Paper: 1-55728-215-3
Out of Print

Adele Logan Alexander, Professor of History
George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

1992 Winner, Gustavus Myers award as one of the year’s outstanding books promoting racial understanding.

Historians have produced scores of studies on white men, extraordinary white women, and even the often anonymous mass of enslaved Black people in the United States. But in this innovative work, Adele Logan Alexander chronicles there heretofore undocumented dilemmas of one of nineteenth-century America’s most marginalized groups—free women of color in the rural South.

Ambiguous Lives focuses on the women of Alexander’s own family as representative of this subcaste of the African-American community. Their forbears, in fact, included Africans, Native Americans, and whites. Neither black nor white, affluent nor impoverished, enslaved nor truly free, these women of color lived and died in a shadowy realm situated somewhere between the legal, social, and economic extremes of empowered whites and subjugated blacks. Yet, as Alexander persuasively argues, these lives are worthy of attention precisely because of these ambiguities—because the intricacies, gradations, and subtleties of their anomalous experience became part of the tangled skein of American history and exemplify our country’s endless diversity, complexity, and self-contradictions.

Written as a “reclamation” of a long-ignored substratum of our society, Ambiguous Lives is more than the story of one family—it is a well-researched and fascinating profile of America, its race and gender relations, and its complex cultural weave.

The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies

University of North Carolina Press
April 2010
240 pp.
6.125 x 9.25, 9 illus.
1 map, notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3381-0
Large Print ISBN: 978-0-8078-7909-2

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

In The Long Shadow of the Civil War, Victoria Bynum relates uncommon narratives about common Southern folks who fought not with the Confederacy, but against it. Focusing on regions in three Southern states–North Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas—Bynum introduces Unionist supporters, guerrilla soldiers, defiant women, socialists, populists, free blacks, and large interracial kin groups that belie stereotypes of the South and of Southerners as uniformly supportive of the Confederate cause.

Examining regions within the South where the inner civil wars of deadly physical conflict and intense political debate continued well into the era of Reconstruction and beyond, Bynum explores three central questions. How prevalent was support for the Union among ordinary Southerners during the Civil War? How did Southern Unionists and freed people experience both the Union’s victory and the emancipation of slaves during and after Reconstruction? And what were the legacies of the Civil War–and Reconstruction–for relations among classes and races and between the sexes, both then and now?

Centered on the concepts of place, family, and community, Bynum’s insightful and carefully documented work effectively counters the idea of a unified South caught in the grip of the Lost Cause.

Visit Dr. Bynum’s blog Renegade South here.

Homelands and Waterways: The American Journey of the Bond Family, 1846-1926

Vintage Press an imprint of Random House
1999
720 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-679-75871-6 (0-679-75871-2)

Adele Logan Alexander, Professor of History
George Washington University

Winner for the top non-fiction prize of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association

This monumental history traces the rise of a resolute African American family (the author’s own) from privation to the middle class. In doing so, it explodes the stereotypes that have shaped and distorted our thinking about African Americans–both in slavery and in freedom.

Beginning with John Robert Bond, who emigrated from England to fight in the Union Army during the Civil War and married a recently freed slave, Alexander shows three generations of Bonds as they take chances and break new ground.

From Victorian England to antebellum Virginia, from Herman Melville‘s New England to the Jim Crow South, from urban race riots to the battlefields of World War I, this fascinating chronicle sheds new light on eighty crucial years in our nation’s troubled history. The Bond family’s rise from slavery, their interaction with prominent figures such as W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, and their eventual, uneasy realization of the American dream shed a great deal of light on our nation’s troubled heritage.

See Adele Logan Alexander of speak about tracing her racial identity through her family roots in her book “Homelands and Waterways” in an interview on the Charlie Rose Show from 1999-10-26 here.

Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)significance of Melanin

University of Virginia Press
February 2010
384 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
40 b&w illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8139-2887

Adele Logan Alexander, Professor of History
George Washington University

When William Henry Hunt married Ida Alexander Gibbs in the spring of 1904, their wedding was a glittering Washington social event that joined an Oberlin-educated diplomat’s daughter and a Wall Street veteran who could trace his lineage to Jamestown. Their union took place in a world of refinement and privilege, but both William and Ida had mixed-race backgrounds, and their country therefore placed severe restrictions on their lives because at that time, “one drop of colored blood” classified anyone as a Negro. This “stain” of melanin pushed the couple’s achievements to the margins of American society. Nonetheless, as William followed a career in the foreign service, Ida (whose grandfather was probably Richard Malcolm Johnson, a vice president of the United States) moved in intellectual and political circles that included the likes of Frederick Douglass, J. Pierpont Morgan, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Mary Church Terrell.

Born into slavery, William had an adventurous youth, including a brief career as a jockey and an interlude at Williams College; ultimately he succeeded Ida’s father as consul. The diplomat’s “expatriate” life provided him with a distinguished career and a stage on which to showcase his talents throughout the world, as well as an escape from racial stigmas back home. Free of the diplomatic hindrances her husband faced, Ida advocated openly against race and gender inequities, and was a major participant in W. E. B. Du Bois‘s post-World-War I Pan-African Congresses which took her to stimulating European capitals that were largely free of racial oppression.

In this, William and Ida’s unique dual biography, Adele Logan Alexander gracefully traces an extraordinary partnership with a historian’s skills and insights. She also presents a nuanced account of the complex impact of race in the early twentieth-century world.

Listen to National Public Radio‘s Michel Martin interview Adele Logan Alexander about the book on Tell Me More (on  2010-02-10) here.