Mixed Race Studies

Balancing Evils Judiciously: The Proslavery Writings of Zephaniah Kingsley

University Press of Florida
2000
160 pages
6 x 9
Cloth: ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-1733-4 ISBN 10: 0-8130-1733-5
Paper: ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-2117-1 ISBN 10: 0-8130-2117-0

Edited and Annotated by

Daniel W. Stowell, Director & Editor
The Papers of Abraham Lincoln

Foreword by Eugene Genovese

For the first time, all the proslavery—but also pro-black—writings of Zephaniah Kingsley (1765-1843) appear together in one volume. Kingsley was a slave trader and the owner of a large plantation near Jacksonville in what was then Spanish East Florida. He married one of his slaves and had children with several others.

While Kingsley eventually emancipated all of his children and their mothers, he became alarmed at the deteriorating status of free blacks after Florida became a territory in 1821. His unusual protest of their treatment, “A Treatise on the Patriarchal System of Society [,as it exists in some governments and colonies in America, and in the United States, under the name of slavery: with its necessity and advantages (1833)],” called for a three-caste society that separated race and class. He envisioned a buffer caste of free people of color between whites and enslaved blacks, but united with whites by economic interests. The treatise simultaneously upheld the legitimacy and necessity of slavery yet assaulted the white southern premise of abject black inferiority.

Daniel Stowell carefully assembles all of Kingsley’s writings on race and slavery to illuminate the evolution of his thought. The intriguing hybrid text of the four editions of the treatise clearly identifies both subtle and substantial differences among the editions. Other extensively annotated documents show how Kingsley’s interracial family and his experiences in various slaveholding societies in the Caribbean and South America influenced his thinking on race, class, and slavery.

In despair of ever changing the slaveholding patterns of Florida, Kingsley finally settled his mixed-race children and several of his slaves in Haiti; however, he left behind more than 80 of his slaves to work his plantations in Florida. When he died, these African Americans remained in bondage, unfortunate victims of hardening American racial attitudes and of Kingsley’s effort to “balance evils judiciously.”

Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought

Duke University Press
1974
334 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-1320-5

Thomas E. Skidmore, Emeritus Professor of History
Brown University

Published to wide acclaim in 1974, Thomas E. Skidmore’s intellectual history of Brazilian racial ideology has become a classic in the field. Available for the first time in paperback, this edition has been updated to include a new preface and bibliography that surveys recent scholarship in the field. Black into White is a broad-ranging study of what the leading Brazilian intellectuals thought and propounded about race relations between 1870 and 1930. In an effort to reconcile social realities with the doctrines of scientific racism, the Brazilian ideal of “whitening”—the theory that the Brazilian population was becoming whiter as race mixing continued—was used to justify the recruiting of European immigrants and to falsely claim that Brazil had harmoniously combined a multiracial society of Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples.

Somebody Always Singing You

University Press of Mississippi
1997
160 pages
ISBN: 0878059814 (9780878059812)

Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees

The story of a multi-racial woman coming to understand her identity

As the child of African-American and Native American parents, Kaylynn TwoTrees grew up hearing herself called “half breed” and “mixed blood,” terms which now, after many transforming experiences, have positive and powerful meanings for her. This book spanning the first fifty years of her life is the account of her extraordinary journey into an understanding of her rich and complex heritage.
 
TwoTrees’s poignant, honest memoir tells of her birth to a Lakota father from a South Dakota reservation and a black mother from an urban neighborhood in Des Moines. She spent summers during her early childhood visiting the Pine Ridge reservation. Her grandmother’s teachings from those days sustained her throughout the subsequent years. She always has remembered her grandmother’s saying “You going/coming back being. Grandmothers always singing you going. Grandchildren always singing you coming back. Somebody always singing you.”
 
After the murder of her mother, she was adopted by her black grandparents, who had worked hard to achieve a middle-class life. TwoTrees was later sent to a Catholic boarding school where she was the only person of color. After she gave birth to a baby girl, whom she released to the care of relatives, she set out on her own. The ensuing journey took her from Chicago to a life in Europe, where she lived for some years as a dancer and a manager of dance companies. Returning to the United States, she lived first in New York, and then in the Southwest, where she spent recent years learning about the landscape and the indigenous cultures and giving workshops and performances.
 
TwoTrees, whose fascinating life journey has been filled with exhilarating as well as painful moments, writes movingly of her efforts to incorporate the diverse strands of her identity. Always carrying with her the love and lessons from her Indian grandmother and many others, she has come to understand the value of her multiple heritages.

Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America

University of Chicago Press
2010
208 pages
37 line drawings, 7 tables
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 9780226793825; Paperback ISBN: 9780226793832; E-Book ISBN: 9780226793849

Michael Tesler, Doctoral Student in Political Science
University of California, Los Angeles

David O. Sears, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Political Science
University of California, Los Angeles

Barack Obama’s presidential victory naturally led people to believe that the United States might finally be moving into a post-racial era. Obama’s Race—and its eye-opening account of the role played by race in the election—paints a dramatically different picture.

The authors argue that the 2008 election was more polarized by racial attitudes than any other presidential election on record—and perhaps more significantly, that there were two sides to this racialization: resentful opposition to and racially liberal support for Obama. As Obama’s campaign was given a boost in the primaries from racial liberals that extended well beyond that usually offered to ideologically similar white candidates, Hillary Clinton lost much of her longstanding support and instead became the preferred candidate of Democratic racial conservatives. Time and again, voters’ racial predispositions trumped their ideological preferences as John McCain—seldom described as conservative in matters of race—became the darling of racial conservatives from both parties. Hard-hitting and sure to be controversial, Obama’s Race will be both praised and criticized—but certainly not ignored.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Obama as Post-Racial?
• Chapter 1: Background: Race in Presidential Elections
• Chapter 2: Racialized Momentum: The Two Sides of Racialization in the Primaries
• Chapter 3: The General Election: The Two Sides of Racialization and Short-Term Political Dynamics
• Chapter 4: The Spillover of Racialization
• Chapter 5: The Racialized Voting Patterns of Racial and Ethnic Minorities
• Chapter 6: The Paradox of Gender Traditionalists’ Support for Hillary Clinton
• Chapter 7: Beyond Black and White: Obama as “Other”
• Chapter 8: Is the Obama Presidency Post-Racial? Evidence from His First Year in Office
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index

To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing

University of Missouri Press
2006
296 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1619-9

Steven J. Belluscio, Associate Professor of English
Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York

To Be Suddenly White explores the troubled relationship between literary passing and literary realism, the dominant aesthetic motivation behind the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century ethnic texts considered in this study. Steven J. Belluscio uses the passing narrative to provide insight into how the representation of ethnic and racial subjectivity served, in part, to counter dominant narratives of difference.

To Be Suddenly White offers new readings of traditional passing narratives from the African American literary tradition, such as James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and George Schuyler’s Black No More. It is also the first full-length work to consider a number of Jewish American and Italian American prose texts, such as Mary Antin’s The Promised Land, Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, and Guido d’Agostino’s Olives on the Apple Tree, as racial passing narratives in their own right. Belluscio also demonstrates the contradictions that result from the passing narrative’s exploration of racial subjectivity, racial difference, and race itself.

When they are seen in comparison, ideological differences begin to emerge between African American passing narratives and “white ethnic” (Jewish American and Italian American) passing narratives. According to Belluscio, the former are more likely to engage in a direct critique of ideas of race, while the latter have a tendency to become more simplistic acculturation narratives in which a character moves from a position of ethnic difference to one of full American identity.

The desire “to be suddenly white” serves as a continual point of reference for Belluscio, enabling him to analyze how writers, even when overtly aware of the problematic nature of race (especially African American writers), are also aware of the conditions it creates, the transformations it provokes, and the consequences of both. By examining the content and context of these works, Belluscio elucidates their engagement with discourses of racial and ethnic differences, assimilation, passing, and identity, an approach that has profound implications for the understanding of American literary history.

My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir

Simon and Schuster
October 2011
368 pages
Hardcover ISBN-10: 1451627548; ISBN-13: 9781451627541
eBook ISBN-10: 1451627564; ISBN-13: 9781451627565

Mark Whitaker

In a dramatic, moving work of historical reporting and personal discovery, Mark Whitaker, award-winning journalist, sets out to trace the story of what happened to his parents, a fascinating but star-crossed interracial couple, and arrives at a new understanding of the family dramas that shaped their lives—and his own.

His father, “Syl” Whitaker, was the charismatic grandson of slaves who grew up the child of black undertakers from Pittsburgh and went on to become a groundbreaking scholar of Africa. His mother, Jeanne Theis, was a shy World War II refugee from France whose father, a Huguenot pastor, helped hide thousands of Jews from the Nazis and Vichy police. They met in the mid-1950s, when he was a college student and she was his professor, and they carried on a secret romance for more than a year before marrying and having two boys. Eventually they split in a bitter divorce that was followed by decades of unhappiness as his mother coped with self-recrimination and depression while trying to raise her sons by herself, and his father spiraled into an alcoholic descent that destroyed his once meteoric career.

Based on extensive interviews and documentary research as well as his own personal recollections and insights, My Long Trip Home is a reporter’s search for the factual and emotional truth about a complicated and compelling family, a successful adult’s exploration of how he rose from a turbulent childhood to a groundbreaking career, and, ultimately, a son’s haunting meditation on the nature of love, loss, identity, and forgiveness.

Black by Design: A 2-Tone Memoir

Serpent’s Tail
2011-07-14
320 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781846687907

Pauline Black

Powerful autobiography from the front woman of influential ska band, The Selecter

Lead singer for platinum-selling 2-tone band The Selecter, Pauline Black has been in the music business for over thirty years. The only woman in a movement dominated by men, she was very much the Queen of British Ska. She saw The Specials, Madness, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and all the other top bands of that generation at their very best… and worst. Black was born in 1953 of Anglo-Jewish/Nigerian parents. Adopted by a white, working class family in Romford in the fifties, Pauline was always made to feel different, both by the local community and members of her extended family, who saw her at best as a curiosity, at worst as an embarrassing inconvenience. Weaving her rise to fame and recollections of the 2-tone phenomenon with her moving search for her birth parents, Black By Design is a funny and enlightening memoir of music and roots.

Born in Romford, Pauline Black is a singer and actress who gained fame as the lead singer of seminal 2-tone band The Selecter. After the band split in 1982, Black developed an acting career in television and theatre, appearing in dramas such as The Vice, The Bill, Hearts and Minds and 2000 Acres of Sky. She won the 1991 Time Out award for Best Actress, for her portrayal of Billie Holiday in the play All or Nothing At All.

Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a Postcolonial World

Berg Publishers (an imprint of Macmillan)
October 2001
272 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-85973-531-2, ISBN10: 1-85973-531-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-85973-632-6, ISBN10: 1-85973-632-7

Lionel Caplan, Emeritus Professor and Professorial Research Associate
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London

Among the legacies of the colonial encounter are any number of contemporary ‘mixed-race’ populations, descendants of the offspring of sexual unions involving European men (colonial officials, traders, etc.) and local women. These groups invite serious scholarly attention because they not only challenge notions of a rigid divide between colonizer and colonized, but beg a host of questions about continuities and transformations in the postcolonial world.

This book concerns one such group, the Eurasians of India, or Anglo-Indians as they came to be designated. Caplan presents an historicized ethnography of their contemporary lives as these relate both to the colonial past and to conditions in the present. In particular, he forcefully shows that features which theorists associate with the postcolonial present—blurred boundaries, multiple identities, creolized cultures—have been part of the colonial past as well. Presenting a powerful argument against theoretically essentialized notions of culture, hybridity and postcoloniality, this book is a much-needed contribution to recent debates in cultural studies, literary theory, anthropology, sociology as well as historical studies of colonialism, ‘mixed-race’ populations and cosmopolitan identities.

The Racial Basis of Civilization: A Critique of the Nordic Doctrine

Alfred A. Knopf
1926
411 pages

Frank H. Hankins, Professor of Sociology
Smith College on the Mary Huggins Gamble Foundation

• PART I–A CRITICAL HISTORY OF THEORIES OF BLOND RACE SUPREMACY
  • I INTRODUCTION
  • II ARYANISM
  • III GOBINISM
  • IV TEUTONISM
  • V ANTHROPO-SOCIOLOGY OR SOCIAL SELECTIONISM
  • VI CELTICISM AND GALLICISM
  • VII ANGLO-SAXONISM AND NORDICISM IN AMERICA
• PART I–CONCEPT AND SOCIAL ROLE OF RACE
  • I INTRODUCTION
  • II CONCEPT OF RACE
  • III ARE THERE PURE RACES?
  • IV ARE RACE AND NATION IDENTIFIABLE?
  • V POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF RACE
  • VI ARE RACES EQUAL?
  • VII THE PROBLEM OF RACE MIXTURE
  • VIII ARE RACIAL CHARACTERISTICS UNCHANGING?
  • IX CHANGES IN THE HEREDITARY CONSTITUTION OF A POPULATION
  • X RACE AND CULTURAL OPPORTUNITY
  • XI CONCLUSION
• INDEX

Preface

The pernicious propaganda relating to the Nordic doctrine before, during, and since the war is the excuse for this book. From the closing years of the last century to the outbreak of the Great War there was in Germany a rising tide of adulation of the blond dolichocephal as the embodiment of all that was great in creative genius, organizing ability and power of leadership. Before that war actually broke many a glittering wave of that same tide had splashed resolutely and ominously on the shores of England and America. With the actual outbreak of hostilities the doctrines that the Anglo-Saxons were the purest of the Nordics and that the salvation of the world depended on the maintenance of Nordic domination were widely and loudly proclaimed. The virus of that propaganda is as yet by no means spent, though it appears to be weakening.

The reader of this volume will be convinced that the doctrines of certain American scholars and publicists, which have been hailed by a large part of the American public as more or less fresh discoveries of American scholarship, are very old. Some of them were promulgated several centuries ago and all of them systematically set forth two generations ago. We do not attempt an exhaustive historical study of them. We have subjected a few of their outstanding formulations to internal analysis and self-criticism. When these authors cannot be convicted of gross inconsistency and made to destroy themselves, they are made to destroy each other. We do not, however, anywhere deny that the Nordic race appears to have excellent endowments; we would admit that in this respect it is one of the world’s premier races. We do deny its universal superiority, as also its claim to a monopoly of certain human excellences. We also deny that to this stock can be attributed a special historical role except in a most vague way. Our thesis is that all important historical groups have been heterogeneous in racial composition; and that all areas of high culture have been areas of extensive population movement and race mixture. In such mixtures the Nordic element has been, according to much evidence, a very valuable ingredient.

Having exposed the fallacies, exaggerations and inconsistencies of the Nordicists, we proceed in Part II to a systematic examination of certain fundamental problems related to the significance of race as a factor in the development of civilization. We contend that racial differences are not those of kind; that all races have all human qualities ; but that they have these qualities in different degrees of development. One race may excel in physical energy, another in creative imagination. This conception does away with the notion of a general or universal superiority on the part of any one race. Moreover, in view of the wide range of variation among the members of the same race, inferiority or superiority cannot be attributed to an individual on account of his race. A short member of a tall race may be distinctly shorter than a tall member of a short race. So with intelligence, organizing ability, or artistic sense. Social barriers on account of race have, therefore, no basis in biological fact.

A similar conclusion is reached in the study of race crossing: there is no biological mandate against it, even in the case of widely different races. The sociological grounds for opposition to race mixture are doubtless important but their importance derives almost entirely from the fact that race prejudice is a social force and not a theory. Offspring receive their hereditary endowments from their immediate ancestors ; if the parents are of high quality, so also will be the offspring, regardless of race. This fact is not altered by the crossing of races. On the other hand, every form of inferiority and deformity flourishes among the lowest strains of the Nordic stock, however pure. We think it can be shown also that race crossing is a factor in the production of talented men, and hazard the guess that most of the superior men of European history have been of mixed racial ancestry.

In relating these findings to immigration policy we think it has been shown that the new immigrants, though in the mass less desirable from the standpoint of general intellectual abilities than the native population, nevertheless have brought into the American population endowments of aesthetic appreciation, artistic creation, and sanguine temperament that will contribute much to the enrichment of American life and culture in the years to come. Since the crossing of sound strains of different races is biologically sound, we contend that well-endowed Italians, Hebrews, Turks, Chinese and Negroes are better materials out of which to forge a nation than average or below average Nordics. From this point of view a sound immigration policy, if it could be governed by biological considerations only, would admit, without limitations of numbers, all those of whatever race who can prove themselves free from hereditary taint and pass intelligence tests which show them to be above the average of the present population in native intellectual capacity. Here again the objections are based on sociological considerations, of which the fact of racial antipathy is most important. Were it not for these traditional popular prejudices, America could do no better than to make itself a world asylum for persons of superior quality regardless of race or color.

While we are denying the extravagant claims of the Nordicists, we also deny the equally perverse and doctrinaire contentions of the race egalitarians. There is no respect, apparently, in which races are equal ; but their differences must be thought of in terms of relative frequencies, and not as absolute differences in kind. They are like the differences between classes in the same population. It thus appears that the eugenic contentions are fundamentally sound, as against both the racialists on one extreme and the thorough environmentalists on the other. From the standpoint of the biology of population quality, superior rank within a race is of more importance than race. From the standpoint of the creation and maintenance of culture, high-grade stock is more important than cultural opportunity, though the latter is doubtless also important. The progress of a people is so greatly dependent on the abilities of its few ablest men that the primary question which a theory of the racial basis of civilization must answer is, what are those conditions which produce the greatest supply of genius? We have tried to show that this is primarily a problem of eugenics rather than of race. It is also a problem of race crossing rather than of maintenance of race purity.

In the preparation of the manuscript I received assistance for which I am grateful from my colleague, Professor Joseph Wiehr, who assisted in the digest of certain recent German materials relating to the subject. To another colleague, Professor Howard M. Parshley, I am deeply indebted for a careful reading of the manuscript of Part II, which has greatly benefited by his numerous suggestions and criticisms. I wish also to thank Professor Robert C. Chaddock of Columbia University for permission to reproduce the graphs found on p. 265. Words are inadequate to express my gratitude to my wife and to Miss Mildred Hartsough for reading the proofs, and to the latter for compiling the Index.

F. H. Hankins

Smith College
March, 1926

Read the entire book here.

A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany

Palgrave Macmillan
September 2010
282 pages
6 x 9 1/4 inches, Includes: 50 pgs illus
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-230-10473-0, ISBN10: 0-230-10473-8
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-230-10472-3, ISBN10: 0-230-10472-X

Maria Höhn, Professor of History
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Martin Klimke, Research Fellow
German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.

Based on an award-winning international research project and photo exhibition, this poignant and beautifully illustrated book examines the experiences of African American GIs in Germany and the unique insights they provide into the civil rights struggle at home and abroad. Thanks in large part to its military occupation of Germany after World War II, America’s unresolved civil rights agenda was exposed to worldwide scrutiny as never before. At the same time, its ambitious efforts to democratize German society after the defeat of Nazism meant that West Germany was exposed to American ideas of freedom and democracy to a much larger degree than many other countries. As African American GIs became increasingly politicized, they took on a particular significance for the Civil Rights Movement in light of Germany’s central role in the Cold War. While the effects of the Civil Rights Movement reverberated across the globe, Germany represents a special case that illuminates a remarkable period in American and world history.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Closing Ranks: World War I and the Rise of Hitler
• Fighting on Two Fronts: World War II and Civil Rights
• “We Will Never Go Back to the Old Way Again”: African American GIs and the Occupation of Germany
• Setting the Stage for Brown: Desegregating the Army in Germany
• Bringing Civil Rights to East and West: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Cold War Berlin
• Revolutionary Alliances: The Rise of Black Power
• Heroes of the Other America: East German Solidarity with the African American Freedom Struggle
• A Call for Justice: The Racial Crisis in the Military and the GI Movement
• Epilogue