Mixed Race Studies

The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution

University of North Carolina Press
June 2016
Approx. 640 pages
21 halftones, 1 figs., 7 maps, 33 tables, notes, index
6.125 x 9.25
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4696-2663-5
Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

Robert G. Parkinson, Assistant Professor of History
Binghamton University, The State University of New York

When the Revolutionary War began, the odds of a united, continental effort to resist the British seemed nearly impossible. Few on either side of the Atlantic expected thirteen colonies to stick together in a war against their cultural cousins. In this pathbreaking book, Robert Parkinson argues that to unify the patriot side, political and communications leaders linked British tyranny to colonial prejudices, stereotypes, and fears about insurrectionary slaves and violent Indians. Manipulating newspaper networks, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and their fellow agitators broadcast stories of British agents inciting African Americans and Indians to take up arms against the American rebellion. Using rhetoric like “domestic insurrectionists” and “merciless savages,” the founding fathers rallied the people around a common enemy and made racial prejudice a cornerstone of the new Republic.

In a fresh reading of the founding moment, Parkinson demonstrates the dual projection of the “common cause.” Patriots through both an ideological appeal to popular rights and a wartime movement against a host of British-recruited slaves and Indians forged a racialized, exclusionary model of American citizenship.

A DNA Test Won’t Explain Elizabeth Warren’s Ancestry

Slate
2016-06-29

Matt Miller

You’re not 28 percent Finnish, either.

Our genes dictate certain things about us, but ethnicity is not derived from a single gene.

Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator who lost to Elizabeth Warren in the 2012 election, has decided to dredge up old accusations that may have ultimately cost him that race.

“As you know, she’s not Native American,” Brown told reporters this week. “She’s not 1/32 Cherokee.” He then called on Harvard University, where Warren was a law professor, to release records that allegedly indicate Warren benefited from affirmative action (there’s no reason to believe this is true), before suggesting that “she can take a DNA test” if she wants to prove her roots.

But here’s the thing: DNA testing cannot definitively prove whether a person is Cherokee. Or a member of any community, at least not reliably. To assume it can is to assume that there’s something inherently different in the genetic makeup of tribal members and that this thing is universal within that community. That’s not true.

Our genes dictate certain things about us—there’s a gene that programs the color of your eyes, for example. But ethnicity is not a trait derived from a single gene, because ethnicity is mostly our perception of a collection of traits, rather than a trait itself. So a genetic test that looks at our genes and comes back with an assessment of our ethnic roots isn’t honing in on a specific gene and reading what it says because there’s no such gene to read. Instead, the test is comparing snippets of our DNA to snippets of DNA of people of known origin and looking for similarities…

Read the entire article here.

The Pain of Passing

Reviews in American History
Volume 44, Number 2, June 2016
pages 264-269
DOI: 10.1353/rah.2016.0028

Renee Romano, Professor of History, Africana Studies, and Comparative American Studies
Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio

Allyson Hobbs. A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. 382 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $29.95.

In the past year, racial passing became the subject of intense media controversy and scrutiny when it was discovered that Rachel Dolezal, then-head of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington, was a white woman who had misrepresented herself as being partly black. In the wake of the media frenzy that followed, commentators took pains to point out that, even though it was unusual to see a white assuming an identity as black, passing itself was nothing new in U.S. history. “The history of people breaching social divides and fashioning identities for themselves is as old as America,” an editorial in the New York Times proclaimed in response to the controversy. But while the act of passing has long been a part of the American story, it has not, until now, been the subject of a sweeping chronological and narrative history. A Chosen Exile by historian Allyson Hobbs succeeds in the ambitious project of crafting a social and cultural history of the most famous version of the practice, that of people of black ancestry who passed as white. Racial passing, of course, was meant to be hidden and to leave no trace. But in A Chosen Exile, Hobbs demonstrates not only that sources exist to recover the history of blacks who assumed white identities, but also that historians have offered a rather onesided story of black-to-white passing that does not mine the experience fully for what it can tell us about the lived experience of racial identity in different eras in American history.

Drawing on creative research in sources—including runaway slave ads, diaries and letters, census and military data, student college records, and novels—A Chosen Exile offers a wide-ranging chronological history of the experience of blacks who passed as white from the late eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. In taking that approach to the subject, it stands out from most of the existing literature on passing. Scholarly work on passing, for the most part, falls into one of two camps: studies by literary and media scholars that explore literary and cultural representations of the practice, such as Gayle Wald’s Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (2000) or more historical works that take a biographical approach to reconstruct the lives and stories of specific individuals or families who passed as white. Gerald Horne’s The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States (2009), for example, sheds light on the strange life of Lawrence Dennis, a former child-preacher who chose to pass as white and who eventually became an outspoken supporter of fascism in the 1930s. Legal historian Daniel Sharfstein follows the lives of three families who changed from black to white from the colonial era to today in The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America (2012). But A Chosen Exile has a much broader scope. Although Hobbs offers lengthy discussions of some key historical figures, she seeks to bring together as many stories of passing as possible to “reveal larger social, cultural, and national dynamics that would be far less visible if viewed through a lens fixed on the idiosyncrasies of a single person, family, or place” (p. 25).

That approach enables Hobbs to develop arguments about how the meanings and practice of passing have changed over time—arguments that are simply not possible in works that are more narrowly focused. She shows, for example, that passing was a relatively egalitarian practice that both elites and the poor engaged in when circumstances allowed; although, as the book progresses, it is clear that Hobbs has found more evidence to reconstruct the stories of economically privileged blacks than she has for poorer ones. She includes the experiences of both men and women who crossed the color line, and she compares the experiences of those who passed strategically—or who temporarily claimed a white identity in order…

Drawing Black History

Bostonia
Fall 2015

Rich Barlow, Staff Writer

Artwork by Joel Christian Gill

Graphic novels bring forgotten stories to life

Home to about 50 mixed-race descendants of a freed slave, Malaga Island off the coast of Maine seemed an oasis of racial harmony in 1912. But then the state, lobbied by ostensible “reformers” who claimed that residents were living in poverty—and perhaps tempted by a land grab too good to pass up—evicted the islanders. The majority who complied were the lucky ones. Those who held out were netted in the nascent eugenics fervor: declared feebleminded, they were confined and in some cases castrated.

Despite an official apology from Maine’s governor in 2010 and a radio documentary about the case, Malaga’s story might have remained little known but for Joel Christian Gill (CFA’04). His graphic anthology Strange Fruit, published last year by Colorado-based Fulcrum, uses comics to tell the stories of African Americans whose contributions and sufferings occupy fringes in the country’s historical memory….

Read the entire article here.

Strange Fruit: Uncelebrated Narratives from Black History

Fulcrum Publishing
May 2014
176 pages
8 X 10
Paperback ISBN: 9781938486296

Joel Christian Gill

Strange Fruit Volume I is a collection of stories from early African American history that represent the oddity of success in the face of great adversity. Each of the nine illustrated chapters chronicles an uncelebrated African American hero or event. From the adventures of lawman Bass Reeves, to Henry “Box” Brown’s daring escape from slavery.

Essence Fest: How Prince helped Misty Copeland discover artistic freedom

The New Orleans Times-Picayune
2016-07-02

Chelsea Brasted, Lifestyle and Culture Reporter

Misty Copeland recounted her own Prince tribute Saturday (July 2) during an Essence Fest weekend full of them. But for the first African American woman to be named principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater, the music star was a friend before she’d ever even seen him in concert.

“I’d never seen him perform live,” Copeland said during an interview with Soledad O’Brien on the festival’s Empowerment Experience stage. Copeland was emotional as she continued her story, adding, “I approached this relationship as this really hilarious quiet guy that became my friend, then I stepped onstage with him for the first time and I was like, OK, I get it now. Like, wow.”…

Read the entire article here.

Becoming Black, White, and Indian in Wisconsin Farm Country, 1850s–1910s

Middle West Review
Volume 2, Number 2, Spring 2016
pages 53-84
DOI: 10.1353/mwr.2016.0009

Jennifer Kirsten Stinson, Associate Professor of History
Saginaw Valley State University, University Center, Michigan

Fig 1. Location of the Revels kindred community in Forest Township, Vernon County, Wisconsin. Map courtesy of the author.

In 1908, Effie Revels penned a memoir, titled the “Diary of the Revels Family,” which chronicled the westward journey taken by her parents, Morning and Micajah, in 1854. After struggles in their Georgia and North Carolina homelands, they obtained a U.S. land patent in western Wisconsin’s Vernon County. There, in a place to which Ho-Chunks returned yearly and which Sauks had recently left, the Revelses helped to found the Forest Township farm neighborhood in the county’s northeastern portion. Effie described their 160 acres as the “roughest that part knows of;” its sharp-rising ridges and deep-plunging valleys made planting and harvesting difficult. But the family’s skill and cooperation with neighbors yielded prosperity into the 1890s. Flora Revels, Morning’s and Micajah’s great-granddaughter, loved Forest’s annual picnics of that era, where kin and friends, as she recalled in an oral history interview, heard “preaching,” plus “speaking, singing, and a program.” The people who enjoyed these events hailed from the upper South, like Flora’s forebears, as well as the lower Midwest, mid-Atlantic, and Europe.

This is the stuff of standard pioneer stories and popular culture. But the more we read of Effie and the more we listen to Flora, the clearer their stories’ challenge to classic white frontier narratives becomes. From 1860 through 1880, census takers labeled 14 percent of Forest’s population, including these women and their Arms, Bass, Delaney, Roberts, Revels, Shivers, and Waldon kin—hereafter collectively called the Revels kindred or Forest’s families—“mulatto” or occasionally “black.” They called themselves “colored,” “Indian,” and “Cherokee,” and they invoked Robeson Indian ties.

This article examines how contests over belonging and transitions to racialized thinking arose at the intersection of American modernity and traditional Indigenous and rural values. It argues, first, that Forest’s founding generation of the 1850s through 1870s did not separate into oppositional, mutually exclusive racial groups. Rather, Wisconsin’s relative civil rights tolerance, displacement of Ho-Chunks, and abundant land allowed the Revels kindred’s U.S. southern Indigenous kin- and land-based belonging and their radical abolitionism to flourish; all of these bound the kindred together. Second, mixing between people whose lives bridged Indigenous-, African-, and Euro-American influences continued during Forest’s 1880s and 1890s post-settlement era. The kindred’s leadership in traditional rural sociability promoted inclusivity. Their modern commercial farming and divergence from allegedly uncivilized African Americans, Ho-Chunks, and Sauks made them model midwesterners and Americans. These factors worked against their racialization. Third, a shift occurred in the late 1890s and early 1900s: The kindred divided into “black,” “white,” and “Indian” when Forest’s traditional close-knit community and kinship collided with modern reconfigurations of race, market pressures, and gender anxieties. Simultaneous to kindred members’ loss of landed independence and manhood, federal officials sought to replace non-racialized and ambiguous statuses with fixed certainty. They predicated U.S. citizenship on racial purity and on quantified Indianness. Cherokees, in response, tried to protect their rights by codifying and sometimes racializing membership.

These arguments enrich a history of the Midwest in which Indigenous lives remain unevenly analyzed, especially their intersections with the region’s African diaspora. Amid a wealth of scholarship on Euro-Indian ties, those few works that do examine midwestern African-Indian connections confine their analysis to the Ho-Chunk, Illini, Ojibwe, Mesquakie, or Sauk. Moreover, they often focus on colonial and early republic Indian-French-British trading culture. They omit other Indigenous midwesterners, who came as farmers from the upper South in the mid-1800s. These included not only the Wisconsin-based Revelses, but also similar kindreds who created substantial communities that combined Indigenous and African diasporic influences: the Beech and Roberts settlements in Indiana’s Rush and Hamilton counties; the Calvin Colony in Cass County, Michigan; and the Longtown Settlement straddling Darke County, Ohio, and Rush County, Indiana. Consideration of the Revels kindred expands understanding of what we mean by the “Indigenous Midwests,” revealing new connections…

Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture by Jennifer Ann Ho (review)

American Studies
Volume 55, Number 1, 2016
pages 165-166
DOI: 10.1353/ams.2016.006

Jeehyun Lim, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture. By Jennifer Ann Ho. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2015.

Jennifer Ho’s Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture raises timely questions about the category of Asian American at a time when reexaminations of identity categories are being actively carried out in what the feminist theorist Robyn Wiegman calls fields invested in identity knowledges. As Ho explains in her introduction, questioning the definition of Asian American in and of itself is not a new project. The category of Asian American, while rooted in grassroots social movements of the 1960s and meant to counter the demeaning signification of “Oriental,” has been scrutinized, if not solely then most forcefully, by poststructural critiques such as Kandice Chuh’s Imagine Otherwise. Yet Ho’s project differs from existing critiques in at least two regards. First, it consistently illuminates the concept of racial ambiguity—mostly through mixed-race identities and identifications but also through other norm-defying and transgressive identities and identifications emerging variously from transracial adoptees to the definitions of Asian American texts—as the method of exposing and critiquing the multiple exclusions that arise in the vexed project of Asian American self-determination. Secondly, as much as it is invested in bringing into high relief the impossibility of a rigid and exclusionary definition of Asian American, it is likewise equally invested in reestablishing the category as an important site of knowledge production and of social and cultural engagement…

‘Free State of Jones’ depicts realities of Reconstruction

The Post and Courier
Charleston, South Carolina
2016-07-03

Adam Domby, Assistant Professor of History
College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina

“Free State of Jones” is the film Reconstruction historians have been waiting for. Reconstruction, which encompassed the decade following the Civil War, is perhaps the most overlooked era in American history. It is the only period that doesn’t have a National Park Service site commemorating it.

Reconstruction, which witnessed the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and the first widespread political enfranchisement of African-Americans, is ripe with stories for filmmakers.

Yet, since the racist celebration of the Ku Klux Klan in “Birth of a Nation” (1915) and “Gone With the Wind” (1939), no major Hollywood film has addressed the violence and drama of the era.

Director Gary Ross has begun to fix this oversight by making a Reconstruction film disguised as a Civil War action flick…

Read the entire article here.

Ranger’s voice spans East Bay history

San Francisco Chronicle
2010-01-31

Lee Hildebrand, Special to The Chronicle

Betty Reid Soskin is a “phenomenal woman,” to borrow the title of a famous poem by Maya Angelou. In her 88 years, Betty has been a shipyard worker, proprietor of a record store, housewife and mother of four, singer and composer of art songs, community activist and, for the past three years, a ranger at Rosie the Riveter National Historical Park in Richmond.

She’s the oldest active National Park Service ranger in the country and works at the park six hours a day, five days a week, doing community outreach and giving guided tours of the now dormant Kaiser Shipyards where she worked during World War II.

Born in Detroit

She was born Betty Charbonnet in Detroit in 1921 to bilingual Creole parents from New Orleans. She has traced her European ancestry to France in the 17th and 18th centuries. The earliest relative of African heritage she’s been able to identify was her great-great-grandmother, a former slave named Celestine who married her former master, Cajun plantation owner Eduouard Breaux. Their daughter, Betty’s great-grandmother Leontine Breaux, was 19 when they married.

“Marriages were relatively common between Cajun slave owners and their slaves,” Soskin explains. “Their marriage papers are dated 1865, at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. His signature is there alongside her ‘X’. Her name is given, in French, as ‘Celestine of no last name.'”…

Read the entire article here.